PS4 Game Reviews
Tussled sprouts
Republished on Wednesday 28th July 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of August's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Plants vs. Zombies has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a tower defence game. After developer PopCap was acquired by EA, the studio...
Review Tennis World Tour 2 (PS4) - A Winner
Match point
Republished on Wednesday 28th July 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of August's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Tennis games tend to be a lot of fun, but even the best ones struggle to capture the intricacy of the sport. In franchises like Virtua Tennis, the emphasis...
Mini Review Night Book (PS4) - Interactive Horror Is More Funny Than Scary
Booking hell
Uh oh, Dad's possessed. What rotten luck! Here you are, heavily pregnant and living in a crummy apartment in Croydon, and your fiancé Pearce has inexplicably decided to jet off to the other side world on business when you need him most. Never mind, Pearce has a plan. He's installed security cameras all over the apartment so the police...
Review Samurai Warriors 5 (PS4) - Rebooted Hack and Slasher Is Fantastic Fun, for the Most Part
Incident at Honnoji
It's been seven whole years since the last mainline instalment in the Samurai Warriors series, and as far as we're concerned, 2014's Samurai Warriors 4 is still one of the best Warriors games on the market. Samurai Warriors 5 has quite the legacy to live up to, then, but is a rebooted storyline, a fresh art style, and a slew of...
Badge of honour
The World Ends With You launched in 2007 on Nintendo DS and quickly gained a cult following despite that year being packed with a seemingly endless supply of classics. Designed by Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura, it was a darker variant of the usual Square Enix RPG formula. Taking a modern setting, a prescient focus on memetic...
Review The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (PS4) - No Objections to This Spiffing Spin-Off
Industrial revelations
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a collection containing two titles never before released in the West, finally receiving official localisations years after their initial Japan-only launches. While this spin-off duology does little to tamper with the series' established formula, it makes up for a lack of innovation by...
Mini Review Akiba's Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed (PS4) - Remastered JRPG Is Fun But Flawed
Strip Tease
How time flies! The Akiba’s Trip series has been going for 10 years and to celebrate Acquire has remastered the first game in the series, which was previously only released on PSP in Japan. The game takes place in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo that is famous for its maid cafés and abundance of stores filled with manga, anime, and...
Review Sniper Elite VR (PSVR) - Precision Shooting That Mostly Hits the Mark
Sniper, no sniping
Rebellion’s no stranger to virtual reality. Having remade Atari's classic Battlezone as a PSVR launch title and publishing Arca's Path two years later, it’s teamed up with Just Add Water for Sniper Elite VR. While PlayStation owners haven’t lacked for Sniper Elite entries — we’ve previously seen
Something completely different
The Procession to Calvary is one of the most unique games we've played in a long time. It's a point and click adventure in the mould of classics like Monkey Island or Broken Sword, in which you play as a murder-hungry warrior hellbent on finding and, er, murdering a religious tyrant named Heavenly Peter. As you'd...
Rabite stew
Legend of Mana was a weird game when it originally launched in 1999, and it's even weirder 22 years later. This is an action RPG where you essentially build your own adventure. Right from the start, you're given next to no guidance on where you are or what you need to do. Most players will find that there's barely a main story until...
Subscribe to Push Square on YouTube152k Watch on YouTube Review WWE 2K Battlegrounds - Rubbish Wrestling and Microtransactions Galore
World Wrestling Spendertainment
Republished on Wednesday 30th June 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of July's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Honestly, there's something sinister about WWE 2K Battlegrounds. And no, we don't mean Bray Wyatt's creepy mask, or the grotesque...
Review A Plague Tale: Innocence - The Rats of Us
Drat
Republished on Wednesday 30th June 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of July's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. A Plague Tale: Innocence is a Sony game without a Sony budget. Focus Home Interactive may not be a forum favourite, but with ambitious original properties like...
Review Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 - The Best CoD of the Generation
Bop to the BlOps
Republished on Wednesday 30th June 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of July's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Call of Duty had to do something in order to remain relevant. After a slew of yearly releases that failed to really move the needle, Call of Duty: Black...
Mini Review Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX (PS4) - Who Thought This Game Needed a Remake?
Not a miracle worker
Before there was Sonic the Hedgehog, there was Alex Kidd, SEGA’s defacto Master System mascot. Once the blue blur took the spotlight in the ‘90s, Alex’s franchise was left as a relic of an older time, appearing only in a few compilations over the years. That was until a remake of the original game, Miracle World, was...
Bolt from the blue
Republished on Tuesday, 22nd June 2021: It’s been nearly two years since we first reviewed Olympic Games Tokyo 2020: The Official Video Game, and a lot has happened since then. SEGA’s decision to release this tie-in title several months prior to the intended start of the event in host nation Japan always struck us as strange,...
Mini Review Minute of Islands (PS4) - A Short But Beautiful Island Trip
Ah, fresh air
Minute of Islands is a beautiful adventure game that's maybe less light-hearted than you think. While the outer appearance is wonderful — we love its cartoonish, hand-drawn style — the game quickly establishes a darker, sadder tone for its six-hour runtime. You play as Mo, a young girl who resides underground after a devastating...
