Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 193 i GamesTM

My experience with Rare games goes back further than I think I fully realised until the release of Rare Replay. If you had asked me before that compilation was launched I would have said that the game that brought me into the Rare fold was Donkey Kong Country. It was a gift that was plugged into our SNES on Christmas morning. We stepped into the room to see it on screen, which was a rather pleasant surprise. Suffice to say, my brother and I kept out of our parent’s hair for most of the rest of the day thanks to that. But actually the first Rare game I played was Pinbot on the NES, although at that time I wasn’t quite as aware of developers as I would become. This…

“FORTNITE HAS FALLEN INTO THE TRAP OF LOOKING AND ACTING LIKE A CHEAP IMITATOR.” FORMAT: PC, XBOX ONE | PUBLISHER: EPIC | DEVELOPER: IN-HOUSE | RELEASE: OUT NOW | PLAYERS: 100 It’s often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s a delineation that is prevalent in all forms of entertainment, but particularly so in videogames – where so many of the worlds that we stomp through and play that we engage in have only come to be through years of diligent iteration. Is it a testament, for example, to the skill of id Software’s earliest designers that so many are still using Team Deathmatch as a cornerstone of the FPS multiplayer experience? That question surfaces once again with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, fast becoming the most popular game in…

FORMAT: PC, XBOX ONE, PS4 | PUBLISHER: FRONTIER DEVELOPMENTS | DEVELOPER: IN-HOUSE | PLAYERS: MMO Frontier Development’s ambitious and incredibly immersive space sim has been growing and evolving ever since launch. It has not only found its home on PC as well as console, but has also ventured into the world of VR too. However, it’s most engrossing addition over the last year or so has been the gradual introduction of a classic enemy from the halls of Elite’s storied past; the Thargoid. These mysterious aliens have been teased for some time and as of September 2017, finally confirmed their presence in the world. But the story of the Thargoid invasion has been a long time in the making with Frontier first teasing their existence and then leaving clues scattered…

“To have the chance to work on a game like this that quintessentially feels like a Rare game, that’s the interesting thing about it.” So says design director Mike Chapman as we catch up with the Rare team to talk about the wonderfully idiosyncratic and enthralling Sea Of Thieves. This is a game that’s been billed as a great many things: a pirate simulator (not far off), Rare given free rein after years of Kinectbased subjugation (more on how inaccurate that is later), and a shared-world adventure fantasy (closer to the mark). But we would call it Rare being itself. A different self, perhaps. A more modern and technologically driven self, but isn’t there something about a pirate game from the Twycross studio that just feels right? “We kind of…

IT’S NOT A RADICAL SHIFT FROM THE GAME THAT CAME BEFORE, BUT IT’S STILL ONE OF THE BEST TOTAL WAR GAMES YET Creative Assembly is kind of frustrating, really. It’s built up such a name for itself producing Total War that each time a new one comes along it’s hard to build up to our usually default level of cynicism to even pretend it’ll be a flop. That’s not to say the developer hasn’t dropped the ball from time to time, but it’s not like any of its more recent Total War releases have been complete disasters. So aside from a few nit-picking Total War devotees, it’s hard to find too much fault or major criticism in Creative Assembly; its consistency – and by virtue that of its most significant…

IT SEEMS TO REGARD PLAYERS AS TOURISTS WHO CAN’T BE TRUSTED TO DRIVE ELOQUENTLY ENOUGH AND RESPECT THE ENGINEERING Entry upon entry, the Forza Motorsport series gets a little bigger, a little better looking and a little closer to the ideal of a racing simulation. But one problem seems to never go away. Grandiloquent and self-serious, the tone of these games is also – probably not on purpose – unwelcoming, and Forza Motorsport 7, particularly in its opening hours, is now the categorical example. To a frankly masturbatory extent, its opening cutscene puffs and hyperbolises the sport of racing: “drivers will talk about their victories, their losses, their journeys,” explains the narrator, in a voice that sounds like she’s advertising business class flights. “Here is the starting point for racing…

IN ALL ASPECTS, THIS IS A RACING GAME THAT REWARDS COMMITMENT Ladies and gentlemen, the world of racing simulators has a new competitor at its top table. Project Cars 2 builds on the qualities of its predecessor, eradicating most of its problems and adding meaningful new pillars to its motorsports blend. The result is one of the finest racers in a long time and, certainly, the best racing sim of this console generation. Project Cars 2’s greatest success comes in how it instils a sense of aspiration within you. Developer Slightly Mad Studios has combined its handling model, race options and car setups to create an atmosphere that pushes you towards constant self-improvement. Resultantly, Project Cars 2 makes for a powerfully active experience. You’re never allowed to simply sleep-drive…

