• Format: PC (version reviewed), Xbox One, PS4, PS3, Vita, Wii U
• Unleashed: Out now on PC and PS4, March 2015 for PS3 and XBox One and TBA for PS Vita and Wii U
• Publisher: Oddworld Inhabitants, Inc
• Developer: Just Add Water (Developments), Ltd
• Players: 1, with hotseat Co-op
• Site: http://www.oddworld.com/oddworldgames/new-n-tasty/
• Game code provided by PR

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty is a remake done right, graphical enhancement aside (where it is substantially better than the original, despite the original not having dated much anyway). There are enough enhancements to fully justify the game’s overhaul and release. In short it’s very good; better than the original in fact.

For those not au fait with the original adventure; Abe is one of a race of slaves (Mudokons) used by a corporation (Rupture Farms) that makes snack foods made from butchering various rare animals (some not extinct). He accidentally finds out that his people are next in line, and decides he’s going to make a break for it.

The original wasn’t a bad looking game and while it is kind of murky looking, it’s not as much of a shock to the system to look at as other games from that era. New ‘n’ Tasty however is more than just pretty, it’s pretty beautiful. Using 2.5D doesn’t always work out for the best but here, it’s utilised incredibly well. You almost always have enough seen on screen to be able to make snap decisions based on what’s ahead of you and it rarely pulls a fast one, due in part to the sound cues that help notify you of most of what you can’t see.

Controls are probably the second most improved thing, with Abe’s movement feeling quite smooth when you use a controller – and it’s quite good on the keyboard too. It boils down to running and jumping being a little more responsive, and Abe will also reposition himself slightly in order to climb ledges and activate objects. It’s extremely useful when you have a very short time to do something fiddly, as you don’t end up feeling cheated by losing to slightly off positioning. The ability to aim what you throw in a more fluid way means that you’re able to pull off some nasty tricks and cool ricochets but still manage to bounce a bomb back into your face. Also, being able to just drop what you carry where you stand is more helpful than it sounds at first.

The difficulty has been tuned to allow more varied skill levels. Easy, normal and hard modes allow you to slowly improve upon your platforming with Abe. It’s also improved via the checkpoint and save system. Every time you enter a new room it saves and since rooms aren’t all that big – save for a small amount of exceptions – you’re likely to have a close place to reload to if you should die; especially as checkpoints break up most of the larger rooms too.  It would be an outright lie if we said you always have fair warning of what’s up next, as the game will occasionally drop an enemy beside you when an alarm is tripped or something similar. It’s about the only thing that could be regarded as unfair when you first come across it – almost every other thing in the game that kills you can be traced back to being your fault.

If you ever feel like giving yourself a heightened perception of just how bad at the game you are, then you will be pleased to know that leaderboards are there to show you how few Mudokons you’ve saved in your playthrough. It also means that if you’re a keen speedrunner then you’ve got references for where you are in comparison to the competition.

Other things worth mentioning are the new secret levels (which in fairness we weren’t much wiser on having never finished the original) but extra content is extra content and surely some of the secrets we found were new, right? Either way, those were some fun puzzles we played. The other thing is it’s strange how the humour has been preserved so well into this side of the millennium. It covers a lot of bases; gallows, slapstick and even puerile, and it’s all enough to make you at least crack a smile. Accidentally throwing Abe into an abyss or blowing him up should be annoying, as it halts progress; but there’s just enough humour there to alleviate that for more deaths than it really should warrant.

Not everyone who played Abe’s Oddysee has managed to complete it – ourselves included (until now) – difficulty usually being the main reason, but the controls never helped either. This ground-up remake is what’s needed to help those like us to have a more enjoyable time playing; it still has the difficulty but improvements to the save system and controls take the frustration out of replaying sections over and over until completion. It’s a great game – as it was way back when – and its success will hopefully mean its sequel, Abe’s Exoddus gets the same treatment.

