The Secret World

Unlike their last effort, Age of Conan, Funcom is using an original setting for this online game: the real world. But don’t worry: this isn’t a game that has you washing +1 dishes before travelling to the supermarket to purchase increasingly nutritious vegetables. Like the classic shooter/RPG Deus Ex, The Secret World is grounded in our most intriguing urban legends, myths and secret societies. This gives Funcom the chance to create lore that’s accessible to everyone, but lets them apply their own interpretations.

Funcom’s focus is on the hidden orders popularised by the likes of Dan Brown, National Treasure, and the tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatics who fuel conspiracy theories. The factions – the Illuminati, Templar, and the Dragon – give players the chance to explore material that’s ripe for development.

Each faction will have home cities – New York, London, and Seoul respectively – based in reality, so don’t expect to see much strange architecture to begin with. Although, that’s not saying it’s going to be an everyday experience. Vampires, Atlantis, and the end of the Mayan calendar (2012) will all play a role in the game.

The factions themselves are full of character. The Templar is a modern take on the traditional crusaders, while the Illuminati are far more corporate with order and money driving their gains. The Dragon is the most mysterious, preferring to spread chaos from behind the scenes like a clandestine puppet master.

Funcom is staying coy about The Secret World’s narrative specifics, bar that its history tracks back 100 million years. There’s also the fantasy realm Agartha which will come later, although details are still sketchy on what it’ll entail. So we’ll just have to wait for the announcement of the inevitable expansion pack.

What it is sure of is the game’s combat. Your powers are identical across the factions. Swords, shotguns, and sub-machine guns all lend themselves to responsive, quick combat. Those thinking of Age of Conan’s problems with scraps will have their views quickly quashed. The combat has been built from the ground up to provide a fluid experience never really seen in MMOs before. Expect plenty of leaping, slicing, shooting and everything else that resides in between.

As your choice of faction is purely cosmetic, it means you can focus on bettering your skills rather than worrying if you’ve selected the weaker faction. Even more interesting is Funcom’s choice to do away with traditional levels and classes. Your avatar is defined by his abilities. The way you play is reflected in your skills. It leads to organic gaming where you are no longer restricted by a poor choice in the beginning. The developers are also hoping it’ll narrow the gap between new players and veterans.

Chuck in player-made organisations called cabals (i.e. guilds) and it’s obvious that Funcom is aiming to reward cooperative players. Age of Conan struggled with social interaction and it’s good to see that Funcom is attempting to rectify the mistake. That’s not saying that you’ll be forced to interact - the game has plenty for the solo player. It’s just as playable alone, but team-based quests and other community-based bonuses mean you’ll be better off if you’re social. Leaderboards and the implementation of social networks are planned – another way to let you keep track of your character’s progress.

But perhaps the best thing about The Secret World is it links to our reality. While there are plenty of mythical beasts and supernatural attacks, you’ll be fighting through the streets of recognisable cities. Abandoned cars, decrepit gas stations, and rusting scrap yards give the impression that this is a world in decay. On top of that, the scope for expansion is unfathomable. Our world alone is huge, and that’s before Funcom starts being all creative.

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Dante's Inferno

God of War meets Dead Space in Hell. That’s how we first described Dante’s Inferno and it wouldn’t be risking the wrath of Hell to suggest that’s how EA’s infernal epic looks now.

However, reducing the game to comparisons no longer does it justice. Sure, it plays like God of War – something the developers admitted to us – and it’s made by the same studio that handled Dead Space, but thanks to the game’s unique vision of Hell, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.

“When it comes to the environments in the game, we’ve tried to be as faithful to the poem as we could,” explains Jonathan Knight, executive producer on Dante’s Inferno. “Some sections, such as the Wood of the Suicides, or the Styx Marsh and the lead-up to the City of Dis, are pretty accurately re-constructed in the game, based directly upon Dante’s descriptions of what he imagined.”

To give you some idea of what that might be, the trees in the Wood of the Suicides are made up of people who took their own lives, constantly twisted and petrified in torment. The road to the City of Dis is a similarly cheery place: here, sinners are trapped inside burning coffins, eternally scrabbling to escape. Sure beats warehouses, docks and generic urban sprawls.

This adherence to the poem extends to the characters. Figures such as King Minos (judge of the dead), Phlegyas (guides Dante and Virgil to Hell) and Charon (ferries the dead across the River Styx) appear pretty much as they are in The Divine Comedy. In fact, Knight is keen to point out that “only when it comes to the story, and to the sins of Dante and his dark past, did we feel the need to really deviate and add new layers”.

He goes on to give the reason for this, saying: “We wanted to make an action game, and so it was important to create drama and conflict. Rather than a simple pilgrimage to find Beatrice, we made it into a rescue mission to save Beatrice from the clutches of Hell. We also gave a bigger part to Lucifer, made him a strong antagonist, and it sort of grew from there.”

Of course, the biggest departure from the poem is Dante appearing as a war-bloodied, self-wounding Knight of the Crusades and not a politically savvy pre-Renaissance poet. Let’s face it: sharp, 14th Century Italian literature doesn’t sell games. This is where the God of War comparisons start to kick in. Dante’s Inferno is a violent, third-person action game with a flawed hero and a slick, simple combo system. Even the buttons are the same as the ones found in God of War. However, instead of reeling in horror when confronted with the question of similarity to Sony’s multi-million dollar franchise, the developers at Visceral actually welcome the comparisons.

“It’s fair and flattering” says Knight. “We are obviously making a game in the third-person story-driven melee combat genre, and games like God of War, Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden are among the best in that class. We are honoured to be mentioned in that company. If the controls remind people of those games, then we hope that’s a good thing for gamers. What we’re focused on are the things that set Dante’s Inferno apart from the crowd.”

And what sets Dante’s apart? Technically, the game does look and play very smoothly. The team has already pledged its commitment to making sure it runs at a solid 60 frames per second, which – despite usually being a stat for the hardcore tech nerds – is important for reaction-based slashers. From a more gameplay-oriented perspective, Knight is keen to talk about the Righteousness system. Righteousness is morality with an action twist.

