This past Friday I attended the EB Games Expo in Sydney Australia where I got my hands/eyes on Gears of War 4, Dishonored 2, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Steep and South Park: The Fractured But Whole. For those interested, here's what I thought!
I played the Horde mode with some randoms on Xbox One for probably around 20 minutes or so. I wasnt a very helpful teammate as I was unable to change the look inversion. Nevertheless, it was very fun, and had a sense of immersive chaos that I was not expecting from a multiplayer mode. The sound design and gore are particularly impressive, with blood spurts, guttural battle cries, explosions and the general din of gun-battle all adding to the mayhem.
When killed, enemies drop resources that you or your teammates can collect and spend on defenses between rounds. These include decoys, spiked traps and even mounted turrets. I didnt spend a lot of time with these because I was too busy trying to aim properly and not die, but it seems pretty cool and simple enough to utilise.
The enemy variety I saw across the span of probably 5 or 6 waves was impressive. There were standard swarm grunts, with bigger, slower dudes that took a lot of hits and had big guns. These dog-like things that jumped up on cover and spat some kind of projectile. There were robot enemies too which, in my limited experience of the Gears of War franchise, I had not seen before. They self-destruct upon death but otherwise dont seem too special. There were little sphere robots that would quickly roll up to your defenses and damage them until destroyed, theyre fast and easy to miss. Finally, there was a big chopper (maybe called a hornet?) that flew in behind our chokepoint, making our cover useless. It took a lot of hits to take down although it was hard to tell how many of us were still alive/actually shooting it at that point.
After a while my team and I were told to shove off, but I made sure to try out the single player as well. This time with a controller on a PC. I changed the look inversion (phew) and actually jacked up the resolution to 1440p just to test the PCs they had set up. The game looks incredible and ran flawlessly. Obviously I have no idea what the PC specs were but yeah, very nice looking game. The demo I played starts with them spotting a dam in the distance, and ends with them getting to some sort of tower. Very brief and no doubt old news to people following the game. The combat feels like classic Gears of War, but the wind flares as theyre called add quite a bit to an encounter. When throwing grenades or shooting the buzzsaw gun youll have to compensate for wind direction and strength. Suddenly all those reliable waist-high walls can blow or roll away or be shot to pieces. At one point a huge pipe rolled down the hill crushing a few swarm and narrowly avoiding Fenix Jr. The physics and effects playing out in these scenes looks amazing, and it certainly shakes up the standard cover-based shooter combat. After a few more encounters a weird laser-lightning storm hits and you have to dodge it and cross the battlefield, almost like a bullet-hell game. The demo ended shortly afterwards.
Ive deliberately been avoiding a lot of media for this game so I can go in as fresh as possible, but I couldnt help but have a go. I played for around 30 mins on Xbox One I think. It was an X1 controller but the system was hidden away, based on the aliasing however I dont think it was PC. The demo I played has recently been shown off in the Clockwork Mansion gameplay trailer. The mansion itself is really cool, you can pull levers to completely change the layout of a room. Its confusing in a good way, making what would otherwise be a standard mansion level quite complex.
Then theres the clockwork soldiers, whose voice acting and dialogue is quite enjoyable. The delivery is spot on, with one example being enemy evasion successful said with a tone of mild surprise and maybe even a hint of admiration. At first I tried avoiding them because it wasnt immediately clear to me how the hell you take them out. Later a Bethesda guy told me you can shoot them in the head which removes their ability to see, they will then remain completely still and rely on their hearing. It will move towards and kill anything that makes a sound, including enemy guards (of the human variety). Theres also white sections of their arms that you can target to remove its limbs. Im fairly sure they have some sort of EMP pulse attack at their disposal too.
One cool thing they mentioned was that every single clockwork soldier in the game will have a unique plaque that you can get by stealth killing them, or, if youre going for a ghost run, you can pickpocket it off them. If you get every single one theres some sort of reward although no idea what that may be.
As for the demo mission itself youre tasked with killing Jindosh, the inventor of the robots, and rescuing Anton Sokolov. Im not quite sure if it was a bug or if perhaps a clockwork soldier went on a rampage, but I got an objective complete for killing Jindosh without being anywhere near him. I found Sokolov and then made a mad dash for the exit, sensing my time was running short. On the way I managed to cut a guy in half, then noticed that I was able to carry his severed legs around. I threw them, then used Emilys equivalent of blink to pull the legs toward me, they flew through the air and landed in a chair with a wet thud.
I cant overstate how cool the level design was here and the vistas of the city below bathed in the orange glow of sunset were gorgeous. Emilys new tools and powers feel fresh, and seem designed to enable even more freedom than the first game. I cant wait to play this.
