Remember the first half-hour of Darksiders? It largely involved hitting things. That's the kind of guy War was, after all: a hulking brute with massive hands and a gigantic sword. When the apocalypse was triggered a touch too early for his liking, he took to the streets - New York, I think - and started smacking around avenging angels, all of whom looked a bit like Transformers. He looked a bit like a Transformer too: squat, thick-limbed, and covered in complicated armour.

The first half hour of Darksiders 2 is a little different. It largely involves scampering over things, up things, around things and across things. Then hitting things. You're Death this time, right? Fellow horseman and friend/brother of War. When War takes the blame for the apocalypse being triggered a touch too early for his liking, you race off on your own journey to prove his innocence. A parallel timeline, but a slightly different adventure.

Death's a lot - well - thinner than War. He's ditched much of the horseman armour during the first few sequences of the game for starters, because Vigil's introducing a new loot system that sees you collecting boots, chest plates, gloves from the enemies you destroy. Kicking things off, then, he looks a bit like an extreme sports star, or Tarzan out of the Disney movie: lean and sinewy and quick.

Read more…

There's a wall inside the offices of Sanzaru Games covered in cute fan art and hand-written notes for Sly Cooper. Each was mailed directly to this building in Foster City, Calfornia, but - as the team readily acknowledges - were prompted by the creations of another studio based 1340km to the north.

Well, that's not completely fair. Yes, the klepto-critter's original trilogy released on PlayStation 2 in the last decade courtesy of Washington State's Sucker Punch; but many of the kids who painstakingly scrawled these letters and sketches weren't even born when Sly 3 crept out in 2005.

This new generation of fans was in fact inspired by Sanzaru's well-crafted HD remake of the series for the next generation of PlayStation. And the 2010 release also impressed Sony sufficiently for it to entrust development of a new instalment to the studio, with Sucker Punch - like Naughty Dog - having left its PS2 cartoon capers behind as it focused its attentions on PS3.

Read more…

"XCOM is the game that teaches you the meaning of 'acceptable losses'," Firaxis' Peter Murray says to me. As he demos an early build of Enemy Unknown to journalists, and as we talk about the 18-year-old game that inspires this re-imagining, something becomes obvious: He wants me to experience failure. He wants us all to. That's a little worrying.

But for Murray, the possibility of loss is part of what defines the XCOM experience. This could be the loss of a mission, the loss of a valuable and experienced soldier, the loss of an expensive base or even the loss of the game. Success, when it comes, should be paid for in blood, measured in bodycounts. Murray looks on as the assembled journalists play through a scripted tutorial mission that kills three of their four soldiers. He then demos additional footage that features the original game's deadly Chrysalids tearing an unprepared and outmanoeuvred squad to pieces. XCOM, he tells us, will not be pulling its punches.

Much of this challenge will be presented by the game's new approach to small squad tactics. After what Murray describes as a "eureka moment", lead designer Jake Solomon introduced "a completely new approach to combat, based on a move/action paradigm". The currency of time units favoured by older XCOM games has been binned in favour of a more streamlined system that represents the simple and yet critical choices a soldier makes in the heat of battle: moving and firing; sprinting forward; hunkering down to provide covering fire; reloading; assisting a squad-mate.

Read more…

"I think caves are just interesting," says Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

"They're kind of this source of beauty on one level and I think there's a prehistoric part of our brain that triggers them as a place of safety. They were our homes for hundreds and thousands of years. There's something intrinsic about a cave that I think everybody likes on some level."

"Do you like exploring caves in real life?" I ask.

Read more…

"Heroes of Ruin" conjures up an image of the most traditional of role-playing games. It's the sort of name where you know it's an RPG without looking at a single screenshot, or moving your eyes any further down the box's cover. But the plural 'Heroes' is vital too.

The game's eponymous heroes inhabit a fantasy land that's no less traditional. It's a world inhabited by magicians, living weapons and leviathan sea monsters. The local ruler Atraxis (he's a sphinx) is sick with a mysterious illness and it is the task of four heroes to find out why.

So you become embroiled in the game's steady loop of missions and side quests, acted out within the game's dungeons and interspersed with visits to Nexus, the game's main city and hub. Nexus is Atraxis' seat of power and the source of the game's main story elements, fed to you through in-game scenes that offer information for the quest ahead.

Read more…

There are so many insane statistics about Russia's losses in World War II that the mind starts to bounce off them after a little while. Let's limit ourselves to just a single detail, then: one in seven Soviet citizens died in the course of the conflict. That offers some kind of insight, doesn't it? That allows you a decent handle on the fate of a nation blessed with such a talent for suffering that its strategy - for much of the early fighting at least - appears to have been to lose and lose and lose again, until there was nobody left standing for them to lose to any more.

Russia overwhelmed with numbers: with the sheer quantity of its often unskilled, frequently unarmed soldiers, and with the bizarre scale of the landscape its enemies would have to conquer. Russia endured because endurance was another talent. Was it triumphant? That really depends on the degree of elasticity you're willing to lend the word.

That one-in-seven stat came to England recently in the PowerPoint presentation of Quinn Duffy, the game director of Company of Heroes 2. For the RTS series' long-awaited sequel, the developers aren't reinventing or re-engineering from the ground up, and they aren't moving the game into an entirely new time period, laying on space marines or medieval trebuchets. Instead, Relic's shifting the focus to a different theatre of the same war. It's looking past the gritted glamour of Normandy to the mass-murder taking place on the Eastern Front.

Read more…

This is ridiculous. I must've pressed the wrong button somewhere, selected the wrong option, because every time I step into the Torchlight 2 beta my experience is less akin to a game and more like an orgy of destruction, spiralling further and further out of my control until everything becomes a bloody mist of damage numbers and body parts. I feel like Caligula with a carving knife. I hope that's not my own voice I sometimes hear cackling.

The numbers just keep getting larger. All the stats increase, the body counts rise, the monsters enlarge, the percentages double and the sheer magnitude of the powers at my fingertips is only matched by the volume of the things I have to fight. And it never ends. And I never want it to, either, until I glance at the clock and, once again, see how many more hours of my life I've lost. Playing Torchlight 2 is like being drip-fed a powerful, soothing and hypnotic drug in ever-greater quantities.

That's not to say it's bad. Not at all. The game does one thing and it does that one thing very well indeed - that thing being hurling stuff at you to slaughter, carefully metering this carnage with rewards of commensurate size. Every other monster is a self-propelled piñata just waiting to gift you gold, a shinier shield, a deadlier dagger or a slightly sleeker pair of pants. (Although saying that, right now one of my characters has the most astounding pair of mechanical pants that I can't ever imagine trading in. I try to show off my pants to other players in the beta, but they never seem to want to stick around).

Read more…

It's not over until it's over, as those in pale blue who left the Etihad Stadium before full-time on Sunday found out to their own eternal embarrassment. This year's Premier League has seen the title move from one side of Manchester to another, a seismic shift that some five years ago would have seemed improbable.

This console generation's battle of the football titans has, at times, felt equally dramatic, as full of fumbles and moments of flair as anything the Premier League has offered up in the last nine months. It started with Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer as champion elect, but now looks set to end with FIFA in a position of unquestionable supremacy.

"It's been an amazing journey. I think it's been the most exciting journey that I've ever been on. But it's come with plenty of sleepless nights," says EA Sports' executive vice president Andrew Wilson, a fast-talking Australian who's the embodiment of corporate cool.

Read more…

Final Fantasy has had a troubled relationship with recent Nintendo platforms. The slightly lacklustre Crystal Chronicles subseries was always a sideshow to the franchises' main offerings, never available on Nintendo consoles. No wonder then that the barely-pronounceable reveal of Theatrhythm, a rhythm-based Final Fantasy spin-off, did nothing to reassure fans that Square Enix saw the 3DS as anything more than another proving ground for more derivative experiments.

But Theatrhythm, perhaps tellingly, makes no mention of the series' Crystal Chronicles days. The game's jukebox proudly blasts remixes from the main Final Fantasy canon, with every core numbered release represented. Starting at the 8-bit chiptunes of Final Fantasy 1 and finishing with the orchestral masterpieces of Final Fantasy 13, this is the first time you'll ever hear Final Fantasy 7's 'One Winged Angel' on a Nintendo system.

Theatrhythm keeps a familiar dosage of RPG elements despite its musical focus and ignorable story. You recruit a four-man party from the game's huge cast of fan favourite characters, each redrawn in the game's chibi style. Each begins the game as a grumpy level 1 novice. "Get lost," berates pink haired Final Fantasy 13 heroine Lightning. "I'm no hero!" whines Final Fantasy 7's Cloud. Luckily these weaklings can be levelled up, increasing their stats and unlocking gameplay-aiding abilities.

Read more…

Games, so the argument's been going recently, are predominantly dumb, trapped in an eternal adolescence and forever fixated with smut and gore. Some games are dumber than others, and some don't seem to care too much about their lack of smarts at all.

That's certainly the case with Sniper Ghost Warrior 2, an oafish but lovable first-person shooter that's got all the intellect of a straight-to-video '80s action flick. Importantly, it looks like it's got all the charm of a VHS classic too. It helps, perhaps, that the expectations have been set low for a sequel to a poorly received original that went on to do improbably well.

The premise of the first Sniper Ghost Warrior was simple enough: imagine an entire game focused on the original Modern Warfare's undoubted highlight, All Ghillied Up, promising stealth, headshots and slick tension. The execution, however, left a lot to be desired.

Read more…

5th Cell's Scribblenauts allowed players to conjure almost any object they could dream up. The first thing I created? A jetpack, because let's face it, everything is better with jetpacks. It looks like someone at 5th Cell agrees, as they've applied this wisdom to their upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game, Hybrid. Add in one of the most peculiar control schemes out there, and the concept of a multiplayer third-person shooter gets flipped on its head.

Indeed, you spend much of your time in Hybrid hanging upside down, since your gravity-defying armour allows you to perch along cover lining the ceilings and walls. In most games this would be original enough, but that wasn't enough for 5th Cell. Instead, they've chosen to throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of ground movement altogether.

That's right - you can fly, but you can't walk. This nonsensical restriction reminds me of Bionic Commando's Nathan "Rad" Spencer, who could swing around like Spider-Man, but couldn't jump.

Read more…

In spirit, it was LittleBigPlanet Racing all along. United Front Games' 2010 DIY kart racer, Modnation Racers, was a charming if slightly unbalanced effort driven by the same 'play, create, share' philosophy that underpins Media Molecule's creations.

William Ho, design director at UFG, calls the studios "kindred spirits", beaming: "We love them. Hopefully they love us!" Ho loves lots of things. Karting, LittleBigPlanet, and LittleBigPlanet Karting, for starters, he gleefully tells a room of journalists. I kind of love his Tango-orange trainers.

Ho is infectiously, uncynically enthusiastic about everything in that American way jaded Brits cannot seem to muster unless they work in children's television. Or at Media Molecule, whose modus operandi is to find the little spark of joy in everything and share it with as many people as possible, joyfully.

Read more…

In comedy, they say, timing is everything. And so, too, in gaming, if you're Giant Sparrow's Ian Dallas.

"Some of my most powerful experiences growing up were games and I thought I was going to go in as a writer," he says. "Coming out of college there weren't really a lot of interesting jobs as a writer in games and I figured that, five or ten years later, that might be different."

So he started writing comedy instead. "I worked in TV, which is super-fun - you're just in a room with a bunch of other guys trying to make each other laugh for 40 hours a week or often much more. But one thing led to another and I discovered programming."

Read more…

When Eurogamer first went hands on with Sorcery, Sony's magical motion-controlled adventure, we described it as "one of Sony's first titles for Move". That obviously didn't happen. After an eye-catching debut at E3, where it was a centrepiece of Sony's Move presentation, Sorcery completely dropped off the radar, prompting speculation that it had been scrapped. Not so. True to its name, Sorcery magically reappeared earlier this year in a puff of PR smoke, having been retooled and reworked as the vanguard of Move's second wave of titles.

