Something Something Games are busy preparing their latest game, Kick Bastards, a parkour game that sees you booting enemies as you run through hellish environments. Today, the team have announced a new trailer, and that a demo will be coming to Steam.
In my humble opinion Disney has brutally mishandled the Tron franchise from the get-go. Their ambitious 1982 film set within the inner workings of an arcade machine was a brilliantly original film whose influence can be seen in films like Ready Player One and Wreck It Ralph. While time hasn’t been kind to the Forty-year-old flick, Tron was the first proper glimpse at what CGI could do but in true Disney fashion, the series was cut dead and it wasn’t until 2010 that the series had a sequel/reboot to its name. Another twelve years have come and gone and while Mickey continues to pledge his support for the series, the lack of tangible proof of this means that all hope of the franchise being taken seriously was pretty much lost. That is, until Tron Identity slid across my desk like a long lost data disc.
Remnant: From the Ashes released in 2019 and is generally thought of as part of the little subgenre of soulslikes that seemed to be everywhere in the second half of the 2010s. On initial release it got quickly labelled as “Dark Souls with guns”, a moniker that is both quite apt and also very reductive. It got a reasonable critical reception, sold quite well, and then largely disappeared without leaving much of a trace on the media landscape. Four years later it's been ported to the Switch, and so here we are.
While I’ll never proclaim myself to be good at them, I’ve always had a soft spot for city-builders and resource management games. Since my first attempts at Sim City on the SNES, I’ve found it fun to hold a growing civilisation in my hand, though I often get about 75% of the way through and then struggle to keep up with all of the management to push through to the finale. Time to point the spotlight on Outlanders from Pomelo Games then; a boiled down city-builder experience where there's plenty to do in a small space and only a few folks to keep an eye on.
Everyone has that one game from their childhood sitting on the shelf that no one else has heard of. It’s typically a 5 or a 6 out of 10 action game that did well enough that you bought it, but not so well that it became a long running franchise. Mine is Oni, a launch window PS2 game made by Bungie and published by Rockstar of all people - it was a middle of the road action-shooter that was the dictionary definition of “bang average” and probably sold about four copies before it was quickly forgotten. One of those sales must have gone to 110 Industries because loading up Wanted: Dead instantly took me back to the early noughties!
Without carbon dating myself too much, as a kid I had been waiting for Samus's first 3D outing since rumours of an N64 game were circulating various Nintendo magazines. Development on a next-gen Metroid was ultimately shifted to Nintendo’s first disc-based system, the GameCube. For the first year of the GameCube’s life I had been enjoying ploughing countless hours into games like Luigi’s Mansion and Super Smash Bros Melee, but in 2003 (2002 for those not in Europe) everything changed. Metroid Prime had arrived. If my mum thought I was obsessed with video games before loading that tiny disc resembling the morphball into my console, she was sorely mistaken because very quickly I became obsessed with Tallon IV. Some 21 years later and Nintendo had the audacity to shadow drop a remastered version of a game I’d played to death. Just like then, I’ve immersed myself into Samus’s suit and didn’t regret a single minute of it.
Chained Echoes is a charming indie JRPG from solo developer Matthias Linda. Taking inspiration from classics such as Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger and Breath of Fire, this title features a broad ensemble of colourful characters to mix, match and swap out during the adventure. Traversing a truly impressive variety of gorgeously detailed maps, you'll recruit new friends, build a small mecha army, and encounter some of the craziest enemies I've seen in a while.
Hitman. Assassin. Executioner. Any way you slice it, the name is synonymous with stealth and precision. They’re like shadows in the night; in and out with no discernible trace left behind, spectres sent to take your soul to the underworld and you’ll never even see it coming... Then, once every lifetime, along comes a different breed of man. A man who can kill a target with a screwdriver from 20 paces. A man who can bean an unsuspecting victim unconscious with a rogue briefcase. A man who can kill you with nothing but patience and a rubber ducky. A man like Agent 47. Welcome back to the cunning and creative world of Hitman.
Looking at Lydia in my backlog, I wasn’t entirely sure what drew me to buying it. It could have been the haunting monochrome screenshots, or the rather sinister key art. It could have been bought in a splurge when I went through a phase of buying really random titles from the eShop that were just a couple of quid each - honestly, I have no idea. Whatever it was, when I found myself with a spare hour before bed last week, and the ever helpful HLTB advised me I could use it to get a whole game polished off, I decided to get to it, eager to add to my dying Beat the Backlog feature!
I’ve been a fan of Metroidvania games for as long as I can remember. I love finding all of the nooks and crannies that I can’t quite overcome yet, and trying to remember where they all are once you gain the ability to progress. Equally, I love a shoot-em-up - dancing between hundreds of incoming enemy shots while also trying to deliver blows of your own is both panic-inducing and incredibly exhilarating! Imagine my delight then when Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team came out with The Knight Witch, which manages to blend them both! And supported by the stalwarts at Team17, who seem to hit much more than they miss, I couldn’t wait to get started!
