Month: August 2015

Dying Light – The Following – Preview

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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It’s over two years since Techland went solo from their Dead Island franchise and found a new home with publisher Warner Bros. The result was last years release, Dying Light, which was a very familiar game if you’d played any of their former franchise. But with a focus on movement and parkour that freed up the constraints in the open world city of Harran, the game was different and enjoyable enough to earn the top spot in January 2015 for sales and became the highest selling debut survival horror franchise ever.

Now, the story continues as you take Kyle Crane to a new area of the world. Gone are the sprawling decaying concrete blocks, discoloured by the eastern Mediterranean sun, as you enter a new, vast farmland area, filled with brooks, small alcoves, interesting groves with people to find and farms and industrial buildings galore. The world is apparently four times the size of Harran. It is very sparse compared to the built up Turkish town and its not the worse for it. It allows for many different approaches to an area or a situation, which I’ll come on to later. But what you will find is that the shadows have given way to the glorious rays of sun that now dominate the skies and the view, really making some lovely use of the Chrome Engine and further solidifying why the last generation of consoles would have had no chance of running these games.

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The plot sees you trying to track down a cult called The Following. Presumably to eliminate them, although I must stress that the preview we played gave us no spoilers for the plot so we have no idea what we’re looking for or who we’re killing. But kill we shall because we are given weapons and the overwhelming urge to use them. In our preview, we climbed our way around a big mountain and dived from an impossible height down to a pool of water. As we climbed out, we saw our first hint of The Following in decorated rocks, much like those you’d see of native tribes around the world. Our journey then led us up to an abandoned house where the poor unfortunate souls before us left a gun and, most importantly, a crossbow.

Then we traversed our way across the farmland that was awash with zombies. Lots of zombies. Basically, don’t traverse the field if you can help it. It’s fun to start killing things with a crossbow, hitting people in the head, as we practiced at the house by clearing the garden. But as soon as you are outside and everyone is on you, forget it. Run. Where were we running to? An old water tower by a small farm building. There were a few ways there of course, either through the throng in whatever zig zag you’d like, up the path where the throng was less or up over the pipes that went across the field. I chose the pipes and ran my way to the high vantage point.

At the top of this vantage point, we saw our prize. A car, or to be more precise a buggy. After clearing the area of militia by using our crossbows at a sniping vantage point, we zip-wired down to the ground, mopped up the remaining guys hiding inside the surrounding buildings and jumped in to the waiting buggies. We, it must be said, was me and my co-op partner and what followed was a race and a slight moment of control adjustment to work out how the buggy went forward and reversed. The race culminated, after mowing down various zombies in the road, in a massive jump and an explosion that signalled the end of our play.

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What I managed to take away from this is that it isn’t a big leap from Dying Light, which is good. We also have a large, new area to explore and traverse. Also good. We have new interesting buildings like docks, processing plants, small villages and the like. Again, good. Then there’s the rather unknown story of this cult, The Following, and the presence of militia and zombies. It certainly gives you some intriguing propositions.

The fact it isn’t a big leap also allows you to jump back in to the game very easily. I haven’t played Dying Light since November last year (before the release) and I picked up the controls like I’d never left them. Simple, natural and the buggy was pretty good once you got your head around how twitchy it is. The weapons are fun and the options you have in approaching an area are also pretty fun. But you sense that, despite a huge world that’s been promised, a lot of it is empty and just populated with aimless zombies for you to mow down. I always find that fast transportation does allow to kind of get away with vast unpopulated areas. I might be wrong, but I’d need to play and explore more.

All in all though, the expansion is solid, the lighting and art direction is great, as it was in Dying Light, and it’s really more of the same. Normally, these things end up being just missions and a few new buildings but a whole new area is a great thing from Techland and a new storyline, regardless of your thoughts on the original’s plot, is entirely welcome. If you’ve already got the season pass then you can expect it for free (I know, right? A season pass that actually includes the add-on DLC!) or if you haven’t then it’ll be $14.99. No news on a UK/EU price yet but I’m sure you can guess one.

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Gremlins Inc – Preview

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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I have sunk what probably seems like a unworldly amount of time in to the mobile game versions of Ticket to Ride and Small World, and probably quite a lot of time playing the board games themselves as well. So when I was asked to go and check out a card game at Gamescom, I was a little bit reticent because I already had my perfect games and I probably knew that, if it was good, I’d lose a lot of my time to yet another game. What happened a was that I lost a lot of my time to the video game version of the game. About half an hour more than I was supposed to… Oops.

Gremlins, Inc. is the brain child of Lithuanian studio Charlie Oscar. Much like the drive to bring the games industry to the UK with tax breaks, Vilnius in Lithuania is trying to become the Eastern European regional hub for the video games industry. Charlie Oscar is a great example of this, boasting programming talent from Russia, Ukraine, Germany and even Spain. Charlie Oscar enlisted the help of Alexey Bokulev, creator of Eador. Genesis (a turn based strategy game that hasn’t done too badly itself) to create a new original world for the game. So what is it all about?

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It’s steampunk, steampunk, money-grabbing gremlins, some more steampunk and then a final bit of steampunk to add on top of that. The world of Gremlins, Inc. is populated by gremlins. Not your normal gremlins though with the aversion to water after midnight, these guys are immortal and immortality will always breed corruption, greed and power. Described as “immoral capitalist gremlins”, the idea is that you go around the board and get enough points to win the game. You do this must lie, cheat and steal the wealth of your fellow players to put yourself in the position to earn the most points, either by becoming the local governor or underhandedly keeping everybody else down. You select one of ten playable gremlins that all have their own benefits and attributes. If you imagine the robber from Settlers of Catan, well thats how you feel with every turn in Gremlins, Inc. It’s evil and it’s glorious.

You start the game with a hand of six cards. These cards have a dual function. Firstly, they act as your die for moving around the board. The board itself is a counter clockwise path with an occasional shortcut here and there for the big buildings of the world like a bank, a casino, a jail, a court and fun places like “The Inferno” and “The Astral Plane”. The first move you make is your movement so you expel the card you want to in order to move. This is where you have to think tactically because the second phase of the game is an action.

