Table of contents for No. 178 in GamesTM

The rise of Dishonored as one of the most highly respected, creative and passionately followed games of the modern era strikes me as a story of perseverance on the part of Arkane. This isn’t a studio with a back catalogue of massive hits behind it, but it is a studio with a long list of promising projects and high-profile suitors. That the likes of Steven Spielberg and EA would tap up this team to support a project (LMNO, which actually never happened) reveals a great deal about the talent and potential the industry was seeing in Arkane long before the rest of us could witness it. Another project I recall getting very excited about around 2008 was The Crossing, an ambitious merger of single-player narrative experience with multiplayer as you…

“ A stunning piece of technology that struggles to find a reason for being in the living room ” “Should I buy an Xbox One S?” That’s the question that has been asked by gamers across the globe ever since Microsoft unveiled its new beautiful white box at E3. By standing (quite literally, as the console can be positioned vertically) at some 40 per cent smaller than the original Xbox One, in offering a new (and hugely improved) controller, in ditching Kinect and hiding the power brick inside the box, the Xbox One S is the must own piece of hardware for 2016. Unless you already own an Xbox One. Unless you are eager to play the likes of Halo and Forza in virtual reality or excited by the prospect…

“I find some of the hardcore ones pretty difficult and I really enjoyed that one ” NICK CHANNON, SENIOR PRODUCER, EA CANADA “The last game I played a lot was Battlefront and I’m not saying it just because it was an EA game, it was just the last one I played. For me, just being able to play a shooter and feel good in it and actually be able to get up the leader board was great. I find some of the hardcore ones pretty difficult and I really enjoyed that one. Just being immersed in that world, too. That was a game I played a lot. It was excellent.”…

CONCEPT A young boy and a large, curious creature must team up to escape a compound they have both found themselves prisoners in INFORMATION Details Format: PS4 Origin: Japan Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment Developer: genDesign, SIE Japan Studio Release: 28 October 2016 Players: 1 Developer Profile Fumito Ueda and several other members of Japan Studio left Sony back in 2014 to form genDesign, but work continued on The Last Guardian in collaboration with their old team. While it already has some ideas on other projects, they are said to be on hold until this game is finally completed. Developer History Enemy Zero 1997 [Saturn] Ico 2001 [PS2] Shadow Of The Colossus 2005 [PS2] High Point Shadow Of The Colossus’s influence on boss design in the early years was immediate, but…

“To find your way out of Wellington Wells and reconstruct the past, you’ll have to blend in with its citizens, who don’t take kindly to those who don’t abide by their not-so-normal rules. ” COMPULSION GAMES PRESS RELEASE CONCEPT The government is suppressing the people of one sleepy British town with a mind-altering drug called Joy. You play as the Downer, a man desperately trying to escape the town after weaning himself off of the drug. INFORMATION Details Format: Xbox One, PC Origin: Canada Publisher: Compulsion Games Developer: In-house Release: TBC 2017 Players: 1 Developer Profile Compulsion Games is a small studio in a big industry. Comprised of just 20 developers, the studio was founded in 2009 with a focus on making artistic and creative games. Its output has been…

INAL FANTASY XV WAS NEVER GOING TO DELIVER A TYPICAL JRPG ADVENTURE. It has always been touted as “a fantasy based on reality” though the reality of that statement doesn’t quite sink in until you are playing it for yourself. Final Fantasy XV actively attempts to bring the background sounds and scenes of our life to the fore - warping them towards the fantastical the deeper the game sinks its claws into your soul. But after many hours spent with XV, it’s difficult still to get a sense of the scale to this fantasy – this tale of four boisterous buddies fighting to save their world and get the girl – or from where indeed it may emerge. For a game bearing the Final Fantasy branding, it isn’t supposed to…

Each of the four heroes has a particular skill. These can be levelled up throughout the adventure, unlocking new skills and opportunities. Noctis’s is fishing, Ignis’s is cooking and Gladiolus’s is scavenging. But it’s Prompto’s that we had the most fun using and levelling up, because it’s essentially a fantastic take on photo mode. Prompto is an amateur photographer and he’s making a photo journal of the lads’ adventure. There are times, as you’re out in the world, where he will prompt you to stand for a group shot or you’ll be able to get him to take particular poses over lovely vistas, but for the most part he will just snap away with you none the wiser. Then, when you set up camp to eat, level up and talk…

