Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i Edge

In this line of work, we think a lot about building things. This month we’re freshly back – well, back, certainly – from Gamescom, the biggest videogame event in Europe. Every year, attendance figures rise, and the show must grow in tandem, something you’d forgive its organisers for struggling with. Part of the solution to an ever-more-teeming throng is to spread Gamescom out beyond the walls of the Koelnmesse. These days Gamescom is not just a gaming show but an esports tournament, a cosplay contest, an industry conference and B2B pow-wow, to name a few. It covers much of the city of Cologne, and has come to feel more like a festival than a pure consumer show. It’s all the better for it. Gamescom’s organisers are old hands at this;…

All told, it’s been a rough 12 months for Telltale Games. Caught between reports of a nightmarish workplace culture on one hand and player discontent with bugs and delayed releases on the other, the studio has undergone a dramatic restructure. It’s unsurprising that Telltale has kept a low profile in 2018: its sole major release is The Walking Dead’s fourth season, reflecting new CEO Pete Hawley’s commitment to releasing fewer games each year at higher quality. “It has been a period of tremendous change for Telltale over the past couple of years,” The Walking Dead’s executive producer Brodie Andersen tells us. “As you know, we got quite a bit bigger, and I’m really proud of the stories we were able to tell, the content we’ve put out. But yeah, Pete…

SHOES Overwatch Air Force 1 bit.ly/upboycustom If only we could buy them. Korean artist and evidently massive Overwatch fan Upboy has designed and made these custom Nike Air Force 1 shoes, which were recently displayed at the Overwatch Fan Festival in Seoul. Each sneaker is themed around a different hero, and incorporates their iconic colour palette as well as subtle decorative flourishes based on their individual abilities. Tracer’s blue, orange and brown shoe, for instance, features a ‘Blink’ symbol on the tongue, while the serrated pattern on the sole of the Genji variant echoes the paintwork on his katana, and McCree’s ‘Deadeye’ skull accents the heel of his. It’s a fascinating study in how Blizzard’s designs and colour choices make Overwatch’s characters so strongly individual and immediately recognisable. VIDEO Urban…

One of the things I most appreciate about Japan – yes, I’m still thinking about Japan, sorry – is how well designed it is. In the UK, public transport is a nightmare, but in Japan it runs like clockwork, and this is only achievable because the entire experience has been mapped out in a logical way. There are little lanes painted to either side of where the doors are when the train pulls in, ensuring everyone lines up nicely and leaves plenty of room for people to get off first. On approach to a station a PA announcement tells you which side of the train the platform will be on, while an HD display above the doors shows you which way to turn when you get off depending on which…

Super Mario Party Switch For all Switch’s delights, it’s too often been a solitary pastime, a delight for long solo sessions but underused in a social context. This finally looks like delivering on the promise of the ads that made Switch the centre of all those rooftop parties – Providing you have multiple consoles. Starlink: Battle For Atlas PS4, Switch, Xbox One We were on board for Ubisoft’s toys-to-life space opera long before Fox McCloud came along. News that the full campaign can be played as the hero of Star Fox pushed Starlink even further up our wishlists. His legacy has been tarnished of late, but McCloud’s in good hands. Mark Of The Ninja Remastered PS4, Switch, Xbox One In the absence of a full sequel to Klei’s remarkable 2012…

Developer IO Interactive Publisher Warner Bros Interactive Format PS4, PC, Xbox One Origin Denmark Release November 13 Of all the stealth-action series in videogames, only Hitman could make a suitcase exciting. One of a handful of new props in IO’s first Hitman game since buying the IP back from Square Enix, it serves as both a portable hiding place for eye-catching toys like foldable rifles, and as yet another way of turning each level’s complex AI script against it. You might, for example, drop the suitcase somewhere for a civilian to find, much like a weapon in the 2016 instalment, but where a weapon would probably be taken to a saferoom (where you might later recover it), the suitcase is comparatively innocuous. Perhaps the civilian will take it to a guard, who might…

As befits the children of a Spartan king, Alexios and Kassandra are probably the most capable warriors in Assassin’s Creed’s lengthy roster. Melee combos, stealthy assassinations and ranged attacks aside, each has access to an eye-watering assortment of upgradeable special abilities, mapped to the face buttons. You might tear a shield from a foe’s hand, then kick them over a precipice, or take out several with a ground pound before launching a cluster of flaming arrows into those left standing. Like Origins, Odyssey’s combat is based on hitboxes rather than automatically aligning player with target, which makes range and positioning more vital than in the other games. Unlike Origins, the game doesn’t allow continuous blocking – it’s either dodge or parry, though you can unlock a self-heal ability in order…

