But what’s wrong with that? 

We all love putting ridiculous guns in our hands, running around a large metropolis, and hunting things that are in no way a possibility.  But with Binary Domain, they take all that normality, and expand upon it.

The storyline is the typical “Robots become our slaves, and an evil person/corporation decides to make some look and act human, which of course is against the law, and now a handful of people need to bring him/her/them down.”  It all feels very Blade Runner, Terminator and Animatrix.  But what I did like about the story is that for once the Japanese are the bad guys!  No Germans, no Middle Easterners, and no Russians! How refreshing.

Story aside, some simple game mechanics help to define this game as something more than your typical war shooter.  You campaign with up to 4 other characters that are NPC or Co-op players.  Each character has his or her own assets that they bring to the table.  You might have a character that utilizes the shot gun for up close and personal combat, or a large man who knows his way around a Mini-Gun.  Each player comes preset, but you are given freedom to customize. 

How about leveling up?  Each kill gives you an experience point-esque form of currency which you can use to purchase the upgrades and weapons from any vending machine (a la Dead Space).  Though this is a game mechanic that sort of draws me out of the experience, it at least is an option.  You can also pick up artillery and firepower from fallen droids and drones.

A cool feature (cool if done well) is the Trust feature.  The trust feature works both ways.  You can earn it and lose it.   I wasn’t given much information on exactly how the Trust will change the overall outcome, but I was told that depending on character choice in relation to their trust towards you, it could present B storylines and events.  How can I earn/lose trust?  A buddy gets hit in the head by a laser toting robot, he’s bleeding pretty badly, and his screams ring out for help from a medic.  What do you do?  Help him (gain Trust) or not (lose Trust)?  It works as simply as that.

Another great feature is the voice command.  This is an optional feature.  You could also just press buttons that show up on your screen.  For those of you who have headsets and love shouting out orders to your teammates in co-op will be able to not only yell out simple commands to your troops, but are also able to dish out banter.  This will also coincide with the Trust system.  You can develop relationships with your AI teammates.  As for Co-op with online buddies, the game will support online but not split-screen multiplayer.

Then there’s the epic boss battles.  A large spidery-bot comes trampling through Japan, in the middle of the city, and only you and your two other buddies are supposed to bring it down. 

In fact, in each of the game’s six “lengthy” chapters, there are at least three colossal sized bosses.  Each boss is a puzzle, whereas you need to “discover” its weak spot before you can even attempt to bring it to its knees.  I was given a 10 minute show of the Spider Robot Boss, and even though the game designer was the one playing the level, he wasn’t able to find its weakness.  So the bosses are large, mean, tricky, and they don’t go down easy.  Not by a long shot!  The boss battles alone are enough to get me eager for this one.

With the MMO market currently dominated by World of Warcraft is there really room for yet another Star Wars flavored massively multiplayer online game, especially after what has become of Star Wars: Galaxies? BioWare seems to think so, and I’m inclined to agree.

After quite a bit of hands on time with The Old Republic I’ve come to two conclusions…

The first is that even with almost no one online, The Old Republic is still an awesome single player game. With every quest having voice over and unique cinematics it really drives the game forward. Gone are the monotonous and meaningless quests that World of Warcraft has given us for the past half a decade. Instead of grinding out quests for no other reason than to hit max level, in The Old Republic you are carving your way into Star Wars history. The characters are incredibly rich and each class has a unique story throughout the entire game.

The second conclusion I’ve come to is that, similar to adding melted cheese to anything, ship based PvP combat makes everything better. Due to a general lack of online community in the game’s alpha state I’ve only been in one star battle, and needless to say I got destroyed many, many times, but that one battle instantly took me back to my Rogue Squadron days. The ship combat is incredible and easily worth the price of admission alone.

I’ve actually been trying to avoid over exposing myself to the Old Republic simply because when it goes live, I want to play with other people. There are many, many features I’ve remained willfully ignorant of so that my friends and I can experience them together and have a blast doing it.

Even despite my self-imposed blindness I am still amazingly impressed by The Old Republic. After seven years of grudgingly continuing to play World of Warcraft, I’m extremely bored with it and was never really that enthralled with it in the first place.

With ToR though, it’s been exactly the opposite. The game is expected to release later this year, and I for one, can’t wait.

There always seems to be a little extra something in the air when the road to E3 winds down each year, and this year is no different. We are less than three weeks away from the hugely popular event and whether it is the promise of rumors being confirmed or the chance to see an anticipated title in action for the first time, there is a lot to be excited about this year as we close in on June 7^th.

 Over the next couple of weeks leading up to the event, we’ll be taking a look at Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony and filling you in on what you should and should not expect to see or hear about, out of each of their respective conferences. We’ll make some bold predictions and try to cool off some of the more unlikely rumors in an attempt to craft an outline for what you can expect out of these conferences. At the end of it all, we’ll take a shot at predicting which of these three powerhouses will “win” E3.

Today, Nintendo takes the spotlight. There’s a lot to be excited about going into E3 when it comes to Nintendo. In fact, this is probably the most anticipated Nintendo E3 conference since we were all riding the Revolution hype train. However, while there’s a lot of potential for Nintendo to shock us with a flurry of stunning announcements, there’s just as much scepticism on whether or not Nintendo can live up to this hype and deliver something spectacular. Anything shy of that may only come across as a disappointment in fans’ eyes. Without further ado, let’s jump right in and take a look at five things you can expect from Nintendo’s E3 conference…

WHAT TO EXPECT

1) NINTENDO WII 2/STREAM/PROJECT CAFÉ OFFICIAL UNVEILING

Well this was a gimme. If there’s one thing that’s for absolute certain it is that Nintendo will officially unveil their next home console on June 7^th to the masses. I would expect Nintendo to save this announcement for the second half of their conference for the sole reason that it is most definitely the biggest thing that is going to come out of the event and anything that would follow it at their conference would pale in comparison. Once all the other business is taken care of and talked about, expect a bit of hype before Nintendo rolls a video package that officially unveils the console, controller and the first game footage in a sort of montage style reel.

See what we did there?

