Review Games Hunt: Showdown

Hunt: Showdown wants you to feel panic. There’s the panic that ensues when the echoes of your gunshots ring out in the forest around you, potentially attracting monsters and players. Then there’s the panic of trying to franticly escape a level with a prize before other players track you down. And finally, the panic and frustration of losing one of your hunter characters who’d amassed a hefty stash of gear over multiple successful hunts, all because you were careless around a pack of zombie dogs. It’s an addictive type of panic that, when everything clicks, is wholly unique and exhilarating in a way that no other game can be.

Hunt is an Early Access first-person shooter from Crytek with a more nuanced premise than most: You (and your partner, if you bring one) are thrown into a swamp-spattered jungle with minimal supplies and the goal of hunting down and killing a twisted, demonic monster somewhere on a map full of smaller but similarly angry monsters. But it’s not that simple. Not only do you need to kill a monster, you then need to escape while evading other players. It has a very Lovecraftian-meets-Van Helsing setting, which does an excellent job of amping up the tension with some of the most realistic uses of actual darkness I’ve seen in recent memory. Instead of just being a vague, blurry, blueish filter over the screen, nighttime feels like an actual absence of light. With a quality pair of headphones, Hunt delivers the spine-tingling sounds some of the creatures make as they stalk you, and quickly becomes one of the most unnerving games out there.

A round of Hunt consists of searching for clues, locating and killing your target, then escaping with your prize – but it’s a lot easier said than done. In its Early Access stage, the only two targets are a giant spider and a lumbering butcher who likes to set things on fire. I’ll never forget the first time I faced the butcher: I was carelessly rounding a corner in the basement of an old farmhouse and got absolutely demolished by his giant, hammer-like weapon in just a couple of smashes. We had to kite the behemoth to take him down, running away and taking quick pot shots whenever possible.

The monsters offer up a decent challenge and are fun when when all of the elements work in tandem against you. But, as they stand, the boss monsters’ AI needs a lot of work. The butcher, for example, refuses to walk through doorways, so it’s extremely easy to exploit this by running outside and blasting him in the back as he walks away. Of course, this does then run the risk of exposing you to other players waiting for you to exit the building after this trick.

But before you can fight a monster, you’ve got to track them down using your Dark Vision ability, which blacks out the world around you to illuminate a trail that leads to the nearest clue. (Naturally, with so many threats lurking, it’s extremely risky to leave this on longer than you absolutely have to.) Disappointingly, all of the clues are just blackish-blue pits that you hover your hands over for a few seconds before getting the trail for the next clue – effectively a simple pickup. In a sense, the word “clue” is a bit of an overstatement, but each one you find does narrow down the potential location of the monster.

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Once you locate the target, you have some important decisions to make. You can go in guns blazing if there aren’t too many enemies nearby or if you’ve got enough explosives and ammo to not care. Otherwise you’ll have to use stealth to stay hidden and carefully plan your approach to each encounter. This is where having a partner to help cover you really comes in handy.

When you’ve finally downed one of the named beasts in a partially glitchy battle, you have to banish it to Hell, a ritual which takes time and notifies everyone on the map exactly where you are. Initiating the ritual will shift other players’ tracking senses to focus on your trail instead of the monster’s, and marks your location with a map marker. It’s a clever mechanic that completely flips around the hunting dynamic. You can no longer hide and you no longer have a target to hunt as you enter full-on escape mode, which totally changes the way you play. Few games offer the same sense of exhilaration and panic as a match nears its finale in Hunt.

Whether you’re the hunter or the hunted, teamwork is crucial for covering each others’ backs. That makes playing solo incredibly difficult, to the point where Hunt is one of the few games that I actually preferred playing with a random (and often silent) partner to just going it alone. Loneliness makes Huntmore difficult, but it’s also boring since it can end up feeling like a shallow game of hide and sneak. With a partner, you’re at least emboldened to act more aggressively and decisively.

The competitive side comes from the fact that you’re constantly racing against up to 11 other hunters (with a max total of 12 in a game) to find and kill the target. But it’s more than a deathmatch -- the temptation to shoot first and ask questions later is certainly there, but it can be more beneficial to stalk other players and let them do the dirty work of thinning out enemies themselves (and take some hits in the process) before you swoop in to finish off whoever wins.

Take a look at 12 minutes of gameplay, above, with an explanation from the game's creative director on how matches ebb and flow.

By mixing cooperative and competitive elements together, Hunt creates a frantic “kill or be killed” atmosphere that leads to some truly palpable moments of tension. My first encounter with another player was about as tense as you’d expect. My partner and I were crouched down in waist-deep swamp waters, peering at our enemy as he slowly crept around the backside of a barn. We snuck up behind him and I blasted him in the back of the head with my shotgun, killing him instantly – but we’d neglected to check our surroundings first, or we’d have noticed that the farm was full of horrifying zombie-dog creatures. Though that fight didn’t end well, I didn’t regret a single second of the overall experience.

