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Little did I know how wrong I was.

In the few years since watching that video my ageing brain has become more accustomed to the type of games that involve more depth and tactical thought. I have also since popped my CCG cherry with a fairly recent and highly addictive game that I will try my hardest not to mention or compare with during this review. If you know me or follow me on twitter you’ll definitely know which game I’m talking about. In any case I thought it was about time I tried one of the oldest and most loved CCG’s of modern times.

For anyone such as myself that is entirely new to Magic, you’ll be happy to hear that quite a bit of Magic 2015: Duels of the Planeswalkers is explained and tested before you start the game proper. Hidden away in the slow and rather clunky feeling menu system there is a handy help section that describes the basics of cards, combat and building your own deck. There is also a skippable tutorial section that consists of five quests and a boss that help you learn the game by practising different predetermined scenarios. Reading and completing these sections set me off on a firm foot for the campaign and I would recommend this for any beginners.

Gameplay in Magic 2015 revolves around the use of different colours of cards; black, blue, white, red and green, each with their own theme. There are also neutral cards that can be used by anyone with enough mana to do so. These coloured cards consist of five different types. Land cards, which generate mana used to cast various spells and summon creatures. Creatures, which can attack your opponent and block damage from other creatures. Enchantments which affect a creature for as long as it remains in play. Sorcery spells, used to cause damage or counter opponents spells. And finally artefacts, cards with various different enhancing abilities.

Still with me? Good.

When tackling the tutorial boss you’re given a choice of two card colours that you wish to base your first deck on. This choice is permanent so think carefully before making a decision as not all the colours blend perfectly. I chose white, which focuses on healing and small creatures; and green, which focuses on larger creatures with powerful attacks.

During the campaign you unlock five different planes or levels with different encounters and a boss in each one. After winning each encounter you are given a booster deck of cards that hopefully (but not always) improves the quality and effectiveness of your deck or any future deck you choose to make. This process is rather slow as a booster deck may only contain two or three cards of the colour you need and they could be doubles. While not actively encouraged, repeating sections to farm for cards or buying booster packs via the store is certainly needed if you want to make any kind of progress in a reasonable time frame. Mulitplayer also suffers a lot from the slow card unlocking and microtransactions, meaning again that you’re either forced to buy premium content or sink hundreds of hours into the game if you want to make any kind of progress here.

There also seems to be a distinct lack of game modes in Magic 2015. While the campaign consists of different encounters, if you struggle at a certain point there is no where else to turn except multiplayer. Multiplyer consists of 1v1 and three or four player free-for-all and while all these game modes are enjoyable the first few times, you soon discover your deck is under par and that multiplayer is somewhat of a pay to win event.

Magic 2015 has kept me entertained for a good ten plus hours now and the initial £7 game price has probably earned its weight, at least in my eyes. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning about the mechanics and tactics of the game and enjoyed trying out the multiplyer modes. However I doubt veterans of the series will consider this price tag quite the same value. I’m happy taking things at a slow pace for now but won’t be long before they’re opening their wallets to strengthen decks with booster cards, and that’s a shame as Magic 2015 started out promisingly. The campaign progress, the multiplyer battles, they all grind to a halt as soon as decide not to spend any more money and that shouldn’t be the way for a game with a base price instead of being free-to-play, and for me this is where it falls short.

I can see myself jumping back into Magic 2015 occasionally for a change of scene and when I’m in the mood for a more tactical battle, but to be honest this was never going to keep me away from Hearthstone…

…dammit I was so close.

The Verdict – On target

Platforms Available – PC, Xbox 360, iOS, Andriod
Platform Reviewed – PC

Please see this post for more on our scoring policy. Steam review code supplied by PR.

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This year Bioware’s main offering was Dragon Age: Inquisition, the next instalment in the series, following on from 2011’s Dragon Age II. Whilst I still think DAII was something of a flawed gem, boasting some of the best characters and writing Bioware have produced, it was an undeniable set down from Dragon Age: Origins in terms of the scale of both the world and the plot.

