Xbox Series X|S Game Reviews
Review Easy Red 2 (Xbox) - This Micro-Budget WW2 Shooter Is Remarkably Solid
Just £7.95 / $8.99 on the Xbox Store!
Of all the settings that have waxed and waned in popularity within the FPS genre over the years, it's unsurprising that we repeatedly find ourselves returning to the really big fight that was World War 2. It's an endlessly fascinating period of history, you see, rich in famous battles and figures to hang your...
Review Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator (Xbox) - A Rough Ride That's Still Surprisingly Fun
It's time to make some craazzyy money
It feels like the Xbox Series X and Series S generation has marked a resurgence for simulation games, with the likes of Police Simulator: Patrol Officers, PowerWash Simulator, Lawn Mowing Simulator and the incredible Microsoft Flight Simulator all proving extremely popular on the Xbox Store in recent ye
Review The Outlast Trials (Xbox) - A Bland Horror Spin-Off That Works Better With A Few Friends
Saw you coming
Red Barrels has somehow been making Outlast games for a full ten years now and, although some of us at PX aren't huge fans of this franchise in general, we do appreciate the things that it does just a little differently than others. Of course we're talking about the fact that these games give players heightened senses of perception,...
Review WWE 2K24 (Xbox) - Just Like WrestleMania, This Series Continues To Get Bigger And Better
The bottom line, 'cause we said so
WrestleMania season is officially upon us, and 2024 marks the 40th anniversary of WWE's grandest event. Last year's show ended up being a memorable two-nighter in front of a combined attendance of over 134,000 people, and we're expecting WrestleMania 40 to eclipse that spectacle once again. That's pretty much what...
Review Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun (Xbox) - Slick Space Marine Shooting Stomps Onto Game Pass
Peace is not in my vocabulary
We're not huge fans of the term "boomer shooter", mostly because it feels like someone is attacking us for being very old, but there's no doubt this most violent of genres has been hitting out with some absolute belters over the past couple of years. If you're an aficionado of all things retro-FPS who's been revelling...
Bring da Truckus
Saber Interactive has hit a surprisingly rich vein of offroad driving fun with its excellent MudRunner series, itself a spin-off from the glory days of Oovee Studio's Spintires. The dev's latest effort, Expeditions: A MudRunner Game, feels like an attempt to capitalise on this somewhat niche franchise's unexpected popularity by...
Review Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster (Xbox) - Solid '90s Shooter Shines In Slick Nightdive Revamp
May the force...etc etc
Nightdive Studios has rapidly fostered a reputation as something of a master within the realms of the retro remake lately. It's not hard to see why, with its fantastic revamps of System Shock and Quake 2 having recently received a ton of praise (including a big fat 10/10 from us for Quake 2). However, Star Wars: Dark Forces...
Big bro, little bro
Just over a decade ago, Swedish game director Josef Fares made his explosive video game debut with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - a short platformer that delivered big on creative two-person puzzling and subtle, heartfelt storytelling. Well, 10 years on this classic has returned in the form of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake,...
Life to the living
How much of what you believe in are you willing to sacrifice for the person you love? It's a question we very foolishly weren't expecting to be slapped in the face with during our time with the latest action RPG from DON'T NOD, but it's one that Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden presents as a constant throughout it's captivating and...
Review Dead Island 2 (Xbox) - Long-In-Development Sequel Embraces The Absurd
Infected on set
Update (Thu 22nd Feb, 2024): Dead Island 2 is now available on Xbox Game Pass, so we thought we'd republish this review to give you an idea of what it's all about. We've also covered the XGP news separately on Pure Xbox: <related ids="162559"> Original review (Tue 18th Apr, 2023): Emerging from the flames of development hell...
Review Balatro (Xbox) - LocalThunk's Deck-Building Roguelike Is A P-P-P-Poker Ace
Love that Joker
The only experience this particular writer has ever had with poker is reluctantly standing beside a nicotine-addled schoolfriend in a smoky 90s arcade while they mindlessly pumped all their pennies into what was surely the most boring game ever invented on planet earth. The end. It stands to reason, then, that we fully expected to...
Review Skull & Bones (Xbox) - Solid Combat Saves The Day In Ubisoft's Middling Pirate Playground
Sea of Peeves
It's taken its sweet time making landfall, but Ubisoft's oft-delayed AAAA slice o' pirate life, Skull & Bones, is finally with us. We've already been hearing chatter from some of those indulging in the game's early access that it's all a bit boring, slow and bland. Me hearties, all of these things are absolutely true! However,...
Review Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered (Xbox) - Updated '90s Classics Finally Arrive On Xbox
Lara discovers the big green machine
Tomb Raider made its grand debut way back in 1996, and since then we've seen loads of releases across a ton of different platforms - including a few movie entries to boot. However, in the almost-three decades since its debut we've never seen the original trilogy on Xbox - until now in the form of Tomb Raider 1-3...
Mission Un-failed
Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has been debated, discussed and deemed a surefire disaster ever since it was first properly revealed back in the early stages of 2023. There was, according to what we experienced of the general consensus at least, no way in hell that this most distinguished of devs could...
Guys, you gotta SEES this
When we reviewed the Xbox Series X version of Persona 3 Portable last year we slapped an enthusiastic 8/10 scoreline on it, calling the game "a turning point for Atlus' franchise", one that redirected the tone away from the dark and dingy aesthetic of the first two entries towards the more confident, cool atmosphere that's...
