PQube and Octeto Studios have today revealed a brand new JRPG set in the open skies, as we got our first look at Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire which will be “coming soon” for Nintendo Switch.
This one wears its Skies of Arcadia inspirations proudly on its wing (still waiting for that Switch remake, by the way). You take on the role of Glenn Windwalker (fantastic name), the captain of a group of sky pirates who jets off on the adventure of a lifetime. There are various islands to explore both on the ground and in the sky as you go about recruiting your crew and catering to their individual strengths to achieve the best results in battle.
Amazon Prime subscribers can claim 13 free games during the month of June. Well, at no extra cost to their Prime subscription, anyway. That’s on top of the recently announced extras that are available for the next few weeks, including Turnip Boy and Calico. But next month’s lineup of freebies – which includes the ever-lovely SteamWorld Dig 2, Neverwinter Nights and Autonauts – starts on June 1st, with more free games being made available every single week after that, so be sure to check back every Thursday.
Whether it’s a book, a movie, or a video game, creative works generally exist for a reason. Sometimes it’s to delight, by entertaining with stories or fun gameplay. Other times it’s to inform, with news or by exposing the audience to different perspectives. Or it makes you think, with interesting ideas that challenge you to consider or reflect. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, however, is a game that does none of these things. Instead, it thrusts you into the role of the titular character without doing anything meaningful with his defining internal conflict, and sends him on a series of missions that are neither fun to play nor interesting to experience. The one question it poses is: why would someone want to play this?
Playing as Gollum sounded like it might’ve been a decent pitch for a game, since he’s one of the more interesting and famous characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy universe. He and Sméagol are two sides of the same coin; the good person that was Sméagol was tragically corrupted by The One Ring, twisted into this pathetic creature. It’s his clammy bare feet that we step into, ostensibly with the goal of regaining possession of the Ring from Bilbo Baggins. However, most of your time is spent experiencing Gollum’s time as a prisoner during the years between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ringin a linear, story-driven series of levels. Prison Simulator: Mordor Edition is sadly less interesting than it sounds. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was supposed to be on a grand Lord of the Rings adventure, and was instead stuck collecting bits and baubles for forgettable NPCs and hiding in bushes to hide from monotonous guard patrols.
There are generally three phases to any level, and they range from uninteresting to just plain bad. There’s the chores phase, in which Gollum goes from one waypoint to another to complete some menial task. There’s always some conceptually different scenario, like crawling through small openings to detonate explosives, but functionally it’s a series of marches across the same areas over and over again. It never feels like there’s any point to it, just busywork. It could be fun to run around with Gollum, thanks to his surprising sprint speed, but he has a stamina meter that depletes in just a few seconds and takes far longer to replenish. Trying to get anywhere involves too little speed, too much waiting, and an unfortunate amount of hearing Gollum choking on his own breath.
The platforming phases are more compelling, but still poorly designed. Spacious rooms with handles to climb, walls to run, and leaps to take bring a faster pace of action, but the loose and floaty way Gollum moves and imprecise controls make it feel like something from the PlayStation 2 era. Having experienced a modern Assassin’s Creed or Tomb Raider game, here it feels far too easy to jump toward the correct point and fall to your death because you drifted to one side, or missed the part of the ledge that has the white line that establishes exactly where you can grab. The paths are rigidly defined, and often involve blind jumps or best guesses at what the next intended handle is. Rather than a throwback, it comes across as outdated; a poor facsimile of classics like the Prince of Persia series.
These issues plagued mediocre stealth games 15 years ago.
Finally there are the stealth segments, which are simply bad. Any time Gollum needs to go from point A to B undetected, it’s going to be a slog. Enemies have extremely limited parol patterns, are terribly nearsighted, and seem to suffer from acute, rapid-onset amnesia, forgetting Gollum ever existed not long after losing sight of him. These are issues that plagued mediocre stealth games 15 years ago, and it’s jarring to see them in 2023. There’s no cat-and-mouse game of outsmarting enemies using interesting abilities and clever level design as you do in something like Dishonored or Hitman, you just exploit their painfully obvious blind spots with no objective outside of reaching the designated point.
