Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i Gamesmaster

I’ve just played through the masterpiece that is Horizon Zero Dawn, and was blown away by the graphics, combat, and vast open world. However, what struck me the most was the sheer ingenuity of the story – surely the most original sci-fi story I’ve ever played. As an avid reader, I find it rare to encounter a game that compares to the storytelling ability of books, but Horizon Zero Dawn, with its fantastic twists and approach of letting the player discover the story at their own pace, may just be one. I find it exciting that gaming is starting to become an extremely powerful medium for stories in its own right. Hopefully, the shallow days of chasing a certain baddie who has kidnapped a certain princess are over! Samuel Mallett,…

“PROJECT JUDGE IS GOING THAT STEP FURTHER, TAKING THE DRAGON ENGINE’S COMBAT UP A NOTCH” Taking place within the streets of Kamurocho, the setting for the Yakuza games, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s latest is very much cut from the same cloth as the beloved series. But whereas the Yakuza series places you on the wrong side of the law (even if leading man Kazuma Kiryu is usually on the side of moral justice), the dev’s new project has you step over that line, and into the shoes of disgraced ex-defence-attorney-turned-private-detective, Takayuki Yagami. Known simply under the working title Project Judge for its Western release, the game’s called Judge Eyes: Will Of The Death God in Japan, and sees Yagami investigating a string of grisly murders. While the last Yakuza game…

Normally in Hurley Access, Leon is starting fires, not putting them out. Which makes Flashing Lights – Police Fire EMS (to give it its full name) an interesting opportunity for him to try and help people as a police officer, firefighter, or paramedic. Will this be the path to redemption, or will GamesMaster be asking for his badge by sundown? 0 MINUTES I’ve always thought I’d make a good cop. And by that I mean I’ve imagined my face in some movie action scene, probably slamming into a wall with a gun in my hand and shouting “It’s over, bad guy” as bullets chip the edges. I mean I’ve obviously not thought about it that hard if I haven’t actually named the bad guy but, judging by the four police…

It’s never quite clear if Resi 2’s 40-foot sewer-dweller is a crocodile or an alligator. Regardless of what species the G-virus reptile is, Leon’s scrap against the beast is one of the game’s coolest setpieces. What inspired Leon to blow off the ’gator’s upper jaw with a nearby canister of compressed air, you ask? You can thank a certain fishy Spielberg classic. In an interview with JP Games Magazine from 1998, series producer Shinji Mikami revealed what a huge fan he is of Jaws. “I saw it at the theatre when I was in middle school,” recalled Mikami. “For good horror entertainment, you can’t just have chase scenes – you’ve got to keep building and building stress… I was contemplating that when I suddenly remembered the final scene in Jaws,…

Format Switch, PS4, XO, PC Developer 2 Ton Studios Publisher Digital Uppercut Productions ETA 2018 Everything – in Western culture, at any rate – always goes from left to right. You are reading this going left to right, loading bars go from left to right, and 2D platformers expect you to cross the screen from left to right. Except for Unto The End that is, because here you’re heading right to left and it makes sense thematically. You play as a father who is trying to get back to his family, so instead of the usual ‘going forward’ notion of questing that features in most stories, this dad on a mission is heading back to where he started, which is on the left of the screen. It’s a nice way…

“YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN ANACHRONISTIC MIX TAPES VIA THE IN-CAR STEREO” Format PC Developer Sea Green Games ETA Q1 2020 Web bit.ly/gm_transmission Fresh perspectives on existing genres are no bad thing as far as we’re concerned. But a driving game being made by someone who can’t actually drive? That’s a new one. “One of the other guys worked on the first three Forza Horizon games and is helping me balance all the cars,” Jon Dadley explains. “So they’ll have a good feel to them, but I’m trying to avoid a dry simulation. It’s more about what feels nice and relaxing.” The focus of Transmission, you see, is less on driving, and more about engaging with the world around you. Dadley cites Euro Truck Simulator as an influence, but is…