The gameplay, however, hasn't really changed at all since its original aborted debut. You still control Finn, a cocky young sorcerer's apprentice with a typical disregard for sensible advice, as he battles a variety of fantastical monsters and supernatural threats, using the Move wand as a wand.

The motion-controlled spell casting is delightfully intuitive as well. A flick of the wand sends your spell on its way, with an obvious touch of automated aiming helping to bridge any gaps between your intentions and the hardware. Context sensitive moments add new tricks to your arsenal - an upwards flick to levitate obstacles out of the way, or a flamboyant swirl to repair broken bridges - without cluttering up the controls with too many arcane movements.

Read more…

While this was a wet weekend for most people in the UK, my own windows liberally speckled by rainfall, the skies over Divinity's Reach remained a beautiful hue of blue throughout. The weather was perfect for a short break in the city and allowed me to enjoy some sedate shopping on the promenade, a carefree visit to the carnival and even a chance to marvel at the engineering extravagance that is Uzolan's Mechanical Orchestra. Of course, while the charming land of Tyria has a lot to see and is ideal for a quick getaway, many of you will be wondering whether it's worth a lengthier stay.

Well, before I can go on I absolutely have to get something out of my system, something I desperately want to blurt at you: Guild Wars 2 is gorgeous, at least sometimes. Quite often it's content to be a gently handsome game, but at certain moments it can just bowl you over. Even in a world saturated with HD graphics, high-res textures and triple-buffered VSync, it still boasts some truly splendid moments and it's not even supporting DirectX 11 yet.

This is as much a triumph of art and design as it is any technical achievement. The city of Divinity's Reach, the focal point for the humans, is the highest of high fantasy, with its thrusting towers, shining causeways and winding, leafy suburbs, all populated by uncommonly good-looking citizens. The jewel in this crown is a splendid greenhouse-cum-orrery chamber, where enormous golden spheres circle lazily about the ceiling in a wondrous aerial ballet. It is, quite simply, grandeur.

Read more…

When I last met Gareth Wilson three years ago, we were sat in the offices of his previous employer, Bizarre Creations. The designer, a veteran of the Project Gotham Racing series, was talking up his next game Blur, telling me how Bizarre wanted to escape the simulation niche and make racing games mass-market again. "I think we should be going back to the reason people play racing games," he said.

It didn't work out that way. Blur was a good game but it didn't find its audience, and a year and a half after we met, Activision shut down one of Britain's best studios for good. But the story - for Wilson, at least - might still have a happy ending. He might yet hit that populist racing jackpot. And he might do it with Sonic the Hedgehog.

This time around, Wilson and I meet in the plush screening room of a London hotel. Wilson now works for Sheffield's Sumo Digital, an unpretentious jack-of-all-trades studio with good racing game pedigree and a good relationship with publisher Sega (both exemplified in its wonderful console versions of Sega-AM2's modern classic, OutRun 2). He's the design director on the freshly announced Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, a sequel to 2010's mascot racer, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing.

Read more…

It's a brilliantly executed reveal. The first live demo to the press, I mean. Not the one that happened the previous week when, faced with more holes in its hull than it had PR fingers to poke in them, Sony gave up trying and rush-announced God of War: Ascension to stem the swelling tide of tittle-tattle.

The bit that was always supposed to be the actual reveal, though, taking place in a private theatre in Hollywood - "Welcome to one of the worst kept secrets in the industry!" chortles game director Todd Papy - opens with a superbly crafted piece of drama.

A brooding warrior, whom we are supposed to think is Kratos, is revealed by a retreating camera to be another muscular, Mardi Gras-attired brute entirely. Soon he's scrapping with a bulging, barmy cyclops and we're in familiar territory: classical hack-and-slash action of murderous beauty.

Read more…

Game of Thrones is a big licence, and without wanting to be unfair to Cyanide, it's been matched with a developer whose stature doesn't quite match up. They're a patchy bunch at best, this French outfit; a handful of years back they delivered a competent if uninspired update of Blood Bowl, and recently they've focused firmly on simulating professional cycling.

While that world is at times full of deceit, double-crossing and dark politics, any comparisons with the mature backdrop of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones stop there. It's the kind of fantasy universe you'd imagine CD Projekt, already a purveyor of naughty worlds and nipples in a time of sword and stone, could revel in. Cyanide - whose one other dalliance with the fantasy genre came with the instantly forgettable Loki - though? Not so much.

But Game of Thrones, the developers' second attempt at the licence after last year's well-meaning but ultimately flawed real-time strategy game, sees them trying, and trying very hard indeed. Work's been going on with this action RPG for over three years, starting well before HBO's adaptation turned Martin's series into a broader cultural phenomenon.

Read more…

So, yes, it's Super Smash Bros. for the PlayStation generation. And why not? "We're fans of fighting games - it's not something we shy away from," says Omar Kendall, game director of mouthful-of-a-title PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

The game, which indie studio SuperBot describes at its formal unveiling this week in LA as "a light-hearted, fun mash-up brawler," is 18 years of Sony-sponsored iconography remixed as a frenetic character fighter in the same vein as the series that has served Nintendo platforms so well for over a decade.

"We're taking the best of what the genre has delivered over its storied history and we're adding our take on it as well," Kendall adds. "We're proud to exist in the same space as these games. We don't mind [the comparisons] at all - our game has a very unique and interesting gameplay feel to it."

Read more…

The Cat House is a high class brothel, a dramatic white building sat far above the city of Dunwall's harbour. Your mark is a regular customer, and he's currently cavorting with a masked lady of the night in its lavish penthouse - you, meanwhile, are crouching unseen on a window sill, peering through ornamental glass.

What next? Well, I guess you could stab him or shoot him. If you don't mind making a mess you could also pause time and hang five separate crossbow bolts in front of his face. That way once normal temporal service resumes he'll be very dead indeed.

Alternatively, you could get creative. Why not leap into control of his body and steer him towards the white marble balcony that overlooks harbour? Then simply jump backwards out of his body and, while he retches up his guts in panic and confusion, spend a little more magical Essence on a Windblast. As he ragdolls into the wild blue yonder it'll feel like the perfect crime, if it weren't for the dainty witness screaming behind you.

Read more…

If you're in the business of turning a beloved TV series into a video game, it's best to start with the very essence of what you're trying to capture. Going after HBO's take on Game of Thrones? You'll want politics and consequence as well as a downtrodden world (and good luck to Cyanide, which is taking on that very task, but it's hard not to wonder what the likes of CD Projekt could have done with the premise). Doing EastEnders? You'll want to preserve the misery and the improbable melodrama (sounds just about perfect for David Cage, in fact).

And if you're doing Doctor Who, you'll want to preserve the lovable if slightly wonky heart of a show that's endured for coming up to 50 years. Sadly, that's something that recent attempts have failed to acknowledge. Recent DS efforts seemed to have forgotten completely that they had the good Doctor to hand, while Sumo's adventure games, for all their charm, fell a little short on quality.

So offer a warm welcome to Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock, a new venture from the BBC that's doing its very best to avoid the mistakes of its predecessors. It's one of the first fruits of a new approach to gaming from the BBC. Outings such as the adventure games were a product of the public service part of the corporation, whereas this is the product of a new commercial arm, and it's one that's very serious about getting games right.

Read more…

When Crysis has been great, it's been Predator. When we surveyed Korean encampments from a distance, planned our assault and attacked from the trees we were essentially Arnie and his travelling band of musclemen. When we cloaked, pounced, cackled and clutched enemies in our oven-mitt hands we were that super-powerful Predator, toying with our prey. For the sequels to both Predator and Crysis, however, a transfer to an urban setting left some feeling that pig-faced tusk-alien and Nanosuit had lost something special.

"We changed the recipe a bit for Crysis 2," admits Rasmus Hoejengaard, Crytek's Director of Creative Development. "Some people liked it, some people didn't - which is how it always is, right? What we want to do now is to take the 'likes' of each, and combine. We want to have the breadth of Crysis as well as the verticality of Crysis 2, while at the same time not opening it out so much that it alienates players. It needs to be fed in digestible chunks..."

Crysis 3, then, frames its hero Prophet as a hunter - hunkering down on the predatory nature of the nanosuit, and presenting him with a Rambo 2 bow and arrow. Our new surroundings, meanwhile, are the best of both worlds. Crytek is taking the jungle of Crysis and the New York of Crysis 2, putting them in a Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker, switching on Maximum Speed and winding that handle...

Read more…

Within the hundreds of hours of content an MMO offers, a million different stories can be told. But behind every MMO there are hundreds of stories often left untold. They are the stories of the makers.

Five years after work first commenced, Guild Wars 2 is in its year of release. Fans will soon savour a game they've waited half a decade for. And as the curtain begins to raise, I was invited to to spend a beta weekend alongside developer ArenaNet at its Seattle base, to live and breathe development of a game that's consumed the lives of its developers long before it's had a chance to consume the lives of its future players.

I went there for a snapshot of a company making a landmark video game, and I came away with emotional tales of sacrifice, teamwork and pride. Guild Wars 2's got what it takes to better World of Warcraft, but right now it's just potential - and five years of life and labour for its 270-strong crew.

Read more…

A virtual world about a virtual world of virtual worlds. The gamer playing a virtual character playing a virtual character. The MMO conversion of Tad Williams's book series has an audacious, indulgent concept, but back in 2008 the stars seemed to have aligned in Otherland's favour. Oli was the last to see it, in a 2008 trip to RealU's Singapore base and, quite frankly, he was blown away.

"It must be one of the most original, thought provoking and intellectually exciting games in development anywhere," he said, "and, although you might be a fool to bet on its success, you'd be a churl to be against it. Because, in the all too-conservative world of MMOs, Otherland is exactly the kind of unlikely story we need."

Then, Otherland vanished.

Read more…

I was never a particularly good mayor. I'd do my town planning with all the care and attention of council official who dearly wanted a buzzing metropolis, but presumably had something of a drink problem. Power-cuts, soaring crime, noisy protests, bits of roads that didn't actually go anywhere; things always seemed to fall apart. Often the only option was to put my poor urban conglomeration out of its misery, finished off with a quick dose of earthquake and/or alien invasion.

This is why, come next year's SimCity reboot, I'm going to be the worst neighbour you've ever had. In the new iteration players tend to their skyscrapers on vast shared maps, meaning that sod's law will have it that I'll be the Shelbyville to your Springfield.

People fed up with living in my urban hellhole will trundle in moving vans to your freshly minted residential areas. My vast cloud of pollution will hover above your pristine sidewalks just as much as it does mine. Your remarkable industriousness, meanwhile, might get commuters driving from my city to yours every morning - but you'll probably get one or two of my arsonists to balance things out.

Read more…

It's easy to forget that, three years back, it came as something of a shock to see Codemasters forgoing the expertise of its racing arm and farming out its newly acquired F1 license to its newly acquired Birmingham studio, an outfit that in its previous life had made the ultimate guilty pleasure in 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand. Fiddy's game certainly had a taste for excess and a questionable sense of politics, but that's where any similarities with the F1 world came to an end.

Three years on and Codemasters Birmingham has established itself as one of the brightest stars in the fast-dimming world of racing games. F1 2010 and 2011 went on to receive deserved critical and commercial success, and can lay claim to being the best take on the sport since Geoff Crammond worked the beat.

Third time around, though, and there's a growing concern that perhaps F1 isn't a diverse enough experience to maintain the yearly churn that such a big sports license dictates - and perhaps Codemasters doesn't have same kind of resources to throw at the series as EA does with FIFA, making for a game that's in danger of getting stuck in its own pretty little rut.

