Latest Reviews
Mini Review Across the Valley (PSVR2) - Repetitive Farming Simulator Crawling with Bugs
Diddly squat to do
Across the Valley is a hand-drawn style, farming simulator from the small indie developer, FusionPlay. Each in-game day lasts 15 minutes and as your role of farmhand you’ll have to fit in as many missions from the task board as possible before dark. The daily tasks around the farm include planting, watering, weeding, and...
Mini Review Road 96: Mile 0 (PS5) - A Tonal Nightmare with Some Interesting Moments
Talk about whiplash
Road 96, the procedural hitchhiking game, was a title with an interesting presentation and a slew of good ideas. Developer DigixArt took that great foundation and spun things off into Road 96: Mile 0, a narrative-focused prequel that strips away the procedural elements, replacing them with rhythm gameplay. The world presented in...
Mini Review The Last Worker (PSVR2) - VR Doesn't Save the First-Person Order Picker
Welcome to the Jüngle
Games exploring the contemporary world of online order fulfilment work were inevitable, but we pictured they’d hit harder and have more to say than The Last Worker does. Playing as the last human employee picking packages to be delivered for a retail monopoly named Jüngle, the real-world parallels are obvious and the setup...
Mini Review Last Labyrinth (PSVR2) - Tediously Torturous Escape Room Experience
Sadistic
Last Labyrinth is a unique escape room experience, and not in a good way. You're strapped into a wheelchair with very limited manoeuvrability. With only head movements available to you and a laser pointer attached to the middle of your forehead, you must guide a young girl through a labyrinth of puzzles and ultimately escape this torturous...
Mini Review Citizen Sleeper (PS5) - Solemn Yet Satisfying Sci-Fi Storytelling
Don't sleep on it
Citizen Sleeper merges the RPG with the visual novel, wrapping it up in a brooding sci-fi blanket. Playing as the titular Sleeper — an android with the emulated mind of a human being — you explore Erlin's Eye, a vast space station run by corrupt corporations and inhabited by people making the best of it. As you progress, you'll...
Mini Review The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners - Tourist Edition (PSVR2) Must-Buy VR Survival
Saintly survival
The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners - Tourist Edition is a 15-to-20-hour post-apocalyptic survival experience developed by Skydance Interactive. Playing as The Tourist, you find yourselves in a flooded New Orleans, among several conflicting factions all fighting over access to The Reserve, a haven full resources for surviving an...
Review MLB The Show 23 (PS5) - Netflix Documentary Inspired Negro Leagues Mode Is the Real MVP
Jazzed up
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for the developers of sports games to offer transformative new experiences in annual releases. With budgets soaring, deadlines looming, and a demand for live service support all season long, franchises like MLB The Show 23 feel like they’ve been caught flatfooted. But San Diego Studio’s baseball...
Mini Review Deceive Inc (PS5) - Multiplayer Stealth Is Mission Mostly Accomplished
Tactical espionage action
Deceive Inc. is an online multiplayer game that puts the emphasis on staying incognito while you work towards your objective. It combines hero shooter-style characters with the stealth and deduction of Among Us, or even the multiplayer of Assassin's Creed, and presents it in a cartoonish, James Bond wrapper. The merging of...
Mini Review Dredge (PS5) - Eerie Fishing Adventure Will Reel You In
There's always a weirder fish
Dredge is a fishing game with eldritch nastiness lurking beneath the surface. It's a perfect combo, and although the spooky side never descends into true horror, there's an ever-present sense of unease as you explore the small open ocean and its island outposts. Playing as a freshly hired fisherman, you begin the game...
Farewell party
Reisalin “Ryza” Stout and her friends are back in another heart-warming RPG which closes out the 'Secret' sub-series. The long-running Atelier series is well known for featuring young alchemists who spend much of their adventure gathering ingredients, crafting new items, and beating up foes. Atelier Ryza 3 is no exception to that...