Review Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (Xbox) - RGG Studio Drops Its Best Game Yet
Hawaii One-Zero?
We mentioned in our recent Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name review that RGG Studio has been on an almighty roll of late when it comes to all things Yakuza-related. As a result this riotous series, so long overlooked by mainstream audiences in the west, has finally become the sort of permanent fixture on 'Best RPG'...
Marshall Arts
The last time we jumped into 2017's Tekken 7 on Xbox Series X we were quite taken aback by how poorly optimised the game was on Microsoft's current crop of consoles. We don't have the exact numbers in front of us right now, and Google is so very far away, but this is a game that, last time we checked, was running at 720p on the latest...
Prince Charming
It has, quite unbelievably, been 35 whole earth years since Jordan Mechner's original Prince of Persia released for the Apple II back in 1989. It represented one of the first examples of what's become known as the 'cinematic platformer', a genre that combines strong art styles, satisfying narratives and fluidly animated protagonists...
Review Assassin's Creed Valhalla (Xbox) - The Best Entry To Date, And A Series X Showpiece
Update: And now it's on Xbox Game Pass!
Update (Mon 8th Jan, 2024): Just over three years since we published our Assassin's Creed Valhalla review, the game is joining Xbox Game Pass as part of the January 2024 lineup! You can check out our original impressions of the game down below, which arrived just a few days after the launch of the Xbox Series...
Review Baldur's Gate 3 (Xbox) - One The Greatest RPGs Of All Time Finally Lands On Xbox Consoles
Electric Isometric
Editor's Note: Originally, we held off displaying our "Outstanding" 10/10 score for Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox because of a major issue in which players were losing their save files. We didn't experience this issue during our review, but we felt it was important to make players aware that they could lose hours and hours' worth of...
Blue Velvet?
Ubisoft's final big release of 2023, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, looks, feels and plays pretty much identically to every open world Ubisoft adventure you may or may not have played over the past decade. It's most reminiscent of Far Cry Primal in its moment-to-moment gameplay, with a focus on gathering and making use of nature to heal,...
Review SteamWorld Build (Xbox) - Thunderful Drops A Stellar Steampunk Adventure Onto Xbox Game Pass
Dig It
Thunderful (an amalgamation of Swedish indie devs Image & Form and Zoink) has been delighting us with its clunkety, clankety retro-futuristic SteamWorld series since SteamWorld Tower Defence on the Nintendo DSi all the way back in 2010. While that particular game may not have been the most explosive of starts - it's definitely the weakest...
Review Teardown (Xbox) - A Slick And Addictive Slice Of Voxel Destruction
Appetite For Destruction
Blasting into Tuxedo Labs' Teardown for the first time, we felt as though we had a pretty good idea on how the experience was gonna go. This is a game that's all about destroying stuff, it's about destroying stuff that's made in a stunning voxel art style so that destroying that stuff looks incredible, and we were fairly...
Review Persona 5 Tactica (Xbox) - A Successful Switch To Slick Tactical Action For Joker & Company
Love that Joker
Atlus games' phenomenal Persona 5 has already provided us with a couple of successful spin-offs in the form of Dynasty Warriors crossover Persona 5 Strikers and the rhythm action effort Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight. Now, the Phantom Thieves return for yet another side gig in the form of Persona 5 Tactica, a tactical turn-based...
Rundown on new ideas
Call of Duty 2023 is here, with Modern Warfare 3 taking the mantle this time around as the franchise's first 'back-to-back sequel' in its 20-year history. This year's game contains three main components: campaign, multiplayer and for the first time in the MW series, Zombies. But, how do they all stack up? And how does Zombies...
War never changes (but it could at least have tried)
A brand new re-release of a bunch of Metal Gear Solid games that take in the series' history from 1987 right up to 2004 should, you would think, be cause for much celebration. Hideo Kojima's jaw-dropping stealth spectaculars remain as vitally important as ever, absolute must-plays for any student...
Review Wild Hearts (Xbox) - Koei Tecmo & EA's Monster Hunter-Like Arrives On Xbox Game Pass
How does it hold up?
Update (Thu 9th Nov, 2023): With Wild Hearts arriving on Xbox Game Pass as part of EA Play today, we thought we'd re-share this review from earlier in the year so you can get an idea of what it's like, and whether it's worth a download. Keep in mind the game has also received multiple patches since release, as documented on the...
What's the story, Morning Glory?
If there's one group of gamers who've been eating better than most lately, it's definitely Like A Dragon/Yakuza fans. Over the past few years we've seen Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio fully invest in revisiting, remaking and remastering important parts of its long-running RPG series, continuing to add stunning new entries to...
Review Robocop: Rogue City (Xbox) - A Slice Of 1980s Nostalgia That Feels Purposefully Old School
This tin man's got heart
There's just something about RoboCop. Maybe it's an age thing, maybe you just had to be there, but the ultra-violent tin cop sits alongside the likes of Knight Rider, Terminator and lots of other 1980s goodies as a property that immediately gets our excitement levels right up to the max as soon as it's mentioned. We'll sit...
Review Jusant (Xbox) - Not Quite The 'Peak' Of Xbox Game Pass, But Still A Fun Adventure
Ready for a climb?
Jusant describes itself as an action-puzzle climbing game with "meditative vibes", and when you combine that with the talented Life is Strange and Tell Me Why studio DON'T NOD, the concept has long sounded like a winning formula to us. But what about the execution? In a year that's been overflowing with new Xbox releases and "day...