Read more…

Last week, we had a chance to try out the Western version Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, a collaboration between premier Japanese games studio Level-5 (Professor Layton, recent Dragon Quests) and celebrated anime outfit Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro and dozens more classic animated films). We played the game shortly after the release of the eye-watering trailer that lays out the story of Oliver, the young boy whose stuffed toy - crafted by his deceased mother - is brought to life by his tears before the creature whisks him off on a grand adventure. It's true trauma escapism, in the style of Where the Wild Things Are or The Neverending Story.

The demo of this emotionally-charged adventure - a PS3 exclusive - was light but alluring, and showed off two different areas of the game, each restricted to a 10-minute taster. The first of these demos, appropriately titled Big Wide World, provided the opportunity to wander with Oliver and friends through a beautifully imagined 3D world: an otherwise typical Japanese RPG fairway made unique by its watercolour shading and free-flowing animations.

Strolling through the deep valley basin - not unlike wandering through the Welsh countryside - brings us to the village of Ding Dong Dell. In voicing the colourful characters that populate the town, the localisation team has drawn on its experience with Dragon Quest 8 to provide similarly charming regional accents. Outside of the village, further exploration takes place on a player-controlled boat, where enemies encountered on the rolling sea come aboard in order to do battle on the decks.

Read more…

"I like games that surprise me," says Antichamber creator Alexander Bruce. Standing in a crowded expo hall in a bright pink suit and tie, Bruce is certainly not afraid to write his own rules. His peculiar choice of wardrobe extends to his game design philosophy, wherein he wants games to be a constant learning experience. "I'm not as surprised by games as I used to be," he laments. "I'd like to make games that fix that."

His upcoming puzzle game, Antichamber, casts you as a nameless, faceless individual plopped down in a series of test chambers. So far, so Portal. But whereas Valve's seminal first-person puzzler relied on a single idea that expanded throughout the course of the game, Antichamber refuses to rely on any one notion for too long. Instead, it's an ever-changing mishmash of spatial and logic puzzles that ask the player to constantly reassess how the world works.

An early room portrays a chasm with the word 'Jump!' Try to jump across it and you'll fall to a room below. The solution is to simply walk across - at which point a bridge forms beneath your feet - but failing to realise this doesn't punish the player.

Read more…

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A terrible dragon has returned to a blighted kingdom, leaving its citizens superstitious and frightened. To challenge this resurrected threat comes just one person - you, as it happens - destined from birth to battle the monster.

You may be called the Arisen rather than Dragonborn, and you may be defying one dragon rather than many, but you sense it's still going to be hard for some players to see past the surface similarities with Bethesda's all-conquering Skyrim when the time comes for Capcom to sell their vast openworld adventure on the merits of its story.

This is a tricky time for a third-person RPG to stand out. Not only does the brutal spectre of Dark Souls still hover over the genre, setting a gruelling standard in player expectation, but any new entry must also fight for attention against the likes of Kingdoms of Amalur, The Witcher 2 and Risen 2. Luckily for Capcom, Dragon's Dogma has a secret weapon: porn.

Read more…

They've been funny little things, these PlayStation Minis. Set up not exactly as an alternative to the App Store but certainly an analogue of it, the initial promise was clear; here was a place where you could find the kind of sugar-sweet candy bar snacks that have slowly taken over the world through iOS. The results, though, have been disappointing - too many thoughtless ports of mobile games, and too many opportunistic cash-ins.

There've also been some brilliant curios - Die Gute Fabrik's Where Is My Heart was a delightful platformer and a true highlight of 2011 - and it's provided a place for smaller, sparky outfits to prove their stuff. Mediatonic showed its worth with Who's That Flying, and Brighton-based developer FuturLab's been doing much the same.

It already had a crack with Coconut Dodge, a brutally simplistic game in which you - a crab that seemed to have scuttled out of Rare's character design lab circa 1999 - dashed from left to right in order to avoid some falling fruit. And that, quite simply, was that, though its basic premise belied a devilishly taut arcade experience.

Read more…

Last November, a film archivist in Hertfordshire found an old tin sitting on a shelf. The tin was labelled "Hungry Hobos", and a quick check on Google revealed that it contained a genuine piece of movie history. It was an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon - he was the precursor to Mickey Mouse - made by Walt Disney's animation company in 1928, and long thought lost forever.

A copy of the film travelled with Junction Point boss Warren Spector when he visited London last week to show off Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, the unexpected sequel to the odd and rather troubled, Wii exclusive from 2010. Spector screened it for us before launching into his game presentation - I wish all press events worked like this - and it was astonishing stuff to watch.

When you think of Disney cartoons - I'm talking about the shorts, here, rather than the full-blown features - you may be picturing something that's lavish and beautiful, but rather tame and rather bloodless. Disney shorts tend not to be funny and violent the way that Warner Bros. cartoons are. They don't feel as subversive.

Read more…

It always pans out the same way. You turn up a bit late and slightly sweaty, because in East London every street looks the bloody same. You then get shown a Powerpoint presentation extolling the virtues of 'Big Shooter Next' multiplayer, and soon after you and your fellow journalists are herded next door where sixteen glowing screens are humming in darkness waiting for you.

It's great, not least because you often get free posh sandwiches, but because it's a perfect way to judge a multiplayer game's potential. Online gaming is about shared enjoyment - so when you hear the gasps, the shouts, the swearing and have someone level an accusatory finger at you then call you an arsehole, you know a game has potential.

Far Cry 3 is going all out to encourage those yelps. Everything about it is being built to encourage teamplay - to keep your side fighting the good fight together. For example, myself and my cohorts were at one stage approaching a Domination point - a lonely spot caught halfway between a wrecked submarine that sits in a murky green dock and the dark interior of a network of jungle caves.

Read more…

"This is the closest that the franchise has come to my original vision," says Lost Planet's creator Kenji Oguro seconds before we first lay eyes on the surprise third entry in Capcom's extreme conditions action series. That may well be the case, but Lost Planet has had to travel some 5700 miles from where it was first conceived to get there.

Once the lights come up after an impressive and generous hands-off demo of Lost Planet 3, there's one image that lingers long after that of the stomping mechs facing off against giant enemy crabs against the cold, blue backdrop.

It's that logo in the lower-right of the screen as the credits fade in, revealing exactly who is behind this expansion of a series that started at the dawn of this generation of consoles, and a series that looks to be sending it off in no small amount of style. Spark Unlimited, it says - and anyone who can remember as far back as 2008 will forever associate the Californian developer with two of the most turgid games to grace this generation: Turning Point and Legendary: The Box.

Read more…

Resident Evil's been going strong for so long that it has become all things to all people: an exercise in suspense and horror for some, or a lesson in video game action at its very best for others. Maybe for you it's a schlocky soap opera set in the world of the undead or - God forbid - a glut of increasingly indecipherable third-tier movies.

For a series spread so wide and often so thin it's not surprising that Resident Evil's dabbled with mediocrity in the past - witness the ill-conceived Outbreak games, or the miserably executed Operation Raccoon City. Even its highs have fallen some way short of what once was, the enjoyable brace of 3DS games showing a series that's now become torn between action and horror.

For two and a half years, a 600-strong team at Capcom has been toiling on a new Resident Evil that's working to bridge that divide. It's a horror game with action set-pieces, a drama in which an undead President is played with the straightest of faces, and a game with tension as well as a warehouse of explosives to play with. It is, in other words, all things to all people - but what's most impressive is how Capcom's all-encompassing take on its long-running series pushes it back towards the brilliance of its glory years.

Read more…

It's not immediately obvious to everyone, but to us beardier, strategier PC types, the ongoing lack of a decent fantasy grand strategy game makes for a painful hole in our collection. While a spellcasting setting might have suited all sorts of RTS and turn-based titles, more than a few weary wizards will point an aging finger all the way back to 1994, to Microprose's Master of Magic, when they want to cite the definitive example of fantasy empire building. Paradox is hoping to finally change that with Warlock: Master of the Arcane.

"There is always the spirit of Master of Magic wandering out there," says senior writer Pavel Kondrashov, whose own brand of magic might be necromancy. "This spirit is demanding to be brought back to life. Although we started as a developer of sci-fi games, fantasy worlds seemed to have claimed us as their servants." That would explain the towns populated by rogues, ratmen or the living dead, all of them researching new spells or constructing strange magical apparatus under the orders of their Great Mages. Outside their city walls, ogres and giant spiders roam the lands.

Much as Master of Magic resembled the original Civilization, with magical research in lieu of technological and elves instead of Europeans, Warlock is clearly inspired by the latest in Firaxis' series, though from the very start the game's world of Ardania is not only prettier but also much more dangerous.

Read more…

Do you remember that bit in the remake of The House on Haunted Hill when whatsit is wandering through the basement of the derelict mental asylum, and she comes upon a forgotten operating theatre? She has her camcorder with her - we all had them, back then - and through its viewing screen, the empty, dusty room is suddenly filled with sexy nurses and wonky old doctors. She lowers the screen and the room's empty. She raises it back up and the room's full. Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir is that scene, basically, with your 3DS standing in for the camcorder.

Photography and the supernatural have a venerable intertwined history anyway, of course, dating all the way back to those Victorian scamps and their cut-out fairies, brought to life by hatpins and Box Brownies. As far as video games are concerned, it's a connection that the Fatal Frame series has been very happy to capitalise on. Spirit Camera's a spin-off of sorts: an AR-powered oddity that looks to be as creepy as it is slight.

The core of the package comes with story mode, which tells the strange tale of a spooky old notebook and an evil crone who likes to steal people's faces. The narrative is refreshingly nasty, as it happens, and it unfolds as you page through a short AR pamphlet that accompanies the game, following on-screen instructions that tell you where to point your 3DS camera as you go.

Read more…

GTA comes close but, if you ask me, no game gets under the skin of America quite like Borderlands. That's why - Badass Fire Skags aside - dropping in on Pandora can feel a little like visiting Arizona, or New Mexico, or the red plains of Utah. Gearbox's endlessly replayable shooter-looter resembles a yard sale in the south west states grown vast and ungainly. It's where the pioneer spirit meets the get-rich-quick mentality, where trailer trash quest-givers greet you in front of a clapboard outhouse, and where the sequel's new villain, Handsome Jack, is a cross between a Roger Ramjet second-stringer and Abraham Lincoln's meaner, cooler younger brother.

Take away the purple skies and city-sized drilling rigs and you're in the dusty America of Steinbeck and Andrew Wyeth, but Borderlands also understands the lurid, gleefully tacky homeland of Billy Mays Jr (RIP) and John Carpenter. The end result's crass and canny and terminally run down, and the whole thing revolves around life, liberty, and the pursuit of guns.

Because in Borderlands, guns mean happiness. That's whether they're dropping from the bodies of downed bandits, or glinting inside the chilled confines of those over-engineered crates you stumble across every five minutes. Vault hunters are lured to Pandora by the promise of riches, but they're paid - and convinced to stick around - with the weapons that come their way in endless torrents: the toxic shotguns, electrical SMGs, explosive repeaters, and crit-casting rocket launchers. Late on in my adventures in the original game, I found an eight-chambered shotgun that set almost all my enemies on fire and reloaded in milliseconds. I still think of it sometimes. I'm surprised I don't have a faded Polaroid of it on my fridge, actually.

Read more…

Once was a time when the plastic controllers of Rock Band ruled the world - or at least the living rooms of the world where they gathered in a garish pile. But if the music genre hasn't exactly died, the one that supported a plethora of peripherals most certainly has, its leave of absence stretching on for some two years and leaving its most successful exponent, Harmonix, looking for new avenues for its rhythmic gameplay.

Enter Rock Band Blitz. The Boston developer's upcoming Rock Band spinoff does away completely with peripherals. Even stranger, it's primarily a single-player game set for release on Xbox Live and PSN.

Rock Band Blitz harkens back to Harmonix's early days with games like Amplitude and Frequency. In Blitz, the camera zooms down the highway of 'Rock City' where a handful of familiar colour-coded lanes represent the different instruments comprising each song. Each lane only has two notes to hit - one on the left and one on the right. Hit enough correct notes with an instrument and you'll gain a multiplier signified by the lane filling in with colour. You can only raise the multiplier to a certain cap before the next checkpoint, so you're encouraged to switch between the various parts like one of those one-man band street performers.