I don’t think that’s going to be a problem in Inquisition. Everything Bioware put out at E3 pointed to a world larger than any other done so far in the series, a globe-trotting quest (I hear it involves saving the world) and a decent amount of player agency (decisions!). As the story goes, rifts have opened up across the land of Thedas, killing stacks of people, spewing out an unreasonable amount of demons and threatening to end the world in an orgy of destruction. It’s fair to say that this might sound just a little bit like Origins, which also involved a quest to stop an army of sort-of demonic creatures threatening to end the world in an orgy of destruction. However, whilst that particular quest involved doing a number of fairly linear quests in any order, much like most other pre-Mass Effect 3 Bioware games, Inquisition is doings things just a bit differently.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfGTtyYeO8E]

Talking to IGN at E3, Creative Director Mike Laidlaw detailed how the player, as head of the titular Inquisition, will travel the world in order to recruit inquisitors and build the strength and renown of the organisation. The E3 demo showed the player travelling through the mountainous Hinterland area in order to end a local conflict between rogue mages and the Templars who, in the world of Dragon Age are more or less meant to stop the mages from being possessed by demons through the time honoured method of stabbing. Whilst it wasn’t evident from the footage shown, this war manifests itself in the form of dynamic fights across the area which refresh themselves – small scuffles which play out until the larger issues are solved.

The upshot of this seems to be that the player has the ability to have a substantial affect the world, rather than having their choices played out in cutscenes or summations of the narrative as has been the case with some past Bioware titles.

We saw plenty of the combat, too. The tactical, almost top-down, combat of Origins seems to have melded with the hack and slash of the second game to produce something with shades of both games. Mike Laidlaw suggested that combat could be played to either extremes; focusing on real-time single combat or on pauseable group tactics. The demo had some detail on the characters, the troops of the Inquisition itself, with yet more detail in a more recent story trailer.

As always, it’s a mixed bunch of races, genders, silly hats and glorious facial hair and a wide variety of backstories which are promised to play into encounters and plot beats. Encouragingly, in these days of sociopathic shouty white male protagonists, the inquisitor, the player character, can be chosen from both genders and a number of races, which is promising for replayability. It’s fair to say that Inquisition at E3 has made me excited about a game I wasn’t entirely sure about before.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H1FN2_–EM]

If the Inquisition trailers and demos that I talked about were about what you’d expect for E3, the short trailer for the next Mass Effect and Bioware’s new IP was just a tiny bit odd. It appears that Casey Hudson lives in some kind of doom pyramid, and works entirely in the dark, for a start. There wasn’t much in the way of information in the trailer itself, being mostly comprised of promises of ‘worlds and journeys for the next generation’ and assurances that Bioware Montreal are going to go further than they’ve ever gone before.

The few seconds of Mass Effect footage shown showed a rather lovely star map, some very pretty landscapes, a Krogan and models of some space marine fellows. All we got for the new IP was some landscapes. Still, even that much was just enough to cause a gentle stirring in my excitement glands. This was probably partly just because the trailer made use of the Mass Effect galaxy map music, one of the most soothing pieces of incidental video game music yet made, and guaranteed make as much use of affection for the series as possible.

Yet the landscapes, wide and open as they were, alongside Casey Hudson’s promise of a ‘whole new region of space’ is just enough to make me hope, and just enough to hint at Bioware’s direction to excite me. Bioware haven’t given us much, but combined with what we’ve seen of Inquisition so far it seems reasonable to suggest that the games being teased will continue along the same path. The promise of worlds with great open zones, with the promise of meaningful choices, ones which alter the game world, is too great not to be just a little bit excited. On the other hand, the microscopic fragments of those games features in the trailer could mean anything.

Whatever the shift in direction and structure might be, it certainly seems to be one which Bioware are attempting, across all of what they’ve shown at E3. The demos of Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the brief snippets of ‘conceptual footage’ for the next Mass Effect and the teased new IP all seemed to be placing the openness of the game world front and centre.

Speculating wildly on the future of RPGs off the back of a couple of demos, a few trailers and some landscape shots might not sound like the wisest course of action, but I’ve started, so I’ll finish. If Bioware RPGs seem to be moving onto a much more open, if not open world, footing, they don’t seem to be alone. The Witcher 3, the other next-gen RPG shown at E3 seems to be doing something similar in parallel. Granted, Witcher 3’s seems to be on a different scale of magnitude entirely and, by all accounts, isn’t zoned. Still, both CD Projekt and Bioware are putting their emphasis on the size and openness of their worlds – the idea of being to go anywhere you can see, and to explore far beyond the bounds of previous games. If I had a pound for every time I’ve seen or heard both studios remark on just how big the worlds of this new generation of RPGs will be compared to those of the last, I could probably shop at Waitrose on a regular basis.

