Innehållsförteckning för July 2020 från Edge

Game Outnumbered Manufacturer LAI Games In the golden era of arcades, nailing a high score was enough to keep players coming back. Now, drawing in casual players is more of a challenge – and will be even harder in the wake of Covid-19. Outnumbered has an app for that. For its new lightgun shooter, LAI Games has developed Weapon Forge, which tracks the player’s score and unlocks rewards – items and mods with which to craft and customise guns. It’s an on-rails Midway-style carnival shooter with three themed levels: High Noon, Quarantine Zone and Deep Space. So far, so nostalgic. But away from the cabinet, the app comes into its own. It’s similar to a redemption game, but instead of spitting tickets at you, it gives you loadout options for…

NINJALA Developer/publisher GungHo Online Entertainment Format Switch Origin Japan Release May 27 NIER: REINCARNATION Developer Applibot Publisher Square Enix Format Android, iOS Origin Japan Release TBA UNBEATABLE Developer/publisher D-Cell Games Format PC (consoles TBA) Origin US Release TBA PEAKY BLINDERS: MASTERMIND Developer Futurlab Publisher Curve Digital Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin UK Release Summer PENDRAGON Developer/publisher Inkle Format PC Origin UK Release Summer…

Format PC Developer/publisher Size Five Games Origin UK Release 2020 When Dan Marshall started talking about the third Dan And Ben game, the second was only three months old. Time Gentlemen, Please had launched in June 2009; by September he’d announced the first in a series of new episodic adventures starring the digital alter-egos of Marshall and writing partner and co-designer Ben Ward. “Right then,” he tweeted the following January, “The ‘The Revenge Of The Balloon-Headed Mexican’ Hype-Machine starts here!” Needless to say, that machine ground to a halt; likewise when Marshall revealed that Son Of Ben And Dan would be the next entry in the series. Eventually, after 2017’s intensely silly football parody Behold The Kickmen, he decided it was finally time to make the game he and Ward…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now There’s perhaps no better summary of Resident Evil 3 than a line from the ill-fated Brad Vickers. “It’s like Arklay on steroids!” he yells, referring to the first game’s mansion incident, and he couldn’t be more right. A game that opens on a panicked populace facing a deadly pandemic may not seem conducive to escapist entertainment at present – certainly, zombies have little concept of social distancing – but you’ll hardly have time to think about that. It splits the difference between last year’s Resident Evil 2 remake and Resident Evil 4: as it teases more narrative links to the latter, the constant forward momentum of its action provides more connective tissue across an intense six-hour campaign that tears…

Developer Firaxis Publisher 2K Format PC Release Out now Being named after a mythical, mixed-up beast feels apt for XCOM: Chimera Squad; Firaxis has rearranged XCOM’s turn-based tactical blueprint with a twist in the tail, said tail being the series’ traditional timeline. In classic XCOM, fights can be lost in the space of one turn while you watch in dismay, unable to influence the battle once you’ve committed to your actions. Chimera Squad’s subversion of this is interleaved turns – individual units and enemies each swap turn order. The timeline is displayed in your HUD, as well as above enemies’ heads, so you can adapt tactics on the fly, for example priority-targeting the next stacked enemy before they can get a shot off. You can also use abilities to change…

Developer/publisher Pixel Reef Format PSVR Release Out now Now we know how Lester Chaykin felt. Granted, we’ve not experienced anything as dramatic as Another World’s protagonist ripping a hole in the space-time continuum and teleporting himself to an alien planet. But we too find ourselves suddenly transported to a strange and barren land, feeling similarly awestruck and not a little frightened. It’s not long before we realise that this place isn’t nearly so hostile – at least not to us. We may have arrived in the shadow of a towering creature, but it’s benign: the gentlest of giants. Gnarled and spindly, it’s something like a skeletal version of the Pokémon Dialga: the title might suggest it’s made from paper, but it seems to be made from bone, studded with tiny…

Developer DotEmu, Lizardcube, Guard Crush Games Publisher DotEmu Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Things are rarely just as we remember them, but Streets Of Rage 4 manages the impressive trick of being exactly the way we recall the classic ’90s side-scrolling beat-’em-up series, in all its vibrant rose-tinted hues. Almost everything feels familiar. Moves, characters and enemies – from brightly mohawked street punks on seedy, neon-lit streets to strobing dancefloors packed with cyberpunk psychos – are portrayed in a beautiful, hand-drawn art style that affords them a bold, comicbook feel, the very image of what our brains believe they really did look like decades ago. You can even turn on a filter to pixellate and add scan lines. That’s the first clue, perhaps, that there…

