Back in December Sony announced that they were planning on releasing some free DLC for Gravity Rush 2 and now we know exactly when this Raven focused DLC will be released. “The Ark of Time – Raven’s Choice” as it is called will be released worldwide on March 21st and as we previously mentioned, the DLC will focus on Kat’s ally Raven who, alone, must battle to save the Lost Children who were left trapped inside the Ark at the end of the first game.
The DLC will also add some additional elements to the main game such as increasing the level of the Devool Trench Mine from 30 to 50 and boosting the rarity of “Talismans” that can be obtained.
Warner Bros. and NetherRealm Studios have released the first part in what will be a series of videos for Injustice 2, called the “Shattered Alliances” trailers. This first one informs us about how Superman and his Regime are working to rise to power once again after losing their battles during the first game in the series.
You can check out the video below, that focuses heavily on story scenes but does feature a bit of gameplay, and be sure to keep an eye out for Injustice 2 when it is released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on May 16th.
Madman Entertainment released the sixth season of Regular Show on DVD in Australia today. This release contains all 31 episodes of the season.
Regular Show ran for eight seasons on Cartoon Network. Its final episode was originally broadcast on January 16, 2017. Season six is available now for $29.95 AUD. Fans in New Zealand can pre-order this release $29.99 NZD ahead of its release on April 13, 2017.
Cartoon Network fans may like to note that the Adventure Time: Islands miniseries will be released on DVD in Australia on April 5, 2017. The second season of Steven Universe is currently scheduled for release on DVD and Blu-ray in Australia on May 24, 2017.
Bethesda has released a new video for Arkane Studios’ upcoming game Prey and this time around they are focusing on showing off the “Mimic Matter” ability that just so happens to be one of the first powers that players will acquire in the game. This ability allows players to take the form of almost any object in the Talos I such as coffee mugs, teapots, lamps, and even bananas to begin with but eventually players can level the ability up to allow them to assume the forms of more complex objects such as security turrets.
You can check out the video below and keep an eye out for Prey when it is released on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on May 5th.
A little over a month ago Death Mark was revealed to be in development for the PS Vita from Experience and while we learned some details about the horror adventure game at the time, we had no idea what to expect in terms of gameplay and while this debut trailer for the game doesn’t feature much in the way of that, it does focus contain plenty of spooky imagery and hints towards the story.
In Death Mark, players control a middle-aged man who loses his memory and awakens with a strange “mark” that is rumored to kill those who have it on their body. In an attempt to learn more about the mark he ventures to a mansion where others with the same fate gather to try and survive the curse.
Koei Tecmo is continuing to introduce the various characters in Blue Reflection: Sword of the Girl Dancing in Illusion through a series of videos and this latest one happens to introduce the rival ballerina Sarasa Morikawa. Originally the fierce rival to the protagonist Hinako back in middle school, Sarasa Morikawa has since become a prodigy at dancing. She holds a severe attitude to her former rival but is still a fairly sociable girl that tends to easily make friends.
The Touhou fan games are continuing to be supported through Western releases as NIS America has confirmed that they are planning on localizing a new game, titled Touhou Kobuto V: Burst Battle, and are aiming to have it released on the PlayStation 4 and PS Vita sometime this summer.
As you’ll see in the video below, this fan game is a bit different from others as it allows players to select from a small number of characters to fight each other in one-on-one 3D action where battles will take place in 3D spaces with players hitting opponents with barrages of bullets and melee attacks to achieve victory.
In something that may be a bit of a surprise to Falcom fans in the West, NIS America has announced that they are going to be handling the release of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana in the West. They are aiming to have the title released physically and digitally on the PlayStation 4 and PS Vita as well as on PC through Steam sometime this Fall.
The game will be available both through a standard version and a limited edition that will include The Codex of Adol Christin: Periplus of the Goethe Sea Writing Materials” hardcover art book, a softcover art book, the original soundtrack, acyrlic bookends, a 33″x40” cloth poster, a SteelBook collector’s case, and a collector’s box.
There are many instances where one can say that a game helped establish something of a new genre and more often than not these titles are then mimicked quite often. One of the most recent titles to earn this distinction have been titles from FromSoftware and while Team Ninja’s Nioh does more than enough to set itself apart from those titles it is clear that comparisons will be made. So now that Nioh is available for the world to play, does it manage to stand on its own?
Story
Set during the Sengoku period of Japanese history, William Adams, who is based off of a historical figure of the same name, begins his story imprisoned in the Tower of London. With the help of his guardian spirit William manages to escape from the prison but not before coming face to face with a man who manages to steal away his spirit, leaving William with no choice but to track him down in Japan where he joins the battle against the yokai at the behest of the Japanese warriors he meets in his travels.
