JOE DANGER


This tricky racer plays like Evel Knievel at his evilest
It didn’t surprise me to learn that Hello Games got its idea for Joe Danger from an old wind-up toy. You play Joe, a washed up Evel Knieveltype character trying to catapult his potbellied form back to stuntman superstardom. You race along a single plane on a tiny motorbike, performing tricks between jumps, bounce pads, and deadly pits to power up your blue plasmic exhaust-fart speed boost power. It’s a fiendish and demanding rhythm game dressed up as a Pixar comedy short, rich with accessible Saturday morning appeal. As if it was a child’s toy, I immediately wanted to pick Joe Danger up and play with it.

The original wind-up toy belonged to Hello Games artist Grant Duncan, who rescued it from his parents’ attic. He and three friends had fled big-budget development at studios like EA and Criterion to make something on their own. They started prototyping ideas with figurines, and the little pull-back-and-go motorcycle man caught their imagination. Before long, they were making ramps out of books and firing their wind-up toy at the annoyed faces of the telephone company salespeople who shared their office. “We always knew the type of game we wanted to make,” game director Sean Players will be able to create and vote on each others’ levels in-game.

Murray explained. “Something that was bright, colourful and vibrant, but also had depth. Mario is this really cheery game, but it’s such a hard, skillful game.” Mario never had to wrestle a bike through a minefield at 50mph, however. I tried a few high-difficulty tracks and was still completely absorbed 20 minutes later. YouTube is full of videos of frustrated players trying to conquer the toughest tracks in the Xbox version. Now, free of console exclusivity deals, Joe Danger (and its sequel, Joe Danger 2: The Movie) are finally coming to PC with new features. The level editing system that lets you plop obstacles into an environment and instantly playtest them existed in the console versions, but the PC version will have Steam Workshop support.

Players will be able to create and vote on each others’ levels through an in-game portal to the Workshop. If JD builds a community on Steam, it could last forever. The PC version also lets you race against your own ghosts, and share ghosts with friends. Both games support Steam’s Big Picture mode, making it easy to play on a flatscreen TV—a setup that Joe Danger is perfectly suited to. The first game is all about Joe on his bike, trying not to die; the
second adds dozens of characters and vehicles, and has a chaotic multiplayer racing mode that’s perfect for parties. A great game for kids, it also has enough depth to challenge hardened Trials experts. The PC deserves
more games like Joe Danger


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SAINTS ROW IV


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With great power comes no responsibility whatsoever
How do you give more power to the leader of the Saints, a man (or woman) already globally celebrated as a crazed, untouchable psychopath? In Saints Row IV, Volition have made him President of the United States. The demo I played opened with the Prez swaggering towards a press conference, making snap decisions on key matters of state. Do I solve world hunger or give cancer the middle finger? Do I agree to a Nyte Blayde marathon with Josh Birk, the show’s airhead actor? Do I punch a fussy old congressman in the face, or the balls? I make my choice: screw cancer; hell yes; right in the crotch.
Obama’s an amateur compared with me. What’s next? Oh, aliens have attacked. Saints Row: The Third was wholly encapsulated by a single song on its soundtrack: Kanye West’s “Power.” Like that song, the game was brash, crude, and childishly defiant, but also self-aware. It was the moment the series found its identity. It stopped trying to be a fun GTA clone, reassessed its ridiculousness, and decided to run with it.


Naked. Saints Row IV continues to run—but now that sprint has become a superspeed blur The dubstep gun does everything you’d expect weaponized wubs to do. I tackle my alien immigration issue with an appropriately insane response. As my cabinet—returning characters Shaundi, Oleg, Kinzie and Pierce—are abducted, I run to the Oval Office, clean out a weapons cache and proceed to gun down the invading Zin across a White House under siege. For most games this would be a climactic setpiece. For Saints Row IV, it’s the second mission. Not that the relentless assault of absurdism is always matched by the game’s individual objectives. After a series of firefights through the crumbling corridors and stairways of power, the mission’s end is somewhat reserved: a turret sequence and a quick time event.