“In the game, the player is given the choice to punish or absolve the damned, the demons and the minions of Hell. This choice isn’t just made in modal interactions with the damned, it’s made constantly in finish moves in second-to-second combat throughout the game,” explains Knight. “Over time, the more you absolve, the more you’ll contribute to a Holy bar, which in turn leads to leveling up the Holy path. At each new level, the cross becomes stronger, and new abilities and modifications open up. The same is true down the Unholy path. You can level up both paths slowly, or more quickly by choosing one path or the other.”

In other words, think inFamous, only with the option to be good or a jerk built in to every significant encounter. And, much like we saw in Sony’s lightning-flinging action game, you’re rewarded with extra abilities and exclusive magic attacks the more extreme your alignment becomes. Throughout the game you find relics (unique weapons), which are either Holy or Unholy. Depending on how you’re playing the game, these relics will be more or less effective – so if you’re following a righteous path, don’t expect too much from your Unholy pick-ups.

“All the different systems are tied into this overall theme of choice: to punish or to absolve. We think it fits very well with the theme of free will, which was so important to Dante Alighieri, and it gives players more options in their play style,” claims Knight. We’re not sure choosing a preferred method of slaughtering unbaptised babies with knives for arms was quite the ‘free will’ Dante Alighieri had in mind when he wrote The Divine Comedy, but it does make for an entertainingly gruesome spectacle.

Dante in the game uses his scythe to produce the kind of finishing moves that would make even Kratos queasy. One example sees him slipping his scythe inside the body of a grotesquely fat enemy in the ‘Greed’ circle and snatching the blade back out, roughly chopping the creature in half. That’ll be an ‘Unholy’ finish, then.

However, we’ve also seen examples of ‘righteous’ finishes, where Dante presses his Holy Cross into the face of a fallen opponent and reduces them to a pile of glowing dust, presumably freeing their tormented soul. It’s all done with a Quick Time Event sequence, just like the God of War series. That seems like a bit of a disappointment considering games like Ninja Gaiden 2, and later down the line, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow have started to move away from QTEs as a resolution to epic (and occasionally not-so-epic) boss battles.

With so much violence and some downright horrific imagery in the levels (as a side note, Knight tells us that there was some material considered too nasty to appear in the final version of the game, but he won’t say what) it only seems like a matter of time before the knee-jerkers and banner-wavers start to close in on Dante’s Inferno in a big way.

EA staged a fake Christian protest at this year’s E3 games show in LA to drum up publicity for the game, and this seems to have kept other objections at bay – presumably for fear of doing EAs work for them. Knight takes an impish view on the subject, saying: “People have had 700 years to protest against the poem, and not much has ever come from that approach. The game is an adaptation of this incredible work of fiction, and that’s just what it is: a work of fiction. It’s a fantasy about a guy fighting the demons of the afterlife, as well as his own demons, in pursuit of the love of his life. What’s not to like about that?”

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BioShock 2

There’s more than one Big Sister. For whatever reason, 2K Marin had been leading us to believe that the lithe nemesis of BioShock 2 was a lonely thing. Sure, she’d pull you through iron doors with psycho-kinetic powers, whirling you up into a violent cloud of debris before slamming you to the floor, but there was a sense that when she wasn’t nearby, she’d be sitting alone and crying, trying to read a book but skewering it with her bayonet forearms.

But the Big Sister is, in fact, many. Now when we can’t see them, there’s the fear that they might be throwing parties and talking about how shit we are. Terror is no longer tainted by pity, and so when you do encounter one of the skittish, wall-leaping assassins, you’ll fear them completely. You’ll also be able to win, which is partly the reason why the Big Sister became a sorority rather than a solo foe.

 “As of last time we spoke,” explains Jordan Thomas, creative director, “we were talking about a Big Sister who was at the centre of the fiction. There’s still a character in whom the soul of that narrative still exists, but as BioShock 2’s narrative must exist in harmony with the gameplay, we decided to give the player that feeling of victory that comes from actually defeating this foe when she comes for you. So the Big Sisters are Sofia Lamb’s, our new villain’s, mightiest enforcers. Yet as you go through the game, you’ll learn more and more about this character who is at the centre of that fiction.”

Hopefully you’re up to speed with the terminology of BioShock, or at least enough of it to not be fazed by talk of young children syringing pints of fluid from corpses before guzzling it down like sinewy Gatorade, because BioShock 2 continues the fiction in a not at all dissimilar way. The opening part of the level we played shows just how little the actual format of the game’s changed – your train journey is impeded by a door which has been frozen shut, a shifty sounding ally (Sinclair, a protege to Andrew Ryan) tells you, via shortwave radio, that to proceed you must find the Incinerate plasmid, which is hidden deep inside a wonderfully constructed and detailed amusement park.

The amusement park’s function in Rapture is revealed to you gradually through scattered audio diaries: when the children of Rapture began to ask about the surface, Ryan decided to build this place – Ryan Amusements – to make them terrified of the world above.

The park’s centrepiece is the Journey to the Surface ride, an on-rails bathysphere trip through narrow wooden streets and cardboard shop fronts. Scenes of metaphors made real judder into motion as you pass: a menacing, giant animatronic hand tears the roof from a farmhouse to steal the farmer’s invisible income while Ryan’s crackling voice echoes the same anti-Socialist, anti-tax agenda we heard during the opening scenes of BioShock.

Subtle as a wet fart in a crematorium though all that may be, there’s still fun to be had exploring Ryan’s distorted vision of the world above the waves. Elsewhere in the park, animated dioramas cheerfully detail the history of Rapture, from Ryan’s original expedition to the laying of the foundations. It’s porn for the detail-perverts, and we love every ounce of it.

You’re also a Big Daddy. Well, an early model Big Daddy, and one not as mutated as those that went into full production. It makes little difference to how BioShock 2 handles, and it’s thankfully unlike the closing sections of the previous game. You’re as nimble as you were suitless in BioShock – the only immediately noticeable differences are in the stomping sounds you make, and your giant drill arm, which replaces the wrench as your melee tool of choice.

