With Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice set to be released at the and of the week Activision and developer From Software have released an official gameplay trailer to show off some of the features of the game. Set in the re-imagined world of late 1500s Sengoku Japan; a brutal, bloody period of constant life-and-death conflict players take control of the “one-armed wolf” who is a disgraced and disfigured warrior that has been rescued from the brink of death.
Players will need to take down larger than life foes while utilizing an arsenal of deadly prosthetic tools and powerful ninja abilities to take down their enemies. You can check out the full gameplay video below and keep an eye out for the game when it is released on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on March 22nd.
It looks like Bethesda is going to be continuing with their special E3 presentations as the company has sent out a “save the date” to let everyone know that they will be holding a showcase event on June 9th at 5:30 PT/ 8:30 ET. It is interesting to note that so far only one game has been mentioned by name and that one happens to be DOOM Eternal which is set to be released on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC though last year the company had quite a few things to show off, including some brand new announcements for future games and even games that ended up coming out later that year.
With the image featuring stars, it is perhaps a decent hint that we may be seeing more of Starfield this time around. As per usual for those who can’t attend in person the showcase will be broadcast on numerous platforms and any announcements will be covered here as they happen.
Everything is awesome! This song is gonna get stuck inside your head! It’s so catchy, catchy! Surprise, surprise. Together with the release of Lego Movie 2 we get the fitting game from developer Traveller’s Tales and Warner Bros. I think it’s safe to say that in 2019 everybody knows about the existence of games from the LEGO franchise, but I have some good news for owners of previous titles. For The Lego Movie 2 Videogame, the developers took risks and show us a different creative approach to the gameplay, that we’ve been used to since 2005. Of course over the years there were slight changes involved and the community wanted to see some new features in the LEGO games, but did we really have to wait 14 years to get something different?
Story
We’re not following the story of the movie level after level this time. Instead we are placed in familiar locations and can explore the areas kind of like a playground. Also the cutscenes came way shorter in the second part as the developers concentrated more on new gameplay features.
Gameplay
To explain
the new style in a few words: more building, less story. If we take a look back
to the game for the first LEGO Movie, you could follow the story that you’ve
seen in the cinema and have fun with all the different characters like
Wildstyle, Emmet and of course the cute
Unikitty. To advance you fought against enemies and stacked LEGO bricks to
reach new locations. This was done by simply pressing one button and holding it
until your character finished the building process. The second game follows the
way it should be, as the fun with LEGO bricks as a toy is actually the building
part. While we are running around in the different areas, we can scan objects
and learn the instructions to build them. If an object requires specific
amounts of certain colored bricks, we simply smash some stuff and collect as
much as we need to progress. This allows us to collect a varied catalogue of
different things that we can build in the world. Unfortunately the building
progress itself is still the same, we only have to gather the required
materials and press one button to place it.
I
was really surprised that the developers decided to use this game for drastic
changes, but It results in a great executed decision. After hours of scanning objects
and searching the right thing to build out of your catalogue, you might feel
annoyed as the solutions provided regarding the menu in combination with
controls are not optimal. But I rather found myself looking for the right
object to build than simply press a button.There are also less fights than in
other LEGO games and compared to the first LEGO Movie game, we are not
advancing from level to level anymore. Instead we use portals to travel to
different areas which reminded me a bit of LEGO Dimensions. Relics that we find
in the world are used to unlock new objects and characters. From time to time
you still have to swap between the characters, for example to talk to a
specific NPC or use a certain special power, but overall it isn’t that
important anymore and you can stick with your favourite character for most of
the time during your playthrough. It gives the game a Sandbox touch, that definitely
feels refreshing
Besides the
main quests there are of course several side quests to complete and you’ll get
more and more rewards. The good thing is, that the time per area doesn’t feel
that long, so you’ll most likely not get bored. The Lego Movie 2 Videogame is
not full of action like other Lego
games, it gives you a playground and you can explore it in your preferred way.
The experience from LEGO Worlds might have had a huge impact on this game and
with a bit more polished navigation options and maybe quick access for actions
that you have to repeat over and over again, the next game might be even
better.
Visuals & Audio
The visual
style is great to look at, there are a lot of details in the world made out of
LEGO bricks and the developers keep improving here. Something that I didn’t
like is the lack of voices and cutscenes. I really liked them in the first game
and they got drastically reduced for the second one. Lucy is telling us from
time to time more about the story, but it’s not the same as we’re not
experiencing it in the moment.