Developer Jump Over The Age Publisher Fellow Traveller Format PC (tested), Switch Release Out now Like the more elusive creatures you’ll find in the seas of exoplanet Gliese 677Cc, writer-designer Gareth Damian Martin’s debut game can be tricky to pin down. We could liken it to an aquatic Metroid Prime in which Samus Aran needs nothing more than her scan visor. Or perhaps it could best be described as a visual novel masquerading as a Metroidlike; certainly, text is especially crucial here. As an artificial intelligence guiding bioscientist-slash-biologist Ellery Vas, who’s here to document alien flora and fauna while searching for her missing colleague, your view of the world is limited: in the centre of a stylish interface, all you see is a wireframe topographic map pocked with simple shapes.…

Below Developer/publisher Capybara Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2018 With teeth gritted, we climb the steps once more. Wasn’t the journey supposed to be easier this time? Below’s new Explore mode, patched into the Xbox One and PC versions to coincide with its arrival on PS4, promised as much, with Capy making a few concessions in the hope of encouraging more players to delve deeper. Hunger and thirst meters are no more. Spike traps won’t instantly kill you. Campfire checkpoints are permanent. In theory, we should be making swifter progress. And yet. Granted, we now have more room to properly appreciate Below’s strengths, our avatar’s enviably efficient metabolism no longer forcing us to hurry along quite so intensely. We can take time to shine our lantern into more…

Last month we celebrated games that could lift the heaviest of hearts, and over the past month or so, it’s become clear that more and more people have turned to the medium for succour in these unprecedented times. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused hardware and software postponements, while distribution and certification delays are ongoing, and yet numbers are up across the board. Digital and physical sales saw a huge spike during the early weeks of lockdown, and while the curve steadily flattened as – in most countries, at least – the same began to happen for coronavirus cases, weekly figures were still well ahead of the average. Doom Eternal recorded the best opening sales in franchise history. The extraordinarily well-timed Animal Crossing: New Horizons became Nintendo’s thirdfastest seller of all…

Childhood is different the world over, but some things remain constant: climbing trees, playing tag, doodles in the backs of notebooks. Paper Tanks brings the latter to life, inspired by Igor Durbazhev’s memories of playing tank games on his Dendy console (a Famicom clone produced for the Russian market). “Drawings in a notebook are an echo from the past, from school times, and those Dendy games,” he tells us. Achieving Paper Tanks’ style was initially laborious and expensive, with every sprite hand-drawn in pen and pencil and individually scanned. But after bringing aboard digital artist Sergey Malkov, and creating a custom, realistic-looking sketch brush in Photoshop, development has been moving faster lately. Desk clutter adds texture and strategy to battlefields: rulers and biros must be manoeuvred around, while rolling your…

WEBSITE Turnip Exchange turnip. exchange Turnip fever has gripped the videogame scene. The ‘stalk market’ has long been a part of Animal Crossing, but the popularity of New Horizons has meant canny players are bankrupting the Nooks (indeed, in a close-to-the-bone case of art imitating life, a game update recently reduced bank interest to try to deal with the broken economy). Turnip Exchange helps crossers share their town’s juicier turnip prices with those whose shops aren’t buying high that week (check turnipprophet.io to figure out your chances of hitting it big). The delightful noticeboard presentation is in keeping with the game’s, and a queue system helps avoid crashes as players pour into town to take advantage of a good deal. If you want to be a ‘bellionaire’, this is worth…

Developer/publisher Crea-ture Studios Format PC, Xbox One Origin Canada Release TBA Have you ever tried to do an ollie in real life? The Tony Hawk’s games conned a generation into thinking it’d be as simple as tapping the X button. Many would-be skaters were inspired to head outside and try it for themselves, where they – and we can neither confirm nor deny whether we’re talking from personal experience – were quickly brought crashing down to earth, with nothing to show for it but the burn of rough tarmac on their skin. Session is a skateboarding game designed with the specific intent of redressing the balance, demonstrating how much effort and finesse goes into pulling off even the simplest skateboard trick. The control scheme assigns one trainerclad foot to each thumb. Pulling the right…