Matches typically only last for about 20 minutes, which is good because they can get boring if there is a shortage of action. You’ll spend the first five or so minutes sneaking around trying to make as little noise as possible, but that part of it just isn’t as engaging as it is in dedicated stealth games. There aren’t any specific mechanics or features that play to the stealth action -- it’s literally just large spaces with mostly oblivious AI wandering around. The introductory stealth environment felt like artificial padding to the lengthen matches where, in reality, getting straight to the action is where the game is most entertaining.

Eventually, every round in Hunt turns into a mad dash for the boss and the exit at the very end. Hunt is full of highs and lows without much in between. Part of that is due to the fact that even though it’s thematically consistent with the post-apocalyptic wasteland setting, the single map feels empty thanks to a lack of landmarks and interesting buildings. There’s barely any loot to find during matches other than ammo, which limits the desire to explore and scavenge, and the limited player count decreases the sense of mass desperation. In fact, you could play several games without ever seeing another player. Hunt does a lot of things that add much-needed terror to the genre, but it could stand to include more mechanics to funnel players together more regularly, too. Hunt’s setting may be a wasteland, but its environment and battle dynamics can frequently feel like one, too.

Some bigger problems still need solutions, too. Chief among them: there’s nothing stopping players from skipping the hunt phase entirely and camping the extraction points -- which are always in the same location-- and waiting for someone else to kill the monster and try to escape with it. Or, more ambitiously, they can simply follow other players, let them kill the monster, and then pick them off while they’re weak to steal the reward for themselves. Getting the flow of those battles right is going to be a tricky balance to strike, and Crytek hasn’t quite found it yet. It’s simply too easy to get away with this kind of profitable murder.

There are more delicate balancing issues at play. Unlike many other games of this nature, Hunt has real, tangible consequences for each death. The named hunter you were using, the guns you bought, the tools you equipped, all of his upgrades/perks, and all of his gear are lost when you die. (It’s sort of like if Escape From Tarkov and Evolve had a twisted, brutal little baby.) The only things that, mercifully, carry over are your experience points and profile level, which Hunt conveys with a bloodline system (suggesting that all of your hunters are from some sort of deranged monster-killing family). As your bloodline level increases, you unlock new tiers of gear -- like better guns, but those guns still cost money to acquire each time, and you also lose a bit of money when you die, so it all feeds back into itself.

Thankfully, your persistent account accrues in-game money over the course of playing games and completing contracts that you can use to spend on recruiting new hunters, buying new gear, and purchasing incremental upgrades. Having more than one hunter at a time can be advantageous because it allows you to keep more than one geared up so that you don’t lose all of your progress – kind of like multiple save slots. Hunters are also assigned randomized traits when you recruit them, which could make them bandage faster (with the Physician trait) or sprint at full speed for longer (with the Greyhound trait), adding some variety to each playthrough.

You’re never completely screwed: If you’re totally tapped out and can’t afford to recruit a new hunter, you can fall back on a zero-cost stand-in that you can use to try to gain back some funds. It’s a minor, but appreciated failsafe that ensures you won’t hit a brick wall of failure.

That said, the first few matches for a new player in Hunt are so difficult, they can feel like a barbed-wire fence of failure. But considering how hard it is to come by new upgrades, it would be nice to have some way to try before you buy. Blowing a bunch of money on a gun only to realize you don’t even like it, or buying a gun and getting killed before you even get a shot off is immensely frustrating.

Thankfully, your persistent account accrues in-game money over the course of playing games and completing contracts that you can use to spend on recruiting new hunters, buying new gear, and purchasing incremental upgrades. Having more than one hunter at a time can be advantageous because it allows you to keep more than one geared up so that you don’t lose all of your progress – kind of like multiple save slots. Hunters are also assigned randomized traits when you recruit them, which could make them bandage faster (with the Physician trait) or sprint at full speed for longer (with the Greyhound trait), adding some variety to each playthrough.

You’re never completely screwed: If you’re totally tapped out and can’t afford to recruit a new hunter, you can fall back on a zero-cost stand-in that you can use to try to gain back some funds. It’s a minor, but appreciated failsafe that ensures you won’t hit a brick wall of failure.

That said, the first few matches for a new player in Hunt are so difficult, they can feel like a barbed-wire fence of failure. But considering how hard it is to come by new upgrades, it would be nice to have some way to try before you buy. Blowing a bunch of money on a gun only to realize you don’t even like it, or buying a gun and getting killed before you even get a shot off is immensely frustrating.

Review Games Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon treads a thin line between homage and outright theft. Created as a Kickstarter bonus for the upcoming modern-looking Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Curse of the Moon taps into project's attempt to continue Castlevania's metroidvania legacy by setting its sights on that series' older, 8-bit entries. Not only does it succeed at paying the NES Castlevania games tribute, it almost does it a little too accurately for its own good.