Read more…

By the time Firaxis had pumped out Civ 4's second expansion, Beyond the Sword, the legendary history-builder was as tight, wide-ranging and complex as it had ever been. No small world wonder, then, that when a trendy, slim-line Civilization 5 scooted in on a pair of wheelies and did a 'Fonzie-point' with thumb and forefinger towards newer players some Civ acolytes elected to stay behind.

For many, systems like Religion and Espionage had become part of the bedrock, as integral to Civ as the desire to crush those bastard Romans. It was seemingly impossible for some to go without the complexity, hexagons or no. With Gods and Kings, then, Firaxis aims to let Civ 5 emit enough cultural significance to retake the allegiance of the players who currently sit beyond its borders.

First on the agenda, then, is the reintroduction of religion. Could this be the point that we can answer the enduring question of 'Which religion is best?' without resorting to the 'Well, my one, obviously' default?

Read more…

We know everything and nothing about Dust 514: it's a shooter, it focuses on large-scale multiplayer combat, it'll even be free and - based on our hands-on experience at this year's Eve Fanfest - it plays impressively (even more so when you consider that this is virgin territory in both game style and platform for the developer CCP). But when it launches, it will also be irrevocably intertwined with the history of gaming's most infamous sandbox, and against a backdrop of villainy, greed and controversy.

This is the unknowable. Actions large and small rock idly back and forth like dominoes - when they fall it can mean the last gasp of an Alliance, which causes a shortage of essential goods, which drives a market price up, which scuppers expansion elsewhere. Some may make a louder noise than others when they fall, but the cascade never really ends - from start to finish, the universe of Eve Online is an intricately woven history of kingdoms and nails.

And yet it's this uncertainty, and this melding together of two of gaming's most unlikely bedfellows - the ruthless sandbox PC MMO and the console first-person shooter - that heralds Dust 514 as the first of our Actual New Games of 2012.

Read more…

"What we like to do as a company is take all sorts of different strategy genres and mash them up," says Ironclad Games producer, Blair Fraser.

A couple years back Ironclad Games caught the attention of many a strategy fanatic with Sins of a Solar Empire, a game that mixed traditional real-time strategy with the longer term games such as Civilization. This time out, they're going after the League of Legends crowd by merging a DOTA-style strategy game with an RTS. More importantly, they've found a way to make MOBA games accessible to those who've never played the genre before.

Sins of a Dark Age is a 'hero and commander strategy game,' according to Ironclad. What this means is that it's a five-person team-based affair where one person assumes the role of a commander, while the other four select heroes.

Read more…

For fifteen years, those who grew up with righteously revered 1993 PC strategy-management-roleplaying-everything game UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka X-Com) have been a faithful dog waiting by the door for their beloved master to come home. Every few years, that door has opened and the dog has jumped up excitedly. Is it him, is it him? No, it's an appalling first-person shooter. Smack! Bad dog!

Is it him, is it him? No, it's a series of scrappy Eastern European games that recreate some of the strategy mechanics but fail to capture the heart and soul of X-Com. Smack! Bad dog!

Is it him, it him? No, it's a lavish reboot as another first-person shooter that looks mightily ambitious but is only tangentially similar to the proud game whose name it bears. Bad dog! Your master's dead. You must love this other man instead.

Read more…

The sulphuric stench of gunpowder hangs in thick, heavy clouds above a war-torn field that's noisy with the opposing forces of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Overlooking the stand-off, General Israel Putnam orders his men not to shoot until they see the whites of the enemy's eyes, while a mysterious figure with a familiar peaked hood silently works his way through the chaos.

For Assassin's Creed 3, the fourth game in as many years for Ubisoft Montreal's open-world stealth series, there's the smell of revolution in the air. Assassin's Creed 2 revived a series that was nearly dead on arrival, while its formula was refined even further in the immediate follow-up, Brotherhood. Revelations was a weary outing - no surprise, perhaps, given its quick-fire nature - a fact acknowledged in the clearly delivered message for the first true sequel since 2009.

"We've made an entirely new experience," says Tommy François, the series' IP and development director and a man who previously lent his new-age corporate evangelism to the ill-fated Innergy. "First and foremost, this has been in development for well over three years, and we still have a lot of time to go. We pooled all our resources wherever possible to make sure that we were innovating wherever possible. This is going back to the original core team that worked on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and that worked on Assassin's and Assassin's 2."

Read more…

If the creators of Indie Game: The Movie make a sequel I'd be shocked if it doesn't co-star Vander Caballero. The Montreal-based designer had a successful career at EA working on games like Army of Two and FIFA Soccer 2004 when he decided he'd had enough. He needed to make his own game; one that told his story.

His upcoming PSN title, Papo & Yo is an autobiographic tale about his childhood, particularly his relationship to his abusive, alcoholic father. Rather than make a literal translation of his upbringing, Caballero re-imagines his life as a small boy named, Quico, befriending a monster.

The monster, simply called 'Monster' is a giant pink rhinoceros-like beast. Much of the time, Monster is a gentle, lovable creature that protects Quico. However, he's addicted to frogs, and when he eats said amphibians he goes berserk and rages on his best pal. The earlier version of Monster shown at E3 resembled a rhino much more, but Caballero realized that he looked more like a pet than his father.

Read more…

It all started with an acorn. Project Ego, the game that would eventually grow into Fable and then further flourish into one of the enduring series of the last decade, was built upon a promise of choice, of being able to craft your own journey in the fantasy land of Albion across your hero's entire lifespan. That acorn was an embodiment of that promise: something you'd be able to plant and then return to, after digital decades had passed, to see an oak in bloom.

That acorn was also an embodiment of the whimsy of Peter Molyneux, founder of Lionhead Studios and, throughout the entirety of the Fable series to date, its figurehead. When that acorn failed to materialize in the very first Fable, to a vocal bunch it came to symbolize what they felt about Molyneux - that he was a snake oil salesman, a purveyor of empty promises and hollow rhetoric.

If you're ever lucky enough to witness the Molyneux show in person, it's hard not to come away thinking he's one of the industry's finest showmen, the kind of character you'd expect to find down one of Albion's alleyways, enchanting a small gathered crowd with his sleight of hand and abundance of charisma.

Read more…

At a time when every MMO that ever struggled or lost the spotlight is embracing free-to-play, you'd think that Warhammer Online would simply throw up its hands and join the party. It may well do so at some point. For now though, it's taking a different approach to the rest, opting to take its existing engine and assets and rework them into this: a free, fast-paced competitive multiplayer game, following in the wake of MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) hits like League of Legends and Bloodline Champions.

As with those games, the basics are simply described. You pick from a selection of unlockable heroes, each with their own abilities and specialities, and team up with another five players on a randomly selected map with its own objectives. The beta currently offers three: a team deathmatch arena with collectible power-ups, a capture-and-hold map, and one about recovering runestones.

All are quick to play, sharing the main gimmick that there are three teams fighting it out instead of two. That makes things much more chaotic, helping to break stalemates and keep you on your toes, though the added random element of simply not having a chance if you your team gets ganged up on won't be for everyone.

Read more…

To Blizzard's credit, it hasn't shied away from addressing the quizzical looks that many players assumed following the announcement at BlizzCon 2011 that the Pandaren - a panda-like race that debuted in an April Fool's joke - would be the focus of World of Warcraft's fourth expansion. That a peaceful, innocent race quietly munching away on bamboo in the isolated mists of the Isle of Pandaria should be a necessary component in the promised grand vision of a return to war between the Alliance and Horde faction is a theme that jarred for many.

At last week's preview event for the upcoming fourth expansion, we got more than a little extra of the message that somehow struggled to make it from those attending BlizzCon to those receiving the information at home.

It starts with the world itself, and the art of Pandaria is predictably drawn from Eastern architectural influences - pagodas and paddy fields, decorated with deep reds and delicate ornaments. While the rugged and Nordic Northrend was a high point for Blizzard's artistic vision, it's arguably been trumped by the efforts in this new expansion - a Great Wall of Pandaria strides across a zone, factional hubs are occupied by cutlass-wielding stone giants, and hanging bells and blossom trees adorn the pagodas and outcrops of the land. Bejewelled and beguiling, it's a pristine and intricate look, with a far greater focus on the finer details than the broad texture swathes that have typically dominated WOW's art style in the past.

Read more…

Lego Batman 2: DC Superheroes' best feature is also its most divisive; it gives Superman most of the best powers. He can fly, melt objects with his heat vision, freeze objects with frost breath, and has super strength. Historically fans of Batman haven't been particularly fond of his Kryptonian rival, so giving this much freedom to Superman threatens to tip the scales in his favour, rendering Bats a secondary character. Thankfully, this is not the case at all, and through a series of clever choices, Lego Batman 2: DC Heroes promises to capture what makes each of its enormous catalogue of heroes and villains so special.

Last time out, Batman was a bit of a dullard compared to his more colourful villains. To make up for that this time around he can switch between various suits, each granting a different set of powers. Batman's green-goggled sensor suit allows him to appear invisible to sensors, see through certain surfaces with x-ray vision, and activate switches from afar. His electricity suit causes him to absorb charges and later deploy them to power machinery, and his power suit launches rockets that can crumble specific parts of the scenery to reveal grapple points underneath.

Robin can gain different suits as well. A blue acrobat costume allows him to carry off slicker combos or form a glass sphere around him, which can be used to knock enemies over or activate switches than require steadily rolling over them in place. Elsewhere, his hazard suit grants him the ability to walk underwater and comes attached with a Super Mario Sunshine-esque hose for cleaning up.

Read more…

This is not Command & Conquer as we know it. In fact, it's not even war as many of us know it. One of the first things that Martin Lohlein, senior producer at Phenomic tells journalists playing the closed beta is that Tiberium Alliances is that he "wanted to give C&C players a chance to engage with the franchise in a different place in their gaming schedule."

If you do rigorously schedule your gaming, then that place could be on your daily commute, in line at the bank or in a well-hidden Firefox tab at work. The idea is that Tiberium Alliances will run on any device with a browser, allowing you to manage its ongoing conflicts with a few clicks, sending succinct instructions on what to get on with until you check back during your lunch break.

In practice this might sound almost like play by mail but in its current state what Tiberium Alliances most resembles is a cross between Phonemic's similar fantasy effort, Lords of Ultima and, well, a Facebook game.

Read more…

If you had any lingering doubts about whether Cormac McCarthy really is this year's zombies, then let Deadlight solemnly persuade you that it's The Road rather than Romero that's currently foremost in gaming's collective consciousness. You'll see the novel's influence in Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, and you'll have seen it in Ubisoft Shanghai's surprisingly coherent view of a post-apocalyptic world, I Am Alive.

And you'll see it again this summer in Deadlight, one of the brightest propositions in store for Xbox Live Arcade, and quite possibly the sparkling gem in this year's Summer of Arcade. It helps that in many ways, Deadlight brings to mind two previous summer beaus on the 360's download service, Limbo and Shadow Compex, with its side-scrolling 2D gameplay that's told with a strong artistic bent.

Deadlight's set against a post-apocalyptic backdrop that's riddled with the walking dead. It's a scenario whose weary familiarity is countered with often breathtaking art design, its lighting veering towards monochrome while its ambiance lays on a thick, melancholic horror. (Spanish developer Tequila Works comprises many ex-MercurySteam staff, and the quality of both Jericho and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow seems to have carried across with them.)

Read more…

You know that thing everybody always moans about when Beenox turns in a perfectly serviceable but rather linear Spider-Man game? That thing about everybody actually wanting a return to the open-world web-swinging of Spider-Man 2? Yeah, well Beenox fixed that thing everybody always moans about.