In fact, all of the weapons you wield are beefier than most of Jack’s armoury. Your rivet gun not only fires, well, rivets, but it’s also capable of laying down rivet traps on floors, walls and ceilings. If approached, these traps will fire rivets directly upwards, downwards or sideways through whatever unfortunate sack of organic matter that happens to get in the way.

Next, your spear gun catches splicers and lifts them off the floor, pinning them to whatever they hit next. Retrieve the spear and they fall back down. Use a rocket spear and the bolt will lodge itself in the splicer’s flesh before sparking to life, launching the victim upwards or into a mad, screaming death spiral about the room. To end the show, it explodes. As you might guess, these rocket spears are as rare as hens’ tits.

As a Big Daddy, your interaction with Little Sisters is more complex than just harvesting or saving them. You’ll come across the girls in much the same way, with their clomping protectors in tow as they flit about the abandoned hallways. A new Big Daddy type is shown, the can-faced Rumbler, who can throw down handfuls of mini-turrets.

“You didn’t see it,” claims Jordan, “but I could’ve frozen the Rumbler and hacked his turrets.”

We believe him – the number of interactions between plasmids and the environment seems to have increased. You can fire an ice plasmid at a cyclone trap to turn it into a freezing wind, capable of turning splicers into flying blocks of ice. Likewise, the Incinerate plasmid will turn a cyclone trap into a blazing tornado. And you can electrocute a flying turret to short circuit it. Do this and it’ll fall, and if it lands in water it’ll zap anyone unlucky enough to be sharing the puddle. As with the first game, there’s scope for ingenuity when coming up against Big Daddies, and the world encourages it in its placement of broken water pipes and security cameras.

As soon as you’ve carved a path to a Little Sister, your binary choice is now between harvesting and adopting her. Adopt, and she hops on your shoulder and guides you to a corpse with magical pheromone-o-vision, a glittering trail of sparkles leading you to a pre-determined body.

According to Jordan, only certain splicer remains are fit to have ADAM sucked out of their torsos, and these corpses are likely to be ones 2K Marin have chosen for us. Ones that sit in well-lit rooms surrounded by enough doors and entry-points to make the inevitable siege unpredictable. They’ll also, based on the two occasions in which we found ourselves chaperoning the macabre event, be flanked by security cameras or turrets, both of which can be hacked to turn the arena to your advantage.

Hacking’s changed too. Instead of the polarising minigames of the first BioShock, in which you’d be faced with an impromptu game of Pipe Mania before being allowed to open a door or crack a safe, you’re now presented with a multicoloured bar along which an arrow slides. Stop it in the green and your hacking attempt is a success, stop it in the blue and your aim is true – you’ll MacGuyver the turret into being even more effective than usual.

Of course, miss both of these colours and not only are you really bad at a simple reaction-based game, but you fail the hack attempt. Crucially, regardless of whether you fail or succeed, the world no longer grinds to a standstill while you fiddle with objects – this explains why Pipe Mania’s been replaced by this rudimentary minigame – turrets will still tear away at you while you’re fingering their access panels, and security cameras will gleefully send teams of robots after you while you poke at their innards.

To this end we now have Remote Hacking Darts, which do exactly what you’re imagining them to. That you have to collect and ration these darts turns hacking into a commodity rather than a pure skill, and ties the stealth approach to moving through Rapture more closely to the action approach. Whereas hacking in BioShock - those times you ran through hails of gunfire to reach the safety of your frozen Pipe Mania limbo - felt entirely like cheating, it instead feels like true ingenuity and resourcefulness in BioShock 2.

Just as we prepared for Big Daddy encounters in the first game, we prepare for splicer sieges in the second. As soon as you set down your Little Sister to allow her to harvest a corpse, the deranged residents of Rapture flood into the room to... well, we’re not entirely sure what their intentions actually are. They’re certainly angry, and as our rivet traps, now-allied turrets and cyclone plasmids roar into life, the room is the scene of the most frenetic combat Rapture’s yet seen. Your preparations falter soon enough and you’re left protecting your Sister with reliable plasmids and guns. And drills.

This is where dual wielding begins to pull its weight. Your role as a Big Daddy might not imbue you with any immediate sense of physical superiority over Jack – but the ability to wield a plasmid in one hand and a weapon in the other allows for far more fluid combat with splicers, and at a faster pace too. A paralysing electrobolt followed by a torso-mangling thrust of your drill replaces a similar, wrench-based manoeuvre from the first game, while the benefits of being able to shred a screaming housewife with Gatling gun rounds while simultaneously grilling her with your upgraded Incinerate plasmid are obvious.

This is where BioShock 2 truly makes  you feel powerful. A good thing too, as elsewhere, your stature as a Big Daddy – the toughest enemies from the first game – seems to have been neutered at every turn. Splicers are more powerful, as Jordan explains.

“The balance of the city 10 years on is much more feral and unforgiving than the first game,” he warns us. “The splicers you encounter have been augmenting themselves for years and years – and those who’ve managed to survive since BioShock are truly post-human. They’re able to take on a Big Daddy with ease. So you’re really fighting for survival.”

Brutes are one of these new breeds of splicer, Mafia goon-types with broken fedoras who’ve been taking strength tonics in the decade between games. They’re walking tanks – not a million miles from Left 4 Dead’s Tank in terms of aesthetics – and they’ll take a fair few smacks before they give it up.

“The Vita-Chambers,” continues Jordan, explaining the various ways this new Rapture intends to punish you, “if you die during a fight with a Big Daddy, you’ll come back to find the Little Sister has healed him. So you can’t just whittle them to death in the way that you once did.” A strange balance has been met then. You’re now in the clomping, commanding iron boots of a genetically advanced, physically-superior super-mutant, but your stomping grounds are populated by enemies more powerful than ever before.

The net total of all this line-shifting is a game that feels severely similar to BioShock in its play style, visual style, format, plot and pace, and that’s something that should cause furrowed brows among those who were expecting more of a departure from the brass-and-glass underwater kingdom.

