Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i PLAY

PREVIEW “YOU’RE ON THE ROAD WITH A RAG-TAG CREW WITH THE AIM OF AVERTING THE APOCALYPSE.“ Riding in a stagecoach at sunset, charging through piles of leaves, and even finding the odd palmful of coins, we can’t rest easy. As everything is bathed in the dying light, there’s no ignoring that something red is coming for us; ruin has found us once more. The first Darkest Dungeon saw you plumbing the depths of a cursed family estate. You’d assemble parties from drifters and odd job men passing through town, tempting them with coin before looking on as they spent ever longer either in the cloister or down the pub after each expedition. Some would never make it back from the estate, and you’d forget their names in time. This sequel…

Mechs, monsters, and metal? You have our attention! A brief glance might suggest this is a predictable 2D side-scrolling shooter, but that word ‘predictable’ needs to go straight into the bin. We’re pleasantly surprised by what we play, which includes the heavy metal guitar growling urgently in the background as we blast our way through. The first Valfaris, released in 2019, was an action platformer, but this is a retro-styled shooter complete with automatically scrolling levels. It’s what you’d expect to an extent: move your heroic chap around the screen while holding down a button to shoot continuously in front of you, all the while doing your best to avoid getting shot yourself. However, if you’re planning just to hold that button down from start to finish, you’ll be dooming…

I Clive chases after a ghost from his past, convinced this mysterious cloaked figure is the one who burned his home to the ground years before. II Winged Eikon Garuda taunts Clive from the air and the ground, keeping the cloaked ghost just out of his reach – but he persists. III Just when we think we’ve cornered the cloaked figure and can discover who they really are, Garuda swoops in and finally picks her fight. IV Using our roster of Eikonic abilities, we slowly whittle away Garuda’s massive health bar. You’ve gotta love an underdog. V But Garuda has her own set of tricks sequestered in her feathers, casting Aerial Blast and Tornado to raise gale-force winds to keep us at bay. VI Despite her immense power, the Eikon…

INFO FORMAT PSVR2 PRICE Free update (PS5 version: £69.99) ETA Out now PUB Sony DEV Polyphony Digital PLAYERS 1 LENGTH N/A ACCESSIBILITY Same as base game, no specific VR options Even though this VR update comes to the main game for free, experiencing Gran Turismo 7’s races in VR (plus a VR car showroom) is just as impressive as any full-priced release. Though there are some caveats to its integration, this is something of a jaw-dropper behind the wheel. What you shouldn’t expect is a front-to-back PSVR2 experience. Menus between races are still presented as flat screens (shown in the standard Cinematic view), and you can’t control the game with the Sense controllers at all. In a race, you won’t be in VR until the opening cutscene has played out…

INFO FORMAT PS4 PRICE £49.99 ETA Out now PUB NIS America DEV Falcom PLAYERS 1 LENGTH 30+ hrs ACCESSIBILITY Difficulty options; high-speed mode; option to retry and lower enemy difficulty after each game over The good news is that if you played Trails From Zero when it was finally released internationally six months ago, the story of Lloyd Bannings and the Special Support Section (SSS) should still be fresh in your mind for this direct followup that’s set several months after that game’s events. The bad news is that very little has changed. Trails To Azure still looks like an old PSP game blown up on the big screen without receiving the TLC that’s been given to ports of some other Trails titles. There’s also the fact that you’ve seen…

INFO FORMAT PS5 PRICE £15.99 ETA Out now PUB Kitfox Games DEV Kitfox Games PLAYERS 1 Romance can be a double-edged sword. It can also be a glaive, a scythe, or even a gigantic axe. At least, it can in Verona Beach, where your cousin is giving you a place to crash for the summer. Looking to meet new people and earn some dough, you hack and slash through “the dunj” wielding weapons who are transformed people (and, yes, they’re single). Along the way you begin to unravel a conspiracy to abduct weapons, while also dealing with some negative romantic attention. Forging strong friendships (and maybe more) with your new weapon pals is key to sorting things out before you have to head home. Racking up XP isn’t the only…