Saints Row IV’s response? Become even more absurd. When the demo skips forward, I’m back in SR3’s home city of Steelport. More accurately, I’m in a virtual recreation of it. Zinyak has placed the protagonist and his crew in a Matrix-style prison, and it’s here that the rest of the game plays out. Also: I have superpowers. There’s a sense that Saints Row IV is a direct expansion to its predecessor—a viewpoint supported by the repeated use of both setting and game engine. But if the lack of a new space to explore is disappointing, it’s balanced by the way Volition uses the setup to re-evaluate how its game’s systems work. It’s now free to provide a more enjoyable route around its open world.


Given the choice, would you rather get into a car and diligently follow the road, or sprint up a building, leap into the air and glide across the map? It doesn’t matter. You can do either. And it’s not just movement that has been overhauled. Health no longer regenerates. Instead, the enemies you kill drop arcade-style healing orbs. It seems counterintuitive at first, but the upshot is that the best way to stay alive is to stay in the fight. The wanted level has been similarly tweaked. Criminal actions draw the attention of regular beat cops. If you extend your spree, hoverbike-mounted Zin will join the pursuit. Keep going and you’ll signal a Warden—a tough miniboss encounter. Beat him and the meter resets, making you incognito again. (At least, as incognito as a superpowered president in a virtual world can be.) SR4 feels like a game that wants to challenge, but not punish, aggressive play.


SR4 also provides you with the series’ most varied arsenal to date. In addition to enhanced speed and jumping, a second set of powers provides you with combat abilities. A freeze blast will slow and shatter your enemies, a ground shockwave gives a powerful area of effect attack, and telekinesis will unceremoniously grab objects and people. It’s a skill tested in one of the new minigames, a spin-off to SR3’s Genkibowl in which I was challenged to
fling mascots through glowing hoops. Combat powers have their place, but there’s a short cooldown period between use, so the guns are still the star. Joining the inevitable standards of shotgun, pistol and rifle, I saw two of the game’s signature weapons.


One fired a mini-black hole that devastated the surrounding area (and me if I got too close). The other fired dubstep as an arcing neon laser. It did everything you’d expect weaponized wubs to do: everyone who’s hit starts dancing. And then dies. Or explodes. There’s at least one more bizarre weapon—the head-expanding Inflate- O-Ray—although I didn’t see it in action. And Saints Row IV’s toolbox of silly toys will almost certainly expand even further. As Kanye says, “No one man should have all that power.” But seeing as you do, you might as well enjoy it.

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TOTAL WAR ROME II



Camels beat horses. Elephants crush everything in their path My elephant units demonstrate their mass, plowing into Roman infantry. Don’t let the history books fool you about the sacking of Alexandria and its famous library. Those warmongering bookworms had it coming. It turns out that Julius Caesar made the Egyptians a very reasonable offer when they got all uppity about him marching an army through “their” land. Not only did he graciously ignore their belligerence and re-establish the longstanding trade agreement the Egyptians had foolishly tossed out (along with all their toys), but the Creative Assembly dev playing Caesar gave Egypt the opportunity to become a client state of Rome as well. A great offer, I think, but the Egyptian ambassador rejected it. I guess this means Total War.



Open the diplomacy tab in Rome II and you’ll see something called the Relations Pane: this contains a list of your actions throughout the history of the game, complete with the relevant faction’s response. It makes the often inscrutable nature of Total War’s AI more transparent, and helps put faction behavior into wider sociopolitical context. You can now see, for instance, that breaking off trade agreements with allies of Egypt won’t go down too well in Pharaohland, but Egypt seems to love it when you commit wartime atrocities against the Macedonians. Making AI responses more readable runs the risk of making them appear nakedly robotic, but it also opens the scope for more nuanced diplomatic strategies.



