By Jim Rossignol on February 11th, 2013.
Hey, do you want to see over eleven (count ‘em!) minutes of the new and handsome Tomb Raider game? C’mon now, it’s got drama, hiding, arrowing, shouting, and nearly some drowning. It’s all-action in Miss Croft’s part of the world. And what part of the world is that? Well, it’s not the dismal sub-rural periphery of Bristol, I can tell you that.
The game arrives on the 5th of March. Our reviewing temple’s candles are being lit, and the altar furnished.
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By Adam Smith on February 7th, 2013.
Lara Croft is Batman! Maybe. At the very least, she seems to have been watching the caped crusader carefully, although her study of his Arkham adventures doesn’t extend to mimicking Wayne’s restraint. When she’s firing ziplines across chasms or attaching rope arrows to destructible scenery to create new routes, she’d look right at home in Rocksteady’s Gotham, but then she shoots a deer in the face at point blank range, or sneaks up on a villain and perforates him unto dying. Batman would just break every limb in sight and then move on. The latest Tomb Raider ‘Survival Guide’ builds up to the reveal of an ‘exploration system’ that you may recognise from elsewhere. It’s called ‘fast travel’.
By Jim Rossignol on January 24th, 2013.
UPDATE: Having some odd issues with the key dispenser, looking into it.
Impressive multiplayer World War II project Heroes & Generals has reached its “hey, everyone, let’s beta test” stage, and we’d suggest you take a look. Reto-Moto have been working like heroes (and generals) for years and months to get this game into the state it is now, which is pretty impressive. You’ll glimpse a bit of that by taking a look at the video below, or indeed grabbing a key from here and playing it for yourself.
And here’s some information about the latest build of the game.
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By Craig Pearson on January 15th, 2013.
Games move so quickly. Today’s AAA title, with a huge marketing spend and adverts, is tomorrow’s experimental sales fodder. There’s a new Tomb Raider coming out in March this year, so Square Enix have lobbed Tomb Raider: Underworld up on their streaming game service Core. That’s the (*counts on fingers*) eighth? Yeah, eighth Tomb Raider game, for fans of chronology. It’s “free” up there, which means you need to watch some ads and install a thing, and even then you might not get to play all of it right away.
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By Nathan Grayson on January 9th, 2013.
Somewhat surprisingly (by which I mean completely unsurprisingly, given the era in which we live), Tomb Raider has multiplayer. Naturally, this has been a source of great outrage among even the least fly-harming-est of gamers, as it’s a distinct disruption of The Natural Order. Granted, it does have two things working in its favor: 1) Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light added co-op multi to pretty great effect and 2) the mode’s an entirely separate, presumably cybernetic leg of the game being attached by none other than Deus Ex: Human Revolution developer Eidos Montreal. Here, now, brown cow, is a video of some finely mustachioed men introducing it to the star of spy dramadey Chuck for some reason.
By Nathan Grayson on December 18th, 2012.
I got lost in a forest once. Admittedly, there weren’t any horrific plane wrecks or crazy gibberish-screaming cultists, but I learned a lot. For instance, never go anywhere that’s not your own bedroom without some form of map, and also poison ivy is the absolute worst. But presumably, I gained some kind of applicable skill from that experience. According to Tomb Raider, however, the reason I haven’t figured it out yet is that I need to go sit at a camp fire and absorb its wisdom-imparting fumes. That’s the base camp system in a nutshell, and – in addition to making perfect sense – it provides Lara with quite a nice range of options in her bid to make it off the island in one piece. Raid the tombs beneath the break – coated in cobwebs and haunted by the ghostly echoes of pun threads long since passed – to see a video of it in action.
By Nathan Grayson on December 11th, 2012.
Survival can take on many shapes and forms. Thus far, for instance, Tomb Raider‘s demonstrated it through climbing, hunting, resting, and fleeing from deranged cultists – so, you know, the usual stuff. But this is an ultra-budget prequel to a series that once featured DINO-BATTLES. In other words, it’s not a slow-paced sink-or-swim sim. Lara has to acquire skills and character traits that will eventually allow her to – again, let me emphasize this – bring down a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Those abilities, it turns out, aren’t often found in the realm of possibility. So then, here’s Lara running, gunning, hacking, slashing, and just generally trying to cope with a world in which the walls, ground, and most aircraft are made entirely of light-breeze-sensitive explosives.
By Nathan Grayson on December 7th, 2012.
Final Fantasy XIV caught me right at the tail end of my MMO junkie phase. I’d put a fairly significant amount of time into Final Fantasy XI before it, so I figured why not? And honestly, I have to give Final Fantasy XIV some credit: it replied to that question very, very quickly. It was as though Square had developed the thing inside a bubble. Reinforced by steel plate. On the surface of the moon. The number of incredibly bizarre, even-more-incredibly unintuitive design decisions was absolutely baffling. A brilliantly flexible class system gelled up its giant anime hair, picked up a slightly smaller blade, and attempted to save the day, but its quest was disastrously unsuccessful. Fortunately, Square decided to scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch. But what’ll the realm look like once it’s finally been reborn? Well, pretty familiar, if a new trailer’s anything to go on. But maybe not for the reason you think.
By John Walker on December 4th, 2012.
Update: Gosh, that was quick. Before any other sites had even picked up on this one, Square have removed the app. Links from it now reroute to the main Hitman page, and previously sent death threats no longer work.
Update 2: Square have issued a statement apologising for the app. The full statement is at the bottom of the post.
Original: Square Enix aren’t having a brilliant Winter. With profits pointing downward, and Hitman a bit of a stinker, they surely must be on the phone with the Humble Bundle folks, trying to follow THQ. But everything’s going to improve with their latest marketing campaign for the disappointing baldie killer! “SQUARE ENIX,” says the email that’s just arrived in my inbox, “WANTS YOU TO PUT A HIT ON YOUR FRIENDS”. Ahaha! Threaten to murder your chums! And mock them for their looks, or the size of their breasts or penis!
By Adam Smith on November 22nd, 2012.
The current IO Interactive may not be developing the next Hitman game but some of the studio’s founders didn’t work on Absolution either – they’ve been working on multilayered multiplayer WWII FPS Heroes & Generals at their new company Reto-Moto. I don’t play many multiplayer games and I wish I could take back the few hours I spent with Guild Wars 2 and spend them cycling through a war instead. It’s the strategic component that primarily interests me, the large-scale European conflict that the Generals prod at, but I don’t spend much time as a soldier in my gaming life and having the greater purpose of the greater war beyond the battlefield might provide enough purpose to engage me. Latest vid below.
By Adam Smith on November 22nd, 2012.
With Hitman’s latest subtitle so recently creeping into public view, IO are already talking about 47′s future. Speaking to OPM, Absolution’s director Tore Blystad confirmed that the next title in the franchise will be developed at Square Enix Montreal rather than remaining in-house. Blystad reckons development will follow a similar pattern to work on the Call of Duty games, so presumably we can expect development duties to alternate between Squenix and IO as they do between Treyarch and Infinity Ward. It almost certainly means we’ll be seeing the wigless wonder more frequently in the next few years. Three weeks ago I would have said that was a good thing. If you’ve played Absolution, perhaps you’d care to compare your thoughts with mine?
