Getting motivated is hard. As we collectively hurtle toward yet another round of New Year’s Resolutions and “this time I’m serious” promises, the space in our lives for the next thing to keep us in line begins to open up. The cold, infinitely less sexy reality is that that thing doesn’t really exist and consistent hard work and self-care is the only real road to long-term succe- Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer is Nintendo’s latest attempt to fill that space with a Switch exercise game. 

The third entry in the (now) long-running Fitness Boxing series which first took a swing at this back in 2018, developer Imagineer has spent most of the Switch’s lifespan refining the edges of its boxing simulator. Where Ring Fit Adventure bundled in additional hardware to expand the range of exercises, Fitness Boxing, as you might imagine based on the name, focuses solely on the one-two punch of boxing, grading your entire performance via the Joy-Con motion controls.

It’s something of an honour system, with your stance, posture, exertion, and form all left to your own efforts, the game itself all too happy to doll out “great punch!” feedback whether you put your body into it or not. 

Despite its relative lack of accurate measurements, Fitness Boxing 3 plays the part of being a casual, ostensibly data-based fitness experience. Booting up the game you’ll be prompted to fill in a questionnaire, ranging from weight to age to fitness goals (weight loss, strength training, relaxed etc), and run through the basics of boxing by the game’s default, and worst, trainer. Once you’ve been onboarded, you’ll need to run through your first full session and a more casual mode before the game’s features fully unlock, but with those done, you’ve got access to the suite of modes Fitness Boxing 3 has to offer. 

THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $64 FROM AMAZON WITH FREE DELIVERY

From daily workouts to free play to stretches to multiplayer, you can engage with the game in a decent variety of modes, but the core mechanics remain largely unchanged. In a solid stance with your core engaged, you’ll perform a series of punch types in time and rhythm with the game’s escalating challenge levels. Your digital instructor (you can choose from a small roster of perky, beautiful people who can in turn be customised to a granular level from outfits to eye colour and even mood) will perform the motions for you a few times before encouraging you to begin your own set of them. 

For basic movements like jabs and straights, this is fine, but as the game begins to fold in hooks and the like, its inability to discern how your movements fair is both unengaging mechanically and at a baseline health level, not entirely good for you. While the game does warn that its calories burnt count has essentially no basis in reality (at which point you might wonder if it’s only included for the veneer of a real fitness experience), higher-intensity workouts are often conducted under professional guidance because the human body is a temperamental thing and repeated, incorrect use of it can be rough in the long-term. There’s a degree of fun to be found in doing some basic swings and seeing the score pop and the screen light up but Fitness Boxing 3 is a toy first and foremost. 

Completing a full workout gives you a star rating, scores to chase higher next time, and some form of currency you can spend on outfits for your trainer and songs to work out to. While it might be initially thrilling to see the likes of Billie Eilish and…KISS in the playlist, you’ll soon tire of hearing these lo-fi, kid’s-bop covers of popular songs as a routine will often run you 10-minutes minimum and the musical offerings are sparse. Still, when the game told me my fitness age was 26 and had me punch at the screen to officiate a stamp at the end of the workout, I smiled. 

A cursory glance at the previous Fitness Boxing games tells me that they’ve also somewhat stepped up the overall visual presentation of the game. While UI and menus remain new-age fitness sterile for better legibility, the animations and flare found in the workout sections are at least vibrant and sharp. Likewise, the game now incorporates a seated mode for players with less mobility, an excellent accessibility option. Difficulty elsewhere is a bit looser, usually just extending the time or intensity of a workout session but stopping short of customisation as far as I could tell. 

As with any exercise program, you’re likely to see some results from Fitness Boxing 3 over time but outside of the initial fun of numbers-go-up punching, the experience is too thin and too imprecise to warrant that degree of investment. The new accessibility options are a genuine win and the series commitment to improving its presentation and mode options is admirable, but with such a limited means of engagement, it’s difficult to recommend. If you’re chasing a thing to help you stick to your goals, it might be worth checking out Ring Fit Adventure, but I’d still bet that the 70 bucks you could spend on Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer would be better used to get a nice pair of shoes and going for a walk.  

The post Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer Review – Joy Con appeared first on Press Start.

“I’m running a museum, Mr. Pots, not a charity” I muttered to the somewhat bloated staff page of my somewhat thriving first museum. We’d had a bit of a rush recently due to a freshly landed exhibit and the resulting foot traffic caused a rise in janitorial duties. At the time of hiring Mr. Pots (affable fellow, really), I was distracted by the slow turnover from the gift shop so I threw in for a third janitor to stem the tide of scuffed floors and mussed toilets. A shortsighted choice- our janitorial output was now too efficient and there was, as they say, far too much leaning and not enough cleaning. So, with the kind of cold precision that any of my former retail managers would have been proud of, I sat Mr. Pots down and told him his services were no longer required. Productivity restored and monthly balances getting a nice bump. It felt good. 

Two Point Studios knows how to turn me into a cartoonish managerial nightmare. After correctly clocking the need in the sim management space for approachable, lower-stakes titles, Two Point’s unique approach to the genre has encompassed the running of a university with Two Point Campus and the daily operations of your own Scrubs (or Grey’s Anatomy? 911? What’s a modern touchstone for medial dramas?), Two Point Hospital. Business is booming in the Two Point and those learned students and healthy(ish) townsfolk need a place to gather and gawk at the wonders of the world. Where better than a Two Point Museum?

The basic principles of Two Point’s design philosophy still apply in Two Point Museum– you’re given control over a newly established business and tasked with generating income and interest via an escalating series of systems and situations. As the managing curator of a collection of museums, the latest outing sees you driving for Knowledge and Buzz among the general populace who flood through your doors daily, both meters, in turn, driving donations and interest you can use to fund more extravagant exhibits and fancier trappings. If you’ve played a Two Point, much of this loop will feel familiar and comforting, the basic rise and fall of supply and demand. 

Two Point Museum starts to play with the boundaries of the Two Point formula though, evidently a studio with a stride now picking a direction in which to move. The needs of a museum after all are pretty unique; the usual assortment of janitorial duties and customer service operations still stand as core pillars of your proficiency as a business (if nobody mans the desk, patrons will begin to queue and get grumpy etc) but the lifeblood of a museum is…well, bones. Or rare specimens suspended in amber. Or haunted artifacts from a lost culture. No matter which of the multiple themed museums you’re running (the preview build also gave us a quick look at a maritime and vaguely spooky one), you’ll need to run Expeditions to “acquire” new exhibits from far off lands, shifting the gameplay outside of the fall walls of Two Point’s finest establishments for the first time. 

Running an Expedition essentially extrapolates the basic hiring and training practices of any baseline Two Point business into more fleshed-out staff excursions. Up to a small handful of your team can be assigned to any given adventure into the unknown; pick a location from a global map, assign staff with the corresponding skills, establish the parameters for the expedition (you can spend a little more for a slower, safer trip or cut corners and demand results quickly), and watch as your crew clambers aboard the company’s military-grade helicopter and sets forth.

From here, a few different things can happen. Best case scenario sees your team return with a fancy new (old) thing to proudly display amid the usual assortment of decorative and informative items (placing a sign nearer an exhibit generates better Knowledge and Buzz), and your adventurous workers unwind in the staff lounge. That new set of bones is also packaged in what could only be described as a Loot Box, a massive package that is unwrapped and opened with a discrete fanfare animation, knowingly. But this being Two Point, things can go comically rather awry. Staff can return with injuries and conditions that need to be treated, for example, or could even vanish entirely under mysterious circumstances. These little flourishes keep Expeditions interesting and work beautifully in tandem with the existing Two Point staff satisfaction and training systems. 

And as Expeditions expand the world around Two Point, so too does your museum require you to consider space and how it’s used. While loading up the walls and floors with fake plants for the simple sake of Vibes and Aesthetics is still a treat (legit don’t think there was a single free panel of wall in my museum I hadn’t covered in drop vines), Two Point Museum asks you to be a little more involved in how a functional space would actually need to operate. Things like walkable pathing through exhibits and the aforementioned correctly placed information and donation stands all play a role in the overall success of the space. It’s just the right amount of extra consideration and sits comfortably alongside the Two Point games’ rewarding customisation options. 

Speaking of, Two Point Museum still hums with the same sense of humour and levity that defined its sister titles. My favourite radio DJ from Two Point Hospital has been replaced with a stately and dry-witted announcer who is just as likely to remind people not to touch the exhibits as she is to inform them that if they’re bored, perhaps they’re just a bit shit. Character animations and art direction likewise fall neatly in line with the broader series and remain a highlight as you zoom in on any given corner of your museum and watch a worker clean tar off their boots or a customer ooh and ahh at the bundle of bones and plants you so proudly angled just right. 

So while Two Point Studios may be inadvertently turning me into my worst self, they’re also continuing to offer up one of gaming’s most approachable and engaging comfort foods. Although we’ll have to wait for the full release to see how far Expeditions go in shifting the Two Point formula, what’s on offer in Two Point Museum is already pointing toward a series that knows how and what to show off. Consider us buzzed. 

The post Two Point Museum Hands-On Preview – Ex(cellent)peditions appeared first on Press Start.

UPDATE (08/11/24): We now have more information on the Online Safety Act that will prevent Australians that are under 16 from accessing online platforms, and as we expected, it seems as though it will apply to the likes of YouTube, Roblox and by definition even extend as far as the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live.

The definition of a social media service as per the Online Safety Act according to the ABC can be found below:

1. The sole or primary purpose of the service is to enable online social interaction between two or more end users;
2. The service allows end users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end users;
3. The service allows end users to post material on the service.

By definition, any online gaming network such as Fortnite, Roblox or the PlayStation Network/Xbox Live would meet this criteria as they exist to enable online social interaction between two or more end users, allow people to interact and in most cases also allow material to be posted on the service.

This is expected to be a good time away from being implemented (12+ months according to the ABC), and it’s obviously going to be a hard one to police, but if it does extend as far as we think it will, it’s going to totally change the structure of these online platforms for massive companies in Australia.

We highly recommend heading to the ABC website to read more about the proposed social media ban.

ORIGINAL STORY: The Albanese government is reportedly looking to enforce stricter rules for teenagers online ahead of the next federal election according to a new report from The Guardian. The prime minister will allegedly announce the bill some time today though exact details of the legislation remain unclear outside of a loosely defined restriction around the use of social media and “other relevant digital platforms” by persons under 18 years old.

While the exact age limit of the legislation has yet to be announced, the news follows Albanese’s previous endorsement of banning social media for anyone under the age of 16. Equally unknown is exactly how far reaching this legislation will seek to enforce itself and on which gaming platforms. 

While major live service and multiplayer titles like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft immediately come to mind, it’s unclear how this love from the Australian government would coexist with pre-existing terms of service and minimum age requirements for the use of transactions and other social media platforms. 

The news comes ahead of Australia’s next federal election, slated to take place sometime before September of 2025. The Prime Minster has spoken out on this issue before, stating that “We know that technology moves fast, No government is going to be able to protect every child from every threat – but we have to do all we can. Parents are worried sick about this. We know they’re working without a map – no generation has faced this challenge before.”

The post Online Gaming Platforms And YouTube Will Also Seemingly Be Banned For Aussies Under 16 appeared first on Press Start.

The thing about the runaway success of the A Quiet Place films (John Krasinski’s now trilogy-spanning horror franchise) is that the premise is absolutely killer. An alien invasion has turned the world upside down and now humanity is being hunted by creatures (Death Angels) with hypersensitive hearing, rendering any noise produced an almost instant and horrible death. It’s exactly the kind of inventive horror schlock that can sustain multiple films, ratcheting up the tension and scenarios that naturally occur from being unable to make a sound in a world that wants to kill you. For 90-odd minutes at a time, it rules. For 8-10 hours though…

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead does its best to try. In keeping with the staples of the franchise, you play as Alex, a young woman who discovers she’s pregnant just as things in her makeshift commune of survivors start to go pear-shaped. Cobbling together a homemade sonar device to measure sounds and gathering up as many inhalers for her dire asthma as she can manage, Alex sets out into an uncertain world in search of some semblance of safety for her unborn child. It’s about as tropey a premise as you’d imagine for a series more concerned with setting than character, though the ability to play as a pregnant woman is at least fresh for mainstream gaming and it does provide the requisite motivations for the journey ahead. 

From the jump developer Stormind Games correctly identifies what the bones of a successful Quiet Place game would look like. Played from a first-person perspective with a graphical lean on realism/fidelity and polished sound design, The Road Ahead immediately looks to ape the tone and feel of the films. You’ll need to slowly crouch walk over puddles and leaves to avoid making noise, gingerly open and close drawers and doors to avoid making noise, steady your breathing and heart rate with medications to avoid…you get it. 

THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $48 WITH FREE SHIPPING

This central tension of noise making is altered somewhat throughout the story as Alex will need to engage in several environment-specific physics “puzzles” or even outright Go Loud moments to break up pacing, but as the hours wear on and the game’s systems wane thinner and thinner, the most celebrated aspect of this franchise, the tension, is all but decimated. As a huge proponent for meticulously paced, even glacial, games (Death Stranding’s walking is good), it’s not that the prospect of a journey taken in halting, precious steps and choices can’t work, even over an extended period. But The Road Ahead is building on a framework designed for short bursts of sustained tension in a theatre, keyly relying on the magic (see technical trickery) of film to suspend disbelief and enable immersion. 

Instead, The Road Ahead’s smoke and mirror show gets in your lungs and eyes all too quickly as its ambitions collide with its scope. Death Angels here aren’t so much active stalkers in the world to be poked and prodded at, but static instant-fail sound triggers, outside of a few missions that let the concept shine. This isn’t a dealbreaker in and of itself but the game’s unreliable detection AI makes the off-screen creatures either far too keenly eared or generously deaf depending on the moment, while the Angels that roam certain levels adhere to fairly predictable pathing and inconsistent awareness. The game’s opening stretch, before these issues reveal themselves, is at least home to some genuine thrills as you accidentally make a sound and freeze in your tracks, senses on edge waiting to clock death coming at you. It’s cool and gets to the heart of what makes A Quiet Place such an effective world.   

Alex’s tools for dealing with the Angels will naturally grow throughout the game as you figure out how to throw objects to cause distraction sounds, pour sand in front of you to move faster over surfaces, and use your reliable phonometer to calculate sound and risk. These systems are fine enough, perfunctory first-person horror tools that are ostensibly elevated by the heightened setting but do little to make the game’s campaign retain any real thrills. Likewise, Alex’s asthma will flare up during physical exertion, regardless of severity, and requires a clumsy QTE to use an inhaler (which in this world are apparently single use) or else her vision will darken and heart rate tick up. Much like the distraction tools and the game’s meticulously placed noise makers (that can over there will get you killed), these systems could have been compelling in a tighter experience but are put under immense strain as the story and levels begin to layer on sillier plot devices and scenarios. 

Along your silent road trip, you’ll see glimpses of day one of the invasion as a means of delivering some much-needed detail to Alex’s character while trudging through the usual assortment of diary notes, scattered documents, and the odd fellow survivor. Like the systems before it, The Road Ahead’s narrative work is largely fine but never truly engaging, outright emulating portions of the films but failing to capture the catharsis of Blunt or Nyong’o’s leading characters. It is at least appropriately dire in keeping with the tone and vague thesis of the movies before it and fans of the franchise will undoubtedly get something out of another run at this world and its ideas. You can even nab yourself a collectible easter egg if that’s your vibe. 

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead then is perhaps best enjoyed by folks who are clamouring for more of this universe. As an extension of that it at least allows fans to actively engage with its cool premise, provided they have the patience for its glacial pacing and wonky detection systems. But as a game in its own right, The Road Ahead is a largely inoffensive, if overly long, experiment in adaptation that would have been a killer 2-3 hour smaller title instead. Stormind Games is an interesting studio, its work on the criminally underrated Remothered titles (an equally wonky but infinitely more compelling survival horror duology) tells of a team with, again, a keen eye for the bones of a solid horror experience. It’s just a shame that The Road Ahead is more whimper than bang.     

The post A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review – Hush Hush appeared first on Press Start.

In a dark, long-forgotten system of caves off the Turkish coast, a small hit squad of hired goons is about to die. An impulsive mission to recover an ancient artifact from an even older tomb has ended in disaster as a young woman’s position was given away and her escape route blocked by men armed with guns and poisoned idealism. From the shadows, she projects herself through the ethereal realm and begins to pull the strings; she positions one goon’s rifle to fire at the head of another, guides yet another’s electric baton to slam into the ground next to a flammable canister, and calmly walks the remaining attacker into the soon to be explosion. She is pulled back to her body just in time to watch the chaos erupt as the world turns in her favour while she watches on, unseen and unknown. 

This is Unknown 9: Awakening at its best– a tightly constructed set of tools and a linear sandbox in which to deploy them, when the game clicks into place, you feel like a minor God. What developer Reflector Entertainment build around these tools is the quintessential AA gaming experience, for mostly better and only rarely worse. 

Unknown 9 seeks to somewhat invert the typical narrative bones of the action-adventure genre by placing us in the shoes of Haroona, a young Indian woman thrown headfirst into a sprawling world of magical intrigue and existential doom. Actively avoiding, and sometimes even interrogating, the staple of “affable bearded white dude blasts through South Asian culture”, Unknown 9 instead uses Haroona’s heritage and characterisation to ground us more thoroughly in these places and cultures, lifting heavily from aesthetics, architecture, and even leading actor Anya Chalotra’s own cultural heritage. 

It’s a successful gambit, the game’s clear appreciation for Indian culture a driving force behind its cast of (relatively) likeable side characters and vibrant litany of levels. It has become disconcertingly easy to dismiss games of this budget and calibre as cheaper imitations of what the AAA space can do, a shortsighted way of engaging with works like Unknown 9. You won’t see the best texture work in the business here but thanks to a killer art direction that feels of a piece with the best action-adventure romps, and smart use of pre-baked lighting and tight-level design, the world of Unknown 9 feels richly sweet.  

And while this cultural inversion lends the game an undeniable uniqueness in the market, its structure adheres much more closely to trends established well over a decade ago in the genre. This will be a make-or-break point for many, as while the likes of Uncharted have largely been able to paper over their mechanical status quo (stagnation if you’re feeling spicy) with breathtaking visual fidelity, Unknown 9 lands firmly in the AA development sphere, leaning more into art direction and vibes than outright AAA quality. In turn, its reliance on the usual flow of stealth in tall grass, clambering up rock textures and vines, crawling between cracks, and a light and heavy combat loop is laid far more bare. Unknown 9 is effectively a 360 game, then, and that kinda rules. 

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $79 WITH FREE SHIPPING FROM AMAZON

The linear narrative action-adventure path is as you might expect with that in mind; Haroona will scramble through just over a dozen chapters, chasing the bad guys around the world and uncovering the secrets of the Unknown 9 in a fairly breezy, pleasant fashion. Many of the game’s major beats you’ll see coming a mile off but Chalotra’s performance is incredibly charming and keeps the central throughline of a young woman coming to terms with a cruel world firmly in hand even as the backend of the game swings into melodrama. The quasi-fictionalised India and surrounding global situation is genuinely compelling though as the game paints a portrait of a people who are actively aware of their impending demise as part of a cyclical destruction that ravages society every X number of years. 

The fallout of this awareness is the forming of the titular Unknown 9, a cabal of immortal beings who seek to stop the cogs of time from churning in an effort that you just know can only end well. The niceties of this set-up are littered throughout dozens of collectibles and notes (Unknown 9 is itself part of a larger transmedia push including books, comics, and audio dramas) but the immediate effect is Haroona’s ability to use Am (magic) and the Fold (a kind of spirit realm) to interact with the game world.

Unknown 9 is equal parts stealth and action game, lifting the fundamentals of each but remixing them brilliantly with Umbric Abilities, skills that Haroona uses Am for. The biggest, and best, of them is the Step, granting Haroona the ability to astral project into the body of most enemies and pilot them around in suspended time, unleashing attacks or positioning them in front of environmental hazards before jumping into the next or recalling back to her body to set her choices in motion.  

Over the course of Unknown 9’s approximately 15-hour campaign, this never gets old. This is partly due to the game’s escalating scenario design in which the Ascendents continue to trot out more elaborate anti-Step machinery and cartoonishly over-designed big boys to deal with (one late-game enemy feels like someone ran Indiana Jones through an Evil Within filter and I clapped). It also helps that Haroona’s skill trees (stealth, Umbral, and combat) are packed full of expressive and fun mechanics that you’re free to chain together in any way you see fit. That cave encounter I mentioned earlier later saw me go loud with abandon, using a shield to parry bullets before double dodging to close the gap and Umbral push a soldier off a cliff while forcing my Am spirit out of my body to punch another in the face.  

Combat sits comfortably in the Arkham tradition of light/heavy, dodge, and parry to build up a stagger meter before delivering a final blow, but it can veer a little sloppy. The camera lock-on in particular fights you at every turn and as the game ramps up enemy numbers, it can begin to feel frustrating keeping track of powerful foes while managing your Am and health. These poorly balanced instances drag on an otherwise solid system, especially once Haroona can start pulling on Am to do AOE attacks and sick-as-shit astral combat abilities that let you close the gap between you and your foe without moving or breaking off of your current action. 

There’s a nice harmony to much of what Unknown 9 sets out to achieve and while its textures can be crunchy and its narrative structure a little flat, the essence of the experience is delightful. This is a text with foundational aspirations; in my preview, I noted that it feels as if we should have had several of these games had they kicked off in the 360/PS3 heyday and I sincerely hope Unknown 9 gets the chance to build off what has been done here. Chalotra’s Haroona is a charismatic lead in her own right and the systems built around her are cohesive and inventive, if in need of some fine-tuning. With time, there’s a killer franchise to be had here, but as far as origin stories go, an Unknown 7.5 ain’t half-bad.

The post Unknown 9: Awakening Review – 360, Party Girl appeared first on Press Start.

Anya Chalotra wants to escape. Still brushing off the early UK morning start, the star of Netflix’s The Witcher and the upcoming game Unknown 9: Awakening sits on a couch entirely too big for one person and patiently waits for our slight audio delay to catch up between questions about life as an actor, her Indian heritage, and the modern-day plight of being Perceived. Softly dancing around answers with consideration, changing thoughts midway and picking up another thread plucked from the air, Chalotra admits to being pulled to massive fantasy worlds in a potentially subconscious bid to escape our reality.

Whether it’s the physical form to be wielded in her extensive acting career, the existential trap of social media, or even the weight of representation in media, Chalotra brings herself in her entirety to Unknown 9: Awakening as we unpack what that means for the soon to be released action-adventure romp.

Can you tell me a bit about your history with video games?

Anya Chalotra: I first became interested in video games and delved into that world when I got Witcher and I got Yennefer because it was such a big game with such a big following. So I played that then. Before that, I played Mario Kart with my family *laughs*. But I’ve always been quite fascinated by them. And especially in COVID, I’ve noticed how huge it has become (and) I never thought I’d see myself in a video game. That’s incredibly exciting.

I can imagine. Can I quickly ask, who did you play Mario Kart?

Anya Chalotra: I think I was Luigi! Who did you play?

I’m always a Peach girly. But tell me how your involvement with Unknown 9: Awakening came about?

Anya Chalotra: The opportunity presented itself, and I grabbed it because it was something that, honestly, I wanted to do. I think maybe I was manifesting it or something. I work with my body before anything else and I’ve always been inspired by Andy Serkis in Planet of the Apes. So I fantasised about being an ape in that because I desperately wanted to use my body in that way *laughs*. And, obviously, Haroona isn’t an ape, but I got a chance to do motion capture and learn on the job because I had no experience before. And there was a lot! Everyone around me was a lot cleverer than I was when it comes to motion capture. So I just learned from them. And I know a lot more now than I did. That’s for sure. I’ve learned a lot.

Are you able to talk a bit about how acting and using your body in that way for something like a Netflix series or on the stage is different from what done now with mocap for a video again?

I thought it’d be a lot more different, to be honest, because I just thought it’d be more technical. But you still are interrogating the same depths of truth in the story, in the scene, in the character. We worked with the director who pushed us to find the best version of truth. And we did take after take after take. It was very similar to being on set but the thing that was different was the freedom I had to explore. I don’t have that on set. I had no makeup, and I didn’t have to fulfill the expectations of costume. And that’s not how I approach it in film and TV, I use it to my advantage and often it builds character building for me. But when I am stripped back, everything has to come from a really vulnerable, true, authentic place. And I want to carry that in every medium now…find that play, that play, because only in that can you access everything.

Unknown 9 feels quite unique in the video game space because it highlights a culture that we don’t often get to see represented in mainstream titles. Was the authenticity of Indian representation important to you while making this game?

I am half Indian, South Asian. It’s funny when I get a role, I’m either one or the other, one half of myself or the other half. But in every role, I bring both. In this role, I very rarely get to lend that side of myself to a role because of the way I look. So it was so lovely to be able to explore that in Haroona and to be with a lot of British South Asian actors on this job as well. And to work with them, it was just wonderful to have that. In any fantasy or any world with another dimension…why wouldn’t you want many voices to create that world? So I’m very proud of being in this game because of how diverse it is and the culture that we’re celebrating in the way this world has been crafted and the way it looks. And at the heart of it, Haroona, who is this Indian woman who…when I play an Indian character, I often feel the weight of family, ancestors, behind everything they do. Especially in Haroona. I wanted to make sure that every choice was about something bigger.

I was reading your Vogue India profile from last year, and you talked about how, I think it was in 2019, you got a chance to get over to India and meet some of your extended family. Does getting to show them a character like Haroona mean a lot to you? Is it a surreal experience to be able to bring something like that into your family and your heritage?

AC: I know when I watch anything with an Indian woman in it, I was heavily influenced by it…I was brought up Indian with those core beliefs and values. So when I watch an Indian woman represented in a really whole way, in a really full way, it ignites a fire in me and I can’t quite explain, but it’s warm and I’m proud. And with characters like Haroona, you’ve got such a considered character here. Such thought has gone into why she is who she is and why she makes the choices she makes. And I’m excited for my nieces and my cousins to play this game. They’ll be to play someone that looks and thinks like Haroona and will have, hopefully, the same feeling.

What’s your favourite thing about Haroona and did you bring much of yourself into the character?

AC: My favourite thing? I think she’s funny! I think she’s funny because she’s got bigger fish to fry. Cut the faff. She just shuts people down with a look, no words. She’s witty…and yeah, I mean, a lot of it has come from my instincts. And then I’ve been challenged by the circumstance and the situation in this new world, these new rules. I trusted in the fact that the people who originated this story and gave her life, trusted in me to do that. And I just go.

With Unknown 9 and with The Witcher as well, you maybe inadvertently gravitate towards these epic fantasy franchises. Is it a genre that really works for you, or did you just fall into these things?

AC: I don’t think you can just fall into anything *laughs*. I think there is something in you, maybe I’m just calling out to just not be in the real world. Maybe people see in my eyes that I’m desperate to escape. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I like to believe things happen for a reason.

Something I’ve read about you is that you’re not hugely into social media. As a person coming up through the Hollywood system that’s an interesting position for you to be in. Do you find that with the whole video game side of social media, have you become more aware of it or is that something you have still have no desire of being a part of?

AC: I’m still figuring it out. I know that I feel better off social media. And I know that when I’m on social media and I’m aware of the people who are very aware of me, I stress out a bit. It doesn’t make me feel very good. So I try and stay off it. I’m very aware of the gaming community on social media and how big that is and how much of an impact that has had on my life. But in general, social media, I struggle with.

It’s a strange tension, isn’t it? Between being perceived in ways you want and don’t want. And you’re obviously someone who throws yourself wholeheartedly into the art that you make. So to have that part of you so open and so out there versus maybe the way people want to engage with celebrities these days…

AC: Yeah! Because I pretend for a living, I also find myself pretending, even though I don’t mean to, on my Instagram. Why am I doing that? What’s going on? Because I suppose whatever you put out there is a version of filtered truth, it has to be to keep private. So what’s the point? Because it’s then taking up all my time.

As someone relatively active on Twitter for his job, yes, I fully agree! But most importantly, what are you most excited for people to see in Unknown 9?

AC: The whole thing. Because it’s so much thought, so many voices have gone into this. And I think the characters at the heart of it, I know Who these characters are, what all the actors have done to bring them to life. And I think if you don’t feel it, if you don’t align with a Haroona and you don’t maybe like her as a character, because it’s possible! Then you’ve got these really vivid characters to align yourself with too. It’s a very interesting world. And the visuals as well. They’re insane. I can’t imagine anything like it in a game. This culture. The representation of the world. I answered that terribly, but all of it.

Not at all, your answers have been wonderful. I got to play a couple of hours of the game a couple of weeks back and one of my biggest takeaways from it was just how nice it was to see an entirely different world represented in a game in a way we don’t really see all that often. More often than not, we’re playing the white hero who comes into these cultures and ransacks and shoots off on their way. And to see it from an entirely different perspective has been really refreshing.

AC: Yeah, that’s how I feel. Ditto. That’s my answer *laughs*

The post Anya Chalotra On Acting, Gaming, And Representation In Unknown 9: Awakening appeared first on Press Start.

Perfect Cell descends into city ruins and lands with a signature smirk and taunting pose, eying his soon-to-be opponent, Third Form Frieza. The two size each other up and exchange appropriately goofy barbs about who wields more power as the camera cuts dramatically, the music swells and they collide. A brief title card declaring this the battle for Earth, a rapid series of blows and then, in the aftermath as Frieza kneels, they throw pithy one-liners at each other once again. The kicker, of course, is that these two characters never existed at the same time in Dragon Ball Z, but using the tools Sparking! Zero gave me, I was able to, at least somewhat, approximate a short scene between them for no other reason than I thought it would be cool. 

It’s been seventeen years since the last time Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi graced consoles with its celebratory exploration of the immensely popular Dragon Ball franchise. A series tailormade for video-game adaptation, its iconic and eccentric character designs from the late great Akira Toriyama were matched only by its blistering focus on extravagantly scaled fights and world-ending arcs. It rules, basically, and developer Spike Chunsoft is picking up the mantle once again, and the time away hasgiven birth to a whole host of new ideas and returning fan favourites.

Sparking! Zero has a kind of holistic charm, a game so full of small touches and loving homages that it’s difficult to single out any one thing from the roughly two hours I spent poking at its edges. It starts at the top level, with elements like UI and menu animations being clearly aimed at players who will get a thrill out of things like Goku launching himself between different anime locations and stages to signify different menus. Landing amid friends and foes as crisp selection menus fill the screen, it sets the stage immediately for Sparking! Zero’s truest intent— a celebration of all things Dragon Ball Z. 

Given its eye-catching visuals and brand recognition, Sparking! Zero’s tutorilisation seems keenly aware of its near two-decade absence from the market and the literal generation of new players that could be picking it up upon its return. As someone who isn’t well versed in the fighting game space, let alone one with this degree of movement and playspace freedom, onboarding is crucial and Sparking! Zero eased me in nicely. Choose a stage I recognised from the show, set me up against a passive Mr. Satan who’s happy to take a beating, and slowly introduce me to the plethora of options available in combat. 

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $99 WITH FREE SHIPPING FROM AMAZON

If you’ve played the Budokai Tenkaichi titles before this will likely feel familiar but for the uninitiated, Sparking! Zero takes the principles of a 2D fighter and blows them wide open with full 3D play spaces. This is in part an excellent means of capturing the spirit of the anime as the game can deploy a series of rapid camera cuts or massive, arena-spanning animations to emulate how it felt to watch titans clash on alien worlds. Only now, you’re (mostly) in control of it all and while the ceiling for skilled players will likely require Saiyan strength to reach, the moment-to-moment is casually approachable and engaging. 

Maneuvering your hero (or villain) of choice around the battlefield is a fairly intuitive affaire, making full use of the space you can hover up or down and use a speed boost to cover great distances while flying toward, or searching for, your opponent. Once engaged in fisticuffs, you’ll volley light and heavy attacks with a smattering or ranged options, all while taking time to block, parry, and charge your Ki meter by holding down the left bumper. This puts your character into the classic “AHHHHHH” state, replete with glowing energy and tensed biceps and fists. Ki is then used to deploy special attacks, ranging from half-charged to full depending on their requirements and subsequent damage. 

Again, it’s a rise and fall of tensions that feels good enough for a newcomer to pick up while deeper tactical and skilled play simmers just beneath the surface. Getting to let loose a quick Solar Flare to momentarily evade attack or, naturally, blast a Kamehameha, always felt cool, doubly so for having had to take the time in between precarious blows to charge my own Ki. The flip side is that a move like the Kamehameha also required some extremely quick thinking aiming to land with effectiveness, a somewhat cumbersome targeting experience I couldn’t quite grapple with during my brief time. Likewise, the game’s parry window feels exceptionally tight to these fresh eyes, a simple block is nice and easy but the dramatic flare and cinematics of a parry ask more of the player than I had anticipated. 

It was difficult to linger on these pain points, either because of my inexperience with the genre making it tough to nail down where the line between skill and game was crossing, but also because the act of just hanging out in Sparking! Zero was consistently so satisfying. The roster of characters to choose from is frankly dizzying (I only didn’t recognise like four of them, please clap for this aging DBZ fan) and many of them contain multiple transformations to adhere to various states as seen in the series. Likewise, combat is elevated by destructible environments that crumble around your fights as your characters get visibly bloodier and more battered as it goes on. Small touches, yes, but ones that add up to make the experience more than the sum of its parts.

Those parts do rule though, as combat is bolstered by two major play modes, alongside the usual assortment of tournament and multiplayer. The first is a greatest hits mix of major story moments from the series, played out across eight different character perspectives and allowing you to fight through story beats and even make some choices to impact them. In my demo, I was able to witness the huge dickheadedness of Radditz and Vegeta from the perspective of Goku and Piccolo, and while the condensed versions of these stories seemingly don’t offer much beyond “oh neat” it is still in fact kinda neat. 

Sparking! Zero’s greatest neat trick is in its editing suite though, as you’re invited to effectively craft your own moments and battles through an extensive creation mode, broken down into Simple and Normal Edit. Simple is as it sounds, a stripped-back version of the full set of tools available in Normal, including a limited roster, but is a great place to get your feet wet in what is otherwise a fairly overwhelming range of options. Edit gives you full control over a fight from opening cutscene to closing— and I do mean full. I touched on it earlier how I was able to rip characters from across time and plot to fight like my personal toy box but getting to that moment gave me hundreds of small choices to envision and execute as I saw fit. 

Everything from the lines of dialogue to the camera angles to the music and character poses can be customised in the editing suite, giving you the ability to fully create cutscenes from scratch with tools that are mostly intuitive, if slightly clunky at times. My highlight was getting to design the splash title card that would precede every episode of the anime, though as far as I could tell I could only fill this space with predetermined words and phrases (there are LOADS of them but I would like the chance to write some stupid shit of my own in its place). Meanwhile, fights can be manipulated to a granular level; say I want to inject some dramatic tension into the exchange, I can implement trigger rules to play that gives my opponent a boost of Ki energy or health once they drop to a certain percentage of either, or give me the chance to rise from the dead if I’m KO’d. It’s impossible for me to truly unpack these options given how short a window I had with the game but this feels like an excellent toybox for the Dragon Ball sickos if there ever was one. 

It’s just all so damn cool and fun to play around with, the finer details of Sparking! Zero’s fighting mechanics and true depth of customisation are to be unpacked when the game releases next month by people with a far keener eye for it than me. But inexperience couldn’t dull what was an otherwise charming and compelling few hours exploring places I’d adored as a child in front of CheeseTV, smashing figures of my favourite characters together and getting to feel even marginally in control of the kind of massive scale battles I would watch with bated breath. Someone else can tell you if Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! Zero is the iterative fighting game you want, for now, I just want to show you how sick it is.  

DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO is out on October 11th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. The cheapest copy is $99 with free shipping from Amazon. 

The post DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO Hands-On Preview – It’s Over 9000 appeared first on Press Start.

Unknown 9: Awakening is taking a swing. An absurdly ambitious multi-media push from Montreal studio Reflector Entertainment and Bandai Namco, the game is the flagship for a broader franchise effort that includes a celebrity lead, a trilogy of novels, a scripted audio drama, and a comic book series. First unveiled four years ago before a hibernation period and eventual return to Gamescom earlier this year, the Unknown 9 story world is primed with proper nouns, lore, and entries ready to dive into before the game’s launch in late October. You’d also be forgiven for having never heard of it.  

Part of the wider problem new media faces in the current landscape is the absolute glut of options available to audiences at any given moment. When everyone and their dog is launching an IP or new franchise to fall in love with, there’s a flattening effect that creates noise instead of buzz. It can be exhausting and forgivably numbing, so when the preview for Unknown 9: Awakening came knocking, replete with new proper nouns and promises of a new world to love, I braced myself for more noise. Instead, I found a humble but enthusiastic game that gleefully plays with genre mechanics and tropes and is poised to be the sleeper AA hit of the year. 

Unknown 9: Awakening marks yet another instance where we play as a sardonic young woman with a magical bracer at her disposal, picking up with Haroona in her pursuit of the man responsible for the death of a loved one who also happens to be heading up a country spanning invasion effort in the form of a paramilitary organisation. Played by The Witcher’s Anya Charlota, Haroona initially appears to be a fairly standard video game protagonist but already there are hints at a deeper portrait of a woman here and her struggles against the invading force form a decent backdrop for the game’s third-person action/stealth adventure.

Across the few hours spent with the game, I climbed, stealthed and struck my way through humble city streets and out into a denser jungle environment, marking an escalation of mechanics and enemy encounters as I went. Unknown 9: Awakening’s toybox is immediately familiar and, somewhat easily, dismissed as a Ubisoft-lite package. Haroona is a Quaestor, a person gifted with the ability to Step into the Fold, a reality that simmers just below ours and flows freely with immense fantastical power. For Haroona this places her squarely on collision course with a legion of soldiers as they conduct an inquisition against Quaestors, but for the player, it opens up a whole host of sick as shit gameplay possibilities. 

We start small; Haroona needs to clear a courtyard or market of soldiers by crouching through tall grass and using environmental hazards for takedowns. As the guards mingle and loudly discuss nefarious plans, you use the Fold to “Peek” and enter the game’s Eagle/Detective mode and spy heat signatures through walls, and you feel right at home with what’s happening here. But then the game invites you to Step right into an enemy’s soul, freezing time for you to take full control of an NPC, piloting them to initiate attacks on fellow soldiers, stand next to an explosive barrel, or even walk clean off a ledge. Time resumes its flow, and your spirit returns to wherever you left your body and the chaos you conducted unfolds from the safety of your hiding spot. 

THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $79 FROM AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

It’s a Godly ability that fundamentally shifts the vibe around what could have otherwise been a fairly rote stealth loop. Unknown 9: Awakening escalates the Step even further as it can be freely wielded even during combat; in a deeply entrenched jungle encampment, I had blown my cover and accidentally gone loud, leading to all Hell being unleashed on me. With a few light and heavy moves at my disposal, I kited and exchanged blows with foes but a heavy brute dogged my every move until the background math of the level design clicked into place. I Stepped into him, navigating him right into a burning oil spill before Stepping into a rifleman on a nearby ridge and placing a shot clean through his head. Whipping back to my body, I watched this man crumble beneath the combined damage and realised just how much fun Unknown 9: Awakening could be. 

My time with Unknown 9: Awakening was full of these moments, small instances where system and player merged neatly to make for cascading “huh!” and “that’s cool” situations. The Fold can be used to “Shroud” Haroona, walking through the otherworldly plane right in front of enemies if you want, or after spending some Gnosis Points in one of the game’s several skill trees (combat, stealth etc), Haroona could summon a shield of Fold energy to block projectiles and push deeper into a level. Or that one time I realised I could turn into an ethereal cloud of particles right as a soldier loosed a shot and simply phased through the bullet to punch him in the face. How these abilities and situations evolved over the full game remains to be seen of course but having just come off the stripped-back stealth of Star Wars Outlaws, Unknown 9: Awakening winds up feeling like a much more accomplished game.

Conversely, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there is some signature AA crunchiness to contend with here. Combat is fairly functional and impactful enough but the camera lingers too closely on Haroona for comfort, especially during crowded scenarios and boss fights. And the overall level design will turn you around more than you’d like, signposting for progress murky amid some unpolished texture work and smudged colours. This is, to my mind, not remotely a deal breaker as the race to photorealistic fidelity has slowed development to a crawl and is producing diminishing returns. And while a preview build has time for last-minute polish, the game’s killer art direction can’t obscure its rougher visual edges. 

These gripes fall away when I think back on the small touches Reflector have crammed into the game though, even in just my two hours with it. Haroona is a playful protagonist, her snarky rebukes infused with an underlying sincerity and clarity of purpose that makes her pairing with an old gunslinger from the West all the more compelling. In an inverted Uncharted, Haroona takes the lead in her own culture and world as the two traverse a fantasy-infused South Asian landscape, its heritage and beauty under threat from forces very explicitly riffing on colonisation and the march of industrialisation. The writing too sings between mandatory exposition; our aging gunslinger grumbles about not trusting machines and Haroona chides him on the silliness of his ways, later still he warns her that the ground in a cave is loose, “then step tightly” she fires back. 

In our first preview of Unknown 9: Awakening we theorised that the game could provide players with the kind of inventive, game-first systems focus not properly seen since the prime days of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Having spent a few hours poking at the edges of it, I’m thrilled to say this hope is alive and well, as the game taps right into that familiar sense of joy and discovery we associate with stealth titles that really want to let the player just play. The world surrounding ghe game, the books and podcasts, may or may not find its footing but Haroona’s mystical skills, sharp tongue, and compelling fantasy landscapes seem worth knowing.

Unknown 9 Awakening releases on October 18th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. The cheapest copy is currently $79 from Amazon.

The post Unknown 9: Awakening Hands-On Preview – Old Toys, New Tricks  appeared first on Press Start.

The soft pitch for Caravan SandWitch is killer. What happens when you take the smooth brain checkboxing of a Ubisoft open-world title and filter it through a French indie lens? Gingerly sprinkle in some tried and true genre tropes and vaguely cozy aesthetic touchstones and you’ve got the individual components to build something charming and contemporary.

Caravan SandWitch plops you in the Lois Griffin-coded shoes of Sauge, a young woman compelled to return to her backwater home world after receiving a distress call from her older sister. The kicker is that this sister disappeared several years ago and your dad, her ex, and almost everyone in your hometown tells you that a distress call is impossible given that the planet has been effectively annexed by the Consortium, a mega-corp that has a monopoly on every aspect of life in this sci-fi world.

Something of a mining town without a mine, Cigalo is a world in the grips of a glacially paced apocalypse. An ominous energy storm dominates the otherwise cloudy blue skies to the south but nobody seems particularly fussed, instead, the various residents and denizens busy themselves with busted water filters, failing crops, and the thousand other bits of busy work to be found in a place ravaged by industry and left for dead. A striking landscape of jagged cliffs, sporadically defiant greenery, and coastline, Cigalo’s Provence-inspired palette allows Caravan SandWitch to dabble in frontier aesthetics and vertical world design while keeping the game within relatively balmy tonal parameters. 

Shot through with sci-fi trappings and a diverse cast of charming locals, Cigalo practically begs exploration, an impulse Caravan SandWitch struggles to wrangle against its greater narrative ambitions and pacing. Sauge is promptly gifted a 4×4 van, an upgradeable and semi-customisable vehicle that lets you zip along dirt roads and careen into the wilds with (relative) ease. Smartly veering more arcadey than sim, the van (and Sauge) are immune to damage and can Skyrim horse themselves into all manner of positions, only ever amusingly stumped by a small rock that stops you in your tracks. There’s a healthy dose of simple platforming and puzzle-solving to be found in Cigalo too, easily Caravan SandWitch’s best expression of streamlined open-world sensibilities and a small joy I never tired of. 