Diplomacy doesn’t work for Creative Assembly’s Caesar in this case, so the developers let me fight my first battle in Rome II. Although CA first showed me the conflict from a Roman perspective, they now have me playing as the Egyptians. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to adjust until I delightedly spot my ranks of troops mounted on camels. The reason I’m playing Egypt is that Rome will face an uphill struggle— literally—to win the Battle of the Nile. My
larger army is mounted on top of the high ground, while the reinforcements Caesar desperately needs are all aboard ships that must wrestle with my superior navy before they can land.

Rome II’s naval and land battles are now controlled on the same battlefield, and the sea is my first priority. Naval warfare feels closer to Shogun than Empire: you can still fight at range, but a volley of arrow The Relations Pane makes the inscrutable nature of Total War’s AI more transparent. fire is really just a polite way of introducing yourself before the prow of your ship slams into your enemy’s starboard side. “Ramming is one of the key weapons
for these ancient ships,” community communications manager Al Bickham explains. “You’ll see they all have these big metal prows.” There’s no need to be subtle here: my navy outnumbers Caesar’s, so I send my ships to entangle his before they can get to shore, pausing to zoom in as my crew leaps on board his vessels and murders everyone.

In the meantime, Caesar has sent a mounted unit up the hill to test my defenses. Unfortunately, horses are easily spooked by camels—their obvious superiors. I send out a unit of camelry (yes, that is the correct word) to meet the attackers, and the Romans quickly scatter. Caesar then marches the rest of his army up the hill to meet me head-on. A standard Total War rout follows, and the obvious superiority of my forces means I don’t need to rely on clever tactics.

I do try out some new defensive weapons, though—flaming boulders that can be pushed down a hill at aggressors—while my elephant units demonstrate their superior mass by plowing head-on into Roman infantry. The heavy-footed pachyderms scatter troops across the battlefield—and, um, head straight into a bunch of archers that I really should have moved out of the way. It’s all a bit easy, in fact, so Creative Assembly offers to let me try the battle from the Roman side.

I’m almost crushed. First I rush my navy to the shore, since I learned the fun way that the Roman forces are no match for the Egyptian fleet. Once there, however, a unit of mounted elephants comes charging out of a nearby forest and tears straight through my freshly disembarked forces. In the meantime, I try to outflank the main body of the Egyptian army but the steep gradient makes maneuvering hard work, and the Egyptians rush down to annihilate me, shamelessly copying my previous tactics.

Once the elephantmangled bodies are counted, I find that I managed to snatch a win by successfully holding down a capture point at the summit of the hill. But it was Pyrrhic at
best, and I suspect it won’t be this easy in the finished game. Caesar’s battle against the Egyptian forces felt like classic Total War, with the extra nuances to the simulation adding tactical subtleties without requiring new approaches. With the polished RTS elements embedded in a similarly overhauled campaign map, Rome II offers players plenty of reasons to cross the Rubicon once more

WOLFENSTEIN THE NEW ORDER Game review

Has this seminal shooter reboot got brains as well as brawn? B.J. Blazkowicz thunders around the platform that orbits the edge of the Moon Dome. He has an enormous shotgun in each hand, and the noise they make is more freight train than firearm—a pounding “CHUNKA CHUNKA CHUNKA” that feels like it should climax in a “CHOO CHOO.” Wolfenstein:



The New Order gives you an array of ways to tackle its arena combat encounters, but I choose to deal with the Moon Dome with the simplest: by holding down both triggers and running fast in a straight line. It works. B.J.’s double shotguns blast bits off the model moon in the center of the room, and send Third Reichers sailing through shattered glass to the floor. “Ever since you got to kill Hitler in the first game, it’s been about alternate history,” senior gameplay designer Andreas Ojefors tells me. “We took that and ran with it. We
asked the question, ‘what would happen if the Nazis won the war?’” That’s all well and good.