Whilst demoing Inquisition to IGN, Laidlaw described how the region being shown was larger than all areas of Dragon Age: Origins put together. One of the first details released for Witcher 3, aside from just how luxurious Geralt’s beard would be, was that the world would be a good thirty times larger than The Witcher 2’s not insubstantial zones. The E3 charm offensive from both studios seemed to place as much emphasis on exploring and traversing the worlds as on the questing and story which might ordinarily take pride of place in the particular type of RPG being peddled here. It’s perhaps more reminiscent of Skyrim, and the Bethesda stable of open world RPGs than of the Bioware games of yore, or the previous entries in the Witcher series.

Maybe this is a trend, the future of AAA RPGs, or maybe it’s just this year’s flavour. Either way, it’s still tempting to see Inquisition and Witcher 3 as the first of a new generation of vast RPGs, on a larger scale than their predecessors but without sacrificing too much of their detail. Worlds on a similar scale to Skyrim, but which players can actually make an impact on. Much of this hype, of course, and although we’re seeing more and more of these games, it’s too early to tell whether this is a new direction, or just a dead-end.

It’s hard not to be hopeful, though.

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I’ve somehow managed to open this piece without even mentioning dogs or the watching thereof; welcome to a brave new world people! Find out what I think about Watch_Dogs after the cut.

Watch_Dogs is a third person open-world hack/shoot/drive-em up from Ubisoft. It has flavors of Grand Theft Auto, a sprinkling of Assassin’s Creed and rather surprisingly, can feel a bit like Enter The Matrix at times as well.

This is a game that has received mixed reviews in some quarters and the most common dismissal I hear on social media is that it’s just GTA with hacking. Thinking about that for even a second gives us an indication of how good the game actually is, the GTA games after all are pretty seminal parts of gaming history, so to add another level on top of that must surely make it even better?

Well, yes and no.

You play as Aiden Pearce who is possibly the blandest and most uninteresting character I’ve ever had the misfortune to play. He’s a hacker and before you get involved he had done bad things which led to his niece getting killed (not a spoiler as it’s the games main driving narrative). Aiden is blind to the fact that he had a huge hand in the situations which led to her death, and that he, not her, was probably the intended target. But never mind that as he will murder thousands of people to make him feel better about himself.

He’s so myopic in fact that even as situations keep getting worse, and more people around him start to suffer he doesn’t even really stop to think if he’s the root cause (save for one throwaway line of dialogue). Now of course, there’s a narrative reason for this and it’s all a flimsy vehicle to pushing Aiden through increasingly escalated scenarios, but unfortunately it’s so thinly veiled as to be somewhat insulting to the player.

Luckily for Watch_Dogs though, everything else is so good that the weak story doesn’t matter too much. The success of Watch_Dogs comes from the world it inhabits, which is ridiculously detailed in places. There is an acute attention to detail on display here and you get the distinct impression that huge portions of the game were agonized over to make it just so. Granted, not nearly enough of the world can be interacted with, with vast swathes amounting to nothing more than window dressing, but as a stage for an interactive story, I’ve not seen any better.

It’s the incidental aspects of the world that really sell it for me. Simple things like the way pedestrians move and interact help flesh out the world. You don’t see the pedestrians as objects, but part of the living, breathing city of Chicago.

This nature of the city is helped immeasurably by the use of the Profiler. The Profiler is one of your key ways of interacting with the world. It allows you to hack items, interact with the environment and to as the name implies, profile people. Once activated, hovering your cursor over someone will trigger facial recognition software which gives you some snapshot details about them; their name, job, salary and then a little tit-bit of information. This is clearly just a random information generator, but it doesn’t matter as it helps you build that world in your head, and all of a sudden the pedestrians go from being rag-dolls to be battered about with garbage trucks to being actual people. It literally changed the way I play this type of game, no longer was I mowing innocent civilians down- in fact I was going out of my way NOT to harm civilians. It really is a brilliant psychological trick.

The integrity of this world is kept, by allowing you outlets for your more destructive side with the inclusion of digital-trip side missions. Here you can enter a digitally invented (or augmented) version of the in-game-world to reap havoc without, importantly, actually doing it in-game and hurting anyone. We’re in borderline Inception territory here, but it gets away with it. This is also where you can get your hands on the glorious Spider-Tank I referred to at the start, and there is a good variety of side missions to lose yourself in (including a rather amusing Pacman-Esq one using in-game augmented virtual reality).

