Latest Articles (Page 896)

GAME has agreed to a £51.9m takeover by Mike Ashley's Sports Direct.

Ramadan can be tough sometimes. No, I'm not talking about the praying, the fasting or the interrupted sleep. I'm talking about making the time to play games, and I know I speak for all of us when I mention a growing collection of games we haven't even thought of loading up for the first time.

"I like McCree's Hot Potato."

Two years ago I remember standing outside the back of the Los Angeles Convention Centre, trying out a new feature called "raiding" in Pokémon Go. It was about 30C, the 4G was wonky and the feature was still in beta. I thought, huh, this will never catch on. Now, I raid most days.

Treyarch has revealed plans to add a guaranteed way of getting a Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 weapon you don't already have to the game.

Cadence of Hyrule should not feel like Zelda. Sure, there's Link - and there's Zelda! - and there's a top-down landscape of villages, beaches and mountains. There's a wood you can get lost in and there's a boomerang you can find. But this is an offshoot of another very different RPG series: Crypt of the Necrodancer. Crypt is a rhythm-action game and a roguelite, I gather. And so in its own way is Cadence. Link moves through the world bouncing to a beat, and he must use the beat to tackle enemies who all, essentially, come with their own weaponised dances. I understand that if I dig through the menus I can procedurally scramble the map, and I can even turn on permadeath. Not very Zelda-y really.

Crash Team Racing - the original one - is my life-or-death game: the one I'd pick if some cartoon, alien villain came down to Earth and told me I had one chance to beat them in a video game to save the world, and one where I reckon I'd actually have a decent shot at pulling it off, too. I have played it quite a lot, basically - so much that I apparently can't even describe it without referencing it's race-to-save-the-world Adventure Mode - and it's probably the only game I'd say I'm actually, genuinely good at. I'm equal parts relieved and delighted, then, to say that with Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled Activision and Beenox have absolutely nailed it. This is a lavish, fantastically polished remaster.

Can a Switch remake of a 1993 Game Boy actually work? Based on the E3 showfloor demo I experienced, the answer is an emphatic 'yes' - and it's partly down to just how good the original design was. A combination of smart overworld design, challenging dungeons and Game Boy-pushing visuals ensured that the original was a genuine classic. While still very much an 8-bit experience, this portable outing managed to deliver a Zelda game that stands toe to toe with its bigger brother on Super NES - and the new Switch version looks quite beautiful.

The blood pack for Total War: Three Kingdoms comes out 27th June.

On Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's announcement day, I was excited. Not just for the usual reasons, but because this instalment promised to tackle some seriously mature topics. Articles were published describing a terrorist attack in London, civilian collateral damage, situations ripped "straight from the headlines" and a particularly challenging child soldier level.

My Friend Pedro is a side-scrolling action game in which you kick skateboards at gangster's heads under the guidance of a talking banana. Would you like a longer introduction, or shall we crack on?

This week, Mortal Kombat 11 received its first DLC character, the brilliant villain Shang Tsung. I've spent some time getting to grips with his unique moveset, working out cool combos and stealing souls all over the shop.

Consistency is everything. Nailing one hot lap is fine - the real trick is stringing together a succession of scorchers all within a split second of one another. That's the essence of endurance driving, really, and it's something that's baked into Assetto Corsa Competizione, a racing-focussed spin-off from Kunos Simulazioni's sensational driving sim Assetto Corsa. It's an officially-licensed take on the Blancpain GT series, which itself feels quietly remarkable; racing games rarely look beyond top-flight series such as F1, but when they do - as in TOCA or GTR 2 - the results can be incredible.

UPDATE 20th June 2019: Sega has been in touch to say it still owns the Alpha Protocol IP, and to clarify the game was pulled from Steam due to the expiry of music rights.

The biggest surprise about this E3's showing of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake? That it's matured into a gorgeous - and very much playable - game. Square Enix's new trailer made a real mark this year in showing how modern rendering methods transform a PlayStation classic into something palatable for the modern day. Gameplay systems are laid bare, and there's a much better idea of how the scale of Midgar is being expanded upon. From a technical perspective, it finally looks set to deliver as one of the company's most ambitious projects.

