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...

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...

(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...