The Highs

Tim Clark: High on Light
I was super high when I played Hyper Light Drifter yesterday, and very nice it was too. I’ve been given some rhino-strength pain meds following a medical procedure involving a camera so heinous that I’ll spare you any further elucidation. (No, not there, there.) So, whilst working from home, I decided to dip into heart Machine’s 8-bit-styled smushing of Zelda and Dark Souls. I mention the latter game specifically because Andy didn’t in his excellent review, largely because he’s sick of people reflexively comparing games that are tough and have swords to Dark Souls.
But, well... It is quite a lot like Dark Souls. Or at least what I understand Dark Souls to be from watching my colleagues play it. I’m one of those babies who tries them each time and then bails after an hour or so. But I’ve sunk about six hours into Hyper Light Drifter thus far, and am acclimating to its chilly sternness quite nicely. The first boss I faced (in the West) took around 20 goes to beat. At first it seemed utterly impossible and unfair, then the pattern became clear and it just seemed really hard. Finally, through repetition, concentration, and most crucially not being too greedy with my damage, the boss fell almost easily.
That’s at least how I imagine Dark Souls works when you know what you’re doing, (James has been reviewing the new one next to me this week), and the sense of exhilaration was very much real. Andy’s review is right, though. The bosses seem like they’re going to be very divisive difficulty spikes. I hope I have the mental fortitude to tough them out, because it’s such a wonderful world to be in. Perhaps the painkillers will see me through.
Samuel Roberts: TimeSplitters on PC!
Kind of, anyway. One cool thing buried in Homefront’s slightly promising-looking sequel The Revolution is a couple of levels from excellent console FPS TimeSplitters 2, which never made it to PC back in the day for reasons I’m not aware of.
The good news is, while this isn’t the full game including its excellent splitscreen multiplayer, the first two levels encompass the Siberian dam level, itself an obvious homage to GoldenEye 007 on N64. That’s a fine extra for a game that maybe isn’t on everyone’s radar right now, and hopefully the first step to the TimeSplitters games making the journey to PC officially.

Another fun duel with @AdamTdark. Too bad Biggs Darklighter couldn't keep those B-Wings alive. pic.twitter.com/CcPbqFnauH
— Evan Lahti (@ELahti) March 31, 2016

Evan Lahti: Stick time
The release of Rogue Squadron on Steam times perfectly with my newfound addiction to X-Wing Miniatures. I’ve started playing this tabletop game more seriously with some folks in our office and it’s been a delight. X-Wing has the perfect amount of complexity for me: physical awareness, planning, and what ships you bring to battle matters, but the game’s rules feel grounded in physical logic. It’s great to be able to knock out a duel in an hour. The experience of losing and instantly going back to the garage to tinker with your build to look for new opportunities for synergy or efficiency reminds me of MechWarrior.
We shot a video about X-Wing and some other recommended tabletop games for PC gamers last year.
Angus Morrison: Escalating quickly
After a few previews, I was a tentative believer that Hitman’s sweeping Paris level had enough scope to keep us occupied before the next one came along in a month, supplemented with the occasional Elusive Target or Escalation. It turns out Io has a sadistic streak, because it’s releasing so many new contracts I can’t keep up.
Despite having pushed the release of the first time-limited Elusive Target further into April, Io has compensated by releasing two Escalations each week, in which a simple hit gets progressively more challenging. I’ve five-starred The Snorrasson Ascension that shipped with the first episode, dabbled in The Mandelbulb Requiem and The Holmwood Disturbance that came next, and there’s still four left to try. I’ve only just discovered the Vampire Magician disguise, which is lucky seeing as there’s now a Vampire Magician Challenge Pack too.
Major bugfixes have also arrived, including a fix for the scoring to make it, er, work, and all of this points to Io being able to pull off what it calls ‘a live game’. Do I wish Hitman had launched in a better state? For sure. Will it eventually end up as a landmark assassin sim? It just might.

Tom Senior: Rapturous
PlayStation 4 players have already been to the rapture. It’s a lovely place, full of cottages and regional British accents, and I’m looking forward to seeing every beautifully rendered bus stop again on PC.
The slow pace and radio play plotting may be off-putting to some, but Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture is a wonderful audiovisual treat. I can’t wait to bask in the late afternoon sun outside the church and listen to the game’s extraordinary soundtrack. The fact I could just walk out of this office into Bath and beyond to get the same experience doesn’t matter. Even small details, like a scribble of graffiti on a park bench, seem more novel in a game world, and few game worlds are as painstakingly realised as Yaughton, Shropshire, Raptureville UK.
Chris Livingston: Motion Slickness
I finally got some real time with VR this week! Adr1ft, Eve Valkyrie, Lucky's Tale, and a few other games. While I'm still not entirely sold on VR becoming mainstream—after about 20 minutes in any game, I feel like the novelty has worn off and I'm done with it—I am very pleased to find that, so far at least, VR doesn't make me motion sick. I sometimes do feel a slight bit of discomfort, usually the first couple times I roll side-to-side, but it passes quickly and doesn't return.
Part of it may be that I simply don't find VR terribly convincing. It's very cool, but nothing I've played has really fooled me into feeling like I've been transported into another world. Still, I'm pleased that I can handle the experience without feeling like I'm going to barf. I know that's not true of everyone, so I feel pretty lucky. I still have my doubts about VR, but at least it doesn't make me toss my cookies.

