Alan Wen

Alan Wen is a freelance video games journalist whose coverage centers on how games feel to play, how their mechanics and structure serve their themes, and whether new entries genuinely advance the series and communities they belong to. He writes features, interviews, previews, reviews, and opinion pieces, moving between big-budget releases, niche cult titles, and mobile spin‑offs to show how each fits into the wider landscape of modern gaming. His work for TechRadar and other outlets is distinguished by close attention to atmosphere, series history, and player expectations rather than hardware specs alone.

Features, previews, reviews, and op‑eds across gaming

At TechRadar, Wen is described as a freelance journalist covering video games in the form of features, interviews, previews, reviews, and op‑eds, and that breadth shows up clearly in his archive.

He writes long‑form features such as his piece on how the creators of LittleBigPlanet pioneered build‑your‑own games, tracing Media Molecule’s path from playful platformer to the creativity tools of Dreams. Alongside those deeper histories, he produces straight reviews like Eternal Strands review: magic monster hunting and Ninja Gaiden 2 Black review: return of the ninja, where he evaluates new and reworked titles through their combat systems, encounter design, and moment‑to‑moment feel. His catalogue also includes previews and impressions for upcoming releases, such as Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve delivers Top Gun thrills, which focus on what early slices of a game reveal about pacing, spectacle, and narrative direction.

Beyond TechRadar, his professional bio notes that his work has appeared in print magazines including Edge, Official PlayStation Magazine, GamesMaster, Games TM, Wireframe, and Stuff, and online at outlets such as Kotaku UK, FANDOM, Rock Paper Shotgun, Digital Spy, The Guardian, and The Telegraph, underscoring that he carries this multi‑format approach across a wide set of mastheads.

Atmospheric exploration, horror, and mood‑driven worlds

Wen frequently writes about games where atmosphere and setting are as important as mechanics, giving his coverage a strong mood‑driven thread. In Silent Hill: Townfall offers atmospheric exploration in a fictional Scottish town, he focuses on wandering through its 1990s setting, highlighting how the town’s design and pacing create unease and aimlessness rather than immediate action.

His preview of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve delivers Top Gun thrills likewise leans on tone, describing the exhilaration of aerial combat and the relationships with wingmen as central hooks rather than just listing new systems or modes. The Media Molecule feature on LittleBigPlanet and Dreams connects atmosphere to creative freedom, showing how inviting worlds and tools encourage players to build their own experiences inside a game.

Across these pieces, Wen’s distinguishing trait is a focus on the sensations of inhabiting a space - how level design, sound, and narrative framing combine to make a game feel lived‑in, haunted, or exhilarating.

Nintendo, party games, and fan expectations

Wen’s work includes a recurring attention to Nintendo and party‑focused titles, framed through how well they serve different kinds of players.

In Super Mario Party Jamboree review: party over here, he assesses the latest Mario Party entry by looking at its mini‑game mix, board design, and social play, weighing whether the package justifies its place in an already crowded series. Mario Tennis Fever review: new rackets make the court similarly examines how new mechanics and equipment reshape familiar sports gameplay, paying attention to whether changes feel refreshing or superficial for long‑time fans. In his GameSpot article Nintendo Fans Don’t Know What They Want, he writes more directly about fan communities, exploring how expectations around hardware, classic franchises, and new experiments can clash and create contradictory demands. Taken together, these pieces show that when Wen covers Nintendo and party games, he is less interested in raw feature lists and more concerned with how design choices satisfy or frustrate the audiences that have grown up with these series.

Remakes, revivals, mobile spin‑offs, and series history

Another strong strand in Wen’s portfolio is his focus on remakes, revivals, and spin‑offs, where he asks whether revisiting familiar worlds is truly necessary. Persona 4 Revival plays well, but I'm still not sure it's an essential remake foregrounds that question in its headline, with Wen weighing the quality of the updated experience against the value of returning to a classic that many players already know in its original form. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black review: return of the ninja continues this theme, looking at how a reworked or updated entry stands next to its predecessors and whether changes make it feel like a definitive version or just another iteration. On mobile and free‑to‑play, Honkai: Nexus Anima could be the free‑to‑play Pokémon killer situates a new title explicitly against a long‑running giant, judging if its systems and monster‑collection loop genuinely rival the appeal and depth of Pokémon. Across these articles, Wen’s distinct approach is to place new releases within the lineage of their series or genre and to treat the question “is this essential?” as central to his criticism, making his work particularly relevant when the story involves legacy, reinvention, or competition with established brands.