Nintendo Switch, Acquire/ Nintendo The moustachioed plumber brothers have a sun-kissed comic adventure in this breezy island-hopping RPG filled with puzzles, sand sharks and talking acorns If there was ever a series that reminds me of being on holiday, it was the Mario and Luigi role-playing games. I fondly remember squinting at the Game Boy Advance’s screen in 2003, commanding my plumbers through thrillingly dynamic battles from a sun lounger. Brothership is the first new game in the series in almost a decade, and it brings a jaunty, seafaring adventure to the mercifully better lit screen of the Nintendo Switch. In a classic Mario plot device, our heroes are whisked away from the Mushroom Kingdom via a giant portal, and groggily awaken marooned in the oceanic world of Concordia. This place is utterly gorgeous. As you leap around the first of many vibrant, cel-shaded islands, you can practically taste the sea breeze. A stunning Wind Waker HD-esque bloom lighting effect lends this bright and breezy adventure a washed-out, sun-kissed feel. Continue reading...

Halloween is coming, and our minds are turning to scary games. But which titles are genuine fright fests? Our writers decided to find out in the most ill-advised way possible Shepton Mallet prison in Somerset is the world’s oldest correctional facility. It is also reportedly one of the most haunted. Between its opening in 1625 and its closure in 2013, it saw hundreds of inmates, from Victorian street urchins to wayward American GIs to the Kray twins. Now a tourist attraction, it occasionally opens to paying guests who want to spend a night behind bars. Some are paranormal investigators, some are brave tourists, and others are video game journalists with a silly idea: how scary would it be to play five recent horror games all night, locked in a haunted prison? Carrying just a torch, an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector, and a laptop, we wandered the prison finding spine-chilling locations in which to play these immersive supernatural masterpieces. Here is what happened … Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox; Bioware/Electronic Arts There is lots to do in this huge and beautiful fantasy world, but inconsistent writing and muted combat dull its blade Developer Bioware was never going to have it easy with Veilguard. It’s been a decade since the last Dragon Age game, a decade for fan theories to percolate and expectations to rise out of control – and that’s not to mention all the strife that’s gone on at the studio after the disappointing Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. Veilguard is by no means a bad game, with plenty of charming characters to meet and new places to see. But the writing, the heart of previous games, is surprisingly mediocre, while the new combat style gets repetitive fairly quickly. You play as Rook, an associate of Varric, who served as companion and storyteller in the previous games. Varric and Rook have been on the hunt for elven god Solas for the better part of a year. Just when it looks as if you can stop him from tearing down the Veil between the physical and nether worlds, unleashing hordes of demons in the process, a magical mishap leads to the release of two other, even worse gods. These new villains are comically evil, but they are a disappointment compared with the compelling character of Solas, who is, after all, right there. Veilguard tells his side of the story, too, through side quests. Continue reading...

A sequel to the Bafta-winning 2019 RPG was recently cancelled by developer ZU/AM. Now, some of its original team have set up a new studio to make a successor A new developer, Longdue, is being set up to develop a “spiritual successor” to the award-winning 2019 computer role-playing game Disco Elysium. The new studio currently comprises 12 people, including some who worked on the original game and on its cancelled sequel, and former staff from Bungie (Destiny, Halo) and Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption). Its debut game is described in a press release as “a psychogeographic RPG” that “explores the delicate interplay between the conscious and subconscious, the seen and unseen. Set in a world where choices ripple between the character’s psyche and environment, players will navigate a constantly shifting landscape, shaped by both internal and external forces.” Continue reading...

This RPG is the third massively multiplayer online game Amazon has published in four years, and lets you morph your heroes into animals. Is it worth a shot? Amazon has been trying to break into the games industry for years, yet despite using the vast resources at its disposal to hire some of the best designers in the business, the company struggled for years to make headway. Lately, however, Amazon has found success publishing massively multiplayer online games. First came 2021’s New World, Amazon Games’ homebrew fantasy with an emphasis on survival and player-built settlements. The following year brought Lost Ark, developed by Korean studio SmileGate, which combined large-scale multiplayer with Diablo-style fighting. Critical reception was mixed, but both games proved popular with players. This week, Amazon publishes its third MMO in four years, Throne and Liberty, also developed in Korea. Here’s everything you need to know about this latest free offering. What is Throne and Liberty? Continue reading...

PC, Xbox; Bethesda Softworks Bethesda’s gigantic space RPG’s first major expansion only highlights the game’s fundamental limitations The first story expansion for Bethesda’s big, bold, rickety space RPG arrives after a year’s worth of incremental updates that have already ironed out the game’s most egregious flaws. Those quest-breaking bugs have been squished, there are now vehicles to make planet-side travel less of a chore, city maps are at least partly useful these days, and there’s now a 60fps mode for those playing on Xbox Series X. But Starfield’s fundamental problems remain – turgid, rubbery NPCs; the baffling profusion of loading screens – but just as the Phantom Liberty expansion finessed Cyberpunk 2077 in its entirety, Shattered Space arrives poised to improve upon what came before. It appears that Bethesda has acknowledged that travelling across space by selecting planets from menus and watching a cutscene was a bit rubbish, because Shattered Space mostly takes place on a single map, much like Skyrim or Fallout. This new, self-contained narrative concerns House Va’ruun, Starfield’s slightly tiresome cult of space-serpent-worshipping zealots. The player is whooshed towards the secretive society’s homeworld after it has suffered a cataclysm, heralded as the civilisation’s potential saviour – which, naturally, means everyone has plenty of chores for you to do, busy as they are standing around staring at walls or genuflecting in courtyards. Starfield: Shattered Space is out now; £29.99 on Xbox, £25.99 on PC Continue reading...

In 2004, Fable was as famous for what it didn’t deliver as for what it did. But this Python-esque fantasy game deserves to be remembered for more than that In 1985, brothers Dene and Simon Carter vowed to each other that they would one day start their own development studio together. The game they imagined was ambitious, as Simon outlined in a developer diary: a fantasy role-playing game, “populated with compelling and convincing characters with real personality, people who actually reacted to what you did … We wanted each and every person who played our game to have a unique experience, to have their own stories to tell.” The idea of a living, reactive game world was an obsession for many game creators (and players) at the time, largely because it had never yet been done. In the 1980s, a virtual fantasy world like this was far beyond the realms of technological possibility. Thirteen years later, they got the opportunity to make the game of their dreams, at their own studio Big Blue Box. Working with British studio Lionhead and its well-known co-founder Peter Molyneux, they put together the fantasy game they had imagined – or a version of it, anyway. Fable was finally released in September 2004, published by Microsoft on the original Xbox. Continue reading...

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...

PC; Blizzard On the verge of World of Warcraft’s 20th anniversary, Blizzard appears to have pulled off a tentative return to form for this historic game World of Warcraft has an enduring identity problem. What was once one of the biggest games in the world is now approaching its 20th birthday, and with every year that goes by, developer Blizzard has the unenviable challenge of trying to prove that WoW still has a place in today’s gaming world. This goes some way to explaining the many times that Blizzard has tried to reinvent WoW. Six years after its initial release, the developer attempted a radical do-over of the game’s world in 2010’s Cataclysm expansion, in which an ancient dragon ravaged and reshaped the realm of Azeroth (an experience you can relive through the recently relaunched Cataclysm Classic). Since then, Blizzard has experimented with numerous gimmicks to try to keep WoW current, including a now much-maligned mechanic that saw players building their power level for two years, only to lose that power at the end of every expansion cycle. 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...