Other side missions will see you tasked with stopping crimes, tailing people, or hitting criminal convoys and hideouts. Each scratches a particular need for the gamer while maintaining the integrity of the game world. You don’t have the narrative dissonance here of Niko from Grand Theft Auto 4, mowing hundreds down in a tank before sedately going bowling with his cousin. Granted, you can still go full-Niko in-game if you want, but it’s nice to be able to scratch a more explosive itch without ruining the immersion or integrity of the game-world.

Movement, once i’d figured out how to toggle walk (alt), feels right but there is a slight issue with the driving, there’s been a slight misstep with the throttle control when converting for keyboard input. It is a binary response where you can just as easily accelerate into a wall as take a corner.

Combat on the other hand is handled with aplomb. It feels suitably visceral and the weapons all feel distinct, with perhaps the exception of the shotguns. The cover system, for me at least, was faultless; just make sure you’ve got it properly aligned up and you can’t go wrong. Head-shots take people down quickly and there’s never a shortage of suspicious explosive items in the environment to make every battle interesting and above all fun. I literally never get tired of having road side shootouts and then taking out the reinforcements before they’ve even left their vehicle. It’s almost HEAT in places, but without the ponytail.

There are then the different takes on the typical missions. The ever present security cameras remove the pain from tailing missions; why follow on foot/car when you can just hop from camera to camera. There are also more contrived missions involving hopping from camera to camera within buildings to complete objectives, but again it lands just the right side of dumb. Some missions are pretty darn good and while most are at least fun, I must warn you that there are some forced-failure missions, something which is hard to forgive.

All that said, and I know I keep coming back to this, but the world really is the star here; that coupled with solid mechanics, generally interesting missions and a pleasing aesthetic all leaves you with something that’s really worth playing.

I’m trying to remember the last time I had so much fun in a game. I can see why people may be annoyed with it, or may try to rally against it, and to be honest if you’re really looking for an issue in this game, you’ll find plenty. If though, you’re just after an enjoyable romp through a genuinely stunning (in both visual and design perspectives) world then I genuinely can’t think of any better. As such Watch_Dogs is getting the highest recommendation I can give it. This really surprised me, and hopefully it’ll surprise you too.

Verdict – Red Mist

Platforms Available – PC, Xbox One and 360, PlayStation 3 and 4.
Platform Reviewed – PC

Review copy supplied by Ubisoft. Please read this post for more on our scoring policy.

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It all starts off like this: you’re on an aeroplane with a child sitting beside you, (who on Earth this child is hasn’t been elaborated upon yet, but hey, it’s an Alpha game, I’ll let it slide), the plane crashes and you wake up to see the islands residents, cannibalistic mutants, dragging away the little child. You gain control of your character and must survive on this island by chopping down trees, scavenging for materials and crafting a base to avoid the ruthless mutants.

I’m sure you’re thinking: “this sounds like a Minecraft ripoff!” You couldn’t be further from the truth. You can craft walls, items and houses, sure, but The Forest has a lot that Minecraft lacks.

The mutants make this game. They are terrifying. You have few methods of defending yourself; you have axes and various weapons you can craft, like Molotov cocktails. But these aren’t any normal (if there is such a thing) mutants, they’re mutant cannibals, and they’re damn strong. It can take 12 swings of an axe to bring one down, they’re nimble enough to avoid thrown projectiles, and even if you have stamina left after the battle, reinforcements will likely arrive soon, leaving you overwhelmed.

You fear the mutants. You actively hide from them. Sometimes they see you and circle around you without attacking, surveying you, assessing you. It’s in these moments where you slowly back away, hoping to whatever God you believe in they don’t all swarm you in a coordinated attack. In a game where death is permanent (after your second “death” anyway), you want nothing more than to hide from them. You’re weak, and the game lets you know that. They drag away their fallen comrades, and the females mourn the death of their friends. Although you are only defending yourself, The Forest does a great job at convincing you that you’re merely a trespasser in these people’s lives, adding to the immersion of the game.

You’ll find yourself in this situation more than once.

For an Alpha release, the attention to detail in the artwork is phenomenal. The developers have a background in VFX, which explains why this game looks so great. Bushes sway swiftly in the wind, moving aside as you walk through them, the gloriously detailed trees are thick and plentiful, giving The Forest a sense of denseness to it. Even a decent computer will have some trouble smoothly running this game, though this is might just be down to poor optimisation during the Alpha release.

