Loot River
2022.05.04 / Xbox (Smart Distribution), PC
A top-down Roguelike game with an exquisite pixel art style, dubbed by PC Gamer as “the baby of “The Diablo” and “Tetris”, because in addition to the background of dungeon exploration In addition to the settings and ARPG gameplay (action, equipment system, etc.) similar to “Dark Souls”, the most distinctive feature of this work is the maze terrain design:
In “Loot River”, plots of different shapes are scattered in each scene. They are all based on squares with a side length of 1 unit. When the player moves to the top, as long as the surrounding space is enough, they can control the footsteps. The plot moves up and down, left and right. This manipulation of the terrain has a lot of significance in the gameplay: the player moves the plot strategically, sometimes in order to divide or gather the enemy group and deal with it efficiently; The exit of this floor, in the author’s opinion, although the plot looks a bit like Tetris, but the process is more Huarong Road.
This work is produced by straka.studio, a micro-studio led by independent developer Miro Straka. Straka has launched the series of “Euclidean Lands” and “Euclidean Skies” on mobile platforms in the early years. Changing the shape of the scene and adjusting the action path shows the core creator’s enthusiasm for terrain puzzles for ten years. However, in addition to tossing the terrain, the above-mentioned old games mainly play turn-based war chess similar to the “Hitman Go” series, while “Loot River” has “new” the real-time action gameplay with the theme of “Sword and Magic”. I don’t know the development team. How’s the grip.
Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters / Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters
2022.05.05 / PC
This game is a turn-based strategy game with the theme of “Warhammer 40K”. Aaron Dembski-Bowden, the best-selling author of “New York Times” and Black Library author who contributed a lot of “Warhammer” literature, is responsible for writing the script. It is published by the British manufacturer Frontier Foundary. The little-known Canadian team Complex Games is in charge of development for the reboot of the 1998 game Warhammer 40K: Gates of Chaos.
In this series, players will control and manage a team of Space Marines to fight against enemies from Chaos forces. However, in the two works, the Space Marines belong to different chapters. In the previous version of the game, players operated It is “Ultramarine”, facing the chaos space warrior “Word Bearers”, Chaos Demon and other enemy forces, the main character of “Demon Hunter” comes from the slightly mysterious “Grey Knights” (Grey Knights) Warband against the plague of Nurgle that is about to engulf the galaxy.
In terms of specific gameplay, “Devil Hunter” looks very similar to typical top-down turn-based strategy works such as “XCOM”, and according to some feedback from the media and the community, “Warhammer” art style, story background and other elements The organic integration of the game has long been a lot of flash points that can make this work stand out in the genre. For example, “Demon Hunter” pays attention to highlighting the characteristics of space warriors as one of the most elite forces in the human empire, and the game rhythm is more than “XCOM”. It is much more intense. The firepower squad faces the destruction of conventional enemies. Violent mechanisms such as critical strikes, executions, and accurate targeting to ensure hits emerge in an endless stream. As the strength of the enemy increases, it is expected that the intensity of the battle will continue to spiral upward, bringing players a sense of urgency. vulgar refreshment.
The Road to Yellow Springs / Trek to Yomi
2022.05.06 / PS4, PS5, Xbox (Smart Distribution), PC
A side-scrolling action game hatched and published by Devolver Digital, led by Leonard Menchiari, a developer who pays great attention to art style (such as his last pixel-style game “The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED]”), responsible for The development task is the Polish developer Flying Wild Hog, who is in charge of the Shadow Warrior series.
Using Unreal Engine 4, the development team wrote a love letter to Akira Kurosawa’s film. “Road to Yellow Spring” clearly pays homage to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai-themed movie in terms of audio and visual, and dilutes the HUD design and the well-defined picture. Elements such as composition, elaborate scenes and camera movements make the gameplay akin to an interactive movie.
However, whether this kind of game with the belief of “reproducing” movies can be done well, the author’s personal vigilance is generally relatively high. Unfortunately, this kind of negative expectation is released in the opening 16-minute process of IGN. It has been confirmed to a certain extent: this work has almost impeccable audio-visual performance, but it is difficult to hide the shortcomings of the game experience design. From the publicity content released, it can be seen that the battles in the game are almost all warriors who queue up with the protagonist 1v1. Knife pairing (guessing) and fighting (fisting), ordinary enemies that appear most of the time in the process can be killed with three or two blows, making “operation” give way to “viewing”, for me, these ten minutes seem quite tired.