Gollum’s only tools are his ability to sneak quietly, throw rocks, and disappear in tall grass or shadows. Because the enemy AI is surprisingly terrible, doing something as simple as standing on a table or knee-high rock can make you completely immune to capture. I was able to navigate a long stealth section in the Animal Pits of Barad-dûr by just jumping and grabbing an overhang anytime someone spotted me. Eventually some of the Orcs get crossbows, but even then the threat is minimal.
There’s no combat per se, which makes sense because Gollum is no fighter when it comes to any opponent larger than a hobbit. You do have the option to strangle enemies, but it comes with some odd caveats. First, it doesn’t work on anyone with a helmet. This makes sense for someone in full battle regalia — Sméagol’s grubby mitts won’t bend steel, after all. However, what defines a helmet in this game is broadly open to interpretation. Is that orc wearing a hat? Decent chance he’s strangle-proof. Also, strangling only applies to orcs. It makes sense you can’t choke beasts like spiders, but other humanoid races like elves apparently have invincible throats, eliminating the only method to bypass enemies apart from stealth. Which, again, is not good.
A few chase sequences change up the pace, though they are a bit of a mixed bag. One places Gollum on a moving object and requires careful dodging oncoming obstructions and archers, and manages to be one of only a handful of fun sections to play through. The other is a Crash Bandicoot-style run toward the camera, made miserable by the imprecise platforming and inability to see obstacles until moments before you need to avoid them. It is frustrating to play as a character who is looking ahead and should see incoming objects but not being able to see them yourself, and die because of it.
There is some potential replayability if you for some reason wanted to revisit Gollum’s lousy adventure instead of playing any of the many spectacular games that have come out recently. Hidden collectibles don’t offer any sort of rewards, you just spread them out on an old piece of cloth to look at while Gollum offers a line of dialogue for each. Even as someone with a natural compulsion to find everything in most games I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm to find the next bat wing or chunk of jar. It just felt pointless to add to his sad hoard of not-so-precious treasures.
What’s it for, Precious?
Hardcore Lord of the Rings fans know Gollum himself is a complex character, both a victim and a villain, but that’s not explored in any meaningful way in this story. There are occasional binary choices to answer questions or take action as Gollum or Sméagol, but it never felt like this altered the story or had lasting effects on Gollum himself. Sometimes there’s a need for one side of Gollum’s personality to convince the other to go along with plans, like when Gollum is hiding from an orc and a painting of the Eye of Sauron sends him into hysterics. The two choices were “Kill the Orc,” which Gullum supported, or the Sméagol-endorsed option to “Keep Panicking.” Sméagol won the argument, but it’s hard to tell if that’s because I made a compelling case for further panicking, or if the multiple-choice options were just too easy to select from. In my 20 hours exploring Middle-earth there was maybe a single instance where the debate didn’t go exactly as expected, which made it feel pointless to engage with.
It’s not very interesting to look at, either. Even with all the PC graphics options set to Epic, places like Barad-dûr look drab and flat, and the empty lifelessness of the Mirkwood stands out in an era of games where lush flora and fauna has become the norm. Gollum’s model looks good enough, including his surprisingly detailed wisps of hair, and his mannerisms are well captured, but other characters suffer from distractingly stiff animations and a haunting lack of facial expression.
The sound design, however, is strong. The raspy, almost choking speech of Gollum is well acted, as is the clearer and more timid Sméagol side of his personality. It sounds exactly like someone who saw Andy Serkis’ performance in the movie trilogy would expect. Even small details, like the clammy sound of Gollum’s hands slapping on different surfaces as he climbs or runs, or the reverberation of ringing bells in certain spaces, stand out as authentic, with impressive attention to detail.
But even if it looked and sounded uniformly spectacular, Gollum would still feel pointless to play, and that feeling turns to despair when technical issues crop up. On three different occasions during this review levels needed to be fully restarted: once because of an unfortunately placed autosave, and twice because parts of puzzles were outright broken, so despite the solution being evident there was no way to advance. They weren’t fully game-breaking problems because restarting fixed them, but they were spirit-breaking – playing through areas that were uninteresting the first time bordered on painful for a second go-around that never should have been necessary.
