Tabla de contenidos para March 2020 en Edge

Getty images/Europa Press Entertainment “You wouldn’t give your child a bike without providing their helmet and stabilisers. The same applies to videogame consoles and parental controls.”Ex-football person Rio Ferdinand launches a UKIE campaign aimed at getting non-gaming parents more involved with their kids’ hobby (and sending gaming ones scurrying guiltily to the, erm, helmet shop) “I try to stay out of the creative process as much as possible. The last thing our studios need is me coming in.”What then, Matt Booty, does the job of head of Xbox Game Studios actually involve? “It’s a public holiday today and it’s my birthday, can you let me relax?”Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda responds to an online fan complaint – and inspires a new autoresponse for the Edge mailbox, too “There are still more…

Developer/publisher The Molasses Flood Format PC, Xbox One Origin US Release Spring Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is at the heart of every survival game. Here, however, the bottom tier of the pyramid gets a long overdue shake-up. To food, water, warmth and rest, you can add yoga balls and creepy dolls. And yes, these do count as essentials in a world where characters can literally die of boredom. Then again, Drake Hollow isn’t really a conventional survival game. It’s not your own well-being you need to worry about; rather, it’s that of the titular plant creatures, who represent your ticket out of a world you’ve basically been tricked into saving. Once you’ve unearthed them in the wild, the Drakes come to live in a village of your own making. It…

FAR EAST OF EDEN III Developer Red Company Publisher Hudson Soft Format PC-FX Release Unreleased BOMBERMAN 64: THE SECOND ATTACK Developer Hudson Soft Publisher Vatical Entertainment Format N64 Release 1997 DRAGON QUEST: MONSTER BATTLE ROAD Developer Rocket Studio, Eighting Publisher Square Enix Format Taito Type X2 Release 2007 FINAL FANTASY XIV: A REALM REBORN Developer/publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS3, PS4 Release 2013 FINAL FANTASY XIV: HEAVENSWARD Developer/publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS3, PS4 Release 2015 Naoki Yoshida is the architect of the Japanese game industry’s greatest comeback story since the original Final Fantasy game. Having cut his teeth at Square Enix on the Dragon Quest series, he led efforts to rescue the catastrophic Final Fantasy XIV, eventually transforming it into an MMO on par with the mighty World Of…

Developer/publisher Scavengers Studio Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Where does the battle royale go from here? In less than three years, we’ve had three titans establish themselves as the boundaries of the genre. Right now, it seems unlikely anything will dethrone the current holy trinity, excepting another Apex-style surprise, but while those games are constantly iterating, there must be room for something a little more transformative. Darwin Project doesn’t uproot the genre, but playing it is like watching someone reimagine the battle-royale template from first principles. Part of this is a result of the game’s history. It first launched into early access at the start of 2018, with a plan to release fully that same summer – a period that turned out to coincide almost exactly…

Developer Piccolo Studio Publisher Techland Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Back in the mists of time – E273, to be exact – Tequila Works sound designer David García was working on the soundtrack to the narrative adventure Rime, and spoke of the influence that legendary composer Joe Hisaishi was having on his work. The Studio Ghibli master was, García told us, “a master of portraying a landscape through the eyes of a child.” García’s soundtrack for Arise: A Simple Story once again channels Hisaishi with some reverence, but this is a very different kind of tale to Rime. Indeed, it is its opposite, telling not of a young boy stranded on a strange island, but of an old man retracing the main beats of a long,…

Developer Stoic Studio Publisher Versus Evil Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2014 The world is ending. And this time we’re not experiencing the desolate aftermath. No, this time we’re present while it’s all kicking off. Humanity is on the brink as the Dredge, towering golem-like creatures with thick stone armour, continue their relentless advance. Humans have formed an uneasy truce with the Varl, a race of horned giants mighty in size and strength but not in number. Both come together under the titular banner, a red flag that flies proudly at the head of your caravan as you set out to seek shelter. At first, it feels like a symbol of defiance: one (possibly final) act of rebellion, a futile surge of rage against the dying of the…

Attending Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show has always seemed to require a special sort of madness. After all, who in their right mind spends the first week of January – a time, traditionally, of abstinence, or at least a bit of low-key living, after the excesses of Christmas and the New Year – in a city where the party never stops and the dinner buffets stretch off to the horizon? We would, if it’s all the same to you, much prefer to stay in bed. Nor has it typically yielded much of great significance to the videogame industry. It is the tech sector’s measuring contest, a place where fantasy becomes a passably prototyped sort of reality, where expensively developed and tenuously marketable solutions go in search of the their respective…