INFO FORMAT PS5, PS4 PUB Draknek & Friends DEV Corey Martin YEAR 2021 Clonk, thud, fwoom: part of the therapeutic joy of burning all your stuff in Corey Martin’s puzzler is the satisfying sounds it produces. With the first chapter of tripartite expansion Lost Memories offering a string of devious variants on the main game’s arrow-trap puzzles, you can add whoosh to the mix. And, from the other side of the screen, hmmm. Not to mention the odd oof. I’m not wincing at any flaws, you understand. Quite the opposite: Martin and puzzle partner Alan Hazelden’s clever challenges barely put a foot wrong. But I do, plenty of times. At which point, I’m reminded of Skyrim’s most infamous NPC quote, except here I’m more often taking an arrow to the…

INFO FORMAT PS5, PS4 PUB Starbreeze Studios DEV Behaviour Interactive YEAR 2016 This chapter’s Killer, The Skull Merchant, counters previous addition The Knight’s mediaeval horror with a much more modern angle: hunting people for sport in true The Most Dangerous Game fashion. Siblings Thalita and Renato Lyra, the new Survivors, were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and unlucky enough to witness this budget Predator going in for the kill. The Skull Merchant’s power is a combination of trapping and tracking, placing drones at key locations that alert her if anyone enters their range. Survivors who venture too far afield show up on her radar, but even without checking it sound cues often let you know where all the action is. Most players have already learned to…

Max Caulfield returns to her hometown after a long absence and, after mysteriously developing time travel powers, manages to save the life of her former best friend. We’re not spoiling anything – you know this is a special game, as that’s just how the story begins. Check it out; you’re guaranteed a good… time (hoho). Life Is Strange’s legacy goes beyond arguments about whether or not real humans actually use the word ‘hella’. It was successful enough to spawn three more games in the series (so far), one of which is centred on Max’s best friend Chloe Price.1 Chloe is brought to life in incredible fashion in this first game, in no small part thanks to an outstanding performance by Ashly Burch. TO THE MAX There, in fact, lies the…

Getting you closer to PlayStation’s most exciting stories, people, and culture This is an online game launching in the wake of high-profile shutterings of several competitors. The world of superheroes and supervillains is one of dual identities. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is no different, the latest showcase since the leaked screenshot of the loot-based inventory only emphasising that. It’s a game with a cosmetic items battle pass, a gear score made up of equipment that has a bunch of little stat percentage numbers, and a constant online connection. On the other hand, it looks incredibly slick to play, with a compelling, well-produced story. We saw plenty of the game in action during a recent presentation. While Rocksteady Studios seemed confident in the production values behind its four-player sandbox,…

Gently lapping tides accompany a rat-a-tat of gunplay that really pops in NDreams’ latest, Synapse. Exclusive to PlayStation’s just-released virtual reality tech PSVR2, it makes the most of the Sense controllers by putting serious firepower in one of your hands and telekinetic abilities in the other. Taking place in a greyscale world, action is punctuated by splashes of colour. Headshots explode into sprays of orange and red, while psychic power ripples through your palm in waves of pink and purple. Levels see you painting a deadly rainbow, blasting away foes in between telekinetically hurling environmental hazards such as explosive barrels their way. If you’re feeling particularly cheeky, you can even grasp and throw their allies into the line of fire. This action shooter takes full advantage of the hardware’s immersive…

Watch out World Of Warcraft, this free-to-play title is gunning for your MMORPG crown with its hero shooter combat and highly replayable co-op questing. Helmed by Airship Syndicate, known for its work on the excellent Darksiders Genesis, this wholly original effort is in its early stages but already showing signs of being the developer’s most successful creation yet. In the sprawling fantasy world of Evenor, a malevolent force called the Gloom spreads through the land corrupting everything in its path. As a wayfinder, a mythical hero armed with a magical dagger capable of purging the Gloom, it’s up to you to banish this evil. Expect to face plenty of fearsome creatures and encounter vicious bosses while amassing an ever-increasing quantity of valuable loot. RIGHT AT HOME On the surface, Wayfinder…

While we enjoy a dark and miserable adventure sometimes (hi Ellie!), it’s nice to break those journeys up with something bright, fun, and full of colour. With a world and art style sitting somewhere between Wreck-It Ralph and Nintendo’s Splatoon games, this is lining itself up to serve that function nicely. Don’t worry, you still get to shoot things. It is The Future, and the internet is populated by AIs (nice ones, not ones that steal people’s work). The AIs are in danger though, as the net’s suffering an invasion of viruses! That’s where you and your fellow Glitch Busters come in, running around a vibrant representation of the net that works conveniently well as a platform shooter playground. Up to four players make up the busting team, locally or…