A morning encounter with Pauline Jacquey begins with a handshake, you can tell a lot about a person by their morning etiquette. “My interest here is to show that Reflections: A Ubisoft Studio is special.” Jacquey conducts her business like she does her introductions: calm, commanding and collected. The managing director offers us a wide smile and a firm grip, her other hand preoccupied with swiftly stirring a coffee, black. “We know that the games we are working on are special, but I’d like people to understand how special the studio is as well.” Jacquey offers us the beverage, a surprise power play or mere act of kindness? Definitely the latter, because, even after a career spanning 20 years of work and play for Ubisoft globally, she knows what a…

THE IDEA THAT DEUS EX HAS COME TO TAKE ITSELF SO SERIOUSLY ALMOST BORDERS ON PARODY AT TIMES DETAILS FORMAT: Xbox One OTHER FORMATS: PC, PS4 ORIGIN: Canada PUBLISHER: Square Enix DEVELOPER: Eidos Montreal PRICE: £54.99 RELEASE: Out now PLAYERS: 1 ONLINE REVIEWED: N/A Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a mess of conflicting ideas and themes, of ageing mechanics and messy iteration. For better or worse, it is blindly beholden to many of the flaws that we can now identify games exhibited back in 2011; the success of Human Revolution casts a long shadow over Adam Jensen’s unspectacular return. Dare we even say it… we didn’t ask for this. Eidos Montreal has attempted to evolve Deus Ex into a careful meditation on transhumanism, though it has attempted to…

THAT WAS A big part of what I wanted. I wanted permadeath, but obviously that was kind of frowned upon because it makes people quit the game, forever. So how are we going to combine this? We had an idea for permadeath and what we were going to do about those kind of things, but eventually permadeath did eventually make it into the series with Hardcore mode – but we wanted to make sure that people would know what they were getting into. So offering both experiences in the end was really the right decision, but I always loved that tension. It was love/hate for sure, with the harshness of death. And I think if you’re going to have an experience like that, then you have to be really careful…

SQUARE ASSEMBLED A 'DREAM TEAM' OF DEVELOPERS THAT WOULD CREATE ONE OF THE MOST AMBITIOUS AND INFLUENTIAL GAMES OF THE MODERN ERA Released: 11 March 1995 Publisher: In-house Developer: Square System: SNES THE INDUSTRY HAS changed a lot in the last 20 years. Gaming has grown up, the hardware has evolved and the technology driving play has given us incredibly cinematic experiences – though none of these achievements are a substitute for real quality or raw ambition. Back in 1995, for Nintendo’s SNES, Square assembled what can only be described as a ‘dream team’ of developers; a group of RPG aficionados that would come together to create one of the most ambitious and influential games of the modern era, one that stands (arguably) uncontested even to this day. Chrono Trigger’s…

1 IT’S A GREAT SELECTION OF GAMES Of the 30 titles included on the NES Mini, eight were recently included in Retro Gamer’s 150 greatest games of all time. Not a bad hit rate by any standard, but big gets like the original Final Fantasy and Castlevania help to bolster first-party hits like the Super Mario series or The Legend Of Zelda. Those games alone promise hours of game time, but the inclusion of puzzlers like Dr Mario and the arcade experiences of Donkey Kong and Pac-Man mean there are some nice quick gaming fixes in there too. Something for everyone, then. 2 THE PRICE IS SOLID At £49.99 in the UK and $59.99 in the US, the NES mini is very competitively priced compared to other plug and play…

“ Metal Gear Survive will offer a fresh take on the series’ famed stealth elements but within a unique co-op setting that is designed for a truly engrossing multiplayer experience”TOMOTADA TASHIRO, KONAMI CONCEPT Following the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, soldiers from Motherbase are sucked up into wormholes and left to fend off a zombie-like horde INFORMATION Details Format: PS4, Xbox One, PC Origin: Japan Publisher: Konami Developer: In-house Release: TBC 2017 Players: 1-4 Developer Profile Konami was seemingly stepping back from console game development with the notable exception of the PES series, but this move to quickly expand the Metal Gear brand following the departure of Hideo Kojima shows that there’s still things to come from this development house. Developer History Suikoden III 2002 [PS2] Castlevania:…

