Latest Reviews
Striking the right chord
Had you asked us two years ago if we'd be reviewing a Guitar Hero game in 2015, the chances are that we would have laughed you out of the building. So, we were as surprised as anyone when Activision announced that they'd be reviving the franchise this year and attempting to bring it into the current generation. And...
Combat Evolved
343 Industries took a lot of risks with Halo 5: Guardians. Tampering with the fundamentals of a series as respected and beloved as Halo could be disastrous, but the Microsoft-created studio went ahead and did it anyway. Considering Halo 4 divided the fan base and caused many to worry that the franchise might be in the wrong hands, you...
Review Wasteland 2: Director's Cut
Putting The Fun Back Into "Dysfunctional"?
First released on the PC back in September 2014, Wasteland 2: Director's Cut is a sequel to the 1988 title Wasteland, a game that has been credited with providing the inspiration for the Fallout series of games. So, it has quite a legacy to live up to, and some mighty big boots to fill! The question we hope...
Review Adventure Time: Finn and Jake Investigations
Adventure Crime
The first hour of Adventure Time: Finn and Jake Investigations is a bit rocky. If you've played a classic adventure game before, you should have an understanding of the agenda almost immediately: search the environments as thoroughly as possible by talking to NPCs, interacting with objects, and collecting items that could be useful...
Review The Escapists: The Walking Dead
Pixel Zombie
The Walking Dead is one of those franchises that seems to be everywhere. From television to every other type of merchandise, Robert Kirkman's comic series has become a global phenomenon and the video game industry has more than taken note, with mobile iterations and story-telling masters Telltale Games giving the zombie epic a highly...
Review Assassin's Creed: Syndicate
Back on track
When it comes to the recent history of the Assassin's Creed series, do we really need to talk about the last version all that much? Surely, everybody knows that at launch – although post-launch patches alleviated some of the issues – Assassin's Creed: Unity was a buggy, broken affair that even Ubisoft acknowledged just wasn't good...
Kaijuuuu!
There's no getting around the fact that tower defence titles have been done to death in recent years. Checking the genre listings on Steam shows that 135 of them are up for grabs on PC at the time of writing. With that said, the apparent limitations of using a controller as opposed to a keyboard and mouse means that not a great deal of...
Review Rock 'N Racing Off Road DX
Bunkered
It's been way too long since the incredible Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road was released. Since the game's debut in 1989, nothing has come remotely close to improving on the mix of sandy arcade vehicle jumping fun, so when we heard that a game with a similar feel - Rock 'N Racing Off-Road DX - was coming to Xbox One, we sat up and...
Fumbling the ball
Blood Bowl 2 comes to Xbox One as part of Games Workshop's continual use of their fringe franchises away from the tabletop. Blood Bowl was a popular tabletop Gridiron and Warhammer violence-laden mashup first introduced in 1987, seeing numerous re-releases since, the most radical of which occurred in 1994. With Games Workshop now...
Spilling the claret
Gaming these days can feel more like work than play. When you've weighed up the 800 million different options that you have to be able to just buy a game (and the preorder bonuses, and the Season Pass, and the holographic Steelbook case, and the "Limited Edition" statue) and finally got your new game installed and patched, you'll...
3, 2, 1... Draw!
Games that have an interesting or unique premise are always going to grab attention in today's expanding market, as they promise an experience unlike the ones that have come before. Draw a Stickman: EPIC is one such game. The player starts the game by drawing their very own stick figure, who then serves as the protagonist of the...
A road too far travelled
From the very outset, Fermi's Path will put you in mind of a number of other games. The game tasks you with controlling a particle, which moves forward automatically and leaves you to dodge and jump over obstacles such as you do in Temple Run or any number of other endless runners. The rotation mechanic, which sees you...
Bit tripped
When the developers of the excellent BIT.TRIP games announce that they're releasing a rhythm action adventure, that's enough of a reason for people to stop and take notice. When that very game looks to be shaping up to be a cross between Rez and Child of Eden, you throw out your work for the week of release because you're relatively sure...
Review Skylanders SuperChargers
Supercharged ... or running out of steam?
Skylanders Superchargers is the latest in a chain of games featuring the Skylanders, a collection of plastic figures that are transformed by the "Portal of Power" into characters you can control on the screen. So far, it's been so good. Each year, a new refinement to the formula is introduced. We've had...
Review The Jackbox Party Pack 2
Jack of all trades, master of fun
Whether they loved it or hated it, nobody can deny that Jackbox's first compilation – The Jackbox Party Pack – was exceedingly well crafted. Providing support for up to 100 players on one console using smart devices such as phones and tablets, the package breathed life into more than a few parties with its...
