PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox; Treyarch/Raven/Activision If you think you know what to expect from a Call of Duty game, well … you’re probably right, but Black Ops 6 does its thing with panache Whoever thought of constructing this game’s campaign around a safe house resembling a haunted mansion on an abandoned country estate deserves an immediate pay rise. After each foray into shoot-’em-up carnage, your team of militarised misfits is deposited back into this sprawling country pile, which for some reason is filled with intriguing mysteries and puzzles: what happens if you play the piano? Where does that passage lead? What is this, scrawled in invisible ink on the wall? It’s like Scooby-Doo crossed with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – a comparison I never imagined making about a Call of Duty game. Lead developers Treyarch and Raven have had four years to work on this title and boy does it show. The multiplayer mode is both familiar and fresh thanks to its “omni-movement”, which lets you run and leap in every direction, radically altering the feel of movement and tipping the balance of lethal encounters in favour of people with spatial reasoning skills rather than lightning-fast trigger fingers. The small maps, taking in derelict radar stations, strip mall forecourts and penthouse apartments, have been intricately built to provide combinations of labyrinthine corridors, long sight-lines and sneaky cubby holes. The weapons, including 12 newcomers, are designed to exploit varying playstyles from quick-scope super snipers to Red Bull-guzzling SMG teens – and the gunsmith allows myriad ways to modify each one, with genuine tangible effects on your play. 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...

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...

Firaxis Games needed to move on from Civilization 6 because, its developers explain, ‘it was getting too big for its britches’ It’s been eight years since Civilization 6 – the most recent in a very long-running strategy game series that sees you take a nation from the prehistoric settlement of their first town through centuries of development until they reach the space age. Since 2016 it has amassed an abundance of expansions, scenario packs, new nations, modes and systems for players to master – but series producer Dennis Shirk at Firaxis Games feels that enough it enough. “It was getting too big for its britches,” he says. “It was time to make something new.” “It’s tough to even get through the whole game,” designer Ed Beach says, singling out the key problem that Firaxis aims to solve with the forthcoming Civilization 7. While the early turns of a campaign in Civilization 6 can be swift, when you’re only deciding the actions for the population of a single town, “the number of systems, units, and entities you must manage explodes after a while,” Beach says. From turn one to victory, a single campaign can take more than 20 hours, and if you start falling behind other nations, it can be tempting to restart long before you see the endgame. Civilization 7 will be released on PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation 4/5 and Nintendo Switch on 11 February 2025. Continue reading...

The creators of the Lego Star Wars and Lego Harry Potter games bring similar energy and humour to this gentle action-adventure Ever since they first clambered into shops in 2010, Funko Pop figures have been an unavoidable part of pop culture fandom, lending their black-eyed large-headed charm to everything from Ms Marvel to Mr Bean. After a couple of minor smartphone releases it was inevitable they’d eventually make it into a major video game. But what could have been a lazy cash-in looks to be a lot more promising. Funko Fusion is the first title from Warrington-based studio 10:10, formed by Jon Burton and Arthur Parsons, the directors on most of the vastly successful Lego titles such as Lego Star Wars and Lego Harry Potter. Their aim is to bring the same energy and humour to the Funko universe. Funko Fusion, then, is a classic cartoon-style action adventure, beholden to the Lego titles naturally, but also to PlayStation favourites Ratchet & Clank and Jak and Daxter. Players get to explore seven themed worlds based around Funko Pop figures and key licensor NBC Universal. As Parsons recalls: “I remember we got sent a spreadsheet, which listed everything that NBC Universal owns from back in the 1920s all the way to current day. And it was like, ‘wow, where do we start?’ That was the fun bit.” Continue reading...

PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC; Hollow Ponds/Annapurna Interactive Filling a field guide is the simple goal of this endearingly strange game, in which you float on a giant bird, collect gently surreal sea life, and shave sheep You might expect from the name that this would be a game about herding sheep, but it is significantly weirder than that. There are sheep, but they are fluffy flying sheep that float around after you as you ride the back of a giant, colourful bird. Now and then you shear them for wool with which to knit new jumpers and hats with pompoms, making the sheep look like naked purple hover-sausages with eyes. But the bulk of your flock is actually made up of sky fish. Or are they fish? Some are sinuous like eels, others squawk like chickens, others are feathered whales. As mentioned, it’s quite weird. Your job in Flock is to fill out a field guide full of these wide-eyed flying fishlike creatures, spotting them in the wild and then identifying them from short, variably obvious written clues (“floppy proboscis”, “vertical stripes”, “often mistaken for a loud radish”). They all resemble sea life through a gently surreal pop-art filter, but they’re so well-drawn that I developed a sense for the differences between a Cosmet and a Bewl, Thrips and Rustics. Some camouflage themselves among weeds or leaves, some flee your approach, some just sit there basking on rocks and clucking at you. You find whistles that teach your bird a song, and then you can collect them Pied-Piper-style into a cloud of creatures that trails in your wake. Flock is out on Wednesday; £15.99 Continue reading...