PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox; Bioware/Electronic Arts There is lots to do in this huge and beautiful fantasy world, but inconsistent writing and muted combat dull its blade Developer Bioware was never going to have it easy with Veilguard. It’s been a decade since the last Dragon Age game, a decade for fan theories to percolate and expectations to rise out of control – and that’s not to mention all the strife that’s gone on at the studio after the disappointing Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. Veilguard is by no means a bad game, with plenty of charming characters to meet and new places to see. But the writing, the heart of previous games, is surprisingly mediocre, while the new combat style gets repetitive fairly quickly. You play as Rook, an associate of Varric, who served as companion and storyteller in the previous games. Varric and Rook have been on the hunt for elven god Solas for the better part of a year. Just when it looks as if you can stop him from tearing down the Veil between the physical and nether worlds, unleashing hordes of demons in the process, a magical mishap leads to the release of two other, even worse gods. These new villains are comically evil, but they are a disappointment compared with the compelling character of Solas, who is, after all, right there. Veilguard tells his side of the story, too, through side quests. Continue reading...

The invitation to EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate that comes with the game’s unfortunately spelled sixth iteration is hard to resist, harder still to play I am feeling anxious about the world. We have had mayoral elections in my part of Canada in which one candidate was backed with more gold than Croesus, so it wasn’t even a contest. In the UK people have not got the Labour government they hoped they were voting for. And as someone who lives a few hours’ drive from the US border, I can only pray that Orange Hitler doesn’t get in again. Or maybe I pray that he does, lest our neighbours to the south end up in an election-denial-driven repeat of the civil war. So I thought I’d play a game where I get to direct the rise and fall of civilisation myself instead. As a treat. Civilization 6 is what’s known as a 4X game. 4X stands for “EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate”, a phrase that offends my pedantic spelling sensibilities. Unfortunately the four “exes” I spent a lot of time doing here was Exert, Expire, Exclaim and then Exit due to this game’s Execrable gamepad controls, which are as intuitive as a Heston Blumenthal recipe. I lost count of the times I moved the wrong unit, or had brain freeze trying to remember what button did what. I would have preferred a more common sense control system, mouse and keyboard support, or an interface that uses the power of thought, like that one Elon Musk pretends he has. Continue reading...

PC, PS4/5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox; Cozy Game Pals/Blumhouse Games Its expertly retro, low-poly visuals are a nod to Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but this horror game has an emotionally resonant story at its heart For those who remember the dawn of the survival horror genre, its aesthetic renaissance in the independent gaming scene has been a spooky delight. Crow County, The Closing Shift, Murder House – are all modern supernatural adventures that use low poly 3D visuals and blocky textures, not just as a visual hook but as a means of reconnecting with what made the likes of Silent Hill and Clock Tower scary and engaging in the first place. Fear the Spotlight, the debut title from Cozy Game Pals and new horror-specific publisher Blumhouse Games, is another wonderful, warmly chilling example. Two girls break into their high school library late at night, looking for one particular item: a spirit board, locked in a display case as part of an exhibition on the occult. Vivian is kind of a nerd, a star volunteer at the library, while Amy is a fascinating outsider, interested in the supernatural. When the two decide to hold a seance in the empty building, they make contact, not only with the dead, but a tragic event from the school’s recent past. And then Amy mysteriously disappears. Continue reading...

PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox; Nomada Studio/Devolver Digital Rarely do games move me to tears, but this tale of a woman rearing her cub in a world plagued by demons had a deep emotional effect A warrior and her wolf are running through perspective-shifting collages of the most sumptuous nature scenes I’ve ever seen in a video game. Cranes flit from shining pools, boar and stags roam in the background; as the camera zooms out on the plain, yellow flowers extending off on all sides, a cleaved mountain comes into view in the distance. But there is a corrupting force at work. Here birds fall from the sky, black flowers blooming from their tiny bodies. Formless masked demons emerge from the ground to feast on them. These are your enemies, vanquished with a thin blade drawn from your warrior’s side. But there are so many of them – and you’re just one human, and a wolf. Neva does not embellish this setup with words. You never find out what led to this corruption, or why you alone are fighting it. It tells its story with extraordinary visuals and elegant animation from developer Nomada Studio, in concert with chest-tighteningly effective music from Barcelona-based Berlinist. Many games that achieve this level of beauty suffer a little for prioritising style over substance, but Neva hits home on all levels. I was on the verge of tears at times, watching its formerly exquisite world succumb to corruption as the seasons passed, its beautiful creatures possessed by the awful blackness, birds frozen in motion, creating dreadful totems of the dead. By the end I was weeping as I clutched the controller. Continue reading...

(Mossmouth; PC) This bundle of 50 new games from the creator of Spelunky offers an electrifying range of retro genres rebooted, from point-and-click horror to Pong When he was a schoolboy, Derek Yu, one of the first indie game superstars of the 2000s, designed games on graph paper with his friend Jon Perry. After Yu’s first major game, Spelunky, became a hit, he and Perry agreed to collaborate again, no longer as classmates but as men in their 40s. This sweet backstory infuses UFO 50, a dizzyingly ambitious collection of 50 games that, so the narrative framing goes, were created by a fictional games company during the eight-year period from 1982 to 1989. Each game has the aesthetic of an Atari 2600 or NES classic – chunky sprites, a warbling chiptune soundtrack – but uses current design trends and understanding to inject old-looking games with modern freshness. Why 50? Who knows. But it’s a sufficiently high number that Yu and Perry (and some supportive developer friends) have been able to flex their design talent across an electrifying range of genres, some of which are familiar, others of which are entirely new. For example, in Party House, we must attempt to throw the best house party by achieving the perfect balance of guests, from vivacious but troublemaking rock stars, to pettable dogs, to comedians who bring the laughter at a financial cost. You’re scored on the quality of the evening you arrange, with penalties if the neighbours complain or the fire department decides your party has become hazardously peopled. Others attempt to perfect games of the era: Night Manor is a point-and-click horror story in which you’re pursued through a mansion; Bushido Ball an Edo-era themed version of Pong; Rail Heist a kinetic stealth-action game in which you play as an outlaw and his horse staging a series of train heists. Continue reading...

This RPG is the third massively multiplayer online game Amazon has published in four years, and lets you morph your heroes into animals. Is it worth a shot? Amazon has been trying to break into the games industry for years, yet despite using the vast resources at its disposal to hire some of the best designers in the business, the company struggled for years to make headway. Lately, however, Amazon has found success publishing massively multiplayer online games. First came 2021’s New World, Amazon Games’ homebrew fantasy with an emphasis on survival and player-built settlements. The following year brought Lost Ark, developed by Korean studio SmileGate, which combined large-scale multiplayer with Diablo-style fighting. Critical reception was mixed, but both games proved popular with players. This week, Amazon publishes its third MMO in four years, Throne and Liberty, also developed in Korea. Here’s everything you need to know about this latest free offering. What is Throne and Liberty? Continue reading...

PC, Xbox; Bethesda Softworks Bethesda’s gigantic space RPG’s first major expansion only highlights the game’s fundamental limitations The first story expansion for Bethesda’s big, bold, rickety space RPG arrives after a year’s worth of incremental updates that have already ironed out the game’s most egregious flaws. Those quest-breaking bugs have been squished, there are now vehicles to make planet-side travel less of a chore, city maps are at least partly useful these days, and there’s now a 60fps mode for those playing on Xbox Series X. But Starfield’s fundamental problems remain – turgid, rubbery NPCs; the baffling profusion of loading screens – but just as the Phantom Liberty expansion finessed Cyberpunk 2077 in its entirety, Shattered Space arrives poised to improve upon what came before. It appears that Bethesda has acknowledged that travelling across space by selecting planets from menus and watching a cutscene was a bit rubbish, because Shattered Space mostly takes place on a single map, much like Skyrim or Fallout. This new, self-contained narrative concerns House Va’ruun, Starfield’s slightly tiresome cult of space-serpent-worshipping zealots. The player is whooshed towards the secretive society’s homeworld after it has suffered a cataclysm, heralded as the civilisation’s potential saviour – which, naturally, means everyone has plenty of chores for you to do, busy as they are standing around staring at walls or genuflecting in courtyards. Starfield: Shattered Space is out now; £29.99 on Xbox, £25.99 on PC Continue reading...

