Содержание выпуска: February 2020 — Edge

Game GunArena Manufacturer Taito The light-gun game? Seen it all before, mate. The genre has barely moved on since Operation Wolf, if we’re honest, and while we’ll always drop a few coins into a House Of The Dead or Point Blank machine, our experience is forgotten about the second we put the guns back into their cabinet holsters. With GunArena, Taito posits a solution to the problem, albeit a rather unsettling one. What if the guns were real? Well, almost real. GunArena – announced in the spring of 2018 and revived at November’s IAAPA convention – uses airsoft guns, a simple target-shooting game in which you fire ball bearings at a shock-absorbing screen. If that all sounds like a health-and-safety nightmare then yes, well done: weaponry is stored behind the…

Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One Origin US Release TBA What if we made a game where you shrunk down to the size of an ant?” As Roby Atadero tells it, that question is the driving force behind Obsidian Entertainment’s latest experiment. The senior programmer is quick to note that the concept was born in 2018, before the Microsoft acquisition and as the team began to wrap on Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire. It has only grown from there. “Once Deadfire started to wind down, we had a brainstorm session and the question was asked: ‘If we did a survival game, what would we do?’” The answer is game creation on a different scale. Grounded is smaller in scope than many of Obsidian’s releases over…

GHOST OF TSUSHIMA Developer Sucker Punch Productions Publisher SIE Format PS4 Origin US Release Summer We’ll admit to having rather forgotten about Sucker Punch’s Kamakura-era brawler, and for a while we assumed Sony had too, perhaps punting it to PS5 and letting The Last Of Us Part II drop the curtain on PS4. A reappearance at The Game Awards, and confirmation of a summer release, puts that theory to bed, but honestly if you’d told us this was a PlayStation 5 game we’d have believed you. It’s a sumptuous-looking thing, flinging particles around with reckless abandon in a world so windy you suspect Sucker Punch is simply showing off. On this evidence, perhaps next-gen can wait. SENUA’S SAGA: HELLBLADE II Developer Ninja Theory Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format Series X…

A decade comes to a close, and with it, the end of a generation – and the latter is quite evident in the pages that follow. This was, once again, a far from stellar year for big-budget games, with platform holders and old-guard publishers largely keeping their powder dry ahead of next year’s launch of Scarlett and PS5. Ten years ago, that would have made for a rather fallow Edge awards, but the landscape has changed vastly over the course of the 2010s. Back then, we had a separate award for indie games. Now they dominate the top ten. As a result, our rundown of this year’s finest interactive entertainment yields a list of no little breadth. At the top end of the budgetary scale, there has been growing consternation…

We had not, honestly, expected our initial decision not to review Death Stranding in E339 to be so controversial. Perhaps we should have seen it coming: Hideo Kojima’s legend means he attracts an avid fanbase, whose passion for his work is rivalled only by the fervour of his legion of detractors. Depending on who you asked, our decision was either the work of a publication that didn’t understand Kojima’s genius, or the one that saw through the façade and unmasked the hack within; we were either the brave outlet taking a stand, or a timid one sliding into irrelevancy. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle of it all, and rather more tamely than has been received. Now the game is in the wild, our review has been…

Developer/publisher Snapshot Games Format PC Release Out now Growing up in the shadow of a beloved older sibling is never easy. Phoenix Point has never been shy of the connection, though – its crowdfunded origins were propelled by the story of Julian Gollop, creator of the original 1994 X-COM, grabbing the opportunity to rework Firaxis’ modern reimagining in his own image. But even if it had tried to make a secret of its family tree, the resemblance would be hard to miss. This isn’t just a game in the same genre as XCOM; it would not exist without it. An offshoot of the same conceptual DNA, mutated like one of the amphibious post-humans who drive Phoenix Point’s plot. In brief: climate change continues, melting the polar ice caps, releasing an…

Developer Asobo Studio Publisher Focus Home Interactive Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Fair play to Asobo Studio, and fair warning: this medieval melange of stealth, horror and action-adventure does not pull its punches. Its opening introduces you to a family of French nobles in 14th century Aquitaine, in the kind of idyllic scene you immediately know is about to go horribly wrong. But just how wrong – and how horribly – is really quite startling. The family’s delightful pet dog is gruesomely despatched. Then, just to prove it’s not messing around, Asobo apparently orphans its two young protagonists, Amicia de Rune and her younger brother Hugo. The boy, to compound matters, is suffering from a curious ailment that’s significant enough to have the English army pursuing…

Developer/publisher Square Enix Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2009 How long does a getaway sequence need to last before it turns into a running joke? Final Fantasy XIII is very nearly the punchline, there. A misjudged bid to pump acid into the veins of a famously stately series, it starts with a boss fight on the roof of a train and keeps up that intensity for 20 hours straight. There’s seldom a moment to breathe as your motley band of fugitives tumbles through the crevices of a mechanical world. The environments, ranging from airship hulls to the whipped-cream contours of a frozen lake, are grander than any previous Final Fantasy backdrop, but also far more disposable, quickly lost in the slipstream. There are hidden treasure orbs, some short-lived terrain puzzles…