Developer Draknek and friends Publisher Draknek Format PC Origin UK Release Autumn Five years ago, Alan Hazelden and a few of his friends taught us that A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build. A good videogame? Well, that’s tougher still. “The process begins with getting a team together to make something with some kind of plan that it’ll take two to 12 months,” Hazelden tells us. “Then it’s obviously always longer than that.” He clearly didn’t expect it to take three years and counting, but A Monster’s Expedition (Through Human Exhibitions), to give it its full title, already looks like it’s been worth the effort. An ‘hour-long’ build turns out to be twice that, and that’s only partly down to our sluggish brains; naturally a game’s designer can get through…

Game The Ascent Developer Neon Giant Publisher Curve Digital Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X Release Winter Don’t look down. It’s the mantra of all those who fix their sights on a point high above their heads and vow to make it to the top. But in The Ascent, it’s impossible not to: the edges of the tower we are climbing are constantly, mercilessly kept in our peripheral vision. Out there, away from the gunfire and the tentacles, drones dart through tangles of cables thatched across a nearbottomless chasm. Disused balconies – more than we can count – line the sides of it, floors falling away below as far as the eye can see. And so the kick of a shotgun is always tempered with a lurch of the…

Developer Id Software Publisher Bethesda Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Round and round it goes: the most literal combat loop ever conceived. You enter an arena – it might be dressed as an open-plan office, or the public square of a gutted American city, or the shore of an underground lava lake at the centre of Mars. But you come to recognise these coliseums wherever you find them by their furniture: multi-layered, adorned with monkey bars and littered with canisters of chainsaw fuel. As the first monsters wink into view, it becomes second nature to start spinning, a constant circle-strafe your only means of survival. It’s tempting to imagine Id Software as the teenager who, having been left in charge of the teacups at a fairground,…

An unpalatable truth about modern videogames is that most people don’t finish them, though the completion percentage for Resident Evil 3 should be a good deal above the average. The lowest difficulty setting, Assisted, gives you an assault rifle from the off, and aim assist to make your shots more likely to hit the weaker enemies from whose attacks you can recover more easily – ensuring that just about everyone should be able to reach the end. On our first playthrough on the Standard setting, even playing cautiously and thoroughly, saving often and collecting all documents while pillaging just about every locker and attaché case, our run concludes at just over the six-hour mark. Before subsequent replays, our total playtime (which would appear to include continues after deaths and cutscenes)…

Developer Team Ninja Publisher Koei Tecmo, SIE Format PS4 Release Out now Two samurai circle one another. Neither set of feet stops moving, but hands don’t move from weapons either. Each weighs up their opponent, waiting for their moment. Around them, cherry blossoms flutter to the ground. A blade swings. It falls short. It’s an opening, one you drive your blade directly into, pressing the advantage in a sudden blur of action. The ex-samurai unfolds into two red-edged halves, spraying orbs of light as they join the petals on the ground. For all the enemies it pulls from Japanese folklore, for all the supernatural abilities it hands you, this is the true fantasy of Nioh 2: a face-off between two evenlymatched, mostly human foes. Yes, the Yokai monsters let Team…

Developer Infinity Ward, Raven Software Publisher Activision Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now There’s no question of whether it’s a riot. Deeply silly military gadgets spewing forth from humming containers; Cockney accents accompanying your death-baiting dashes from Eastern bloc petrol stations to dilapidated arenas; thrumming ballistic effects and crosshairs changing smugly to indicate you’ve hit the meat of the cranium; knee slides, item pings, punch-ups in gulags and quad bike jumps in gas masks – Warzone is the highlight reel version of battle royale. No, instead the question Infinity Ward’s free-to-play juggernaut raises is this: how much has been lost in the process of creating this more accessible, thrill-a-minute version of the genre, and how much do you miss it? It’s certainly a substantial simplification of PlayerUnknown’s…

Developer Lucky Mountain Games, Sumo Digital Publisher Curve Digital Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin UK Release June We are delighted to report that Hotshot Racing plays exactly the way it looks like it does. As we turn into the first corner, the slightest squeeze of the brake button sees our car’s back end slip out, tyres squealing as we enter the first of many, many drifts. As we wrestle the vehicle around the turn, walking that delicious arcade-racing tightrope between oversteer and understeer, our boost bar slowly fills. We exit the turn and trigger it, surging ahead of the pack, almost feeling the wind in our hair. Gawd, it’s been too long. Hotshot Racing is not merely content to be a throwback to a bygone age of gaming: it simply revels in it,…

