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DEAD SPACE3 EA’s frosty shooter returns to…
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great Xbox games you never played − all under £20!
dawngUard: 15vitaltips the trUth Behind the halo movie me3 dlc: deBated resident evil 6: hUge hands-on
OCTOBER 2012
£4.99
Assassin’s Creed III
LATEST INFO
assassin’s creediii
A new hero promises to tie up some old loose ends in the AC universe D E TA I L S
The naval battle isn’t subtle, but it shows off how great AC3 looks
Format / Xbox 360 Publisher / Ubisoft Developer / Ubisoft Montreal Release / 31 October
A
ssassin’s Creed III dominated E3 in June. We saw hero Connor stab, shoot and sail his way through masses of foes as Ubisoft showcased the variety of the game’s combat. But what do we know about Connor? After all, Assassin’s Creed has always been about characters as much as killing. “You’ll see most of Connor’s life,” says creative director Alex Hutchinson. “We really wanted to show his evolution from someone who is not involved in either the revolution or the assassins, and tell
the story of how that comes together and why he makes the decisions he does and why it pans out.” From what we’ve seen, Connor isn’t as charismatic as Ezio – more a toughened survivor of the brutal frontier world he inhabits. He hunts, he kills, he loves justice, but will he love women? “Maybe,” says scriptwriter Corey May, but he refuses to be drawn on plot. And what about the series’ present-day star, Desmond? “Desmond is a key piece in this,” says Hutchinson. “In a lot of ways in my mind Assassin’s III is the end of the first arc, trilogy or whatever you want to call it of the AC universe. We feel obliged, as we’ve stuck with it from the start, to tie some things up. Desmond’s in there, he’s more active than before, but I’m banned from giving any details.” ■
Connor is expert at turning his enemies’ weapons against them
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Community will be the online focus via a new mode ‘Football Life’
NEW INFO
Blackops2
This COD has multiple endings, a first for the series
Call of Duty defies its linear heritage D E TA I L S Format / Xbox 360 Publisher / Activision Developer / Treyarch Release / 13 November
T
he Call Of Duty games are regularly criticised for being too linear. In response, Treyarch have added an element of choice to Black Ops 2. You can get different endings by making certain life or death decisions throughout the campaign. We’ve seen major characters die in earlier games, but now their demise could be your fault. It’s a welcome effort to make the game less of a shooting gallery. The new strike Force mode will also affect the outcome of the overarching story. These sandbox
INFO BURST tBC 2013
missions are set in huge maps, and see you commanding battles from a tactical overhead view as well as fighting in them yourself. The outcome of these confrontations will help direct the story, and, in Treyarch’s words, “shape the cold war”. sounds impressive, but we need to see it in action before we get excited. Treyarch compare the branching paths and multiple endings to Mass Effect, but we wonder if they can match the emotional power of BioWare’s RPg. As good as Call Of Duty is, it’s not known for nuance. But Treyarch are to be applauded for trying something new with the Call Of Duty formula – a series that hasn’t really changed, besides some added bells and whistles, since the first game. A compelling story with branching paths could add some depth to the slick, big budget man-shooting. ■
devil’sthird
after the rough news that thQ had removed this bloody action game from their schedule, we hear Valhalla games (fronted by ninja gaiden creator Itagaki) has been handed back the rights. he plans to distribute the game digitally across a variety of platforms, but it’s unclear what this means for the 360 version.
Pre-order and you get a reimagined version of the Nuketown map
aug 2012
transformers: fallofcyBertron
good news if you like massive robots punching and shooting each other. this third-person actioner is due to launch a week early, on 24 august. we’ve played this and high moon have fixed most of the complaints from the last transformers, and they’ve added Dinobots.
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fireplan
THQ have filed a patent request for “1666”, believed to be the title of Patrice Désilets’ new game at THQ Montreal. Assassin’s Creed’s creative director left Ubisoft in 2010 to build the studio and new game, rumoured to be set around the events of the Great Fire of London.
likely
callofthestars
Neversoft are at work on a new Call Of Duty, believed to be the rumoured SpaceCOD. Activision have bound Raven, Sledgehammer, Treyarch and now Neversoft to the franchise, which is eternal like Phillip Schofield.
halo5
343 Industries are recruiting for a new Halo game. Our sources suggest 343 are pushing ahead with Halo 5 for release alongside the next-gen Xbox just one year after Halo 4. The Reclaimer Trilogy is already plotted and 343 have the manpower for it.
wakeUp
Alan Wake 2 is set in a town called ‘Ordinary’, says the game’s writer Sam Lake. In a tweet, Lake said, “it’s happening again. It’s happening right now,” and linked to a mysterious teaser blog at bit.ly/Lgybs2.