“What would be the one I’d pick, if I could only choose one that I love? I’d have to pick Sega Rally Championship . Specifically, it would be the Saturn version, which I know is not necessarily the finest piece of engineering of all time. But it’s purely because of the hours that I had spent with it; the fact that you can still go back to it today and still get excited about shaving 0.01 of a second from your time is absolutely magnificent. And the track design in Sega Rally , for my money, has never been bettered. The fact that I can still close my eyes and drive through the entire game now, some 23 years on,…

FORMAT: PS4 | PUBLISHER: SONY | DEVELOPER: QUANTIC DREAM | RELEASE: 2018 | PLAYERS: 1 Quantic Dream has never been one for following convention. It has built its reputation by going against the grain and, should you love the results or loathe them indiscriminately, it’s difficult to deny the assertion that there’s nothing in this industry quite like a Quantic Dream production. For 18 years now the studio, led by the ever-enigmatic creative pairing of David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière, has put all of its time, energy and resources into creating unique and divisive videogames; challenging and creative works of branching fiction that are as determined to be considered interactive movies as they are practical showcases of a hardware generation’s true power and potential. The studio’s latest – Detroit:…

FORMAT: PS4 | PUBLISHER: SONY INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT | DEVELOPER: GUERRILLA GAMES | RELEASE: 7 NOV 2017 | PLAYERS: 1 1 MORE OFA GOOD THING Aloy is back in action in Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds. Pitched as an expansion to the early 2017 base game, The Frozen Wilds will continue the flame-haired hunter’s journey through the unknown as you enter into a fresh territory full of dangerous new threats. 2 IT’S GOING TO BE HUGE Offering a brand new map to tame, new weapons to locate and new settlements to explore, The Frozen Wilds is a substantial addition to the Horizon package with developer Guerrilla Games estimating that there will be over ten hours of new content for you to enjoy. 3 INVESTIGATE THE BANUK The Banuk were a…

FORMAT: PC, PS4, SWITCH, XBOX ONE | PUBLISHER: TEAM 17 | DEVELOPER: VILLA GORILLA | RELEASE: 2018 | PLAYERS: 1 Yoku is a pint-sized postman looking for retribution. After a mysterious deity destroys your post-office, it’s up to you to catapult yourself around a gorgeous hand-painted island, collecting fruit, unlocking areas and completing quests in a surprisingly enjoyable pinball platforming design. This melding of genres works wonderfully; creating a game that is as chill as it is intoxicating to play, a great idea backed up by great execution. 1 PINBALL AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT You might not think it now, but the pinball and platforming genres are a match made in heaven. It takes just a few minutes with Yoku’s Island Express to come to understand this; the traditional…

FORMAT: PC | PUBLISHER: DEVOLVER DIGITAL | DEVELOPER: CRYPTIC SEA | PLAYERS: TBC | RELEASE: 2018 Get some time under your belt with Sub Rosa , and you’ll quickly get the sense that it’s the sort of game that just wouldn’t be possible without Early Access. It is, admittedly, rough around the edges, but it’s there, a fantastic premise that is just waiting to further expanded and improved upon. At its most basic, Sub Rosa is a multiplayer first-person shooter looking to simulate a world run by corrupt corporate businesses, where you, a lowly agent, get caught up in the bloodshed. Sub Rosa already has a dedicated fanbase behind it, a group intent on upholding the rules and spirit of the game to the best of their…

LG OLED E6 SERIES Available in 55” and 65” varieties, the E6 displays offer an elegant design, and great black levels, which should mean deep contrast. Being an OLED display, each pixel generates its own light, which results in a super crisp image with no colour bleed. PRICE RANGE: £2,059-£3,500 PANASONIC DX802 SERIES Offering some pretty amazing value for money given the quality of the display you’re getting, the DX802 is available with a 50” or 58” display and comes with a soundbar, which is ideal for improved audio if you don’t have a surround sound setup. We quite like the easel design too. PRICE RANGE: £999-£1,249 SAMSUNG KS7000 SERIES Another quite reasonably priced series of 4K TVs when compared to the market at large, the Samsung offerings range from…

IF YOU’VE GOT THE TIME, THEN SHADOW OF WAR WILL BRING THE FUN – THAT’S THE PACT YOU ENTER INTO WITH MONOLITH There’s no doubt about it, Tolkien is spinning in his grave. What started as a slow rotation – it’s difficult to pinpoint how this strange phenomenon began exactly, though some will attribute it to the posthumous completion of the Silmarillion, others (more correctly) to the creation of the Hobbit trilogy of films – has now erupted into something far more uncontrollable, violent even. The inertia of the coffin now generating such centrifugal force that Tolkien has likely found himself on a one-way journey to the centre of the earth, to the domain of the Balrog – that one is on Monolith. Middle-earth: Shadow Of War plays fast and…