Overall
I know that The Lego Movie Videogame 2 probably is a polarizing game. You’ll love it or you’ll hate it. I enjoyed my time in Bricksburg and the new gameplay changes felt very refreshing. The question remains, if less story was a good idea for this game based on a movie. I would’ve liked to play the whole story, but if you can deal with “just” visiting known locations from it with a variety of the popular characters, you shouldn’t miss this one. If you’re not familiar with LEGO Worlds yet, this might also be a great introduction to some new features we’ll hopefully see in the next LEGO games aswell. Stay awesome!
The soon to be released supernatural horror film Pet Sematary have given fans a new look at the upcoming film in the new featurette, titled “TRUE HORROR.”
Pet Sematary is based on the 1983 Stephen King novel of the same name and is directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, and stars Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz and John Lithgow. Pet Sematary follows Dr. Louis Creed who discovers a mysterious burial ground hidden deep in the woods near the family’s new home. The film will close the 2019 South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, USA.
The film releases in Australian cinemas on April 4th.
So In the Houseis back for another season and we’re very excited to see their triumphant return with the first installment in the Rambo action film series: First Blood directed by Ted Kotcheff. I had not previously seen the movie when I came in to the theatre and I honestly had some preconceptions of what I was going to see based off of the pop culture that has sprung up around the film in the decades following. I was expecting an 80s action film with all the machismo and gungho violence inherent to that particular genre (similar to Predator). With that in mind, I holstered hunting knife and headed on down to George St cinemas.
Draz and Ryan from the Movie Nerds had a pre-recorded video promo discussing the film’s trivia. The two performed some fine banter and shared some interesting bits of trivia. A couple of my favourites were that the film’s script itself was rewritten over 60 times and that the original cut of the film ran for over three hours which forced Stallone and his agent to push for a shorter (and less damaging) cut of the film which was ultimately released.
Story
Our story opens with special forces veteran, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), meandering across the American West coast when he comes across the sleepy mountain town of Hope. The town’s sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy), finds the vagabond veteran a nuisance and harasses John to leave town; John pushes back and gets arrested. During his mistreatment in lock up at the police station, some of the abuse he suffers triggers his memories of torture while serving in Vietnam and leads him to break out of the police station and go on the run. Rambo escapes into the mountains with the authorities soon giving chase but will his guerrilla training and war experience be enough to keep him alive?
The script is lean and mean and largely pairs as it can back in favour of giving you more action. The dialogue is sparse with the film setting up the central conflict early on with our two main characters, Rambo and Teasle, butting heads over fairly trivial issues but which grow into something far larger. The film does do quite well with conveying information through other means however. The war experiences of Sheriff Teasle in particular are not discussed explicitly but we see from his medals in his office in the back of a shot suggest that they have an effect on him in the present… and potentially serve as a source for his animosity to Rambo. The one exception to this is Richard Crenna’s Colonel Sam Trautman who laconically discusses Rambo in such glowing terms that the dialogue borders on fan-fictionesque.
The film’s ultimate climax is where I think the script truly shines as Rambo has his resistance finally brought to an end in a somewhat anticlimactic fashion. His final monologue as he expresses the rage, fear, and loneliness that his character experiences after the war while also dealing with trauma of his experiences while serving reveals itself as a masterful piece of screenwriting. Stallone’s delivery of these final lines are interesting in how he conveys the range of emotions and pain his character is dealing with. His stilted and unclear manner of speaking add a sense of verisimilitude to the character as someone who’s struggling. His performance, alongside Crenna’s as the paternal authority figure who’s grappling with the realisation of failing those in their charge, absolutely sells the scene and the film’s ultimate resolution.
Visuals & Audio
The visual direction is similarly paired back with everything except the action sequences. There is some very fine cinematography with regards to depicting the North-Western American mountain wilderness but mostly the camera to showcase the action. There were a number of sequences in the first act which had unusually long cuts to raise the tension before Rambo finally strikes from the underbrush to attack the police tracking him. The shots are particularly affecting because Rambo has been in the frame but hidden the entire time and so his sudden appearance when he attacks is as much a surprise to the audience as it is to the hapless policeman being attacked. There is not too much that is too grandiose in the film’s visual direction beyond these action sequences but honestly, that’s pretty much exactly what you need to make a film like this enjoyable.
The film’s soundtrack is fairly unremarkable but competent in it’s punctuation of the film’s narrative and emotional beats. The film’s score is your fairly common orchestral score but with some noticeable motifs for particular characters. Trautman, in particular, gets a particular trumpet solo whenever he’s on screen which gives a particular militaristic flavour to the soundscape whenever we see him. Ultimately, this score doesn’t leave too much of an impression beyond the film’s runtime but it does what it sets out to do and hits the emotional beats it needs to.