Review Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1) - The Pinnacle of PS1 Ridge Racer Games
I want to be R4-ever young
Republished on Saturday, 18th March, 2023: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of March 2023's PS Plus line up. The original text follows. Push Square has pondered the infancy of 3D console graphics during the 32-bit era, and reflected that the ageing process was not always...
Review The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners - Chapter 2: Retribution (PSVR2) - Great Game, Sinful Name
Born on the bayou
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners - Chapter 2: Retribution deserves recognition. Never before have we seen such a verbose title manage to communicate so little while saying so much. It fails to convey to newcomers that it’s a standalone game complete with its own campaign, and it coyly obfuscates the fact that this isn’t...
Review Tchia (PS5) - Unique Island Adventure Is a Joyful, Creative Playground
Totally tropical
Developer Awaceb created Tchia as a love letter to its native home of New Caledonia. Though the game itself is set on a fantastical archipelago, it draws deeply from its real-life counterpart in terms of environment and story. It feels really genuine as a snapshot of the culture; its story is heavily rooted in the territory's...
Review The Light Brigade (PSVR2) - Solid Rogue-Lite Doesn't Need to Reinvent the Wheel
Look for the light
Developer Funktronic Labs is no stranger to crafting interesting, meaningful roguelike experiences. Look no further than Nova-111, a fantastic game released back in 2015. Fast forward a handful of years, and the developers have revisited this ever-fruitful well, delivering the rogue-lite The Light Brigade for Sony's new headset...
Review Resident Evil 4 (PS5) - A True Masterpiece Made Even Better
Bingo time
No new console generation feels quite right until a re-release of Resident Evil 4 rolls around. Following a PS2 version in 2005, the Capcom classic has been ported to every home system from Sony since; you can't have one without the other at this point. However, following the developer's recent remaking efforts with Resident Evil 2 and...
Review The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR (PSVR2) - Lousy Rails Shooter Is a Supermassive Shame
Ride it out
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, a rails shooter with a rollercoaster theme, was one of the surprise highlights of PSVR’s catalogue, so there was understandable enthusiasm surrounding the announcement of Supermassive’s spiritual successor, The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR. Unfortunately, this is a dour shadow of a follow-up, let-down by...
Review Anno 1800 Console Edition (PS5) - Victorian Strategy on an Industrial Scale
Moving up in the world
Anno 1800 Console Edition sees the advent of 2019's excellent PC colony builder on PS5, and we were pleased to find the transition has been an incredibly smooth one. What was once the province of mouse and keyboard finds an incredibly comfortable fit on console, enhanced with all the DualSense bells and whistles. If you...
Mini Review Job Simulator (PSVR2) - A Port Worthy of a Promotion
Jobsworth
Job Simulator’s enduring popularity is no coincidence: it is, after all, the quintessential virtual reality game. Spread across four impressively interactive occupations, you’ll turn your comically exaggerated hands to all kinds of amusing tasks, like cooking the books as an office worker and dealing with a robbery as a convenience...
Mini Review Unplugged: Air Guitar (PSVR2) - An Entertaining Rhythm Game, Warts and All
This game’s got the beat
Originally released on the Meta Quest, Unplugged: Air Guitar is a rhythm game where you, well, play an air guitar. You strum with one hand and move the other to different parts of the neck according to a note chart similar to games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. With a core track list of 20 plus tracks from across the...
Review Mato Anomalies (PS5) - Surreal Turn-Based RPG Falls Flat
Neo-future Shanghai is about to explode
Mato Anomalies is a hodgepodge of ideas and motifs that works, for the most part, but suffers from trying to do too much with too little. It's aspirational, but the experience as a whole suffers from poor pacing and repetition, and comes off feeling like just another mediocre JRPG as a result, despite some...
