Monthly Archives: February 2015
Release Date Revealed for Not A Hero
Developer Roll7 and publisher Devolver Digital have announced that Not A Hero will release on PC on May 7.
Not A Hero is a cover-based shooter from the developers of indie skateboarding title OlliOlli. You play as Steve, a professional assassin turned amateur campaign manager.
It will also be coming out for PlayStation 4 and Vita later in the year, but there have been no announcements of the exact dates for those platforms.
To get an idea of what Roll7 has done in the past, check out IGN's review of OlliOlli, a "bare-bones beginning of a great skateboarding franchise".
Behind-the-Scenes of Uematsu’s Final Fantasy Soundtracks
Earlier this year, we got the chance to join legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu at London's Abbey Road Studios as he settled down to revisit 20 years of his most compelling work.
Today, we've managed to get our hands on a trailer showing some of the songs that'll be included on the finished Final Symphony album ahead of its release on February 23. You can check it out above, along with some thoughts from Uematsu on what it felt like to work with his older titles once more, and with the London Symphony Orchestra.
SEGA Acquires New Studio, Invests in Two More
SEGA has acquired development studio Demiurge, and invested in two others, Ignited Artists and Space Ape Games.
The move, according to SEGA, is to bolster “its foothold in the Western market.”
While SEGA has outright acquired Demiurge, the company now owns a majority share in the San Francisco-based gaming start-up, Ignited Artists. No specifics were given regarding the Space Ape Games deal other than SEGA has made a “strategic investment” in the UK-based studio.
“A top five publisher in Japan, SEGA Networks is investing heavily in the West and with its latest acquisitions and investments, the publisher is further leveraging its global footprint,” says SEGA Networks CEO Haruki Satomi.
Owl Cave Announces The Charnel House Trilogy
Indie developer Owl Cave and publishing studio Mastertronic have announced the point-and-click adventure collection The Charnel House Trilogy for PC.
The trilogy consists of Sepulchre, the prequel Inhale, and the sequel Exhale.
Sepulchre sees the player take on the role of Dr Harold Lang as he tries to piece together memories in a tale of “trains, historians and huge bags.”
"Sepulchre has always been part of a wider story I wanted to tell,” says developer and writer Ashton Raze. “A number of my fiction works (interactive and non-interactive) take place in the same universe, so when Sepulchre was granted a Steam release, it seemed the perfect time to expand on the story I've always wanted to tell surrounding Old Gloria, and that fateful train journey as seen in the original game.”
The Order: 1886 Review
The Order: 1886 is a torturer and a tease. It promises you a circuitous story populated with near-immortal knights, it promises you exciting encounters with snarling werewolves, it promises you clever weaponry the likes of which you rarely see in video games. It dangles these hopes in front of you and then yanks them away, reneging on one promise after another, letting you hold that precious toy in your hand and then denying you the chance to maintain the thrill. The Order is cruel in the way it plays with your expectations, taking a promising premise and then sucking out much of the energy with boring cutscenes, an ending wholly devoid of closure, and shooting-gallery action sequences.
"Boring" is the best word to describe The Order in general, actually. That this third-person action game turns a parade of steampunk imagery and Arthurian legends into a dull stew of modern games' most tiresome cliches is quite a feat, though hardly one worth celebrating. It is (as you probably guessed) 1886, and you are Grayson, otherwise known as Galahad, one of the Knights of the Round Table. It is a time of trouble: common citizens have begun to rebel against the gentry, possibly allying with a race of werewolves the game alternately refers to as lycans and half-breeds. It's a brilliant setup, ripe with possibilities. You look to the sky and see zeppelins hovering overhead; you look to the armory, and you find a young Nikola Tesla ready to introduce you to clever armaments. That such a world could be so lifeless is unfathomable.
Yet The Order turns the mystical into the mundane. You face lycans early on, leaping out of the way and shooting them down before killing them off for good by plunging a knife into them. And then they are cast aside for hours until the half-breeds are barely a memory. The Order pulls them out of hiding a few more times, though the circumstances are highly controlled, and conclude with the kind of anticlimax that becomes the game's calling card. The most dramatic of these few battles end with quick-time focused snoozes that betray the very idea of confronting such beasts. As for the nature of the lycans--where they come from, what their presence has meant for humanity, how humans could ally with such creatures--most of that is left to your imagination. Developer Ready at Dawn doesn't address the most interesting aspects of its own ideas.