As you progress the game’s story, as paced through hardline chapter markers, the van will pick up several tools that allow for deeper exploration of the map and points of interest. These upgrades are purchased using scrap found in the world and gifted for completing quests, ranging from common green to rare purple. Toss in some map uncovering via radio tower destruction and a few collectable questlines and you’ve hit all the markers on Ubisoft’s golden path to smooth-brained joy in an open world. 

Only, Caravan SandWitch digs potholes for itself before setting off which frequently turns smooth into bumpy. The world is effectively open in its entirety after the game’s first hour and given how gorgeously inviting it looks, you’d be forgiven for gathering up some small requests for this or that and trekking out to simply vibe in this space. But then you find you can’t pull that door open yet, you can’t hack that elevator, or ride that zipline to a cool point of interest. Your impulse to roam is thoroughly roadblocked by your inability to interact. So, you snap some nice screenshots, hyper-focus on gathering enough scrap for the next upgrade, and head back out only to begin the cycle anew, just truncated sightly. 

It never stopped feeling antithetical to both the genre the game plays with and the breezy sense of openness Caravan SandWitch works overtime to maintain. By pacing the tools needed to enjoy the space out the way the game does, it funnels you into focusing on the main quest and gathering cycles to reach a stage where you feel you could actually venture out and allow your eye line to dictate your course and not your lack of tools. But Caravan SandWitch is also peppered with time-sensitive quests, meaning that if you progress the story (automatically occurring when an upgrade is crafted) without completing your chores you’ll lose the chance to do them, creating a strangled tension between player and game. 

This is a shame because the various comings and goings of Caravan SandWitch’s cast and world are fairly charming if not always compelling. The game’s bigger picture ideas are a rogue’s gallery of indie talking points, from the organic drama of human connection to space capitalism woes, which dabble in momentary depth but largely settle into a comfortably familiar cadence. But in the margins this world comes alive; a race of native frog-creatures observe humans with coy fascination as you help them gather their young and learn about memory as understood through shared consciousness. Or the small family struggling to decide if life in a small, dying town will be existentially better for their kid even if he misses out on big city opportunities. 

You might also be wondering about that big, missing sister neon sign that kicked off the adventure and Caravan SandWitch feels unsure how to handle that. Where Breath of the Wild and its ilk avoid the narrative dissonance of Quest: Save the World and Side Quest: Johnny Needs Six Apples by simply refusing to acknowledge it, Caravan SandWitch frequently points to what should be Sauge’s singular care. Much like the halting use of exploration tools, the game’s competing desires to be both open and focused pull at its edges in strange ways- it’s pleasantly skilled at building a world for you to enjoy at your leisure but unable to edit its ideas down to a point where doing so feels organic.  

Your mileage on Caravan SandWitch’s tensions will vary greatly depending on your relationship to open-world titles and the cloying tropes of cozy indies, but an immacuate eye for aesthetics and some hidden gems at least bring it together to be almost more than the sum of its parts. It helps too that the whole thing hums along with Antyomy’s score, a kind of French-draped “lo-fi beats to roam to” that infuses the game with a sense of place and tone befitting its better intentions and impulses.

But as I trundled out into the wilds to gather up my umpteenth bit of scrap, I couldn’t help but wonder if Caravan SandWitch’s attempted subversion of the open-world genre had been bogged on its otherwise gorgeous dirt roads.

The post Caravan SandWitch Review – Oh Sister Where Art Thou appeared first on Press Start.

The Albanese government is reportedly looking to enforce stricter rules for teenagers online ahead of the next federal election according to a new report from The Guardian. The prime minister will allegedly announce the bill some time today though exact details of the legislation remain unclear outside of a loosely defined restriction around the use of social media and “other relevant digital platforms” by persons under 18 years old.

While the exact age limit of the legislation has yet to be announced, the news follows Albanese’s previous endorsement of banning social media for anyone under the age of 16. Equally unknown is exactly how far reaching this legislation will seek to enforce itself and on which gaming platforms. 

While major live service and multiplayer titles like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft immediately come to mind, it’s unclear how this love from the Australian government would coexist with pre-existing terms of service and minimum age requirements for the use of transactions and other social media platforms. 

The news comes ahead of Australia’s next federal election, slated to take place sometime before September of 2025. The Prime Minster has spoken out on this issue before, stating that “We know that technology moves fast, No government is going to be able to protect every child from every threat – but we have to do all we can. Parents are worried sick about this. We know they’re working without a map – no generation has faced this challenge before.”

The post Albanese Apparently Wants To Ban Social Media & Digital Platforms Including Gaming For Aussies Under 16 appeared first on Press Start.

Star Wars Outlaws lives and dies on its most marketed aspect– the scoundrel fantasy. Shifting the perspective character in the galaxy far, far away from sword-wielding monk or Rebel pilot to a humble street rat gifts Outlaws a unique viewpoint and gameplay systems with which to push and pull at the edges of an otherwise familiar universe. This is, we’re told, decidedly not an epic tale of light and dark but a more personal story as we get to put boots on the ground of Star Wars’ seedy underbelly, the syndicate-dominated world of illegal trade, fast lies, and faster Credits.

Clambering her way out from the lowest socioeconomic rung of the opulent Canto Bight, Kay Vess’ ambitions of a new life land her current one squarely in the scope of the emerging crime syndicate Zerek Besh. Having crossed its leader Sliro and landing on the wrong side of a much wider conflict, Kay and her pet bestie Nix commandeer a ship and lightspeed jump into scoundrel on the run before either of them are ready. For all her bluster, Kay is a small-town girl in a big-city world and with a looming Death Mark dogging her every move, she soon finds herself in the employ of the smooth-talking Jaylen and his impossibly hot droid, ND-5.

Structurally speaking Outlaws cribs a lot from classic heist films; a likeable everywoman needs to put together a crew of appropriately quirky specialists while navigating the competing needs of the crime world’s biggest and baddest. This loosely allows developer MASSIVE Entertainment a narrative framework to implement the patented Ubisoft Open-World loop as Kay can freely-ish move between a handful of planets, gathering up resources, taking on odd jobs, raiding bases, and planning the big final heist, you know, the one that’s gonna get them all out of the game for good this time.

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $89 FROM AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

Landing somewhere between the third-person action-adventure structure of Uncharted and the open-zone, immersive Star Wars vibe-extravaganza of Jedi: Survivor, Outlaws plots an uneven path through the galaxy. It is, on paper, exactly the kind of game fans have been clamouring for and will undoubtedly scratch a deep-seated itch for many. It’s also keenly aware of this though and subsequently seeks to craft an experience as frictionless and smooth as possible within the confines of its genre and tropes. Whether or not that gives you a bad feeling about this is up to you.

Outlaws, despite its scope and scale, is strangely hyper-focused. The limited range of action verbs it offers the player as Kay has a flattening effect on the game’s mechanical pacing, the final heist feeling systemically identical to the dozens of repeated Imperial bases you cleared while exploring and the tutorial mission you did way back when this all kicked off. It runs amok on the sense of scale in the galaxy, as everything from syndicate hideout to Imperial garrison to ancient waterways feels functionally indistinguishable thanks to heavy asset reused, linear climbing sections, and endlessly recycled hacking minigames that lose their charm before you’ve left your first planet. 

There is a small escalation of available tools as Kay meets Experts, named characters who exist to abstract traditional skill trees into ostensibly more immersive, free-form gameplay expressions. Say you want Nix’s senses to reach further or your stealth takedowns to impact heavies, instead of investing points in a menu now you’ll run odd jobs for palatable faces and complete arbitrary challenges while exploring. In many ways this is a step in the right direction for Ubisoft, especially given that the skills Experts offer aren’t linear and can be focused at your discretion. But even a glance at the full list of upgrades reveals how little Outlaws will offer you at your best and how much it has stripped from you to do so.

Some of it tracks with conventional modern RPG-lite design; health upgrades and additional inventory slots bolstering additional stealth options like smoke bombs. Others though seem to have been reverse-engineered for the sake of it; your speeder, a BMX hoverbike, is awkward when you first begin exploring but can be “upgraded” to feel like something you’d actually want to use, same with your ship the Trailblazer, which controls like a shopping cart full of rocks until a Glup Shitto says its time for it to start feeling fun. Throttling the player like this feels like an attempt to slow the inevitable realisation of how little Outlaws has to offer beyond its opening hours but it has the opposite effect, rapidly exposing the game’s dated and overly simplistic mechanics.

These rudimentary systems are truly put through their paces in the game’s middling level design and mission structure. Outlaws leans surprisingly hard on stealth, often placing you in instant fail scenarios that expose baseline limitations and odd pain points. Moving through a space, Kay can crouch to ostensibly muffle sounds, crawl through vents to avoid line-of sight detection, and use Nix to distract enemies and so on. You’ve seen these loops before, but Outlaws struggles to make them functional; I would frequently and loudly jog behind guards who remained blissfully unaware, those same guards just as likely to walk over a dead body as they were to react to it, though could clock me from a mile away if they decided it was time to.

This strains on moment-to-moment enjoyment and immersion but has a disastrous impact on segments that will boot you back five minutes if spotted even once. And it cascades from there with Outlaws as missions break requiring hard reloads, level design and garish UI fail to communicate basic directions, and enemy pathing and AI feel absent. It grates more often than it impresses but MASSIVE rightfully has a reputation in the shooter space for its work on the Division titles and there are moments in Outlaws that feel of a piece with this legacy. A stripped-back third-person shooter that forgoes a constant arsenal or cover for an on-the-fly vibe, Kay will wing it in skirmishes by picking up dropped enemy weapons with limited ammo so as to always return to her reliable sidearm. This concept truly thrives during the Empire’s WANTED threat as imperials bring Hell down on Kay in escalating and tense shootouts. 

It’s a nice bit of narrative and mechanical synergy and the blaster, a fully customisable weapon with several alternate firing modes and power modules, feels decent if never truly great. MASSIVE’s pedigree rears its head with some of the stray weapons you’ll find during combat, with a solid range of blaster types and a Star Wars arse shotgun that I would have killed to always have on me if just for how much fun it was to use. Kay can also whip out a thermal detonator or two but doing so is staggeringly clumsy, requiring you to hold left on the D-pad to access a submenu, fully halting movement as you leave the left stick cold in the process.  

So, Outlaws finds itself with two distinct playstyles but no real penchant for either, oscillating between fine and frustrating, basic and busted. For all the mindless vibes of the Far Cry games I could at least rely on their shooting to be consistently enjoyable and stealth systems, however stripped back, reliable. Outlaws offers no such smooth-brained ease, no flow state as Kay trips around scenarios that feel unpolished and fundamentally unengaging. To say nothing of the space combat that places you in some admittedly stunning nebulas but only provides barebones shield and laser management and a whole lot of dead air between where you jump into a system and the planet you’re trying to reach.

Comfort then is to be sought in the gorgeously rendered open-zones, the wheeling and dealing of syndicate powers and the loosely desirable “Star Wars” of it all. Here, at least, MASSIVE’s promise of immersion finds some solid ground as the assorted planets and environments Kay can meander through are universally impressive from both a technical and vibes perspective. The Snowdrop engine puts in the work as spaces feel appropriately dense and gritty, evoking the sights and sounds of Star Wars in ways that lull you into a serene and welcome sense of place, made whole by the game’s excellent emulation of camera lenses from the original trilogy.

Where Outlaws struggles is finding much meaning in this impressive tonal recreation. Not a single explorable hub location feels untouched by care but not a single one I found offers anything markedly different from any other, a series of beautifully crafted theme park attractions where the workers can sell you something and not much else. Kay can’t flip a table in a cantina and fire stray shots, civilian hubs deemed non-combat areas.

Likewise, the lauded Lens Project (MASSIVE’s use of Snowdrop tech to capture the specific lighting and image composition off 70s camera lenses) is a neat trick deployed to no discernible end as the game’s in-engine cutscenes showcase no cinematic flair and the pre-rendered ones move like YouTube fan films. It’s a long way to go to create a world so laboriously dedicated to Star Wars without bothering to understand that it wasn’t the camera or dirt that made those films what they were in the first place.

The syndicate system is ambitiously interesting at least, allowing you to define Kay’s loyalties through a series of choices big and small that impact your standing with any of the four major crime organisations in the game. So, as an ardent Solo: A Star Wars Story defender, I lent toward aiding the rise of Crimson Dawn and its queen Qi’ra, taking every chance I could to steal, frame, and sabotage other syndicates if it helped my CD pals. This raises a reputation bar and unlocks higher level missions (most of which have you doing the same stealth/shooting loop but with a dangerous tag on them for some reason), unique items and cosmetics, and how thugs in the world react to your presence. The syndicates themselves are relatively affable, from your iconic Hutts and Pykes to the strangely coded Ashiga Clan, an Outlaws original creation that leans all the way into Orientalism and has insectoid aliens espousing the “ronin” path and honour codes. 

It also falls apart in the face of Outlaws’ competing priorities as a linear narrative experience. You can spend hours roaming planets running missions for the syndicate of your choice but if the next major story beat requires that same syndicate and Kay to have a falling out, enjoy watching your Reputation decrease and your investment deflate. The final mission of the game jarringly remembers it ostensibly allowed you to align yourself with someone and folds in whichever clan leader you have the highest rating with at the time, which for me meant I went from a rather hardline rejection of a character to playing buddy with them within the space of two hours and no additional context.

It’s not hard to be sympathetic to the balancing act of wanting to allow players to fulfil their fantasy while also wrangling the narrative into a functional shape but Outlaws seems entirely unsure about how to go about this, let alone what it even wants to be by doing so. It’s not just that its composite parts might be incompatible when assembled, it’s a permeating disinterest in its own ideas and world, edges smoothed so nobody could possibly cut themselves and the game becomes incapable of drawing blood.  

Kay Vess is archetypal to a fault, a broad outline of a character whose lines are only beginning to be filled in as the game reaches its goofy narrative conclusions and sidelines her entirely (flowers for Humberly González who does her best to elevate the material). Much ado is made about the relationships that develop between the crew, especially Kay and ND-5, but missions rarely provide more interactivity than idle radio chatter and key moments rely heavily on telling you how much these characters have grown to care about each other rather than showing you in any meaningful way why, or even how, that came to be.

When I first played Outlaws earlier this year, I flagged the potential pitfalls of a game playing with this subject matter trying to remain largely apolitical in its writing, but Outlaws pushes this tension to breaking point with its narrative choices, firmly cementing it as an experience that wants the aesthetics of drama without bearing the weight of perspective or stance. I won’t spoil how things break bad but if you’ve seen any Star Wars media from the past five years you can hazard a pretty likely guess, Outlaws capitulating to fan service in such a convoluted way as to render its already flimsy “scoundrel fantasy” framing and overarching themes mute.

Something you could forgive on a game meant to be this broadly appealing at a scale of production this high if it weren’t for last year’s Jedi: Survivor, a game that Outlaws echoes in a disconcerting number of ways but lacks the perspective and refinement to stand shoulder to shoulder with. The best-case scenario is that this is MASSIVE’s Jedi: Fallen Order, a flawed but relatively ambitious experience that millions will play, and millions more will forgive so that a better version of it might see the light of the twin suns further down the road.

Impressive aesthetic charm and neat ideas aside, Outlaws is simply too unsure of itself to make much of a lasting mark. For a game so keen on living the scoundrel fantasy, Outlaws is oddly afraid to shoot first. 

The post Star Wars Outlaws Review – Far, Far Away From Perfect appeared first on Press Start.

It’s a bit of an open secret that Star Wars: Bounty Hunter isn’t exactly a great game. Originally developed for the Nintendo GameCube by LucasArts as a loose prequel to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, you could tell the game was destined to be a fan favourite from the cover art alone. Jango Fett, the chrome and blue Mandalorian precursor to the iconic Boba Fett, blasting across the box with dual pistols firing and jetpack sparking against a rusted Mandalorian sigil. It was, and remains, cool as fuck. Throw in a lengthy, cutscene filled campaign about the seedy underworld of bounty hunting and a dark lord for good measure and you’ve got the exact kind of game to make an early 2000s Star Wars fan very happy. The only issue being it was kinda jank.

And hey, speaking of Star Wars and jank, Aspyr Media’s had a rough run of it lately. Coming off what felt like a string of successful ports of classic games set in the galaxy far, far away, Aspyr’s relationship with Star Wars soured rapidly around the confounding development of the Knights of the Old Republic remake and subsequent return to ports with the crunchy Battlefront Classic Collection. This was, to my mind, always a tremendous shame as the preservation of older titles is crucially important work for any franchise but especially one as storied as Star Wars. It’s a surprise to be sure but a welcome one then that Bounty Hunter is a return to form for a studio that feels at its best reminding us why we loved these games in the first place. 

Relegated to the wonderful, messy halls of Legends now (the pantheon of stories and lore that Disney no longer considers canon to the Star Wars universe), Bounty Hunter weaves its tale with the exact kind of joyful, reckless abandon you could have only found during its particular era of franchise tie-in materials. Across its six chapters and twenty-odd missions, we follow the eventful life of Jango Fett as he finds himself in the employ of Count Dooku in the waning years of the Republic’s era of peace, war bubbling just below the surface as Fett is tasked with tracking down a rogue Dark Jedi. God, remember when we could call someone a “Dark Jedi” and it wasn’t a whole thing? Jango remembers, and following his journey from hunter to mentor and eventual father is solid pulpy fun. 

Bounty Hunter always had an eye for aesthetics and tone, one of the few things that survived its jump to modern hardware back in 2016, but as we come up on a decade since then, the game’s signature jank is rapidly aging. Working with the original GameCube source code, Aspyr has managed to divine an honest-to-goodness port, allowing a pretty staggering level of spit and shine to be applied. Bounty Hunter looks good and plays even better, the clumsiness of the original level design and encounters still very present but mitigated greatly by the ground-up work done to bring controls and presentation fully in line with modern expectations.

The sweeping changes to camera and control schemes are the true highlight. The original game’s camera could be generously described as deranged, opting to control itself in an attempt to track and adjust to the player’s movements and choices. Cool in concept, disastrous in practice. Aspyr’s port gives the camera back to the player with contemporary control methods like full 360 angles and the use of the triggers for aiming. The aiming speed is still a little too slow for my liking, especially when you can amp up the camera swivel to satisfying levels, but the use of standardised controls is still a welcome change. On the PS5 version at least you’ll also experience a few nifty haptic sensations associated with individual weapons, cute flourishes if you’re still into that kind of thing.

This frees the game from its cumbersome inputs and allows for a flow of mostly successful changes. Weapons can be cycled with the D-Pad, and Jango’s signature Bounty Scanner (which shifts the game into first person to scan NPCs and mark them for bounties) is quick equipped with triangle now. Though you can’t quick equip out of it for some reason, meaning you’ll need to actively reach for the D-pad again to switch back to weapons in a strange oversight. Still, it has a holistically uplifting effect on the game, the verticality and layered levels no longer a chore to physically navigate as the camera works with you now instead of against. Granted, if the pain points of the original game’s enemy health balancing were an issue for you that won’t have changed, but giving players a better toolset to engage these issues goes a long way.

These updates are adorned by Bounty Hunter’s glorious shift to widescreen HD. The original game was no slouch in its presentation, squeezing the most out of the GameCube to craft a visual identity adjacent to the shine of the Prequel films, and in tapping right into that source code, Aspyr has juiced this port. Playing the PS4 re-release and this latest effort side by side it really is a marvel how well-realised the visual upgrades feel, from textures to lighting, it’s coherent and relatively polished. There are still visual bugs present, I was able to recreate some across both versions, but nothing game-breaking or particularly noteworthy that I saw during my mad dash across missions.

The package also houses the additional content found in the PS4 version alongside a smattering of new unlockable goodies including a comic and some digital trading cards. You can even grab a Boba Fett skin if you’re looking to fully break the timeline and play as the iconic hunter. It all comes together to make for not only the definitive way to play Star Wars Bounty Hunter but also a return to form for Aspyr’s remastering efforts. This is the platonic ideal of a port, offering the original controls for posterity but allowing players old and new to experience the best of what the game had to offer while updating it to be not only palatable, but genuinely fun for modern audiences.

The post Star Wars: Bounty Hunter Review – Fetter Late Than Never appeared first on Press Start.

“Commitment and experience.”

Star Wars Outlaws Lead Systems Designer Matthieu Delisle muses as we sit in the MASSIVE Entertainment offices and unpack Star Wars’ next big video game step. While the galaxy far, far away has gifted us with cinematic multiplayer shooters, Jedi-power-fantasy adventures, and even a stray dogfighting sim, Outlaws is set to become the first truly open-world game set in the stars. It’s been a long time coming and, in a sense, it’s not surprising that a Ubisoft studio is the one to step up to the plate.

Outlaws is taking a little bit of inspiration from all corners of Star Wars gaming. A swashbuckling action adventure that takes MASSIVE’s shooter heritage and transplants it into an original tale of a scoundrel, her dog, and her ship, Outlaws is finally gearing up for release. With two days spent with the team in their hometown of Malmo, Sweden, we’ve already unpacked our complicated feelings on the narrative of Outlaws but unsurprisingly, a production of this scale requires many certain points of view. 

A New Lens, An Old Hope

So much of what makes Star Wars work, whether you realise it or not, is the feel of it. One of the largest franchises in cinematic history, an empire all its own, built around a very specific vibe that delicately balances nostalgia and contemporary visual language. It’s a hard enough tone to achieve in traditional mediums, as Lucasfilm’s pivot to StageCraft technology The Volume has turned some audiences off due to its lack of tactility. Others still scrunch their nose at the Sequel Trilogy’s sharper contrasts and cooler colour palette. New is hard, old is gold, and MASSIVE is keenly aware of this.

The Lens Project is, on its face, a remarkable bit of game development magic. Taking the team’s familiarity with the Snowdrop Engine and blasting the hinges off, The Lens Project is an extensive and all-encompassing push to ensure everything you see in Star Wars Outlaws looks and feels like Star Wars. A painstaking replication of the Ultra Pan Vision 70 Lenses used to film the original trilogy, The Lens Project uses a combination of lens flares, vignetting, lens breathing and about a dozen smaller touches to give the image the same textured warmth of the original films.

And honestly, it looks tremendous, a true achievement in aesthetic composition and emulation that gives Outlaws a tangible cinematic vibe absent from many AAAA gaming experiences. There are few better places to experience the impact of this effort than the cosy sound editing room tucked away on the upper floors of the MASSIVE office, and in here we glimpsed one of the game’s many cutscenes. In it, Kay and Nix are fleeing enemy fighters in their ship and between the lens effects, extensive mo-cap, and Wilbert Roget II’s bombastic score, Outlaws becomes nearly indistinguishable from a modern Star Wars film.

The thing about feel though is that it’s guttural and there’s a deep irony in the directors being eyed for inspiration including J.J. Abrams. A somewhat underrated journeyman, Abrams helmed arguably the biggest return to form Star Wars had seen with 2015’s The Force Awakens, an ostensibly new tale in the galaxy that sought to recapture the feeling of Star Wars through a series of expensive emulation techniques. It also looked tremendous, hailed as an authentically Lucas experience due in large part to its aesthetic touchstones.  

But time has been…interesting to The Force Awakens. As we pushed deeper into the new wave of Star Wars stories, many began to consider the film’s dedication to nostalgic comfort a detriment to the new trilogy’s vision and somewhat indicative of broader creative stagnation within the franchise. Rogue One, another of Outlaws’ major influence points, skirts these same criticisms due to its gestures toward violent maturity but still exhibits many of the same retreating comforts of Abrams’s work and Outlaws now follows suit.

PRE-ORDER ON AMAZON FOR $89

And it does begin to hit you just how funny it is that the night changes, that we’re now a decade out from The Force Awakens’ nostalgic glow, two from the Prequels experimental digital efforts, and nearly fifty years since A New Hope began this cycle. Here we still are, warping digital light and matter in admittedly wonderful ways to make sure this Star War, developed by a diverse and vibrant team, feels the way the franchise is remembered rather than how it could be envisioned for the future. Maybe it’s not fair to ask this of a game of this scale, perhaps the stakes are too high even for a scoundrel, but The Lens Project is as much an immaculate monument to comfort as it is to inertia.

Lucas Strikes Back

Outlaws is of course making its own mark on the Star Wars visual vernacular, a combined effort of aesthetic layering and original art direction. Sitting down with Associate Art Director Marthe Jonkers and Lead Concept Artist Samuel De Vos, we began to unpack the myriad influences, pressures, and joys of getting to truly create something new within the galaxy.

“There was a lot of inspiration from pets! I think it’s a very emotional connection that we would like the player to feel and that goes back to that relatability…not only with Nyx, but also other wildlife that we see on Kijimi, for example, but also the vehicles,” De Vos excitedly explains, “I look at the Trailblazer, and the only pet that I had was a turtle and it was fun to see that that also came back as a main inspiration for the Trailblazer. But the goal is really to go with the original trilogy methodology of designing because we really want to be respectful to the time period within the Star Wars timeline.”

Picking up where De Vos left off, Jonkers continued, “A lot of the sixties and seventies design was definitely inspiration for this, as well as it was for the Original Trilogy. And (things like) Samurai movies and Spaghetti Westerns, we really try to dig into the same sources of inspiration that George Lucas would have had when he was creating the universe for the Original Trilogy.”

Pursuing the same influences as Lucas is always a double-edged lightsaber though and has landed some of the original ideas in Outlaws in a strange place. On the one hand, the game is overflowing with fun and creative designs; Kay Vess is head to toe a gorgeous addition to the galaxy, with massive hair and a popped collar, the art department poured themselves into her design and it has paid off dividends. Likewise, the love of pets is evident in Nyx’s every feather and move, and more broadly, the wildlife we’ve seen glimpses of on planets like Kijimi is captivating and cool as shit. A giant creature that appeared to be one part owl, one part bat eyed me off with its singular eye in the streets and I got a little kick out of seeing a new animal in this far-off place.

Elsewhere on Kijimi though, the newly crafted Ashiga Clan returns to the original sin of Star Wars. Lucas was not particularly shy about his influences, the films were effectively a hodgepodge of other properties and, crucially, real-world cultures. Science fiction broadly has an issue with this, with Western creators lifting elements of Asian and MENA art and customs to craft “alien” aesthetics. Star Wars has been guilty of it since inception (still plucking away for shows as recent as The Mandalorian), and Outlaws, in its Lucas reverence, does the same. The Ashiga are shamelessly Samurai coded, right down to the brazenly promoted “honour code” and broader race traits.

Poke your head into Star Wars fan spaces and you’ll find no shortage of praise for the Ashiga already, their striking insectoid designs and gold-plated armour do make for a compelling identity after all, but much like The Lens Project, it’s a strangely retro-minded bit of design impulse. Outlaws seems full of other incredible work of course, the touted war between syndicates is pulling in many different factions from Solo’s Crimson Dawn to The Clone Wars’ Pykes. And they all look so well realised, which makes for a strange contrast with the game’s other less-considered aesthetic choices.

A MASSIVE Open World

MASSIVE is, unsurprisingly, keenly aware of its heritage and place in the wider gaming industry. With roots in tactical games sprawling all the way back to the late 90s, MASSIVE was pulled into the Ubisoft gravity well in the twilight years of the aughts and quickly put to work on what would go on to become Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Forging ahead under new leadership, the studio would go on to helm the wildly successful Tom Clancy’s The Division titles and last year’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, titles they say have uniquely prepared them for handling Outlaws.

“What we mean by open world is this full spectrum experience of activities and ways to interact with the world, including climbing and driving and flying and talking to people in cities,”  Lead Systems Designer Matthieu Delisle explains as we discuss why it’s taken the industry this long to produce a truly open-world Star Wars game,  “And to that degree, I think that it’s partially tech, like being able to go from ground to space to hyperspace and down again, but it also takes commitment and experience to be able to do that. We have, and Ubisoft have, a lot of experience in how to build open-worlds, and the engine was ready for it as well.”

The first Star Wars game made outside of the infamous agreement between Disney and EA, Outlaws shares some DNA with the incredible Star Wars Jedi: Survivor but is angling for a distinctly Ubisoft flavour of open-world. When I flagged that invoking such an idea is to gesture toward many years of discourse around the genre and its proliferation and somewhat untenable expansion under Ubisoft, Delisle (understandably) opts for diplomacy that would make a Republic senator blush.

“We really started with, what does this game need to make you feel like you’re living in Star Wars and being a scoundrel?…and it’s evolved from there. And of course, we’re going to use some mechanics and inspirations from other games. Sometimes they’re from outside of Ubisoft, sometimes they’re from inside Ubisoft. I think it’s really an inverse of how we really think about it. We really don’t think about a template or a way of making games in a pattern. We think about, what’s this fantasy and how do you do it?  We had decided it is an open world and so obviously, with open-world comes some expectations of what you’re supposed to be able to do in it.”

Outlaws will likely meet many of the expectations your mind conjures when you hear “Ubisoft open-world Star Wars game.” Streamlined RPG systems and player-driven exploration combine to make for a familiar, but approachably comfortable, loop as Kay scours the galaxy for lessons on how to be a better scoundrel, parts to upgrade her modular blaster and ship, homesteads to defend from raiders, and of course, syndicate missions and quests. We’ll have extensive thoughts on these systems soon enough, but the action verbs being used to describe the Outlaws experience are expected but not wholly unwelcome.

Kay Shot First

And while these systems have become somewhat standardised in the genre, MASSIVE’s shift from tightly tuned shooter to narrative-driven action has given the team a chance to stretch its legs. “It was certainly a challenge, and we went through some different ways of approaching it, but we needed to stay true to what a scoundrel is, and a scoundrel has their sidearm and a bunch of other tools to get through trouble,” Delisle explains, “But for the gunplay, we knew we still wanted variety so we worked with Lucasfilm to invent a new type of blaster that can switch out modules on the fly and turn into different types of firing experiences…so built into that gun, and accessible through the workbench on the Trailblazer, is pretty broad-spectrum shooting experiences. Then you add on top of that, that we really want you to grab weapons from enemies as well, we really took the opportunity with a Sci-Fi title to go a little bit further than we’ve ever done on The Division and give you shooting experiences that you could really only do in Star Wars.”

And it is a blast to mow down a Stormtrooper before dodge rolling to nab his heavy repeater and turn it loose on his fascistic little buddies. With Nyx roaming to blow up barrels and Kay’s slight frame struggling to control the beastly weapon (a deliberate friction to reflect her relative lack of experience with weapons beyond her own), there’s a clarity of vision between system and idea. This is Outlaws at its best, a synergistic design ethos born from allowing developers of all disciplines to interact during the creative process, building play spaces and interactive means fitting the narrative and vice versa.

Lead Gameplay Designer Fredrick Thylander and Senior Systems Designer Alice Rendell are riffing on this effort with me toward the end of my visit. “Once the project landed on that scoundrel fantasy, there was so much to play with in terms of what you can do, like playing Sabacc (Star Wars poker) or playing arcade games (Outlaws features possibly the first depiction of a video game inside a Star Wars video game)” Rendell enthuses as Thylander concludes, “We have a game that’s lucky in the sense that it is very rich in terms of the different verbs. You can talk to people, you can sneak in, you can slice, you can pick locks, punch people…it was more about finding what we think is the most fun rather than working around constraints.”

Constraints is an interesting note to linger on, as Outlaws feels simultaneously supported by Lucasfilm Games and free to have charted its own path through the galaxy and reverentially cloying and shy. The enormous compound of a building that houses the MASSIVE team (a converted textile factory that towers on an unassuming corner of Malmo) is a maze of small rooms, desks and shelves crowded with Original Trilogy memorabilia and Ralph McQuarrie prints. A shrine built around Han Solo in carbonite adorns a corner and you get the impression that Outlaws is exactly the kind of Star Wars experience this team intended to make.

Between the adaptable systems, mostly charming character and world design, and raw nostalgic energy of The Lens Project, Outlaws has a holistic sense of very specific comfort to it. Loaded though it may be, so far Outlaws is undeniably a Star War through and through.

Star Wars Outlaws launches on August 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders available for $89 with free release day delivery for Prime members.

James was a guest of Ubisoft with travel and accommodation covered for the purpose of this preview.

The post Star Wars Outlaws Is Nostalgic For The Franchise’s Legacy appeared first on Press Start.

KILL. ALL. GODS.

God, what an impression the marketing for Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn made. The latest effort from Ashen developer A44 Games, Flintlock ticks a lot of boxes. A striking art direction and tone established from the jump, a beloved indie studio shifting gears into AA scale with yet another riff on the Soulslike genre, and a cute fox creature with mascot-sized ears by your side. But between ideation and execution, something comes unstuck in Flintlock.

We pick up with the world of Flintlock some ten years after the Door to the Great Below was breached and the Dead spilled forth into the land of Kian, a war-torn country perpetually on the brink of collapse but somehow managing to teeter. The game follows the misadventures of Nor Vanek, a Sapper (some kind of specialist soldier) for the Coalition (some kind of coalition formed to fight the Dead) after she and a small group of mates inadvertently unleash a pantheon of cruel, if incredibly stylish, gods into Kian.

Much of this is clumsily established in the opening half hour, which has a sort of rapid, in medias res feel to its opening that never reverts to an earlier state to help you find your legs. It’s a flurry of proper nouns and character names and relationships that fails to establish a sense of place or even basic emotional investment in the world, before the cut to title card and the game can begin in earnest, as a wounded Nor is rescued by the above-mentioned mascot fox, Enki.

PRE-ORDER THE DELUXE EDITION AT A DISCOUNTED PRICE ON AMAZON

Enki and Nor don’t have much in common, what with one being an immortal God of death and the other a scrappy war orphan hellbent on killing the Gods, but the two quickly form an accord and set forth across Kian to dispose of Enki’s colleagues. It’s a dynamic that is ostensibly ripe for character drama but Flintlock relegates the development of their relationship to off-screen conversations and humdrum walk-and-talk segments, neither of which offer much insight into the two’s unlikely friendship.

It’s unfortunately emblematic of the kind of incuriosity that plagues Flintlock, especially as the actual act of killing all the gods is a fairly homogenised melting pot of systems and beats. Nor is set loose into humble open-zone maps, a crisscross section of mountain paths, caves, and settlements, to hack and slash her way through hordes of the Dead while gathering resources and currencies for her various armaments, skill trees, and collectables. You’ll find colour graded gear for your different equipment slots, magical crystals to change Enki’s passive and active abilities, and just generally feel as if you’re playing a video-game-arse-video-game.

There are flashes of brilliance layered into this pastiche though. Flintlock’s combat loop is overly familiar and sporadically sloppy, Nor’s Sapper training allowing for a flurry of light and heavy blows with the requisite parries, status effects, and ranged pistol options. But overlaying this is the game’s wonderfully spiteful Reputation multiplier, an escalating percentage booster applied to accrued experience that gets higher the longer you avoid damage. But get whacked, even once, and you lose the multiplier and only the baseline exp is added to your pool.

It’s sick, a genuinely fun and thrilling addition to the Souls-adjacent action combat formula that is only truly undone by that sloppiness mentioned earlier. Flintlock’s combat is ultimately best enjoyed on lower difficulties where the game’s loose understanding of parry frames and animation priority can’t hurt as much, but too often you’ll lose your hard-earned Reputation multiplier due to the unpolished and unreliable collision of camera, hitboxes, and poor visual communication.

Elsewhere Flintlock dabbles in verticality with exploration bolstered by Rifts, ethereal portals that Enki can whip you up to in a flash and then project you out of for more Rift hopping or platforming. Nor can also lob some Godly-gunpowder below her to jump higher or propel herself forward, which in tandem with the Rift leaping, can lead to some brief bursts of fun. Combining these tools can lead Nor to hidden treasure spots and the occasional shortcut but despite a considered set of traversal tools, there aren’t many places to actually go in Flintlock.

Kian is frequently gorgeous to behold, a kind of geographically Frankensteined fantasy land of Middle Eastern, New England, and New Zealand influences. This approach gives Flintlock a stunning array of vistas and landscapes to play in, with the mid to late-game offerings particularly of note. Though no matter how fantastical the land is, exploration is never truly enticing as finagling Nor over rooftops and cliffsides is frequently awkward and beyond the stray side quest, there’s not much incentive to get her anywhere other than the golden path.

With the notable exception of Flintlock’s wobbly combat fundamentals, there isn’t much in here that is experience-breaking so much as consistently underwhelming. The cultural touchstones used to give Kian life can lead to some truly inventive visual touches as you explore settlements and discover increasingly gaudy armour sets, but when it all loops back into fairly rote, poorly communicated fantasy storytelling and limited exploration, no amount of aesthetic shine can catch the eye for long enough to sustain investment.

There’s a moment toward the end of Flintlock where Nor and Enki are having it out about the highs and lows of their time together. A half dozen Gods slain along the way, secrets revealed, cool new axes upgraded, and the land of Kian mapped and liberated. The two are heatedly trying to decide who will undertake a risky final step when Nor declares that despite everything, Enki is now a Sapper first and a God second.

But then, and even now, I still don’t fully understand what a Sapper is.

The post Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn Review – Let Sleeping Gods Lie appeared first on Press Start.

We recently had the chance to spend two days at Massive Entertainment’s studio in Malmö, Sweden, playing Star Wars Outlaws and speaking to the team behind the project to get an understanding of what’s going into the game and how it’s all coming together.

You can read our first big feature piece from the trip here, and there’s more to come, but below you’ll find a full transcript of one of our chats, in this case with Associate World Director, Cloe Hammoud, and Art & World Director, Benedikt Podlesnigg, where the two revealed the immense amount of worked put into crafting the game’s locales – including entire bibles of research on Star Wars’ enormous universe and history.

Some comments have been edited for clarity and readability.

The first open-world Star Wars game! Can you walk me through how you built these play spaces to keep them in line with the tone and feel of the films?

Cloe Hammoud: We had a very fruitful collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, which allowed us to nail the authenticity. We thought we knew Star Wars, but you start to be very humble when you actually create content for this franchise, making sure it can be as timeless as the ship or vehicles they (Lucasfilm) created. We did a lot of research. We did a lot of style guides as well to be able to understand, for example, the Imperial shape language, what they were using in their compounds, and what was not allowed in terms of materials or even lighting, for example. So all of these different elements allow us to be as truthful as we could be but we were also eager to add a little bit of new things. And it comes down to having this good balance of new locations, but also iconic locations. I think what also is interesting is the cinematic realism… and making sure the game feels as well a bit like a movie.

Benedikt Podlesnigg: I think it’s taking a step back and looking at it as the big picture. Every single element comes together. It’s not just the Star Wars aesthetic, it’s not just the science fiction or the fantasy elements. It’s the camera, the feel, capturing that original movie vibe with a modern twist. You’ve seen in Rogue One where they did that on the movie side and that creates this entire feeling. One of the most important steps is not to be self-referential. You’re not referencing Star Wars with everything you do, but you’re actually referencing the things that inspired, or the time that inspired, the movies when you create any props or characters or anything. So making sure you create something fresh that is new and not just building on variants of what is already there.

Speaking of, you folks got to create a whole new moon for Outlaws in Toshara. My understanding is that in the lore this is a place that evolved separated from the Republic so does that distinction give you more license to create an aesthetic that does differ from the rest of Star Wars?

BP: The planet Toshal is a large gas giant that Toshara circles around and that creates a very turbulent atmosphere in the space region. Whenever a ship jumps in, if you don’t know how to navigate this very scientific gravitation current, you would have a hard time. You see that in space with a lot of shipwrecks, a lot of broken down ships that are fairly old. Then it gives you the freedom to do a lot with the elements on the surface. If the surface then is like, ‘Oh, they’re settlers that manage to navigate those, but it’s still very hard to get there’ so they might have a time where they can thrive and build up their society. So we created this whole culture around the Toshari (the locals) and here you see all these connections of the space debris in the sky. They use that as building material, so that’s why there’s a lot of metallic buildings on the surface. So they repurposed these materials because there’s very little raw materials that are useful on Toshara because of the Ambrein. And ambrein is, as we designed, is not necessarily useful and that’s why nobody needs to mine it. It doesn’t have value necessarily. Those are these connection[s], that you get to design really something that feels very coherent and very consistent in the approach.

CH: We push a lot the world-building and we create a lot of documentation, not only for the team to understand how to realise and execute things, but also making sure Lucasfilm understand our intentions, and we create a whole backstory for the planet, for the people that live there, for all of these different ingredients, natural materials, but also architecture-wise, to make sure we create something that feels very consistent, and we can create micro-stories on this, create a quest, or an expert has a specific story to tell to Kay and Nix. That’s something that feels very unique.

Toshara or otherwise, we’ve heard that each planet in Outlaws will have some form of city to better facilitate the underbelly/crime world experience no matter where the player goes. How did you go about differentiating these cities so that it didn’t just feel like that repeated open-world content that I think a lot of players are probably a little bit tired of at this point?

BP: Every city has differences… you take Kijimi, it’s on the mountain. It’s very hilly. It’s literally on the summit of a mountain where all the buildings were built with the material of the mountain itself versus on Tatooine, it’s more widespread. It’s more flat. There’s more lower buildings. Akiva was very interesting because Akiva is only described in the books. We read through the books and we did a fantastic job on marking everything out and doing all the research on that. You pick some elements out. For us, it was the water, the rain, how the society deals with that element so the locals are very prone to know when it will start to rain. So as soon as you see somebody running, you will probably know that it will be going to be raining, that’s one little detail.

CH: I think they are all different from one another. I don’t think it was a conscious thing of how we need them to be different, I think we just created different cities. We wanted to create different things, whether it’s in terms of architecture, but also, for example, people will have different clothing because it’s a different types of weather. You will find different crime syndicates, so different opportunities related to vendors, what type [of] items you will be able to buy. There are many different things, and we wanted to translate that. I think players will definitely feel like, Okay, I’m in a new space, a new place. And it’s a different local culture.

Which is such an integral part of the Star Wars film fantasies too of course, but on an open-world scale you have so much more space to fill in and fewer unseen corners of the galaxy than ever before. What went into filling in side streets and homes to make players feel as if they’re truly able to explore the galaxy far, far away? 

BP: We spent a lot of time really thinking about every location, especially not just cities, but the open world. We created detailed maps where we know exactly what is happening here and what is happening over here. Or this is a movie location, but looking at it through all sorts of material is like, Okay, how does that connect to this and what could be there? There’s a lot of heavy research going on. Cloe created amazing World Bibles. I wish we could release them as books.

CH: That would be great to be able to publish these materials. I think the gamers will be able to see a glimpse of the thought process that went into that, and many mood boards as well. We also thought about what type of sounds that will be in this environment. For example, if it’s an Imperial hangar, you would hear that type of noise. I think that helped us really paint a picture of, okay, what this space and their functions, how it’s been just used on a regular basis by people.

BP: Knowing the things that might not even be on the surface level that you will see in the game, but that we know about. Like the history of a place, the when, where, and what questions. Answering these for us helps tremendously to recreate all these extra parts of the city.

Star Wars Outlaws launches on August 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders available for $89 with free release day delivery for Prime members.

James was a guest of Ubisoft with travel and accommodation covered for the purpose of this coverage.

The post Star Wars Outlaws’ Teams Created Whole Bibles Of Research To Build Its Worlds appeared first on Press Start.

Ubisoft has a type and it’s probably not the one that just came to mind for you. While the proliferation of open-world tropes and checklists can be, loosely, laid at the feet of the global mega-publisher, Ubisoft’s actual type is far loftier. I’ve spent a lot of time with developers working under the Ubi banner, in different corners of the globe developing wildly different projects, but the one consistent thing among all of them is a raw, unbridled passion for the idea of the next Ubisoft game. No matter the genre, there’s a consistency of enthusiasm and idealism around whatever Ubisoft project is up next. MASSIVE Entertainment, operating out of Malmö Sweden with a network of support studios at their back, has an idea of an idea.

