Tag: gaming

The Wandering Village PS5 Review

The Wandering Village on PS5 was sent my way by Stray Fawn Studio, for which I am grateful. I had previously played this on Xbox, and I must say that there seem to be some substantial changes over that time. The opening, as an example, now includes a beautiful anime-style video that wasn’t there at first.

The game takes place on the back of Onbu

In a world being rampaged by a poisonous plant, your tribe finds itself on the back of a massive creature called an Onbu. This traveling giant is content to ferry you around and let you live on the resources that grow on it. In turn, you care for it and guide it, if you can get it to trust you.

The game is a classic city builder at its finest, and a solid story has been naturally built in. As the people living on the last known living Onbu and the only people traveling the world, it has fallen on you to collect ancient seeds that might be able to be planted to fight back against the poisons that are destroying the world.

The game looks magnificent, and the controls are great. My only gripe is that a few times when trying to click on certain objects, the camera angles get a bit weird, but this is a minor annoyance and never really ruined the gameplay for me. Just watching my characters build things and live their lives as my lumbering creature travels the world to different biomes is a nice experience.

Another nice experience is the characters you meet along the way, many feel desperate for your help without coming across as sad and pathetic. They are hopeful while still giving off a sense of urgency. It is a nice touch, you don’t often get. At a $30 price point, I have no complaints about this game, and with everything just being included by the in-depth tech tree that is still small enough to allow multiple play-throughs on various difficulties, there is a lot to love here, definitely a 9/10 experience for fans of the genre. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

RPG / sim crossover announced! Road Truckers: New Beginning

Just a quick announcement from my friends at Movie Games: the RPG/Sim game Road Truckers, featuring Truck Driver, has been announced and is now open for wishlist on Steam and PS5. Check out the trailer below. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Curiosmos Steam Demo Preview

Curiosmos is a cute demo sent to me by Céline Veltman & The Silly Stars and is essentially a space sim that lets you build your own little star system. You will start out by slamming dust and rocks together to form a planet, and once it is big enough, you can start messing around on the surface.

On the surface, you can do all sorts of things, like hit the planet with more asteroids to see what happens to the surface, form clouds and rain, or even just anger the planet and watch it spit lava everywhere. The planet does have feelings after all.

The demo is sadly rather short and cuts off when a black hole appears, leaving you at a sort of cliffhanger as the sun explains that there is a way to make the black hole happy and leave your newly forming solar system in peace. The demo does, however, do a great job of showing you how you and your new robot friend can collect materials to form new planets and how you can play with them. It is a fun little demo, and the game itself shows some real promise. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition PS5 Review

Reviewing Neverwinter Nights 2 on PS5 is a bit odd for me. No, it isn’t because it is based on the 3.5 system, and I played Dungeons and Dragons 5.0. Also, before I go further, shout out to Aspyr Media for hooking me up with a copy of this one.

The story of Neverwinter Nights 2 is pretty standard fare in 2025. You are an adopted child whose parents died and are thrust by your uncle into an adventure you seemingly were born to take. After what was a rather in-depth character creator for its time, which for today’s world is bare bones. You move on to participating in a summer festival of games, which serves as your tutorial. It will teach you everything you need to know about casting spells, how to steal, and avoid traps, and equipping weapons and combat.

You can skip the tutorial if you want, and move right on to the city being attacked, but you will miss some story elements and the chance at some early items, nothing fantastic, and that you will outgrow soon anyway.

But how does this enhanced edition play? Well, it is the definitive way to play it on console. It comes with all previously released DLC, and graphically, it has never looked better. So if you happen to own the original release, this is definitely an upgrade. If you have never played it and have Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition (PS4), this is definitely something you will want to pick up as well. The game isn’t without faults; however, a few times, my main character would get stuck on seemingly nothing. This is easily fixed by simply switching to a different person. The stuck character simply moves on his own, and you are free to swap back. Once or twice during the dialogue, people’s lower jaws decided to just overlap their front jaws, and their teeth just sort of appeared in front of their faces. I also once had to restart when, mid-fight, I got stuck in the pause menu while swapping characters.