With a fat shipment of new games arriving every week, it’s getting increasingly difficult to navigate Switch’s eShop. The store certainly doesn’t feel like it was built to handle this volume of releases, and a quick browse can make it hard to tell the cash-ins from the classics. So we’ve gone through hundreds of download-only games, chucked the chaff, and picked out the very best experiences that Switch has in-store, from brand-new Nindies to hidden gems, couch co-op classics to story-led single-player experiences, Metroidvanias to XCOM-a-likes, and everything you could think of in between. If you’ve got a Switch, get these and you’re guaranteed to have months of brilliant fun. STRATEGY DARKEST DUNGEON Publisher Red Hook Studios Developer Red Hook Studios Price £17.99 When you start up Darkest Dungeon, a…

“SOME OF WHAT FIFA 19 INTRODUCES IS INCONSEQUENTIAL, AND YET IT’S STILL ESSENTIAL” Format PS4 (reviewed), XO, PC Publisher EA Sports Developer EA Vancouver ETA Out now Players 1-22 Incremental advancement is a luxury EA’s annual football game can afford. FIFA 19 is the outperforming hare who steals a breather after pulling ahead of the tortoise. Some of what it introduces is inconsequential, poor even, and yet it’s still essential. Take one of this year’s most touted features: Timed Finishing, a risk/reward system making shots potentially deadlier. Pressing the shoot button summons a meter above your player’s head, and pressing it again when the meter’s dial hits the middle puts more potency on the ball. It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t feel right. Shooting in football is supposed to…

“THINGS HAVE LEAPFROGGED ‘ACCESSIBLE’ AND LANDED STRAIGHT IN ‘OVERSIMPLIFIED’” Format Switch, PS4 (reviewed) Publisher NIS America Developer SNK ETA Out now Players 1-2 If you’re a particularly cynical sort, no doubt you will expect that, this being a fighter with an exclusively female cast, each character will be designed with activities unrelated to pugilism in mind. And your cynicism would be warranted. Mai, in particular, has a default costume that offers little in the way of protection or, indeed, exercise for the imagination. Still, this kind of thing can be largely ignored if it’s wobbling provocatively on the front of a deep and compelling game. Which, you know, it isn’t. To the developer’s credit, the combat system isn’t a lazy cut-and-paste job from a hundred other games. In fact, you’ll…

The more tombs she raids, the more Lara’s skill set and arsenal of tools and deadly weapons grow. You earn experience points for pretty much everything you do in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, from executing stealth kills, to popping headshots, and making your way in and out of crypts (which are like bite-size tombs, and it’s very hard to stop at raiding just one). You can spend all of this XP on unlocking new skills that slot into three colour-coded categories: seeker, scavenger, and warrior. Seeker skills will let you improve things such as your climbing speed and the ability to spot traps and crafting components using Lara’s Survival Instincts (her equivalent of detective vision). With scavenger, you can unlock chain takedowns for two quick stealth kills, craft lure…

NBA 2K19 certainly isn’t lacking when it comes to game modes. Beyond MyCareer and all the activities contained within, there’s the franchise MyLeague mode, the story-driven MyGM, and the Ultimate Team-esque MyTeam, which, of course, is full of more microtransactions than you can throw a basketball at. MyLeague is still a massive timesink, letting you select a team and play through as many NBA seasons as you want, signing free agents, making draft selections, and so on. It hasn’t changed all that much from last year, but there are a few new options related to contracts and trades, including sliders that can prevent role players from asking for max contracts. MyGM is like a hybrid of MyLeague with a story that essentially functions as a bad visual novel. There’s no…

“THERE’S A NOVELTY TO JUMPING FROM 8-BIT PAST TO 16-BIT FUTURE AND VICE VERSA” Format Switch (reviewed), PC Publisher Devolver Digital Developer Sabotage ETA Out now Players 1 Even in our digital age when you can have an app tracking exactly where your delivery is, we’re pretty sure our couriers are never likely to encounter hazards any worse than road congestion. Fighting demons, swimming through underwater caverns, and jumping across lava pits would probably not be part of the job description. So at first glance The Messenger might not sound like the most appropriate title for a game that’s actually a terrific homage to the classic 2D Ninja Gaiden games. As a young ninja given the titular responsibility after a demon army lays waste to your village, you must jump…