The question that The New Order answers more satisfactorily is, “If a jackhammer got to spend one night as a Ever since you got to kill Hitler in the first game, it’s been about alternate history. human, what would it do?” Another inadvertently answered question is this: what would the first-person shooter look like in 2013 if someone had annualized Quake back in 1997? The New Order isn’t an id Software shooter, but it is deeply aware of its heritage. B.J. is delivered to the London Nautica—the Nazi research facility that houses the Moon Dome—in a car with a little Quake 3 Arena rocket launcher dangling from the key in the ignition.

The game hybridizes modern and retro design, mixing partially-regenerating health with medpacks that can be gobbled in excess to temporarily shunt your health over 100, id-style. “We tried to combine the best of the old-school shooter design with the new,” Ojefors continues. “There are things that shouldn’t have been left behind, and things that should.” He’s insistent in referring to Wolfenstein as an action-adventure game, rather than a shooter—but, well, it’s a shooter. Its noncombat ideas are expressed through environmental puzzle-solving and bits and bobs of linear narrative, neither of which are totally left-of-field for a game that also features shotguns the size of railway ties. What I saw, however, was well executed.

Machine Games is partially made up of veterans from Starbreeze, the developer behind the quietly excellent The Darkness and Chronicles of Riddick games and, by way of contrast, the noisily crap Syndicate reboot. The stylish ultraviolence and characterful writing of those games are visible here, particularly in an early sequence where Blazkowicz is interrogated about his heritage by SS officer Frau Engel and her Aryan boy-toy Bubi.

Think Inglourious Basterds by way of BioShock, and you’ll get a sense of the tone. The New Order is also linked to Starbreeze’s early work by a thick vein of priapic silliness. B.J.’s shotgun-slinging has the same uncritical hyper-macho swagger that informed The Darkness’s deadly tentacle weapons and the entirety of Vin Diesel’s career. When the industrial metal soundtrack kicks in and there are Nazis to be shotgunned, there’s a lot of uncritical hyper-macho fun to be had.

The New Order’s newer, smarter ideas resonate a little strangely in this context. Blazkowicz now has an upgradeable laser weapon that can be switched between man-blasting and scenery-cutting fire modes. The latter is used to find secrets and solve environmental puzzles, and a bit of clever engineering means it slices away at the world in relationship to the movement of your cursor. Want to retrieve some ammo from a crate? You only need to cut a hole big enough for B.J. to grab it. Want to make a hole in a chain-link fence, but bored with squares? Carve yourself an amusing When the industrial metal soundtrack kicks in, there’s a lot of hypermacho fun to be had. banana-shaped entryway! The laser also facilitates stealth. It’s possible to crouch behind cover, slice out a gun-hole and then take pot shots through it with one of your other weapons.

This is something that I’ve never done in a shooter before, and it’s nice to be surprised. The only issue is the dissonance—the change in pace doesn’t quite work, and the high difficulty level of the build I played meant that I felt pushed into playing cautiously despite the wide array of options presented to me. I came away from The New Order far more interested in it than I was going in, but it’s got a way to go in the six months before release. Pace and feedback both need work, particularly the transition from mindless corridor blasting to meticulous set-piece battles.

It’s also majorly juvenile, and a lot will hinge on how knowingly that sense is embraced. Machine Games’ Starbreeze DNA will help, but there are certainly times when The New Order plays like something a teenager might scrawl on the back of a history textbook. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course. I would have adored it when I was 12, but I also wonder about how much the hobby has changed in the years since. Then again, this is still an industry where a grown man can answer a question with a remark beginning “ever since you got to kill Hitler...” so Starbreeze will probably be fine.