Your cards will have certain actions that can either benefit you by giving you extra gold, extra power or points, or can ruin the plans of your opponent by stealing points, sending them to jail, or utterly destroying the political gain they’ve just spent ages earning. These actions are also limited as to where you play them on the board. So if you have a card like the “Everybody Dance” card with the casino symbol on it, you can only play it while you are at the casino. This is where the strategy comes in of having to regularly change and use cards, even if they look cool, just for movement as the game can, and will, quickly turn against you.

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Of course you have this issue, as do all of the other players. This is then made even more treacherous by the board itself. There are several places across the board where you will be fleeced for bribes, be at risk of arrest for your corruption, or even have some misfortune (which could also affect other players as well as you). The good thing about this game, regardless of how high you put the points and how hard you make it to achieve a win, is that something is always happening. You’re always thinking about how you’re going to win the next round of turns and are even thinking or planning three or four turns ahead. The board is small and manoeuvrable enough to get to where you’re hoping to go in a few turns, as long as someone doesn’t ruin it for you.

This constant going back and forth in my game with production assistant Monika Dauntye was only halted when we were told how long we’d been going and that people needed to go home. It was utterly captivating and I’m really excited to play more of it with my friends when it comes to Early Access in September. There is also a board-less card game being created in conjunction with the video game version, which is easily transportable and follows the same concept (minus the die movement). Even talking with other journalists later in the day, we were all surprised how much we enjoyed it. Keep your eyes open on Steam for when it comes.

You can find more information on Gremlins, Inc. over at http://gremlinsinc.com/videogame/

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Constructor HD – Preview

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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Back in 1997, a game was released by Acclaim on MS DOS and then ported to Playstation in 1998. It was a very difficult game, which took on a life of its own with a dedicated following that enjoyed its sense of humour, its challenge and, probably most importantly, its playability. This game was Constructor, developed by System 3 and it was one of the first games to successfully make the leap from PC to console in the strategy market (apart from real time games like the Command & Conquer series and possibly Sim City on SNES).

The aim of the game was simple. Build houses, get tenants, compete against the computer players (or friends on a LAN) in building more and gaining control, whilst your tenants become more unruly and moan… A lot. The game had a little bit of the dodgy dealing cockney kind of 1960s feel about it. You’d probably get the sense of the camaraderie from the original Guy Ritchie movies like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrells, but it probably owes a lot more to the late George Cole’s Authur Daley from the Minder TV series. The problem with the game was that it was incredibly difficult. The dedication you’d need to keep any semblance of control, keeping tabs on the thugs, builders, tenants and the opposition whilst everything potentially crumbles around you, was immense. Of course as video gamers, we loved it and lapped it up like cats with a saucer of milk.

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But of course it isn’t 1997 anymore. It’s 2015 and the original game, re-released a few years ago on PSN and GOG, has certainly aged. The humour and style is still there but the years have not been kind to its 256 colour palette, its very close view or its steep learning curve. And in this age of remasters, forgotten classics and current generation accessibility, the game is going to return. Recently announced by System 3, Constructor HD is coming to PC, Xbox One and PS4 in 2016, in the hands of original developer John Twiddy. Why? Well in his words “of all the games I’ve done, this is probably the one I enjoyed the most.”

It hasn’t been for the want of trying though, as John told me after seeing the game at Gamescom “I know it’s taken a long time to get around to it, but it was never the right time. We always planned to do something.” Over the years of course the technology has moved along so that System 3 can improve on the game and give the fans, and hopefully new converts, something they’ll enjoy. A lot has certainly changed to make it more accessible, and I’m not just talking about the however many million more colours there are.

Firstly, the game itself is exactly the same. Same premise, same enjoyable caricatures of British or more London stereotypes, same neat animations and unique ways of dealing with problems. Thugs can still be deployed to take over a property to intentionally piss off your tenants. Or repair men can fix, or cause, any issue that the ever more demanding occupants of your properties may come up with. You’ll have local mills and cement works ready to give you the tools and supplies you need to build your property empire. All of them though are lovingly upgraded from the original drawings to the new HD era. But the best thing though, by far, is the upgrading of the user interface.

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On the face of it, it’s exactly the same design as it was in 1997. A right sided tool bar with a ticker up top and the game being displayed in a window. But now, thanks to screen ratios and better design tools, the toolbar is much more free. It’s a part of the game window rather than your game window being a part of it. The essential information is now conveniently positioned on the sides of the screen, so as to allow more game space. The biggest improvement in this though though is in the map and view itself. as you can zoom out much further and see much more of the maps that you are playing.

One of the biggest cruxes of the original game was the limited view that you had. Another crux was that the sub-menu screens dominated the whole playing area. When you clicked to see about a house or move tenants in or any kind of sub menu, it literally took over and was a bit clumsy. But now, these menus fit on the same screen and are mostly opaque so you are never fully taken out of the action of the game. And, thanks to the original simple design of the menu, the controller works perfectly with them. There are some that still need you to go deeper like selecting individual houses but for the main part of your game, construction and assigning your workforce, you’re never away from the map.

“Because the original Playstation version was a straight port of the PC version, it never really worked that well. It was always a bit slow,” John tells me. “Where as now, with the shortcut keys I actually find it easier to play with the controller than I did with the keyboard and mouse originally.” Back in the PC/PSX days, you could have a keyboard and mouse controller, which was alright but never spot on for the PlayStation. But as John told me, the use of the controllers now allows for very quick and easy accessing of various options and submenus. Something that is a lot easier thanks to the bigger screen, easier controls and very fluid shortcuts. Of course the biggest part of all of these improvements is that game retains what it originally had, which was fun by the bucket loads.

And it has. The demo we were shown allowed us to flood an enraged tenant out of their apartment. Another allowed us to have a Young Ones-esque perpetual house party, much to the annoyance of the occupants. The wooden fences went up around an empty lot that we selected and a team of builders came in and erected a house. We made someone else happy by giving them a rather garish iron fence around their property. The metro system allows for super fast travel and the yard, your base of operations, still has that backwater hut feel about it. The kind of trailer that you’d see at the back of a scrap yard and be impressed that there’d be a fax machine in it, regardless of whether it was plugged in or not.

