The Bureau: XCOM Declassified didn’t have the best entry into public consciousness. So vociferous and heated was the fan reaction when a shooter based on XCOM was announced that 2K Marin went back to the drawing board and had a good long hard think about what they wanted to convey in the XCOM Universe, and The Bureau feels like a good compromise of their intent as well as what fans expect from an XCOM game.

In an age where bellyaching and whining has blighted the sales potential of many a perfectly fine game (DmC being one example and more contentiously, the underrated Syndicate being another) it’s maybe wise that The Bureau: XCOM Declassified liberally takes more from the preceding games than anyone thought it would, for the developer’s sake at least.

Plot wise, it’s set back in the good old 1960s, so it’s chronologically the first in the series, and takes place right at the start of an alien invasion of Earth. America is the focal point, as the developers are more interested in telling a more localised, personal story this time around, rather than have a planetary wide struggle as seen in previous games.

Your character is William Carter an agent with a gruff voice, a ghostbusters style backpack and a sweet hat, that never falls off no matter how wildly you roll around like a moron. Carter’s at the forefront of the fight back against the alien menace, working as he does for the newly formed XCOM. The mission played saw him jet off to New Mexico where he sees first-hand the devastation wrought by these less than pleasant visitors upon the innocent locals and the local terrain, as terraforming technology is set down.

It’s hard not to think of Mass Effect, or even Alpha Protocol when playing through The Bureau. It’s no longer a first person shooter, as was first revealed. It’s metamorphosed into a third person shooter, albeit one with (and some fans can breathe a sigh of relief here) a heavy focus on tactics and positioning, with a minimum of running and gunning.

There’s a hub centre where you take your missions, giant alien monoliths loom ominously in the background while alien crafts whizz past, and even the special skill wheel that pops up during gameplay bears more than a little resemblance to the one Shepard uses to force Garrus and his compadres to charge at and attack the Reaper menace. After some exposition you’re placed in the heat of battle, you and two other agents engaging the alien menace. If your team mates die by the way, that’s it. They’re gone. There’s no coming back, no miraculous comic book style resurrection. You got them killed and your pixelated chap will have to live with the consequences.

The Bureau will gleefully tear you and your squad to shreds if you play like a lunkhead raised on a diet of Chuck Norris films and raw meat. If you position them wrongly, don’t constantly place them behind cover and accidentally expose them you’re in for trouble. Even from an initial play through the demo stage, it feels a lot more methodical and punishing than other shooters.

This is not a game to be rushed. Despite appearing somewhat unremarkable at first glance, there is depth here and an incentive to play carefully. It also successfully conveys a sense of dread and creepiness. The locals have become mindless husks, and slowly wandering through them as they moan and wander whilst picking up diary entries of their last few days is gratifyingly morbid, and more than a little befitting of an apocalyptic alien invasion.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, has perhaps done enough to silence entitled naysayers, and is far more cerebral than first glances perhaps reveal. Though it may not set the world on fire, nor be particularly original, it juggles with a number of different genres fairly successfully, and looks like one to watch come August, when it invades.

This preview is taken from Issue 135 of gamesTM, which goes on sale Thursday 16 May. You can buy the issue in newsagents and Imagine Shop, or digitally through greatdigitalmags.com.

With Wildstar, Carbine Studios is hoping to succeed where many others have failed: the sci-fi MMORPG. From Tabula Rasa to Star Trek Online to the troubled Star Wars: the Old Republic, taking massively multiplayer roleplaying into the final frontier has often floundered, and almost always failed to make a massive impact.

Layers On Layers On Layers

So can Wildstar buck the trend and make a splash in the MMORPG market? One thing that goes in its favor is that there’s no shortage of things to do, and they’re all begging for your attention.

The game’s developers mean to cram it full of instances, public quests, jumping puzzles, world events and more. Their intention is to keep you entertained, with new areas being introduced roughly every half an hour. It’s a game where one thing always leads to another: quests will spinoff into other quests, which point you to public events, which point you to other quests, and so on.

You’ll also get fun, arcade-style challenges on the fly, such as killing a certain number of monsters in a limited amount of time. All this happens in a bright, goofy world that feels like Firefly had a baby with Borderlands, complete with bluegrass music.

Characters and enemies are cartoonish and stylized, and easily hold one’s interest – especially some of the more massive monsters the game boasts. Expect to explore environments from orange-tinted canyons to the dead-quiet surface of a moon (complete with low gravity and friction) to dusty, sleepy plains.

The story is intriguing, but unlikely to raise any eyebrows as far as science fiction goes: Wildstar tells the tale of Nexus, a legendary planet once inhabited by the Elden, a hyper-advanced race that’s long gone – but, in traditional gaming fashion, they managed to leave behind tons of technology for folks to scavenge and learn from.

You pick from one of two factions, the Exiles or the Dominion: the latter being your intergalactic renegades and the former being your powerful, interstellar empire. They’re both struggling to control the mythical planet and its secrets. You’ll spend the game searching for treasure, battling your rival faction, and uncovering just what happened to those Elden.

Wildstar Keeps It Simple

One thing you’ll notice is that the game eschews the current MMORPG trend of cut scenes and intricate dialogue options, opting instead for an old-school blurb of quest text and an accept button.

It keeps the amount of words to read very low, with quest givers usually only having one or two lines of dialogue. In the demos seen at PAX East, this quest text was usually infused with enough personality to keep it from feeling dull. It’s part of the effort to keep you playing with minimal interference.

Combat’s Wild… But Not A Star

As with any MMORPG, you’ll spend a lot of time in combat. Here, Wildstar is light and quick: abilities have short timers and enemies die fast. You can double tap any movement key to dodge out of the way – which is especially useful when tied with the fact that enemies telegraph their moves by showing their area of effect right in the environment. 

That idea also applies to you and your allies’ abilities: you’ll see the full range of your abilities when you use them, or be able to target a specific area, and you’ll see the same things for your allies. This gets interesting when you playing with a healer or buffer, making it so you two share the responsibilities for proper positioning. Combined with some thrilling dodging, it all lends a strategy, excitement and depth to combat that keeps things interesting.

Excluding the high-visibility targeting and addictive dodging, it’s a fairly stock MMO combat system, but battle still feels well executed and tight. Based on our hands-on session, it does little to set the game apart from the pack, but certainly doesn’t hurt anything either.

Make Yourself At Home

Carbine is also hoping to hook players with housing. WIldstar boasts a robust housing system, and players can expect to get their own plot of land relatively early on.

You have an enormous amount of control over your home's look and feel, with a myriad of layouts and looks to choose from. You’re free to decorate them with a number of different items: furniture such as tables, lamps, chairs, and more decorative things like the heads of bosses you’ve slain.

Expect plenty of fun theme items to give your home its own unique flair, like a mystery-themed pack that features low lighting and emulates passing headlights. Placing items around your house is surprisingly amount flexible – you can place things virtually anywhere, and rotate them however you like, even if it defies gravity.

You can customize the outside of your house as well. At PAX East, Carbine showed off a number of functional items that can be built, like raid teleporters, crafting stations and daily quest givers. You’ll have the ability to bring your friends to your home and allow them to use your facilities as well.

Walk Your Own Path

Another attractive element is the paths system, and this one is definitely innovative. In the beginning, you choose a class, which conform to standard MMORPG conventions and mainly deal with combat  – think sci-fi versions of warrior, rogue, tank, healer, etc. - but you also choose a path.

The available path options are soldier, scientist, settler and explorer. What these things determine is how you’ll spend the majority of your time: soldiers spend their time fighting and discovering new combat skills.

Scientists are tasked with digging deep into Nexus, searching for abilities hidden in the Elden’s ruins. Settlers construct outposts in dangerous areas and upgrade the existing towns with things like banks, transportation networks, and vendors. Explorers seek to find the most remote areas of Nexus and claim them for their side. These tasks all intermingle regardless of your chosen path, but you’ll spend the majority of your time doing things directly related to your specific path.

WildStar: Worth The Wait?

So can Wildstar pull it off? Can this be the sci-fiMMORPG that finally gets a firm hold in the hearts of MMORPG fanatics everywhere? It’s too early to tell – we don’t even know if it’s free to play or not yet – but it has some interesting systems and intriguing design philosophies that make it worth paying attention to.

With a big offering of varied content that flows right to you, a robust housing system, and some raw innovation with the paths system, Nexus might just be a place we want to mine for secrets, treasure and – most importantly – fun. We’re as eager to find out as you.

Real Racing meets Forza. That’s Autoclub Revolution summed up in three easy words; but the reality is Eutechnyx’s free-to-play browser-based racing sim has an identity all of its own when you dig a little deeper.

The game packs a mixture of real world and imagined tracks, a la Gran Turismo, and a variety of vehicles from the perennial people’s wagon the VW Beetle to the Lancer Evolution and top end race cars like the Bugatti Veyron.