All of these things were very rare, happening once, maybe twice, across an entire playthrough that could easily last 60 hours if you are a completionist. I wouldn’t at all advise against picking it up based on these minor and rare bugs that I haven’t seen anyone else really mention. It is still a 7/10 experience that I think fans of D&D and Neverwinter will enjoy. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

JET OFF ON A ‘STARSAND ISLAND’ ADVENTURE, YOUR WAY!

Chinese developer, Seed Lab, is today exploring the great outdoors of its upcoming life sim, Starsand Island, and has hinted at some of the game’s adventures and scenic journeys to be had when it launches on PC and consoles in late 2025.

Players will be able to skate, ride, drive, and fly a range of vehicles, including skateboards, rollerblades, cars, scooters with (and without) sidecars, and even a paraglider, across the island’s lush pastures, green- and amber-hued woodlands, glistening sandy beaches, and the surrounding azure seas. Amphibious craft will also be available, enabling seamless land and water traversal, further expanding players’ horizons.

Exploring the island won’t have to be done solo: a number of vehicles have passenger seats, allowing NPC pals and pets – and even real-life friends via the Starsand Island’s multiplayer gameplay – to go along for the ride, while the game’s photo mode will allow players to capture memories and moments from every part of their adventure.

Showcasing the game at this year’s BitSummit expo in Japan, Seed Lab is also unveiling more details on both the character and vehicle customization available in Starsand Island. The game’s vehicle modification system lets players fully customize their rides; for example, cars can be painted with new colors, and detailed with a range of decals, wheel rims, and interiors.

Starsand Island also features extensive customization for the player’s character, including the ability to finely tune them with a range of facial features, skin tones, makeup, and hairstyles, while choosing from a vast wardrobe of outfits and accessories to complete a fresh, edgy vibe ready for island life. Further customisable options will be expanded post-launch, along with additional social and collaborative gameplay, while more information on Starsand Island’s multiplayer functionality will be released in the coming months.

Horror Night with Tung Tung Tung Sahur PS5 Review

Horror Night with Tung Tung Tung Sahur on PS5 was sent my way by Source Byte, which I am grateful for, but admittedly, they don’t always put out the best games. They help a lot of very small indie companies publish their work, and it can be a bit hit and miss for them. Horror Night honestly is one of their hits, and I did not expect that from a meme game.

For those that don’t know, and I imagine it is most of you without children, Tung Tung Sahur is considered an Italian brain to character that shows up a lot as one of the bad guys in Sprunki Logi videos.

The game itself follows typical horror movie and game logic: you crash your car outside, you knock on the closest building for help. The door creaks open, and you walk inside only to be trapped inside with some crazed or demented entity or person.

There is honestly absolutely nothing new or inventive about this game, and for $10, you shouldn’t expect there to be. What you should be asking for at that price is, was the game entertaining, and was it functional, and the answer is yes, it is, for about 2 hours if you take your time. The game has 11 ratings on PS5 and is sitting at 4 out of 5 stars, and this seems fair to me. I call it an 8/10 experience compared to other games at this price point. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Co-op Space Roguelite “Void Crew” Comes to PS5, XSX Sept. 4

After a successful launch on PC, Focus Entertainment and Hutlihut Games are thrilled to announce that Void Crew—the chaotic co-op space adventure where you explore, fight and scavenge loot across the galaxy with your crewmates—is coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on Sept. 4, 2025. Console porting has been handled by Piktiv AB, ensuring a smooth and optimized experience wherever you play!

With more than 5,600 reviews and an 87% “Very Positive” rating on Steam, Void Crew continues to build momentum with its most recent 1.1 update. This version expands the chaos to support up to six players, introduces new ship modules, adds a “Survivor” game mode and ramps up the challenge with even more intense space battles.

Console players will also be able to enjoy full six-player crossplay encompassing PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. So get ready to rally your crew, command your vessel, and journey into deep space on thrilling missions. Just watch out for asteroid storms, solar flares, hostile aliens, desperate human scavengers, your buddies’ screw-ups, and the rest of the galaxy!

Void Crew is available now on Steam and will release for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on September 4 in its 1.1 version.

Silence of the Siren becomes Heroes of Science and Fiction! Also, Map Editor and Random Maps!

As many of you may know, I have been a long-time supporter and player of Silence of the Siren (PC), and Oxymoron Games has shared some news with me that we don’t often hear. They have quite literally changed the name. Due to confusion with other titles out there, Silence of the Siren is now Heroes of Science and Fiction. I have added some other news about the game below as well. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

What’s new?

