You could be forgiven for overlooking Fenix Furia. Originally released on PCs as Fenix Rage in 2014, the game slipped onto Xbox Live in early June with hardly a peep from Microsoft, and a slightly altered moniker. And with the flood of independent games on Xbox One, Fenix Furia doesn’t exactly standout, given its rather generic protagonist who looks like …

It’s hard to not feel a little sad for Battleborn. The developers at Gearbox have clearly put a lot of work into the game, and there’s a lot of fun to be had with it, but being a hero shooter and releasing just two weeks before Blizzard’s hotly-anticipated Overwatch is not a good spot to be in. Battleborn may ultimately …

I grew up in the ’90s when fast-paced shooters like Doom, Quake, and Unreal were king. I put countless hours into the many campaigns of the old Doom games (even the underrated Doom 64) and then had my first deathmatch experiences in Quake and Unreal Tournament. Those were fun times, but over the years I’ve grown to find those games …

Gaming has been so completely oversaturated by first-person shooters  over the past two decades that it’s hard to imagine that there’s any room left for innovation. Fast-paced shooters. Slow-paced, methodical shooters. FPSs with parkour and RPG elements. It seems like it’s all been done. The last time there was something truly different in the field was when Valve released Portal, …

E3 is like Christmas for gamers. Maybe we don’t actually get anything that day (unless we’re lucky enough to attend), but after months of hoping and wishing, we at least find out what we’ll be playing for the rest of the year. The announcements at E3 can be enough to make grown men weep, or can nearly sink a console. …

I’m not really a fan of difficult games. That doesn’t mean that I enjoy a cake walk like Yoshi’s Story (one of the worst and easiest games I’ve ever played). I like a bit of a challenge. Games like the recent Quantum Break or Halo 5 are challenging games with great difficulty curves that I really enjoyed. But if I …

My girlfriend plays free games on her Android, but isn’t much of a gamer beyond that. She says that console games are “too complicated” for her, so she mostly leaves me be while I play whatever I want. So as I’m playing TRON RUN/r, she’s sitting next to me on the couch on her phone, not paying much attention to …

There are moments of brilliance in Quantum Break, like hitting enemy soldiers with a blast of frozen time and stacking bullets on it to watch it explode, or watching an episode of a streaming TV show that you helped influence, that are absolutely brilliant and feel like the future of video games. Then you’ll come upon an elevator that won’t …

Way back in 2003, EA reinvigorated the Need for Speed series and turned it into one of its biggest yearly franchises with the release of Need for Speed Underground. Focusing on tuner culture, it was one of the first racing games that let you fully customize your car. And boy did that game ever have style, from the blur effect …

Full-disclosure: I had a major addiction to the original Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords when it hit the Xbox 360 back in 2007. I probably lost a good two months of my life to scouring the whole map, reaching the maximum level with my warrior and beating every last enemy, plus the Revenge of the Plague Lord DLC. But …