2) NINTENDO 3DS 2011 CALENDAR BECOMES CLEAR

It is no secret that the Nintendo 3DS, while still seeing massive success, slightly fell short of what was expected following the intense hype leading up to it’s release. Nintendo won’t pull any punches in reassuring it’s fan base about the Nintendo 3DS’ potential and incoming game library. I’m fairly confident that we’ll see larger game play demonstrations or video packages for big titles such as Mario Kart, Paper Mario, Kid Icarus and Super Mario 3DS. The latter of those three will almost definitely receive a decent portion of stage time to be formally unveiled to the public. I’ll also hazard a guess and say that Mario Kart 3DS, Kid Icarus and Super Mario 3DS will all be given 2011 release dates, just to put the icing on the cake when it comes to needing a reason to own a 3DS this year.

3) LEGEND OF ZELDA: SKYWARD SWORD RELEASE DATE

There really isn’t any more time left to hold off this announcement. Nintendo will be moving on from the Wii to greener pastures soon and they need to hype up what could very well be the last big Wii release as soon as possible. A firm release date will do just that and I would be very surprised if it wasn’t for Fall 2011. I’ll even narrow it down further and say that we’ll see it released in the last three weeks of November, just in time for Christmas and in order to give the Wii one last big holiday send off as the Wii 2 will almost surely dominate Nintendo’s Holiday 2012 plans.

4) NINTENDO 3DS eSHOP COVERAGE

The eShop of the 3DS is supposed to launch later this month, only a week or two before the E3 event. I would expect Nintendo to take few moments during it’s conference to highlight some of the features of the service, detail the 3DS Netflix launch and probably even give us all a sneak peek into some of the games that will be finding their way onto our eShops and Virtual Consoles. While I don’t think it will dominate stage time in any way, it would be a missed opportunity for Nintendo not to promote this service at all, especially when it seems as though they are focusing on building stronger online systems and communities.

5) HARDCORE REUNION

Finally, I think that we’ll see a different style of press conference from Nintendo this year. There has been a lot of talk about Nintendo recapturing the hardcore crowd recently and though a lot of it stems from yet to be confirmed rumors, it is pretty safe to say that this seems to be the way Nintendo will be leaning in the next couple years in an attempt to regain their hardcore audience. Tying into this, I would say that it’s safe to say that you can expect at least one third party shocker during the Wii 2 announcement. It will most likely be something of the magnitude of Nintendo getting Rockstar on board to develop titles for the Wii 2. I think this is one of the biggest ways Nintendo can prove that it is getting serious about hardcore development in the next home console generation.

WHAT NOT TO EXPECT

1) NINTENDO WII 2/STREAM/PROJECT CAFÉ RELEASE DATE OR PRICE

While the Wii 2 will most definitely be the focus of Nintendo’s event this year, I think any announcements regarding price or release dates will be reserved for next year’s E3. It’s simply far too early to expect Nintendo to lay all of it’s cards out on the table, especially when companies like Sony are known for stealing ideas from innovators and retooling them for their own consoles. Plus, announcing a price or release date would only give Sony and Microsoft more time to react in some sort of strategic fashion, whether that be undercutting the price or pushing for a quicker release. I predict that the best we’ll get from Nintendo is confirmation that the console will definitely not be coming in 2011, but rather, sometime after March 2012.

Nintendo's Wii successor is codenamed Project Café

2) SURPRISE FIRST PARTY GAME ANNOUNCEMENT FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN WII 2

Nintendo’s big ace up their sleeve is going to be the Wii 2. On the game front, a lot of the big releases that will be coming have already been announced or shown in some way: Super Mario 3DS, Zelda: Skyward Sword, Ocarina of Time 3D, Paper Mario 3DS, Animal Crossing 3DS…the list goes on and on. We all remember when Metroid: Other M shocked all of us with its surprise announcement that no one seemed to see coming. Well, don’t expect anything in that vein to come out of E3. I think the most we will get is a showcase of titles that will be featured on the Wii 2, which I’m sure, will include favorites like Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Metroid and even Pikmin. I think the Wii has seen it’s last big surprise and the 3DS doesn’t need to surprise us this year; it just needs to deliver on what we’ve already seen. Anything that is going to shock us in the game department is going to be something in development for a 2012 release alongside the Wii 2.

3) SUPER SMASH BROTHERS 4

Prove me wrong, Nintendo! Prove me wrong!

4) ANY MAJOR FOCUS ON WII SPORTS/FITNESS/VITALITY SENSOR TYPE PRODUCTS

As I mentioned earlier, I think the bulk of the focus at this conference is going to be about Nintendo proving its allegiance to the hardcore crowd once again, and spending too much time on the above mentioned items is only going to detract from that. Having said that, the Wii has been immensely popular because of the casual crowd embracing it, so I won’t outright say that there will be NO coverage on casual products, but expect it to be brief and limited. A quick announcement for something new out of the Just Dance series and then they’ll move right along.

5) TO COMPLETELY LOVE THE WII 2

Nintendo is all about innovating and taking risks. This is going to be the first unveiling of the new console and we all remember what it was like when we first heard and saw about the Wii. “It’s called Wii?!” “It’s all motion?!” “Wii Sports has such bad graphics!” Eventually, for the most part, everyone came around in regards to the Wii and it went on to be widely successful and deliver some amazing video game experiences. I don’t think the Wii 2 will come across as quite as big a confusing gamble, but expect to have lots of concerns and questions in regards to the next home outing from Nintendo. Just remember, Nintendo knows how to deliver on its risks and its promises.

There you have it. Nintendo’s showcase at this year’s E3 is promising to be absolutely spectacular. Don’t miss next week when we delve into what you can expect from Microsoft at the big event.

A man wearing a long leather coat and faintly ludicrous ten gallon hat stands with his back to the camera, looking out over a sun-drenched canyon floor. He recites verses to himself absently, gobbets of Old Testament, his Californian twang calling to mind the clatter of saloon doors, the hiss of tumbleweeds at high noon. Bristles of fern and tall cacti ripple in the heat rising from the sand.