The visuals aren’t the only thing that stand out to me, the audio in this game just as good. In the same way the Battlefield series is known for its phenomenal sound in the shooter genre, The Forest should be equally respected for its sound in the survival genre.  Every sound of the axe, ranging from chopping down a tree to striking a mutant round the face is incredibly satisfying, hauling logs and placing them onto your shelter provides a lovely thudding sound, giving you a sense that you’re actually building something. Coupled with the visual progress being shown whenever you place materials on any contraption you’re building, you really feel like you’re actively surviving on this island, building whatever you can to keep yourself alive.

All of this together leads to a terrifying sense of immersion. Even opening up your inventory proves to be a surprise, you see all your collected items sprawled on a mat in front of you. The mat becomes progressively more cluttered the more you collect, and more bare the less you have. Little things like this, coupled with large things like the graphics and audio give The Forest a sense of immersion that games like Minecraft don’t have. Crafting is probably the only similarity the two games share.

The game truly does look beautiful, even in its early stages.

There are no shortage of crafting blueprints, you can build noose traps to secure your base from cannibals, to effigies built from mutant limbs to ward off enemies, letting them know that they’re in your territory now, and with the release of v.0.02, rafts to get across large lakes (although rafts were introduced without sails, which seems kind of pointless to be honest, but hey, it is still early days). Custom building blueprints are also abundant, allowing you to build your base as you want it. Want a heavily fortified fort with spiked walls for defences? Knock yourself out. Or maybe you’d opt for building traps everywhere, hidden in the dark forest to lure your enemies into. The forest is quite literally your playground (until you get mauled by the residents that is).

The game world itself is also vast. It takes a solid while to walk from one end of the forest to the other, and if you wonder too far off, the game informs you that the area is not available yet. However, the developer has stated that more areas will be released, so those snowy, huge mountains in the distance? Yep, we should be able to travel to them as development of the game progresses. I’m excited just writing this of the potential of this game.

The fact that this game is basically in its foetal stages at the moment does mean it has its fair share of problems. Swapping from a Molotov cocktail to anything else in your inventory immediately drops the Molotov at your feet, setting you alight. Chopping up dead bodies for effigy materials also sometimes kills your character, as if he got knocked down by the flying head send towards him. Camouflage doesn’t seem to do much, clipping problems with character models are abundant, and the lack of a story may lead some people to get bored of the game quite easily. Okay, I’ve built a near impenetrable fortress, now what?

The biggest problem for me is that fire is incredibly overpowered in the game, completely destroying any sense of immersion. This will most likely be fixed. At the moment, all it takes is one shot with the easily found flare gun to bring down any enemy in the game, and with the infinite ammo glitch easy to perform, if you opt to use the flare gun, the horror aspect of the game is virtually non-existent. But again, this is only v.0.02, this will most likely be patched soon bringing back the sense of hopelessness against the cannibals.

It all boils down to this, are you willing to spend a tenner on a game that you’ll get countless hours of enjoyment from, but are willing to put up with the insane amount of bugs and glitches? I know what my answer was, and seeing the potential of this game is even more incentive to buy it, and support the developers help create a survival horror game to remember.

The Forest is available on Steam Early Access  for £10.99

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Talat

E3 has come to a close, and what an E3 it was. While there were no shocking, jaw-dropping announcements, what there was, was a solid stream of brilliant game after game after game. It was refreshing to see the lack of “Kinect Animals Xbox One Edition” or “Sony Move to the Beat PS4 Exclusive”. Instead we were greeted with new, exciting gems such as No Man’s Sky, Bloodborne and (finally) a new Rainbow Six title, along with much more. The conference was so packed with solid titles in fact, that a quick nip to the bathroom cost me the announcement of a new Mass Effect title (thankfully I was able to watch the clip after the conference).

So, what am I most anticipating? Well, The Witcher 3 looks phenomenal, with graphics that’ll make my high-end PC choke to death and fantastic gameplay to go alongside it. Being an avid fan of the Souls series, Bloodborne, the spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls has got me into a fit of excitement that would put any fangirl to shame. Assassin’s Creed Unity also looks gorgeous, with its French Revolution setting, the largest playground to date in any Assassin’s Creed game, and a fun new co-op mode so we can finally plan and execute an intricate assassination with mates.

