We crack a few (undead) skulls during our hands-on session with Dead Island.
Dead Island, the upcoming zombie-themed action game, is the latest example of how the zombie apocalypse is already upon us. Day by day, more books, movies, television shows, and video games are joining the ranks of the undead, and their numbers only continue to grow. But this new game from developer Techland (creator of Call of Juarez) will try to evoke some of the tragedy and emotion you might expect from a getaway-vacation-turned-zombie-nightmare. We recently got a brief, hands-on demonstration of the game to see how the zombie slaying stacks up.
Dead Island takes place on a tropical paradise that has turned into a living nightmare after the local populace starts chowing down on one another. We started a few hours into the game, standing outside of a lighthouse. Vincent Kummer, brand manager at publisher Deep Silver and our copilot throughout the demo, informed us that we were in control of Xian Mei, one of the resort’s (former) employees. Apparently, her job must have involved a lot of cutlery because Mei’s weapon of choice was anything with a blade. Described as an assassin type of character, our character was one of four playable characters in Dead Island, along with a tank, leader, and jack-of-all-trades.
The lighthouse itself served as a makeshift refuge from some of the island’s locals. It was a somber scene, and it set the tone for the rest of the demo. All around us, people could barely contain their desperation. Some lashed out with anger; others pleaded for help. One woman wept silently in a corner. When we talked to the leader of this group and were assigned to go retrieve some signal flares from the beach, we were relieved to get out of that den. The path leading away from the lighthouse was lined with bodies; some heavily burned, others torn to pieces. Under the circumstances, this wasn’t too surprising. Then one of them moved. The low, all-too-familiar moan that followed left no room for error; this was a zombie that had spotted its next meal.
At least, that’s what it thought right up until we used our machete to hack its head clean off its shoulders. Combat was all about maintaining our stamina. Attacking, running, jumping, and other such activities would all cut into our stamina bar, which would refill quickly provided we didn’t do much more than walk a few steps. Without stamina, we couldn’t defend ourselves. This made battles against large numbers of enemies especially challenging because our initial urge was to lash out wildly at everything in sight. As we became more accustomed to the fighting, we learned–in perhaps the same way a real survivor would in this scenario–to stop and think. Taking that extra moment to line up a killing blow to the head and not waste energy made all the difference in these encounters.
We take a look at destruction-centric Unbounded, the start of a “new branch” for the Ridge Racer series.
You have to squint to see a Ridge Racer game in Ridge Racer: Unbounded. It looks, in many ways, closer to any number of racing titles built around violent takedowns and environmental destruction. The way producer Joonas Laakso tells it, Unbounded is the product of his racing specialist studio, Bugbear Entertainment, being tasked with bringing its technology to bear on a “new branch” of the Ridge Racer series–that is, racing damage and physics technology grown out of making the demolition-focused FlatOut games. “We are really good at smashing things up,” he says.
Bugbear has matched that destructibility tech with Ridge Racer “intensity”, says Laakso, in the fictional East Coast city of Shatter Bay, where illegal racers (the titular Unbounded) battle to dominate the streets. The city, inspired by New York and Chicago, is designed for “carnage and risk-taking”; built for dynamic, piece-by-piece, physics-based destruction rather than scripted spectacle that is the same each time it’s triggered. (Laakso admires Split/Second but says that unpredictable, procedural destruction gives Unbounded the edge over it.)
The driving experience itself takes drifting and boosting from its Ridge Racer heritage–otherwise, says Laakso, nothing has been brought over wholesale from earlier Ridge Racer games, except for some classic cars. We are shown Crash Race mode, in which you charge up your destruction power with drifting, chasing other drivers, and post-jump airtime (other modes will be more purely about crashing, and others more purely about racing). With this power charged, you’ll see markers thrown up on certain buildings and obstacles, indicating a target in need of your destructive attention. Unbounded, then, has unscripted but not universal destruction–there are certain spots designed specifically for taking dynamic damage.
As part of the publisher’s strong fiscal year-end earnings report this morning, Ubisoft confirmed that Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will be arriving toward that back end of that revised schedule. In a post-earnings conference call, CEO Yves Guillemot said that the game is now scheduled to release during its January-March 2012 quarter.
“It will be released in fiscal Q4 as we want first to have the best quality possible, as well as to avoid the very crowded Christmas landscape in the shooter genre,” Guillemot said. Shooters that are expected to arrive during the holiday quarter include a new Call of Duty game, Battlefield 3, Resistance 3, and Gears of War 3.
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier gets its name from the “Future Soldier” programs being conducted by the US and its NATO allies. The initiative, currently part of the US Army’s Brigade Combat Team Modernization Program, focuses on outfitting infantrymen with networked communications and high-tech equipment.
The latest installment in the Ghost Recon franchise has been announced for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, and DS. For more on the game, check out GameSpot’s previous coverage.
Square Enix launches teaser trailer for next installment in stealth action series; Io Interactive developing.