And another unresolved question is, since the nature of the work is obviously closer to an interactive film, does “The Road to the Yellow Spring” “look” good enough? At least for PC Gamer’s editor-in-chief , the plot of this work is nowhere near Kurosawa’s related work.
Songs of Conquest
2022.05.10 / PC
The work of Lavapotion, an independent Swedish studio, a team that is very keen on board games, sword and magic fantasy, and ancient strategy games. As Lavapotion’s first product since 2017, “Song of Conquest” A turn-based strategy game with team-favorite elements.
Commenting on the game’s E3 2021 release , Kotaku Australia’s editors believe that the game is highly similar to Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia. The core of the gameplay – this is also consistent with the development team’s self-report. In “Song of Conquest”, players can choose one of the four camps with different fighting styles to fight, and lead a team of heroic units to explore the map and defeat them. Strong enemies, search for resources, manage your own base camp, and constantly upgrade your abilities. When encountering an enemy, you will switch to a checkerboard-type battlefield with a hexagonal grid for turn-based battles. According to the propaganda, this game supports local and online cooperation, and also has a built-in level editor (which can be consoled, music, script events, etc., and can be shared), which is believed to enhance the vitality of the game.
Another source of attraction of this work is the beautiful pixel-style art. Kotaku Australia calls it a JRPG, which is based on the core of “Heroes of Might and Magic”, and is based on the “Hundred Heroes Biography (Eiyuden Legend)” led by Murayama Jilong. Chronicle: Hundred Heroes)”, but let me say that the look and feel of the 2D+3D implementation in “Song of Conquest” is far better than the “2D character + 3D scene” scheme that some Japanese counterpart studios have used in recent years (typically, the first scratch HD-2D, which started this trend): In this work, the pixel images of characters, landmarks, scenes, etc. are highly integrated, with delicate and unobtrusive 3D light and shadow, and there is no abuse of depth of field, which is generally pleasing to the eye. Regarding the update and changes of the game art style since the beginning of development, the development team also released a video to tell the bitter history , which mentioned anecdotes such as the amazing preview of “The Last Night” touching the team. Interested readers can jump to Youtube to watch it. Look.
Hundred Heroes: Rising / Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising
2022.05.10 / PS4, PS5, X1, XS X|S, NS, PC
Coincidentally, the “Hundred Heroes” series mentioned above is also on sale this month. Let me introduce it in detail. This is a series led by the core team of “Suikoden” and has been successfully crowdfunded. Rabbit & Bear Studios, the ARPG series, “the father of “Fantasy Water Margin”” Murayama Yoshitaka, is mainly responsible for the true story and is scheduled to be launched in 2023. This month’s release is positioned as a “craving” prequel, mainly by Japanese developers. NatsumeAtari was completed under the guidance of the Murayama team.
The two announced works of “Hundred Heroes” have the same art style, and both use the visual presentation of the combination of 2D characters and 3D scenes, but they are quite different in the gameplay mechanism: from the information disclosed in the publicity, the actual story is more It seems to inherit the turn-based RPG gameplay of “Fantasy Water Margin”, and it is on par with the spiritual predecessors who have “one hundred singles and eight generals”, involving a large number of heroes (after all, “Hundred Heroes”); “Rise” is a A more standard horizontal ARPG, involving fewer characters, including considerable town management and construction content, will of course also play a role in introducing the true world view and story.
The birth of “Hundred Heroes” is also related to the notorious “Whampoa Military Academy” Konami: the IP of “Fantasy Water Margin” belongs to Konami, and Murayama Jilong, as the founding producer, was responsible for the production of “Fantasy Water Margin III” in 2002. A series of works (it is rumored that he had left during the development of the work due to creative differences), and then left Konami; in March 2020, Murayama announced the establishment of a new studio, Rabbit & Bear Studios, which collected many old people who participated in “Fantasy Water Margin”. Will, in July of the same year, the crowdfunding of “Hundred Heroes” was launched on Kickstarter. The minimum target was about 510,000 US dollars in two hours. In the end, nearly 4.57 million US dollars was raised, which was almost 9 times the minimum target. The community is eager to resurrect the legend. Enthusiasm is evident here.
Salt and Sacrifice
2022.05.11 / PS4, PS5, PC
This game is the sequel to the 2016 game “Salt and Sanctuary”, the former created such a 2D sideboard scene to imitate “Dark Souls” and “Bloodborne” (Bloodborne) A 2D ARPG series designed for gameplay such as Castlevania. The development team is Ska Studios, an independent studio that has been active since the XBLA era.