The Rumour Matrix Spooning the honey of truth from a hive of lies twicetheslice
workingitover
MG Rising Revengeance will get a second playable character in postrelease DLC in the summer of 2013. Original ninja Gray Fox would be a great fit, despite dying before Rising is set. Do flashback scenes beckon?
JUstsayrow
Overstrike skipped E3 but only so it could debut properly at the end of summer, says EA boss Frank Gibeau. We hear it’s good, but EA are unsure of how to sell it – they want a new Dead Space, not a new Mirror’s Edge.
hotdogs
A Volition developer’s Linkedin profile mentions Saints Row 4, in development for next gen. It will almost certainly come to both current and next-gen platforms, and include the Enter The Dominatrix campaign.
Ubisoft are shopping a Watch Dogs movie around Hollywood, despite the game not actually existing yet. If the contract is anything like the one cut with Sony for Assassin’s Creed – giving Ubisoft complete creative control – the film may never happen.
Unlikely
weaponofchoice
Red Faction’s NanoRifle
#14 In a series of 89,450,043
MANUFACTURER UlToR MAGAZINE SIZE 25 RANGE loNg PRIMARY FIRE MATTeR-devoURINg NANITes SECONDARY FIRE N/A NICKNAME The dIsINTegRAToR
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T
he trouble with massive destruction is that it’s so, well, massively destructive. In the brilliant and underrated Red Faction Guerrilla, Mason’s Nano Rifle is the perfect weapon for picking apart
buildings one piece at a time with none of the mess and horrific death inflicted by less subtle weapons. A shot from the Nano Rifle dissolves anything it hits, letting Mason chop notches out of the biggest structures
till gravity does the work for you. The Nano Rifle got an extreme upgrade in Red Faction Armageddon, with extra nobbles and spiky bits, but retained the same basic function in a less interesting world.
primer
Analysis / Opinion / Gossip Flying mounts are rumoured for future DLC. Imagine riding a dragon
videohintsat newskyrimdlc
Dragon mounts and air combat coming?
W
hen work on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was finished, developers Bethesda had a week to create whatever they wanted using the game’s development tools. The result was a collection of mods, tweaks and new gameplay features, the best of which were shown in a video at the 2012 DICE Summit by director Todd Howard. Much of the content featured has already been created by modders for the PC version, but due to the ‘walled garden’ nature of games consoles, we’ll have to wait for Bethesda to implement it themselves before we get to enjoy it on 360. Interestingly, out of the 36 examples shown, a handful of features have already appeared in the game’s first expansion, Dawnguard (review on p98). The werewolf perk tree, vampire feeding animations, vampire lord alternate form and ghostly mount all made it into the first wave of dlC. some other features were also added in patches, namely cinematic kill-cams for magic and ranged attacks, mounted combat, and Kinect dragon shouts. This experimental ‘game jam’
Dawnguard was conceived at ‘game jam’. What else will come out of it?
was clearly more than just a bit of fun for developers finally freed from the crunch stage. so it’s safe to assume that any future dlC will incorporate mods from the video that didn’t make it into Dawnguard – some of which are really exciting. There were a lot of relatively minor visual tweaks including seasonal foliage, flow-based water shaders, characters leaving footprints in the snow, and enchanted mudcrab animations (er, yay?), but it’s the
“It’s the promIse of new gameplay features that has really set our mouths waterIng”
promise of new gameplay features that have really set our fantasysavouring mouths watering. First and foremost, we saw flying mounts. Imagine being able to fly around the world seated on a mighty dragon. That’s exactly what we see in the demo video, and it’s a thrilling prospect. excitingly, we may be able to capture and tame, rather than heartlessly murder, dragons; or (less cosily) engage in mid-air combat. We also saw some impressive stealth enhancements, including the ability to track enemies through walls with ‘assassin vision’, and create your own shadow by extinguishing torches with water arrows – which guards can relight, in a touch clearly inspired by the Thief series. stealth in Skyrim was always a little flaky, but with these tweaks it would become a great deal more fun – and be the perfect foundation for a new sneakingfocused dlC questline.
mod sqUad
In the demo video we also see some other interesting experimental mods: spear weapons, new follower commands, the ability to adopt children, building your own house, combining spells to create new effects, goblin enemies, fat giants, giant mudcrabs (please let this be a secret boss), ice and fire arrows, a terrifying looking ‘werebear’, and imp minions for vampires. With the coding work in place, you can pretty much guarantee that some of this stuff will make an appearance in the next wave of dlC. so you can look forward to adopting your own giant mudcrab baby soon. ■ 41
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FeATUre
DEAD SPACE 3
After its new ice planet setting and all-action E3 showing met with a cool response, XBW goes hands-on with Dead Space 3 to answer the big question‌ Is it still scary?
