Horizon Zero Dawn
Or, as they should be calling it: Third-Person Adventure Sperm Bank
A new IP! Let's treasure and nurture it and give it every chance to blossom into greatness!
It's a carbon copy of Enslaved: Odyssey To The West's world overtaken by robots premise. You know the kind: 'Let the forests reclaim the land' and all that while humans devolve back to cavemen and mechs evolve into simulacra of animals? Plus, it's got the absolute worst parts of Assassin's Creed's bush stealth and the 2013 remake of Tomb Raider's combat and crafting. Let me take this opportunity to speak for everyone:
"Not all of us want to go back to bows and arrows, games industry. Most of us were perfectly happy with guns."
The robots do look nice. But I'll be buggered with Monkey's electro staff if I give this rampant kleptomania a pass because of that. This is, by the way, Guerilla Games' new pet project. You know, the folks who gave us the Killzone games? Landmark efforts that set the bar for Playstation graphics with games about fighting Space Nazis? Granted only, maybe, two of them were good but this, just this whole thing seems tragically lazy for them. And they were onto such a good thing potentially with Shadow Fall.
Gears Of War 4
Or, as they should be calling it: Tears Of Bore 5
Due to a mixture of anti-psychotic medication, spiced rum and indigenous, shower mould spores, I thought The Coalition (formerly Black Tusk Studios), the latest developers to have a crack at making the original Gears' games particular brand of lightning strike twice, had dropped the 'Of War' bit from the title. My second thought not counting the one about building a device to make all humans within ten metres of me invisible and silent, was how cunning a move that could be. I was wrong, obviously. I just don't have the technical expertise necessary to make it a reality. Perhaps I could crowdsource it? Also the other thing. It is indeed and unsurprisingly Gears Of War 4 coming soon to Xbox One.
But then another thought occurred. That's a fucking great idea. Gears 4 is shorter, snappier, easier to remember if you've the mental and physical age of 12 like most of the target audience, but still has that precious brand recognition. It's also apt as balls because according to the six-minute demonstration they deigned to give us this year, any sense of organised conflict seems to have been dropped from the billing.
Instead, we have a more slenderly stacked duo (by Gears standards, which is to say, one brick shithouse per fitting to the usual four and a half) hunting or being hunted by monsters through the ruins this planet seems to have a fucking franchise deal with. An idiot might watch this and assume there's a subtler, more intimate tone this time. Everyone else will say: "You cut out the massive setpieces and bravado that made these, OK, one of these game what they were? Kind of alright? That's why Judgement was such a squeaky fart of a seller. It's barely even recognisable as a Gears Of War without those things. They could have called it Kicking in Over-Sized Doors - The Game!"
Just Cause 3
Or, as they should be calling it: Just Because, Again.
During one demo, a member of the Just Cause devs described how the team approached the mechanics of explosions in the game in a way that exactly reflects why you should want it. He said that they kept making them bigger. Nothing fancy about smoke density or spark decals or flame physics (although I'm sure there are lots those technical things involved) just bigger. Until they were so enormous that the game just broke. Then they stopped.
If that isn't enough and you didn't play Just Cause 2, consider this: That world map was vast but had plenty of interesting ways to get around it. If you're boring and sad and peoples' eyes glaze over when you talk to them and you'd escaped the digital internment camp we have for people like you called Grand Theft Auto, you'd probably buy a car and drive where you needed to go.
If not, you could grapple up the side of a skyscraper in enemy territory, start some shit, grapple over to one of the attack helicopters they sent to dissuade you, hijack it, fly down to street level, bail out, land on a super car, attach a soldier to the abandoned helo as it crashes into the sea, bonnet surf a few miles before taking the car for yourself and drive it over a cliff and parachute the rest of the way. It's like 'the floor is lava' routine but you've never not got access to rocket launchers, fighter jets and whole islands full of petrolly disaster waiting to happen. And Just Cause 3 will have more of all of those things.