For The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker's got all of New York City to play around in once more: he can swing down 5th Avenue, jump most of Central Park in a single bound and splat himself against the wall of the Empire State Building whenever he wants - or at least the wall of a building that looks a lot like the Empire State Building, since the design for the original is under copyright (or whatever the equivalent of copyright is for skyscrapers).

Beenox, in other words, has done what everyone was asking them to do. After the unexpected pleasures of Shattered Dimensions and the mild disappointments of Edge of Time - a) it was a rush job and b) Val Kilmer - a proper movie license has given the developer the chance to give Spidey a huge chunk of real estate to patrol. So how's the game shaping up?

Read more…

When DICE announced at its recent Battlefield/Medal of Honor event that its upcoming pack of DLC, Close Quarters, would focus on tight, indoor firefights, reactions were understandably divisive. "If you're going to focus on an indoor shooter, you might as well play Call of Duty," said one voice in the room. "This is great. The worst part about Battlefield 3 is that it took too long to find anybody because the maps were so goddamn large," said another. "A part of me died when I saw that Medal of Honor trailer," said another yet.

While there's no accounting for taste, DICE is doing its darnedest to try by releasing themed DLC packs catered to fans with divergent play styles. While Close Quarters will focus on cramped infantry-focused indoor affairs, the following DLC, Armored Kill, promises to have the largest terrain of any Battlefield to date with loads of vehicles and epic scale wars. There will be a third pack too, Endgame, but DICE remains cagey on the details there.

"We want to widen the spectrum of how we play these games. It comes back to the idea of having choice as a player," DICE general manager, Karl-Magnus Troedsson explained. It's a smart move, and a decidedly honest model that ensures players will only have to pay for the type of experience they want, without having to fork over extra dough to collect their favourite maps spread haphazardly across several nondescript map packs.

Read more…

Poor Sonic. Once a star runner rivaling Mario he went on to become as washed out a mascot as they come, subjecting himself to several of the worst platformers in the last decade with Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Sonic Unleashed - the latter of which cast him as a 'werehog' because he apparently didn't have enough misguided baditude already.

Just as he was about to fade into obscurity, he's seen something of a resurgence lately with both Sonics Colours and Generations. It's been a slight return to form, but still there was something missing. With 2D gaming back in vogue there was a demand for an entirely 2D HD Sonic game that could blend our memories of Sonic blazing through roller-coaster-like terrain with the snazzy new graphics of today.

When the highly awaited first numeric sequel to the franchise since 1994 arrived with Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode One, it was met with mixed reception. Its simplified design harkened back to Sonic's golden years, but the ropey physics left a sour taste with his long-standing followers.

Read more…

If you're a paid Elite subscriber and an Xbox 360 owner, you'll be getting Content Pack 3 on March 13th. If you're an Xbox 360 owner but you're not a paid Elite subscriber, you'll have the opportunity to pick it up - bundled with Content Packs 1 and 2 - as traditional paid DLC on March 20th. If you're on PS3 or PC, regardless of what you're paying for, you're going to have to wait for the time being. Thank heavens Elite came along and made everything so much simpler, eh? Thank heavens for timed platform exclusives, too.

Confusion aside, I got the chance to take a pretty good look at the three new maps that make up Content Pack 3 at an Activision event last week, and the good news is that they're all worth the wait - no matter how long your personal situation means you'll actually be left hanging on for. Weighing in at three maps in total, what's on offer here is as big as the first two content packs combined, and you're in for lots of hectic, death-defying fun, moving along at 60 fps.

Let's start with Black Box, as it's the only standard multiplayer map in the selection and probably the one that you're going to spend most time on overall. Black Box is a fairly large chunk of territory, and it's set around a crashed airplane. A crashed airplane? If you're picturing the buckled body of a Cessna sticking out of a turnip field somewhere, you're probably thinking COD's lost its flair for drama. Maybe your next Spec Ops assignment will involve queuing to buy donuts with exactly the right loose change, eh? Don't worry: the plane in question is actually Air Force One, and the surrounding landscape is the Hollywood hills.

Read more…

When it comes to continuities, Transformers is almost as complex as Star Wars. All you have to know about High Moon Studios' recent run at the video games, though, is that War for Cybertron was great and Transformers: Dark of the Moon was a bit of a mess. It felt stripped back and rough around the edges. It felt like a side project that was rushed out of the door to meet a movie street date - and that's apparently exactly what it was.

For Fall of Cybertron, the first true Cybertron sequel, the team is trying to make up for that disappointment. It's taking the core of the franchise - the control layout, the multiple playable characters, and the freedom to transform whenever you want - and it's building on top of it in some interesting ways.

It's the incremental improvements approach to sequelising, then, but it's taking place on a number of fronts. What ties the various tweaks together is that the changes have all been inspired by listening to feedback: feedback from the audience, and from the development team itself.

Read more…

Sound designer Alistair Lindsay stands onstage at the Bit of Alright conference in London, strange noises booming from the room's PA system. He's demonstrating the aural splendour of Introversion's new game, Prison Architect - a classic management sim with a smart twist.

At the rear of the hall, a group of us sit around a table of laptops, sampling the opening mission. We play to the soundtrack of Prison Architect's eerie ambiance married with Lindsay's in-depth commentary. For just a moment, the vibe is unsettling.

It's all about psychological trickery to get inside the minds of players says Lindsay, as he loads up the execution sequence we're simultaneously playing towards. Listen carefully, he says, and we'll notice that the sound of the electric chair powering up is, in fact, the same sound of a pistol cocking that we heard in a separate cut-scene minutes earlier. An unrealistic touch, perhaps, but it primes us for something awful to happen, and it all contributes to Prison Architect's dark, suspenseful mood.

Read more…

I think for the most part we get a bit of a raw deal in the hero stakes these days. At one end of the spectrum, you have the likes of the wordy John Shepard, a man who's always struck me as more of a council mediator working through a series of lengthy noisy-neighbour disputes than a saviour of the universe. At the other end, there are the quieter meat-heads who let their guns do their talking, backed up with the kind of crotch-enhancing space armour all too reminiscent of those horrifyingly tight, shiny suits that Jamie Redknapp's fond of wearing on Sky Sports.



And as I grow older and fartier with what seems like every passing second, it's characters like Geralt of Rivia I find myself growing closer to - the more life-like middle ground where pleasantly brutal violence goes hand-in-hand with believable characters, convincing relationships and repercussions.

In reality it's simply not the done thing to deal with life's infinite array of petty irritations by tracking down the instigator and planting a silver sword in their anus before winding down with a nice cup of coffee and a pancake. This makes me sad.

Read more…

In 1994 a then unknown game director named Goichi Suda made a wrestling game called Super Fire Pro Wrestling: Special, wherein the protagonist commits suicide upon claiming his victory after realising how empty his life is. This refusal to adhere to conventions was simply the tip of the iceberg for what would end up being one of the boldest voices in Japanese gaming today.

His Killer 7 followed an elderly fellow who manifested his various personalities as a cabal of hitmen, No More Heroes saw the rise of an Otaku fanboy rising the ranks of an assassin's tournament so he could win the heart of a vapid French opportunist, and more recently Shadows of the Damned was a riff off the story of Orpheus with a whole lot of dick jokes. By his eclectic standards the upcoming Lollipop Chainsaw about a chainsaw wielding, zombie-slaying cheerleader is downright conventional.

When asked about its mainstream appeal Suda admitted that he wanted something "more accessible to a wider audience." Upon first glance Lollipop Chainsaw has consumerist Hot Topic fodder written all over it. It's hard not to feel pandered to when Juliet exclaims "This is great! I'm such a game geek!" upon being transported into an arcade game like Tron's Kevin Flynn, but on the surface, Juliet seems like a groan-worthy manic dream girl; all curves, catch phrases and kills.

Read more…

It's rare to be surprised by anything these days. Microsoft's Spring Showcase in San Francisco promised a day of feigning astonishment as Playground's Forza was finally unveiled, and a skinny overview of what to expect from the next Halo was given (spoiler: it's got guns in it, and maybe a space marine or two).

The look of shock when presented with Fable Heroes, a four player beat 'em-up that presents a knit-work Albion by way of Castle Crashers, was genuine - as were the expressions of delight after playing what's shaping up to be an utterly charming off-shoot for Lionhead's fantasy series.

Fable Heroes is the product of one of Lionhead's creative days, an annual in-house meeting where the team throws around ideas. "The things that usually come out of it are a new piece of technology or a toolset," says Ted Timmins, formerly a quest designer on Fable 3 and now promoted to lead designer of Fable Heroes. "This is the first time that a videogame has come out of it, and it's great - it puts that extra bit of pressure on us because we won't get this opportunity again, and we want other people to have this opportunity."

Read more…

It's Halo. Which says a lot and yet says very little at the same time. There are the same springy jumps, the same man-cannons and the maps with the same perfectly crafted symmetry. There are Spartans, there's a battle rifle and there's a grand, extra-terrestrial backdrop, the architecture as ever seemingly a result of Frank Lloyd Wright being kidnapped by some alien race and forced to design the flat steel that twists beneath beautiful skyboxes.

It's Halo, and the fourth mainline game is in essence the same we've all been playing since Combat Evolved in 2001. And that suggests, in one regard, that 343 hasn't dropped the ball for its first serious attempt at the series since Bungie departed.

A Halo without Bungie at one time seemed as inconceivable as a Mario without Nintendo - but 343's definition of the Halo experience, it turns out, isn't so very different from Bungie's after all. "Jamie Griesemer of Bungie once defined it as this golden triangle," franchise director Frank O'Connor tells us. "And while I'm not a game designer, I have my own personal definition of it.

Read more…

I had a friend who had synaesthesia. Sounds would form a iridescent fog over her vision, with different sounds creating different colours, and multiple sounds layering over one another; blue could be shot through with silver, or pockets of red would flare in a brown malaise. Most of the time, she said it was actually quite pleasant, as though she was seeing an extra layer to sound that was unique to her. Most of the time, it made her feel special.

Sometimes, when there was too much sound, or too many that conflicted, it would overwhelm. It would make it difficult to see, and difficult to think, with this violent storm of colour covering everything. It was only at those times that she ever claimed to 'suffer' from synaesthesia.

Proteus, a procedural exploration game by Ed Key, doesn't let you see what you hear. It lets you hear what you see.

Read more…

There's a strange thing in the End of Nations map I'm trying out, and that thing is a suspension railway. How quaint. The global economy has collapsed, the world is at war and all its major cities lie in ruin, yet as I send my troops into battle I can clearly see there's still a suspension railway trundling its way about this town I'm trying to occupy, casually weaving a route through the demolished buildings and over the cratered streets.

If there's anyone in any of its carriages, then they have a superb view of the fighting. Tanks the size of houses cascade down the main road like a tide of liquid metal, armoured infantry bounding along beside them. Low in the sky, a pair of trigger-happy helicopters launch ordinance liberally into the town square. Following the streaks of their missiles, it might just be possible to catch sight of the rocket launchers they fire at.

Then again, this sight might have become all too familiar for any passengers or commuters travelling by. Battles like this are raging across every continent, all day and every day. Generals come and go as they please, territories change hands by the hour and this regional skirmish might well be overshadowed by others nearby, battles where dozens of commanders could be hurling their troops into a massive melee. With all this war going on, it may be a struggle to find anything interesting to read in the morning metro paper.

Read more…

My head is spinning. RedLynx has built upon Trials Evolution's predecessors so comprehensively that it's now scraping the heavens. Trials has been expanded in every way possible - local multiplayer joins online multiplayer joins an extensive reworking of leaderboards - and it will continue to expand well after it's finally released, its creation mode promising to churn out more and more content until the servers are switched off.

My palms are sweating. Trials has always set the heart racing, stretching your nerves out across a series of impossible inclines and falls, but Evolution adds a new level of suspense. Tracks can be hung in the skies, a generous draw distance letting you see every inch of the drop that awaits those with a clumsy throttle finger.