But what sets it apart from its console siblings is the focus on social. Much like its name suggests, one key focus of Autoclub is the ability to jump in and out of car clans at will.

Autoclub Clubbing Clubs.

You can start your own club, name it and give it a flag, then everyone who is part of it can contribute to a combined ‘pot’ of credits. Much like COD, working with a group of mates to boss it online can have benefits for the whole team. You can still play all on your lonesome, but in a club you’ll take home all the credits of your fellow club members when you hit each level’s requirement threshold. It’s a system that encourages teamwork, even if you’re all online at different times.

That’s good, because there’s not really a single-player campaign to speak of. You can do practice laps to get used to the way cars feel or test out upgrades, but in order to earn credits and XP you’ll need to head to a race against other, real players. Considering this is a browser-based game, though, getting online shouldn’t be an issue.

Outside of the in-game currency, there’s also e-bucks. As you’ve probably guessed, these are funded with Actual Moneys, and can be used for all sorts of purchasing, from cars to tuning parts and paint jobs.

Hyper-Real Racing?

But unlike, say, Real Racing, you still can’t money your way to the top of the racing tree. The level system inside Autoclub stops you from being able to buy cars or enter events if you haven’t sufficiently leveled up through winning races. And though you can spend your credits or your real pounds on all sorts of items, the game never feels like it’s forcing you to open your wallet.

One advantage Autoclub has over console racers is that it’s always changing. Though there are plenty of cars and tracks, the game is never really ‘finished’ and new vehicles are added regularly, while some less popular models are given the hook.

What it means is that, unlike GT or GRID, players will never see and do everything, then wait for the sequel, because it’s in a constant state of flux – without having to fork out for DLC (unless you want to buy cars to increase your collection, of course).

Facebook integration and a deep messaging/competitive challenge system similar to Criterion’s Autolog round out the superb social features.

Autoclub: A Racing Revolution?

But what about the, er, actual racing?

While cars have a decent sense of speed and assists and the like are deeply customisable, vehicles still feel a little ‘ropey’ compared to traditional racers and have a slightly odd sense of physics. There’s also no damage – though the devs promise this is an area they’re looking at.

The graphics, while perfectly serviceable, never truly pop or excite in the same way as GT5 or the upcoming Project CARS. But this is a browser-based title, and in that context it looks pretty good all things considered.

But Autoclub is still in (open) beta, so every aspect of the game is likely to see a tune-up in the coming months.

Autoclub Revolution packs a lot of promise; a well-constructed front-end which ticks all the ‘social gaming’ boxes, while being a free-to-play title that doesn’t nickel-and-dime to death. Under the hood, the racing itself could perhaps be better – but that’s why it’s still beta.

Autoclub is off to a decent start, but there’s still plenty of tuning before this can pull the leaders into its sights. Being a free browser game, perhaps it doesn’t need to. Because as a free browser game, it’s easy to recommend giving it a race or two.

Also read our Thief interview with producer Stephane Roy and lead level designer Daniel Windfeld Schmidt.

“From the beginning it was 100 per cent sure that [the goal was] to restart it, to reinvent it, to make sure that you are going to perceive us as a part of the future and not part of the past.”

Those are the words of Stephane Roy, producer on Thief. Eidos Montreal has recently managed to successfully navigate the difficult task of developing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a sequel that drew in a new audience while keeping die-hard series fans happy.

So it makes sense that the studio is now looking to repeat the trick with Thief, which is a reboot rather than a sequel but answers to fans who are equally passionate.

“It’s a big task, especially with Thief because people hate or love this franchise – it really is a polarization,” adds Roy. “We have to be really solid when we make a decision; we have to be able to explain why and be sure it supports the DNA of the franchise. It’s been a big challenge to find all the elements, because making a game is one thing, but really making sure it’s Thief and not just another game – that one takes time.”

Thief: Where Stealth Began

Thief: The Dark Project was the first game in the series, releasing on PC way back in November 1998 and just a few months after Metal Gear Solid made stealth trendy with PlayStation owners.

Thief was, in the crudest of terms, a first-person shooter without any shooting, the emphasis placed on avoiding confrontation rather than actively seeking it.

This was mostly achieved through sticking to shadows and not making any sounds. You have water arrows to extinguish torches and a blackjack to incapacitate enemies, both tools remaining key parts of Garrett’s arsenal throughout the series.

Two sequels followed – Thief II: The Metal Age (2000) and Thief: Deadly Shadows (2004). While some elements have been added and dropped throughout the series, such as the supernatural enemies (removed from Metal Age, returned in Deadly Shadows) and a third-person view, the aim has always been the same. Remain quiet, remain unseen, pinch loot.

Thief Drawn Out Of The Shadows By... Dishonored?

That formula won’t change for this Thief reboot, which sees Garrett returning to The City only to find it being run by a tyrant named ‘The Baron’ and the city itself infested with a plague. It’s the perfect opportunity for Garrett to reach into the pockets of the rich and pinch loot. But a lot of time has passed between Deadly Shadows and this project, scheduled for release next year. The games industry has changed and a lot of games have been released.

One game, in particular, proved the time was right for Thief to return.

“Between the last Thief game and the one we are going to release in 2014, a decade will be between the two games,” explains Roy. A lot of players on the forum will ask us to just remake the first one, and we really believe if we do it would be a mistake – the way we played games then and the way we play games today has changed a lot. It is subtle evolution.”

“I think the best proof is Dishonored,” continues Roy, answering our question of ‘why now?’. “Dishonored proves that the interest is there. Obviously, there is a lot of comparison; for me it’s amazing to see how Thief has been a good inspiration for Dishonored, because Thief is the godfather for that type of game. Definitely the timing for us is just perfect, because the door is wide open.”

“A lot of people heard about Thief but never played it. The Thief universe has a lot to offer,” adds level designer Daniel Windfeld Schmidt, before Roy jumps back in. “You know [as a veteran player of the series] that Dishonored has been inspired by Thief. But for a lot of players they are going to see us and think, ‘oh ok, the inspiration is Dishonored’.”

Thief's Gameplay

The House Of Blossoms is the hedonistic playground for the rich of The City, run by ‘Madame’ Xiao Xiao. Its seedy décor and opium haze suggests that this is a place The City’s law can’t or won’t reach, and its patrons are hardly the most attentive bunch. In attendance on this particular night is Theodore Eastwick, principle architect of The City who has a glittering medallion dangling across his neck.

There’s a problem. The House Of Blossoms locks its doors at midnight, which means Garrett would need to find another way in if he misses that window of opportunity. Dawdling is an easy thing to do. In Thief, as with previous games in the series, there are plenty of distractions around. The City is full of NPCs, whose chatter fills you in on the backstory. It’s not just the sound either, as the gloomy atmosphere created by the rainfall and shadows is engaging. If you’re one of those gamers who likes to slow down to gawp at the visuals, Thief lays on plenty of visual candy to distract you.

But hurry he must. Garrett heads to The House Of Blossoms by picking through guards on the streets who stand in his way. There are several options available – distraction (throwing a bottle to create noise), arrows (to the neck, not the knee), stealth (sliding under wagons and behind cover) or third-person takedowns (think Deus Ex: Human Revolution).

There are plenty of deft touches here that enhance the immersion. Birds scatter when Garrett breezes across rooftops, the noise catching the attention of guards below. Garrett himself puts his hands out to steady himself behind barrels or walls, a nod to Mirror’s Edge. Eventually, Garrett reaches his destination.

Garrett's New Abilities

If outside The House Of Blossoms was a demonstration of Garrett’s new moves, then inside is a showcase of the master thief’s new abilities.

First up is Focus, which flags up objects of interest, NPCs carrying valuable items and increases the speed with which Garrett can pick locks and pick pockets. Focus replaces Garrett’s mechanical eye (something that goes back to the story of the original Thief outing) but Eidos Montreal won’t elaborate on any plot specifics regarding this.

The logbook reveals what room Eastwick is staying in but as you realise that he’s not at The House Of Blossoms for its simple hedonistic pleasures. He desperately inspects the walls after killing his girl a chloroform handkerchief, muttering to himself that “it has to be this one.” He leaves the medallion unattended, which Garrett snatches away. At this point you can leave with your prize…

Or you can use Focus to see what Eastwick is looking for. It turns out an adjacent room is hiding a glyph, which can be entered into the medallion. The medallion whirrs into life but at the same time, Eastwick discovers the medallion is missing. The alarm is raised.

If you paid attention to NPC conversations, you’ll have overheard a conversation about a previous disaster at The House Of Blossoms, when an abundance of opium caused the guests to pass out. Garrett springs to the opium chambers and using this knowledge, sets a trap for the investigating guards to stumble into. The opium is triggered and the guards pass out.