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The game looks great of course as the original material was cartoonish and comical enough that it kind of transcends its age. In fact the only thing that really dated Constructor was the technology and graphics. So Constructor HD really doesn’t have that much change in its design. The only thing it really has changed is the aspect ratio and the easier, less intrusive sub menu system. Although the game has had some modifications to its famously unforgiving difficulty.

It’s all about rebalancing the game, John tells me. “People got overpowered by the complaints, so we’re reigning that back in to give more balanced gameplay. For the story, similarly, we’ve got new tutorial modes because it is quite a difficult game to get in to. So we’re trying to make it for a more modern audience who want a bit more ‘pick-up-and-play’ and try and improve it for them.” But they are keeping the masochistic difficulty level. “You have to make it difficult to give someone a challenge,” according to John.

Of course it might well be the right time to start looking at strategy games on consoles. It’s not been a popular genre for the twin analogue stick machines, but Zoo Tycoon is a pretty decent game. Civilization Revolution was a fantastic game on console and the Tropico series seems to have made the leap superbly. There probably hasn’t been a better time, especially with the announcement of Halo Wars 2, for a strategy IP to make a comeback. Constructor HD will probably irk the more casual gamer and if it does, then expect the boys around to trash your house and get you to move out, you complaining tenant!

Constructor HD is due for release in January 2016 for PC, Xbox One and PS4.

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Mafia 3 – Preview

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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The year is 1968. The Vietnam war has been raging for over ten years but the American public have begun to protest against the reality of the violent images dominating the headlines. President Lyndon B. Johnson declares he will not go for re-election after assuming the Presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which then sees the election of Richard Nixon at the end of the year. America begin to win the space race after Apollo 8 orbits the moon. Elvis Presley’s Comeback Special cements the artist’s place in music history. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated causing riots across the country and lead to the biggest social change in recent history. The Khmer Rouge comes in to power in Cambodia and a coup d’état sees Saddam Hussein become the Vice Chairman of the revolutionary council of Iraq leading to his assumption of total control. It’s safe to say that 2K and new studio Hanger 13 are right in saying they’ve chosen one of the most turbulent years in American and world history in which to set Mafia 3.

The story and the date are paramount to the sense of opportunity and upheaval that the America of the time presents. Mafia 3’s lead character, Lincoln Clay, comes back from the Vietnam War without a cause, without a family. He finds one in New Orleans with the Black Mob but as soon as he finds his new home, his world is once again shattered when the Italian Mob attempt to murder them all. Clay survives and starts his one man war against the Mob, starting his own “family” of close lieutenants and vying for control of The Big Easy.

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The development of the Mafia has pinged about a bit as 2K reshuffled themselves and the 2K Czech studio closed. But the newly formed Hanger 13 picked up the mantle over in California and for the past two years has been up to a lot of secret work developing the game. One of those secret things has been a lot of upgrading to the games engine. You probably wouldn’t believe it but Mafia 3 uses the Mafia 2 engine that has been heavily updated and it looks absolutely awesome. The open world of New Orleans looks great with tiny little alleys and small buildings with neon signs advertising Jazz. But it also seems to operate well enough with a lot of entities going around. The streets are a buzz of life and people trying to forget the looming threats in the world. The big graveyards with concrete tombs painted in the vibrant colours and celebrations of life are the perfect meeting grounds for New Orleans’s dark underbelly. The clubs are frequented by many people looking for fun and a good time and behind every door in these clubs, in every cellar, there could be a hideout for the mob, waiting for a hostile takeover.

Hostile is very much the aim of the game here, hostile and violent. In a world that has been born of corruption, ruthlessness, warfare and oppression, violence is inevitably the human answer. Open world games have come on quite a way, even since Mafia 2 and one of the things that exposes a lot of the genre to criticism is violent combat. Mostly because it is taken out of an arena where violence is blindly accepted and put in to a social, close context. The game is very violent but only in the same regards as Hollywood action movies and rolling news’s normalisation of brutality. The third person perspective gives that feeling similar to GTA V and Uncharted in that the game suddenly turns from open-world exploration to cover-shooter and stealth killer. Anything from shooting guns and hiding behind scenery that slowly breaks with more bullet holes, to pulling your combat knife from your holster and lodging it deep in to the brain of your assailant via his eye socket. Car chases will ensue where the Police and the mob will chase you, highlighting the repercussions of your actions, shifting the power dynamic. But Clay is a man that knows nothing but violence. Between war and crime, it is the only way he knows how to respond effectively. This won’t be for the feint of heart.

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That dynamic shifts as you take over the various businesses and hideouts that the mob controls. You don’t just want to kill those that tried to kill you, you want to take everything from them, everything they’ve owned, everywhere they deal, you want to annihilate them completely. Your lieutenants, after you’ve enlisted them, become vital to your operation. They can be set to control these new acquisitions and have different skills that will get different bonuses out of them. They can also be called from pay phones to help your situation, like clearing your wanted level for example. If you’re a Mafia fan, you might even recognise one of them. Vito Scaletta returns from Mafia 2 but his story has moved on somewhat. He’s joined by new characters Cassandra and Burke.

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The New Orleans of the time is a vibrant and superstitious city. Louisiana is a place of the soul and of magic, the population as enraptured with voodoo and the darkness as they are with the escapism of 1968 America. The French Ward, which we were shown around in the demo, is a colourful place that feels like there is something going on everywhere. It feels like the multicultural party city it is portrayed to be and the soundtrack especially evokes that. Some excellent cuts come over the in-car radio as well as the clubs of the city. From choice riffs from Jimi Hendrix and the great hearty soul and blues of Sam & Dave, The Rolling Stones, and others, this is a game that wants to place you within a time and within an era.

From our first impressions, Mafia 3 looks like it will be a great game. Yes it’s going to be a departure from the Mafia’s we knew before. The move forward to the end of post-war America and a game at a time of social upheaval is actually quite exciting. We’ve had many games deal with sensitive points in history but never before have we had one so focused in a particular time and place that wasn’t a satirical pastiche or a historical war game. I’m interested to see more of how the game handles the time but I’m very confident in how the game handles gaming. It looks, sounds and appears to play very well and I’m looking forward to more.

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Rory McIlroy PGA Tour – Review

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated; it satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time rewarding and maddening – and it is without a doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.