Still, it’s the setting that will ultimately impress, and the opportunity to return to one of gaming’s most original locations in order to rummage around bits of the city that went curiously unnoticed in the first game. Ryan Amusements alone is testament to the sort of quality set-piece locations 2K Marin are capable of conjuring up - dark and twisted insights into the unhinged brainwrongs of Andrew Ryan - and places as unsettling as anything you could care to dig out of old Rapture.

That’s just the tip of this maddening iceberg too: the real thrill will be in uncovering the crackpots - the Sander Cohens - of this new world. And having had 10 years to properly marinate in their own lunacy, surrounded by naught but sea and splicers, they’re sure to be properly cuckoo.

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Dust 514

EVE Online is serious business for a serious number of players so devs CCP are treating Dust’s place in their universe with care. Every war fought on Dust’s battlefields will impact on the EVE universe, affecting trade, politics, and warfare throughout the space-based PC MMO.

With this power placed in the hands of console gamers, CCP are doing their best to keep the riffraff out. The first few months with the game will largely be spent in battles against AI or in skirmishes which have no effect on EVE’s universe of New Eden. Later, players will form alliances and will be hired by corporations and individuals operating in EVE Online, temporarily paid to seize control of a rival faction’s cities or military structures.

Each battlefield clocks in at around five kilometres with servers supporting a ‘significant’ number of players. Missions begin on board your faction’s War Barge overlooking the planet to be assaulted and detailing your commander’s load-out for the mission. Commanders provide shape and order to the battle – each faction’s leader remains on board the Mobile Command Centre, a sky fortress which hovers high above the battlefield. While grunts and squad leaders engage at ground level, commanders issue orders, deploy vehicles, and place waypoints, while positioning and re-positioning the MCC to keep it safe and effective.

The ultimate objective on any map is to bring down the enemy base, and battles escalate as ground forces seize objectives, earn command points, and raise the stakes. Ground assault troops will be able to lower the carrier’s shields and strike at its other defensive countermeasures to leave it open for attack, but still careful manoeuvring can keep your home base safe a little longer. Even as the game reaches its climax there’s still reason to fight on and assault the enemy’s outposts – attacking their artillery to buy your carrier a few more seconds; just long enough to take down the enemy’s own base.

Instead of a gradual crawl up an arbitrary Achievement tree as a reward, every win or loss in Dust means something to someone who has a personal stake in the EVE universe. You’ll have their gratitude; better still, you’ll have their money – to be spent on new guns and equipment.

Dust is experiment layered upon experiment. It’s a large-scale shooter from a first-time shooter dev which affects the balance of power in a game console-only gamers will never even play. It’s a tactical game without classes, only stacks of equipment and complex customisable weapons to choose from. It’s a test of how willing shooter players are to invest in a system of microtransactions to incur advantages in-game.

Toughest of all, it’s a multiplayer shooter without a real campaign element. Every time any developer tries that trick on a console, they fall on their face. Shadowrun, Quake Wars, Section 8 – all solid multiplayer shooters built without real campaigns, each failing harder than the last. Only Battlefield 1943, at bargain price, has landed on its feet. With those handicaps and the fickle console community behind the wheel, it’s not enough for Dust to be the cleverest shooter of the generation; it’ll have to be the best shooter too.

It’s unfortunately not enough for Dust to look and play as well as it should. As a pure multiplayer game, without tens of thousands of players on day one there might as well be no game at all. Picking the stupefying name of ‘Dust 514’ probably wasn’t a good start.

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Aliens vs Predator

In space no-one can hear you scream. But in the gaming room of Oxford-based developer Rebellion’s head office everyone can. Sitting mere meters away from the world’s largest TV screen with the lights down low and the volume up high, Aliens vs Predator is a very scary game.

It’s also a very ambitious game. Each species (humans, Aliens and Predators) gets its own campaign, control method and even screen furniture. Clearly Rebellion has gotten under the skin of these creatures to bring them to virtual life as accurately as possible. The result is a game that can by turns leave you feeling slightly sick with fear or giddy with power.

That each species has been fine-tuned for just the right balance of vulnerability and toughness is also impressive. Humans have access to greater firepower, the Aliens are quick and stealthy and the Predator is a master of the hunt. None are invincible and all can be deadly when used effectively.

It‘s a supremely authentic feeling title. There are various nods to the movies, from iconic weaponry such as the pulse rifle to the horrible clicking sound the Predator makes. There’s even a terrifying Predalien too.

So far, so impressive (our playthrough left us feeling a bit jittery with adrenaline), but questions remain. The Predator’s controls for instance feel a bit unwieldy at times and close quarters combat can be a slog. The major fear though is that the game’s chief selling point – its three distinctive campaigns – will result in each feeling too short and the whole feeling a bit, well, bitty.

That said, Aliens vs Predator is without doubt one of the most playfully inventive and exciting shooters we’ve seen for some time. We’re going to go out on a limb and say that if it were a movie it’d be Aliens rather than AvP: Requiem. The next three sections cover the three species’ campaigns, so read on to find out what we played of each.

We’re first introduced to Six, the game’s playable Alien character, as he bursts out of the chest of some poor unfortunate soul somewhere in the bowels of the Weyland-Yutani compound. It’s a sinister and unsettling scene but, oddly enough, makes us sympathise with Six and start eyeing up the evil scientists for a good mauling.

Cut to an adult Six that’s restrained in a lab and being put through his paces by a particularly sinister scientist. As more unfortunate employees of the world’s most evil corporation are marched in one by one we quickly get the hang of things.

You can’t carry weapons as the Alien, but effectively you are a weapon. Armed with vicious claws, a long tail and two (count ’em) mouths, playing as an Alien is visceral, gruesome fun. Felled enemies can even be grabbed, initiating one of several finishing moves. Our favourite? Puncturing skulls with the inner mouth.

But once Six is freed from his prison, it’s the speed of the thing that really impresses. He can barrel along at a frightening pace and takes walls and ceilings in stride. To move more stealthily he can even dodge in and out of vents and use his tail to disable light sources. And you’ll need to be stealthy too. Faced with armed guards and sentry guns you’ll be torn to acid-soaked ribbons in seconds.