Review Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition
Are you sitting comfortably?
To kick things off here, we'd like to address a bit of criticism that we've seen for Three Fourths Home across social media since it launched on Xbox One. The main critique – despite the game's description containing the words "visual short story" – seems to be that the product is not a game at all. Then again, we...
Play the ball
With two absolutely rancid rugby union titles already available for Xbox One (Rugby 15, Rugby World Cup 2015) it was with apprehension that we strode out onto the field to take on the competing code of rugby league in Big Ant's latest offering. Fortunately, the team is nothing to do with those godawful games, but is responsible for the...
Round and round
In a world where twin-stick shooters are becoming more and more popular, it takes an awful lot to even think of climbing the ladder to battle against the might of titles such as Geometry Wars 3. One way that smaller studios can attempt to take the big guns to task – aside from getting the gameplay down, of course – is by...
Review Transformers: Devastation
Exactly what meets the eye
Transformers: Devastation is not a catastrophe like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5. It's clearly a game that was made on a modest budget during a restricted development cycle, but it's a Platinum game and that's exactly what it feels like – exactly. It's an action-packed, fluid, and adrenaline-rousing exercise in ultra-quick...
Scarily addictive platfoming
The resurgence of retro-inspired platformers is something that has not gone unnoticed. Through the [email protected] program, more and more of these little titles appear to be popping up on Xbox One and their popularity speaks volumes about the genre itself. Extreme Exorcism is one such title. Giving a twist to the established...
Disorganized crime
In Guns, Gore & Cannoli, players fill the shoes of Vinnie Cannoli, an enforcer for the mob in the 1920s. When Vinnie is sent into Thugtown to locate a person of interest for his employer, he soon finds that circumstances are dire. Zombies and rival gang members are everywhere, and the city is in disarray. With an arsenal of...
Review Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart
Walking the plank.
Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart comes to Xbox One during an extremely odd phase in digital game publishing on the platform. Developers looking to make a quick buck can now seemingly easily publish their quickly-ported games on the Xbox Store and see them get front page coverage upon release. This doesn't always work all...
Review The Book of Unwritten Tales 2
Pen to paper
It's no secret that there has been a resurgence in the popularity of point-and-click adventure games in recent years, with titles such as Life is Strange receiving both critical and player acclaim and Telltale Games gaining similar plaudits for the likes of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. The genre is ripe for the plucking and...
Pitching in
When the generally super-positive reviews of Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 started hitting the net, it was hard to see – given the relatively limited list of improvements that EA were touting – quite how FIFA 16 had any real chance of defeating Konami's franchise this time around. Despite impressing in some areas though, PES contained...
No try. In more ways than one.
When it was announced that HB Studios, the development team behind the diabolically bad Rugby 15, were developing the official game based on the 2015 Rugby World Cup and that it was due to be released just nine months after their first effort, alarm bells started to ring all over the show. Would the developer take on...
Psycho Circus
Penarium is a 2D arcade-style game about survival. When a boy named Willy is tricked into joining the circus, he quickly finds out it's not what he expected. The man running things, referred to as the Director, imprisons Willy and forces him to endure one of the most inhumane big-top shows of all time. With simple pick-up-and-play...
Review Blues and Bullets - Episode 1
Seeing red
It's a wonderful time to be a fan of the adventure game genre. Whether you prefer traditional point-and-click puzzle solving (King's Quest, Broken Age) or more recently, the flurry of choice-based narrative stories (Life is Strange and anything from Telltale), it's becoming increasingly clear that this once-ignored genre is most...
Review Pro Evolution Soccer 2016
A game of two halves
It isn't our policy to look at reviews from other publications before playing a game that we know we'll be reviewing here at PureXbox but this time around, we weren't sure whether or not we'd be reviewing Pro Evolution Soccer 2016, so we indulged in a little light reading. It appears that the game is universally loved and is –...
Pump it louder
In this world of games that are filled with tutorials, guides that hold your hand through half of the product, rewards for every little thing you do and achievements that rain down from the skies for going into an options menu, it's rare to see a title that bucks that trend. Pumped BMX+ is one such game and heavens, it's a refreshing...
Review Toy Soldiers: War Chest
The sum of its parts
Toy Soldiers: War Chest comes to Xbox One on the back of two successful iterations in the form of Toy Soldiers and Toy Soldiers: Cold War for Xbox 360. This, coupled with the addition of popular toy licenses makes this new entry an exciting proposition. Excitement for the game, however, may be short lived upon noticing how War...
