I forgot about just-launched horror game Tormenture when ravelling together this week’s round-up of potent PC releases, but thankfully, Maw disciple Fachewachewa was on my case in the comments. It’s one of your ‘cursed video game’ videogames in the spirit of Inscryption and Pony Island, and based on a quick blast with the demo, it seems lush.
It’s set in the 1980s, a premise I now automatically find horrible because I was born in the 1980s and that was, like, a million years ago. You’re a kid who’s playing a legendary 8-bit game that’s said to be possessed by evil spirits. The experience sees you alternating between the surprisingly labyrinthine space of the game, and the increasingly threatening environment of your bedroom, where terrible toys abound. Did you have one of those phones on wheels with eyes as a kid? Whoever invented that deserves a spell in Arkham Asylum.
Call of Duty: Black Ops is often more overtly gung-ho and violent than Modern Warfare and other Call of Duty series. But for every Michael Bay-style blockbuster moment there are flashes of betrayal, psychological warfare, and plenty of undercover operations that skirt the grey zones of morality. But, of the 50-plus campaign missions across the Black Ops series, which is the best?
IGN sat down with senior Call of Duty Black Ops developers to ask them what their favorite campaigns are from across the entire Call of Duty: Black Ops franchise. Have your favorite missions made the cut?
Vorkuta (Call of Duty: Black Ops)
One of the most popular Call of Duty: Black Ops campaigns among the development team is Vorkuta. Three separate, senior Call of Duty devs named Vorkuta as their favorite campaign in the whole series, and for good reason.
A key mission in the very first Call of Duty: Black Ops, Vorkuta sees hero Mason attempt a daring escape from the Soviet labor camp of Vorkuta in 1963. The ensuing great escape sees Mason fleeing through the mines while fellow prisoners are dying alongside him and it culminates in an explosive motorcycle chase. As a single mission, it’s packed with action and heartbreak.
“It’s the great escape from the mine and the motorcycle chase,” says expert level designer and Nuketown creator Adam Hoggatt on why Vorkuta sticks with him after all these years.
“Vorkuta is an obvious choice,” says Raven Software lead audio designer Jake Harley. “It’s just an incredibly memorable map. Reznov leading you out from the mine, the sacrifices of the other Russian prisoners pushing the mine carts as you’re taking cover behind them. It was just an epic map that was full of a lot of action and big moments.”
“It had a lot of strong narrative and gameplay beat changes from beginning to end, especially the escape on the motorcycle. But I’m a big motorcycle guy…” adds Raven Software lead designer Damon Shubhastari.
Rebirth (Call of Duty: Black Ops)
Another popular campaign mission cited by multiple Call of Duty developers is Rebirth, also from the first Black Ops game. This mission, where a big plot twist reveals the character Reznov was actually a figment of your mind the entire time, highlighted Black Ops’ psychological thriller themes. The mission set the whole tone for the twisty, grimy world of the Black Ops in the years to come.
“That moment when you realize that Mason and Reznov are one and that Reznov was actually dead and in Mason’s mind is such an ‘Oh my god,’ moment,” says Treyarch associate creative director Miles Leslie. “It really cemented what Blacks Ops is internally, and you could feel that in the studio when we were developing it… I’d walk over to the team making it and we would talk [about Rebirth and I would just go], ‘you’re blowing my mind.’”
Judgment Day (Call of Duty: Black Ops 2)
Another of Leslie’s favorite missions is Judgment Day from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. A tense assault on a secret Haitian facility led by Mason, this operation eventually culminates in a player choice on whether to kill the game’s primary antagonist — Menendez — or capture him alive. The player’s choice determines which ending the player gets.
“I have fond memories of people [asking me],’ Oh, you killed Menendez? How could you do that? That’s not the way,’” recalls Leslie who’d respond by adamantly explaining that Menendez “had to die.”
“It was really cool that even internally we would have these debates on the branching story,” Leslie adds.
Break on Through (Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War)
The branching paths would become a staple of the Black Ops series, with player choices leading to different scenarios. Take Break on Through, a mission from the recent Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, as an example. Unable to get the location of a nuclear bomb, Russell Adler drugs the player in the hope psychoactive chemicals will uncover the hidden location. The drug trip that ensues forces Bell to either obey or disobey Adler through a series of drug-fueled scenarios.