The end result is a fast-paced first-person experience that plays against all your finely honed shooter instincts. Here escaping firefights by taking cover behind scenery is pointless. Instead, you’re required to climb the walls before dropping from the ceiling for a surprise attack. It’s a wrench to get your head around, but once you do, mercilessly hunting down your quarry becomes a guilty pleasure. Just as well too, as the scene ends with Six releasing his brethren and the Alien queen. It looks like there are going to be a lot more Alien attacks in mission two.

The mighty Predator’s game begins as a group of warriors descend to the planet to investigate the deaths of a pack of wet-behind-the-mandibles young Preds. The scene is set by a transmission showing one victim being latched onto by a facehugger – nicely setting up the inevitable appearance of a Predalien later on.

The game proper begins with a tutorial, necessarily so as the Predator controls are easily the most complicated of the three characters. Largely, combat is handled with wrist gauntlets - raise both of them to serve as a block that can set up counters. It’s a weighty, pugilistic system that again subverts the norms of first-person combat.

Left at that, the Predator’s game would be something of a slog. But in common with the Alien, the hunter is more vulnerable than his movie appearances would have us believe. As a result there’s a wealth of other techniques available that make for some nicely tactical gameplay.

At one point we’re charged with entering a heavily guarded human compound to retrieve the head of its commander. Simply wading in and slashing away quickly proves futile. Instead, we choose to approach things differently by enabling the cloaking device and leaping from rooftop to rooftop.

Targeting an enemy allows you to record their voice and project it somewhere else in the compound. Curious humans will now be drawn toward the sound and become ripe for picking off with a well-timed lunge or a blast from your shoulder-mounted cannons.

Despite your character’s immense power, then, the real thrill comes from approaching things tactically. Herding a soldier like a dumb cow before tearing his head and spine out is much more satisfying than trading blows for bullets.

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2

If you’re reading this, then you’ve managed to find a spare few minutes to drag yourself away from Modern Warfare 2. Yes, we know, it’s difficult – you’ve just got the Ninja perk and launched your first Tactical Nuke. But you also have the intelligence to appreciate that Modern Warfare 2 isn’t the absolute and final word in war-based online multiplayer.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was always likely to be dogged with comparisons to Call of Duty. But the simple fact is that the Battlefield series has always presented multiplayer on a much grander scale, and for a longer period of time.

The dusty, bleached-looking level we sampled, set on America’s Pacific coast, has typical Battlefield magnitude. An evolution of the original Bad Company’s ‘Gold Rush’ mode (now just called ‘Rush’), your mission to defend or destroy two important locations will, as always, rely as much on transport as on-foot soldiers.

Gordon Van Dyke, producer of numerous Battlefield titles, admits to us that vehicles have felt a little fragile in past games. Not so here – tanks feel thunderous and weighty (not to mention devastating), while armored trucks and quad bikes are rapid but not quite so unstable. Of course, the finely honed ‘paper, scissors, stone’ nature of Battlefield games (Bad Company 2 being “the best tuned Battlefield to date”, according to Van Dyke) means these vehicles aren’t invincible.

Each of the four classes (Medic, Assault, Recon and Engineer) has explosive methods to dispatch armor. Plus, tactically maneuvering the fight from open, treacherous land to intense street combat is a specialty that DICE have been perfecting nicely since Battlefield 2 back in 2005.

In our hands-on we got a chance to play in two teams of five (rather than the full 24 players), so the colossal maps did feel a bit empty. Respawning back in base could mean a huge trek to get back into the action if you’re an invading force. This did, however, give us the opportunity to try different approaches of attack; storming in with a tank, sneaking round the flank on an ATV or advancing quietly up through cover on foot, for example.

The two-man tank combo is as devastating as ever. With one man driving and operating the turret to take down other vehicles, the second man on the machine gun mops up any sneaky beggars trying to place charges on you. Killy goodness. The arcade feel to the driving suits the game just fine, and makes rolling a vehicle fun instead of a pain in the ass.

Like all Battlefield games, there’s a near vertical learning curve. If you’re new to the series, don’t even think about going online without some offline practice first. If not, get used to respawning and super accurate snipers. As you gain ranks, you’ll attain more ways to customize your soldier, including familiar upgrades like more grenades and unlimited sprinting.

Luckily, the early guns are relatively lethal, so a skilled player will still have a shot at beating veterans, although some might opt for support classes before attempting to take on everyone toe-to-toe. Still, when in comparison to MW2, the guns are noticeably less powerful. The survivability of everyone is necessary so that Medics actually have something to do – if everyone died in a couple of shots, you’d never get a chance to heal anyone.

Developers DICE know that Bad Company 2’s long term appeal lies in the multiplayer but are keen to stress that the single-player campaign has also been given more attention than ever. As you’d hope, Sarge, Sweetwater, Haggard and Marlowe of B-Company return but the tone is darker and the attitude more mature – something highlighted by the fact that they’re in conflict with the Russians while simultaneously attempting to neutralize a substantial weapon threat in South America. Certainly more righteous than lining their pockets with gold.

Such a mission will take B-Company across Chile – from the snow-capped mountains of the Andes, to barren desert, to tropical rainstorms in central Chile. DICE want to deliver the feeling of open-world freedom but also put you in controlled, exciting situations and from what we’ve seen so far that’s exactly the case. Bad Company 2 looks like it will be very good company indeed.

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Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction

A choke hold is a great bonding experience. Not between you and the man who’s holding a gun to your head – there’ll always be a tragic, longing awkwardness in that relationship – but between you and your fellow player, the guy flitting from shadow to shadow, circling around to spring up behind your captor and snap his neck like a bony pencil.

Or maybe, if he’s got one of his execution moves prepared, your friend will poke a hole between the eyes of the guard with Bauer-like aloofness. For these situations Splinter Cell Conviction needs a Manly Hug button, because when one spy helps out another, the mutual appreciation for one another’s usefulness is almost tangible.