It could be a scene from one of Thomas Ford’s rootin’ tootin’ epics, but this isn’t the Wild West – or at least, not the one we remember. The camera sweeps round, exposing the Kevlar plates strapped to the man’s chest and the pick-up truck parked behind him. Voices crackle over an earpiece, and gunshots cut through the sizzling air, dragging the anonymous warrior-preacher and his audience back to the modern era.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a game with one foot in the past – or more precisely, perhaps, a game with one foot in the present. The third in Techland’s hard-boiled gun-slinging series, it enters a world in which the Wild Western shooter, once just another bandito fleeing the wrath of Sheriff Contemporary Middle Eastern Scenario, has ridden to fame and fortune. That’s mostly the work of one videogame, the much-caressed, multiple-zillion-selling Red Dead Redemption, and it’s of course this game, however fairly or unfairly, that The Cartel will be measured against when it hits consoles and PC later this year.

Lacking Rockstar’s cultural cachet and reliably excellent writing, just how are the Techland gang and publisher Ubisoft to set their whiskery brainchild apart? Well, firstly by sternly resisting the temptation to go open world, a prospect toyed with at intervals in the otherwise heavily micro-managed Bound in Blood.

Outlaws to the trend

“It’s true that Red Dead Redemption is an excellent game, and if you release a western game now you’re going to be compared,” Senior Producer Samuel Jacques admits to VGD after walking us through a two-mission demo, “That said, we’re a different kind of game. We’re a shooter, we’re more action-oriented, while RDR is what Rockstar knows how to do very well – it’s a sandbox game where you can wander through the environment.”

Nice place for a picnic.

The other point of differentiation is a tad more drastic: The Cartel’s 16 missions take place over a century after the events of Rockstar’s magnum opus, scattered across the ganglands of Los Angeles, the Mexican town of Juarez itself and the intervening desert. But hold your horses a second, pardners – can a game in which mouthy tattooed pimps unload automatic weapons at spangly inner city discotheques really be styled a “Wild Western”? Why yes, Tex, yes it can – and “style” may be the key word.

In Techland’s view, conjuring the spectre of the American frontier isn’t a question of adhering to chronology, but of embracing certain archetypes and attitudes, a certain look and feel. “We keep saying that the Wild West was universal, it was not an era, it was a spirit – we want to prove that,” Jacques explains. “We’ve been saying that since the first Call of Juarez.”

Which makes perfect sense when you think about it: the Wild Western in film and literature has always been rather closer to fiction than documentary reality, whether you’re talking about the clean-shaven, clean-living John Wayne kind or the oppressive, unsentimental No Country For Old Men variety. By freeing the genre of its historical shackles, time-warping its tropes and techniques into modern-day America, Techland’s writers have set the stage for some spicy bits of self-referential humour, like the directorial gag outlined in my opening paragraph.

As I walk through the shadow of the valley of death I shall fear no evil, for the checkpoints are evenly spaced...

Less agreeably, they’ve also treated the Wild Western to a fresh layer of controversy. Mere hours after The Cartel was announced, Fox News Latino accused Ubisoft and Techland of glamorising real-life violence in the region. Juarez, see, is a very real township, and not one trumpeted for its law-abiding youth. The broadcaster’s case, apparently based on a single press release, is as rife with assumption as you’d expect, but in Fox’s defence, the implication that the romanticised anarchy of the Old West can be easily equated with the current state of the US-Mexican border deserves a bit of scrutiny.

Jacques says the Cartel team are following the Fox story “pretty closely”, but that the game itself will steer clear of any socio-political nitty-gritty. “The game was Call of Juarez for years before events took such a dimension,” Jacques tells us. “We are not really depicting any real life act. The game is an entertainment product.”

“We’re going to Juarez, but it could happen somewhere else,” he adds. “We could go to Argentina. We’re not supporting the violence – we’re playing cops, we’re not playing the Cartel guys.”

It’s rare these days that a first-person shooter manages to be interesting. Plenty are enjoyable, many are even worth buying, but few genuinely intrigue. “Oh look,” you’ll say. “A new shade of brown. Fascinating.” Or: “My god, you shot his arm off. Let us now exchange high fives in accordance with age-old masculine tradition.”

Splash Damage’s Brink, however, is all interest. There’s the setting: racked by environmental catastrophe, mankind has retreated to an enormous, blue-toned floating city called the Ark and, mankind being mankind, is embroiled in a full-scale civil war over the on-board resources.

There’s the souped-up art design, and particularly the beguiling goofy character models, poised somewhere between Team Fortress 2 and Francisco Goya’s satires – what you might get if you treated Duke Nukem to a selection of equatorial re-skins and stretched him out on a rack.

Bioshockish, no?

And of course, there’s the replay-friendly team-based action at the game’s heart, driven on the one hand by a freeform multiple objective system, and on the other by an uncommonly lush level of avatar, class and load-out customisation, extending from how you style your hockey mask to how you manage the recoil on your shotgun.

But most importantly of all, given recent revelations on the publishing front, there’s the parkour. As you may be aware, Electronic Arts has cast doubt over the future of the free-running, free-thinking Mirror’s Edge franchise.

This makes us sad pandas. You know what makes us sadder pandas, though? A security team dug in around a prison gate, supported on both flanks by automatic turrets and bolstered to the rear by annoyingly elusive medics. Pandas aren’t cool with annoyingly elusive medics. But never fear, there’s a solution. It involves a combination of our character’s Light build – which makes him puny but fleet-footed – a nearby stairway of horizontal pipes, and left bumper, or as Splash Damage calls it, the SMART button.

SMART stands for Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain, which stands for Mirror’s Edge With Decent Guns. Run into a raised surface while holding the bumper, and you won’t simply grind against it – or worse, glue your back to it, acquiring a sudden, inexplicable resilience to incoming fire.

Instead, you’ll clamber up and bound right off the obstacle – a phoenix bursting from the ashes of lock-to-cover tedium, arms spread to grasp at new and exciting possibilities. And ledges. Ledges like the one overlooking the gate, from which cosy vantage point to drill those irksome medics full of red-hot nickel. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

On first load, Brink presents the player with an ostensibly simple choice: you can attempt either to halt the Ark’s slow spiral to self-destruction, or escape it before everything goes to hell.

Choose to save the place, and you’ll wind up in the arms of the Resistance, junk-loving lower caste sorts who have cobbled together their own settlements on the outskirts of the city. Elect to call it quits, and you’ll be welcomed into the ranks of the Ark’s enforcers, with their riot helmets, boot polish and cool corporate pigmentation.