Garrett then shows off more of his offensive abilities to dispatch of guards. One arrow knocks a statue into a guard, crushing him. Focus allows Garrett to pinpoint attack points on the guard’s body, as he chains attacks together and dispatches three of them in a violent sequence of moves. Outside once more, Garrett dissolves into the shadows, leaving behind a chaotic House Of Blossoms, drugged guards and furious Eastwick.

Action Versus Stealth?

It’s classic Thief – open-ended missions influenced by your actions with unpredictable outcomes.

One potential concern is how action might override the stealth aspects of the game but it’s a worry Eidos Montreal is aware of and has addressed. “The objective is never to assassinate anybody, never to be aggressive – that’s not the main purpose of the game. But for some players, they find satisfaction in completely removing everybody from an entire playing field,” says Schmidt.

“You can play our game completely without killing anyone; this is something that’s very important for us. The Blackjack doesn’t kill anybody, it only makes them unconscious, [though] you can go through without knocking anybody out, too. Can you get through this without ever being seen or heard? Now we are bringing a whole new level of difficulty.”

Oh, and another potential concern has been ruled out. It has been confirmed that there will be no multiplayer.

“We don’t support multiplayer,” says Marc Benoit. “We want to build the best single-player experience we can. We don’t want to waste resources. We have another game mode, but it’s not multiplayer. But we are really, really focused on building the best single-player experience we can, so no multiplayer.”

Garrett Doesn’t Have A Facebook Account

Following on from the no multiplayer revelation, it turns out Garrett doesn’t have a Facebook account either. We know! We’re shocked too. You might have pictured Garrett as your typical social media-obsessed thief from Victorian times – scrolling through his Facebook news feed or retweeting animated dog gifs between pinching jewelry – but apparently that’s not the case.

“Garrett is quite anti-social,” explains Steven Gallagher, narrative director on Thief. He doesn’t talk to a lot of people, he doesn’t have a Facebook account and he doesn’t shake hands very much. But he’s incredibly intellectual and he would be amazing to talk to, so luckily for us he talks to himself.”

But one technological aspect that is up to date is the choice of platforms, with Thief coming to PC, PS4 ‘and other next-generation consoles’

“Next gen is really interesting to us for the immersion. Now if you peak and you check something there are no pixelated textures or something like that,” explains Roy. “The dense city – the immersion – this is where the next generation is really great for this type of game. It’s not a question of having more polygons or big explosions – no, no, no. You are going to be Garrett in The City, and when you are going to see his hands peaking it will be your hands. This is where next gen helps us. We are going to be able to avoid the ‘loading, loading, loading’. Now there’s no more loading, because next gen is here.”

And so is Thief, which looks like a textbook example in how to reboot a franchise without alienating fans. As Roy says himself – this looks like part of the future and not part of the past. Here's to the future, then.

If we’re going to talk about whether or not The Elder Scrolls Online (TESO) manages to capture the essence of its namesake franchise, then we better start by agreeing on what exactly that essence is.

For sure, it’s not the combat. It’s not really the lore and universe, either.

Think about it for a while and the only sound conclusion is this: the thing that makes Skyrim and its ilk feel like themselves is the way they create a world, with living, moving parts, brilliantly detailed and brimming with activity.

Oh, the possibilties!

They create possibilities upon possibilities, from theft to random acts of murder to the way your quest choices change huge chunks of the experience.

What the Elder Scrolls Online is trying to do is translate that experience to the MMORPG – but that’s not easy.

MMORPGs demand certain things – you have share the entire world with millions of others players, for one thing. Most people would frown upon their character being able to be murdered at any time.

If everyone in an MMO could kill NPCs, there’d be no quest givers left. These central tenants of MMORPG design are directly opposed to the essence of the Elder Scrolls series.

But ZeniMax Online Studios doesn’t seem to care about that. They’re forging a unique combination of MMO and Elder Scrolls that balances between the two and knows when to let one side or the other win. 

You’ve got to share

The world is far more static than previous Elder Scrolls titles. You can’t steal stuff. You can’t kill NPCs. In the areas previewed at PAX East this year, there wasn’t an abundance of locked doors for you to mischievously pick or cupboards to rummage through.

These seem like small omissions, but they’re part of the madness that makes Elder Scrolls games special – and it’s hard to see them go.

There’s also a lot less loot being dropped. That makes sense, given the genre. Too many loot drops would flood the game’s economy, and MMORPGs tend to focus more on specific, extremely powerful pieces of gear instead of a steady flood of lesser items.

Not having to vendor things all the time is nice, and allows you to explore the world with minimal annoyance.

A world stuffed to the brim

The PAX East demo we played featured the starting area for one the game’s three factions: the tropical Stros M’kai. Walking around it, nearby quests revealed themselves on the mini-map once you were near them.

Expect to find strange characters sleeping in tents in the middle of the deserts, or an old crown left amongst ruins that bestows upon you a quest to give it to an interested party.

One quest began when you come across a blacksmith Orc in the shadow of a statue. His mother has forced him to be a warrior, but all he wants to do is make swords – not swing them - and he needs your help to slay a monster.

These quests, from the epic to the quirky, feel decidedly Elder Scrolls-ian. So does the size – it’s huge, and it’ll take you a while to get from place to place.

There were limited fast travel options in the PAX East demo, which seems to signal that ZeniMax wants you to walk around the world and discover the many adventures waiting out there for you, even if it gets a little tedious.

Decisions, decisions

The trademark conversation response choices are there, meaning you and your friend could have very different experiences. It appears as if most responses tend to change the way the world responds to you – you’ll hear people say different things, essentially. 

The PAX East demo featured several such choices, from handing over a just-retrieved jewel to a brigand or whether or not to cure a just-poisoned pirate captain.

The game seems to move away from true branching paths, which can help avoid awkward situations that segregate players. It’s not exactly the most Elder Scrolls thing to do, but it’s practically a necessity. 

Character customization happens with each new level, where you can dump points into one of the games three statistical categories – health, magic and stamina – and also pick new abilities from several different categories.

Compared to Skyrim’s labyrinthine skill tree, it’s a little rudimentary.

The world itself has Elder Scrolls written all over it. The aesthetic is right in-line with previous games, from the clockwork Dwarven creations to the towering, shimmering building and the massive statues that line city streets.

Graphically, the game is not quite as impressive as Skyrim, but that’s not to say it isn’t full of impressive vistas and scenes. The scale seems a little different: in relation to the buildings, your character feels smaller than Skyrim. It helps to make the world feel massive.

A whole new way to fight

There’s one thing that is undoubtedly different: the combat. It works similarly to action MMORPG titles such as TERA or Vindictus. You move with WASD, attack with right click and block with left click.

Hold left and click right while an enemy is charging up an attack and you’ll stun them. You have a limited number of abilities and spells to place on a hotbar, meaning you have to be wise about what you’re taking into the fray.

You can also double-tap a directional button to dodge out of the way. Many enemy attacks are well telegraphed, and a large part of the action involves you making split-second dodges or stuns. It’s tense, dramatic and satisfying.

Compared to the combat in previous franchise entries – which feels sort of like trying to hit a piñata with a wet fish – it’s a revelation. It’s slightly slower than you’d expect – each missed swing is a significant mistake – and the thrilling satisfaction of dodging an attack is addicting.

Launching an offensive into a pirate camp, as we did at PAX East, means you’re tasked with facing multiple enemies at once. In these situations, you have to stick to your interrupts and dodges or you’ll face a quick death. 

Where past Elder Scrolls titles’ combat often felt like a crapshoot, this one is very reliant on player skill. Tellingly, you get gold bonuses for expelling enemies without taking much damage.

The combat is a highlight of the game, and you may leave wishing they could graft the same system onto previous titles.

A compromise, but a good one

Does the Elder Scrolls Online capture the essence of its predecessors? Yes and no. Visually? Absolutely. Writing-wise? Definitely.

And the way you can explore a world that is chock-full of interesting people, items and situations is spot-on – even if the fact you have relatively limited interaction with it isn’t true to the series’ roots.

The combat is a massive departure – but in moving away from tradition, ZeniMax has breathed new life into the series, allowing the combat to be a dramatic and fun element, not a frustration.

The Elder Scrolls Online is a different take on the Elder Scrolls formula, and it doesn’t stick to it exactly – but the feeling is there. If you’re nervous that Tam’riel won’t feel right, don’t worry. You’ll be right at home, and much less frustrated when your sword is drawn, here.

Crysis 3 on PC looks totally jaw-dropping.

That shouldn’t really come as a major surprise, Crytek’s series is known for bleeding edge technological innovation, but with the series making the jump to consoles with Crysis 2, there was a change in creative direction that didn’t quite hit the mark in the same way as the original PC game.

With Crysis 3, Crytek is ready to reclaim its ‘you wish your PC was powerful enough to play this’ crown and with next-gen consoles just over the horizon, now is the perfect time to remind gamers why the PC will always have the edge over consoles.

Be it at the beginning of a generation or the end.