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FeATUre DEAD SPACE 3
ead Space is all about anticipation. Players remember its hideously unpleasant enemies all too well, but − for us − the special horror of the game has always come as much from the suggestion of a meeting with the grotesque necromorphs in some dingy corridor, as it has from the moments of enthusiastic vivisection when series hero Isaac Clarke actually takes them on. Setting is all – which is why news that Dead Space 3 will leave the cramped spaceship behind has been met with such scepticism. When you pluck Isaac out of the confines of his craft, whack him on the surface of an ice planet and give him a gruff action hero to fight alongside, the concern is that you leave the horror behind as well. But that’s where developers Visceral are hoping to prove us wrong.
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hands-on, limBs off
Our hands-on picks up right after the harrowing events of Dead Space 2 – and before Isaac crashlands on ice planet Tau Volantis. Isaac hops across to a series of abandoned ships he finds floating in the middle of nowhere, looking for salvage, information, and something to shoot the legs off of. Luckily enough for us, he finds all three. This is classic Dead Space gameplay, and the studio clearly
haven’t lost their touch – the prospect of having something with more than the regulation number of limbs appear in the darkness and try to suck Isaac’s brain out the back of his head is a constant worry. Visceral have kept intact their ‘special trick’ of making the same six or seven gambits scary every time, somehow. Just knowing that the scare is on its way (or is it?) is the scariest part of all. Thanks to the need to amputate limbs to succeed, combat remains frantic and difficult. We’re told it’s still possible to lob off a body part, freeze it with Stasis, and shoot it back into a necromorph’s chest using telekinesis (especially impressive during co-op mode) but in DS3 it’s hard enough fending them off, let alone doing trick shots with their pre-owned forearms. Stomping on a wounded enemy and having it pop like a wet pinata under your steel-booted foot is still satisfying as hell, too. We explore the ship, mostly opening doors at range using our new Torque telekinesis power; but we have to fix one by solving a voltage puzzle to provide power to the motors. There are six usable switches of different power ratings: too much power and the door overloads, giving us a nasty shock; too little power and it just sits there. After much singeing of eyebrows, we eventually figure it out and it hisses open nicely. Once inside, there’s plenty to find in the way of health packs and ammo (ammo is
Some necromorphs will sprout new mutations if you don’t finish them quickly. And then this kind of thing happens…
“Stomping on a wounded enemy and having it pop like a wet pinata under your foot is still satisfying as hell” meet the heroes isaac clarke
Originally an engineer on board the USG Ishimura, Isaac was haunted by visions of his dead girlfriend, Nicole. During the second game he was forced to survive a necromorph infestation of The Sprawl.
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sgt John carver
A maverick soldier, who goes rogue after his family is killed by necromorphs. He looks like a generic space marine and swears a lot in the demo, but we’re told he has ‘complex issues’ that emerge during the game.
now universal, rather than specific to each weapon) and, of course, necromorphs. Necromorphs everywhere. Dropping from the ceiling. Jumping out of the floor. Stalking the corridors horrendously. It’s all too close for comfort; mutated limbs and jagged bone spurs seem to appear from everywhere in this game.
The first part of the game takes place in ‘familiar’ outer space
We make our way past a massive electricity generator and listen to a message left by the ship’s previous owners. Phrases like “barricades”, “we’re holding off as long as we can” and “they’re onto us” crop up. But precisely who “they” are is the least of our concerns right now, because fat white spiders the size of a human fist are swarming into the corpses around us and distorting them into hideous monsters. These arachnid spooks are called swarm infectors, and they haunt our nightmares. After finding a body, they’ll get to work on giving it some spare elbows
(extra pointy, mind) then set about eating you at break-neck, juddering speed. If you’re not fast enough on the trigger, they’ll mutate into an even more dangerous form, forcing you to rethink your tactics. It’s a smart way to keep action varied.