Hellblade
Or, as they should be calling it: The Story Of Me: I'm So Sorry And Why I'm Always So Terribly Sorry
Hellblade is the crappily named but nonetheless intriguing IP from my newest and favouritest, Cambridge-based pet studio, Ninja Theory. Previously of Heavenly Sword, Enslaved: Odyssey To The West and the preposterously titled DmC: Devil May Cry ONLY, these local-grown fellas have shot into my good books by making games with compelling and well-directed narratives plus the single best action game control scheme ever. I'm serious. DmC uses every facet of whatever controller you happen to be using (which now includes the Xbox One and PS4 ones since the HD rerelease) with trouser-tearing elegance. Combat in that game is like looking down at a naked woman. It's going to take all your fingers, thumbs and a few other things to get the most out of the situation and you've got more than enough motivation to try.
Heavenly Sword was a distinctly God Of War-ish hack and slasher, inevitably drawing the comparison because of its fixed camera. They hit their stride harder with Enslaved, which had this melancholy feeling because it was basically a swan-song to adventuring-platformer types like Jak & Daxter that we'd never see again. And as I said, Capcom dumped the then bloated and fetid carcass of the Devil May Cry franchise on them which they proceeded to fucking nail with the tightest combat system you'll ever experience.
Hellblade is looking to be infinitely more reserved and serious than the bombastic, cock-waving bravado of the game that made me love these developers but at the same time, it has a strangely apt premise for me. It seems to be focused entirely on mental illness to whit, depression. It looks like one person's slow but inexorable decay into madness and oblivion. It also seems to be a game about fighting occasionally and this is where my excitement starts to go soft.
Infinity Blade. It just looks like Infinity Blade. An iOS game where you take on knights and monsters much larger than you one at a time, with strategic blocks, evades and strikes from a close-range, over-the-shoulder view. Not that Infinity Blade wasn't rad because it was. It had a radness it could whip out for all to see. Uncoiling and thunking to the floor of the app market to put every other mobile game dev to shame. It just wasn't the kind of rad I was hoping for from Ninja Theory's next IP. Still. I can look forward to more exploration than usual from them plus their usual blend of solid writing and art design. And some would say that's enough. Would I? What's that? Andy Serkis is on board again? Oh, sold! Sold, sold a thousand times sold!
For Honor
Or, as they should be calling it: Deadliest Warrior If It Made Less Sense
This seems like another Infinity Blade clone that noone else noticed. In combat at least. It is vastly different in scope as a sort of MOBA with skill involved.
As one of the precious few IPs here I feel I should explain that For Honour is a multiplayer duelling game with four players duking it out and AIs filling in the numbers as defenceless blade fodder for the more cowardly players to hunt down. You can be Vikings, Samurai or Medieval Knights but it seems to make as much difference as it does sense.
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
Or, as they should be calling it: The Nathan Drake Ethnic Cleansing Experience. The New Ride At Universal Studios!
Ahhh, Christ. OK. New things! Grappling hook, errrr, mud effects? Wet t-shirt physics, fruit displacement, crowd...errr sourcing? Long lost brothers! Vehicular manslaughter! Jum-errr, jump... jumping! No. No, I just can't do this. I can't even begin to care.
Alright, what about story? Do you like the same one the other three have told? Don't be ashamed, I do. I just don't like the game part of the video game. But apparently I'm the only one so if you are partial to the Joss Whedon-ish direction then take it from me: do the smart thing. Watch the Youtube cutscene films. They've all been the length of the average summer blockbuster Uncharted has always tried so hard to be up until now and won't cost you a penny. Support the video games industry some other way. Buy Papers Please five times or something. Screw with some marketing figures.
Doom
Or, as they should be calling it: Actually, that's pretty accurate.