FORMAT PS5 / ETA 22 JUN / PUB SQUARE ENIX DEV SQUARE ENIX / PLAYERS 1 Seven years on from the last mainline Final Fantasy, expectations for the next couldn’t be higher. In celebration of 35 years of history, XVI hews close to series traditions in some regards while making big swings elsewhere – and we’ve played it. “WARS ARE FOUGHT AND WON WITH THE EIKONS’ POWER – AND ENTIRE TERRITORIES LEVELLED JUST AS EASILY.” New setting Valisthea is described as ‘a realm in its twilight,’ incorporating familiar series touchstones such as crystals alongside a recognisable roster of summonable beasties, though both enjoy a fresh spin here. Valisthea is not, strictly speaking, an open world, instead composed of large, detailed areas with many paths to explore, through the volcanic outcrops…

INFO FORMAT PSVR2 PRICE Free update (PS5 & PS4: £34.99) ETA Out now PUB Capcom DEV Capcom PLAYERS 1 The base version of Resident Evil Village uses its first-person perspective to deliver in-your-face horror, so you’d expect it to be primed to impress when it gets on your face with this free update for PSVR2. While it’s certainly a great way to play, some iffy implementation makes this feel less definitive than Resi VII was on PSVR (which is still locked to that older hardware). The whole of Resi Village is playable here in VR, including most cutscenes (ones you didn’t originally view in first-person are displayed in Cinematic mode). Mostly, these serve to remind you that just because a cutscene’s in first-person, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will translate…

INFO FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4 PRICE £39.99 ETA Out now PUB Bungie DEV Bungie PLAYERS 1-12 depending on activity LENGTH 6 hrs approx (campaign) ACCESSIBILITY Choice of controller layouts; vibration, motion blur, and hints on/off; colourblind modes; reticule colour selection; customisable ADS sensitivity Previous Destiny 2 expansion The Witch Queen set the stage well for this one. An interesting new location, a new weapon type, a popular campaign that ended by introducing a villain… it hit all the right notes. Bungie rode the subsequent wave of positivity all the way to Neptune, where Lightfall takes place, where we find – well, not too much of anything, really. It all feels half-finished. We were promised that the setting, the city of Neomuna, would be unlike anything Destiny has offered players before.…

INFO FORMAT PSVR2 PRICE £16.99 ETA Out now PUB Neat Corporation DEV Neat Corporation PLAYERS 1 There are all the hallmarks of a chill farming VR game here, from the pastel palette to cute creatures you can feed and pet. But things are muddled by a crafting system that feels more like bartering with arbitrary items. You learn to grow plants and vegetables and craft other materials, before plopping the whole lot into a crafting machine, though the materials required to craft things won’t necessarily make sense. Also, requests to build certain objects or for a creature to give you an item are not logged, which annoyingly means a lot of back and forth to remember what you need to gather. It’s not helped by controls that don’t always make…

INFO FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4 PRICE £59.99- £94.99 ETA Out now PUB Focus Entertainment DEV Mundfish PLAYERS 1 LENGTH 15+ hrs ACCESSIBILITY Closed captions; difficulty settings Developer Mundfish’s debut effort is like the hybrid enemies of its campaign: two disparate robotic halves mashed together. For every beautiful vista and striking display of science-fiction architecture, there’s a moment in which our protagonist frustratedly screams “Where’s the shitass way out of here?” It may be possible to overlook some of the rougher mechanics in the face of its visuals, but awful writing drags the entire experience down. Things start promisingly enough with a short walk through the streets of a floating Soviet city. It’s a perfect showcase for both the beautiful art direction and the intriguing alternate-history setting: a reimagined 1950s in…

INFO FORMAT PSVR2 PRICE £19.99 ETA Out now PUB Pontoco DEV Pontoco PLAYERS 1 When a game manages to make factory-style production lines compelling, you know you’ve found something special. The twist? You create these production lines, with a great deal of freedom, with robotic clones of yourself. Set in a fantastical universe that the story gives you only teasing glimpses of, the clock is set into a huge tree. As the clockwinder, you summon different rooms within the tree into your central workspace to work through the puzzles within. The aim is usually, at a fundamental level, to get fruit from one end of the room to the other as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s not that simple, of course. Sometimes what needs to be harvested requires preparation…