We’re playing the third map in Conviction’s co-operative campaign, Yastreb Complex, a small part of a five-hour long prologue to the events of the single player game. The two-player campaign is a game in itself, taking in new locations and seen through the luminescent goggles of two new characters. The story goes that Third Echelon notices that three Russian EMP bombs have vanished, and must jump into bed with their Russian-counterpart, Voron, in order to track them down and save the world. It’s James Bond in spandex with big thigh muscles.

Enter Archer, the green-goggled Fisher-lite character, and his soon-to-be best pal Kestrel, who, as a Russian man, has to wear the red goggles. Despite their chromatic differences, the two eventually become the best of friends, crow barring doors open together, planting C-4 charges for simultaneous detonations, and marking and executing entire rooms of people at once.

Gone, as far as the Yastreb Complex level tells, are the vaguely erotic acrobatic moves of Chaos Theory (the phrase “use me as man-rope you mucky cow” may never be heard again) and arriving are the well-phrased mechanics of Conviction we spoke about in our last preview, tuned for two players.

Yastreb Complex, then. Having C-4ed a bit of wall, we slither into a loading bay area shrouded in darkness. The objective is to find and interrogate one Major Rebko, and my partner in this spy thriller is Patrick Redding, game director for Conviction’s multiplayer game and in possession of the kinds of skills that only come of having demonstrated the game a thousand times.

As in the single-player game, “marking and executing” is your most effective means of shoveling out death, and to illustrate Redding effortlessly marks three patrolling guards who immediately appear on my HUD as hovering arrows. In response I clamber up a pipe. Desperate to look like I know what I’m doing up in my lofty perch, I mark three more men. All six are within our collective field of vision, and should we decide to, we may dispatch them with clinical precision.

They’ve called this, simply enough, ‘Dual Mark and Execute’. Executions are rapid-fire, auto aimed fatal shots, available only once you’ve engaged in melee with an enemy (in this way, you’re restricted from using the powerful one-hit-kill move against every guard you encounter). In co-op, executions become grandly choreographed, synchronous events. When one of us triggers an execution, time slows to allow the other player to begin theirs, and the end result is a room of six guards dropping to the floor before they realize what’s happening.

Stylish, efficient, and visually elegant, it’s a spectacle that’s rationed throughout the level, requiring co-ordination and (whaddya know) co-operation to pull off. Lone executions are still an option, naturally, as is the ability to execute targets marked by another player. The potentially intrusive time dilation only comes into effect if both players have the opportunity to simultaneously perform an execution, otherwise it’s carried out on the crack of a whip.

Yastreb Complex, along with every inch of the co-op campaign, is built from the ground up to be tackled by a duo. Multiple routes are nearly always available, and enemies often appear in formations that require they be taken out simultaneously – either hawkishly watching one another’s backs or moving in patterns that can be identified and relayed to your fellow player. As we approach our objective, myself and Redding are made to rely on communication and co-ordination. The complex’s office floor, replete with scalable partition walls and a crawl-space above the ceiling tiles, tests our abilities to work in tandem.

Redding hoists himself up into the maze of asbestos-riddled ceiling tiles and switches to his sonar goggles to highlight enemies below. I creep, otherwise blind to what’s around the next corner, from cubicle to cubicle while my teammate barks warnings and instructions: “Wait at that corner”, “The guards are chatting, move now”, “Quick, vault over that photocopier all awesome-like”. Inside, though you’d never admit it, you feel that maybe this is how real spies talk to one another. On some childish level, Conviction’s co-op is the authentic espionage experience.

When it all goes tits up though, and we’re both unable to carry out our swanky execution moves, Redding starts firing silenced shots through the ceiling tiles, a mysterious deadly hail falling on the unwitting guardians of the office. Taking aim at the light fittings, I plunge the room into darkness and turn the tide of battle back in favor of the men with the sonar-goggles. This is when the choke hold happens, I’m grabbed from behind and my perilous incompetence is flagged up on Redding’s screen. It’s the Splinter Cell equivalent of being Smokered in Left 4 Dead, or incapacitated in Modern Warfare, and Redding’s reaction – to circle around and twist the man’s head off – cements the spirit of the co-operation in a manner familiar to you if you’ve played either of those games.

Interrogations appear in co-op too, and much like in the single-player, they employ “contextual bash points” in the environment, that is, you can pin an interrogatee’s hand to a tree with a knife, or smush his face into a photocopier until both are shattered and covered in toner, depending on where you take him. Both players can have a go at hurting a man until he talks, with one doing the grabbing and shaking while the other keeps an eye out for reinforcements.

In its current form, however, the implementation feels odd. On the Yastreb Complex level, Major Rebko flops petulantly to the floor in between snippets of information in order to allow the other player an opportunity to “have a go”. And the role of scouting during the interrogation is pointless, as backup never arrives until you’ve progressed by completing the scene.

Yastreb ends with me lugging Major Rebko to an eye and fingerprint scanner with my teammate providing cover. Gunmen stream onto the mezzanine outside Rebko’s office, while Redding monkeys along balconies, popping up above the railing to grab enemies and throw them down to the floor below. Then there’s a twist, tables are turned dramatically and we find ourselves in the most Mexican of stand-offs. We fade to black. The playthrough is over. Just 20 minutes of a five-hour co-operative campaign, outside of the Fisher-focused single-player adventure. The question is: who would ever want to play single-player after that?

But this is (very almost) 2010. Multiplayer without a World at War-style Siege mode, or a Left 4 Dead-style Survival mode, would cause ladies to faint in the street, and men to start brawling and tumbling through shop windows. With this in mind, on top of a co-op campaign fledged to within an inch of its life, you’ll find, astonishingly, Deniable Ops, a collection of maps playable in four different game types with either one or two players. It’s also designed to be played over and over until our sun explodes, with Ubisoft reckoning that Deniable Ops is where players will clock up most of their playtime.

A quick and humorless rundown of the four game types then. Hunter has you eliminating all enemies on a map as quickly as possible. Infiltration has you doing the same, but forces you to avoid detection. Last Stand is Conviction’s nod to an increasingly popular game mode in which you must defeat increasingly well-equipped waves of enemies. And finally, Face-Off pits two spies against one another in a map populated by AI guards.