PS. This is part of March’s Playstation Plus which is also cross-buy once it’s released on PS3 and Vita respectively. Go get it. 

Rock Band – one of the greatest games franchises of all time – is set to release on “current gen” consoles this summer, which includes both the XBox One and PS4 but not Wii U. It’s not an entirely unforeseen move, as surveys over past months seemed to probe people for what was important to them in a new version.

The important points to take away however, are mainly for those who had previous Rock Band content (sorry Wii Rock Band users, not you). DLC for 360 and PS3 users is supposed to be usable for both the XBox One and PS4 if and when the songs hit the new consoles. So if you have spent far more money than you should on Rock Band tracks, then your library should be safe. They are working to get previous iterations of the peripherals to work with the new console of the same platform (Microsoft and Sony), so if you have any old instruments (barring keyboards), they should hopefully work.

It’s not going to be one of many either, Rock Band 4 is the only current gen Rock Band that will be released. Instead, content will be provided in updates and DLC, rather than forking out the standard RRP of a new game every year or so. As Harmonix are partnering up with Mad Catz for distribution and a new set of instruments (which will have the same features as the old ones) they have slightly more leeway with what they produce than with EA or Viacom.

In the end it all means that we’re going to get the best possible Rock Band for years to come, which will be heavily iterated on with tweaks and enhancements, and we just can’t wait.

Source: GamesIndustry.biz and Kotaku UK

Fast forward unto dawn of the 17th of March and you will be able to start watching Halo: Nightfall on VOD except in the UK… which will get it on the 16th instead, Yay us! There are also the obligatory Blu-Ray and DVD releases which are presumably out on the 17th also.

It chiefly revolves around James Locke, who is a manhunter and agent for ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence), who is also going to play an important role in the next game. THe names involved are pretty good; Ridley Scott as Executive Producer,  Battlestar Galactica’s Sergio Mimica-Gezzan as Director, Mike Colter as the lead Locke and also, Christina Chong (24: Live Another Day), Steven Waddington (Sleepy Hollow) and Luke Neal (Final Prayer).

For a shooter Halo has always had a pretty deep universe and always succeeded with its extracurricular storytelling – with a multitude of successful books and comics, as well having had a go at both live action and anime. Nightfall may not revolve around the Chief but it looks like it could be good; but take a look at the trailer below and make up your own mind. Beware there are minor spoilers!

• Format: PC
• Unleashed: 20th February 2015
• Publisher: Nordic Games
• Developer: KING Art  Games
• Players: 1
• Site: http://www.kingart-games.de/bout2/
• Game code provided by the publisher

The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 was Kickstarted, and they sure have put their money where their mouth is. It’s better than the previous two titles (first game and prequel) in almost every way. It’s incredibly sharp looking, we would say better written in terms of dialogue and humour, and overall, the puzzles are quite good.

The game begins with a quick recap on the events that transpired in the first game, before skydiving into a life or death situation for the (now bearded) Captain Nate Bonnett. Strangely enough, after this initial sequence – which doesn’t quite seem to add up with the story after you’ve seen what happens before and after – it’s only then that you get a tutorial with the basics of movement, interaction etc.

It follows a similar structure to the first game where you play a section with one character, before it switches to another just after a major plot point. Eventually you’ll spend time switching between multiple characters; but you’ll have many a chapter spent reacquainting yourself with Princess Ivo, Wilbur Weathervane, Nate and Critter in a myriad of both new and old locations.

The plot is largely entertaining, though the overarching plot isn’t quite as interesting as the chapter by chapter plots for each character. The dialogue and jokes – subjective as it may be – are vastly better than the previous two instalments. Something that can be said though is that the humour does seem to be at its best when it takes a visual medium. It does still have many pop-culture references throughout and, while some are very on the nose, they aren’t overused.