“THE PUNCHY TECHNO BEATS WRUNG LUDICROUS LIFE FROM THE MEGA DRIVE’S SOUND CHIP” Developer Sega AM7 Publisher Sega Released 1991 Format Mega CD, Game Gear, Mega Drive, Master System Get it In Sega Mega Drive Classics – PS4, XO, PC There’s something to be said for the scrolling beat-’em-up genre, just for how it introduced a generation of players, and then desensitised them, to the notion of finding roasted meats in bins and eating them without question. Streets Of Rage wasn’t the first to do it, but its mix of bin-apples and bin-pork stuck with everyone who played it (and argued over who got it). The origins Away from arguments about cooked meats in the rubbish, Streets Of Rage’s genesis came as a result of another kind of conflict: the…

It’s Still Good! Rainbow Islands Format Mega Drive, NES, Amiga, arcade Developer Taito Released 1987 If you’ve ever heard the Amiga music to Rainbow Islands, it’s going through your head right now. Blissful. Extra blissfully, this 31-year-old platforming masterpiece is still as fresh and fun today as it ever was. It’s not just platforming, it’s strategic use of your rainbow powers… and a really irritating giant spider. What a game. Classic Moment! Super Mario Bros Format NES Developer Nintendo Released 1985 Cheats never prosper, except for when they unlock a level select with zero drawbacks – apart from the fact Super Mario Bros gets a lot harder when you skip from the first to fourth worlds. Anyway, this cheat felt like you were breaking the game: jump abovethe level on…

THE MOST DEDICATED TEAM IN THE BUSINESS It’s nearly time for the team to indulge in its favourite Halloween tradition: an annual re-watch of ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper classic Hell Comes To Frogtown. It’s not scary per se, but it’s definitely unsettling. Robin Valentine Our soon to be ex-editor has been spending his last month on the job in the traditional way: setting a series of traps for his successor. Anyone who can’t deal with a couple of punji pits doesn’t have the nerve to run a games mag anyway. What’s your scariest gaming moment? Having an existential crisis in Soma. Rob Crossland Our art editor’s fattened-up cockerel keeps escaping its pen, and the resulting rash of innuendo has left the team near-incapable of getting anything done this month. These are…

“TOO KYO IS HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING WITH NO FEWER THAN FOUR PROJECTS ANNOUNCED” If a supergroup is a band made up of already-famous performers, then new Japanese game developer Too Kyo Studio is a superdev. It brings together Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka, Zero Escape creator Kotaro Uchikoshi, No More Heroes composer Masafumi Takada, and many others. If you like weird, quirky Japanese games in that sort of vein, then some of the masters of the craft are present and accounted for. And their style of output won’t be changing. The more the merrier. You might think these creators would take it slow for a bit, given that Too Kyo is a brand-new studio, but the company’s hitting the ground running with no fewer than four projects already announced as…

“WITH RESIDENT EVIL 2, THE CONVENTIONS OF THE SURVIVAL HORROR GENRE WERE FIRMLY ESTABLISHED FOR YEARS TO COME” The Resident Evil franchise has been around for over 20 years, spawning a whole cast of beloved characters, almost half a dozen deadly viruses, and multiple evil megacorporations. During that time the series also moved on from its survival horror roots and became more action-oriented, to the point where the days of sneaking around zombies were a distant memory. But with 2017’s Resident Evil 7 having brought back the scares, it seems the perfect time to give the most beloved series entry a new lease of life. From today’s point of view, the original Resident Evil 2 looks a bit camp, with its splatter movie soundscape, clunky character models and voice acting,…

Format PS4, XO, PC Publisher THQ Nordic Developer Gunfire Games ETA 27 November Six years after the last Darksiders, the franchise has received a second lease of life, and the result is a game that tries to go back to its roots as much as it shakes things up. The biggest difference between Darksiders III and its predecessors is its main character, Fury. She isn’t only the series’ first female protagonist, she also brings a completely new fighting style to the series. Whereas Death and War were heavy hitters, reflecting their chunky builds, Fury is likened to a mage. “She’s every bit as powerful as her brothers,” lead level designer Richard Vorodi says, “but she mostly has a ranged fighting style, using her whip and magical spells, so hordes of…

Format PS4, XO Developer Amazon Game Studios Publisher Amazon ETA 2018 Amazingly this TV tie-in isn’t just a fairly standard racing game with with a licence slapped on top of it, which is what we cynically expected. It really is a playable version of the hit Amazon show, where you get to play through the iconic scenes that until now Clarkson, Hammond, and May have been the only ones to experience first-hand. The opening sequence from the first episode of The Grand Tour allows you to race alongside your co-presenters, as Jeremy Clarkson heads from the UK after his firing from the BBC to LA, where the crew are joined by hundreds of other vehicles driving across the Californian desert. During the playable sections voice lines taken directly from the…

