What we've been playing - old brands revitalised, ageing classics, and cursed character creators
A few of the things that have us hooked this week.
23rd August 2024
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we enjoy Delta Force coming back in a big way; we try out the new character creator for pretty Sims-like Inzoi; and we wince a bit as Skyrim shows its age.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, PS5
It's strange going back to Skyrim because it's one of those obelisk-like games that hovers imposingly in my - and many other people's - mind. It's a biggun, and I remember being very impressed by it at the time - impressed by how it looked, how it played, how it everythinged. But it's old now, and I've never been more keenly aware of this than when I revisited it on PlayStation 5 at the weekend. I wanted to properly introduce my partner to it. Skyrim's a name she's heard over and over, muttered like legend - could the reality of it really live up to the legend?
It wasn't a great start. I've always loved that opening - I think I've loved all of Bethesda's openings - but to someone who didn't see it at the time, and whose biggest modern RPG experience was The Witcher 3, and then Baldur's Gate 3, it looks dated. It's not just the technology, it's the acting and whole thing as a holistic package. I found myself quickly making excuses for it.
And yet.
And yet it doesn't take long for Skyrim to work a bit of that old magic and get under the skin again. It's that ambience, that pastoral calm.. Despite being set in the frozen north of Tamriel, there's still a summer afternoon's buzz about the world when you emerge from that cave. Pickable flowers are in full bloom, bees buzz around. You can sense the lazy heat warming the rocks and air. And in the background, gentle music massages you. I'd forgotten how relaxing a place Skyrim can be just to potter around. That's its heart, I think, as a game and as an experience. For all the epic it tries to conjure, it's the simple moments in Skyrim that speak to me.
God damn I can't wait for The Elder Scrolls 6.
Delta Force, PC
I have a fairly strict rule for myself that I've been breaking this week: don't play a game before release if you're already confident it's going to be good. My reasoning is this: if you know you're going to get a game, it's better to spend your time with it in its best state, maybe after a few post-release patches, or as a hugely discounted complete edition. But certainly after the game has officially been released. Yet for a good 15 hours this week, I've been playing Delta Force: Hawk Ops, a game still in alpha, because I can't seem to stop - even if every gun I buy and mission I complete, and character I unlock, will be stripped away once the game is released.
We've already covered the basic premise and genuine goodness of Delta Force: it's a Call of Duty-ish military shooter with an Escape from Tarkov-style extraction mode, and Battlefield-style rush and conquest modes. A single-player campaign set amongst the events of Black Hawk Down is promised for launch. For a game in alpha, it feels surprisingly polished. It has a sensible interface, good gunplay and interesting maps, and there's already a staggering amount of hashtag-content to explore outside of the shooting-people-in-the-back gameplay. There's base building, missions, an auction house, crafting, cosmetics, multiple digital currencies, and, err, a global chat full of racists that could use some urgent moderation.
Within the game, there's plenty of variation too. As with Battlefield, there are four archetypal classes, each with different equipment, and as with Battlefield 2042, there are named characters within those classes who come with special abilities. I've adopted "Hackclaw", a recon character who has silent steps, throwing knives, drones and a scanner, which makes for a nice sneaky playstyle, in stark contrast to the mobile "D Wolf", who tears around on a motorised exoskeleton, shooting off grenades and sliding around like a Call of Duty character. It feels like there's room to choose something that vibes with your preferences rather than just choosing the strongest character, which is nice.
I'm not surprised the extraction stuff is well implemented - developer Team Jade worked on Call of Duty: Mobile, another surprisingly good game, and there's plenty that can be learned from COD's DMZ. But the Battlefield-style mode already feels a lot better than BF2042 did when it launched. The different map stages are more focused and interesting, vehicles are rare and don't feel too overpowered, and squadplay is the means for success that it should be. A short time to kill means that it's possible to defeat a numerically superior force, and there's even a scoreboard to see how you're doing - which was famously left out of BF2042's 1.0 release. There's certainly room for improvement - not all classes have anti-armour capability, there are far too many weapon attachments, and the IFF system sometimes fails to paint your allies correctly - but for an alpha, this is impressive stuff.
If you'd like to check it out, I have some codes to share in the comments, courtesy of the developers.
-Will
-Bertie
Inzoi: Character Studio demo, PC
After a long overdue driver update on my part, I was able to actually play the Inzoi character creator demo without it being a stuttering mess. But a heads-up to any Sims fans on ageing hardware: you might need an upgrade if you plan on trying it out, or if you plan to get Inzoi when it launches. If it was struggling on my okay gaming laptop, I don't see Inzoi running well on Sims-friendly potato setups when it comes out.
Enough about tech. Is the character creator any good? Visually, it's stunning - it's a little unbelievable how good it looks, actually, even on lower graphical settings. The customisation goes deep too. It's got all the usual bells and whistles, and even a few chimes to boot, as we're treated to entire categories for things like fake nails. Fake nails! Personality customisation doesn't go as deep, from what I can tell in the demo, but it's nice to see inclusive gender and sexuality options there already.
But my favourite part of character character creators is never my creations - it's the communities'. Inzoi's creative community uses a website called Canvas to upload their works, and boy did I find some great creations on it. From a scarily accurate Billie Eilish, to horrific renditions of Shrek and Wallace, from Wallace and Gromit. I downloaded Shrek, naturally, and made him do some beautiful poses in the photo mode.
I'm a little scared Inzoi might melt my laptop when I play the full game, but how can I resist it when Shrek shenanigans await me?
-Jessica