We've been covering 11 bit studios' next game, Frost Punk, for some time now. Today marks our first look at the gameplay in motion, albeit for only a moment. It's a "city-survival" game about establishing a settlement in a frozen hellscape and facing tough ethical decisions as you form societal customs.
Pretty much what you'd expect from the folks behind This War of Mine, then.
This trailer confirms something I already suspected: that I'll want to play this game bundled up. The sound design makes me shiver. I'm also suddenly struck with the intense desire to rewatch Snowpiercer.
Capcom has partnered with iam8bit to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Street Fighter with the production of limited edition Street Fighter II cartridges for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
Each cartridge will be newly manufactured and will come in one of two colors. Grab it in Opaque Ryu Red or Translucent Glow-in-the-Dark Blanka Green. It houses the original game code and will be fully playable on NTSC consoles, so dig out your SNES or plug in your Retron.
Inti Creates has done right by Nintendo Switch owners with Blaster Master Zero and Mighty Gunvolt Burst, and its next game looks even more up my alley. Dragon: Marked for Death is an action-RPG from director Ryota Ito (Mega Man Zero, ZX, 9, 10) with local and online co-op support for four players.
The screenshots totally sold me, and there's also some footage in the Nindies Showcase (skip to 14:35).
Dawn of War III didn't have the best fan reception at launch. While I thought it was actually a pretty solid campaign, the multiplayer drew too many comparisons to MOBAs and the lack of mod support put a lot of people in a sour mood. While the multiplayer eventually received an update to include a different mode, the eventual Steam Workshop integration was never really dated. Thankfully, the wait is over and modding tools are in.
Available starting today, you can now mod the game to your heart's content and then upload your creations directly to Steam. The new update for Dawn of War III (which launched yesterday without mod tools) also includes a lot of balance tweaks and includes an autosave feature for the campaign mode. I definitely could have used that at launch.
You can read the rather extensive tweaks done to specific units over on the official website, but I'll include the more pertinent patch notes below.
Warhammer: Vermintide went over well enough that Fatshark is making another one. Details are near-non-existent for the sequel, but I have to imagine it'll follow a similar Skaven-slaying format.
"Set in the dark and grim Warhammer Fantasy world, you must join forces with up to three other players to tackle the endless hordes of enemies," reads the Steam summary. "Equipped with a variety of melee and ranged weapons, you and your team are all that stands between utter defeat and victory - and if you fall so will the Empire." Will there be more enemies to beat down? Hope so!
This is merely a teaser. The full reveal is set for October 17 at 10:00am Pacific on Twitch.
I was just thinking about how much I missed Left 4 Dead. This isn't quite the same thing, of course, but it scratches some of those itches. Vermintide sold 1.5 million units, so they're clearly onto something.
As Bungie gears up to launch Destiny 2 next week, we're already able to look toward the game's post-release content. There's already some information available about the first add-on, and it sounds substantially more ambitious than original Destiny's debut DLC, The Dark Below, ever was.
Kotaku reports that Destiny 2's first DLC will be called The Curse of Osiris, and that it stars the eponymous space warlock Osiris. The story is said to be centered around saving Osiris from the Vex, an ancient cyborg robot species of alien. Kotaku says that it has multiple sources who corroborated this information.
The Curse of Osiris will seemingly feature significant areas for players to inhabit. It will introduce a new patrol zone on the surface of Mercury, and a social space on the Lighthouse. In Destiny, the Lighthouse was an area where players would gather rewards if they were successful enough in the competitive multiplayer mode "Trials of Osiris." Bungie appears to be expanding that location as a new gathering spot.
The last time I had gotten my hands on Dissidia Final Fantasy NT it was in the middle of a hazy, exhausting E3. I'm not making excuses for how I reacted to Dissidia's massive wave of new information, but there has been a noticeable difference in how differently I've perceived it playing it at home during the online beta.
Now while I've been able to parse exactly what's going on in these fights, it doesn't change the fact that Dissidia is largely a stiff, unintelligible mess. And I love it.
Enthusiast Gaming, our parent company, helped fund a new documentary video series that will be exclusive to Destructoid. The production team consists of a web community called Gameumentary. The goal is simple: we want to tell stories behind our favorite games. The Kickstarter was set to $22,000 and it's a done deal. The question now is, which documentaries are you interested in most? To vote, simply write Darksiders in the comments below. I'm half kidding. Yes, they plan to do that documentary.