INFO FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4 PRICE £44.99 ETA Out now PUB NIS America DEV Nippon Ichi Software PLAYERS 1 LENGTH 70+ hrs ACCESSIBILITY ‘Gentle world’ difficulty; adjustable movement controls; text for most speech Think you’ve seen everything number-crunching dungeon crawler RPGs have to offer? Well, think again. Just make sure that your thinking is outside the box, as that’s exactly what makes Galleria such a triumph – both narrative and mechanics spool out in unexpected directions. You’ll break this one by design, but always in a way that makes you feel super-smart. You’re exploring the labyrinth as a kind of self-insert wandering soul, summoned and bound to the Lanterne De Fantasmagorie (giving you the nickname ‘Fantie’) by a bubbly witch’s apprentice, Eureka. Madame Marta, known as Granny, has enlisted her…

INFO FORMAT PS5, PS4 PUB IO Interactive DEV IO Interactive YEAR 2021 This new mode, released as part of the latest free update for Hitman 3, is a surprisingly meaty addition that breathes new life into almost all of the trilogy’s well-worn locations (Carpathian Mountains, Hawke’s Bay, and the ICA facility aren’t included) with an exciting roguelike flair. It’s set some time after the main story, when 47 has relocated to a lavish woodland safehouse and is working as a freelance assassin. Your targets? A sinister band of international criminals involved in everything from arms trafficking to eco-terrorism. Tackling individual ‘criminal syndicates’ takes the form of a mini-campaign, dropping you into a string of past locations with new procedurally generated targets to hunt down. SHARPEST TOOL IN THE BOX In…

Not every videogame needs to leap to the screen as a straight adaptation. Sometimes the stories that surround gaming in the real world can be just as interesting, as is the case with Tetris (just released on Apple TV), which dramatises the true story of the game’s weird licensing rights situation, which caused chaos in the publishing world back in the late ’80s. If you’ve ever seen a documentary or read a book about gaming history, you’ll be familiar with the tale. When Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) creates Tetris it’s a hit as shareware, becoming a target for licensees to make a boatload of cash. When Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) tries to expand his sub-licensee rights to include handheld, he ends up pulling on a thread that not…

Marvel’s Midnight Suns has set the turn-based superhero adventure bar incredibly high. One thing that immediately works in Capes developer Spitfire Interactive’s favour, however, is that its game does several things differently. If you want a new approach to superpowered heroes punching baddies in the face, this just might end up being what you’re looking for. “CAPTURES THE FEEL OF A PARTICULAR TYPE OF COMIC.” In the world of Capes, the supervillains have already won, and it’s now a crime to develop powers that might pose any sort of threat to them. It’s therefore up to you to manage a steadily growing team of new heroes, slowly retaking the city and putting the good guys back on top. Interestingly, Capes leans much more heavily into a comic-book-style presentation than the…

You could argue that the real difficulty of Age Of Wonders 4 is getting past its surprisingly robust character and faction creation screen. But after going hands-on and faffing with helmet types, banner insignias, and whether or not to indulge in cannibalism, we discover a vast and variable 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) strategy game at our fingertips. It’s testament to the strength of the series that we’re able to step into it several games in (science-fiction spin-off AOW: Planetfall was the last time we saw it on PlayStation) and not find ourselves floundering amid the minutiae of differences and updates – but that’s not to say it hasn’t, like your own in-game empire, expanded and evolved in impressive ways. AOW 4, like an onion (or an ogre), is made…

INFO FORMAT PSVR2 [reviewed], PSVR PRICE £24.99 ETA Out now PUB 17-Bit, Perp Games DEV 17-Bit PLAYERS 1 LENGTH 15+ hrs ACCESSIBILITY Difficulty options; sitting and standing VR; different locomotion/comfort options; free jump Crouching in the bushes, we loose an arrow that finally takes down the feathered beast we’ve been tracking, taking care to recover the arrow shafts as they’re too precious to waste. But as we look down at our spoils, wondering whether to skin it for its pelt first, or carve out some meat to sate our hunger, we realise it’s almost nightfall and we’re a fair trek far from our campfire. Survival games are all about making many minute decisions to ensure that you stay alive for another day, but they feel much more immediate in VR.…

