PC | Alone, confused, and sick in the world of Stasis.

Turn off the lights, puts some headphones on, and get ready to wake up in the world of Stasis. The trailers had us biting our nails off.

You wake up, covered in a green slimy liquid. There's nothing to indicate what time of day or year it is. You don't know where you are or what you're doing lying face-up in a dirty abandoned research facility. Yet, three defining thoughts enter your brain: Where's your wife? Where's your daughter? What are you going to do to get your family back? Stasis is an adventure horror game told in an isometric perspective, which is a viewpoint that is rotated slightly to reveal other facets of the game environment than are visible from a top-down perspective or side view, thereby producing a three-dimensional effect.

You play as John Maracheck, a man in search of his family within the confinements of an abandoned research facility. There is no beta or demo to try out, but there are two trailers that seem to capture the eerie horror of being clueless and alone in a facility reminiscent of one found in Dead Space or BioShock. The sound design in the gameplay trailer offers a bit of what to expect in the final product; eruptive sounds had us jumping out of our seats and creepy computer voices had us biting our nails. The game has no release date, but we'll be eagerly awaiting this one. Check out the trailers below and see for yourself.

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PlayStation 3 | Street Fighter X Tekken Gets Cross-Platform Play

The Vita version of the crossover brawler will enable battles between the PS3 and Vita, and comes with the 12 new fighters packaged as DLC for everyone else.

When Street Fighter X Tekken arrives for Sony's handheld this autumn, the home console versions will have been kicking around for months. So it's just as well the Vita release is more than the same game squeezed onto a smaller screen. It also opens up cross-platform play between the Vita and PlayStation 3s--good news for Vita owners with more friends on PS3s than on Sony's portable console.

Smooth cross-platform matchmaking and battling like this is no mean feat; in a demo at Capcom's annual Captivate showcase (that is, admittedly, under ideal circumstances), there was no perceptible lag between action on the Vita and PS3 displays. And it looks terrific on the Vita, too.

The Vita version adds Blanka et al.

On top of the Sony hardware love-in, there's the new touchscreen battle system, which divides the touchscreen and the rear touchpad on the Vita into a few programmable sectors, to which you can map combos and other actions--in practice, not dissimilar to the 3DS version of Super Street Fighter IV. In our time with the game, part of the back pad could be swiped to tag in our second character. That's all layered over familiar gamepad-like controls assigned to the Vita's two sticks and face buttons.

Given the abundance and variety of input options, we're curious about the control habits into which players will settle in the long term to balance comfort and killer instincts; making the most of all the sticks, buttons, and touch surfaces at once in our first go made for some finger gymnastics, but we're sure there's a more elegant solution (for more elegant players). Yet to be answered is also the question of the competitive advantage in cross-platform play. Our hands-on was strictly Vita versus Vita, but between easy combos tied to touchscreen regions for Vita players and comfy, full-sized pads or even fight sticks for PS3 players, whose platform gives them the edge?

As to the other big addition, Street Fighter X Tekken arrives on the Vita with a fuller roster than that of its home console forerunner. There are 12 extra characters in the lineup, six from each side of the crossover fence: Blanka, Sakura, Guy, Cody, Elena, Dudley, Alisa, Bryan, Christie, Jack, Lars, and Lei. Among the new story-based fighter pairings with their own bespoke cinematics, the sparky duo of Blanka and Sakura is our favourite.

Those new dozen characters are the very same infamously burned onto the Street Fighter X Tekken home console discs and locked off as a slice of future downloadable content. At least PS3 players planning to pick up the Vita release won't have to pay twice; owning both versions of the game adds the new fighters to the PS3 version, where they will also be available for PS3-on-PS3 brawling.

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PlayStation 3 | DMC: Dante Gets Naked, Is Fun to Play

Now that we've gone hands-on with Ninja Theory's Devil May Cry reboot, we can stop talking about the hair. Right after this preview.

Tameem Antoniades is relieved to put DMC into the hands of the press at last--maybe now we'll stop banging on about how Dante looks and start on whether he's any fun to play. "Ironically, Dante's hair is black and mine's turning white now," says the Ninja Theory chief, referring to months of being denounced by fans for supposedly remaking the white-haired Devil May Cry star in his own image.

And we would stop banging on about it, if Dante weren't naked as a nudist jaybird as we find him at the start of DMC. He's sleeping off a heavy night in a grungy trailer strewn with pizza boxes and someone's girly underthings. But gratuitous this (non-graphic) nudity is not, says Ninja Theory. It's an allegory for Devil May Cry's fresh start, of course, in which its protagonist has been figuratively and literally stripped down, then rebuilt and reclothed from scratch. Therefore, you'll spot young Dante in an introductory fight cinematic, doing a slow-motion dive into his free-falling outfit, adult-rated anatomy slyly concealed with props (pizza slice, baseball bat).

Combos in limbo.

Demonic forces have brought a grudge match to Dante's front door, turning the pleasure pier on which he lives into a nightmarish limbo dimension, a twisted version of the real world with a sneering layer of satire, where neon arcade signs read "Spend Money" and "Gluttony's Good," and omnipresent security cameras house twitchy red eyeballs. Only Dante can see (and shoot and skewer) the denizens of limbo, though the impact of certain actions crosses back into the real world; when Dante and his hunter demon adversary tear down a Ferris wheel, it's sent crashing and rolling down the pier in the land of the living as well.

But nakedness and hellish backdrop aside, how does it play? Very nicely, in fact. The action doesn't cleave quite as close to Devil May Cry 4's as claimed (if it did, why bother with a reboot?), but it's emphatically a Devil May Cry game, with the essentials firmly in place. There are scores and combos and grades to beat the band, and paths locked off with supernatural obstacles until you clobber all the demonic nasties in the area.

Dante is armed with his canonical twin handguns and sword, but also an angelic and a demonic weapon (an ethereal scythe and a fiery axe in our hands-on), tied respectively to the left and right triggers. The face buttons call up a familiar set of moves--shoot, stab, launch--but, in combination with a trigger, also bring the corresponding special weapon into play.

A demonic smackdown on the pier.

With an angel weapon active, Dante can grapple across an arena to a distant enemy (or up to a flying one) or swing around with a quick, wide-ranging attack, and the "launch" manoeuvre with the angelic weapon equipped can whirl a whole host of spindly demons skyward. With the devilish weapon enabled, Dante can drag a lighter enemy from across the arena into stabbing range, pull a flying foe out of the sky, or bash a shielded, heavy enemy with a more powerful blow.

The angel and demon weapons amount to a combat system with instant switching between a quick and a heavy mode, lots of variety for creating combos, and the means to stay all up in the enemy's grille for chained attacks. A flock of cherubic flying monsters, for instance, lets you string together a series of grapples, hoisting Dante higher and higher over the battlefield, smashing demons all the way--and staying aloft by shooting and skewering the enemy is gleeful good fun, with the soundtrack music and vocals ramping up according to how high your grade rises. So relax: there's much more to DMC than a bratty hero with a controversial haircut.

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PlayStation 3 | Lost Planet 3: The Last Thing You Expected

Unless you expected a civilian hero, a personal story, and Western developer Spark Unlimited (in which case, good job).

After Lost Planet 2's modest sales and lukewarm reviews, Capcom must have had a long, hard think on its sci-fi shooter series. A change of direction was probable, then, but not an about-face like this: Lost Planet 3 is a character-driven, primarily single-player adventure set years before the events of the first game. It's recognisably a Lost Planet outing (frozen plains, armoured mech suits, glowing akrid weak points), but there's a civilian hero, a personal story, engaging voice acting, and nary a nod at multiplayer co-op in its debut presentation at Capcom's annual Captivate showcase.

The new direction comes partly of a new studio. Lost Planet 3 is in the works at US studio Spark Unlimited, not with a Capcom in-house team. The new looks come of a new engine--not Capcom's own MT Framework, but ubiquitous workhorse Unreal, doing a spiffy job on the bluish alien glaciers, orange sunlight, and glinting mechs of E.D.N. III. The action, meanwhile, combines third-person shooting and exploration with first-person mech piloting and robo-brawling.

Where Lost Planet 2 took place after a thaw, revealing new jungle and desert environments, Lost Planet 3 turns back the clock to when the alien world was fully frozen, in the early days of human colonisation. Franchise director Kenji Oguro, still overseeing, promises a return to strictly cold climes, implying the second game steered too far from the icy terrain that marked out game one. "When you think of Lost Planet," he says, "you think of snow and ice and a very desolate world. This is one of the core concepts of Lost Planet 3."

Capcom producer Andrew Szymanski, meanwhile, talks up the story, a tale of "surviving in a harsh environment and unravelling its mysteries" as everyman protagonist Jim, a bearded construction labourer working to support his wife and baby back on Earth. ("The more I earn, the sooner I get to hold you both again," he says.) The hands-off demo was heavy on the cutscenes, charmingly voiced, showing Jim waking from a nap in the cab of his construction mech suit--the game's main vehicle and the series' biggest mech to date, says Oguro-san.

