Staff Profile
- Username
- johncalmc
- First Article
- News/Features
- 10
- Reviews
- 98
- Avg. Review Score
- 6.2
- Article Comments
- 2,819
- Total Articles
- 109
Mini Review Ten Dates (PS4) - A Much Improved Rom-Com Sequel
Seven out of ten dates
Has humanity ever had a worse idea than speed dating? Once you forget all the obviously terrible stuff like biological weapons and motion controls, speed dating must be right up there. Five minutes of pish banter with a person who isn't laughing at any of your killer jokes before you half-heartedly ask for contact information...
Game of the Year John's Top 5 PS5, PS4 Games of 2022
Put an Elden Ring on it
Our individual Game of the Year articles allow our lovely team of writers to share their own personal PS5 and PS4 picks for 2022. Today, it's the turn of reviewer John Cal McCormick. 5. Cult of the Lamb: I really enjoyed my time with Cult of the Lamb. I 8/10 enjoyed it according to my review. It’s grisly, and dark, and...
Mini Review Brewmaster (PS5) - All Hail the Best Beer Brewing Sim on PlayStation
"Just a half for me, Susan. I'm driving"
Back in the good old days you could go to your local pub for a pint of Housewives Knee and the only other people in there drinking proper beer would be old men and people who go to Games Workshop. People wearing fedora hats. Those sorts of people. But then they came. The normal people. Suddenly craft beer...
Review Star Ocean: The Divine Force (PS5) - Space Age JRPG Barely Takes Flight
One small step for man. One smaller step for JRPGs
After forty-five hours, a few smiles, and one or two frowns, we walked away from Star Ocean: The Divine Force with a shrug. It’s a middle-tier Japanese role playing game that at no point, ever, threatens to get promoted to top-tier status nor sink so low that it ends up sandwiched between...
Review New Tales From The Borderlands (PS5) - No Tale, Too Much Borderlands
Fails from the Borderlands
There’s an argument to be made that 2014’s Tales from the Borderlands is actually the best game in the Borderlands series. Now, hold on. Don’t go typing up your angry comments just yet. Hear us out. Sometimes you just want a capital V capital G Video Game that’s about running and jumping and shooting and looting...
Review Valkyrie Elysium (PS5) - Quality Combat Elevates Drab Action RPG
Par for the Norse
There's something distinctly old school about Valkyrie Elysium, and we don't mean because it's part of a long-running franchise; a series that started with the turn-based JRPG Valkyrie Profile way back in 1999. This is a game with an almost PlayStation 2 style design philosophy, for better and worse, and what you're here for will...
Review Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed (PS5) - We're Just Remaking Anything Now
Close Encounters of the Turd Kind
At some point during the billion hour long campaign for Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed — a remake of 2006's Destroy All Humans! 2 for PS2 — we began to wonder where it had all gone wrong. There we were, running around as a little alien shooting innocent passers-by with a gun that reduces them to skeletons and...
Review Cult of the Lamb (PS5) - Deliciously Evil, Giddily Gruesome, and Bloody Brilliant
Breaking Baa-d
Few games make as strong a first impression as Cult of the Lamb. It had us in its thrall within a minute, and we remained enraptured for most of our 20 or so hours with the game. It’s a title that frequently delights, with an arresting tone, gruesome gameplay, and a cavalier approach to taste and decency. Only a handful of minor...
Review Two Point Campus (PS5) - Stress-Free University Builder Is a Lazy Good Time
School's out
Uh oh. Your mum told you that you either had to go to university or you had to get a job so you begrudgingly signed up to a Media Studies course and dossed about for three years smoking doobies and watching Countdown. Now you've got a useless degree, a lingering reputation as the family pothead, and a mountain of debt from tuition fees...
Review Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series (PS5) - No-Frills Remasters of Old School Platformers
It's-a me, Klonoa
Back in the late '90s, the platforming genre was going through a bit of an identity crisis. The technological heft of consoles like the original PlayStation meant that, for pretty much the first time, our gaming worlds could be expanded into true three-dimensional spaces. However, this meant there was a whole new dimension of...
Mini Review Yurukill: The Calumniation Games (PS5) - Zero Escape Meets Bullet Hell Mystery Madness
Virtue's Blast Reward
Oh no. You've been convicted of murdering 21 people and sentenced to 999 years in prison. Now you've been kidnapped by a super-rich megacorporation so you can take part in a series of games against other teams and the ultimate prize will be your freedom. You're fitted with a collar that can inject you with lethal poison at the...
Review The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan (PS4) - An Unexplosive Opening
Until yawn
Republished on Wednesday 29th June 2022: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of July's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Maybe it's just because our Dad let us watch Jaws when we were six, but we've always been skeptical of the sea. It's wet, and there's weird things in there...