One thing the two sides have in common is a spread of ethnicities, reflecting the Ark’s population of drifters and refugees. While it’s possible to fashion a stubble-headed son of Sam, belligerent black sports star or thin-lipped Yakuza with the character editor, the templates range far beyond these well-trodden baselines.

Slip-sliding awaaaay...

My ability to match faces with places isn’t up to much, but I was able to pick out Frenchies and South Africans in the default line-up, each mug dripping with a personality that’s worlds away from the porcelain effigies we’re accustomed to in certain other Bethesda releases.

And that’s more than some mere question of cosmetics. Brink’s plot lacks an obvious main character and is, we’re guessing, short, with only eight maps to its name. Opening and concluding cut scenes provide each mission with a bit of narrative momentum, but the bulk of the fiction, lead writer Ed Stern tells us, must be teased out of the make-up of the environments themselves and the gun-toting caricatures who scurry through them.

We’re talking about “emergent storytelling”, then, that old friend of the ludologist critic – an increasingly familiar quantity in solo gaming, but still comparatively unknown (or at least uninvestigated) in multiplayer circles.

The two maps on show are thickly layered with backstory. Besides the run-down prison, there’s Container City, a dockyard slum composed of bright, rusty blocks of shipping crate. Graffiti draws the eye to remote doorways, but the other team gives us very little leisure to take stock as we escort a bunker-busting drone to an illegal bio-weapons lab (“Or is it?” Stern mysteriously interjects).

Thanks to the SMART system – and regardless of whether you patch turrets as an Engineer, don disguises as an Operative, haul ammo as a Soldier or toss healing shots as a Medic – Brink’s gunplay is a fluid, fast-paced affair. It’s possible at intervals to find a corner, bust out the ironsights and defend against all comers, particularly if you plump for a Heavy character. But default to this tactic too regularly and you’ll spend a lot of time at the bottom of the scoreboards.

Nimbler opponents will slide under your shots, kicking out your legs in the process. Others may ignore you altogether, switching their waypoints to softer objectives by way of a stripped-down selection wheel on D-pad up.

And when they do, you’ll come to appreciate the bitter pearl at the heart of Brink’s experience system: shooting people is not the only, nor even the best way to crank out experience points. Those who buff their comrades and burn through the mission to-do list will earn their unlocks quicker than players who tot up scalps.

Just to recap that last point for emphasis: this is a multiplayer FPS that thinks you have better things to do with your time than kill things. Little old London-based Splash Damage may not have the resources of a Guerrilla or the brand power of a Valve, but if sheer ballsiness counts for anything, the studio’s next game is a match for every other shooter you’ll play this year.

There’s a key line of dialogue towards the beginning of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, a pivotal point in the game’s opening hour. Big sweaty bald man Caddoc and foxy Elf chum E’lara are strolling through a ruined temple one morning when they’re accosted by an enormous pair of spectral bosoms.

“Hi you guys, I’m Seraphine,” husks the enormous pair of spectral bosoms, not in precisely those words. “See that funny green crystal on the plinth with the skeleton slumped against it? That’s a deathstone, and it can bring you unimaginable riches and power. Why don’t you pick it up?”

Our heroes glance at each other. “But it’s a deathstone,” ventures Caddoc, after a pause. “Next to a dead body.”

Erik Wolpaw could have done more with the material, but I chuckle nonetheless, and that chuckle says a lot. To be precise, it says: “Thank the gods. Hunted: The Demon’s Forge may be a game where sultry waifs who have trouble seeing their own belly buttons foist ominously-named artefacts on passers-by. It may be a game with runes and loincloths and monsters that look like wrestlers draped in radioactive Pot Noodle.

“And it may be a game where the man speaks Cockney because dude, that’s way manlier than regular English, while the woman talks posh because mate, everybody knows that elves are posh. But it retains just enough wit and insight to realise how truly ludicrous all this truly, truly is.”

When VGD spoke to InXile Entertainment president Matt Findley last March about the Californian studio’s new action role-player, he was careful to distinguish between Hunted’s “dark fantasy” and the so-called “high fantasy” of games like Baldur’s Gate. The difference will probably be lost on those to whom one set of pointy ears or hats is much like another, and when Findley splits hairs during our hands-on months later, observing that Hunted is towards the “darker end” of dark fantasy, we’re tempted to roll our eyes and suggest he turn the gamma up.

Despite his size and strength, Caddoc's a cautious fellow.

Actually, InXile is quite right to labour the point. High fantasy is magisterial, severe in its parsing of lore, humourless. But dark fantasy – dark fantasy can afford to crack jokes, and therein lies its redeeming value. Zooming in on the grubbily amoral and ingloriously violent aspects of fantasy’s founding myths creates a marvellous potential for absurdity. Take Hunted’s serial mistreatment of non-player characters – beloved of RPGs like Dragon Age, they’re lucky to last a minute here before the hammer comes down.

At one point in our session, for instance, an imposing bloke in a horned helmet instructs Caddoc and E’lara to commandeer an Orc – sorry, a Wargar catapult before it wipes the town of Dyfed off the map. He then follows the pair into the main square and dutifully walks under a falling house, expiring in a puff of dispersing organs.

Caddoc and E’lara are a good fit for such brutally unfeeling comedy: they’re mercenaries, wandering Hunted’s sumptuously arrayed world with no higher aim than making money, and when Seraphine’s dad, the grotesquely obese mayor of Dyfed, proposes that they scour the catacombs for the source of the Wargar threat, haggling quickly commences. By this stage Caddoc and E’lara have already (secretly) agreed to collect magical crystals for Seraphine herself, trading them for new abilities and magic by interacting with the wisps of unearthly light that dot the path ahead.

Hunted may look like a meat-grinder, a ham-fisted experience-cruncher in the old dungeoneering tradition, but the level structure is redolent of latter-day third-person action titles like Gears of War – a cinematic corridor where sword-fights and brain-ticklers jostle for a share of your attention. Nor does it suffer from the comparison – indeed, there are things Epic’s designers could learn from this game, like how to make room for exploration without losing your thread.