In what has been a stellar year for incredible fighting games, ‘decent’ just doesn’t cut it. And when you’re dealing with a comic franchise that loves throwing around terms like ‘sensational’, ‘amazing’ and ‘spectacular’, ‘fine’ doesn’t evoke quite the same degree of majesty. MvC: Infinite is a game that just manages to tread water in a sea of such hyperbole, the ultimate irony being that like so many of its absentees, it would probably best be described as ‘uncanny’ – curious and intriguing, if perhaps not in the ways its creators intended. Infinite is borderline broken, almost par for the course in a crossover fighter, but here taken to strange new heights that sit at odds with the game’s rebrand to court the casual crowd. One fewer character to learn…

A plot to kill The Outsider is a strong concept for DLC. The dapper, black-eyed god has underlined all our adventures into the blood and filth-filled streets of Dishonored, giving us access to all manner of dark magic. But what if we were to try to kill him? Punish him for all the suffering his putrid sorcery had wrought? That is the central question of Arkane Studios’ latest work. The standalone DLC rides that idea with confidence. Playing as long-time supporting character Billie Lurk, the game starts you out trying to find Daud, her assassin mentor. This then spirals into an assassination attempt on a god, telling an important story for the lore. It’s great to see Arkane commit to a plot with huge ramifications for this world in an…

When you think of classic console JRPGs, your mind often jumps to seminal works like Final Fantasy VII , Tales of Symphonia and the Persona series. Battle Chasers: Nightwar takes the design tenets from these classic JRPGs and forms them into its own mould. Based on the classic Nineties comic book Battle Chasers written by Joe Madureira, who you might know as the character designer behind the Darksiders series, Battle Chasers looks to shake up the JRPG mould with its western take on the classic genre. We’re quickly introduced to our main characters, who are stranded on an island after getting ambushed by bandits on an airship. The meek Gully serves as our main character, who has been bestowed with a magical…

BIOSHOCK From its introduction of the orphaned Little Sisters, and the Big Daddies compelled to guard them, to the overdosing citizens turned Splicers that populate Rapture’s sunken corridors, BioShock is fraught with guilt and gunplay. We are kindly asked to do all we can to survive, but such a mission is undercut by human tragedy at every step. Empathy makes you reconsider your instinctive violent tendencies, even if playing the good guy ultimately de-powers you in an increasingly dangerous situation. SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS An almost constant assault on your conscience, Shadow Of The Colossus finds real pleasure in making you feel awful about your decisions. In its ancient world, populated by 16 fragile titans, you are tasked with slaying them one after the other in an effort to save…

“MORGAN STRIKES US AS SOMEONE STILL VERY MUCH COMFORTABLE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LAW” FORMAT: PS4, XBOX ONE | PUBLISHER: ROCKSTAR GAMES DEVELOPER: ROCKSTAR STUDIOS | RELEASE: Q2 2018 | PLAYERS: 1-TBC Allow us to introduce you to Arthur Morgan, your new Red Dead Redemption II protagonist. We would never go so far as to say ‘hero’ about any character you play as in a Rockstar game, but such a moniker would appear to be even more ill-fitting in Morgan’s case. The latest reveal of the game has suggested that the redemption element of it may not be at the forefront of Morgan’s concerns as he gallops around the West, extorting money on behalf of the infamous Dutch van der Linde. So, what we’re…

“FRONTIER HAS ACCESS TO THE SOURCE ILM 3D FILES TO ENSURE THAT THE DINOSAUR RENDERS ARE AS ACCURATE TO THE FILMS AS POSSIBLE” FORMAT: PS4, XBOX ONE, PC | PUBLISHER: FRONTIER DEVELOPMENTS DEVELOPER: IN-HOUSE | RELEASE: Q2 2018 | PLAYERS: TBC For fans of Jurassic Park , it doesn’t get much better than this. Ever since the release of the 1993 Spielberg classic we have long dreamed of creating our very own Jurassic Park, succeeding where John Hammond so famously failed. It’ll be Summer 2018 when Frontier Developments – responsible for Elite: Dangerous and Planet Coaster – will deliver that unto us, where we will finally have the opportunity to construct, manage and evolve our very own Jurassic World. Tasked with bio-engineering new dinosaur breeds and constructing…

“ It was a massive inspiration for what Sea Of Thieves would eventually become ” JOE NEATE, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, RARE “I only ever played this game once, but that was enough. About five years ago I started playing DayZ after reading about it. I remember reading all of these stories and going ‘I need to play this game’; Because these players had been given this world, this freedom, and they decided to do whatever felt right for them. [The stories] were so compelling that it just pulled me into the game. So I managed to download the mod, get it applied and all that – I’m not very tech savvy, that’s why I’m a producer – and I managed…