The portion presented comes from early in the game, starting in the enormous ice cavern hangar of the colony construction squad to which Jim is contracted. He ambles around this quest and upgrade hub in third person, whipping out a Dead Space-style holographic menu interface projected from a gauntlet gizmo. When he's piloting the mech suit, on the other hand, the game pops into first person: a cockpit view through the rig's frosty windows, from which he controls its mighty power arms--one a giant claw, one a giant drill, both strictly meant for construction work and clearing paths, but also handy in a scrap with a giant akrid crab beast.

Of which there are plenty on Jim's first mission. In it, he's despatched to plant ice-melting thermal posts at an intended building site. When a sudden storm ices up the cockpit canopy, he has to kick his way out--and the rest of the time, we're told, you can hop in and out at almost any point. Initially there are man-sized, four-legged akrid to see off; later come the colossal crab monsters, inevitable glowing weak spots protected by thick plates of translucent ice, as well as smallish, skittering, buglike variants. These latter beasties turn up in a mysteriously abandoned base Jim discovers while going about his day job; locations like these are inaccessible by mech, leaving Jim to tramp about on foot.

And the view from his mech suit.

The strategic akrid battles that combine shooting and mech controls are the most interesting. In one scuffle with an armoured, scorpionlike akrid, Jim uses the suit's claw hand to seize the monster's giant arm and pin it in place, before leaping out of the cockpit to fire away at exposed underbelly. In other fights, the mech can do all the work, grabbing with one arm and drilling with the other, spattering the windows with glowing akrid goo.

As first impressions go, this was a good one--a blast of icy fresh air after the ho-hum shooting and stomping of game two. Spark's last offering was the mediocre Legendary, but that's ancient history (2008), and on the strength of the demo, be prepared to keep an open mind. Capcom's approach here to rejuvenating Lost Planet (hand it to a Western studio) resembles the Devil May Cry reboot given to British developer Ninja Theory. Here's hoping it pays off.

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PlayStation 3 | Resident Evil 6: The Third Guy Is Wesker's Son

And the blonde girl is Sherry Birkin. Also: real zombies, "horror entertainment."

Is the future of Resident Evil action or horror? The series of late has been evolving towards action, and you could call it adapt or die; the producer of the 3DS instalment Revelations says the market is too small to support horror as we once knew it. But the makers of Resident Evil 6 talked up a "return to horror" at Capcom's annual Captivate showcase, where they balanced the all-out action of January's announcement trailer with a slower, darker gameplay presentation.

First things first, though, since they settle a great wodge of the speculation raised by that trailer. Resident Evil 6 stars a trio of protagonists: series veterans Leon Kennedy and Chris Redfield, plus buzz-cut mercenary Jake Muller, son of one Albert Wesker, the longtime Resident Evil villain last seen taking a faceful of rocket inside a volcano at the end of game five.

Each member of the trio has a story path to tread. Leon's begins in the American university town Tall Oaks, where a bioterrorist attack has zombified the visiting president, while Jake starts out in the fictional Eastern European nation Edonia. In the course of the game, he and Leon converge on Chris in China, Resident Evil 6's main location, where the bulgingly bicepped one and his squad are tackling further bioterrorist atrocity. And with three tales to follow, each a bit shorter than Resident Evil 5, expect a reasonably lengthy adventure.

In the actual action, which we are, by degrees, getting to, each protagonist also has a partner. Leon's is US security service agent Helena Harper; Chris' is sharpshooter Piers Nivans; Jake's is Sherry Birkin, daughter of Umbrella scientist-turned-mutant William Birkin. As in Resident Evil 5, these partners are controlled by the computer or a second player--but with less fuss than in the previous game, we're promised, now that co-op play is properly drop in and drop out.

In old-school Resident Evil fashion, you choose the order you play each of the main characters, though executive producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi says he would prefer you take Leon first. Accordingly, the Captivate demo took in the very first part of Leon's story, which "really encapsulates" the horror flavour of Resident Evil 6, claims Kobayashi.

The longish section is dark, spooky, slow, and taut, set in a big old university building that harks back to the haunted mansion of the first game. How fully it represents the whole game experience remains to be seen, but this early segment could have been engineered specifically to placate grumpy survival horror fans. In it, Leon has just been forced to kill the zombie president and must escape the university and the city with co-op sidekick Helena.

They work their way through the Tall Oaks campus building, navigating grand lobbies, dark corridors and kitchens, and a great dining hall still decked out with streamers and balloons for the presidential reception. The lights are out in the wake of the attack, a storm flashes outside, and a handful of victims' corpses lie slumped along the way, awaiting eventual reanimation.

For entire minutes, though, there's nothing to shoot at or run from, just dark rooms to explore, a survivor hunting for his student daughter, and a spot of mysterious distant piano playing. It's a slow and deliberate buildup to a genuinely good jump scare, embellished with the classic violin horror sting. If anything spoils the atmosphere, it's the waypoint marker, hovering white and obtrusive over the gloomy environment.

But determined to show off its horror chops, the game quickly follows that fake-out scare with a grisly real scare: Leon and Helena trapped in a lift, in pitch blackness, as the survivor's daughter suddenly turns zombie and tears into her dad. In the dark, flashlight swinging about, there are only glimpses of gore, but the squelchy, gruesome sound effects are more affecting for it.

The panicky lift fight marks the demo's shift into upper gear, as from here on there are flocks of zombies to battle through. These are honest-to-goodness real zombies, too, as the gamemakers take pains to point out: shuffling, shambling zombies, slow at a distance but with a fast lunge up close. Leon wades out of the lift into an underground car park, busting out his new melee moves--a wide-ranging mix of contextual strikes and grapples, among them an unlikely running bulldog takedown.

The controls are "all new," we're told, and though a hands-off demo can't prove they feel right, they look just the job, properly enabling--whisper it--moving and shooting at the same time. It's not quite flat-out running and gunning, but that suits us fine. There's dual wielding too, and shooting from prone; after diving to the floor, Leon can blast away at the swarming undead from on his back.

Among the horde of "real" zombies are a few with weapons, a point of contention for purists, but for what it's worth, the weapons are things they would have been carrying pre-zombification. One ghoul swipes at Leon with a pipe; Leon can wrench it away in a contextual melee move.

Leon and Helena at Tall Oaks' Ivy university.

Everything looks mighty fine, as dark and moody as Resident Evil 5's opening was bright and jarring, but it's the minor show-off details that leave an impression. When Leon gets bitten, his arm spurts blood. When he shoots a zombie in the midriff, fleshy chunks blow off. When you steer him against a doorframe or a banister, he reaches out to touch it, convincingly natural.

It's all very promising, then, but is it horror? Kobayashi diplomatically calls it "horror entertainment"--horror in the service of a plot rather than horror for its own sake. That's borne out by the second, story-led trailer, which emphasises the three protagonists' intersecting paths and the game's globe-trotting plot, playing down the full-on action elements of trailer one (gunfights, a cover system).

It's telling that our demo didn't include the game's "main" enemy, a quick-mutating creature called the J'avo. Leon's mooch around an ominous old building could play the same part in Resident Evil 6 as the opening of Resident Evil Revelations, in which Jill explores an abandoned luxury liner (another haunted mansion stand-in): a slower, spookier intro to anchor a game that later tips the scales away from creeping horror and towards frantic action. But what we've seen so far is encouraging--if finding the perfect balance between the two is the future of Resident Evil, so be it.

Capcom has brought the release date for Resident Evil 6 forward from November 20 to October 2.

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PlayStation 3 | Mugen Souls: Spinning Rainbows, Rabbit People, and Split-Personalities

We check out the bizarre results of Idea Factory's latest work.

Here's a fun fact about Mugen Souls, a quirky little role-playing number from Idea Factory: the game was produced by an unnamed developer calling himself the new Keiji Inafune (that is, the Mega Man creator who left Capcom to form his own studio). The "new Keiji Inafune" stint was nothing more than a publicity stunt to get people turning their heads to the game. What's even more surprising is that the real Inafune is in fact contributing a few character designs to the game.

With recent news of the former Capcom producer turning to Idea Factory and Compile Heart, it's no surprise that the company's PR would use his name for self-promotion. Does that automatically mean that Mugen Souls needs a bit of help in the image department? If you're judging it from first looks alone, then yes. However, this role-playing game has a few tricks up its sleeve in terms of personality.

You control a girl name Chou Chou (pronounced "Shoe Shoe"), whose sole goal is to conquer the seven universes. Accompanying her is an angel named Artis and a manservant named Lute. The former wishes to turn back into a demon by going along with Chou Chou's plans, while Lute was Chou Chou's first servant who somehow managed not to be turned into a shampoo rabbit. Yes, we forgot to mention that the majority of servants piloting Chou Chou's ship, the G Castle, are rabbit creatures called shampoos.

Chou Chou striking a pose with Artis.

During battle, you can move the party members within a designated pink circle and choose any attack command made available. To keep with the recruitment-by-force theme of the narrative, Chou Chou can convince enemies to join her cause and subsequently turn into shampoos. We were offered three empty brackets to fill up with random choices of text, and we could form a love confession at the start of a sentence, before capping it off with a rejection.

Depending on the combination you make, you either raise or reduce an enemy's emotion level. Saying the wrong things can make your enemies go berserk, rendering them immune to being servant candidates. Since it takes a lot of shampoo minions to pilot Chou Chou's flying fortress, she needs as many as possible to fulfill her world domination plans.