INFO FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4 PRICE £21.99 ETA Out now PUB Black Salt Games DEV Team 17 PLAYERS 1 LENGTH 10-12 hrs ACCESSIBILITY Colourblind mode; QTE adjustment; menu adjustment HP Lovecraft meets open-water fishing game’ is quite the elevator pitch, and Dredge lives up to it masterfully. Marrying the cosmic horror of the deep sea with a surface world ripe with gnawing disquiet, it takes what could have been a simple management game and twists it into something genuinely sinister. Arriving at a remote island community, you fill the role of its fisherman, catching fish to fill the bellies of the islanders while paying off your debts and upgrading your boat. Those upgrades are crucial, as while you’ll need money for repairs and the odd new motor, your most important…

INFO FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4 PRICE £34.99 ETA Out now PUB Prime Matter DEV Mad Head Games PLAYERS 1 LENGTH 18 hrs ACCESSIBILITY Subtitles Aboard the spacecraft Hermes, a Sentient Contact Assessment and Response team (or SCAR) is tasked to research the Metahedron, a mysterious structure that’s alarmingly close to Earth. Its pull causes the ship to power out, throwing the crew onto another planet entirely. Not one to be deterred by a crash landing, mission specialist Dr Kate Ward embarks on a new assignment to find her crewmates and unearth what’s really going on. A glowing apparition who occasionally guides you on your journey aside, this planet’s inhabitants aren’t exactly welcoming. Resources are scarce, Kate’s dodge recovery isn’t as quick as we’d like, and the toxin-lobbing monstrosities that pop…

INFO FORMAT PS5, PS4 PUB EA DEV DICE YEAR 2021 At launch, some people bounced off the latest Battlefield so hard, they got whiplash. If that was you then you’ll be interested to hear that, 18 months later, a huge number of changes and additions – big and small – have since been made. If you were happy with the way things were at the beginning, though, you might be slightly less happy now… One common complaint was that there were too many wide-open spaces, often leading to infantry embarking on long, lonely jogs as though they were getting some exercise in during lockdown – jogs that would often end in being swiftly cut down by a sniper or a helicopter. This is something that DICE has taken clear steps…

War vet Niko Bellic chases the fabled American Dream, only to find his cousin Roman’s failing taxi business, dirty apartment, and everything he owes to the loan sharks on the other side of the pond. Fans of the open world crime-’em-up series are no strangers to disillusioned protagonists or their tales of violent delights, but GTA IV has earned a special place in the hearts of many. “Still the best one!” says Alex Hutchison. “Best GTA,” Michael Drone agrees. “Genuinely fun to explore and play offline. The most interactive world of any Rockstar game other than [Red Dead Redemption 2].” BIG FISH, SMALL POND IV can’t escape comparison. Luke Michael Hodgson calls it, “Ten times the game GTA V is…” @ThatKidCarnage adds, “I’ll take the darker tone and the physics…

By 2016, PS Vita’s star was fading. But that didn’t stop Drinkbox Studios looking to complete a hattrick of releases on the platform, after Guacamelee! and Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack. While debuting a title on the handheld may have seemed a strange decision, Severed was a perfect fit and one the last great pages in Vita’s history. One reason Severed stands out is that it’s not like much else, nor for that matter like anything Drinkbox had made before, aside from its familiarly angular visual style. While Guacamelee! and Mutant Blobs were side-scrolling platformers, Severed pulled us into the first-person perspective of its one-armed protagonist, Sasha, and a delirious, dungeon-crawling action RPG. Drinkbox also dumped the zany comic touches it had made its name with, opting instead for…

FORMAT PS4, PS VITA / PUB SQUARE ENIX / DEV SQUARE ENIX / RELEASED 2016 You don’t have to use your imagination in Dragon Quest Builders. If you like, you can stick to making rudimentary rooms and following blueprints to fulfil the townsfolks’ requests. But where’s the fun in that? The spirit of Builders is in architectural ambition and an eye for the fabulous, and nothing quite fulfils the brief like mounting a rollercoaster atop your castle. Adventuring is often a destructive pursuit, as you bash up monsters and loot their dens. And while you still need to do that in Builders, it also encourages you to consider what you can create from the wreckage, along with any raw materials and décor you gather on your travels. In the early…