Over the course of the next year, Gameumentary will be producing documentaries on the Darksiders franchise, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Battle Chasers: Nightwar, Gunfire Games, and two indie startup studios, Outpost Games (SOS) & Helm Systems.
This also means Destructoid will be bringing you some of these great interviews exclusively, as we have an executive producer role. The first one about BioShock is on Destructoid's YouTube channel right now. Please hit like and subscribe to help support this new video series.
Our CEO, Menashe said, "We're commissioning high quality content, this is good journalism that requires traveling and documenting things over long periods of time. We want to take these stories further." Look for more great videos from the Destructoid's ever-growing extended family soon. We are legion!
To follow the Gameumentary team on social media be sure to check out their Facebook and Twitter.
The leak about inFamous and Child of Light coming to PlayStation Plus was accurate(ish). Sony has confirmed the PS Plus lineup for September, and in North America, we're getting these titles:
inFamous: Second Son (PS4)
Strike Vector Ex (PS4)
Truck Racer (PS3)
Handball 2016 (PS3)
We Are Doomed (PS Vita, PS4)
Hatoful Boyfriend (PS Vita, PS4)
In Europe, instead of Strike Vector Ex, subscribers will be able to nab Child of Light. I would've rather had the chance to check it out instead, so that's a slight expectations-versus-reality bummer. Darn. The pigeon dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend is a nice little surprise, though!
There's also an extra game: RIGS: Mechanized Combat League. The multiplayer-centric mech game is free from September 5 through November 7 and if you own PlayStation VR, you really ought to download it. I have to imagine no one is playing it online right now, but hopefully that'll change.
Yesterday, new and upcoming game publisher Annapurna Interactive announced on Twitter that they would have a reveal for today. Never in my wildest imaginations did I think it would mean that we would finally be getting a conclusion to the four-year-long episodic series Kentucky Route Zero, or that it was heading to the Switch. Well, color me surprised.
For those of you who may not know, Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist adventure game that puts you in the driver's seat of a delivery man trying to navigate the roads of a familiar but different Kentucky highway. Along the way you meet all types of characters that need your help as much as you need them.
The first episode of the game came out in January 2011 for PC and ever since then episode releases have been getting further and further apart. Episode four came out last year and there hasn't been a peep about when the final episode was going to come out. I've long been waiting for the end of this saga as the art style is second to none and the music is one of the only bluegrass game soundtracks that I can think of.
Unfortunately, no official date has been nailed down, but just having an "Early 2018" release window is better than what we knew before. The game will release with all five episodes simultaneously on Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One alongside the final episode's release on PC for those that bought the season pass.
Image & Form has settled on September 21, 2017 for SteamWorld Dig 2. It'll be out on Nintendo Switch first, priced at $19.99/€19.99/£14.99, with a PlayStation 4 and PC release landing "a few days later."
I didn't need another trailer to sell me on the sequel, but I'm glad we have this all the same. The video is short and sweet, and has me even more invigorated for Dig 2. I'm loving those movement abilities.
According to Image & Form CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson, the adventure should take "somewhere around 10 hours," not including secrets and unlockables. I can't tell you how many times I've cleared the original game because it ended before I had gotten my fill, so that sounds good to me.
Enthusiast Gaming, our parent company, helped fund a new documentary video series that will be exclusive to Destructoid. The production team will consist of our friends over at Gameumentary. The goal is simple: we want to tell stories behind our favorite games. The Kickstarter was set to $22,000 and it's a done deal. The question now is, which documentaries are you interested in most? To vote, simply write Darksiders in the comments below. I'm half kidding. Yes, they plan to do that documentary.
This also means Destructoid will be bringing you some of these great interviews a little early, as we have an executive producer role. The first few videos, which were shot by their own steam pre-funding. The first one about BioShock is on Destructoid's Youtube Channel right now. Please hit like and subscribe to help support this new video series.
Our CEO, Menashe said, "We're commissioning high quality content, this is good journalism that requires traveling and documenting things long periods of time. We want to take these stories further." Look for more great videos from the Destructoid's ever-growing extended family soon. We are legion!
The Nintendo Switch is back on top this past week thanks to the release of the Monster Hunter XX port for Switch. It helped drive the consoles sales to over 69,000 which is more than all other consoles combined for the week. Switch was also the only console to see an improvement from the previous week; all other consoles took a dip in sales.