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Arnold Palmer said that. It must be said that this quote came from a world before Rory McIlroy PGA Tour Golf came to us armchair 19th hole patrons. There’s been a lot of changes to the franchise over the past four years, some of them enforced by the changing dynamic at the top of the PGA rankings, and some of them enforced by the development cycle of the current generation of consoles. So let’s first address these changes.

Firstly, Tiger Woods is gone. The name, the player, the licensing, everything that was Tiger Woods is no longer here. Yes Rory McIlroy is the new cover star but it goes a bit deeper than that. I’ve constantly found myself referring back to the name out of habit and quite possibly expecting a similar level of depth, gameplay and customisation that a nearly eighteen year franchise should bring. This game is a very different game in some respects compared to what we are used to but the kind of reliable soul that the previous games have, that kind of feeling where you know what you’re getting and you know you’ll be pleased, is gone. It’s always a risk making this kind of change because you could completely break what has made the formula successful. They haven’t broken it entirely but something isn’t right.

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Tiger Woods isn’t the only thing missing. In fact you could call the game anaemic compared to previous titles and even other EA Sports games. The game boasts eight courses and four fantasy courses, so twelve in total compared to the last game which had (including variations) thirty six. So we have a third of the courses of the previous game. We have just as much cut from the roster. Gone are the ladies tours and the amount of golfers that you can select. Gone are some of the licensed clothes, clubs and courses (The Masters deal having expired) and gone are a lot of the different faces and body looks that you can choose for your golfer. In fact, this is probably the worst cut of them all as, when embarking on a career, you lose any of the personalisation, the feel that you are a part of this career role playing and mostly just level up your character so he can hit things better. Yes, this is what you do anyway but it does show a lot more thanks to the lack of anything else.

The game engine has changed with the EA Sports signature Ignite engine giving way to the EA Games signature Frostbite 3 engine. Honestly, this hasn’t really made a lot of difference, the game still looks quite good although there are some odd moments where you have things like bushes and fences pop in and out, and the crowd very rarely moves in any fashion other than in unison. The faces in the game itself aren’t particularly great either with Rory McIlroy himself looking more like Formula One’s Pastor Maldonado. Strangely, with the menu system and everything else going on around it, it does feel quite… Battlefield-y. Like a mod of a Battlefield game almost. Not surprising given how much Battlefield there is with a humourous character and a playful destructible course. The actual gameplay is largely unaffected with very similar controls and displays as you would find in the previous games, although it does look a little easier to read, a litter tighter in the design and a little clearer overall, with the exception of the putting and green reads which are, frankly, pointless. All this is then coupled with an incredibly repetitive and cliche ridden commentary team that seems to have the NBC logo attached to it for no other reason than to look a bit like the TV. It’s absent everywhere else so it’s inclusion is confusing.

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Gimmicks are here a plenty actually with a PGA Prolouge mode that introduces you to the game, its controls and a rather bored and nervous looking McIlroy speaking to camera about his Open Championship win, which you then recreate through the tutorial. There’s a Nightclub mode where you do several challenges that look like the golf course version of a nightclub (Why? I mean honestly, why? You want to show night, I get it but a “nightclub” themed mode in a golf game? Seriously?), and there’s an online play mode but mostly, much like everything else, it has all been scaled back. No skins mode (there goes my old drinking game), no select holes (back 9 for example) and no alternative game modes really at all. Which would be ok if you could actually play a full round of golf in the career but as soon as you start, you get the highlights of the last few holes. Your entire career mode is basically not messing up what the computer has already simulated for you. Hardly my career, is it?

We’ve had a few sports games lately on the site that are entering their first current generation attempts. It feels worryingly uniform now that (unless you are FIFA seemingly) game modes and features are haemorrhaged for seemingly little gain in the new experience or anything above an expected graphical improvement. It can’t be easy for EA Tiburon as they haven’t used the Frostbite engine before now, and they’ve produced, under the pressure of expectation, a stable and capable golf simulator. Unfortunately in doing so any of the magic and fun of the previous iterations appears to have left with Tiger Woods (although he certainly hasn’t kept that magic himself). It’s an interesting reboot with a big new name and with a sport that will likely see a much more open and less solitarily dominated landscape in the future. If only the game could have captured that.

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Rory McIlroy PGA Tour is a new direction for the EA Sports franchise that has had the chip lifted from its shoulder and let free again. An engine change and a new generation of consoles seems to gone well and the gameplay is still as reliable as it was before. So in one sense, job done. But the lack of game modes, massive cuts to the roster of golfers and courses, and customisation and career mode input has taken some of the spark from the game and really, for a generational leap, it has fallen way short and landed with a rather subdued thud in the bunker.

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  • A nice looking golf game, with only occasional visual glitches
  • A solid gameplay experience that has carried well from the last generation
  • An easy to read display that allows you to play well, and quickly.

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  • A complete lack of features compared to previous games
  • A huge lack of courses compared to even the last game
  • It feels like its missing a little bit of its soul, like it lacks the confidence to be a new golf game.

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I mean, honestly, it’s not a terrible game. It’s very playable if only for the time it takes to play a casual 18 holes. But the lack of anything that made the last games great has really hurt this iteration. For once, in an odd circumstance, we’re actually upset that there isn’t more in the game to do because they have transitioned to the new engine and new generation quite well. But poor looking player models, a third of the courses and with 75% of the fun removed from the experience, it needs some saving to build on the solid gameplay they have next time out.

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This review was based on the Xbox One version of the game, provided by Xbox. Thanks!

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All The Best Game Music Is On SoundCloud

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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You know this probably sounds like a self explanatory title, but if you haven’t ever heard of SoundCloud it is a streaming music site that is used by a lot of unsigned bands and DJ’s/Composers to showcase their talents. Those can be original songs, remixes, podcasts and anything in between.

But it’s also home to a lot of excellent and beautiful music from our beloved video games. Many developers have released songs to stream on the site and Playstation also have a great load of game music on their page as well. In fact, you can find a lot of publishers, developers and composers who have released their game music on SoundCloud. No longer are iTunes or Spotify the only places you can find these gems of video game composition. So just to be a bit of debate starter I’m going to list some of the favourites that I’ve found, my personal highlights if you will, and if you have anymore then please link them and share.

