If you are any kind of Gamer and you haven’t been following E3 you need to be. At their live press release today at E3 they showcased some of the new up coming releases as well as some new trailers for already announced games. So here is a little break down of what was shown and some of my thoughts on them at first look.
Evolve:
I am a huge fan of Left 4 Dead, as it was one of the first games to feature forced coop play where the other players were actually necessary and you have to work together to survive the Zombies.
Evolve puts a new twist on it this time as you play four hunters tasked with trapping and killing a giant monster, while surviving indigenous wildlife and the environment as well. What really makes it different this time is that the Giant monster is now player controlled, and if you played Left 4 Dead online as one of the special infected you know how much fun that can be.
The monster has the ability to grow and evolve with new powers and great size through each three stages of its evolutions. While the hunters have to rely on team work, equipment and team work.
The new E3 trailer show cased 4 new hunters as well as the new monster: the Kraken, a large Cthulhu like beast with lighting based attacks.
Assassin’s Creed Unity:
The new assassin’s creed is exclusive to the Xbox one, and features a new mode of play that I have been wanting for a long time. Story Mode Co-op. This time around its set during the French Revolution, and you are not alone. You can now play with up to three friends in your own Brotherhood assassin team up.
Forza Horizon 2:
Forza is back doing the same thing as every other Forza game. New cars, prettier graphics, blah blah blah, its still the same old hat of; drive car round track really fast. Put some machine guns on the hood or a rocket launcher and I might give it a chance. Not a racing game fan.
Call of Duty Advanced Warfare DLC:
CoD has honestly gotten a bit stale, and it lost me with its last couple of future warfare games. Advanced Fighter picks up the train and runs with it, though beautifully. Featuring new future weapons, technology and jump jets. Not there aside from the jetpacks really interested me, and I have to ask why is E3 pimping DLC?
Sunset Overdrive:
Sunset Overdrive looks simply amazing. It temps to poke fun at current gene Shooters for their lack luster color and mediocre, run here, shoot that, hide behind cover, style of gameplay.
Quite frankly this game looks like the bastard offspring of a Tony Hawk game and Serious Sam, with a touch of Dead Rising. The only word to describe the game is; Quirky. The game play demo shows the player character grinding rails ye old Skate boarding style while firing off an arsenal that looks like it was build by the Joker while on cocaine.
There is some story line about a tainted energy drink turning people into monsters and warring factions, but I didn’t catch too much of that as my eyes were too busy exploding from how colorful the game is, having only been seeing brown and gray current FPS games.
This one looks like a ton of fun.
Rise of the Tomb Raider:
Showing no actual gameplay, we see a trailer in which a young Lara Croft is in therapy due to the trauma she endured in the last Tomb Raider game. The trailer shows her out running a bear leaping a canyon nearly falling to her death, oh and yeah…..killing a guy. It’s a beautiful trailer but it is only cinematic. So it’s still up in the air as to what the actual game will be like.
Fable Legends:
This one actually kind had me stumped as to whether or not I am looking forward to it. I LOVED Fable 2, and Fable 3 disappointed me…a lot. But it looks like they are taking another stab at it this time focusing on multiplayer which may or may not be a good thing, Nothing was really said about the single player option of the game, but they show cased some cool new stuff for the Coop.
You can now play with up to 3 friends specializing in ether Will(Magic) Skill(Shooty McGunslinger), strength(Warrior) or the bland mix of all three classes, and raid dungeons and what not together as a team. The real interesting part is the ability to play the villain. Which confused me at first since Fable has a Moral choice system which lets you be good or bad depending on your choices. This seems different as playing the villain you take control of the dungeons in a mixture of Tower Defense/Real time Strategy, where in you control traps, spells and monster hordes to try to stop the Heros from finishing their quest.
While game play is shown, not about the single play game is hinted at.
Ori and the Blind Forest:
The indie developers who created Ori and the Blind Forest make about the biggest of a push for the argument of Games as Art. The plays style is similar to the old side scroller of Limbo, however the art style and story seem to be more of a Studio Ghibli feel, which makes it amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9DFPxGsPlM
Halo 5 and the Master Chief Collection:
Some of my best memories of high school are the weekend Halo Parties we used to have. We would stay up all night playing Halo 2 Multiplayer, eat pizza and have a blast. Later we went on to play Halo 3 and eventually around college time we still tried to keep it going with the later Halo games, but nothing was more fun that those first nights of Halo 2.
Lucky they re-releasing the Halo franchise all in one HD Collection disc, that is right Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4, all remastered in HD quality, as well as all the multiplayer maps and addons. I personally can not wait to get my hands on it and see if we can’t relive some of those great party moments.
They show a trailer for Halo 5, and hint at some new player who is pretty cool looking but nothing really more beyond that, as well as the new live action Halo: Nightfall show. The HD halo collection with come with access to the Halo 5 beta and BTS stuff from Nightfall.
CrackDown:
They announced a new Crackdown game, if for nothing else than to screw with my filing system. Crackdown will supposedly “redefine open world gaming”, but frankly its still the same old cell shaded rehash of what we saw on the two previous games. Another trailer that shows only cinematic and no game play, so it makes me kinda suspicious.
Tom Clancy’s The Division:
The thing that amazes me about Tom Clancy games(and books), is how he is about to write/contribute to more than a dozen books/games in about a week, especially since he is dead. The Division adds nothing new to the table. Once again its another lack luster third person over the shoulder military ego stroke, written with a story based on a paranoid NRA members wet dream.
They do a few interesting things with hub design, but other than that its boring.
Scalebound:
I really don’t know what to say about Scalebound. The trailer shows a pretty epic looking monster battle, with some kid running around like a flea tossing pebbles at the monsters before transforming into some armor knight and then saddling up one of the monsters to fight an even bigger monster. Nothing is said about the game, or anything about story. Nothing, just a nice cinematic, and if you don’t know how I feel about cinematic yet…..well I don’t hold my breath.
These are just a few of the announced new releases, more as it comes out maybe. I for one am looking forward to many of these new releases and who knows maybe when they come out, you might see some of our reviews of them here on Twisted Squirrel.