I had fun with the game but I'd watched so much footage of the starting area that it kinda felt like I'd already played it. That said the combat feels great and the inventory is reasonably intuitive. The whole hold a dpad direction then scroll through with the sticks is definitely unusual though. Its not frustrating to use but I wouldnt be surprised if it was designed with the NX in mind as some people have theorised. After all, why not just have an item wheel like Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess?
Visually its a mix of good and not so good looking. I probably dont need to explain this but the art style allows characters, monsters and structures to look great but on the whole Well its definitely a Wii U game. The frame rate got a bit spotty at times, it was particularly bad around the Steppe Talus rock dude.
A lot of impressions from E3 talked about how easy it is to get distracted in this world and I can now wholeheartedly agree. Seeing a chest or a bombable wall or an encampment of enemies, it all drew me in immediately, and not in a Ubisoft tick a box kind of way. It felt far more organic: Im wandering through this world, I see something interesting so I go and investigate. Its more than just following a map marker.
I spent a solid portion of the demo at the edge of the plateau, using the slate to zoom into the distance to see what I could see. And I did see a few things I hadn't seen in any other footage. One was a weird hut thing to the north west of the plateau, its roof was like a giant Dragon head thing made out of cloth and wood. Looked far more like someones home than just another monster lair but I could be wrong. I also had a good look at the thing climbing death mountain. It is NOT a Goron. It looks more like one of the guardians but huge and elongated. It had some weird windmill looking tail as well. Similarly, the flying platform was way more T-shaped than I realised, and I'm almost certain it has propeller things parallel with the ground, like a hovercraft.
Like watching your friend play a game for hours and hours then finally getting a turn yourself, my time on the plateau wasnt anything groundbreaking. It was more of a confirmation. Yes this is an open-world Zelda game, yes its as fun as it looks, and yes I need to know more asap. At this point I think a trailer showcasing towns or more of the story would turn me into a blubbering mess. Cant wait.
This started with a story trailer I hadnt seen before with some human enemies in masks. Then the guy played through the E3 demo. I then got around 15 minutes with the game. It was basically the small area from the E3 demo from the edge of Aloys village to just before the scene where she fights the demon. I ran around, picked up plants, took over a Broadhead and made it my mount, shot arrows from its back, killed some of the raptor-looking things, shot canisters off the backs of grazers and killed one of the tough crab machines with big loot crates on their backs. To give a very general sense of how it played: think Rise of the Tomb Raider crossed with the freedom and more open areas of The Witcher. Ive had a sneaking suspicion for a while now that this games open world will be far more like the former than the latter, but this demo was too small to come to any conclusions. One things for sure, it looks phenomenal. I asked what I was playing on and they said a PS4 dev kit, whatever that is, but the game is gorgeous and ran quite well too. Im not sold on the story elements that weve seen so far, but the game has plenty of time to win me over on that front.
This was just a brief eyes-on presentation not an actual playable demo. It started with a night-time mission with commentary, thankfully without the fake voice acting from the E3 demo. The graphics seem great and, dare I say it, achievable. Weve been burned by Ubisoft on more than one occasion, but from what I saw it doesnt seem to be reaching for anything unattainable. Who knows when it comes to performance and bugs however.
The demo saw Ghosts one through four sneaking their way through an enemy camp to find intel on an enemy targets location (the guy they go after in the E3 demo). Two Ghosts commandeer an enemy vehicle which allows them to drive straight into the enemy camp without being detected. Meanwhile a third Ghost sniped lone guards and shot out lights for his teammates. Eventually they get the intel but get spotted and have to make a hasty escape. One of them turns off the generator and they switch to night vision and shoot their way out, eventually driving away in a buggy with a chopper on their tail. Was cool but also hard to imagine it going that smoothly with a bunch of online randoms. I was getting both MGS V and The Division vibes from what I saw, make of that what you will.
I honestly dont know why theyre demoing this. Rough as hell in every way possible; it looked, ran and played like crap. I dont personally see the point of a game like this and I wouldnt be surprised if it goes the way of The Crew. It feels like its trying to blend two different types of game and not doing a good job of either. One positive is that I laughed a lot at the physics when I stacked it, flight suiting into tree branches, skiing down sheers rock faces etc.
Another very brief demo, was probably done in under ten minutes. It seems the kids have this time decided to play superheroes instead of fantasy, and I got the impression youre the same new kid as the first game. Obsidians absence has me a little concerned but rest assured the game is still funny. Your personal heros origin story involves fighting off home invaders shortly before walking in on your parents having sex (or in the words of Cartman Your dad fucking your mom ). A nice touch was one of the burglars checking their phone while waiting for you to choose your attack. There was only one other combat encounter and it was again too brief to really get to grips with the subtleties of how it will all work, but the game is definitely fun and funny.
So there we have it. I had a lot of fun at the expo and I'm now excited for quite a number of games that I was lukewarm on before. I was really keen to try out PSVR, specifically RE:VII and the Arkham thing, but the lines for those were ridiculous at all times.