When all else fails, just bash them to bits. In addition to your standard attacks, you can team up with your party members within the pink circle to initiate a coordination attack. Whether it's with another party member or two, each attack is different and deals different amounts of damage.

Combat isn't relegated to on-foot party battles. You will also have to take your flying fortress into air battles against other uniquely shaped enemy ships. This, too, is turn-based, meaning you'll need to select the appropriate command depending on what your first mate Lute says on the bottom left of the screen. From there, you can choose to either fire, reflect projectiles, defend, or dodge against enemy retaliation. The effectiveness of your commands depends on the number of servants you have together with how well you read your opponent's attacks. We had fun engaging in these fights, as each of our attack and defensive commands were presented in '70s space anime opera style.

Combat can get bizarre if you play your cards right.

Chou Chou also has the ability to turn into one of her seven different personalities to bolster her combat and linguistic skills. While the masochistic personality is more childlike and klutzy in nature, the tsundere personality is more cold and eventually warms up to people over time. All seven personalities are obvious parodies of anime stereotypes.

Dialogue options to win minions over change depending on the personalities adopted. A dominatrix-style sadistic personality would be better suited against submissive opponents, while a vigor personality would fare better in winning over hyperactive enemies.

From what we've seen, part of the game's presentation could benefit from improvement. Frame rates when moving around overworlds were horrible, while the overall aesthetic, while keeping in tone with its comic nature, looks more like a budget title.

Regardless, we felt that there is still potential to be found within the game's odd combat system and bizarre narrative. It's not every day players get to woo minions to their side by uttering seductive or damning praises, all while doing party tag team attacks involving spinning rainbows of death and slot machines.

Mugen Souls will be out in English this fall.

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Xbox 360 | Rock Band Blitz: Kicking It Old School

Say good-bye to plastic peripherals and hello to some streamlined, fast-paced rhythm action.

Before Guitar Hero and Rock Band reduced our living rooms to a plastic peripheral junkyard, developer Harmonix made a little-known title for the PlayStation 2 called Frequency, a fast-paced rhythm game that used a standard PlayStation 2 controller to perform songs. So too did its follow-up, Amplitude, which upped the pace and made the seizure-inducing visuals even more outlandish. Both were incredibly tricky beasts to master, arguably much more so than even the most difficult of Rock Band tracks. They were games for the hardcore rhythm nut--frantic, fast, and completely ruthless.

If you've been hankering for a return to the old school, then we suggest keeping an eye on the upcoming XBLA and PSN release Rock Band Blitz. Though it bears the Rock Band name, there are no plastic peripherals required. Instead, you navigate the familiar scrolling note charts with your controller. Like in Frequency, you're tasked with performing each part of the song simultaneously, which in this case includes the drums, bass, guitar, and vocal lines.

Each instrument has just two note markers to follow, but don't for a second think that makes things easy--you need some serious coordination to rack up the points. That's down to having to navigate multiple tracks by flicking between them using your controller's triggers: spend too much time on a single instrument, and your multiplier goes down. The key to success is finding a balance between all the instruments before you hit one of the strategically placed checkpoints in each song, which increases your score bonus.

Mmm, shiny.

It's incredibly frantic stuff that's made all the more hectic by various power-ups you can assign yourself before each song. There's the bottle rocket power-up, which blows up a bunch of notes on the chart; the autoplay power-up, which is exactly as it sounds; and the pinball power-up, which places a ball on the chart you can bat around with the chart selector and use to remove notes from your stream. And, of course, there's the Star Power-like Blitz mode for all-out high-score carnage. Further powers are unlocked by earning XP, which you accumulate by your super-awesome rhythm skills.

While Rock Band Blitz is only a single-player experience, its longevity lies in leaderboards. All your scores are linked up with other users, and there's nothing more infuriating than seeing your once-mighty high score toppled by a friend. There's asynchronous multiplayer too, which is basically a virtual version of smack talk, letting you send out custom challenges to other players.

In terms of songs, Rock Band Blitz introduces 20 new ones, but also lets you play tracks from the huge Rock Band library. Any content from previous games, and any DLC you've bought, can be imported into Blitz for free. And, if that's still not enough songs for you, a music store--complete with recommendations based on the songs you play--is integrated into the game.

SkullCrusher Mountain: Deerstalker optional.

Sadly, Harmonix hasn't announced exactly how much Blitz is going to cost but has mentioned it'll be priced similarly to other XBLA and PSN titles. Regardless, it's shaping up to be a great little game, one that goes back to the roots of the genre for some seriously hardcore button bashing. It's definitely one to look forward to.

Rock Band Blitz is due for release this summer on XBLA and PSN. Look out for more on GameSpot soon.

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Xbox 360 | Is Far Cry 3's Multiplayer Worth Howling Over?

We got to play two maps and two game modes to find out.

While Far Cry 2 boasted a long and varied single-player campaign, its multiplayer didn't really manage to compete in a post-Modern Warfare world. For Far Cry 3, a separate team at Ubisoft Massive is hoping to create a multiplayer experience that can compete with the shooting genre's heavy hitters, as well as carve a niche of its own. We were lucky enough to get to play the game at a recent preview event to find out how it's shaping up.

There's no sense Far Cry-ing over spilled milk-tiplayer.

The first mode we got to play was Domination, a first-person shooter staple that should be instantly familiar to anyone who has played an online shooter. The map featured in this mode was called Sub-Pen--a small village made up of corrugated iron huts that surrounded a battered submarine pen. Raised areas offered sniping spots to fire at those capturing points, while zip lines allowed you to move quickly through the map while firing a handgun--which was not only a lot quicker, but way more badass.

As we quickly discovered, teamwork is vital in Far Cry 3's multiplayer. Whereas other shooters usually restrict medic abilities to those in specific classes, anyone in Far Cry 3 can revive their fallen comrades. If you're the person who has been downed, you can tap a button to keep yourself alive until someone hopefully rescues you--if not, you bleed out and are respawned after a short wait.

Then there's the new Battle Cry feature, which allows you to give a rallying cry that buffs up teammates around you. These perks vary depending on the class you're playing as, but they can increase the speed, accuracy, or health of those around you, which is useful for when you're all trying to capture a node.

Tagging is another feature based around working together. Whenever you tag enemies, fallen teammates or strategic points, you earn team support points that can be redeemed against bonuses. These include a scout that reveals enemy positions, and psyche gas, which blurs your opponent's vision and turns all other players into dark demonic figures. The inability to tell friend from foe is worsened by the fact that friendly fire is temporarily activated, meaning it's easy to kill a teammate in the chaos. If you do shoot at the wrong person, not only do you risk killing them, but you'll also be stripped of your own team support points as a result.

One of our favourite features was the animation at the end of each game. The top scorer on the winning team is given a choice--either to punish the highest-scoring member of the losing team, or to show them mercy. Choose punishment, and the loser is punched repeatedly in the face; choose mercy, and they are cut free and let go. Ubisoft Massive promises a mix of animation movies in the finished game to add a bit of variety.

Teamwork is the key to success in Far Cry 3's multiplayer.

The second game mode we got to play was called Firestorm, where you have to ignite an enemy fuel dump while defending your own. Each team has two supply points to protect, and teams need to work together to ignite both of the enemy's oil drums in quick succession. The Firestorm map we played took the form of a temple ruins, with oil dumps littered around an ancient ruined structure.

Getting to the depots and knifing the barrels released fuel that was then set on fire to cut off a good chunk of the map. At this point, the objective changes--a radio antenna is activated at the centre of the temple, and the attacking team races in to call in air support. If the defending team manages to hold control of this location, the fires are extinguished and the process starts again. However, if the attacking team holds it, they call in air support, and a plane flies in to add more fuel to the fire, setting the whole map ablaze and winning the game in the process.

Our preview session gave us a good taste of both Far Cry 3's standard multiplayer game mode and the more unique fire-based mode. We're also promised an improved level editor, as well as mobile apps that will allow you to unlock new weapons while you're away from the game. We had a great time playing Far Cry 3 in multiplayer, and thankfully we don't have too much longer to wait for the finished game, which is out on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in September. In the meantime, keep it locked on GameSpot for more on the game as we get it.

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Xbox 360 | From Halo to Hadley's Hope: Building a Flexible Aliens Sequel

Randy Pitchford on why he wants you to experience your own personal Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Randy Pitchford is an enthusiastic guy. With an infectious smile and a limitless supply of energy, the man at the helm of Gearbox is always willing to tell you why he's so excited about his studio's latest project. But unlike most CEOs, he has a level of blunt honesty interspersed with all that energy that can reveal some interesting details about his work as a game developer.

"I've been stealing from the Aliens films my entire career," says Pitchford before showing us a demo of Aliens: Colonial Marines, the canonical sequel to 1986's Aliens. You get the sense that he's kind of joking, but kind of not. Whichever it is, simply talking to Pitchford tells you all you need to know about his status as a diehard Aliens fan.

