Innehållsförteckning för August 2019 från Edge

“For many years, Microsoft has been a key business partner for us, though the two companies have also been competing in some areas.”Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida puts a kindly gloss on the current generation’s non-war when announcing a cloud streaming deal with Microsoft “When game studios die, we shouldn’t pull the games. Residual payments need to exist in games. We’re erasing art!”Former COD developer Robert Bowling laments the demise of not only Telltale Games, but of Telltale’s games, too “Through your experience playing the game, I hope you’ll come to understand the true importance of forging connections with others.”Ah, Hideo Kojima, so that’s why you’ve spent the last two years posting selfies with every game-studio CEO on the planet “We looked at what Marvel has done in taking the world…

Publisher Id Software Developer Bethesda Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin US Release TBA Put down the shotgun, pressure-wash away the dismembered corpses and Doom is really a puzzle game, albeit a perfectly tuned, tremendously tachycardic one. Despite its new, somewhat loftier setting, Eternal is no different. So while the resting heart-rate may have been punched up another two-dozen BPM or so, the dazzlingly pure framework that Id Software built for 2016’s reboot is still firmly, intoxicatingly intact. “If you meet people’s expectations, you haven’t done enough,” says Hugo Martin, the game’s co-director, as he explains the nuances of refining a series like this. The answer, he acknowledges, is not just to meet expectations, but to surpass them. Id’s aim with Eternal is to provide players with the exact…

Developer Sharkbomb Studios Publisher No More Robots Format PC, Switch Origin Germany Release Summer (PC), 2020 (Switch) Hope is in short supply in any postapocalyptic scenario, but Nowhere Prophet is no ordinary post-apocalypse. Martin Nerurkar’s enterprising deck-builder adds a dash of optimism and a splash of colour to the genre. As its creator points out, it’s less The Road and more Mad Max: Fury Road, which he (correctly) identifies as “one of the best movies of the past decade”. But its distinctive look is rooted more in his own half-Indian heritage: the bright robes sported by the characters are inspired by the festival Holi. For once, browns and greys are scarce. The game begins with the discovery of a dying machine, which speaks of a crypt somewhere out in the…

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Developer Infinity Ward Publisher Activision Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release October 25 Joining Tomb Raider and God Of War in the “most likely to confuse parents at Christmas” club is Infinity Ward’s reboot of its esteemed 2007 FPS (itself remastered in 2016). This time, you play grizzled mainstay Captain Price and Urzikstan rebel leader Farah Karim, fighting all over the world on both sides of a harrowingly contemporary war. Photogrammetry and new spectral rendering technology hope to boost gritty realism. In the interest of preserving it, a co-op mode replaces Zombies – though, as ever, we expect the rampant teabaggery of the multiplayer to forcibly drag us back to reality. We appreciate the effort, at least. DEATH STRANDING Developer Kojima Productions Publisher…

Developer Avalanche Studios, Id Software Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now There are a number of game development jobs we wouldn’t do for any price: modelling rocks, for instance. Yet we’ve always fancied a go at naming things. We could do you a pretty good Destiny arsenal, we reckon, and could cook up excellent business names for a future Grand Theft Auto. To that list we would like to add the job of naming NPCs in a future Rage sequel. Lord only knows what Avalanche’s narrative team were on during Rage 2’s development, but we want some of it: it’s given us the likes of Peely Wally, Chris Le Dong and Mike Chinwag. Whatever the source of that creative spark, it’s given them the…

Developer Mobius Digital Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now Thank goodness that in space no-one can hear you scream, otherwise our reputation as an intrepid explorer would be in tatters. At first glance, the autumnal colours and painterly geometries of Outer Wilds – not to mention a lovingly simulated marshmallow-roasting mechanic – suggest relaxed space-camping. The reality is quite different. Gigantic anglerfish, landmass-juggling cyclones, caves filling up with sand, moon rocks that move whenever we’re not looking directly at them, yawning black holes that spit us into the other side of the solar system: we know now that we are terrified of all of these things, and more besides. Honestly, a sugar rush seems more our speed. But we can’t sit by the campfire forever,…

Developer/publisher VBlank Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Vita Release Out now Just as the Bolivian government got stroppy about the country’s portrayal in Ghost Recon: Wildlands, it’s fair to say the Hawaiian tourist board won’t be writing a thank-you letter to Brian Provinciano anytime soon. His follow-up to Retro City Rampage paints the island as a hive of hooligans and delinquents, gangs and maniacs – and, more pertinently, deeply unscrupulous CEOs looking to revive their flagging empires through exploitative (if not wholly illegal) practices. You are one such businessman, a greying, pot-bellied suit who uses news stories about local crime as business plans: after a bulletin exposes a repossession racket, he heads out to jack a car and re-lease it, setting up the first of a series of lucrative…