cold comfort
We get away, in the end, and the demo moves to a section a little later in the game. After crashing on frozen Tau Volantis, Isaac staggers from the wreckage and tries to find shelter. Since we’re in the middle of a blizzard visibility is low, and we get lost a couple of times. Much like the threat of oxygen loss in
previous titles, you’ll sometimes have to battle with extreme cold and weather conditions that put a timer on your survival, but equipping protective gear (like the retro-futuristic fur-lined snow suit) can give you a fighting chance. We’re trudging through the knee-deep snow when a reanimated lunatic in a parka lunges point-blank out of the storm with a pickaxe aimed squarely at our face, so we panic-fire our assault rifle into him (and the surrounding snow) until he sprouts three tentacles in place of his upper
30 59
Caves are the new ‘creepy corridors’ on ice planet Tau Volantis
You can dismember humans in Dead Space 3. If you really must
Swat this guy away, or have your co-op partner help you out
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body. We finish him off with the under-slung shotgun. Making our way towards a friendly outpost, we come across our first big enemy – a crawling spider-beast the size of a rhino. We’re promptly gutted by a single barbed tentacle, so we decide that this is the time to give the new drop-in, drop-out co-op gameplay a whirl and see if that can even the odds. Co-op players are only able to enter the game at a checkpoint, or following the death of the main player, so our evisceration was pretty timely. In co-op, the second player controls grizzled military badass Sgt John Carver, and this is another cause of the Dead Space faithful’s unease. On the standard shooter protagonist trope scale, Carver
scores high. His hair is buzz-cut. His face is scarred. His attitude is strictly no-nonsense, and his sole motivation is to kill the aliens on account of them (here comes the final part of the generic space bastard puzzle) eating his family. It’s bargain-basement stuff, and given the sharp characterisation of Isaac, it seems almost lazy. If Carver is a box-ticking exercise, what does that say about the gameplay he’s bringing to DS3? The co-operative mode definitely doesn’t seem tacked on, though. As the checkpoint reloads, we see a different, multiplayerspecific set of cutscenes as the two characters give each other assistance and argue in equal amounts. Occasionally, they’ll talk to each other during combat too,
FeATUre
DEAD SPACE 3
which is nice – although when both of them have full-face masks and similar voices, it’s often difficult to tell who’s saying what.
the monster inside
After defeating the mini-boss, we meet our first human enemies: the Unitologists, a human sect that worships the necromorphs and is still hunting for Isaac. To help out with the gun battles (which make up no more than a quarter of the total fights in the game, we’re told), Visceral have put in a subtle cover system. Stand near a corner or crouch behind a box, and Isaac will tuck behind it; pulling aim will pop him out for a quick shot. The change of enemy brings a change of tone with it: chopping up enemies and stomping on their corpses feels strange when they’re human, no matter how evil they might be. The demo ends after we duke it out with a huge alien which mauls us as it rears over a cliff edge and then swallows us whole so the fight can continue, Jonah-style, from
Steve Papoutsis talks terror
There’s unparalleled necromorph variety in this third game
cave, or as part of a research station: Visceral are still the best company in the world at making a game that jumps out from behind a corner and shouts at you, over and over, until your nerves are shot. Does co-op lessen that fear? Of course. Having a friend to help you out (even against increased enemies and multiple objectives that are added when they drop in) is always going to be calming, and watching a chum bash aliens away from you as they try to eat your face is a
“Chopping up enemies feels strange when they’re human, no matter how evil the Unitologists might be” inside. But instead of having Divine Intervention to help us out of the belly of the beast, we’re equipped with guns that shoot buzzsaws. The wide variety of enemies is commendable – big ones, small ones, some as big as your head (because they’re literally just a head on tentacles that eats other heads and then animates the bodies) – but the giant enemy monsters aren’t doing anything to lessen the inevitable comparisons with Lost Planet 3. And perturbingly, nor are they especially scary.