It’s often said that working on the Star Wars IP is a dream come true. The people who were kids wearing out a VHS of Empire Strikes Back; the (now despondent) millennial who thinks the prequels are fine but, really, it’s The Clone Wars that did it right; even the new kids on the block sporting cheesy canon novels and calling their dogs Kylo. Cast your net as wide as you want and you still couldn’t possibly encapsulate every flavour of Star Wars fan and MASSIVE has thrown their net with evident gusto.

This has manifested as Star Wars Outlaws, a new story set between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi that follows a young woman, Kay Vess, and her axolotl-bird-dog Nix as the two navigate the thorny underbelly of the galaxy. Pitched, extensively, as the “scoundrel” experience that fans of Star Wars’ roguish bounty hunters and Spice runners archetypes have always craved, ratcheted up to eleven through the first truly open-world Star Wars game to hit the market.

Across two full days spent with the team, we sat through hours’ worth of presentations and talks about the vision for Outlaws. Breaking bread and cracking cold ones over talks of favourite films and franchise fatigue. Roaming offices adorned with collages of Nix and a stray BB8 unit guarding a whiteboard full of secrets (doodles of aliens and printed memes). Everywhere you went, you got the impression this is a game being made by people with a deep reverence for Star Wars. By the fans, for the fans. Six words that will give you a feeling about this, one way or another.

Criminal Minds

Kay Vess is on top of the world. Perched atop her speeder bike, skidding against nothing in an anti-gravity BMX without the wheels kind of way, she surveys a sweeping vista that nestles comfortably between Americana frontier and fantastical alien plain. An unknown species of bird flocks overhead, the sun is low but in just the right way to bathe the land in a golden, picturesque glow. The world is opening up before her, all Kay needs to do is…go.

“I go back to the idea of Kay being one of us. I think there’s something to someone who’s on the ground, not part of that larger galactic battle, that just felt very universal” Outlaws Narrative Director Navid Khavari tells me as we reflect on the described image above, a sprawl the team uses as a tonal genesis for Outlaws. It preceded hours of information about Kay and the world around her, but the core idea the team keeps hitting is that of the scoundrel fantasy, a role in the Star Wars universe almost exclusively filled by high-profile men, until now. For Khavari and the team though, designing Kay was primarily focused on the universal power fantasy.

“I think we really just approach it from the perspective of who Kay is. It’s about keeping focus. What are we trying to tell here? This is a story of someone who’s grown up with nothing, is scraping by to survive, who is taking on jobs and maybe not doing so well with them…and essentially ends up with this bounty on her back,” he explains, Outlaws primarily about Kay’s volatile relationship with the crime syndicates leading up to one last job that is going to set her up to finally live free of the galaxy’s push and pull. “That’s what we were focused on, is how does a character like this grow and change? How do we keep them relatable as well?”

­A big part of that relatability seems to have emerged from Kay’s actress, Humberly González. “You write the game throughout the whole development process, really. You have multiple recording sessions, and you get to hear things in-game with the character and really hear the character’s voice as you’re writing it,” Khavari continues, “…that really makes it come to life and find its own little place and Humberly brought so much character. I think it helped a lot.”

It isn’t hard to see why González made such an impression on the team; born in Venezuela, the actor/director got her start in the critically acclaimed Orphan Black but has since worked with Ubisoft on multiple projects including last year’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Watching her work in behind-the-scenes footage for Outlaws, her energy and presence is infectious, and playing the game, she has the exact kind of charisma required to fill the fabled shoes of Star Wars’ outlaw archetype.

F*** The Empire

But my mind caught on a detail in Kay’s backstory, her home planet of Canto Bight, one of the newer additions to Star Wars canon introduced in the divisive second instalment of the Sequel Trilogy, The Last Jedi. In the film, and indeed in Outlaws, Canto Bight is a world defined by decadence– an Outer Rim haven for wealth, gambling, and excess, the planet is a breeding ground for scum and villainy the likes of which Star Wars rarely bothers tackling. It is a deeply political component of the film and Kay’s scoundrel fantasy is, at least so far, being pitched as coyly apolitical.

PRE-ORDER ON AMAZON FOR $89

“I think our focus was what’s organic when you think of where Kay comes from and what she’s experienced,” Khavari explains when asked about how growing up in such an environment will impact Kay’s views, “This is a moon in the middle of nowhere. She doesn’t know about the Jedi. She doesn’t know much even about the Empire. She just knows that they’re in charge. That evolution is more about, ‘wow, okay, their reach goes quite far’”. The reach in question seems to be largely focused on the game’s Wanted system, a riff on the escalating levels of chaos associated with violent or disruptive actions done by the player in any given location. Each raised level will bring more of the Empire’s goons down on your head, resulting in iconic foes for Kay to run and gun with.

It’s a cool system but not the kind of implementation of the galaxy’s wider ideologies I was hoping for and Khavari, considered and evidently passionate, seems to clock this. “We definitely want to leave some room for players to find out some more when they play on August 30th. But I think especially that perspective, and that’s what I’d really hammer home, that perspective of, ‘I’m not a rebel. I’m not one of them. I’m definitely not one of the Empire. How do I find my place in the galaxy?’ was crucial to her story, and that’s something she’s going to be discovering as she goes.”

“It’s really that thing of Kay representing all of these people and beings across the galaxy who are just trying to survive. They can’t afford to worry about the fate of the galaxy and whoever is in control because that doesn’t really matter to them,” he continues, “They’re so busy with their own personal life and so on. That’s what has shaped Kay a lot and why she doesn’t really have aspirations to do something greater or anything like that. It’s a cutthroat galaxy, and she’s just looking out for herself in it. Kay is not a political operator, she’s a scoundrel” he concludes.

There’s something to this, the idea of following a character throughout the Star Wars galaxy whose apathy toward its wider machinations is fuelled by the harshness of her upbringing on such a place as Canto Bight. The Last Jedi itself dabbled in this concept, leaning harder into a nihilistic take on it, but rarely has a Star War seemingly declared itself so uninterested in a perspective on the galaxy’s issues. Outlaws, with its hyperfocus on the rollicking power fantasy of being a scoundrel, may or may not find room to expand on this choice throughout its runtime. But when working with elements of Star Wars that pivot around the galaxy’s nastier edges, it’s at least interesting to note how avoidant the marketing material has been to acknowledge the dissonance. 

“It All Comes Back To Lucas”

It isn’t fair to say that this lack of perspective is something that the rest of Outlaws exhibits, but between the impressive technical achievements of the Snowdrop engine and the clear and present love for all things Star Wars within the team, you start to notice things. MASSIVE have moved mountains to best emulate the visual language of the films, or more specifically, some of them. Working their way from George Lucas’ original works all the way to the fan favourite 2016 Rogue One (itself an emulation of a fabled house style), MASSIVE’s vision for Outlaws is evidently one of comforting familiarity, down to the finest detail.

Over the next month, we’ll be taking a deep dive into some of the ways this was achieved but even at a glance, you can clock the level of care. The game sports a slick 21:9 cinematic ratio, which is entirely optional but having played with it both on and off, feels essential to moment-to-moment framing and shot composition. Elsewhere, Outlaws is using real-time colour grading and a small army of lens effects to keep the image perfectly balanced between modern fidelity and nostalgic glow. Likewise, the game’s sound has been kept as authentic as possible, the team going so far as to record using a Nagra 4.2 recorder, the same type used back in the 80s, for analogue warmth.

These efforts sprawl across Outlaws’ impressive scope in myriad ways. Nearly sixty-two thousand lines of recorded dialogue, half that again in specifically alien dialects. MASSIVE’s pedigree with shooters (the team’s work on The Division series certainly a different beast to Outlaws, a change they described as a pointed shift in power fantasy tone) layered with their desire to have Kay’s arsenal feel narratively appropriate and humble. Dozens of real-world locations scouted and referenced to craft the game’s half-dozen explorable planets including a wholly new creation, the rustic moon of Toshara.

“Toshaal is like a large gas giant that Toshara circles around and that creates a very turbulent atmosphere in the space region. Whenever a ship jumps in, if you don’t know how to navigate this very scientific gravitation current, you would have a hard time. So you see that in space there are a lot of shipwrecks, a lot of broken down ships that are fairly old. It gives us the freedom to do a lot with the elements on the surface.” Outlaws’ art and world director Benedikt Podlesnigg excitedly explains as we unpack what MASSIVE could do with an original planet in the Star Wars galaxy, “So we created this whole culture around the Toshari where you see all these connections to the space debris in the sky. They use that as building material. They repurposed these materials because there’s very little raw materials that are useful on Toshara because of the Amberien.”

It’s one of MASSIVE’s cooler choices, heavily modelling Toshara after the windswept plains of Tanzania, right down to foliage dispersion and raw geography. The Star Wars of it all comes from the Amberien, a striking substance the colour of a sunset that ripples through the rockface of the planet and will undoubtedly play a role in things to come. Along with an expansive Tatooine map, the exotic rainforests of Akiva (shoutout to the Aftermath books, what a deep cut), and the snow-covered city streets of Kijimi (Rise of Skywalker jumpscare), Outlaws won’t be short of frontier fantasies to roam and sketchy underworld locations to skulk through.

Out Gun, Out Run, Outlaws

What Outlaws isn’t though, is overwhelmingly big. Ubisoft’s feature and size creep has reached untold levels in recent franchise material like the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, but MASSIVE says they’ve learnt the right lessons from fan reactions. In a conscious counterpoint to the expected, Outlaws has been crafted with intentionality and focus as guiding principles, giving the player something of a goldilocks situation with explorable locations, craftables, outfits, and collectables but without succumbing to bloat, allowing the team to streamline the narrative and overall pacing. Likewise, while Kay’s relationship with the different crime organisations can be somewhat pushed and pulled through your choices to help or hinder, the story won’t deviate from its intended endpoint.  

We’ve already had a chance to go hands-on with Outlaws at Summer Games Fest and running through these missions again with the MASSIVE team offered some interesting insight. There’s a lot of talk around the action verbs of the game (pointedly “climb” and explore”) and the kind of emotional co-op provided by running missions with Nix at your side (the little goober can distract guards, scan for them, be fucking adorable etc), but the actual act of playing Outlaws is disarmingly familiar. A distant cousin of the Uncharted clamber and shoot experience, Outlaws is a cinematic vibe piece first and foremost in these early missions, the team’s aesthetic efforts on full display while the gameplay takes a relaxed, backseat approach.

Across space battles, wrecked ship exploration, and stealthy heists, Kay and Nix broadly control smoothly and without much (intended) friction. There’s a lot of nuance to unpack around these instances in the weeks to come but there is an undeniable level of enjoyment raised by simply being in a Star War. Planets will each house established settlements to ensure no matter where you are, you can play in-universe mini-games, bet on Fathier races, or try your hand at Sabacc. These spaces have been painstakingly considered by Associate World Director Cloe Hammoud, who tells me of entire design bibles for each planet that she got to develop with Lucasfilm. “We push a lot the world-building and we create a lot of documentation, not only for the team to understand how to realise and execute things, but also making sure Lucasfilm understand our intentions,” she explains, “We create a whole backstory for the planet, for the people that live there, for all of these different ingredients, natural materials, but also architecture-wise, to make sure we create something that feels very consistent.” 

Having spent some time aimlessly wandering the streets of Toshara’s main settlement, this approach has paid off for the team. Most corners house a neat little thing to smile at, a reference or point of intrigue to be followed. At one point I accidentally roamed beyond the bounds of the demo and while I can’t talk to what I saw, I can say it made me genuinely feel something. The lights and sounds of that mythical galaxy far, far away are inherently magical for countless people and seeing it realised with such precision and care here is captivating, if not always mechanically compelling.

Fans will be eating good, basically. As MASSIVE walked us through the overarching design principles of Outlaws, touchstones of Star Wars productions were hit with the expected reverence. A world that feels lived in and tactile? Bringing everything they do back to Lucas? Characters and locations from across the pantheon of Star Wars movies, comics, books and more? It’s all here, and all smoothed into the mould of an approachable, open-world action adventure. Imagine the warm charm of Lucas’ original films with the refined cleanliness of The Mandalorian and you’re at the doorstep of Outlaws.

A Long Time Ago, And Even Further Away

And what a familiar stoop it is. While Outlaws has the makings of a potentially unique take on the Star Wars galaxy, with its female-led exploration of the underworld and freeform take on spaces typically reserved for linear design schools, the vibe around the game is oddly bullish. Draped in reverence for a vision of the galaxy crafted decades ago by a goofball with a love of matinee cinema, ten bucks, and a dream, MASSIVE’s massive development apparatus bent around this specific creative reference point feels like a calculated effort to rock the boat as little as possible.

In a sense I sympathise; Star Wars fans are vocally resistant to change, the comfort zone established by Lucas in the 70s and bottled, to varying degrees of success, by Disney is potent and bountiful. There’s a reason efforts like The Last Jedi draw ire while Rogue One flourishes. When crafting a new tale in the galaxy, especially one with a woman of colour at its centre, the choice to pamper audiences as much as possible is tactile but undeniably valid. Two days with MASSIVE was enough to feel the genuine Fan vibes in the building and Outlaws reflects this shared perspective between developer and player.

But Star Wars also thrives with change. Lucas’ blueprint is hallowed, yes, but it’s only a part of a wider cultural tapestry the franchise has since grown to reflect. The best part of the Disney expansion era has been the varied stories we’ve gotten to see told in these stars; Jedi Survivor’s examination of the Jedi Order, Andor’s hardline rebuttal to apolitical indifference, The Mandalorian’s (initially) streamlined Western romp, Visions finally giving creative license back to cultures Star Wars has liberally “lifted” from for decades. There’s palpable excitement to be mined when Star Wars is allowed to grow, to have a perspective.

There’s a metric freighter load of talent in the halls of MASSIVE, and across the globe running support, but we’ll have to wait until next month to find out if Outlaws has more on its mind than a scoundrel fantasy. It will undoubtedly be fun, there’s joy and comfort in a chill romp between a plucky kid and her weird space dog, and the craft is genuinely quite impressive. But while Kay Vess might be speeding toward that golden horizon, Outlaws seems largely unconcerned with what could actually lie beyond it.

Star Wars Outlaws launches on August 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders available for $89 with free release day delivery for Prime members.

James was a guest of Ubisoft with travel and accommodation covered for the purpose of this preview.

The post Star Wars Outlaws Is A Rebel Without A Cause appeared first on Press Start.

We recently had the chance to spend two days at Massive Entertainment’s studio in Malmö, Sweden, playing Star Wars Outlaws and speaking to the team behind the project to get an understanding of what’s going into the game and how it’s all coming together.

You can read our first big feature piece from the trip here, and there’s more to come, but below you’ll find a full transcript of one of our chats, in this case with Narrative Director, Navid Khavari, and Associate Narrative Director, John Bjorling.

Some comments have been edited for clarity and readability.

I don’t think it’s unfair to characterise Star Wars fans as being fairly passionate about what they like and what they don’t like. Did you look to the franchise’s history and audience reactions when you were designing Outlaws?

Navid Khavari: Not really, to be honest. It’s interesting because we’ve got this question a few times and I think the thing about it is when you’re starting out, it’s so top secret, and it’s such a small group that’s working on it that you’re really just focused on how do we tell a Star Wars story within this era? And within the underworld and the scoundrel like Kay?

I think if you start thinking too much about those things, it’s very hard to do your job. You’re setting up expectations, and there’s maybe a cloud of ‘who are we pleasing?’

For us, I think it was really just super focused on telling a scoundrel story. We’re introducing a new character in Kay and multiple characters like ND-5 and Nix. The wonderful part is that era of the Original Trilogy has been written about in the movies, and the underworld angle has been touched on in comic books, but not in games and not in films. It gave us a really blank slate to have a lot of fun.

John Bjorling: I think it was very much about us building a team and working on something that we felt passionate about, that we believed in. I think that that was the only real way to do this, to have that self-reflection rather than worrying about possible perceptions of things.

NK: It was really key that we have lots of Star Wars fans on the team, too. You also have your internal gut checks of things that keeps you true.

You’ve talked before about how Star Wars is wonderfully indebted to tropes. It’s part of the DNA of the franchise, especially with the scoundrel. Did you find when writing Outlaws that there was an awareness of these tropes? Do you think that Kay being a woman who’s playing a scoundrel this time instead of a traditional Han Solo type, does that change how you write that archetype now?

NK: I think we really just approach it from the perspective of who Kay is. It’s about keeping focus. What are we trying to tell here? This is a story of someone who’s grown up with nothing, is scraping by to survive, who is taking on jobs and maybe not doing so well with them and failing at that, and essentially ends up with this bounty on her back. That’s what we were focused on, is how does a character like this grow and change? How do we keep them relatable as well? 

PRE-ORDER ON AMAZON FOR $89

I go back to the idea of Kay being one of us. I think there’s something to someone who’s on the ground, not part of that larger galactic battle, that just felt very universal. I don’t think necessarily that was top of mind, but I think it came about very organically in terms of how we’re developing the character. Then what’s interesting is once you start casting, and we brought on some fantastic actors like Jay Rincon for ND-5, and obviously, Humberly González who plays Kay, they bring such great personality and breathe life into your characters as well, that you start looking at the writing, you’re looking at what you’ve developed, and you’re saying, Okay, wait a second, how we can incorporate Humberly[‘s] flavour and approach to Kay?

You write the game throughout the whole development process, really. You have multiple recording sessions and so on. You get to hear things in-game with the character and really hear the character’s voice as you’re writing it. I think that that thing really makes it come to life and find its own little place. Humberly brought so much character, I think it helped a lot.

I would also say that I think one of the really important things for that matinee adventure tone that we wanted to emulate and approach from the Original Trilogy, it is also that sense of a character that is thrown into the deep end of the pool but is still optimistic about being able to make it to the other side, really. I think that that, if anything, is probably the one scoundrel character aspect that just feels so universal. Everything else is very much like, plucked from case specific story and character.

JB: She’ll always think she can pull it off. Even if everyone’s telling her no. Even if she’s ultimately lying to herself. But Nix knows! (laughs) 

So you’ve decided to have Kay’s origin story be on Canto Bight, which is to my mind and probably Rian Johnson’s, a very political planet in The Last Jedi. You’ve talked about this being an everyman’s story, more of an overarching view of the galaxy but will Kay’s politics and reaction to something like the Empire and Imperial threat be something that evolves over time throughout the game, or has it really been put on the back burner for this?

NK: It’s a good question. I think our focus was on what’s organic when you think of where Kay comes from and what she’s experienced. Within Canto Bight, this is a moon in the middle of nowhere. She doesn’t know about the Jedi. She doesn’t know much even about the Empire. She just knows that they’re in charge. That evolution is more about, wow, okay, their reach goes quite far. 

She’s going to be encountering things like the Wanted System, for example, where, okay, now she isn’t just dealing with the Canto Bight police. She’s dealing with an extremely powerful force that has taken charge of the galaxy. I think there’s an evolution in that sense. 

I think we definitely want to leave some room for players to find out some more when they play on August 30th. But I think especially that perspective, and that’s where I’d really hammer home, that perspective of, I’m not a rebel. I’m not one of them. I’m definitely not one of the Empire. How do I find my place in the galaxy was crucial to her story, and that’s something she’s going to be discovering as she goes through.

JB: It’s really that thing of Kay represents all of these people and beings across the galaxy who are just trying to survive. They can’t afford to worry about the fate of the galaxy and whoever is in control because that doesn’t really matter to them. They’re so busy with their own personal life and so on. That’s what has shaped Kay a lot and why she doesn’t really have aspirations to do something greater or anything like that. It’s a cutthroat galaxy, and she’s just looking out for herself.

NK: Kay is not a political operator. She’s a scoundrel. That’s super important for us to get to find.

I’m personally a pretty big Sequel Trilogy defender so seeing two of those planets beautifully realised in the game has been a really nice treat. Can you talk a bit about what you find thematically interesting about somewhere like Kijimi?

JB: Kijimi is really cool because, of course, you only see a glimpse of it, really, in The Rise of Skywalker. Then the sourcebooks that have been released, with Pablo Hidalgo expanding some of the stuff in some of the books. But we really felt like there was a lot of room between the Dai Bendu going to Kijimi and what you see in the Sequel Trilogy, especially through an underworld angle. 

What we’re looking at there is almost like a criminal dynasty in the Ashiga Clan and how they are, because you don’t see them in Rise of Skywalker and it’s curious what happens to them. But that pretty big story of this criminal empire and what happens when they get challenged by a very powerful competitor and so on. With us going deeply into the underworld in this game, it was so cool that we could go to these different planets and [ask] what’s the underworld angle here? Really, Kijmi is about this conflict between two criminal syndicates and Kay getting caught a little bit in between. 

NK: Even having Qi’ra from Crimson Dawn, who appeared in Solo as well, it was so exciting to know that she’s going to be part of this story and her perspective during this period. I think having those major players that maybe exist beyond the Original Trilogy, it just opens up new avenues of storytelling.

When writing someone like Qi’ra, because it is a pre-established character, both through the movie and  the comics as well, how do you go about putting your characterisation onto someone who’s already been established?

NK:  You want to be truthful to not only how she was written, but the performance from Solo, you want to honour the cadence. So little things of just how she talks, how she presents herself. Then once we nailed that, everything else comes organically. I think the approach to characters that have been established, what’s new comes in terms of how they react to the characters you’ve crafted originally. How Qi’ra perceives someone like Kay… that’s where you learn not only something new about Kay, but you’re going to learn something from them, their perception of the galaxy and their perception of what’s going on.

JB: I do think that Qi’ra is a really exciting example as well, because first we only really saw her in Solo. Then, of course, we’ve had this big comic event with Crimson Reign… then the Crimson Climb book came out that filled the gaps a little bit in that moment in Solo where they’re separated. But I think that all of them, all of these stories are bringing in nuances to Qi’ra that we’ve looked at and seen how that fits in with us. I do think that the way we look at it, Qi’ra, she’s at a very specific moment in her time during Star Wars Outlaws, and we try to, as much as possible, stay true to that. But also that it’s ultimately Kay’s journey and what does her meeting with Qi’ra look like? 

Alright here’s a weird one to wrap things up. The internet really loves ND-5, are you aware of people’s reaction to the droid and how did that feel for the team internally? 

NK: If anyone tells you they saw that coming, they are lying. I just love that people are excited about the character. When we were at the announcement, we were seeing the reaction, and then I was looking at ND-5, and I was like…okay, yeah, I can see it. I think it’s just exciting, right? You can work on a Star Wars story. You never know how people are going to react to [it]. That was actually a really fun surprise.

JB: I think people who liked ND-5 with what we’ve shown so far, I think they’re going to love him even more once they play the game. He’s such a huge part of Kay’s journey as well. It’s about them really getting to know one another and growing together in a way. But yeah, he does carry a lot of scars, both emotional and physical.

Star Wars Outlaws launches on August 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders available for $89 with free release day delivery for Prime members.

James was a guest of Ubisoft with travel and accommodation covered for the purpose of this coverage.

The post We Spoke To Star Wars Outlaws’ Narrative Team About Shaping Kay’s Journey appeared first on Press Start.

As my extensive three-hour session with Elden Ring’s forthcoming Shadow of the Erdtree expansion came to an end, a representative from Bandai Namco’s European office asked me how I found it. Instinctively, I replied, “Yeah good- I mean, it’s more Elden Ring”. It’s true, but it was a phrasing I kept turning over in my head as I left the preview and began to sort through my serial killer’s scribbles worth of notes.

Shadow of the Erdtree is more Elden Ring after all, a game that I can confidently skip giving you the briefing on because of its enormity and cultural penetration. But I think in that success, it’s easy to, even unintentionally, become numb to the craft displayed by developer FromSoftware. Few studios have had such meteoric rises and with that comes an expectation of quality that can sometimes dilute the responses to its inevitable arrival. Call it the Tears of the Kingdom effect, but the idea of more of a perfect thing* in this medium can wreak havoc on appreciating the minor miracle of actually having more of a perfect thing*.

Accessing Shadow of the Erdtree is a simple affair. Players will need to have bested Starscourge Radahn and Mohg, Lord of Blood before being whisked away from Mohg’s palace. FromSoftware is loosely recommending player level be at 150, though the expansion uses Scadutree Fragments, found by following in the footsteps of Miquella’s golden path, to boost viability within the DLC. These fragments give a flat stat boost to damage dealt and health, requiring one Fragment for one level, two for two, and so on. Similar fragments can be used to level-boost your Spirit Ashes for good measure.

Shadow of the Erdtree frontloads a new ensemble cast of characters, one of whom will quickly give you a literal map to finding more fragments, using crude sketches to match to your overworld map and begin your quest for power. It gives things a nice tactile nudge and serves double time to introduce you to the miserable little merry gang of despots you’ll be travelling the lands with. Best discovered for yourself, I’ll still say I found myself instantly enamoured with this group, their despondency and faith as compelling as their sicko armour sets and cryptic jabs.  

The machinations that get you to the Land of Shadow will be unspooled in time but on arrival, there is an immediate and pervasively thrilling redefinition of Elden Ring’s scale and spectacle. Elden Ring often made you feel small, but even between its colossal map and late-game locales, “small” remained somewhat relative. In Shadow of the Erdtree, I felt as if I had trespassed on a forbidden land of giants. There are spaces where this feels quite literal as doors and halls tower over your Tarnished in exaggerated heights, but less quantifiably, there’s something wrong in the Land of Shadows.

ELDEN RING: SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE EDITION (INCLUDES BASE GAME) – $99 WITH FREE RELEASE DAY DELIVERY

Granted, there was plenty wrong in the Lands Between too but here FromSoftware has escalated the sickness, everything from soil to stone to flesh feeling distinctly rotted. Like the unique sweetness of overripe fruit on the edge of spoiling, Shadow of the Erdtree is curdled decadence, the footprints of Miquella’s golden path, and subsequent rising sigils left behind, blooming in contrast.

Much ado has been made of the Plateau moment in modern open-world games, the instance where the player emerges into the world and is subsumed by a vast, playable distance that instils both a sense of adventure and a typically subtextual foreboding. Here, that moment is borderline alien, the pastel greens and fields of Limgrave replaced by muted earth tones and repellent towering cliffsides. I’m lingering on the feeling of this new map because Elden Ring’s primary language is feelings, the way it deploys waves of it like the tide to guide the player through the emotional journey of its otherwise knotted narrative and worldbuilding.

Though arguably Elden Ring’s greatest triumph of feeling is its refined combat loop and it won’t surprise you to learn that Shadow of the Erdtree picks up right where we left off. Packing triple digits worth of new weapons, spells, and gear into the expansion, half the joy of the early hours is stumbling upon unfamiliar swords and fabrics, that small part in the recesses of your monkey brain firing off because shiny new thing. There’s a world in which FromSoftware rests on its laurels here, the bones of Elden Ring’s combat being strong enough to hold up a new adventure with just a few minor additions to weapon skins and the odd incantation.

Shadow of the Erdtree has more on its mind though, not content with being iterative it instead toys with innovation with the introduction of Dryleaf Arts. Kicking the age-old adage that these games are best played without shields into the stratosphere, Dryleaf Arts enables a full-tilt melee build. The initial trailer for the DLC caused an excited uproar among fans when it showed a glimpse of what looked to be a high kick– the full set of moves will make you combust. Difficult to fully master but revolutionary once your feet find the rhythm, Dryleaf Arts fundamentally change the shape of Elden Ring, something I didn’t imagine possible having sunk over two hundred hours into the base game.

A combination of nimble weaving and powerful focused strikes, this build uses a flurry of kicks, punches, and an all-timer Weapon Art to deftly handle both crowds and armoured single foes. There’s also the Red Bear’s Claw, a kind of boxer remix to Dryleaf’s Wuxia style flow, but both push situational awareness and stamina management to new heights. You’re also free to wield these techniques in one hand and deploy magic, weapons, or a shield in the other, but the sense of momentum and freedom granted from leaning in is unparalleled. It’s lacking a proper backstab animation and you can’t apply elemental buffs to your fists (boo), but as I danced across a lakebed with the rotting corpse of a dragon and punched it in the face, I knew they had done something tremendous here.  

Elsewhere, the Smithscript Daggers were a surprise delight; essentially magical throwing knives that replenish through a fancy little puff of smoke, these can be whipped out rapidly or charged for a stronger hit, though range is fairly limited. Switching between these and the Dryleaf Arts made for the exact kind of power fantasy you’d imagine. If you’re looking for a more traditional means of engagement though, sword purists will rejoice in the Backhand Blade, a curved sword wielded backhanded that allows for speedy flourishes and comes packed with a Weapon Art that swooshes the player behind a foe for easier backstabs.

I also had the chance to dabble in some new Sorceries and Incantations, the small selection I had on offer ranging from the ethereal (weaving silver strands into reality before they splinter into projectile blades) to the gnarly (the Tarnished convulsing before expelling tendrils from their back to whip and slash at foes). Unsurprisingly, Shadow of the Erdtree imbues all of this with thematic weight and relevance; weapons inlaid with crimson gems signalling the rot and spread of Mesmir (the new big bad) and his flame, or the Shriek of Sorrow harnessing resentment to boost your attack power as the Tarnished wails on the battlefield.

It’s FromSoftware at its best, seeping tone into lore, storytelling into minute detail, a subconscious journey as much as an explicit one. Our few hours in the Land of Shadows began at the plains of the Three Path Crossing, a sprawling graveyard that led to the decrypted Belurat Castle Settlement and the looming Castle Ensis. These spaces are spectacular in a muted way, with immaculate detailing and vibes subdued by ambient weather effects and a prevailing sense of death. This land dwarfs you, the verticality and scale of the main game heightened as to make you feel infinitesimally small but, in following Miquella’s light, never insignificant.

The land is of course peppered with discoverable dungeons and caves, turn one corner and find an automatic crossbow-wielding knight guarding a tomb, turn another and lose yourself in a sprawling system of above-ground waterways. Belurat Castle Settlement is an overwhelming monument to decay, a sprawling city and manor that hides multiple pathways to its beastly guardian boss. The enemy design here is especially wild, with bizarre hybrid creatures and engorged insects emerging from cracks in the ceiling, the collision of the absurd and the fantastical more akin to Dark Souls II than anything else in FromSoftware’s catalogue.  

Meanwhile, Castle Ensis is a smaller but far denser legacy dungeon, dotted with embattled soldier camps and erstwhile Raya Lucaria scholars. Its more traditional fantasy architecture belies the expansion’s renewed interest in platforming and verticality with a back entrance to the heavily guarded fortress tucked away among cliffsides and an honest to god climbable waterfall. Again, it’s impossible to explore Shadow of the Erdtree and not see FromSoftware firing on all cylinders, the organic bleeding of oppressive environmental storytelling into rewarding systemic play is a constant joy.  

Both landmark locations house their requisite boss encounters too, to somewhat mixed results. Belurat’s lord, a deformed and deranged lion creature with a jaw that makes giga-Chad’s look rounded, leans hard into one of Elden Ring’s few contentious points– Big Guy. Typically adorned with stunning art direction but frustrating mechanics, this boss archetype has developed a less-than-stellar relationship with the Souls community as issues around hitboxes, camera speed, and erratic move sets surround these encounters. It’s a shame, especially contrasted with Castle Ensis’ regal sorcerer knight, a towering but refined foe more akin to Elden Ring’s considered design ethos.

Mileage has always varied on boss meta and will continue to do so here, others in my sessions besting the Lion with apparent relative ease, others still bordering on profanities. But it’s not what I take away from Shadow of the Erdtree. Instead, my mind is still racing considering the implications of a painting I found in a cave, “The Sacred Tower – last moments of death” scribbled below the frame. The sledgehammer use of metaphorical imagery as a creature with a uterus for a head jumped me from a field of golden grass. The huge blue worm dudes who we all assumed would be our friends transforming into… nah, you can see that for yourself.

For now, as if there were any doubt, just know that Shadow of the Erdtree is decadent, mean, and perhaps most importantly, it’s more Elden Ring.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree launches on June 21st and you can pre-order a physical copy including the base game here.

The post Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree Hands-On Preview – A New Leaf appeared first on Press Start.

When developer Evil Empire announced that it was moving the release date of its upcoming The Rogue Prince of Persia to get out of the way of Hades 2’s Early Access drop, I realised we’d hit another turn in the industry. It’s not the first time a dev has shifted a release to avoid a crowded date, it’s not even the first time this year (see Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail’s strategic dodging of the forthcoming Elden Ring DLC) but this change is indicative of the shifting expectations around Early Access.

Supergiant Games effectively broke the mould with Hades, while Larian Studio’s Baldur’s Gate 3 shattered it into pieces that even smaller indie titles like Dread Delusion are now walking all over. It’s a killer change for the players, better games earlier and cheaper and with more input from consumers than ever before, but it does shift the goalposts even further afield when a massive publisher like Ubisoft decides to play ball.

The Rogue Prince of Persia, a collaborative IP experiment between Ubisoft and the Dead Cells folks, bears the markings of Evil Empire’s pedigree from the moment you jump in. Stylish and immediately parsable, the game streamlines the Prince of Persia blueprint into a roguelike format, discarding anything it needs to drop to become the nimblest version of itself possible. We still have a Prince of course, this time a roguish young man gone to war with the invading Hun after inadvertently provoking their violent ire. Equipped with a magical bola that allows him to cheat death by reverting back to a set point in time, the Prince is set on a path of looping death as the Hun push deeper into his kingdom.

It’s a neat little set-up, adding in just enough timey-whimey nonsense to feel at home in both the roguelike genre and wider Prince of Persia mythos, and the additional layer of the Prince’s hubris being the inciting incident is a welcome one. The current version of The Rogue Prince of Persia is light on story content though, largely patched over by its solid systems and aesthetics, the leaner narrative and small cast of characters doesn’t do much to incentivise investment in events beyond the mechanical. Depending on priorities and feedback this may or may not change with time, but the bones of a cool world are begging to be fleshed out here.

Due to genre and release style proximity, it’s not unlikely that comparisons between The Rogue Prince of Persia and the Hades series will be made. Where the latter cemented its place in the zeitgeist with expressive character and worldbuilding as well as systems, the former opts for a stripped-down approach that might let its combat and traversal shine but dims potential elsewhere.

This isn’t to say The Rogue Prince of Persia presents poorly, if anything its art direction and tone is an achievement in its own right. To lift directly from my own preview, the stylish melding of Cartoon Network vibrancy with the sharpened edges of a Tartakovsky series makes for a distinct visual experience. Its simplicity deployed beautifully, abstracting places and faces into minimal but evocative tableaus. Likewise, the game’s score is already shaping up to be one of the best of the year, with pulsing synths that push you forward and create momentum and aggressive play by simply knowing what sonic notes to hit to make you feel like a badass at all times.

The Prince turns on a hair trigger, dashing, jumping, and wall-running his way through the game’s currently six available levels. In a genius bit of level design that never loses its magic, the game incorporates backdrops and walls into the play space, despite its 2D structure, allowing the Prince to move along and up surfaces that in any other game would be set dressing. Combined with a humble but effective jump, this grants the player a wider playground in otherwise fairly contained levels, adding a nice amount of potential verticality and exploration before moving on to the next stage.

The Rogue Prince of Persia escalates its platforming challenges the deeper in you push against the Hun, sharp reflex time and situational awareness becoming essential tools to reach equally escalating rewards. Some of this is organically strewn throughout the level, short bursts of spike traps and saw blades to overcome, but the sweatiest stuff is tucked away in challenge rooms that will push your mettle. You’re allowed a small window of grace in shifting the camera to peer below nearby floors and walls, but that verticality mentioned earlier will see you needing to make breakneck choices as you invariably plunge into the unknown and risk health and time spent on a run for a chest spied just over yonder.    

The Prince’s fluidity makes combat just as tightly tuned and thrilling as the platforming. The Hun are a great gang of foes; using shamanic magic to bolster their units, they flood the levels with a variety of enemies you’d expect to find (brutes, archers, beasts oh my), and the game isn’t shy about deploying as many as it wants against you. Things can get hairy quickly, especially against the two boss foes whose health bars boggle the mind. The Prince is equipped with a baseline dodge and kick, neither of which can deal outright damage but are critical in avoiding attacks and breaking shielded enemies or sending them careening into pits. To draw blood though, you’ll make use of a variety of weapons with primary and secondary arsenals running the gamut of light, heavy, and ranged.

There’s a fun assortment of goodies here, again escalating nicely as you move from daggers to spears, bows to chakrams and so on. Each weapon can be found repeatedly in levels with increasing damage stats and is nicely bolstered by the game’s Medallions (run-specific power-ups), but for as keen as I was to find new tools, nothing overly revolutionised combat for me. Outside of hyper-specific items, the combat kept at a satisfying and tight loop without much in the way of highlights, competent if not all that thrilling. Likewise, certain weapons, like a throwable javelin, can’t be aimed in any way I could discern, so the novelty of having ranged options falls a little flat.

Medallions close this gap nicely though, allowing the Prince to equip up to four passive abilities that alter gameplay nicely in your favour. Broken down into subcategories like Fire, Poison, Healing, Throwing Knives and so on, the Medallions typically transform basic actions by adding offensive buffs. Vault over an enemy, drop a puddle of poison; break an enemy shield, set fire to those around you; kill a Hun using elemental damage, regain some health points. There are loads of these things in the game and it truly comes alive when you begin to combine Medallions.

Both weapons and medallions can be upgraded either during a run or outside using one of a few currencies. Sacks of gold litter the levels and are used at sporadic storefronts, but the real money is in Spirit Glimmers, a mystical substance dropped by fallen foes and used back at your Oasis basecamp for blacksmithing and so on. Glimmers are lost on death unless deposited in specific portals, which can be few and far between making the risk/reward feel especially tense given how pricey some of the Glimmer stuff can get. Still, it’s nice to have something to work toward, often I would go on runs with the only goal being to farm Glimmer and get the hell out of dodge.

It all coalesces into a solid roguelike experience, small pain points around health balancing and combat variety feeling inevitably bound for patching and refinement. On that note though, given how far out of its way Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown went to making itself as playable as possible to as many people as possible, The Rogue Prince of Persia’s distinct lack of difficulty modifiers or accessibility options beyond basic colour blind and text sizing feels deflating. Evil Empire has been clear that more options are to come in future updates but to launch with this little is a disappointment.

It’s not entirely representative of The Rogue Prince of Persia’s current form but it is emblematic. With the basic moment-to-moment movement nailed down, and combat beginning to shape up into something thrilling, the game is undeniably off to a great start. But it is light in other key ways, lacking diversity in its weapon feel and only clocking in around ten hours, a time that will likely compact rather quickly in the hands of genre fanatics.

Evil Empire is no slouch though, even within the review window a patch dropping that pushed quality of life changes like mid-run resuming if you need to close the game. With Ubisoft’s sizeable backing and open ears to player feedback, there’s nowhere to wall climb but up for The Rogue Prince of Persia.

The post The Rogue Prince Of Persia Early Access Review – Heavy Is The Crown appeared first on Press Start.

To level with you from the jump, I’m not sure how any anime kid born in the 90s could possibly approach Sand Land with any real semblance of objectivity. Akira Toriyama’s work defined generations and genres, a singular point of influence so crucial to the definition of taste, to the fabric of nostalgia, that the pitch of “what if you could play a game set in the pages of his art” is immediately, and understandably, disarming. Sand Land, adapted from the manga and anime series of the same name, delivers on that pitch with varying degrees of success, a charmingly clumsy romp with eyes bigger than its stomach but an admirable appetite all the same.  

Sand Land plops you into the shin-high boots of Beelzebub, Prince of Demons, son of Lucifer, veritable little stinker. Running a Robin Hood adjacent gig in the outskirts of Sand Land, a once thriving continent hardened into a desert wasteland following a devastating war, Beelzebub and his demon gang are lifting what water they can from the far-reaching clutches of the Royal Army. An occupying force of vaguely nationalist shitheads, the army hoards Sand Land’s remaining resources while disparate towns and settlements cling to life under its harsh sun.

Life, and rebellion, find a way though, and soon Beelzebub, along with his curmudgeonly old demon mate Thief, are enlisted by Roa, a local sheriff on a last-ditch journey south in search of the Legendary Spring, a water source said to hold the secret to Sand Land’s potential restoration. Toriyama’s iconic art style contrasts nicely with the simmering bleakness of Sand Land, Beelzebub’s quest taking him through an assortment of striking locales and an affable supporting cast while never failing to chew on the meatier concepts baked into the game’s themes.

To sweeten the pot, Roa gifts Beelzebub a gaming console (much to the chagrin of Lucifer, who despite being king of demons is also a “one hour a day in a well-lit room, kiddo” kind of dad). It’s a cute moment, the promise of a world-altering adventure paling in comparison to the new console he has waiting at home, but it’s also indicative of Sand Land’s approach to design. From the baseline open-world and vehicular combat, it piles mechanics and systems with joyful, messy abandon­ – beat-em-up on foot encounters, perspective-shifting platforming, forced stealth sequences, deep customisation, and a whole bunch of quests. There are even a few old faithful radio towers dotted around the humbly sized but inviting map.

It’s a minor miracle it all feels as breezy as it does, the potential bloat of its systems teetering on the edge of Content but never toppling. This is probably in large part due to Toriyama’s designs running a near-constant interference on even the most banal tasks, but it’s also because Sand Land is forgiving, welcoming, and endlessly warm to the touch. Beyond its aesthetic markers, it’s difficult to say it is the best at any of the hats it wears across its twenty-odd-hour adventure, but the effort feels sincere and the execution almost always in good faith. It badly wants to be like the games that inspired it, and there are worse design impulses to follow.

To get the grit out of the way, the stealth sections are kind of a pain; occasionally a party member will need to sneakily scope out a location or loot supplies using a rudimentary crouch, shuffle, cone of vision-avoiding set of tools. It’s not bad, but it’s not all that fun either, the trigger points for guards and paths often being a little too loose but, at least, rarely punishing. Likewise, the typically smooth UI could be a little more forthcoming in its crafting material information. I once lost a solid ten minutes to roaming settlements looking for a material with nothing but the “occasionally found at workshops” to go by.

It was mildly irritating but if only for how much these pain points stood out against the prevailing Sand Land experience, which is one of ease and small joys. Given the nation’s proclivity for conflict, the land is littered with war machines to pilot and do battle with. Beelzebub’s roughly half a dozen arsenal includes a portly tank, a legs for day jumping bot, and a fierce speedy bike to name a few, each required for different elements of the map. Sinking sands need to be swiftly crossed, large gaps leapt over, you get the idea. Carried in capsules for immediate switching and open-world use, this collection of metallic oddities is Sand Land’s traversal and combat backbone.

And they’re a blast. Controlling the tank feels like piloting a Dalek, top and bottom halves operating independently for goofy but useful manoeuvrability as you cycle through a canon and minigun rotation, each methodical reloading timed to suit the other. The bike blasts the world wide open, whipping along dunes and craggy cliffsides using the overdrive boosters found on all units, on cool down during combat but unlimited while exploring to incentivise pointing in a direction and just letting loose. The other bots are less inspiring, but each can be radically overhauled with customisable parts, each machine broken into component elements in the workshop, those individual pieces themselves are also upgradable, discoverable, and craftable.

Materials and pieces are farmed in the open world, hunting stray packs of colourful dinosaurs and roaming gangs of bandits and army men alike. You’re just as likely to engage these foes, and several other key story moments, on foot though, with Beelzebub’s demonic powers used in flashy, if simple, melee combat. Light and heavy attacks, a nimble dodge, a skill tree to fill out that enables stronger blows and a whole separate one for passive and active companion abilities, Sand Land hits all the notes. Unlike the stealth though, these moments are fun and reliably well-paced, each time a clobbering was required feeling narratively satisfying and mechanically sound.