Long before today’s teenagers doodled in the backs of their geometry notebooks, medieval monks hand-copying manuscripts kept themselves entertained by including sketches of penis trees, fighting snails and donkeys playing trumpets with their rear ends. Inkulinati is a turn-based strategy game all about such marginalia; using ‘living ink’, you scribble ridiculous troops that do battle across the page. “It’s Worms meets Monty Python And The Holy Grail,” designer Wojtek Janas tells us. The design of each unit is based on drawings from real historical manuscripts, chosen by artist Dorota Halicka. The team works with a medievalist to ensure authenticity. “It’s important to me that every detail, like the shape of the sword, the clothes of the character or the visual effects of the fire, look like they’ve been taken from…

APP GOG Galaxy 2.0 gogalaxy.com After six months in closed beta, GOG’s ambitious bid to unify the fragmented PC gaming space is publicly available. GOG Galaxy 2.0 isn’t just a way of playing DRM-free games purchased from gog.com; you can now link accounts from a host of other PC storefronts. A unified library pulls together your games from Steam, Epic, Origin et al, with smart filtering and a global search function; friends lists are brought across too, allowing you to view pals’ online activity across platforms. And achievements and playtime are tracked, if you’re into that sort of thing. Yes, it’s ultimately about bringing more people to GOG – the open beta launch coincides with the winter sale – but when it means a better quality of our PC gaming…

Developer/publisher Freebird Games Format PC Origin Canada Release 2020 Story is everything in Kan Gao’s games. Since his 2011 breakthrough To The Moon, he’s ploughed a successful furrow using RPG Maker XP, creating narrative-led adventures with simple graphics and straightforward mechanics: they might look like 16bit roleplayers, but essentially Gao was doing walking sims before the term was even coined. With that in mind, he’s understandably keen not to give too much away about the third main entry in the series – which obviously presents a challenge when you’re trying to find out what it’s about. According to Freebird Games’ own blurb, it’s “a bonkers time-loop tragicomedy murder mystery thriller involving multiple casualties and a suspicious cat”. We know it will star Dr Eva Rosalene and Dr Neil Watts from…

Developer Catastrophic Overload Publisher The Yogscast Format PC Origin UK Release 2020 Human tradition dictates that, on a semi-regular basis, our strongest must come together in displays of might to determine who among them is the superior being, dominance usually depending on how quickly one can get a ball in a hole from some distance away. Sports are weird. And that’s before you even get to the capitalism bit. Drink More Glurp’s aliens have very much got to the capitalism bit. Having received a sports broadcast from our planet, they’ve decided that the colourful logos plastered across stadium arenas and popping up on screen every five minutes must be the entire point. And so, they’ve made their own homage to our Earth sports – long jump, lawn darts, pachinko and…

Developer Ice-Pick Lodge Publisher TinyBuild Games Format PC (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Pathologic 2 is intended to be “almost unbearable”. That’s what it tells you in the difficulty settings, a feature reluctantly added by the developer after this magnificent, tormenting reboot struggled to entice players accustomed to the gentler ordeals of western-made RPGs. It certainly captures our mood, a third of the way through, when we discover that we’ve caught the plague we’re supposed to be curing – yet another threat to our health bar, on top of thirst, hunger, fatigue, muggers and the occasional Molotov cocktail. A budding haruspex (in Roman days, somebody who read the entrails of sacrificed animals, but here treated as synonymous with ‘surgeon’), we arrive in the slurry-brown backwater of Town-on-Gorkhan full of…

Developer Dontnod Entertainment Publisher Square Enix Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now We may have bid farewell to Arcadia Bay – and, for that matter, to Max and Chloe. But the opening episode of Dontnod’s sequel puts us on familiar ground. Phoenix’s Lisztomania, one of a miserly selection of contemporary pop songs, gets us off to the best possible start. Then we’re into a conversation between two teenagers about sex, drugs and pop culture that is somehow clumsy and perceptive all at once. The world, as before, appears to be locked in a perpetual late-afternoon glow. All the major players are introduced, before we get our pivotal tragedy, and the sudden awakening of latent supernatural powers. But from then on, until an unexpected late-game cameo, Life Is…

Developer/publisher SFB Games Format iOS (tested), PC, Switch Release Out now One of the joys of Tangle Tower – and there are many in this vibrant point-and-click murder mystery – is seeing just how much love its developers have for the whodunnit. The nods are subtle, but visible: the way new areas are introduced by name with the clicking of typewriter keys, à la Ace Attorney; the visual presentation of Professor Layton-esque puzzle curios; the lively, flickering animations of its cast of characters recalling Hotel Dusk. SFB Games understands that Ace Attorney and its ilk – all of which have design flaws aplenty – are enjoyed because of the worlds they weave, and has applied this understanding liberally to its Detective Grimoire followup. A fanciful premise piques curiosity: Freya Fellow…