The Monster Hunter XX Switch port itself did not perform as well as many expected, "only" moving 84, 277 units. The series and the console are both so popular in Japan, at least 100,000 was expected. Also new this week was The Lost Child, successor to El Shaddai. It only sold a bit over 7,000 copies, PS4 and Vita combined.
The SNES Classic pre-orders have come and gone and the dregs left behind without one will be forced to scramble wildly, clawing desperately at one another like a depiction of hell in a Hieronymus Bosch painting for the scraps. I don’t want to make any wild predictions, but shit’s gonna be hard to get, and just like last year with the NES Classic, renewed nostalgia is going to introduce a whole new wave of people to retro game collecting (not to mention put more money into the pockets of Raspberry Pi manufacturers.)
One of the most important features of just about any devices these days is the video output. RCA is dead, long live HDMI, and just about every new TV is either not going to take the input of old devices at all, or is going to make it a miserable experience. The resolution doesn’t upscale properly, so without proper (and expensive) equipment, if you try to play an old SNES on a new TV, you are likely gonna have a bad time.
The Retro Freak by Cyber Gadget is a very capable solution to playing a wide variety of different game cartridges adequately and with a few excellent features to make it a strong experience, and certainly the best of its kind among a very small group of competing products.
A few games shown during Nintendo's indie game showcase had me doing double takes. Morphies Law, a "robot morphology driven 3D shooter" in which you steal mass from your opponents' body parts and consequently grow larger the better you play, is definitely one of them. It's something else.
As the trailer shows, it's not just cosmetic. You need mass to power up your team's giant avatar and your body size directly affects your abilities and traversal options. The shooting itself looks a little rougher than I'd ideally like, but the concept is super interesting, and I'm weirdly into these character designs. Morphies Law kind of has that TimeSplitters-esque off-kilter feel going for it.
Oh, and you can redistribute mass among your team. "In team games the team avatar combines the sizes of all team members. The team with the tallest team avatar wins. Friendly fire does not change your team's avatar size and can therefore be used to implement advanced team tactics. Shift your team mass from one player to the other to get your whole team to an advantageous position. Or designate an offensive player and shrink him to make him difficult to hit. Then, once he grows by decimating the other team, transfer his mass to your defensive players by showering him with friendly fire."
Morphies Law will be out this winter on Nintendo Switch and it's also coming to PC.
Floor Kids heads to Nintendo Switch this holiday season, featuring badass breakdancing moves, hand-drawn art and music by Kid Koala, a member of legendary hip hop group Deltron 3030 and one of the DJs behind Baby Driver's soundtrack. The game's characters began life in 2007 within a series of short, animated films that were incorporated into Kid Koala's concerts. But, this year, they'll become a fully fledged video game.
One of my favorite themes in storytelling is appearances versus reality. Is what we are seeing actually what's happening or are we on the wrong end of a dirty trick? So it should come as to no surprise that when I stumbled onto PikuNiku with its bright colors and seemingly dark underbelly it immediately had my interest.
PikuNiku is described as an "absurd puzzle-exploration game that takes place in a strange but playful world where not everything is as happy as it seems." The gameplay looks to be your standard step on block and activate door or lift mechanics so nothing really special to write about here. It does feature co-op which is always a welcome feature in games, especially on easily portable Switch.
Aesthetically it is an absolute joy to watch with bright happy music and playful sound effects, which I'm sure will be put to great use to tell what seems to be a darker story. It looks just about as odd as you would expect a Devolver Digital release on the Switch to be with a juxtaposition of bright colors and cartoonishly proportioned characters walking around a world with government spying and robots mixing among the townsfolk.
Originally announced years ago as an auto-run platformer for PC and tablets, it has resurfaced and is now planned for Steam, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android in 2018.
"To describe [the game] as an auto-runner would be a disservice," says Team Meat. "It's like saying that Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a game about a swordsman. Meat Boy / Bandage Girl do always run, but there is so much more to the game than running. They can attack enemies, they can dash through the air, there are tons of levels, there are bosses, there are secrets, and there is a surprising amount of difficulty that doesn’t feel unfair. It's everything you would expect a Super Meat Boy sequel to be."
Nugget is all that's good in this world. I'm already emotionally invested.
Another note: "Levels are dynamically constructed based on difficulty. Each time you beat a level, it reconstructs into a harder version of itself (up to a point...we aren't gods)." Super Meat Boy Forever has a "system that allows us to give a criteria of difficulty and pacing that makes the levels randomly, but still within the confines of what we want the levels to be presented as," according to Team Meat.