Nioh quickly diversifies itself by delivering a solid storyline featuring full-length cutscenes where characters interact with one another and set up the next event as players advance through missions. This helps provide a nice narrative that works well enough through the fleshed out historical side-characters that players interact with along the way.
Gameplay
Nioh utilizes the tried and true method of throwing the player into the game with little to no explanation of how certain mechanics work. While many titles usually prefer to hold the player’s hand, this one drops players in an opening level where they must fight through a castle before beginning the game proper. In a way this serves as a fairly satisfying tutorial as players will quickly learn how certain mechanics work as they face off against simple guards before the enemies begin to scale up a bit before the first boss battle.
This steady increase in combat difficulty keeps the combat fair and engaging as it never feels like a death is the result of simply being underpowered but rather some mistake made on your part. In fact, thanks to the fact that enemies will regularly drop new weapons and pieces of armor players will be able to spend plenty of time sifting through their inventory in an effort to select the best armor and weapons that best fit their enemy. This means if your foe might be weak to a certain element, then perhaps it would be best to save a certain weapon type even if it may not be as strong as your go-to weapon.
This customization aspect goes one step further when it comes to combat as every weapon type can be held in three different stances; high, low, and medium. High attacks can deal more damage but will leave the player open for counter attacks and use more stamina while low attacks are quicker but deal less damage and so on. Switching between different weapon stances on the fly is a blast and can really help face off against some of the tougher or trickier opponents you’ll come up against. In fact, there is even a way to quickly regain your stamina by timing a Ki Pulse properly, allowing you to refill a depleted stamina meter and keeping you in the fight longer.
This snappy and fast paced combat allows for players to always feel like they are on the move which is essential because even the smallest enemies can prove to be fatal to William if he is caught off guard. Thankfully death in Nioh is a fairly simplistic affair as players will only drop their gathered amrita while still retaining their picked up items. This amrita is gathered by your current guardian spirit and can be either picked up when you get back to where you died or sacrificed if you simply want to recall the spirit or happen to die once again.
Guardian spirits serve as something of a trump card as players can unleash their powers, giving William a status effect boost to damage and elemental type, when the icon is filled. Combine this with a massive skill tree featuring numerous skills, combos that can be unlocked, and more and you have a multitude of ways you can build William to feel like a unique fighter personal to you.
Those looking for a little extra challenge will find that in every level there are graves marking where other players fell in combat. Unlike other titles with this style, players can activate these graves to summon a Revenant, a replicated version of the fallen enemy who wants vengeance for their death. This allows players to test their skills against the fallen character and if they succeed you may even be able to get some special equipment from their corpse.
There is one downside to the way that Nioh is set up however and that is the way that players are encouraged to travel back through old levels in an effort to grind out materials. Thanks to the way missions are set up, players will go back through missions multiple times in an effort to obtain a rare item and this can grow to be quite tedious if you want some of the best gear possible.
At the end of nearly every main stage William will face off against a dreadful boss enemy that is taken directly from Japanese folklore. These boss battles may begin to feel a bit cheap when you first come across them but once you pick up on their weaknesses and attack patterns they will soon fall and leave you with a great feeling of satisfaction for overcoming such a challenging foe, especially when you pull off a narrow victory using the game’s satisfying combat.
Visuals & Audio
One thing that immediately sets Nioh apart visually is the fact that the game takes many queues from Japanese folklore to design the enemies and monsters that William will face off against. These foes range from predictable enemies such as bandits, Oni, and Cyclops to more uncommon enemies such as Nurikabe and even Kappa that will, just like the myths say, steal amrita that the player has gathered by pulling it out of his butt. This attention to detail with the folklore and the designs for the boss foes will delight fans of Japanese myths but it does pain me to say that there is an unfortunate lack of variety here. While players will initially see quite a lot of variety with the enemies they will eventually begin repeating quite often which is something of a disappointment.
It is also worth noting that although there is a decent amount of variety in the environments to explore, Nioh does tend to rely on using many different cave systems to form its dungeons and this tends to be rather annoying after a short while. As for the soundtrack, the title features some outstanding music that fits the theme of the game and it is interesting to note that Team Ninja went the extra mile by making it so the Japanese voice actors would speak English with William rather than simply dubbing over their voice tracks, giving the title a more authentic feel.
Overall
Nioh may be seen as a game that took inspiration from previous titles from another developer but it does more than enough to help set itself apart and stand on its own. By delivering a wonderful combat system that feels fast paced and tight to control players will always feel like they can win even if the game is more than willing to punish their overconfidence. While the grind may be a bit disappointing at times and the variety is eventually a weak point, those looking for a great action game can look at Nioh as one of the best this year.
