Eye On '07: PC

Crysis

• Developer: Crytek
• Publisher: EA Games
• PC Exclusive
• Gamepage

Looking now at the various iterations of Far Cry, the first game from German developer Crytek, it's easy to forget just how jaw-dropping the game was when it appeared - with sprawling island environments and visuals that seemed a whole generation ahead of the competition. We're reminded of this when we look at Crysis, a game which is hands-down the most visually advanced videogame currently in development. Seen in still shots, it's a stunning leap towards photo-realism; seen in motion, it's even more impressive, with a myriad of tiny but crucial physics interactions building up scenes more believable than anything we've witnessed before on any platform.

Crysis is far more than just a pretty face, though. The eminently realistic behaviour of everything from foliage to weather, from water and ice to bullets and enemies, is finely tuned not only to look good but also to have a bearing on how you play the game. The beautifully detailed shadows affect how easily enemies can spot you; the ability to knock the flora of the islands around manifests in creative ways to take down enemies or block their lines of fire. No game has ever been so ambitious in the number of ways it offers players to interact with the environment.

The ambition of Crysis doesn't end there, either. The conventional start of the game, which sees you fighting enemy soldiers around a Pacific island, is quickly replaced by a battle against intelligent, bio-mechanical dinosaur-esque horrors, and eventually you'll end up fighting in zero gravity environments where full Newtonian physics means every gunshot will have to be carefully measured. Call us optimists, but we can't help but wonder if the team at Crytek are about to become the first people to significantly lift the bar set by Half-Life 2. We certainly hope so.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

• Developer: Splash Damage
• Publisher: Activision
• PC Exclusive
• Gamepage

After the poorly received Battlefield 2142, it's probably worth going to some lengths to point out what this isn't - it isn't Battlefield married to Quake, despite initial impressions. Instead, the British team at Splash Damage are building a multiplayer-focused game which combines the accessibility of Quake and its ilk with team-focused, objective-oriented matches which owe much to the likes of Team Fortress and, of course, Splash Damage's own hugely popular Return To Castle Wolfenstein mod, Enemy Territory.

While perhaps not a graphics showcase, Enemy Territory definitely looks great - but far more important than that is the focus on balancing two very different forces, the humans and the Strogg. Rather than providing reskinned carbon copies of the same units, the team has created vastly disparate sides, and players will have to learn entirely different strategies in order to switch sides, which should add greatly to the longevity of the game. Moreover, the game should be enjoyable even for those who aren't in organised clans, since it dispenses with the commander class used by many other tactical, team-based FPS games and instead allows players to take independent actions which they coordinate with their team-mates, rather than waiting for orders from above.

All the ingredients are in place for one of the most interesting online games since Battlefield 1942, or even Counter-Strike - a range of classes which are easy to learn but whose subtleties will take ages to master, vehicles and deployables to spice up the battlefield and provide focal points for players, team-play which looks set to strike a fine balance between being pointless (thus encouraging lone wolf behaviour) and being so essential that a few bad eggs can ruin your entire team. More accessible than Battlefield, more extensive and varied than Counter-Strike - every few years a game emerges which dominates the PC online landscape, and we've got a strong feeling that Enemy Territory's turn in the limelight is next.

Hellgate: London

• Developer: Flagship
• Publisher: Namco / EA
• PC Exclusive
• Gamepage

It may be a new company, but it's no surprise that Flagship is attracting plenty of attention - after all, it's made up largely of Blizzard veterans who count some of the best-loved PC games of all time among their creations. Chief among them is Bill Roper, whose CV includes senior roles on Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo - and having spent countless hours on those franchises, not to mention having seen how he's basically treated like a walking deity in South Korea, we're not about to question those credentials.

Besides which - Hellgate: London, Roper's first game since leaving Blizzard, looks fantastic. As the title suggests, the game has a particular resonance for gamers in the UK, since you'll be battling your way through the post-apocalyptic streets of London, where idiot tourists who stop suddenly in the middle of crowded pavements, annoying mothers pushing prams the size of Humvees down Oxford Street and insane street preachers banging on about sinning and winning have been replaced by all manner of demons and hellspawn. Believe it or not, this is actually worse than the present situation, so humanity is forced to take refuge in Tube stations and tunnels - and Templar knights with weapons and powers that fuse magic and technology have to fight back.

