Captain America: Super Soldier is a third person action adventure set during World War II.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a short and shallow shooter that fails to deliver on the potential of its beloved license.

Another Transformers movie means another Transformers game. For many longtime fans, Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and the other robots in disguise are special characters, and hope endures that someday, a Transformers game will come along that does them justice. Unfortunately, Dark of the Moon is not that game.

The action in this third-person shooter isn’t bad, but it also isn’t anything remarkable. There aren’t any surprises or standout moments during its brief campaign, and the shallow multiplayer isn’t likely to keep you coming back for very long.

Score: 5.5 / mediocre

New release slate championed by premiere of Gearbox’s long-in-development action game; Wii Play: Motion, Child of Eden, Alice: Madness Returns, Transformers: Dark of the Moon also out.

Duke Nukem can be called a lot of things, but vaporware is no longer one of them. Gearbox Software’s much anticipated first-person action game Duke Nukem Forever finally arrives tomorrow for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, following an international market release last week.

Initially announced in 1997, Duke Nukem Forever was synonymous with vaporware for over a decade. While at original studio 3D Realms, it went through at least two engine changes, with its protracted development reportedly costing $20 million to $30 million.

Duke Nukem Forever will be available in both a standard edition, as well as a Balls of Steel Collector’s Edition for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. This top-tier bundle includes a bust of the titular hero, a set of playing cards, dice, and two casino chips. A comic and hardcover art book are also included in the collection, along with a numbered certificate of authenticity.

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Konami unveils a host of AI improvements for its football sim PES 12.

FIFA 12 wasn’t the only football game on show at this year’s E3 expo, with Konami unveiling a bunch of new features for Pro Evolution soccer 2012. As yearly updates go, PES 12 is looking like a big one, with improved animation, visuals, and AI updates that attempt to make it a more realistic experience. With FIFA currently taking the football crown, Konami’s certainly got its work cut out to return the series to its glory days, and back to the top of table.

Of all the new features, PES 12′s AI improvements are the biggest, with changes being made to almost all aspects of the game. Our first look started with Active AI Overlap, a new feature that’s designed to improve the performance of players off the ball. In PES 11, if you passed the ball forward to an open area on the pitch, more often than not supporting players wouldn’t chase the ball down. Players will now run forward to receive passes, letting you make better use of open space.

This is enhanced by improvements to Dummy Runs and Diagonal Runs, which see players drawing out defenders to give you space to play the ball, and make runs across the whole length of the pitch, rather than just along one side of it. The next new feature we were shown was Zonal Defence. It attempts to improve defensive lines, so players now stay in formation. We were shown a clip from PES 11, which showed defensive players in a zigzag formation outside of the box. In PES 12, that line has been straightened up, more accurately mimicking real-world players.

The final AI improvement we were shown was called Zonal Marking, which attempts to improve the defensive play of your teammates. Players will automatically pick up on attacking players’ runs, chasing them down and launching tackles. As well as AI improvements, we were shown one tweak to the controls, which allows you control players off the ball. For example, if you’ve got a throw in or a free kick, you can move other players around the pitch, as well as line up your throw or shot.

The AI improvements are substantial, and if they work as promised, they’ll go some way towards making PES 12 a more realistic experience and a better alternative to FIFA. With the game currently only 60 per cent complete, there’s still a lot of new features Konami have yet to implement, including new personal update data, animation improvements, and more responsive button presses. Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 is due for release in Q3 of this year. Look out for more on GameSpot soon.

Check out The Sims 3 parody of The Hangover II.

X-Men: Destiny has you playing a new recruit amongst comic’s motley mutant band and promises a branching storyline that features a deep element of choice.

Ubisoft confirms latest installment in Tom Clancy tactical shooter series will avoid holiday fray with January-March release window.

When Ubisoft first teased Ghost Recon: Future Soldier in January 2009, it expected to have the game out before April 1, 2010. However, by the time Ubisoft officially announced the game in February 2010, it said the game had been bumped back to the final quarter of that year. Since then, the game has been pushed to the first quarter of 2011, and then again to sometime before the end of March 31, 2012.

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.

Thor: The Video Game is a third person action adventure game based of the Marvel movie.

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.

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