Author: Erik

Junker Queen is dominating Overwatch 2's new Battle for Olympus mode, easily stacking up the most kills. This is according to Blizzard's player data, which suggests a whole lot of us were making the most of a recent oversight that made her completely overpowered, letting her spam her axe non-stop in certain situations. The stats, which rank each Battle for Olympus Hero based on how many kills they've amassed so far, show that Junker Queen is in the lead by more than one million points. At the time of publication, players who used the Tank had amassed a total of…

Saving is tedious. You’d rather get on with your game, but you’re so often forced to conquer the enemy that is menus, loading screens, and monotonous routine. But some games manage to cut through the dryness, ironically with incredibly boring concepts like Ico’s ‘benches’ (they’re definitely just sofas), Resident Evil’s typewriters, and Yakuza’s phone boxes. Resident Evil is the perfect example. After spending time solving puzzles amidst yet another zombie outbreak, the typewriter represents safety. You hear a calming jingle, the click-clack of worn keys as you document your progress, and a comforting feeling that, at least for the moment,…

Every time a video game phenomenon like Vampire Survivors comes around that does something totally original, the copycats are never far behind. Every milestone game going as far back as Doom, Super Mario, and even Tetris has its clones, and as the industry has grown we’ve seen the cycle repeat more often. Dark Souls had plenty of early Soulslikes that just wanted to cash-in on its popularity, as did Fortnite before Battle Royales became a well-rounded genre. Most recently, Vampire Survivors created a new blueprint, sometimes called the reverse bullet hell, and as expected, the clones are already here to…

Someone asked me the other day what kind of game Citizen Sleeper is, and I had to stop myself from rattling off the old list of tired genre signifiers we constantly use to describe games. Citizen Sleeper is a story-driven sci-fi RPG, but so are Mass Effect, The Outer Worlds, and Horizon Zero Dawn, and those are all very different games. Instead, I described it as a video game novella about an android on the run from capitalism. I like that explanation, not because it’s heavy on prose, but because it relates the kind of experience playing Citizen Sleeper is.…

Game reviews are an interesting part of gaming journalism. They're articles with Schrodinger's importance. Reviews rarely get traffic on the level of that of features, guides, or news, and they're often too all-encompassing to offer the deep criticism more targeted features can offer. They also require a huge playtime investment, up against the clock, which means they're not only shallow and largely go unread, they're also rarely your best work. And still, our industry is defined by them. What a game scores on Metacritic is used in fan circles as talking points, or when it differs from the User Score…

Despite all the hints, many were shocked when it was announced that Pokemon would be retiring Ash and starting the Scarlet & Violet generation with two new characters. It’s hard to imagine the series going on without Ash and Pikachu, and these new protagonists have some huge boots to fill. All we’ve seen of Liko and Roy is a single image, so there’s no way to know whether they’re good characters yet. Unfortunately, the fact that they’re not Ash is enough to draw disdain from fans. After all the hate Ash’s Sword & Shield friend Goh got when the community…

It says a lot about your game when its player base is trying to find ways to not do what you want them to do. While Overwatch 2 changes quite a few things from the previous entry, it has left in some of the more annoying aspects – namely, the terrible microtransaction economy. To add to this, some of the in-game challenges are almost impossible to beat while playing a regular game. Unfortunately, none of this changes with the game's first big event of the year. RELATED: Overwatch 2 Is Failing Us As A Live Service Battle For Olympus Seasonal…

To understand the new smart watches and other pro devices of recent focus, we should look to Silicon Valley and the quantified movement of the latest generation. The League of Legends series will explore the sisters’ childhood in Piltover and Zaun, and explore the twin cities. Piltover is the upper-side utopia, while Zaun is the mean streets, and is Runeterra’s dystopian underbelly. As you’re tapping, scrolling, and swiping on your phone, you probably don’t give much thought to the fact that your apps are consuming electricity – just that they’re chipping away at your battery life. My past is not…

To understand the new smart watches and other pro devices of recent focus, we should look to Silicon Valley and the quantified movement of the latest generation. The League of Legends series will explore the sisters’ childhood in Piltover and Zaun, and explore the twin cities. Piltover is the upper-side utopia, while Zaun is the mean streets, and is Runeterra’s dystopian underbelly. As you’re tapping, scrolling, and swiping on your phone, you probably don’t give much thought to the fact that your apps are consuming electricity – just that they’re chipping away at your battery life. My past is not…

To understand the new smart watches and other pro devices of recent focus, we should look to Silicon Valley and the quantified movement of the latest generation. The League of Legends series will explore the sisters’ childhood in Piltover and Zaun, and explore the twin cities. Piltover is the upper-side utopia, while Zaun is the mean streets, and is Runeterra’s dystopian underbelly. As you’re tapping, scrolling, and swiping on your phone, you probably don’t give much thought to the fact that your apps are consuming electricity – just that they’re chipping away at your battery life. My past is not…