Out This Week - 22/04/11

It's a hard time to be a gamer. Marvellous temperatures outside and a small flotilla of incoming bank holidays call you away from your gaming device(s) of choice. What else could herald one of the busiest weeks of game releases so far this year?

Wormholing platformer Portal 2 lands this week! Stay inside, take off your flip-flops and remind yourself it's only April. The sequel to Valve's perfect platform puzzler is almost certainly definitely going to be good.

Also challenging Zumba Fitness' two-week reign atop the UK chart is Mortal Kombat, the latest launch in the veteran fighting series. And alongside that are two very different shooters - Codemasters' slightly-futuristic sequel Operation Flashpoint: Red River, which is set in Tajikistan, and High Voltage's Wii exclusive and very-futuristic shooter The Conduit 2, which is set at least partly in Atlantis.

And it's all happening a day earlier in the UK, as we get Friday off. Well, you do. We're still here.

This Week in Shops!

• Portal 2
• Developer: Valve
• Publisher: EA
• Formats: Mac, PC, PS3, Xbox 360

What is it? It says a lot about Portal that, despite launching as merely one slice of a much larger bundle, its follow-up is now one of the most anticipated releases of the year. Can the sequel live up to such a near-flawless piece of first-person platforming? As Chris Donlan eloquently wrote in his very optimistic preview: "It's both clinical and funny, like a shaggy dog story told by Stanley Kubrick, and its complex folds wrap geography and narrative together so tightly that they become two sides of the same object." What does Eurogamer think? Eurogamer's review will go live at 9am tomorrow morning.

Mortal Kombat

• Developer: NetherRealm Studios
• Publisher: Warner Bros
• Formats: PS3, Xbox 360

What is it? A bone-crunching, skull-cracking fighter, back for a brand new outing. The series has been around for years and was even in 40 Year Old Virgin. It was a very amusing scene. This latest subtitle-disliking instalment is a reboot of sorts, and features God of War's Kratos if you're playing on PS3. What does Eurogamer think? Eurogamer's review will go live on Wednesday.

Operation Flashpoint: Red River

• Developer: Codemasters
• Publisher: Codemasters
• Formats: PC, PS3, Xbox 360

What is it? Tajikistan, 2013. You're a US Marine charged with ending the country's civil war. When you're not commanding troops and calling in air-strikes, you'll be staring at the lovely bloom-lit surroundings. There's a multitude of modes to explore, as Martin Korda explained last month in his preview, including "the Black Hawk Down-style Combat Search and Rescue, where the salvage of downed pilots inside enemy territory is your primary objective, and Combat Sweep, a series of waypoints through the Tajik landscape to remove any and all insurgent threats from local villages". What does Eurogamer think? Eurogamer's review is currently scheduled for this Thursday.

What Else?

• The Conduit 2 (Wii)
• Puzzle Bobble Universe 3DS (3DS)
• Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection (PSP)
• SOCOM: Special Forces (PS3)
• Zumba Fitness (PS3)
• Section 8: Prejudice (XBLA)
• Fancy Pants (XBLA)

Chart Predictions!

Each week one of the team will step up to predict the UK all-formats chart. The following predicts the outcome for the week beginning Thursday 21st April (to be reported on Monday 25th April).

Tom Phillips, Website and Video Administrator

"With such a storm of new releases, we'd be remiss in not giving special mention to that other new candidate for Zumba Fitness' top spot this week - the PlayStation 3 version of Zumba Fitness. Exploiting that killer combination of being a dance and fitness title has made the game as attractive to casual gamers as the back of a turtle shell to Italian plumbers. Will it beat itself to the top spot? I'd guess, no. But a top five placing is probably still a cert."

1. Portal 2
2. Operation Flashpoint: Red River
3. Zumba Fitness
4. Mortal Kombat
5. Crysis 2

Eurogamer news editor Wesley Yin-Poole attempted to predict the future last week. We've put together a fancy table to show how he did.