"One of the reasons I was so excited to get involved with Halo--when Microsoft and Bungie trusted Gearbox with the PC version--is because Halo was the closest I'd ever got to playing an Aliens game with Colonial Marines," reveals Pitchford with no shortage of excitement. "The sergeant in Halo was basically the sergeant in Aliens! And the dropships were all Cameron's stuff!"

Pitchford is practically smiling from ear to ear as he tells us this, but the game itself is far from a bucket of sunshine. The demo Gearbox has in store is steeped in tension and bleak atmosphere. A marine boards the Sulaco starship, or at least what's left of it after Ripley's climactic battle with the alien queen. Everything here has gone to hell. Lights are flickering in the darkness, blood trails run the length of the floor--it's like a disaster zone that everyone besides you was smart enough to flee.

"The marines boarding the Sulaco don't know the events that you know," explains Pitchford. So as you explore the dark rooms and creepy hallways of this terrorized military vessel, you know that something has gone horribly wrong here, and you can bet there's plenty of terror left onboard.

The marine pulls out his motion sensor, looking at the blips on the screen to see if there are any aliens lurking in the dark. Sure enough, he's not alone. A few moments later, a stalker appears--one of the new alien breeds Gearbox has created for this sequel. It seems to enjoy tormenting the marine, running in and out of the shadows before finally falling victim to the marine's assault rifle and grim determination to survive. From here, the action ebbs and flows with a couple of large shoot-outs (including one that lets you take control of a smart gun with lock-on capabilities), some more creepy hallway crawls, and an explosive escape that threatens to jettison the marine into the vacuum of space.

Seeing this demo, we can't help but wonder how co-op is going to work here. This scene seems so focused on tension and isolation that Colonial Marines' support for four-player drop-in co-op could drastically alter the experience.

We ask Randy Pitchford and he agrees: co-op will probably affect the overall mood of large chunks of the game, to the point that some players will play it as more of a horror game and some as more of an action romp. But what matters most for Gearbox is giving you the means to create a variety of "shared experiences," because when you build a game around a beloved franchise like this one, you're always going to attract a wide audience of players.

"This does bring some challenges," Pitchford admits. "For some players, the minute that second, third, or fourth guy is in the game, we just start rampaging through it. And maybe the tension has softened a bit because we're not alone, but that experience is fun too! Just because there's one way to play, why would we prevent all the other ways to play?"

"Imagine if the Halo guys did that," he explains. "I love Halo as a co-op game. When I get in the warthog, I'm the driver! Sweet! And the second guy, cool, I'm the gunner! Oh, and we have a third guy in the game. Well, he's kind of in the passenger seat. And the fourth guy, he's all, hey wait up! Where are you going! So maybe you throw in another warthog or throw in a banding system that teleports you up. Look, those are just the technical realities of [the co-op] experience. But it's better that the fourth guy got to come in the game than not at all."

Letting players experience the game in distinctly different ways is something that applies to the competitive multiplayer side of things as well. Colonial Marines' online offering is unabashedly asymmetrical, with one side playing as marines and one side playing as the aliens. No matter which side you're on, there's a significant learning curve to deal with: those playing as aliens need to learn how to cloak themselves in darkness, run along ceilings, and attack only from short range. Conversely, the marines have to deal with the fact that they're slower than their enemies, can't see through walls, and must travel as a group to survive.

There's a huge difference between the way those two sides play and feel, and in a lot of ways, it's one that echoes the audience as a whole. Pitchford acknowledges that there's going to be a mixture of diehard Aliens fans playing this game, those who are simply in it because they enjoy shooters, and even those who are attracted to the Gearbox name after the success of Borderlands.

Aliens: Colonial Marines, then, is a game that needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people--hence the reason for letting players build their own experiences. Want to play multiplayer purely as a xenomorph? Go ahead. Want to play the story campaign by yourself the first time around and then with a full four players the second run through? Feel free.

Ultimately, Pitchford wants us to know that while Aliens fans like him are the top priority, they're not the only priority. "As creators, yes, we can commit ourselves to the narrative and the crafted experience," he explains. "But let's let our players enjoy it, too. They'll manage their own fun."

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PC | Borderlands 2: Playing the Siren

Forget everything you think you know about sirens in Borderlands; Maya has little in common with her predecessor.

Along with Dan Chiappini from GameSpot's Australian team, I recently had an opportunity to play through a lengthy demo of Borderlands 2--the same demo that PAX East attendees will be able to get their hands on later this week. Dan and I played through the demo's two zones cooperatively using the only two characters that were available; Dan played as Salvador the gunzerker, while I played as Maya the siren.

Before jumping into the first of the two zones, titled The Wildlife Preserve, we were told that our characters were already at level 20 but that none of their skill points had been spent yet. Job one, then, was to check out the skill trees and settle on one of three specializations. Surprisingly, none of the skill trees in Borderlands 2 (or at least not in the pre-alpha version of the game that we were playing) appear to have anything to do with specific weapons. (Regardless of which character you play as, you're proficient with all of the weapons in Borderlands 2's extensive arsenal.) Rather, skill trees can be used to augment your chosen character's special ability.

Phaselocked enemies are rendered defenseless for a short time.

Like Lilith, the siren from Borderlands, Maya has a special ability that's the same regardless of where you spend your skill points. Lilith's ability was a phasewalk that simultaneously made her invisible to enemies, immune to damage, and significantly quicker on her feet for a short time. Maya's ability is very different; her phaselock lets you temporarily encase an enemy--even a really big "super badass" one--inside a bubble that hovers a few feet above the ground. Enemies are unable to do anything while phaselocked, but are still vulnerable to attacks. Furthermore, depending on where you spend your skill points, the phaselock ability can have a number of other beneficial effects. The first time I specced out my siren, for example, I put points into the harmony skill tree's "sweet release" skill so that enemies killed while phaselocked would drop healing orbs that homed in on players.

By pouring a lot of skill points into the harmony tree I was able to make my siren a pretty effective healer. "Restoration" gave me the ability to heal other players simply by shooting them, "elated" caused all players' health to regenerate anytime an enemy was phaselocked, and "res" let me resurrect downed teammates by using my phaselock ability on them. Other, less-healer-oriented options on the harmony tree included "mind's eye," which increased my crit and melee damage; "recompense," which gave my shield a chance to regenerate anytime I took damage; and "wreck," which increased my rate of fire with all gun types when I phaselocked an enemy. Abilities like these will surely make the harmony siren a great character to have on your team, but since only two of us were playing on this occasion, there were definitely times when I felt that points spent to deal extra damage might have been more beneficial.

Heading into the second zone, Caustic Caverns, I opted to put all of my skill points into the cataclysm skill tree, which, in massively multiplayer online terms, would be considered the DPS spec. The abilities I chose to put most of my points into included "flicker," for an increased chance to cause status effects; "immolate," which added fire damage to any shots that I fired when down and trying for a second wind; and "cloud kill," which caused my shots to leave behind acid clouds that were harmful to enemies for around five seconds. Other noteworthy abilities on the tree included "foresight," which increases both magazine size and reload speed; "helios," which caused a fiery explosion anytime I killed a phaselocked enemy; and "ricochet," which gave my shots a chance to bounce around multiple enemies for a short time anytime I got a kill. In short, I became far more effective in combat.

Salvadore and Maya make a formidable duo.

I didn't have a chance to mess with the third skill tree, labeled "motion," but it appeared to focus on survivability, and since some of the skills improve Maya's movement, I suspect it will be the tree that most closely resembles playing as Lilith. Something similar to Lilith's phasewalk ability would definitely be welcome, since among the impressive array of new enemy types on show in the demo were a number of wormhole threshers covered in spikes that, after emerging from the ground, have an almost irresistible ability to pull you toward them. Other memorable enemies from the demo are too numerous to detail here, but you can see some of them in action, plus hear Dan and me discuss them in our Borderlands 2 video preview.

Borderlands 2 is currently scheduled for release in September. We look forward to bringing you lots more coverage of the game in the coming weeks and months.

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Xbox 360 | Borderlands 2: Gunzerkering

Does twice the guns mean double the fun in Borderlands 2? We find out when we take Salvador the gunzerker out to the target range.

What's got two itchy trigger fingers and loves the hunt for phat lewt? This guy! At a recent event, Justin Calvert and I had the chance to sit down and take Salvador the gunzerker and Maya the siren for a spin in Borderlands 2. Since the machines were set up next to each other (PCs with Xbox 360 controllers), it made sense to tag-team the two-zone demo and play cooperatively. In the interest of getting down to the nitty-gritty of how each of the new characters felt in our hands, we both played the entirety of the demo with our respective characters. My thoughts below are on the gunzerker, and you can read Justin's impressions of the siren here.

Two guns, two river threshers.

Each of the four new characters in Borderlands 2 leans on the archetypes set up by their previous counterparts. For those who played the first game, Salvador felt most like brutish big guy Brick. He's heavyset and never afraid to drop fist bombs when push comes to shove, but he also packs a new card up his sleeves: the ability to temporarily wield a pair of guns when combat gets a little too hot. The extra firepower comes with a cooldown, so you won't be constantly riddling prey with akimbo machine guns, but when you do, you forgo weapon sights to fire from the hip. With two effective elemental weapons equipped, targets tended to die pretty quickly at our hands. Just the way we like it.