Format PS4, XO, PC Publisher Tate Multimedia Developer Tate Multimedia ETA 2018 As far as videogame concepts go, Steel Rats’ elevator pitch is about as instantly exciting as they come: you ride around a foreboding city on a motorcycle, the front wheel of which is essentially a super-chainsaw that can smash through almost anything, while pulling off crazy stunts. If that doesn’t get your blood pumping, we don’t know what will. While this may look like a Trials-like with a darker art style, Steel Rats is more about solving environmental puzzles and getting rid of enemies than the challenge of getting from one end of the level to the other – and where Trials focuses on precise movement, Steel Rats is all about breakneck speed. One level requires you to…

Format Switch, PS4, XO, PC Dev Shadowplay ETA 2019 Web bit.ly/gm_projection An enlightening journey in every sense, this 2D adventure casts you as Greta, a shadow puppet who runs away from home. After getting lost she visits new lands, including Indonesia, China, Turkey, and England – and learns how to respect the cultures of each place. You control Greta with the left stick, and a light source with the right, shifting it around to help her negotiate the world. It might be something as straightforward as angling the light to create a ramp or a platform, but soon you’ll work out more advanced techniques. “You can also lift objects, use shadows to hide yourself from enemies, or build a bridge across an open pit and then drop it while they’re…

Considering he doesn’t own an ultra-expensive utility belt like a certain nocturnal Gotham vigilante, it’s impressive Spider-Man can squeeze so many gadgets into that skin-tight suit. Once you unlock Pete’s full array of burglar-brutalising tools, you essentially become a one-(Spider)man army. Initially, the wall-crawler starts with only his trusty Web Shooters, which can stick most stunned bad guys to any surface with a few taps of R1. As the story progresses and you unlock more gadget tokens, though, you’ll soon be taming NYC’s criminal element with a range of thrilling gizmos, ranging from a Concussive Blast (great for knocking thugs off rooftops) to a Suspension Matrix (a doodad that temporarily freezes baddies in mid-air). What are our favourite gadgets to break out in a tight spot, you ask? Well, in…

“IT’S VERY SATISFYING TO SET A COMPLEX SERIES OF ORDERS IN MOTION AND SEE THEM PLAY OUT” Format PC Publisher Mode 7 Games Developer Mode 7 Games ETA Out now Players 1-2 There’s something very reminiscent of tabletop gaming here. You control a small squad of armed soldiers, usually four or five guys, as does your opponent. Everything they do, from movement, to positioning, to whether they fire at will, is up to you. Both players’ turns go off simultaneously, so you need to anticipate what your opponent will do. It’s a game of outmanoeuvring, of prodding and poking, and it’s very satisfying to set a complex series of orders in motion and see them play out perfectly. Of course, this was also true of the first Frozen Synapse game.…

PES 2019 marks the first time in ten years that neither the UEFA Champions League nor Europa League find themselves included in an official capacity. The tournaments still exist in a different form, however, and nearly all of the competing teams remain licensed in the game. Borussia Dortmund also miss out this year after transferring their license to the FIFA series, but in their place lie new partner clubs including Schalke 04, Monaco, and both Celtic and Rangers. There are plenty of new league licenses this year spanning countries from Scotland to Switzerland. Each new addition receives a tailored presentation package in modes such as Master League and Become A Legend, and you also get some of the teams’ stadiums, including FC Basel’s St Jakob-Park, Ajax’s Johan Cruijff Arena, and…

“LARA’S TUNNEL VISION IS SO SEVERE SHE DOESN’T TAKE THE TIME TO CONSIDER HER ACTIONS” Format PS4 (reviewed), XO, PC Publisher Square Enix Developer Eidos-Montreal, Crystal Dynamics ETA Out now Players 1 At the end of 2013’s rebooted origin story, Lara Croft had evolved from a reluctant killer to someone prepared to save the day with her signature twin pistols and a cacophony of hot lead. Flash-forward five years and one sequel later, and Lara is finally ready to become what she was always destined to be. It might have taken longer than anticipated, but accompanying Lara during her formative years, packed with death-defying adventures and wanton bloodshed, has been thrilling, so we can’t complain too much. Now, though, we want her to bethe Tomb Raider. It is time. Shadow…