If this game amounts to an act of plagiarism, though, at least it's self-plagiarism. After all, Bloodstained creative lead Koji Igarashi is best known for directing numerous Castlevania games during his time at Konami. He served more as a supervisor here than director, but you can definitely see his fingerprints on Curse of the Moon; he even appears as a mini-boss. On top of that, the credits list several other long-time Castlevania contributors, such as composer Michiru Yamane. If this game amounts to Castlevania in all but name, that's because Castlevania is what its creators know.

Curse of the Moon conspicuously borrows critical mechanics and concepts specifically from 1990's NES classic, Castlevania III. It allows you to alternate between four different playable characters, each with their own distinct skills and attack styles, as you fight your way through eight linear stages packed with monsters and platform hazards. They're practically spitting images of Castlevania III's playable characters, from Gebel the vampire (who throws fireballs and transforms into a bat, like Castlevania's Alucard) to Arthur the wizard (who swings a puny staff and controls overpowered magic, like Castlevania's Sypha). Curse of the Moon moves a little faster and feels more forgiving than Castlevania III, making it feel more modern than the slow-moving 90s games, but there's absolutely no mistaking the intent.

While at times Curse of the Moon may drift a little too close to naked imitation in its attempts to channel a nearly 30-year-old game, it works on its own merits, too. It introduces new features and quality-of-life design elements, and it offers a wide array of difficulty options in order to provide a satisfying yet manageable challenge for players of all skill levels.

Rather than taking so mundane an approach as making things harder by ratcheting up enemy endurance or hit points, Curse of the Moon elevates its difficulty by introducing material changes to its play mechanics. The most basic upgrade in difficulty introduces limited lives for your party and adds a knockback element to create an extra bit of danger when you take damage from foes. But there are more interesting challenges to understand, such as the two alternate paths in which main protagonist Zangetsu tackles the quest alone, forcing you to adopt completely new tactics for battling the bad guys. Completing the campaign opens up additional new play options as well.

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Even before you apply modifiers, there are a lot of ways to tackle Curse of the Moon's eight stages, and each level contain multiple routes to the end. The variety created by these branching paths and play options, and the bone-breaking old-school challenge available in certain formats, give Curse of the Moon far more replayability than its brief, two-hour length would suggest.

Curse of the Moon’s title hints at the exploratory, perfectionist mentality its creators seem to want to encourage. The term "Curse of the Moon" appears in-game as a cryptic menu option, and selecting it allows you to jump back to previous stages. This permanently resets your progress to that earlier point in your adventure, erasing all your saved accomplishments beyond the stage you select. In return for permanently sacrificing your progress, though, you gain the opportunity to poke around the different pathways through a level in search of better acquisitions. Each stage contains hidden items that permanently boost your heroes' stats that you'll want to seek out. On top of that, gathering collectibles to rack up extra points is essential to earning additional lives in the more advanced difficulty modes. In other words, it's not enough to simply complete a stage, challenging as that can be at times; what you really need is to master it inside and out.

Developer Inti Creates has done an excellent job of capturing the look and feel of NES games without being slavish to the limitations of the platform. Your characters are a little less stiff than the NES heroes of old, a little faster to react, a little more fluid in motion. And although the widescreen format creates larger rooms to navigate than in the days of 4:3 aspect ratio and 8-bit screen resolution, Curse of the Moon compensates for this by throwing more enemies at you at a time or by making them move faster.

Fans of Shovel Knight will likely be reminded of that game's outstanding approach to recapturing the look and feel of the NES era. Curse of the Moon doesn't quite reach that remarkably high bar; it lacks Shovel Knight's meticulous level design and surprising variants on standard enemies. The basic foes you face here never stray far from the Castlevania mold, relying on familiar concepts like Medusa heads flying in tricky sine patterns and armored knights tossing axes. They look different, sure, but this is the standard Castlevania bestiary with swapped sprites.

On the other hand, the bosses feel nothing like Castlevania. In fact, they highlight what might be the biggest flaw in this retro homage: inconsistency. Where Shovel Knight used Mega Man as a jumping-off point to become something truly its own, Curse of the Moon feels less confident in itself. The moment-to-moment action feels mostly like a Castlevania fan game, true. However, the boss encounters (along with a few set pieces, such as the trial-and-error gimmick that dominates the final stage) feel more like they were taken from Inti Creates' work on the likes of Mega Man Zero and Blaster Master Zero. For every boss that amounts to a fun riff on Castlevania favorites, like the tribute to Rondo of Blood's battle with Death atop the mast of a ship, there are several encounters that feel wildly out of keeping with the source material.

Curse of the Moon’s shortcomings aren't limited to quirks of style. Most notably, the death mechanic feels more clever than fun: when one of your team members dies, they're taken out of the action altogether until you complete the current stage or lose the entire team. This mostly serves to punish you for making use of your favorite protagonists, since you're always a single false jump or unlucky knockback away from losing the one you enjoy controlling most. We see lots of devs tinkering with the penalty for failure in retro-style games lately, but this is one of those cases where the idea doesn't work quite as well in practice as it does on paper. Like WayForward's recent The Mummy Demastered, death in Curse of the Moon often punishes you with tedious inconvenience. On the whole, however, these missteps prove to be fairly minor.