Both of our characters came pre-played to level 20 and packing one of three different weapon loadouts. We were presented with a handful of skill points waiting to be spent, and doing so gave us the chance to customise our own areas of priorities for expertise. Like in the first game, three skill trees are available, but rather than spend an initial point for your class-specific special ability (Lilith's phasewalk, Brick's berserk, and so on) before drilling down further, this time your first point is spent directly in your tree of choice. The Brawn tree is all about optimising your special attack, with the "come at me bro" skill allowing you to taunt in gunzerker mode to return you to full health. Taunting attracts the current target's hate, making it useful for taking on a group tanking role, or wrestling danger away from another member of your crew. Using it doesn't spell imminent death, however, as activating it also rewards you with a buff that helps mitigate damage--presumably long enough for someone else to throw you a heal, pass on the aggro, or put down the target. Brawn isn't solely about punching things either, and the early tiers also pump up your chance at landing critical strikes, as well as increasing your effectiveness with certain weapon types, such as pistols.

The Rampage tree offers the "keep firing" (Spaceballs reference?) talent that speeds up your rate of fire in line with the speed at which you tap the triggers on the controller. Faster presses result in faster shooting, and when it's used with gunzerking double weapons, you'll chew through bullets at a rate of knots and provide enemies a free session of lead acupuncture in the process. "Inconceivable" and "5 shots of 6" were our standout abilities in the Rampage tree. The former granted a coin toss for each shot fired not to consume a round, while the latter was a maximum 25 percent chance to add an extra round of ammunition to the chamber when blasting away. Used together, they give you a chance to stand your ground and shoot with only minimal concern for running out of bullets. Gearbox devs on hand at the event even told of experiences during testing where players had fired 40-second bursts of chain gun weapons without needing to reload, simply by getting lucky with the perks.

Gun Lust is the third and final tree and offers extra health early, but upgrades your things that go bang a few tiers down. "No kill like overkill" adds a damage multiplier to your next shot fired after killing an enemy, giving you an instant leg up on your next victim, and will be invaluable for speeding things up when mowing down groups of poorly armoured, low-hit-point enemies.

That's right, gunzerk is totally a verb now.

With each of the three skill trees composed of fewer than a dozen unique abilities each, very few appeared to be filler to get you to the next big reward. As a result, we were forced to be brutal with the placement of our points, using them to raise our health or rate of regeneration, pump up critical strike chance, or weigh it up against permanent damage increases to specific parts of our arsenal. With only 15 points to spend during our play, we couldn't purchase all the abilities available in a single tree, let alone across the three distinct categories. We're interested to see how players will distribute them later in the game; whether buying out the juicy talents in each tree, or forcing your hand to pick and then feed a single approach to combat.

Gunzerker dual-wielding was our get-out-of-jail-free card for emergencies, and while we'd be lying if we said we didn't feel like a complete badass when we were pinging off rounds by the fist load, it is worth paying attention to the weapons you've got equipped. Activating gunzerking pulls the next weapon in the queue into your hands, and on more than one occasion, we realised after lighting up our target that it was an enemy resistant to that particular weapon type. You can still swap to something else more effective in combat, but it's worth keeping in mind before you activate your skill.

Playing the gunzerker was a blast, and while we have to admit it's probably not the most cerebral experience played solo, when he was paired with Maya's phaselock energy prison, we had a lot of fun whittling down enemy health bars in a hurry by playing off both special skills. This is clearly an experience best played with others, as evidenced by this Borderlands 2 video preview in which Justin and I discuss our time spent with the demo. Borderlands 2 will be out on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC in September this year.

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PC | Interested in a challenging yet fun indie turn-based strategy game?

We found a great indie game for you this week that will keep you up most of the night as you try to figure out how to beat the demo.

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PlayStation 3 | Spending Bullet Time With Friends: Max Payne 3 Multiplayer

Has Rockstar figured out how to adapt Max Payne's signature mechanic into a multiplayer setting?

You're pinned behind a bus in a Sao Paulo transit depot, with a half-dozen mercenaries ready to wipe you from the face of the Earth the second you peek your head past the headlights. You keep still, planning your next move, when out of nowhere some lunatic flings himself from a second-story window and manages to shoot every single one of those armed thugs before he even hits the ground. Immediately upon impact, he pops up as if to say, "I'm good!" and then proceeds to loot each of his victims like a ravenous hobo. Right now that guy might look like the craziest man on the planet, but he's also your teammate. And he just saved your life.

Like in the single-player campaign, cover can be used in Max Payne 3 multiplayer.

Welcome to the delightfully chaotic world of Max Payne 3 multiplayer. At the heart of that chaos is Max Payne's signature bullet-time mechanic--the ability to fire off bullets in dramatic slow motion, often while leaping through the air with a complete disregard for your personal safety. Unlike most shooters that feature a time-manipulation mechanic in the single-player campaign, Max Payne 3 doesn't ditch bullet time in the online half of the game. In fact, it embraces it wholeheartedly. All you need to do is kill a few enemies to build up your adrenaline gauge and then cash it in with the tap of a button to start diving around like the star of a Hong Kong action movie.

When you engage bullet time, anyone caught in your direct line of sight will have their movements slowed down as well, indicated by their screen suddenly turning a reddish hue. The really interesting thing about all this is that this bullet-time effect can be chained from one target to another. So if your target also happens to have his sights set on a teammate of yours, slow motion will spread to that third player as well. This gives your opponent a chance to either go for the kill he already had his eyes on or simply break from your line of sight to escape the bullet-time effect altogether. It's a clever way of balancing the slow-motion effect in a competitive multiplayer setting, giving successive targets an opportunity to avoid frustration when they're caught in anyone's bullet time force field. And when you manage to turn right around on them and counter their attack with a kill of your own, it's immensely gratifying.

Combine this with the fact that you can dramatically leap through windows or down entire flights of stairs, and you can see how a typical Max Payne multiplayer match has a way of turning into an acrobatic free-for-all. What's more, bullet time is just one of several "burst" rewards you can elect to use in online matches. Bursts are basically multitiered kill streak rewards; the more kills you rack up, the higher your adrenaline gauge and the greater the reward you can trigger.

You can build a custom character based on each of the different gangs playable in multiplayer.

These rewards come in a variety of flavors. The Weapon Dealer burst gives you infinite ammo for a certain amount of time, while the Weapon Double Dealer burst allows for more sinister fun by making the other team drop their spare grenades to the ground (charged and ready to explode) at the third and highest reward tier. Other burst sets allow you to play mind games with your opponents, with the Sneaky burst letting you appear to have joined the other team and the Paranoia burst making all your opponents see their teammates as enemies (with friendly fire disabled at the first tier but enabled at the third tier). Most of these bursts seem well balanced in the overall spectrum of chaos that is Max Payne 3 multiplayer, but if there's one that could prove a lightning rod, it's Paranoia. That's the burst that seems to be skating on the thinnest of ice, and we can easily see it being nerfed down the line.

Choosing which burst you equip your character with is one of the borderline insane number of customization options in Max Payne 3 multiplayer. On the cosmetic side, you can choose from a variety of clothing, facial, and hair options--with distinctly different fashion choices for the six types of Sao Paulo gangs you can play as in multiplayer. Seriously, if you're a fan of character creation screens, prepare to spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking each of your multiplayer characters. (We're big fans of the stoner burn victim Max Payne look.) On top of that, you can upgrade your character with functional equipment like gas masks (to protect you from tear gas grenades) and balaclavas (to help remain undetected on the radar) that also appear on your character model in-game.

Then you've got the various custom loadout kits. You can design a handful of customized loadouts using different sidearm, primary weapon, and grenade options and then further tweak those with a series of attachments. That type of loadout creation is pretty standard stuff these days, but what makes this approach different is that each of those customization options affects your overall weight. There's very much a risk-reward element to arming yourself to the teeth: you can easily turn into a tank on the battlefield, but you'll run, leap, and roll with significantly less agility than players who bear less resemblance to a walking arms factory. With movement playing such a big role in Max Payne 3 multiplayer, that weight meter is definitely something you want to keep an eye on.

When you get up high, slow-motion diving becomes that much more fun.

In fact, it's that focus on movement and agility that we like most about Max Payne 3's multiplayer offerings. The game always seems to give you a reason to run around doing silly, stylish things. This is a game where diving down a flight of stairs not only looks awesome, but can also be quite practical when it lets you slow down time and catch your enemy off guard. Even if you're not particularly good at the game, you're given a reason to avoid cowering behind cover thanks to a looting mechanic that lets you pilfer dead bodies for pain pills (medicine that gives you a second chance after death), ammo, or even adrenaline--the reward you'd get for having killed those players to begin with. Beyond that, there's also a vendetta system that allows you to put a mark on the head of someone who has been tormenting you so that you know exactly where to go to seek justice. There's always a reason to keep moving and exploring new corners of the map, resulting in a brisk pace awash in a distinctly chaotic sense of style.

There's plenty more to the multiplayer that we haven't covered here, including the various game modes and a unique approach to clans Rockstar is calling crews. But here's the bottom line: it works. Rockstar has managed to take what you enjoy about Max Payne's single-player exploits and translate that into a functional, enjoyable multiplayer experience. You may look like a lunatic diving through windows and looting corpses, but you'll be having an awfully fun time with your newfound lunacy.