Shortly after launching the trailer, developer Io Interactive and Square Enix Europe officially announced that Hitman Absolution is indeed in development for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The announcement did not offer a release window for the title but did say it had been built from the ground up using Io’s proprietary Glacier 2 engine. The game will be shown off behind closed doors at next month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.
The trailer, which also surfaced on the official Hitman.com website, shows series protagonist Agent 47 screwing a silencer onto the end of a pistol. The scene then fades into a shot of one of his trademark Silverballer .45 pistols with a rattlesnake curled around it. The shot then fades to a UPC barcode with the numbers “110706″ and “47″ highlighted in red.
Both the YouTube page and the official announcement offered a brief synopsis of Hitman Absolution’s plot: “Hitman Absolution follows Agent 47, a cold blooded assassin, who takes on his most dangerous contract to date. Betrayed by those he trusted and hunted by the police, he finds himself at the centre of a dark conspiracy and must embark on a personal journey through a corrupt and twisted world, in his search for the truth.”
Hitman Absolution will be the first entry in the series since 2006′s Hitman: Blood Money, which saw 47 bring silent death to locales ranging from mid-Mardi Gras New Orleans to the White House. The series follows the murderous exploits of Agent 47, a bald killer genetically engineered to be the perfect assassin. Hitman: Codename 47 (2000) told the tale of how the protagonist found work with the International Contract Agency (ICA) whacking high-profile criminals. In Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002), 47 is pulled out of retirement after his priest friend is kidnapped by the Sicilian Mafia. In Hitman: Contracts (2004), he revisits many missions from the original game, albeit in reverse.
We get back into the mud for a look at a very near-final version of Codemasters’ upcoming off-road racer.
Dirt 3 wastes no time in making the point that rallying is back. While it was present in Dirt 2, the extreme sports aesthetic and overall feel made it seem slightly out of place–but in Dirt 3, point-to-point races in classic rally cars are front and center.
The first thing you notice when starting the game is that the paddock and RV from the previous game are gone, along with all the product placement and extreme sports lifestyle gubbins. Your pre-race car selection is now set up as a team selection but can be done on an ad hoc basis, with the vehicles determined by your reputation rather than by your ability to afford them.
Once you’ve picked your team and car, you find yourself in the “service area” near the start of the race, where you can tweak individual car settings, as well as the difficulty level of your opponents, the number of available flashbacks, and the driving assists.
To begin with, you’re presented with two classic rally stages in Finland, which do a good job of setting the scene for the game. Despite the trimming of the fat that got between you and races in Dirt 2, it will feel instantly familiar for fans of the series. The two stages you hit first are challenging but not punishing: relatively open bends and small jumps that help to ease you into the driver’s seat.
The choices of a Peugeot 207 and Abarth Grande Punto are hardly the most thrilling, but they’re good little rally cars that are fun to throw around the track.
2K Games today detailed its plans to spread Darkness throughout the world. The publisher confirmed that The Darkness II, the sequel to 2007′s well-reviewed supernatural first-person shooter, is set to arrive in North American stores October 4, with an international launch October 7.
Driver: San Francisco will let you change lanes…and change identities. Get the details in our hands-on report.
Drawing inspiration from such classics as Bullit and The French Connection, as well as more contemporary titles, such as the Bourne series, Driver: San Francisco is aiming to instill some of Hollywood’s hard-nosed cop bravado into its action racing formula. Recently, we got the chance to go behind the wheel of this latest entry in the Driver series alongside series creator Martin Edmondson of developer Ubisoft Reflections.
While previous entries in this series have dabbled in the realm of third-person combat, our demo of Driver: San Francisco forwent such extraneous features and focused on making the driving as fun and wild as possible.
Our session with Driver San Francisco picked up with the continuing story of the series–months after the events that took place in the awkwardly titled DRIV3R. The series’ protagonist, on-again, off-again police officer Tanner, had finally succeeded in putting the villain Jericho behind bars. Jericho’s sentencing was close at hand, but as we soon discovered, not everything would go according to plan.
In brief, Jericho hatched a daring scheme involving an acid tablet, a rocket launcher, and a local news helicopter to make his escape, but not before forcing Tanner into a deadly automotive wreck. After regaining consciousness, Tanner discovered that this event had yielded unexpected results: he could now leave his body and posses other drivers on the San Francisco streets.
With the press of a button we could depart our mortal shell and take flight above the city. From here we could glide around using the two analog sticks (our demonstration was on an Xbox 360) and possess the driver of any vehicle we wanted. In the beginning we were limited to a very intimate view of the city.
However, as our powers developed, we were eventually able to pull the camera back to reveal the entire city and instantly jump anywhere we wanted. As Edmondson noted, including the ability to quickly hop from one side of this massive city to the next in mere moments has been no small technical feat.
To pull this off, the team at Ubisoft Reflections has forgone the use of any middleware in favor of building all its own tech from the ground up–and keeping it running at a smooth 60 frames per second no less.