I’m shown the Lumber Mill map in Infiltration mode, this time in single-player. The crippling loneliness is made worse by the sense that you’re now half as effective as you were before, and with that comes the burden of having to mark your own enemies and scout your own routes – it’s a remarkably different experience. Lumber Mill is notable for all of its piles of lumber, great big trunks stacked in well-lit rows, forcing you to make daring scoots down between bright wooden corridors and clamber among the rusted machinery.

Unlike the story-led co-op mode, in which enemies’ starting positions are dictated by level designers, Deniable Ops promises “emergent gameplay”. That is, enemies will crop up in different places each time you play. This creates some interesting situations in the Face-Off games, especially when combined with one of the single-player game’s features: last known position.

Successfully breaking line-of-sight with the AI leaves behind a ghostly visage of yourself, indicating where the AI last copped eyes on you. The AI will investigate that area, or simply fire blindly at it while you maneuver yourself to a more advantageous location. In Face-Off, using your last known position to lure guards towards your opponent is also a viable tactic.

Of course, in this mode the game-ending executions are impossible to pull-off against human players. It’s also, you might have noticed, the only non-co-operative part of Conviction’s multiplayer game. Spies vs Mercs won’t appear in Conviction, as Ubisoft focus their efforts on the lengthy co-op campaign.

Tying the whole experience together is P.E.C.S. (the Persistent Elite Creation System): XP that’s earned with everything you do in single and multiplayer. Challenges are set across both single- and multiplayer, requiring you to kill certain numbers of people with certain weapons, or achieve other unlikely feats. With the XP you earn from doing so, you’ll be able to get upgrades, new equipment, and costumes for Archer and Kestrel.

Clearly, Conviction’s multiplayer won’t be a side feature. For many it’ll be the main attraction, a juggernaut of a co-op campaign bolstered by the inclusion of replayable Deniable Ops missions. Splinter Cell seems to have found a new online niche, shedding the Spies vs Mercs (sure to cause some pained howls at first) in favor of the richer co-op experience. From what we’ve seen thus far, the change in focus is paying off.

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Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

Can it be true? Is this the last ever Command & Conquer? Has Kane finally met his match? Respectively: Apparently, ditto, and it would appear so. We’ll believe it when we see it, but according to assistant producer Matt Ott, “We’re really going to wrap it up this time.”

It’s mildly terrifying to consider that the first C&C game came out in 1995 but it’s one of those rare games that can genuinely claim to have pioneered a genre. Real-time strategy may not be the poster boy for the PC it once was, but the development team at EA are refusing to rest on their sizeable laurels, and are indeed introducing fundamental gameplay changes for this fourth and, allegedly, final fling.

As any fools knows, one of the key concepts of C&C is fortifying your base, hunkering down and clinging on for dear life, repelling all that the enemy throws your way. Not anymore. Step forward the crawler mobile base, which as the name suggests, can stagger to a point on the map and unpack into a fully working base. Furthermore, should your base be destroyed, you can simply redeploy the crawler, even switching to a different class. Yes, there are three classes, namely offence, defence and support. Bluff traditionalists needn’t panic however: “There’s a lot of classic elements in there,” says Ott.

“If you choose to play a defensive class you’ll be able to fortify, hold down an area, build up around it. You’ll still have access to classic buildings like super weapons: the Temple Of Nod, the GDI Ion Cannon. So that kind of bunker down and build up your base gameplay still exists in the game; we’ve just added the offensive and support classes for people who work together as a team.

“Offence class is more tank-oriented - you also have the commander unit, and the support class has access to the airport - they’re very mobile, quick, and they also have player powers that can be used anywhere on the battlefield.

“Any of those classes is going to have all the tools you need to be successful. It is possible to have a team of five offensive players and still win a match. However, the classes really play to each other’s strengths by working together as a team.”

It’s a lot to take on board at once, particularly for someone who struggled to complete the demo of the original C&C, which came on a floppy disc and was played on something called a 486. This time round, We’re on a 10-PC LAN in a disused dairy in East London, sitting next to none other than Kane himself, or at least the man who plays him, Joe Kucan.

There’s no shame in admitting that we make a pig’s ear of our time with C&C4, simply sending all of our troops to a fiery death before trying again with a different class, and similar results. It’s almost a relief when our PC crashes, sparing us the indignity of another crushing defeat. Although we later learn that we’ve been playing at level 20 – the highest. Yes, there are RPG-style levels, with persistent player progression throughout the entire game, whether in you’re in campaign, skirmish or multiplayer mode.

Although in terms of story it’s a classic Nod vs GDI scenario – The Scrin, C&C3’s purple aliens, having been dropped – C&C4 appears to be advancing the genre that the original Command & Conquer founded. The advancements will also impact on the single-player campaign, which will be fast-paced and heavily reliant on map awareness, albeit more forgiving in that you can simply redeploy your crawler, whenever your base is wiped out.

So is this really the end? Ott is adamant: “This is the epic conclusion of the Tiberian saga, the story that we started back in 1995. It’s going to be the conclusion of Kane’s plan, GDI versus Nod, the fate of the world, the fate of Tiberian, it’s all here. It’s going to wrap up the saga.”

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Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Like precious drops of life-giving water in a barren, dust-strewn landscape, details on Ubisoft’s new Prince of Persia game – slated to launch across all major gaming consoles in just a matter of months – have been excruciatingly scarce. Even the teaser trailer below left fans choking in the desert sands, desperate for real information. After chatting with Director of Level Design Michael McIntyre at a recent Ubisoft press event, however, we’ve managed to scavenge a few draughts of early intel on the game to temporarily slake your thirst.

Forgotten Sands ties back into the Sands of Time trilogy and features the titular Prince from those games, rather than the rebooted Prince character from 2008’s Prince of Persia title. This new tale takes place during a gap between Sands of Time and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. “[During that gap] there were all these adventures that the character went on that we never really talked about, so now we’re making a game based on one of those adventures,” McIntyre says. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the whole time story.”