Sand Land is also not particularly shy about its themes and ideas, happy to smack you around the ears if it feels like you’ve not been paying attention. You can grok it immediately; the tutorial mission for vehicle combat is framed as a sepia-toned flashback to the war that devastated the land, the final horrific act of the conflict serving as your last checklist item to cross out. Sand Land knows its tanks and bikes and mechs are all fun to play with, but it’s also keenly tuned into the story it wants to tell, tethering combat to theme through a series of small cup checks. Characters often exclaim how impressive it is that you cleared a small army without killing anyone, stealth “kills” are actually just scaring the guard into fainting, and Roa’s role in the party is to always remind Beelzebub that all this fun is built on the graves of war.

Is it a bit silly to think your arsenal of missiles didn’t kill someone during that last mission? Sure, but a core part of Sand Land’s appeal is its invitation to enter a world in which that’s possible and even necessary. The end of the world for Sand Land was a mere fifty years ago, lending some surprising weight to Roa and Thief’s occasional bouts of forlorn reminiscing and eventual plot revelations. The story can feel somewhat disjointed at times, its thematic and character strength stumbling over odd pacing and lurching between scenes rather than smoothly flowing, but the thrust of it is frequently engaging or, at the very least, entertaining.

All of this is wrapped in presentation that borders on magical. Toriyama’s art is almost perfectly translated into an explorable space in Sand Land, as if the world just beyond the frames of his books had spilled out and invited you to dick around in it. There’s a smattering of the hard lines and grit lost in the translation from the original work with Sand Land but it’s a minor gripe, the achievement of Sand Land, the place, and the expressive character animations all but papering over any purist complaints. It makes for a game that is striking to look at in trailers but doesn’t reveal the real breadth of its beauty until you’re sitting down with the thing, the ability to swing the camera around and move Beelzebub through these spaces without it breaking the immaculate art and vibes being the crowning achievement for Sand Land.

In the face of this evocative work, the mechanical and pacing fumbles feel distinctly less important, their severity already dulled by the game’s overall quality and likely nullified entirely for some by its relentless charm. It is, to my mind, the quintessential 7/10 video game experience, the kind of good time that makes a man in his 30s ache with warm and, as of recently, bittersweet nostalgia. But in many ways, I’m not sure Sand Land is meant for me, it’s meant for the new anime kid with a PS5 and 30 hours of free time to do the side quests, to build up the towns and track down the collectibles all while becoming slowly enamoured with the work of a man who has left us all too soon.

Or maybe Sand Land is for both of us, the past and present generations, taking a moment over a cool video game to say hey, thank you Akira Toriyama. I can think of no better goodbye than to inhabit one of his boundless, beautiful worlds.

The post Sand Land Review – Mad Mechs appeared first on Press Start.

Prince of Persia fans are in such a weird state of flux right now. Having watched their favourite franchise rise and fall in popularity over the past couple of decades, it seemed as if the pendulum was finally swaying back in their direction with a hotly-anticipated Sands of Time remake on the horizon. Then comes The Lost Crown, a 2D Metroidvania series revival that understands the assignment to the core and stakes a claim as one of the best titles of 2024 in its opening month. Cool, they say, but surely the next game in the franchise must be the remake though, right? Right?

Following the mammoth success of its rogue-lite 2D platformer Dead Cells, developer Motion Twin formed an internal team dedicated to continued support of the hit game. Evil Empire would then go on to craft a whole world of DLC experiences for Dead Cells, but earlier this year, the team announced it would be moving onto new projects. I’m not sure anyone would have guessed that that project would be a collaboration with mega-publisher Ubisoft, let alone the next Prince of Persia title.

Last week I had the chance to spend about half an hour with The Rogue Prince of Persia, Evil Empire’s new baby. In this 2D rogue-lite, the Prince is tossed against time and death itself, embarking on a one-man war against the Huns, whose blades and arrows are no match for his magic bola, a mysterious gift that rips the Prince backward in time upon death. Having listened to the team talk up the project and dabbling in its opening levels and systems, I’ll say that it’s hard to care that this isn’t Sands of Time.

It’s impossible not to notice The Rogue Prince of Persia’s heavily stylised art direction and overall tone; this thing moves like a Genndy Tartakovsky creation meshed with the charming tones of a Cartoon Network outing. Deliberately simplified but expressive models paired with sharp action animations and a unique colour palette to tie it all together. The invading Huns are draped in purple hues, contrasting with the rich warmth of the gold and blue Persia into which they’re marching. The transition from cutscene to gameplay plays with all these elements beautifully too, shifting to an even more abstract art style that allows the game’s core systems the fluidity to truly shine.

Which, given the genre and pedigree of the developer, is kind of essential to nail down. The Rogue Prince of Persia, maybe unsurprisingly, moves with unparalleled ease and responsiveness. Across randomly generated levels, replete with spiky floor puzzles and a small army of Hun warriors to cut down, the Prince will effortlessly duck, weave, jump, and slide across the game’s distinctive use of 2D level design. Essentially if you take Todd Howard’s famous “You see that mountain? You can climb it” approach and apply it to the backdrops of The Rogue Prince of Persia’s levels. With the press of a button, the Prince can wall run up and across what in any other game would be background textures, adding a whole new layer to the concept of a 2D platformer.

This has obvious applications, like traversing gaps or reaching tight vertical spaces, but ultimately what matters right now is that it feels cool as shit. And it’s just the first of many tools available to the young royal, Evil Empire’s genre DNA and Ubisoft’s franchise seamlessly blend to give you a bounty of movement and combat abilities that all manage to feel both good and necessary for level completion. You’ll begin each run with the Prince’s baseline twin swords and bow, deploying basic attacks and dodges to get through basic foes. But as things ramp up, you’ll need to use the game’s incredible kick mechanic to stun-lock targets, the divebomb attack to thin crowds, and special combo moves that vary based on your current loadout.

Being a rogue-lite, the game isn’t shy about giving you new tools, abilities, and currencies on the regular – some that are run-specific, others that persist, and all of which fit the overall tone and flow nicely. While our demo was short, we did get a chance to test multiple weapon types and a good handful of passive and active combat abilities. Early on we nabbed a heavy hammer that changed the baseline swift special attack into a lumbering, powerful charged blow. Later this was swapped out for a target-seeking spear that combined rapid attacks with ranged capabilities.

Throughout a run, the Prince can stumble onto chests, merchants, and shrines that each have the chance of offering up a new power to be used throughout his current adventure. These will undoubtedly take countless forms, but in my time, I found an ability that infused my kicks with a short burst of fire damage, another that spewed a tar-like substance onto enemies to slow them down, and a passive buff to dropped currencies. These have three levels of potential strength, multipliers often tucked away in hard-to-reach spots or discrete platform challenge rooms that take the flow and risks of a standard level and crank up the difficulty for short, controlled bursts.

These tools all hang together in a combat flow that feels sharply responsive but rarely punishing. In a very (say the line James…) Soulslike fashion (yay!), The Rogue Prince of Persia requires your focus and patience more than your raw skill at times, though the boss included in the demo kicked my arse within roughly 45 seconds. Health is treasured and the Prince, for all his wily ways, is a tender lad, only able to take a few hits before being punted back to basecamp to try it all again. But the game knows you know all of this, so it tests your patience not with raw difficulty but pulse pounding momentum. Much like the art direction, the score to the game is this immediately infectious dubstep-dripped South Asian banger gallery that courses through your veins and pushes you, constantly, to keep flow, keep swinging, keep going.

It’s a killer bit of style and substance synergy, and the perfect ribbon to wrap around the core loop. Elsewhere, you’ve got a standard array of rogue-lite trappings and Ubisoft building blocks. A base camp location, The Oasis, teases a blacksmith who can upgrade your gear between runs, empty stalls and corners clearly begging for smart-mouthed NPCs to sell you nick-nacks and the like. The pause menu also drops a surprise Assassin’s Creed-style narrative mystery map with targets and lore tidbits, all of which may prove interesting but barely register above the electric hum of the game’s music and momentum.

It’s very early and very short days yet, but the only raised eyebrows around The Rogue Prince of Persia so far have nothing to do with the game itself. Its proximity to The Lost Crown is a little confusing – Prince of Persia fans currently clamouring for the elusive Sands of Time remake might find the timing of yet another game in the franchise that distinctly isn’t what they want to be confusing. Though the quality of the work done by Evil Empire should quickly dispel any notions that this thing isn’t a worthy entry in the franchise.

But the Early Access tag is probably the strangest part of the game’s rapidly approaching release. A short media presentation talked about how using the Early Access program to ensure the game could be adaptive to player feedback would be an invaluable tool in its development and given how well that approach worked out for Dead Cells, it’s hard to argue with the logic. It’s just strange to see a publisher with Ubisoft’s resources wading into an indie-sized resource pool.

Still, Evil Empire has more than earned its swing at such a storied franchise and for a short demo to leave such a clear impression, there’s evidently some juice here. The Rogue Prince of Persia will likely go through about as many iterations as the Prince through lives but the baseline flow is already impeccable and with nowhere to go but up, it’ll be a treat to see how high the crown’s latest claimant will rise.

The Rogue Prince of Persia is launching as an Early Access product on PC on May 14, 2024.

The post The Rogue Prince Of Persia Hands-On Preview – Wall Run, Don’t Walk appeared first on Press Start.

On Skull and Bones’ title screen – something you may or may not have ever expected to actually see – there’s a small prompt that simply says, “Press any button to rule the seas.” It’s an innocuous game trigger, but something about its phrasing kept echoing through my head as I sunk hours into Ubisoft’s latest outing. This throwaway bit of UI guidance is an inadvertent portent for the experience of Skull and Bones, the promise that what you’re about to experience, no matter how grand in aesthetics or romanticised by a lengthy development cycle, will ultimately be as digestible and disposable as a decently constructed tourist trap.  

I’m ahead of myself here, sorry, it’s been a long week under a blaring sun on salt water-worn decks. Skull and Bones is ostensibly a lot of things. Sometime in the late 17th century, a naval war is being waged in the Indian Ocean between various factions, all of whom envision a different kind of freedom, or control, for or of the world around them. Into this maelstrom you arrive, a nameless little cully tossed against the rocks of fortune and fate as your shipwrecked arse lands in the office of John Scurlock, the pirate kingpin of Sainte-Anne, a stronghold of the craven. Scurlock offers you the keys to the envisioned new kingdom, setting you on a path of scum and villainy in service of riches and power.

Across the game’s opening hours, you’ll hear dozens of phrases and ideas. Talk of capitalism run amok, the overarching threat of the massive trading governmental powers, the plight of the nomadic sea people or the champions of the oppressed making plans in the north seas. It’s a healthy mix of genre cliches, quest hooks, and vague gestures toward socially progressive idealism that have found their way into Ubisoft’s lexicon. Delivered with unimpeachable politeness by a small cast of quest givers and plot figureheads, this pastiche forms the framework for much of what you’ll be asked to do in Skull and Bones, every single element of the game eventually bending back around to completing a small set of objectives in the name of some faction or another.

Before you can set out on the high seas for some swashbuckling though, you’ll need a ship to call your own. Skull and Bones’ customisable ships are a highlight of its main campaign, your pirate’s rise to power is directly reflected by the strength and grandeur of the vessels they can command. As you rise in Infamy, the game’s separate player level, you’ll unlock additional ships that require increasing levels of resources gathered in the open world and during quests. Ships are categorised into small, medium, and large, and while this is technically a variety of choice, the moment-to-moment of Skull and Bones all but requires a consistent push toward the next available model, never giving you much of a reason to revert to an older ship for the sake of speed or manoeuvrability, for example.

This odd bottlenecking of player choice is necessitated by the raw numbers game Skull and Bones needs to play with you. While you may prefer the handling and aesthetics of a medium ship, its baseline speed and defensive capabilities will always be outclassed by a larger ship, even with the somewhat flexible weapon and passive boost systems that raise the ships numerical class ranking. Endgame ships are further classified by standard multiplayer roles like DPS and healer, further fracturing player expression and choice across predetermined, group-dependent requirements. The accompanying visual flourishes that are more directly under your control fare better at least, with a healthy supply of vibrant adornments and customisable components meaning your ship will at least look the way you envisioned.

AMAZON HAS THE CHEAPEST SHIPPED COPY AT $89 WITH FREE DELIVERY

Once on open water, Skull and Bones’ strengths, shortcomings, and potential bob to the surface. With a design backbone as strong as Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, it would have been surprising if the core sailing felt anything other than fantastic. And while Skull and Bones leans a little harder into arcade-control than the hefty realism its art direction implies, the sheer joy I felt when navigating a storm or cresting a wave is undeniable. The game’s first-person camera perspective, while utterly useless in combat, makes for a heightened and immersive experience as its emergent weather and lighting systems play out beautifully across the deck. The ship’s crew is reactive to the world around them, often pointing out local sights or incoming threats too, and my pet lemur’s skittery movements were always welcome company.

The heavily marketed naval combat meant to define the core of Skull and Bones ultimately treads water for much of the game, neither fully sinking or swimming. While bolstered with weather effects and impressive particle and destruction physics, blowouts between ships are only ever overwhelmingly fine, keeping on par with, and occasionally lagging behind, the game’s 2013 blueprint. The concise user-friendliness of Black Flag’s arching aiming has been replaced with contemporary crosshairs in a move seemingly meant to invoke deeper player involvement in things like gravity and momentum. Likewise, boarding has become an inert inventory screen, your pirate rooted to the spot as a short cutscene shows your crew having more fun than you. Neither change is disastrous, but nor are they additive and combined with the arcade-y movement and increasingly large enemy health pools, combat becomes a visually spectacular chore at a base level.

Traversing Skull and Bones’ huge ocean map is similarly peppered with immersive, thrilling moments and lengthy stretches of downtime. As both critic and player, I am categorically in favour of meditative silence while moving through an open world, and there are glimpses of this kind of melancholic peace found in Skull and Bones. Things will inevitably return to live-service adjacent shenanigans though, as infinitely spawning enemy ships and other players cut into your brief respites on open water. But with space comes raw distance and while the scope of this world is admirable, doing battle with headwinds that slow your pace and a fast-travel system that gouges into your quest profits, moving through the game loses its charm far quicker than I would have liked.

From here, Skull and Bones spends a lot of time trying to elevate or obfuscate this core deficiency with varying degrees of success. Endgame content gets closest, kicking things off with fantastical boss encounters like the ghost ship and sea monster, before The Helm begins its earnestly interesting efforts toward establishing an in-game economy. Through control of trade routes and running deliveries via daily quests, you can operate a nifty little side hustle in which you use labour camps to refine materials that are then illegally traded for profit. The majority of this is played out on charts and maps, the only other active engagement possible is more sailing and combat, making for a middling loop.

Elsewhere, you can initiate raids on settlements, a kind of risk/reward enclosed area that sees your ship sailing in circles for minutes at a time while enemy waves spawn and a loot bar fills up. Most of your quests will see you running errands back and forth across the ocean, occasionally hunting down rogue ships or stopping to use the game’s rudimentary harvesting quick-time event. Skull and Bones’ omission of any true on-foot gameplay wreaks havoc on its pacing here, as you are technically free to explore a few islands and locations, but interactivity is severely limited to throwaway dialogue choices with NPCs and clumsy treasure hunts. Sketched maps with big red Xs are a wonderful idea but the game’s lean into realism and dense fidelity means finding the designated spot is often tiring.

Skull and Bones almost always keeps you at arm’s length, its experiential comparison point being closer to the Disneyland flavour of Pirates of the Caribbean than the films. Everything is minutely curated and sanded down for minimal player friction – press any button, rule those seas, it’s not going to stop you. It’s a pervasive tonal and mechanical creep that makes this admittedly gorgeous world into a tourist attraction, animatronic NPCs spouting generic calls to action while lifting empty flagons to plastic mouths as unseen speakers pipe in region-accurate animal sounds. It’s overwhelmingly artificial, whatever efforts made to emulate biomes and ideologies of the time are unfortunately painted over by the kind of passive world live-service titles seemingly require.

And look, I like Disneyland fine. With a couple of good mates and a manageable day plan in mind, you can have a decent time there and much the same could be said of Skull and Bones. There’s a reason our previews were positive; the game’s opening hours are brimming with promise and potential, and perhaps in short bursts its lacklustre elements wouldn’t break the surface as quickly. But here is a game that wants to be played for far longer than it has the systems to properly sustain, its ambitious ideas lapping its raw capabilities. There’s a glimpse of a decent attraction here and there, but I can’t help but wonder if Ubisoft has mistaken the appeal of a day pass for the promise of a yearly membership.

The post Skull And Bones Review – Swashbuckling Under Pressure appeared first on Press Start.

Odds are, cully, that you’ve probably read some variation of the following introductory paragraph in coverage of Skull and Bones, Ubisoft’s live-service pirate adventure game, about as many times as the game has reportedly been through development hell. It’s an industry wide narrative that’s impossible to escape in any coverage of the game, which finally launches this Friday after several years of false starts, but it’s not hard to see why.

The allure of such a tale is as gold to a pirate, the ubiquity and size of Ubisoft making such an evidently turbulent development cycle all the more visible and compelling. At least sitting across from the game’s Project Manager Jessica Chung and Content Director Gabriel Tay, the two do a tremendous job of projecting a better vibe than the game has had for some time.

Given the protracted, and hugely public, development time for Skull and Bones, it’s impossible to find yourself in front of anyone from Ubisoft Singapore and not ask how they’re feeling about the whole ordeal. “Oh, amazing! The team is super excited.” Beams Tay when asked about the vibe in the studio right now, his enthusiasm undeniably evident as we finally broach launch day for this troubled ship. “We even have a countdown clock just like running throughout the studio and everyone’s excited to have the game finally in players hands.”

It’s a nice image, the team behind a fairly publicly, if not derided then at least dissected, title finding its sea legs in the home stretch. As with most game development though, nice images are painstakingly drawn and Skull and Bones’ eventual clarity of purpose took years of constant player feedback and careful management. “Ultimately we want to build the game that players want to play,” said Tay of the game’s extensive use of community testing feedback, “because we get direct feedback from our most passionate players, we really want to incorporate as much of these bits of feedback into the game. There’s definitely still the aspect of us looking through what will be the most impactful kind of changes and the ones that fit Skull and Bones the most.”

By tapping directly into player-led feedback, sourced from countless Ubisoft insider testing alphas of the game, Chung reflects on how her job has been changed by the approach, “I think the data really helped us in a lot of our planning on what features that we really need to focus on,” she said,  “as a project manager, it’s really nice to have that data to focus the team. And of course, the team knows that it’s coming from real players, so that makes it even more real and more exciting to actually work on something that players really want.”

This kind of adaptive development isn’t winding down either. Skull and Bones is launching into a fairly crowded live-service market, and its evolving relationship with its soon-to-be wide-open player base will be used to steer through waters that are proving choppy for many studios right now. “We’re constantly listening” says Tay, chewing on the future of the game, “we’re paying attention to feedback as we release each season, and we’re balancing the kind of vision we want to deliver as well as what players want. There is a lot of opportunity for that dialogue between developers and the players, and we’re really excited to engage with players to really build the kind of game they want.”

So, they’re listening, but the question on many player’s minds right now is around the initial buy-in for Skull and Bones. A rather steep price tag accompanies the additional attention cost of investing in a new live-service experience, something both Tay and Chung are optimistic about overcoming with the game’s core systems. “Our take on Skull and Bones is really what sets us apart, a game that’s really focused on deep naval combat is, I think, really unique in this space,” says Tay, all hands and gestures as he excitedly explains, “And I think with the level of customization we’re offering to players in terms of ships, the playstyles, the weapons they can equip, there’s really a broad canvas for players to play with and engage with… and our grounded pirate fantasy is something that we don’t really see a lot in the market.”

There is certainly something about the pirate lifestyle that seems destined to work for video games, an overlap between two distinct styles of power fantasy and romanticised history. And while Tay waxes poetic about the ideals of freedom during piracy’s golden age, for Chung the appeal is far more visceral. “It’s really the constant feel of danger and threat!” she says, “In the world of Skull and Bones, there’s a lot of things that will kill you… but the reward is so good. So balancing that kind of feeling, it’s really what a pirate feels like. And of course, you can make friends, but you can also make enemies.” Here we shared a laugh at the potential collision course between live players and Skull and Bones’ cutthroat world, though Chung very politely said of player’s potential PVP griefing proclivities, “you can choose to.”

All of these system considerations and online elements are housed in a game that Ubisoft Singapore wanted to play, gently, with history. According to Tay and Chung, a considerable amount of research went into the writing and worldbuilding of the game, and striking the right balance between realism and romanticism was key to crafting the game’s tone and direction. While players can of course look forward to some heightened elements like the heavily promoted ghost ship battle, the core of Skull and Bones is somewhat more grounded in its expansive economic and trade systems, allowing you to establish your own micro-economy for profit.  

“It’s really about striking that balance,” said Chung on the push and pull between fantasy and reality in Skull and Bones, “and part of it is also for us as developers, we wanted to have fun and ask what if these things existed in the real world? And we wanted to kind of straddle that line. And I think we found a nice position between these two elements and I think players will be really excited to see these things alive in our world.”

As our time together wrapped up, we riffed on Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, the 2013 progenitor for Skull and Bones. “We know the legacy we’re coming from and we really want to acknowledge that and build upon the strengths of that game,” said Tay, “Black Flag really introduced players to that strong pirate fantasy and we really wanted to take it to the next level. So we really dive deep into the whole naval combat, really increasing the level of customization and at the same time taking the Indian Ocean itself, not featured as much in games, and we really want to showcase it in a completely different light.”

Skull and Bones is available now for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has the game for $89 with free shipping.

The post We Spoke To Ubisoft Singapore About Skull And Bones’ Pirate Fantasy, Player Feedback, And The Legacy Of Black Flag appeared first on Press Start.

Avowed has a lot of eyes on it. The latest fantasy-action RPG from legendary studio Obsidian Entertainment, the first-person adventure had barely a 90 second reveal trailer to its name before the Skyrim comparisons started flowing. This was in some way inevitable given the eternal dance between Obsidian and Bethesda Softworks, the two studios having circled each other in the zeitgeist thanks to the duology that was Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. Each studio’s ravenous fanbases celebrating, or decrying, one approach or the other. The grand irony of course is that both developers would wind up umbrellaed by Microsoft in the coming years after its extensive acquisition sweep through the industry. This, in turn, brought even more pressure to Avowed, the latest game (after the likes of Redfall and Starfield) to be saddled with the expectation of being the one to define Xbox’s seventh console generation.

All of this before Obsidian even begins to consider how its die-hard fanbase will react to the studio’s return to fantasy and to a pre-existing IP, Pillars of Eternity. When I asked Avowed’s game director Carrie Patel about how it felt to be marching back into the Living Lands with decades of player expectations at their back. “It’s very exciting,” Patel says, “I worked on the first two Pillars games and the DLCs… Pillars 1 was actually my first game with Obsidian! So it definitely feels really special to be returning here, taking a slightly different approach to combat and gameplay and I think building an experience that’s going to welcome in a lot of new players.”

As we unpack the strange balancing act of emotions working within a studio as storied as Obsidian brings with it, Patel reflects on the simultaneous pressure and comfort such history brings. “I mean, honestly, it’s a bit of both. It is so heartening to know that we have people who love our games, are familiar with them, and are always interested and ready to check out what we’re doing next. But obviously you want to make sure that you’re delivering on those expectations. But it’s definitely been gratifying to see with games like Grounded and Pentiment, where we’ve done something that’s a little bit outside of our normal mould, to see those games still finding their audience, finding a lot of love, even again, when they’re doing something that is not in the same vein of RPGS that we’re necessarily known for.”

Both Grounded and Pentiment, two smaller-scale releases from Obsidian since its time with Xbox, have been met with critical acclaim and a fairly positive audience reaction. Patel is right of course, neither are what you would consider typical Obsidian outings, one being a co-op survival experience and the other… well, I’m still not sure how one describes the brilliance of Pentiment. But Avowed Gameplay Director Gabe Paramo talks about how, while different, these games kept the Obsidian spirit alive. “Our mantra is kind of ‘Your world, Your way.’ Even though they seem very different, their core is Your World, Your Way. So even though they might feel to the players ‘experimental’, they are still not far off from where we’re trying to have that nugget of giving the player the freedom and choice to kind of play the game and do the things they want to do, just maybe in slightly different contexts.”

Obsidian fans who have been craving a more recognisable experience from the studio don’t have much longer to wait though as Patel explains how Avowed’s storytelling and quest design stems from the studio’s lauded narrative skills. “Players who are familiar with our RPGs will feel right at home in Avowed and in its quest structure and the cast of characters we’re creating,” she says, “Quests are primarily how we reveal the world to the player, how we immerse them in the themes and the conflicts and the personalities and factions that play in the world. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with Avowed as well. We’re not pursuing the structure of having factions where you have sort of tracked and metered formal relationships with them like we did in, you know, New Vegas. This is kind of a more organic approach to choice and consequences and letting the player set their alliances, make their decisions, sort of push the world in one way or another as they go through and see those consequences play out in their interactions with other characters further on down the line.”

Paramo chimes in as we discuss the shift to first-person magical combat and how Avowed’s take on it came to be. “The challenges with first-person, and again, because it’s a fantasy action RPG, we really wanted to focus on that momentum and trying to make sure that we’re not slowing the player down, making sure they’re feeling kinetic, immersive,” he says, thinking on how this differs from previous Obsidian titles, “So I think on kind of a top down perspective, you get a little bit of a higher view, whereas you’re now embodying the character. And so the animation requirements and then as well as the dual wielding system, you can put something in your offhand, in your primary hand, and trying to kick up the fidelity a bit, but while trying to just make the player feel, again, immersive but also flexible.”

Avowed’s marketing kicked into high gear just weeks ago at the Xbox Developer Direct event, a showcase of upcoming titles for the system that gave us our first extended look at the world and systems of Avowed. The reaction was largely positive, though some viewers found themselves wary of the first-person combat, but for veterans like Paramo, this has become somewhat old hat. Toward the end of our chat we were openly discussing how development had been tracking with Avowed and Paramo opened up about how it felt on his side of the fence to see the internet talk about the project.

“You’re going to get feedback on a lot of things, right? The gameplay that we showed was alpha. We’ve shown gameplay in the past where you’ve also gotten comments and then you’ve gotten the new comments that are like, wow, that looks better than what the previous one,” he explains, “So anything that we can do to just keep showing these incremental improvements to the player, I think is all positive. Whether or not the feedback might come back as maybe not so positive. But it’s just to say that even the pieces of feedback that we’ve gotten on the internet already, like through forum posts, we’ve already been addressing those things and we’re going to continue to improve those things between now and when we release. So again, it’s exciting. We’re happy to show it again. The more the player can kind of see the game in the current state and then see that there’s been changes is, to me, always a positive thing.”

Patel agrees, “One thing that we don’t always get to talk about and show as much love and appreciation for is just how much iterative work goes into a game and how much of the team’s process is trying something, finding the fun, and then building more and more on that. I was actually really pleased to get to talk about this a little bit in the Xbox podcast segment on Monday. But the dungeon that you see, the little adventure space, the grotto that Tyler McCombs built out and that Peter Wayne and Seth May did the interior and exterior art for, was originally a much smaller space.

“And every once in a while, you end up in that wonderful situation as a dev, where you actually are a little bit ahead of something and you have a little more time than you thought. Usually it’s the opposite, and all three of those guys had been super on the ball. With the work they were doing… And so I think a lot of times it’s easy to sort of see pre-production and then see the end product and everything in between is just sort of this steady path up. But I think what gets lost and what’s hard to see if you’re not in the process is just the trial and error and the lessons you’re learning and the way you’re building on what you’ve done before and just how much progress comes from that process, even though it’s certainly a lot of work in the moment.”

Sitting (even virtually) across from Patel and Paramo as they unpack these thoughts, the energy in the room tangibly changes. Launching a new game must be a complicated thrill of feelings, and while our brief discussions of the game’s size (think The Outer Worlds) and immersive-sim-light elements (players can use elemental magic to change the landscape and access new areas) were certainly enjoyable, it’s the look at the studio and its emotional makeup that brings the three of us to life. Likewise, as Patel and I unpack the thematic elements of Avowed, a surprising connection is formed.

“I think that’s something that we’ll get into probably in a few months when we get closer to talking a bit more about the story. But I mean, being said, in the Living Lands, there’s definitely a theme of exploration and discovery. You’re coming to understand this very big, mysterious, dangerous land, and also, as the player character, some very important things about yourself…there is a mix of conflicts and challenges that you’re going to face that are both enmeshed in the political world and the different factions of characters you’ll meet, but also in the metaphysical world, in the realm of the divine.”

This is my shot, and I’m glad I take it. As part of the Developer Direct marketing blast for Avowed, the game’s key art was unleashed upon the world. The art is a stunning work depicting a skeletal warrior with sword in hand, its flesh and internal systems exposed as creeping, fantastical vines, coral, and other naturally forming substances. It’s striking, evocative, and immediately reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi novel Annihilation (the Alex Garland film adaptation is equally brilliant). In Annihilation, a strange metaphysical occurrence engulfs a portion of the United States, warping anything trapped in its boundaries at a horrific, but beautiful, cellular level.

Given that Avowed’s plot synopsis hints at a strange virus running rampant through the lands, I had to know if I was reading too much into things or not. “So again, without getting into story details, I will say you are not reading too much into things!” Patel practically beams at me, “I am so glad you’ve made that connection. I had perhaps heard that that one was a little too esoteric.”

It is the single most exciting thing I personally could have heard about Avowed, and it skyrockets the game up my list of things to look forward to in 2024.

Avowed is slated to launch on Xbox Series X|S and PC in 2024.

The post We Spoke To Obsidian About Avowed, Internet Reactions, And A Surprise Sci-Fi Inspiration appeared first on Press Start.

Skull and Bones is a lean game. The byproduct of the game’s prolonged development cycle is perhaps an inadvertent response to what many consider to be the Ubisoft house style. In its years of production, and much to the chagrin of some expectant players, Skull and Bones has seemingly shed many of its skins, emerging as a streamlined and remarkably focused experience, at least in its early hours. This is a double-edged cutlass of course; with a stronger emphasis on a handful of systems, the game is quick on its feet with a palatable scope, but without the staple Ubisoft checklists, it leaves little room for error or even variety. Skull and Bones is a naval combat game, and that’s either enough for you or it isn’t.

Fortunately, there’s an innate satisfaction to navigating Skull and Bones’ waters. This isn’t hugely surprising—Skull and Bones only exists because ten years ago Ubisoft Montreal nailed it so hard in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, proving its sailing so popular that it fundamentally shifted the franchise and spawned work on DLC that would (eventually) grow into the game before us today. A decade of refinement is a luxury in this industry, and while the tone around Skull and Bones has been intermittently shifting between sour and curious, the time given to its systems has been very kind. I cannot begin to explain how much I enjoyed simply existing on these boats. The grander trappings of Skull and Bones aside, the baseline act of taking to the open sea is some pure, unadulterated good shit.

Skull and Bones casts you as a fully customisable shipwrecked scoundrel with a hungry eye trained on the upper echelons of pirate society, an unofficial ruling class of Kingpins whose crowns you covet and thrones you wish to topple. In a move that immediately differentiates the game from contemporary pirate stories, Skull and Bones sets this tale of rags to riches against a distinctly Southeast Asian setting, the Indian Ocean, allowing the game to pull on a visually and culturally diverse history. Ubisoft Singapore has crafted a romanticised world here, respectfully interweaving elements of the region’s pirate heritage and landmarks with exaggerated sea creatures, ghostly vessels, and elusive warring factions with whom your role can change based on your choices.

The core loop of Skull and Bones sees you running short missions out of the Sainte-Anne central hub, where you can customise your ship and cosmetics, trade with vendors, pick up quests and bounties, and follow the game’s main plot line. There doesn’t seem to be a wrong way to play as such, though the core story of pirate Kingpin John Scurlock’s quest to use you as a pawn against the local Sea People and their queen will fast-track your progress and exposure to the world.

Sainte-Anne cuts an impressive profile for the game’s introduction, a densely populated and decorated shanty town that immediately displays a grasp on environmental design and graphical fidelity beyond what previous hardware generations could likely have handled. You can practically smell this place, the sense of space and location is more akin to Red Dead Redemption 2 than most Assassin’s Creed titles. As you roam its streets, NPCs will heckle you or cheer you on depending on your rank, the game’s voice acting and general performances feeling a cut above what has come before in Ubisoft titles, though exactly how much that matters in the face of a grand open ocean and co-op pirating remains to be seen. That said, a random shopkeep told me he “wouldn’t give me the steam off his piss” and I laughed out loud sincerely for the first time in a Ubi game in a long while.

PRE-ORDER AT AMAZON FOR $89 WITH FREE SHIPPING.

Our preview session saw us helm two different ships, though most of the time was spent with the game’s second boat, the Bedar, a medium-sized skipper meant for captains still a little green around the gills. There’s a finesse to controlling these ships that is difficult to convey until you’ve gotten hands on with them, a perfectly tuned balance of arcade-y realism that encourages you to catch the wind and mind your port side but doesn’t punish more extravagant moves like drifting a whole-arse boat around enemy ships and tight corners. While sailing you can adjust your speed between three different sail modes, the highest allowing for faster navigation but at the cost of your crew’s stamina. Rapidly dropping speed allows for some very fun, very goofy manoeuvring, but for the most part you’ll need to be mindful of your ships pressure points and limits.

Moment to moment sailing is divided between two contrasting modes of engagement, combat and exploration. Open sea warfare is tense and challenging, your roaming vessel’s customisable weapon loadout and armour coming into play immediately as you often find yourself outgunned and numbered. While it’s tempting to just hoist the flag and sail right into danger, the game rewards a modicum of patience, allowing you to perch high up in the crow’s nest and use a spyglass to scope enemy weaponry and threat level before engaging. But prepared or not, the thick of it feels fantastic. Be it aligning shots with consideration for gravity drop and waves, targeting weakened ship parts, or eventually launching swift boarding crews for more loot, it all just clicks the way you would want it to.   

Elsewhere, Skull and Bones takes on an entirely different, surprisingly welcome vibe. Switching to a first-person camera, you can take in the full spectacle of navigating the sizeable map as you watch waves crash and break on your deck, your chosen pet play beside you, crew exchange tasks and gags, and just generally absorb the beauty of what Ubisoft Singapore has crafted. It is deeply immersive, with the swaying of the ship being at times meditative and at others bloody terrifying. One instance saw me get lost in a small collection of snaking rivers, having to gingerly move our hulking ship through sharp turns as local wildlife ran along the shoreline. Another saw us hopelessly lost in a raging storm, the waves throwing the boat around with such force we took visible damage and had to chart a course to a nearby island until it passed. You can skip all of this, fast travel being available almost from the jump, but to do so would be to deny the idealised core experience of Skull and Bones and that would be a shame.  

Often, Skull and Bones will invite you to head back to dry land and explore small, but richly lush, on-foot environments in search of treasure, allies, and quest items. Given the game’s initial design influences, it’s interesting to see just how far from combat these land segments place the player, not a swash to buckle in sight. Instead, these instances are borderline serene, leaning all the way into quiet, explorative vibes as your pirate pulls out a torch and ventures through overgrown forestry, musty caves, and places of worship for local cultures. The game is good at giving you reasons to be there, dolling out crudely drawn treasure maps to follow or highlighting a local NPC or settlement that you need to have a chin wag with. But there is a tangible lack of tension here too, each location I saw housed the same utilities and lacked the kind of risk/reward you’d expect to encounter on the open seas.

Underpinning all of this is Skull and Bones’ streamlined RPG systems, an amalgamation of Ubisoft-isms that are undemanding and largely inoffensive. Progression is tied to your Infamy, a pirate-themed levelling system that progressively unlocks new ships, items and cosmetics, each major rank housing smaller intervals of unlocks to keep the flow of rewards steady. To upgrade your ship, or do much of anything, you’ll need resources that can be gathered and plundered from your time at sea or as rewards for quests. The former involves an odd little quick time minigame that sees you pull your ship up to your desired resource, a tree or a shipwreck let’s say, and tap a button as a small meter moves between yellow and green segments. Hit the green, get a better pull, hit the yellow, and still get some wood but just a little less. It’s textbook Fine gameplay, though of all of Skull and Bones’ streamlining, it is easily its least interesting.

And while there is much to enjoy on your own in the game, Skull and Bones truly comes alive in co-op. Ubisoft Singapore hasn’t been shy about this, the majority of the game’s marketing having pivoted the experience to a live-service one that will rely heavily on player investment via seasonal content and roadmaps, but having faced company ships and harsh waters with a crew, it’s hard not to see why. The frenetic chaos of ship combat doubles its thrills with a friend, introducing another element to keep track of as your two ships gracefully skim the outskirts of an encounter, or clumsily collide mid-hunt. Quests and content have been designed with this in mind, both players sharing the progression and plunder, and given how deep the cosmetic system and ship customisation runs, I’m genuinely keen to see what my sicko mates do to their ships.

Despite how focused an experience Skull and Bones has turned out to be, it’s almost impossible to cover it all in a single preview. The crew’s sea shanties, the great inventory management, the overwhelming initial combat encounters, the weirdly non-committal politics of the world, the sheer scope of customisation – there’s a lot in here and almost all of it points toward a game I will enjoy, but for how long exactly I’m still unsure. Live service is a fickle, crowded market, and Skull and Bones’, well, bones, have a great deal of weight to bear if they’re to chart those waters. But if I ignore the market, forget the stats and systems, and just take to the sea with a nicely decorated boat and a vague sense of direction, that’s when it becomes a pirate’s life for me.

Skull and Bones launches on February 16th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders available for $89 with free shipping.

THE AUTHOR TRAVELED TO SINGAPORE AS A GUEST OF UBISOFT FOR THE SKULL AND BONES PREVIEW EVENT. FLIGHTS & ACCOMODATION WERE COVERED BY UBISOFT.

The post Skull And Bones Hands-On Preview – Finally On Stranger Tides appeared first on Press Start.

Sitting in Ubisoft Singapore’s warmly decorated offices, walls adorned with splashy images of pirates on raging waters, watching an enthusiastic developer wax poetic about the science and magic behind in-game water modelling, you’d be hard-pressed to think Skull and Bones had had anything other than a standard production cycle. In many ways, understandably, the wider Ubisoft apparatus would prefer you to think that too, the game’s decade long development kicking off just as Grand Theft Auto V first hit the market, for reference. That’s ten long years of very public and increasingly scrutinised announcements, delays and course corrections, the horizon finally approaching as the game nears its (hopefully final) release date of February 16th next year.

The time has, at the very least, been kind to the game itself, as we came away from our extensive hands-on session impressed by its pirating spirit and surprisingly streamlined overall gameplay. But it’s impossible to sit here and unpack the identity behind Skull and Bones without at least trying to get a better appreciation of the human element behind its discoursed-to-death development. Sitting down with senior producer Neven Dravinski and game director Juen Yeow Mak, it’s clearly a talking point Ubisoft has anticipated.

“So I think if I were to speak for myself, it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience,” said Dravinski when I asked about how it had felt to be the people on the other side of such a public development cycle, “I’ve been now in Singapore close to two years, and I think, like most people at the end of the pandemic, was doing a lot of personal reflection, and coming to Singapore was an opportunity to go on my own adventure across the ocean, literally and figuratively.” It’s a nice sentiment, though everybody in the room knows what I’m really asking about and Dravinski muses on this. “And you’re right, this development has been tracked publicly. And I think for me, what’s been really rewarding is how over the past year the team really started to focus on what makes this game great, double down on the things that are positive and amazing, and the things that I think really reflect maybe the true Ubisoft spirit.”

Mak has been nodding along as Dravinski chooses his words, both men relaxed enough but understandably focused on this final development push for the game. “The rewarding part really is to see the team members who have been working hard with the project and have been with us for a long time, really bearing fruit,” Mak notes, “And also seeing that we are still offering a certain level of creative freedom to them while we try to close the game together and build a cohesive, good product.” There’s a lot to discuss about Skull and Bones, though the narrative around the game’s lengthy gestation seems to be choppy waters, and perhaps rightly so. Internal development processes are too often abstract to the general gaming market, production cycles and project directions typically rife with change only ever talked about several years post-launch, normalised.

Skull and Bones’ growing pains have been made into Content, the ostensibly amorphous Ubisoft banner catching the strays of sharp media headlines and deliberately inflammatory YouTube rants. But wandering the halls of Ubisoft Singapore, chatting with artists and writers whose desks are messy with snacks and personal trinkets, pride flags awkwardly jutting out from monitor arms, you get an appreciation for the people behind the process. I can’t exactly blame Dravinski and co for wanting the world outside of their work to not exist for a day, even if I lament the loss of the stories of those who’ve had to steer this ship through an apparently endless storm.

From one challenge to another though, as Skull and Bones’ gameplay identity finally snapped into place, the game barrels toward another challenge, one that hadn’t even truly been conceived when development first began. “On the topic of live service games, I would say, I think what we have in terms of the sandbox multiplayer…it’s more about opening depth in the gameplay,” said Mak as we unpacked Skull and Bones entering into the crowded and fickle live service market, “and we take an iterative approach with our community. We take an iterative approach with our users, and test with our team members to start to build all the necessary depth in terms of combat, in terms of the world, in terms of the lore, in terms of the characters. I think this is where I feel Skull and Bones will actually have a different kind of experience.”

The community has seemingly played a massive role in the development of Skull and Bones, the team discussing at least six different Ubisoft Insider programs during which hand selected players would run through the Beta content and provide extensive feedback. A real-time fan response system built right into development, a point of both freedom and pressure Mak reflects on. “I work in live games because I enjoy the process of actually getting real feedback. You’re kind of working with the players and this is something that I think the team has actually slowly got to get used to,” he says, explaining that the team is often also playing the game internally to get an appreciation of the holistic experience, “…over this whole process of really getting feedback and playing, our team members actually get to understand more about what players really want. And I think that’s where we actually try to get all these things together to try to mould something that actually works for both parties.”

Davinski agrees, a producer who is already no stranger to strong player expectations and shifting markets thanks to his time on Call of Duty’s live services. “If we’re talking about pressure on the team, there’s no shortage of pressure. There’s always going to be expectations, there’s always going to be deadlines. And just the nature of this business and making games is hard, clearly. And there’s an art to deciding what’s important, what you put the priority on, and involving the community in that process, I think it’s a fantastic data point,” he explains.

“We can’t forget that at the end of the day, we’re creating an experience that our players are going to be enjoying and we want them to enjoy for years. We want them to be spending their time with the things that we’ve created. So on one hand, we have to have a vision. We have to have a vision that creates a unique product, that creates a unique game experience in this industry of tons of amazing games and experiences. And we think we have a strong entry in there, but we also have to take note of what’s resonating with our players. Who’s playing this game? How do they enjoy this game? And we have an incredible amount of depth, I think, to look at and to experience across the board.”

Ubisoft Singapore has indicated that there will be more to share in time regarding the game’s long-term content plans, but it clearly has ambitions to see Skull and Bones catch the precarious winds of the live service market. An ambition I find both admirable and concerning, the game’s solid mechanical foundation and unique historical backdrop setting forth in search of waters many developers have dashed themselves against the rocks trying to find. Dravinski and I chat about those very waters quite openly, “It’s an incredibly unique opportunity in this industry. As you start looking at games that have been around for many, many years, and those are the games that are being played by the majority of people. It’s sequels, it’s these big brands. And so this opportunity, I think, represents an opportunity for the team and the company to create a new franchise.”