Conclusion
Overall, I very much enjoyed my time with this movie as a visceral action experience with a bit of thought under the hood. The story and characters are there to set up the film’s central conflict and don’t do much beyond that save some laconic bits of humour. The film’s visuals are similarly pared back but for the action sequences which it goes to great lengths to depict on the screen. The film’s score performs its job in punctuating the film’s story but doesn’t leave you with any earworms. The film knows what its strengths are and largely keeps to them by paring everything besides the action back. It was an excellent action film to watch on the big screen and I would absolutely recommend this film to any action movie fans and any of you who particularly enjoy Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Kudos to the good folks at In the House with opening with such a banger!
For other films which In The House is screening, feel free to check out their schedule here.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
Now that Jump Force has been released worldwide for a little bit Bandai Namco has announced who the first DLC character will be when they begin releasing characters. After an initial free update in April that will add clans, a vertex event, and new avatar costumes May will see the release of Yu-Gi-Oh!‘s Seto Kaiba as well as two other fighters who have yet to be announced.
For now though the company has given us a look at how Kaiba will be fighting in the game as he, similar to Yugi, will be able to use his favorite cards in battle by summoning Blue-Eyes White Dragon and Obelisk the Tormentor. You can check out these screenshots of him in action below alongside a roadmap of what to expect for Jump Force, both in the way of free updates as well as paid DLC, over the next few months.
The first official trailer for Nippon Ichi Software‘s latest game, To All of Mankind, has been released and while it may not show a whole lot it does give us a brief look at the five heroines who must survive in Akihabara after a strange occurrence leaves them in a world that has fallen into ruin. With nature retaking the land, these girls must survive by hunting, gathering, and growing their own food while surviving the elements.
You can check out the footage below and as for the game itself To All of Mankind is set to be released on the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in Japan on May 30th and while the game has not yet been announced for release in the West, NIS America did just announce the localization of their other most recent title, Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers.
Anthemis long time RPG developer Bioware’s first new franchise in quite some time, and Bioware’s first multiplayer shooter. Taking cues from Mass Effect, Anthem takes players to Fort Tarsis, two years after the Heart of Rage disaster. Freelancers wielding powerful Ironman-esque armour suits known as Javelins are now living in the shadows. Long gone are their glory days as heroes, but the reappearance of Dominion troops may offer the opportunity for the Freelancers to reclaim their honour.
Story
Bioware lives up to their reputation as Anthem is rich in story. The main plot is decent, but its twists are
little a bit predictable. The biggest problem with the main plot is its short length.
Things move at a quick pace and there just aren’t many story missions to begin
with. While the main plot is not the deepest of story experiences, the writers
make up for it with the game’s considerable breadth. It may not be every gamer’s
cup of tea, but there are plenty of side stories and minor NPCs to discover. There
is rarely a true good or evil answer in Anthem,
but rather a sarcastic or a sweet response. The writers clearly see Anthem as a game as a service, at they
spend a lot of the time laying down the foundation for future content instead
of pushing the main story along.
Gameplay
Veterans of Bioware titles will feel the influence of the
company’s previous titles all over Anthem.
Mechanically, the game is a competent third person RPG-style shooter that mixes
a pleasantly complex spell system with casual-friendly gun play. There are four
Javelins in the game. Each Javelin has two standard abilities, a consumable, and
an ultimate skill. The Javelins cover the standard RPG archetypes of tank,
caster, melee DPS, and ranged DPS. There’s no true holy MMO trinity here, but rather
a more modern approach that emphasizes dodging over soaking damage. The Javelins
hit the right balance of being similar enough to transfer player skills between
Javelins, but different enough to have a noticeably different playstyle.
Anthem’s ability
system emphasizes teamplay. Many abilities can either apply a status effect or
trigger existing status effects for extra damage. Players who aren’t willing to
dig into the details can coast along and avoid the combo system all together
but may run into a little trouble at higher difficulties.
One of Anthem’s biggest
problems is its poor tutorials and documentation. The tutorial is extremely
bare bones, only teaching players the basics of the game. A lot of more
advanced, but vital mechanics like the combo system and status effect vulnerabilities
need to be learned from the player journal or the load screen tooltips. New
players would have been much better served by more generous tips popping up on
the screen during the first five to ten player levels.
The mission design is poor, so players will be running the
same basic mission structure repeatedly. Players will need to fly to a
location, kill a few enemies, maybe find an item or two, then do it all again a
couple more times. If the game is feeling spicy, it might just send you into a
cave to do the same thing in a mini-instance. The obligatory flight sections
feel like they’ve been forced into the missions to show off the game’s flight
mechanics. It would have been much better to integrate flight into the mission
design instead of turning the Javelin’s rockets into a glorified flying taxi. Puzzles
are rare and equally repetitive, usually requiring players to find missing
objects or match an icon. The game’s three dungeons aren’t much better, with
incredibly dull final boss design. All fights are in three stages and each of
the boss only has one marginally interesting mechanic.