“Sonic Mania brings fans back into the 2D world of platform games with nostalgic pixel-style art and core classic gameplay”PRESS RELEASE SEGA CONCEPT Forget the last 20 years of Sonic and prepare for an old-school adventure as Sega finally listens to fan demands and delivers the Sonic game the Sega Saturn never received. INFORMATION Details Format: Xbox One, PS4, PC Origin: USA Publisher: Sega Developer: Headcannon, PagodaWest Games Release: Q1 2017 Players: 1 Developer Profile Known in professional circles as The Taxman, Christian Whitehead is an independent game developer out of Melbourne, Australia who made a name for himself as a homebrew developer that created his own game engine – Retro Engine – and used it to create authentic Sonic games, which ultimately landed him a job with Sega. Developer…

1 SYSTEM SHOCK Format: PC, PS4, Xbox One Publisher: Nightdive Studios Developer: In-house ETA: December 2017 A PC demo for this HD remake of System Shock is already available to play and it’s every bit as creepy as we remember. As sci-fi horror goes, System Shock was an intense experience and this new version has managed to update every facet of the visuals without losing any of the tension. It’s no great surprise that the spirit of the game should remain intact since Nightdive also made the enhanced edition of System Shock in 2015, remastering its original graphics. The reboot, built with Unity, is still some way off from a full release, and the controls could do with some tightening up, but it’s got the looks. 2 HOUSE OF THE…

FULL NAME: Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin BIRTHDATE: 2nd Day, Month of Rain, 1827 BIRTHPLACE: Dunwall, Gristol EYE COLOR: Dark brown HEIGHT: 5’10” Domino: • Chains enemies together so that the fate of one affects the others. Starts with just two characters, but can be upgraded to more. Doppelganger: • Creates a copy of Emily to distract enemies. Can be upgraded to fight on your behalf. Shadow Walk: • Emily turns into a living shadow, allowing for stealthy movement and access to smaller routes. Dark Vision: • Allows Emily to see guards and other enemies through walls. Mesmerize: • Emily creates a surreal object in the air that will capture the interest of enemies, allowing you to slip by unnoticed. Far Reach: • Similar to Corvo’s Blink, but can be seen…

If there's one thing that the original Watch Dogs lacked entirely, it's cohesion. While the best games of its ilk come together as one glorious package, Ubisoft’s open-world hackstravaganza never managed to convey any degree of logic that truly bound its disparate elements together. It wasn’t one game – it was a bunch of different games of varying quality playing out at the same time. And while the same criticism could be levelled at other jack-of-all-trades open-world games, including the mighty Grand Theft Auto, you don’t hear it often because of the strength of the glue Rockstar uses to assemble its many misshapen fragments of popular culture. In the case of Watch Dogs, however, none of its individual elements – not the solid open world it took place in, not…

DETAILS FORMAT: PS4 OTHER FORMATS: PC, Mac, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, iOS, Android ORIGIN: UK PUBLISHER: Double Eleven DEVELOPER: Introversion Software PRICE: £19.99 RELEASE: Out now PLAYERS: 1 ONLINE REVIEWED: N/A Endlessly unappreciated and constantly bungled, the videogame tutorial is one of the few areas of game design that persistently manages to shirk innovation. A clever tutorial can bolster a mediocre game and a clumsy one can distance you from a masterpiece, but even the greatest studios in the world persistently fail to explore beyond boilerplate bouts of monkey see, monkey do. Prison Architect’s tutorial is a clear-cut masterpiece because it uses a brusque narrative to disguise a totally unpalatable bombardment of information. Make no mistake though, the stories in the “Prison Stories” tutorial mode are the oldest chestnuts…

“Every single thing that they do was so well done ” BEN HAUMILLER, PRODUCER, EA SPORTS “I just finished playing Uncharted 4 at home, and that’s one of those games that’s just jaw dropping. It’s just so much fun. Every single thing that they do was so well done. I know that’s not an EA game, but we’re not here just to talk about EA. We play everything. That’s the beauty of being a game developer is that you have to play everything. You have to understand what’s going on in the industry.”…