“And we’re not just interested in shipping a game. We’re interested in creating a franchise and an experience that we believe is cool and is fun and it’s positive and has a lot of opportunity to explore all these great things,” he continues, looking back on that prolonged development and the course it has ultimately led the game to chart, “And so we talk about the choices that we made. It was really about how do we create a world? A sandbox, right? Where you get to play with amazing ships and weapons, with these amazing locations in the Indian Ocean and features that support that vision.

“You have to have depth in combat, you have to have an open world that’s playable with your friends, co-op, getting to have your own ship, being able to make your own choices with a healthy dose of amazing adventures in PvE, but then also PvP opportunities. These were sort of the tenets that we believe are the recipes and the foundation for success. And now it’s up to us to get that out there, start seeing that live. And really, as we talk about going on this journey with the community and seeing what’s resonating, what are the things that we double down on? What are the things that we adjust and move forward from there?”

It’s a pertinent question, really, and one without any clear answer just yet. There are plans, of course, and grander goals for seasonal content and additional stories to tell, but the same flexibility of development that has allowed such a high level of player feedback and shifting priorities has left Skull and Bones in an incredibly fluid position. For years this has been a death mark on the game’s public perception, and for almost any other publisher it would undoubtedly be so, but there’s an enticing sense of the indefinite about Skull and Bones’ future that might just, ironically, prove to be the game’s greatest strength. The horizon may have shifted and titled beyond initial recognition, but this ship is finally on course to cross it, even if what lies beyond is the great unknown.

Skull and Bones launches on February 16th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders available for $89 with free shipping.

THE AUTHOR TRAVELED TO SINGAPORE AS A GUEST OF UBISOFT FOR THE SKULL AND BONES PREVIEW EVENT. FLIGHTS & ACCOMODATION WERE COVERED BY UBISOFT.

The post Ubisoft Singapore Is Finally Ready To Drop Sail On Skull And Bones appeared first on Press Start.

Thirsty Suitors is interminably likeable. The pitch alone is enough to make you smile; a celebratory South Asian riff on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World that sees a millennial queer woman return to her hometown to make amends for a rather dramatic split from family, friends, and lovers back in her early twenties. In her absence, Jala (Farah Merani) has developed something of a complex, manifesting her older sister as her internal monologue, and the player’s third wall breaking guide, as well as a string of romantic insecurities and avoidance tactics. Typical burnout millennial shit, basically.

Only in Thirsty Suitors, everything is dialled up to eleven, every trauma point, conversation, and action translated through the game’s hyper-stylised energy. Practically speaking this means getting around town is handled by a skating mini-game, cooking with your mum by quick-time events, and confrontations with your cabal of exes as turn-based RPG clashes.

It’s ambitious, sharply drawn in both art direction and character, clumsy in execution, but always deeply, deeply likeable. You’re thrown into the game’s vibe immediately, Jala avoiding thinking about her collision course with home by completing a Dolly magazine-adjacent dating profile quiz. As you become accustomed to the skating, a fairly basic system that allows for some jumps and light trick work, you’ll be grilled by your mind sister about the kind of person you are inside a relationship, your choices here allocating points into one of the three “classes” Jala can play as. Thankfully Thirsty Suitors approach to this RPG staple is as fluid as its understanding of sexuality and gender, meaning you’re always free to change up how you play, distributing points between stats like health, focus points, and attack and defence.

This personality-driven class system spills over into Thirsty Suitors’ two primary forms of combat; emotionally charged conversations and literal turn-based battles, often at the same time. Turns out leaving a thoroughly burnt bridge on your way out of town makes coming home a rough river crossing, every corner of your once-comfortable quaint Americana home a possible battleground. The game presents you with a small map that allows you to warp between major locations, each one an explorable open environment that usually makes use of Jala’s skateboard and plays host to several potential conflicts. The plot features a handful of large-scale battles, complete with extravagant set dressing and specialised boss moves, while your lovingly meddling grandmother has dispatched an army of potential suitors who can also engage Jala in combat.

Both of Thirsty Suitors primary systems are thematically rich but equally lacking in some way. Turn-based combat is breezy to a fault, deploying several quality-of-life changes and always making impeccable use of the world (summoning your mum to smack someone giving you lip is a delight), but the baseline systems rarely register above fine. Jala can taunt opponents with emotion-specific options that in turn open up vulnerabilities, like running into a particularly needy ex and flirting to lower defences, but beyond this fights quickly become basic attack looping, punctuated by the game’s odd quick-time events. Likewise, skating feels strangely akin to The Simpsons: Hit & Run, or a similar PS2-era control experience, arcadey in the right ways but unwieldy in others.  

Nothing in Thirsty Suitor’s toolbox is ever overtly problematic to the experience holistically but a coalition of “fine” does begin to weigh down a game that otherwise soars. Jala’s active attempts to better herself and make amends for the damage she caused in her youth is genuinely one of the most compelling and entertaining video game narratives I’ve played all year. It’s a layered approach that blends fantastic character writing, overt representation of a typically unseen culture in games, proud queerness and just outright fun. I laughed out loud more times than I can count, the game’s understanding of internet humour and culturally specific but universally human emotional truths lending it a contemporary edge and an earnest heart.

Homebase for Jala’s conquest is, well, home. Crashing back in her childhood bedroom, Jala begins and ends each in-game day with her parents, two standout performances and characters who veer archetypal but connect all the same. Jala’s South Asian culture permeates the game, informing its social politics and aesthetics, best exemplified by spending time in the kitchen with her folks. Meals are a language unto themselves in Thirsty Suitors, cooked as favours for friends, bonding exercises with family, and of course, mechanical benefit during combat. These segments rely heavily on quick-time events that feel slightly off thanks to some input timing confusion, but are elevated by expressive animation work and sincere character moments. As an explosion of colourful, delicious meals I’ve quickly added to my recipe tab play out, Jala and her parents reconnect, the familial art of cooking finally repairing that bridge.

Likewise, combat is almost always a smokescreen (and largely successful metaphor) for the real meat of Thirsty Suitors – people finally talking to each other. Jala is a flawed person, someone who spent years inadvertently hurting those around her through a perfect storm of youthful ignorance, cultural pressures, and outright selfishness. In her wake is a town filled with pain, and while the Scott Pilgrim framing of exes is initially fun, it quickly gives way to a far better story about coming to terms with the pain you’ve caused others and the kinder tomorrow you might be able to reach together. I can’t overstate how much I adored this turn, several times I wished combat could just fall away and allow me to simply choose dialogue options and watch as this charming and diverse cast of characters came to terms with each other as adults.

There are a handful of other systems at play in Thirsty Suitors, ranging from cute (you can get cool new jackets and shoes to wear) to vaguely complimentary (defeating an ex will give you a phone keychain that offers combat bonuses) to superfluous (there’s a quest log of sorts). Like much of the core gameplay, these are all resoundingly fine but stop short of engaging, small pit stops along the way to the next emotionally resonate story beat or considered character exchange. There’s evident ambition in this medley and the thematic connection these systems have to the story is well-reasoned, but I don’t come away from Thirsty Suitors fondly recalling its moment-to-moment.

Instead, I’m completely smitten by Jala’s journey to adulthood, the joyful and studious expressions of culture, purpose, sexuality and gender, the hyper-stylised and saturated art direction. The list goes on, Thirsty Suitors has heart, it has soul and maturity that is sorely lacking in this space and is a stellar example of why diversity on and behind the screen matters so much to the forward momentum of the medium. All things considered, Outerloop Games is still relatively fresh-faced and with time, its mechanical leanings and goals will be better realised. But that gawky eagerness only serves to highlight that Thirsty Suitors best moments feel like finally growing up.

The post Thirsty Suitors Review – Grind Home appeared first on Press Start.

It took me a minute to find my footing with Jusant. Ever since its reveal during the June Xbox Gaming Showcase, the lofty promise of “what if the climbing from Breath of the Wild but a whole game” has been swirling around in the back of my brain, idealised but never thoroughly considered. Never mind that it had emerged from French developer DON’T NOD, best known for its outstanding narrative work and hardly the first studio you’d call to mind to craft a relatively linear rock-climbing simulator. It’s in this dissonance though that Jusant has flourished, a collision of new ideas and studio-pedigree that results in a game with a rich, singular goal and an unmarked path toward it. Bumps and bruises fading as the view from the top comes around.

Jusant’s nameless protagonist is on a mission. Who they are, where they’ve come from, and why they’re so determined to reach their goal is almost immaterial to the game and is left in turn to be largely defined by whatever it is you, the player, decide to bring to this climb. Loosely you come to understand that the world of Jusant turns on an axis of absence; you emerge from an endless dry waste, once an ocean, and begin to ascend an impossibly tall and organically ornate pillar that reaches into the clouds and beyond. As you climb you learn more about the structure and the people that once built their lives around it, a people whose symbiosis with water produced majestic art and culture but, in its absence, have now fled into the wastes, leaving behind a vertical monument to their old ways and Jusant’s haunted relic of an obstacle course.

It is understood to the climber that atop this graveyard is a chance for new life, one they will be ferrying gently in their humble backpack. A kind of esoteric boy and his dog tale, Jusant has you caring for a strange creature whose body is composed of mystical, semi-formed liquid and whose small chirps have resonance with the world around you. Both emotionally charged lore ping and invaluable mechanical buddy, the two of you venture upward with Jusant’s simple, but refined, climbing systems, navigating a densely packed environment, and gently probing at the edges of the game’s aloof, but deeply affecting world. This is a game about taking your time, and while you could easily surmount the climb in around five hours, Jusant’s deliberate nature rewards an equally studious climber.

Which is something the game clearly communicates through its mountaineering with each handhold, footrest, and timely jump revolving around a limited stamina bar and dual trigger-controlled grips. The two shoulder triggers each align with the climber’s left and right hand, giving you freeform control over what each is holding onto at any given moment. The longer you hold or further you move, the more of a strain it places on your stamina meter, which can be partially restored by loosening your grip but never fully regained until you’re back on solid ground. As you progress further through the mountain, environmental stimuli will impact your manoeuvrability, like a hot sun draining your stamina faster or a strong wind giving your jumps, typically stamina heavy moves, a bit of extra distance.

The intensely singular nature of the climbing calls Death Stranding’s somewhat infamous walk balancing to mind. Jusant layers its climbing with some finesse and niceties but is ultimately only ever truly concerned with having you master a specific toolset and find your own flow with it. There’s no fail state, the climber protected by invisible walls on most perilous drops and each climb beginning with an anchor point and generous rope allowance with additional anchor points, player-placed and otherwise, dotting the way along lengthy climbs. Even if you do flub a jump or misjudge your stamina, you’ll plummet but lose nothing but time and some patience, spooling the rope back up as you begin again, a little wiser and maybe a little wearier.

At times Jusant can frustrate, its impeccable visual path delineation and rock-solid mechanical foundations wavering as you clumsily work through its more ill-advised tightly timed platforming puzzles, methodical rhythm interrupted by bouts of sporadic clambering. There are times this tension feels deliberate, but others lack the care you’ll come to expect from the game. Those aforementioned niceties go a long way to smooth over these moments at least; your blob creature can be called upon to perform a melodic chirp, bringing nearby fauna and creatures to life to assist in your platforming, while another prompt can guide you toward either the next progression point or one of Jusant’s many collectables. Littered throughout the mountain are dozens of nooks in which you can find traces of Jusant’s rich world, from extravagant art installations to hastily scribbled notes between people who once lived here.

The overarching aesthetic and tonal work of the game is often awe-inspired, those hard-earned rests between climbs made magic by the relics of the old world you can discover. Water, and more specifically its absence, is everything to Jusant, informing not only its broader plot but its thematic currents too; light and memory are refracted through liquid facsimiles housed in room-sized constructs, traces of sea creatures and living in balance with the ocean permeates every dwelling and abandoned business or home, the game’s chapter’s punctuated by towering monoliths activated by the sound of breath through shells. Your climb facilitates restoration of nature both mechanically and spiritually, but what water means to you will inform what you ultimately take away from Jusant’s tale.

This richly incentivising ambiguity is strained somewhat by the game’s more explicit plot work, those letters and correspondence found in the world often halting progress and imagination with walls of text. It’s not poorly written by any means; one instances saw my breath catch slightly as I poured over a diary entry lamenting the loss of a partner, “we’ll see each other again when the clouds decide” wrote someone long before I came to this place. It’s the kind of turn of phrase that tells me Jusant’s writing is always keenly aware of its all-encompassing thematic work, but the abundance of these text entries does puncture the otherwise ethereal tone. It’s not the first time Jusant made me think on Fumito Ueda’s works but where his worlds almost entirely trust the player to pulls its threads into a tapestry, Jusant feels hesitant to operate with the same confidence.

Still, Jusant is more than any individual stumble along its meditative ascension. Its closing moments, though bordering on reliance on the aesthetics of emotion more than the connective tissue itself, still managed to move me. An elegantly crafted landscape plays host to a culture both mystical and familiar as the game studiously teaches you the inherent value of a single act, done methodically and with care. Jusant’s plainly spoken world and restrained mechanics make for a timely and engaging experience but between the words, amid the climb, is where you’ll find Jusant’s true oasis.

The post Jusant Review – It’s The Climb appeared first on Press Start.

Never underestimate the power of a good lunch break. Despite the jet lag that was surely buffeting him like the cold Melbourne winds hit all of us at PAX Australia earlier this month, ZeniMax Online Studio’s Rich Lambert was surprisingly chipper as I sat down with him in a hotel lobby. The Creative Director of The Elder Scrolls Online, the now ten-year running MMO based on the already massively popular fantasy IP, Lambert was the picture of chilled when we found a quiet corner to talk all things ESO. His secret, he tells me, is that he’d just come back from a good lunch and felt alive again. Kind of a key thing for an interview to go well.

Over some laughs and knowing looks we unpacked how it has been to be so deeply involved with such a colossal game for over a decade now, what challenges arose and how the team met them, and perhaps most importantly, how nobody has to do any of this alone.

So, ten years of Elder Scrolls Online. How does it feel?

It’s pretty wild! You know, I’ve actually been working on Elder Scrolls games since 2005, so Oblivion was the first game and I moved over to ESO in 2007 when we started the studio. So, it’s rewarding to see ESO go from kind of the paper concept to launch, and then to turning it around from launch into what it is today.

“Turning it around from launch” implies a fair bit, what went into that?

Launch wasn’t stellar for us. We were trying to find that happy medium between MMO and an Elder Scrolls game, and we didn’t hit it. We just didn’t hit it. The community let us know that and there were core elements they loved and a lot of elements they didn’t love, and so we had to really have a hard think about what it was we wanted to do, and we chose Elder Scrolls. It’s an Elder Scrolls game first and foremost, so every decision after that point was like, does this make it feel more Elder Scrolls? If it does, we’ll do it. If it doesn’t, we won’t do it. And we’ve kind of got what we’ve got today.

In those initial planning stages was there ever potential for the team to have done a Fallout MMO instead? It’s a concept that has existed in the ether for a while now after all.

It was always Elder Scrolls from the beginning. Like, I bugged Todd (Howard) a lot about making Elder Scrolls an online game. And when I first actually met Matt Fiber, who’s the president and game director, he was actually in Todd’s office. And Todd was just like, Matt, this is Rich. All he talks about is making online games. Rich, this is Matt. Matt’s going to start up ZeniMax Online Studio. You two should talk, please. And we talked for like three or four hours that day, and Matt hired me.

Obviously, it worked out okay given the huge success of ESO but a decade is a long time, especially on the internet. How has the changing digital landscape impacted the game and the team?

It’s interesting, especially with COVID there were a ton of people that jumped in and started playing more so than before and because we chose kind of Elder Scrolls first, massively multiplayer second, we made a lot of decisions to focus more on what you can play by yourself. It’s more focused on your personal journey through the world and whatnot. But there’s also a lot of elements in there that make it easy to play with other people. And I think it’s definitely the magic of online games is those social bonds and social ties to other players. If you can establish those, you just play and you play forever. You’re not necessarily logging in to play the game, you’re logging in to meet with your friends and play with your friends. So, trying to find that balance between those two has been a learning experience for sure.

I think that kind of “forever play” idea is interesting in the context of Bethesda’s fandom, a typically very passionate group of people. Does that pressure ever get to you? And do you think having a game that’s this connected to its fans necessitates more of a community driven development or ideas process?

Like you said, people are really passionate about Elder Scrolls. It’s almost thirty years old at this point. And I think that the thing that separates Elder Scrolls games from other games is this kind of unreliable narrator. Stories are told from multiple perspectives and so a lot of the lore and what’s going on in the world is open to interpretation. So, there’s a lot of debate within the community about that and it’s definitely something that we pay attention to. We spend a lot of time on the forums and Reddit and other social media places just to kind of see what people are saying, what their thoughts are. We take a lot of in game feedback as well and try to use that to help guide and shape where we’re going to go next and the types of stories we tell and features we work on. So, it’s pretty community driven, I would say.

I can’t begin to imagine how important the overarching lore of the series must be internally; I imagine there’s a Bible somewhere. But does writing these stories for a persistent online world present a different challenge than a more traditional single-player world?

It does, and we learned a lot of what not to do from launch. One of the core pillars of Elder Scrolls is you’re always the central figure to the storyline. You’re always the hero. So, we tried to replicate that in ESO. We did a lot of things like you go into an area and it’s under attack, and then you can choose to save it or not. If you choose to save it, then you get this one kind of the world changes and if you don’t, then the world doesn’t change. That was cool! And that works really well in a single player game! But it doesn’t work in a multiplayer game because you’re separating players.

So it sounds like a duh moment when you think about it now, but at the time we were more focused on those stories and really making the player feel powerful and the central core pillar in the story. And we forgot about the multiplayer side of things. So, we spent six months after launch, seven months after launch, fixing all of those player separation issues. And what we learned in there is you can give players interesting choices, but you should try as hard as you can to never separate them. Because I could make a decision, you make a different decision, and then you can never play together when you’re in that area. And that’s bad.

Especially given how many new players ESO must be picking up the game now that it’s on Xbox Game Pass, right? Does that influx change how you think about things like onboarding and player count and retention?

What it did shed a light on is kind of that new player experience is probably not as good as it should be in terms of on ramping into new systems, surfacing all the different types of content and systems we have in the game. We don’t necessarily do that as well as we should. So, it’s added another thing to our list of things to think about, and it’s probably going to be the next kind of big thing we tackle, is that new player onboarding and also returning player onboarding. If you’re gone for six-eight-twelve months and come back to the game, there’s four major updates you’ve missed. So, the game has changed a lot and finding ways to surface that to those kinds of players is important.

Same thing with when we just recently moved on to the Epic Game Store. We saw a huge influx of players and so obviously we cohort that group and we track that group and see how they kind of work through things. So, we’re absolutely aware of that stuff when we track where players churn out, where they get stuck, that kind of stuff.

With ten years at your back, what does the future look like? What has you most excited and most nervous? Or is that the same thing at this point?

It’s kind of one and the same. I’ve always said that as long as players want to continue to play the game, we’re going to keep updating it, and adding to it and making it better. It takes a long time to build zones, it takes a long time to build that kind of hand-built content. A Chapter takes eighteen months to build.

So we launched Necrom in June but we’ve already been working on next year’s Chapter for a while. At that point we’re working on things for fourth quarter next year and I’m working on stories with the team for 2025 and 2026. So, it’s kind of this never-ending cycle of like, here’s all the stuff we have to do and we try to plan as much as we can as early as we can so that the teams have some wiggle room to kind of pivot on things. If we get some player feedback that says we hate this, okay, how can we change and adjust? It’s trying to predict player behaviour, which is really hard, and trying to predict what they’re going to like, what they don’t like, and then trying to iterate on that as quick as we can.

Hearing you talk about plans into 2026 puts into perspective just how big this game has been and how much it will continue to be so. It must be a lot?

I mean, I could talk about ESO forever. It’s the thing I’ve been working on for almost seventeen years at this point. It’s a huge part of my life. It’s a huge part of the team’s life. I’m super proud of kind of where we started and then kind of where we…I don’t want to say “ended” because we’re not done yet, but where we are at now, where the game is very different than what we launched and that only happened because of the team and the hard work. It is amazing to be able to be a part of that team and to represent that team. Like, I don’t do it all by myself as right. I have a really stellar team I get to work with every day, so it’s pretty cool to be a part of that and be a part of the community.

Find out more about The Elder Scrolls Online and get started on your own journey right here.

The post We Spoke To The Elder Scrolls Online’s Creative Director About Lessons Learned Over A Decade Of Stories appeared first on Press Start.

There was a moment about ten minutes into the first episode of Netflix’s new Ubisoft-infused animated series Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix that truly, genuinely, gagged me a little.

In it, Cyber-enhanced cool guy Dalph Laserhawk is on the run from an army of dystopian cops with his partner in crime Alex Taylor, the two of them having just pulled off a daring highway heist. As their battered hover car enters an anti-gravity slip lane, the two realise they’re surrounded. “We’re fucked,” Alex says in his gruff, overly-muscled way before Dolph, floating upside down, glides into frame and plants a tender, lengthy kiss on the man. “Wish me luck,” he teases, drifting into the suspended air and kicking off a gorgeously-animated, sick-as-shit action set piece.

It hit me like a truck. I’ve managed to avoid most of the marketing for the show so its finer details, including Dolph and Alex’s relationship, were a complete surprise when I binged the six-episode run earlier this week. If you’re like me and need a primer – Captain Laserhawk sees Ubisoft dump a truckload of its franchises at the feet of Adi Shankar, a powerhouse of a writer and producer who can be found in the credits of the banger Castlevania anime and the criminally underappreciated 2012 Judge Dredd film, Dredd.

Shankar’s sensibilities and Ubisoft’s toybox collide to produce a dystopian, sci-fi world in which mega-corp UBI abuses its workers for endless profits (yeah) and has turned the United States into a company-country dubbed Eden. Keeping closely in line with genre tropes, Eden is divided starkly between the ultra-wealthy and the rest, a collage of the disenfranchised humans and a new Hybrid race made from splicing animals explicitly for manual labour.

It’s a starkly nasty little world, Eden replete with the usual array of neon lighting and fetishised Asian culture, a festering hub just begging for a revolution. And for a fleeting, gorgeous little bit, Captain Laserhawk gives you that revolution. In one of the show’s boldest opening choices, Dolph and Alex’s relationship is shattered by Alex’s commitment to a fledgling rebellion. In the fallout of their disastrous breakup, Dolph finds himself forced into service by the Warden of a super-prison Suicide Squad style, while Alex heads an openly queer call to arms for the marginalised masses.

It’s a simmering pot of tension and some pretty sincere romance, Alex’s bold vision for the future never dampening his love for Dolph and Dolph’s blinding hurt at Alex’s betrayal fuelling his inadvertent, state-controlled opposition to a new world he desperately wants but can’t quite grasp.

Also, Rayman hosts every TV show and a giant portal lets Kaiju-sized Rabbids into the world. Honestly it’s kind of a minor miracle, and testament to Shankar’s ideas, that the Ready Player One level of IP use doesn’t derail the emotional core of the show, at least not immediately. Captain Laserhawk is so sharply drawn, both visually and conceptually, that its folding in of iconic gaming figureheads and aesthetics (several sequences see the show devolve into pixel-art) remains of a piece with the Vibe.

The action is a crisp callback to Saturday morning cartoons of old, the titular Blood Dragon nostalgia tinge a nice warming glow accompanying the effective direction and set pieces. The writing also shines, getting some proper laughs and interlacing the show’s absurd premise with some timely commentary.

Until episode three. Ubisoft’s properties have always had a strained relationship with politics. From Far Cry to The Division to Watch Dogs, it’s a publisher with games that frequently dance with political ideologies and commentaries but rarely, if ever, find the courage to follow through. That lack of conviction skewers Captain Laserhawk at the mid-way point of the season, thoroughly dismantling its best ideas and leaving the show to slowly bleed out as it limps into an unrecognisable back half.

Spoiler embargoes mean we can’t unpack this as much as it needs to be but it’s not difficult to envision the ways the show compromises its ideas and structure. The best character dynamics are tossed aside for a bizarre pivot into IP-worship and clumsy world-building, the show losing that delicate balancing act and instead floundering to big name Ubisoft characters. This could probably be forgiven if the show didn’t also completely fail its politics in the process; having the minority-led revolution immediately commit unforgivable acts of violence against other minorities is just outrageously piss poor form.

And it’s weird, right, to be this invested in the ideological failings of a show that features a talking frog in Assassin’s Creed getup and fascist power-rangers but this is the crux of Captain Laserhawk. It frontloads genuinely compelling ideas and craft, with frenetic action and tight pacing laying the groundwork for a non-traditional, queer hero and his quest to dismantle a well, if broadly, drawn world. It asks you to care, to take it seriously despite its goofy DNA, but that investment is punished rather than nurtured, making its opening act feel like a big joke I missed the punchline on.

Those later episodes maintain the quality animation work and pepper in some fun bits and voice work, but the show never recovers from its facile turn away from everything that would have set it apart from other video game adaptations.

During an early heist, Dolph and Alex take in the corporate enormity of their surroundings, glumly concluding that they’re in “an abyss full of stuff”. They soon share another intimate moment, easily one of the best of the show, but I can’t help but walk away from Captain Laserhawk with that same glum conclusion.

The post Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix Is A Killer Queer Revolution Until It Isn’t appeared first on Press Start.

Sitting across from Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s Narrative Director Sarah Beaulieu as she animatedly explains the delicate details of video game story writing, you’d never guess she just got off a 20+ hour flight from France. Having been in transit for about as long as Mirage’s main campaign will run players when the game launches later this week, it’s hard to see anything other than excitement on Beaulieu’s face in the Ubisoft Sydney office. But a game like Mirage, even with its veritable army of developers, doesn’t come easy and while the atmospheric fan events and the general goodwill around the game has bolstered the spirits of the Ubisoft Bordeaux team, Beaulieu is still processing what she calls the “overwhelming” experience of working on a franchise as storied, monitored, and adored, as Assassin’s Creed.

We’re in launch week! How are you feeling? How’s the team feeling?

It’s a mix of feelings! It’s both excitement and fear and joy and, you know, it’s a melting pot.
But I think everybody is excited. It’s very…yeah (laughs).

I noted in my preview that Basim reminded me of the early days of Assassin’s Creed protagonists, like Ezio, but how was it writing for a character with a fixed end point? How do you craft a coming-of-age story when we all know this character already?

Well, I like to say it was pretty easy. It was not easy, but it was not that complicated. As you know from playing Valhalla – yes, Basim has a specific fate, and we know where he comes from, but it was basically a blank page before Valhalla. So, the only thing we knew is he grew up in Samarra, he lost his father, and that’s all we had. As you know, Assassin’s Creed lore is very complex, and we made sure that we wouldn’t do (sic) any mistakes with the character. So, I talked with Darby McDevitt, the Narrative Director of Valhalla, making sure that I wouldn’t do any mistakes. 

But otherwise, I like to say it’s a totally different character. And you played the game, so you know that he doesn’t speak the same way, he doesn’t have the same personality at all. So actually, it was pretty exciting just imagining how everything happened and how he became the character he is in Valhalla. And I know that a lot of people actually hate him, so that was… that’s fair, I mean, I understand that. But what I liked in him in Valhalla was the fact that he had this mystery around him. He’s not very talkative. And I like the challenge of making people who hate Basim currently love him when they play Mirage.

Fan reactions to Basim like you’ve just mentioned bring me to I think one of the biggest things heading into Mirage which is the idea that this game has been designed to directly tackle expectations and desires expressed in the Assassin’s Creed community. But does that kind of pressure get to you at all?

Yes, of course. We listen to the community very much, and I’m just going to be very honest about that – sometimes the community can push you in a very positive direction because they’re supportive and sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming. And that’s fair; people are waiting for specific stuff and not everybody thinks the same way. So, we have a part of the community that is more used to the open worlds, like Valhalla and Origins, and the ones that are actually coming from the earlier games, and that’s the community we speak to the most because they want this kind of game. And we have to also take a bit of what existed in the more recent games, which is actually the open world structure. 

So, in terms of narrative, we took both of these – we took the linear story from the other games, so the beginning (of Mirage) is very linear and then you have the ending that is linear too, with a point of no return. And the open world section has been structured in a way that every tool that you get from Musa and the inventors, every rank that you get from the Hidden Ones, it’s totally related to the story. So even in this open world structure, you still have this feeling of evolution and of a character growing up, and that was very important. 

So, I think we took both worlds, the most recent and the earliest ones, but it can be a lot of pressure and sometimes it can be a bit, yeah, overwhelming is a good way to put it. Because it’s so heartwarming when you see people being passionate about what you’re doing and being supportive and saying, okay, we’re behind you guys. That helps a lot, because doing a video game is not easy. And we like to say that when you can launch a game, it’s a miracle every time because it’s such a messy, messy thing.

And overwhelming isn’t always a bad thing, right? It can be an interesting motivator.

Absolutely. But yeah, it’s hard. It’s good to have some nice feedback and people just being supportive even though, you know, everybody is not going to be pleased with everything. That’s the way things are. But we had a very supportive community.

I want to talk a little bit about Rashan, Basim’s mentor character. It’s so refreshing to see an older woman placed in such a pivotal position in the narrative, I feel like matriarchal types are really underutilised in the gaming space. Can you talk a bit about how you wrote her and what she means to you?

When we talked about Roshan for the first time, Stéphane Boudon (Creative Director) and I, we had a conversation during probably the first two weeks of the project. And we talked about Basim and he said “he should have a mentor” I was like, yeah, he should have a mentor and I would like it to be a woman, but I would like it to be a woman in her 50s and he was totally on board. And it started just like that, and it never changed. Coming from the movie industry first, I know that a lot of my friends are actors and a lot of them, the women, they actually struggle to have roles, big roles, when they reach even 40, actually. So, it was something I wanted to do. 

And soon enough, during the process of creating this character, she was supposed to be Turkic, and she had another name at that point because Roshan (the name) is Persian. Eventually our producer suggested Shohreh Aghdashloo, the actress who actually portrays Roshan, would be great in this particular role. So we asked her, she said yes!

In creating Roshan, the challenge was that I wanted to avoid having a mother-son relationship that we tend to see between a female mentor and a guy like Basim that is much younger. And that’s probably why Roshan has her secrets, she doesn’t talk very much and she doesn’t like Basim talking about his own struggles. So, most of the time she would just say, you know, we’re all about the Hidden Ones and it’s not about yourself, keep your mind on the job.

While we’re talking about the character writing in Mirage I’d love to hear about how designing the story for the game felt for you and the team given that you didn’t need to worry about, say, filling out a 50+ hour game? Did this allow for a more intimate narrative?

We talked about the structure at the beginning, but since we knew that we wanted to go back to the roots the linear stuff was pretty much the solution. The problem with open worlds, and I’m sure you’ve played plenty of them, is that it’s very difficult to gate the narrative. So that means having the feeling, for example, if you take Valhalla, you don’t have the feeling of Ivor evolving in that sense, even though you have some very specific plot points, she’s not going to change as a person because in gameplay, that would mean a lot of things. That would mean changing the dialogues, the way she answers to people. That would be very complicated. So, it was way easier and also it was a choice having the linear structure inside the open world. And the tricky thing is making sure that the player doesn’t feel like they’re constrained in the open world. Because we know that players playing Assassin’s Creed games recently, they like to be free to wander the city and do all the stuff.

But the other thing was on the narrative side, making sure that every side content, you would call it, but I don’t like the term side content, the Tales of Baghdad they were all built and written in a way that would support either Basim or the world. So, making sure that people feel what Baghdad was and encounter different characters, even for a few minutes. So that was easier, I think, for the writing part. What was more difficult is making sure that the player feels the evolution of Basim, that was the key point.

I want to pick your brain about something you just said. You don’t like calling it “side content” and I love where your head is at with that. How do you delineate narratives and where does the value for writing a video game narrative specifically come from for you?

Well, I always say the same thing – it’s all about making sure that mechanics and narrative work together. So, in this specific example of Mirage, it’s really about making sure that the feeling that player has of being more and more skilled and becoming an assassin themselves is linked to what the character is feeling. So, it’s more about working on this symbiosis between mechanics and narrative. So that’s what I like the most and that’s why I pushed the linear beginning and linear ending for Mirage because we needed that.

Narrative in video games, people tend to think, and even inside of the industry, that narrative is just a cherry on top, that you actually write stories maybe at the end of production and no, that’s not how that works. And also, if the story is just coming from nowhere, you have the feeling as a player that you’re just fed with meaningless cinematics most of the time because the gameplay doesn’t make sense and what we call Ludonarrative Dissonance. So that’s something that I really want to avoid, and I like the little details and side content, for example, can reinforce this feeling of mechanics and world being tied to the narrative. And world is narrative, too. It’s what I like about video games, is using these tools of interactivity.

I know that Mirage has effectively been born from DLC originally planned for Valhalla, can you talk a bit about how the narrative team built it into its own story? I imagine that was a tough process?

Well, it was not at all, because actually, when I entered the conception phase… we were thinking about bringing Eivor to the Middle East, that was the DLC. And it’s something that could happen because Vikings actually went to the Middle East, and they were used as bodyguards for some caliphs. But the Middle East is very iconic in Assassin’s Creed and maybe we could do more and very soon, I think it was a couple of weeks, Stéphane actually pitched to the HQ and said, okay, we have the opportunity to do something going back to the Middle East, and we have Basim, that actually comes from Samara, and could we do something with that. So, he pitched the idea, and right away it started like that. 

So, we didn’t have a process, because when we started working on that, it was so early, and we started with this idea of a standalone game instead of a DLC. Bordeaux, the studio, they worked on Wrath of the Druids before, and it’s cool doing DLCs, but it’s not really your content, per se. And in this case, it was like the opportunity also to lead a first project, and especially an Assassin’s Creed game, which is great.

It seems like the team has enjoyed this experience. Is it something you’d personally want to do again?

Why not? (laughs) Life will tell. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing with Assassin’s Creed is that the lore is especially complicated and it’s very easy to make inconsistencies. So, that’s the tricky part, it’s a challenging one. And the community is also asking for different stuff and everything.

But the experience itself, and especially with Bordeaux, we have a very strong and great team, and we like working with each other very much. So that’s something that is important, too, especially in the video game industry.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage launches on October 5th, 2023 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. Amazon has physical pre-orders for $64 including shipping.

The post We Spoke To Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s Narrative Director About Linear Games, Women In Hollywood, And Fan Expectations appeared first on Press Start.

“Break shit, kill people,” I’m trapped in a room full of ravenous vampires, werewolves, and magic orb throwing, weeping brides. “Break shit, kill people,” I’m frantically diving and dodging, nabbing precious ammo boxes and the odd stake left on the ground after one of my stray bullets shattered a chair. “Break shit, kill people,” I’m locked in a hellish space that centres a smaller room in which a lifetime’s worth of love and pain is playing out, each time I pass the windows another scene, another fight. “Break shit, kill people,” at some point the reverberating undertones of the score and the constant whine of gunshots had synthesised into a vocal backing track with the chorus looping, inviting, demanding – “Break shit, kill people.”

It’s noisy in James Savage’s head. On a self-proclaimed “one way trip” to his hometown of El Paso, Texas, Savage is in the throes of a relapse. His worst to date, the clean living and uneasy commitment to sobriety curb stomped by two specific and somehow equally deadly trigger points – his ex is back and she’s trying to end the world. In a piece of shit motel somewhere in El Paso, Draculae, the queen of the vampires, has taken hostages and pierced the veil between our worlds, inviting The Void into the hotel’s dank halls. Savage, taking up arms and a bottle of pills, wants to save the innocent, and prevent the apocalypse, but if he’s being honest with himself, all he really wants is to see Janet Drake again, the only woman he’s ever made happy.

This is the gunshot El Paso, Elsewhere starts the race with. Heavily inspired by Rockstar Games’ iconic Max Payne franchise and the noir genre, the game sends Savage down a fifty-story gauntlet of discreet, maze-like levels to do battle with hordes of Draculae’s monsters and his own demons. Interspersed between levels, and sometimes during, developer Strange Scaffold fuses the overtly gamified structure with intensely cinematic visual language to create something unique and compelling.

Stopping Draculae’s plans to call curtains on humanity means going toe-to-toe with a cavalcade of monsters ripped from mythology and folklore. Casting its eye all the way back to ancient Egypt, contemporary Western religious imagery, and a whole host of strange things in between, El Paso, Elsewhere throws a lot at Savage. When faced with a biblically accurate angel tossing celestial missiles your way, I’m not sure what else you would do other than take up an Uzi and pray. Savage’s arsenal of guns is well-rounded, running the gamut from pistols, rifles, shotguns, and special weapons like holy fire grenades and the one-shot kill stakes. Given El Paso, Elsewhere’s penchant for violence, it’s fortunate there isn’t a dud in the line-up, each gun a proficient tool for dealing with a variety of foes and feeling fundamentally good to let loose with.

But for all its heart-pounding gunplay and pulsing aesthetics, this isn’t a game about relentless carnage but considered and deliberate shots and movements. El Paso, Elsewhere is littered with ammo pick-ups but absolutely saturated in enemies, the ratio meaning that timely and accurate attacks will serve you far better than the spray and pray approach. The vibe of the game screams let go but its systems demand a steady grip, a purposeful bit of tension that heightens encounter design and almost effortlessly mirrors Savage’s re-descent into addiction. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to surrender, to lean all the way into the trigger finger cravings?” the game asks. “No,” you have to say back, all the while keenly aware of how sweet it tastes to do so.

The tartness of this need for precision is mellowed by the game’s bullet-time mechanic that sees Savage slow down time while diving or simply on a whim with a button press. This limited resource refills slowly but is a style powerhouse and gameplay godsend as later levels throw increasingly dramatic encounters your way. Once initiated it makes high-damage shots and crowd control much easier, even if swinging the reticle around felt a little off in enclosed environments. There were a handful of times Savage was awkwardly crammed into a corner by enemies, the game’s aiming not quite up to the task of dispatching foes that close to the player. This is one part skill issue, my own fault for not handling the situation better, but paired with some rough platforming sections, it did paint a picture of systems that excel in most cases but mildly frustrate in others.

These moments only hit the palette so harshly because of the contrast with the rest of El Paso, Elsewhere’s impossibly-slick command over game feel and tone. At around seven to eight hours to finish there’s a case to be made that it sticks around a little longer than it needed to, its core loop of dropping in, rescuing hostages, blasting baddies, repeat, becoming a little numbing after hour five or so. But it’s difficult to remember those feelings when you collide with the next story beat or gorgeous cutscene. It should be clear that El Paso, Elsewhere isn’t just a game about vampires and guns, its ultra cheesy noir vibe is a carefully constructed bait to make you take a full bite out of its tale of addiction, self-worth, and starkly-human relationships.

Anchored by two outstanding voice performances and more support work than I have time to list, El Paso, Elsewhere’s beating heart is its narrative and thematic work. The game’s creative director, Xalavier Nelson Jr. and voice actor Emme Montgomery, bring Savage and Draculae to life respectively in turns that manage to quietly slink between pulpy and achingly real without you even noticing. El Paso, Elsewhere is heavily stylised and its noir trappings result in genre staples like gruff monologues and sweeping metaphors (audio log memories are played on projectors), but behind that façade are raw moments that hit like a truck. Savage’s relationship with Drake is messy, far messier than I’ve seen a game try to handle in years, and it results in something that of course exists in the heightened reality of vampires and magic but is always grounded in brutal, recognisable reality.

Nelson’s art has never turned away from his real-world inspiration points and El Paso, Elsewhere is something of an achievement in this design philosophy. A towering ode to the Black American experience as well as personhood as understood through vulnerability both ugly and beautiful, this is a game that uses a relatively solid mechanical foundation to reach far greater heights. It’s soaked into the walls of it; the game’s relentless soundtrack is a collaboration between Nelson and musician RJ Lake, a hip-hop infused banger that compliments every scene it’s used in. The art direction is an uncomfortable dreamlike collision of high-fidelity lighting and smudged textures, placing the game entirely out of time aesthetically and lending its absurdist creations, and human drama, an eerie identity.

It’s style as substance, taking a fun and well-realised third-person shooter and fortifying it with Remedy-esque level design, Rockstar-adjacent combat, and wholly Strange Scaffold life. Even when I found myself growing weary of its loops, the promise of the next moment that would make my chest tight or eyes pop propelled me forward. In a fun call and response to Dark Souls’ historic “YOU DIED” splash, when Savage falls in battle “YOU KEEP GOING” slams onto the screen, each word punctuated with a hard beat. El Paso, Elsewhere loves its vampires and its crunchy gunplay, but what it wants more than anything else, no matter what you’re facing, is for you to keep going.

The post El Paso, Elsewhere Review – You Keep Going appeared first on Press Start.

I’ve missed Assassin’s Creed. It’s an odd thing to think, really, given the ubiquity of the franchise across its now sixteen-year run. Assassin’s Creed never went away, if anything it became even more entrenched in wider gaming culture thanks in large part to its smartly-timed pivot to an open world, action RPG format. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the most recent entry in the series has made over a billion dollars in revenue and solidified the series as a household staple in the AAAA game lineup, so Assassin’s Creed is big business. And yet, I’ve missed what I once understood to be Assassin’s Creed. Or at the very least, what I remember it being.

Ubisoft Bordeaux is a team largely comprised of people like me, folks who’ve missed a certain kind of Assassin’s Creed. We recently had the chance to spend the day with them in their Bordeaux office, going hands-on with a few hours of their efforts to recapture a more traditional assassin experience, Assassin’s Creed Mirage. This smaller scale title has been marketed just so; a discounted entry (clocking in at around 70 bucks locally), Mirage represents a concerted effort to provide fans with an old-school experience. No DLC, no pre-planned post-launch content roadmaps, stripped back RPG elements and a renewed focus on stealth. This is ostensibly the exact experience many have claimed to want for years and after some time with the game, it’s hard not to buy into this mirage.

Much ado has been made about Ubisoft Bordeaux’s recreation of ninth-century Baghdad. Western media has an abysmal track record in how in represents Middle Eastern cultures, but this is Baghdad as we’ve rarely been allowed to see it before. A vibrant and lush sprawling intersection of cultures and colour, Ubisoft Bordeaux has spent years piecing together its best approximation of the golden age of the round city, working closely with historians and cultural advisors to best capture a place so thoroughly scrubbed from history by war and time. This isn’t a yellow filtered landscape but one of diversity, its biomes and people and tone all thriving and all primed for our new-ish protagonist, Basim Ibn Ishaq.

One of the first thoughts I had playing Mirage was that fuckboys are back on the menu in Assassin’s Creed. Despite his introduction in Valhalla as a master assassin, the Basim we meet in Mirage is all youth, bluster, and potential. A far cry from the antagonistic stoic we crossed blades with in the British Isles, Basim’s street rat youth on the streets of Baghdad immediately calls to mind the charm of Ezio Auditore da Firenze or the swagger of Arno Dorian. Actor Lee Majdoub’s first turn in the role is of a piece with the kinds of men this franchise used to trade in, too – wise-cracking, warm, talented, and just a little bit of a shithead.

Majdoub’s Basim is something of a palette cleanser then, a refreshing reminder of the playful tone that used to be second nature to the franchise before its turn to self-serious, lore-driven protagonists. Which isn’t to say that Basim is carefree. This is a man haunted by spectral nightmares and poverty, his induction into the soon-to-be Brotherhood, seen in Mirage as The Hidden Ones, a necessary step for a man of his social standing and proclivities. This melding of tones is complimented and elevated by the legendary Shohreh Aghdashloo’s work as Basim’s mentor and surrogate mother, Roshan. The two share an almost Jedi-like cadence, her rules and raw skill pushing him to better himself but not without some tension.