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WATCH DOGS PC Games Preview




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Big Brother is watching, but then so are you It’s that old superhero dilemma: if you see a crime, is it your responsibility to stop it? What if you think the victim deserves it? Watch Dogs’ protagonist Aiden Pearce has a lot in common with Spider-Man—he’s just a little more OK with murdering. A lot more, really. Pearce is an any-means-necessary style vigilante out for revenge against some Bad People who did Mean Things (Ubisoft is staying quiet about major story details) in a near-future Chicago. Like all vigilantes, he’s no friend to the police—but he has a secret weapon to deal with them. Chicago is run by CtOS, a network of computers that manage the city’s services,
including traffic lights, trains, and security cameras. With his phone, Pearce can control these systems with a single button, and can also tap into other phones to steal private information.

He’s not above emptying an innocent’s bank account in pursuit of vigilante justice. Pearce protects the people at the expense of their privacy. Among his tools is the city’s crime prediction algorithm, which digs through personal information to spot potential victims before they’re attacked. He doesn’t have to intervene in crimes he witnesses, though. In the live demo I saw, Pearce stayed hidden while a suspected rapist was murdered in an alley. Geez. The fidelity of the alley and characters made that scene feel especially gruesome. The world looks properly lived in—not as sterile as GTA’s satirical cities—with grubbier neighborhoods speckled with Aiden Pearce is out for revenge against some Bad People who did Mean Things.

graffiti and litter. Litter that, thanks to Ubisoft’s new Disrupt engine, realistically flutters around in simulated wind. When Aiden walks into a pawn shop, the light is snuffed out and street sounds give way to thumpy beats and the whine of fluorescent lights. The people in and around it walk with purpose and loiter with intentional lack of purpose. They aren’t just NPCs there to scream and be run over—they have stories and personalities. Or, at least, Ubi creates the illusion that they have those things. Personal details about pedestrians pulled up by Pearce’s augmented reality HUD reveal hobbies, fears, shortcomings, and fetish porn addictions—snippet of lives as a catalyst for
our imaginations.

It’s an effective way to convince me that I’m looking at a city full of real people, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m watching an elaborate stage play, no matter how good the motion-captured animations are. Watch Dogs might approach the uncanny valley of open worlds; it’s close enough to convincing that it induces Truman Showlike paranoia. Given the theme of the game, that unease may be an asset. When not quietly admiring the city’s fidelity, though, Pearce keeps busy by starring in a violent action game. Actually, I’m told that Watch Dogs can be played non-violently, but what I saw was Pearce slowing down time with Focus mode (hey, Max Payne can do it, so whatever) and shooting people’s faces. In his defense he prefers to murder bad guys where possible, but if a stray bullet hits someone... well, that’s more of a manslaughter, isn’t it? The first conflict in the demo starts off with a few friendly, non-lethal takedowns, the player using his hack-o-matic to turn on a forklift and open a gate, distracting nearby guards so they can be sneaked up on.

Hacking is all binary decisions—turning something on or off, or assuming the POV of a security cam. Interestingly (and nonsensically), cameras can be chained together, because hacking only requires line of sight. This is how Pearce eventually infects a CtOS server with a virus without ever entering the building. But first, it takes a cover-to-cover firefight to finish off the guards outside. Despite his usual slow pace Pearce shows bursts of athleticism, traversing the lot with daring parkour leaps and using Focus to chain deadeye shots. Focus mode and quick-draw hacking look to be especially important when driving, during which the player can change traffic lights and raise concrete blockers to end the careers of the cops in pursuit with spectacular crashes, the camera swinging around for slow-mo Burnout-style views of the wrecks. The world stops feeling quite so grounded and natural here, but it does look fun. Like in GTA, a five-point gauge indicates the level of police engagement, and players must break line of sight to escape. In one version of the demo, the driver hacks open a parking garage door, glides into a parking space, and strolls away like he’s loosely reenacting the opening scene of Drive. If nothing else, I want to do that.