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PC | A beautifully hand-drawn indie game, The Banner Saga

Once we saw this beautiful trailer, we knew you would want to check out this hand-drawn story-driven indie game, The Banner Saga. Check it out!

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PC | Fear and Excitement in the New SimCity

The legendary city-building series is back with a new game to revitalize the franchise, and we have all the early details (and concerns) right here.

Playing a SimCity game is a lot like playing with Legos. You build, you marvel at your creation, and then you smash it all to bits (sometimes with a tornado). Part sandbox, part strategy, this city-building series is famous for mixing smart planning and management with a dash of dry humor. And now, after roughly a decade of absence, SimCity is back. Recently, we paid a visit to Maxis Studio to check in with the team behind this new game. The early details revealed some exciting new additions, as well as a few concerns.

Multiplayer

That's right, multiplayer is coming to SimCity. You will join up and form regions, which lets you share resources and influence each other for good or for ill. In the examples we saw, one player shared some excess energy he had generated with his neighbors, while another player, whose city generated a lot of crime, inadvertently raised the others' crime rates. On a larger scale, all players in SimCity will influence the global market: a place where resources are bought and sold. Prices will shift based on supply and demand, and you can track who the big players are in each resource though leaderboards.

The global market is not an auction-house style of service; you will not directly buy from and sell to each other. Instead, you purchase goods from the market. The finer details of how this will work in the game are still in development, but our main concern is how people will try to break it. What will the limits of a player's influence be? How will the game change when you're not online? Does that mean you lose access to the global market, a service seemingly designed to be both a resource safety net and a way to earn some extra cash? How Maxis balances this service whether you're playing online or offline could greatly determine if this is a single-player- or multiplayer-focused game.

UPDATE 28/03/12 After this preview was published, EA confirmed that SimCity would require a persistent internet connection to play, due to the pervasiveness of the online features.

Presentation

A key point the developers from Maxis stressed was accessibility. They want the return of SimCity to appeal to those who don't find poring over spreadsheets and tax reports an enjoyable way to spend the evening. That means giving these numbers a fresh coat of paint. Electrical power distribution was the example shown. By toggling an overlay, you can view a red line leading out from your (nonfunctional) power plant across the city to all your buildings. When you power up the plant, a yellow bolt of energy shoots down the line, lighting up all the buildings along the way with a jingle.

You can specialize in various areas, such as gambling or coal production.

This is a simple example of the larger design philosophy of adding some extra flair to otherwise mundane parts of management. No matter how you dress it up, at its core, SimCity has always been a game of numbers. It's unlikely the team at Maxis working on this game, which includes developers as far back as SimCity 2000, could forget this. However, in their quest to make the series more user-friendly, we hope they don't forget the simple pleasures that come from diving into the details of your city and optimizing them to peak performance. Hopefully style won't come at the expense of substance.

Side Quests

The new SimCity borrows a page from The Sims 3 by offering lots of additional objectives for you to work toward outside of straight city management. Part of this design decision was to help put more emphasis on the sims who live in your city, thus giving your city some extra character. A simple example is a coal factory foreman who requests more coal for his factory (imagine that). On the more aggressive side, villainous sims can move into your city, such as the arsonist who will drive around setting fire to your buildings.

Along with the presentation overhaul, the underlying goal is to help this new SimCity engage a broader audience. This is all well and good, if these side quests are largely optional. If you wish to focus purely on the management aspect of the game, rather than constantly diving down to meet the individual whims of your citizens, that should be an option. The bulk of these quests should reward completion and not punish failure. And for the ones that do punish failure, it should fit naturally into the course of the game.

Specialists will visit your city with offers of new and unique buildings.

In addition to extra cash, the rewards for completing missions include new modules for buildings. We saw a small fire station receive a shiny new radio tower module that decreased the station's emergency response time. Cosmetic items, such as flags and signs, are also available. From a simple fire station to the game as a whole, SimCity is receiving a lot of upgrades. Some of them have us a little nervous, but the game still looks slick and colorful. We're very excited to learn what details will be revealed next, but until then, know that SimCity will be released on the PC and Mac sometime next year.

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PlayStation 3 | Assassin's Creed III Is the Type of Sequel This Series Needs

Why a new hero and a new era are just the tip of the iceberg.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations was an odd game for longtime fans of the series. Judged by its own merits, the most recent entry in the franchise was a perfectly enjoyable and well-made adventure. But for those who know the series inside and out, Revelations had one persistent flaw that was difficult to ignore: the whole thing just felt too familiar. It was a game that left a lot of fans wondering if Ubisoft's creative momentum had stalled, stirring up quite a bit of concern over Assassin's Creed III in the process. Something tells us that the worrying won't last for much longer.

See, here's the thing about Assassin's Creed III: what we've seen looks terrific. This sequel appears to be the breath of fresh air that fans have been clamoring for in ever-growing numbers. One obvious reason is the brand-new setting and protagonist, with 18th-century New England serving as the backdrop and half-Native American, half-English assassin Connor acting as the main character. While Connor's journeys between Boston and New York have him living through the American Revolution, he's very much an outsider with no horse in this race. It's a really interesting premise, but what has us most excited is that this new setting is more than just a chance to explore a new historical era. Ubisoft has cleverly used the Revolutionary War backdrop as an opportunity to evolve the core strength of the game: player movement.

From the beginning, the series' empowering sense of momentum has been a critical part of its overall success by letting you freely dart across rooftops and perform feats of acrobatic wizardry. But what so many of us loved about leaping across rooftops in those early games failed to evolve in any meaningful way with each subsequent installment. With Assassin's Creed III, however, it looks like that might just change. As Connor, you'll spend a good deal of time stalking your enemies not only on rooftops, but also in the wilderness. He can climb trees, leap across branches, and scale sheer cliff faces one handhold at a time. It's more than just an extension of the city navigation on trees: there's a much more feral look and feel to Connor's forest exploits.

Seeing Connor in motion is impressive, and you really get the sense that controlling him in this world will feel very different from controlling Ezio. Part of that is the revamped animation system; Connor really moves like a new man, not some Revolutionary War version of Ezio. You see it in little details like the way he vaults over low obstacles with a single outstretched arm, or the way he sidesteps tree trunks when jumping from branch to branch. Beyond that, Ubisoft is promising a revamped control system, giving you more control over when you want to scale straight up an obstacle, or simply run over it. It's refreshing to see that Ubisoft has gone into such detail to make sure the sense of movement looks just as different as the world around you.

Dual wielding is a new addition to combat.

Connor's journey through this world also requires him to deal with weather effects in a way that Ezio never had to worry about. The story spans a number of years, with chapters set during various seasons. In the wintertime, you might need to stick to the trees because the ground is covered in knee-deep snowfall. It may be fun to see Connor trudging through all that powder like a skier who has lost his skis, but it also means you're in dire straits if a bear happens to sneak up behind you as we saw in our demo. Yet not every type of weather is a reason to worry, as Ubisoft has promised that you'll be able to exploit certain weather effects to your benefit, like using thick fog as a chance to increase your stealth levels during nighttime assassinations.

If you're worried that Assassin's Creed III has basically become Far Cry, don't be: you'll still be spending plenty of time in real, honest-to-goodness cities. According to Ubisoft, Connor will be splitting his time between Boston and New York. We got to see the former in all its British-occupied, pre-war glory. It's a different look from the dense medieval cities of Italy we saw in the Ezio trilogy, with wider streets and more open space to contend with (which Ubisoft can now exploit with up to 2,000 people onscreen at a time). The cities not only look different, but behave differently as well, with opportunities to run through open windows and through people's houses in order to break from your pursuers during a chase scene.

Naturally, each city you visit is awash in turmoil considering the whole American Revolution currently going on. Connor is in an interesting position during all of this. Ubisoft is very careful to stress that this isn't some "Woo! America!" type of game. Connor is an outsider: he doesn't identify with his English heritage, and he has taken issue with his Mohawk tribe after they were ravaged by enemies, and the elders refused to retaliate. Long story short: Connor has found a new home with the assassins, looking to eradicate the newfound Templar threat on this side of the Atlantic.

It's often beneficial to take out the poor little drummer to break an enemy's formation.

At times you'll see Connor assume the role of the lone wolf on the battlefield, similar to those scenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 where Snake crept through an ongoing war independent of either side. One scene has Connor running downhill through a full-on warzone, dodging cannon balls erupting in clouds of dirt and debris in pursuit of a British officer. It's an interesting form of stealth compared to previous games: rather than blending into a crowd of people, you're trying to blend into a scene of chaos and death, sneaking toward your goal while trying not to die yourself. It sounds a little impractical until you realize it's an awfully effective way to catch your target while he's distracted.

This being an Assassin's Creed game, it's not all watching other people fight: you'll be doing plenty of that yourself. Ubisoft has promised a number of tweaks to the combat system, including dual-wielding weapons, human shields, and even the ability to stab enemies at a dead sprint without breaking stride. There even seems to be a little bit of the most recent Batman games in there, with Connor being able to string up enemies from tree branches to distract the attention of a larger group.