The Verdict
The prospect of playing such a lovingly crafted tribute to the vintage heyday of Konami's seemingly abandoned Castlevania series more than makes up for a few out-of-place boss fights and a slightly too punitive death penalty. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon delivers a brief but effective burst of nostalgia, and thanks to its many creative modifiers it contains enough replay value to engage (and challenge) anyone who pines for gaming's bygone days. And this isn't even the "real" Bloodstained! As appetizers go, it's substantial — nearly satisfying enough to be its own main course.

Review Games Call of Cthulhu

Even the Old Ones themselves would have probably lost patience waiting for Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth to finally show up. First unveiled more than six years ago, this horror-themed action adventure based on the work of influential American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is clearly ambitious, mixing first-person action, sneaking, and adventure elements with a creepy story filled with various surprises. The good news is that all the delays have resulted in a one-of-a-kind game that fans of horror and action adventure gaming (and of H.P. Lovecraft) absolutely should check out. However, the presentation looks somewhat dated at times, and some other aspects are also pretty rough, just like the Xbox original released six months earlier. But if you can tolerate a few technical deficiencies and are up for a significant challenge, then you can look forward to Call of Cthulhu mightily impressing you and freaking you out equally in turn.

This is essentially the same game as the Xbox version, with the key differences being that the PC version supports higher resolutions and its mouse-and-keyboard controls are slightly more responsive. It also retails for a lower price. You play as Jack Walters, a private investigator with a history of mental instability. But he's fine now, honest. Jack is trying to get his life and his career back on track, but he just can't seem to remember a six-year period from his past. Soon after the opening of the game, a missing-persons case takes Jack's attention away from his own predicament. He finds himself in the quiet port of Innsmouth, a little-known shantytown with a rather standoffish populace. It's a dismal place on first impression, filled with rundown buildings and thuggish residents who gurgle veiled threats in response to Jack's inquiries. Before long, Jack begins to uncover a sinister secret lurking just beneath the surface. He asks one too many questions and soon finds himself fighting for his life against unspeakable horrors. The game does a great job of gradually magnifying the sense of danger and the scope of the mess that Jack has gotten himself into, and it also does pretty well at evoking the early-20th-century period in which the story takes place.

You don't need to be familiar with Lovecraft's stories or the Cthulhu mythos in order to enjoy this game. In fact, the experience will be all the better if you go into it without any real sense of what you're in store for. H.P. Lovecraft is best known for horror stories that attempt to describe the indescribable--horrifying things that can make a man go mad just from looking at them. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth captures the essence of Lovecraft's work by presenting the entire game through Jack's own eyes, and by incorporating various elements that simulate how fleeting Jack's sanity can be when faced with terrible sights and realizations. It doesn't help the poor guy's case that he tends to have out-of-body experiences from time to time, which let him briefly see the world through the eyes of some rather strange beings. The game also intersperses some choice quotations from Lovecraft, as well as some well-written journal entries and other light reading that helps set the stage for what's happening. Ironically, if any aspect of the presentation doesn't really fit, it's Jack himself. It's his voice in particular, since he sounds like a matter-of-fact private detective...only, his rather calm demeanor isn't consistent with how he's supposedly being driven half mad by what's happening around him. The voice performance itself is fine, but it's too bad Jack sounds so brave.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth looks like it's a first-person shooter, but it combines action and adventure elements in equal parts (fans of the Thief, Deus Ex, and System Shock series will be in store for a similar kind of game). In fact, for a large portion of the game, Jack is unarmed, and he'll need to make progress using his detective work rather than his brawn. The game is probably at its best when no shooting is involved, since the shooting portions aren't that great. Your enemies will sometimes use cover when attacking you, but they don't behave very believably in battle, and their bodies quickly vanish when killed. It's a long time before you get into any pure action in Call of Cthulhu, and when it happens, it's at once thrilling and a little disappointing--thrilling because there's been so much buildup and tension leading up to the fighting, and disappointing because the foes you're facing aren't as cunning as you'd hope. Fortunately, the game rarely attempts to create challenge just by thrusting you into first-person shooter sequences, and the shooter portions are at least decent. The period weapons you'll get to use, such as Tommy guns and revolvers, feel like they pack a mean punch.

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The stealth portions are pretty good, too, especially because the game never flat-out forces you to be stealthy--it's just a means to an end, useful for avoiding combat (such as when you're unarmed) or getting the drop on your enemies. But if you're spotted, you can always fight...or run. Later in the game, you'll get to perform some highly gratifying stealth kills by plunging a knife into the backs of unaware opponents, who totally deserve it, by the way. All throughout, though, you'll be able to avoid confrontation by sticking to the shadows and keeping a low profile. You may also peek (and shoot) around corners in your efforts to stay safely out of sight.

