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...
Tag - Action games
(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...