Posts By Mat Growcott

Astrobot is an inoffensive, entertaining little platformer that has been entertaining fans and critics since it released last week. So the discussion around cameos might be a little surprising. Like its predecessor, the free-on-PS5 Astrobot’s Playroom, Astrobot contains a whole load of cute cameos. PlayStation characters in all shapes and sizes return in their dozens. Unlike Playroom, which came out at the start of the generation, today’s cameos ...

Just a few hours after I wrote that Concord wasn’t dead yet, Sony killed it. I guess that’s a lesson to us all. You can no longer buy it. Servers will be shut off tomorrow. After eight years of development, the game lasted about a fortnight. Its director said that it will be back after the development team “explore options, including those that will better reach our players”. If you heard “free-to-play model” then you ...

Within hours of release, PlayStation’s Concord was labelled a failure of the highest magnitude. Analysts have suggested sales could be sitting at around 25,000 on console. Steam sales are behind that. And man, people are loving it. Endless analysis from people without the information needed to give it and, huh, surprise of surprises, the analysis all points to exactly what their opinion on the situation is. Sony is focussing too much on GAAS, and this is ...

Once upon a time, retro collections were rapidly thrown together catalogues of old games. These were roms, and other than a menu connecting them together, nothing else had changed. Gone are the days. Capcom has another Fighting Collection on the way. A Tetris set is in the works too. This is awesome news. And I’m especially aware of it, because I’m working through the incredible Sonic Origins collection right now. First, Fighting Collection 2. Any ...

Ask social media for a list of the most important games Xbox ever put out and Indiana Jones probably isn’t even in the top twenty. And yet Indy is whipping way above his weight. I don’t want to put undue pressure on this game. It’s looking like it’ll be a great time, and the developers are saying all the right things. This isn’t a “Starfield is Xbox’s last chance” situation.  That boat has sailed and is long over ...

Game Pass is getting restructured. First party games are leaving PlayStation Plus, and there’s no evidence they’re coming back. The grand experiment is over, and it looks like the glory days are gone. It was supposed to be a shake up on an industry that desperately needed shaking up. The traditional model of paying increasingly high amounts for increasingly safe and padded out video games was starting to feel hard to justify. Many of us were paying ...

People are talking about Final Fantasy XIII again. A vaguely worded Square Enix post on Twitter has fans discussing the possibility of a remake. But is it a trilogy that even needs a major revisit? XIII was an important game to me, for a variety of reasons some too personal to get into. But it was the first Final Fantasy game I’d covered as press. I was surprised people were so vehemently against it at the time, and especially because…

Red Dead Redemption never officially came to PC. So it’s unusual that the PlayStation Store is currently announcing that it will be making the jump. Yes, you read that right. The PS4 version of Red Dead Redemption was given PC-centric copy for a while there on the store. I just wish I could say that it wasn’t a moment too late. It would be hypocritical of me to grumble too much about the original PS3 classic getting a release on…

There’s been a lot of talk lately about where the industry goes from here. It’s is in a bad place. Games that are too big to fail are failing. Releases are becoming fewer, and developers are playing it absolutely safe. And yet the answer is right under our noses: Fortnite. Now, I can’t say that I love this future. But every so often the topic of Fortnite will come up amongst myself and colleagues and although it’s not our cup…

Avowed has been delayed into 2025 to give it room within a chockablock run of Xbox releases later this year. Which would be all good and well… but what releases are we talking about? Take out the PC-style strategy games, Call of Duty (which will be everywhere), DLC and AA games and you’re left with Indiana Jones. Which I’m not going to knock for a second, but if that’s your main release for the entire year, then something has gone…