And I can't stop laughing. Trials always had a keen sense of slapstick, and now it's taken centre stage. It's a novel way of sweetening the thousand failures that underpin any extended game of Trials; fall off your bike, and the ragdoll rider will bounce limply across the scenery.

Read more…

Your first thought on firing up ShootMania Storm is: is it 2003? With its plain looks, small maps and basic controls, this online shooter for PC seems to belong to the time French studio Nadeo last made a brand new game, the community racing sensation, TrackMania. Or even earlier than that.

Your first thought on finishing a game of ShootMania is: again, again, again! Just like TrackMania's zippy arcade stunt racing, it has a purity, playfulness, pace and instant accessibility that make it refreshing and addictive in equal measure.

Also like TrackMania, ShootMania is built for a community of tinkerers and sharers. It comes with a powerful but intuitive map editor as well as the ability to use a scripting language to write your own mods and game rules. Like last year's entirely wonderful TrackMania 2: Canyon, it lives on Nadeo's new ManiaPlanet platform, a social network and system for sharing user-generated content.

Read more…

Spelunky is a game about stories. Great big ones that last hours, five-second misadventures and everything in-between. No single one defines it. Instead, over hours and restarts they blend together, and from your missteps and triumphs some kind of epic takes shape.

Not bad for a rogueish platformer with a red-nosed hero. Spelunky was released for PC in 2008, and this XBLA remake is the real thing: an audio & visual overhaul, new objects & zones, and all the original's genius for accident and disaster.

The re-done visuals are gorgeous. As with every 'update' to a classic, there are those who will swear blind by the original pixels, but the hand-drawn art here is bold and colourful with the exagerrated proportions of its cartoony figures keeping just enough of the original sprites. There's one tiny touch I miss - the edges of the spelunker's hat used to flop up and down, but now he's wearing a hard hat. Perhaps a well-drawn fedora would have inched too close to copyright.

Read more…

"Even our most optimistic internal projections show that continued investment was not going to lead to a title at, or near, the top of the competitive open world genre.

"In an industry where only the best games in each category are flourishing, to be blunt, it just wasn't going to be good enough."

Ouch. Activision CEO Eric Hirschberg didn't pull any punches when explaining the reason the publisher pulled the plug on True Crime: Hong Kong last February.

Read more…

Close your eyes - not if you're driving! - and picture a Facebook game. What do you see? A farm, most likely, or perhaps a city block or even the inside of a fifties diner. (If you see Triple Town, of course, you get a free biscuit and a chummy punch on the shoulder.)

There's definitely an increasing number of good games on Facebook, but many of the things you'll encounter offer little but charmless toil: plant this, scrub that, build this, tell your friends. Could I have some money now? Could you tell your friends I'd like some money, too? It's like having a tapeworm that lives in your gut and eats five-pound notes. Occasionally, it will poke its head out and have a quick round of Ludo with you. Like!

PopCap's approach has always been a little different. PopCap's games all have monetisation, of course, and, yes, they do work a touch better if you enjoy them alongside your friends, but they're not about clicking and waiting, planting and tilling.

Read more…

Back when I worked in a game store selling third-party controllers to unsuspecting customers (on the basis that if I ever recommended an official pad, I'd be on permanent stockroom duty) an import-savvy shopper informed me that Famitsu had announced a crossover between Namco and Capcom. My automatic assumption was that this had to be a fighting game, and that Capcom had somehow struck a deal with Namco and was about to bring the likes of Ryu and Jin together in the ultimate 2D mash-up. Boy was I wrong.

Namco x Capcom turned out to be a tactical-RPG, and when a fan translation patch surfaced a few years later I saw for myself that this was a million miles off 'The King of Iron Fist Tournament with a Shadaloo twist' that I'd imagined. But it did get me thinking as to how a crossover between the world's most popular 2D and 3D fighting game franchises could ever work.

Street Fighter has always been about condensed command lists with special moves that rely on charge and circular motions, while Tekken is defined by its limb-based buttons that focus on juggling. And although they share the concept of one-on-one combat with health bars, multi-hit combos and a three round format, in every other respect they're the polarised bookends of a diverse genre.

Read more…

2K's Spec Ops: The Line is riddled with conflict and contradictions. It's partly about the culture clash that's played out across the dunes of Dubai as the Middle East crashes violently into the consumerism of the West - a parable told in the tidal waves of sand that splash up against the city's shards of concrete and glass in the game's near-future vision.

But there's another, more curious conflict at Spec Ops' own dark heart. Here's a tale of the dehumanising horror of war, its story leaning heavily on Conrad (and a little awkwardly too, with its Kurtz-inspired character clumsily renamed Konrad). And at the same time, here's a game about the simple pleasures of slamming your shoulder into a wall before lining up headshot after headshot after headshot, in combat that's physical, muscular and entertaining.

Can 2K and developers Yager Development have their cake and eat it, providing a moral tale and a meaty shooter all at once? A tour through a handful of Spec Ops' campaign missions doesn't present a comprehensive answer, but it does give a glimpse of a game that, with its own internal conflict, promises to be more interesting than many of its peers.

Read more…

Lumines wasn't any old PSP launch title. It was the PSP launch title, and arguably the best pure puzzler since Tetris (a title it held onto until Drop 7 came along, of course). The synesthetic concerns of Q Entertainment, which first strutted along in ten-inch platforms in 2000's Space Channel 5 before taking a turn for the metaphysical in the following year's Rez, were melded perfectly with simple, grid-based puzzling. Like Rez before it, Lumines felt like a celebration of club culture - or, with its lazy rhythms and ability to consume whole hours, more a celebration of post-club culture.

It was the launch title in part because of its brilliance, and in part through a lack of anything else worth getting particularly excited about. For a year at least, the PSP was a Lumines machine - a situation that, in light of the Vita's bustling launch line-up, is unlikely to be repeated this time out.

The years since have seen Lumines spread like a sweet virus, although its appeal has been watered down a little, its rhythms gradually becoming easier to resist. Sequel has piled upon sequel, and each new iteration has struggled to add much of substance to the original - which is always a problem when you get it so very, very right the first time around.

Read more…

Motorsport is glitz and it is glamour. It's the teardrop curve of an F1 car as it reflects Monaco's harbourline, its perfect swoop capturing a moment of speed in carbon fibre, or the romantic siren call of a V8 as it bounces across the housefronts of the Mulsanne Straight in the dead of night.

That's one ideal, anyway. There's another world of weekend heroics where the smell of simmering bacon grease mixes with that of engine oil and damp grass, and where the cars, with their punctured bodywork and torn-off doors, capture a moment of violence rather than one of speed.

I used to go there myself, when trips to the likes of Silverstone and Brands Hatch were out of the question. Here, in a track marked out of discarded tires in the backwaters of Bovingdon, drivers would take out their frustrations on one another, turning each other to pulp over the course of a slow Sunday afternoon. It's a spectacle that, for its lack of airs and graces, offers just as much as any Grand Prix or sportscar race.

Read more…

The townsfolk have been listening to Shepard pulling the old "Commander who shouted 'Reaper!'" ruse for some time now. First she (he, if you're feeling obtuse) shouted 'Reaper!' when she discovered that the caretakers of the Galaxy were about to sweep up all known galactic civilizations. Then, in Mass Effect 2, she shouted 'Reaper!' after she'd fought against a big icky monster that had been made from human body parts, and had all/most/some of her underlings killed in the process.

Did the intergalactic townspeople listen though? Did they pay attention to this particular Shepard, and her sad tale of a sexy secretary being mulched and, as a consequence, all her fish dying? Of course they didn't. The Earth people were too busy worrying about what their Cerberus faction were up to, the Krogans were whinging about the Genophage putting the kibosh on procreation and the Quarians were preoccupied by wondering what their own faces looked like. Typical. The cretins even stripped her of her rank for something she did in the DLC. Tch.

So now the Reapers have finally showed up, guess who has to clean up all this mess? That's right: muggins here. Good old reliable Commander Shepard - back to save the day with a brand new sexy space adventure.

Read more…

You come to Syndicate with expectations. It's unavoidable. Your eyes can't help but flit over the screen, desperate to find nostalgia that's survived unscathed. Occasionally they succeed. The fabled Eurocorp corporation, that jagged and efficient-looking world map, the spotlight street lamps and the cold and business-like mission run-downs all trickle cold fire through your synapses.

After a fashion, however, bright eyes grow dim. You feel a slight heat in your head while your emotion chip boots up, your brain fuzzes over and consequently (thankfully) teardrops do not fall. You just kill, and kill again. During my hours with Syndicate's co-op mode I certainly felt Bullfrog twitches (once I saw a comrade's flapping coat and said out loud "Syndicate coat!") yet each time my mood was swiftly stabilised.

Co-op missions may be loosely based (very loosely) on the original game - but at no point does pressing RB let you see your surroundings in Rosetint Vision™ where everything's isometric, the explosions are the greatest thing 1993 has ever seen and, if you listen hard enough, you can hear your Mum shouting that your tea's ready.

Read more…

Jan 27th, 1868. A snowy plain just outside of Kyoto. The battle of Toba-Fushimi is about to take place. A small battalion of Imperial soldiers shiver as they face down a force of the Shogun's finest warriors advancing across a handful of rivers, hopelessly ineffectual at preventing the samurai from their coming attack. Hundreds of these majestic samurai warriors riding on noble horseback are drawing near. Playing as the Imperials, I'm hopelessly outnumbered. Traditionally, I wouldn't stand a chance. But these are hardly traditional times.

From the trailers released so far for Fall of the Samurai, you could be forgiven for thinking of the ill-fated Satsuma rebellion that made Tom Cruise sad in The Last Samurai, but while set in the same period of turmoil, Fall focuses on the earlier 1869 Boshin War, a civil conflict that barely lasted two years. A brisk timeframe to contend with as you struggle to determine the course of Japan's embrace of industrialisation.

But don't go thinking Fall is going to be a couple of scant missions and some new DLC outfits. This is a proper old-school expansion pack with all-new toys, a different beast entirely from Shogun 2's campaign. This was a period in Japan's history that saw it transform overnight from a feudal agrarian society into a steam-powered industrial powerhouse. To represent the lightning pace of development, turns on the campaign map take up a mere two weeks. Better pack an extra pair of mittens, as that means Winter now lasts a morale-shattering six full turns.

Read more…

Several months ago Tom Francis, whom you should know from his writing for PC Gamer, went to Seattle to interview the team at Valve. When he sat down with Gabe Newell and Erik Wolpaw, something really weird happened. They asked him how his game was coming along.

His game, as it happens, was coming along pretty well. I saw a rough demo of it at around the same time, and I've just now played the newest version, which has art by John Roberts and Fabian van Dommelen, music by Ryan Ike, Francisco Cerda, and John Robert Matz, a new mission structure that ties its individual levels together in a witty fashion, and an IGF nomination for excellence in design. Newell probably wants to kick him in the nuts, frankly.

The game's called Gunpoint, and it's a stealthy action-puzzler in which you play a secret agent for hire, breaking into hi-tech buildings and stealing various cyberpunk MacGuffins. It's the future as rain-slicked corporate nightmare, but the game looks more like The Spy's Guidebook than Bladerunner. Meanwhile, with its 2D cross-sectioned levels and flashes of nasty humour, it feels a little like a grown-up version of Bonanza Bros. And that's a compliment.

Read more…

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It's an instantly forgettable title. And it's not just meaningless and profoundly generic, it's saddled (like Dragon Age: Origins before it) with the exhausting suggestion that this isn't the birth of an exciting fantasy universe so much as the launch of a new franchising opportunity.

Having spent 15 hours or so in the company of a near-finished preview build of 38 Studios' brisk role-player - out next week - I can confirm that it deserves much better than this limp nomenclature. And yet, it's true that the title fits it like a glove.