HIRONOBU SAKAGUCHI • Hironobu Sakaguchi, the producer and creator of the Final Fantasy series, conceived Chrono Trigger back in 1992. He served as director over the first five entries of the Final Fantasy series, helping to establish many of the RPG systems and mechanics that are still used to this day. His last major release was Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey for Xbox 360 in 2007. AKIRA TORIYAMA • Potentially the most famous of the development team behind Chrono Trigger, Toriyama is best known as the creator of anime Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball. Toriyama was brought in during the early stages of development to design the characters and settings; he would later team up with Sakaguchi a decade later to design characters for Blue Dragon. YUJI HORII • Yuji Horii is…

“Guy Ritchie is a friend of the franchise, so it was great to have him back to work with us, assisting in bringing Kit Harington’s character to life in Infinite Warfare”DAVE STOHL INFINITY WARD CONCEPT Call Of Duty takes its battles off of the streets and into the stars in this truly global encounter INFORMATION Details Format: Xbox One, PS4, PC Origin: USA Publisher: Activision Developer: Infinity Ward Release: 4 November 2016 Players: TBC Developer Profile Founded in 2002, Infinity Ward was brought in to develop a rival to Medal Of Honor for Activision – by the very developers that were building it for EA. This core team would go on to reinvent the shooter time and time again, before many of the core team left the studio in 2010…

“The visual presentation of the game is inspired by the maps and tools of the Age of Exploration, and we’ve made several key gameplay changes such as expansive cities and active research that makes Sid Meier’s Civilization VI an entirely unique experience” ED BEACH FIRAXIS CONCEPT The latest in the acclaimed series of human progress simulations is, unsurprisingly, the most feature-packed and complex yet, with more of an emphasis on making every session feel different to the last. INFORMATION Details Format: PC Origin: USA Publisher: 2K Games Developer: Firaxis Release: 21 October 2016 Players: 1-8 Developer Profile Sid Meier’s name is one synonymous with quality and innovation in the field of strategy gaming. After cutting his teeth on flight sims, Meier’s star turn came around in the early Nineties, with…

We catch with Arkane Studios and find out how a new generation up , new engine and new hero are helping it to make the stealth action game it always dreamed about Sometimes you have to wait for technology to catch up with your vision. That’s typically a maxim used in the movie industry, but occasionally it has come up in gaming. Only, games have usually seen vision driven by tech and not the other way around. For Dishonored, however, there were signs that Arkane had a vision for the new world it was creating and as gloriously brutal and grizzled as it was, it wasn’t quite where it wanted to be. The great advantage that a new generation of consoles and more powerful PCs has given the Lyon-based studio…

Pretty much everything you do in Final Fantasy XV will earn you Ascension Points (AP) and you’ll need that all important resource for levelling up your party members and upgrading their abilities. The Ascension Grid is where you’ll manage your upgrades; think of it as a simplified Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. AP points are shared between all four characters, so you’ll need to wisely balance your spending across the Grid. It is possible to over-level one hero, leaving the others woefully underpowered. As for what you’re investing in? The Grid tends to veer off in offensive, defensive and utility trees, so you can decide to immediately spec Noctis in more powerful attacks/combo possibilities or look to allow him to wear two status-boosting bracelets. The three other heroes can…

STEALTH MISSION: Take after Sam Fisher and Solid Snake to infiltrate targets without ever being spotted Upgraded tech and new hacking options should stand to make pure stealth a more viable option than in the first game. You have myriad ways to distract patrolling guards and creating new entry points to many locations, so your only excuse for getting caught red-handed is that you messed up. FOR FANS OF: Metal Gear Solid, Thief HYBRID MISSION: Do whatever it takes to get the job done With so many new systems layered on top of tweaks to old ones, this will be the play style most of us fall into, whether we want it or not. An all-out attack on an objective might present a way to cover your tracks, or a…

