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Child of Light was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released April 30, 2014, on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 for $14.99. An Xbox One copy was provided for review purposes.

Child of Light is a game that isn’t afraid to take what it likes. Ubisoft Montreal’s pastiche borrows liberally from the JRPGs of yesteryear in paying homage to them. Its roughly 12-hour adventure is filled with bits from its source material: Final Fantasy VII‘s sword gigantism, Final Fantasy X‘s in-battle character swapping and a sidekick that acts like a more palatable version of Ocarina of Time‘s Navi and looks like a Dragon Quest Slime, to name a few.

The story also feels like it was cut from the same cloth of many seminal RPGs. It revolves around a group led by the titular Child of Light (Aurora) on a quest to save the fairy tale world of Lemuria from the Black Queen, who has pilfered the land’s sun, moon and stars and appropriated its throne for herself. Child of Light‘s pitting of good-natured youngsters against an evil covering the world in darkness is nothing new, and its world, while beautiful, can be less than exciting to traverse. You might not then expect a game aspiring to be an indie love letter to the JRPG composed by the blockbuster shooter production crew at Ubisoft Montreal to keep you happily adventuring along. Thanks to a sublimely addictive combat system, pretty artwork and a delightful cast of characters, however, you’ll continue to gravitate towards this quest until you reach its conclusion.

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Microsoft has announced that a number of its popular video game franchises could potentially get their own TV shows, reports Joystiq. Vice President of Xbox Entertainment Studios Jordan Levin …
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Everybody loves The Avengers. They’ve been getting all the attention lately, making countless movies and, thanks to their awesome skin pack, saving the world of Minecraft from creepers. Their skin pack contains many characters, yet it …
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Over two years after its PC debut, Dustforce is available on Xbox Live Arcade. The 2D platformer features an acrobatic janitor who cleans his way to victory over increasingly …
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Strategy-loving Xbox One owners can rejoice today following the news that 4gency’s unusual resource management/building simulator Habitat has reached its initial funding goal of $50,000. The game (which has …
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The 13th title update for Happy Wars has been released. The upgrades and changes this time around include support items, which are consumables used to hasten the progress …
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The news comes directly from the digital mouth of Phil Spencer: Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition saves (worlds) will be able to be transferred to the Xbox One. This is …
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Major Nelson announced yesterday that Kuno Interactive’s tower defense game, Defense Technica, is now available for download through Xbox Live Arcade on the Xbox 360.

Defense Technica …
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ID@Xbox developers now have access to Unreal Engine 4 tools through the subscription program announced by Epic Games back in March 2014. Previously, the program was catered to Xbox …
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This November will mark 12 years since the launch of Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming service that currently boasts more than 48 million global users. Ensuring all of those Live members are constantly connected with each other and enjoying all of the service’s many features is paramount to delivering the Xbox experience gamers have come to expect. To pull it off, Microsoft has staffers working around the clock at its Xbox Live Operations Center (XOC) in Redmond, Washington, reports Total Xbox.

As part of their job function, XOC staffers respond to clear-cut problems. The majority of their time, however, is dedicated to ferreting out issues that no one knows about. Team members search for irregularities and investigate them to discover whether or not they are problems that need solving. They can’t guess at whether something is a threat to uninterrupted Xbox Live service or not; they have to know. They have to find out.

Microsoft Gaming Ninja (yes, that’s his real job title) Eric Neustadter informed Total Xbox that his team has to be ready for anything at all times. “It’s a bit like being in the fire department or police, where you have to think through what would I do in [a worst case] scenario. My boss was in the fire department for years, and he went from doing that to running services like this. In a lot of ways, it is a similar mindset.”

Redundancy is Neustadter’s go-to tool for preventing an Xbox Live doomsday scenario. “We have all the things you need to run 24/7/365, like multiple power grids connected into the campus,” he explained. “When that fails, we have diesel generators with huge tanks out there so that we can run for roughly 72 hours without power, and then we can bring in tankers with more diesel and refill the tanks while they’re running. We also have a disaster recovery site… somewhere else on a different power grid with almost all of this replicated so we can go over there and work instead.”

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