This week, inspired by Doom running on teletext, the Electronic Wireless Show podcast investigates: what other devices, mechanisms, or live animals can join the immortal shooter’s vast empire of unlikely ports? Despite not even being on the show this week, Alice Bee tasks us with finding the best, worst, or weirdest cases of Can It Run Doom from across the internet. And, sometimes, inside Nate’s mind.
We also discuss what we’ve been playing this week, with a double bill of disappointment in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Darkest Dungeon 2, before Nate transforms the Tower of Jocularity into a marketplace of Dark Bargains. Capitalised for terrible, terrible emphasis.
Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Destiny 2.
Destiny 2 has teased the return of a major character in its upcoming expansion, The Final Shape.
A new teaser trailer (above) for the game’s upcoming expansion has unveiled the return of a fan-favorite character who hasn’t been seen in quite a while.
Cayde-6 (voiced by Nathan Fillion) will be back in The Final Shape, Destiny 2’s next expansion which follows on from the recent Lightfall expansion.
In the video, he’s seen conversing with Ikora Rey, one of his fellow Guardians, and one of the three original class Vanguards. But quite how he’s back remains a bit of a mystery… and it might not be a permanent thing.
“I wish you could have been there,” says Ikora as she recounts some of the events that have passed during Cayde’s absence. “I’m here now,” he responds. “Wherever here is.”
Cayde-6 was dramatically killed off in the earlier Destiny 2 expansion, Forsaken where the iconic Hunter Vanguard was brutally murdered by Uldren Sov after his ghost was destroyed by the Scorn.
IGN’s Destiny 2 review gave it 8/10 and said: “Destiny 2 is a blast out of the gate thanks to its excellent co-op shooter gameplay and strong storytelling in the campaign. Not all the features I’d expected to find are here, but it does deliver the same kind of highly social gameplay and rewarding, loot-driven progression that helped the original keep me hooked for hundreds of hours.”
The latest Nintendo Download update for North America has arrived, and it’s bringing new games galore to the eShop in your region. As always, be sure to drop a vote in our poll and comment down below with your potential picks for the week. Enjoy!
Switch eShop – Highlights
MAQUETTE(Annapurna Interactive, 25th May) – MAQUETTE is a first-person recursive puzzle game that takes you into a world where every building, plant and object are simultaneously tiny and staggeringly huge. Head to the center of the world and you’ll feel like a giant, towering over buildings and walls. But venture further out and start to feel small as things get larger and larger – to the point where cracks in the ground become chasms! In MAQUETTE you will explore the scales of everyday problems in a modern-day love story, where sometimes the smallest of issues can become insurmountable obstacles. Solve the puzzle today on Nintendo Switch!
I’m a sucker for any game with a gorgeous art style, so guess which announcement caught my eye at last night’s PlayStation Showcase. Neva is a new puzzle platformer from the creators of Gris that tells the story of a red-capped swordswoman named Alba and her faithful wolf pup as they “embark on a perilous journey through a once beautiful world as it slowly decays around them.” That’s not much to go on, but feast your eyes on the stunning animated trailer below. It’s a looker.
Hi, I’m Romain Clavier, Game Director at Tindalos Interactive, the studio developing Aliens: Dark Descent, a strategic real time squad-based tactical action game with rich management systems and twisted horrors. On June 20 you’ll be able to witness the Xenomorphs stalk their prey in a contemporary strategy game. But before you descend into the darkness, I want to use this blog post to shed some light on how our development team fused terror and tactics for Aliens: Dark Descent’s intense, lo-fi world.
First, let’s look at the horror elements of Aliens: Dark Descent. As the title suggests, the game is set in the Alienuniverse, more specifically tinted towards James Cameron’s action-based take on Aliens (1986) where players take on the role of a group of colonial marines trying to escape from a colony overrun by the titular aliens. From the very beginning, we worked hard to establish a tense and foreboding atmosphere; there are cryptically dim corridors, flickering fluorescent lights, and the constant threat of a Xenomorph attack, but what really changed Aliens: Dark Descent for the better was when we implemented our unique fog of war mechanic, where areas of the map are hidden to create dread and let players’ imagination run wild. This means that you must carefully plan your routes and movements at every turn, taking into account the risk of running into a Xenomorph or other unknown dangers.
