This seemingly minor addition allows players to sprint and dive in every direction so crunch moments can feel like a ridiculously fun John Woo shootout Here is a statement of fact that I am not entirely proud of: I have played every Call of Duty game since the series launched in 2003. I’ve been there through the extremely good times (Call of Duty 4) and the extremely not good (Call of Duty: Roads to Victory). And while I may have cringed at some of the narrative decisions, the casual bigotry rife on the online multiplayer servers, and the general “America, fuck yeah!” mentality of the entire series, I have always come back. In that time, I’ve seen all the many attempts to tweak the core feel of the games – from perks to jetpacks (thanks Advanced Warfare!) – but having spent a weekend in the multiplayer beta test for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, I think developer Treyarch may have stumbled on the best so far. It is called omni-movement. Continue reading...

(KeelWorks; Konami; PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox) The Scottish studio’s debut game is a fiendishly innovative take on the classic space battle genre Years before Star Wars, video game designers had begun to explore galactic dogfighting. In 1962, Spacewar!, the first formal computer game, was a rudimentary but influential attempt: two narrow triangles swirled around the gravity well of a star, launching torpedoes at each other. Having established the medium’s first principles, hundreds of developers attempted to refine and perfect the genre, which rose and dived in fashion but never fully warped away. Cygni is, perhaps, the highest production attempt yet, a debut from a tiny Scottish studio that answers the improbable question: what if Steven Spielberg had directed Space Invaders? A lone fighter, you streak across an alien planet attacking swirling flocks of UFOs and purplish space jellyfish as they pipette across the screen. Stylistically reminiscent of the polarity-swapping arcade classic Ikaruga, Cygni is a technological masterclass, your spaceship sweeping over distant robot battlefields, buffeted in the blast of a thousand fireworks. An orchestra, one moment frantic, the next melancholic, provides complementary backing to the action, which ebbs and flows with moments of respite between the flurries of activity. Continue reading...

PlayStation 5, PC; Game Science Prior to this release, few would have heard of Chinese developer Game Science, but the studio has produced a totally original epic Black Myth: Wukong is a video game obsessed with spectacle – but inspiring awe requires confidence. Such self-assuredness is a rarity in big-budget games, where concerns about mainstream palatability often inspire timidity instead on the part of their developers. Thanks to its state-of-the-art graphics, Black Myth: Wukong looks as though it belongs among the blockbusters, but this action game is actually the product of a Chinese indie outfit, Game Science. Yet the experience is so fully formed that it’s hard to believe that this is the studio’s first “premium” game. It is based on the seminal 16th-century east Asian novel, Journey to the West, which has already inspired enormous swaths of modern pop culture, from Dragon Ball to the 2010 game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. You play as a stone monkey, Sun Wukong, a major character in the novel whose description always seemed destined to become a video game protagonist. In the original story, Wukong is said to possess incredible strength and speed – but that’s not all. He can also transform into all sorts of animals and objects, and can manipulate the weather. Oh, and he can make copies of himself, too, just in case one all-powerful monkey isn’t enough to take care of the job. Continue reading...

The minds behind the forthcoming Monster Hunter Wilds talk about creating a world of extremes for players to explore Out in the desert, the skies begin to darken. You’re here to hunt the Doshagama, a kind of scaly lion with a squashed face that roams the dunes in small packs, an intimidating beast. But the incoming storm suggests that something bigger is on the way. Before long a giant silhouette descends from the heavens: the Rey Dau, a horned, gold-fringed dragon that commands the lightning. Are you strong enough to face it? Or is it time to run for the hills? Monster Hunter is one of Capcom’s most successful game series – though it was not always thus. When I started playing it, in 2006 on the PlayStation Portable, almost nobody else was interested. It was fiddly, demanding, famously difficult, and online play didn’t work well. In Japan, meanwhile, when I moved there in 2008, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing someone playing Monster Hunter on a train or in a cafe. It was 2018’s Monster Hunter: World that truly turned the game into a global hit: technology had finally enabled the kind of expansive natural setting that did its huge, intimidating, eminently believable monsters justice – and frictionless online play was a reality. Continue reading...

PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series XS, Xbox One; Red Thread Games; Spotlight by Quantic Dream Dustborn tries to be more than just another narrative travel game, but its half-baked focus on serious topics weighs down great dialogue and beautiful character writing The story begins on the road, miles out from a state border in an alternative US. The stakes are clear, even when nothing else is: Pax, the player character, is a Black woman in her 30s, who has just completed a heist with her friends. The border means freedom. The police car telling you to pull over means trouble. Pax and co are Anomals, people who wield manipulative vocal abilities called vox. Pax can bend people to her will by making them feel bad, using abilities named “trigger” or “cancel”. Her ex-partner, Noam, can soothe people with an ability known as “gaslighting”. Dustborn certainly isn’t subtle in what it’s trying to say. Soon you encounter people who get infected by weaponised disinformation. Continue reading...

This beautiful-looking action game is based on Journey to the West, the great Chinese novel – but its own journey to release has hit a bump in the road When Chinese developer Game Science revealed its debut console game Black Myth: Wukong last year, it immediately caused a stir. Inspired by the great 16th-century Chinese novel, Journey to the West, the action-packed footage featured the titular mythological monkey Sun Wukong battling Buddhist-folklore demons and sword-wielding anthropomorphic foxes in lusciously rendered forests. Smartphone games are inordinately popular in China, but console game developers are still few and far between, and the excitement for Wukong in Game Science’s homeland reached fever pitch. Within 24 hours, the trailer racked up 2m views on YouTube and more than 10m on Chinese video sharing site Bilibili, much to its creators’ shock and delight. One excited fan even broke into the developer’s office, desperate for more info on the game. After playing Wukong for an hour and half in a London hotel suite, watched nervously by several Game Science employees, I can confirm that – somewhat miraculously – this stunning Chinese mythological twist on Dark Souls delivers on that showy trailer, marrying fluid-feeling combat with reflex-testing difficulty and the expensive filmic sheen of something like God of War. As I sprint through Wukong’s dense jungle, ducking and dodging through its deadly array of flora and fauna, I come face to face with everything from gi-wearing toads to nightmarish, gigantic-headed infants. Unlike many of its brutally challenging, FromSoftware-inspired peers, the difficulty in Wukong feels expertly judged. My simian avatar met a grizzly end more times than I’d care to admit, but I persevered. Eventually I defeated enough foes to unlock new abilities. Soon I can perch atop my staff mid-attack, giving me an edge against its murderous mythological monsters. I can buzz around the forest as a stealthy cicada, summon flames with my glaive, and eventually topple a snarling, lorry-sized werewolf atop a crumbling temple. Continue reading...

The haunting songs of the video game and TV series get to the heart of Joel and Ellie’s story. The man behind them talks about the ‘magical’ process of composing The Last of Us is a story about tension – the tension between love and loss, violence and intimacy, protecting and destroying, life and death. It’s a study of how impossibly delicate life is, but also the terrifying stubbornness of our will to survive. As its composer, Gustavo Santaolalla’s job was to navigate and soundtrack that tension, a mediator between the game’s warring themes. His mission was to score music for a video game that was doing something different, and really had something to say. Santaolalla tells me that when he was a child in rural Argentina, one of his tutors quit on him after just a few lessons, telling his parents “there is nothing I can teach him”. His career proper began in 1967, when he co-founded the band Arco Iris, which specialised in fusing Latin-American folk with rock. Later, after leading a short-lived collective of Argentine musicians in Soluna, he began striking out on his own, releasing solo albums and composing for TV shows, adverts and, eventually, films (most notably Amores Perros, 21 Grams and The Motorcycle Diaries). Continue reading...