Underworld Ascendant is the first in a series of titles where Looking Glass studios alumni are moving to reclaim their former mantle. Under the OtherSide Entertainment banner, they’re working on a proper System Shock sequel, but the game we’ll see out of the gate next is the Ultima Underworld sequel we deserve. The Dungeons & Dragons flair is mixed into an immersive sim setup that lacks the Ultima name but keeps the spirit alive. Amidst deadly traps, evil glowing skeleton bois, and red hot liquid magma, there’s adventure to be had and hundreds of terrible deaths to meet! But not if you can outwit the game, which OtherSide is counting on.
Not long now until you get to sit in the cockpit of your own floating Cold War submarine-inspired spaceship, because Objects in Space [official site] is coming out early next year. Before now it didn’t have a publisher, but 505 Games have decided to bite.
If you haven’t heard about it before, it’s an open-world “stealth-action” space game that thinks the ships in other space trading games are too fast and nippy. They should instead be big, bulky, and look like they’ve come straight out of the ’70s. So, you sit behind a retro cockpit, try and stay off other ships’ radars by hiding in asteroid belts and, if combat can’t be avoided, take them out from long distance.
Every week we send Brendan into the no-go zones of early access to take pus-filled samples of half-made games. This time, the infectious disease management of Quarantine [official site].
Beijing, Chengdu, and Dehli are all quarantined. Michael Clayborn, my crack medical operative who has served me faithfully, has died in the industrial Siberian wastes of Irkutsk. The entirety of South America has been sealed off from the rest of the world, and Manaus is now considered a “lost city” so infused with disease that it can’t be treated or approached in any way. People are stating to suffer “pustulent buboes” in Santiago, a highly contagious development that I need to deal with. A pop-up box aide comes to me with a decision to make. Do I want to distribute medicine and help the suffering masses of Latin America? Or should I send in some white coats to analyze these curious buboes? Of course, I send in the scientists. Read the rest of this entry »
A cursory glance at the newly announced Quarantine [official site] could easily lead you to say something like “oh, it looks like Plague Inc but from the human’s side”. But you are not thinking hard enough, cursory glancer. As board game aficionados will tell you, Quarantine looks a lot more like a single-player version of the much-loved Pandemic. Read the rest of this entry »
David Lynch-inspired, small town whodunnit Virginia [official site] is gearing up for its launch next week and has released a new character trailer in preparation. We get a closer look at the game’s protagonist, Anne Tarver.
She’s an FBI agent, fresh on the scene after graduation. She drives around Virginia with her partner, Maria Halperin, as they try to solve the case of a missing boy. She has a very official looking badge. She can drive. There is a large telescope. Okay, so the trailer doesn’t actually tell us that much about the character, but the game sure looks pretty.
Right, I’m going to level with you: I’m really behind on Virginia [official site] news because I want to go into it as fresh as is feasible while retaining my job on this PC gaming website. Single-player mystery thrillers involving FBI agents are very much my area of interest and I do prefer mysteries where I know very little about them going in.
With that in mind, I’m watching this cinematic trailer for Virginia, but I’m doing the kind of watching where I’m deliberately not paying attention, I’m just trying to ensure it’s definitely a trailer and there’s definitely a game and no-one’s accidentally left a bunch of porn halfway through or something:
It’s been ages since we last visited the Twin Peaks-inspired-ish first-person vignette ’em up Virginia [official site] but whoa hey hello, here’s a release date and a demo out of nowhere. The demo is about twenty minutes long, offering a taste of life as a ’90s FBI agent investigating a missing child in a small town and answering basic questions like “Okay but what is it and what do I do?” That is now answered for me and so I’m quite looking forward to its full launch on September 22nd.
Last year, Overkill Games upset a pretty vocal corner of their Payday 2 [official site] community by introducing microtransactions to the co-op heist ’em up – something they’d previously promised to avoid. In an announcement made yesterday, Starbreeze – Overkill’s parent company – revealed they’ve now acquired full rights to the Payday franchise and as such will scrap paid-for in-game items via the next update. Oh, and Payday 3’s been confirmed.
Survival games seem to break down into two broad categories. On the one hand, you have the survivalist games, where the focus is on an endless battle against the elements, a hostile environment, and resource scarcity so severe that even basic needs like food and shelter are hard to satisfy.
Then there are survival games like EKO Software’s How to Survive 2, where some survival elements have been added to a rather conventional game design in order to make progress a little more meaningful, play a little harder, and your rewards a little less secure. In a word, you’re still an almost unstoppable badass able to impose your will on the world around you… but sometimes you need to stop for snacks and juice.
Dear Alice,
Why do people not call Jonathan Blow, Jason Rohrer, Jonathan Brodsky, and Jonatan Van Hove by their preferred names of J. Blo, J. Ro, J. Bro, and J. Ho?
Oh, and when will you post about Skullgirls folks Lab Zero’s crowdfunding campaign for their action-RPG Indivisible? It has a public playable prototype out!