Developer/publisher Berzerk Studio Format PC, PS4, Switch Release 2018 Set to the bouncy chiptune of Danimal Cannon’s Long Live The New Fresh, Just Shapes & Beats’ opening boss fight starts predictably enough: the tutorial prepares you for a musical bullet hell in which you must dodge pink shapes using only a thumbstick and an invincible dash. A circle spews spiky pellets – at the drop, it suddenly transforms into a monster, sprouting rocket-powered arms all the better to batter you with. It’s a moment that crystallises what some of the greatest masocore games have in common: the element of surprise. But the thrill doesn’t last. Mastering these games, whether it’s a platformer, a combat challenge or a bullet hell, demands three things: memorisation, execution and a little bit of cheese.…

The race is on to define the future of virtual reality, and two very different philosophies of what that should entail are in play. On the one hand is Valve, driving for fidelity, believing that for VR to truly succeed it should look and feel as close to actual reality as possible. On the other is Oculus who, no doubt influenced by its parent Facebook, is all about mainstream appeal, keeping costs low and inconveniences to a minimum in a bid to get VR in front of as many people as it can. That both companies should take their biggest steps to date towards their very different goals by releasing new hardware within weeks of each other is surely no coincidence. The next generation of virtual reality has begun. Valve’s…

Game Black Emperor Manufacturer Bumblebear Games Bumblebear Games’ Killer Queen has been an important game for the arcade scene, as we’ve covered in these pages before. Indie games in bespoke cabinets don’t exactly come along every day, but the game’s success, particularly as a tournament pursuit, has shown game makers, players and arcade operators of the merits of looking beyond the big names. Six years on from Killer Queen’s debut – and with a revised version, subtitled Black, due on PC and console this summer – Bumblebear is returning to the arcade with Black Emperor. Unlike Killer Queen, this is a singleplayer game, and is stripped back to the barest essentials, with only two control inputs. A button manages your motorcycle’s acceleration, while a spinning wheel – like a trackball…

Developer Double Fine Productions Publisher Starbreeze Studios Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2019 Reinsert the loose tooth; unzip the dental door; psi-blast the uvula – Psychonauts 2 walkthroughs are going to sound weird. Which, of course, is as things should be. The first game was a witty but otherwise unremarkable 3D platformer elevated to something much greater by the feverish imagination of its worlds, each birthed from the turbulent subconscious of a troubled mind. Early signs suggest that, 14 years on, the sequel might just repeat the trick. We open on the upper cortex of a brain, with the wrinkles steadily widening until the whole thing morphs into a top-down view of a nightmarishly large office, housing countless nondescript cubicles. Inside one we find protagonist Raz, who…

Game Watch Dogs Legion Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Toronto) Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release March No city is anything without its people. Yet they’re often the last thing we think about when it comes to urban open-world games. We marvel at the number of square miles of real estate we’ve been given to explore; we gaze longingly at the toys and tools we’ll eventually accumulate to help make the place our own; we stare at map screens pocked with icons, spoilt for choice about what to do and where to go next. Meanwhile, the people are often little more than hapless victims. They’re there either to sell us an illusion, the ideal of the so-called living, breathing world, or they’re targets – for violence, comedy, or perhaps both at once. Watch…

Developer No Code Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, PS4 (tested) Release Out now No Code’s wildly ambitious follow-up to the eerie Stories Untold casts you as an AI that feels as flawed as a human. The game’s elevator pitch is essentially 2001: A Space Odyssey, but from the perspective of HAL – and while Observation doesn’t quite match up to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, your role here is similarly, fascinatingly ambiguous. At various points during this gripping narrative adventure your actions will leave you feeling squirmingly uneasy. Are you really doing the right thing? Can it can be justified by the fact that you’re playing a computer? All the while, you have the shivering sense that at least one of Asimov’s laws will be broken by the end credits. It spins…

Developer Blue Manchu Publisher Humble Bundle Format PC (tested), Xbox One Release Out now The Krell fuel tanker Winsome Pugilist is a squat vessel, with corridor-sized tubes protruding from each flank. The floor is splatted with puddles of radioactive materials and – health and safety be damned – stacks of cheese and onion sandwiches. Above all, the entire ship’s security systems are switched permanently off. No Gunpoints, no Peepers, no Secbots to worry about. It emboldens us to scour every corner for fuel cans, machine parts and snacks until we’ve got enough supplies to jump to the far side of the Nebula. Every game of Void Bastards plays out on two scales: firstperson looting runs on spaceships, and an FTL-style galaxy map where you chart a course between these ships.…

Developer/publisher SIE (London Studio) Format PSVR Release Out now What’s your weapon of choice? For us it’s always been the pump-action shotgun, but we can’t abide Blood & Truth’s implementation of it. It’s all risk and too little reward. What has always been, to us, the purest expression of the super-soldier power fantasy is transformed by virtual reality into, well, reality. This is what would happen if you put a pump-action shotty into our reallife hands and dropped us in a battlefield: we’d miss the first shot, remember we had to pump before letting off the second slug, then miss with that as well. Cut to teary family members at our funeral, then fade to black. This happens time and again in the six or so hours that comprise Blood…