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Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture promised many things and it has delivered on them so far. One of these things was a beautiful soundtrack. Composed by Jessica Curry and James Morgan, Dust and Shadow is just one of the haunting choral and orchestral melodies that you will here in the game.

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Max Payne’s dark, disturbing and melancholic theme is one thing that has stuck throughout the series. There is a great communication in the soundtrack to a game sometimes that perfectly portrays the world and character. This version of the cello theme from Max Payne 3’s composers HEALTH is one of the most haunting versions.

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Ok so this is a bit of a cop out but it is on there and I challenge you to find a better game that so brilliantly uses the leitmotif in this theme and throughout game. Gustavo Santaolalla is a magnificent composer and, like all good entertainment, his score is one vital part of a great big experience.

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I’ve put this here because it is a wonderful score in general. The darkness of Mordor and the lore that precedes the green prettiness of JRR Tolkein’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is here in abundance. It is also is co-composed by Nathan Grigg and Garry Schyman, the latter name you might know from the Bioshock series.

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Long live Tangerine Dream. Edgar Froese’s music is one of the great things that glues Grand Theft Auto together. His electronic progressive rock that mixed with experimental soundscapes gave us an excellent connection between three otherwise distant and different characters. Whilst the music featured on Grand Theft Auto is some of the best popular music in recent years, the music OF Grand Theft Auto is also some of the best composed music.

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Here we go on a bit of a love letter to Devolver Digital, but we said in our review of Titan Souls that one of the things that really binds the feeling of loneliness in the game is the music, expertly composed by David Fenn. The inspirations behind this are easily recalled which is a testament to how well the music has captured the genre and respected those that came before it.

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Are you kidding me? Of course we’re going to have some Hotline Miami on here. In fact the entire soundtrack to the first game is available on Devolver’s page and is perfect for a Friday afternoon countdown to the weekend.

There are some great selections from Hotline Miami 2 as well. These two are my personal favourites but you should definitely look them up yourself.

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Here’s a more fantasy based game with The Witcher 3. Polish composer Marcin Przybylowicz’s soundtrack (featuring Percival) is a brilliant achievement and as many of the games journalists on the internet will testify to, a great part of an even greater game. You’ll also find some select cuts from The Witcher 2’s soundtrack on his page as well.

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I make no bones about the fact that the Halo soundtracks are some of my favourites. I’ve waxed lyrical about the Halo 3: ODST soundtrack in the past. But if you asked me to choose one song from it all, it would be Unforgotten, or as the rerecorded Halo 2 Anniversary edition version is named “Unforgotten Memories”. It is a wonderful theme that repeats itself throughout the second and third games, along with the inspired change of tact from the more well known gregorian monk chanting. But for good measure I’ve included that below along with some riffing guitar too.

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Battleborn – Preview

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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Gearbox is at it again. No, it really is. Borderlands may well have been setting the bar for co-op shoot and loot FPS games, but their sights have now been set on something much more team focused and something much more competitive, despite the inclusion of a story mode. Battleborn is the studio’s latest attempt to look at the competitive scene and maybe break in to that much coveted eSports arena.

It’s something 2K hoped to crack with Evolve but, regardless of how good the game was, the amount of people playing it and the fairly long nature of play and upgrading characters hasn’t taken off as well as they’d have wanted. But Battleborn aims to capture this market, especially when Blizzard are releasing Overwatch, and give a decent and enjoyable story mode for you to play as well.

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That mode should allow for five player co-op online or via splitscreen and is what 2K are referring to as “Modular”. What that means is that you have a voting system of what missions to do next within your party, but you can also replay missions you’ve already done for better loot. So each mission is its own module or block. Loot and experience, much like Borderlands, is a key element here but, because of the competitive nature of the game, it is much quicker and easier to implement. The DNA helix is a very nice system, quite similar to those you find in MOBA’s for quick levelling and adapting your play style to suit the objective. The helix has a tier of ten different levels and you select the path you want by hitting (on the controller anyway) left or right trigger to select it. It’s quick and easy, it works well, it doesn’t take you out of the game, and it is very… Modular.

Battleborn is going to boast twenty five playable characters, some of which you’ll see in the video below. But you’ll get characters with a lot of different specalities like healing, massive destruction, speed… The usual you would expect. But it was definitely interesting to see a bit of the behind the scenes of these characters. We were treated to a look at the test game area in the game engine to see how the destruction skills of these characters are over an area and how much damage they actually do. Ambra for example can command a meteor down from the sky and compared to her small three space area staff attack, this makes the battle area look like game of Guess Who that’s close to the end – flattened. These powers are also helped by your loot improving your player. But this kind of talk doesn’t make for a great preview. So how does Battleborn play?

Well… It plays like Borderlands really. I’ve spent a good week trying to work out, from a single player co-op perspective anyway, how I can separate the two so that I can talk about the game in a bit more depth. But with the gameplay, the style, the humour, and more, everything is Borderlands-esque. When I say that, I don’t mean it’s Gearbox-esque. Gearbox is a good studio (regardless of what you think about the ex-magician in charge) and they’ve had a great success with the Borderlands games. So really, there’s no need to change the formula. But this feeling of similarity goes beyond just the basic mechanics that make those games.

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Our four player co-op mission saw us going through a fairly cavernous and empty futuristic storage complex that had been built in to an otherwise barren rock. We went through as a team, defeating the minor enemies in the way, to get to a certain checkpoint where there would be a mini-boss and then progress through to the bigger boss. On the way we can open up containers to get some power ups or health packs in the shape of little green balls, and all around us was amber shards of rock that we could destroy to earn cash. We were being guided though with a bodiless radio communication between characters at the top of the screen giving us the exposition we needed to fulfil our objective.

Our objective was to get this automated tank like unit called a “Wolf” safely to an area where it can open up a big door and where we get ambushed by these dark gangly creatures with white faces. The cash we’ve earned allows us to activate upgrades on the Wolf to help defend itself such as a big healing shield. There’s a lot in this co-op that would be good with friends albeit possibly a bit easy and, if you’ve had the six years of Borderlands, you might be asking where the differences are.

