King’s Quest: A Knight To Remember

It's worth going back to the well

This might just be the most pleasantly surprising game we've played this year. We say that because when we heard that King's Quest was being revived by the behemoth that is Activision (through its Sierra subsidiary), the cynic in us was primed to expect a soulless take on the source material designed to capitalise on the nostalgia of King's Quest fans. When we heard that the season would be selling at near twice the price of other episodic titles like Life Is Strange and some of Telltale’s output, we further furrowed our brow at what looked like an attempt to capitalise on the popularity of episodic gaming at Activision prices.

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Rare Replay

Celebrating a gaming legacy with one of the best-value compilations of all time

Something of a hodge-podge, is this Xbox One exclusive. It’s a collection of 30 notable offerings from one of British game development’s most enduring names, returning all the way back to its origins as Ultimate Play The Game. But it’s an incomplete picture, missing several of the games for which Rare is most fondly remembered. Its piecemeal delivery is an awkward fudge, with some games unchanged, others emulated, and more appearing as high-definition updates. Yet it’s also a wonderfully generous package, valuable both for its historic significance and for its sheer volume.

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Mafia III

The death of the family

“Mafia is known for its stories… stories about crime,” Andy Wilson, Hangar 13’s executive producer tells us, shortly after the game’s debut unveiling in Cologne, Germany. By this point we’ve seen protagonist Lincoln Clay in action – he’s exactly what you’d expect from a Mafia protagonist: angry, dejected, with a violent disposition, but also somewhat charismatic and – in his own way – alluring. Obviously, he’s on a revenge quest (he’s just returning to New Orleans, where he was raised, after the Vietnam war), but that doesn’t mean Hangar 13 wants to simply churn out the same gangster revenge plot that’s been stuck in a feedback loop for years.

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Grand Ages: Medieval

Laying siege to the console castle

It’s perhaps not the sexiest impression to take from a preview, but what impressed us most about Grand Ages: Medieval was how its developer, Gaming Minds, has managed to take something so outwardly complicated and make it so apparently simple. In the hour we spent being talked through our hands-off demo by creative director Daniel Dumont, we watched from a god’s-eye-view as settlers, trade caravans and soldiers by the hundred scurried across the crisscrossed roads of late game Europe, peddling wares and besieging towns seemingly completely under their own steam. Sometimes Dumont would zoom in to show us something, like what was in the back of a trundling trade cart, but for the most part, Grand Ages’ populace seemed like model citizens. By this we mean they weren’t pestering us.

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Volume

Even better than herding rectangles, you say? It can’t be!

Never has a game’s title lent itself so readily to trite observations about its content. Mike Bithell’s follow-up to blocks-with-feelings breakthrough Thomas Was Alone offers an enormous serving of stuff, and just in case your appetite for sneaking around its neon environs isn’t satiated by the 100 story missions, there’s a level editor, too. Player-generated content is already suitably… voluminous, and particular gems find their way into the hallowed ‘Staff Picks’ collection to save you trawling through the Pac-Man clones.

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Lost Dimension

Gunpowder, treason and… not a great plot

Too many JRPGs run through a very familiar story set up (some hybrid of ‘kids team up to save the world’ and ‘kids join forces to attend Japanese high school'), but this unique title from the under-celebrated studio behind Etrian Odyssey has a refreshing arrangement. You start off with a large party of characters, but this number dwindles as traitors in the group are exposed and… disposed of.

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We Happy Few

Wait, what? A survival game set in a quaint English town full of bobbies on the beat, bunting, and people having a jolly good time, you say? Oh wait, now we see the creepy masks, rampant drug addiction, and corpses among the flower beds. Never mind. Welcome to the not-so-sleepy, and really quite unsettling, Wellington Wells in 1964. It’s broad daylight, but we’re still afraid.

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Everything you need to know before Halo 5: Guardians

We answers 15 of your frequently asked questions about the Ha-lore surrounding Master Chief’s latest outing

Even though 2015 is leaving us spoilt for choice when it comes to great new games, Halo 5: Guardians is still our most anticipated Xbox One exclusive. But for a newcomer trying to get into the series, four games’ worth of backstory can be pretty intimidating. Especially if you then start including the spin-off games, tie-in novels, TV series, ilovebees.com… So we’ve compiled this list, giving you everything you need to know to be prepared for Master Chief’s latest adventure.

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Hell & Back

We dive into DOOM’s lightning-quick Team Deathmatch mode and discuss the game’s other fast-paced offerings with id Software’s Marty Stratton

Enter the phrase “Bruce Lee with a shotgun on a skateboard” into your search engine of choice and you’ll quickly discover it’s the favoured description id Software’s executive producer Marty Stratton likes to use to sum up DOOM’s aggressively paced gameplay. While the colourful catchphrase’s implications should please loyal but sceptical fans let down by Doom 3’s slower, survival horror-inspired style, we were determined to dig a bit deeper into the imaginative analogy.

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Galak-Z: The Dimensional

Scintillating but imperfect 2.5D space shooter Galak-Z proves that FTL’s creators were onto something when they coined the ‘Roguelike-like’ label. We do need a less generic umbrella for tough games that aren’t afraid to reset a chunk of progress when they kill you, and procedurally generate their levels. 17-Bit’s latest comes in hot on the tail of The Swindle, another game to be loosely classed as Roguelike, both titles experimenting with structural twists designed to retain the tension of permadeath while allowing each lifespan to contribute to a detached progression path. Call these Samsara games, perhaps: your actions in past lives can influence this one, but you’re still lashed to the merciless wheel of rebirth.