With the launch of the Xbox One X we have entered into a unified 4K era of gaming. With Microsoft’s latest offering alongside the PS4 Pro and the continued performance lead of PC, 4K is now the standard for this generation of gaming. As such we thought it would be a good idea to review and refresh on the ins and outs of what makes 4K gaming tick, what TVs and other displays you should be looking at, what games best show off the format and more. We’ve covered some of this ground in the past, but this time we’re also leaning on the expertise of our colleagues at T3, the renowned technology magazine. They’ve been tracking the cutting edge of TV and gaming tech for even longer than ourselves…

BEING A PARAGOOMBA OR WIGGLER IS SO UTTERLY FOREIGN THAT IT’S A BIT OF A REVELATION There is something miraculous about Super Mario Odyssey . The joy of it is inescapable. Perhaps we could have said much the same about a number of Mario titles over the years, but this one just keeps delivering over and over and over, and each time with a new twist or element that elevates each experience from the last. Just when you think Super Mario Odyssey has given you its peak moment of happiness or nostalgia or nerve-jangling challenge, it has another one up its sleeve. So, clearly we have been impressed with Mario’s latest offering and at the time of writing we still haven’t stopped playing. The story has long…

YOU’VE NEVER PLAYED OR SEEN ANYTHING QUITE LIKE THIS BEFORE Studio MDHR's debut is unapologetic in everything that it attempts and achieves; in its style, its design and, all-importantly, in its execution, Cuphead knows what it wants to be and strives for it without hesitation. Studio MDHR has never wavered in its resolve to craft something so uniquely out of time, and it has done so without, astoundingly, succumbing to the pitfalls of playing to nostalgia – as so many other modern genre games are want to do. Everything Cuphead does, it does within reason and with purpose, and it’s all the better because of it. The art style, a scintillating homage to the cartoons that emerged out of Fleischer Studios in the late Twenties and…

The English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga are generally considered to be the world’s finest football leagues, containing the best teams and the deepest rivalries. They’re also two very different beasts. Where the Premier League is known for its ferocious pace and dedication to scoring goals and shooting whenever possible, Spain’s equivalent is a more considered, tactical affair in which creating quality scoring chances is more important than quantity. If FIFA 18 was a football league, it would be the Premier League. Here’s a game of digital football in which attacking play is the order of day, the tweaks made to last year’s formula almost exclusively designed around allowing you greater freedom when it comes to avoiding defenders and launching shot after shot on goal. Its technique and complexity…

The sco Re You see aT The BoTTom of The page was pushIng IncRedIBlY close To BeIng a Ten With a party ambling around, unsure as where to go next and, frankly, getting a bit tired of all this – literal – running around in circles lark, Divinity: Original Sin II throws us a bone. Less metaphorically, we encounter a rat and, realising that a member of the party channels his best Doctor Dolittle and is able to hold a conversation with our animal friends, he manages to garner important quest info from the squeaky plague-bearer and we are able to complete our mission and move onto new and exciting locales. Divinity: Original Sin II is a game that is absolutely littered with moments like these;…

Spinning Monster Hunter off into a turn-based RPG isn’t much of an ask. After all, a lot of the groundwork has already been done; you can bring the crafting, gathering and mission systems across wholesale, and that’s exactly what Marvelous has done for Monster Hunter Stories. All you need to approach differently is the combat, and tweak the premise ever so slightly – namely tone down that whole ‘hunting’ thing. Stories works by drawing in elements from Pokémon and JRPGs like Dragon Quest. Your character is not a Hunter here, but a Rider instead. This shift means that you’ll be battling alongside ‘Monsties’ and levelling them up, rather than cutting off their body parts and wearing them – although a degree of that still exists in the game’s armour and…

 Released: Irrational Games ONE OF THE GREATEST MAGIC TRICKS GAME DEVELOPERS EVER PULLED OFF WAS MAKING IT FEEL AS IF YOU EVER WERE FREE INSIDE OF THEIR WORLDS Publisher: 2K Games Developer: 21 August 2007 System: Xbox 360 “WOULD YOU KINDLY?” On the surface, it was always a simple quandary to wrestle with. We answered the call dutifully, locking ourselves into a wicked sense of forward momentum at the whim of an omnipotent narrator, pushing ourselves ever deeper into a submerged metropolis steadily taking on more and more water. But, as BioShock players would soon discover in the autumn of 2007, the question itself was loaded. A smoke-and-mirrors tactic that has come to define a certain era of first-person shooters – particularly in the hearts and hands of console-bound gamers.…