The game owes much to the Diablo series in terms of its heritage, but unlike Diablo, it's gorgeous 3D environments all the way - and while the combat is largely focused on your stats (it's very heavily slanted in the RPG direction), some modicum of skill in aiming and so forth will also be required, especially for the Hunter class, which was added to give FPS fans something to get their teeth into. A variety of interesting classes and skill upgrades complete the picture - for now, at least, because Hellgate is seen as being the start of a pretty major franchise. More massive Blizzard-style franchises with sprawling back-stories and astonishingly solid, balanced and well-considered core gameplay? Now there's something everyone can enjoy.

Spore

• Developer: EA
• Publisher: EA Games
• PC Exclusive
• Gamepage

Will Wright is the game designer's game designer - a true creative genius who devours scientific and academic texts and distils their concepts into interactive titles with grand scope and near-perfect execution. Even by his own lofty standards, however, Spore is an astonishingly ambitious title; one which takes the concept of the "god game" further down the road towards its logical conclusion than ever before. Players are given control of evolution itself, quite literally working upwards from a single spore to the management of advanced life forms - doing for the entire story of life itself what Civilisation did for the story of human history, in effect.

Will that yield a game which is actually fun? Almost certainly; Wright may be fascinated by the science which underlies his creations, but he's a game designer through and through, and his real genius lies in his ability to take complex fields like city planning and economics, or sociology and human interaction, and turn them into astonishingly addictive games like Sim City and The Sims, respectively. Already we're particularly intrigued by the idea of sharing our Spore creations with friends and watching them interact, and like all Wright's games, we expect there to be plenty of other fascinating elements which will keep us up long past our bedtimes.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Spore is that it's being made at all - it's a game concept so alluring, complex and beautiful that it's an astonishing testament to Wright's influence that it has survived the harsh economic realities of game development. Doing a little crystal ball gazing, we also predict that it could be the game at the heart of one of the most peculiar mass-media outings ever for videogames; a game allowing the player to command evolution itself could not be appearing at a more controversial and fractured time in the United States, and it could be fascinating to see what happens if the loony fringe of Creationism and Intelligent Design get their hands on the game. Videogame news headline writers across the land are undoubtedly rubbing their hands in pre-emptive glee already.

Supreme Commander

• Developer: Gas Powered Games
• Publisher: THQ
• PC Exclusive
• Gamepage

Designer Chris Taylor is best known as the man behind Total Annihilation - one of the finest strategy games of its time, or indeed of any time. When he named that game, he wasn't kidding; most decent games of TA left the entire map smouldering, burning, and horribly scarred. It transpires that when he decided to call his new game Supreme Commander, he wasn't kidding about that either; this game promises maps of such epic scale that a new zoomed-out view which replaces entire army divisions with icons has been invented to allow players to create effective, all-encompassing strategies as well as managing their armies' combat at a fine detail level.

Perhaps the finest achievement of Supreme Commander is that the game will be instantly familiar to RTS fans - who will appreciate the slick interface and controls, as will newcomers to the genre - but quickly makes it apparent that this is not a game where the old rules apply. Creating strategies which span entire continents calls for a whole new approach from players, and Taylor's instinct for game balance and ensuring that every single unit on the map is crucial in its own way ensures that the range of strategies available to players will be almost limitless. Already we're hearing about the end of the ages-old tank rush strategy, the newfound importance of naval units, and the need to balance short-term tactics with a coherent long-term strategy - a whole new world for RTS gameplay.

If you're a fan of the RTS genre, this game looks like it's about to change your world, and if you're not a fan of RTS, it may well be the ideal entry point. In a genre which hasn't lacked for excellence in the last 12 months, Supreme Commander is still a prospect which stands head and shoulders over the rest of the battlefield.