THE CHEAPEST SHIPPED COPY: $64 AT AMAZON WITH FREE POSTAGE

This dynamic ripples through one of the extended set-pieces we played in our preview session, as Basim trains with the Hidden Ones at Alamut, the stronghold of the assassins. Mirage’s answer to The Witcher’s Kaer Morhen, this still-under-construction temple is nestled atop a criss-cross of cliffs and mountains, making the perfect playground for a young assassin to prove his worth. Here, players guide Basim through a series of small-scale quests, fetching items and chatting with other members of the organisation as he learns the ways of the assassin, including some combat tutorials and a very cinematic montage. This early-game section is a mission statement of sorts too, Mirage leaning heavily into the mythology of the series, culminating in Bassim’s inauguration replete with gruesome, and cool, interactivity.

As a long-time player, if not always fan, of Assassin’s Creed, it’s a surprisingly effective moment and does wonders for Mirage from the jump. This is undoubtedly in part thanks to Aghdashloo’s performance, her stern dedication to the creed felt in every moment, but having the player take an active role in Basim’s big moment is a stroke of genius. The sombre tone contrasts with the game’s opening missions too, in which we catch up with a younger Basim and mate Nehal running small-time thefts in their hometown. This was a much shorter segment but offered a window into the relationships of Basim’s youth; a stern older man objects to him taking on bigger jobs and Basim teases him about his growing fears, “My worry is the same,” he replies, “I’ve only grown too old and too tired to hide it.”

These worries, at least for now, are relatively unfounded as Basim proves to be a rather capable assassin. Mirage is pointedly returning to the series’ stealthier roots, something of a course correction felt necessary by a large, and vocal, collective of fans. It’s impossible to deny how hard of a left turn the franchise took into approachable action design philosophies but as with most things, the way we remember something is rarely reflective of its reality. Assassin’s Creed II was far more bombastic and loud than we often recall, Assassin’s Creed Unity’s parkour far slower too. Mirage feels like an idol to the memory of the franchise then, a collectively agreed upon ideal Assassin’s Creed that selectively remembers in order to craft something closer to those rose-coloured monuments in our minds.

And it whips. Basim is a glass cannon character, sporting a range of neat little tricks and tools to sneakily get in and out of a situation but rarely able to survive for longer than a few minutes when dragged into the light. During one mission I had managed to manoeuvre my way into a nook and had two guards perfectly within my sights just across the courtyard. Reflexively I opened the weapon wheel to pull out the now-series-staple bow and arrow and immediately grimaced with delight; Mirage doesn’t care for quick and easy solutions. I spent the next ten minutes deliberately plotting my way through the play space, starting with the use of my eagle Enkidu to scout and mark foes. Certain strongholds will attempt to shoot down Enkidu, marking the marksman for you to take out before you can continue your recon work.

The feathery companion concept is a favourite of mine for the series, a shortcut to both mechanical approachability and a cool pet. Enkidu’s abilities can be modified through Mirage’s skill trees, a scaled back and far more digestible bunch of traits that fall into Phantom, Trickster and Predator subcategories depending on your preferred play style. These range from simple things like unlocking additional tool belt slots, to more powerful abilities like Enkidu’s sight being able to mark guard’s movement patterns. No matter how you spec your Basim though, you’ll not be making him into a traditional badass as combat is always a last resort. You can technically fight, and the game has a generous and rewarding parry and melee system, but you’ll be quickly overwhelmed more often than not.

Of all the things I ever imagined a modern Assassin’s Creed capable of making me feel, genuine tension was not one of them. And yet, Mirage pulls it off, giving me the exact set of tools to make a particular kind of power fantasy achievable while constantly pulling on the leash to keep me in check. To balance your relative weakness in active combat, Basim is a beast in stealth mode. The Hidden Ones workshop grants you access to a small but highly effective loadout of tools, like sound makers to distract guards, a blow dart pipe that can be upgraded to do poison or berserk damage, the classic smoke bomb, and a bunch more. The best of Mirage is when you have a large enough play area to use all of these in an interlocking stream of silent death. Conversely, I was also able to dispatch a small battalion of guards by hiding in a giant bush and whistling them over to me, making a progressively larger stack of bodies. We’re so back.

Perhaps the biggest concern going into Mirage, given its use of the Valhalla engine and systems, was that parkour and traversal wouldn’t be as engaging as previous, stealth focused titles. It’s a fair point and one I still have after some time with Mirage; Basim doesn’t control poorly but he is less reactive than I would have liked. The streets of Baghdad provide a vibrant and engaging playground for parkour, but Basim’s pathfinding is a little wonky, resulting in a few mildly annoying missteps while clambering around. Few being the optimal word there though; Unity set a benchmark for uniquely player-involved traversal and Mirage’s simplicity in that regard is at least mitigated by its fantastic world design.

Mirage’s Baghdad is a playground of classic Assassin’s Creed tomfoolery and some refreshing new mechanics though. Pickpocketing has been completely reworked with a QTE minigame that flashes a prompt as you try and nab someone’s stuff, requiring you to hit the shown button at just the right time or else get caught. Some truly gaudy UI aside, this small addition turns a basic function of the series in an engaging, endlessly repeatable moment. Social stealth makes a return too, Basim able to slip into crowds, and even hire some, to mask his movements through the city. Elsewhere citizens can doll out side-quests and activities, tailors can dye your clothes, and cats can be cradled. These small slices of Baghdad life eventually lead you back into the game’s black box missions, major set piece assassinations that require a fair amount of pre-planning to execute.  

The Hidden Ones are in active pursuit of Mirage’s big bad, a collective dubbed the Order of the Ancients. These gold mask wearing antagonists have become something of a running bit for the franchise but here, the stakes surrounding them feel appropriately to scale with Mirage’s focus on Baghdad and her people. The lavishly-rendered Bazaar marketplace plays host to Basim’s strike on the Order as he moves about this large play space collecting information on the target and adding it to the Investigation tab in your menu. While on this mission I saw several times things could have played out slightly differently; a cinematic auction offered me to the chance to bid on an item sought after by the Order if I’d had the coin to do so. Only time will tell if these small variants are more than smoke and mirrors but it’s a good sign for now.

A second black box mission saw Basim infiltrate an ornate garden, needing to remain unseen as he rummaged through supplies and whatnot for clues and information on a botanist. Much like the Bazaar, this garden was gorgeously-rendered and painted a vivid image of Baghdad ripe for exploration. Mirage is, so far at least, a largely successful interlocking set of mechanics and tone, but its single most astounding element may just be its sound design. Micro details like Basim’s breathing changing based on his skill-level are bolstered by a score unlike anything I’ve heard in the franchise before, a haunting, yet rousing blend of Annihilation-style horns and series staple sweeping orchestra.

During my extended time with the game, I got a clearer idea of Mirage’s intentions and a better appreciation for that advertised 20-ish hour runtime. Even when it goes big, this is a game about small, bespoke moments meant to highlight the sharpest edges of Assassin’s Creed’s blade. It’s a leaner experience, keenly aware of its fans and hyper focused on its self-constructed identity within the franchise. In countless ways, Mirage feels like a game ripped from an alternate timeline I’d very much like to visit. 

Assassin’s Creed Mirage launches on October 5th, 2023 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. Amazon has physical pre-orders for $64 including shipping.

The author travelled to Bordeaux as a guest of Ubisoft for the purposes of this preview content.

The post Assassin’s Creed Mirage Hands-On Preview – Knives Back Out appeared first on Press Start.

“Cautious”

I’m sitting in a room decorated with an assortment of Ubisoft IP marketing offcuts. Lifesize Rabbids stare me down as Bordeaux, France crosses over into early evening and my body clock is screaming. Across from me sits the Art Director on Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Jean-Luc Sala, a man with an easy gait and an even easier laugh. I’ve just played through several hours of the game under the watchful eye of the team at Ubisoft Bordeaux, the first time they’ve seen third-parties touch the fruits of their labour, and while there will be plenty of time to talk about the return to stealth for the long-running franchise, for now all I want to do is ask Sala about how it felt to be tasked with recreating a place as storied, and misrepresented, as Baghdad. “Cautious” he says with that same light gait but a slightly less easy laugh, “…it’s my first Assassin’s game, so I was really cautious also to not be the one who messed everything up.”

Assassin’s Creed has come to mean a lot of things to a lot of people. The now sixteen-year-old franchise has run the gamut – over half a dozen studios, billions in revenue, genre-hopping in search of a new identity, multi-media spin-offs, countless platforms, and ports. It doesn’t really end, Ubisoft having spent the better part of the decade defining the AAA game space, but it was the unassuming 2007 stealth title about memory DNA and an ancient order that would birth one of the industries largest franchises. And while growth, and inevitable change, precipitated the series’ mammoth success, fans of that original, humble beginning remained.

Many of them, it turns out, got jobs at Ubisoft Bordeaux. A relatively small and fresh-faced studio based in the scenic port-city best known for its wine, this is a team largely comprised of developers who cut their gaming teeth on the first entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the average age of the team here being early thirties. When it comes to what makes this franchise special to the person reading this with fond memories of Ezio Auditore’s antics on the Xbox 360 and the bulk of developers working on Mirage right now, the common ground is happily shared. Walking through their current office space (the team is preparing for a move to a larger, far nicer office according to the concept art on the walls in the break room), it’s hard to not get the impression that Ubisoft Bordeaux has been allowed to pull off a heist with everyone watching.

“I think for us, and for me, it feels very natural because we were part of, I would say, the people who were eager to play an Assassin, going back to the roots, being able to parkour through a city, doing stealth assassinations and stuff like that,” Fabian Salomon, Lead Producer on Mirage tells me in the Just Dance room. “Even if honestly, I really enjoy playing the most recent games, like Valhalla, Origins, and Odyssey is a blast. So, I’m a bit mixed… It’s good to keep on proposing both kinds of experience at some point because it’s really enjoyable and I think it’s really important to keep on exploring new settings too.”

Listening to Salomon talk about the process behind Mirage is fascinating. Ubisoft Bordeaux aren’t exactly green when it comes to the franchise, the team having worked on the Wrath of the Druids DLC for Valhalla, itself something of a fan-favourite story. But as the finishing line for Mirage comes into sight at last, Salomon reflects on how it’s been to lead a full Assassin’s Creed title for the first time. “How does it feel today? It’s a relief because we really are very close to shipping the game. It was a fantastic adventure, intense and challenging. It was, for myself, a lot of pressure because it’s Assassin’s Creed, it’s myth, even for most of us. I grew up with this franchise, obviously, so I feel very honoured to have been able to work on this project. And so, I try to stay humble, obviously, but I feel very lucky.”

All things considered, it’s maybe not that surprising that Ubisoft decided to take another shot at the more traditional ideals of the franchise. A growing trend in fandom spaces has been the idea that vocal demand for a product to be a certain way is the best indicator of direction for a corporate body to take when it comes to future products. This is, to my mind, a fraught path that often blurs lines between consumers and artists, rarely ever benefiting either in the long term. But in the case of Mirage, the call initially seems to have come from inside the house. Planned as another DLC for Valhalla, Mirage, as these things are wont to do, warped and shifted under closer inspection and the team’s passion for the project had it taking on another form entirely. I asked Salomon about the makeup of the team and how it has impacted the direction of Mirage as a project.

“We have people that worked on the first Assassin’s Creed as developers. That’s why the average age is… I would say old people,” here he breaks into a laugh, our collision of languages allowing neither of us to help the other as we fumble for the right words, but he continues, “But we are veterans, programmers, and developers that used to even work on older games here in Bordeaux. And I guess even for the new ones or the youngest people, we have a lot of fans of even the games of the first eras. So, they really wanted to put their own pieces in this game to kind of honour the franchise.” Institutional game development knowledge is often the first thing under threat in the shifting sands of the modern AAA market and to see Salomon light up as he talks about the almost generational collaboration happening on Mirage in his office is warming.

Which isn’t to say that Ubisoft Bordeaux has been going it alone. The majority of mainline Assassin’s Creed titles have been huge, collaborative efforts between Ubisoft’s many studios and Mirage, while personally driven, is no different. “It was a critical support, to be honest. As you know, we are a pretty young studio, even if we have a lot of veterans. But doing a game like Mirage, even if the scale is shorter and smaller than any other big Assassin’s Creed game, it’s really complex,” Salomon explains.

“Without our dear partners, this project would not have been real. I have in mind (Ubisoft) Sofia, Singapore, Kyiv, Odesa… I’ve missed obviously a lot of others, but they were very critical on this project. And to us, it was really important to find a way to give them a high amount of ownership, like, okay, what do you want to do? We know your expertise on this, what can you propose? So that’s why, for instance, with Singapore, we restarted the collaboration with them very early in the process and we really proposed to them, you are very good at doing world design, quest design, etc, so what about you will be able in charge of many districts and potentially a lot of main arcs from the quest? It was a risk and a challenge, but we felt like they were the perfect one. And I’m very convinced that giving ownership to developers, you will have the best from them. So that’s the way we try to achieve that.”

Salomon’s faith in his team is exemplified best inside the Bordeaux studio though, where Sala and the team have spent years labouring over something the Assassin’s Creed series does as second nature – historical recreations. “It was not the easiest setting, I should say. We had a lot of red lights,” Sala explains when I asked about the importance of getting an unrepresented culture right, “Just like, we are going to talk about religion, we are going to talk about a culture that is not easily found in entertainment media, or when it is, it’s not really the way they would like to be represented. And so, we knew we had to be cautious and to do everything to do it right. Just like every Assassin’s Creed is tackling a culture, a setting…and I felt at the very beginning when we announced the game in September, but even before, because we made all that work to make it happen, to say, ‘this is going to be the Arabic Assassin’s Creed’ and to be sure that the Arabic world will be happy to have it.”

While the unveiling of the game was met with a positive reception, behind the scenes at Bordeaux the team was neck deep in what would turn into one of Ubisoft’s most challenging Assassin’s Creed titles to date. Baghdad is a historically difficult city to catalogue, centuries of war and the corrosive sands of time leaving us with a very loose understanding of how the once thriving multi-cultural hub actually stood in its prime.

This is not lost on Sala and the team, “There was an interesting article when we said we were going to Baghdad, a professor of archaeology or history wrote an article saying, ‘Ubisoft is going to explore Baghdad and the Abbasid period – good luck to them’,” Sala laughs, again easily but not without a hint of exhaustion. The article went on to explain that the nature of exploring this era meant that historical reference points would be much harder to find for the team. “So that’s when we started with just what was the architecture like, what are the texts, the historical text at that time, what they were talking about… so, it’s a reconstruction. Very difficult because of the assets but also very soon we discovered it was a freedom of creativity.”

This freedom rippled through the game’s artists and level designers the most, Bordeaux consulting with an array of historians to get a better understanding of the tools they would need to build to faithfully recreate such a richly storied city. During a presentation on the process of constructing an ideal Baghdad, the studio walked us through an array of culturally significant cornerstones of the city and surrounding area. Distinct districts mark the layout of the map, from the busy markets of Karkh to the dreary and often overlooked worker district of Harbiyah. The Four Gates of Baghdad were also a point of pride for the team; these colossal barriers to the inner-city were designed to best reflect their adjacent districts and cultures, history itself having conflicting reports on their actual appearance allowing the team to consult and craft a particular vision of this golden age.

“It took a long time,” Sala says, leaning back in his chair to cast an eye over the artists working just outside of the IP room. At one point during the interview, he excitedly tells me about how hard they had all been working on this project, shooting a little wave through the glass door to puzzled but smiling faces. “You start with a tool kit, an architectural kit. After that you do the landmark kit. So, it was really asset by asset and thematics after thematics. And at the same time when we prepare the kind of Lego box we need to do the kits, we were also mapping the cities urbanistic level and deciding to perhaps not do that, but if we don’t do that, we can have that instead. And that’s when we started to talk about Alamut. The level artists were responsible of making the streets per streets, the city and shops per shops, everything, even the flowers and the vases. They did it themselves, decided it was going to be there. So, from macro to micro, it has been a long time.”

It’s not lost on me as an Australian writer visiting a studio in France that I’m in no position to offer any clarity on the validity of Bordaeux’s work surrounding Baghdad and its intersection of cultures and religions. The office is practically littered with books about the city, stacked between Funko Pops and assorted Assassin’s Creed collector’s editions, nobody we had the chance to spend time with didn’t at some point acknowledge the weight of this attempted cultural recreation. Sala, who’s childhood in the Persian Gulf was disrupted in 1979, causing his family to flee through Baghdad and forging a lifelong connection to the region, reflected on the need to be as respectful as possible when dealing with this kind of game, “We had a team helping us to be respectful in every aspect because of course we studied a lot of Middle East culture but you’re going to have monasteries with Nestorians, so it means Greek Orthodox, Greek religious people, and we have some Chinese characters and so on. So yes, it was made with the same attention but with different experts.”

Sala seems to fully embody the spirit of Ubisoft Bordaeux and the studio’s approach to creating Mirage. Light on his feet, quick to laugh, but never not ready to unpack the how and why of making such a game. As we wrapped up our time together, we shared memories of previous Assassin’s Creed titles title and how far Mirage had come, even if just in its visual representation of the Middle East. “When they told me, ‘what do you want to have?’ I said, I want pink flamingos, I want marshlands, I want palm tree groves and the canals, because I remember the place as being very greenish and it’s really the opposite of the cliché,” Sala explains, “So that was when I started to say, let’s be grounded. Stop using filters every time. And it’s going to be perhaps… the same colour everywhere, but you will have the feeling of being there. People from the culture, they noted that it was really looking like the real stuff.”

Assassin’s Creed Mirage launches on October 5th, 2023 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. Amazon has physical pre-orders for $64 including shipping.

The author travelled to Bordeaux as a guest of Ubisoft for the purposes of this interview content.

The post We Visited Ubisoft Bordeaux To Discover How Assassin’s Creed Mirage Was Created appeared first on Press Start.

For a game with a seemingly endless supply of porn jokes, Eternights is surprisingly sweet. Coming from the independent Studio Sai, Eternights is a scale relative but ambitious swing at the Persona-like. The easiest way to define the Atlus-led subgenre would be to cram a bunch of quirky teens into a high-stakes situation that links their social interactions to their combat abilities and see what happens. It has endless potential and it’s not all that surprising to finally see smaller studios attempt to recreate it, but Eternights isn’t content with a simple emulation. Instead, it layers its earnest (and incredibly horny) social elements with a robust, real time combat system, injecting some freshness into the formula. It also, crucially, lets gay people exist.

Eternights is largely about the end of the world as God-like beings collide over the existential fate of humanity – but it opens with two mates shit talking each other’s tinder profiles. The player character, a self-named 18-year-old dude, is lamenting his dating inexperience with Chani, his lifelong bro and eager wingman, the two sharing an immediate and easy cadence. After a short introduction to the game’s visual novel dialogue choices and overarching tone, the two lads find themselves trapped in a bunker as their city is sliced up by a series of colossal, magical walls. This opening tears through table setting, almost immediately demanding you get on board with its supernatural premise, the protagonist’s new mystical sword arm, and the introduction of the third primary character, pop-star Yuna.

It’s not poorly done, just a little breakneck when also trying to parse the profoundly sweaty vibes the game gives off around its young adult shenanigans. These are explicitly sexual characters, often stumbling on the line of sexualised, but almost always straightening back up with some decent writing or emotionally resonant story beat. It’s not going to be for everyone, but I can’t deny the kind of dumb shit I was thinking at 18 and to see these character’s perform exaggerated versions of those thoughts wasn’t entirely without charm. All said there are four other party members you’ll recruit over the course of the game’s roughly 10–15-hour campaign, three women and one other guy, all romanceable and all sporting their own backstories and gameplay mechanics. To break those newly erected walls, the gang will have to ride a beefed-up rail train through the city, taking each calendar day and night to hang out, work on themselves, and eventually venture into dungeons.

Eternights’ ensemble is a likeable bunch of archetypes, no single characterisation much to write home about but collectively an endearing cast all the same. The playable character is a bit of a blank slate, his personality and tone decided during conversations from a small range of dialogue choices that in turn lean him toward several potential personality types. My guy, Knox, ended up being a sensitive type who would often opt for acceptance with a dash of confidence about his situation. Which was fine, until the endgame came around and I needed a higher confidence level to access the final dates with my chosen romance. Fortunately, the game leaves time for some confidence training with your best mate, but it was a shame to see my natural leanings lock me out of certain options organically.

Your day to day on the horny express is broken up into several activities, all of which you can freely choose from but each taking up a portion of the day. The headliner is the social interactions, seen here as choosing to “spend time” with a character of your choice, but the crew is also your gateway to training and scavenging missions. Spending time with people takes many forms, each character’s ideal “date” representative of their personalities and proclivities. Sia, the science geek, would often ask to observe me in combat, her love language being that of cold numbers and charts; Yuna, Eternights’ obvious favourite choice, accompanied me to an old high school to talk about her life in the spotlight; Yohan, my obvious favourite choice, would visit me in my dreams and we’d talk about trauma responses while chasing ethereal butterflies. And yeah, that last one is a little wild, but Eternights does all of this with the same confidence, no situation or interaction too silly to impact its stride.

Nothing you do is time wasted in Eternights, every mechanical engagement rewarding you with tangible progress and deeper social interactions. Characters can offer the protagonist training sessions, short and simple minigames that grant boosts to certain social levels or social currency to be spent on the game’s skill trees. You can also sneak out at night with someone to loot nearby locations for essentials like towels and fresh coffee, these excursions yielding similar rewards and strong interpersonal connections. It’s a lean and refined core loop that gives you direct control over your combat potential and romantic possibilities while showcasing the game’s warm character writing and vibes.

Making love not war is a nice enough adage, but Eternights sports a surprisingly weighty real-time combat system to balance its social systems. Combat is all about momentum, building from your basic button mashing attack with Bayonetta style timed dodges, QTE-driven special moves, and a whole subclass of unique attacks and support abilities. If you land enough hits in a row, you’ll have access to a simple finisher move or a super-powered elemental blow that utilises the unique powers of your crew with the left trigger and a series of QTEs. The use of hit stop makes even the smallest attack feel mighty, a stylistic choice that has great effect on the experience. Eternights slowly feeds you increasingly powerful mechanics too, ensuring you’ll always have a cool new toy to play with as the plot progresses. Using your social interactions to unlock stronger skills feels natural and makes taking these characters into combat even more satisfying.

The gang will need to contend with a handful of dungeons throughout the game, each an escalating gauntlet of combat and puzzle-solving. These multileveled event scenarios are plot heavy and often quite cinematic, housing fully animated cutscenes and creative level design along with boss encounters that test your combat proficiency. The puzzles are a tad goofy but fun enough, often repeated simple floor pattern recognition, sliding blocks, and even a late-game run that saw me jot down numbers on pen and paper to make life easier. You’re more likely to hit combat rooms and large-scale encounters though, and Eternights has a genuinely fantastic grasp on enemy aesthetics and design, leaning into body horror in fun ways. Some encounters can get a little much, often descending into button-mashing to get through it, but the strength of the combat and overall visuals mostly mask this.

There’s a dash of Suda51-adjacent design philosophy in here, a strange and exaggerated melding of explicitly gamey mechanics to strengthen combat and its cinematic potential. It all locks into place with the game’s strong art-direction and animation fidelity. There are shortcuts you’ll need to allow for; major moments will often cut to black and explain something in plain text, no doubt a budget limitation you can meet halfway if you’re willing. But Eternights is frequently beautiful too, with expressive designs, sharp lighting, and a broad understanding of the more pleasing visual trappings of the genre and anime writ large. And while the writing can sometimes veer a little off-course, the voice work is stellar and always grounds these characters in the game’s unexpectedly sad tale.

There’s also Studio Sai’s decision to actively include queer romance in the game, something Atlus with its years of massive success and growth has still been unwilling to do. This is a genre predicated on the fundamentals of the human experience, Eternights smartly recognising that that experience comes in many forms. Yohan is as fleshed out as any of the heterosexual romance options in the game, showing up a little later than I’d have liked but a substantial portion of the second and third act is played with him in the team.

There are no jokes made at your expense for romancing him, no stilted subplots of unacceptance or half-arsed dates either, Yohan is a fully formed character and your story with him is profoundly moving at times. It’s not perfect; the inclusion of just one option is unbalanced and the game’s pacing still favours its women (all of whom I enjoyed but would have killed for a friend-zone button), but the ability to be gay in a genre so thoroughly alienating to me was a marvel. It was also emblematic of Eternights as a whole; a little uneven and requiring some good faith on the part of the player, but if you’re willing to get on board, this train ride will take you to some very cool places.

The post Eternights Review – It’s Persona-l appeared first on Press Start.

We don’t get many games like Lords of the Fallen 2023. This industry is saturated with IP reboots and sequels but rarely does a developer and publisher sit down and just say, you know what, let’s take another run at this. The “this” in this case being Lords of the Fallen 2014, one of the first major studio swings at the then-relatively fresh Soulslike genre. Co-developed by Deck13 and CI Games, it was a largely forgettable fantasy action outing that attempted to recapture the, uh, soul, of FromSoftware’s booming Dark Souls franchise, a monumental task too great for such a green concept. But a lot can change in a decade, and while Deck13 carved its own niche, CI Games never quite let go.

That dedication to the series has finally borne fruit, though not without years of tumultuous growth and pruning. Originally planned as Lords of the Fallen 2, the game I got to play a few hours of earlier this month now emerges from Hexworks, a CI Games internal studio formed in 2020 to fulfill the publisher’s vision for the series. A vision that passed through both Deck13 and the now-shuttered New York based Defiant Studio, before finally finding its footing some five years later back in the CI Games fold.

In many ways, it feels like Hexworks has made its best approximation of Dark Souls 4; a relentless blend of FromSoftware’s past decade of ideas and aesthetics, cobbled together with its own ambitions and Euro-centric fantasy vibe. Which is, frankly, pretty bold; the original Lords of the Fallen made a name for itself with its proximity to Dark Souls and the newly imagined version seems to have distinctly doubled down on the connective tissue. But where FromSoftware has garnered a reputation for deliberately considered design, Lords of the Fallen sprints in the other direction, opting for decadent art and a stacked array of mechanics that majorly impact everything from combat to exploration. It’s big, brash, and hard to not find kind of compelling.

THE CHEAPEST PRE-ORDER: $84.99 AT AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

Things begin as they often do in these affairs, with a crunchy character creator followed by a mysterious, solemn awakening in a prison. There are a handful of potential classes to choose from with some banger names like Udirangr Wolf, Hallowed Knight, and my personal favourite, the Blackfeather Ranger, a multifaceted build that was doing their best at a Bloodborne cosplay, right down to the silly little hat. Classes followed the basic archetypes of strength, agility, magic and so on, each sporting a fun bit of worldbuilding and lore. Once you’ve chosen your class, you’ll be stirred awake in a gloomy cave by a mysterious figure talking in riddles about your “sacrosanct flesh” before asking you to find him in the world.

The overall onboarding of Lords of the Fallen can be a little much as the game is tasked with not only teaching you the basics of combat but the mechanics of its signature idea, the Lantern. This cursed object always hangs from your hip and is somewhat clumsily equipped by holding both LT and LB in a crab-like grip. With it you can peer into the Umbral Realm, a shadowy mirror of the real world that hides new pathways through levels, different enemy types and an all-seeing ominous eye that gets wider the longer you spend in Umbral. You can fully enter the Umbral by holding X and tearing your soul from its flesh, giving you decreased defences but the ability to exist within the realm for lengthy periods of time. Conversely, if you’re downed in the “real” world, the Lantern will give you one final chance at life in a form neither corporeal nor spirit, dramatically altering your health pool.

It’s a neat trick, and one that the game will be using regularly to help you navigate world puzzles, obscured pathways and take on increasingly gruesome foes. Aesthetically the Umbral is a bit washed out, layering existing gameplay areas with a blueish grey filter, and littering them with piles of corpses and congealed fleshy goo. But the details really make it sing, those same piles covered in eyes that follow your movements, heightening the feeling that you’re not supposed to be here, and somebody knows it. Imagine the Insight endgame of Bloodborne and you’re halfway there, only now those mammoth Lovecraftian horrors are everywhere and waving at you.

Soulslike combat is also impacted by the Lamp, giving you the ability to rip souls from bodies for increased damage strikes and strip enemies of otherworldly protections. Baseline is exactly what you’re imagining; light and heavy attacks assigned to bumper and trigger respectively, a dodge roll, block, parry, and stance swapping all tethered to a limited pool of stamina. There’s a lightness to the combat that does raise an eyebrow from time to time, your character feeling a little less grounded in the world and the swings of weapons than I’d like for the genre. But the primary concern with combat was the camera, which swung wildly between functional in open spaces and frustratingly clumsy in tighter, smaller arenas. I died to one boss about half a dozen times thanks to the camera and lock-on system breaking, something that will hopefully be tweaked before launch.

Lords of the Fallen closes this gap through sheer force of will though, papering over its limitations with a collage of weapon and build variety, a generous parry window, and fantastic enemy diversity. My Ranger was positioned as a dual melee/ranged build, capable of wielding a swift one-handed axe and switching to a long bow with the press of a button. Both would prove vital and fun across my few hours with the game, as I could easily pick off foes from a distance with a variety of arrows (even in boss arenas) before rolling in with my axe and shield for a more traditional bout.

Parrying is kind to the player too with a rather wide window of opportunity but the trade-off being much less of a stun on the enemy when successfully done. Damage is mitigated by blocking but not entirely done away with too, leaving a greyed-out portion of your health bar that you can claim back by hitting foes, encouraging more aggressive play. And while I didn’t have time to try them out, I also picked up a bevy of cool weapons to skill up into, and even found a little freak to sell me powerful Umbral spells for a magic build.

The world of Lords of the Fallen is actually packed with little freaks come to think of it. This is a vaguely Dark Fantasy, Pagan-esque shitshow of a land drowning in bloody ritualistic magic and colliding power systems. To try and recount the full table of proper nouns and plotting I saw would take most of the day but essentially the citizens of Mournstead have been locked in an endless war to prevent the return of a tyrannical demon overlord and they’re losing. Begrudgingly sanctioned to use dark magic to prevent the end of the world, you’re enlisted as a Dark Crusader by the Church of Orius to become hero of the Radiant God and stop Adyr’s army of demonic beasts. In practice this means you’ll be running operations from a central church hub that can be used to connect to various corners of the world in which you’ll find giant beacons to destroy. But the true Lords are the friends you’ll make along the way.

Over time the church becomes more populated with folks you find in the overworld and even former bosses. After the first major boss encounter wraps up, your foe is reborn from a spewing mass of blood (I know) and later shows up at the church to be your maiden of sorts, allowing you to level up and purchase items. I explored this church for a good while, finding secret alcoves with strange figures happy for a chat and another vendor menu. Though many of them would recoil at the Lantern and call me a heathen, I still appreciated how far Lords of the Fallen goes to make this space feel inhabited. Down some stairs I found sleeping quarters even, and raising the Lamp revealed a room-sized creature who was actually rather nice if you got to know them.

It all coalesced into a dense experience that had me hanging out for just a bit more time in the world, out of both sheer curiosity for its oddities and a need to poke at its systems a little longer to better understand where it’s all headed. Lords of the Fallen is clearly winding up for a major swing, layering its own unique concepts on top of years of genre staples and aesthetics, and these hours with the game at least hint at it all paying off. With some combat refinement and polishing, this could easily be one of the cooler action fantasy experiences of the year, even if it took a second run at it to find solid ground.  

Lords of the Fallen releases October 13th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders for $84.99 including shipping.

The post Lords Of The Fallen Hands-On Preview – Any Soul Is The Goal appeared first on Press Start.

There’s a lot of friction in Atlas Fallen. Some of this is intentional; grinding across sand dunes and slamming overpowered attacks into fantastical creatures that are hungry for your blood to stain the earth below. Some of it isn’t; those same overpowered attacks in a constant wrestling match with the game’s camera while its overarching plot and writing catch like sand between gears. A slow but undeniable churn of grit in the machine that undercuts the game’s best ideas and brings an otherwise cool set of mechanics low.

I can always see the vision in a Deck13 game. The German developers have spent the better part of a decade emulating the FromSoftware house style, transplanting challenging action combat systems into fresh settings on a much leaner budget. The Surge games, both of which adhere much closer to the team’s inspiration points in terms of structure and theme, also embodied some of its best work. Tightly crafted experiences that introduced unique layers to the formula and successfully lifted it all into a gritty sci-fi world. Atlas Fallen pivots in almost every way; deliberate play spaces traded for open-zones, discreet encounters for bombastic rumbles, sharpened storytelling for genre pastiche. It goes on, but for the pockets of fun I had in Atlas Fallen, I struggled to see the vision.

Atlas, the titular world, has fallen. A harsh and arid land of rocky mountains, sandy dunes and dying pockets of forest, this primordial plateau has been the stage of a centuries long holy war. In the process, the land has been systematically strip mined of its Essence, a glittery sand-like substance that fuels the magic of the realm and is now solely meant for Atlas’ looming god, Thelos. Having taken the form of a massive stone idol that floats above the land, tracking its denizens like a fucked up Mona Lisa, Thelos has weaponised humanity’s belief systems and forged a religious army to do his bidding. You play as a Nameless, an underclass of people who form the worker backbone of the continent with very little in the way of compensation or basic respect.

THE CHEAPEST SHIPPED COPY: $79 AT AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

Once you’ve customised your hero from a decent enough selection of hairstyles, you’ll be quickly introduced to the game’s central idea – the Gauntlet. Found during a disastrous trip across the country and quickly wielded to set herself free from servitude, the Gauntlet is 2023’s third sentient, magical handheld that cracks wise at the player while offering them access to escalating powers to use in combat. Atlas Fallen’s Gauntlet houses Nyall, a Na’vi-looking blue man with a vendetta against Thelos and a tremendous arse to boot. Nyall will be with you across your whole journey, granting access to a plethora of RPG systems, traversal tools, plotty dialogue and game hints, the latter of which can be thankfully toned down in the game’s settings.  

From here, Atlas Fallen is a pretty straightforward action RPG affair. You’ll be sent out across Atlas to collect pieces of the Gauntlet to power it up enough to progress to the next story beat, each portion of the map a discreet but interconnected series of open zones that house side quests and challenges to complete. The Gauntlet allows the Nameless to shift the sands of Atlas, raising platforms, activating timed magical puzzles, and best of all, propelling themselves across the sand like an ice skater. Deck13 use this to great effect, turning any open space into a slip and slide for the Nameless, and solving the open-world traversal slowdown effortlessly, if not seamlessly. You can only glide if the game registers sand beneath your feet, making some areas a clumsy stop/start experience as a small rock abruptly stops your flow in frustrating ways.

These flow issues are writ large in the game’s combat, an uneven and sporadically fun collision of systems. Atlas Fallen gives players an impressive arsenal of tools to play with, layering basic weapons like axes and whips with several types of modifiers and an underlying risk/reward micromanagement in Momentum. Landing consecutive blows against enemies raises the Momentum meter, unlocking evolved versions of your base weapon along with tiered special abilities, but also making you much more vulnerable to damage. Momentum can be expelled through critical strikes that deal massive damage and lower the bar again, making for a constant and engaging push and pull between power and limitations. It’s also consistently undercut by an unstable camera that pulls focus in frustrating ways during group encounters, endlessly fighting with the lock-on function to make for a disorientating experience.

Doubly so when camera control is essential to fully engaging with Atlas Fallen’s enemy designs, most of which require targeting specific body parts to deal meaningful damage. In concept it rules, harkening back to The Surge and allowing you to incapacitate certain attacks or cleave off new weapons by focusing on armoured limbs and the like. In practice, it wears thin, as to actually defeat a foe you’ll need to focus damage but the camera makes this an exercise in frustration. Atlas Fallen’s menagerie is detailed but limited, a rotating door of Wraiths who escalate over the course of the game but never vary all that much. It’s a combination of issues that take a baseline solid combat system and dulls its shine like sand slowly but surely burying a treasure.

Elsewhere there is a loose set of RPG systems churning away, most of which can be ignored to no real peril. There are a few currencies to collect to spend on vendors, leveling and perk slots; a crafting system that requires you to collect plants and ores from the world; a bunch of side quests and NPCs; armour customisation; the list goes on. The bulk of essentials will be given to the player via the main questline, but what really makes these systems forgettable is the overarching world of Atlas Fallen. It’s not bad, as such, but it’s shockingly dry. Voice acting and dialogue is about as unenthused by it all as I am writing this, and the repetition of the game’s missions and puzzle challenges quickly dispels any real sense of adventure.

Which is a shame because Atlas Fallen is partway to being exactly the kind of elevated action experience the genre deserves right now. A comforting throwback to design ethos of old, happy to let the player just wail on some monsters in a cool looking world. And there are elements of that kind of fun buried in here. Atlas feels grand, a massive playground to whip across the sands on and marvel at the imposing natural beauty of it all. Claiming it back from an evil god with these particular tools should be a great time. Instead, for the moments of fun I had at this beach, I just feel sunburnt and ready to wash the sand off.

The post Atlas Fallen Review – Sinking Sand appeared first on Press Start.

You shouldn’t be intimidated by Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. If you have even a passing knowledge of Dark Souls developer FromSoftware’s mech-combat series then this statement might hit different, but the looming six in the title alone is enough to strike a harsher profile than many were expecting following the mammoth success of Elden Ring in 2022. Armored Core is, put simply, niche; with humble sales figures and unpredictable critical reception, the last game in the series released a decade ago and its modern legacy is memed controller options and vague allusions to difficulty.

Hardly the franchise you’d be expecting FromSoftware to return to after releasing its biggest game to date. But this success, and time away, has shaped Fires of Rubicon in fascinating ways while retaining the series’ core tenets and vibe. I recently got to spend about five hours with the game, giving us a solid look at its entire opening act and overall structure. The tldr? I forgot to blink several times. Fires of Rubicon has been pitched as a soft reboot, the Rubicon of the title more important than the number.

In Fires of Rubicon you’ll be playing as callsign Raven, or 621, a scientifically modified human who has returned to Rubicon (the game’s humanity cradle and Earth approximation), under the watchful eye of your handler, Walter and AI program, ALLMIND. Together, you’ve been primed to be hired out by a loose network of corporations and paramilitary organisations. Rubicon has been burned alive in search of the game’s McGuffin fuel source-come-magical substance, Coral. In the ensuing chaos, swathes of corporate entities descended onto Rubicon to scour for the remaining Coral, triggering an endless war with the planet’s native population who have galvanised into a resistance force.

Basically, it’s an Armored-Core-arse Armored Core premise. The franchise has a long history of post-late-stage capitalism narratives, riffing on the horrors of war and those who seek to profit from it. In Fires of Rubicon’s opening act at least, this quest for spoils feels particularly nasty as you’re hired to pick remains from a long-abandoned corpse of a planet, swatting at any others who are attempting to do the same. All of this is communicated to you in stylised mission briefings and static shots, the first layer of Fires of Rubicon’s distance from recognisable humanity that is fully realised in the game’s signature mech customisation and combat. There’s no character creation here, no maiden to gently ferry you into the unknown, it’s just the machine and the faceless entities that seek to control, deploy, and eventually abandon it with you inside.

This framing is an essential part of Fires of Rubicon and the only reason the game’s tremendous combat and player expression come together the way they do. The titular mechs, shorthanded to ACs in the game, are deeply customisable and effortlessly cool to use, both systems immediately approachable but hiding endless layers of complexity for those willing to pry. Every component of your AC can be customised; from limbs to weapons to engine, software, and even individual paints, sheens, and cosmetic damage, it’s all waiting to be bent to your needs.

Each choice will impact a set of stats, the biggest concerns being weight distribution and energy consumption, as these numbers trickle down to affect your AP meter (health), as well as EN gauge, an energy pool used to fuel flight and massive speed boosting. Changes can be made mid-mission too, but only if you fall in combat. From this reload screen you can access the garage and flip between pre-built Cores saved in Profile slots. 

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $74.99 AT AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING AND PRE-ORDER PRICE GUARANTEE

These small changes made in the garage can have a major impact on the moment-to-moment gameplay found in the game’s discreet mission structure. Ditching open zones and worlds entirely, Fires of Rubicon keeps with Armored Core tradition and gives you a list of missions to choose from, each rewarding currency and story progression in some form. It’s all streamlined from a slick set of menus and is something of a breath of fresh air in a market saturated with the idea that more will always equal better. Once you’ve been given the lowdown on events from your handler Walter, you and your AC will be set loose in a variety of environments, some quite linear and brief, others wider and with more to accomplish. Both, most importantly, are a fucking blast.

From minor grunt work that tasked me with cleaning up errant artillery to major, co-operative assaults with other corporate AC units on towering structures, Fires of Rubicon understands the importance of scale and escalation in its missions. These varying mission designs also have a drastic impact on difficulty, with some missions taking mere minutes to blast your way through, fully leaning into the mech power fantasy, while others will push your Core to new limits in lengthy, massive areas and cinematic encounters.

One mission tasked me with sabotaging a large mining vessel deep in the deserts of Rubicon, its slow and lumbering structure hiding essentially a Death Star canon that would attempt to swat at me as I boosted across the sand to try and get close enough to launch an attack. The first time that blazing white energy tore through my hull out of nowhere was such a thrill and Fires of Rubicon manages to near constantly replicate that thrill over and over.

Combat is frenetic; rapid bursts of intense violence and momentum that require more concentration then maybe any FromSofware title before it. This is in large part because of the number of meters you’ll need to keep in mind while engaging enemies. ACs can be equipped with up to four different weapons, all of which will require ammo or energy cool downs to manage, on top of your AP and EN consumption, the former replenished by a finite healing tool and the latter requiring strategic breaks from movement to regain. And hesitation means death here, the game equipping you with an endless base boost for speed and an extended but high-cost rapid boost to close gaps in combat and traversal. With these tools in mind, you should always be on the run, either toward or away from danger.

Add to these systems the barrage of assaults that can be coming your way from enemy fighters, all of which trigger visual and audio warnings, and combat heats up rapidly if you’re not completely locked in. The minor miracle Fires of Rubicon seems to have achieved is that it’s all buttery smooth to control and, once memorised, comfortably mapped to the controller.

These interlocking mechanics are almost pushed to breaking point during the game’s boss encounters. Almost. The first handful of bosses I faced were varying degrees of patented FromSoftware rough; the tutorial boss especially breaking me in quite early, but all ultimately being wars of attrition. Some required faster reflexes, others methodical resource deployment, but all were tough and engaging. The final boss fight of the opening act, however, is where things got heated. An assault like no other, this flying tank unit absolutely demolished me for an hour straight with a barrage of countless missiles and rapid movements. It’s clearly designed to be the Dark Souls Bell Gargoyles of Fires of Rubicon, a capper to the opening act that makes sure you’re ready for what comes next.

These bosses also raised my only real red flag of the whole experience. Encounters play out in sizeable but still limited arenas, the walls indicated by stylised warning messages and hard limits that flash up if you try and breach them. The issue being that boss units can flaunt these rules, flying out of your reach during critical points in the fight and rendering your melee attacks, some of the strongest in the game, completely useless. It didn’t happen too often but often enough to wrinkle my nose at.

Still, it did little to dampen the flames of my excitement for Fires of Rubicon. It was burned into my brain for days after playing, my mind constantly trying to process its esoteric story and deeply layered combat and mech customisation. During my time with the team, it was noted that FromSoftware felt as if the ten-year gap between titles came down to the hardware not being quite ready for its true vision of Armored Core. With its 4K, 60FPS fidelity, decade of gameplay lessons learnt, and our own world teetering on the edge of an AI disaster itself, it seems like no better time for these slumbering giants to wage war once more.

Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon releases on August 25, 2023. Amazon has pre-orders for the Day 1 Edition for just $74.99 with free shipping.

The post Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon Hands-On Preview – An Exciting Return To From appeared first on Press Start.