Bethesda have become the unspoken masters of old-timey game reinvigoration. With the possible exception of whoever published XCOM: Enemy Unknown. 2K? I want to say 2K. Their last foray into ancient gaming history rewarded the world with the surprisingly excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order and the admittedly less rational Old Blood. And though I'm the only person in the world who didn't like Fallout 3 and will be damned if I talk about how they've added a dog (because that innovation worked so well for Call Of Duty, remember?) for more than a second, I've every faith that Bethesda can give the same miracle beauty treatment to the other crow's footed hag-child of Id Software, Dooooooom. Or Doom. If you want to spell it right.
There's an undeniable sense of logic to this move. Especially from a marketing standpoint as the Wolfenstein remake kicked such goose-stepping arse. And as comparisons go, it and Doom are hardly that disparate. Neither had any issue, say, with motivation. Wolfenstein might ask whether you'd like to push a bit of old pipe into a Nazi's brain as casually as you might a stick of celery into some houmous. And you'd reply, well he was a Nazi, Wolfenstein. I was already doing that.
Doom, on the other hand, is a game about killing demons from Hell on the planet Mars and sometimes in Hell too. I know, right? Positively cryptic by comparison.
This is probably the game I'm most not saddened by because it's refreshingly uncomplicated if not remotely original or intelligent. But it doesn't have to be. It revels in the dumb, cathartic fun of ridding the universe of something it unambiguously and obviously doesn't need like the Skittles, Nazis or Popcorn Chicken that came before it. It's a generous gift basket of sharp metal objects, squishy body parts and ever the twain shall meet. And the devil's in the details.
It's old skool without ignoring all the innovations or at least, trends shooters have charted in the many years since Doom 3 forgot it wasn't System Shock. Duke Nukem Forever thought it would be funny to make fun of all the games it was ripping off and look how that worked out. Shittily, that's how.
So Doom has Titanfall-y jetpack manoeuvring that isn't contextual as balls. And a backpack full of more than two guns but a less finicky weapon wheel so you can pick the one you want under pressure because you're never not going to be under pressure. And health packs. Tasty bits of health all over the place that I don't have to pick up one at a time like a fussy cleaner waiting for her nail polish to dry. And contextual finishing moves without- well they seem pretty intact, like them or not but this is at least a game where the brutality and glorification of same at least makes sense.
There's nothing controversial about pulling a demon's leg around to stove in its own head with because it's a demon. Buck-toothed little shit had it coming. And it's made painfully clear what will happen if you don't. One of the demos ended with a jetpack-toting skeleton tearing off your arm and beating you around the space chops with it. Although from its perspective you probably had it coming too.
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| This bit. Right here. |
This is a game I'm looking forward to playing. I'm looking forward to finding a Transfunctionating Cyber-Dragon Bollocks Cannon that shoots crotch-seeking laser tigers and not having to ditch it when the game decides: "Right, you've had your fun with that in the one section we made it available, now go back to the regular shooting drudgery."
I want to hoard that ridiculously overpowered cannon ammo until I reach a scenario where I'm down to my last shred of health and just want to make everything bad go away. I want to scour the environments looking for new Transfunctionating Blastey-Bollocks cannons even on the off-chance they were stashed somewhere. I want to validate the courageous man who raised his hand at a dev meeting and said:
"To hell with audio logs. Why not video logs? Better yet, hologram-video logs?"
Why not indeed?
***
My usual stream of bile notwithstanding, I'm probably going to get all of these games (except Gears Of War, obviously) because I don't believe you can take an accurate reflection of a game away from five minutes of highly rehearsed footage. Sometimes. Mostly.
Even in an industry built on franchise reiteration, you can't really be sure how developers are going to do with sequels. I mean, Dragon Age: Origins didn't hold my attention for more than two hours and the second one shat a hole right through the bed depending on who you ask but the third soaked up a week of my life and I love its frickin' pants off for it. I suppose my point is that you don't know what you want until you actually have it. I mean, I didn't know I wanted Inquisition until I had it and then I wanted the shit out of it. I guess that also means my point is - this whole thing was pointless. Wonderful. Until next year then. Happy E3.
