PC, PS4/5 (version tested), Switch and Xbox One/Series X While there are no spectacular advances on last year’s game, new refinements provide a vivid glimpse of what it’s like to be a genius on the field It’s been a year since EA, having abandoned its Fifa licence, brought us EA Sports FC, the most awkwardly named sports game franchise since Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona. Sales were apparently 5% down after the switch to the catchy new moniker, but profits were up thanks to the cash-raking power of Ultimate Team, EA’s controversial, financially voracious take on a Panini sticker album. Now we’re on to the follow-up and with Konami’s eFootball still underperforming and no new Fifa title on the immediate horizon, it’s another open goal for team EA Sports. Fortunately for us, the developer is not taking its dominance for granted: there are genuinely intriguing new features here. Last year it was all about the advanced HyperMotion2 animation tech, this year it’s FC IQ, which looks to enhance the strategic side of the game by giving you intricate control over team and player mentalities. Here, you can tweak your build-up style and defensive approach, then go in and change the priorities of each individual player. Want Saka to play in an aggressively attacking rather than balanced role at Arsenal? You can make that change. Then, when you start a match his AI will be yelling at him to make forward runs at the expense of providing defensive support. It’s a fun option for Claudio Ranieri types, but a bit much if you’re just after a kickabout. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Eight years and many millions of dollars in the making, the latest high-profile multiplayer flop points to an existential problem in game development • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here As is now traditional, right after I’d filed last week’s Pushing Buttons, huge gaming news broke: Sony was pulling its hero shooter Concord from sale just two weeks after launch – because nobody was playing it. Everyone who bought it on PlayStation 5 and PC was refunded, and the future of the game is now unclear. This is a brutal sequence of events. Sony bought the makers of Concord, Firewalk Studios, in 2023. Concord had been in development for eight years, and it was an expensive game, with bespoke cinematics and a long-term plan that would have cost $100m or more to develop. In its two weeks on the market, it sold fewer than 25,000 copies, according to estimates. This is a shocker, even compared with the year’s other bad news for developers and studios. Continue reading...

Extra £300 on a Digital Edition PS5 buys an upgraded graphics processing unit and an 8K mode on enhanced games After months of rumours and speculation, Sony has finally revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro console, an update to its current machine, offering enhanced technical specifications and a 2TB solid state drive for £699/$699. It is launching on 7 November, with pre-orders beginning on 26 September. It is an expensive machine compared with current systems, coming in at £300 more than the Digital Edition PlayStation 5, which retails at £390. It’s also digital only: if you want to play games or movies on Blu-ray discs, you’ll have to add a Blu-ray player for an extra £100. Continue reading...

Following extraordinarily low sales and player counts, Sony has removed its latest shooter from sale on PC and PS5 Sony has announced that new PlayStation 5 shooter Concord, which released on 23 August, is to be taken offline just two weeks later, with refunds issued to every player who bought it. The game is a team-based hero shooter in the vein of Activision-Blizzard’s hit Overwatch, pitting teams of five against each other in tight combat arenas, and its launch has been one of the most high-profile flops of the gaming year. It has recorded player counts in the mere hundreds on Steam, the most popular PC marketplace, and is estimated to have sold fewer than 25,000 copies, according to analysts at GameDiscoverCo. Continue reading...

It is beautifully made but achingly familiar so could struggle to lure players away from what is already out there It is fair to say that the video game industry is undergoing a period of alarming disarray. Studios are closing, development budgets are exploding and profitable genres are becoming saturated by mega-budget pick-me candidates that feel utterly interchangeable. Into this troubling market comes Concord, Sony’s new five-v-five “hero” shooter, the subgenre of the multiplayer online blaster where players control characters with elaborate special powers rather than identikit spec-ops soldiers or space marines. Set in a warring galaxy controlled by an autocratic regime known as The Guild, the game gives us control of various Freegunners – mercenaries who plough the space lanes looking for jobs while also slinging one-liners at each other in the game’s highly polished cutscenes. In the game, however, what they do is fight. Continue reading...

Firaxis Games needed to move on from Civilization 6 because, its developers explain, ‘it was getting too big for its britches’ It’s been eight years since Civilization 6 – the most recent in a very long-running strategy game series that sees you take a nation from the prehistoric settlement of their first town through centuries of development until they reach the space age. Since 2016 it has amassed an abundance of expansions, scenario packs, new nations, modes and systems for players to master – but series producer Dennis Shirk at Firaxis Games feels that enough it enough. “It was getting too big for its britches,” he says. “It was time to make something new.” “It’s tough to even get through the whole game,” designer Ed Beach says, singling out the key problem that Firaxis aims to solve with the forthcoming Civilization 7. While the early turns of a campaign in Civilization 6 can be swift, when you’re only deciding the actions for the population of a single town, “the number of systems, units, and entities you must manage explodes after a while,” Beach says. From turn one to victory, a single campaign can take more than 20 hours, and if you start falling behind other nations, it can be tempting to restart long before you see the endgame. Civilization 7 will be released on PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation 4/5 and Nintendo Switch on 11 February 2025. Continue reading...