Others have tried, but Call of Cthulhu is one of the first games to date to succeed at presenting a completely clutter-free first-person viewpoint. There are no health bars or ammo counts or anything to get in the way of your suspension of disbelief, yet the game still provides sufficient visual and audio feedback to keep you informed while playing. While there will probably be times when you'll wish the game were a bit more transparent about telling you when your health is low or when you're in danger of being detected by enemies, Call of Cthulhu's invisible interface definitely is to the game's credit. There isn't even an aiming reticle for any of the guns--you just aim down the sights to line up your targets. And you know you've taken damage when you see spurts of blood along the edges of the screen, and subsequently start to hear Jack gasping in pain and losing color vision. You can even have your limbs broken--you'll cringe listening to Jack trying to walk with a busted leg. Fortunately, he's got first aid kits to bring him back into shape. First aid takes a few seconds to apply, so you can't use your kits in the middle of a fight, but you can use them in a safe spot to cure fractures, bullet wounds, and so on. No, that's not realistic, but it's a good-enough system that's in keeping with the spirit of the game--Jack can't survive much damage in the first place.

Call of Cthulhu also features heavy adventure elements, in the form of exploration and puzzle-solving. A couple of puzzles involve pattern recognition while others simply require you to use the right inventory objects in the right places. The puzzles aren't very difficult, but when combined with the game's rather large and complex environments, they can make it tough to figure out how to proceed. You don't have a map in Call of Cthulhu, and there's no mission-objectives screen or anything like that, so it's possible that you might get confused and disoriented at times--yet even this is roughly in keeping with the feel the game is trying to evoke, unless you become too frustrated or completely stuck. Fortunately, the plot and premise is compelling enough that it's worth suffering through the occasional tight spot. It's all the more exciting and satisfying when you finally get past those parts and set foot in new territory.

The game also deserves praise for creating some truly harrowing chase sequences. For whatever reason, horror games tend to be heavily focused on combat, but the scariest things are the ones that force you to flee. While Call of Cthulhu's escape scenes are scripted to play out a particular way each time, they absolutely make you feel desperate to survive. To slow down your foes, you're able to bolt doors, which buys you precious seconds as you continue your escape. The music swells to a crescendo and your enemies' screams are deafening as you scramble to find a way out. These escapes are definitely some of the moments that stick out the most vividly in hindsight.

Call of Cthulhu has a lot of great moments in it, actually. You view the action through Jack's eyes practically the whole way through, so all the game's noninteractive cutscenes are still done from a first-person viewpoint, where you see Jack manipulating various objects and so on. Some of these interactions are amazingly lifelike in a subtle way, like how Jack gingerly manipulates the combination lock on a safe, for instance. So it's a bit of a shame that these bits tend to switch to a grainy letterboxed view, which informs you that you no longer have control for the moment and takes you out of the experience. And for all the great attention to detail, it makes you notice things you might take for granted in other games, like how Jack doesn't put away his gun when he climbs a ladder, or how you can't see your feet when you look down. Nevertheless, Call of Cthulhu is much more convincing than many other first-person games in how it makes you feel as though you're really there in the environments. When you reach some of the later stages, you'll truly get the impression that you're exploring places that no normal person was ever meant to find.

You'll also feel sorry for Jack, who goes through an awful lot, all the way up through the game's disturbing, fittingly Lovecraftian ending. As he begins to see the truth behind the Esoteric Order of Dagon--the religious cult that seems to have Innsmouth under its complete control--his sanity will be threatened. Specifically, your vision will start to blur if not swim, and you'll start hearing Jack muttering to himself or his teeth chattering. These purposely distracting effects are well done and help make some of the game's bigger confrontations all the more bewildering. The sanity effects are temporary and tend to dissipate quickly if you find one of the game's save points, which take the form of unusual white glyphs painted on certain walls. These glyphs look ominous, but in a testament to how effectively creepy Call of Cthulhu can be, you'll catch yourself breathing a sigh of relief whenever you spot one of these safe havens. You might still be frustrated by the limited save system, which is a holdover from the Xbox version. Not only can you not save your progress except at these certain points, but you also have a limited number of save slots to work with. However, the limited save system is probably for the best, since being about to quicksave your way through a game like this would sap a lot of its tension.

What the game lacks in high-fidelity graphics it makes up for with surprising variety. Character animations are sometimes a little choppy, textures are noticeably blurry, and weapon models look plain, so you might catch Call of Cthulhu looking like a second-rate shooter from time to time. Much more often, though, you'll find a lot of great little touches in the environments, which are surprisingly expansive in spite of how much there is to see and do in them. Unfortunately, Call of Cthulhu lacks support for wide-screen resolutions, which would be perfect for viewing a cinematic game such as this. But the game manages to look great anyway, thanks to excellent art direction that results in some highly atmospheric locales. You could easily imagine that had it been released a few years ago when it was originally supposed to, it would have looked amazing. Luckily, the visual style still succeeds at drawing you into the experience, even despite some graphical holdovers from the Xbox, like the ugly, low-res inventory system.