Instead, the story focuses on its stale protagonists, who sit and argue at the round table every so often while getting to the bottom of the rebel plot. What a shame that interesting supernatural and social elements would be sidelined in favor of boardroom shenanigans, particularly given the light character development. I applaud the cast: the voice acting is brilliant, far better than the material deserved, and it is the acting talent alone that invested me in the characters' fates. The soundtrack, thick with cellos and violas, also rises above the blandness, but by the time the finale and its predictable quick-time events arrive, it is too late to squeeze emotion from this dry turnip. The credits roll after the button press that serves as an ending, and vital story threads are left dangling in the wind. Perhaps the Order: 1886 means to hint at a sequel, but whether or not that was Ready at Dawn's intention, it's a disrespectful end to a plodding story. This may have been a fine close to the second act of a three-act story, but it's a rude sendoff to anyone hoping for explanation or reason.
How bizarre, then, that The Order is so focused on its narrative. During the initial sequences, you may assume that it is more Heavy Rain than Uncharted: you respond to threats by pressing the right buttons when prompted. As it happens, The Order is divided more or less equally into four disparate pieces: cutscenes, QTEs, walking around, and shooting. In time, the game strings these features into poorly-paced sequences that have no sense of rhythm. It is the modern action game personified: This is the part where I walk for three minutes, and now comes the short bit where I have to pick a bunch of things up and look at them, and then comes the brief shooting part that practically ends before it begins.
Walking, looking, and shooting aren't bad on their own, of course. What makes such basic mechanics so predictable and rote in The Order is how they are used. When the game forces you to holster your weapon and walk at a snail's pace, you may expect it to build tension or to develop its characters. Instead, The Order becomes an exposition machine, dropping basic plot points until you either open the door that leads to the next ultra-linear stage of the ultra-linear level, or another character does it for you.
The sequences in which you examine your surroundings looking for clues are even more tedious. You trudge about a room, picking up objects and looking at them, perhaps even turning them over in your hands before setting them down. In a few instances, the game might identify a detail of interest, and you have to press a button to continue, though the overall goal is typically to pick up everything in the vicinity until you trigger the next event--and in at least one case, you aren't even the one to discover the pertinent information, making all of that monotonous strolling aggravatingly pointless. A few weapons aside, you're rarely looking at anything of interest: old photographs of characters you barely know (if at all), letters that provide the tiniest morsel of backstory, and so forth. That The Order is so in love with its own object models is almost laughable: You pick up minor knick-knacks and lovingly rotate them as if you have discovered the Holy Grail. Yes, this model ship is lovely, but was the self-congratulatory time-padder necessary?
I presume that The Order: 1886 wishes to build its world by demanding you admire the details, but Ready at Dawn needn't have tried so hard to point out how pretty their art is: it is simply pretty, full stop. The game has a few of the standard tricks up its sleeve to gloss over the occasional flaws: motion blur, a subtle film grain effect, overzealous depth-of-field effects, and the such. It's difficult to overlook The Order's tonally consistent aesthetics, however: It is fully committed to its style. From a bridge's vantage point, you wield an electrically charged cannon while gazing upon a smoky Victorian London. The bridge is dotted with iron carriages, some still sturdy, and some ravaged by the ongoing firefight. Rococo flourishes adorn the Knights' chamber: walls decorated with gold leaf, floors embellished with Latin script, flickering candles embedded within serpentine sconces. The Knights' weathered faces aren't quite beautiful, but they are remarkably human; Each of the Lord Chancellor's grimaces and squints betray a soul-crushing history you wish you could have partaken in.
The action is almost an afterthought, given all the talking, the walking, and the quick-time events, few of which complement onscreen motion in the manner of Telltale Games' best QTEs. It's a shame that The Order evokes Heavy Rain so early in its six-hour play time, because the comparison does not work in this game's favor. The Order clearly has cinematic aspirations, regardless: The loose camera hews close behind you, to the point where you can not often see much of the battlefield once you have taken cover. The game is at its best when it allows itself to be a shooter, which is what makes its failings all the more disheartening. The thermite rifle is one of the most interesting weapons in recent memory, letting you fire a round of magnesium ammo and then ignite it with a rush of air. What a blast it is to mess with such a unique firearm--and what a heartbreaker to have such grossly limited use of it. The same is true of the previously mentioned cannon: It is ripped from your hands all too quickly and replaced with less-interesting pistols and carbine rifles.