The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is quite a hefty game in terms of how long you spend (and hopefully enjoy) with it, which makes how open the ending is a little disappointing. It ends in a more satisfying way than the slightly abrupt way the first game closes; but it has a lot of loose ends that you kind of expected to have resolved before the end of the game.

As an adventure game, the “logic” puzzles use is fairly reasonable; your choices for interactivity are whittled down through removing interactables and not allowing you to trade items between characters that the recipient would not/could not use. Both help remove the strain of the age-old point and click genre’s “try every possibility” to progress which would have been made worse by the multiple characters the game has.

There wasn’t anything in particular that caused annoyance other than two puzzles. One involved using a machine by operating it with a sequence of events that didn’t have any clear indication of when repeated steps were additive to the sequence rather than resetting it. The other seemed to be a very specific order of looking at certain objects before you could start the next puzzle.

Aside from those issues there wasn’t anything to complain about with regards to the difficulty; objects are – thankfully – easy to spot due to a hotkey for showing all hotspots. It’s a small feature that’s oft excluded to make things “more difficult” but in reality, lacking it only serves to add ‘hidden object game’ to the genre description.

Unlike Critter Chronicles, which had a hard mode that added extra steps to puzzles to make it harder, what’s given here is a few optional extra quests that give “outfits” as rewards. It’s mostly hats which may or may not improve the tone of the situation the characters find themselves in. There are quite a few of them though so you have a fair amount of optional content.

The voice acting is almost completely great across the board and the problems we have with it don’t lie with the performances given. Firstly, the lip sync isn’t really that great but isn’t jarring. A small issue is that the child of a character with a thick Brummie accent is American – which feels a little weird. Neither of those are much of a problem; but what we can only hope is a terrible oversight is the money-grabbing, tax avoiding merchant has what could commonly be thought of as a Jewish accent – especially when combined with the merchant’s visual design, which is reminiscent of Fagin. Considering much of the voice acting has so much warmth behind it, we can hope it’s foolish casting/direction, which potentially looks even worse in this instance through King Art Games being a German developer. However both the casting and the VO were done by OMUK, which is a London based studio. It does muddy what is an otherwise warm and light-hearted game, but doesn’t ruin the rest of the experience.

Marred only by its dubious choice of accent for the greedy merchant, it is an otherwise brilliant addition to the series. The opportunity that funding through Kickstarter has afforded them has been put to good use and it’s easy to recommend to any fan of the series or adventure games in general. It isn’t made to be overly difficult, so those wanting to indulge in a humorous fantasy setting shouldn’t get bogged down often by the puzzles. It’s obvious that they want to make another game in the series and hopefully that will live up to the new bar they’ve set here.

Square Enix has a sale for the most holy of business created holidays, Valentines Day. What better way to spend Valentines Day, than wholeheartedly embracing buying things last minute for your significant other or maybe even for yourself. That being said, it is an awfully good deal they have going on though. You can get the Legacy of Kain Collection for a mere £1.99 / €2.49 / A$2.99 which includes four games with Legacy of Kain in the title and it also has a Nosgoth Veterans Pack in there to boot.

Murdered: Soul Suspect also has the same deal on and which we reviewed a while ago and thought it was merely OK. It is only £1.99 but if you can only buy one, then it’s probably better that you buy the one with 5 games in it, but it is your money so invest it as you please.

There is a dating theme to this sale as you can see in the pictures below but the main character in Murdered (Ronan), a big part of who he was, was the fact his wife died and he never stopped loving her and only her; so having a dating profile made for him is in bad taste – especially since he’s only just died.

Chess is going to get more Warhammer 40K-ey this year, and now we have a gameplay teaser to show us what’s in store. It boils down to very violent cinematic battles between the 40K themed chess pieces which is certainly more than enough to warrant interest for some but it also has footage of their Regicide mode. Regicide mode has leveling, abilities and pieces will have HP as well, and whilst it’s not entirely clear how much difference it’ll make, it does show that your units can (presumably) be killed in more than just the traditional Chess manner.