Developer Tendershoot Publisher No More Robots Format PC Release 2019 Of all the Long Games that could possibly be played, we expected this one least. Hypnospace Outlaw, in which you play a banhammer-wielding Enforcer on an alternate-reality version of the late-’90s Internet, wrapped up its ending tightly. It told an all-too-familiar tale with unnerving accuracy: how grassroots scenes are very often warped into unrecognisable shapes by money-motivated industries. And yet, we find ourselves logging back onto HypnoOS within the year of its release. The reason? A free modding update. Not a fictional, in-game representation of modding, but something with real functionality: supported by mod.io, it allows players to code their own additions to the ‘sleeptime social network’. Webpages, the ‘zones’ the pages are organised in, emails, soundscapes, stickers, new characters…

“We know for a fact that some reviewers actually didn’t play the game. They have to review games, and they have 15 of them to review in one week, and sometimes they don’t have time.” Magazine teams are small, Ancestors creator Patrice Désilets, but they’re not that bad. We do, like, 12 game reviews per week at most “I have some issues with VR: it’s isolating, and I think of games as a communal experience. We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and… nobody’s asking for VR” Fair enough, Xbox boss Phil Spencer, but just who cried out for a new Battletoads? “I thought everyone would get the joke but no one did. It was the first time I’d ever had anyone write something negative about my music.”…

Developer Upstream Arcade Publisher Raw Fury Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin UK Release 2020 Each new descent into West Of Dead’s underworld begins in the same place: a dusty Old West saloon, upright piano in the corner, a half-finished game of Texas Hold’Em laid out on a card table. You’ll return here again and again, having mistimed a dodge or lingered out of cover a second too long. You’ll nod to the waistcoated barkeep, pushing grime around the same glass into eternity, then head out through those swinging saloon doors and into a freshly-baked labyrinth of rooms, all of them dressed for a shootout. As well as a fistful of enemies, there are two elements that pretty much all of these rooms have in common: a smattering of…

Developer Studio Seufz Publisher Application Systems Heidelberg Format PC Origin Germany Release February This game doesn’t especially care whether or not you actually play it. You can put down The Longing, uninstall it even, having never left the starting area – come back in a year or so, and you can still watch its ending play out. Once you’ve watched the game’s opening, and witnessed the creation of your character by an ancient king who then promptly turns to stone, a countdown begins. Four hundred days, until the king wakes once more and – his words – ends all fear and longing. Those 400 days play out in realtime. Or, as designer and artist Anselm Pyta puts it, “one second in the game is one second in your life”. With…

Developer Funomena Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4 (tested) Release Out now You can tell Keita Takahashi has had kids. Katamari Damacy cast you as a child working to please a particularly strict parent; in Wattam, you’re the one playing the role of cosmic guardian. The fractured world, floating somewhere in the atmosphere, is populated by all manner of strange anthropomorphic entities – rocks, fruit, piles of faeces, toys, telephones, facial features – all of whom delight in running around at top speed, giggling, climbing all over each other and making each other cry. Our job is to manage the chaos. And, as we loosen a desk fan’s grip from the head of a squid so that we can bloody well get on with whatever we’re meant to be doing,…

Developer/publisher Shin’en Multimedia Format Switch Release Out now We will never be convinced that the Fast Racing series is anything more than a pound-shop F-Zero, embraced by an audience too easily dazzled by visual flash to notice they’re driving an vastly inferior model. Still, credit to the former demosceners at Shin’en Multimedia for wringing every watt of horsepower from Nintendo hardware. Combining retro-style voxel art with modern lighting and weather effects, The Touryst isn’t far off how you’d imagine a 3D Octopath Traveler might look. But the more immediate comparison is the toy-town aesthetic of Link’s Awakening – albeit with a more effective use of shallow focus and no distracting framerate drops. In visual terms at least, Shin’en has outdone Nintendo itself. Technical brilliance tends to be where the praise…

Developer/publisher Cloudhead Games Format Index, Quest (tested), Rift, Vive Release Out now One word of advice: maybe close the curtains before giving Pistol Whip a spin. And while we’re at it, we also suggest you do a proper warm-up before you reach for your holster. Pistol Whip is quite the workout, not only in its rhythmic intensity but in the strange shapes you make while playing it, contorting madly to dodge enemy bullets that, once you allow them to start, won’t stop coming. You will sweat, you will pull muscles and, to the outside observer, you will look quite ridiculous. Hence the bit about the curtains. Our postman’s been looking at us funny ever since he caught us playing it. In simple terms, Pistol Whip is a sort of cross…