The noticeable repetition in Jack's and his enemies' dialogue is the main knock against the often-outstanding sound. As mentioned, Jack's narration isn't a perfect fit for the circumstances, but most of the speech throughout the game is delivered convincingly, and Jack's enemies sound especially good. Gunfire is piercingly loud, and various ambient effects help thicken the atmosphere. There's also some great music throughout Call of Cthulhu, which tends to cue up nicely with whatever's happening onscreen.

Jack Walters' journey to the dark corners of the Earth should take you at least a good, densely packed 10 to 12 hours, but it could easily take more, depending on how long the tougher bits stump you. You then unlock a tougher difficulty mode (there's still another one to unlock after that), which heightens the challenge by making ammo scarcer and enemy encounters harder to survive. The game also ranks you based on how quickly you reached the end, how often you saved your progress, and other factors, in case you want to pay another visit to Innsmouth and its outskirts. So there's some value in revisiting the adventure--but your first time playing through Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is liable to leave a lasting impression no matter what.

Review Games Knights and Bikes

KNIGHTS AND BIKES is a hand-painted action-adventure set on a fictional British island in the late 1980s, inspired by coming-of-age movies like The Goonies and classic games like Earthbound and Secret of Mana.

The story features two new friends: Nessa & Demelza. They're tough and imaginative girls exploring the island of Penfurzy in search of mysteries and treasure. Cycling around on their bikes, exploring the natural beauty of their surroundings, they experience their first taste of a more grown-up freedom. But this new-found independence also leads them into danger, both modern and ancient.

With a mixture of ingenuity and imagination, they deal with enemies and a challenging environment using frisbees, water-balloons, a cranked-up stereo, a pet goose, and more. The trinkets they collect from their adventures allow them to upgrade their bikes and widen their treasure-hunt.

As Nessa and Demelza try to figure-out the puzzling adult world around them, it's their friendship and imagination that guides them on their quest: to find the legendary treasure! (as well as saving some of those stupid adults that just keep disappearing).

The game is by Rex Crowle, (Creative Director: Tearaway/Tearaway-Unfolded, Art & Design: LittleBigPlanet) and by Moo You (Gameplay Programmer: Ratchet & Clank and LittleBigPlanet). Audio design by Kenny Young (Audio Lead: Tearaway & LittleBigPlanet) and with a musical score by Daniel Pemberton (Composer: The Man From Uncle, Steve Jobs, King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword)

Things to Do
Best friends forever! Play single-player with an AI companion, couch co-op or online co-op.

Solve puzzles and deal with enemies using your improvised abilities! These include: frisbees, water-balloons, puddle-stomping welly boots, and a powerful boom-box stereo.

Work together! Both characters have different skills so you'll want to experiment with how they combine in order to succeed.

Explore the island! Seek out its modern tourist-attractions and ancient ruins, both on foot and on your customised bikes.

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Discover treasure! Ranging from trinkets like broken action-figures and animal skulls, to the legendary riches rumoured to be hidden on the island.

Upgrade your bikes! Barter with adults (offload your junk) so you can personalise your bikes, unlock extra abilities or at the very least: get those training-wheels removed!

Tend to your pet goose! Captain Honkers has a keen nose-beak and can help you find what you need, if you keep him fed and happy.
KNIGHTS AND BIKES is a hand-painted action-adventure set on a fictional British island in the late 1980s.

Players will take on the roles of Nessa & Demelza to explore an island with their bikes. They’ll uncover treasure, mystery and trouble. This leads to them ultimately attempting to steer the ancient island away from modern ruin.

They’ll be pedalling into danger, facing threat head-on with frisbees, water-balloons, puddle-stomping, and whatever other kid-like schemes that players can improvise.

Each islander that Nessa & Demelza rescue passes on new abilities, allowing them to do more and travel further. So as they face-up to the adult world, its their ingenuity, friendship, and wide-eyed-wonder that guides the adventure.

“A game which grabs our attention and won’t let go.”
— Engadget
KNIGHTS AND BIKES is designed for one or two players (playing locally or online) and was funded successfully via Kickstarter in March 2016. It will be published by Double Fine Presents.

Review Games Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown

Bandai Namco's upcoming flight sim Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown has been delayed to 2018.

Ace Combat franchise director Kazutoki Kono announced the delay in a personal letter addressed to fans, saying he and his development team Project ACES need more time to realize the vision they have for the title.

"We would have loved to launch Ace Combat 7 at the end of 2017 as we originally intended, but doing so would compromise our goal for the game," Kono explained. "We take our art very seriously and that means we have instead chosen to devote additional time and effort to perfect and optimize this newest chapter of the Ace Combat saga."