'Kingdoms of Amalur': the game's universe is exactly the derivative mishmash of worn high fantasy tropes that you expect after reading those three words. It's been rubber-stamped by some big-name creatives (fantasy author RA Salvatore and comic and toy king Todd MacFarlane), and I suppose it's possible that "every building, tree and creature has a clear and defined history within this immersive world," as the literature claims. But this land of elves (sorry, Fae), dwarves and men initially offers nothing to distinguish itself beyond a similarity to Blizzard's Warcraft that's not so much striking as actionable. (I could swear that I met the Night Elf druid from the original WOW trailer. She even had the same clothes on.)

Read more…

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier ain't quite what it used to be. When it first broke cover - and when we last took a serious look at it - Ubisoft's tactical shooter series had evolved into something far removed from the games of old, having become an action-heavy third-person shooter starring a soldier who was, in Ubisoft's own words, "an F-16 on legs". It had turned into Gears of Recon, and it proved an unpopular shift in direction for a series once known for its tactical smarts.

"We'd just finished Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, but that was just an iteration of the first Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter," creative director Jean-Marc Geffroy says of Future Soldier's first pass. "The team wanted to renew the game - they wanted to stay faithful, but they wanted to renew as well. And sometimes, when you're like that maybe you go too far in one direction."

Remember the over-powered exoskeleton, the class system and the player tethering discussed at the game's reveal? Forget about it - all of it - as today's version of Future Soldier is a world away from the one first shown in 2010.

Read more…

I wonder if David Ostman, the indie developer behind A Science Fiction Saga, has received a call from Futurama's lawyers yet. His upcoming release tells the story of Anderson Kane - an unfortunate chap who finds himself thrust thousands of years into the future after an incident at work. The involvement of pizza and cryogenic freezing is something that's yet to be confirmed.

Far removed from Futurama's silliness, though, this point-and-click adventure is set in a world touching on Star Trek, Firefly and fellow indie point-and-clicker Gemini Rue. In it, the entire human race has found itself caught up in a vast conspiracy, full of interstellar police forces and private investigators. You'll even become the owner of a spaceship, complete with crew members who begrudgingly accept your space travel ineptitude.

Impressively, all this is in the first game of a planned series. It's a vast undertaking for a solo developer, with a little help from an animator on the side. Is he mad? "You have to be a bit crazy to get into game development," he says. "It's hard work and often little-to-no glory, and you need to be stubborn as a two-headed mule to stick with it."

Read more…

"Choose Your Own Death" is one of the strangest video game pitches that's been flung our way in a while. Choose Your Own Death. Okay, so I've thought about it, and I'd like to go with rollerskates, a wonky stepladder, a plate glass window, and the glinting tines of an upended garden fork, please. At my funeral, I want them to play the theme from Shaft, and everybody has to dress like they work at Burger King.

It all makes a bit more sense, though, when you discover that Death is the new protagonist for Darksiders 2. He's taking over from his brother War in a sequel that fits neatly inside the timeline of the original. Think of it as Back to the Future 2, but with a rock-fisted demon in place of Thomas F. Wilson. War has been accused of kicking off the Apocalypse early, and he's out to clear his name: that's Darksiders. Meanwhile, Death thinks War is his kind of people, so, as another of the famous four horsemen, he sets off on his own parallel adventure to see if he can help his brother out. That's Darksiders 2.

As for the element of choice, this comes from a slight change of emphasis. In Darksiders 2, you'll be able to shape Death a little as the game progresses, selecting which armour you want him to wear as you pick paths through his skill trees, while juggling his load out of weapons and magic attacks. It's a mix-and-match approach that mirrors that of the developer, Vigil Games, which built the original Darksiders, in part, from its favourite pieces of the Zelda and God of War series, taking the dungeons-and-gadgets structure of the former, and the pointy melee combat of the latter. For Darksiders 2, all of that stuff remains in place, but the team is throwing in some new inspirations as well.

Read more…

CyberConnect 2's central office is equal parts library and games development studio. Before you can get to the 140-strong workforce in the developer's Fukuoka base - supplemented by a further 70 staff working out of Tokyo - there's a lobby that houses over 3,000 DVDs and Blu-rays, the walls lined with a comprehensive collection of sci-fi and anime. Downstairs there are shelves upon shelves thick with manga, the stark strip-lighting and functional furniture giving the large open-plan meeting area the feel of a school reading room that's stacked with forbidden fruit.

It's more than mere decoration or pleasant distraction for CC2, a team that made its name first with the .hack series and then found greater success with Naruto before embarking on a brand new game, Asura's Wrath, in partnership with Capcom. All of these DVDs and all of these mangas are required reading for the team. Every single one of them.

"It's a general rule in our studio that all staff members should know all of the anime and manga that are on the shelves," CC2's president Hiroshi Matsuyama tells us with a smile, before his face hardens a little; "If they don't, and if they're not reading something or watching something, I get mad."

Read more…

It all began 15 years ago, with a lofty voice that proclaimed: "Transcending history and the world, a tale of soul and swords eternally retold!" But after the progressively stifled SoulCalibur 4 - a game whose unique selling point was the clashing of katanas and lightsabers in a Star Destroyer docking bay, with its cameos from Darth Vader and Yoda - it seemed like the curtain had finally fallen on the Stage of History. However, nobody told Project Soul director Daishi Odashima, as by taking the series 17 years into the future and retiring certain members of the cast, he finally gives us a SoulCalibur that shows tangible progression since its days on the Dreamcast.

A quick trip to the select screen reveals that Taki, Xianghua and Kilik have been replaced by Natsu, Leixia and Xiba - respectively an apprentice, daughter and successor. This passing of torches is also inherent in their fighting styles, as with bō-staff in hand, Xiba (whose named is pronounced the same as a popular brand of cat food) fights in a way that closely resembles his less goofy predecessor. Although his move set has been subtly tweaked, you can still achieve a ring-out by jamming your pole between your opponent's legs and tossing them over your shoulder.

While Sophitia has passed on her shield duties to her twin children, Patroklos and Pyrrha, the rest of the roster is made up of Calibur classics like the nunchaku-twirling Maki, the axe-swinging Astaroth and the double-cheque-cashing Yoshimitsu. Some of them also look more advanced in years, with Mitsurugi keeping it classy with his Just For Men mane and Lizardman - who now goes by his human name of Aeon Calcos - rocking an angelic set of wings that give his techniques an aerial edge.

Read more…

Here's the scene; an orphanage, on a dark and typically stormy night. Blood runs through the corridors, and fresh corpses pile up by the walls. In the nursery, under bright birthday bunting, there's a lullaby of screams as a guard strapped to a wooden chair is slowly tortured.

Meanwhile, a silent killer picks off his prey one-by-one. At one moment in this violent game of hide and seek, a brightly coloured beach ball rolls silently past - at another, with one more victim dispatched, the body's hidden in a nearby ball-pool. It's an orphanage, but with the body count tick-tick-ticking ever upwards it may as well be an orphan factory.

For all the concerns about Hitman: Absolution's grittier, more action-led take on Danish developer IO Interactive's bloodthirsty mascot, it's most definitely retained its line in jet-black humour. "We tried to take it out of Absolution in the beginning," says game director Tore Blystad, a man that, despite being in charge of one of the medium's most notorious killers, can't hold back the widest and most infectious of grins, "we wanted it to be more serious, so this humour had to go. But then it crept back in, so we had to embrace it. It's one of the fundamental pillars of the game."

Read more…

Racing studios are, sadly, a diminishing breed, and those that still stand are having to adapt to survive. Following the closure of Bizarre Creations and Black Rock Studios last year, existing developers are finding new paths to explore - Codemasters steering its Dirt brand toward the downloadable route, while Slightly Mad turns to the strange new world of user-generated content for its ambitious and intriguing Project Cars.

There's one studio that's weathered the storm well enough, however, and which, despite the struggles elsewhere in the market, still manages to produce up to three boxed racing games per year. And it does that with a thinly stretched team of 90, spread over three floors of a slightly scruffy studio near the centre of Milan, Italy.

It's this team that put out the functional yet entertaining WRC game and its somewhat underwhelming sequel, and that in the SBK series has produced arguably the best bike game on the market; not a particularly impressive feat when its sole competitor, Capcom's MotoGP games, has seemingly slipped into obscurity, but a noble one nevertheless.

Read more…

It has, since its unveiling late in 2009, been hard to muster much in the way of enthusiasm for Binary Domain. Fronted by a stubble-chinned, crop-haired hero who's seemingly more anonymous than the waves of robots he's tasked with gunning down, it's a game that's generic to the point of rendering itself invisible.

If Sega's own Tokyo studio's perverse objective has been to blend in its first foray in to the duck and cover shooter genre crowd in much the same way as Binary Domain's new breed of robots try to hide themselves within its imagined future society, it's proved successful; some have emerged from demos from this year's trade shows with little recollection of what they've just witnessed, an instant amnesia brought on by what seems to be a particularly inoffensive yet uninspiring effort.

It's all the more dispiriting when you consider the heritage behind the studio that's developing Binary Domain - this is the same outfit that has in recent years produced the consistently brilliant Yakuza series, games that are as colourful as they are eccentric and unique, and it's headed up by one gaming's few rockstar developers, Toshihiro Nagoshi. But beneath Binary Domain's innocuous exterior there's something smarter, more cunning and ultimately more beguiling than first looks might lead you to believe. Yes, it's a third person shooter set in a dreary monochrome future, but it's one that's got character, style and a handful of neat tricks to boot.

Read more…

The Guinness Book of Records: Gamer's Edition must be having a field day with Star Wars: The Old Republic; most expensive game ever, most vocal recording in a game, longest hype, most embarrassing cosplayer, most Jedi teabagging...

Yet despite the long list of superlatives already attached to it, SWTOR feels like the last of its kind; a game that was started at the end of one era of the MMO, and one that will be released at the beginning of another.

There are uneasy parallels that can be drawn with Star Wars: Galaxies, SWTOR's much-maligned predecessor, here. Galaxies took the (then still mostly-unsullied-curse-you-Phantom-Menace) main Star Wars brand and made a universe out of it, doing a fair job at replicating the feel of the world. It was released at the peak of the paid-for MMO business and did respectably, despite repeated design screw-ups, only being shut down to make room for SWTOR.

Read more…

When it comes to keeping secrets, the games industry is about as trustworthy as Julian Assange. Just ask Konami, whose VGAs-closing trailer revealing MGS: Rising as a Platinum Games title leaked online hours before the show.

And yet, defying the odds, news of two-years-in-the-making The Last of Us, created by an 80-strong Naughty Dog team no-one knew existed, was met with that rarest of emotions when it broke cover at the weekend: genuine surprise. But, oh, how close it all came to unravelling as the big day approached.

Two months ago, Neil Druckmann, creative director and writer on the project, left his iPad on a plane. An iPad with the debut trailer for the game stored on it. Frantic calls to the airline ensued, but the device was gone. Naughty Dog waited nervously. And, to its considerable relief, nothing happened.

Read more…

Gotham City Impostors is all about obsessive fans. Obsessive fans who, as is so often the case, happen to be both slightly unstable and very heavily armed.

It's a multiplayer-only online shooter set in the Batman universe - but because Batman doesn't actually like to shoot people in his universe, Monolith, the game's developer, has had to get creative. The solution it's come up with is to offer players the choice between two opposing teams of cut-price vigilantes decked out in cheap costumes and weighed down with home-made gadgets and weapons.

Drawing inspiration from the real superheroes and villains, these gangs have called themselves the Bats and the Jokerz, and they spend their weekends blasting each other to pieces. This, in case you haven't noticed, is the set-up for one of the weirdest licensed games you'll have seen in quite a while.

Read more…

The Darkness II sees the moody franchise handed a new developer and a new secret weapon. The developer is Digital Extremes, an outfit that takes over from the gloriously under-appreciated Starbreeze Studios, and the secret weapon is colour.