Amidst the chaos of the E3 show floor, dipping into the quiet, colourful world of Journey to the Savage Planet feels like a breath of fresh alien air. Savage Planet has the colour palette and creatures of a particularly designed No Man's Sky planet, the exploration of a classic 3D adventure game, and the campy humour of a Russell T Davies-era Doctor Who episode. And that's all very much my space jam.

Asobo Studio deserves kudos for the scale of the achievement delivered in the recently released A Plague Tale: Innocence. Where many smaller studios tap into established engines like Unreal Engine 4 or Unity for their technological needs, this outfit did things the old-fashioned way, developing its own proprietary engine technology. The end result is an absolutely beautiful game and one that scales remarkably well as we climb the console ladder and beyond to the heights of PC's most powerful graphics hardware.

R. Talsorian Games is having a pretty big year. The studio is riding high on the release of The Witcher RPG last year, with expansion Lords and Land in the works. Cyberpunk Red, the latest edition of the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG is releasing in August, 15 years after Cyberpunk V3.0. And, of course, Cyberpunk 2077 played a starring role in this year's E3.

Hey everyone! I've got a bit of Eurogamer news to share. It's sad at first but ultimately super cool and very exciting.

On yet another swelteringly hot LA afternoon, I found myself wandering around a grey town with snowy rooftops and a pint of dubiously fizzy beer in hand. Why? It was the launch event for Niantic's Pokémon Go follow-up, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which following a beta in Australia and New Zealand, has finally been given a US and UK release date. That's happening pretty soon, in fact - this Friday, 21st June.

Square Enix has an ethics department, a new interview has revealed - and it advised the Final Fantasy 7 remake team on development.

PES 2020 - sorry, eFootball PES 2020 - is rebranding, in case you hadn't noticed. Konami wants this game to be known as the go-to football esport, built on its reputation as the go-to football sim: the serious one for serious football fans, as any Mundial-reading, Italia '90 shirt-wearing, Borussia Mönchengladbach scarf-waving hipster would tell you.

After being left thoroughly impressed by Luigi's Mansion 3's E3 2019 demo, I got to chat with the game's two leading developers: director Yoshihito Ikebata, and Nintendo's legendary Kensuke Tanabe who is overseeing the project (and others).

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic's magical follow-up to Pokémon Go, is due to release in the UK and US on 21st June. More regions will then follow at a later date.

This piece contains significant spoilers for Observation!

Of course, Watch Dogs Legion's E3 demo starts in a pub. It's the kind of upmarket boozer where city types in chino suits manspread across leather sofas, necking Riesling after a hard day moving money between accounts. It's late in the evening, so there's the usual prick wearing shades despite being sat inside, boot up on the arm of a strandmon while quaffing Brewdog. Wandering out on the street, we're only a block away from Parliament, which looks stunning despite the shitshow going on inside. Across the Thames, the London Eye towers over the near-future skyline, lit in red like a neon Sauron.

The wait is finally over - today, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night releases on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, with the Switch version due out next week. It's a journey that began with the launch of the Kickstarter back in 2015 - although, of course, the journey began well before that, when Koji Igarashi began working on the Castlevania series during his time at Konami, and put his own imprint on these beloved games. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night stays true to that, and the early signs are promising. We've only just got code, and our review will be with you shortly - for now, here's a discussion we had with Igarashi during Kyoto's BitSummit a couple of weeks back.

Metroidvanias are an inherently clever genre, and the cleverness can sometimes sap a little of the energy. I've played plenty of Metroidvanias that were very easy to admire but a bit of a drag to play. It can be slightly enervating, being blinded by all that brilliance. I can appreciate how ingenious it is that a certain area works differently depending on whether it's on fire or filled with toxic gas, but it can take something truly special to shake me out of quiet reverence for someone's design smarts.

Call of Duty: Black Ops' Zombies mode has been unplayable on PC for a week now, leading to a glut of negative reviews on Steam.

A brief glimpse of the forthcoming Monster Hunter movie has leaked online, and our very first look at the Paul W.S. Anderson-helmed production suggests it's shaping up nicely.