Game Pong Knock Out Manufacturer UNIS Back in 2017, Gerardo Orioli added a project on Kickstarter with a simple premise: “Play Atari Pong in your coffee table’. His suggestion was pretty much what the headline described: a coffee table whose top folded away to reveal a modern take on the classic Atari cabinet, with one crucial difference: the game was not played on a screen, but using mechanical parts. Three years on, Orioli and his team have unveiled a follow-up. Where do you go after Pong? Why, to Quadra Pong, the fourplayer sequel first made by Atari in 1974. Once again, it’s played from above – but this time, you do so standing up, perhaps in recognition of the greater stakes. Once a player has conceded a certain number of…

Developer/publisher Fireproof Games Format PSVR, Quest, Rift, Vive, Windows Mixed Reality Origin UK Release April We reach out, grab the turntable the puzzle box sits on, and spin it idly, Wthinking. The air almost feels chilly. A light in the ceiling of the large stone chamber in the British Institute Of Archeology occasionally sparks, interrupting our thoughts, in which hieroglyphs dance. Two sides of the box feature symbols on parallel rails; it is clear we are supposed to slide the Eye Of Horus underneath one of the posed Egyptians, but which one? Suddenly, a flash – not the broken light, but a memory of where we saw a potential clue. And we’re off to the other side of a room, poring over a stone tablet riddled with keyholes, sockets and carvings. It’s a…

Developer/publisher Wolfire Games Format PC Origin US Release US 2020 You’d be hard-pressed to find a game as fixated on guns as Receiver 2. There are Y plenty of blockbuster shooters that love their military hardware, yes – but it’s hard to imagine any of them asking you to load individual rounds into a magazine or manually clear a weapon malfunction. But, as with its predecessor, this sort of thing is Receiver 2’s stock-in-trade. Instead of just hitting R to reload, the button might pop out a revolver’s cylinder or rack the slide of a handgun, one part of a four-step process that has to be followed carefully. Each of its guns is simulated right down to the springs and screws of its inner workings, developer David Rosen proudly tells us,…

POKÉMON SWORD & SHIELD: ISLE OF ARMOR Developer Game Freak Publisher The Pokémon Company, Nintendo Format Switch Origin Japan Release June A mid-priced expansion pass will replace the traditional third game for this Pokémon generation. Isle Of Armor is the first part, offering a large free-roaming setting that will host a new, self-contained story, with your existing save carrying over. The news earned a rather warmer reception than the base games, perhaps because it’s giving the fans what they want: 200 extra Pokémon, including newcomers, fresh Galarian forms and plenty of old favourites, will be spread between this sun-kissed island and the icier climes of second add-on, The Crown Tundra, which should be with us by November. Now, about that missing ‘u’… RESIDENT EVIL 3 Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4, Xbox One…

Darwin Project is, understandably, extremely motivated to ensure its own survival in a hostile environment – not a wintry deathmatch arena but the overcrowded battle-royale market, which is essentially the same except you’re hoarding players rather than wood – and so developer Scavengers Studio is pursuing the most obvious path available here in the bleak future of 2020: courting streamers. It makes sense for a game that is a hybrid of two genres beloved by online content creators, the perfect Let’s Play fodder of survival games, and the battle royale, undisputed king of streaming. But finding that audience is a gamble, and Scavengers Studio isn’t about to take a chance on this happening of its own accord. Right on the homescreen, there’s an enormous button inviting you to link up…

Developer/publisher Yacht Club Games Format 3DS, PC, PS3, PS4, Switch (tested), Vita, Wii U, Xbox One Release Out now This coming April, it will have been seven years since Shovel Knight’s Kickstarter campaign began – yet only now is it time for Yacht Club Games to bring it to an end. Surely not in the developer’s wildest dreams could it have conceived what its unpretentious retro platformer would become in that time. Shovel Knight has grown into a full-blown franchise, with spin-offs, cross-game cameos and even its own Amiibo line. Dispassionately speaking, King Of Cards is the belated fulfilment of a stretch goal – Playable Boss Knight 3, as the campaign put it – and yet it arrives feeling like the closing chapter in an epic saga. It’s an ending,…

Developer/publisher G-Mode Format Switch Release Out now The Japanese language is full of excellent disses – we are not sure our ego will ever recover from learning of unibare, the word for ‘everyone knows you’re wearing Uniqlo, and we’re embarrassed for you’. Now, thanks to this tongue-in-cheek puzzle game, we know of kuuki yomenai: a person who can’t read the room. In Kuukiyomi: Consider It, your number one goal as a player is to try to not be, as one might say in English, that guy. Consider It’s main campaign presents you with 100 social situations and asks you to react to each in the manner you deem most appropriate. While the element of the scene that you control is always bright red, you end up steering a huge variety…