Except the overall art style is hand-drawn cartoon, and the level design is “flattened” to two-dimensional, most of the content of this work has a strong From Software “soul” game flavor: under the dark and depressing art tone, players need to Be careful to deal with all kinds of threatening enemies, build and upgrade your own Build, try to unlock various paths or shortcuts; this sequel also strengthens the performance of the PvP link, and the sense of balance and excitement may be more than “Salt”. With Sanctuary, at least the development team strongly recommends players who like PvP to try it out.
Evil Dead: The Game
2022.05.13 / PS4, PS5, Xbox (Smart Distribution), NS, PC
A big party work with elements of the “Ghost Man” series of movies and TV series, which was officially released for the first time at The Game Awards 2020, and was jointly produced by Saber Interactive, Boss Team Games and other teams.
The IP “Ghost Man” originated from an ultra-low-cost thriller filmed by director Sam Raimi in the 1980s. It tells the story of the protagonist group discovering a “Book of Death” during their vacation, activating spells to find evil spirits, and killing blood. The story, with thick black humor and exaggerated special effects, has become a cult masterpiece after its launch, and has now spawned a movie trilogy and three seasons of TV series.
With the popularity of “Ghost Players” film and television works, peripheral games have appeared endlessly over the years, but this work will be the adaptation of the most series of film and television works so far, because “Ghost Players: The Game” has been pulled for the first time. All copyright owners of movies and TV series have original film and television actors dubbing them to fill in their feelings to the greatest extent. More importantly, the development team has paired an extremely suitable gameplay “partner” for this IP – asymmetric multiplayer confrontation.
This work adopts a third-person perspective. Players can choose the roles they want to play from film and television works of different periods (including different interpretations of the same character), and form a four-person team to start the journey of survival. With the accumulation of kills, Unlock abilities, swipe equipment, and complete the goal of stitching cracks in other worlds; just like “Left 4 Dead” and other benchmark works in this genre, players who are tired of being a good person can also play as an elite enemy of the demon camp to It’s your job to hunt down human players.
According to the propaganda, “Ghost Players: The Game” will contain a large number of original tribute scenes and bridges. From the earliest trailer, we can already see “the place where the dream begins” – the small broken wooden house that can be called the symbol of the series, Looking forward to having a solid gameplay to support more surprises.
Snow Bros. Special Edition / SnowBros. Nick & Tom Special
2022.05.19 / NS
A power-enhanced version of the arcade remake. The original game was first launched on the arcade platform in 1990 by the Japanese manufacturer Toaplan. It is a level-based, fixed-layout platform jumping action game. Up to two players can play on the same screen. Very simple: the player’s goal is to clear all the enemies on the board. The main method is to shoot bullets, seal the enemy into a snowball, and then kick the complete snowball away. The snowball will roll layer by layer like a three-dimensional pinball. Go down, take away the enemies you hit on the road (drop the props), and finally get out of the scene; since then, the game has also derived many tests of skills, such as using only a few or even a snowball to clear the screen. Lots of points, high temperature scenarios with fires that can make snowballs difficult to complete, maintain, etc.
East Asia Project went bankrupt in 1994. After going around for many years, most of the classic IPs such as “Snowman Brothers” were taken over by Tatsujin, the new company of the original East Asia Project founder Gong Chiya Minor. This time, “Snowman Brothers” was authorized to CRT Games, a Korean studio specializing in retro game remakes. In addition to the audio-visual effects to catch up with the times, this game has added 30 levels to the 50 levels of the original arcade version, and also provides operable Enemies and the “monster mode” that uses their skills, the playable content is much richer than the original.
Lost in Deep Space: Shipbreaker / Hardspace: Shipbreaker
2022.05.24 / PC
A typical first-person simulation work, with a good sense of immersion, especially the beautiful and realistic HUD design, which left a deep impression on the author. It will be launched in the form of Early Access in June 2020, and will finally be launched this month. into the official version.
Ship breaking is an important industrial link for resource recycling in the real world. By dismantling old ships, a large amount of raw materials such as steel and non-ferrous metals can be recovered. In this work, the operation scene has been moved to space, and the player will play the role of a spaceship. Dismantling blue-collar workers owned by tycoon Lynx Corporation, using various professional tools to try to dismantle ships, earn wages, upgrade capabilities and shelter, and try to pay off astronomical debts owed to the company. Personally, I think a major point of the game is to squeeze as much high-value resources as possible from the scrap ship hand-built by the development team, and at the same time to ensure safe operation, because there are many “flammable and explosive” parts inside the ship. This is especially true of some precious parts, and once a deflagration occurs, it will be a small matter for one’s own life (?), the disintegration of the spacecraft and the flight of parts to the universe will be a big problem.