Alan Wake

• Developer: Remedy Entertainment;
• Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
• Also Available On: Xbox 360
• Gamepage

Max Payne creators Remedy have superb pedigree when it comes to fantastic visuals, and Alan Wake looks like being a showcase for the capabilities of modern graphics hardware. This is far from a pretty-but-dumb game, though. Described by the developer as a "psychological action thriller", this has the potential to combine the best elements of Grand Theft Auto and Silent Hill with gameplay that draws heavily on the engine's ability to render convincing light and shadow. Being Remedy, though, it also has the potential to be delayed again, and again, and again - but Max Payne proved that it's worth keeping the faith sometimes.

Alone in the Dark

• Developer: Eden Games;
• Publisher: Atari
• Also Available On: Xbox 360, PS3
• Gamepage

The venerable franchise that launched the survival horror genre returns on next-generation consoles - and while the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill have overshadowed Alone in the Dark in recent years, early looks at this update to the series suggest that its fantastic atmosphere and focus on short, tightly plotted episodes may well propel it back to the cutting edge of videogame horror.

Assassin's Creed

• Developer: Ubisoft Montreal;
• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Also Available On: Xbox 360, PS3
• Gamepage

The latest creation from the studio that reinvigorated Prince of Persia is one of the most hotly anticipated titles for the new generation of consoles, and for good reason; early demonstrations have shown stunningly realistic combat and movement, adaptive AI which sees entire crowds reacting realistically to your actions, and the kind of freedom of choice which gamers have dreamed about for years.

Bioshock

• Developer: Irrational Games;
• Publisher: 2K Games
• Also Available On: Xbox 360
• Gamepage

The "spiritual successor" to the classic System Shock series is laden with promise. The series seamlessly integrates brilliant narrative, a complex, interactive world and thoughtful first-person action into a brilliant, atmospheric whole. Bioshock adds an "AI ecology" to the mix - giving other characters and entities in the world their own objectives and personalities, which interact with both the player and with each other to create surprising, complex scenarios, unlikely alliances and even moral dilemmas. Transposing the action from the abandoned space station setting of System Shock to an art deco undersea city has given the game a unique visual style to complement its extraordinary gameplay - and is just another reason on the growing list of reasons that Bioshock screams "instant classic" at us.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

• Developer: Gearbox;
• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Also Available On: Xbox 360, PS3
• Gamepage

In the crowded World War II shooter market, Brothers In Arms stands out not just for its tactical nature - where commanding your squad is as important as shooting straight - but also because it's one of the few WWII games which focuses heavily on characters and relationships rather than on guns and explosions. Hell's Highway continues the story through Operation Market Garden, and promises to be the thinking man's WWII game - with civilians to consider, clever AI to outsmart, and missions that require careful thought rather than just rushing towards an objective marker on the map.

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

• Developer: EA;
• Publisher: EA Games
• Also Available On: Xbox 360
• Gamepage

It's no secret that we weren't big fans of the last C&C outing here at Eurogamer. However, while the dismal and borderline offensive Generals was a fairly major disappointment, our enthusiasm for the C&C series continues unabated - all the more so because C&C3: Tiberium Wars looks like being a truly worthy successor to the franchise, and a bloody good game to boot. The RTS genre is increasingly crowded with quality products, but the promise of classic C&C gameplay with a refined and streamlined user interface and a more involved, multi-threaded story (not to mention the return of Kane) is good enough for us, frankly.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2

• Developer: Ubisoft;
• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Also Available On: Xbox 360, PS3
• Gamepage

The first GRAW was a stand-out hit for the Xbox 360, and we know plenty of people who are still playing it months later - so the team knew that for the second game (or the fifth in the Ghost Recon series, but who's keeping count ), they couldn't afford to rest on their laurels. GRAW2 is promising dramatic real-time weather effects, even more stunning lighting, realistic smoke and gas effects and a host of other visual changes - but more importantly, it's also going to beef up the tactical side of the game, especially in terms of how you select your squad and the impact that has on the success of your mission.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

• Developer: Valve;
• Publisher: Valve / Steam
• PC Exclusive (Although it'll be part of a pack on Xbox 360/PS3)
• Gamepage