Regicide will also incorporate a story campaign, beginning with the first of three acts upon release, which is entitled The Angels of Death; it’ll likely revolve around the Blood Angels chapter of Space Marines. We know it’ll be just Space Marines and Orks to begin with but we also know that there are multiple Chapters of Space Marines, as the White Scars are a free bonus to anyone who signs up on the game’s site.

You can already preorder the game if you really want to and for not much extra you’ll get a t-shirt that isn’t half bad at all. The game is due to release in an early access style on PC in Q2 this year at a $14.99 price tag. Android and iOS versions will follow up later but you will have one account across all versions of the game, which has cross-platform play a la Hero Academy.

Carrying on in the tradition of bringing awesome games to PC, Mac, Linux and Android users for a small price and helping charities to boot, Humble Bundle have an Adventure Bundle that’ll send you packing – for an epic Adventure, not send you packing because it’s a bad bundle… ah… you get the idea.

For the minimum amount of your currency ($1 for Steam keys), you can get the excellent Detective Grimoire (also on android), both the brilliant Broken Sword: Director’s Cut and equally brilliant Broken Sword 2 (not quite the right format review but close enough), and finally The Whispered World, which has either the best or worst voice over for a sad clown that you’ve ever heard.

Pay more than the average ($3.50 at the time of writing) to snag: The Detail Episode One, which is pretty darn good; A Golden Wake, which we liked; and Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller: GOTY, which contains two colons in its title and it also meant to be pretty darn good.

If you opt to give $10 for the final tier, then you’ll at least have donated extra money to charity. You could also donate some time to Broken Sword 5 but… well… the less said the better.

For the third and final time we will post a Life Is Strange Dev Diary (First and Second Dev Diaries). This time we get the very wordy talk about the lighting, art, script, music, voice actors and how it wants the indie film vibe – which it really does seem to have. The music is one of the main draws for it and it adds to the indie film vibe with its mellow tunes, which aren’t dissimilar in tone to Garden State’s Soundtrack. The songs are hand picked for the game and are yours to peruse through these handy playlists for both Youtube and Spotify.

It’s also worth noting that the lead character is voiced by Ashly Burch who is the voice of Tiny Tina in Borderlands 2. The first part of the five episode game drops tomorrow and the others will release in 6 week intervals.

• Format: PC
• Unleashed: 20th January 2014
• Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
• Developer: Daedalic Entertainment
• Players: 1
• Site: http://www.daedalic.de/en/game/Blackguards_2
• Game code provided by the publisher

We were more than happy with how Blackguards 2 was shaping up, save for a few minor hitches in the early levels of the game. Luckily, it’s still managed to keep its stride going into the full build of the game. It’s a challenging tactical RPG with a dark storyline, with no heroic protagonists. It’s very enjoyable despite the difficulty going awry in some areas.

The main characters in the game consist of a few who reappear from the original Blackguards but this time under the command of the central anti-hero, Cassia Corapia, a noblewoman out for revenge on her husband Marwan, who imprisoned her in the catacombs beneath his city. Left to rot, Cassia tirelessly searches for an escape, but sharing her new home with the spiders known as Corapias has led to their noxious bites slowly sinking her into madness. Eventually, she escapes and begins recruiting misfits to begin cutting a swathe through her ex-husband’s empire.

Before she gets to do any swathe cutting though, the early levels are arguably some of the most difficult, as they – much like the preview build – don’t give you much of an opportunity to drive character development in a way that will give you many advantages in these levels. It will likely still take a few attempts at these, just so you can meet the somewhat awkward-to-fulfill victory requirements.

The levels become far more lax in their difficulty once you break out into the world map. It gives you more direct control of progression and allows you to see to challenges when you want, to rather than pitting you against them when you don’t quite feel ready. There are times where you need to snuff out a threat early to gain a hefty reward but, for the most part, you get to do things your way. You do still get the occasional story battle that comes for you when you might not expect it, but at least it has the courtesy to let you prep your party.