The development team of this game, Blackbird Interactive, was mainly initiated by the former Relic Entertainment and EA Canada. The CEO and Chief Creative Officer are both founding members of Relic and participated in the classic real-time strategy series “Homeworld” I and II Generation production, Blackbird is also one of the most important heirs of the “Homeland” IP, which was auctioned after the original owner THQ went bankrupt, Gearbox Software (which was recently acquired by several original Square Enix European and American studios in early 2021) (acquired by Embracer Group) and Blackbird to participate in the auction, the former eventually won, but authorized the latter to develop a sequel – that is, “Homeland 3”, which is being developed by the original team.
The reason why I talk about the above is that the author not only wants to point out that the development team has been deeply involved in the space theme for many years, it is interesting that the code name “Shipbreaker” was proposed very early in Blackbird, and the earliest corresponding is a “Homeland” series of prequels The work-that is, “Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak” in 2016, according to relevant interviews in 2020, after the completion of the above-mentioned prequels, a new prototype of “Shipbreaker” was born on the internal Game Jam, first established The use of “cutting” in the game was later influenced by the scene of the shipbreaking yard in Alang, India, and finally turned the production direction to the track of “Lost in Deep Space: Shipbreaker” in front of us.
Sniper Elite 5 / Sniper Elite 5
2022.05.26 / PS4, PS5, Xbox (Smart Distribution), PC
The professional users of sniper simulation game have finally returned after five years. It was still launched by Rebellion Development Limited, the British developer in charge of the series. The development team confirmed the news of the development of this game in early 2019, and it was not officially announced to the world until The Game Awards 2021.
Consistent with the consistent theme of the series, this work focuses on creating a role-playing experience for Allied snipers during World War II. This time, the series protagonist Karl Fairburne will go to the French battlefield in 1944 to destroy the war technology research of the Axis enemies. During the battle, players can experience the iconic X-ray kill close-up shot of this series: when performing a long-distance kill, the camera will follow the flight path of the bullet, and when it hits, the camera will cut to the enemy’s body section, showing the bullet’s impact on bones, meridians, The specific destruction of internal organs, etc., has always been one of the core selling points of the “Sniper Elite” series.
What is more refreshing is that this game also conforms to the trend of the times and strengthens the online gameplay. “Sniper Elite 5” has added an online intrusion system. Players can join the main line process opened by other players online as a German sniper. The danger of hunting is more than adding a real enemy, because the German sniper controlled by the player can obtain Karl’s position from the designated AI soldier’s field of vision, and can also give the soldier an instruction to enter the alert state, which is really exciting to think about.
When collecting information about the improvement of “Sniper Elite 5” compared to the previous work, the author browsed the attitude of some fans of the series to the outgoing demo content of the 5th generation (the complete process of the first mission), and it seems that many supporters have been pushed to anger The edge of the game, because they think that the graphics, story and other aspects of this work are too little compared to the fourth generation, which is not the quality they are happy to see after five years of waiting. As one of the demo players said , the new gameplay like invasion It may be able to calm down the anger temporarily, but if this series has six or seven generations, it is still progressing according to the efficiency between the fourth and fifth generations (and it is still so expensive), I am afraid it will be difficult for people to buy it.
Pac-Man Museum+ / PAC-MAN MUSEUM+
2022.05.26 / PS4, X1, NS, PC
The sequel to the 2014 9-in-1 work “Pac-Man Museum”, this time expanded to 14-in-1, including “Pac-Man” works released on multiple platforms since 1980.
The basic gameplay logic of “Pac-Man” is very simple, that is, Pac-Man eats along the track and avoids opponents before there is no “energy pill”, and in “Pac-Man Museum+” such a compilation that details the history of IP , you will be able to fully appreciate the whimsy of different development teams: Although the concept of “Pac-eating” is not easy to throw around, it does not prevent developers from retaining the form and working on a higher-dimensional architecture, so we You can see “Pac-Land”, which can pass the horizontal board, the puzzle game “Pac-Attack” with the flavors of “Tetris” and “Puyo Puyo”, and 3D “Pac-Attack” like a bird’s-eye view. Sonic’s “Pac N’ Roll”, “Pac-Man 256”, which continuously challenges the infinite generation of new mazes, and so on. In short, if you are very interested in what flowers “Pac-Man” can toss with, this work will be a good choice.
(The picture in the text comes from the Internet)
This article is reprinted from: https://markonreview.com/2022/05/11/2022-may-upcoming-games/
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.