So yes, Connor is a very impressive assassin. His tactics are a little more feral (climbing trees and blending into the wilderness) and a little more guerrilla (those enemies you string up from trees? They can be dead), and moreover, he moves with a distinct style and animation set all his own. We really like what we've seen of Connor the assassin; now we're just wondering about Connor the hero. Ezio was one of those wonderfully memorable protagonists you got to see grow and mature over time. We're hoping Connor will be just as interesting, but in his own distinct way. So far Ubisoft isn't revealing a whole lot about Connor's backstory, so we've got our fingers crossed that we'll be given reasons to care about his role in the story as opposed to, say, Altair from the original game.

The wilderness is an important part of ACIII.

All told, Assassin's Creed III looks like the type of sequel that we were hoping for all along. There's a new historical era to explore, a new main character to learn about, and a whole slew of tweaks and outright overhauls to the gameplay that should make this a fresh experience compared to the deja-vu-inspiring Revelations. Naturally, all that comes with the caveat that we've seen only a small slice of this game and haven't had the opportunity to play it for ourselves just yet. So keep an eye out for more Assassin's Creed III coverage coming your way this year. This is definitely a game you'll want to have on your radar.

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Xbox 360 | Zelda for Those Who Might Not Like Zelda Anymore

Can Darksiders' interpretation of Nintendo's franchise continue carrying the load?

Much of the inspiration from the Legend of Zelda series found in the original Darksiders remains firmly intact in its sequel, at least if a mid-game (about six hours in, we're told) dungeon called The Foundry is any indication. This sprawling zone is home to rivers of lava, all manner of mechanical contraptions, and an assortment of stone golems, one of which is about the size of a six-story building. Despite the window dressing, Darksiders II still retains the same general structure of Nintendo's adventure series: find keys to get through locked doors and then solve some puzzles, which inevitably leads to the special item that also happens to unlock the way forward to the dungeon boss.

It should all be very familiar to fans of Link's adventures, and Darksiders II seemingly does them justice with the complexity of the puzzles found in The Foundry. In fact, there's a really nice mixture of puzzles that rely heavily on Death's own acrobatic abilities as well as his interaction with the stone golems (he can ride them) and sticky bombs found later in the same area. But there are also a fair share of brain busters where taking a step or two back from the situation goes a long way in presenting a solution. One of the more notable puzzles in The Foundry actually requires a fair bit of exploration, which played well into the sheer size of that particular environment.

There's no shortage of things to do in Darksiders II. When Death isn't solving slower-paced puzzles, he's usually battling foes with a combat system that bears more similarities to Capcom's Devil May Cry series than to The Legend of Zelda, and that serves as one of the first examples of how Darksiders II, much like its predecessor, separates itself from Nintendo's franchise. It's still a slick system complete with fairly complex combinations of moves that use the various tools at Death's disposal, including an assortment of equipable scythes and secondary weapons that are much slower but more punishing.

But perhaps even more telling of Darksiders' attempt to distance itself from Zelda is the addition of a new loot system that adds much more equipment to the ecosystem than in the previous game. It's one of the few times where the action in Darksiders seemingly comes to a halt, but the trade-off is more weapons and pieces of armor that have various effects on Death's base stats. Death is far more nimble than his horseman predecessor, so it's a little jarring to slow down and spend some time on the specifics of which item is better than another and whether or not Death can even equip a piece of gear. Truth be told, this might just be a side effect of being thrown into a later dungeon and not having a chance to experience what happens in between dungeons, presumably in the hub world that exists. Still, switching loot to auto-pickup as opposed to manual pickup or equip on pickup seems to make things a little smoother in that regard.

Things swung back around to the Zelda formula with the Foundry boss--a massive golem activated by collecting special heart stones from various parts of the dungeon. It's not so much the boss battle that's a reminder of what Zelda has done before it, but rather Vigil's focus on making boss battles that not only are memorable, but also serve as a satisfying conclusion to a slog through a large dungeon. It's at that point that it seems Vigil wants to take the core characteristics of the Zelda series and improve the parts of it that some people may not find as appealing or change them to reflect a more contemporary aesthetic. It remains to be seen if the team has succeeded.

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Xbox 360 | Junction Point Turning the Disney Up to 11 in Epic Mickey 2

The latest platformer from Warren Spector's studio feels like much more of a product of its parent company.

The original Epic Mickey really wore its heart on its sleeve. In spite of the game's flaws, you could tell how much love Warren Spector's team at Junction Point felt toward the source material--essentially the entirety of Disney history--and that showed through in a mountain of clever references to the company's past and even in its use of the nearly forgotten Oswald the Lucky Rabbit as a central character in the game's narrative. But take one look at the upcoming sequel, and all of a sudden the original Epic Mickey looks like a piece of fan fiction. Junction Point has seriously ratcheted up the level of, well, Disney in this game, to the point where it feels less like a love letter to Walt Disney's memory and more like a product of Disney itself.

What a difference HD makes

With Epic Mickey 2, this series is no longer a Wii exclusive; it's being developed for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in addition to Nintendo's console. One glance at the 360 or PS3 version, though, and you realize that this is a series that deserved to be in HD all along. The art design stands out so much more, and so do the little details and references to Disney's past that litter the environments--whether it's the brooms marching off in the distance in a Fantasia-themed level, or simply the shimmery, viscous texture of the paint that you use to restore each world you visit. It's sort of like how diehard Pixar fans buy those movies only on Blu-ray: you can still enjoy the animation at a lesser level of visual fidelity, but you lose so much of the subtlety and attention to detail in the art design.

Speak up, Mickey

Another big change comes by way of the game's audio. Junction Point has dipped into Disney's pool of voice acting veterans to lend a voice to each of the game's main characters. Characters like Mickey and Goofy will sound like their usual selves--the themes in the game may be dark, but the voice acting isn't--so don't expect any big surprises there. However, there is one particularly notable voice-acting choice: Frank Welker as Oswald. With Oswald getting his start during the silent animated feature era and subsequently falling into relative obscurity after that, Epic Mickey 2 marks the first time in Disney history that Oswald has been given a voice.

Singing as storytelling

It's a good thing the characters have voices; otherwise, this next one would be kind of weird: Epic Mickey 2 is a musical. Warren Spector has somewhat indulged in his love of Broadway plays and decided to give Epic Mickey 2's story cinematics a classic Disney cartoon flair. In typical musical fashion, characters will randomly break out into song--most of which have been crafted by the team of Jim Dooley (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Mike Himelstein (who is somehow credited with work on both Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and The Sopranos). Junction Point promises that many of the songs you hear in the game will change based on your gameplay choices but that the songs aren't part of the gameplay itself. Warren Spector insists he'd be "run out on a rail" if he incorporated the narrative's song-and-dance leanings into core gameplay mechanics.

Oh, and about that "video game" part…

So those are a few of the ways that Epic Mickey 2: Power of Two feels like much more of a proper Disney endeavor than its predecessor. But if you played the last game, you probably remember that it was never a game lacking for charm--it was in the gameplay itself where the original Epic Mickey suffered most. So be sure to have a look at our video interview with Warren Spector to see what the Junction Point co-founder has to say about fixing the camera, making player choices more persistent, and what they're hoping to bring to the table with drop-in co-op.

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3DS | Where next for the creators of Street Cleaning Simulator?

We talked to Excalibur Publishing's managing director Robert Stallibrass, the man whose audience wants him to make Hairdressing Simulator and even Ice Cream Van Man Simulator.

Last year, Street Cleaning Simulator was a huge hit with the GameSpot community. While we rated it at 1.5 and called it 'abysmal', users flocked to submit user reviews, taking it to a 9.1 average user score from over 2,400 votes--making it more popular and higher-rated than games such as Dark Souls. While many of these scores were clearly mocking the absurd nature of the game, Excalibur itself has become one of the busiest games publishers around, releasing two to three titles per month, including both Utility Vehicle Simulator and Airport Firefighter Simulator recently. We approached the company's managing director to find out more about the company, its games, and the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Simulator series.

GameSpot UK: Tell us a bit about Excalibur--the games, the company, the history.

Robert Stallibrass: Well, most of the people here, or certainly myself and my co-director, have been in the games industry for about 25 years. Contact Sales, which is the company that holds Excalibur Publishing, is 15 years old on the 24th March, so individuals have been around a long time. We started our life publishing simulation add-ons for Microsoft Flight Simulator and Micrsoft Train Simulator under a brand called First Class Simulations and that proved to be very, very popular. Fly a 787, fly an A380, fly from [London] to New York, London airports, etc. Drive a train from London to Brighton, and that sort of thing. Very popular, very successful.

Three years ago, Microsoft pulled the plug on Flight Simulator, and we looked around and said, "we have a formula here where people like simulations." We were lucky, and we happened to be talking to the developers of Farming Simulator. And that is really where our life started under the Excalibur brand, by publishing Farming Simulator. Worldwide, it sold, and you'll laugh, about 1.8 million copies, so that in a way became a formula. We got involved with products like Euro Truck Simulator, which again has sold about half a million copies worldwide, UK Truck Simulator which has sold somewhere in the region of 75,000 copies in the UK alone. So this is not your Modern Warfare, where on day one they sell 5 million copies worldwide--this is a slow, long-term burn of products, and we're still selling Euro Truck, UK Truck and Farming Simulator and some of these have been out for three or four years.