Mini Review Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel (PS5) - Hotel Hell Makes for Effective Survival Horror
Hotel Califobia
If we were reviewing the St. Dinfna Hotel for Tripadvisor, then it would be a bit of a mauling. Old fashioned décor, a serious damp problem, monsters, rubbish WiFi, and a smug receptionist that didn’t even offer to carry our bags to the room. We simply couldn’t recommend staying there. But here at Push Square, we’re in the...
Mini Review Super Perils of Baking (PS5) - Charming Old School Platformer Rises to the Occasion
Hell Soufflé
Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, People of all gender persuasions, Cats and dogs and goldfish too, You join us on quite the occasion. We're here today for a Push Square first, A review written entirely in rhyme, A review for Super Perils of Baking, A two dimensional good time. The story of Super Perils of Baking, Is told in...
Transylvanian Families
Vampires get a bit of a bad rap, we think. Thanks to a few rotten apples like Dracula and Kristen Stewart we've grown accustomed to seeing vampires as insidious creatures of the night, but there's lots of fun vampires, too. Count Duckula, for example, and the one from Sesame Street that goes "Ah-ah-ah!" Anyway, what we're...
Review Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (PS5) - Borderlands Fantasy Spin-Off Can't Quite Find the Magic
No time to dice
If you read our review of Borderlands 3, then you've basically read our review of Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, only this game isn't as good. We're just doing it again in different words, and we're a little more weary this time around. Nothing of much consequence has changed between the two games. The budget is lower, clearly, and the...
Everything you need to take the fight to Chaos
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is the new action RPG from Square Enix and Team Ninja, available now on PlayStation 5 and PS4. While it comes up short in some areas, we think it just about redeems itself with its fun combat, awarding the game a 6/10 in our Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy...
Review Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (PS5) - Utterly Ridiculous Final Fantasy Spin-Off
Elixer? I hardly knew her!
The first four minutes of the ludicrously titled Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin set the scene perfectly. There’s a cutscene of a dark knight annihilating a platoon of soldiers while he carries an unconscious princess on his shoulder. Then you’re in a boss battle against a multi-headed creature without...
Mini Review Submerged: Hidden Depths (PS5) - Perfectly Fine Boaty Exploration
Keep Rowin' Rowin' Rowin' Rowin'
Submerged: Hidden Depths is a fine game. It's not fine as in a fine wine, nor is it fine like the little dog from the meme sat in his burning house saying, "This is fine." Submerged is fine fine. It's neither impressive nor offensive, never quite boring but almost certainly not exciting. There's nothing here that...
Review Monark (PS5) - Tedious JRPG Grinds to a Halt
Shin Megami Tensigh
On the surface, Monark looks like any number of other Japanese role-playing games that star high schoolers like Persona, Trails of Cold Steel, or some Shin Megami Tensei titles. But Monark differentiates itself from that crowd by leaning into horror, with a slick gothy vibe throughout — it's a bit like Persona 3 going through a...
Game of the Year John's Top 5 PS5, PS4 Games of 2021
Point of no Returnal
Our individual Game of the Year articles allow our lovely team of writers to share their own personal PS5 and PS4 picks for 2021. Today, it's the turn of reviewer John Cal McCormick. 5. F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch: Oh baby, you had me at steampunk-metroidvania-starring-an-anthropomorphic-bunny-with-a-giant-metal-fist. I...
Review Jurassic World Evolution 2 (PS5) - Dinosaur Park Builder Sequel Delivers
Open the door. Get on the floor. Everybody walk the dinosaur
Avid Push Square readers will undoubtedly recall that we rather liked 2018's Jurassic World Evolution. Making an amusement park full of dinosaurs that occasionally escape their confinement and eviscerate the slack-jawed tourists is what we're all about. Now the sequel is here — the...
Mini Review Bloodshore (PS4) - Silly Interactive Action Movie Mayhem
Battle Royale with cheese
Battle royale is a term that sends shivers down the spine of many a gamer, evoking thoughts of garish, costumed shoot-'em-ups, egregious monetisation, and an entire generation of children for whom flossing has absolutely nothing to do with dental hygiene. Stop liking things we don't understand, kids. Play Yakuza. Anyway,...
Mini Review The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes (PS5) - The Best Game in the Series So Far
Trapped between Iraq and a hard place
After the crummy Man of Medan and the better-but-not-quite-there Little Hope, The Dark Pictures Anthology has finally started hitting its stride with House of Ashes. Set in Iraq in 2003, the invading United States army is looking for weapons of mass destruction wink wink. Satellite imagery has alerted them to a...