Without going into a lot of specific detail, he outlined Forgotten Sands’ initial story premise for us. “Our prince character is going to visit his brother’s kingdom, and when he arrives he finds the kingdom is under attack. He’s essentially trying to help out this brother.” This better explains the action found in the trailer footage above, with scenes of a desert city under siege. Billowing clouds of smoke emanate from the battleground, while combatants are gutted by a surge of undead warriors. Amidst the chaos and crumbling buildings, the Prince nimbly darts his way through the wreckage and climbs to the top of a tall spire where he’s greeted by a massive, demonic-looking sand beast that towers over the ruined city. Yes, the “dark secret” the narrator professes to be hidden within the sand does not appear to be a friendly one.

As expected, Forgotten Sands won’t deviate from the action-oriented platforming gameplay the series is known for. The Prince’s acrobatic maneuvers, the puzzles and combat will all be very similar to Sands of Time. “We’re really trying to evoke the same spirit of that trilogy, so it’s all going to be very reminiscent of that,” says McIntyre. In the trilogy, the prince had a bevy of slick moves and magical, time-altering powers. McIntyre confirmed that the ability to rewind time to get out of sticky situations will return, but the remainder of the Prince’s powers this time around will focus on the elements of nature.

Though we weren’t fortunate enough to steal a glimpse of the game in action, the trailer shows the cel-shaded visual style from the recent Prince of Persia game has been ditched in favor of a look that better matches the Sands of Time series. It’s pretty slick, and we’re anxious to get our hands on some Princely action soon. Forgotten Sands is scheduled to launch in May 2010 for consoles and handheld gaming platforms alike. Keep your eyes peeled here for more details as they come out.

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Supreme Commander 2

A Monkeylord has steamrollered the front lines, Titan bots are overwhelming your point defence, and a Sky King Extreme just pelted your Commander so hard he had to eject his own head to survive. And your secret weapon, an automoton the size of the Empire State, is only 70% complete. In any other RTS, game over. In Supreme Commander 2.

“Activate.... the Universal Colossus!”
“But sir!” your robot engineers would say if they could, “it’s not ready yet! It’s never been field tested! There could be catastrophic consequences we-”
“SILENCE! You have your orders!”

It stirs. It turns. It stomps. Lasers shoot from its eyes, obliterating whole lines of enemy units. Graviton generators in its hands suck tanks into the air and crumple them. It goes toe to toe with the damaged Monkeylord and smashes it into a burnt-out wreck. And then, it stops. It’s crashed.

SupCom was good at two things: massive experimental units, and making you feel inadequate about your PC. SupCom2 is no good at the latter: it runs faster on a given PC than its three-year-old predecessor (as for Xbox 360, well we haven't seen how it runs yet). But it’s gone nuts with the former: it has 27 Experimentals to the first game’s 9, and you can Half-Bake one before it’s complete. The result is fully functional, but every ten seconds it runs the risk of complete and permanent failure.

There’s often something you want in a hurry. SupCom creator Chris Taylor showed us the mobile Bomb Bouncer, a device that projects an umbrella over your other units and absorbs everything aerial units try to rain on them. It can turn that stored energy into an energy blast to take down enemy planes.

Then there is the Loyalty Cannon. It fires loyalty. It looks like one of Supreme Commander’s characteristic stadium-sized artillery pieces, but it zaps nearby enemy units with a beam that rewires them to fight for you. We watched it neutralise a whole incoming army, turning the front lines against the rear, then turning the rear lines too.

Unlocking Experimentals means spending research points to climb one of four tech trees: Land, Air, Sea, or Structures. Other options in these trees upgrade certain classes of your existing units. To unlock the hilarious Unit Cannon – a structure that fires the bots it builds at the enemy – you need a few of the upgrades in the Structure tree.

It’s no longer a case of "What’s the best thing I can afford?," but "What do I fancy specialising in?" With three different factions, each with five different tech trees and nine unique Experimentals, every commander’s answer will be different. Watching those answers wreck each other is going to be fun.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

STALKER: Call of Pripyat was the third game of the series Survival FPS STALKER The events in Call of Pripyat occurred after the end of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. After learning about the open path to the Zone, the government then held a large-scale military operation to control the CNPP. The group's first military conduct air monitoring to know the details of the land. After that, the main military forces would be deployed. While preparations are very mature, the operation failed. Most observers falling helicopter. To gather information about the cause of this failure, the Security Service of Ukraine to send its agents into the Zone. After that, it all depends on the player.

Like games S.T.A.L.K.E.R. previously, Call of Pripyat is an FPS game that is filled with RPG elements. Players completed the quest from the NPC's scattered in various places, gain new weapons and armor stronger, and generally trying to make him stronger for the adventurous in the Zone.

The entire world in Call of Pripyat are divided into several separate zones, and at the beginning of the game players will start playing in an area called Zaton. Players will begin his adventure with carrying an AK 47, a pistol, ammunition, and some basic treatment. Players will walk through a ghost town that was once alive with people.

Entering the old buildings, some NPC assembly and to offer such a quest to find missing objects or checking the odd circumstances, but only a little information relating to the helicopters are gone. The NPC also sells a variety of goods and equipment upgrades to provide the players. AK 47 for example, players can pay to increase the capacity of its magazine, reduce recoil, increase the rate of fire, grip and durability. Some upgrades, such as changing the caliber of the ammunition of a pistol, can reduce durability.

Zone is a dangerous place. Everywhere there are pockets of strange energy that could explode into flames if touched by the tower, so players must be careful in choosing the way he is going through. Another strange energy able to teleport players to the near collapse of the helicopter. But the place was filled by creatures of human form is crawling like a mutant spider and howling like an animal. In the darkness, the player is difficult to see them before they enter into the reach of the player flashlight. Sometimes they directly ambushed and attacked players with their claws.

Call of Pripyat display graphics created as closely as possible to their original places, like the city of Pripyat, the station Yanov, factories Jupiter, Kopachi village, and others. This game also features sleep function, the new player interface, and the possibility to continue the game after finishing freeplay mode.

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