Brightly coloured raincoats aren’t just about fashion: they’re designed to make you easier to see in the gloom of a heavy storm, too. So it is with Mo, the star of Minute Of Islands, an attractive puzzle-platformer in development at Germany’s Studio Fizbin. The archipelago that serves as the game world is entirely hand-drawn, and Mo’s bright yellow coat ensures she doesn’t get lost in the detailed backdrops. “We decided to give the artists a big part in the level creation for both stylistic and game-design reasons,” the game’s art director Tim Gaedke tells us. “Painting each island individually, with every background a unique work of art, brings about the look that makes this world so rich and explorable.” Mo is a young tinkerer in an unstable world that was…

APP Arcade Sidekick Score Keeper bit.ly/arcadesidekick Classic arcade games are all about high scores, but these days there’s rather less kudos to be had from topping a coinop’s leaderboard; no one’s really paying attention. To the rescue comes Arcade Sidekick, an iOS and Android app that serves as a one-stop shop for high scores in just about every retro classic you’d care to name. In addition to global leaderboards, there’s support for closed friends lists and clubs, and over time the app has expanded to include the latest news from the arcade scene, a community rating feature and gameplay videos. One potential drawback is a lack of verification – there’s nothing to stop some wag stinking up leaderboards with fabricated scores – but retro fans are an honest bunch, by…

Developer/publisher Rebellion (Rebellion Developments) Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin UK Format Origin Release February 4 There are two versions of the Second World War that exist in fiction: the war-is-hell one, a venue for telling stories about what it means to be forced to kill your fellow man; and the pulpy, boy’s-own-adventure version. As WWII-set shooters increasingly gesture towards the former, Zombie Army sits firmly in the latter camp – and camp really is the operative word. You’re not just going to war with Nazi zombies, but undead sharks and zombified Panzers with fleshy innards tucked away under their armour plating. There’s a resurrected Hitler in there somewhere too. It is, in other words, pretty much exactly what you’d expect and hope for in a game titled Zombie Army 4: Dead…

Developer Airship Syndicate Publisher THQ Nordic Format PC (tested), PS4, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now (PC, Stadia), February 14 (PS4, Switch, Xbox One) Well, it’s certainly an improvement on Darksiders III. Despite the admirable efforts of Cissy Jones as Fury, the dark fantasy series’ 2018 comeback suggested its best days were behind it. This time, having done passable impressions of Zelda and God Of War and some less impressive mimicry of Dark Souls, Darksiders turns its magpie eyes to the likes of Diablo and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. It’s not as single-minded as the former: it’s a top-down dungeon-crawler that largely focuses on combat, yes, but it throws in the odd bout of platforming, a dash of parkour and some environmental puzzles. Enemies still release cascades of goodies, but…

Developer/publisher Vertex Pop Format PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now Within minutes of playing this side-scrolling beat-’em-up, we’ve let out that sigh. You know the noise you make when, after a long day’s left you with a dry mouth and a headache, the first drop of a cold beverage hits your tongue? When Super Crush KO immediately hands us an uppercut, a multidirectional air-kick and a ground-pound, which all segue into each other at the merest suggestion of a button-press, that sound escapes us. Ahhh. There is something undeniably refreshing about this type of game, which – although in no danger of shaking up the world of videogames as we know it – executes a tried-and-true concept with relentless focus and tons of sparkle. Vertex Pop is a master at…

Developer Tunnel Vision Games Publisher Aspyr Format PC Release Out now Given you spend all your time in Lightmatter manipulating light and dark, it’s perhaps no surprise that developer Tunnel Vision is so comfortable in the long shadow cast by the game it’s clearly been inspired by. Everywhere you look, it’s there: firstperson puzzling that revolves around a science-fiction MacGuffin and the mechanics it introduces, navigating a stark white laboratory, chamber by chamber, your only companion a disembodied voice making increasingly sinister jokes. By this point, we probably don’t need to actually speak its name, but for the sake of the record: Lightmatter is just about as pure a Portal-alike as we’ve ever played. The game opens with you waking in a semi-ruined scientific facility after some kind of party…

Destiny 2 Developer/publisher Bungie Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2017 One year on from Bungie’s shocking split from Activision, the picture of the future of Destiny as made by an independent studio is much clearer. To put it another way: there is no more room for excuses. A little slack could be cut in the Forsaken era, as Bungie suddenly found itself with neither publishing support nor the help of the Activision satellite studios that contributed significantly to the making of Destiny’s 2018 expansion. Two seasons in to the Shadowkeep era, Bungie’s vision for Destiny is taking shape. We’re not sure we like what we see. Prior to Shadowkeep’s release last September, series director Luke Smith explained his frustration at how big Destiny 2 had become. Just about every…