Review WWE 2K23 (PS5) - 2K Sports' Wrestling Series Continues Its Steady Rise
Never give up
Minor tweaks and improvements are the usual selling points of annualised sporting titles. Yes, the teams and kits may be updated, player ratings may be tweaked, and 4K beard follicles may now be visible in replays, but that’s usually your lot. Not so with 2K’s WWE series. Standing on the shoulders of WWE 2K22’s solid efforts, the...
Mini Review Puzzling Places (PSVR2) - A Lovely Game with a Few Problems
Puzzle me this, Batman
Puzzling Places is absolutely lovely — that’s the best way to describe it. A puzzle game best described as a 3D jigsaw, this is far and away the most relaxing time you can have with your PSVR2. The game leans into its unique appeal, allowing you to put together 3D dioramas of things that under normal circumstances would be...
Mini Review The Last Clockwinder (PSVR2) - A Satisfying, Chilled Out Puzzler
Going it a-clone
In a nutshell, The Last Clockwinder is a blend of solving puzzles and building factories. It's not the most original idea, but it's executed really well, taking advantage of virtual reality's unique perspective to create some truly engrossing gameplay. Set within the Clocktower, an enormous tree acting as a safe haven for various...
Mini Review DC's Justice League: Cosmic Chaos (PS5) - All-Ages Brawler Is Surprisingly Good Fun
Justice for all
With absolutely no word on this game ahead of its release, you'd be forgiven for being a bit wary of DC's Justice League: Cosmic Chaos — a sandbox action title aimed squarely at an all-ages audience. But this cutesy take on DC's superheroes is actually pretty good. It's a surprisingly heartfelt release, featuring chunky combat,...
Mini Review Pistol Whip (PSVR2) - Still One of the Best VR Games You Can Play
Whip it
Upon its PSVR launch, we found Pistol Whip to be a sublime experience, brilliantly blending rail shooter and rhythm mechanics. How does the upgraded version fare? Well, even better. Unlike some of the PSVR2 upgrades, Pistol Whip doesn’t make a huge impression graphically. It was a stylized title with a solid aesthetic on first attempt, so...
Mini Review No Man's Sky (PSVR2) - Explore an Infinite Universe on a Whole New Scale
Space is big
We've revisited No Man's Sky a number of times over the years. It only seems fair to check in every once in a while considering how much changes with each major update. The latest of these, Fractal, adds full PSVR2 support, allowing you to explore planets, space stations, and everything in between within Sony's new headset. The initial...
Review Before Your Eyes (PSVR2) - Eye Tracked Tearjerker Will Move You
Blink and you'll miss it
There will be no dry PSVR2 headsets among those who choose to try Before Your Eyes. This truly unique 90 minute narrative experience asks you to set aside your DualSense, and relies on the headset’s eye tracking as its primary form of engagement. Rather than using the controller, you’ll instead blink to interact with...
Review Transport Fever 2 (PS5) - Impressively Detailed Transport Sim Hits a Few Potholes
Connect the dots
Transport Fever 2 is a meticulously designed logistics simulator which tasks you with the timely transportation of passengers and goods via trains, trucks, planes, and ships. There is a simple satisfaction in getting something where it needs to go as efficiently as possible, and that sense extends to the gameplay experience as a...
Mini Review Rez Infinite (PSVR2) - PSVR Classic Remains a Must-Play on PSVR2
To Infinite and beyond
Rez Infinite was a transcendent experience on PSVR. A game originally from the PS2 days, the title seems at home in virtual reality to such a degree that it might as well have been made with that in mind. And the PSVR2 glow-up actually makes things even better. First and foremost, the graphical upgrade is immediately...
Review Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (PS5) - A Warts and All Survival Horror Remaster
Photographic Violence
Here at Push Square it's site policy that we don't believe in the supernatural. Vampires, werewolves, and Frankensteins? Poppycock, hogwash, and flannel, we say. Having never believed in ghosts we've never considered what we'd do should we ever come face to face with one. We can plan for World War 3 or Covid 2 or bumping into...