When CEO Dominic Wheatley joined the firm in 2016, his plan was to grow Curve Digital into one of the UK’s biggest videogame publishers. “Over the years, the industry has been dominated by those people who managed to clamber up the slippery slope,” he tells us. “And the reason was that the capital required was so enormous. It required 200 million pounds of capital just to be able to deal with warehouse inventory coming in and out from Sony, Xbox and so on. And so we saw a dearth of British games publishers.” Initially, Curve ported popular PC games to consoles. With the rise of Steam and the digital market, and the declining visibility of indies, came an opportunity to provide a platform, with the warehouse costs gone. Hits such…

The first act of desecration in Doom happened before the first game was even finished, when John Romero and John Carmack threw out the Doom Bible. Id co-founder Tom Hall had slaved over the document, which detailed characters and backstory. He had planned an opening in which a demon burst in on off-duty marines playing cards; only Doomguy would survive. Before long, though, Hall was isolated from his peers and kicked out of the company. Figuratively speaking, his bible was burned. What the two Johns realised was that Doom didn’t need a story – only a premise. The naturalistic scenes Hall had been pitching for levels paled next to the heightened, abstract realms Romero was building; strange, shapeshifting warrens that defied explanation through lore but compelled players forward. Long after…

Developer The Coalition, Splash Damage Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC Release Out now Two men, as broad as they are tall, stomp into a room. “What are we looking for?” grunts one. “The most classified-looking file they got,” growls the other. It’s a reassuring moment: a line this knowingly silly, delivered with a straight face, immediately lets us know we’re in safe hands. And familiarity counts for a lot in Gears Tactics; it’s a big part of what makes this spin-off feel so instantly accessible. Your units advance towards cover in that recognisable crouched waddle, magically adhering to those convenient waist-high walls as if their armour were lined with magnets. There are frag grenades, Lancers and Gnashers; Corpsers, Kantus and Wretches, too. And when the Theron Guards and Boomers…

Developer Moon Studios Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC (tested), Xbox One Release Out now The real world seems even more grey when we tear our eyes away from the screen. We’d begun to wonder if Moon Studios’ sequel was going to be a permanent E3 fixture for Microsoft – since its 2017 announcement, each year has given us an increasingly spectacular-looking trailer, a reason for Xbox owners without Game Pass (if such people exist) to keep their consoles mothballed. If anything, it’s more dazzling than the promos; even the darkest areas of this sprawling world are bathed in a bioluminescent glow. Its palette covers the entire spectrum, and frequently reaches for the most vibrant hues. You sprint through a forest on the cusp of winter, the warmth of a…

Developer Ninja Theory Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now This team-based melee fighter desperately wants to be noticed – with its ostentatious style and bold character design, at times it can feel as though Ninja Theory has forced us into the Clockwork Orange eye clamps. It’s an approach that backfires: go in with eyes wide open, and the similarities between Bleeding Edge and its contemporaries become uncomfortable. So much of Bleeding Edge feels lifted from Overwatch that it’s awkward, as if the two had rolled up to a party in the same outfit. Gizmo actually has: her pink mech suit is oddly reminiscent of D.Va’s. Half-motorcycle cyborg Buttercup has a chain-hook like Roadhog, and support hacker Zero Cool throws up a protective wall and…

Developer/publisher Fireproof Games Format Index, PSVR (tested), Quest, Rift, Vive, Windows Mixed Reality Release Out now For years, Fireproof Games has invited us to puzzle our way inside its intricate contraptions. Now we find ourselves inside from the start, surrounded by the kind of world into which we’re used to peering. As we descend further into a supernatural-tinged Edwardian mystery, this feels like a VR wonderland in more ways than one. With otherworldly portals shrinking us to investigate objects from within – having manipulated them from the outside to form pathways inside – we’re frequently left asking ourselves just how deep the rabbithole goes. Curiouser and curiouser, indeed. This series has always rewarded the player’s natural inquisitiveness like few others, and Fireproof makes the most of the opportunities the tech…

Developer Crytek Publisher Electronic Arts Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2007 Right now, your PC can probably – probably – run Crysis. But even as recently as 2015, anyone incanting PC gaming’s most famous meme in response to a new hardware release wasn’t asking an entirely redundant question. What Crytek created in 2007 was a technological spectacle so advanced, and so astonishingly different to the look of its contemporaries, that it took mainstream PCs almost a full decade to accommodate its demands. On launch day back in November 2007, anyone who hoped to enjoy the sandbox shooter (whose scarcely believable screenshots had been ubiquitous in the gaming press for months) at anything like a smooth framerate was about to get their paradigm shifted. This was mid-noughties PC gaming in a…