A lot of that's down to reviews--to use Street Cleaning Simulator as an example, a lot of people laughed at that, but actually it's a hell of a good product, and I think slowly people are coming round to the fact that not everything in life is, "drive a car fast, kill everybody, or roll a tank through London and shoot the daylights out of buildings". There is a whole market of people who actually want to do something a bit more casual, and that's really where our market is.

Farming Simulator is by far and away Excalibur's most popular franchise.

GSUK: Presumably physical retail is important to Excalibur?

RS: Physical retail is absolutely essential. We get fantastic support from people like Game and PC World, and a number of specialist independent retailers across the country. We also have great support in Europe from key retailers like GameStop and MediaMart, in Germany, Scandanavia and Italy. And also, we do great business in South Africa, Australia, even the Middle East, so without retail we wouldn't have a business.

GSUK: So does what's happening to Game worry you a little bit?

RS: I tell you what worries me--a business that is turning over …900m and made a paltry loss of …18m is being absolutely taken to the cleaners. You look at other industries and there are people out there losing hundreds of millions of pounds. You look at the banks--look at the money the banks have lost! People shore them up. I'm not saying Game should be shored up, but look at it--…18m loss on …900m turnover--they probably spent that on paperclips and pens! I think the whole thing has been blown out of proportion, and I also think that some of the publishers should be shot who are not supporting Game. They have made a fortune out of Game over the years, and the tables have turned and they've gone, "Ooh, I'm not going to support you now!". I think it's pathetic.

GSUK: How many people do you employ, and how many teams are working on games at any given time?

RS: We've got a very small in-house development team. In total we are getting products from something like eight developers across the world.

GSUK: Based on the number and frequency of releases, you're one of the most prolific publishers around at the moment. Do you think other publishers could learn from that?

RS: The market for simulations is as wide as your imagination. We get people saying, "Have you done Hairdressing Simulator, have you done Ice Cream Van Man Simulator?" Some of these are extreme, but yeah, we are putting out two, maybe three products a month, but equally we are being very weary about quality. I think one of your colleagues may say, "well, yes Robert--we've reviewed one or two of your products which aren't very good". Well, yes, that happens from time to time, but that's just the way we are.

There's three elements. Hard work, luck and common sense. I think that's all we do--I don't think there's any great formula to it. I think some publishers lack one or all three of those elements. We just get on with it.

GSUK: It seems as though there's some similarity between your games and some social games out there--are you focussed on continuing to charge for your games in future?

RS: Yes, we definitely are, and yet you're quite right--there is a crossover. You look at something like Farmville, for example, which I think at the last count had 65 million players at any one time, and Farming Simulator has to some extent ridden on the back of that success as well.

GSUK: How important is the media to Excalibur? How important are both critic reviews and user reviews?

RS: I think the problem is, some of our games are a bit odd and they get into the hands of people who don't necessarily want to play simulation games. We do get a slating from time to time, both in the media and from users, and we have people complain about the products. On the other side, we have people who buy from us regularly who say, "actually, your products are great for that type of market". The media is very, very important for us, because we do not have the advertising budget of the larger publishers out there, or the marketing budget. A lot of our sales are driven by good reviews, and at the end of the day, it's the consumers that really decide if our products are good or bad. We do watch quite closely what they're saying about our products, and where they we try not to make that error again. Feedback for us is very important too.

GSUK: We gave Street Cleaning Simulator a very bad review, and when that happens, it sometimes results in an angry phone call from the publisher. It didn't in the case of Excalibur.

RS: [Laughs] We're a bit more laid back--we put our products out, and if people don't like it, they don't like it. As long as people have valid criticism for our products, that's absolutely fine. In fact, Street Cleaning Simulator went viral, and we had over 80,000 hits on our site about it in the first week.

GSUK: Would you say that there's any real competition in your market?

RS: Yep, we have one or two people who do stand alone simulations--the Mastertronic Group under their "Just Sims" label do one or two budget simulations, there's one or two other people out there as well who do simulations. Some of the competition is very good, and it's great to see competition because it grows the market. It keeps us on our toes, and we wish them all success. We want the simulations market to grow.

GSUK: What's your most popular franchise?

RS: Farming Simulator is by far and away our most popular, and we've been very much labelled as a one-product company. But we also have Euro Truck Simulator, Bus Simulator 2…

GSUK: Street Cleaning Simulator must have done well?

RS: Street Cleaning simulator just did ok--because it was a bit of a quirky one, I don't think anybody quite took it too seriously until some of the reviews. We've got a number of other products that did a lot better.

GSUK: Is there one country or region where Excalibur's games do particularly well?

RS: I always laugh about this, but our partner in Italy buys more than anybody else. And I don't know if they use them as doorstops, whether they eat them, put them in their pitta bread, or mix them in with their pasta, but the Italians absolutely love our products. I mean, an astronomical amount of business compared to the UK. Germany's very strong as well.

GSUK: What's next for Excalibur--what's the plan for 2012 and beyond?

RS: Our next key product is a title called Circus World, which is coming out in July, which is our first title that we've developed in-house. It's very much simulation and management--you run a circus and grow it, and you have to make sure the acts do well, and you sell hot dogs, and you make money, and that's been in development for three years.

GSUK: When you say it's in-house, where is it physically being developed?

RS: We took a decision some years ago that we wanted to have our own small development team, and when I say small, I mean four or five people. It's a team that we fund, that we look after, that we advise, that we work with to develop products for us, so it's as good as our team. It's based in the UK, but it's spread about. We have a central person who looks after it all and we outsource some of the functions like the music and the graphics.

GSUK: That's quite a common independent development model--would you say you have an indie approach to making games?

RS: I really hope so, because I think there's a lot of creativity in independents, and I also think that the tried and tested franchise model--versions four, five, six and seven, are great, and I understand why some of the big publishers do it, but actually it's a bit boring.

We have another title that's due out later this year called Zoo Park Simulator, and we have two other key products coming from outside--Euro Truck Simulator 2, which has been a highly anticipated product, and gosh, should I be telling you this? Yeah, I'll tell you this. You're the only person that knows this. There will be another version of Farming Simulator coming out September/October, which will be a completely new version, a complete rewrite of the code, so it won't just be a rehash. We've planned for console versions, but they probably won't happen till next year.

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Wii | Holy Building Blocks, Lego Batman!

New heroes, an open city, and dialogue are just a few of the things coming to Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes.

Keeping licensed Lego games fresh can be quite the challenge. For the upcoming Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, developer Traveller's Tales needs to find a way to set it apart from other games in the genre. The game itself brandishes one of the new aspects to be featured in the game: the inclusion of additional DC comic superheroes, like The Flash. But there are a few other things included to help ensure that this Lego experience isn't like every other one.

For starters, this time around, Traveller's Tales is incorporating an open-world approach to the Lego Batman universe. While the core story will be pretty linear--involving an evil plot concocted by The Joker and Lex Luthor--there will be opportunities to go off the beaten path and explore the city of Gotham. The entire city is yours to discover. The story may have you visit certain locales throughout the adventure, but if you want to go back and check out certain areas, you're more than welcome to do so. Of course, some areas will be accessible early on, but others will require certain items, specifically suits, for the characters to reach them.

Both Batman and Robin will obtain special suits that, when worn, give the ability to do cool things. There will be a handful of different suits to collect throughout the game, and each has a specific feature. You'll also switch between various suits on more than a few occasions. In Robin's case, there is an acrobat suit that will let him climb up certain areas that are otherwise inaccessible. Batman will get a stealth suit that will let him go past henchmen and security cameras undetected. If you wear the electricity suit in an area guarded by electricity, you will be able to reach your desired spot and collect any kind of treasure that might be lying there.

Additional DC superheroes are also included. The previous game allowed you to play with additional characters, both good and bad; this one will have 50 playable characters. Of them, though, the one who plays a central role to Batman and Robin is, of course, Superman.

The man of steel will join the dynamic duo partway through the game, and players will have access to Superman's abilities. As Superman, you'll be able to freeze people, fly high in the sky, and reach spots neither Batman nor Robin can reach. While it may seem that Superman should be able to do anything, thanks to his incredible power, the developers have found ways of making it so that you need to use all of the characters to access everything in Gotham.

Getting the band together.

Of course, there are other aspects to Lego Batman 2 that should help to differentiate it from other Lego games. Traveller's Tales heard that people wanted the ability save their progress midway through each level. Rather than having to restart an area from the beginning, now, you have midlevel save checkpoints that should be real time-savers. The other big reveal for Lego Batman 2 is that this is the first game to actually feature talking Lego characters. While we didn't get to see the talking in action, it appears that the entire game will be fully voiced. It will be interesting to see whom they line up as the voice talent for the characters and just how much dialogue is in the story.

Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes is scheduled for release sometime this summer on every platform, but no firm release date has been set. There is a lot riding on this particular Lego game to have it stand out from the others, and hopefully, an open-world Lego Gotham with a fully voiced story and the man of steel are enough to do that.

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