A tale of someone’s inner demons becoming real under extreme stress might, to anyone who’s been around Edge during deadline week, appear a bit on the nose. But in Sea Of Solitude it’s loneliness, rather than workload, that brought out a monster. Jo-Mei CEO Cornelia Geppert was inspired by Akira, Dark Souls, her upbringing on the Baltic coast and her current home of Berlin in crafting the aesthetic of what she says is “the most artistic and personal project I’ve ever created.” The monster, Kay, is a manifestation of Geppert’s own emotions while she was writing the game’s story: “Anger, despair, loneliness, worthlessness. I imagined myself just angrily scratching with a black pencil onto blank paper.” The titular sea rises and falls to reflect Kay’s mental state, transforming the flooded…

Developer MachineGames Publisher Bethesda Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin Sweden Release July 26 Well, they had us at ‘developed in partnership with Arkane Studios’. Eighteen months after the release of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Swedish studio MachineGames has hooked up with the Lyon-based creator of Dishonored, ostensibly to augment this vibrantly violent alternate-history FPS with a dash of Arkane’s open-ended level design. And – if you hadn’t noticed from the neon-soaked sights and Jean-Michel Jarre-esque sounds – to take the whole thing to the heart of France in the synthesised midst of the 1980s. It isn’t, it transpires, the only big change. MachineGames is pitching Youngblood as an even bigger leap forward for the series than 2017’s The New Colossus was from 2014’s The New Order. That’s…

Publisher Team 17 Developer Playtonic Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin UK Release 2019 Credit where it’s due – the team of mostly former Rare developers at Playtonic know exactly what they’re doing. Released in 2017, the Kickstarter-funded Yooka-Laylee wasn’t so much an homage to 1998’s Banjo-Kazooie as a modernday rebadging of it, a spiritual reboot not only of a classic game, but of a whole genre, or at least the part of it that Rare absolutely cornered in the N64 era. So it is here. The elevator pitch is straightforward: if Playtonic’s colourful Banjo riff tickled your fancy, you will probably also be interested in its spin on Donkey Kong Country. Squint a bit and, on first inspection, Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair is mechanically inseparable from Rare’s…

While it’s easy to admire the eccentric invention and imagination that forms the foundations of LittleBigPlanet, Tearaway and Dreams, none of these milestone games would exist if it wasn’t for Siobhan Reddy. One of Media Molecule’s five directors, she took the role of producer, marshalling wild thickets of ideas and technology into games which could actually be made, and then ensuring they actually were. And if that wasn’t enough, she also led the studio itself, building its corporate culture and team and steering its growth as not only one of the UK’s premier – and most distinctive – game developers, but also one of its most diverse. After 13 years, all five of its directors still work together, a testament to her ability to thread the needle of enabling sustainable…

Developer Sumo Digital Publisher Sega Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Of all the company mascots to receive their own kart-racing game – Sonic, Mario, Diddy Kong, even Crash Bandicoot – the hedgehog famed primarily for fleetness of foot always seemed a strange choice. It’s not only the peculiarity of putting those red sneakers on an accelerator pedal; beyond the immediate draws of Tails and Knuckles, there’s not a particularly deep bench of beloved characters to fill out the starting grid. After all, who out there is really itching to pick Zavok or Blaze The Cat from the character select screen? The previous Sonic racer from Sumo Digital, 2012’s Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, solved this problem by opening up its roster to include characters from…

Developer/publisher Nyamnyam Format iOS, PC (tested) Release Out now Heavens above, not another Elizabethan astrological satire. Nyamnyam’s follow-up to 2014’s Tengami is based on the casebooks of real-life charlatan Simon Forman, who declared he would cure plague-ridden Londoners by reading their stars and prescribing dubious homebrew remedies. As Forman, you follow star charts to advise a variety of patients – from hypochondriacs to professional widows – helping them with a range of maladies through to more personal issues and predictions via a combination of logic and guesswork. With medical authorities closing in, you need to earn eight letters of recommendation from your clients to become officially recognised as a physician. These exchanges take the form of lightly animated but otherwise static conversations presented in the style of an artisanal pop-up…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2012 Like its cyclical fantasy world, Dragon’s Dogma has lived many lives. First released for PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2012, it was then re-released on those same consoles, updated and expanded, as Dark Arisen in 2013. In 2016 it returned with a PC port, then again for PS4 and Xbox One in 2017, and, most recently, it came to Switch in April of this year. That its cult success endures to this day is testament to its wonderful, singular strangeness. On the surface, it appears a rote open-world action RPG, Japanese developer Capcom aping Western ideas and Tolkienesque fantasy. Dig deeper, however, and you discover something far more distinct and alluring. Capcom had its own vision for what…