While the drug-fuelled interrogation was an exhilarating experience, Treyarch lead game designer Joanna Leung says that the level’s repeated use of the red doors to teleport the player through different vision quests was a personal highlight, having worked on a similar mechanic for the multiplayer map, ‘Deprogram’.
In Darkness (Call of Duty: Black Ops 3)
Treyarch senior level designer Matt Coutras fondly remembers the first campaign he worked on when he joined the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 development team.
“It was called ‘In Darkness’ and it takes place in Singapore during a bad storm. Singapore is partially destroyed and it was a cool location to go through,” he says. But as a designer, the real challenge with In Darkness for Coutras was how the map integrated the four-player co-op and how the large map allowed multiple players to explore different parts of Singapore. “You have a bunch of cool locations — from docs to a flooded subway to a downtown space.”
Brick in the Wall (Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War)
One of the first missions developed for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and a favorite mission of audio designer Jake Harley, is Brick in the Wall, a spy-thriller stealth mission where Bell and his associates hunt down one of Perseus’ men in East Berlin, meeting with informants and sneaking past Stasi guards in the process.
“I love stealth missions to begin with and I really liked seeing how the team brought East Berlin to life and just sneaking through the ghost tunnels. It was a really cool experience.”
Karma (Call of Duty: Black Ops 2)
One mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 called Karma sees the player entering an opulent club and fighting on the dance floor with dubstep blaring in the background.
“As an audio person, that was so cool to me and memorable,” says Harley, who says Karma is his second favorite campaign mission behind only the crowd favorite, Vorkuta.
Those are the favorite Call of Duty Black Ops campaigns according to the developers. Let us know what your favorite Call of Duty Black Ops campaigns are in the comments and keep an eye out for all the latest updates on Call of Duty Black Ops 6 right here on IGN.
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
Not many people hit the refund button on Sonar Shock, the indie immersive sim that’s rated Very Positive on Steam. But those that do tend to complain they couldn’t get the hang of the controls. You can understand why. Try to strafe left to dodge an attack from a blubber monster, and you’ll instead rotate on the spot. Attempt to turn the camera with a flick of the mouse, and you’ll discover that your view remains fixed in place – the cursor moving across the screen as if searching for an icon on your desktop.
“The controls are actually one of the biggest points that make people bounce off the game,” developer Raphael Bossniak admits.
And yet they’re also a unique selling point. Where last year’s extraordinary System Shock remake embraced the interface and keyboard conventions of modern gaming, Sonar Shock leans into the experimentation of pre-Quake control schemes – long before WASD and mouselook became standardised for the sake of ease and sanity.
Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai has ended his popular YouTube channel by teasing the upcoming announcement of a mystery new game.
In the final video from the Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games YouTube channel, Sakurai revealed that he received a video game development proposal in July 2021, as he was busy putting together the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Kazuya reveal video as well as DLC character Sora.
Sakurai added that, assuming this video game gets made, it should be announced “sooner or later,” though didn’t say anything more specific.
“I received a request to write a game proposal, which I finished at lightning speed,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t share more about this project, but assuming we’re able to get it made, it should be announced sooner or later.”
(Sakurai also revealed that until recently, all the footage of him for his channel was recorded two-and-a-half years ago, if you were wondering why he all of a sudden looks older.)
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launched in 2018 and Sora arrived as its final expansion fighter in 2021. The Kingdom Hearts character wrapped up an 89 character roster for the game, which includes fighters from The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Banjo Kazooie, Dragon Quest, Persona, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Minecraft, and many more.
What might Sakurai’s next game be? Nintendo is preparing to announce its Switch successor console, and there will surely be more Smash Bros. games given the incredible success of Ultimate (34.66 million sales and counting). Perhaps yet another sequel is now in the works, but is Sakurai involved?
Image credit: Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games: Finale Special / YouTube.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Dave The Diver is getting a story DLC and, possibly, more games set in the same universe. This comes from an interview with developer Mintrocket’s new CEO Jaeho Hwang, who spoke to VGC at Gamescom Asia about their plans to expand Dave and his diving. A future Dave may not even dive, but like, connive. Keep a beehive alive. Jive. Collect tithe.
Developer Nalua Studio revealed its classic side-scrolling beat ’em up Vengeance Hunters earlier this year, and its Switch launch is right around the corner, with this one punching onto the eShop on 28th October.