Entering Dyfed’s lower levels, Caddoc and E’lara encounter an enchanted door shaped like an enormous stone head, which hints at the legendary door-opening properties of a certain blue flame. A single side-passage soon leads us to the phenomenon in question, but it also takes us past a secondary objective – a tomb packed with tasty mythical weapons, unlocked on production of four mystic runes.

Pushing a little further down the passage, which eventually loops round to the talking door, we find the runes tucked into crevices and alcoves (along the way, Caddoc narrowly escapes being eaten by a giant spider in a solitary burst of QTE mashing). Back at the tomb, there’s a skeletal warrior to duff up before swiping the prize.

By contrast, E'lara's a fiesty one. Don't expect her to keep her distance forever.

Next to such gentle triumphs of arrangement and pacing, the combat can feel a little crude. The shoulder cam shooting seems ill-advisedly prominent for a game set in Ye Olden Days – however buffed, double-buffed or laden with spiky bits, bows and crossbows can’t rival the impact and, well, the bass of gunpowder weaponry. The two-button melee system meanwhile is badly in need of a lock-on of some sort, or failing that a strafe modifier – I’d often find myself turning my back on a foe when I meant to circle him, shield raised against his blows.

That’s thinking about the mechanics in isolation from the co-op functionality, though, on which much of Hunted’s entertainment value is predicated. Caddoc and E’lara skew towards hand-to-hand and ranged combat respectively – her primary weapons are longbows, while he favours cleavers and maces – and set pieces draw out each character’s strengths in simple but successful ways.

There’s a boss battle at the close of our demo, for instance, which kicks off as a cover shoot-out, E’lara stuffing wall-top goons full of exploding purple arrows while Caddoc does his best to look threatening with a bog-standard crossbow. Eventually the Wargar mage at the heart of it all throws a tantrum, descends to ground level and starts teleporting around the arena, tossing fireballs. The balance between partners thus shifts – Caddoc wrecking faces, E’lara reacquainting herself with the beauties of the evasive roll.

If one character is downed, the other has a few seconds to revive him or her by tossing a resurrection vial. Last year, we feared that letting players patch each other’s wounds from afar would take the risk out of splitting up, but in practice, having to face a needy comrade and hit B button during a brawl is engagingly hazardous. Only a handful of healing and resurrection potions can be carried around at once, visible on the character models themselves in a Dead-Spacey twist. All told, anybody worried that InXile has taken the easy way out with co-op should quit their wittering.

Besides the old revival juice, the glue holding Caddoc and E’lara together is magic. Lightning bolts and tornadoes have obvious applications, but you can also use them to power up or “battle-charge” your partner, which is probably a good way to forge lasting relationships online. Elemental spells also facilitate tag-team moves, because nothing says “let’s go for a pint afterwards” like turning somebody to ice so your mate can shatter them with a hammer.

Co-op is available in online and splitscreen flavours. Apparently there's a level creator waiting in the wings, too.

Actually, Hunted’s handling of spells tells you a lot about the game as a whole – about its blend of cleverness and stupidity, of cliche, meathead action, black irony and elegance. Fireballs are the “default pistol” in a wizard’s arsenal, but the ones you’ll call on here behave just a little differently – they roll like grenades, and require a touch more finesse of the player than is usual.

And when you’re working in genre fantasy, and attracting comparisons with the likes of Gears of War, those little flashes of individuality are crucial. Hunted won a few headlines last year by promising to “bring back” the classic dungeon-crawler, but we’re more excited, in the end, by how InXile has brought it forward.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is out on 1st June in the UK and 3rd June in the US.

Love, as Bill Shakespeare off Moulin Rouge once quipped, is a many-splendoured thing. Love comes in all shapes and sizes, times and places. There’s the kind most of us yearn for, the unquestioning, natural kind that manages to feel entirely off-the-cuff yet solid as a rock, and the fraught love that hangs from every word or gesture, and the love that somehow survives in the face of jibes, pulled hair and thrown crockery. There’s the love you read about on Valentine’s Day cards, and there’s the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

And then there’s the love that burns houses and topples dams, the insatiable, incubus-love that loves too hard and too fast, and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the love Kid Icarus bears for your lenses and retinas. Many-splendoured? You don’t know the half of it, William.

Nintendo could have picked a better time of day to introduce the UK-based gaming press to playable 3DS builds in January. With flights leaving London for Amsterdam at ungodly hours in the morning, most of us arrived at the venue in a zombified state, begging for caffeine or, failing that, a defibrillator, less than prepared for the unique perceptual demands of a parallax barrier screen.

I wasn’t doing too badly, at first. Super Street Fighter IV gave me a bit of a headache, but Pilot Wings mollified my protesting lobes with its primary colour panoramas, and the pacing of Resident Evil 5: Mercenaries allowed me to digest the illusion of depth comfortably. But then I got hold of Kid Icarus: Uprising, and the world exploded into a billion, shrieking, rainbow fragments.

Kid Icarus: Uprising - not to be confused with what you'll see after visiting one of Amsterdam's famed coffee shops.

Where the ancient original Kid Icarus was a side-on action-platformer, Uprising is an on-rails shooter cut from the Sin & Punishment mould. Commanding the infant Pit, a teeth-grindingly perky mix of Cupid and any given protagonist from Insert Square Enix Game Here, players hurtle through the skies of a fantasy world, zapping bogies and being zapped at in turn. There are a lot of those bogies, they send a lot of heat your way, and the landscape behind them teems with colour and motion.

The general experience is thus of dozens of objects flying towards your mug at somewhere near the speed of sound. With the 3D off, this is very impressive. With the 3D on, it’s a little like throwing handfuls of glass Christmas decorations at a bank of industrial fans. Dazzling, yes, but painful.

As the perspective fills with bat-winged eyeballs, streaking plasma bolts, whirling contrails and gormless farting jellyfish, the natural instinct is to lash out, stymieing the onslaught before your optic nerve starts to crisp. Occasionally developer Project Sora relents, toggling cruise control in order to show off some monstrous background feature, like the smug spectral outline of Medusa, Pit’s nemesis. But the reprieve is inevitably short, the ensuing fury all the more furious.