The Australian games industry is changing. Decades of market forces, genre trends, federal inquiries, emerging talent and old-guard persistence have cultivated a landscape prime for growth. Chris Mosely is a man who’s been tilling that particular soil for over two decades now; a staple of the Aussie development scene, Mosley has had a hand in several studios and is now using that experience to help bring about a shift in the industry.

We recently had a chance to have a lengthy chat with Mosely about the exciting changes happening in our own backyard, as well as dive deep into his latest venture, the genre-bending sci-fi sim Beyond Contact.

Chris Mosely, CEO/Director/Co-founder at Playcorp

Well first up, for those who don’t know your path through Australia’s development scene, can you tell us your story? 

Chris Mosely: So I’ve been in the Australian game scene for about 30 years. I’m quite the reclusive, but I’ve been involved in a lot of game studios here and games that have been developed by Australians. So going back 30 years, I was one of the co-founders of Blue Tongue Entertainment, which went on to do some great stuff locally. After Blue Tongue, founded Red Tribe and the newest studio right now is Playcorp.

So back then, I think I was in my early 20s when we started Blue Tongue, there was certainly no sort of idea that you could go out and find investors or anything like that. And the idea that you could make games from Australia was still quite foreign to a lot of the international community. They weren’t aware of the fact that we had some really great development talent in Australia. So it was quite an uphill battle at that point. But I think we became one of four or five of the biggest game studios in the country at that time, so we had a lot of fun with that.

On the topic of the Australian development scene, what’s your current take on it as a whole? The climate, the people, the “vibes” for lack of a better term?  

CM: I think there’s just such a breath of fresh air. There’s so much fantastic talent that’s come into the Australian development scene. I remember when I started, there was a huge lack of confidence. Like, Australians lacked confidence in their own abilities, they lacked confidence in competing on a world stage. And I think more recently, it’s almost the opposite. We’ve got so much confidence and so much ability to express ourselves the way that we want to express ourselves, which is critical to success in the games industry. You can’t simply be trying to please your overseas masters and hope to do well in the games industry. So we’ve got more of the risk takers, we’ve got more of that self-confidence within the industry. And this is all coming from a new generation of game developers, in my opinion.

I definitely see and feel that confidence you mentioned in this space but do you think there are challenges that specifically exist for Aussie devs? 

CM: I think that there always is going to be. You can sense it in the DNA of the way that government thinks about games, for example. There’s always been a challenge for a country and where it’s come from to take games as a serious art form. We were fighting for many, many years to get games to be seen as a serious art form, on an equal footing with film and other types of art, which I think it is and we’ve come a long way, but you can still see that there’s still work to be done in that area. And I think with the new initiatives that the government has put in place and the various funding opportunities that the government’s put in place, you’re probably going to see huge dividends for Australia. For every dollar that the government invests in this industry, I think it brings in many multiples of dollars in revenue and export revenue into the country. So it’s definitely a very good investment when you look across the board.

The Digital Games Tax Offset Has Officially Passed Through Aussie Parliament

Over the past year, we’ve seen a bit of boon from the Australian Federal Government with programs like the Games: Expansion Pack funding. Do you think enough is being done to support local devs? 

CM: It’s a really hard question. I mean, we haven’t had anything like this before and I think the danger is that you really want to be supporting the startups and the homegrown developers within Australia. And a lot of these programs tend to get sidetracked along the way, so they start off with the best of intentions and they end up essentially bringing competition or large companies into Australia that then end up competing with these little smaller studios. And so you start to lose your best staff and things like that. Over the last 30 years, I’ve seen quite a bit of this where the government will say that they’ve spent a large amount of money on the games industry, but what it really translated into was this sort of “head office” mentality where they bring large publishers into the country and unfortunately, that tends to stifle a lot of the local studios that are in place. 

Now, having said that, any money is great and everyone sort of benefits and all ships rise when the water level rises, all the ships rise together. And so the talent pool overall has grown. It’s very, very hard and very, very complicated to try and assess how well these programs have done, but I think overall, you can see that from the point of view of educating a new group of developers and the talent pool itself, and access to money from the government and access to investors, we’re in a much healthier situation than we’ve ever been in the past. And then if you look at the sales records of Australian companies, it’s really quite astounding.

Do you think we’re doing enough to incentivise young Australians to consider a career in game development?

CM: This is a really tricky question. For me, being a game developer is like one of the most painful things you can do *laughs*. You don’t get into this industry to get rich. You get into this industry because you absolutely have no choice. You just love and you’re so passionate about games and you have this thing that you want to do. And if you don’t have that, you’re just not going to survive. You’re just not going to be in it for the long haul because it’s going to kick you in the guts over and over. You may spend two or three or four years working on a project and it doesn’t work out, and that’s absolutely heart-wrenching and mentally destructive. So should you encourage people, more people to want to do that? I think really they themselves need to want to do that.

Having seen the effects over the last 30 years of what the games industry can do, like the creative industries as a whole, I think you really want it to happen organically and naturally, and I think that does happen within Australia. I think we have that breadth of talent across the board that you need to create studios to create projects. A lot of countries don’t have that. They’ve got these little they’ve got bits and pieces of it that they don’t have that whole, but Australia does. 

While we’re talking about support networks for studios such as yours, how has your working relationship with Plaion been? 

CM: We’ve had a very good experience with Plaion and the particular group that we’re working with, I mean, they’re all veterans of the industry. They know their stuff really, really well. These are people who are independently successful developers who Plaion has kind of purchased and cherry-picked some of the talent. And that talent is now rising through the ranks within Plaion. So I imagine in the next five to ten years, you’re going to start to see a lot of this play out. But they’ve got some great talent there. They know their stuff. They know that they need to give developers time to create great products. Great products take time, they don’t happen overnight. And so this is all very positive.

You’ve recently launched the 1.0 version of your game, Beyond Contact, can you tell us a bit about the journey to 1.0 and how it feels to finally arrive?

CM: It’s been a hell of a ride for us. We had to build the studio from scratch. We have, I want to say 30% of our staff are veterans from the games industry. And then we’ve got a whole new cadre of people who are up and coming in the games industry and maybe don’t have as much experience, so they’re learning very rapidly. And this project was probably a great one for them to learn because we had this opportunity of working with a community. So we silently launched the game into early access and then started to work with what turned out to be a very vocal and passionate and small community of people who were playing the game, who helped us to get to the stage that we’re at now.

It’s actually a much, much bigger game than we first envisaged and there’s many, many elements to it. It’s almost retro in style as well, in the sense that it has this intro story mode that you can play. And adding a story mode to a survival game is no small feat, as you can imagine. And then having the more traditional endless survival mode as well on top of that is kind of reminiscent of RTS games in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Something that struck me as I was playing the game is the polish and ambition around its systems, but how does it feel entering into a market as full as the survival sim? 

CM: It’s a huge challenge. We’re really passionate about the survival game genre. That’s where it all started. So our strategy was essentially, if we keep iterating on this, if we keep making the game as good as we possibly can, then more and more people are going to start to notice that and the review scores will slowly increase. And if we get enough momentum around it with its unique pulp science fiction comic style and then some of these much more ambitious features within the game over time, that’s going to draw a bigger and bigger crowd. 

Now, the problem with our industry in general, obviously, is that things change very rapidly, but game development is a very slow process, so you have to be very careful. So, yes, there’s a lot more competition now in this area than when we started, but we have a huge list of things that we want to do to the game. The game is not by any means finished. We’re just really touching upon what’s possible with the farming system. So there’s kind of three stages that we envisaged for the game. Stage one was supposed to be this hunter gatherer stage, and then stage two is supposed to be more of a base building and a farming stage.

And then stage three is supposed to be more about automation and optimization. We’ve got as far as stage two so far, which is the farming and building stage, but we haven’t gotten to stage three. And so you see some players and they don’t like the grind in the later parts of the game. And that’s actually a valid response because there are certain features that still need to go into the game such as auto mining and late game farming. So we’re trying to get these features out as quickly as we can, but it’s unclear whether we can get them out in time, I guess.

That’s understandable – are you looking to add these extra elements as free updates or are we expecting a more traditional expansion pathway? 

CM: It’s a fully paid up game, so all of the major content that we update will be free. So we’ve got a new planet underway, we’ve got a new playable character that’s arriving. Actually a lot of the changes that I’m talking about, about the automisation and optimisation will probably arrive in the next four to six weeks. With a bit of luck. So again, that’s going to transform the experience of the game. 

There will be DLCs. We haven’t quite figured out what they’re going to look like yet, but more than likely when we introduce a new feature to the game, I can’t mention exactly what new features are coming in, but there’s some really exciting new features that we’re putting into the game. Those features will be free for the players. And then there’ll also be some special shiny versions of those new features that can be purchased by DLC packs. So they’re going to be additional customisations that certain people may want to pay for, but you certainly don’t need in order to play the game by any stretch of the imagination. And you’re still going to get the full experience and all of the features within the game without having to pay any additional money. And this comes from the team, the team wouldn’t let us do anything else. There’s no in game shop for example.

I can imagine you’ve got a million different answers but what’s something in Beyond Contact you’re most excited for players to see? 

CM: Well, it’s really hard because over the last few weeks, I mean, all we’ve been doing internally is talking about all of these exciting new features. I’ve got to put my mind back to where we were when that game released. I think the most exciting features are going to be the new habitat system. You can literally build a habitat that covers the entire surface of a planet. You can do that with the current game, with the current engine, you can just keep playing indefinitely. I think a lot of players haven’t fully engaged yet with the raid system.

I know that if you look at the recommendations or the reviews on Steam, you’ll see that you’ve got your normal trolls that play the game for 5 seconds and don’t give it the time of day. And that tends to happen because the game isn’t well known. If the game was better known, they’d probably give it a bit more time and get into it and understand it more. But if you look at the higher quality reviews, things like the Raid system and the territory war system, it’s a whole other overlay on top of survival crafting again, which is quite unique along with having a story. So having the story mode itself was quite unique. And then having this whole territorial warfare system on top of the endless survival mode again, quite unique.

Beyond Contact is available on Steam now. Grab it here.

The post We Spoke To Aussie Studio Playcorp About The Local Development Scene And Its Ambitious New Game appeared first on Press Start.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is Respawn Entertainment’s dark middle chapter. What Jedi: Survivor isn’t, is Respawn’s Empire Strikes Back. That would be too easy; instead, the team has crafted an unruly, introspective tale that pulls from the best of Star Wars storytelling while striking out on its own. It echoes Attack of the Clones and The Last Jedi, pivoting focus and intent seemingly on a whim to forefront its characters and massively expand its gameplay languages, resulting in a game that plays like an action movie but flows like a drama – a dissonance that requires Jedi-like trust in the process to eventually see the light.

Jedi: Fallen Order left Cal and the Mantis crew in a bit of no man’s land. Having conclusively destroyed the list of potential Jedi survivors, the little band of unlikely mates were set adrift into a galaxy that has already had its storytelling potentially largely tapped. These are the dark times, the height of Empire with only a budding sense of Rebellion to push back, and having run the gambit of iconic locations and faces in the first game, exactly where Respawn would take Cal next was something of an enigma. It’s here, in this freedom, Jedi: Survivor thrives.

Many years of fighting the Empire has fractured the crew, each of them peeling off one by one to pursue a different path after the inevitability of the imperial creep – except for Cal. Knighted in battle and unable to let go of the fight, we pick up with this version of the now seasoned Jedi in the midst of a Rebellion heist. Like the entire cast of the game, he’s changed. Jedi: Survivor’s Cal is stronger, faster and angrier. The game’s opening sequence is an all-timer in intention statements, a colourful and violent descent through Coruscant’s underworld culminating in a definitive blow dealt by Cal that lets the player know, right away, this is not going to go the way you think.

THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $84 AT AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

Fleeing the scene and seeking to lay low for a while, Cal and BD-1 find themselves on Koboh, a sprawling, original planet that serves as the game’s hub world and primary location. That last point there is undoubtedly going to raise some eyebrows; the first game prided itself on being a galaxy-trotting adventure and Jedi: Survivor sprints in the opposite direction, instead opting for a more narrow scope but becoming deeper for it. Koboh is a towering achievement of Star Wars world design complete with a charming cantina, unique wildlife, half a dozen biomes and some deep cut lore that set my heart aflutter. Your adventure will send you to a handful of other locations but these are often much smaller instances, no less intricately crafted but all roads lead back to Koboh in the end.

Initially, this tighter loop made my brain short-circuit – for all my bluster about wanting entirely original Star Wars stories, I still found myself somewhat wanting for more recognisable planets and locations to visit. But the longer I sit with the game the more I’ve come to appreciate the intentionality behind it. Jedi: Survivor is rarely the game you’re expecting it to be and once you embrace that freefall, you can begin to appreciate the ride.

Jedi: Survivor’s core gameplay systems have been effectively perfected, a remarkable spit and shine of Fallen Order’s ambition to offer both meaningful combat and exploration. There are five different Lightsaber stances to choose from – single blade, dual blade, double blade, blaster and cross-guard, each offering players unique engagement methods that favour balance, speed, defense and power. You’re able to have two of each style equipped at any given time, flipping between them with a simple button press. These stances all sport their own skill trees that unlock progressively cooler moves, most of which drain your Force meter, which is then refilled by hitting foes with standard attacks.

Speaking of the Force, it has well and truly awakened in Jedi: Survivor. Cal begins the game with a basic assortment of abilities (Push, Pull, Mind Trick) that can all be upgraded through another set of skill trees. But the true joy of the game’s combat snaps into focus through the middle stretch, during which Cal will unlock additional Force powers that bolster his existing ones, allowing for markedly improved crowd control and offensive capabilities. There’s no wrong combination of stance and Force here, a delightful bit of player expression that allows you to build Cal out in the exact way you prefer to play. For instance, I sat on my skill points for hours waiting for the cross-guard stance to unlock, eventually dumping them all into the tree and wielding a Lightsaber claymore for the rest of the game.

Once you’ve found the stance you’re most comfortable with, the fluidity of Jedi: Survivor’s combat becomes undeniable. Cal has a bounty of animations to pull from, giving attacks contextually interesting outcomes that you’ve earned through a series of tight parries, dodges and deliberate blows. Stronger foes will deploy these same tactics against you in turn too, often requiring your patience to wear down stamina meters before you can break through and land a blow. Exchanges, largely, feel like a dance – weighty, pointed strikes spinning out into micro-breaks in flow that allow you to catch your breath before throwing yourself back into the fray.

Cal is every bit the Jedi Knight Cere expected him to become, and in turn, the player is allowed to experience a power fantasy that lifts the best elements from previous titles like the Jedi: Knight and Force Unleashed series. Jedi: Survivor does this without sacrificing its original intentions, rewarding conscious player choices with bombastic, cinematic thrills, capitalising on the contrast for great effect. Boss battles are the crown jewel of this balance, often extensive and incredibly trying exchanges that require your best play and in turn deliver some genuinely stunning set pieces that had my jaw cratered on the floor.    

Likewise, exploration has been vastly improved over the first game, with quality of life choices and a sharper eye for level design both elevating Jedi: Survivor. Cal moves much faster now, scampering along derelict ships and cliff faces with a fluidity that removes unnecessary player friction and allows you to feel more equipped to manoeuvre the game’s immaculate platforming playgrounds. Again, in pulling focus onto just a small selection of locations, Respawn has crafted far more engaging play spaces that utilise an array of traversal mechanics, including a contextual hook shot, improved Force jumping, ground and air mounts, and some Arkham-lite tools BD-1 picks up along the way. Traditional puzzles have been dialled back from the first game too; the ones that are here are enjoyable enough but largely Cal’s only barrier to progression will be your skill with his new movement abilities.

Conversely, Jedi: Survivor features a handful of systems that can be largely ignored by the player. There is a whole Perk system that requires slot management for passive boosts to your skills but to be frank, I had entirely forgotten about it for long stretches of play. That charming cantina on Koboh also has an adorable rooftop garden you can maintain with BD-1 but for the life of me I never found much of a mechanical imperative to return to it. There’s also the excellent cosmetic customisation suite that allows players to fully build their own saber, deck out BD-1 and the blaster in custom parts, and even change the colour shading on the dozens of outfit combinations. And yeah you can give Cal a mullet. The game never forces your hand on these systems, content to let you engage at your leisure, but this system passivity is at odds with, to my mind, the game’s most interesting player demand – that you care for the sake of caring.

Jedi: Survivor has a confidence in its storytelling and a faith in its audience, I find utterly fascinating. The game is effectively a four-act narrative, picking up and discarding threads with ferocious speed as it whips through tones and plots that run the gambit of earnest human drama to old Extended Universe novel pulp. The Empire takes a backseat for the majority of the game, instead Cal and friends are embroiled in the centuries old plot of High Republic era Jedi Dagan Gera as he races to claim an oasis planet hidden beyond an impenetrable abyss. Cal sees the planet as a potential Rebellion training ground, pitting him against Dagan as the two Jedi survivors duke it out to claim a new home. It’s smaller stakes than expected and gives the game room to explore what exactly it means to be a survivor in a galaxy this far gone.

This conflict draws in several familiar faces, as well as some compelling new ones, and forms a tremendous thematic backbone for the game. Dagan is a treat, absolutely devouring scenery as he paces in his ornate golden robes and taunts Cal for letting the galaxy fall after the High Republic. The game does a cursory job at educating players on the relatively recent Star Wars era, and while some aesthetic touchstones are present, the majority of the High Republic connections are found in data files and inference alone. You should still read those books though. Much like the planets, I was initially caught on this choice but Jedi: Survivor has so much more cooking than anticipated, and while its ambitions can result in some pacing hitches and speedy conclusions, its achievements are worth the scramble.

Much like Jedi: Fallen Order, moment-to-moment dialogue can still occasionally slip into broad strokes, or some exposition heavy exchanges, but Jedi: Survivor navigates these characters into far more interesting waters. Cal’s Jedi journey is perhaps most surprising, a brilliant echo of the High Republic teachings and a definitive answer to what exactly you do with this character. Elsewhere, Merin returns in a pivotal role that balances Cal’s changes and locks the two of them into exciting narrative potentials. Dagan is drawn a little lighter but remains fun throughout, and the new supporting cast are thoroughly likeable and will break your heart if you let them. It helps too that the game lets you spend more organic time with its characters as Cal is sometimes joined on missions by companions, giving them a chance to banter in mostly organic and charming ways.

The race to find a hidden planet is a wonderfully fun set up, all the more for giving Cal a plot that doesn’t necessitate known factors and instead allows Respawn to craft their very own corner of the galaxy. Jedi: Survivor overflows with colourful and expressive art that draws Star Wars in tones and shapes that feel fresh and exciting. From Koboh’s Old West-inspired ranch towns to Jedah’s ornate Jedi temples and even the phenomenal score and sound work, the game is dense with little flourishes that make it feel both a part of the larger galaxy but also distinctly its own beast. The only real issue is performance; playing on PlayStation I was hit with a fair few issues, from texture pop in to slowdown and clipping. Which is a shame because the game is otherwise a technical marvel, that gorgeous art direction rendered beautifully on screen, when it works.

Jedi: Survivor feels like it has something to prove. Maybe to the team behind it, whose ambitions for Cal have clearly grown exponentially in the interim years, and maybe to its audience, who the game places explicit trust in. It’s a game that dances, gleefully, in the tonal dissonance of its Star Wars building blocks. Colliding power fantasy mechanics, high-concept sci-fi and nuanced, character-driven writing, the end result occasionally stumbles trying to hold it all together but ultimately emerges a roaring success of genre melding. Jedi: Survivor is a monument to the best of Star Wars.

The post Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Review – An Audacious Middle Chapter appeared first on Press Start.

During a special live presentation at Star Wars Celebration 2023, Respawn Entertainment have dropped the final gameplay trailer for their upcoming title, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

At the three-day event held in London, game director Stig Asmussen and star Cameron Monaghan took to the stage to discuss all things Jedi: Survivor before premiering the trailer, which has been captured using only live gameplay footage according to the team.

[presto_player id=143577]

VIDEO PRESENTED BY PLAYSTATION VR2. CLICK TO LEARN MORE.

In the trailer, we see Cal effectively waging war on the Empire across several planets, most notably the city world of Coruscant, a fan favourite and highly requested playable location. Amid waves of Stormtroopers and boss fights though, we also briefly glimpse Cal engaging in a speeder bike chase on a desert planet, during which he launches an enemy into an incoming TIE-Fighter, like the dramatic dude he is.

Take a look at the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Final Gameplay Trailer below:

While Respawn Entertainment is still playing the game’s story close to the chest, the trailer does at least give us a better look at some of the other cool features we can expect to play when the game releases later this month. Cal is seen fighting off foes with the aid of companion characters this time, something we chatted with the developers about during our recent hands-on preview of the game. Here we see Merrin and Cal using the Force together to take down an imposing foe but if you’re concerned about how these characters impact your downtime, be sure to check out our chat with the team.

During the preview event, we were only given time with three of the five combat stances in the game but the trailer also shows off the cross-guard stance, a heavy attack approach that looks to change up the pace of the game considerably. Enemy variety also looks to be expanding as Cal’s adventures on Coruscant (possibly even in the Jedi Temple) pit him against recognisable droids from the Prequel Trilogy, like the shield-deploying Droidekas. Elsewhere, actor Cody Fern’s mysterious Lightsaber-wielding character and Cal clash once again and Cere delivers an ominous warning of the dark times to come.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the game’s development, and a rather lengthy chat about the customisable ponchos found in the game, you can head over to the official Star Wars YouTube page to watch the Celebration live stream.

You can also watch us discuss our hands-on preview of the game in our video podcast below:

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Survivor is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on April 28th. The cheapest pre-order is $84 Standard Edition / $114 Deluxe Edition from Amazon with free delivery. 

The post Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s Final Gameplay Trailer Teases Speeder Bikes And Coruscant appeared first on Press Start.

We’re just a few short weeks away from the release of Respawn Entertainment’s hotly anticipated sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Jedi: Survivor. In a recent story trailer for the game, we caught a glimpse of protagonist Cal Kestis doing battle with the Empire, only this time with a companion character in tow. Cal can now perform unique attacks in tandem with returning characters like Nightsister Merrin, not too dissimilar to the systems in the recent God of War titles. 

[presto_player id=143577]

VIDEO PRESENTED BY PLAYSTATION VR2. CLICK TO LEARN MORE.

While this certainly looks cool, it did raise a few eyebrows around the office as we wondered, and worried, if we would be subjected to gaming’s most recent frustrating trend – overly chatty companions. Just last week we had the chance to play an extended preview build of Jedi: Survivor and sit down for a chat with a couple of the creative minds behind it. Cinematic Director Dori Arazi and Narrative Technical Director Joanna Rob fielded our questions about the game and I was able to ask directly about how they’ve gone about ensuring Cal’s journey won’t be too noisy.

“He (Cal) can have Marin and Bode with him out as he’s exploring the galaxy. We don’t want to talk too much about specifics, but it was really awesome to be able to have characters in the same space as the player because it just totally changes how the narrative is being delivered” said Rob when asked about the role these companions will play in the game.

“It changes from being what I would kind of describe the past tense experience of exploring levels where a story has happened and you’re piecing it together to a story is unfolding here with my companion. Or in other cases where this is still kind of the past tense level, now those characters have opinions or they can remark on things that you find, stuff like that, which is really exciting.”

As someone who is always chasing new and organic ways in which games can tell us stories, it seems as if Jedi: Survivor is pushing in the right direction with its narrative design choices. In the preview build, I met several NPCs who made the world feel more compelling and actively engaging in the way Rob describes.

But I still found myself nervous about overwhelming the player with what Rob calls “systemic barks”, voice lines that prompt the player with character information among other things. These can be incredibly useful, such as delivering lore tidbits or even puzzle assistance for increased accessibility. But player downtime is equally important in exploration experiences and I pressed the team on how they intend to balance banter, exposition and that all-important peace.

“From a pacing standpoint, in terms of overwhelming the player with information, the game is very carefully designed with ebbs and flows in mind, including the side quests and the secrets and the exploration,” Arazi told me, “but we were very careful on when do we start bringing you back on the path. And that’s when we start storying you back in and maybe escalating it with a cinematic. But the pacing of the banter is ebbing and flowing with the experience of the story.” 

Only time will tell if this balance is achieved but having spent time with the team and the game, I’ve come away confident that Respawn understands the need for player downtime. 

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Survivor is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on April 28th. The cheapest pre-order is $84 Standard Edition / $114 Deluxe Edition from Amazon with free delivery. 

You can read our extensive hands-on preview of the game here.

The post Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s Companion Characters Will Know When To Shut Up appeared first on Press Start.

Star Wars fans love a dark middle chapter. There’s a reason some forty-odd years later you still hear about The Empire Strikes Back during discussions of the best of the series. The fresh-faced heroes are now hardened by years of war, the encroaching darkness is closer than ever, and nothing is quite what it seemed. With Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Respawn Entertainment may have made its Empire Strikes Back.

In a recent hands-on session hosted in Los Angeles, we had a chance to play a solid three hours of the game’s opening act. In it, we saw a very different Cal Kestis, this time on a strange new quest that ripples through decades of Star Wars storytelling. It’s bigger, bolder and more ambitious than its predecessor and after some time with its finer details, I’m all but convinced this is the Star Wars game I’ve been waiting for.

[presto_player id=143577]

VIDEO PRESENTED BY PLAYSTATION VR2. CLICK TO LEARN MORE.

I was cooler on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order than most. Despite rave reviews and massive commercial success, I always felt as if something was missing from Respawn’s first crack at a Jedi story. While it chased the highs of FromSoftware’s Souls combat and attempted the cinematic language of the galaxy far, far away, I couldn’t help but see emulation rather than proper fruition. Jedi: Survivor feels designed to address every point of contention players like me could have had with the first game, resulting in a new entry that builds on the solid foundations of the first while escalating the stakes, and quality, exponentially.

It’s been five years in-universe since we’ve linked up with Cal Kestis and that time has dramatically changed our lead Jedi. Years of struggle against the Empire have hardened Cal into a gruffer version of himself, no longer a boy on the run but a man at war. To keep pace, Jedi: Survivor has expanded its combat and exploration mechanics to match this new, more confident Cal. Our demo set us loose on Koboh, an arid planet that housed an expansive open-world environment with pockets of lush vegetation and some truly delightful mysteries. We also had access to three of the five combat stances in the game; whipping around a single Lightsaber, dual sabers and the sick double-edged blade that dominated my playstyle.

THE CHEAPEST PRE-ORDER: $84 AT AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING.

Moment to moment combat is a fully realised Jedi power fantasy as Cal is equipped with countless animations that see him weaving between foes, the saber a fluid extension of his movements and in turn your inputs. Across the board the game feels more responsive than the first, faster to react to player choices but still committed to inputs, a balancing act between the precision of the game’s Souls inspirations and the free flowing fun of Star Wars’ more arcade-y games like The Force Unleashed. Enemy collision has been improved from the first game too, blows now landing with a more satisfying thud and eventually cleaving off limbs this time.

Each combat stance has been given its own bespoke skill tree for deeper player expression; something Respawn told me they were the most excited for players to experience. Skill points are still earned through combat and exploration but feel far more valuable this time around as your preferred stance can be radically beefed up with proper investment.

Over time I was able to use the Force, still a limited but rechargeable resource here, to twirl my saber into a colourful windmill, while other stances allowed for automatic parrying and the classic saber toss. While these low level skills were enjoyable enough, we were also shown footage of late-game play that incorporated the remaining two stances, a heavy hitting cross-guard saber and the absurdly cool blaster and saber combination.

In the hands-off demo we saw Cal handling dozens of troopers with ease, deploying an overwhelming amount of Force skills to crowd control while using the saber in escalating, creative ways. This footage included the use of the game’s new Perk system, slots that allow for passive and active combat enhancements like increased block duration.

The blaster will undoubtedly be the headline attraction here, calling to mind the interruptive parrying of Bloodborne’s off-hand pistol, but this time paired with a straight-up Dead Eye slow down ala Red Dead Redemption. It was an immaculate display of force, all but guaranteeing that while Jedi: Survivor is angling for a darker vibe, you’ll still be treated to some childlike wonder in the face of its many combat options.

A Jedi’s arsenal extends beyond their saber though and Jedi: Survivor has taken its expansive approach to skill trees and equally applied it to Cal’s Force abilities. For those concerned that the game would require you to re-learn skills from Jedi: Fallen Order, fear not. The game begins with no unmapped buttons, all your base abilities still present here including staples like Push, Pull and Slow.

These classics are revitalised through customisation, with new skill tiers allowing for more precise deployment for both offensive and defensive play. Often I would roll into a group fight, pinning one trooper against the ground while using the Force to yank another toward me, impaling him before twirling the saber in an exaggerated “come and get me” fashion – all in the span of a few seconds.

Maybe most intriguing of all though is Jedi: Survivor’s adapted approach to violence. Call me a softie but I always found the wanton animal killing in the first game to be a little distasteful, especially considering the Jedi’s creed. Seems like someone at Respawn agreed as now Cal can use the Force in creative ways to pacify not only animals but all sorts of foes. Holding down a bumper transforms the face buttons into higher level skills, like the impossibly useful Jedi mind trick that can turn foes into allies and even tame wild animal life.

In what can only be described as Star Wars’ answer to a Chocobo, Cal can tame wild Nekko, large creatures that you can ride to reach new locations and generally move much faster through the world on. Cal can use this newfound wildlife appreciation to tame flying mammals too, allowing for soaring, cinematic rides across vast stretches.

These creatures are an essential new component of Jedi: Survivor’s refreshed approach to world traversal and map design. Given the expanded nature of the game’s new worlds, of which we hear there are many and are far larger than we’re anticipating, Cal needed updated movement systems to match the scale. The best example being that the first game required you to hold the interact button to remain attached to climbable surfaces but Jedi: Survivor does away with this, meaning Cal can effortlessly move between spaces far faster. Throughout the world you’ll also find specific instances where Cal can use his new hook-shot to get through tightly timed puzzles and find hidden areas.

Exploration is consistently rewarded, both mechanically and in just outright Star Wars vibe-y goodness. Cal can find Health Essence in the world to boost his overall health (along with the Force meter, both of which also feature their own skill trees), as well as cosmetic items and, most importantly, settlement upgrades. Koboh looks to be something of a home for Cal in the game, with the Rambler’s Reach settlement housing a cantina he can upgrade over time into a hub of NPCs, shops, and personalised living quarters. Cal can find seedlings out in the world and plant them in a rooftop garden here too, allowing BD-1 and you the chance to craft your own little slice of paradise, another expansion on the first game’s Mantis planters.

There are about a dozen things in Rambler’s Reach, and Koboh at large, that I want to celebrate here. This place radiates cowboy Western energy from the moment you step foot in it, rescuing the locals from a rampaging raider in a very slick stand-off that only serves to further remind you how far Cal has come as both Jedi and general badass. Typical touches like easter eggs and fan-favourites are easy enough to spot but it’s the deeper cuts that make Jedi: Survivor’s world feel like a genuinely inhabited space.

On my way into town, I ran into a young girl named Mosey, a local farmer who raises Nekko and spoke with a warm, country twang in her voice. Nearby I found roaming raider gangs and quest giving characters in need of help. Cal’s Force Echo returns too, with one particularly killer moment showing me an echo of a local droid repairer working on a busted Separatist unit that quietly chirped at her about the Clone Wars – “Did we win?”

It’s difficult to talk about the story of Jedi: Survivor without straying into spoiler trouble but from what we’ve seen, Cal’s journey is set to catapult him into the farthest corners of Star Wars canon. The familiar touchstones of Empire and Sith Inquisitors in Jedi: Fallen Order were an enjoyable launching pad but it’s thrilling to see Cal navigate a whole new version of this galaxy. Lucasfilm has semi-recently launched its new canon timeline, The High Republic, and this largely book-focused venture will be playing a major role in the events of Jedi: Survivor.

Keen-eyed fans have already spotted the aesthetic signatures of this era in trailers for the game, a mere glimpse at the depth to which Respawn have incorporated these new ideas into its version of Star Wars.

I came away from my time with Jedi: Survivor a rambling mess of thoughts, half of which I haven’t even been able to address here. The game feels familiar but almost entirely unmoored from the trappings of the original, able to strike its own unique visual and mechanical vibe that honours the best of its predecessor but pushes its ideas and characters into far cooler new territory. It can be next to impossible to follow up on a beloved first entry but Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order looks set to stake its claim as the bold, dark and deeply interesting middle chapter of Respawn Entertainment’s own potential Star Wars trilogy.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Survivor is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on April 28th. The cheapest pre-order is $84 Standard Edition / $114 Deluxe Edition from Amazon with free delivery. 

The post Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Hands-On Preview – High Republic, Higher Hopes appeared first on Press Start.

I’m always stoked when a game quietly sneaks up on us. You know the type, usually something from the AA industry that had a cool cinematic trailer some time ago but has since faded from our collective minds, only jolted back when someone mentions it got a release date. Atlas Fallen is one of those games. Serving as both game developers and publishers under Focus Entertainment, Deck13 Interactive has been quietly churning out bangers for the last five years. Makers of the criminally underrated The Surge series, which took Soulslike combat and planted it into a sci-fi dystopia, Deck13 are no strangers to rock-solid action experiences.

With Atlas Fallen, the Frankfurt-based studio is riffing on a whole other flavour of action title, the heady-hack’n’slash. I’m not sure if that’s an official designation for anybody else but for me it calls to mind the original God of War trilogy and buried Xbox 360 era gems like Darksiders – games that deliver fast-paced, button-slamming combat but also reward deliberate, methodical mashing for those willing to engage at a deeper level. With a shiny new May 16th release date locked in, this third-person action RPG is starting to show the pedigree we’ve come to expect from this team. After spending a few hours in a preview build of the game, I’m left weary of its setting but absolutely enamoured by its systems.

But first the broad strokes, and in the case of Atlas Fallen they are definitely rather wide. The preview was light on details, dropping me into the game’s modest open-world without much fanfare around the plot and settings but from what I gleaned, we’re in for a trope-y fantasy tale. You’ll be playing as a customisable character who is thrust into an age-old war that has torn apart the world of Atlas as a ruling class of magic wielders do the bidding of an almighty god. There’s a litany of proper nouns thrown at you in quick succession by a talking gauntlet (the third of the year, if you’re counting) and while none of it really stuck with me, the looming stone god in the sky is certainly a striking image. 

With the fantasy exposition dutifully doled out for now, I was let loose into the game’s open world with the task of gathering up fragments of my almighty glove so that it may allow me to effectively fly. Atlas Fallen’s entire ecosystem revolves around this device, using its magic for traversal, combat and narrative structure. The latter has potential, hinting that the being trapped in the glove, Nyall, has more of a role to play in the war than first imagined (shocker), but the raw gameplay is undeniably a blast. Moving through the world is fast and loose; I’m hesitant to call it floaty because of the connotations but it truly is to the benefit of the player. Your character can propel themselves across any sandy surface, gliding along the fine particles regardless of incline, turning even basic exploration into a satisfying, quasi-skiing experience. Better yet you can transition from this glide into a substantial double jump that has some very generous gap correction, magnetising you to surfaces you should (by all rights) have missed. Unless it wants to gate you from an area, at which point this little boost will turn off in mildly frustrating ways. 

These great movement options seamlessly fold into Atlas Fallen’s combat, an easy to grasp but layered system that shows great potential. Fights are frenetic balancing acts that require a shifting combination of dodging, parrying and aggressive play to be successful. Alongside your gauntlet you’ve also got an Idol that is charged up by continuous, successful blows against foes. It allows for three healing charges, infinitely refillable provided you can stay on the offensive, as well as three additional super attacks that can be crafted and equipped in the game’s extensive Essence Stone system. These special skills are tiered, with progressively stronger moves gated behind a Momentum meter that, like the healing flask, fills up with repeated attacks. I started the game with a sick hammer throw, not too unlike Kratos’ axe as it magically flew into enemies, but eventually crafted a summonable tornado that would unleash a solid DPS blow to whatever I was targeting.

THE CHEAPEST PRE-ORDER: $79 AT AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

All of those traversal tricks still apply during enemy encounters too, with stages often designed to utilise free flowing movement and a variety of engagement methods. Weapons have two base attacks as your standard light and heavy moves can be altered by holding down the face button instead of tapping. For instance, my whip-blade-thingo could quickly swipe from afar but if I allowed time for a long hold, it would lodge into an enemy for extra damage and crowd control. Likewise the basic axe weapon could be turned into a hefty, downward hammer slam that would have environmental impact as well as raw damage. Momentum, in addition to unlocking skills, also allows your weapons to Ascend, unlocking beast mode versions of them that deal far more damage through flashier animations but likewise make you more prone to damage in turn. Atlas Fallen is smart enough to not lock you into this state though, as Momentum can be spent by holding down both triggers to unleash a massive blow.

Atlas Fallen’s menagerie of corrupted creatures, called Wraiths, are likewise worthy foes for your arsenal of tricks and tools. I have some minor reservations around repeated enemy designs; the short trailer at the end of the preview build showing off mostly the same rotation of Wraiths I had already grown a little tired of, but this is mostly concerning the smaller foes. Atlas Fallen’s bigger, nastier Wraiths are a delight; towering creatures with targetable body parts and naturally forming armour, these fights pushed the game’s systems to new limits. Scattered throughout the world, and typically found defending quest points, these Wraiths call Monster Hunter to mind but with the pacing of a God of War encounter. One instance saw me doing battle with a sand serpent whose head was its only vulnerable point and would frequently hide underground while summoning adds, forcing me to ground slam to trick it back onto the surface.

While most of my time with the game was centred around these fantastic, interlocking combat tools, there seems to be a whole RPG ecosystem ticking away in the background. Caladrias, the area I was able to partially explore, had this beautiful (if a little dry) aesthetic of a collapsed kingdom, taken back by the sand. The world is littered with NPCs who will happily give you quests big and small, often rewarding you with crafting materials and the game’s experience currency, Essence Dust. Which, while we’re on the topic, isn’t lost upon death, the game explicitly telling you that it won’t punish you for messing up as it wants players to experiment with different systems to find their preferred method of play.

It speaks to the overall tone I took away from Atlas Fallen, a borderline nostalgic action romp that presents a simple, good time while inviting deeper player exploration so that the experience might ascend like its signature weapons before it. I’m still not completely sold on its fantasy world but a stellar combat system, effortlessly cool exploration and decent array of foes make this a tale worth keeping earmarked for May.

Atlas Fallen is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on May 16th. Amazon has the cheapest pre-order price at $79 with free shipping.

The post Atlas Fallen Hands-On Preview – Power Glove appeared first on Press Start.

Scars Above is exactly the kind of game we talk about when we lament the loss of the AA game development scene. This sci-fi, third-person shooter has been (somewhat deservedly) held fast in comparison to the critically acclaimed Returnal, sharing more than a few recognisable similarities in both aesthetics and gameplay. It’s not a flattering comparison when made directly, but it does serve as something of a jumping off point for what Scars Above actually is.

Retailing at a neat sixty bucks Australian, Scars Above is a return to form for the budget title. A term we have largely come to deride in the market but one that I, and many others, associate with a particular itch that needs scratching. Sometimes, on a lazy Sunday arvo or a restless hump day evening, you just want to unwind and play a capital V. G. Video Game. It doesn’t demand a huge amount from you, happy to give you some solid action thrills and palatable reasons to delve down that extra path before barrelling ahead. Scars Above is that game. The comfortable and sorely missed B-grade shooter.

A mysterious and immense object, dubbed the Metahedron, has appeared above Earth. Its presence effectively sparks International Space Race 2: Alien Boogaloo as scientists across the globe attempt to engage the enigmatic ship. You play as Kate Ward, an accomplished young scientist who has the knowhow to propel her team of SCAR (Sentient Contact Assessment and Response) agents headlong into the not-at-all-ominous pyramid in the sky.

It’s here that Scars Above gently opens, landing its first of many surprise hits with a short but sweet section aboard your ship ala Mass Effect. You can roam about the shuttle, chatting with colleagues and assembling the basic tools of the game in their initial scientific context. Your primary gun only exists in the first place to deliver short bursts of energy to a stagnant engine. It’s neatly presented and relatively cute all things considered, even if the writing barely ticks above the notable line.

But as is wont to happen when a group of idealistically intrepid explorers toss themselves at the great unknown, things go terribly wrong. The Metahedron responds to your presence, directly interfacing with Kate through some means before whipping you across space and time. Stranded, and now eerily alone with only scant signs of the crash to follow as clues, Kate finds herself on Scars Above’s unknown alien world and the game begins in earnest. There is some proper noun writing involving an aloof alien hologram and the contractually obligated visions delivered by ancient alien technology, but moment-to-moment, this is largely the story of Kate’s survival. Soon after arriving you’ll be acquainted with Scars Above’s pillars system, effectively the Soulslike bonfires of your combat and exploration loop. 

From what I’ve seen so far, it seems as though Kate will have a limited arsenal of base elemental weapons that are bolstered by upgrades and a rather fetching set of tools. Ol’ reliable is your automatic electric rifle, affectionally referred to as VERA, but as you progress, you’ll also unlock several other launchers with distinct fire rates, feel and effect. Kate will frequently use her scientific wits to craft supplementary gadgets such as grenades, healing items and traps, forming a wholistic and flexible approach to combat encounters. For example, early on you’ll discover a means of crafting an orb of flammable liquid to accelerate the impact of your Thermic Charger, a cracker fire starter that requires a long hold before its ready to release. These are not revolutionary mechanics, but they are solid and the give and take between Kate and her environment is harsh and compelling enough to paper over any semi-rote trappings.

Scars Above is being pitched as a difficult experience and while there are certainly moments where the game can overwhelm if you’re not careful, its early impressions haven’t convinced me it fully understands how to be challenging. While exploring semi-linear levels you’ll run into a variety of mobs and more powerful standalone foes, scavenging limited ammo and the game’s base currency used for healing and gadgets. These sections are fun enough, diverting you to find little upgrades and so on, typically leading to a boss encounter where difficulty can suddenly spike. Sometimes this is because an alien creature requires dexterous dodging and weapon cycling, others because of a frustrating stun-lock, but all leading to repeated attempts.

Using a bonfire system like these pillars requires near-constantly compelling boss routes as you’ll be running them over and over in the worst-case scenario and Scars Above doesn’t quite have it down yet. Doubly so considering how little else there is to see and do on these paths after a first and thorough pass. Conversely, enemy variety was always a joy as Scars Above has taken some inspiration from classics such as John Carpenter’s The Thing. Grotesque and mutated creatures are everywhere, with some especially fun boss designs taking me right back to 1980s horror. As for environmental art, things are a little less inspired. The opening hours are the weakest aesthetically speaking, all flat greys and drab lighting, but as you explore further there are some surprisingly warmly rich environments to discover.

There is also a small but noticeable dissonance at the core of Scars Above and it’s one that a preview window isn’t enough to fully grapple with. Much ado has been made about Kate’s scientific background, both in marketing and the game’s world, as you’re levelling up comes by way of Knowledge collection rather than outright combat. This is primarily found in floating purple boxes littered through the environment, but I can forgive some goofy Video Game framing.

What’s less easy to parse is that Scars Above’s central language remains one of violence. An obvious enough statement about a third-person shooter of course but one that is incongruous with the game’s admirable greater ambitions. You’ll occasionally be prompted to enter first-person segments in which Kate observes something in the environment, scanning it several times to identify its structure and usefulness. A fascinating alien churns its stomach acid and fires its cortex to produce bile that can freeze things. It’s cool and weird and creepy. And of course, Kate must turn it into a gun.

