Matthew Smail

Where once the squad-based tactical shooter was a rarity, I feel that these days I’ve been inundated with them. This is a good problem to have as long as new entries to the genre, such as Chains of Freedom, pass the simple “is it as good as…

While I much prefer the challenge of reviewing console-based strategy games, the dedicated Romanophile in me does occasionally surface in order to pick up the occasional, exceptional PC based strategy game. The last of these was 2019’s…

From the moment Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 boots up and almost without fault across its 25 to 50 hour runtime, the player will be treated to a modern masterpiece that wows with its visual and aural delight — often in spite of its macabre…

Well, here we are — no new or particularly exciting racing games in the board game world for ages, yet now we have HEAT: Pedal to the Metal, Thunder Road: Vendetta and finally Joyride all landing in rapid succession. For me, HEAT is still…

Games like Blue Prince make me wary. With a 90+ rating on Metacritic, this is a game that has met with widespread critical and mass approval, yet it left me feeling a little bit underwhelmed. Blue Prince is a puzzle game first and foremost,…

Games like The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era don’t come around very often. The size, scope and scale of Chip Theory Games’ latest effort — not to mention the cost of producing it — speaks volumes about the confidence of the…

War has never been a particularly lightweight topic, but it remains an important one. Human beings are fascinated by conflict and as a result, the global wars of the 20th Century remain some of the most popular themes for both board and…

I first became interested in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream about ten years or so ago when it had its first re-release on Steam (having originally been released almost thirty years ago on MS-DOS). I didn’t persevere for very long when I…

It’s been a long time since the first Crossroads game — Dead of Winter — was released. Since then, this choose your own adventure style system has been through a number of iterations, with settings that feature living toys, anamorphic…

It seems completely natural — excuse the pun — for board games to use natural history as a theme. The slow pace, the thematic concepts and the general appeal of animals and nature just seems to be a great fit for the medium. But what…