The differences of course are going to be in the competitive arena which will have three game types. Incursion sees you trying to destroy the enemy base whilst AI minions battle it out for mid-ground supremacy, Devastation is a deathmatch-come-king of the hill type game and Meltdown which sees you throwing minions to their deaths for points (much like a reverse Lemmings really). The humour of Gearbox is there and there’s a lot of different character choices with their own styles to make that experience a lot more fun and unique, and there’s going to be a lot of differences in the arsenal that can keep it fresh at least.

But even with the new colour palette and the slightly more fantastical art look, I still felt the game was a bit too close to Borderlands to have its own identity at the moment. Although that maybe exactly what you want. It certainly works well enough and the gameplay is fun but there wasn’t enough there yet, and I stress the word yet, for me to be sinking hours in to this and enjoying that time. I think what I want at this stage is just a bit more of Battleborn’s lore to come to the front, a bit more of the weapons and loot to be explained and more examples of how it all implements to your gameplay and character progression. Battleborn definitely looks like a game that can stand on its own but still has that air of a younger sibling about it. I’m sure as soon as we get towards the end of the year and some beta testing starts appearing, we’ll be able to see how much it has grown up.

Battleborn is currently due for release on February 9th 2016 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One

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LEGO Dimensions – Preview

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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So it’s no secret that I’ve been a tad critical of the LEGO games as of late. I’ve found that maybe the formula had gotten a little stale and that, whilst nostalgia of the title kept my interest, they’d become a bit repetitive. Whilst I was at Gamescom, LEGO Dimensions proved me utterly wrong.

We all know and have heard the basic idea of LEGO Dimensions. Buoyed on by the success of franchises like Skylanders, Disney Infinity and Nintendo’s Amiibo range, it’s hardly surprising that a toy manufacturer who is already in the video game market noticed an opportunity. And it would have been so easy to see it like that, as an opportunity for profit using toys in games. But thankfully TT Games is at the helm and if there’s one thing that the years of producing LEGO games has given them, it’s that they know how to hit us gamers in the nostalgia bones and give us something with love.

Firstly, the game requires a LEGO Toy Pad and a Gateway which the start pack of LEGO Dimensions comes with. You’ve seen it no doubt, the little plastic pad you put your LEGO figures on and something that looks like the Goa’uld from Stargate would use to invade many worlds. And as the announcement video starring Joe McHale of Community showed, it you build it yourself using actual LEGO. All of the LEGO is actually playable and indistinguishable LEGO, from the Batmobile included and the three figures of Batman, Gandalf and Wyldstyle. Having a LEGO game with actual tactile LEGO is quite a fun novelty really. Building stuff for yourself is always fun, and during the game you will get the opportunity to reconstruct some things in order to solve various puzzles, with onscreen building instructions. Very awesome.

The game sees you going through the LEGO Multiverse trying to stop Lord Vortech from being the dastardly overlord who controls it. So you set out to stop him from taking the foundational elements and achieving this domination. Of course, you will have friends that join you along the way and you can even bring your own by getting the various packs that have been announced. But enough of the exposition, how does it actually play?

Incredibly well of course. TT Games has a very good pedigree in excellent, easy to pick up gameplay. LEGO Dimensions is no exception to that with the same look, style, controls and mechanics of any LEGO game. It is something that has translated perfectly to every franchise it has graced and it works just as well with multiple franchises. The demo that we played saw us walk down the Yellow Brick Road from the Wizard of Oz. Of course, not as the Oz characters, who were up ahead of us, but as our starter trio. Upon the road were some flowers that could not be passed by our intrepid trio. And so the toy pad came in to play.

We placed the Batmobile on the pad and a dimensional wormhole opens up and pops the vehicle in to the world. Batman jumps on it and we mow down the pesky flora from the yellow bricks of Oz’s M1. Our driving only went so far until we stumbled across one of the characters aiding Lord Vortech, The Wicked Witch of the West, who then started defying gravity* in order to attack our cross-series fellowship. It’s amazing that through all of this, nothing looks out of place. You suspend disbelief that these characters and vehicles don’t belong in the worlds your seeing because, quite frankly, it’s really, really cool.

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This cool crossover of franchises doesn’t just end with the main game. The recently announced Adventure worlds are separate worlds, much like you’d see in a normal LEGO game between the missions except that they’re all based on a particular franchise. We had a little go around in the LEGO Movie world because we had Wyldstyle but other areas will be accessible with the relevant figures selected. So you’ll have to have the various level or character packs in order to access these mini worlds. We’ve already seen clips of Middle Earth, Springfield, Hill Valley and Aperture Science lab inspired worlds and there’s fourteen in total (so far) so collecting these expansion packs isn’t just going to be cool to look at or use in game, there’s decent amounts of extra content as well.

Those extra characters all come with perks too. Scooby Doo for example can swim underwater, which is great for exploration and underwater racing. Much like the free-play elements of most LEGO games, every world and level has the same kind of task appropriate character and vehicle. There’s lots of cool little nods to all of the franchises as well including some slight cel shading for the Scooby Doo levels, Wyldstyle moves like she’s in some stop-frame animation. Every vehicle can be rebuilt in three different ways and can help with different tasks like pulling things down with a winch, or flying like the DeLorean from back to the future… Or spinning wildly out of control like the TARDIS.

Yes it’s taken me 850 words to get to a point where I can talk about one of my favourite parts of the game, and as a massive Doctor Who fan (who has had a TARDIS on every desk I’ve ever written on and a fairly full DVD/VHS collection), I am incredibly biased by this part of the game. Which is why you can imagine how high my expectations are and that after playing the Doctor Who elements of the game, the poor young lady who was helping to show me the various minifigures couldn’t stop laughing at how open my mouth was in shock.

Firstly, there’s The Doctor. With all of Peter Capaldi’s swagger and vocal officiousness. Capaldi voices the dialogue which has been specially recorded but every Doctor also speaks thanks to some clever raiding of the BBC and Doctor Who archives. And yes, I said EVERY DOCTOR. Just the one minfigure gives you thirteen unique Doctors that you could regenerate in to which all have their own little quirks and personalities. Yes even the oft forgotten eighth Doctor and the following John Hurt War Doctor. If you die in the game as The Doctor then you’ll regenerate in to one of the other thirteen randomly with a nice little animation. Then there’s the TARDIS. Jump in in and you can take off, spin around and fly with reckless abandon through worlds like only a 12ft tall oblong wooden box can.