Crysis 3 is pushing things to the current limit, and a bit beyond according to the team at Crytek, but just what does this mean for PC and next-gen consoles and can Crytek’s series use its technological innovation to create an FPS that totally immerses players in a visually stunning world that also plays as good as it looks?

Worthy questions, but here are 4 reasons why Crysis 3 on the PC provides us with a glimpse into the future of gaming and the experiences we’ll be playing…

1. More human than human

Banging on about just how impressive Crysis 3 looks can get old really rather quickly, what’s ultimately more important is what Crytek is able to do with that extra power and no where is this more evidant than with game's characters and enemies. Stepping into the nanosuit and walking out into the over-grown NYC, it’s the character animations and detailed facial detail on your occasional allies that helps sell the scene.

Not only that, but how Crysis 3’s enemies look and react, both human and alien, have seen the tech behind them pushed to the absolute (current) limit. What’s surprising about playing through a good chunk of Crysis 3’s single-player campaign is just how thoughtful the enemies require you to be.

Crytek is able to push the PC so much further than consoles (at least the current consoles) and that’ll still be true when the next generation rolls around. Facial detail on humans, and full-body animation on Crysis 3’s range of characters really are impressive and though it’s easy to say the next-gen will simply add to developer’s ability in this regard, it’s hard to imagine specifically how next-gen machines will iterate on Crytek's work.

And that goes for the AI in Crysis 3, too. Looking back it’s easy to accuse the Xbox 360 and the PS3 of infecting Crysis 2 with console sensibilities and limited processing power, but there’s generally no excuse for such poor AI.

We’ve only spent about 30 mins taking on the enemies of Crysis 3 but already it’s easy to see where Crytek has put in the work and it makes a huge difference to the overall gameplay. But, again, what will next-gen consoles add to this that the PC isn't technically already capable of?

That does depend on just how powerful they turn out to be, but if Crytek have proven anything with its Crysis series, it's that the PC will never be behind the curve for long.

2. It’s like Crysis 1, only much, much better looking

Crytek is making a bit of song and dance about the reasons why Crysis 3 is more like Crysis than the second game. It’s easy to lose sense of that when you’re reinserted into the same setting as Crysis 2, just with its visual overhaul. But, spend a bit of time experimenting in Crysis 3’s sandbox and it becomes clear. Crysis 2 really did rely on its narrative too much and pushed players through its levels.

Crysis 3 is so much more stealth-focused than Crysis 2 and using the open environment is key to progressing and feeling like you have control over the situations you’re presented with. In essence Crysis 3 is removing the console (read Call Of Duty) influence and returning to the open nature of the original game.

Combine this with the advancements made visually and Crytek is giving PC players an experience unlike anything else.

3. It’s all about 'immersion'

Immersion is one of those words that gets bandied about by developers as a way of proving just how realistic certain aspects of their game are. What they really mean to say, or conversely what they really should do is combine player investment in a game’s world with immersion.

What’s immediately impressive about Crysis 3 might be its stunning visuals and tech, but without players investing in that world, chances of them ever being immersed in it go straight out of the window. Crytek understand just how important graphics are.

Though many great games use gameplay as a way of immersing players in their world, Crysis and particularly Crysis 3, uses its visuals and insanely detailed world as a way of grounding players in New York and thereby immersing them in the gameplay.

It’s very easy to become immersed in a world that behaves and looks more advanced than anything that has come before it. On PC, Crysis 3’s depth and detail provide players with an incredible environment to explore and it is here that additions to the gameplay quickly become obvious.

The overgrown nature of New York, or as Crytek rather cringingly call it, its ‘urban jungle’ vegetation has an enormous impact on how you approach situations. Six-foot tall blades of grass sway in the wind and bend as you’d expect when someone – or in the Ceph’s case, something –steps through them.

Not only is this a wonderfully technological trick that heightens your immersion in the world, it also means you can spot an enemy walking through the grass just by the way it is moving. Spend even a few seconds looking around Crysis 3’s world and hundreds of incidental details will inform you of what’s going on.

Next-gen consoles with increased processing power promise all sorts of improvements like this, but the PC can and always will have an edge on them in terms of tech.

4. Crysis 3 – your PC can’t play it on max settings.

That might not sound like a good thing, but Crytek are adamant that Crysis 3 should be future proof and regain the original games moniker of the game that requires the very latest in PC tech to run.

‘Can it run Crysis’ became synonymous with cutting edge PCs and Crysis 3 is pushing things so much that once again owning a PC that can play Crysis on max settings will be something worth shouting about.

How the first generation of next-gen games compares to what Crysis 3 is doing now will make for fascinating viewing. The Xbox 720 and PS4 will no doubt provide a closed system that will give developers ample opportunity to push the gaming envelop over the course of their lives, but the increased length of the current consoles has provided the PC with the chance of regaining some ground.

And it’s really made an impact. PC gaming has never been more accessible or impressive. Whether you’re looking at the Kickstarter revolution or powerhouse experiences like Crysis 3, the closed systems of the consoles have begun to appear like an antiquated and limited approach when it comes to game design.   

With more and more people turning to PC for their gaming needs, and with experiences ranging from the small indie Kickstarters to the Hollywood production values of Crysis 3, next-gen consoles have their work cut out.

You can also read NowGamer's exclusive interview with Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli and senior creative director and Crysis 3 Rasmas Hojengaard.

The MMO genre is getting increasingly crowded, so to be surprised by the beta of one is a fairly rare occurrence these days. Yet somehow Firefall managed it.

There’s a fair amount already known about Firefall, but for those not in the loop already here’s a summary: Firefall is an MMOFPS set in the future that focuses on resource gathering. Simple really, when we put it that way.

But the game itself – like any MMO ought to be – isn’t quite so simple. We jumped into beta weekend to find out for ourselves what it’s like.

Class-Based Combat

It wouldn’t be an MMO without classes and unique abilities, and Firefall does fail to live up to expectations. There are five classes available – known as Battleframes – each specialised in some way.

Anyone who has ever played an FPS will know what to expect here: Assault is your typical gung-ho warrior, Biotech is your healer, Engineer is your turret-constructor, Recon is a sniper and Dreadnaught is a heavily armoured idiot with a Gatling gun.

As you might expect, each class is tailored around a particular role – but you’re not stuck with that. The initial tutorial quests have you unlock an additional Battleframe of your choice but, if you’re willing to pay the fee, the remaining three could be yours too.

It means you can always switch out class if you fancy a change – or even if your group of friends needs a healer – and there’s no logging out to do it. Just visit a Battleframe Station and switch out. Easy.

How About Firefall’s Combat?

Look, we’ll admit to having a bit of a fascination with jetpacks: any game that has them is automatically better, and Firefall does them well.

The jetpacks (or jetboots, for some classes) add an extra dimension to the combat though, tying into the game’s high-speed nature. There’s no irregular tapping on numbers 1-0 here: simply point, click and kill.

There are abilities, of course, we should point that out, each of which is unique to a Battleframe. They’re fun additions to combat, and though they’re useful against tougher enemies from our hands-on they never felt too-important.

In a good way, though. It meant combat is more reliant on your natural skill and awareness of the battle, finding and hunting down enemies quickly and manoeuvring (with the jetboots, too) to evade damage yourself.

This ties into the PvP too, meaning there isn’t too much of an unnecessary focus on number crunching and gear-grinding: if you’re a skilled player you’re just as capable as anyone else.

Resources And Crafting

Crystite is a large part of Firefall’s story, and it’s something you’ll gathering in a variety of flavours. Think of it as currency, which is used to unlock Battleframes, purchase equipment or even craft new items.

It’s important, then. It’ll drop from most enemies, so even natural progression through the areas will reward you with a plethora of ore types that can be used for different items or equipment.

It’s a perfect MMO system, since it relies heavily on grinding for particular ores but doesn’t require you to be in a certain location to collect it – though rarer ores are obviously tougher to locate.

This also ties into ‘Thumping’, a means by which any player can call down an automated mining drill which will gather under-earth resources and then shoot off and add the total to your account.

It’s not quite that simple, however: initiating a Thumper will also call in swarms of nearby enemies, and the more valuable the resource/Thumper, the more dangerous the types of enemies are that attack.

It’s an interesting system that means you’re never left with nothing to do. If you want to Thump, you can: defend the Thumper for long enough (or send it on it’s way before it’s destroyed) and you earn a reward for doing so, while enjoying the combat that comes with it.

With these resources you’ll then be able to craft items: basic items such as ammo and health drops are fairly cheap, but new Thumpers will also require some of the resources you’ve gathered. It’s a cyclical system, then.

The Firefall Community Is Ace

We’ll admit we were confused a couple of times. Firefall isn’t particularly surprising when it comes to mission layout or progression, but with a unique interface and myriad storefronts to explore, we found ourselves confused.