The everlasting threat of a single bullet, the terrifying glint of a sniper scope in your eyes, and the darkness that covers your enemy make Sniper Elite V2 [official site] one of the most gripping gaming experiences I’ve had. You can’t take your eyes off the screen for a second; instead, you must remain calm, remain patient, and study your environment. Was that sliver of movement in the corner of your eye the enemy or foliage shifting in the wind? Does that scope glint signal impending death or did they fail to see you as you had failed to see them?
The tension is greatest in a one-on-one deathmatch fight, in which one wrong move can be your end. The skills of a sniper are your only help.
Payday 2 [official site] studio, Overkill, have announced that they’re going to be putting out updates and supporting the game for another two years thanks to a new deal with publisher 505.
The devs certainly seem excited about the news (“We love working on Payday 2 and look forward taking care of our game for two more years, making new free updates, paid DLCs and awesome campaigns together with the community”) but I decided to ask Alice as she’s someone here who actually plays it.
We gushed a little about Abzû in our E3 chat yesterday but in our fawning, er, hadn’t actually got around to posting about it yet. (The same thing happened with Cuphead.) That may because we don’t much at all about it, other than it’s a gorgeous undersea game and that developers Giant Squid are lead by Matt Nava, who was previously art director of thatgamecompany’s acclaimed console wander ’em ups Journey and Flower. It’s not much to go on, but certainly is enough to pique my interest and fill our heads with fanciful dreams.
This might be a first. 505 Games have announced the cancellation of Ashes Cricket 2013 after it’s been released.
The game, a terrible mess that certainly doesn’t function as a cricket simulation, was briefly on sale via Steam, before mysteriously vanishing. We contacted Steam and publishers 505 Games to find out why at the time, but no one seemed to know. And now we do. They’re just giving up. And blaming it on the developers, Trickstar Games. This is extraordinary.
The sorry saga of 505 Games’ Ashes Cricket 2013 continues apace. Beginning with one of the dumbest trailers in gaming history, it was supposed to appear in June this year. You know, in time for the Ashes. It didn’t make it, except they got lucky. For reasons my brain cannot work up the energy to care about, rather than the usual two year gap between the Australia Vs England bat-to-ball grudge series, they’ve started another one already, just a few months later. A fortuitous one-off anomaly allowing the game to slip five months and not suddenly be enormously out of date. So now, in time for the latest Ashes, it’s been released on PC alone. Except, it’s all going a bit wrong. Just a few days later it’s been mysteriously pulled from Steam, the Facebook page has vanished, and there are lots of rather cross customers. And an increasing number of excellent videos.
EKO Software’s zombie ARPG with survival bits, How To Survive, comes out rather soon. I got my hands on it for a bit of a rummage, and – genre cliché be damned – I was fairly impressed.
It is the future, the year 2013. As technology adapts to the very specific needs of the human race, we are presented with a series of precise options: which exact flavour of survival game do you need to satisfy your apocalyptic escapism? In the case of How To Survive it’s an action RPGish thing, with you beating your way across an island full of the formerly-dead. Take a look at the latest trailer – premised on the rules needed to survive this trouble – below. Read the rest of this entry »
Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death’s Steam page is my favorite Steam page. I don’t think it’s a joke. I hope it’s not a joke. I mean, it seems decently self-aware, but I’m also whiffing the faintest hint of sincerity bludgeoning all noses within a 50 mile radius of its location. “A new breed of WARRIOR returns, committed to destroying the enemies of FREEDOM. When ONE angry man, has a world to protect – There is only ONE future – HIS OWN. No-nonsense hero Marlow never shied away from danger or trouble. But now he faces his ULTIMATE challenge. After crash-landing in Central America, he has an industrial evil to defeat whilst bound to an ancient Mayan Death Mask who’s had no-one to talk to for 2000 years.”
If Marlow Briggs does indeed have all of these things, it is the ultimate videogame. Also, John, did you write the copy for this? Come on now. Fess up.
I’m not sure if any of the RPS crew have played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons yet, but it’s out today and sounds like it’d be the ideal interactive experience for at least a couple of us. It’s a character-driven, single player co-op game, and I’m not sure what either of those things mean. ‘Character-driven’ because it’s about the brothers and their encounters with other people, creating moments of what I believe Professor Henry Playful would describe as ludonarrative resonance. We hear about the dissonance much more often, but occasionally these things called game do resonate along just the right axis. The ‘single player co-op’ part describes the mode of interaction – two characters, one controller. It’ll be interesting to see how it works with the more usual PC paraphernalia. From what I can gather, the joypad controls are a pleasure to use. Trailer below.
I think I squeezed enough puns into the that title to take the rest of the day off. Go me! As you can tell, I am suggesting that Takedown: Red Sabre is a tactical shooter. It is. It’s actually a Kickstarter title that squeezed past its goal just over a year ago, pitching a return to the sort of games Tom Clancy of ten years ago would personally code for us. There was a lot of noise made by the developer about the state of games and the particular hole that’s been left in the release schedule that it’s trying to fill: slow-burn games of planning and execution, where a SWAT team will sweep through a ship or an oil rig and deliver precisely planned justice to terrorist foreheads. Have they made that game? We’ll find out soon. Read the rest of this entry »