Developing the Xenomorphs was one of the most rewarding challenges, as we want them to hit the same level of ruthlessness they’re famous for on film. Our goal is to have players drown in the tension from the potential of a ferocious ambush of a conniving pack of Xenomorphs. That said, we wanted to avoid having swarms of Xenomorphs in a way that would dull their individual significance so we opted to give the game’s enemies cunning strategic impulses to plan maneuvers on the fly, flank squads, and quickly retreat to gather more numbers.
Sound design is also crucial in eliciting that primal dread; we made sure to add the subtle hums of the tattered tech and eerie chirps of the creatures’ hissing and scurrying as you lead your crew on a variety of crucial missions.
But Aliens: Dark Descent isn’t all suspense and dismay – it also requires strategic thinking and planning to succeed. Players must manage their resources carefully, gathering supplies and weapons while avoiding detection by the Aliens and other enemies.
While the constant threat of a Xenomorph attack creates a sense of urgency and danger, the strategic gameplay elements add depth and complexity to how players must react. Our stress mechanic is a ticking time-bomb acting as a constant reminder of how things can go wrong if distraught marines are left uncared for in this hostile environment. Permadeath will be the unfortunate reality for the most unlucky marines, making each mistake have a lasting impact; and the more the marines have progressed, the more heart-wrenching losing them will be. Players must constantly adapt and change their tactics to stay one step ahead of the Aliens, making each playthrough personal and exciting. My personal favorite feature is the slowdown mechanic, as it forces players into inescapable situations where they must make a split-second reaction while the clock ticks away.
With Aliens: Dark Descent I can confidently say we have crafted a persistent air of terror while still allowing everyone to explore the secrets of Lethe; so we’ve added a plethora of accessibility options, lower difficulty levels for players who want to focus on the story, and the option to turn slowdown mode into a full pause so you can approach Aliens: Dark Descent your way.
As a long-time fan of the Alien universe, it’s been a joy and an honor working on this game with the rest of the team at Tindalos Interactive, Focus Entertainment and 20th Century Games . We’ve pushed ourselves and overcome challenges to make Aliens: Dark Descentan unforgettable blend of suspense and strategy. I’m excited to see how our tense world keeps players on the edge of their seats.
Aliens: Dark Descent slithers onto PS5 and PS4 June 20.
“The Delta symbol (Δ) was chosen because its meaning fits the concept of the remake project,” read a tweet from the official Metal Gear twitter account. “Delta means ‘change’ or ‘difference’ without changing structure.”
Delta is a symbol taken from the Greek alphabet, which is often used in the modern era to denote a state of change, chiefly in scientific fields. For example a lowercase version of the symbol can denote an alteration in molecular chemistry, while the change in velocity of a space rocket is measured in delta v (Δv).
The Delta symbol (Δ) was chosen because its meaning fits the concept of the remake project.
We don’t yet know exactly what form these changes will take, but Konami has promised that the remake will boast “unprecedented graphics” and “immersive sound”, and that it will feature evolved gameplay with “a seamless user experience”.
The company has also told fans that the remake — which has yet to be given a release date — will represent a “faithful recreation” of Kojima’s 2004 original in terms of story and game design.
Xbox also took to Twitter earlier today to highlight the fact that Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater will also be coming to Xbox Series X|S consoles, along with a number of other titles revealed during the PlayStation showcase. The title will also be coming to PC.
PlayStation also revealed the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 at yesterday’s event, which will make the first three games of the franchise available to play on PS5 when it drops in August this year.
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
My happiness comes at a small price: give me a paraglider that I can whip out at any second and a strangely beautiful open world, and there you go, I’m a happy bunny. It’s the Zelda formula. Or the Tchia formula. Or the Just Cause formula. Either way, it’s good fun. That’s why Towers Of Aghasba caught my eye when it debuted a stunning trailer at last night’s PlayStation Showcase, offering a glimpse at an alien open world and some settlement-building.
