15 years on, Metal Gear Solid 3’s geriatric sniper remains peerless — I like many, have a love-hate relationship with boss fights. This is largely due to their wildly varying quality both within individual games and across the medium as a whole. Boss fights can disappoint by being overly linear, too long, or too bland to match the story’s high stakes…

Bethesda’s most infamous release deserves its bad reputation, but is there a light at the end of the tunnel? — There’s not really any other way of introducing this topic, so I will just come right out with it: I am absolutely fascinated by Fallout 76. I’d consider myself a pretty big Fallout fan, but one who had tempered expectations of Bethesda’s multiplayer spin on Fallout 4’s cycle of looting…

XCOM: Chimera Squad pulls off some audacious tweaks that could only be attempted in a spin-off — Experimentation can feel like a bit of a rarity in the triple-A space these days. That’s not a criticism, though. Studios do a fantastic job of innovating and iterating on their genre forebears, while maintaining some consistency to gave players the familiarity they often need to create that initial buy-in…

In Doom Eternal, the most important bullets are the ones you don’t fire — About two months ago, acclaimed video game documentary makers Noclip spoke to Doom Eternal’s creative director Hugo Martin. The video was a rundown of the new — and old — enemies players would get to pit themselves against in the then-upcoming sequel to 2016’s well-received reboot of the Doom franchise…

A brief analysis of the animal kingdom’s Hitman — In the last little while, I’ve had three new games in my rotation. That’s a rarity for me: I’m typically patient when waiting for sales, and don’t usually like splitting my time between multiple games at once. However, September’s triple-threat of Borderlands 3, Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and…

This first expansion level doesn’t quite hit the series’ high bar — A few months ago, I wrote at length trying to capture what it is about IO Interactive’s new Hitman formula that is so enticing: chiefly, how the game teaches, but never tells. Hitman 2’s underdog story (where it once looked unlikely to get a look in on my personal…

How does Bungie’s seminal title hold up almost two decades on? — Back home, there used to be a radio show called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. As the title might suggest, the show revolved an affable host encouraging C-list celebrity guests to try new things — in particular, experiences that might be common for others. Whether it was seeing Star Wars…

Borderlands’ ‘enhanced’ edition is a great excuse to return to the series’ humbler beginnings — Have you seen Star Wars? No really, have you? I’ve seen Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, which came as part of a DVD remaster trilogy I bought in 2004. But savvier fans of George Lucas’ sprawling space opera series know how hard it is to come by the…

Hitman’s most important mechanic is one of its subtlest — I was walking into a runway show in Paris. I’d been tasked with eliminating the owner of a world-renowned fashion brand, as well as his model-turned-spymaster partner. It was my first experience of Hitman’s episodic reboot from 2016, and I had little to no idea what I was doing…