If there’s any name in PlayStation gaming that demands attention it has to be Uncharted. The signs are pointing to a mightily positive launch title that should be on everyone’s pre-order list.
The game has been developed by Sony Bend studios rather than Naughty Dog, but that certainly hasn’t harmed the brand. The best comparison would be the amazing job Ready at Dawn did when they brought the God of War series to the PSP.
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This is one the first action beat em’ up titles we’ve seen on the PS Vita and from this hands-on demo it’s fair to say that it’s one of the most visually appealing Vita games yet. Despite the demo being in English, there’s not much we can gleam about the story. There’s a mystical cat in a quaint town square, then monsters attack.
The aesthetic style is a hybrid of comic-book visuals and anime cell-shading. Storyboards illustrate some plot elements and you can move the Vita around to peak around the frames, providing a rather pleasing semi-3D effect. The gameplay seems to have been influenced by a wide range of sources as gamers will be able to spot elements of Bayonetta in the combat and the Spider-Man games in the way you utilise walls as traversable surfaces.
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With the Vita on a seemingly unstoppable display of going from strength to strength, it was almost unsurprising to see a complex title like Little Big Planet appear so at home so soon on the new handheld.
During our hands-on time, we were able to try out a few levels that showed off how the Vita’s extra features would be uniquely utilised during gameplay. We were also invited to a developer demonstration of the create mode too, and we’re now convinced it has the potential to be much more user-friendly than the PS3 versions.
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This was new a sample of some new multiplayer playgrounds, unfamiliar even to players of the recent beta, with some local matches over a LAN connection bringing Manchester PlayStation Access attendees together before encouraging them to pull each other off ledges.
Uncharted 2 surprised everyone by making a fine first effort with the multiplayer and U3 looks set to surpass it easily with its dosage of cinematic sequences and power plays where a team is given a temporary stat boost. Today we played around on a few maps new maps with team deathmatches being the game of choice. One map was set in a desert village, similar to that seen in the recent single-player footage. There were lots of close alleys with corners and walls to hide behind, making for a fast-paced match where itchy trigger fingers and sharp melee skills proved most lethal. The climbing was brilliant here too as it can be used to perform grab kills to pull opponents over a ledge. It’s uber-slick and will probably cost us many lives in the pursuit of enjoyment over a decent kill/death ratio, as it does leave you vulnerable to being swatting off the wall in a hail of gunfire.
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It would be a shame if this gets lost in the Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 storm, as it’s a hell of a lot of fun. It might just be the perfect tonic to military shooter fatigue.
The aiming still feels a little loose, as I noted with my Gamescom preview, but the game plays quite well forgoing iron-sight aiming and just blasting through. There is a large amount of auto-aim when you pull up your sights and watch as they pull across the screen to the nearest enemy. As with most titles though I’m sure you’ll be able to tone down the sensitivity and turn off any auto-aim functions so you can maintain control.
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Starhawk’s single player game is something I’ve been waiting to get my hands on for a while now and I’m glad to say it was well worth the wait. This sci-fi third-person shooter is shaping up to be a lot of fun, especially given the original game’s lack of an offline side. But can it compete in a genre crowded with classics like Uncharted and Gears of War? Being able to instantly drop an arsenal of buildings, turret towers and vehicles from your own personal orbital carrier will certainly help its cause.
This early mission introduces the eagerly awaited building mechanics of the game. First though, it was time to clear the building site of a few aliens, who have a neon-Chimera feel to them. The standard assault rifle weapon was more than capable of taking them on, with no sign of any unwanted auto-aim to take away your fun. Red barrels and grenades provide huge explosions scattering bodies everywhere in glorious fashion. After playing through Brink, recently, it felt good to have grenades that erupted in fire again instead acting like a popped semi-deflated beach ball.
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For years, the Ratchet & Clank series has been crying out for co-op and from what I’ve played so far, it was a great call for Insomniac Games to finally run with it before they put all their efforts into the multi-format Overstrike. After playing the beta recently, I was worried about a few bugs that required a game reset, but I’m happy to report they were nowhere to be seen with this latest build of the game that took place in the same levels.
Ignoring the usual heroes, Ratchet and Clank, we opted to play an offline two-player game as the showboating Captain Quark and the er nefarious Dr. Nefarious, the two characters that have provided some great laughs over the years. Players will find the action very similar to the older games with every character having shooting and melee skills, complete with their own version of Ratchet’s Comet Strike, where they throw their weapon, only to have it boomerang back to them, which is great for smaller enemies and crates.
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Here’s a roundup of some of the games I managed to get some extensive hands-on time with at the recent Eurogamer Expo in London. As well as highlighting what was looking good, I’ve pointed out a few that you should definitely beware of before you splash the cash. The Contender category consists of a few games that you might usually overlook due to past form or generic looks, but have a read; you might just change your mind.
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Tags: Brendan Griffiths, Rage, Binary Domain, Need for Speed: The Run, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Eurogamer Expo 2011, Hands-on preview, Sonic Generations, Inversion, Anarchy Reigns, Ridge Racer: Unbounded, Driver 3DS
Unlike Skyrim (“get off, I’ve just levelled up!”), racing games are perfect for expos. The queues are never that long and you can have a quick blast on a couple of tracks, test out a few new cars and get an idea of how they’re shaping up. So here’s a look at some of the biggest racing games lining up on the console grid.