“PACE AND STRENGTH ARE MORE PRONOUNCED, GIVING CERTAIN PLAYERS AN EDGE” Format Switch, PS4 (reviewed), XO, PC Publisher 2K Sports Developer Visual Concepts ETA Out now Players 1-10 It feels like Visual Concepts’ NBA 2K series has been treading water for a while now. The past couple of games are still enjoyable renditions of the game of basketball, but cracks have begun to appear in the foundations, and they only grow deeper the longer you spend on the court. Improvements have been incremental at best, while microtransactions dominate the heart of the experience. Maybe it’s because the competition was floundering, but EA Sports’ NBA Live series is gradually finding its footing, so 2K can’t rest on its laurels for too much longer if it hopes to keep its crown. The…

“GIVES US A BETTER APPRECIATION OF JUST HOW GOOD THE REAL-WORLD DRIVERS ARE” Format PS4 (reviewed), XO, PC Publisher Codemasters Developer Codemasters Birmingham ETA Out now Players 1-20 In a sport where every millisecond counts, racing in Formula One isn’t just about a car’s power output or its driver’s ability to hit a corner’s apex at a hundred miles per hour. These are integral aspects, of course, but there’s so much more behind every victory, and this is something Codemasters has emphasised in the past few iterations of its F1 series. You might spend most of your time out on the track, but your contributions off it are just as crucial to success. Both facets of F1 2018’s portrayal of the world’s most popular motorsport collide in the excellent career…

“BY TURNS SOOTHING AND MELANCHOLY – A BELLE & SEBASTIAN SONG IN GAME FORM” Format Switch (reviewed), PS4, PC Publisher The Voxel Agents Developer The Voxel Agents ETA Out now Players 1 For many of us, games and childhood are closely linked. But that period of all our lives is rarely explored in videogames. There’s EarthBound and Pokémon, and more recently the Life Is Strange spin-off Captain Spirit, but we’re not exactly inundated with playable explorations of what it means to be young. To this curtailed canon, you can now add The Gardens Between. The game opens on a treehouse, one rainy night in suburbia. Inside, two kids sit in gloomy silence. Before it can explain why, something curious happens. A hiccup in the timestream, a flash of light… and…

Format PC Pub Sega Dev Two Point Studios ETA Out now Players 1 Few games enjoy as fond a place in the collective memory as Theme Hospital, a ’90s management sim elevated to classic status thanks to its gleefully satirical humour. Recreating that magic is an ambitious aim, but Two Point Studios – founded by Bullfrog veterans – takes it on with confidence, skill, and a flair for the ridiculous. For anyone unfamiliar with the premise: Two Point Hospital casts you as a strikingly mercenary hospital administrator, whose job it is to build up your medical facilities room by room in order to cure an ever-widening pool of bizarre diseases – and, in the process, maximise your profit at every step along each patient’s journey. Charmingly British take-down of the…

Counter-point I read Errol Kerr’s Take Aim on disability in games being shown in a negative light (villains having disfigurements and so forth) [see GM334] but I feel I must (and this may be the Bethesda fan side of me talking) call him out on his use of Wolfenstein as an example. Take The New Colossus – it is actually one of the most empowering games for disabled players if you don’t focus on the negative. The hero, William J Blazkowicz (who has degenerative injuries from the previous game) overpowers an actual boatload of able-bodied bad guys in the first mission whilst wheelchair bound, Fergus is an amputee who still pilots helicopter gunships, Caroline is a paraplegic who is the leader and mother of the team, Max Hass has learning…

“A CROSS BETWEEN GHOSTBUSTERS AND CLEANING THE HOUSE BEFORE YOUR MUM COMES OVER” With E3 now a distant memory, that’s all the big game announcements done for the year, right? Not if you’re Nintendo. It’s set the internet alight by finally announcing that Animal Crossing is coming to Switch. Fans of animals with mortgages rejoice! Some time next year, it’ll be on shelves , and it’ll the first Animal Crossing playable on a TV since 2008’s Let’s Go To The City on Wii. That announcement would have been an epic mic drop on its own, but it brought some other Switch friends to play in 2019. Almost as exciting for some will be Luigi’s Mansion 3 (and dare we hope for remasters of…