GAMBITIOUS DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT AND VILE MONARCH REVEAL OH…SIR! THE HOLLYWOOD ROAST
Inventive insult ‘em up spinoff coming to Windows PC, iOS, Android, Mac and Linux this spring
AMSTERDAM – March 7, 2017 – Gambitious Digital Entertainment and independent developer Vile Monarch are back to announce Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast, a spinoff of the original irreverent insult dueling game Oh…Sir!! The Insult Simulator, launching this spring on Windows PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast takes the infamous insult ‘em up franchise to Tinseltown for a star-studded series of spoken slights and slaps with other Hollywood elitists. Play as one of many illustrious – but, for legal purposes, only coincidentally similar – pop-culture icons and spar on familiar film sets using creative put-downs to verbally obliterate opponents in single-player or online and local multiplayer.
Just like the blockbusters that inspired it, Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast tries to cram way too much in, adding new features like an expanded career mode, controller integration, and a character creation mode for making distinctively formulaic celebrity clones. There’s also a new charged comeback mechanic to swing the tide of battle and a redesigned scoring system for more engaging fights.
Vile Monarch is a hard rock game studio created by two twisted minds: Kacper Kwiatkowski and Grzegorz Mazur, who catapulted from 11 bit studios where they had worked together on This War of Mine. Soon after he was born, the Monarch started using his exceptionally skilful minions to start making engaging video games for various platforms, full of surprising, novel ideas. And what’s worse, he forced them to have fun while working! All of it to – you wouldn’t guess – conquer the world! Vile Monarch lives in his castle in Warsaw, Poland. He likes rock music, beer and Mad Max: Fury Road movie.
About Gambitious, Inc.
Launched in 2012, Gambitious, Inc. is the first global crowd-financing platform exclusively for games. With a mission to create and foster a sustainable ecosystem for independent game creation and publishing, Gambitious utilizes its evolving set of creative crowd financing tools and techniques to get more great game titles funded, produced and successfully released. The company’s publishing label, Gambitious Digital Entertainment, was created in 2014 to offer professional, developer-friendly production, marketing and distribution services in order to ensure a timely return to investors and developers on projects. Gambitious has successfully established partnerships and released its titles on Steam, the PlayStation®Store, Xbox Games Store, GOG.com, Humble and the Mac App Store, as well as a number of emerging global digital distributors. For more information, visit the official Gambitious website, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Nioh quickly diversifies itself by delivering a solid storyline featuring full-length cutscenes where characters interact with one another and set up the next event as players advance through missions. This helps provide a nice narrative that works well enough through the fleshed out historical side-characters that players interact with along the way.
This steady increase in combat difficulty keeps the combat fair and engaging as it never feels like a death is the result of simply being underpowered but rather some mistake made on your part. In fact, thanks to the fact that enemies will regularly drop new weapons and pieces of armor players will be able to spend plenty of time sifting through their inventory in an effort to select the best armor and weapons that best fit their enemy. This means if your foe might be weak to a certain element, then perhaps it would be best to save a certain weapon type even if it may not be as strong as your go-to weapon.
This snappy and fast paced combat allows for players to always feel like they are on the move which is essential because even the smallest enemies can prove to be fatal to William if he is caught off guard. Thankfully death in Nioh is a fairly simplistic affair as players will only drop their gathered amrita while still retaining their picked up items. This amrita is gathered by your current guardian spirit and can be either picked up when you get back to where you died or sacrificed if you simply want to recall the spirit or happen to die once again.
Those looking for a little extra challenge will find that in every level there are graves marking where other players fell in combat. Unlike other titles with this style, players can activate these graves to summon a Revenant, a replicated version of the fallen enemy who wants vengeance for their death. This allows players to test their skills against the fallen character and if they succeed you may even be able to get some special equipment from their corpse.
At the end of nearly every main stage William will face off against a dreadful boss enemy that is taken directly from Japanese folklore. These boss battles may begin to feel a bit cheap when you first come across them but once you pick up on their weaknesses and attack patterns they will soon fall and leave you with a great feeling of satisfaction for overcoming such a challenging foe, especially when you pull off a narrow victory using the game’s satisfying combat.
It is also worth noting that although there is a decent amount of variety in the environments to explore, Nioh does tend to rely on using many different cave systems to form its dungeons and this tends to be rather annoying after a short while. As for the soundtrack, the title features some outstanding music that fits the theme of the game and it is interesting to note that Team Ninja went the extra mile by making it so the Japanese voice actors would speak English with William rather than simply dubbing over their voice tracks, giving the title a more authentic feel.