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Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture starts in a familiarly restrictive manner, funnelling you down a set path marked out by immovable barriers and impenetrable shrubs to keep you from wandering off into the tempting landscape beyond. It’s a sop to convention that feels almost like a letdown in the context of the promises made for the game, but any sense of disappointment is short-lived. Only a short while later you’ll be overwhelmed with indecision as Rapture’s world and story reveal their surprising – and entirely refreshing – indifference to your presence.

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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Hideo Kojima isn’t normally one to practise what he preaches. The Metal Gear saga warns against puppet masters who would govern our lives from the shadows, but does so in adventures traditionally trussed up by directorial intent and a rigid script. Kojima’s self-contradictory nature is perfectly captured in The Phantom Pain when series mainstay Revolver Ocelot berates new recruits for “fighting as Hollywood taught them” only to spend a few seconds swivelling a six-shooter on his finger in slow motion. This is the same man who, two hours earlier, helped us unload a shotgun into a flaming unicorn. The series has made knowing nods to the conflict between authorial vision and agency in the past – think of Raiden at the end of MGS2 – but until The Phantom Pain (and its playable prologue, Ground Zeroes), it had not sought to remedy it.

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Devil’s Third

Six years, four game engines and two publishers later, Tomonobu Itagaki’s latest could generously be said to have endured a problematic gestation. And yet, setting aside the fall of THQ and the shift to a new console, it’s always seemed to be a game built upon precarious foundations. On a fundamental level, its combination of FPS gunplay and thirdperson melee combat simply doesn’t work. And when you shoot the leg of a man standing a good five feet away from the nearest cover only to stifle a chuckle as his head inexplicably pops off, you’ll wonder if Devil’s Third would have been much better under ideal conditions.

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Satellite Reign

Driving rain. Neon skies. The hum of plasma in the air. The warmth of a nostalgia stretching back to Syndicate (the 1993 game that introduced a generation to the joy of cities as playgrounds, not the quickly forgotten 2012 shooter). On the surface, Satellite Reign looks like the sequel fans have been waiting for since 1996’s Syndicate Wars, and in many ways this Kickstarted spiritual progeny is just that. In execution, though, something fundamental has gone missing – and it’s not just the adverts for Ghost In The Shell.

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Until Dawn

Horror’s a fine fit for a Heavy Rain-style game, and teen slasher horror seems to fit the mould even better. While Until Dawn was beaten to the whole jump-scares-and-QTEs thing by The Walking Dead, tension in Telltale’s game comes from the fear of a known quantity: shuffling undead that bite and kill indiscriminately. In Until Dawn, the fear stems from ignorance – you don’t know what’s out there, what it wants, or what form the attack will come in, if it comes at all. The fear of the unknown is a powerful thing.

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Heat Signature

Gunpoint’s creator still has a way to go before signing this off

Spinning through the vacuum of space in a recently extricated urinal block isn’t a situation we planned for today. It’s the stuff of Douglas Adams-fuelled nightmares and came about as a result of being a little too bold at the helm of what was, until recently, a considerably larger vessel. Luckily, our personal pod can be remotely controlled, so after leaping clear of the space lav, we’re soon back in an oxygenated environment.

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Scalebound

Xbox One’s exclusive action-JRPG doesn’t want for scale

Hideki Kamiya starts his presentation of a pre-alpha Scalebound by stressing that, even though the session will focus on combat, this isn’t a traditional action game, but an action-RPG. The game channels Kamiya’s work on Okami as much as it does Bayonetta, then, and we’re promised a vast world in which to showboat.

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Ark: Survival Evolved

This survival-RPG crossbreed has escaped containment into the hands of modders

Open-world survival mixed with crafting and available now via Early Access: it’s the call that millions who by now might know better still find themselves helpless to ignore. Ark: Survival Evolved sold over one million copies in its first month and yet is built on a familiar formula. Anyone bailing on Rust or Stranded Deep in search of something less rough-and-ready will intuit the rules, punching trees for wood, rocks for stone, and dodos for meat. They’ll take these materials and use an in-game recipe book to spawn tools that beget bigger, pointier tools with which to fend off dinosaurs and provoke the neighbours.

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Star Fox Zero

After a radical change to the Arwing’s controls, Fox resits his pilot’s exam

The last time we squeezed into an Arwing cockpit, it was far less complicated than this. It takes a few flights in Star Fox Zero just to feel like a borderline competent pilot again, and we scrape our fuselage across plenty of scenery in the process. Partly, that’s down to Zero’s esoteric split-view approach, the GamePad displaying Fox’s in-cockpit perspective, while your TV is reserved for a more traditional chase-cam setup. Aiming is handled by tilting the GamePad, and you’ll need to make effective use of both of your viewpoints in order for Fox McCloud to live up to his formidable reputation as a fighter pilot, flipping between the small screen for pinpoint targeting and the main one for tactical awareness. It’s exhausting at first.

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Dropsy

A surreal adventure game about being nice to people

The key to Dropsy is the hug system. Anyone you see – and some inanimate objects – can be hugged. Dropsy may look like the stuff of nightmares, but he has a heart of gold. Not everyone will want to hug him at first, though. First you have to make them like you by completing sidequests. For every successful hug, Dropsy pins a picture of the hugee to the wall above his bed.He’s a serial hugger, whose hunger for hugs cannot be sated, and the most unlikely videogame hero of the year.

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