Tutorial pop-ups did appear from time to time but, whether due to a bug or Firefall’s beta status, the one that told us our ability to choose items to drop in was mapped to the ‘C’ key didn’t appear until after we learnt that.

But the Firefall community, bless them, were happy to help. They’ve probably answered stupid questions from noobs like us for hours at a time but they continued to answer politely and friendly. Respect to those guys.

Even more so, if a difficult Thumping is going on other Firefall players are happy to jump in and help out. It might be a side-effect of the enjoyable combat, of course, but we never saw anyone run past us as we battled a horde of enemies – regardless of how simple those creatures may have been.

Despite the ‘massively multiplayer’ part of an MMO, more and more are becoming increasingly solo affairs. It’s good to see a community really take to the social aspect of an MMO again, and hopefully that’ll continue long after Firefall is released.

UPDATE: EA HAS ISSUED A FIX FOR 'CHECKING FOR UPDATES' AS WELL AS A BUNCH OF SERVER STATUS DETAILS.

You’re not our grandma and we’re not about to teach you to suck eggs. You already know if SimCity is the type of game for you, so if killstreaks and KDR are the very last thing on your mind then you need know a bit more about the newest SimCity.

Though many of you will already have been playing the SimCity beta – which launched yesterday – there are still plenty of features yet to see and understand.

Now we’ve had hands-on we’re a little clearer about some of the mechanics behind SimCity, and this could well be one of the best city building sims in a very long time.

Roads Control Density

Previous SimCity games were fairly regimented in the way you went about constructing your metropolis. You painted the ground with green, blue and yellow, strapped some power lines to it and the world grew from there.

Now it’s not quite that easy. Zoning is applied to roadsides, and providing that road is connected to the outside world sims will travel to your city as long as there’s a reason to be there.

Obviously low density roads are cheaper, but they can handle much less traffic. As such, any buildings attached to low density will be restricted to low density styles – shacks, fancy bungalows or low-rent stores.

This is good for two reasons: first, you can design your city around how you want it to look far more simply. Don’t want skyscrapers by the sea? Then don’t upgrade that low road.

Secondly, if roads start to take heavy traffic – and therefore signalling the area’s popularity – then upgrading that route also improves the density of the buildings surrounding it. It’s a natural evolution to your city, rather than a forced one.

In Fact, Roads Control Everything

A while back when SimCity was first shown there were power lines. It’s only now – post-building comedown – that we’ve realised they’re not there any more. They’ve been removed.

Shock horror, perhaps? But no. This all ties into the ‘agent’ system of SimCity’s GlassBox engine: as long as there’s a road there’s the ability to transfer electricity. Or water. Or police coverage. Or poop. You get the idea.

In fact, you can’t actually place a building if it doesn’t have a road. Workers need to get there, after all, so the road comes first and then the city comes with it.

But it works well, and the fact that it took so long to lament the loss of power lines suggests we never really needed them anyway.

The infographic style data layers rely on roads, and with so many possibilities in the way to lay tarmac it’s this one aspect that could be key to building the ‘perfect city’.

Multi-city Gameplay Changes The Way You Play

That might sound like something you’d read on the back of the box – and we’re sorry about that – but it’s actually true. While you can focus on building a very typical city carefully managing the needs of RCI, that’s not all your city needs to do.

Multi-city gameplay has been talked about a lot by Maxis, and for good reason. Now we’ve had hands-on, however, it’s clear that this is just another strategy to your city building.

One city could focus on industry, for example, gathering up ore, oil and other natural resources, and attracting commuters from other cities from across the region.

You might be tempted to give in to the RCI bars – it is an understandable addiction – but the hardcore SimCity player will find that persistence will make this industry city just as useful.

This then frees up your other cities to cast off any filthy industry, set up a commuting service between the two and focus on city on building a haven for the rich and the famous.

City Size Limits Aren’t Bad, Honest

Most diehard SimCity fans have been concerned about the 2k by 2k limit size to each city, and there was every reason to be. But there’s actually a benefit to this, primary among them being the multi-city gameplay.

After that though, the limitations actually make for a more interesting city construction. Through limits you’re given choices: do you specialise in tourism, for example, or trade? 

You can’t have everything – as was the case with previous SimCity games – so now you create your own objectives. Work with the land available to you, plan for the future and – if needs be – make up for any shortcomings with neighbouring cities.

So yes, while your sprawling metropolises won’t be quite as sprawling as before, there’s a greater level of pride involved when you reach that ultimate goal.

Land Value Is Important

There’s a subtlety to SimCity that none of the others had before. Back then, if you wanted nice buildings you simply made an area safe, watered and full to the brim with parks and utilities.

Now there’s more of a careful cultivation involved. Land value is the key element to getting the rich to enter your buildings, and even that takes time. Everything starts off on the low-end of the scale, working its way up as its happiness is catered for.

Residential needs all the basic demands and places to shop, commercial needs shoppers while industrial needs workers and places to ship their freight.

Industry aside – let’s face it, that brings land value down - the only way to improve the quality of your inhabitants is to improve the value of the land they’ve built on.

Parks, libraries, local amenities; all important tools to improving this particular data. Most of all, however, is the Mayor's Mansion – a large but attractive building best placed where you want all the poshies to live.

See, this building can be consistently upgraded: keep your Mayor’s Approval rating above 75% for long enough and you’ll earn different building add-ons, boosting the happiness of Sims in the local area and the range of effect the building has.

It's this subtlety that really highlights this new SimCity's down-to-the-pixel depth, a gradual and careful manipulation towards the perfect city - rather than the unending march that previous games had and limited only through available cash.

Keep an eye on this SimCity, it's something special.

Ace Of Spades is Minecraft meets FPS.

There you go! There’s the laziest intro you’ll ever see on NowGamer, flexing its SEO muscles for seven words before calling it a day.

(kelly brook naked dark knight rises torrent top 10 free downloads justin bieber music milf viagra. You know, just in case.)

If you want a fuller intro than the one provided, Ace Of Spades is… actually, no, we’re just going to repeat what we said. It’s Minecraft meets FPS.

Have a look at aceofspades.com to see. Have a look at these screenshots to see. See? Minecraft meets FPS.

“But what is this madness, how is that possible?” you cry, flipping your keyboard in sheer terror at the genre-splicing madness.

Minecraft Meets FPS

It’s simple. Ace Of Spades can be played as a straight up 8 vs. 8 FPS game in a world that looks as though it was assembled on the Minecraft factory floor, being built out of voxel blocks, bright colours and straight lines.

Every block of the world can be obliterated. Blocky bridges can be chipped away with pistols or blown up with dynamite until their foundations are gone and they crumble into the knee-high river below. Trees can be brought down with shotguns. Walls can be worn down with rocket launchers.

Ace Of Spades differs from the usual games shouting about destructible environments on its press release because in this world, everything must go. There are no indestructible pillars to hide behind, no essential structures with an invulnerable framework to shield you from gunfire. Everything is built on blocks and every block can be destroyed. The world is yours to smash to pieces.

We’re not going to say “this lends itself to obvious tactical advantages such as shooting away at cover!” because you’re not an idiot, you were already thinking that. What it does is two things.

First, it creates a nice sense of uncertainty and unease. You aren’t safe anywhere in Ace Of Spades’ world so you’re to survive you either keep on the move and challenge your opponent’s aim to be good enough to hit you or get creative – more on that second option later.

Secondly, it’s strangely empowering knowing everything in the world falls apart thanks to your firepower, and it’s great fun leaving your battle scars across Ace Of Spades’ colourful playgrounds.

Manic Miner

Four classes bring unique skills to the battle. Scout is the fastest, packing a SMG as his weapon of choice while Engineer can set up mines and gun turrets. Soldier is the cigar-chomping all-rounder and Miner can build and clear blocks the fastest.

Miner sounds useless in the context of the other classes who are armed to the teeth, but his unique skill of building and demolishing at great speed plays into the other side of Ace Of Spades – creating new landscapes.

This is where you get creative to survive. By calling up prefabs, you get to quickly place huge blocks and structures around the world. You can throw up towers, walls and barricades or carve out bunkers, sniper windows and tunnels.

With a quick-clicking finger and some creativity, you can stitch together increasingly elaborate structures until the other team wanders over and blows it up with rocket launchers. Consider this. We played one level on a lunar base, with lunar mountains, space stations and decreased gravity giving way to a wide open central area, giving the map an open feel. Open, as with any FPS, means vulnerable. Vulnerable means imminent death. Imminent death is not good.

Fear of imminent death led a ramshackle bunker being built out of side of the space station, with a small window to snipe out of. Walls for the bunker were built two blocks thick, then three blocks thick, then four blocks thick as cowardice took hold. And there it was – our own sniper bunker, thick enough to withstand rocket launcher fire, with the smallest of windows to snipe from.