Developer/publisher Klang Games Format PC Origin Germany Release TBA With its rolling felt plains and creamy, retro-futuristic habitats, Seed’s garden world isn’t an obvious setting for bloodshed, but earthly paradises have a way of self-combusting, and developer Klang anticipates plenty of conflict once its persistent online simulation goes live. “There will be a lot of chaos, I think, to begin with,” CEO Mundi Vondi says. “But I hope to see emerge from that chaos a level of sophistication. I think gamers are inherently competitive in the sense that they want structure, power and wealth, and those things are not going to come easily – they’ll have to create all of that.” It’s to spur such ingenuity that Klang has opted not to police the game’s players, beyond instances of abuse…

Not all your warfare is biological. Biomutant has an in-depth crafting system that allows players to customise one- or two-handed weapons in thousands of different ways. Base materials such as wood, metal, ceramic and plastic each have their own properties to take into consideration. Weapons can be customised by popping cryo mods onto guns or making use of special blade coatings. Then there are the weapons you find out in the wild. Each of the world’s six tribes has its own weapons, each with their own Super Wushu special attacks – one of them being the Klonk Fist, a massive metal gauntlet that allows us to break open yellow doors and unleash a Super Wushu attack that clobbers multiple enemies over the head and into the ground like tent pegs.…

When did CD Projekt Red approach you about working on Cyberpunk 2077? What was the moment that convinced you that this would be the right team to bring it to digital life? They approached us about six years ago. I didn’t know much about them, but The Witcher 2 copy they sent was impressive and when I looked over their operation in Warsaw, they were even more impressive. But most important was the fact that they had grown up with Cyberpunk 2020 and were true fans. You’ve worked with other game companies in the past. What’s different about working with CD Projekt Red? They listen. And they are willing to do whatever it takes to get a great product. What are the challenges of translating pen-and-paper mechanics into videogame form?…

STILL PLAYING Dead Cells Switch Ice Bow was proving such a problem that we are now forcing ourselves to ignore even the most overpowered drops of Dead Cells’ best weapon by far. It’s an approach that’s set us back a bit, certainly, but in the process we’ve gained a new appreciation for shields, which occupy the same slot as projectiles. A well-timed parry is always a thrill, and is especially so here, thanks to a generous timing window and prominent UI prompt. Eat your heart out, Daigo. Destiny 2 PS4 The Solstice Of Heroes event with which Bungie dropped the curtain on Destiny 2’s troubled first year showed both how the game has improved over the last 12 months, and how far it has yet to go. A suite of…

The largest map icons are the blue diamonds that denote a side-mission, though many turn out to simply be trigger missions for yet another kind of collectible, or task to be repeated. One has clearly been lifted from Breath Of The Wild, tasking you with finding specific locations with only a photograph (and Parker’s incessant monologuing) to guide you. Another introduces you to a local who has lost his homing pigeons after a house move: you’ll seek them out on the map, then chase them down, capturing them with the same button prompt you use to fling chunks of scenery at bad guys. They survive, apparently, but lord knows what kind of state they’re in.…

A small team at Drinkbox Studios started work on Guacamelee 2 while the rest of the studio finished work on dark firstperson adventure Severed. Lead designer Gary Corriveau and concept lead Augusto Quijano were among the former group; here, they discuss pacing, speedrunning techniques and where the game’s many jokes come from. When you decided to make a sequel to Guacamelee, did you have a particular story idea in mind, or did it begin with certain mechanics you wanted to explore? Gary Corriveau Probably a little bit of both. I think Augusto had the story pretty early on, but it was independent from the mechanics. That was more about, ‘What are we going to do to preserve the feel of the first game, as well as making it feel fresh?’…

There are three playable characters, and you’ll meet the other two during Arthur’s story, which unfortunately lasts far longer than the others. Next up is Sally, a chemist and herbalist who produces her own special batch of Joy. She’s a far more intriguing character than Arthur, and while it seems you’re supposed to sympathise with the male lead, we’re left wondering why Sally would ever bother with such a chinless wonder. Her story incentivises a craftier approach to encounters, though a story development that would seem to have major ramifications for her survival mechanics only really results in having to locate slightly different items. With most of the same problems recurring throughout the third story – this time starring the slightly unhinged Ollie – only gluttons for punishment will see…

Donut County takes frequent and unabashed inspiration from Katamari Damacy. One particularly notable instance is the Trashopedia, a complete level-by-level collection of the things that you’ve sucked into the hole, with each item accompanied by a note from BK. Most are funny, some are sad and others tell a kind of story when read in sequence. You’ll probably only really appreciate the Trashopedia if you’re a fan of Esposito’s surrealist millennial humour, although you’d surely have to be living under an Internet-less rock not to enjoy the joke about the swimming pool.…

Online multiplayer was the most highly requested feature for the sequel, and Ghost Town Games has done an admirable job of implementing it. Setting up a lobby to play with either friends or strangers is easy to do, and the netcode is largely stable (although when it lags, you’ll know). The lack of in-game voice chat is a savvy decision, given the younger-skewing audience. An emote wheel provides a mostly successful method of communication – even if remote co-op just isn’t the same as sitting on the same couch, and we do miss having a designated “swear” button.…

You spend most of the game hovering high above their heads, but XCOM does a great job of fostering a sense of attachment to your soldiers. First, there’s the mechanical motivation: stick with an individual for long enough and they’ll become all-powerful, with abilities that can change the course of a battle. But they’re also fragile, investments that need protection. More personally, though, every soldier has a name, nationality and, once they get promoted a couple of times, a randomly-chosen nickname. That’s often enough to create an emergent personality. All of these elements are customisable, which an early mod took advantage of to pull names from your Facebook friend list and incorporate them into the game. Who wouldn’t worry about an old schoolfriend as they’re pinned down by enemy fire?…

Movies and videogames can happily marry When it comes to adapting licences, the balance of power between videogame makers and their peers in TV, film and literature has never been more even. “I think going back in time, narrative in games was often dismissed, and that’s very much changing,” Brodie Andersen says. Licensors no longer see interactivity and storytelling as “mutually exclusive”, he goes on, not least because so many creators in other media are also prolific game-players. “A lot of films are about games now. There’s a lot more crossover between the mediums; it’s an interesting evolution. I think whatever is pushing forward the union of narrative and gaming, we’re not always going to see it coming.”…

Japan’s penchant for celebrating videogame milestones in off-kilter real-world ways continues. Hot on the heels of Namco’s pop-up live-action Pac-Man game comes Space Invaders Room, a temporary installation on the ground floor of the Yodobashi building in Osaka’s Umeda district. As the style guide dictates, a gift shop offers up Space Invaders merchandise ranging from the predictable (t-shirts, tote bags) to the, err, esoteric (water bottles shaped like baubles). Yet elsewhere are attractions that celebrate a true arcade classic in, credit where it’s due, a series of fun, creative ways. There’s Space Invaders Gigamax, an eight-player installation piece played on a huge screen; it won’t quite match its appearance at a resort in Gamagori earlier this year, where it was projected onto the side of a building and players were…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to PlayStation Plus, courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment Low battery You’ve had a few letters along these lines over the years. Those about young gamers who’ve now grown up, and complain about the usual – slower reaction times, a bit of apathy towards gaming in general, and so on. I’m now one of those gamers – at the age of 42. I’ve had my lulls over the years, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve always ‘recovered’. This time though, I’m not sure what’s wrong. I find it harder and harder to pick up the pad. It doesn’t stop me spending a stupid amount of money each financial year on…

Fifteen years ago, after working around 40 days back to back to get a build ready to show Sony during the early days of the PS2, I didn’t think it was possible to have a long career in games without doing yourself permanent damage. As a bunch of guys in their mid-20s with no other focus, it wasn’t even a scary thing – perversely, we kind of liked it. Five years later, while working at Maxis in Redwood Shores during the pre-lawsuit EA Spouse crunch period, it started to become less fun, and we all agreed that you could probably survive, but you couldn’t work in games and keep a healthy work/life balance. Today, as game developers become more diverse, including in terms of age and lifestyles, things have started…

The only barrier Agent 47 doesn’t have to worry about in Hitman is the language, a source of some irony for a series that is given to globetrotting. IO has toyed with having NPCs speak a range of tongues, but feels this would make life too difficult for players. “At one point we were thinking, let’s go full indigenous, let’s put in a language you might not understand,” Eskil Mohl comments. “Which would be really good for the fantasy, but so much of Hitman is about eavesdropping.” The new game does, at least, feature properly accented dialogue for each map. “We got hit hard for the dialogue in the 2016 game – it was strictly vanilla American, which in certain levels can feel a bit immersion-breaking.”…

Klang is making no bones of the idea that Seed has real-world social relevance. The game’s website has a Theory section where you can find essays on transhumanism, solar system colonisation and the Doomsday clock – most of them glorified blog posts, but a promising show of the range of ideas in play. Klang has also sought out the insights of Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. A long-time proponent of US electoral reform, Lessig has argued that MMO communities can serve as useful case studies for constitutional scholars, especially when carried out at great scale. He has suggested, optimistically, that Seed will provide an environment free of the entrenched interests and power structures that otherwise constrain public conversations about politics.…

The indie revolution is over. The gates have swung open for solo developers and small studios: Steam, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft’s storefronts splash their games across their front pages and parade them on their conference stages. With these developers has come a new breadth of story, setting, style and themes, heralding the beginning of a new era. But with new eras come new challenges. “The game industry is in a wild state of fragmentation,” says Teddy Dief, who lead the development of Hyper Light Drifter. “Game makers have more and more options for platforms, audiences and technology, creating new subsets of our audience such as VR, streamer-targeted designs, and new experiments in genre and narrative.” For Dief, that means shouldering new risk, and seeking out huge new creative opportunities. “We’re…

Daisuke Sato Director, Binary Domain The voice recognition feature – did it work in Japanese? Yes, it works in Japanese, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish – it should work. But it was not well made [laughs]. When you started making Binary Domain, it was an interesting time for Japanese games. You certainly weren’t the only studio trying to appeal to western players by making a game in a popular western genre. Well, yes. A long time ago, around the PlayStation 1 or 2 era, Japanese titles sold really well in the overseas market. But I think in the middle of the PlayStation 2 era or so, companies in the west started releasing a lot of high-quality games, and Japanese titles started not selling so well in the US and…

When doing anything creative, you must fight the temptation to try and reinvent the wheel. Everybody thrills at the sight of the new – this month’s cover game makes that perfectly clear. But that should not demean the notion of simply delivering on people’s expectations; it might not be as exciting to work on, but it’s no less honourable a goal. It’s a recurring theme this issue – and how could it not be, in a month that yields a new Dragon Quest (in this case DQXI, p112)? Yuji Horii and co have made their careers out of making much the same thing over and over again, striking just about the right balance of nostalgia and progress with each new instalment in Japan’s favourite series. Their latest release could not…

Videogame execs must be looking at the Marvel Connected Universe, or MCU, with tremendous envy. This is one of the greatest tricks the entertainment industry has ever pulled, an elegant combination of multiple franchises that means fans no longer wait two or three years for a story to be continued, but a mere matter of months. It is the cinematic equivalent of mobile-game cross-promotion – serving ads about a new game to users of the popular old one – but on a far grander, far better received and far more lucrative stage. If you’re prepared to reach a bit, there’s certainly a case for this sort of thing to be more common in games. Ubisoft could quite easily tie its forthcoming PVP pirate game Skull & Bones to the Assassin’s…

The Clan Creator mode introduced in Yakuza 6 returns again, and has been further fleshed out, but remains as easily ignorable as ever despite the addition to the cast of some more Japanese wrestlers. The addition of Yakuza 0’s cabaret-club management, however, is a different story. There’s little in the way of refinement to the mode, but it barely needs it: the simple act of hiring, making over and levelling up your roster of comely maidens remains as irresistible as ever. There are new additions elsewhere, of course. The weirdest of the lot involves Toylets, Sega’s real-world urinal minigame aimed at keeping public conveniences in a pleasant state, that here plays out as a button-basher in which you must maximise Kiryu’s flow without losing control of it.…

Planet Alpha’s alien world feels remarkably fresh, but it’s constructed from familiar elements. The blocky pastels and open skies recall Rime and The Witness. Outside of games, there are flashes of French Impressionist painters such as Monet and French comics artist Moebius, while the enemy robot and rocketships are lifted straight out of ‘50s American sci-fi like Forbidden Planet. There’s some remarkable alchemy at work, fusing these disparate elements into a single, mostly coherent aesthetic.…

Last November, faced with sluggish sales of its wondrous shooter Nex Machina, Housemarque announced that it was moving away from the arcade games that had been its trademark since 1995. In August the Finnish studio gave us our first look at Stormdivers, an Unreal Engine battle-royale game with a strong emphasis on verticality – PlayerUnknown’s Crackdown, to cut a long story short. Housemarque’s older fans have reacted to this change of focus much as you’d expect. “It’s like, fuck you, why are you ruining my childhood?” game designer Henri Markus sums up. The outrage is hard to swallow, he says, because Housemarque still adores arcade games and would happily have carried on developing them, if only they would sell. “It’s painful to read that we need to go back to…

James Zabiela broke onto the club scene at the turn of the millennium, when he gave a mixtape to progressive-house god Sasha after a show and was taken under his wing. These days he’s the head of record label Born Electric, and a prolific DJ. He may have started mixing records at a tender age, but as we discover here, he was even younger when he got into games. What’s your earliest videogaming memory? Hungry Horace for the ZX Spectrum 48k, with rubber keys – the doorstop, we used to call it. I used to play it for hours on a Kempton joystick. I went from that to Horace Goes Skiing, and Horace & The Spiders. Everyone’s forgotten about Horace. I then got into Ninja Turtles, and had that on…

We all know videogames are bad, but just how bad are they really? An organisation called the Children’s Screen Time Action Network has written to the American Psychological Association claiming that they are very bad indeed. The authors want, they say, to “call attention to the unethical practice of psychologists using hidden manipulation techniques to hook children on social media and videogames”, which results in “risks to their health and well-being”. Outbreaks of moral panic have, of course, been a regular occurrence over the last four decades of popular videogames, but this latest critique is expressed in scientific terms and is signed by an impressive roster of psychology professors and other researchers. So how seriously should champions of the medium take it? The first thing to note is that the…

The appeal of the Assassin’s Creed series has always been as much about the pull of its historical tourism as its story, parkour, stealthy stabbing or, in the case of more recent entries, its RPG elements. Ubisoft is forever tinkering with the framework of its most famous series: climbing isn’t so important these days, but combat is more of a focal point than ever. Yet what sets Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (p42) apart, both from its predecessors and the games with which it’ll compete this autumn, is its setting. A vision of Ancient Greece, informed by close study of the classics, is quite the proposition. No one expects Odyssey to be a truly accurate representation of the period, of course, but a veneer of authenticity goes a long way. And indeed,…

Devil May Cry 5’s story is set to pick up where the fourth title left off. Nero is just one of the three characters you’ll play as (Dante being the second, the third unconfirmed). Nero has set up a new demon-hunting agency out of his van, working alongside brilliant engineer Nico, the brains behind his elaborate new Devil Breaker arm. He’s out to get revenge on the person who necessitated his new limb – his Devil Bringer was ripped from him by a cloaked figure. By the looks of it, it’s almost certainly Vergil (now confirmed to be Nero’s father, by the way: ouch). This raises a couple of possibilities, in our mind: that Vergil could be the third playable character, and that Devil May Cry 5’s story could well…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Quebec) Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release October 5 How might this year’s Assassin’s Creed play if it wasn’t just named after Homer’s Odyssey, but modelled on it? For starters, it would probably forgo the open world genre’s usual rhythms of acquisition and conquest. The Odyssey is, after all, the account of a refugee, returning by sea in the aftermath of a ruinous war. Rather than letting you climb every mountain you see, a game based on this story might make a virtue of impotence, asking you to endure the whims of spiteful gods, beg shelter from wary rulers and use cunning rather than force to overcome monstrous creatures. It would trade the average open world’s glut of navigational aids for a meditation on alienation and forgetfulness: when…

Dontnod protagonists tend to be fond of talking to themselves, especially if there’s an opportunity for a corny joke. Sam takes this to an extreme by bandying the occasional word with a hallucinatory double, a well-groomed collegiate sort in a striped blazer and specs who pops up at intervals with enigmatic suggestions and warnings. The doppelgänger sometimes appears while you’re in conversation with flesh-and-blood characters, offering his own thoughts on their agendas. Intriguingly, he’ll also try to dissuade you from following up certain leads, promising that it’s for your own good. Presumably he represents some buried aspect of Sam’s psyche, assuming that Sam is not in fact a buried aspect of his. The odds of a concluding revelation in the vein of, say, Fight Club, seem high.…

Developer Experiment 101 Publisher THQ Nordic Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Sweden Release December 31 Vitality almost radiates out of the screen in waves. A year has passed since our last demo of this open-world action-RPG, in which its profusion of ideas meant well but presented as rather rough and scatty. In that time, Experiment 101’s team has grown quietly, but dramatically – and its game has flourished in kind. With some polish, what once seemed like overexuberance is now starting to look rooted in reality. Well, as much as a game about a kung-fu red panda that can mutate its body at will to gain the upper hand – or indeed, hands – can reasonably be. Yes, you’ll start out moving a point around a circular area in…

Game Cyberpunk 2077 Developer CD Projekt Red Publisher CD Projekt Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release TBA We hardly know where to look. Every inch of Night City’s Watson district is alive with detail, denser and richer than anything we’ve ever seen in a videogame before. Normally in a scene like this there’s a particular focal point – in Cyberpunk 2077, everything is a focal point. Over to the left pedestrians pour over a crossing; in the foreground two tattooed Slackers lounge on a low concrete wall as the sun beats down. Hundreds more people, chattering, no single one the same, sweep past protagonist V as he pushes against the crowd. Blinking neon signs boast ‘live nude’ on the sides of skyscrapers; advertisements for NiCola soda blare out jingles. As…

Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn, Tale Of Tales Minecraft Making a museum exhibition, it turns out, can be a lot like making a videogame. That’s certainly been the case with Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt. Showing at the Victoria And Albert Museum in London from now until February 24, and headed up by Design, Architecture and Digital department curators Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing, it takes a close look at the medium’s growth over the last 15 years into one of the most innovative, disruptive and pervasive design disciplines ever. “In the mid-2000s, there was a whole host of technological catalysts which radically impacted the way that games are designed, discussed, and played,” Foulston says, pointing to developments such as broadband, smartphones and social media. “That whole period was not just about game…

Founded 2001 (as Sammy Entertainment) Employees 125 Key staff Peter Della Penna (studio head), Matt Tieger (vice president, game director) URL www.highmoonstudios.com Selected softography Darkwatch, Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy, Transformers: War For Cybertron, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, Transformers: Fall Of Cybertron, Deadpool, Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Destiny Current projects Destiny 2 The call came, as High Moon studio head Peter Della Penna recalls, when Destiny was six months old. By which time, he and his team were already well and truly hooked on Bungie’s MMO shooter. As a brand-new proposition for both developer and publisher, it had already become apparent that this multi-year project was going to struggle to sustain its player base for its planned duration. And so Activision phoned Della Penna and asked if High Moon fancied…

Developer Insomniac Games Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now A few minutes in to Marvel’s Spider-Man, Peter Parker is preparing to suit up and head out. Picking up his costume from a table, he brings it to his nose, and looks briefly disgusted. It’s the sort of peek behind the curtain that this kind of game should be perfect for: it’s only when you get this close to a superhero, and see the world through their eyes for a couple of dozen hours, that you start to wonder about the little things: about, say, what a man-made, skintight costume might smell like after a few nights on (and above) the town. Not great, it turns out. It’s also, whether by accident or design, a canny way of introducing one…

Developer/publisher Drinkbox Studios Format PC, PS4 (tested) Release Out now No chickens were harmed during the making of Guacamelee 2, or so its closing credits claim. Plenty were during the playing, however – or certainly in our time with the game, at any rate. Yet for the most part, it’s not the chicken on the receiving end. In the first game, luchador hero Juan could transform into a rooster as a kind of Morph Ball analogue, squeezing through narrow gaps to locate secret rooms and the like. Now in his feathered guise he’s a full-blown fighter – and with a low slide to trip up opponents and darting diagonal attacks to launch and juggle them, he’s as capable a grappler as in human form, if not more so. Funnier, too:…

Out in the field, campfires are an opportunity to take a load off, recover HP and MP and save your game. But mostly they’re a chance to use your portable forge to make or refine weapons, armour and accessories. The unrefined materials are spread across a grid, with a bar attached to each square: the object is to steadily fill all of these to the green sweet spot with successive bashes. The more you make, the more advanced techniques you unlock: raising the temperature of the forge heightens the potency of the next bash, while a lighter touch is required for those finishing touches. It’s probably too much effort to seek out the materials to create new gear, but a +3 variant on a currently equipped sword or staff does…

Strange Brigade’s ‘tally ho’ presentation is a lot of fun, but it does come with a certain amount of baggage. The game’s occasional half-hearted jabs at the British Empire – mostly in the form of jokes about characters lining their pockets with stolen riches – isn’t enough to dispel the slight hangover of colonialism. One of the four playable characters is African, but with special abilities focused on running fast and leeching the health of enemies she hits, it’s hard to see her presence as a victory for representation. Similarly, future DLC additions to the cast look like they’re playing into period stereotypes of Indian and Japanese people, which may be accurate to the pulp source material, but is certainly uncomfortable viewed with a modern eye.…