I played the Horde mode with some randoms on Xbox One for probably around 20 minutes or so. I wasnt a very helpful teammate as I was unable to change the look inversion. Nevertheless, it was very fun, and had a sense of immersive chaos that I was not expecting from a multiplayer mode. The sound design and gore are particularly impressive, with blood spurts, guttural battle cries, explosions and the general din of gun-battle all adding to the mayhem.
When killed, enemies drop resources that you or your teammates can collect and spend on defenses between rounds. These include decoys, spiked traps and even mounted turrets. I didnt spend a lot of time with these because I was too busy trying to aim properly and not die, but it seems pretty cool and simple enough to utilise.
The enemy variety I saw across the span of probably 5 or 6 waves was impressive. There were standard swarm grunts, with bigger, slower dudes that took a lot of hits and had big guns. These dog-like things that jumped up on cover and spat some kind of projectile. There were robot enemies too which, in my limited experience of the Gears of War franchise, I had not seen before. They self-destruct upon death but otherwise dont seem too special. There were little sphere robots that would quickly roll up to your defenses and damage them until destroyed, theyre fast and easy to miss. Finally, there was a big chopper (maybe called a hornet?) that flew in behind our chokepoint, making our cover useless. It took a lot of hits to take down although it was hard to tell how many of us were still alive/actually shooting it at that point.
After a while my team and I were told to shove off, but I made sure to try out the single player as well. This time with a controller on a PC. I changed the look inversion (phew) and actually jacked up the resolution to 1440p just to test the PCs they had set up. The game looks incredible and ran flawlessly. Obviously I have no idea what the PC specs were but yeah, very nice looking game. The demo I played starts with them spotting a dam in the distance, and ends with them getting to some sort of tower. Very brief and no doubt old news to people following the game. The combat feels like classic Gears of War, but the wind flares as theyre called add quite a bit to an encounter. When throwing grenades or shooting the buzzsaw gun youll have to compensate for wind direction and strength. Suddenly all those reliable waist-high walls can blow or roll away or be shot to pieces. At one point a huge pipe rolled down the hill crushing a few swarm and narrowly avoiding Fenix Jr. The physics and effects playing out in these scenes looks amazing, and it certainly shakes up the standard cover-based shooter combat. After a few more encounters a weird laser-lightning storm hits and you have to dodge it and cross the battlefield, almost like a bullet-hell game. The demo ended shortly afterwards.
Ive deliberately been avoiding a lot of media for this game so I can go in as fresh as possible, but I couldnt help but have a go. I played for around 30 mins on Xbox One I think. It was an X1 controller but the system was hidden away, based on the aliasing however I dont think it was PC. The demo I played has recently been shown off in the Clockwork Mansion gameplay trailer. The mansion itself is really cool, you can pull levers to completely change the layout of a room. Its confusing in a good way, making what would otherwise be a standard mansion level quite complex.
Then theres the clockwork soldiers, whose voice acting and dialogue is quite enjoyable. The delivery is spot on, with one example being enemy evasion successful said with a tone of mild surprise and maybe even a hint of admiration. At first I tried avoiding them because it wasnt immediately clear to me how the hell you take them out. Later a Bethesda guy told me you can shoot them in the head which removes their ability to see, they will then remain completely still and rely on their hearing. It will move towards and kill anything that makes a sound, including enemy guards (of the human variety). Theres also white sections of their arms that you can target to remove its limbs. Im fairly sure they have some sort of EMP pulse attack at their disposal too.
One cool thing they mentioned was that every single clockwork soldier in the game will have a unique plaque that you can get by stealth killing them, or, if youre going for a ghost run, you can pickpocket it off them. If you get every single one theres some sort of reward although no idea what that may be.
As for the demo mission itself youre tasked with killing Jindosh, the inventor of the robots, and rescuing Anton Sokolov. Im not quite sure if it was a bug or if perhaps a clockwork soldier went on a rampage, but I got an objective complete for killing Jindosh without being anywhere near him. I found Sokolov and then made a mad dash for the exit, sensing my time was running short. On the way I managed to cut a guy in half, then noticed that I was able to carry his severed legs around. I threw them, then used Emilys equivalent of blink to pull the legs toward me, they flew through the air and landed in a chair with a wet thud.
I cant overstate how cool the level design was here and the vistas of the city below bathed in the orange glow of sunset were gorgeous. Emilys new tools and powers feel fresh, and seem designed to enable even more freedom than the first game. I cant wait to play this.
I had fun with the game but I'd watched so much footage of the starting area that it kinda felt like I'd already played it. That said the combat feels great and the inventory is reasonably intuitive. The whole hold a dpad direction then scroll through with the sticks is definitely unusual though. Its not frustrating to use but I wouldnt be surprised if it was designed with the NX in mind as some people have theorised. After all, why not just have an item wheel like Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess?