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BATTLEFIELD 4

BATTLEFIELD 4
     


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Commander mode returns to lead the way
Bad Company and its sequel were great multiplayer games, but they lost some of what made their predecessor, Battlefield 2, such a marvelous team-based shooter. Battlefield 3 took a step in the right direction by making large-scale warfare the norm again. Battlefield 4 is going even further, by bringing back Commander mode. One player on each of Battlefield 4’s two teams is now able to view the battlefield from above, issuing orders to different squads, dropping resources such as vehicles to aid in their team’s assault, and launching tactical missiles to take down enemy units. It brings back another layer of tactics to Battlefield’s endless war, and it makes perfect sense on the large levels.


The mission I played at this year’s E3 was the same shown at the EA conference: the Siege of Shanghai. It takes place on the streets surrounding the city’s waterfront, with a river bisecting the map. A Metro station acts as one of the capture points; another is placed on top of a tall, central skyscraper. It’s designed for 64 players, and at each team’s spawn, there’s a plentiful supply of tanks, jeeps and helicopters. My first round as the game’s familiar recon class starts in typical fashion: players leaping into vehicles and immediately driving off while I chase after them in a If every server was full of tired, confused journalists, it would be my favorite game. desperate attempt to get inside. Eventually I find a vehicle of my own, and set off through the streets with a group of random squadmates. We capture our first point without taking a shot.


Next I move to another point on the roof of a multi-story car park, and leap from the van seconds before it explodes under heavy fire. I kill one, two, three people at midrange by using my sniper rifle to injure them and my pistol to finish them off. I capture the point and move on again. At this point, my squad and I have been scattered to the wind, but when I die and respawn with them later, I’m atop the game’s central skyscraper. Half the people
playing have congregated here, because they’ve all seen what happens when you destroy the building’s supports: it falls over, spectacularly. We all want to be on top of it when that happens.


My squad and I kill any enemies on top, and then wait. And wait. And then, when we realize nothing is happening, we throw ourselves over the edge and parachute down below. I land on the roof of a much smaller building, and bring my sniper rifle out again. One kill, two kill, three kill, four. I’m top of the server at this point; if every Battlefield server was full of tired, confused journalists, it would be my favorite game. For a while, it’s possible Battlefield 2 was my favorite game.

It wasn’t the bombast—though running across cratered beaches while machinegun fire pinged around your feet and jets buzzed overhead was a thrill. Instead, it was the quiet moments with my squad that made me love it: Tom Francis, Craig Pearson and I camping on top of a structure in the middle of the desert, observing the battlefield around us, picking a target or waiting for the Commander to select it for us. There was a sense that you and your friends in a squad were a tactical unit, and that you existed within the broader context of a raging battle, whether you were taking part in it at that second or not. The Commander helped with that, bonding everyone together—again, whether you ignored the person in the role or not.

Just as before, you get bonus XP if you do decide to follow your Commander’s objectives. And if your team is doing well, the Commander gets more abilities: from UAVs to provide tactical information, to artillery strikes and Tomahawk missiles. I noticed only a few changes to the game’s classes; assault, engineer, recon, and support each return from the previous game. The recon class now has the C4—previously a support class item—to
complement the sniper rifle. On the Siege of Shanghai, C4 is one of the best ways to bring down the skyscraper at the center of the map, so I wonder if the change means we can expect more destructible buildings on other levels. Each of the four classes also now has access to three types of grenade: the standard frag, plus flashbang and incendiary grenades.

It’s too early to tell how these changes will shift the flow of the game, or how the system of weapon and item unlocks might have been tweaked. So much of what makes Battlefield compelling can only be discerned from dozens of hours of play, and my session with the game ended after a too-short 15 minutes. But there’s a clearer change in the prevalence of boats: battles in the river and inlets around Shanghai were as constant a fixture as the fight for air dominance. Best of all, ejecting into the water doesn’t damn you to a long, boring swim: you launch out on a jet ski. Battlefield 4 plays like it could be a bigger, prettier and more tactically complex iteration of BF3. My only complaint from the little I played is that I never saw the map’s tower fall. I was either elsewhere in the map when it happened, or waiting to respawn. Next time.

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