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But then you hold down the entry button a little more and find yourself IN the TARDIS. The control room is fully explorable with all it’s pomp, flashing lights, incredible decor, time rotator column, round things and control panel. The far right control panel will allow you to change the music to whichever show theme you want, the middle one takes you to the relevant level pack and the left one allows you to choose any of the Doctors and have a little regeneration scene. So I went to my Doctor, the Seventh – Sylvester McCoy with his little hat and swinging an umbrella, and left the TARDIS. But then the poor young lady told me to go back inside the TARDIS. So I did.

The console room had changed. It was now the 1983-1987 console room occupied by the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors. It will change to whichever console room is relevant for which Doctor, including the first two having a black and white filter for ultimate TV authenticity. At this point I became speechless and started rambling about how much this meant to me as a fan of the show and as a four year old watching McCoy’s Doctor for the first time and the last for many years, and how strong my nostalgic connection was to this era… It came as no surprise that my time was up. But this is seriously the best job of Doctor Who anyone has ever done in a video game and this can only bring hope for further licensed stuff between LEGO and the BBC.

After my fanboy blubbering I was forced to conclude that, whilst this is going to cost me a lot of money to have everything, LEGO Dimensions is ultimately going to be worth it thanks to how unique every pack will be, how every level will have something special and how every character has their own life to them. I know parents will be asking how they can justify buying this and everything when they’re already knee deep in Skylanders, Disney Infinity and Amiibo statues and I say this to them – Buy it for you, because your kids won’t understand why this is so marvellous… Treat yourself.

LEGO Dimensions is due out on September 27th 2015 on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and WiiU.

*Yes I like musicals and made a Wicked pun… Bite me.

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PES 2016 – Preview

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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Every year it’s the same – A few promises of new excellence and a vain hope that this year will be better than last. It all sounds like lyrics to a 90s alt-rock song or a cringingly created poem for TV montages, but it is a fair and accurate representation of how fans of football games feel every August when we wait and see how FIFA and PES stack up. We all root for the underdog and wait for the excellence we once knew to return, and every year we say “it just might.” This year I am saying “IT DEFINITELY WILL.”

The thing with FIFA is that fans of Football games don’t actually play it. Football fans do because it scratches their itch for a quick 10 minutes of play, or they become helplessly addicted to the ultimate team mode like us older types used to get addicted to collecting Panini and Merlin sticker albums. But to actually play football, a virtual representation of the difficulty and tactical skill of the beautiful game, we football fans have always preferred Pro Evolution Soccer or PES (or Winning Eleven).

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The problem was that the game, for the past six years or so, hadn’t really caught up with the changing technology and just as it was, it changed again. The best football games lists will always include either PES 4 or PES 5 and last years PES 2015 was a hugely celebrated step in the right direction. But that list should definitely make some room for PES 2016. Playing it, I felt transported back to the days where I worked in an office and did a charity day every month where people just paid to come and play in their breaks. PES 2016 has that magic of creating stunning football again.

Firstly, let’s address the licences because the first thing people say is “oh, it doesn’t have every team with the correct kit”. Well boo hoo. Nothing ever used to have that and we always forgave PES because the gameplay was much better. But PES has all the licences you can dream of except the Premier League. All of Europe, a select few other clubs, international kits, the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and the recently announced Euro 2016 tournament are all here. There are going to be a couple of teams from the Premier League as always, so keep your ears open to hear more on that.

Of course there are several features that PES has always had and a lot of new ones. There’s a refined Master League and the myClub feature (kind of like the FUT) makes a return. You’ll also see some excellent use of the FOX engine which the studio used last year. The FOX engine if you don’t know is the Kojima Productions engine that’s powering Metal Gear Solid V’s Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. As such there’s several things that the game can do compared to other games.

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You’ll get the ability to completely change what you’re doing while you play. Now by this I mean that the animation of what your player is doing is no longer locked. So you can abort out of a run, move, tackle or shot and really change what your doing quickly and reactively to what’s going on around you. The AI is going to make the player think more about runs and passing moves, as it will find the space and the runs and you need to be able to read it. Not just you sending your player on his way, it’s also going to be up to you react to your team. The collision system is much improved as well giving players a much more physical way to play the game.

 

That physicality directly translates to your controller. The game is much smoother than it has been and, dare I say it, even feels a bit weightier. There’s a gravity to the game and the movement that’s realistic and physical but not concrete or too light to be flying all over the place. It’s a very well balanced movement system and it might take some newer players a while to get used to. For the seasoned PES veterans however, this will take you back. I had a lovely animation where I was running under the ball, whilst fighting off an attacker and managed to head it away whilst turning my head, not my whole body, my head only. It was wonderful to see this kind of real physicality in the game.

One of the things that’s also improved thanks to the FOX engine is the graphical fidelity. Player textures are much better now and not just a shiny layer of lighting. The pitches and stadiums are just as well presented and dynamic weather will feature. So you can have a spat of rain, or a gleam of sunshine if you’re playing anywhere above Birmingham, and the game will change accordingly. There’s more to do with dynamic celebrations as well, much better keeper animations (something FIFA tried last year and half succeeded in). The TV presentation isn’t as TV heavy as FIFA’s but it’s nice and we in the UK get Peter Drury to voice our commentary. There’s also image editing on the PS3/PS4 too so there’s some great customisation options.

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PES is celebrating it’s 20th year. For the past two decades it has had some big highs and some very big lows. But 2015’s iteration was the first to really show the light and won a few awards. That in turn has obviously spurred the team on and they’ve really made a great effort here. From the time that I played it, I got the same feeling as I did back in the PES 4 & 5 days, where you’d share a memory card to get all the kits, and you’d work relentlessly just so you could hit that one perfect pass or catch that one perfect volley. You’d practice for hours in the training ground just so that when the time came, you knew where to aim that free kick and could let fly and be your own star of your imaginary football heroism. I think this could be the best PES in years and quite possibly the best Football game. You don’t have to wait long to make up your own mind either, but for me, PES has returned and will definitely ruffle a few feathers in the dressing room.

