VGR 5.04

It's Trey, Kevin and Miguel this week, talkin' 'bout some Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, the FCC, Besieged, ToeJam & Earl, Joystiq, and all sorts of other stuff.  Also shout-outs to the gaming club at UNCG.

-=Download 5.04=-

Dying Light Review

In recent memory, Dying Light might be one of the most derivative games I’ve played.  While in some cases that might be seen as an insult, for Techland’s open-world-zombie-parkour simulator, it’s borrowed from the best in order to make one of their best titles yet.  The influences are worn on it’s sleeve, taking Dead Island’s basic gameplay structure, and mixing it with a healthy modicum of movement from Mirror’s Edge, the end result being a very large game, with a some great interplay between gameplay systems.

VGR 503

So January managed to get pretty busy right near the end there.  While Kevin is knee-deep in the dead and online CCG's, everybody else is getting irate about the kerfluffle that is the Nintendo Creators Program.  Hear our thoughts on this, along with other news of the week, and some cool music to boot!

-=Download 5.03=-

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Today IGN got an exclusive look at some footage from Techland's new game Dying Light. Techland is famous for game franchises such as Chrome, Call of Juarez and Dead Island. The game itself looks like an interesting mix of Mirrors Edge and survival horror. The trailer shows the main character using the environment to his advantage by leaping off of buildings, railings and telephone poles to escape the horde. Put the one aspect of this game that intrigues me the most is how radically the game changes from day to night. During the day it appears that the zombies are tame, slow and generally easy to get away from provided you don't get surrounded a la Walking Dead/ Left 4 Dead. However, come nightfall something changes and the slow shuffling zombies become the 28 Days Later/ I am Legend zombies. This presents some interesting dynamics that can take place in the game setup. People that have been itching for a survival horror game will get to experience it along with some free running action. This will also be one of the first zombie games that I can think of that will give the player free roam capabilities and to use the environment to actually escape the zombie hoard and not just for picking up gas cans and setting zombies on fire. At another point in the trailer, the character seems to be wielding some sort of shock blade. While this isn't confirmed I hope this means there will be a scavenging and crafting system present in the game. This wouldn't be surprising since this is the same company that developed Dead Island. Dying Light is expected to release in 2014 for current and next gen.

Pre-3

We've started to get a lot of early trailers this week as we look forward to the Electronic Entertainment Expo, so we've gathered some of the best here along with our opinions:

I'm pretty sure Zombies + Parkour is a subgenre of zombie games that we haven't touched yet (heck, parkour games in general are hard enough to find as it is).  I'm always down for any trailer that uses Woodkid for music, but as is Techland's track record, no actual gameplay footage.  I'm hoping this is closer to the actual game than the Dead Island trailer was, but we'll just have to wait and see.

A rather big update for Metal Gear with Keifer Sutherland taking the reigns of Snake over David Hayter (who doesn't seem to be taking this all too well).  Sometimes different can be good, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was another long con by Kojima.  Hopefully we'll get some more details soon

The new Castlevania series seems to have the best music around for trailers.  The timeline for how this game works is a bit of a mess, so I'm interested to see how they sort it out.

This one comes with a bit of a pushback of the release date to early next year (big surprise).  The lastest feature for Lightning's return thats being show off is a sort of class and visual swap system, not unlike the Dressphere system from X-2.  Cool to see some returning characters from the series, don't think Snow will ever catch a break.

Mobile platforms are becoming increasingly appealing to developers it seems, so now we've got a new Deus Ex game for the iPad, much in the same vein as Human Revolution.  Looks pretty slick, but I feel like it's going to be a nightmare to control

More to come soon, so stay tuned!