Then one of the enemy team figured out our tactic and started demolishing the rear of the bunker with a pickaxe. It was genuinely terrifying to see daylight poke through the bunker wall, knowing our hiding place had been breached. There’s just no equivalent of it in any other FPS game we’ve ever played.

Token Zombies Mode

Likewise, there’s a zombies mode. Boo zombies! Zombies are boring! Boring zombies! Boo! That’s the instinctive reaction to any zombies mode nowadays but when you play the variant in Ace Of Spades, you come to realise it’s actually refreshingly different.

The survivors are holed up in a church, which goes up many floors into the sky, and they have a few minutes to cobble together defences before the invasion begins. On the zombie-side, the undead have no guns but they can destroy blocks at a terrifying rate.

What this leads to is a bizarre meta-game where survivors climb higher and higher in the church to escape zombie clutches, gaining the distance to safely pick them off, while the zombies start clawing away at the base of the church and its towers to bring the entire thing down.

While most zombie modes are played on a horizontal, flat surface, Ace Of Spades dares survivors to climb fragile structures to get away. Better yet, when the sides are swapped after the round is over, the structural damage remains, so you’re left picking through debris and a damaged, rickety church.

Minecraft Meets FPS (How Many More Times Do We Need To Say It?)

At the very, very basic level, Ace Of Spades can be played as though it’s a FPS game with destructible environments. At a ever-so-slightly-less-than-basic level, you can chip away at the world, carving out shortcuts, destroying everything around you.

It works really well. We’re not going to use the word ‘charming’ because that word has been ruined by writers who use it as shorthand for ‘lots of colours and vaguely cartoony’ but Ace Of Spades is endearing and lovely, two words you’d rarely use to describe a FPS.

We’re grown men with neckbeards that smell of ham and yet even we tittered with glee at the vibrancy and chaos of Ace Of Spades.

It’s an impossible game not to love and given its budget price point when it releases in early December, we predict great things for this quirky shooter.

Tactical games are trendy again! Sort of. XCOM: Enemy Unknown has done a lot to make games based that prioritise stats, thinking ahead and smart tactics fashionable once more but it’s the kind of game that Kalypso has been pushing for a while now, via its Tropico series.

Game publishers at large are still chasing whatever breadcrumbs are leftover at the Call Of Duty table, so it’s nice to see some still have the balls to go against convention.

Omerta: City Of Gangsters should see that faith pay off for Kalypso. It’s a refreshing game on many levels. It doesn’t want to blow you away with explosions consisting of 34 graphics or dramatic set-pieces but rather, it places all its faith on your lust for tactical tinkering and floating numbers. Its 1920’s American gangsters theme also feels surprisingly novel, and it has a surprisingly calm, sedate pace

Everything here revolves around The Boss, an up and coming mafia leader who looks like Michael Hutchence from INXS. As the floating eye in the sky looking down on Atlantic City, which is ready to be picked apart with clean hits and dirty money, you direct The Boss around the streets.

There isn’t much direct control over The Boss though, as you’re actually clicking on buildings and floating icons dotted around the city instead. Omerta isn’t so much about building a city as it is about transforming it. You’re not creating new buildings and watching them rise out of dust clouds as you are renting what’s there and repurposing it. There are plenty of options for what you turn buildings into, each with their own benefits – breweries allow you to control liquor, boxing rings earn you money from gambling, weapons factories mean you can supply your crew with more guns and so on.

In addition to that, there are powerful figures around the cities to be influenced – rival gangsters, politicians, celebrities and so on. You can use them as you rise to the top or discard them, creating a reputation as a gangster to be feared who the police keep an eye on. That duality is played upon with the money side too, as you earn both clean and dirty money rather than one big pile of cash to spend.

There’s a pacing issue with this side of Omerta though. It’s easy to get your city up and running, and good fun too, but you soon hit a ceiling where you’re waiting for resources to accumulate to satisfy the objective needed to progress. Either the wait is too long or there’s a lack of busywork in between watching the resources tick over but either way, for a gangster, there’s a lot of time spent twiddling thumbs.

It’s not an issue with the actual battles themselves, which is the other side of Omerta. These isometric battles kick in for the usual mobster reasons – fights over territory, raids and so on – and they too remain tactical and forward-thinking in nature.

It’s turn-based, with movement points and action points determining what choice is available to you for each turn. Each crew member has different special moves, which cost different amounts of action points. You might go for a shot that makes your target bleed rather than doing direct damage, useful for enemies with high health bars. Other moves trade damage for accuracy, or allow you to shoot through cover, or allow you to heal up or defend.

There are a lot of moves to select and not many action points to spend them on but another consideration is cover. Cover is your best and often only defence against taking damage but being in cover also limits your options on who to shoot at.

It’s an intriguing mix of risk versus reward, as moving into open ground to get a better shot leaves you vulnerable. There isn’t a huge sense of feedback due to the underwhelming animation and presentation but the sense of tinkering with crew

Another important consideration is getting the right mix of crew members. They have their own weapons and their own statistics, which includes important attributes such as nerve (panicked crew will lose statistics). You discover new crew members as you work your way through the game, providing incentive beyond unlocking new chunks of city to explore.

Two very different ways of playing, both very similar lines of thinking. Once you learn the user interface quirks, Omerta: City Of Gangsters is tactical without being intimidating, light without being throwaway. Issues with pacing and presentation could hold it back but regardless, Omerta has our attention. Maybe the tactical gaming revolution continue.

“So today, we’re proud to show off for the first time in SimCity – bridges!”

It’s not the sort of rallying war cry that will cause a stirring in the gaming crotch, the sort of call to arms that has the front row punching the air with delight while the back rows scramble over each other to get a closer look at these fabled… bridges.

And yet, it’s surprisingly apt for SimCity. Half-an-hour later, we thought bridges were brilliant. A sentence we never, ever expected to type in any game coverage. Ever.

If you’ve somehow remained oblivious to the series over the years, SimCity is a city simulation game with no specific end goal to complete. You just build a city. And you try to make it the biggest, best city you possibly can, by creating somewhere people want to live and where they’ll be happy.

Creating a happy place is harder than plonking down a few homes and somewhere nearby for Pot Noodle runs. You need to create desirability zones for people to live in. No-one wants to live next to a smelly, noisy factory but they don’t want to live too far away if that’s where they work. Parks are good for creating a sense of community and for families but it will also have homeless people milling about during the day. Creating tourist attractions will bring more income and prestige to your city but will also attract opportunistic criminals. It’s all about balance.

You can also choose the specialisation for your city, so you can tailor yourself towards gambling, trade, metals, education and so on. This changes the appeal of your city and determines what attracts visitors or new residents.

If you want an example of the ridiculous depth on offer, you can build a bus shelter. You then see a dotted line showing the bus routes throughout the city and how far people are prepared to walk to take the bus. You then put down as many or as few bus stops as you want, with the option to expand the bus shelter so you can buy more buses to drive around the city. You can even see the buses parking up in the shelter at night. An entire paragraph about BUSES.

With so many components in the works and so many different factors, how on earth does Maxis keep everything balanced and keep the entire thing from collapsing under its own weight? We asked Jason Faber, the producer on SimCity, and he seemed to struggle to answer. We reworded the question. How many spreadsheets does he have to look after? Jason laughs.

“Well, we have one designer that’s pretty much dedicated purely to tuning. Tuning is definitely a big part of the game,” he answered. “As for all the systems, Stone Librande who’s our lead designer, he’s really the mastermind of how systems work together. He does a lot of research into how systems work in the real world and tries to apply that into how they work in our game. Sometimes we need to tweak them to make them more fun and more gamey. But the core base under them is how do they work.”

With all these different factors to consider, SimCity’s attempt to make things easier for players to understand is through data layers. Data layers cast a blank overlay across the entire city, with only the relevant detail being flagged up for you to examine – perfect if you want to see how quickly police respond to break-ins, for example.

 “That’s one of the goals of data layers, to take the old spreadsheets and charts and graphs and made it a little more readable and accessible to newer players,” explained Jason. “And to older players. Even though we have some pretty hardcore players in our studio, they love the data layers as well. It’s such an easy way to see what’s going on in your city and it’s such a cool thing to look at.”

And there are bridges! We’re shown how bridges can be dragged across the sea as an easy way to connect land and we’re also shown how roads, motorways and train tracks can be twisted and manipulated however you want. Faber showed us one motorway in particular that twisted back on itself spaghetti junction style. If your roads become congested as your city becomes more attractive to visitors, you can also drag the roads open so they encompass four lanes rather than two. Somehow, creating roads looks fun. How? How can creating roads ever be fun? SimCity has nailed the formula, somehow.

Then there’s online! It’s not an afterthought mention like it is in this article (sorry Maxis) but something that’s been considered and integrated from day one of development. We haven’t seen quite how online works yet but the idea is that there are challenges to accomplish and the obvious leaderboards incentive.

