Developer: Afil Games Publisher: Afil Games Release Date: January 13, 2026 Available for: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch (version reviewed) Beetle Shock could be described in a sentence written in crayon on a napkin, and you’d lose nothing in terms of detail or value prospect. That’s not entirely a criticism, either – it is exactly what it looks like on the tin, short and slight yet adequate enough as a game to make the question of whether it’s worth your time more subjective an inquiry than normal. What we have here is a mascot platformer that owes part of its design to A Boy and His Blob , minus the jellybean-infused powers of a shapeshifting companion. Like the Boy of that game, Beetle Shock’s titular protagonist is limited in their mobility options; they can only run forward and back, jump, and perform a mid-air ground pound that smashes through breakable bricks and increases the height of jumps when hopping on mushrooms (this game's version of bounce pads). The Beetle...
I'm still cooking up the next new piece, so this week I thought I'd dig through some of my past work and find something that still actually holds up well. The following is a retro review of 2003's Call of Duty , originally written for and published on a previous blog that I created and ran for a number of years. While there may be individual points and observations with which I now disagree or regard in different terms, and while certain details about the wider franchise may have changed in the time since publication, I feel that this is a solid piece from the end of that blog's run and that there's much to be learned from revisiting one's earlier productions. So, for your reading pleasure (I hope), here goes... When I think about how the first-person shooter has evolved, my first instinct is to turn to Call of Duty . The little-remembered 2003 war epic turned a niche genre – the military shooter – into a full-blown phenomenon, earning millions for publishe...