While Telltale’s amazing The Walking Dead adventure game was a sort of prequel/sidequel to The Walking Dead graphic novels, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (formerly titled: AMC’s The Walking Dead Video Game) serves as a prequel to the popular television show based on those novels. With a different developer, source media, graphical style, and ludic genre; it seems like we shouldn’t be able to make much of a comparison between the games, but they do have something in common: the attempt to recreate the stress and high-strung emotions of a survival situation, by forcing the player to make difficult decisions. Survival Instinct attempts to recreate the difficult decision-making that made the Telltale game so good, but place it into a first-person shooter, a feature characters unique to the show.
The player takes on the dual role of Daryl and Merle Dixon as they make their way across the southern United States toward what they believe will be a safe place in Georgia. We all know how the story ends, of course. Their path to that eventual point, however, is up to the player to decide. How many other survivors will the pair try to protect and feed? Will they get that food by scavenging, robbing, or hunting? When they encounter walkers, will they go through them or around them? The Dixon brothers are rather morally ambiguous at the start of the series, so any kind of back-story can be made believable.
LEGO City Undercover takes LEGO video gaming into two new spaces. This is the first time a LEGO game has been published by Nintendo, and it’s the first time a LEGO game has incorporated original LEGO IP, rather than one of their licensed IPs. Undercover will take place in the world of LEGO City, the collection which currently contains all of their modern infrastructure sets, like airports, fire-stations, and luxury homes. The game-play is reminiscent of the GTA franchise with some Mirror’s Edge thrown in: a third-person adventure takes the player around the open-world city environment on foot and in vehicles. Of course, as it’s LEGO, the player gets to be the detective, instead of the criminal. Features include a ‘disguise’ system in which the protagonist will be able to switch out the LEGO blocks which compose his body in an effort to go undercover or to change his stats and abilities. Of course, there will also be building: the player can construct vehicles, tools, and other devices from various blocks found around the city. It sounds like great fun. The only drawback? Unlike past LEGO games, there is no co-operative multi-player mode.
The Icrontic Spotlight this week illuminates the haunted corners of Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon. This sequel to Luigi’s Mansion is the first Luigi-centric release in an event that Nintendo is calling The Year of Luigi. Besides being on a new platform, the game will be more puzzle-oriented than the first, requiring Luigi to do more than just walk around searching for—and sucking up—ghosts with his Poltergust. The strange vacuum-sweeper based weapon will now function sort of like a ‘gravity gun’. Luigi will use it to manipulate the environment, carry objects around, and solve the many puzzles in the rooms of the mansion. The flashlight has also been improved with a ‘dark-light detector’, which will play into various puzzles.
The setting of the new game is also much larger, consisting of several mansions, each with a distinct boss monster, and a much wider variety of ghosts than the original game. In addition, there will be a special mansion specifically designed for 4-play co-operative play in a variety of different modes. Still no Mario, however; in the multi-player, each player is a differently-colored Luigi.
Following is a full list of this week’s announced North American releases:
Windows
- Alien Spidy
- Patterns
- The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
WiiU
- LEGO City Undercover
- The Croods: Prehistoric Party!
- The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
3DS
- Jewel Master: Cradle of Egypt 2 3D
- Lola’s Math Train
- Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon
- Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate
- The Croods: Prehistoric Party!
Xbox 360
- Alien Spidy
- Gears of War: Judgment
- The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
PS3
- Dollar Dash
- Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory
- The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
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