Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.
It was wholly inevitable and now it’s arrived… the first wave of High School Musical imitators.
New kid at school Will (Gaelan Connell) is roped into managing a band by its chirpy lead singer (Disney Channel alumnus Alyson Michalka). But will leading the group to a record contract interfere with Will’s romancing of edgy – well, brunette, anyway – outsider – Sam (HSM grad Vanessa Hudgens)?
Todd Graff’s slicker follow-up to Camp sports a respectable set of reference points – Will listens to The Velvet Underground and David Bowie; Sam loves Evil Dead 2. In other words, they’re not so much modern teenagers as avatars for filmmakers long past their own adolescence.
Whether your nine-year-old niece will care about that is moot – but she’ll definitely resent the poor ratio of musical numbers to clunky, contrived emotional scenes. (Nothing like an elderly character’s death to spur resolution…)
Earnest performances – but you can’t dance to those, can you?
Ex-Bethesda dev turned indie says "good things often happen by accident," like that time Skyrim players convinced themselves the RPG's foxes were leading them to treasure
Palworld dev says the studio went dark for months because "the team was getting burnt out from all the social media stuff, I was getting burnt out, our CEO was under attack in Japan"
Metaphor: ReFantazio had to dial back an early battle system inspired by a notoriously brutal 2003 JRPG, because 20 years later, players found it "irrational" and "just not fun"