PARASITE EVE Produced by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Parasite Eve combined elements of survival horror with RPG mechanics, including real-time combat using the Active Time Battle system. The skills and weapons used by protagonist Aya could be upgraded to aid her in the hunt for a supernatural creature called Eve. PE may have a dodgy plot, but gained high praise for several shocking moments, as well as its beautiful rendering of Manhattan. DINO CRISIS After Resident Evil, Shinji Mikami gave us the Dino Crisis franchise. The concept basically stayed the same – limited ammo, trouser-ruining levels of anticipation as you explore a building – but added dinosaurs . Need we say more? While the formula’s appeal wore off quickly with the following instalments, the original Dino…

Capcom sure has a thing for dumping survival horror projects. Like the canned ‘Hook Man’ version of Resident Evil 4, Resi 2 was originally markedly different to the game that arrived on shelves. Resident Evil 1.5 focused on a more modern police station, with less detailed zombies roaming its law-enforcing halls. Capcom ultimately scrapped the game after deciding it didn’t carry enough of the gothic undertones of its iconic predecessor. “It was too realistic,” recalled Noboru Sugimura in a now-20-year-old interview from Japan’s JP Game Magazine. “The ominous atmosphere from the first game… it had been removed. The Police Station had been changed to a very modern building… everything felt too modern and strangely sterile.” Despite dozens of developers working on the game for many months after the release of…

“POKING AROUND JOY’S FLAT, WE FIND TRACES OF A WELL-CARED-FOR DOG AND… WELL, MORE THAN TRACES OF THE DOG ITSELF” Format PS4, XO, PC Publisher Bigben Interactive Developer Frogwares ETA 21 March 2019 There is something very wrong in Oakmont. As WWI veteran Charles Winfield Reed, you’re going to get to the bottom of it. Unfortunately, that puts you slap-bang between the devil and the deep blue sea. Reed is haunted by a supernatural incident that decimated his fellow crew members aboard the USS Cyclops, plagued by nightmares that spur him onward throughout Oakmont – come Hell or high water. And neither of those options are purely metaphorical. A flood has submerged half the town and the water simply isn’t dissipating. The place is like an American Venice, though with…

At Halloween there’s nothing better than closing the curtains, turning off the lights, pretending you’re not in for the pesky kids knocking on the door, and settling down to a terrifying game or six. But what to choose? Creeping dread? Monstrous foes? Ironic teen-speak and Inception levels of self-referential meta-narratives? Choosing the perfect horror game to play is harder than deciding whether or not to investigate that strange scraping noise coming from the dark alleyway outside. Fear not. Here’s our gory collection of the best horror games to play this Halloween. We’ve even sorted them into handy sections. Because we’re helpful/evil that way. THE GOREFEST DEAD SPACE Format PC, PS3, 360 Publisher EA Developer EA Redwood Shores Released 2008 It’s been a whole decade since we were first handed a…

“DON’T EXPECT A HAPPY ENDING; TEMPORARY SURVIVAL IS ABOUT AS UPBEAT AS IT GETS” Format Switch, PS4, PC Dev Panstasz ETA 2019 Web bit.ly/gm_worldofhorror It’s the end of the world, and eldritch abominations have risen from the sea to terrorise a sleepy Japanese coastal town. Though armageddon approaches, if you can retain your sanity in the face of these unearthly horrors, you might just be able to stave the end off for a while. Lone developer Paweł Koźmiński has conjured a terrifically creepy anthology of short stories that play out like classic RPGs in miniature – in fact, it’s deliberately styled like a 1980s Macintosh game (yes, those were a thing), with one framing option even letting you play it on an in-game monitor. Once you pick a tale, you’ll…

Format PS4, XO, PC (reviewed) Publisher Rebellion Developer Rebellion ETA Out now Players 1-4 The internet has brought us many great things – hot and cold running cat pictures, easy access to the thoughts of politicians, the ability to have ice cream delivered by a man on a bike – but it’s had a deleterious effect on the number of new games shipping with split-screen multiplayer. Everybody knows this is the best kind of multiplayer – especially in co-op. Happy were those who played Halo: Combat Evolved as a pair of Spartans, or took on the Locust Horde as Marcus and Dom. Given a large enough telly, there’s really nothing like gunning down monsters or aliens with a buddy on the same sofa, the yelling confined to a single room…