Anthem is also
direly lacking in content in general. The main mission line is astoundingly
short. End game can be reached well before the level 30 cap for pilots. Once the
side missions and the main storyline is done, players only have a small handful
of options: fly around free roam looking for world events, grind out contracts,
or run the game’s three dungeons. While many MMOs rely on post-game content
drops to extend the end game, Anthem is
already anemic out of the gate.
The Javelin controls are excellent. The controls follow the
standard shooter layout. Even on PC, there is a generous aim assist for
abilities that allow for quick deployment of abilities. Flying controls are
traditionally the bane of the mouse and keyboard, but Anthem copies the very simple controls from a fellow EA title, Star Wars: Battlefront 2. So, whether
you’re using a mouse or a thumbstick, you simply point in the direction you
want to go, and the game takes care of the rest.
Anthem switches
between a first-person view inside the safety of Fort Tarsis and a third person
view in the Javelin. The city zone is hobbled by painfully clunky controls and slow
movement. Compared to the agile Javelins, walking around on foot feels like the
player is wading through mud. The Javelin and city sensitivity are linked,
leaving the first-person camera feeling slow and mushy.
The menus are not well designed for PC. Loot management is
quite a pain as the only way to mark multiple items as junk and salvage them
all for parts is through the stash. Menu bindings are also not editable on the
PC, so those with non-QWERTY keyboard layouts or non-standard binds may run
into problems.
Anthem is also struggling
with a general lack of polish. I didn’t run into many game killing bugs on the
PC version, but there were enough smaller bugs to make the game feel like a
beta. While I can’t speak for the speed of fixes on the console version, Bioware
seems to be releasing patches and hotfixes at a pretty decent clip on the PC.
Visuals
Anthem is a good-looking
game with a few hiccups. The art direction is very good. Enemy factions are
visually distinct with some cool ideas. The Javelin parts range from industrial
machines to some crazy sci-fi designs. The world is gorgeous but lacks a bit of
variety. There are large stretches of towering cliffs and dense vegetation, but
not enough interesting locales to provide enough variety to make parts of the
map look visually distinct. The animations are good for the most part, though
some of the NPC facial and body expressions are over-exaggerated.
Audio
The audio experience in Anthem
is solid. The sound effects are excellent. As expected from a big AAA title
from a major publisher, the voice acting is very strong, from the main
characters all the way down to minor NPCs. The soundtrack is an enjoyable
listen and reminds me a lot of the Mass Effect
soundtracks with its light electronica tunes.
Overall
Anthem has a lot of room for
improvement. Much of it can be addressed in future content releases, such as
stomping out bugs and more end game content with better mission design. Others,
like the poor design of the city controls, may end up following the game around
like a ball and chain. Considering how well the Javelins handle, it’s a total
disappointment the game has been ruined by its repetitive missions, short main
story, and poor documentation.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa has been given its first bit of gameplay footage by PQube and in it we get both a look at some of the visual novel segments as well as a bit of the match sequences that players will need to complete in order to properly interrogate their targets and expose their truths, even if it means stripping them both figuratively and literally.
You can check out the footage below and keep an eye out for Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa when it is released on the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC on May 31st in Europe and June 4th in North America.
Idea Factory International has announced that they are planning on releasing Dragon Star Varnir sometime this summer for the PlayStation 4. To go along with this information the company has also released a new batch of screenshots as well as information that focus on the game’s battle system.
Dragon Star Varnir follows the story of a knight named Zephy who is almost killed while on a mission to hunt down witches only to be saved by two of these mysterious witches with the blood of a dragon. Given new magical abilities from their efforts he finds his fate intertwined with the witches and reluctantly joins them to fight against an Empire out to destroy his kind, ruthless dragon hunters, and a witch more powerful than any in existence.
As for the battle system players will find that battles in the game can take place a 3-tiered field where players can move freely between the top, middle, and bottom layers with players being able to use a variety of attack types on enemies such as slashing, piercing, shooting, or simply hitting them. With six types of magical abilities players will be able to easily target enemy weak points and while physical attacks can only be performed on enemies at the same tier, magic can target enemies on any tier.
While fighting enemies you can raise their Fear Level by targeting weak points and performing critical hits and if they happen to be truly afraid, they can be Devoured and unlock their skill tree. If an enemy’s fear level happens to reach the maximum level a weak point rush can occur and if they manage to be slain during this rush, a Devour is guaranteed. On top of this players will even be able to trigger Dragon Awakening, a transformation that increases a character’s abilities and armor.