PC, PS4/5 (version tested), Switch and Xbox One/Series X While there are no spectacular advances on last year’s game, new refinements provide a vivid glimpse of what it’s like to be a genius on the field It’s been a year since EA, having abandoned its Fifa licence, brought us EA Sports FC, the most awkwardly named sports game franchise since Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona. Sales were apparently 5% down after the switch to the catchy new moniker, but profits were up thanks to the cash-raking power of Ultimate Team, EA’s controversial, financially voracious take on a Panini sticker album. Now we’re on to the follow-up and with Konami’s eFootball still underperforming and no new Fifa title on the immediate horizon, it’s another open goal for team EA Sports. Fortunately for us, the developer is not taking its dominance for granted: there are genuinely intriguing new features here. Last year it was all about the advanced HyperMotion2 animation tech, this year it’s FC IQ, which looks to enhance the strategic side of the game by giving you intricate control over team and player mentalities. Here, you can tweak your build-up style and defensive approach, then go in and change the priorities of each individual player. Want Saka to play in an aggressively attacking rather than balanced role at Arsenal? You can make that change. Then, when you start a match his AI will be yelling at him to make forward runs at the expense of providing defensive support. It’s a fun option for Claudio Ranieri types, but a bit much if you’re just after a kickabout. Continue reading...

PC; Strange Scaffold Deep in the woods, hardbitten spec ops soldiers are having a proper falling out in this gleeful piece of pulp brilliance Harding and Burkin might sound like a law firm, but these two go way back on the battlefield. Harding was the brilliant spec ops guy who could get anything done, no matter how bloody. Burkin was Harding’s handler, and now he wants him back for one last job. Harding’s long since retreated to the woods to start a new life, so can Burkin flush him out at gunpoint? How far will each man go? And, lost in the wilderness together, who’s really hunting whom? This is the deliriously pulpy premise of Strange Scaffold’s latest action game, I Am Your Beast. What follows is not Rambo so much as an exploration of the way that Rambo has settled in the memory, all trees and traps and body counts. Strange Scaffold is known for making hectic, relentless games at a hectic, relentless pace. I Am Your Beast is another masterwork of briskness and efficiency. Binged in three hours, it’s a first-person shooter in which you’re always outgunned but endlessly resourceful. Even the longest of the game’s “micro-sandbox” missions is over in 90 seconds, been and gone before you’ve had time to register the fact that the level names all sound like Jack Reacher novels: Late Shift, Breakdown, On Your Six. Continue reading...

The collection comes from a mysterious (and fictional) 80s video game company and includes puzzles and platformers, RPGs and category-defying hybrids, all in 8-bit splendour When it comes to video games, one thing is universal: releasing one is tough. But releasing 50? At once? That’s another boss level entirely. This is the challenge for the team behind UFO 50. This much anticipated 8-bit anthology of retro-styled games is finally due to release this September, seven years after its announcement. With 50 games included, the wait is justified. UFO 50 is a jumbo variety pack of complete video games, each with its own title, genre and story. “They’re not minigames,” asserts developer Derek Yu and creator of 2008 platformer Spelunky, named one of the greatest games ever made. “Every game could exist as a full release on some 80s console or computer.” Continue reading...