JUmp start
If you’re worried about the horror leaving Dead Space, though, you can put your mind at ease (or at least, as easy as you can feel when you’ve just been reassured that a multilimbed grotesque is on its way to meet you). The cramped corridors and terrifying surprises remain – instead of being on a space ship, they’re now underground, or in a
remarkably different experience to pulling them off yourself by frantically hammering the a button. The addition of Carver makes any scene an action game. But ultimately, that doesn’t matter. The whole game has been designed as a single-player experience first, and a co-op title second. You can still trek cautiously through derelict spaceships on your own, and stand alone against nightmare creatures the size of a building. And then, once you’ve finished, you can play it again on a harder difficulty setting with a friend to watch your back and help you out on the trickier bits. Or not, if you’d prefer. In terms of challenge, style and tone Dead Space 3 is almost two different games, and one of them is much, much scarier than the other. For once, we’re happy to feel the impending dread of Dead Space. ■
The vice president of Visceral speaks exclusively to XBW
Are there any challenges you’ve had in keeping players terrified? At this point we’re at the third instalment and and the sheer shock value of seeing our enemies, seeing the dismemberment, seeing some of those things that have become basically staples of the franchises – they aren’t going to continue to scare people the way they have in the past. How are you making snow planets as scary as corridors? The elements themselves are very scary: if I dropped you in the middle of Antarctica now, it wouldn’t be a walk in the park for you. You can’t see in the middle of a snow storm. You never know when a blizzard’s going to kick up. You never know what’s going to come shambling out of the mists towards you. And let’s not forget – just because it’s a planet doesn’t mean there aren’t enclosed areas. How have you used co-op to reinforce the scary parts of the game? We want a true co-operative experience that feels different when you play it with a friend. We don’t just want to make it so there’s another character there – we want to make you rely on each other. What recent games have inspired you during Dead Space 3’s development? I’ve been enjoying Battlefield 3. There’s nothing in particular in there that makes me say, “We need to do this!” because obviously we’re not making a similar game, but it’s got a very addictive quality. Finally, isn’t using Isaac’s strategic dismemberment on humans (and stomping them) a little bit grim? You don’t just have to shoot off their limbs, but if that’s the kind of thing you’re into, you can certainly take their limbs off and torture them. You can even stomp on them. But I think that really comes down to an individual’s playstyle, and most importantly, if they find that to be fun.
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review
The Amazing Spider-Man
D e TA i L S publisher Activision developer Beenox release Outnow price £34.99
This game complements the film, and expands on it, with villains like Rhino here
theamazingspider-man
Apes Arkham City, but falls short of Batman’s brilliance what’sthe story? set just after the film (making spoilers inevitable, so approach with caution), new oscorp executive alistair smythe creates cross-species hybrids using the research of Dr Curt Connors (aKa the lizard). whaddya know, they somehow make an escape and it falls to our friendly neighbourhood spider-man to get the mixed-up beasties off the streets
gameography
76% 104
70%
Spider-Man: Edge Of Time
Guitar Hero Greatest Hits
Beenox’s last three scores Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions
Reviewer Ben Griffin
57%
T
he key to a superhero is his power. Batman is vulnerable in light and powerful in darkness – a hard balance to pull off, but one Rocksteady were more than up to in Arkham Asylum and City. The lesson? Nail the power and you nail the game. Beenox have nailed SpiderMan. His new Web Rush ability conveys superhuman speed and agility without demanding superhuman players. Hold RB to momentarily freeze time, pick a spot, then release to flip there in the most stylish way imaginable. Your bog-standard web-swinging’s similarly balletic, a close-up camera used to eye-watering effect as it shakes and blurs behind. You’ll damn near need goggles to keep out the bug splats. Beneath stylish new movement mechanics, the game draws from previous models. There are side-missions (halt the getaway car with a street-sized
web, save girl from tough guys) collectible comics and character models, and upgrade trees. But there are improvements too – hey, there’s no delivering pizza.
ace-legged freak
Getting around asylums, research labs and secret facilities is somewhat clumsy, but levels expand into wide and high hubs facilitating obvious aping of Arkham-style room-clearing. It makes sense to learn from the
at high speed. Momentum meters demand some skill, but it lacks Batman’s finesse. Pinning together ten hours of game is a story that, were it a forum post, would come with a big old “SPOILER!” tag. It picks up soon after the film and in the first five minutes details the fates of Spider-Man, the Lizard, Gwen Stacy and Oscorp. Yes, it’s a well-told epilogue that makes room for several familiar foes the movie couldn’t accommodate (bad guys like Rhino, Vermin and Scorpion have been reimagined as cross-bred Oscorp experiments), but all the same, you’d best save the game for after the film. ■
“Beenox have nailed SpiderMan’s powers with Web Rush” best, but they’re not such a good fit for Spidey as for Bats. Despite all the spectacle, there’s zero tension – nothing stops you slingshotting an explosive canister at a crowd then Web Rushing away. In Arkham, armed goons made careful planning a necessity. Here they’re more annoyances, even in combat sections which see you bashing in SWAT teams
verdict
Web Rushing makes you feel full-on super-powered. Although clumsy interior sections dent the illusion, this is almost Spider-Man’s Arkham City
7.7