Thanks to the power current generation hardware and Unreal Engine 4, the "skies of opportunity" have been opened to the Project ACES team, Kono said. He also noted how today's technology has allowed them to "deliver the minute details of flight combat - such as cloud cover and air currents – or give players a new way to experience dogfights and attack sorties through hardware such as the new PlayStation VR."

More information about Ace Combat 7 will be revealed very soon, as Project ACES plans to unveil a new demo at E3 that showcases one of the game's non-VR missions.

While initially revealed as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, Bandi Namco has since confirmed Ace Combat 7 will also release for Xbox One and PC.

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is the 17th entry in the series. Having become renowned for its over-the-top action and melodramatic storytelling, Skies Unknown will also be the first time Ace Combat delves into the realm of virtual reality.

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TrustedReviews has compiled all the latest news about Ace Combat: Skies Unknown including all the latest news, release date, gameplay, trailers and more.


Ace Combat 7 release date
Skies Unknown is currently slated to launch in 2018 for PS4, PSVR, Xbox One and PC.

Ace Combat 7 story – What’s it about?
Taking place in the year 2020, the country of Erusea has declared war on the Osean Federation for seemingly unknown reasons. Prior to this, a space elevator was erected in Usea that will play an important role in the ensuing conflict as you strive to discover its true purpose.

Unfolding through the perspective of multiple different characters, Ace Combat 7 will be a fittingly hectic military drama where the entire world could end up being at stake. You can find the confirmed list of characters thus far below:

Ace Combat 7 gameplay – How does it play?
Ace Combat 7’s flight mechanics will feel mostly familiar to those with past experience playing the series, since it maintains similar models for both in-game aircraft and elements of its heads-up display. Controlling your trusty jet should be awesome fun; just try to keep your wits about you.


For the first time ever, clouds will play a substantial role in how you navigate the skies. They can even be used for stealth, concealing you from the enemy as you sneak up behind them. But stay concealed in the clouds for too long and your aircraft might freeze up.

Review Games Wargroove

Our impressions of Chucklefish's turn-based game after two couch-based PvP rounds.
I expected a 1v1 match of Wargroove to last about 15 minutes when I visited Chucklefish's office two weeks ago. It turns out it takes 40-60 minutes, if you're anything like me. I found myself spending far too much time fretting about exactly where to move a unit, or whether to buy an archer at that moment rather than saving my money for the stronger and faster knight during the next turn.

Such caution isn't unwarranted in this turn-based, grid-based strategy game, though. The deeper you get into a multiplayer game, the more you worry about pushing a unit one square too far. You might be putting a knight in range of a trebuchet, or an archer. By hovering over an enemy unit during your turn, you can see their possible movement range, allowing you to plan ahead as much as possible.

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Your goal in Wargroove is to kill the opponent's commander, or take over their base. Either will trigger a victory. Across the map, there are buildings that act as resource points. The more you control, the more gold you have coming in per turn. Capturing an enemy building requires you killing the guard unit inside first. Though each of the game's factions have unique commander units, they otherwise have an identical selection of units, aside from the way they look.

I start my first game by deploying a swordsman, and later, a couple of spearmen, at the top of the map. My opponent is moving up from the south. When positioned next to each other on the map, spearmen will perform a critical hit, meaning there's some benefit to building a little wall of them. While I'm getting used to the unit creation and movement, my opponent has occupied a load of buildings and suddenly has loads more money coming in than I do. Over the next few turns, fast, flying vampire units and a massive golem enter the fray and take out my comparably pathetic spearmen and swordsmen. It's over, and my commander, Mercia, is killed. It's all over, lads.

The flying units are particularly tough to deal with—their counter is an alchemist, since melee ground units are useless against them, but it takes me a bit too long to get one onto the field due to my slow gold funds. This nonetheless feels like a good crash course for how much is going on in a game of Wargroove, and how fiercely competitive it is.

That's my way of saying I got my arse handed to me, basically. But the next game won't be nearly as brutal.

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Let's try that again
This match will be a little easier. For one, Chucklefish picks a map that doesn't have water or the ability to summon flying units, making it a little simpler to grasp in terms of pacing and counters, without yet knowing the minutiae of every unit off by heart. It's basically just a desert-y field, with my base on the left, and my opponent's on the right. We grab half the buildings each, and the fight converges in the central lane.

As I learned from the last match, a couple of spearmen placed closely together are pretty great in the early game. I don't find the basic swordsman units useful for anything other than grabbing buildings, so I focus on pushing spearmen forward instead. They're slow, but they're handy as a kind of moving wall. A few turns later, my opponent drops a golem, which memorably slapped my troops aside during the last game. I'm dreading its arrival as it plods across the map.

I buy a knight unit, the best unit I can afford. They can move five squares at a time, and if they end their turn on the fifth square, they'll land a critical hit. This is how I counter the golem—the knight races in and takes it down to about a quarter of its health, forcing my opponent to withdraw before it's done any real damage.