I'm looking forward to attempting to overcome the ridiculous challenges that await.
Suda51 and the snarky, over-the-top, ultra violent titles he makes -- like the Wii's No More Heroes and the more recent free-to-play experiment on the PS4, Let It Die -- are some of the best gaming experiences around. During Nintendo's live stream focusing on indie developers Wednesday morning, Nintendo revealed a brand new title from the auteur, Travis StrikesAgain, which is coming to the Switch in 2018. There's even a new fourth wall-breaking trailer here, which sets up the new game's story.
Believe it or not, there hasn't been a console version of the mysterious, narrative-driven Kentucky Route Zero since the first act arrived in 2013. Well, it's here... and you may have a good reason to get it even if you've played the adventure title to death on your PC. Cardboard Computer has revealedKentucky Route Zero TV Edition for the PS4, Switch and Xbox One, and this new version will premiere the fifth and final act of truck driver Conway's strange journey. Yes, you may need to head to the living room if you want to finish the story as quickly as possible. It'll include all the supporting interludes, too.
There are a lot of great resources out there for Overwatch players. Tons of guides, tutorial videos, and strategies that you and your crack squad of regular teammates can employ. Deep strategies you can use to climb the competitive ladder and improve your game.
Which is great... for the players who actually experience the game like that.
But, what about the rest of us? What about us poor sons of bitches that have limited time and a meager pool of would-be teammates? Those of us who just hop online with a spouse, partner, or buddy and have to rely on the slot machine that is the public queue for our teammates? How do you tilt the odds in your favor when you can only depend on yourself and one other person to shoulder the load?
That’s when you need some great duo play. A pair of characters with some good synergy and an easy strategy that works no matter what the rest of the randos on your team are doing. A pair of characters strong enough to (hopefully) drag the other four bastards across the finish line, like it or not.
Your mileage may vary, but for my money these are some of the most effective two-man teams in Overwatch.
Yacht Club Games took advantage of the Nindies Summer Showcase today and announced that their final expansion for Shovel Knight, King of Cards, will be arriving in early 2018.
As promised this Kickstarter-based DLC will feature King Knight, and will not only show off his talents, but involve some sort of card mechanic. Like before you can buy each expansion separately, or all together as part of the Treasure Trove pack. It's expected to launch as a timed Switch exclusive just like the Specter of Torment expansion.
It's sad to see Shovel Knight end like this, but who knows if Yacht Club is working on a sequel or more secret content beyond the promises of their Kickstarter.
Voltron: Legendary Defender is currently tied with The Expansefor my favorite active television series. I grew up watching the original show, but it’s got a lot more than just nostalgia going for it. The reboot is, legitimately, hilarious, and the epic mech action checks all the right boxes for me. I typically have trouble sitting through any form of passive media these days, but this dumb children’s show keeps me glued to the screen from start to finish.
Obviously, I completely lost my shit when I saw the trailer for, the new PlayStation VR game, DreamWorks Voltron VR Chronicles. Everything appears to be incredibly faithful to the source material, and it seems the original voice cast is on board too! Rhys Darby (aka Murray from Flight of the Conchords) is disgustingly good at making me laugh, so my eyes lit up like Christmas when I initially heard him speak.
For the first time since the console released, I actually really want a PlayStation VR. Even if this just ends up being a basic, half-hour long interactive episode, it looks like a lot of fun.
Failbetter Games' sequel to Sunless Sea launches today on Steam Early Access and GOG Games in Development. Sunless Skies is a top-down RPG with a literary twist -- think FTL with more story. It takes place ten years after Sunless Sea, and Queen Victoria has moved the British Empire to the skies.
You play as the captain of a locomotive in said skies, or a space pirate on a train. Fight space beasts and other pesty locomotives as you travel to distant ports, where you'll uncover stories, pick up passengers, and deal in cargo. You'll also contend with Failbetter's unique Terror, Hunger, and Heat mechanics, which affect your journey across the heavens. And apparently you can murder a sun?! That's enough to make me intrigued.
With the immense financial success of Pokemon GO last year, it doesn't surprise me other large properties like The Walking Dead are looking to get in on the augmented reality action with their own game The Walking Dead: Our World from developer Next Games.
Based on the popular AMC show, the game will be releasing for Android and iOS devices with no announcement as of yet for a release date. The game seems to be a location based augmented reality game. Judging from the CG trailer you'll be doing as you do in The Walking Dead -- fight off zombies with a variety of weapons and bad CGI.