  • The Map Editor we used to create all the maps in the game (there’s an official Steam Guide)!
  • BETA version of the Random Map Generator
  • A powerful Event/Scripting Editor battle-tested by creating different campaigns (there’s also a Steam Guide for this part of the editor)
  • A simple Steam Workshop integration so you can share your maps directly from the Editor
  • A new planet with a 6-phase day-night cycle, new maps. This includes the map from the Next Fest Demo 2024 and an even older demo map uploaded as an example to the Workshop!
  • 4 new units
  • Random commander selection for scenarios and skirmishes
  • Statistics for the victory screen with the army strength timeline
  • New commander list UI

Holdfast: Nations At War PS5 Review

Holdfast: Nations At War is now a new game; it is simply new to consoles. Anvil Studios released it back in 2020 on Steam and finally put it on consoles, and were kind enough to send me this masterpiece of a game. I am not calling it a masterpiece because it is beyond reproach; it is actually quite flawed.

For example, the graphics are pretty dated, and the controls can be clunky. I am not a fan of the melee weapons at all, and it feels like swinging through pudding regardless of the weapon. If you know anything about the Napoleonic Wars or World War One, you can imagine what it is like playing a FPS where half the weapons are essentially black powder rifles with slow reload times.

I know I just said a lot of bad things about a game I just called a masterpiece. Truthfully, I have not had this much fun with a $20 game in a very long time. I even spent $5 on the American Forces pack because I wanted to support the company and use the 103rd Infantry Regiment stuff that comes with it, along with in-game shouts. and such. Admittedly, it is basically just character skins you can pick, but it is a small detail that the game gets right.

This is where the game shines. The player base is full of people just enjoying themselves. Proximity chat is full of people laughing, making harmless period jokes about doing it for queen and crumpets while charging over a wall only to get shot down and respawn and hop on a boat and play with a steam whistle. You will see guys chatting while launching shells of artillery shells, and as an artilleryman myself in the army, I appreciate this because that’s basically how it really goes. But it is real people just chatting away in these 150-person games. (75 on each team)

The gameplay is basically as average as it gets, but the community is as good as it comes, and the game itself is a blast to play, and for $20, it shouldn’t be missed. It is truly one of those hidden gems on the PS5. 8/10, best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Scum Steam Review

Scum recently transitioned from early access to 1.0, and Gamepires sent me a copy, which I greatly appreciate. SCUM prides itself on being the most realistic open-world survival game on the market, and honestly, it might just be. Where most games are happy to let you just eat anything to refill your hunger, what you eat matters here.

The story is no slouch either, you find yourself on SCUM island, a place for criminals to work of their crimes by entertaining the masses. Death doesn’t save you, as you are revived and sent back to the start of your attempt to be the last one standing. Ok, so that part doesn’t really make any sense. To be fair, none of us is playing a game with a genitalia modifier for the story anyway, right?

A few words of warning, the requirements to play this game are hefty. For the first time ever, my laptop struggled, and it struggled hard. I have more than the minimum requirements, and I still find myself messing with settings. Also, ignore the negative reviews you find on Steam for the most part. Many of them are long-time players, with over 1000-2000 hours, complaining about what isn’t in the game or how their ideas weren’t used, etc. While some of them are perfectly valid, they do ignore the fact that the game is incredibly detailed.

The multiplayer aspect is amazing, the base building is very in-depth, and while the learning curve is pretty steep, you are rewarded with a one-of-a-kind experience. Everything needs to be balanced in this game, from your diet to weight management with your inventory, but not to such an extent that I ever felt like the game was a chore to play.

I do have a few small issues, and you will see these are pretty common complaints. Melee combat is basically as clunky as it gets. The learning curve is also huge, making the game pretty much impossible to just dive right into. The community also isn’t always exactly the most inviting, either. You can find great people in it, don’t get me wrong, but others are pretty much the definition of toxic and take the last man standing part very seriously.

So is it worth the $40, however? As a survival fan, absolutely, it is a 7/10 experience that I don’t regret for a moment. Just maybe avoid it if you don’t have the time or patience to learn it. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.