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Regretting not finishing Final Fantasy XIII? Well that probably depends on whether you managed to forgive the linearity and heavily automated combat to push on and finish, or on how adept you are at finding HD cutscene compilations on torrent sites to enjoy what was a cracking story along with some generation-leading CGI.
Either way you better get cracking because there’s every chance that you’ll want to return to Cocoon and Gran Pulse next year with this sequel. Don’t worry about your FFX-2 flashbacks; no Dresspheres have been sighted, yet.
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After a brief panic of thinking I’d spent a full year queuing for games at Gamescom I stirred myself awake to remember an early Olympics title would of course be released the Christmas before the event itself. Especially after the previous games on the Wii sold by the tonne. It’s still heart breaking to see Sonic standing next to archrival Mario with no signs of murderous intentions though.
Our hands-on session with some of our German cousins was in the form of a multiplayer party with laughs and smiles hiding the pride of wanting to win at all costs. Wiimotes at the ready then.
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One of the biggest challenges facing the PS Vita handheld is its ability to work with first-person shooters. The addition of a second analogue stick -and they are proper sticks now instead of nubs- is an important leap forwards from the original PSP and from our hand-on experience it’s a challenge the device and developers are already relishing.
Nihilistic are bringing the Resistance series to the handheld market for the first time in FPS form, after the third-person adventures of Retribution. The improvements are instantly noticeable, making the console’s 2012 arrival seem very far away for everyone outside of Japan.
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If anyone could make another great game for the PlayStation Move, it would be the team behind its best game so far. Rather than knock out Sports Champions 2, Zindagi Games have opted for a fun action title. You might recognise parts of the game from the early tech demos for the PlayStation Move back at E3 2009. It’s good to see that demo become a full game, we’re just surprised it took this long.
Medieval Moves is a first-person action adventure game with movement around the game world taking place automatically and the action kicking off between stops. This leaves your hands free to concentrate on using your weapons and other cool gadgets to get through the medieval settings against an army of skeleton warriors and other ghoulish foes.
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If you don’t have a Nintendo Wii, then you may have ignored their Goldeneye remake. Hell, you might have a Wii, but the prospect of taking it out of the box to mangle your childhood memories with bastardised controls just doesn’t seem like a good idea. Well now the N64 classic, a game that many regard as the best movie tie-in ever and one of the finest multiplayer games in existence, is getting the HD treatment it deserves. Fuck knows why emotional potato man Daniel Craig is in it though.
Goldeneye: Reloaded isn’t an entirely faithful HD reworking, it’s more of a ‘reimagining’, which if you remember Tim Burton describing his remake of Planet of the Apes the same way a few years ago, isn’t always a great thing. In fairness though the game scored well on the Wii and it’s bound to be better than the last Bond title we saw on the HD consoles, Blood Stone.
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Since Saints Row 2 surprised us all by being a hell of a lot better than the original and for many, a more enjoyable game than GTAIV, we’ve been waiting to see how the next game would handle the pressure. Well, just remember it was a bit bonkers before and it’s not prepared to put its pants back on quite yet.
With just one hour to play the new game, we couldn’t believe how quickly it went. The first part of the demo is a bank heist with your Saints Row buddies, and all of you are disguised in oversized Johnny Gat heads, including Gat himself. It would appear that the Saints might have chosen the wrong bank to knock over though. As soon as they let their guards downs, all the bank tellers pull out some serious military grade hardware and open fire.
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A Sony console just wouldn’t be right without a WipEout game and the new PlayStation Vita handheld is more than capable of doing the series justice for its tenth title. In our developer session at Gamescom 2011, we were lucky enough to enjoy a presentation from Sony’s Studio Liverpool team and then get a play for ourselves.
Set just 37 years from now, at the “dawn of the sport,” four years before the original PS1 game set in 2052. It’s the first season of the sport, just after anti-gravity was invented. At this rate, it’s highly doubtful we’ll see technology leap forwards as much in the next 37 years, seeing as we’ll all be forced to plod along in hybrids at misery MPH. That’s why we’ll always love games like this as do Studio Liverpool who are keen to emphasise the importance of the time setting of the game compared to the other games in the series:
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When the developers first announced there wouldn’t be a cover system for this third-person-shooter it raised a few eyebrows. Now that I’ve seen the suicidal nature of a swarming orc hoard eager to test the might of a Space Marine’s weaponry, it seems it was a great decision.
So forget about turn-based choices, real time strategy and dice rolling, this is the full-on action title we’ve been waiting for. Strategy fans have enjoyed the Dawn of War games, but action fans always intrigued by the rich sci-fi lineage of the series can now look forward to the first decent Warhammer game since Fire Warrior.
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Red Faction Armageddon’s multiplayer is going for a co-op angle this time around, similar to the Horde mode in Gears of War. Teams of four players will face off against 30 stages of enemies for each of the eight maps. Expect lots of tighter arenas compared to the last game’s open multiplayer deathmatches on the surface of Mars. We’re going to miss those epic jetpack battles.
The main map we got to try out was the underground Black Market. For the most part this level was made up of fairly narrow tunnels with low ceilings, making for some claustrophobic chaos. There’s a small square decorated with lots of neon signs which all too often distracts you from looking out for the alien’s bioluminescent glowing parts. The area of play seems to loop around in a circle. With the terrain including slopes and staircases.
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