A surprising amount of battles have more than just a ‘kill all enemies’ component and it makes for more interesting and memorable battles. “Bosses” in particular are quite interesting as they usually require a little more puzzle solving than most levels and may make you have to attempt the level multiple times before you crack a solution. Battles can degenerate into tedium at times, mostly when you fight to defend areas already claimed. These occur every three battles (unskippable story missions not included) and are Marwan’s attempt to reclaim lost territory; if you happen to inhabit the area chosen for attack then you can make use of your party, otherwise you have to rely on your mercenaries – whatever the state they may be in.

As you will only ever have proper control over the development of four characters, you have to make sure that you aren’t spending points frivolously when building them into their roles. Unfortunately they begin the game pigeonholed into those roles, with Cassia being the only exception. It’s two fighters, a mage, and whatever you want Cassia to be. Any remaining holes can be plugged by mercenaries later on.

The biggest issue with this is that there isn’t a huge variety of skills and specialisations for non-mages to delve into. You basically pick some skills to go with whatever weapon they are using and then work on buffing stats. It means that towards the end of the game they don’t really do anything that interesting in combat, other than fighting on the front lines by tanking damage and dealing out comparatively low damage themselves. By comparison, Mages have so much choice but so few skills to have at a level where they are particularly useful. It feels like there will always be a best choice of skills regardless of your wants and needs, especially as when you get a character, they already have points spent in a specific set of weapon or spell specialisations.

Moving onto equipment; it gives you a fairly large set of options but again, a lot of it is tied to skills as you will eventually be able to kit out most of your party with full heavy armour – if you can buy/find enough – without having to deal with many/any adverse effects. It doesn’t help that you often aren’t given new equipment to buy and even when you are you are you can’t always get a full set of an armour to get the much coveted armour set bonuses. Even mission or loot rewards scarcely get you much; often leaving you with really interesting parts but almost never full completed sets.

One of the most interesting features is the interrogation sections; usually if you defeat a particularly powerful foe who ties into the plot in some way, then you can give them the once over with your party once you return to camp. Each character has a different technique for influencing the prisoner and if you choose the correct one – which can be discerned through conversation or perhaps the compendium entry describing them – you gain at the very least some information. Unfortunately we only chose correctly once, which gave information that helped prepare for the mission the event led to but every other case left us devoid of any helpful titbits. So in those cases we had the choice of executing the prisoner or letting them go; we opted for the former in most cases.

It’s a dark and interesting story about revenge– which is also surprisingly well voice acted – and the way Cassia falls into madness is an odd delight, as you never quite know what she’ll decide to do next; it also allows you narrative freedom to be good or bad at any point without feeling out of character. That combined with plenty of interesting battles, a reasonably fair amount of character development and a rather challenging level of difficulty all the way through, makes Blackguards 2 a highly recommended Tactical RPG.

War Child is a charity that helps save the lives of children who need protection from the effects of war. So it’s quite fitting that This War of Mine developers 11 Bit Studios have teamed up with War Child to do some charity work, as they both have anti-war messages to relay. If you need an incentive to give money to charity, then don’t worry – there’s something in it for you, too.

If you give at least one US dollar to the cause here then you will have a warm fuzzy feeling inside to denote you having done a good deed and that absolves you of all your sins. If that wasn’t enough you will also be entered into a raffle to win one of many lovely tech related prizes, including an Alienware 14″ laptop as the grand prize and copies of This War of Mine; so long as you met that aforementioned $1 requirement.

The competition lasts until the 29th of January so if you feel like dropping a buck or perhaps even more than that, then follow this link or maybe even check out War Child itself.

Also, since we are indecent human beings with no shame, riding the coattails of a news piece about a charity; here is a link to our This War of Mine review.