Running a tea shop in the woods doesn’t help arena fighter Alta to escape her trauma. Designer Davey Wreden explains how his cosy gaming dream-fulfilment fantasy turned into something much more meta At first, Wanderstop appears to tap into the same restless urge as many other cosy games: the wish to leave our stressful lives behind and escape to an anonymous wilderness. The game opens with you taking an assistant job in a woodland tea shop, where you spend your days cleaning, tending the garden, and researching the perfect tea blend to satisfy the needs of visiting customers. Scratch a little deeper, though, and you find a game tearing at the hollow rewards of the escapist fantasy. The bucolic setting is born out of an image game designer Davey Wreden became fixated on in the months after the release of 2015’s The Beginner’s Guide. His mind would repeatedly wander to a daydream of going to a tea shop in the woods and lying on a bench by the water. He sketched variations of the scene for months before deciding to make it as his next game. Continue reading...

When two horror movie fans took the leap into game development, the last thing they expected was for an actual movie production company to want to get involved In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Crista Castro and Bryan Singh were moved to think about what they really wanted from their lives. An animation director and programmer respectively, the couple had worked on other people’s cartoons and video games at big studios for years, but both had nursed ambitions to make something of their own. They had collaborated on weekend projects here and there, but felt if they really wanted to make a game together, they’d have to quit their jobs. So in 2021, galvanised by lockdown-induced introspection, that’s what they did, forming a husband-and-wife development team under the name Cozy Game Pals. And just to raise the stakes further, they became parents at around the same time. They gave themselves two years. At the end of it, in 2023, they had made something: a short game called Fear the Spotlight, a 90s-inspired horror adventure that looks like a lost PlayStation classic and feels like a teen ghost movie. They released it on Steam, to a very positive reception from the few people who played it – but they didn’t know how to market it, and it didn’t sell much. “We were like, OK, I guess that was it,” Bryan tells me. “Let’s go find jobs again. And then Blumhouse showed up.” Fear the Spotlight is released this autumn on PlayStation 5 and PC This interview with Cozy Game Pals took place at Summer game fest in Los Angeles. Keza MacDonald’s travel and accommodation expenses were met by Amazon Games Continue reading...

Set in the year between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws follows Kay, an ambitious street thief as she plots a giant heist. We meet the gang behind the gang About 10 minutes into the latest preview build of Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s forthcoming open-world adventure, lead character Kay Vess enters Mirogana: a densely populated, worn-down city on the desolate moon of Toshara. Around us is a mix of sandstone hovels and metallic sci-fi buildings, crammed with flickering computer panels, neon signs and holographic adverts. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, R2 droids glide past twittering to themselves. Nearby is a cantina, its shady clientele visible through the smoky doorway, and just to the side is a dimly lit gambling parlour. As you explore, robotic voices read out imperial propaganda over public address systems and stormtroopers patrol the streets, checking IDs. At least as far as this lifelong Star Wars fan is concerned, these moments perfectly capture the aesthetics and atmosphere of the original trilogy. Like A New Hope itself, it’s a promising beginning. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC; Hollow Ponds/Annapurna Interactive Filling a field guide is the simple goal of this endearingly strange game, in which you float on a giant bird, collect gently surreal sea life, and shave sheep You might expect from the name that this would be a game about herding sheep, but it is significantly weirder than that. There are sheep, but they are fluffy flying sheep that float around after you as you ride the back of a giant, colourful bird. Now and then you shear them for wool with which to knit new jumpers and hats with pompoms, making the sheep look like naked purple hover-sausages with eyes. But the bulk of your flock is actually made up of sky fish. Or are they fish? Some are sinuous like eels, others squawk like chickens, others are feathered whales. As mentioned, it’s quite weird. Your job in Flock is to fill out a field guide full of these wide-eyed flying fishlike creatures, spotting them in the wild and then identifying them from short, variably obvious written clues (“floppy proboscis”, “vertical stripes”, “often mistaken for a loud radish”). They all resemble sea life through a gently surreal pop-art filter, but they’re so well-drawn that I developed a sense for the differences between a Cosmet and a Bewl, Thrips and Rustics. Some camouflage themselves among weeds or leaves, some flee your approach, some just sit there basking on rocks and clucking at you. You find whistles that teach your bird a song, and then you can collect them Pied-Piper-style into a cloud of creatures that trails in your wake. Flock is out on Wednesday; £15.99 Continue reading...