All in all, I was pleased with E3 this year. Not only did the main three contenders have great conferences, but Ubisoft and EA also shone just as brightly. I can say with pleasure and certainty that 2014/15 will be a fantastic period for gaming, and a horrendous period for our wallets.

Chris

I’ve already talked at quite some length on some of the games that caught my eye, but there are still others that I haven’t mentioned just yet.

While I never quite hooked up with Magicka, I am extremely pleased to see Paradox are bringing the series back and what’s more, it is going to be coming onto the PlayStation 4 as well as PC. I’m sure the team at Paradox will work their magic to ensure all the systems work well on a gamepad and I have to wonder whether Paradox will be in a position to bring any more titles across to Sony’s machine.

Any game that features a colour palette that isn’t limited to brown and sci-fi blue tends to get my attention. No Man’s Sky is no different, and is even more eye-catching because it has DINOSAURS! The trailer really does look gorgeous and instantly traversing from walking with the aforementioned dinosaurs to space-combat before continued air-combat in the skies of another planet. Awesome.

One last, slightly disappointing, thing is that so many of the big games aren’t coming out until next year. The Legend of Zelda, The Order 1866 and Crackdown are three big console exclusives that we won’t see until next year. A great shame, but at least there will still be some awesome titles coming out this year like Destiny, The Witcher 3 and the next-gen and PC port of Grand Theft Auto V.

All-in-all, this was a damn good E3.

The post Our Week in Games Special – Post-E3 Thoughts appeared first on The Reticule.

Rainbox Six: Siege

I first paid attention to the Rainbow Six games after reading the book of the same title by Tom Clancy. I really enjoyed the book, it provided a nice diversion from the Jack Ryan saga which at times found itself spinning off far and away from its original premise. The Jack Ryan books are analogous to the Rainbow Six games in that they turned from tightly focused tactical experiences to more action-oriented adventures with games like Rainbow Six: Vegas. From all accounts, the Vegas branch were thoroughly enjoyable games, but had somewhat lost the heart of the originals.

What made me sit up and pay attention to Siege (apart from the gushing praise from those who saw it up close) is that the reveal trailer shows off some awesome destruction of the house the Rainbow team are storming and the focus on teamplay. The destruction for one is amazing to behold, and somewhat more satisfying than the Levolution effects seen in Battlefield 4. Everything from the hostage takers laying barbed wire and reinforcing doors and windows to the Rainbow team blowing their way through aforementioned windows and even a basement ceiling. If all the levels are structured similarly to this demo and are of the same size, the destructive elements will provide numerous different ways of approaching the objective.

I can imagine some people will snort at the trailer and the contrived conversations between those on the Rainbow Six team, but the essence of what they were talking about rings true for me. I used to play Battlefield 2 with my buddies in the -=256=- Clan in some competitive leagues. While we weren’t a match in skills (or exploits) for many other teams, the nature of discussing plans and communicating on your progress to the objective was broadly similar to what went on in the above video.

It does leave me wondering what will happen when playing with random punters, and I haven’t seen any concrete details on how singleplayer will shape up. For what we have seen though, I am pretty happy to see a long-running classic return to its tactical roots.

Dead Island 2

I’ve got slightly less to say about Dead Island 2 having never played the first. However, I do note that the new game is being made by Yager, the team behind Spec-Ops: The Line, a title which I am only just getting my teeth stuck into. How I missed this game for so long, I don’t know as it is really well crafted. I’m looking forward to seeing further evidence of what Yager can do with this open-world zombie game. The notion of seamless drop-in co-op in a similar vein to Journey is interesting, how that works out will be interesting.

Apart from that, the trailer for the new title is brilliant. It might not match the slow-mo time-switching trailer for the first game, but watching a man who has been bitten, run along a Californian beach front while humanity unravels behind him, before he too succumbs to the inner zombie is thoroughly enjoyable. The ending is quite amusing too.

The post The Reticule (Not at) E3 – Rainbow Six: Siege and Dead Island 2 appeared first on The Reticule.

Blackguards 2

While no media has been released yet, the sequel to Blackguards (pictured above) was revealed. Despite taking a while to get going, I ultimately found myself quite enjoying the first game, and I’m not too surprised to see another game in the series be confirmed.

The new game will continue the stories told in the first game, and promises to address some of the issues fans had such as an improved cover and line of sight system. Blackguards 2 will be coming in 2015. The press release provides further details on some of the new mechanics.