Review Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection (PS4) - Cut-Throat Action, Old-School Design
Ninja star
Ryu Hayabusa has been enjoying an early retirement ever since the Ninja Gaiden series was put on ice years ago. Team Ninja has been busying itself with the Nioh games in the meantime, a more deliberate style of action title that takes things in a different, yet more modern, direction. Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection brings Ryu back with...
Mini Review Jay and Silent Bob: Mall Brawl (PS4) - Mallrats Brawler with Nine NES Chapters Nootch
NESnootchie bickety bam beat-'em-up
Can a retro modern game be too retro for its own good? This is a question we asked ourselves while playing Interabang Entertainment's Jay and Silent Bob: Mall Brawl as a PS4 beat-'em-up restricted by the limitations of additionally being released on a cartridge for the original NES hardware. We also questioned...
Mini Review Tour de France 2021 (PS4) - Nacon Peddles Another Tactical Sports Sim
Battle of Brittany
Outside of fitness software like Zwift and VirZOOM, it’s hard to imagine how you can make a game about cycling entertaining. French studio Cyanide has been trying for several years now, and Tour de France 2021 is the culmination of its efforts so far, delivering a realistic simulation of the world’s third most-watched sporting...
EDF! EDF! EDF!
We’ve seen several Earth Defense Force games on PS4, but World Brothers isn’t your normal fare. Offering a family friendly spinoff with voxel graphics, this third-person shooter takes us to Square Earth, where we find this world shattered by Dark Tyrant’s forces as several motherships appear, and it’s down to us to restore it...
Mini Review Song of Horror (PS4) - Scare-Free Horror Is Frighteningly Dull
Sighlent Hill
Song of Horror begins with Daniel — a former drunkard attempting to escape the financial ruin that the bottle has left him in — taking on an errand for his boss. It's one of those go-to-a-creepy-house-and-investigate type jobs that any sane individual who has ever seen a horror movie or played Resident Evil before would know to...
Mini Review Gadgeteer (PS4) - A Fulfilling VR Physics Puzzler
Go, go gadget Rube Goldberg machine
Virtual reality is a fantastic arena with which to explore puzzles – especially when the idea is such a fun and refreshing one. Gadgeteer sees you designing amazing Rube Goldberg contraptions by placing all the missing pieces to complete the machines, while progressing through an abode’s various rooms. What...
Mini Review Stonefly (PS4) - Tranquil, Bug-Sized Adventure Lacks Bite
Sleepy crawlies
Stonefly comes from the team behind Creature in the Well, but aside from sharing a gorgeous visual style, they have very little in common. This new game is an enjoyably peaceful experience about a world inhabited by tiny people living alongside the bugs in giant natural ecosystems. Humans get around by piloting bug-like rigs,...
Mini Review Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World (PS4) - A Gorgeous Cel-Shaded Remake
A world of wonder awaits
Over 25 years after the original release of Monster World IV, the cult classic 2D action-platformer has been remade for modern consoles. Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World keeps the style and charm of the original, while updating the game to feature cel-shaded, 3D visuals. The game looks gorgeous, thanks to the eye-popping...
Review Capcom Arcade Stadium (PS4) - Capcom-asters of 32 Arcade Games from 1984 to 2001
Worth every Zenny
The widespread use of CD-ROM formats during the 32-bit era allowed space for decent retro game compilations on the PS1, but the potential of retro collections blossomed into larger libraries and extra features on the PS2 and PSP. The likes of Taito Legends, SNK Arcade Classics, and especially the various volumes of the
A rough first time for newcomers
In a world where the point-and-click genre has passed its heyday, this notorious series is one of the few keeping it going. Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice is a direct follow up to 2018's Wet Dreams Don’t Dry, continuing the story with a similar cast of characters and plenty of callbacks to previous...
Mini Review Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection (PS4) - Armour-Strippingly Hard and Proud of It
You'll need a change of underwear
There's so much exploding clothing in this game that you'd be forgiven for thinking it's another instalment in the Senran Kagura series. Fortunately (or, depending on your opinion, unfortunately) it's just the unbelievably fragile armour of enduring Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection protagonist, Sir Arthur. You see,...
Review Star Wars: Squadrons - This Might Not Be the Game You're Looking For
Squad goals
Republished on Wednesday 26th May 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of June's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Star Wars: Squadrons probably isn't the next title from a galaxy far, far away that Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order fans were looking for. It may not even be the...
Mini Review King of Seas (PS4) - A Slow But Seaworthy Pirate RPG
Weathering the storm
King of Seas might have an uncomfortably similar name to Microsoft's Sea of Thieves, but the two are very different takes on nautical adventuring. This is a top-down, sea-faring sandbox in which you play as the child of the titular monarch, framed for his murder and forced into a life of piracy. The story isn't going to blow you...
Review Rust Console Edition (PS4) - Ugly Survival Game Has Special Moments
Endure and survive
Rust Console Edition should be rubbish. Double Eleven’s tardy PlayStation 4 translation of the seminal PC survival smash has taken its sweet time to release, and it’s not exactly enjoying the smoothest launch period, with crafting bugs, hit detection hiccups, and some of the most vomit-inducing visuals we’ve seen in years...