THERE IS AN ELEMENT OF ‘MY FIRST SPACE SIM’ ABOUT SOME OF NO MAN’S SKY DETAILS FORMAT: PS4 OTHER FORMATS: PC ORIGIN: UK PUBLISHER: Hello Games DEVELOPER: In-house PRICE: £49.99 RELEASE: Out now PLAYERS: 1 ONLINE REVIEWED: N/A There’s a certain frontier spirit that’s required to fully enjoy No Man’s Sky . It’s easy enough to appreciate its technical accomplishments. You can step back and admire the incredible feat of engineering and conceptual design that it took for a relatively small team to make something so immense. But scale is not a measure of quality on its own, so it’s important to try and step even further away than that to see what more No Man’s Sky can provide. The answer is plenty, so long as you’re…

DETAILS FORMAT: PS4 OTHER FORMATS: Xbox One, PC ORIGIN: UK PUBLISHER: Team17 DEVELOPER: In-house PRICE: £19.99 RELEASE: Out now PLAYERS: 1-6 ONLINE REVIEWED: NO Save for its odd venture into 3D, the Worms series has almost always stuck to its miniature guns and offered up a soil-scented, turn-based shindig that’s barely changed since the original Worms back in 1995. For most franchises this would be a problem, but Team17 knows exactly what makes its most recognisable licence tick, so every new addition made to its latest incarnation, Worms W.M.D, never gets in the way of the simple pleasure of blowing up smart-mouthed invertebrates with a bazooka. If you’re new to the comical death-dealing world of Worms (honestly, where have you been? The series is available on…

ABZÛ’S STAR ATTRACTION IS ITS VAST UNDERWATER SETTING – THE OCEAN’S DEPTHS A LIVING ECOSYSTEM BUSTLING WITH LIFE DETAILS FORMAT: PS4 OTHER FORMATS: PC ORIGIN: USA PUBLISHER: 505 Games DEVELOPER: Giant Squid Studios PRICE: £15.99 RELEASE: Out now PLAYERS: 1 ONLINE REVIEWED: N/A Plumbing the depths of Abzû’s mysterious ocean is, ironically enough, a breath of fresh air. There are no boss fights, no scampering between cover – instead it’s just you and the deep blue sea, and the experience is both relaxing and beautiful. Not that there aren’t any stakes in Abzû worth fighting for. The game is a story of one being’s resistance against a darkness spreading across the ocean. But rather than plunge us into the stress of a battlefield, Abzû’s approach is…

DETAILS FORMAT: PC OTHER FORMATS: PS4 ORIGIN: US PUBLISHER: Adult Swim Games DEVELOPER: Double Fine Productions PRICE: £14.99 RELEASE: Out Now PLAYERS: 1 MINIMUM SPEC: Windows 7 (64-bit), Dual-core 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 550 Ti, AMD Radeon HD 7750, 4 GB available space ONLINE REVIEWED: N/A A Headlander reviews word-cloud would be pure filth. There’s no real way to write about this game without talking about giving robots head – your head, to be precise – or mentioning shag-pile carpets. You see, the game’s core concept is that you are a head. The last human alive, you have no body, lungs, or any of that good stuff; you’re just a voiceless, rocket-propelled head stuck in a retro-futurist dystopia full of fashion conscious robots who love plush carpets.…

SEGA’S GAME GEAR was created with one purpose – to go head-to-head with Nintendo’s phenomenally successful Game Boy. On paper, the Game Gear appeared to have everything it needed to be a success of its own. It had a large colour screen like its closest rival, the Atari Lynx, but unlike Atari’s console had far better third-party support. US Gold, Probe Software, Taito, Codemasters and Acclaim were just a few of the many developers and publishers that supported the system, and it played host to a large number of games. It must be said though that the Game Gear didn’t have a huge number of exclusives, relying instead on Master System and cut-down Mega Drive ports. It was still worth owning however, with the following games still holding up incredibly…

IN THEORY, THE very first pitch was single-player, we wanted to do multiplayer but we had no networking experience. And so [Blizzard] said “We’re going to make it multiplayer” and then we said, “Yeah, sure, multiplayer… okay…” and so we went along for about a year and they asked “So how is that multiplayer coming along?” And we said it was coming along well but meanwhile it wasn’t multiplayer at all. Then they came around and asked to take a look at it. It wasn’t running at all, and they said “Oh my god, this isn’t ready for multiplayer at all.” A couple of the guys from Blizzard had done a bunch of LAN multiplayer things with the WarCraft game so they moved up to the Bay Area for a…