“THE BARD’S DRUNKENNESS BECOMES A COMPELLING PART OF THE EXPERIENCE” Format PC Publisher InXile Entertainment Developer InXile Entertainment ETA Out now Players 1 It’s not often that you get to call a dungeon-crawler cosy, but here we are. The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep is a cosy game. It’s enjoyed best at night with the lights off, your hot drink of choice at hand, and a quality pair of headphones covering your lugholes. This is because Barrows Deep does not present its world like most dungeon-crawlers. Sure, there are some horrible beasts from Scottish folklore lurking in dank corners, but they’re mitigated by eccentric high-fantasy characters wise-cracking in their faces. The world has its tongue stuck firmly in its cheek, despite how much the narrative attempts to sucker-punch you with…

“YOU’RE RARELY AFFORDED A CHEAP GOAL, WHICH MAKES IT MORE SATISFYING WHEN YOU SCORE” Format PS4, XO (reviewed), PC Publisher Konami Developer Konami ETA Out now Players 1-22 It feels like Pro Evolution Soccer has undergone something of a revival in recent years. The adverts have become more prominent, the acclaim has been more plentiful, and the hushed whispers on the virtual terraces have begun to echo the phrase, “PES is good again”. There’s a real belief that Konami can, or even has, returned the series to its former glories, and that EA Sports’ FIFA juggernaut is struggling to match PES’ quality on the field. That’s never been more prominent than in the series’ latest title, which plays the best game of football we’ve seen to date. This time, the…

“KIT IS ESSENTIALLY BLIND, PERCEIVING THE WORLD THROUGH SOUND. A BUBBLE SURROUNDS HER” Format Switch, PS4, XO, PC (reviewed) Publisher Fish Eagle Developer Lunar Great Wall Studios ETA Out now Players 1 Cats often have a hard time in videogames. You teleported one in Half-Life 2, learned wall-climbing from one in Okami, and we don’t talk about Blinx. But while this magazine is put together by a team of moggies working out of the top turret of an extremely gothic castle, we don’t let that bias our opinion toward games that feature felines. Another Sight, a 2D puzzle-platformer, begins with crying rather than miaowing. A girl, Kit, lays on the ground, lights and enormous cogwheels visible behind her. It doesn’t take long for Hodge the cat to appear. Ginger and…

Format Switch, PS4 (reviewed), XO, PC Pub Sega Dev Sega ETA Out now Players 1 The trope-y antics of a group of anime teens and 20-somethings, and the horrors of WWII. It’s certainly not an obvious pairing, but with charm, a gorgeous art style, and some sharp tactical thinking, Valkyria Chronicles 4 just about pulls it off. For the benefit of anyone burned by last year’s disappointing Valkyria Revolution, rest assured: this is the mainline follow-up you’ve been waiting for, very much continuing the traditions of the revered original and its PSP sequels. It sees you once again taking to the front line in a fictionalised version of war-torn 1940s Europe, and assuming command of a group of improbable-haired recruits who look more ready to battle with goblins and cast…

There’s something about tropical islands – they can be gorgeous, spooky, plain old backgrounds, way too green, and everything else you could think of. But when a game is set on a tropical island, it does something else: it makes the whole thing feel more like… well, a game . There’s something so over-the-top, innocent, and joyous about them, not to mention they’re the sort of places you’re unlikely to ever go in your life – like all gaming locales should be. So with that glee in mind, we set out to pick six of the best games set on and around tropical islands… and all of them ended up being Nintendo games, so we re-jigged the list a bit. Seriously, Nintendo loves it some tropics. We…

“IT TOOK ME A YEAR TO COMPLETE THE WHOLE DIABLO SET WITH SIX MAIN FIGURES” While gaming’s mainstream stars are readily available in model form on shop shelves, it can be pretty tough to acquire merchandise depicting the more obscure characters. Should you have a certain fondness for Dead Island’s Xian Mei, for example, you can’t just waltz up to a counter and obtain a statue of the leading assassin lady. That’s not a problem for Samo Kramberger, though, who uses his free time and superb sculpting skills to reproduce his favourite characters from movies, comics, and videogames in clay. When it comes to artistic experience, Kramberger’s got it in spades. A qualified art teacher, he’s also worked as a designer in many studios, and in 2009 set up his…