Author: Chris Tapsell

I’ve been thinking a lot about realism recently – in part because I’ve been playing an awful lot of Football Manager 2024 (probably a lot more than I really needed to for the review, but keep that between us), and FM is nothing if not an attempt to make very fake looking football feel…

What should be a transitional year for Football Manager feels like a quietly revolutionary one, thanks to a handful of little changes with big impacts. It’s rare to notice a new Football Manager’s tweaks as quickly as I did with FM24. It’s March 2025, two-and-a-half seasons into my traditional Manchester United rescue job, and…

Hello and welcome to definitely-not-miserable November, where the nights close in, the Big Coat is officially back in rotation, and video games become a greater draw than ever. But starting a new month also means a return for our recurring series, too, where we summarise What to Play This Month. As always, the goal here…

Football Manager 2024’s Early Access period – until now called an open beta – is now live, silencing the usual screams of desperation from fellow FM addicts. For those unfamiliar, this is generally how new FM games roll out each year, with a period of up to a month before the official release date –…

At once a little simple and a little over-stuffed, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is still above all a game of immense charm and fluid, free-form style. Spider-Man’s always been a busy guy. He’s got classes to attend – or in this slightly older Peter Parker’s case now, teach. He’s got a girlfriend to see, friends…

[ad_1] Forgive the surprise, but 80s action movies haven’t typically made for the smoothest transitions to modern video games. Predator had Predator: Hunting Grounds, for instance, “a naff waste of great material”. Terminator had Terminator: Resistance – “generic and boring”. The infamous Aliens: Colonial Marines was admittedly followed by Alien Isolation and the enjoyable…

[ad_1] Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order didn’t launch in the best of states – or at least not if you were playing on the base versions of the PS4 and Xbox One. There were a few jitters here and there, a few crashes, and for me a couple of especially memorable, minutes-long hangs on…

[ad_1] Important questions first: what’s the deal with Lords of the Fallen’s name? The first one, you’ll remember, came out the best part of a decade ago in 2014, but that was also called Lords of the Fallen – and this new one isn’t a remake. Or maybe it is. Lords of the…

[ad_1] Spoiler warning for God of War Ragnarok’s late-game story! With much of the final, climactic level in place and the last few visual effects coming in, the developers at Sony Santa Monica realised they had a bit of a problem: there’s a big plot development that happens here, essential to the entire story…

[ad_1] If you played Wordle religiously through 2022, you might remember one particularly rough day’s answer: Parer. This turned out to be the most difficult word of the year, in part thanks to its use of a recurring ‘r’, but a GDC talk yesterday from Zoe Bell, the New York Times’ executive producer…