Developed for the Neo Geo, this one will see you playing as one of three unique fighters — the blade-wielding brawler Candy, the mechanised menace Golem and the rocket-firing scientist Loony — as you make your way through five worlds packed with fearsome foes and bosses.
PS5 Pro has an AI-powered upscaling feature called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) that can automatically improve the image clarity of games, but PS5 Pro Enhanced games take particular advantage of the beefier console’s features.
Naughty Dog detailed The Last of Us Part 1 update 2.00 in patch notes published to its website. On PS5, the game has a new ‘Pro’ mode that renders at at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K “while maintaining a target of 60fps.”
Elsewhere, on PS5 Pro The Last of Us Part 1’s Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and “provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5.” Naughty Dog failed to confirm what those framerates are, however.
The Last of Us Part 1 PS5 Update 2.00 Patch Notes
PlayStation 5 Pro
New rendering mode added that takes advantage of PlayStation® Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR)
New “Pro” mode renders at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K, while maintaining a target of 60 fps*
Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5*
*Enhanced features require a compatible display in addition to the PlayStation 5 Pro console.
General
Fixed issue where New Game+ mode wasn’t being applied when using Chapter Select
Fixed an issue where a player’s Artifact collection could become desynced with their Save Data, preventing trophy acquisition
Fixed an issue where game could be locked at 40 fps on boot up when using a 4K, VRR monitor
Gameplay
Fixed an issue where players could become unable to swim quickly due to rebinding conflicts with a Custom control scheme
Fixed an issue where the speedrun timer could revert to the most recent checkpoint’s time if the player quit or the game crashed
[Bill’s Town] Fixed an issue where Ellie and Bill would not follow the player as expected
[Lakeside Resort] Improved Ellie’s accuracy with the hunting rifle while crouched
[The University] Fixed issue with library generator that could affect progression
[Bus Depot] Fixed issue where Joel’s flashlight would turn on when inspecting certain artifacts despite being in direct sunlight
Accessibility
Added additional support so that more PlayStation 5 console Accessibility settings are now reflected in-game
[Pittsburgh] Fixed an issue where a generator could be pinged by ‘Enhanced Listening Mode’ before intended
[Tommy’s Dam] Fixed an issue on New Game+ where there was no prompt to turn the hand-wheel
[Left Behind – Back in a Flash] Fixed an issue where Navigation Assistance could become disabled unintentionally
Meanwhile, Naughty Dog has detailed The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered update 1.2.0, again in patch notes published to its website. The PS5 Pro features for Part 2 are the same as those for Part 1: a new Pro mode that renders at 1440p with PSSR upscaling output to 4K while maintaining a target of 60fps, with game’s Performance and Fidelity rendering modes providing a smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5.
The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered Update 1.2.0 Patch Notes
PlayStation 5 Pro
New rendering mode added that takes advantage of PlayStation® Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR)
New “Pro” mode renders at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K, while maintaining a target of 60 fps*
Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5*
*Enhanced features require a compatible display in addition to the PlayStation 5 Pro console.
General
Fixed an issue where some trophies would not unlock after importing PS4 save data
Fixed an issue where Abby’s torso could disappear when switching between her bonus skins
Gameplay
[The Tunnels] Fixed an issue where Dina could be grabbed an additional time while escaping in the subway
No Return
Fixed an issue where the stun bomb was not being accurately counted toward the player’s “Stun” stats
Fixed an issue where some weapon kills were not accurately tracking toward player’s stats when performing stealth kills in between those weapon kills
Fixed an issue where shiv kills were not being accurately counted toward the player’s “Shiv” stats
Audio
[On Foot] Fixed an issue where music tracks would not progress as intended when speedrunning
Accessibility
Added additional support so more PlayStation 5 console Accessibility settings are now reflected in-game
[The Tunnels] Fixed an issue where code for the locked room could not be located using Enhanced Listen Mode
[No Return] Fixed an issue where enemies specified by a Gambit were not properly identified when using High Contrast Mode
Technical leads at various developers, including Naughty Dog, have already spoken about how on the base PS5 players would often have to choose between Fidelity mode, which offers better resolution at lower framerates, typically 30fps, or Performance mode, which raises the framerate to 60 at the expense of better graphical textures and ray tracing. That choice is no longer necessary on the PS5 Pro, which can run games combining better resolution with higher framerates.