Those weapons function just fine, at least. The level design is functional, too, but uninspired. You know a turkey shoot is about to begin as you enter an area and see all the obvious cover spots--and then the turkeys appear, right on schedule, ready to die at your hands. Expectedly, such predictability breeds apathy. Grenade-lobbing supersoldiers aside, it's all too easy to mow down the opposition, making the blacksight mechanic, which allows you to temporarily slow down time and pelt foes with bullets, all but unnecessary on medium difficulty. There's a system in place for recovering if you are downed in combat, but it, too, is superfluous: should you fall, a rebel soldier almost always lands a killing shot.
All of these gameplay tropes are then shoved together into herky-jerky levels that end just when you think they might gain momentum. The only individual sequence lengthy enough to find a rhythm is a later stealth level, though it's far too simple to inspire wishes for more sneaky sections. What, then, to make of The Order: 1886? It is, at best, perfectly playable, and lovely to look at and listen to. But it is also the face of mediocrity and missed opportunities. A bad game can make a case for itself. A boring one is harder to forgive.
Sony Looking to PlayStation For Profitable Future
Sony has revealed its plans for increased profitability in the coming years center on PlayStation and cameras, while it may depart the TV and smartphone business.
According to Reuters, CEO Kaz Hirai made the announcement explaining that the dominance of Apple and Samsung meant it was becoming increasingly nonsensical to pursue sales growth in the smartphone sector. When asked whether the TV and phone businesses could go the way of its PC arm, which was recently sold off, Hirai said he wouldn't rule it out.
Cross-buy Heads to Resident Evil Revelations 2 Pre-orders
Cross-buy functionality has come to Resident Evil Revelations 2 pre-orders in the US.
Players who pre-order the Complete Season on either PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4 will be able to download the season on the opposite platform at now extra cost.
Capcom points out that even though the feature won’t be available at launch, it should be live “shortly after” release.
Currently, the pre-order page for the Complete Season is down for maintenance, so if you’re thinking of taking advantage of the offer, you’ll need to wait until Sunday Feb 22 for the page to be live again.
In the comments section of the Capcom Unity blog, one user expressed their dismay having already pre-ordered Revelations 2 on both systems prior to this offer. If that is the case for anyone reading, Capcom advises you to contact Sony to see about getting one of the pre-orders cancelled.
The Zombie Apocalypse Is Coming to London
The zombie apocalypse is coming to London in the form of an immersive theatre experience.
Following on from sell out showings in New Zealand and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Generation of Z: Apocalypse is heading to London. You can see what it's all about in the video below:
Tickets for the 'show' officially go on sale on Friday, but you can get them early now if you head to www.thegenerationofz.com and use the code EXTINCTIONISNOW. The show is running from 4th April to 5th July. Tickets range in price from £25 to £42.50, depending on day of the week.
Check out the gallery below which has some pictures from the show:
Comic Book Reviews for Feburary 18, 2015
There's no such thing as a small week of comics, is there? Justice League caps off its Amazo Virus story, Batgirl has a crazy last-page twist, and Robin discovers some downsides to his super powers.
Over at Marvel, we got the third chapter of X-Men/Guardians of the Galaxy's Black Vortex, the debut of Silk's solo series, and the wrap-up to the Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier in Uncanny X-Men.
Indie-wise, Plunder, Secret Identities, and Ei8ht debuted and we got more of Bitch Planet, Invincible, and our favorite series about magic-using anthropomorphic animals, Autumnlands: Tooth and Claw.
Also, check out what the IGN All-Stars are doing in their reviews of all this week's Comixology Submit releases.
J.J. Abrams’ Company Prepping Edison Movie
Bad Robot, the production company owned by J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens) and Bryan Burk, is reportedly developing a feature film about American inventor Thomas Edison.
The Wrap has it from multiple sources familiar with the project that the movie “will depict the legendary inventor as a rugged eccentric genius.” Sounds about right for a man who held over a thousand patents and invented devices such as the phonograph, the motion picture camera and the first commercially viable light bulb.
There was no comment from Burk or Paramount, where Bad Robot is based. If the movie is eventually made it could compete with the Weinstein’s long gestating Edison biopic The Current War, though there hasn’t been much movement on that project in some time.