“I think once they see how it works and they experience it, they’ll understand why it’s so important and so critical to the game,” said Jason. “We know that some players just want to play on their own and that’s why we included the option to play an entire region solo. We in the studio, we like to do with our regions as well. We play some on our own, some with other people. But you know, being connected allows you to have that regional experience and play on the bigger SimCity world stage.”

And that’s SimCity. With bridges. And roads. And buses. And it’s fun. SimCity fans will drink up the detail being offered but the real victory for EA is how accessible it’s making the city-building sim without any compromise at all.

The Football Manager series is an odd one, in that it seems to get away with behaviour many other long-running franchises simply cannot.

Namely: it iterates on a yearly basis and complaints are only ever muted, if heard at all. But then along comes something like Football Manager 2013 and… well, shows you that the studio absolutely isn’t resting on any laurels.

The big addition for this year’s game is something of a terrifying one, set to devour souls as readily as it does hours.

Admittedly it might not actually be evil per se, but it’s hard not to see Football Manager Classic as anything other than a vindictive move on the part of Sports Interactive, with the nefarious types who make the decisions at the studio clearly feeding – growing in power – off of the spare time of others.

It’s the only explanation for the addition of a mode that strips things back to the Championship Managers of old (pre-Eidos split, of course), because this is the sort of thing that will lure back lapsed FM players into the fold. “I don’t have enough time to play it” will no longer be an excuse. That’s quite frightening, actually.

And playing it, you can see why: this is exactly what it promises to be. It’s less involved than the main game (which is, of course, still available) with many decisions for the backroom element simply taken out of your hands.

One thing Sports Interactive hasn't changed is the lack of an ability to take a decent screenshot...

It’s also a lot quicker running, going so far as to allowing you to simply generate the result of a match automatically – unless you want to sit through the text commentary games, as is tradition.

We would baulk at such a direction, what with the simplification of games being such a stain on the industry as it is.

But this is a mode offered on top of the meaty ‘proper’ game, and that sees the usual batch of about 34,000 additions, tweaks and changes to a formula that has hardly put a foot wrong in the last few years.

But for some strange reason, Sports Interactive hasn’t stopped there: we also see the addition of Challenge Mode, which brings back wonderful memories of International Superstar Soccer’s scenarios (score from that corner against Japan or YOU LOSE).

Basically it is a mode borne from Football Manager Handheld and sees you, as manager (duh), trying to win out against a set of stipulations put in your way.

Our first try at the mode was straightforward enough: you’re in a relegation battle, so get the hell out of it (not Sports Interactive’s words).

Choosing the Spanish side Celta we were shocked, though unsurprised considering it’s the entire point of the mode, to find ourselves bottom of the league in February, 12 points behind the team above.

It might not look very compelling, but believe us when we say this will quickly become your life.

We lost our first game 4-2. At home. It didn’t get much better than that through the rest of the season.

But the thing is, we wanted it to get better. We wanted to start over and play again. These instances of Football Manager drama are what makes the series so captivating, and this method of distilling them down to their constituent parts and feeding them directly to your brain is enough to make us potentially OD on virtually managing footballers.

It is more than we have come to expect from a new Football Manager, and it is a couple of fantastic, logical additions to a series that might well have started to maybe possibly (maybe) get to the point where familiarity was its downfall. Possibly.

Instead, there’s a breath of fresh air pumped straight into the lungs of Football Manager and, much as the lapsed fans won’t want to hear – for the sake of their spare time – there’s a lot here to appeal to even those without hours upon hours to put into the game.

Just so long as challenges are varied, replayable and numerous enough to keep us going for a while – as if they’re not it could feel like a hugely wasted opportunity.

Well played, Sports Interactive. You spare time-stealing monsters.

Way before recharging health, last stand perks and gravity guns, there was a time when the PC FPS scene was about firing without reloading, rocket jumps to anywhere and vaporising the opposition rather than filling them with different sized pieces of lead.

It was a gaming-era when the allure of the online deathmatch wasn’t in unlocking customisation parts for your favourite firearm but instead in sprinting across the map while lining up one-shot-kills in an instagib showdown.

This is the type of multiplayer experience that Nadeo, the studio behind the excellent TrackMania series, is trying to rekindle.

As the first of three planned instalments that will be set in different environments, ShootMania Storm is a multiplayer-only FPS that’s focused entirely on the act of running, jumping and gunning your way to victory.

There are no classes or character customisation options to mull over – aside from adjusting the look of your back-mounted shield – and if the beta is any reflection of the final product, then the only guns you need master are a quick firing rocket launcher that has minimal splash damage, a sticky grenade launcher that equips automatically whenever you go underground and a laser that functions as a railgun.

You don’t even have to worry about health or ammo pickups. Your gun automatically recharges when left alone for a few seconds and if you take two hits from a rocket or one glance from a laser, you’ll disintegrate before respawning back in the action.

Some of the map creations are quite impressive.

This is the fundamental premise of the free-for-all Melee mode; where the winner is determined by the most hits scored rather than out-and-out kills.

But with eight official modes to choose from in addition to a comprehensive map editor, ShootMania lets you tailor the action without the need for prior modding experience. 

The simple map editor offers a basic Lego-style setup where you choose from a range of structures that neatly click together, whereas for players who like to build battlefields with a touch that’s more personal, the Advanced map editor starts you off with a variety of terrain editing tools and a blank canvas.

It’s an elegant system that builds upon the community nurturing focus of TrackMania, and although the beta was lacking the full range of map components for obvious reasons, it’ll be interesting to see what proves popular and what doesn’t when the full game finally releases.

What we can say with some certainty, however, is that ShootMania is designed to be “e-Sports friendly” from the ground up. In particular, the Elite game mode pits one attacker armed with a laser and three armour points against three defenders equipped with rocket launchers.

Both sides can win by wiping out the opposition while the attacker can steal victory by capturing a flag post. It’s an easy mode to spectate as each game lasts exactly six rounds; each round lasts no longer than a minute; and the only character you need to focus on is the trigger happy attacker.

One of the community-created modes, called Sabotage, plays homage to Defuse in Counter-Strike and Search and Destroy in Call of Duty.

But while Elite is all about the three-on-three skirmishes, ShootMania can theoretically support up to 255 players on a single server. Given the limitations of modern bandwidth, its unlikely this lofty figure will be reached anytime soon, but as a reflection of Nadeo’s open-ended and forward-thinking approach to FPS development, it’s clear that ShootMania is built with longevity in mind.

We even got to play one match that hemmed us in with 70 other opponents on a player-created map. Suffice to say that dodging the ceaseless barrage of rocket fire was akin to playing Gradius from a cockpit perspective.

As it stands, ShootMania is shaping up to be a bouncy FPS that’s refreshingly light on gimmicks. There’s no single player element outside of making new maps, no onscreen gun to wave around menacingly and no fancy reload animations.

It’s just you, a hovering pair of crosshairs and a map full of online mouse warriors who want to vaporise each other with purple rockets and red lightning bolts.

While the storytelling quality of the last three Star Wars movies is something of a contentious issue, there’s little question that for all George Lucas’ failings as an auteur he has been at the forefront of some of the biggest innovations in the movie business.

So it’s with the combined might of some of his greatest accomplishments (digital effects house Industrial Light & Magic, cutting-edge animators Lucasfilm Animation and audio engineers Skywalker Sound) that LucasArts has focused on high production values for the latest videogame offshoot of the intergalactic soap opera.

Every effort has been made to make Star Wars 1313 as close to the cinematic presentation of the films as possible, immersing players into a seamless mix of spectacle, action gameplay and narrative.

While LucasArts is keen to stress that the game is only in pre-production at the present, there’s definitely potential in the central conceit.

Downplaying the presence of lightsabers and force powers – along with anything midi-cholorian or Gungan – gameplay takes on the guise of a typical third-person cover shooter.

Unsurprisingly, this lends an overwhelming sense of familiarity to the action, as an unnamed stand-in protagonist (LucasArts isn’t ready to reveal the game’s hero, but Boba Fett is a likely candidate given the game’s title doubles as a reference to one of the notorious bounty hunter’s aliases) enters a skirmish with a squad of soldiers that board his ship.

The cinematic quality of the lighting is what makes the visuals stand out the most.

While the bombast is exhilarating to behold, seamlessly transitioning between gunplay, melee combat and a platforming, the gameplay itself is a derivative Uncharted-alike escapade.

Nevertheless, as the hero clings to the wing of a crashing spaceship and you try to scramble to safety, it’s evident that the set-pieces tick the right boxes.

It’s hard to gauge where exactly Star Wars 1313 will take us, given that the whole project has been shrouded in mystery since its recent unveiling.

Alongside story details and the yet-to-be-named protagonist, there’s the little matter of which platforms the game will release on. LucasArts has told fans to keep an eye out for an announcement next year, which would suggest that 1313 is destined for a next-gen system.