There are some nasty/jaw-dropping surprises in store. At one point in the second (and tougher) of the demo’s levels, Pit circled a shadowy Gothic castle, shooting the breeze with off-screen cheerleader/heavenly sponsor Palthena. Relaxing a little, I allowed my eyes to focus appreciatively on the distant, lavishly-modelled crenellations and turrets. Suddenly – PRANG – lollypop-red laser beams raked the foreground, sending the muscles of my irises into paroxysms. It was like being punched in the face by Disneyland.

As with other 3DS action games, the blow can be softened by tweaking the projection continually (during my hands-on a smiling, inexplicably cruel PR person kept pushing the slider up to full). It’s hard to get the better of the game’s bone-shattering control setup, however. Using the touch screen to aim makes sense, but this leaves your left hand in charge of both movement with the thumb pad and attacking with left shoulder button.

In a game geared to continual dodge-shooting, putting that kind of weight on one pincer is a big ask. Imagine, if you will, popping every bubble in a two metre sheet of bubble-wrap, at speed and in random order, and you’ll have a fair approximation of the things Uprising will do to your thumb, forefinger and wrist. The agony reaches its apex when Project Sora introduces a dash move, triggered by two tricky-to-articulate sideways tugs, which keys into more powerful projectile attacks.

Zap - there goes my fitness for military service.

When he isn’t scouring the heavens like an angelic toilet brush, Pit likes to throw down with the Medusan hordes on terra firma, shoulder shooter style. Players gain control over the camera in the process, stroking the periphery of the screen to orient it in large-ish increments.

This is less awkward than it may sound to those who heed the Call of Duty, thanks to broad, obstacle-free level design and a no-nonsense waypoint indicator, but responding to threats from the rear (after dashing through a charging foe, for instance) shows up the clunkiness of the system. All told, it’s hard not to wish the developer had stuck to the on-rails template, dialling back the pace a few notches to accommodate slightly more complex enemy behaviours.

If Steel Diver and Street Fighter are the meat in the 3DS sandwich, Kid Icarus: Uprising is the dressing – a high-saturate dousing of proof-of-technology, flexing the handheld’s not-inconsiderable processing muscles and squeezing the very last thimbleful of sex appeal from the 3D display. The risk, of course, is that all this excess will come at the expense of a game you can relax with. Uprising is clearly a labour of love, restoring a forgotten franchise to the limelight, but playing it is something of a labour too.

Release dates have yet to be announced.

As a sport, tennis has found itself as something of a poster child for motion control gaming. Since Wii Tennis convinced an entire generation that they could be front-room Federers, the intuitive pleasures of swinging an imaginary racquet have proved to be a smash with the more active of gamers.

Celebrating its twelfth year now, the Virtua Tennis series is almost a victim of its own success. Having replicated the fine English art of tennis so effortlessly on their first attempt, Sega found the series in an evolutionary dead end, with leaps in character roster and texture resolution merely cherries on top of an already a beautifully complete cake. Following the lukewarm reception the Sumo Digital-developed Virtua Tennis 2009 received, development duties have been handed back to Sega’s legendary AM3 studio, headed up by series’ producer, Mie Kumagai. We briefly caught up with Kumagai on her recent visit to London to discuss the challenges of breathing new life into the classic franchise.

As with Virtua Tennis 3 before it, player detail is beautifully observed. Everything from beads of sweat to popping veins.

Having been at the cutting edge of bringing 1080p gaming to PS3 and Xbox 360 back in 2006, Kumagai explains the most pressing challenges her team faced in approaching Virtua Tennis 4: “Tech-wise, Virtua Tennis 4 is the first time the development team has supported all home platforms at the same time – Wii, 360 and PS3. Adding the motion control through PlayStation Move, Kinect and MotionPlus has doubled the challenge, plus we have completely remade the online system from scratch to provide the best experience possible. Tech-wise it was a huge challenge.”

These are challenges that after hands-on time with the game have been met with varying degrees of success. Working within the boundaries of each console’s idiosyncratic capabilities appears to have produced a clear disparity between versions; and the PS3 takes the grand slam victory. Visually the HD formats obviously take centre court, though the added bonus of 3D means it’s advantage PS3. Sony may have had a difficult time selling 3D to the gaming hardcore, but the benefit of true depth perception in a sport like tennis is undeniable, making for a far more a more playable motion controlled experience.

The PS3 takes the second set too, clearly emerging the victor in the motion control stakes. While both Move and MotionPlus offer the subtleties of slice and top spin, Kinect’s simplistic control scheme does neither, offering perhaps too realistic a simulation of what it would be like to play real tennis with just the palm of your hand. Both HD versions include the ability to approach the net by simply stepping towards your TV – an option that the camera-free Wii can’t replicate.

When playing with motion controls the view switches between thid and first person perspectives. The delicate balance of utilising the licensed players and putting you in the shoes of said player.

One area that all three versions dismiss entirely is the thorny issue of player-controlled movement, and the result is one that vindicates Nintendo’s reductive Wii Tennis approach. Following overwhelmingly negative feedback to player-controlled movement in Virtua Tennis 2009, movement is handled automatically, leaving you to focus purely on those court-splitting returns.

To long-term devotees of the series the whole discussion of motion control is a moot point. Virtua Tennis’ perfectly nuanced digital control scheme has worked flawlessly for over a decade now and many see the entire motion control issue as an unnecessary gimmick. This is an issue Sega have been quick to address, reassuring players that motion controls are only an option for the adventurous rather than the default control scheme for the series from here-on in. The gulf between the two play styles is great, with motion control users unable to play their digital counterparts. In fact the game ships without the option for online motion controlled play, though this is apparently planned for later inclusion via DLC.

Digital players need not feel totally abandoned by the new feature set, as the new match momentum meter is an exclusive feature for traditionalists. As you land successive returns using your player’s trademark shots, you build a meter that when full can be used to unleash a super shot that puts your opponent on the back foot, allowing you to regain momentum in gruelling rallies. The effect is pronounced but never unbalanced and still requires skill on the part of the aggressor to make the shot pay off.

Ten all-new mini-games will be included in the package, along with the return of some old favourites.