Last month, Travis McIntosh, Naughty Dog’s head of technology, told IGN that the ability to play The Last of Us at 60fps in 4K is “a huge deal.” “It makes it so we don’t have to compromise, so you don’t have to pick between high fidelity and good performance.”
“The high fidelity mode on the base PS5 actually looks even better when you’re on Pro,” McIntosh added. “And there are some minor performance issues in performance mode on the PS5 base model that are also much better. Very solid 60 [fps], a lot less frame drops when you get to the Pro.”
This week, developer Remedy detailed its approach to Alan Wake 2’s PS5 Pro update, explaining that Quality mode adds ray tracing at the expense of running at 30fps, but the patch also includes big improvements to Performance mode.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
‘Tis the season for new gaming CPUs. While Intel gear up to release their efficiency-focused Core Ultra 200S chips, AMD have announced a November 7th launch date for their Ryzen 9000X3D series – the latest to use their framerate-juicing 3D V-Cache. No specific CPUs have been named, for some reason, but we can be reasonably sure from leaks and retail listing whoopsies that this launch will include at least one of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Ryzen 9 9900X3D, and Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
For most of us, the biggest penalty for making too much noise might be a scolding shush from the movie theater seat behind you, but in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead you’re only ever one creaky floorboard away from getting snuffed out by an alien threat that’s always listening out for you like it’s the most sinister form of Siri. This instant fail stealth-heavy horror story does a pretty convincing job of recreating the breath-holding tension of the films, in addition to borrowing heavily from the likes of Alien: Isolation in the way it casts you as the reluctant rodent trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse. The result is a consistently stressful undertaking from start to finish, even though my careful creep down The Road Ahead moved at a relentlessly glacial pace and occasionally snagged on some slightly curious design decisions.
A standalone story mostly set around four months after the alien invasion seen in A Quiet Place: Day One, The Road Ahead casts us as college student Alex Taylor and follows her attempts to flee her abandoned hospital hideout in order to make a silent and steady pilgrimage towards an off-shore safe haven isolated from the threat of the monsters, known as Death Angels. It’s a straightforward setup, but tender early moments spent with her likable boyfriend Martin and kindhearted father Kenneth were enough to get me invested in Alex’s cause before inevitable alien-inflicted tragedy spurs her escape plan into action. It’s a bit of a letdown that, in spite of its strong start, the payoff for The Road Ahead’s plot in its dying hours is all too predictable, and its overall story comes up noticeably lacking in impact – particularly in the wake of the far more emotionally resonant tale found in Day One earlier this year.
Still, there’s no shortage of affecting human artifacts to comb through along the way. Outside of the story’s opening chapters and the odd flashback, Alex is alone with her own thoughts – which are appropriately represented via onscreen text since any spoken sentence is only ever followed by a death sentence – for most of The Road Ahead. In lieu of any interactions with other survivors, I got a strong sense of the history of each space I shuffle-stepped through by observing the heartbreaking family portraits handcrafted in a child’s crayon tacked to the wall of a deserted safehouse, or the hilarious note about a toilet paper-related riot left by a store owner in a seaside shopping strip. There are plenty of great worldbuilding touches like this in The Road Ahead, and I had ample opportunity to study every little detail since I moved through it in a constant state of slow-motion, desperately trying to keep my every movement on mute.
Creeping with the Enemy
It might be a first-person adventure almost completely devoid of combat, but The Road Ahead is no “walking simulator;” it’s a balking simulator. Every step you take or action you perform is a reluctant one, because even the lightest door hinge-squeak or stomped-on gravel crunch can alert an alien hunter to your whereabouts and end your slow-walk to safety in an instant. Thus, most of my progress through Alex’s adventure through empty houses, camping grounds, and trainyards was made with micro movements to my controller’s thumbstick; tip-toeing through rooms at a snail’s pace and incrementally tilting forward to push doors open or carefully pulling back to slowly open desk drawers to search through. It felt a bit like coming home late from a night out and trying to find your way to bed without waking your significant other, only in this instance your significant other is a spindly-limbed extraterrestrial who wants to rip your insides out rather than simply ask you to sleep on the couch.