Visually its a mix of good and not so good looking. I probably dont need to explain this but the art style allows characters, monsters and structures to look great but on the whole Well its definitely a Wii U game. The frame rate got a bit spotty at times, it was particularly bad around the Steppe Talus rock dude.
A lot of impressions from E3 talked about how easy it is to get distracted in this world and I can now wholeheartedly agree. Seeing a chest or a bombable wall or an encampment of enemies, it all drew me in immediately, and not in a Ubisoft tick a box kind of way. It felt far more organic: Im wandering through this world, I see something interesting so I go and investigate. Its more than just following a map marker.
I spent a solid portion of the demo at the edge of the plateau, using the slate to zoom into the distance to see what I could see. And I did see a few things I hadn't seen in any other footage. One was a weird hut thing to the north west of the plateau, its roof was like a giant Dragon head thing made out of cloth and wood. Looked far more like someones home than just another monster lair but I could be wrong. I also had a good look at the thing climbing death mountain. It is NOT a Goron. It looks more like one of the guardians but huge and elongated. It had some weird windmill looking tail as well. Similarly, the flying platform was way more T-shaped than I realised, and I'm almost certain it has propeller things parallel with the ground, like a hovercraft.
Like watching your friend play a game for hours and hours then finally getting a turn yourself, my time on the plateau wasnt anything groundbreaking. It was more of a confirmation. Yes this is an open-world Zelda game, yes its as fun as it looks, and yes I need to know more asap. At this point I think a trailer showcasing towns or more of the story would turn me into a blubbering mess. Cant wait.
This started with a story trailer I hadnt seen before with some human enemies in masks. Then the guy played through the E3 demo. I then got around 15 minutes with the game. It was basically the small area from the E3 demo from the edge of Aloys village to just before the scene where she fights the demon. I ran around, picked up plants, took over a Broadhead and made it my mount, shot arrows from its back, killed some of the raptor-looking things, shot canisters off the backs of grazers and killed one of the tough crab machines with big loot crates on their backs. To give a very general sense of how it played: think Rise of the Tomb Raider crossed with the freedom and more open areas of The Witcher. Ive had a sneaking suspicion for a while now that this games open world will be far more like the former than the latter, but this demo was too small to come to any conclusions. One things for sure, it looks phenomenal. I asked what I was playing on and they said a PS4 dev kit, whatever that is, but the game is gorgeous and ran quite well too. Im not sold on the story elements that weve seen so far, but the game has plenty of time to win me over on that front.
This was just a brief eyes-on presentation not an actual playable demo. It started with a night-time mission with commentary, thankfully without the fake voice acting from the E3 demo. The graphics seem great and, dare I say it, achievable. Weve been burned by Ubisoft on more than one occasion, but from what I saw it doesnt seem to be reaching for anything unattainable. Who knows when it comes to performance and bugs however.
The demo saw Ghosts one through four sneaking their way through an enemy camp to find intel on an enemy targets location (the guy they go after in the E3 demo). Two Ghosts commandeer an enemy vehicle which allows them to drive straight into the enemy camp without being detected. Meanwhile a third Ghost sniped lone guards and shot out lights for his teammates. Eventually they get the intel but get spotted and have to make a hasty escape. One of them turns off the generator and they switch to night vision and shoot their way out, eventually driving away in a buggy with a chopper on their tail. Was cool but also hard to imagine it going that smoothly with a bunch of online randoms. I was getting both MGS V and The Division vibes from what I saw, make of that what you will.
I honestly dont know why theyre demoing this. Rough as hell in every way possible; it looked, ran and played like crap. I dont personally see the point of a game like this and I wouldnt be surprised if it goes the way of The Crew. It feels like its trying to blend two different types of game and not doing a good job of either. One positive is that I laughed a lot at the physics when I stacked it, flight suiting into tree branches, skiing down sheers rock faces etc.
Another very brief demo, was probably done in under ten minutes. It seems the kids have this time decided to play superheroes instead of fantasy, and I got the impression youre the same new kid as the first game. Obsidians absence has me a little concerned but rest assured the game is still funny. Your personal heros origin story involves fighting off home invaders shortly before walking in on your parents having sex (or in the words of Cartman Your dad fucking your mom ). A nice touch was one of the burglars checking their phone while waiting for you to choose your attack. There was only one other combat encounter and it was again too brief to really get to grips with the subtleties of how it will all work, but the game is definitely fun and funny.
So there we have it. I had a lot of fun at the expo and I'm now excited for quite a number of games that I was lukewarm on before. I was really keen to try out PSVR, specifically RE:VII and the Arkham thing, but the lines for those were ridiculous at all times.