Blackguards 2 will again be based on the RPG rulebook of The Dark Eye, but it will come along with some revisions, optimisations and simplifications. The gameplay will focus on turn-based battles once more – this time the players have to conquer Cassia’s lands and defend them against intruders when the need arises. As in a fraction-based game the enemies can recapture the territories from the Blackguards.

If not in a battle, players take care of a lot of quests and the development of their characters. As common in RPGs, the quests will offer optional and alternative plotlines.

FIRE

FIRE is coming in the fourth quarter of this year and places the player in control of Ungh (pictured), the main protagonist of this Stone Age set adventure.

Ungh will do traditional Stone Age things such as trying to find fire for his tribe, meet his true love and even take a ride on some dinosaurs. Ok, so the timeframe of this game might be slightly wonky, but true to Stone Age life, there won’t be any comprehensible dialogue with Ungh communicating his needs through facial expressions.

An interesting idea if I may say so.

The Devil’s Men

The Devil’s Men is a steampunk adventure from author Kevin Mentz who also worked on Memoria which was well received by Kevin last year.

His new title is set in Victorian England in 1871 in a seaside town which has seen a series of strange murders. Evidence leads to a group of misfits known as The Colony who are exerting their influence in the town. This will all lead to two ladies (how about that Ubisoft?), Adelaide and Emily coming together to try and unravel the mystery.

While details are slim on all three games at the moment, based on the strong history of adventure games coming from Daedalic and the steampunk setting, The Devil’s Men is probably the one I have an eye on the most.

The post The Reticule (Not at) E3 – Daedalic Go New Game Mad appeared first on The Reticule.

The big news from developers SCS Sofware then is that the next full-scale map expansion for the trucking sim will be going into the Nordic regions of Europe. While there are undoubtedly some fans who would have been calling for southern exploration into Spain and the rest of Italy, I am quite looking to some of the stunning Nordic scenery we have become so used to thanks to the swathes of dark brooding TV dramas produced in those chilly countries. I don’t expect SCS to include any murder mystery elements to the expansion, but one can dream can’t they?

Getting back on the road, the prospect of views such as this one are already quite enticing.

If the news of the Nordic expansion wasn’t enough to whet your appetites, or you simply aren’t keen on splashing out more cash on a trucking game, the latest news on the upcoming patch might pique your interest. In addition to the already know addition of an in-cab seat adjuster and further AI behavioural tweaks, something special is lurking.

SCS have been busy working with Heavy Load Studios on making some additions to the map. When the next patch lands, you will be able to visit three new cities: Venice, Graz, and Klagenfurt. The area of the map that is being updated can be found below.

Are you looking forward to exploring the Nordic lands or do the three new cities excite you most?

The post Non-E3 News – Euro Truck Sim 2 Going Nordic appeared first on The Reticule.

Hyrul Warriors

We’ll start off with the ‘lesser’ title, the Dynasty Warriors spin-off that many die-hard Zelda fans probably decried when they first heard about it last year.

Not being a signed up member of the Zelda die-hard fan club allows me to take a look at the game from a different perspective. I see this as an exciting new turn for the franchise, and more importantly, one that is coming out this year. It might give newcomers to the series a feel for the world (distorted that it will be) and it will also be a enjoyable romp through massive hordes of enemies.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect it to be a Game of the Year contender, but it is at least something that I will be keeping on my radar.

The Legend of Zelda

This was the moment of Nintendo’s E3 in my opinion, if they hadn’t pulled this out of the bag, I think we would have known that Nintendo were pulling the plug on the Wii U already.

Despite the positive reception the announcement received in general, I have to say that I am gutted we only got a vague 2015 release date. While I wouldn’t want to see Nintendo rush The Legend of Zelda, especially as it is now an open world title…I was really hoping it would be coming out this side of Christmas.

I am all for Nintendo releasing top quality games, just take a look at Super Mario 3D World and Mario Kart 8, but I find myself thinking that their entire strategy with the Wii U was under developed from the off. Despite some of the positive signals I talked about before E3, their E3 event left me feeling like this is a company sleep-walking into a downward spiral.

That is enough talk on the wider context for Nintendo as I am still really excited for a new Zelda, especially an open-world one. We only got a small glimpse of things in their E3 event, but it already has me excited.

The post The Reticule (Not at) E3 – Zelda (!) appeared first on The Reticule.