This is a major victory, since the golem cost 1200 gold. It's a formidable threat in the right circumstances, but when it's thrashed like this, that's a lot gone to waste. "It’s very intimidating, but it’s actually true that most of its powers are symbolic," says marketing manager Molly Carroll. To look at, it's certainly a scary thing marching across the battlefield. "You’re like 'oh, I’m fucked!'"

The golem's demise underlines the idea that everything has a counter in Wargroove, and that all units have their own drawbacks. My knight, for example, can't cross mountain range tiles, and nor can it actually take control of a building—it can only kill the enemy units occupying one. Alternatively, the trebuchet, which costs 900 gold, would've been effective against the golem too, but that can't move and shoot in the same turn.

Work in progress
"[The golem] is potentially getting more powerful," Chucklefish founder and director Finn Brice explains. "We’re experimenting with its ability to pick up and throw allied units across the map, but it’s a big balance change, so we have to look into it. But I think it’s the only non-commander unit to have an active ability instead of passive, because it won’t have a [critical attack] to make up for that."

Nothing feels overpowered in this build, though. If anything, some units could do with being more threatening, particularly the commanders. Of the two I sample, one, Mercia, has an active AOE healing power, and another, Valder, has the ability to summon a basic skeleton swordsman unit from the dead, but both abilities take a long time to charge up.

I ended up leaving my commander out of the fight in the second game, because they feel a little too fragile. This is an area where a lot of balancing is going on—working out long it takes for each commander's 'Groove' to charge, and how game-changing that ability will be. "The ultimate goal is to ensure that they all feel immensely powerful and that they affect your game so much that playing with one commander over another requires an entirely different strategy, and I think that’s what’s going to make the game particularly interesting," Brice explains. "[It's] also particularly hard to balance, but we’ll cross that bridge."

"I think the community has come to expect this kind of thing," says programmer Rodrigo Monteiro. "StarCraft was being rebalanced, what, ten years after release? There were still releasing balance patches because the meta of the game adapts, and you have to adapt the game with it."

Right now, most of the non-commander units feel balanced enough. The right set of moves can wipe out every enemy unit on the map in a single turn, which more or less happens twice during my second game on both sides. The push towards my eventual victory is exciting: starving my opponent of gold, then building more and more units for the hell of it. By the end, I'm considering a second trebuchet that I have no need for.


This was a relatively decisive victory, but there's plenty of opportunity to grab a quick victory in Wargroove if someone's left their leader in the wrong place—your entire strategy can unravel in a single turn, but you'll understand why when it happens, and you'll learn. Chucklefish hasn't made a strategy game before, but this shows the team is on the right track to me.

It's turn-based strategy as we know it, but presented in a very pleasing and accessible-looking form, which is largely how I felt about Advance Wars back in the day. With asynchronous multiplayer, singleplayer campaigns, extensive mod tools and loads of scope for custom campaigns, I look forward to losing my temper when one of my PCG colleagues inevitably demolishes me on their 20th turn.

Review Games Guacamelee 2

Brawling has never been more beautiful! The long-awaited sequel to the smash hit action-platformer is here: Guacamelee! 2 brings luchador Juan Aguacate out of retirement for a stunning new Metroidvania-style adventure, where he must face his greatest challenge yet - one that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of the Mexiverse!

Explore a huge, hand-crafted world inspired by Mexican culture and folklore, filled with sassy new villains and weirdos (and a few old friends!). Learn a deep repertoire of bone-crunching wrestling moves to fend off the skeletal hordes and overcome skillful platforming challenges... and who said anything about a Chicken Illuminati? Certainly not us!

Check out these features:
An epic adventure spanning time and space, featuring drop-in 4-player local co-op for you and your best amigos!
A brand new upgrade system: discover “trainers” around the world, defeat their challenges, and develop your skill sets for movement, combat, and more!
A vibrant, colorful adventure that takes you from the Mangrove Swamp to Hell itself, featuring twice as many enemy types as the first game and a roster of eccentric new bosses!
An absolutely fuego electro-Mexican soundtrack, and more gorgeous visuals than ever thanks to a fancy new rendering engine!

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Definitely no secret society of chickens that teaches you ancient chicken abilities previously lost to the ages!
The chickens are back, and at least some of them are giant, in Guacamelee! 2.

Developer Drinkbox’s 2013 side-scrolling brawler recaptures the elements that made the first a hit, from its luchador-inspired fighting-game-style combos, to its goofy, humorous writing. Guacamelee! 2 does what good sequels should: Recaptures the highlights of the first game, while expanding on the scope to reinvigorate the formula.

Guacamelee! 2 picks up seven years after the original. Players reprise the role of Juan, the blue-masked Luchador with spiritual powers, who must work through another “Metroidvania”-style world, beating down bosses and finding new paths on an adventure to save the world from a mysterious new foe.