The new world tour mode has been rebuilt from scratch, with a specific focus on addressing the complete lack of challenge and variety of VT 2009. Careers are now split into four seasons (America, North Europe, South Europe and Japan) and each season features a unique route across a packed map screen. Working your way up the seeding list will earn tickets to travel to new areas and there are plenty of other ways to kill time such as handling publicity events, signing autographs and even giving money to charity – even the prospect of realistic minor injuries sounds preferable to the monotony of VT 2009’s career.

To end with we ask Kumagai how her experience with the series has changed over the past decade: “It’s been over a decade that I’ve been involved with Virtua Tennis and I feel that the major changes in creating the series have really been limited by technology. When Virtua Tennis first came out on the Dreamcast, people were blown away by the realism of 3D polygon tennis and when we introduced 1080p resolution we really increased minute details like blades of grass on the court and realistic textures on player’s faces. Now we have 3D on the PS3 and the different motion control options, so over the last decade we have always tried to look at the technology to see how we can deliver Virtua Tennis in the most innovative and modern kind of way.”

There’s been considerable noise and fuss over the rather, shall we say, “comfortable” state of currently announced Nintendo 3DS software. Too many familiar faces, goes the refrain, not enough compelling new blood. This is an unjust complaint for three reasons. One, launch wave titles are backward-looking affairs almost by definition – the last thing most right-thinking publishers want to do is try out something new on commercially untried hardware. Two, the day we turn our noses up at the combination of Super Street Fighter IV, a workable analogue stick and medium-length train journeys is the day this here United Kingdom tips over into the Atlantic Ocean.

But most importantly of all, the people whining about the prevalence of old names on the handheld are turning a blind eye to Steel Diver, perhaps the tastiest 3DS exclusive in the offing. It’s easy to turn a blind eye to Steel Diver, to be fair. Screenshots suggest a somewhat characterless underwater shooter, all muddy blues and coppery browns and cute but generic cartoon submarines. There are enemy tubs, nobbly mines and tetchy, tentacled molluscs to blow up or avoid while exploring ripple-haunted aquatic landscapes, each stocked with Saturday morning cartoon props like carved Aztec statues and wrecked pirate galleons.

The fact of the matter is, the old adage about needing to play something before you pass judgement is more than usually true of this naval oddity, an ancient DS tech demo that blew through to the big-time at E3 2010. For one thing, the much-vaunted, much-questioned 3D effect brings the presentation into its own. Background objects are more precisely defined against the all-pervading murk, the shimmer of surface radiance accentuates the curve of your hull, and the water itself acquires a beguiling sense of volume and heft. It’s still no eye-popper, but that’s to Nintendo’s advantage in some ways: Steel Diver won’t tax your lenses like certain other 3DS titles. The thrill of visual projection here is gentler, more accommodating, enhancing rather than overriding the experience of play.

Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto likens the game to a pocket aquarium. With high explosives in it.

And that’s crucial, because Steel Diver has plenty of other ways to tax you. Submarines are steered not with the D-pad but by moving various sliders and wheels on the touch screen, mocked up to resemble a nautical dashboard. To accelerate, for instance, you press and drag the engine slider into the positive. Or, to raise the sub’s nose, roll the steering wheel forty-five degrees anti-clockwise.

It’s a ponderous, unintuitive system, and were this your average air or space-based schmup I’d be so much torn drifting metal by now, but nothing happens quickly on (or under) the high seas. You could catch the Eurostar to Calais in the time it takes a torpedo to find its target, and fit in a sexy weekend at Paris before the accumulated pounding sends your vessel to the bottom. Top speeds are reached only reluctantly, even aboard the smallest and nimblest of the three playable subs, and the dreamily unhurried physics system will have you scraping sparks from every boulder till you learn to reverse-thrust several beats ahead of when you’d like to stop.

Accordingly, the idea isn’t to dart in and out of engagements by the seat of your diving suit, but to plan out manoeuvres carefully by way of the sonar map on your dash. That’s not to say you won’t have to think on the hoof at times – in one of the missions we tackled, destroyers battered us with depth charges while sneaky subs threw torpedoes our way from marginally off-screen. Air is health, and you can replenish it simply by going topside (if you dare), but critical damage will make your submarine leak. Fortunately, the swift application of a stylus point is all it takes to inch a punctured craft back into the green.

The feel is less, in the end, that of a shoot ‘em up as of something akin to that old momentum-managing favourite Lunar Lander. Inertia and water resistance are both your allies and your nemeses as you struggle to out-cap’n other cap’ns, unloading torpedoes not at where they are but where they will be by the hoped-for second of impact. It’s thoughtful action with a splash of strategy, straying just near enough to simulation to challenge, while retaining enough insta-fixy twitch value that you wouldn’t mind whipping it out on the bus.

Left hand down a bit. (Any Navy Lark listeners in the house?)

We were unable to try the periscope shooting gallery mode during our hands-on, not so much for want of time as for being unabashedly embroiled in the main game, but acquaintances have sung its praises. Using the 3DS gyrometer to move the scope, players must blow nearby ships out of the water. It sounds like a nice, relatively brainless break from the carnage beneath the waves, give or take a few niggling concerns about the marriage of motion sensitivity and autostereoscopic 3D.

I can’t imagine Steel Diver topping pre-order charts – for all the whinging about derivative software portfolios, consumers can be relied on to play things safe – but in its own, quirky way the game stands head and shoulders over everything I’ve seen on 3DS so far. True-blue originals are rare enough even on long-established platforms, and this one has the makings of a classic.

Hope it shows up over ‘ere then – Steel Diver has yet to be confirmed for European release. The Yanks get it alongside the 3DS on 27th March.

Dragon Age II spins a good yarn. Several, actually. In a reflexive twist, BioWare’s latest attempt to press banknotes from chunkily rendered orc-flesh makes storytelling a part of its fiction: the new leading man (or woman) is a chap (or chappette) named Hawke, but you’ll step into the shoes of this martial prodigy only via the less-than-trustworthy recollections of old dwarven pal Varric, under questioning by members of the Chantry, principal god-botherers in the cosily generic realm of Ferelden.

It seems another cataclysm is in the offing, and the aforesaid Hawke is the only mega-upgradeable, non-gender-specific hero for hire who can avert it. Hawke beat the stuffing out of the Darkspawn – Dragon Age’s recurrent demonic menace – back in the day, see, and Varric’s interrogator Cassandra is convinced that somewhere in the chronology of said stuffing-beating lies the solution to Ferelden’s present, undivulged troubles.

Varric isn’t overly disposed to throw his captors a bone, however, being less than enamoured of the Chantry and its inquisitorial methods. He treats Cassandra to a dubious account of the final clash which doubles, rather handily, as a playable introduction to the game’s three classes, pitting a powered-up rogue or warrior plus swap-in mage accomplice against waves of dribbling leatherheads.

That's Bethany on the right there. I wish *my* sister knew how to set people's bottoms on fire.

But Cassandra’s not swallowing any amateur dramatics, expressing her disdain for the exaggerations of history books by impaling one on her dagger. She orders Varric to go back to the beginning, at the height of the first game’s Darkspawn outbreak, when Hawke and his family were just another clump of refugees fleeing the horde.

The mediated, slippery narrative is easily the most intriguing thing about the new Dragon Age, promising to wreak havoc on tired plot devices as Cassandra cross-examines Varric, dissecting his calculatedly patchy memory, sorting fact from fancy. Where the original gave us a labyrinthine but slightly prosaic tale of small-time adventurers rising to world-saving prominence, the new aims to shatter and reformulate the grandiosities of other RPGs from scene to scene, continually scratching beneath the surface of Hawke’s fable. It’s as much a critique of fantasy’s shabbier habits as a fantasy itself, the Spike Jonze of the Dungeons & Dragons milieu.

The gameplay has its competing strands, too, and much like Varric’s sensational war story, some of them are less convincing than others. A baroque, jargon-laden monstrosity in an age of scrubbed-up Facebook sims and levelling online shooters, Dragon Age: Origins was feted by fans of Bioware’s reputation-making Baldur’s Gate series. But in winding back the clock to 1998, the developer struggled to replicate the faster, showier flow of latter-day, console-leaning stat-crunchers, and the result, on Xbox 360 and PS3, was a shonky halfway house – an action game hand-cuffed to an auto-attack, a strategy game hobbled by a third-person view.

Rather than trying to bring about another best of both worlds, BioWare has laboured to make each version of the game its own entity. PC gamers can look forward to more top-down micromanagement in freeze time, the weighing of this cone-effect flame spell against that teleporting backstab, this petrification potion against that acid flask. Console gamers, meanwhile, will find things decidedly more hack ‘n’ slashy. There’s the same breadth and depth of tools and features to either side of the line, but the control and pacing are worlds apart.

The number of on-screen foes has burgeoned, reflecting the new emphasis on massacres.

Before plunging further into Hawke’s backstory, I’m invited to put my own spin on the bloodied, rugged ’70s porn extra who serves as default male avatar. There’s the usual avalanche of sliders and pigments, letting you tweak everything from nose width to eye colour, but BioWare has sacrificed choice of species in order to better choreograph the plot. That’s the official line, anyway. The development team may simply loathe dwarves and elves, and given the quantities of man-hours they’ve piled into polishing and repolishing those rather tepid racial archetypes, who can blame them?

With a splash of Evans-Thirlwell magic, BioWare’s sharply bearded poster boy develops a receding hairline, obscene arabesque eyeliner and pudgy bronzed cheekbones – a potent mix that clashes horribly with the fine Anglo Saxon features of his mother and siblings. The latter trio will accompany you on your journey from zero to hero, their opinion of their illustrious relative shifting in the wake of key decisions, putting forth new plot threads. In the short term, though, they’ll happily fill in as fire support.

The Hawke clan begins the second flashback at one end of a corridor of dirt basins and crags, recovering their breath after a hasty exit from the village of Lothering – and if you’re looking for a key word for what follows, it’s “body-count”. Darkspawn spill into view like ants from a kicked nest and are just as swiftly dispatched, whether by Hawke’s dual blades (I’m rocking a rogue), the broadsword of his brother Carver or the lightning bolts of wizardly sister Bethany.

Attacks and abilities – like a stunning pommel-bash, or an evasive back-flip – are performed in more-or-less real-time with the face buttons, repeated bludgeoning of which becomes the order of the day. You can still distribute the pain by way of the old item/ability wheel and targeting reticle if you wish, but given the efficacy of relentless button punishment, it’s easy to breeze over the minutiae of tactics. A little too easy, perhaps. At this stage in the proceedings, the feel is more Castle Crashers than Neverwinter Nights.

For a game which leans so heavily on the process of giving the pad a jolly good seeing to, there’s a disappointing lack of physicality to what happens on-screen. Basic blows glide through their targets with all the impact of a mobile phone signal. Knockback, where applicable, is painfully wooden. Though punchier than its predecessor, Dragon Age II still hinges on the mating of arbitrary numbers behind the scenes, and this leaves the battling feeling rather bloodless despite its infantile enthusiasm for gore.

Hey, you've dropped your keys... STAB.

Dialogue is now conducted a la Mass Effect, players rolling an analogue stick towards abbreviated (but fairly transparent) responses. There’s not much interaction of significance to be had in the prelude, but I do derive a certain chilly satisfaction from telling a beat-up Templar couple to hop it, suspecting their intentions towards Bethany (Templars, remember, are Ferelden’s magic policemen). Early speech choices break in three along the same lines as in older BioWare outings: you can play the jerk, the saint or a chin-stroking shade of in-between.

And that last phrase sums up my feelings about this game. Doubling the adrenaline dose would seem a great way of tackling those notoriously fidgety console owners on their own intellectual turf, but in doing so BioWare has thrown open the door to comparisons with the likes of Onimusha or Castlevania, and what we’ve seen just doesn’t cut the mustard. The self-conscious narrative fascinates, and there’s plenty here in terms of features – Enchanted Aluminium Bastard Sword +3s, Chromium Ice-balls of Painingness and whatnot – but the battlefield is where things need, and have yet, to come together.

Dragon Age II is out for PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Mac on 8th March in North America in 11th March in Europe. Why not read our interview with BioWare’s Robyn Theberge? Watch out for another one soon!