PAL New Releases Roundup - 17/09/09

Batman PC! WET! NFS Shift! Katamari!

News by Robert Purchese Associate Editor

Updated on 17 Sep 2009

Hello autumn, with your orange leaves and conkers, and bye bye summer with your sweaty armpits and sunburn. You have brought us a busy schedule, so let's look at what's in the Friday store.

There's WET, the Bethesda-rescued action game starring a sultry hero who uses guns, acrobatics and swords to kills swathes of goons. Ellie's full analysis will be on Eurogamer later this week.

There's a new Need for Speed and Shift is its name; apt, given the slide away from urban rhymes to traditional race-track times. It's an admirable start, but weak against giants Forza 3 and Gran Turismo 5. Our Need for Speed: Shift review dissects.

There's Batman: Arkham Asylum on PC, which swoops in a couple of weeks late but adds fancy PhysX treats for NVIDIA owners to a bloody brilliant game underneath. Buy; our Batman: Arkham Asylum review tells why.

Other PC latecomers arriving this week are Red Faction: Guerrilla and Resident Evil 5 - the latter adding stereoscopic 3D to the zombie mix.

There's SingStar Motown, which excites people like me, and Katamari Forever, which brings the beloved collect-'em-up series to PS3 for the first time.

MotorStorm makes its mediocre PSP debut in Arctic Edge, and there's World War II dogfighting in Heroes over Europe - few reviews of which have surfaced, which is a worrying sign. Same goes for Square Enix's strategy game Order of War.

Oh, and there's an ice-hockey showdown as NHL 10 and NHL 2K10 slide into the rink together.

Friday 18th September in shops: