Innehållsförteckning för September 2017 från Edge

No studio had a busier E3 than Supermassive Games, but Hidden Agenda might just be the pick of the Guildford studio’s litter. Using Sony’s new Playlink initiative, which uses a smartphone app for local social play, the game casts up to four players as both team-mates and opponents: you’ll take critical decisions together, but might occasionally be given the opportunity to screw over the others for your own benefit. The Until Dawn formula is a fine fit for local multiplayer – Supermassive says Hidden Agenda was partly inspired by YouTube videos of people playing its notionally singleplayer adventure in groups. Once again every character can die as a result of your decisions and actions, including the detective and district attorney who serve as protagonists. Playlink may have been primarily designed…

While Rift launch title Lucky’s Tale had plenty of problems, its use of VR was not among them. Viewing the action from a shifting thirdperson perspective helped elevate it from a bland cartoon platformer to – well, a bland cartoon platformer that felt somewhat novel because it was in VR. Developer Playful is hoping to repeat the trick with Star Child. It’s a galaxy apart from Lucky’s Tale, but its inspirations are similarly obvious, despite the sci-fi set dressing. Rather than call back to the ‘90s, here it’s the new breed of 2.5D platformers, and particularly Inside, that lays the foundation. Unimaginative, perhaps, but the pedigree’s there: director Kynan Pearson has credits on the likes of Metroid Prime, Halo and the Shadow Of The Colossus remake. We’re hardly expecting a…

This year’s E3 hardly lacked for the influence of The Last Of Us and Dark Souls, but nowhere were those two inspirations more coherent, than in Kratos’ latest outing. The father/son relationship that lies at the core of the new God Of War may not be especially convincing after Kratos’ long, wearying history as the biggest empathy vacuum in videogames, but by insisting that our hero’s offspring, Atreus, will be more asset than burden, creative director Cory Barlog continues to make all the right noises. In addition to helping out in combat, Atreus will act as translator, since Kratos cannot speak the language of his new Norse homeland. And the prospect of the two sharing a progression curve throws up some interesting, if absurd, decisions: shall we make you a…

Behind closed doors, the day really is gone. While SIE Bend’s press-conference showing had protagonist Deacon St John assault an enemy camp in broad daylight, here a studio rep plays through the same section at night. Where the public demo took place in blazing sunshine, here St John pads through the driven snow. And while previously he’d lured a swarm of infected (here styled ‘freakers’) to clear out the settlement, this second playthrough has St John work largely from the shadows. On stage, the mutant swarm made for another convincing showcase of Bend’s remarkable flowing crowd technology. Behind closed doors, the studio intends to highlight how dynamic weather can affect the way a given section plays out, and to show off St John’s other, more personal methods for dealing with…

Heat waves ripple over shimmering asphalt, sandy residue coats headlights in splotches, and there’s not a jagged edge in sight, unless you count the harsh angles of sun-bleached cliffs surrounding new track Dubai Autodrome. Turn 10’s car sim spearheads the launch of Xbox One X for a reason. It perfectly showcases the platform’s strengths, with 4K resolution at 60FPS and HDR lighting as rich as the premium you’ll pay to see it. After Forza Horizon 3’s off-road escapade last year, the return to fixed circuit racing focuses your senses on the temperament of your vehicle rather than whose garden you’re veering into. Handling’s certainly grippier, given it takes place exclusively on tarmac. But don’t take your eyes off the road. Dynamic weather draws fresh beauty from courses we’ve lapped hundreds…

Three years after its debut on Microsoft’s stage and with development on the game now well into its seventh year, the end is almost in sight for Cuphead: it will, we’re assured, be finally with us soon. The game has had an awkward history at E3: non-playable the year it was announced, decried as nothing more than a hot-looking boss rush the year after and then, last year, damned for its cobbled-together platforming sections. Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t playable at the show this year. Given that meagre team size, it’s probably the right call to finish it instead of knocking out another demo, but it was a disappointing, conspicuous absence – even if people would’ve probably slagged it off.…

Developer Mojang Publisher Microsoft Studios Format Xbox One Release 2017 Yep, it’s still a sensation. So much so that Mojang has announced the cross-platform Better Together update, which will let Minecrafters everywhere share the same game worlds regardless of the device they’re playing on. Unless you own a PS4 or PS Vita, that is. Sony has, once again, declined to join in on the fun, citing security concerns. For The Players indeed. Making Minecraft a more unified community brings benefits, of course. The Minecraft Marketplace – selling custom content like skins, texture packs and staggeringly detailed pre-built maps from individual creators – will expand, while multiplayer servers from community partners Lifeboat, InPvP, Mineplex and CubeCraft are to be brought into the game on all platforms. Would-be owners of the Xbox…

There’s a reason Nintendo has limited our glimpses of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to a lot of footage of people running around – and it’s not just been to showcase the variety and beauty of the game’s world. Combat has, in a way, been streamlined for this sequel. But it’s a difficult thing to get your head around. Your avatar performs their basic attacks automatically, as in the first game. And you still select from a pool of special attacks, known as Arts. But where previously Arts were governed by cooldowns, here they are charged by performing basic attacks. Performing Arts, in turn, charges your Blade ability. Once the meter is full, you can inflict a status effect – but hold on to it, and you can power up a level-three…

Ubisoft’s decision to give Assassin’s Creed a year off in 2016 was a huge one. The series has, after all, become one of the most important entries on its publisher’s balance sheet: its largest seller, on shelves every Autumn without fail, guaranteed to sell multiple millions and offset any disappointments elsewhere on the release slate. Taking this bold step would, you’d think, mean Origins would emerge from its extra 12 months at E3 2017 shorn of bugs, and with a host of new gameplay ideas. If that’s the case, prepare to be disappointed. In fairness, with several months of development to go – and the final stages of a game’s creation being one of optimisation – it may not be fair to lay too heavily into this weirdly jerky, uneven…

If you were disappointed by Mass Effect Andromeda, here’s the game to blame; Anthem has been BioWare’s primary focus for the past few years. Some of the studio’s fans are unhappy, taking this as a signal that the days of BioWare making deep, singleplayer, story-based games are, if not over, then at least fading fast. Others – us included – are simply struggling to see the game beneath its all-too-obvious influences. There are shades of Titanfall in its robot designs, and of any recent Call Of Duty in the class-based, but customisable exosuits. Others have pointed out similarities to Killzone Shadow Fall or Dead Space or just about any sci-fi shooter you can think of. Mostly, there is Destiny. So, so much Destiny. It is multiplayer focused; there is loot;…

The empty wheelchair – a maligned horror cliché cameoed in everything from BioShock to Alien Isolation. You know the drill: creep into a room and a light flickers; a vacant chair sits lifeless; a bloodied hand mark on the floor, its owner having been dragged unceremoniously into the shadows. Things are different in Wolfenstein II. There’s a wheelchair, but it’s not for incidental environmental flourish. Instead, MachineGames uses it to transform returning protagonist William ‘BJ’ Blazkowicz into a mobile weapon. Set five months after the first game, The New Colossus’ opening sees Blazkowicz newly awoken from a coma and in a vulnerable state. Wheeling around with nothing but a submachine gun, you have to navigate the tight corridors of a stolen Nazi U-boat. But it’s different to how you’re used…

One of the secrets of South Park’s success as a TV show is the speed at which its endearingly, enduringly cheap production values can be taken from the script to the screen; the show is made to a rolling schedule of one-week deadlines. Whether you like it or not, it is always, at least, topical. That’s certainly not the case for The Fractured But Whole. Announced at E3 two years ago, it’s already been delayed twice. And the longer it takes, the less relevant its Hollywoodskewering tale of two rival superhero factions feels. Ha, yes, they sure do make a lot of superhero movies these days. What else have you got? Fart jokes, by the looks of it. While predecessor The Stick Of Truth was not without its charms, the…

The latest product of Fun House, the small outfit at Ubisoft Montreal with an experimental brief, sees the team partner up with Spectrevision, an LA VFX firm co-founded by one Elijah Wood. This isn’t Wood’s first foray into VR – he voiced the title character in Henry, an Emmy-winning short that launched alongside Rift. But Transference, as an Ubisoft producer was at pains to point out during a pre- E3 briefing, is absolutely, positively a game, albeit one with film-like elements. It tasks you with entering a VR reconstruction of the minds of multiple members of a single family, piecing together their history and affecting events in the real world through your decisions. It’s a Spectrevision concept built by Ubisoft, whose continued support of and experimentation with VR is a…

Ubisoft may have given Beyond Good & Evil 2 the closing, one-more-thing showstopper slot at its E3 press conference, but Starlink was the most pleasant surprise of the publisher’s show, and arguably of E3 as a whole. It marks Ubisoft’s belated entry into the toys-to-life sector – which, previously, had been widely assumed to be on the way out. Starlink might just be its second wind. The toys-to-life genre has two persistent problems. First, its collectible figurines play a single, specific role; you can always buy more, but the differences between them are rarely transformative, simply variations on a theme. Second, the genre is still waiting for its first real classic, for an end to truly justify the means. It has, as a result, struggled to shake off the perception…

This gave E3 2017 its Milkshake Duck moment, after an eye-catching announcement trailer turned heads across the industry, only to turn stomachs within minutes after its co-creator’s antifeminist beliefs were shared on social media. By the time attendees of Microsoft’s E3 conference had emerged from the arena, the Internet had already regretted to inform them that The Last Night, for all its neon-lit, pixel-art beauty, was a problem. Creators can believe what they want, of course, but when their controversial personal politics inform a game’s core concept, you can expect people to turn away in their droves – and that’s precisely what’s happened to a game that takes progressivism having ‘won’ as its dystopian jumping-off point. For what it’s worth, director Tim Sorets has distanced himself from views he says…

While Ni No Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch was not without its flaws, it was the sheer verve of Level-5 and Studio Ghibli’s worlds and storytelling that drew us in, inspiring a real sense of childlike wonder. Despite Studio Ghibli itself no longer being directly involved, we’re excited to revisit Ding Dong Dell – this time playing as recently usurped boy-king Evan. Unfortunately, the battle we’re thrown into couldn’t be less inspirational. Fighting against dragon Longfang is a mess of muddy, brown visuals and confusing hitboxes. The sequel has moved away from the classic, largely turn-based combat of its predecessor, favouring a realtime combat system – an attempt to appeal to a broader Western audience, presumably, but the battle feels miserably slow as a result. It doesn’t help that…

An Ubisoft driving game was the last place we expected to see an Inception reference, but here we all are. We’re playing the opening mission of The Crew 2, and the Christopher Nolan nod is intended to add a little dramatic spectacle to developer Ivory Tower’s grand plan for its open-world sequel: realtime vehicle switching. Using a radial menu and the right analogue stick, you can move in a flash from the driver’s seat of a sports car to the cockpit of a light aircraft, and from there to the helm of a sprint boat, then back and forth as you see fit. The reins are a little tighter in this scripted opening mission, however: all the better, it turns out, to bend the scenery about every time you switch.…

Format PC, PS4 Developer Giant Sparrow Publisher Annapurna Interactive Origin US Release 2017 Like all good stories, it started with a shark in a tree. Giant Sparrow had begun developing its debut, The Unfinished Swan, with nothing more than what writer/director Ian Dallas describes as “an abstract but describable goal”. For that game, Dallas hoped to create a sense of awe and wonder; this time he was hoping to evoke “the sublime horror of nature”. The process had worked once, so Dallas and his team were emboldened to try a similar approach for its successor, but it wasn’t until three or four months into development that the image of a shark in a forest, falling 30 or 40 feet to the ground, came into his head. Nature’s sublime horror suddenly…

Much of the appeal of Marvel’s friendly neighbourhood Spider- Man comes from his personality – the sense that, like most of us, he’s making things up as he goes along. Insomniac’s version of the hero, however, looks positively professional. Sony’s behind-closed-doors E3 demos are normally intended to dig a little deeper into a game’s press-conference showing, but our second viewing of Spider-Man is almost indistinguishable from the first. This is a Spider-Man who, by age 23, has found all eight of his implied feet, boasting mastery over his movements unless the script demands otherwise. At its best, Insomniac’s game is fluid and improvisational, the stuff of our web-flinging dreams. But it’s nothing we haven’t seen before – both in the press-conference demo, and Rocksteady’s Batman games. Parker spends much of…

Poor Mark Cerny. The chief system architect of PlayStation 4, who helped devise the checkerboard-rendering solution that meant PS4 Pro could achieve 4K on a budget, couldn’t even get his new game on Sony’s E3 stage. For all that PS4 launch title Knack has become a running joke, its sequel is a rare commodity: a firstparty PlayStation game that will be on shelves this year. You’d have thought its publisher might have been able to spare it 90 seconds of stage time, if only out of respect for its creator. Especially because – whisper it – it actually looks OK. Knack II has God Of War’s writer and appears to have borrowed its combat template too, with a super move affording our hero two swords for a spell of Kratos-style…

Or, if we may, Square Enix Batshit Fishing. The publisher’s post-launch support for Final Fantasy XV has been commendable, and varied – recent updates have added thirdperson shooting stages and free-roaming, off-road driving, while the forthcoming Comrades expansion will offer fourplayer co-op. It seems Square Enix intends to, slowly but surely, turn Final Fantasy XV into the everygame, containing every genre and gameplay mechanic known to man. It’s an interesting experiment, you must admit. That’s at least one of the more plausible explanations for Monster Of The Deep, a VR-powered mix of Sega Bass Fishing with FFXV’s matey central foursome and hideous aquatic bestiary. Details are thin on the ground, but really, there’s little more to say. This is FFXV’s fishing minigame reborn in a VR headset through the lens…

First came campy teen slasher Until Dawn, then PSVR horror-coaster spin-off Rush Of Blood – yet Supermassive still isn’t done with the scares. It’s back to the butterfly effect for The Inpatient, a psychological horror set 60 years before the events of Until Dawn in the Blackwood Sanatorium asylum in which Supermassive’s BAFTA-winning horror was partially set. If it doesn’t sound terribly original, that’s because it isn’t. Our demo soon reveals the triple whammy of amnesiac protagonist, flashbacks and cheap (but effective) jump scares. Dialogue choices are made using head-tracking controls, with key decisions leading to different outcomes at the end of the three-hour runtime. There’s a glimmer of proper dread when our left ‘leg’ is punctured by a syringe – but it’s not the first time we’ve had something…

There can be few greater signs of how things have changed chez Sony this generation than the debut trailer for Horizon Zero Dawn’s first DLC expansion. In years past, the sight of the Guerrilla Games logo on Sony’s E3 stage would have resulted in a polite ripple of apathy for the announcement of a new Killzone and, in 18 months or so, another Edge 7. Yet Horizon was the firstparty standard bearer in what was a remarkable first few months of 2017 on PS4. And in the absence of much else to get excited about on Sony’s console for the rest of this year, an excuse to dive back in to one of the finest open worlds around is not to be sniffed at. Moving Horizon’s action to the frozen…

So it does still exist. Crackdown 3 was announced at Microsoft’s conference three years ago, and we were beginning to worry it had met a similar fate to some of the games with which it shared a stage that day. Fable Legends, Scalebound and Phantom Dust have all since been cancelled, and given how long Crackdown 3 has been in the shadows, we worried it would be next. Not so: it was here, it was playable, and it’ll be out before Christmas. Concerns persist, however. This is the singleplayer portion of the game, developed by Sumo Digital and, because it’s playable offline, shorn of the eye-catching, cloud-powered destruction that turned heads when Crackdown 3 was unveiled. Stripped of its apparent USP, the game loses much of its allure; the concept…

Brendan Greene must be enjoying life at the moment. Currently having phenomenal success on Steam with his battle royale multiplayer shooter, the self-styled PlayerUnknown is now set to clean up on consoles – and timed Xbox One exclusivity presumably didn’t come cheap. Whatever the cost, it’s quite the catch for Microsoft. The PUBG hype train shows no signs of slowing down, the formula bulletproof: 100-player deathmatches, pitting teams of up to four players against each other, with occasional random missile strikes and an evershrinking play area to prevent camping. There can only be one winner. Given its compulsive allure as a spectator sport, Battlegrounds might even be the game that finally gives Microsoft’s Twitch-alike Mixer service a reason to exist.…

Azombie game is a hard sell in 2017. But it was a hard sell in 2013 too, when Undead Labs launched the first State Of Decay. Clunky, uneven and ramshackle, the game nonetheless attracted some 4.5 million players, its flaws easily overlooked because of the things it did so well. It was not a game about killing zombies – though we certainly killed a lot. Instead, it was a game about surviving the undead apocalypse, a deep simulation of what it takes for people to stay alive against overwhelming, flesh-eating odds. The sequel smooths out the first game’s kinks, broadens and deepens its simulation, and adds what the studio says was the most-requested feature that never made it into the first game: online co-op. That comes either through menu selections…

After the unlikely success of Hyrule Warriors on Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo was always likely to task Omega Force with repeating the trick on Switch. And while on first inspection this is simply what the name implies – a classic Dynasty Warriors hack-and-slash set in the Fire Emblem universe – this is no lazy cash-in. Indeed, the developers have gone to surprising lengths to make this feel like a Fire Emblem game. The grid-based map screen hints at what’s to come. Ally characters can be assigned to different parts of the level, and will attack or defend automatically as circumstances demand, though you can switch between party members instantly with a single button press (a feature introduced in Hyrule Warriors’ 3DS incarnation). If two allies are assigned to the…

You can normally name a new game within seconds of the start of its E3 trailer, but Metro Exodus had us stumped. The hints were there, of course – the camera lingering on an abandoned gas mask certainly suggested its heritage – but it was outdoors. The Metro games take place almost entirely below ground. We’re told to expect plenty of similar sections in Metro Exodus, though it appears the focus this time is on the surface. 4A Games intends to mix Metro’s signature linear action with more open, explorable environments as returning protagonist Artyom embarks on a train journey across post-apocalyptic Russia. The demo, with its suspiciously well-timed attacks from persistent mutants, was worryingly tightly scripted; 4A prefers the term ‘choreographed’, and insists the final game will feel more…

From the looks of the reveal trailer and the sounds of the title, A Way Out is a two-player co-op Prison Break simulator. But in our demo, jailbird lead characters Leo and Vincent have long flown the clink and are wandering about a petrol station they’re planning to rob. On one half of the split screen, the player controlling Leo decides to warn a customer away and enters a cutscene conversation. Vincent strolls past in realtime in Leo’s background, sabotaging the phone in view on his screen to prevent any inconvenient outgoing calls. We can’t help but think of a David Cage game, with its focus on choice, consequence and gently generic action scenes. But the two-player entry requirement – preferably local, we’re told by director Josef Fares – is…

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Arc System Works makes playable anime. It was true for the astonishing Guilty Gear Xrd, but Dragon Ball FighterZ is the ultimate manifestation of the phrase. It’s built with the same stylish toolkit: made in the Unreal Engine, running at 60fps but with character models animated at 15fps to replicate the look of handdrawn anime. But this time, it’s actually based on one. Dragon Ball Z fans have been underserved by tie-in videogames for years. That streak has ended. Dragon Ball FighterZ is spectacular. Clear, crisp and cartoonish, it is eminently readable despite the onscreen chaos. It’s a 3v3 fighter in the Marvel Vs Capcom style, where tactical play revolves around keeping a well-balanced team alive. The E3 build lets us…

Credit where it’s due: 505 Games has come a long way since the Cooking Mama days. After the likes of Payday 2 and Abzû, and with Alan Wake developer Remedy recently signing up, the publisher is on something of a roll. Last Day Of June may not hold quite that profile, but it’s further proof that 505 is quietly becoming a vital, discerning publishing partner for the indie scene. Helmed by Murasaki Baby director Massimo Guarini and inspired by a song by Steven Wilson, Last Day Of June tells of an elderly man whose wife dies in a car crash. He discovers he can time-travel through her paintings, and relives her final hours in an attempt to alter history by preventing the fateful crash. Heartfelt, plaintive and with a charming,…

We’ve played Absolver a few times now, and each time we do, we’re a shade more intrigued. This online, martial-arts, fightinggame RPG certainly doesn’t lack complexity: brawling your way through its world takes myriad forms of skill. There’s the twitchbased kind, based on rhythm and timing as you dodge, feint and parry foes. Preparation is important, too: you gradually learn new moves from sparring with others, building them into optimal, beautiful ‘decks’ of combos and fighting styles. And there’s a mental skill involved, a balletic dance of memorisation and improvisation, as you chain and switch between combos, weapons and styles. And we really do mean dance. We try the new drunken boxing style during a one-on-one duel with another player, our avatar’s woozy stagger immediately calling to mind early Jackie…

You might not be interested in Beyond Good & Evil 2, but Ubisoft certainly gives plenty of fucks about it. This was surely the sweariest E3 trailer of all time, with most of the filth coming from a cockney simian whose voice actor appears to have stumbled accidentally into the wrong booth while looking for Guy Ritchie’s latest project. A CG trailer may not tell us much about Michel Ancel’s long-awaited game – aside from its foul mouth, anyway – but for most, a chance to simply lay eyes on such a long-awaited game was more than enough. Behind closed doors at E3, however, more emerges. This is a large, seamless online game, playable alone or with others. The ship seen at the end of the trailer forms your base…

Change is everywhere in Monster Hunter World, which initially led some to worry that Capcom was dumbing down a series which, while colossally successful in Japan, has never really taken off elsewhere. Those that love it, really love it; many more simply ignore it, while others bounce hard off a game that can often seem to have been designed specifically to repel them. Monster Hunter World suggests that Capcom has belatedly realised that there was much about its game that was needlessly fussy and, in places, archaic. Series fans have heralded as transformative a set of changes that simply make Monster Hunter feel contemporary. A fast-travel system that lets you return to base camp wherever you are; the ability to change gear at said camp; radial menus for item selection,…

Flow is everything in a great competitive FPS – at least, it is for Lawbreakers director and industry veteran Cliff Bleszinski. “The kind of shooters that I like to make these days, getting away from Gears [Of War], have that sense of flow,” he tells us. “For me, it’s what verbs I have – how quickly I can jump off the walls, dodge, grapple, jump-jet, stab, slide.” In fairness to Bleszinski and his new studio, the verb-vomit is an accurate representation of their debut game. With the laws of gravity scrambled after the destruction of the moon, Lawbreakers’ arenas are a mix of tight corridors and open, low-grav areas in which airborne opponents soar past each other while frantically trying to rack up kills. It’s running at 60fps on PS4…

Game Super Mario Odyssey Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD) Format Switch Release October 27 There’s an awful lot of Breath Of The Wild in Super Mario Odyssey. Sometimes, it’s a direct lift: jump into a lake and dive beneath the water, for instance, and Mario borrows Link’s stamina wheel, repurposing it as a breath meter. Often, it’s in the scenery, in the way a tempting trinket looms on the horizon, far away and out of focus enough to compel closer inspection. It’s there in the structure, too. Instead of Stars, here Mario collects Moons to progress, and while plenty are locked away behind tricky platforming sections or boss battles, many are to be found through simple, playful experimentation with your surroundings. A ground pound on a suspicious bump in a rooftop, for…

Sega was dead, or so they said. Back in 2012, with financial pressures forcing it out of publishing in continental Europe, the company’s execs spoke ominously of ‘strategic realignment’ and ‘a refocusing on digital’. To all extents and purposes, it seemed beyond a handful of proven successes – Aliens, Total War, Football Manager and Sonic – the Sega we all knew and loved was no more. Five years on, and things are looking a good deal rosier for the publisher, thanks to a number of smart licensing deals, creative partnerships and revivals of the games with which it made its name in the first place. Last year, it acquired Endless Space developer Amplitude Studios; in May, the sequel to the popular 4X strategy sequel launched to a warm reception. Halo…

Despite its charming jewel tones and tiny feathered protagonist, Luna has quite a painful premise. “It’s a game about mistakes,” Funomena CEO Robin Hunicke tells us of her new VR adventure, which is due later this year for PC and Rift. “In our cultures, a lot of the dialogue about mistakes comes in the form of shaming or blaming oneself, or others, for having done what humans do – which is try things and fail.” Luna aims to challenge that. The story starts with Bird, who is tricked by wily Owl into swallowing the last piece of a waning Moon and upsetting the balance of nature. The rest involves putting the pieces back together: reassembling constellations, arranging terrarium-style levels and helping fellow animals who have also been fooled. Physical interaction…

Quantic Dream is quick to wave away the suggestion that Detroit: Become Human’s tale of race-based slavery might be in any way, you know, political. Eyebrows all over E3 shot up when auteur David Cage said his dystopian android thriller wouldn’t deliver a message. Associate game director Gregorie Diaconu backs him up: “We are not trying to have an agenda,” he tells us. “The thing is, we started making Detroit a few years ago,” he adds. He points out that Quantic’s 2012 tech demo, Kara, was the game’s true genesis. “We try to be very sincere – stay true to each character, let you make your own decisions and reach your own conclusions about what it is exactly to live in that kind of world.” At first, we balk at…

True to its word, Naughty Dog isn’t bringing back Nathan Drake for one last, archaeologically devastating hurrah. Chloe Frazer makes for a convincing enough replacement, though. In this hefty standalone expansion, we watch her pulling off all the usual moves in her search for the legendary Tusk Of Ganesh: yanking guards over ledges, sneaking through grass, sliding from pillar to post to avoid gunfire and generally running her mouth. Uncharted fans, rest easy – Drake may be gone, but his template endures. Not that there isn’t room for a few characteristic set-piece surprises: our demo ends with an armoured jeep bursting through the wall Frazer is climbing. The owner of said jeep is Asav, a power-hungry mercenary also seeking the Tusk. We’re on familiar ground, then, but The Lost Legacy…

Sony is unlikely to ever repeat the remarkable three-hit combo of its press conference of E3 2015, when Final Fantasy VII Remake, Shenmue III and The Last Guardian took the game industry’s annual festival of hype to an unprecedented peak. This remaster, while rumoured in the run-up to the show – and mangled through Chinese whispers to be a sequel, rather than a remake – was as close as Sony got to wet-dream wish fulfilment at E3 2017. Fumito Ueda’s shonkiest game is to finally get the technical execution its design ideas have always deserved, courtesy of remaster specialist Bluepoint Games. It’s certainly in good hands. Bluepoint’s CV includes some of the best remakes around: the Texas studio was behind the Metal Gear Solid and Uncharted collections, ported Titanfall to…

Farpoint may have come and gone, but your new PlayStation Aim controller isn’t quite ready for the attic just yet, thanks to Supermassive Games’ cheerily safe military shooter. Abrupt shifts in perspective jar at first: pressing X autoruns our soldier in thirdperson to cover, where we snap back into firstperson to fire over cars and through windows. But as we make our way across the bridge with our co-op partner, we’re soon convinced of the system’s elegance. VR footwork is at best functional and at worst nauseating, so semi-automatic movement lets us enjoy simply aiming down sights and pulling triggers without rooting us to the spot, as many other VR shooters do. Voice chat feels optional rather than a necessity, and while a thumbstick flick performs a quick 180, we…

Navigating our way to the Microsoft booth this year is easy: we simply have to follow the laughter. Chuckling groups stagger away from it in droves, telling tall tales of their time at sea. Clearly much has changed in the last 12 months. Sailing the seven seas at last year’s E3 was a delight soured only by the lingering question of what else there was to do in Sea Of Thieves. But this time, our demo is packed with possibilities: treasure to hunt, riddles to solve and chunky little blunderbusses to fire at skeletons. At some point, we might even get around to them. Simply boarding the ship is an uproarious struggle: our crewmates find a barrel of grog and the inevitable happens, the arc of our stagger now wider…

This came as little surprise given the success of Ori And The Blind Forest, but did they have to name it after a 1980s TV show whose TV-faced antagonist still gives us the willies? Perhaps it’s an appropriate choice for the sequel to a game whose ethereal Gareth Coker score and Ghibli-style whimsy belied some often infuriatingly punishing level design, which was only mildly tempered by the ability to drop your own respawn point on the fly. Expect more of the same here, albeit in 4K with HDR support on PC and Xbox One X – though if Moon Studios hasn’t learned its lesson, and gives us another hair-tearingly difficult level like the original’s Ginso Tree section, there’ll be hell to pay.…

It’s quite a bold recipe. Take a humdrum, charmless, weirdly slow 3D platformer that’s only even vaguely noteworthy because of its VR component. Now, remove the VR bit, and make a sequel to it. The result, as you might expect, is very little worth writing home about. And that’s putting it politely. A trailer should, you’d think, show a game’s highlights. On that basis we assume that the titular fox bouncing on a trampoline to collect a vertical line of coins, hitting a switch to reveal a platform two feet away, jumping a series of small gaps, or ambling through a side-scrolling section, are about as good as Super Lucky’s Tale gets. At an E3 where Super Mario Odyssey rewrote the 3D-platforming rulebook to such stunning effect, this never stood…

The last thing we expected the Rabbids to have was a brain. Yet the detestable creatures’ next outing sees gaming’s most beloved avatar fights side by side with Rayman’s furry, moronic annoyances. And it’s smart. This turn-based strategy RPG borrows much from XCOM. Yes, including the guns — we’re still struggling to process that. Miyamoto asked Ubisoft to “try and make a Mario game that has never been made before”. Job done. Our three-hero squad consists of Mario himself alongside — bite your tongue, now — Rabbid Peach and Rabbid Luigi. The trick is manoeuvering each into favourable squares within their allotted movement fields (indicated by a blue border). You must set up attack rounds for your team while minimising the damage from the enemy Rabbids’ turns, using various kinds…

EA has struck an oddly apologetic tone when discussing Battlefront II. The lack of content in its predecessor’s launch incarnation was always going to be the elephant in the room, but it’s been strange to see a company normally so sure of itself go to such lengths to reassure everyone that it has learned from its past mistakes. On stage at EA Play, the publisher’s CEO Andrew Wilson said there’d been plenty of feedback to 2015’s Star Wars Battlefront: “A lot of it positive, and a bunch of it… constructive.” He even paused for the laugh he knew was coming. The EA Motive producer who guides us through a demo toes the party line, assuring us that Battlefront II will ship with three times the content of its predecessor. That…

Bingo cards at the ready: this open world RPG has shades of Dark Souls, Journey and Zelda. Combat in the dusky forest feels deliberate – and familiar – but it’s the passive multiplayer element that introduces intrigue. We can’t talk to our partner (as in Journey, there’ll be no voice chat, with gestures the only form of communication) but when we spot a door with two handholds, we wordlessly agree on what to do. Teamwork is key once the dungeon opens – our friend lights the darkness with a lantern while we battle a gargantuan spider. Our demo comes to an abrupt end when we blindly follow our anonymous pal off a ledge to our death. Witho no verbal warnings to heed, Ashen will be punishing. But away from the…

Phew. While our trip to Sledgehammer Games for E307’s cover story left us confident that the studio’s exhaustive research work would deliver a robust, authentic singleplayer campaign, we remained unconvinced by the multiplayer component. Slow, heavy, World War II-era weapons and gear seemed incompatible with the Ritalin-paced merry-go-round of the modern-day COD online mode. After an hour-long session, any lingering concerns have melted away. Team Deathmatch and Domination play out largely as you’d expect, but benefit hugely from what feels like a slower pace. It may simply be a consequence of WWII’s developer removing the expanded traversal abilities that have infected COD multiplayer in recent times, or of flattening out maps which had grown upwards to accommodate double jumps and wall-runs. But it feels right – more so than any…

Annapurna Interactive’s winning form continues with this psychedelic rock opera, the brainchild of Australian developer Johnny Galvatron. As well as designing the game, he’s supplied the frantic fretwork that provides The Artful Escape with its beating heart. Tap the jump button twice and, as you’d expect, our lanky, bespectacled hero performs a double jump. But keep pressing it and he’ll whip out a magical guitar and play a lightning-paced lick that’s pure Bill & Ted. These airborne sonic excursions sync up perfectly with the ethereal backing track; never before has running from left to right felt so wrong. This is a game that begs to be played in the air. It’s not just for show, admittedly – from time to time you’ll come to a chasm that must be crossed…

Well, it’s a damn sight better than we were expecting. Built on the foundations of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, without Kojima’s direction, we’re fully prepared for co-op survival zombie shooter Metal Gear Survive to be a hollow cash-grab. But during the third wave of our base-defence efforts, up to our ears in mutant threat and gut-churningly low on shotgun shells, we realise we’re having fun. Controls recall MGSV’s online multiplayer, but the D-pad brings up various defensive items to help protect our wormhole generator. While combat is basic and clunky, it’s not without nuance. Ever-weirder enemies have weak spots: shooting Bombers’ bulbous heads isn’t as effective as knee-capping them, for example. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, and it’s not particularly polished either (a recent delay might help fix…

At an E3 where Sea Of Thieves delighted, it was a bit of a surprise to see another multiplayer pirate title appear. In fairness, Ubisoft did it first: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’s naval combat was rousing stuff. That component was built by the publisher’s Singapore studio; now, it is building an entire game around Indeed, our 5v5 battle feels almost exactly like Black Flag at first. We play from the thirdperson perspective of our chosen ship’s captain, tapping buttons to order our crew to speed up, turn or slow down our vessel. But as we learn the rules – take down enemy player and AI ships for treasure, then escape safely to bank the most loot and win – tactics come to the fore. In our Loot Hunt match,…

Was this sequel commissioned after a Bethesda exec spotted that there was a Friday the 13th in October this year, and felt the opportunity was too good to miss? Whatever the reasoning, creator Shinji Mikami is being given the chance to address the failings of the promising, but flawed original The Evil Within, as protagonist Sebastian Castellanos returns to the madness to save Lily, the daughter he thought he had lost in a house fire. The chief addition is a series of open, freely explorable environments designed to balance out the tight, linear areas that powered the first game, and will return here. There’s also a device that lets Castellanos move between Union, the horrific mystical city conjured by Lily’s subconscious, and the real world. Hopefully Mikami and co have…

Given how poorly suited the typical open-world game is to a showfloor demo – a condensed, 20-minute slice rarely flatters a sprawling, 50-hour whole – perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into it. But we come away from our first sit down with E308’s cover star feeling a little deflated. Our excitement for Far Cry 5 stems largely from its setting and story; two elements that are never going to be the stars of an E3 demo. But still, at the core, this is just another Far Cry, a game of assaulting various configurations of enemies with stealth or absurd ordnance. You needn’t fix what’s not broken, sure. But we found precious little to be excited about. Indeed, the major gameplay addition, the Guns For Hire system, does little to…

With Dontnod busy working on a second season of episodic teenage drama Life is Strange, new studio Deck Nine has been picked by Square Enix to explore what came before. This three-episode prequel is an effort to meet the passionate fanbase’s demand for more, again taking place in Arcadia Bay but a few years prior to Max Caulfield’s story. Max has momentarily moved away, and so the spotlight falls on her best friend Chloe Price. Foul-mouthed and fancy-free, Price is a fan-favourite character, and her troubled past coloured many of the events, choices and outcomes in Life is Strange. Before The Storm focuses on the complicated relationship between Price and another returning character, Rachel Amber. But there’ll be no timerewinding powers present in the prequel. In our demo, Price navigates…