Colour, eh? Cliché that it is to comment on the fact, it's all too often MIA in contemporary shooters. Once it's back, you realise how much you've missed it. Digital Extremes has interpreted The Darkness' funny book origins as an excuse to paint its levels with pools of rich blues, greens, and reds. Look closely and you'll see a touch of cel-shading on top. Look closer still and you'll see traces of Borderlands' lovely cross-hatching, too. It's hard to see the game in motion and not want to try it out. That's colour for you.

In the single-player, the other big ideas include quad-wielding (it was inevitable really) and Nolan North (ditto). All of that's for another day, though, sadly. Today we're only talking about multiplayer.

Read more…

The automotive industry in Britain isn't what it once was, but it's learnt to adapt and evolve, finding and filling niches and flourishing in an ever-changing market. For the country's virtual automotive industry it's much the same story; there have been some big casualties (rest in peace, beloved Bizarre) but there are those that continue to thrive, creating the same, well-crafted output that made the industry's name in increasingly novel fashion.

Codemasters struck gold with an Indian investor and the F1 license, while Criterion worked its magic on Need for Speed and looks likely to return to the franchise it breathed some much-needed life into. Elsewhere, South London's Slightly Mad Studios, its own stint on Need for Speed seemingly on hold, has turned its expertise to Project Cars, a crowd-sourced game that's taking more than financial donations from its fledgling community - it's taking their ideas onboard too.

And then there's Newcastle's Eutechnyx, modest veterans of the UK's racing scene with coming up to 14 years experience of crafting driving games. Like Slightly Mad, it's struck out on a different path to many of its competitors, although Eutechnyx is currently a little further along the road.

Read more…

By now, you may well have seen the target footage of Rainbow 6 Patriots that Ubisoft released earlier this month, hot on the heels of a hurried announcement. Not much more than a week previously, I'd been sitting in Ubisoft's Montreal game factory watching the very same sequence played live on a PS3 - albeit still presented as a "target" rather than a piece of the finished game. It differed in minor details, but it matched the target video beat for beat.

You find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. (Although David Byrne didn't mention the iPad or the option to PRESS X TO KISS WIFE, you way well ask yourself: how did I get here?) You're a successful banker. A group of men break in and capture you both; you wake up with a bomb strapped to your chest, tasked with taking it to Times Square in New York and committing an atrocity to save the lives of your wife and baby. Ending up stuck in traffic chaos on a rain-lashed Brooklyn Bridge, you're cowering under cover from police fire and following one of the terrorists forward, car by car.

The action then switches to the Rainbow counter-terrorist team, high in the bridge's superstructure. You snipe, taking out an interfering NYPD officer with a shot to the leg. You rappel dramatically, running vertically down the brickwork, firing as you go. You make your way forward through panicked civilians, using a stark virtual-reality tactical overlay (not unlike Batman: Arkham's detective mode) to pick out and close in on the enemy.

Read more…

We're a fussy bunch, really. Soon after a game's release and public forums become autopsy slabs, full of should have, would have, could have. It's at this point in a game's life cycle, once the hype has blown away and after the controller's been put down, that everyone becomes a game designer; everyone knows how to make a game better.

Project Cars, Shift developer Slightly Mad Studio's latest project, inverts the process. Here, it's those suggestions, that nitpicking and those moments of fan inspiration that are being harvested for a game that's bravely decided to do much of its growing up in public.

It's all quite simple; sign up to WMD, the somewhat unfortunate acronym chosen for Slightly Mad's World of Mass Development platform, and you're granted access to regularly released builds of the game, which you're then free to pick apart in the official forums. That feedback then gets absorbed by Slightly Mad Studios, a simple loop that means that, when the game is eventually released, it'll be as much a product of the community as it is of the studio.

Read more…

After three years of silence, I Am Alive feels as much a statement as a title. The tale behind its development threatens to overshadow the game itself, and it's as packed with enigmas, dead-ends and abandoned ruins as the story that's within.

French outfit Darkworks, creator of Cold Fear, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare and other anonymous classics, were the team originally in charge when the CG trailer first emerged, though there's doubt that the game ever got beyond the concept phase - and whatever the case, when the project limped towards Ubisoft Shanghai some two years later, work was started anew.

The loose post-apocalyptic premise set out by the original trailer remains, though it's now been bent to Ubisoft Shanghai's own ends. Twelve months on from an inexplicable and unexplained catastrophe known only as The Event, the world has collapsed into rubble and dust. Our unnamed hero finds himself at the end of a yearlong trek across the width of the country to his hometown of Haverton, in pursuit of the wife and child he still optimistically believes are alive somewhere in the chaos.

Read more…

I must be going soft, or I must be getting old. Perhaps both. Maybe I've become pulpy and aged, like an over-ripe fruit that's due for the bin, because the Dota 2 beta is punishing me.

It may well be that I've spent far too long amongst the warm comforts of its accommodating and enormously successful peer League of Legends, with that game's gentle tutorials, helpful replays and precisely-tuned player matchmaking. Side by side, a game of LoL now seems like a finely-honed fencing match where opponents parry and riposte, while Dota 2 is an unforgiving broadsword duel in which one false move spells disfigurement or even death.

What's more, while opposing LoL players may give knowing winks as they feint and strike, more than a few Dota 2 players practically spit in each other's faces. Like the original Dota, Valve's Source Engine update has no sense of sympathy. That's not what you play it for. Nor is it what you expect from the remake of a game whose beginner's guide is simply titled "Welcome to Dota. You suck." Highlights include a section on "DISGUSTINGLY COMMON NOOB ITEM MISTAKES," you disgusting new person, you.

Read more…

Mounted high on the gleaming silver superstructure of one of Dubai's improbable skyscrapers is a vast advertising hoarding filled with a model's pouting lips. In the bottom left corner of the huge banner, someone has used bright red paint to scrawl a single word: Help.

It's disquieting stuff, even when glimpsed from the relative safety of a military helicopter as you pass low over the city, but - listen to that voice - at least you've got good old Nolan North to keep you safe. Or have you? Minutes into Spec Ops: The Line, it's clear that this is a story that cuts a little deeper than the likes of Uncharted, and if that's Nathan Drake we're playing as, it's a Nathan Drake who's recently spent a really long time thinking about all those people he's killed.

It's not Nathan Drake at all, of course. The Line's hero is a Delta Force soldier named Captain Martin Walker, and he and his two squad-mates have touched down in a ravaged near-future Dubai to track down Colonel Konrad, a military officer with a near-perfect track record. He's also been presumed dead for the last six months, caught up in a failed evacuation as freak sandstorms steadily picked the world's strangest city apart. Over the last few days, evidence has started to emerge suggesting that he might still be alive.

Read more…

"You haven't strayed into some atrocious Dan Brown paperback," comments the recruiter for the Templars, one of the three secret societies you can join in The Secret World, Funcom's modern-day MMO. Well no, that much is clear - from that self-same gag, if nothing else. Dan Brown was never especially self-aware or prone to post-modern irony.

That said, Brown's airport-novel take on the bookish conspiracies of Umberto Eco is an identifiable part of The Secret World's make-up. It's just one of the many dirty mugs in its overflowing kitchen sink of influences from pop culture and post-Crowley occultism: The X-Files, Cryptonomicon, Hellblazer... Maybe you haven't strayed into The Da Vinci Code, but you have strayed into a playable version of every Neil Gaiman graphic novel you've ever read.

That's The Secret World's secret weapon in the not-so-secret war for the future of MMOs. It's a good hook - and creative director Ragnar Tornquist and his teams in Oslo and Montreal know it, making enthusiastic if not constant use of it to keep the genre tropes feeling a good deal fresher than they do in rival games. It's not this game's only new idea, but it is its best one. Personality goes a long way, and The Secret World has it in spades.

Read more…

If you don't like Final Fantasy 13-2, it's your own fault.

For better or worse, the sequel to Square Enix's hard-to-love 2009 effort is a product of democracy. From its opening moments, it's clear that the franchise's core fanbase - or at least its noisier elements - has played a central role in how the game has taken shape.

Did you complain that Final Fantasy 13 was too linear? Square has listened - the corridors have widened out. Thought the first one took an age to get going? Fixed - FF13-2 throws you straight into a wildly OTT boss battle. Were you one of those stamping their feet at the lack of towns to explore and NPCs to chat up? Fear not - 13-2 is busier than Bluewater on Boxing Day. Or perhaps you took to a message board to decry the lack of merchants or Moogles? Rejoice - they're back.

Read more…

For the longest time, I knew virtually nothing about the UFC. I'd dabbled with the Ultimate Fighting Championship game on the Dreamcast, and even watched some classic Royce Gracie fights on a borrowed cassette tape, but I was always far more interested in arcade-style fighting games where you could hurl fireballs and juggle opponents ten feet in the air. But after watching an MMA demonstration at an Undisputed event back in 2009, I began to watch and appreciate mixed martial arts as both a technical sport and a freeform style of hand-to-hand combat.

This started with The Ultimate Fighter, an ongoing reality television series that plays out like a cross between Big Brother and Ong-Bak, before moving on to the main UFC events themselves. It's here that I got to see Jon Jones relinquish the Light Heavyweight Champion belt from Mauricio Rua with some savage ground and pound; Cain Velasquez school Brock Lesnar with a round one TKO; and Anderson Silva, after being dominated by the relentless wrestling ability of Chael Sonnen for four rounds straight, lock-in an epic triangle armbar submission to secure his seventh title defence as Middleweight Champion.

It was then, like a music aficionado who can't stop listening to a new band and then takes the plunge to see them on tour, that I finally got the opportunity to see a main event live. This was thanks to an invitation to watch UFC 138 at the Birmingham LG Arena, where I got to see Che Mills earn Knockout of the Night with a thundering knee strike, and Terry Etim achieve his fourth Submission of the Night award with a guillotine choke in the 17th second of the first round.

Read more…

After all the talk of Monster Hunter and Demon's Souls, all the footage of giant beasts being tackled in majestic battles, it's quite a surprise to sit through the first couple of hours of Dragon's Dogma and realise what this actually is: an extremely traditional, noticeably Western roleplaying game.

It's set in a wide open fantasy world, which stretches from the sandy shores to mountainous regions, and walking from place to place promises lengthy, tempestuous journeys. The enormous monsters the game has already become known for are conspicuously absent: only one appears during our demo time, and it doesn't stick around for long.

Capcom have never made a secret of Dragon's Dogma's status as an open-world RPG, but it's interesting to see just how close to the standard formula the game sticks. Its universe is Oblivion, it's Two Worlds and it's Risen - it's places you've seen on countless occasions before, pieced together to create something whose only real identity is in how it combines the lot. And of all the quests you'll undertake throughout the game's duration, only a small percentage concern the slaying of gargantuan monsters.

Read more…

The secret to enjoying EA's new take on Syndicate might be to put aside all your hopes and dreams and cherished memories regarding the original, and think of it instead as, well, a new Starbreeze game. That's not a perfect solution for everyone, perhaps, but it's also not without its pleasures. Starbreeze is a studio that's constantly poised on the edge of greatness. It brought a sturdiness and a peculiarly grim invention to both Riddick and The Darkness. I think the team can do good things with Syndicate, too.

That's how I felt after dipping into both single- and multiplayer campaigns a few weeks back, anyway. Starbreeze is deeply committed to the concept of clever nastiness - a trait that should ensure it has little trouble bringing the series' near-future landscape with its warring corporate leviathans to life. It's also used to merging nice, heavy gunplay with gadgets and gimmicks: Riddick's melee combat, say, or Jackie Estacado's cackling tentacles.

As Syndicate's main campaign starts up, dispatched on a clandestine corporate raid, your AI partner fills you in on the backstory and deals out queasy office euphemism like "soft assets" while he casually shoots two receptionists waiting patiently in the lobby you've just crashed into. It gets things off to a wonderfully unpleasant start and ensures you're on your toes straight away.

Read more…