Look, we know - it's not even a mission pack, it's part of a mission pack. However, after the seminal Half-Life 2 and the first episode of Valve's follow-up series, we're excited about this like no other expansion ever (except perhaps Burning Crusade, but we'll be covering MMOG titles for 2007 in another article). Episode One proved that Valve had no intention of churning out more of the same, while reaffirming their commitment to making sure that everything with the Half-Life name on it is truly top-notch FPS entertainment; Episode Two, accompanied by the launch of Team Fortress 2, could well prove the validity of episodic gaming as well as simply being an awesome game.

Haze

• Developer: Free Radical Design;
• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Also Available On: Xbox 360, PS3
• Gamepage

Most famous for being "the guys who did Goldeneye" when they were at Rare, Free Radical have proved their worth with the comical but beautifully balanced TimeSplitters games, and the more recent departure into seriousness, Second Sight. Haze is another "serious" first person shooter; set in the near future in South America, it sees you fighting as part of a band of mercenaries against an insane rebel leader who wears the skins of his captives as clothing. Nice. The graphically stunning Haze remains largely under wraps for now - but great things are expected.

Medal of Honor Airborne

• Developer: EA Los Angeles;
• Publisher: EA Games
• Also Available On: PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2
• Gamepage

The next version of EA's massive Medal of Honor franchise, as the name suggests, focuses on the airborne units - placing you in the boots of a paratrooper who is dropped into various war zones across the European theatre of World War II. Updated graphics are a given; the chief innovation that's been revealed so far is that you can control your descent in the parachute, and where you eventually land will affect how your mission plays out significantly. Shadowrun Developer: FASA Studios; Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Also Available On: Xbox 360 Starting out life as an astonishingly deep pen and paper roleplaying world, Shadowrun is now the (very loose) basis for FASA's eagerly awaited multiplayer-only first person shooter. Focused entirely on bringing both top-notch combat and the cyberpunk abilities from the Shadowrun universe into squad-based FPS action, the game won't have much to offer to non Xbox Live types - just offline play against bots, no campaign mode - but online, a combination of superbly creative abilities (seeing through walls, gliding, turning into fog and plenty more) with high-powered ranged and melee weapons promises one of the most interesting multiplayer experiences of the year.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

• Developer: GSC Game World;
• Publisher: THQ
• PC Exclusive
• Gamepage

It's been in development for almost as long as industry laughing-stock Duke Nukem Forever (which isn't on this list because frankly, putting it on a "most wanted" list for the sixth year running seems a bit silly), but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looks like it's finally nearing the finish line. Relentlessly grim, the game is set in the real-life exclusion zone around the Chernobyl reactor, and while reaction from those who have seen it so far has been mixed, gamers who have been following the progress of the title for around five years will undoubtedly be keen to see how it turns out.

Unreal Tournament 2007

• Developer: Epic Games;
• Publisher: Midway
• Also Available On: PS3
• Gamepage

Epic's latest instalment in the Unreal Tournament series will be a showcase for the latest version of the industry-leading Unreal technology - and given the new benchmark which the Unreal-powered Gears of War set for the Xbox 360, it's going to be interesting to see how it shapes up on the latest PC hardware. As, of course, will fans of the most extensive and finely tuned series of multiplayer FPS games ever - if UT2007 continues the progress the series made with UT2004, this should be a really exciting game for the online multiplayer fraternity.

The Witcher

• Developer: CD Projekt; Publisher: Atari
• PC Exclusive
• Gamepage

Another game which has been on the radar for some time and will finally see the light of day in 2007 is CD Projekt's The Witcher, a fantasy role-playing game which runs on Bioware's rather excellent Aurora engine. While it's a relatively traditional western role- playing game at heart, the combat system promises to be interesting - and perhaps more importantly, the game looks like being relentlessly, uncompromisingly grim and bleak, and bloody violent to boot. Topping it off, the storyline branches all over the place depending on your actions, and the vast amount of content that requires may go some way to explaining why it's been in development for such a long time.