The Lows

Evan Lahti: Doomed
The Doom multiplayer closed beta is both fun and underwhelming. It is an unapologetically retro take on deathmatch—arguably that’s exactly what Doom should be. The weapon roster is mostly stuff ripped from 1999, you don’t have to reload any of it, and the two maps are dull, subterranean places dotted with pickups and powerups that deliver lively but simple deathmatches. There’s plenty of early-‘00s spirit, but it’s awkwardly blended with contemporary stuff, like a progression system that unlocks armor pieces and weapon cosmetics, and customizable buffs that activate when you respawn.
I can handle something that’s stuck in the past, but what sticks out most to me is how graphically uneven Doom is. None of the assets feel like they were created in the past year or two, evidence that this is a game about hell that’s been trapped in development hell.
Tim Clark: Break bad?
No Quantum Break review from us today because despite the glorious cross-platform future routinely described by Microsoft, the PC code isn’t ready on time. My hands-on impressions from a month ago can be found here. It seemed fun, in that silly, B-movie way that Remedy specialises in, though I was less sold on the TV show integration stuff. Speaking to developers at the preview event, I also sensed serious qualms about the way Microsoft had implemented UWP, and particularly the options we expect as standard on PC which it had hobbled. Phil Spencer spent some time this week talking about fixing those, but his answers on mods and the explanation for the lack of Halo 5 on PC where less convincing. Hopefully we’ll be able to get Quantum Break in time for its April 5 release date. In the meantime, treat with caution.

Tom Senior: Immateria
Square has been porting Final Fantasy games to PC at quite a rate in recent years. I hoped that by sheer force of momentum this year’s huge moneyed sequel would find its way onto our hard drives this year. Sadly, it’s not to be. Director Hajime Tabata this week confirmed that development is focusing on the consoles exclusively, for now.
Final Fantasy XV is a spectacular prospect. A decade in the making, with pre-recession production values. I’ve spent the last couple of years fully expecting it to never come out. It had started to take on a mythological quality, like Half-Life 3 and Duke Nukem Forever back in the day, before that turned out to be rubbish. Tabata left us with some hope, at least. “We will definitely take a good, hard look at PC and what we need to do, and consider all our options”, he says. I guess all we can do is loudly let Square Enix know that we’d quite like to play this one, please.
Samuel: Your regular Halo moan
This week Microsoft’s Phil Spencer gave a slightly complex explanation about why certain games belong on console, while others belong on PC (the PC has both controller support and a mouse and keyboard, so all games belong on PC, really). Once again, the subject of Halo 5 coming to PC emerged. "In terms of Halo FPS on PC, I think there’s a ton of opportunity for us right now, but I don’t want to get into a world where we’re looking back, like at Halo 5,” Spencer said. “It doesn’t mean there’s nothing there that could ever end up on PC, but I’d much rather look forward with what our plans are."
That’s a big ‘maybe’, then—and the ‘looking back’ logic sort of works were it not for the fact Killer Instinct only recently arrived on PC, despite launching on Xbox One in 2013. I’d like to see Halo return to PC after a decade away, but Halo Wars 2 aside, it doesn’t sound like it’s happening any time soon.

Chris Livingston: Dr1ft1ng
I guess my disappointment of the week was Adr1ft (my review is here). While it's a great concept and a beautiful game, the repetition of unchanging tasks becomes tiresome almost immediately. Without making my own suggestions on how it should have been handled, I'll just say that I think the game's constant hunt for oxygen was a poor choice to go with. At the very least, I think it could have been balanced a bit better.
Keeping players anxious, moving, and progressing through a game can be accomplished without making the game /entirely/ about that. Yes, Pac-Man has to gobble dots to win, but if he stops gobbling for a minute he doesn't die of starvation. He only dies from ghosts. Maybe they should have gone with ghosts.
Angus Morrison: Fooling no one
Games industry April Fools’ Day tradition is less perplexing than the French version in which they stick cardboard fish to each other’s backs, and that’s the nicest thing I’m prepared to say about it.
Today I woke up to a slew of game-related nonsense: Roach DLC for The Witcher 3 (dead horse, more like), Arma 3 eau de combat, thumb insurance from Game. It’s not the nonsense itself that bothers me, but the fact that it’s so obviously nonsense. There’s a difference between pulling off a masterful prank and saying something a bit silly.
No one will be shaking their head in amazement when those rapscallions at Warhorse announce that they’re not really porting Kingdom Come: Deliverance to the SNES. Blizzard isn’t trying to fool anyone with the vaguely amusing concept of a Hearthstone MMO.
Next year, I want to see a large and respected (or reviled) company leverage its vast resources to launch subtle yet devious misinformation campaign that I believe, report and cause you to believe before issuing a hasty correction as we all laugh and shake our heads at those loveable scamps in corporate PR. I’m still half hoping The Chinese Room is playing the long con and that today’s announcement, interview and 4K screens for Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture were faked in the basement at NASA.