This week’s edition will cover last week and this week.
Like Borderlands, but wish it was more ‘future earth’ rather than ‘alien wasteland’? Last week’s Fuse may be for you. This sci-fi third-person co-operative shooter blends the crazy weapon designs of other Insomniac games, like Ratchet and Clank, with a grittier, more realistic environment and a higher-stakes mission. Players choose from among four classes, each with their own special abilities and skill development tree, then team up to take down a bad guy who is bent on getting all of the Fuse, an alien element with near-magical properties (I mentioned that this was sort of like Borderlands, right?). The game’s focus is on teamwork, and the character’s special abilities will work together in various ways. Some of the game’s other features include a cover system, and additional multiplayer modes. Not sure how much variety there will be to the various weapons in the game, but many will have special abilities granted by the use of Fuse. Unfortunately, there is no word of a PC release.
The Swapper is mostly interesting from a graphics perspective. The game itself is a multi-self platform-puzzler, a genre which is still neat and tough to do right, but not really new anymore. What’s interesting here is that the beautiful scenery and levels of the game are all real-world sculptures. The only fully digital graphics are the special effects (the lighting and particle effects, and so forth) everything else is constructed from photographs.While that’s also not a completely new idea, I’ve never seen it implemented so well as it is here.
CastleStorm is a 2.5D combination of a building sim, a tower defense game, and an Angry Birds-esque catapulter, with a bit of tower defense thrown in for fun. Each side in a given match uses their resources to build their castle, which serves as a sort of economy for the side, with various rooms providing functions like making money, generating resources, training soldiers, or sieging other castles. Then these sides battle it out by sending soldiers and missiles across the gap between the castles. Ballistas and catapults can destroy the enemy infrastructure, and various military units fight it out on the ground. Victory comes when the enemy flag is captured, or when their castle is destroyed. A player can go up against an AI, or join a friend in several multiplayer modes including two co-operative modes: Survival, in which one player controls the castle, while the other controls the soldiers, and Last Stand, in which each player controls a single combat unit, fighting off waves of incoming enemies. The single-player mode of the game is a campaign with a goofball story and a rising power curve. I don’t know if I’d play it alone though. This is a game to share.
Switching to this week, Prime World: Defenders is going to explode the brains of anyone who is a fan of both tower defense games and of collectable card games. In each mission, players use a carefully built deck of cards to play towers on the battlefield, and stop the forces of the old kingdom from stealing back their artifacts. At the end of each mission, players are rewarded with a few new cards, randomly, so everyone’s advancement through the powers of the game will be different. A bit of additional replayability is introduced with randomized levels, but unfortunately, there is no multiplayer mode.
Marvel Heroes is being called the superhero world’s answer to Diablo. With gameplay heavily influenced by Diablo II, the game allows players to dungeon crawl (supervillain’s lair crawl?) cooperatively with a number of Marvel superhero characters to choose from among. Characters advance along a branching skill tree, obtain loot from dropped enemies, craft stuff back in town, and the levels are randomized. In fact, the only thing other than the theme and graphics fidelity that seems to differentiate the game from classic Diablo is the player count. They’re calling it an MMO due to the number of players who can inhabit an instance simultaneously. Hopefully, that doesn’t ruin the co-operative aspects. Also, the game will be free-to-play with micropayments. The designers assure us, however, that players will not be able to pay-to-win, and that the entire storyline is available without purchase.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf adds yet more cool new features to the perpetually complexifying world of Animal Crossing. This time, the big thing is the ability to become town mayor. That nice elderly turtle is on the outs, and you’ve been installed in the posh office. As mayor, you can set tax-rates, and spend the public money on new and better public works—bridges, fountains, police stations, lamp posts, benches, pavement, and the like. In addition, the laws of the town can be changed to accommodate your play style. For example, if you like to play late at night, you can now pass laws to force the stores to stay open later. Other new features include customizable pants (past games only had shirt and hat customization), variable floor-plans for houses, swimming, tropical island mini-games, the ability to hang furniture on the walls, greater customization for character faces, two new animal species (deer and hamsters), and—of course—hundreds and hundreds of new furnitures to collect.
Following is a full list of last week’s and this week’s announced North American releases:
Windows
- GRID 2
- Gunpoint
- Hoops Manager
Marvel Heroes- Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode Four
- Prime World: Defenders
- Remember Me
- Skies
- Spaceman Sparkles Moon Edition
- The Night of the Rabbit
- The Swapper
- Titan: Escape the Tower
- TrapThem
- Wargame: AirLand Battle
WiiU
- Mario Party 10
3DS
- Animal Crossing: New Leaf
- The Denpa Men 2: Beyond The Waves
Xbox 360
- Bandfuse: Rock Legends
- CastleStorm
- Fuse
- GRID 2
- Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode Four
- Remember Me
- State of Decay
PS3
- Bandfuse: Rock Legends
- Fuse
- GRID 2
- Remember Me
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