We finish the game first.

ComboPilot is an independent games publication based in Wellington, New Zealand. One rule has governed everything since day one: no verdict before the credits roll.

Our mission

Reviews you can plan a weekend around.

Games ask for your most limited resource — time. A modern RPG wants eighty hours; a live shooter wants every Friday for a year. We think a publication's job is to treat that request seriously: to tell you not just whether a game is good, but whether it is good for you, and whether it stays good at hour twenty when the tutorial gloss has worn off.

That is why our reviews come late and long. We ship a verdict when the game is finished, patched impressions when a game changes, and we go back — as our re-reviews of long-running games show — when time has something new to say. It costs us traffic every launch week. We consider that the price of being worth reading.

ComboPilot takes no payment for coverage, buys the majority of the games we review at New Zealand retail prices, and clearly discloses when review code was provided. Our poster-style covers are drawn in-house — because we would rather show you how a game feels than reprint a marketing screenshot.

Close-up of vintage typewriter keys — the editorial spirit of the desk

Old habits: the desk still argues about every verdict, letter by letter.

The team

Tessa Aldridge

Editor-in-Chief

Founded ComboPilot in 2020 after a decade covering games for print and radio in Wellington. Believes a review should tell you how a game feels at hour twenty, not hour two.

Rory McAllister

Senior Reviews Editor

Twenty years of RPGs, roguelikes and anything with a skill tree. Runs our review score standards and still finishes every game before writing a word about it.

Mia Ngata

News Editor

Tracks the industry from Auckland — release calendars, studio news and the local Aotearoa dev scene. If it happened overnight, Mia has already read the patch notes.

Callum Reid

Guides Editor

The person you want next to you in a boss arena. Writes guides the way he learned to play — by dying repeatedly so you don't have to.

Priya Sharma

Staff Writer

Covers indies, strategy and simulation. Has a soft spot for games about building things slowly and a hard rule against skipping dialogue.

Dan Kowalski

Staff Writer & Art Director

Designs our poster covers and writes about action games, horror and visual design in games. Grew up on the Polish school of poster art — it shows.

Your name here?

Freelance contributors

We commission guest reviews and guides from writers across Aotearoa. Pitch us — especially if you cover genres we're thin on.

Pitch Us

The office & the city

Gaming desk with mechanical keyboard, controller and headphones in warm light — The review room — where every game gets finished before it gets judged.

Wellington cable car climbing above the harbour and city — Wellington, our home town — up the hill from Cuba Street, wind included.

Six years, briefly

2020
ComboPilot launches from a Te Aro flat with three reviews and a manifesto nobody read. One of the three reviews still holds up.
2021
First full-time hire. The review scale gets its two-editor rule after an argument about a farming sim that lasted four days.
2022
The guides desk opens. Monthly readership passes 20,000 — mostly, we suspect, people stuck on the same boss.
2023
Dan joins and the poster covers begin. Three get printed by readers without asking. We take it as a compliment and a licensing question.
2024
First NZGDC media partnership. We start systematic coverage of the Aotearoa dev scene — the beat we're proudest of.
2025
Readership passes 80,000 monthly. The office upgrades from a flat to a slightly larger flat on Cuba Street.
2026
Article №1,200 ships. The rule is still the rule: finish the game first.

1,240+ articles published

415+ games reviewed

88,000+ monthly readers

7 team members

Something we should cover?

Tips, review requests, or a game made in Aotearoa we haven't noticed yet — our inbox is open.