PES 2016 is due for release on September 18th 2015 in the UK and September 15th 2015 in the Americas on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.

A demo will be released on August 13th 2016.

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Mad Max – Preview

Posted on by Sean Cleaver

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I didn’t want Mad Max to start with. I didn’t ask for it, and I certainly didn’t really care too much about what the gameplay would be like. Fair enough, there was a movie coming that looked interesting but I just imagined a dead 80s franchise being milked while it became relevant again. Then I played Mad Max and I soon realised this could be the one game that I wouldn’t be able to live without.

It’s a bold statement in a year that has Fallout 4 on the cards and the similar stylings of Batman: Arkham Knight arguably in pole position as Game of the Year right now, next to Life is Strange. But something about the short time I’d spent with Mad Max gripped me and took me to a place of customisation and driving intensity in arid areas I’d never have imagined.

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To start with, it’s worth pointing out that whilst you are the titular Max Rockatansky, you are not any of the movie versions of him. He’s his own character and rather autonomous so you can slot in to playing as him better. The black V8 Interceptor (a 1973 Ford Falcon in real life) is absent thanks to theft by marauders, but this only furthers the plot and the gameplay dynamics. Swedish developers Avalanche Studios have basically been given the keys and asked to come up with their own thing. So this is not a tie-in of any kind – Box one ticked.

Gaming is very spoilt with dystopian post-apocalyptic madness, which has probably got something to do with the movies and fictions game designers had growing up in the 1980s. So it’s with a sense of irony that the films probably inspired the games we love (Fallout being a prime example) that then inspired this game. But Mad Max’s world is extraordinary.

Everything that’s crazy about the movie world is here. You have the crazy side characters and seemingly endless insane cults and gangs ready to wreak havoc upon you in inventive ways. You have the vast and inescapable desert and the occasional hard rock. You have the intense weather from the films, dramatic and violent storms blowing sand everywhere or crackling with electricity.

In the play-through I had a companion from the studio to help me get to grips with the game and the controls quickly, communicating through a headset, but that became absolutely pointless as a storm hit. The storms are not scripted events and have varying degrees of severity. It was loud and obnoxious like an old TV used to sound at 3am when you fell asleep to it and all that was on was static. The only thing I heard my companion say was “you need shelter,” and she was right.

Three cars had come out of nowhere and started attacking me and trying to ram me. It had nothing to do with the mission to reach a stronghold in search of a legendary V8 engine. No, the actual mission had become incredibly mute and unimportant compared to the three guys throwing fiery explosive javelins at me. The cars had come from out of nowhere, just like the storm, and destroying them presented other problems. My own javelins were doing their job but the wreck of the car was now scrap metal which got caught up in the winds and was now smashing in to my face.

My visibility was zero and I did what only a professional coward would, and drove away really fast. Anywhere, just away from the remaining pack of cars. This presented its own problems in the shape of large immoveable rocks that only a 4×4 would dare attempt. I crashed, weakening my own car even more before seeing how far out from my original waypoint I was on the in game map. The road was much closer than I realised and as soon as I relocated it, I put the foot down on my upgraded V6 powered car and lost my assailants in the dust. I reached the stronghold which was under attack, but as a cutscene played and the storm relented, I suddenly realised how open my jaw was and how much fun I had just had. – Box two ticked.

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All of this is made possible by some excellent gameplay features. The open world is a huge expanse of post-apocalyptic wasteland that is split in to regions. The story mode will take you across all of this but you will need a lot to survive. Our demo was a mission that was just under half way through the game, and so our character, our Max, was suitably levelled up for us. You can customise your Max in any way (looks, clothing, weapons) but what is more fun is the car, the Magnum Opus. Driving in this game is incredibly responsive and you can do a great number of things to your car to personalise your experience, and that personalisation feels key to what Avalanche are attempting to do here.

You can upgrade your engine parts, wheels, chassis, etc, by using scrap metal that you collect throughout the world. You’ll find old car wrecks and there’s bits and pieces that you can find after you’ve destroyed other vehicles. This scrap is then used to purchase these upgrades but in some cases, you need to find them first. A new car chassis will be in the desert for you to find and the rewards for exploration and discoveries like this translate directly to what you can do with your car.

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You have a companion called Chumbucket, on your journey who sits in the back of your car and is the man who fires your main weaponry.  Your harpoon is the standard weapon but there are also the Thunderpoons (the explosive bolts), a sniper rifle for distance shots, your own shotgun and the option to either quick fire or aim yourself. All of which you purchase with your scrap metal. So you can go quite balanced, very weapon heavy, quick armoured speed, whatever you want. Your car customisation can add a ram at the front, different hood ornaments, the cool wheels with spikes, flame throwers on the side of your car, your own colour schemes… There’s an incredible amount and the team at Avalanche have taken inspiration from Forza Motorsport of all places in how to personalise a vehicle.

The game should see you try to reunite Max with his fabled car whilst also looking to end his madness, but one of the things to stress here is that you are Max. So therefore YOU are the mad one and you can be as mad and as crazy as you want. The game is a veritable sandbox (desert pun unintended) that allows you to play how you want, to whatever goal you want and with whatever setup you want. Even in my demo, no two journalists had the same experience and we all had our own stories. I’d talked the day before with another journalist who thought the harpoon was overpowered because you can just tear the wheels off enemy vehicles with it and then mow everyone down in a Carmageddon-esque frenzy. But that was their story and unless I did exactly the same as them, my own story would be unique – Box three ticked.

The game did blind side me as to how much playability there was from what is essentially a core concept of a bonkers bloke driving a car around and destroying everything that attempts to destroy him. But after I played it I realised that the story I was taking away was my own, not Max’s. And although there is the main quest with a story and plot, this doesn’t interfere with your experience and how you go about attaining that. Where other games after a while do get a bit repetitive, and I can imagine that hunting for scrap could possibly get a bit repetitive if you’re that way inclined, Mad Max kept me interested, gripped and excited for what I was about to do next with reckless abandon. So now that I don’t have Mad Max, I want it even more. Roll on September.

Mad Max is due for release on September 1st 2015 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

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