Almost every environment you explore in The Road Ahead is purpose-built to test your coordination and fine-motor skills. Rooms are cramped and cluttered with beast-stirring booby traps to avoid and – if you’re not careful – simply brushing past hollow barrels or pulling open the cover of an air vent too eagerly can bring your swift undoing. Thankfully, Alex is given a homemade phonometer early on which, when carried in her left hand, indicates the decibel level produced by her movements relative to the overall volume of the ambient sounds around her. I basically spent the entire seven-hour journey anxiously trying to prevent its meter from lighting up as a result of each steady-handed interaction I performed, not unlike trying to extract the wishbone in a game of Operation without suddenly triggering the patient’s buzzer and blinking red nose.
Some of the ways The Road Ahead conjures up a life-ending crunch or clang do feel a little contrived, though. It makes total sense for there to be shards of broken glass lining the paths beside the shattered windows of an upturned train carriage, but the number of discarded paint cans to be found on remote forest hiking trails does seem a touch too improbable, like rolling out from under the Simpsons’ family car and finding yourself in a carpark that’s inexplicably full of garden rakes to step on. I managed to suspend my disbelief and just abide by the noise-making obstacle course that the developers have created, but I do wish they’d been able to disguise their monster-rousing trip-ups a little more organically.
The threats to blowing Alex’s cover aren’t only found in the world around her, though; they’re also within. Alex is an asthmatic, so actions of overexertion – like pulling herself up onto ledges or carrying heavy planks to use as makeshift bridges, as well as moments of heightened stress such as finding herself in close proximity to one of the alien stalkers – can push her into a state of noisy hyperventilation, which acts as a heavy-breathing beacon to any monsters in the area. This brings the welcome challenge of identifying when to best use the inhalers that can be collected along the way, even if it does seem a little silly that they’re single-use only, as though their previous owners huffed each of them right up to the limit.
Quiet Riot
The Road Ahead isn’t only about stalking around in silence like some sort of survival-horror street mime, and along with the phonometer you are provided with some other basic tools to keep the keen-eared killers at bay. Bricks and bottles can be picked up and lobbed to temporarily distract them in fairly standard stealth-game style, while some other items serve dual purposes, like the hand flares that can be sparked to either light up darker environments or tossed away to confuse your petal-faced pursuers with their crackling hiss. It does feel a bit arbitrary the way certain items in Alex’s inventory can only be wielded in certain hands, though. It may create an added layer of tension to be forced to choose between measuring sound with the phonometer and illuminating the path forward with Alex’s flashlight, for example, since they can each only be wielded in her left hand, but it hardly makes any logical sense. Where was this flashlight purchased, at Ned Flanders’ Leftorium?
Occasionally, I’d find myself caught in close quarters with a monster and not have any noise-making tools in either hand, which put me in the lose-lose situation of either trying to make a run for it and getting instantly slashed in the back, or standing perfectly still only for the blind beast to accidentally bump straight into my nose and strike me down on the spot. It didn’t seem to matter if I chose to stick or twist, since either way I was going to find myself stuck and twisted apart. Thankfully, The Road Ahead’s generous auto-save system meant I was rarely penalised too heavily each time I perished, so although the slightly scripted feel of its enemy encounters mean it’s never as outright terrifying as Alien: Isolation, it is at the very least more lenient and less likely to frustrate because you couldn’t reach a manual save point.
It’s never as outright terrifying as Alien: Isolation, [but] it is at the very least more lenient and less likely to frustrate.
The quarter-speed crawl along The Road Ahead does eventually run out of steam, though, even despite the fact that encounters with the aliens do evolve in some ways. There’s only ever one enemy type, but midway through they develop the ability to sense your movements even if the sounds you make are masked by the threshold of the ambient noise, effectively forcing you to simply take your hands off the controls and stand as still as a statue until the concussive effects of their scanning is completed, as an example. These modest changes help preserve the tension level throughout, but they struggle to completely disguise the fact that you’re otherwise mostly doing tedious tasks like turning valves and searching through drawers for supplies like any other survival-horror game, only at a considerably slower pace and without any combat sequences to release that tension in. There is one short flashback sequence that allows you to briefly blaze away with a shotgun out of the back of a speeding van, but The Road Ahead could have done with a few more of these dynamic detours to help break up the bit-by-bit crawl even more.