Simmering just under the surface of Scars Above is a narrative about corrupted nature, of typically peaceful alien wildlife turned violent by some nebulous goop. You can feel it aching in these analysis moments, reminiscent of the best of Metroid Prime’s vibes. You can see it as you crest a hill and find a horde of grazing space bison, unconcerned and happy to hang with you in an untouched valley, waiting to be consumed by the violent machine churning around them. It’s why the game opens the way it does and it’s arguably the most interesting thing about Scars Above. How well it’s able to embody these themes and ideals remains to be seen but every time I would be rewarded with another ammo upgrade or means of slaughter, I wondered about my role as invader and if the game was prepared to grapple with it.

Still, amid these lofty concerns and some mildly grindy boss runs, Scars Above exhibits the promise of a good weekend game. Given the considerable dent I’ve already put in the game’s achievement list I can’t envision this outstaying its welcome and with a solid mechanical foundation and a little narrative luck, this will be a great way to kick off 2023’s gaming line-up. I just hope developers Mad Head Games are as bold and inquisitive with their world as Kate attempts to be in hers.

Scars Above comes to PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC on February 28, 2023.

The post Scars Above Preview – Wicked Science appeared first on Press Start.

I can’t help but feel for Sonic Frontiers. At a glance, it’s almost too easily categorised as Sonic Team’s attempt at Breath of the Wild, a comparison point the team has been quite doggedly avoiding during preview coverage of the game. This is, partly, kind of absurd given how obvious the comparison point is. Sonic Frontiers plops the titular blue blur into large, open-zone environments in which ancient technology has broken down and nature has largely returned to claim its land. Mysteries abound, friends must be rescued and existential questions answered. But Sonic Frontiers is so much more than its surface. It’s deeply strange, often throwing conflicting ideas at the player at breakneck speed, and ultimately not entirely successful. But it makes a bold and earnest attempt at the genre and despite losing a few rings along the way, still clears a comfortable A grade.

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $74.90 FROM AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

Sonic Frontiers sees Sonic and friends thrust into one of the series’ more touching tales. Eggman has meddled with forces far greater than even his genius and inadvertently trapped himself, and Sonic’s best mates, in a digital realm known as Cyber Space. Here, memories are warped by Godly AI processing power and rendered into explorable manifestations (in this case old Sonic levels and subtext-packed cutscenes). With the Chaos Emeralds and his loveable roster of friends and foes trapped on Starfall Islands, Sonic must venture forth into the unknown and explore a series of loosely connected open-zones, solving puzzles, completing levels and generally being a snarky little hero.

These islands arguably serve as Sonic Frontiers’ biggest formula shift since the series’ jump to 3D back in the late 90s. Massive in scale and crammed full of small activities to complete, these spaces are borderline seamless playgrounds designed to push Sonic’s speed and your platforming skills to new limits. Equipped with the divisive Boost mechanic on the right trigger, Sonic is effectively encouraged to tear arse through the five available islands, utilising a simple but engaging loop of momentum, combat and exploration geared toward constantly rewarding the player. To complement the speed of the Boost, Sonic is also able to create whimsical trails of light with the new Cyloop ability that has you hold down a button and draw a loop in any shape you can muster. This is often used to activate puzzles, lower enemy defences or uncover rings and other useful items.

The five islands are an amalgamation of gameplay ideas that individually function quite well but collectively can wear a little thin. There is great fun to be had in simple exploration with approachable momentum-based platforming and rail building for convenient traversal ala Death Stranding. The overworld is littered with springs, platforms and rails to bounce between, offering some form of collectable as a reward for the thirty or so seconds it might take you to complete them. It all works, managing to blend fixed and free camera work in a split second and realising the best of Sonic’s movement. Those collectable rewards are also directly impactful of your progression, as Sonic will need to gather up a surprising number of resources to move the story forward and unlock new things to do.

Cyber Space levels, the game’s small but gorgeously rendered line-up of classic Sonic platforming levels, need to be unlocked using gears that you can nab from harder combat encounters. These levels are all themed around old-school Sonic aesthetics and while not the biggest roster of influences has been drawn from, what’s here is some of the most fun you can have in Sonic Frontiers. Depending on how well you complete each level you’ll be rewarded with keys (one for finishing, S rank time, red coin collection and ring numbers) which are in turn used to unlock Chaos Emerald vaults.

There are also friendship tokens that are given liberally and used to unlock cutscenes with your mates, and some fishing coins you should absolutely keep an eye out for. The game’s fishing economy is wonderfully broken, allowing you to effectively buy your way through an island if you wish, all while chilling with Big and catching random junk as a goof. Along with the skill points to earn, attack and defence tokens to uncover, and the admittedly wonderful Kocos to collect, Sonic Frontiers can often feel a bit much. The tone of the open-zone is so deliberately serene and begs a flowstate from the player but the game’s overarching systems can harsh the vibe as it were, even if they’re relatively harmless individually.

As Sonic Frontiers begins to expand its adventure and you push from five to ten to the roughly twenty or so hours it takes for a first pass, these systems lose some shine. The back end of the game increasingly wrestles camera control away from you in unforgiving platforming sections while the level design itself begins to constrict your speed potential, effectively snuffing out a lot of the fun. There is also the game’s severe pop-in problem that can sometimes snap a new rail into existence mere meters away from you. The speed at which Sonic moves through these environments means I can empathise with the difficulty of rendering it all at once but when you need to be making split-second directional choices, it can be immensely frustrating to not know what might pop in next.

Given the shift to freestyle adventuring, Sonic is also forced to engage in combat more directly than ever before. Sonic Frontiers certainly understands the need for style and flair, often making you feel like a badarse with its flurry of hyper-speed, vibrant animations as Sonic lobs energy balls and booms at foes. Better still that all of this can be achieved in a remarkably approachable way, whether actively through basic button combinations or passively through the auto-skill ability you can toggle on and off once unlocked. Like exploration, combat just feels good to use, and just like exploration, it can wear thin over the game’s run.   

You’ll be unlocking high-level skills quite late in the game, though these are just additional button combinations to add to your roster, combat itself only fundamentally evolves based on what you’re fighting. Sonic Frontiers’ roster of robotic foes is largely a delight, a hobbled-together assortment of vaguely humanoid/animal creatures that require slightly different approaches to defeat without incident. The islands are also home to several larger-scale fights that utilise platforming and tighter timing to take down, often serving as a nice precursor to the game’s exceptionally cool major boss fights, the Titans.

Sonic Frontier’s Titan bosses are a standout of the game and are best experienced firsthand for a multitude of reasons. The first of these fights, Giganto, has been featured in marketing so I’m at least comfortable enough to talk about this walking anime cutscene of a monster. The Titans tower over the islands, using that scale to implement platforming segments before and sometimes during moment-to-moment, intensely cinematic combat sequences. All of this towering scale kicks off with unique, pop-rock tracks that bellow earnest lyrics about hope and new horizons while you effectively fight mecha-God. It rules so incredibly hard and I’m glad we have creators in the AAA space willing to be this dorky.

It’s a sense of style the rest of the game largely carries too, with a vibrant, if sensible, art direction and a general understanding of the power of going really fast through well lit-environments. The islands themselves aren’t anywhere near as varied as I would have liked though, with the initial greenery of Kronos dominating the palette for much. Ares was my favourite play space, with its harsh topography and small oasis pockets to discover in the arid deserts, but Chaos’ volcanic slopes and fragmented land mass left me a little cold. The final two islands, one of which is more of a gimmick, do lean back into forestation but the last one is a wonderful spot that made me wistful to be wrapping up.

Sonic Frontiers presents its story in a rather odd way though, which is especially sad given that the narrative beats and character interactions are all fairly compelling and fun. In an attempt to harness the power of the Chaos Emeralds, Eggman has made himself a daughter in the form of an AI project named Sage. As Sonic races against time to save his trapped friends, Sage will frequently show up to observe or interact with the gang and their impact on her is not inconsiderable. It’s a simple tale but ends with surprising weight, made all the more impactful by the game’s background narrative that doesn’t shy away from some pretty heavy stuff.

The game’s final moments had me cheering a little, and the cut to credits is shockingly poignant (even with the mid and post-credits scenes evening out the tone a little). The moment-to-moment writing is clumsily pronounced but again in an endearing way—Sage’s ruminations on what a “real” family is, Knuckles lamenting his life of service, Amy pondering love and Tails fighting imposter syndrome. The only one without a clear arc is Sonic but he works as a mirror to the cast in many ways and is more of an observer to the game’s true story. Which is all wonderful and good, but pacing issues and obfuscation dull its best qualities. There are some great Sonic lore elements at play here but you wouldn’t know it from what the main story gives you alone, instead, you’ll need to dive into menus and memos to find out.  

All of these disparate systems and uneven feelings can’t fully derail this ride though and despite my many small grievances, I still look back fondly on my time with Sonic Frontiers. Its open-world adolescence is awkward, yes, but endearingly so— you can feel how badly this game wants to impress and that carries it far further than I imagined it could. Its moment to moment gameplay remains fun from start to finish and while the middle section slumps somewhat, it pulls up just in time to deliver a gorgeous and absurd final act. At some point in the story Sage observes Sonic trying to help his friends and shakes her head, “He never stops. Clarification, he never gives up”. And yeah, Sonic Frontiers stumbles often, but just like its titular hero, it never gives up.

The post Sonic Frontiers Review – Brave New Zone appeared first on Press Start.

Sonic Frontiers seems like a weird game. A bold new step for one of the longest-running franchises in gaming. An immediately noticeable bit of immitative open-world design. Another silly adventure for Sonic and his friends. A strangely melancholic bit of tone work. New and old, colliding at high speed. Thanks to our friends at Sega I was recently able to hop over to Hawaii to play about six hours of the upcoming title. Our preview session ran us through three of the game’s islands and gave us access to late-game builds for combat and exploration. I’ve come away from my time with Sonic Frontiers both impressed and puzzled, intrigued to play more but cautious of its limitations.

In terms of premise and plot, I’m not much more informed than you if you’ve seen the trailers for the game. Sonic and friends are tracking the Chaos Emeralds to Starfall Island when a mysterious wormhole snatches Tails and Amy before stranding Sonic in a digital Hellscape. In this “Cyberspace”, Sonic’s memories are extracted and reworked into remastered classic levels, rippling with digital glitches, mildly concerning distortions and a banger soundtrack. Once completed, the blue dude is dropped onto Kronos, a lush green island plagued by robotic monstrosities, and Sonic Frontier’s open-world adventure sprawls out before you. After a disembodied voice informs Sonic that he is the key to solving the island’s digitised woes, you’re set free in large-scale open-play areas with a set of loose goals. 

Each island has an array of currencies to find, from friendship tokens to restore the memories of your captured friends, Portal Gears to unlock Cyberspace levels, keys to unlock Chaos Emeralds, Skill Pieces, purple coins and much more. Gathering these resources forms the main gameplay loop, whether through platforming exploration, combat or Cyberspace S Rank chasing. What I can’t quite tell yet is if this push into 3D-world collectathon design is at odds with Sonic Frontiers’ very clear inspiration points. This is a play space that is stylistically riffing on slower exploration with less specificity of goals. I’m hesitant to make the direct comparison we all know I want to make but let’s just say I wonder about the breathing room in this wild.  

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $74.90 FROM AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

Sonic Frontiers is undeniably fun to control so far though, perfectly capturing the “gotta go fast” spirit and transplanting it into an open-world. The islands are overflowing with platforming challenges, rails to grind, new wall-running mechanics to use and an absurd amount of precision jumps to make. These micro-challenges are enjoyable in their own right but also serve as vital traversal tools to help get you around often quite-large play areas. Sonic is equipped with a speed boost on the right trigger that propels him forward rapidly at the cost of a stamina wheel, but just straight running between objectives can be a little dry. Utilising the platforming elements in the world can often slingshot you toward a goal much faster, though occasionally will spit you out in the wrong direction if you’re not careful. 

It makes traversal an active part of the experience, not too dissimilar to Death Stranding’s deliberate walking mechanics only in Sonic Frontiers the gameplay is geared toward speed and fun, as opposed to plodding and meditative. Conversely, the pace at which you blast through these islands is somewhat hiding how empty they can feel. There is always something to jump on of course, but there is a distinct lack of character to the spaces between, almost no one to talk to or cultural signifiers to discover. There is a day/night cycle that changes puzzle availability, and some small native creatures to guide home, but these spaces still feel a little too empty. It doesn’t help that uncovering the map is a glacially slow task at times, requiring you to complete fun-enough puzzles to uncover woefully small sections of it at a time. 

Using the narrative conceit that the Cyberspace levels are specifically based on Sonic’s memories has allowed the Frontiers team to bask in the best of the series though and as a result these are explosively full of life. The upgraded visuals, along with Frontiers own glitch-punk-adjacent aesthetic, make for visually stunning sequences at blistering speeds and the precision gameplay had me fixated on getting the best outcome each and every time. Achieving an S Rank time, collecting all the red coins and so on will reward you with more keys for the overworld locks so you’re incentivised to spend time in Cyberspace, as well as the gameplay itself being naturally addictive. 

Once back on the islands, Sonic will also face down a surprisingly rich roster of foes in combat that works, most of the time. There is a simplicity to Sonic Frontiers’ translation of hedgehog combat into a 3D space, primarily relying on X button smashing and the occasional dodge or generous parry. There is skill tree that can be used to flesh out your approach, typically building up combos with X before tossing in one of the other face buttons to unleash a flurry of sonic booms, spin kicks and more. Sonic’s new Cyloop, which has you hold down Y and trailing light behind you until you close the loop, can also be used blast through enemy shields and discover secrets in the overworld.

It’s a decent set of tools, impactful to use and easy to pick up, but balancing is holding back its potential. Enemy health seems largely stagnant across the three islands I played, ranging from hour one to roughly eleven of the game, according to the save data. There were mild changes to movement complexity but each foe went down just as easy as the last, even after I bumped the difficulty up to Hard. Ostensibly I understand the need for approachability but without any noticeable means of making these engagements more complex, I worry about the longevity of combat over five islands. 

Players can also unlock a skill that will automatically unleash higher level skills without the need for button combinations, which I thought was a really neat way of allowing all players to feel cool during combat, regardless of skill level. When you first start up Sonic Frontiers it gives you the standard difficulty options but also prompts you to choose between distinct gameplay styles geared around familiarity with 3D play spaces. You can even tweak Sonic’s boost speed in the options menu, making for a game that is clearly trying to make itself as approachable as possible to old and new fans. 

Elsewhere, boss encounters are phenomenally fun and frequently goofy in the best way possible. The islands are littered with Guardian bosses of varying scale and complexity, most of which incorporate some platforming elements for good measure. These fights are entirely optional, with each robotic beast roaming the lands in their own way, waiting for you to enter into the danger zone before attacking. Likewise, if you feel underpowered or even disinterested, just slam that boost and run Sonic in the other direction to disengage the fight – the damage you deal will even be there when you come back. It’s a remarkably relaxed approach to open-world combat that makes the boss designs, an eclectic collection of capital A anime concepts, all the sweeter for it.

The presiding design ethos of Sonic Frontiers being one of relaxed approachability is also felt in its tone and aesthetic choices. This is a more serious adventure than we’ve seen before for the blue hedgehog group, with the initial island in particular feeling quite sombre at times, but Cyberspace allows for a constant balance of light and “dark” vibes. While players have seen Kronos and Ares before, we got time with Chaos, a volcanic wasteland island that hints that this game’s art direction holds much more potential than we know. The soundtrack, from what I’ve heard, is immaculate too, boasting some truly beautiful overworld themes and outright banger rock-pop tracks. 

After half a dozen hours with Sonic Frontiers I can’t deny that I have reservations but I’ve been itching to play more of it ever since. There’s a gem (emerald, if you will) of joy in its multi-layered design choices, a compelling core amid potentially clashing vibes and ideas that compels me to come back to it. As we noted in our initial hands-on preview, there are still technical concerns here too with noticeable pop-in and visual issues, but hopefully these will be ironed out in the weeks to come before release. For now, Sonic Frontiers has at the very least proved its concept and makes for an approachable, light on its feet adventure that may just take 2022 entirely by surprise after all.

Sonic Frontiers releases on November 8th, 2022 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch and PC.

Amazon currently has the cheapest price at $74.90 with free shipping.

The author of this article attended a Sonic Frontiers preview event in Hawaii. Flights and accommodation were provided by SEGA.

The post Sonic Frontiers Hands-On Preview – Rings of Power appeared first on Press Start.

As the sun settled on Kona’s breathtaking shoreline and the breeze carried the smell of salt water and tropics up to the third-story conference room, I couldn’t help but think about how sweaty I must have looked. It was the end of two full days of Sonic Frontiers mayhem on the famous Hawaiian “big island”, our mates over at Sega having brought us out for an extensive hands-on preview of the upcoming title. You can read my full thoughts on that here, but the game is shaping up to be one of the more interesting titles of 2022 and as I sat there waiting for my time to interview Sonic producer and legend Takashi Iizuka, all I could think about was how bloody hot it was.

Fortunately for me, and Sonic fans everywhere, Iizuka San was graciously relaxed about both the heat and his team’s latest effort. It’s not hard to see why, Sonic Frontiers has us cautiously optimistic about its transition from linear platforming to open-world exploration, a shift Sonic Team has been preparing for for quite some time. As the light left us and the air conditioner blessedly finally kicked in, Iizuka San and I unpacked the moving parts behind Sonic Frontiers’ combat and open-world systems before diving head-first into the game’s spiritual inspirations and aspirations.

First up, I know it’s been a long couple of days, so thank you for coming out at the end of it to chat. I appreciate it. So, Sonic Frontiers is quite a change for the iconic blue hedgehog. How does it feel to create a game that is such a departure for the franchise?

Takashi Iizuka: Yes, we changed a lot from the previous Sonic titles and to be honest, Iwas a little bit nervous to show this brand-new product to people for the first time. But actually, when we announced the title, we were play testing as well at the same time and really trying to figure out, hearing from the people playing the game outside of our company and outside of the development team, what feedback they had from us on the game – how they felt about the open zone concept and really listening to what they were saying and what they wanted and what they want to change. And spending the time with the development team using the user playtest feedback to change the game to improve the game and to balance it. And because all that work went in, the development team really did a great job listening to all that feedback and improving the game and getting it to be what even other people were excited to play. It really shows at Gamescom and TGS, we saw a lot of people really excited about the game content and it’s because of all the hard work put into improving the game that we were able to get there.

So were there specific things that you wanted to retain from older titles, whether it was mechanics, iconography, or anything like that?

Takashi Iizuka: When we talk about Sonic, the high-speed action and really the speed is something that we need to be very, very respectful of because that kind of is the lifeblood of the character and the experience that people are having. So, all of the game systems that we were putting into play, Cyberspace was one of those game systems that we had in the concept originally and we were going to deliver. And Cyberspace is going to be that high-speed Sonic action that everyone knows and loves. The team was very confident that they’d be able to deliver something that felt like that high-speed action. But when we talk about moving into the open area and what are we going to do in that open area and how is it going to get that Sonic-y high speed gameplay down, that was one of the elements that the team wanted to make sure in the very early stages they were getting right and getting in well.

Sounds great, and you sort of answered my next question about how early the Cyberspace portions were included in the game. But I guess I just want to talk on specifically how the Cyberspace parts contrast with the open space and how you feel those two things work together to form Sonic Frontiers?

Takashi Iizuka: When we talk about Cyberspace and the Open Zone area, Kishimoto-san, the director of the title, has also kind of stated this before, that the inspiration behind the Open Zone format was really to create a playable world map that Sonic could run around on. And the whole purpose of that map was to get you into the Cyberspace areas, to get you into the core gameplay, which is that linear, high-speed Sonic action. And that was really the idea that it started with. But when they started making that, they realized they had this big map that you could kind of run around as Sonic and you get into the Cyberspace areas, and it felt very good as Sonic in the Cyberspace areas, but when you go back into the open area map, it didn’t feel like there was anything really to do except just kind of walk around. And as they were developing the game, they realized, we need to add a little bit more to this map to really make it something playable and fun, because there’s nothing really to do here. And so they started adding all these new elements, new gimmicks, they added boss battles and all these other things to do on the map.

So most of the gameplay used to be like Cyberspace, but next thing you know, the map is becoming this whole new, huge piece of gameplay in addition to the Cyberspace content that they were planning on.

Speaking of those boss battles, there are quite a few impressive and very scary enemy designs littered throughout the game. Can you talk a bit about how you and the team were inspired to create these things? I noticed a little bit of Evangelion in there, maybe?

Takashi Iizuka, laughing: In usual Sonic games, we have Eggman as the villain, and all of the kind of enemies are Eggman created robots, which are usually kind of animal themed designs as robotic enemies. But in this game, the enemies are not created by Eggman. These are completely strange new enemies not made by Eggman. What are they doing here on this island? Who created them? Why are they attacking Sonic? Like, what is even going on? These are all the mysterious elements that we wanted people to feel when they saw these original enemies on the very first map. This is not a usual Sonic and these are not usual Sonic enemies. Sonic, as well, doesn’t know what these enemies are, what they’re doing here, who made them. And that was part of the whole design concept of the world and of the environment. And the story that they wanted to tell is to really get into more of that mysterious look and feel, to have people really think about what these enemies are and maybe why they’re designed like that. The enemy design especially doesn’t look like a typical Sonic enemy design. And that’s intentionally done because they wanted to bring that mystery in and not have it feel like just a usual Sonic enemy.

So, combat seems very easy to pick up, but tricky to fully master. How did the team go about balancing Sonic skills for new and old players in this new world?

Takashi Iizuka: So yes, the boss battles in the game are kind of as important as the Cyberspace levels. And making sure the battles felt good was important because Sonic games never really had battle systems, enemies that you would stop and fight because you’re always running to the end goal. But with the open zone format of the game, we’re now allowing people this open space to run around and do what they want. If there’s an enemy that’s on the map, they can choose to not engage it, or they can choose to engage it, or they can choose to engage it and say, “I actually don’t like this and I want to run away”. So, making sure the boss battles felt good, making sure the boss battles felt like something you wanted to do because you had the choice to do it or to just not even do it at all, was very key to them being a unique and fun element of gameplay. So, yes, we have the high-speed action as the core Sonic gameplay. Yes, a lot of our core fans have a lot of game skills and game time put in, but we don’t really have boss battles in there, so we think even our core gamers, our core Sonic fans, may not be all that skilled at boss battles.

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $74.90 FROM AMAZON WITH FREE SHIPPING

So we wanted to make sure boss battles are fun, but if everyone can’t do it and they’re not going to be very easily maybe picked up, we wanted to have a bunch of actions and abilities and things that Sonic could do that you could unlock and say, hey, I’m not really good at battle, but if I have these abilities, I think I can defeat these people. That was kind of the idea that brought forth the skill tree to say, if you want to do the high-speed action abilities, yes, you can do that. If you want to do battle, here are the different features or the different actions that Sonic can be upgraded to, to make battle easier. To make sure, even if you’re not, you know, if you’re a new player or you’re a core player who maybe isn’t all that good at battle, you can still have a lot of fun. And we’re giving you the ability to make Sonic strong enough to defeat enemies at the skill level that you’re comfortable with.

Yeah, fantastic. So I guess pivoting a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration behind the different islands and why are they named after Greek gods?

Takashi Iizuka, feigning the look of a kid caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar: All the namings have a lot of meaning in the world, and a lot of the meaning is going to be kind of tied into the story and the things that are happening in the story. So, the Chaos Island specifically is something that will touch on that…so the Titans that exist on the islands, and again, in English, they’re being called Titans. But if you play the game in Japanese, they’re going to be called Kyojin or Kyoshin and the Kyo is going to be like gigantic or monstrous, very large. And the Jin or the Shin part is going to be God. And this isn’t like a Christian Islamic God. It’s probably going to be more of like, the Eastern gods that exist within this world. It’s going to probably have that more of a feeling to it. Each one of the Starfall Islands has one of these enormous gods that kind of presides over the island. So, you can think of the entire Starfall Islands as islands where these enormous deities do exist.

Wait, so is that an exclusive story point reveal?

Takashi Iizuka and the translator both laugh.

The opening hour of the game is very subdued and almost sad sometimes. I found this contrasted with the more frantic energy of Cyberspace and I was wondering how you feel about those two tones and what you want the player to feel when they’re playing through those early hours?

Takashi Iizuka: The theme and the tone is really a serious and a mysterious tone, especially on that first island. You’re getting to the island, it’s kind of like, what is this place? Why am I here? I don’t understand what’s going on. These are kind of the emotions and thoughts that Sonic is having as well in the very beginning. So, they did want to make sure people were interested in what was going on and not told what was going on, but having them want to explore and want to figure out and want to find more about the story of the Starfall Islands and the story of what the characters are doing there. But Sonic is still a fun and happy game, so we’re not going to be like, overly serious. This isn’t like we’re going to really hit you over the head with the sad, sad, sad storytelling. We do have a lot of stuff that we want to put in there because it’s fun. We have the Kocos, the creatures that live on the islands. We have Big the Cat! Like, what’s he doing in Cyberspace? And we’re fishing?!

We want to include these things that are not so serious in because it’s still a Sonic game and we still want people to laugh and have fun and not just be like a sad, depressing story. It is supposed to be serious, but we’re still light-hearted.

Lastly, I wouldn’t be much of a games journalist if I didn’t ask this while I had the chance. Is there a chance we’re going to see Shadow in the game?

Takashi Iizuka: Ah, No (laughs). Shadow is one of my favourite characters, and I definitely want to see Shadow in more content. So, I’m going to try to include more Shadow in content moving forward.

Sonic Frontiers releases on November 8, 2022 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch and PC.

Amazon currently has the cheapest price at $74.90 with free shipping.

The author of this article attended a Sonic Frontiers preview event in Hawaii. Flights and accommodation were provided by SEGA.

The post Sonic Frontiers Interview – Open Worlds, Boss Fights And Ancient Mythology With Takashi Iizuka appeared first on Press Start.

While the rest of us have been lamenting the inevitable slate of delays hitting the 2022 release schedule, Davide Soliani and the folks at Ubisoft Milan and Paris have been hard at work. The 2017 surprise hit Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle smashed together Nintendo’s iconic Italian and Ubisoft’s bizarre Rabbids, in the process creating one of the Switch’s best titles. The strange blend of cartoonish franchises and rich turn-based tactical gameplay worked a charm and now, half a decade later, Soliani and the team are pushing the hybrid of their own making into fantastic new places. 

I recently had the chance to play a solid chunk of the sequel, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, and found it to be as fun as the original title. Only this time, the game is forefronting player freedom and expression in surprising ways. I was fortunate enough to pick Soliani’s brain about how this new title has evolved the genre, taken surprise inspirations and is serving up maybe the most Twitter flirted rendition of Peach I’ve ever seen.

What were the key elements the team wanted to focus on when creating the sequel? 

After the release of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and Donkey Kong Adventure, the team wanted to expand on the game’s universe. We were all excited about the beautiful and kind reception we had with our players and the community that we started to establish since then.

We had our own goal for the game, but we also spent time speaking with our players, listening to their desire. I believe that today, Sparks of Hope Is reflecting this intersection of desires.

I believe that what is defining the game today are many things, but three elements clearly stand out: Real Time Movement, Exploration and Synergies.

It’s not easy to change something that the player appreciated so much in Kingdom Battle as the combat system, but everyone in the team wanted to bring something more, something new, to keep surprising our players. Keeping a clear foundation on the tactical aspect of the game, we wanted to give the freedom to the players to move their character inside an area of movement instead of moving BEEP-0, as a cursor. This allows the players to quickly go where they want to, check if there’s enemies in reach for an attack or vault over a cover to dash some enemies and then coming back and taking your time to think about the next move, without having to confirm the end of your movement phase. This feeling of freedom was really important to us, and I believe it’s a paradigm shift in our combat system which is giving way more possibilities compared to the previous titles of Mario + Rabbids.

The second element is the exploration. Many players in the past told me they loved the game’s environments, and they would have loved to explore them all. In Sparks of Hope, it’s finally possible and players can decide to explore the planets as they please. Do they want to keep following the critical path of the game and advancing on the game’s story or do they want to enjoy the side content more? Players’ agency was a fundamental aspect for us to inject in exploration.

Last point are the Sparks. They are the buddies of our Heroes, and they are also powerful creatures that can be evolved through the game to make them stronger and stronger. They are also a modular element as they can be equipped on any hero. This gives additional freedom to our players to create even more incredible synergies in combat, between the heroes. I’m still doing many walkthroughs of the game, and even so, I’m still finding new ways of combining those powers together to solve different battle challenges.

Super Mario Galaxy has obviously played a huge role in the tone and lore of this game, how did you come to this decision and what kind of Easter eggs can fans be on the lookout for in the game? 

Sparks of Hope is set in the universe of Mario + Rabbids, so there’s no direct link with Mario Galaxy. It’s a different story with a different universe. As a team, we are always inspired by many elements of the Mario universe and we are lucky enough to be able to pick different elements out of this universe that are really inspiring us. Lumas from Mario Galaxy were definitely one of those elements.

I would love to suggest to our players who enjoy spending time to know the lore of a game, to find all the Echo Memories sparse through the game. Our Narrative team and our script writer poured their hearts on that, we hope that you will find the Echo Memories a pleasing addition. 

In shifting to small open sandbox environments what things did the team consider filling the world with and what do you think this free roam offers players?

For us, the main goal was to make sure the player could always feel joy when exploring the planets. Second, we wanted to make sure they could always find something to do; small real time challenges, quests to help the villagers, combat opportunities, secrets, and a good amount of humour to glue everything together.

On top of that, we also wanted to make sure that the experience could keep offering some interest. For example, players can engage in combat with a roaming enemy and the ensuing battle will always be different.

Speaking of freedom, the ability to freely move around the battlefield with the characters, as well as the huge variety of special abilities, definitely give the impression you want this game to feel less strict than the first. How did the team come to this decision and why do you think it’s important?

Our aim was to make sure the players could enjoy freedom in their movement phase. We are always looking into how to open up the tactical genre and to renew what we are offering so this was a nice challenge for us; making sure the player could feel at home with our game, as it’s based on the foundations of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, but at the same time, surprising them with a new way of interacting with the game, an evolution that could bring new way of playing.

In Sparks of Hope it’s possible to quickly operate actions that in the previous game were more mechanical as it was requiring the players to browse and select their skills over an action console. Today you can do many things within the movement phase.

Let’s take Mario as an example. With Mario, a player can run over the battleground as they please, use Mario to team jump in real time on a teammate, stomp an enemy during the trajectory, and land close to a Bob-omb. Mario, within the same movement phase, can dash the Bob-omb and grab it and throw it against a cluster of enemies, maybe Goombas. But it could be also the other way. Mario could dash a Bob-omb, grab it, and then team jump over a teammate to go further away and once landed, finally being able to throw it against enemies that were previously too far to be damaged.

Those are just small examples of the level of freedom and synergy you can have with the free movement, and the character’s skills.

Grant Kirkhope’s soundtrack for the first game was a huge part of its magic and so far it seems as though the music for the sequel is even better. What has it been like working with such icons as Kirkhope, Coker and Shimomura?

As usual, working with Grant is a real pleasure. I’m in love with his style and he is always pushing to get the best out of his music. I also believe that in Sparks of Hope, Grant Kirkhope really reached an incredible level of quality.

He is often telling me that he believes to have written the best music of his career in Sparks of Hope.

As Sparks of Hope is a space journey through different planets, with different NPC and stories, we thought that working with such legendary composer as Yoko Shimomura and Gareth Coker would allow us to enrich our palette of emotions even more. The real challenge for us, especially for Romain Brillaud, the Audio Director, was to make sure to obtain both a diverse and homogeneous output, musically speaking, from all of them. Diverse, because it was important for us to get the most out of their legendary skills, but also homogeneous, in order to have a field rouge through the journey. 

Rabbid Peach has some of my favourite dialogue in the game so far and she strikes me as very “online” with her mannerisms and language. How does the writing team go about influences for comedy in the game?

I’m so happy about your feedback and I believed the Narrative team and the script writer will be happy as well. We really wanted to depict each character psychology in the best way possible to make them really pop out, and voices as being really important to achieve this goal. For example, I’m laughing a lot while using Rabbid Mario in combat just for the things he is saying, or Luigi when he is shaking bushes or trees.

Rabbid Peach is the diva of the group, she really takes care of her audience and we believe this aspect of her is helping some players to create a bridge between them and the character, as well as other players will be more inclined to enjoy the silent mood of Edge, or goofiness of Rabbid Mario.

Mario + Rabbids releases on Nintendo Switch on October 20th. The cheapest copy is currently $69 with free shipping.

The post Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope Interview: Building On And Reinventing A Breakaway Hit appeared first on Press Start.

Pop culture cross-over events and multiverses almost feel a little long in the tooth at the moment. Games like Fortnite, which currently features *checks notes*, Spider-Gwen flinging chrome grenades at Darth Vader, have made such mammoth strides in IP cross-pollination that the concept itself has lost some of its shine. But before this deluge of absurd event marketing, Nintendo paired up with Ubisoft to release the almost unassuming Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle back in 2017. A turn-based tactics game that took characters from the Super Mario and Rabbids franchises, blending them together in an impressively approachable riff on the usually complex genre.

Now, the two gaming juggernauts have reunited for a surprising sequel that is already shaping up to outpace the original, if not outwit. Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is a bombastic and silly game, a colourful explosion of freeform tactical battle mechanics and considered open-world design. I was fortunate enough to experience a substantial portion of the upcoming title earlier this month, playing around four hours of both early and mid-game combat, exploration and more. What I came away with was both an appreciation for the strides made since the first game and a need to jump back into this toybox again as soon as possible.

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope really wants you to have a good time. This might seem like a redundant statement for (most) games, but in building on the original, this sequel forefronts a sense of open wonder and player expression. The titular Mario and Rabbids are now in bizarre co-existence, with iconic characters from Nintendo’s flagship franchise and their respective weirdo-counterparts frolicking about in the Mushroom Kingdom. Not missing a beat from the first game, the writing and humour on display here are endearing and laugh-out-loud funny at times. The inherent goofiness of these characters living together, even before the story kicks off in earnest, is an entertaining concept. 

THE CHEAPEST COPY: $69 WITH FREE SHIPPING FROM AMAZON

Peace times are a rare treat in the Mushroom Kingdom however and it doesn’t take long for Sparks of Hope to introduce its great new foe, Cursa. This being from the great beyond strikes an image somewhere between Pixar and Lovecraft, a cartoonish and menacing force for Mario and his mates to tackle. Through mysterious magic known as Darkmess, Cursa has been wreaking destructive mayhem through the galaxy, causing the Sparks to seek help from our heroes. Sparks are an ungodly union between Rabbid and Lumas, each sporting their own unique style and helpful combat capabilities. So the gang piles aboard an AI-piloted spaceship and sets off into the galaxy to clean up the Darkmess and probably make some new friends along the way.  

If there was a core idea that Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is playing with it is undeniably player freedom. The biggest shift from the first game is the move to small but dense sandbox environments that serve as over-worlds between battles. In the preview build I played I was able to fully explore the game’s first planet, Beacon Beach, which served as a fantastic primer for the game’s new design ethos.

You are now equipped with a quest log and map begging you to explore these fantastical environments. Red Coin challenges have made their way over from other Mario titles, making these spaces feel much more of a piece with Nintendo’s overarching plumber franchise. Elsewhere you can chat with locals to take on side-quests, collect coins that can be spent at a vendor for power-ups, and of course, engage in combat.

Taking notes from other JRPG worlds, combat in Sparks of Hope is kicked off by approaching, or being approached by, enemies in the overworld with level indicators over their heads. These encounters rip you away into small pocket dimensions themed after the aesthetics of the current planet. In these spaces, Sparks of Hope continues to evolve on its promise of player freedom with a revamped movement system and impressive range of combat options. Gone are the restrictive grids and pre-set movements of the first game, instead a fully traversable portion of the arena opens before you.

Within this space, you can run around, engage with the other characters in your squad, use warp pipes and even slide into enemies for a free hit of damage before combat proper kicks off. This shift to a looser movement system works remarkably well but did occasionally land me in annoying hot water as I would accidentally slide into enemy scopes due to the game’s maybe too slippery run animations.

Drilling deeper into the game’s systems, you’ll find a robust set of combat options thanks to the addition of the Sparks. These odd little globules all come equipped with unique powers ranging from elemental weapon coatings, defensive shields that reflect or disperse incoming damage and a variety of attack multipliers, to name a few. Each member of your team can have two Sparks equipped, inviting you to cleverly balance skills and Spark types before each battle kicks off. Alongside a generous difficulty modifier, you’re able to take a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield before your first move, noting enemy types, locations and traits. 

I came away from every encounter with the strong impression that Sparks of Hope really wants you to thrive in its freeform systems. A welcome warmth for a genre typically defined by its top-heavy mechanics and difficulty. Additionally, the game has a decent skill tree with several upgrade paths for each character, notably not locking you into any choice with an easy-to-use refund button for spent skill points. Those vendors I mentioned earlier also play a part in the game’s approachability, offering you new weapons and consumable items that can drastically alter the battlefield through terrain damage and party member buffs.

During my time with the game, I was able to play several different battle styles as well as explore two of the game’s gorgeous dungeons. Battles range from outright assaults to pushing forward in a location to reach an endzone, but across all levels of complexity, the interplay between the party remained engaging. Dungeons shake up the formula even more, with overworld puzzles that incorporate pattern recognition, lite-stealth and more. The two dungeons I played weren’t exactly complex (bar one oddly confounding water puzzle), but the chance to spend time in the ambience of these colourful worlds was a delight all the same. There is a staggering amount of care put into the lore of the game and you can feel all of it while exploring open-ended environments.   

I’d also be remiss to not prime you for just how joyous Sparks of Hope’s aesthetics, tone and music are. I mentioned Pixar earlier and it’s difficult to place a more suitable comparison point for the game’s vibe. This is a romp of an adventure through and through, overflowing with memorably drawn locations and characters. Watching Mario and co. throw themselves into battle and beyond radiates fun, no encounter too serious for a joke to not punctuate the tension. It helps then that the writing is as sharp as the first game so far, with mentions of “ghosting” and “serving looks” thrown around making it all feel very online in a way that works far better than it should. 

Last, but most certainly not least, is the game’s score, which I think I highlighted about six times in my preview notes. Grant Kirkhope, a master of video game scores and composer of the first game’s soundtrack, returns in full force with the help of Yoko Shimomura and Gareth Coker. This frankly absurdly talented lineup has crafted something fantastic in Sparks of Hope. Stellar sound design underscores the trio’s soundtrack, a full-bodied and diverse mix of bombastic calls to adventure and quietly charming overworld beats. 

Truth be told there are about a dozen other things I want to tell you about from my time with Sparks of Hope but with the game’s release right around the corner, some of those surprises will have to wait. For now, I’ve come away from my time with the game with a keen understanding of its core ethos and design goals, two things that beautifully build on what the original accomplished half a decade ago. Sparks of Hope is begging to be enjoyed and feels primed to take the end of the year by storm. 

Mario + Rabbids releases on Nintendo Switch on October 20th. The cheapest copy is currently $69 with free shipping.

The post Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope Hands-On Preview – Old Toys, New Tricks appeared first on Press Start.

I don’t think I’m alone in being more conscious of time these days. These past couple of years haven’t been our collective best, a daily reminder that very little can be taken for granted. Likewise, we have witnessed our national healthcare system pushed to the limit and then some, another unavoidable example of who we are and what we stand to lose. What this nationwide freefall has left me with is a keen awareness of time and the indispensable nature of human kindness. Wayward Strand is a game that fundamentally understands this too. The ways we use and waste time, the passage of it, the warmth of memory and the pain of an old wound. It achieves this vision while being earnestly Australian too, with a familiar vibe that encompasses this simple but effective narrative experience.  

Wayward Strand sees you fill the shoes of Casey Beaumaris, a young teenager trying to make the most of her school holidays in the summer of 1978, Australia. Bored and restless, Casey has thrown herself into her writing and is looking to pen the ultimate expose for the school paper. Her subject is the magnificent airborne hospital that floats gently above the red earth, filling the blue skies with its lavish and omnipresent design. Joining her mother for the long weekend aboard the ship, Casey must use the three days to both investigate the ship and try to help the elderly patients who occupy its aesthetically rich halls.

Melbourne based developers Ghost Pattern have been open about the intentional limitations of Wayward Strand’s narrative design. Aboard the ship are over a dozen folks to interact with, but as Casey’s three days march forward, she won’t have time to discover everyone’s stories. The game wants you to make choices and make your peace with what you may miss, a built-in hook for replayability and a nice mechanical riff on the game’s thesis on time itself. To help you keep track of all these threads, Casey comes equipped with a journal for noting routine times, locations and points of interest. You can also be quickly directed toward a resident by clicking on their portrait in the journal and following an arrow.

Guiding Casey through the ship is a smooth experience, requiring no more than basic inputs to move about and interact with the game’s many friendly faces. Using simple arrows at the bottom of the screen, Casey will either walk or jog left or right, stopping to allow contextual options like going up or down stairs, entering a patient’s room or talking to a passerby. Casey can also be a bit of a snoop, hiding behind walls to eavesdrop on conversations and overhear clues or hints as to where to go next. It’s all very open, a freeform experience that allows the player to dictate their own path and pace.

Once you’ve chosen who you’d like to spend some precious time with, Casey enters into a charming conversation wheel system with them. Baseline options usually allow you to start a chat with branching dialogue, have a bit of a nosey around their belongings, leave or simply sit a while and allow the air to settle. Which of these you lean toward will vary based on the person you’re trying to talk with. Some patients prefer a slower-paced conversation, the silence you leave allowing them to bring up topics of their own choosing. Others will gleefully answer your questions, even if it’s with polite bemusement. Others still will tell you to bugger off if they’re too tired.

Wayward Strand does a terrific job of situating you in Casey’s reality thanks to its writing. Every single one of the people you can meet on the good ship feels unique and fully realised. By the end of my first day onboard I had already fallen in love with the kindly, slow talking Mr. Pruess, and promptly decided to walk the other way when Esther Fitzgerald would be moseying down the hall. You’ll undoubtedly find your own favourites, your own stories and worlds that appeal to you and make you compelled to spend your time in your own manner. The collision of the game’s Australian nature and its gorgeous writing results in a feeling not too dissimilar to visiting your grandparents when you were a child. A luxury so few of us have these days.

The writing is in turn elevated by Wayward Strand’s amazing cast of voice actors who bring their respective quirky characters to life. Nancy Curtis plays Casey with pitch-perfect youthful earnestness, a layered portrait of a young woman confused, intrigued and frustrated by the world around her. Elsewhere a litany of Australian stars grace the halls, including familiar faces from iconic shows such as Neighbours, Blue Heelers and more. All of these performances go a long way to realising Wayward Strand’s unique Aussie world, a place that manages to capture the light, and grit, of people just trying their best.

Wayward Strand is also obviously a game with things on its mind. The heightened reality of its airborne hospital is something of a cosy trap. A warm and vaguely familiar glow obscures some deeply meditative words on medicine as a system, the power of people, war, and of course, death. Ghost Pattern’s public decrying of crunch culture in game development feels of a piece with the commentary in the game. A definitive and gently amusing riff on how certain systems can steamroll good people and the damage caused in turn. It never shies away from the harsher truths of the human condition but is always ready to offer a shoulder when it all feels a bit overwhelming.  

While the game is a visual delight and a moving meditation on emotional subjects, it can sometimes waver in its ability to grasp the player. Wayward Strand is a strikingly slow experience in ways I often adored but its pacing being player-driven can lead to some slumps. The inability to save is the real killer here, as the game only autosaves after the completion of a full day at the hospital, approximately an hour and a half in real time. I can appreciate that this is done to avoid save scumming the narrative but in practice, it can lead to some tiring pushes or even lost progress.  

The post Wayward Strand Review – Everybody Needs Good Neighbours  appeared first on Press Start.