Which isn’t exactly surprising news: the gameplay footage displayed was running on a high-end PC and it certainly was one of the most visually arresting attendees at E3 this year.

It’s a major contributing factor to a fresh vision of Star Wars, set within the seedy underbelly of Coruscant’s subterranean level 1313 – filled with gangsters, murderers and malevolent androids.

The protagonist is accompanied by his mentor in the portion of gameplay we’ve seen, which may indicate a co-op element – or, in another Uncharted comparison, it may just serve to add some additional dramatic coating – but it’s hard to say how everything will meld together.

1313 is the number of the level of Coruscant you'll be visiting, and also a reference to Star Wars' famous Bounty Hunter.

A more focused story-orientated Star Wars videogame would be welcome, and it’s a bold move to strip away many of its most synonymous components, but from a gameplay perspective it’s embarking down a well-trodden path.

At least LucasArts has been canny enough to reveal the game at this early stage in the title’s development. The progressive visuals have boosted awareness for the game and if the rumours of a next-gen release prove true, then it has given LucasArts a much-needed early buzz.

It just remains to be seen if this drastic new direction in the franchise can reignite interest in the brand after the rather so-so reception of The Old Republic and Star Wars Kinect.

It’ll be a while before we get further impressions, but if this is a genuine first-look at the next generation then it’s an underwhelming debut.

It’s certainly a tasty bit of eye-candy but the game itself looks like a staid retread of Naughty Dog’s greatest hits. Time will tell whether Star Wars 1313 will genuinely offer something new to the oversaturated brand or just another disappointing offering with some added gloss.

The Secret World isn’t quite as innovative as has been made out. Early previews and brief hands-on concealed the fact that Funcom’s intriguing MMO is still as grounded in traditional genre conventions as any other.

But there’s more to it than just that.

After having an extended hands-on time with The Secret World in closed beta, we look at how the game plays and why – despite its limited innovation – you should still be interested in this MMO.

This seems important to the storyline. How, we're not yet sure...

How Does The Quest System Work?

There have been a lot of details from Funcom about The Secret World’s ‘inventive’ quest system, but – just so we’re clear – you should probably lower those expectations a little.

The reason for this is the division between quests, which can be separated into two very simple categories: story and everything else. 

Unsurprisingly the story quests are the most interesting, with regular cut-scenes, intriguing plot and more bespoke quest tasks – this is where the quest system ignores the majority of MMO staples.

The rest are a mix of branching character quest lines and random found-in-the-field quest objectives. The majority of these follow traditional MMO tasks – kill an X of number enemies or collect Y items from location Z. Your typical MMO formula, really.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not interesting. While it’s disappointing that The Secret World does resort to traditional quest types like this, it’s hardly unsurprising.

The investigative quests add enough variety to the pacing of your objectives, however, where instead of fighting you’re asked to discover clues and solve a puzzle or two.

This might be collecting items in the world, deciphering clues to find a specific location or even using real-world knowledge to discover passwords to locked computers.

It’s necessary to relearn your usual quest intake too. You won’t be able to accept all available quests, head out to an area and tick them off one by one. Here it’s only possible to have one quest active at one time.

Even then you’re limited to the number you can accept. Sounds frustrating – and initially it is – but the result is a closer care for the objective at hand, the world you’re in and how it all ties together.

Some of the characters you meet are very distinctive, it's just a shame you don't spend more time with them.

How Are Dungeons Affected By The Quest System?

Dungeons are the least original aspect of The Secret World. As a separate instance for a team of five players, these events are largely the same as any other MMO.

A series of tougher-than-ordinary enemies lead toward a string of bosses, each of which are themed for that particular dungeon. Familiar, yes, but if it ain’t broke, why fix it? 

What The Secret World does bring to the template is a little more variety in how the boss fights unfold, tasking your team with sensible awareness of the whole arena.

Particular parts of a fight might require careful environment navigation to avoid taking damage, while unique boss abilities will need understanding to counteract whatever debilitating effect it might have.

This could be hiding behind a rock, as seen in the game’s earliest dungeon Polaris, to prevent the Ur-Draug from locking on, slowing you down and slicing off the majority of your health.

It’s not much, but coupled with additional cut-scenes and a reason for being there helps make the dungeons in The Secret World as entertaining as any MMO, if not particularly inventive.

The contemporary setting of The Secret World is refreshing to see in an MMO.

How Does The Character Development Work?

Having access to over 500 abilities might seem overwhelming, but this is probably the most innovative part of The Secret World.

You’re free to pick and choose the abilities you want, though you can only equip seven active and seven passive abilities at once.

This is limited enough that each ability you choose to equip is painfully pondered over, so while the system enables you to play a jack-of-all-trades, you’ll be hard pressed to find a successful one.

Which is why The Secret World enables you to save your gear and abilities as kits, and switch them out on the fly so long as you’re not in combat. Anyone can fill any role, providing they’ve got the tools to do so.

As a point of interest, though, it’s not possible to re-spec a character. Once an ability is unlocked, it’s yours forever.

If you decide you want a change, you’ll have to continue to rebuild your character from that point on – there’s no option to pay a fee and reset your setup. Frustrating, perhaps, but it’s intended to enable careful decisions.

It’s an interesting system, the depth of which is hidden behind hundreds of hours of play. Will you want to be bull-headed in your search for specialisation, or prefer a more casual, experimental route to picking your character?

There's a lot of knowing references to gaming and even the wider society. It's not forced, however, and well done.

Is The Story Important In The Secret World?

Simply put, yes. Naturally this isn’t going to be the MMO equivalent of Shakespeare: it’s still a videogame and so the storyline isn’t going to make grown men weep.

It’s well done, however, with a series of cut-scenes and voice-acted dialogue to introduce quests or storyline points – which is enough to distinguish it from most MMOs.

The contemporary setting is surprisingly fresh as well, eschewing the typical fantasy elements in favour of a range of settings that no MMO has tackled before. 

It’s all about the characters you meet, however. Whether it’s the police officer who grounds himself on classic cop shows or the false fortune-teller who suddenly finds herself the victim of real visions.

Each NPC is unique, fleshing out a genre that is known for its countless uninspired NPCs, quest givers and even story characters.

There’s a dark humour to The Secret World too, such as the aforementioned cop who laments the death of his pet kittens, but not the suicide of his father.

This black comedy is apparent from the start alongside many fourth-wall breaking comments of social commentary from other NPCs.

These are the reasons to get involved in The Secret World, providing an intriguing enough hook that will keep you on the hunt for more and more to see and do.

How on earth will you survive the wait until 2013 knowing Crysis 3 is on the way? It’s only recently been announced and already there’s a sense of excitement surrounding Crytek’s next Crysis.

The new gameplay trailer doesn’t help, either, proving that Crytek are continuing to push technological benchmarks with each instalment.

But NowGamer has seen much more after watching the trailer’s gameplay demoed first-hand. Here are some of the secrets we’ve discovered that the trailer hasn’t shown.

Crysis 3 Has Better Graphics Than Ever Before

You can see that for yourself, of course, but seeing it in action is something else entirely. It’s the minutiae that help create a believable world, after all, and Crysis 3’s attention to detail – even at this early stage – is uncanny.

The gameplay trailer is set inside one of the ‘seven wonders of the rainforest’, a term used by Rasmus Højengaard to describe the seven distinct areas of the nanodome covering New York.

This particular area is set in Chinatown, part-submerged to create a swamp-like location. The Cell Corporation has set up floodlights too, basking the area in a sterile light.

Prophet’s objective here is the reach the top of the tower in this area, but it is heavily defended by Ceph enemies.

Again, it’s the subtleties that make the visuals standout – whether that’s the impressive flickering of ragged curtains as a Ceph ship flies by or the interaction with frogs as they leap through the water of the marshland.

Old enemies will return, as well as some new ones.

Crysis 3 Is More Sandbox In Combat

One of the biggest criticisms of Crysis 2 was its linearity, especially from fans of the original Crysis who preferred the freeform combat.

And with Crysis 3, Crytek are emphasising the triple-A gameplay that has always been at the heart of the series – in this sense meaning ‘Assess, Adapt, Attack’.

It’s not easily spotted in the trailer, but there’s a much more sandbox nature to combat in Crysis 3 than its predecessor. Attacking the Ceph required much more than charging in, instead beginning each assault by tagging the enemies in the area with binoculars.

And then, even when under attack, there’s more to combat than standing your ground and blasting away. Prophet will need to clamber over the derelict structures to avoid getting overrun.

There will be killcams for well-executed kills with the bow.

Plenty Of New Weapon Types

We’ve already seen the composite bow that Prophet is using, and the new trailer shows it off a little bit more.

But the important thing about the bow is that it can be fired while cloaked, which is perfect for stealth combat. That said, there are multiple arrow types for the bow – and switching to explosive arrowheads is great for direct combat.

There’s also the Cell Typhoon: a ridiculous creation from the Cell Corporation that fires 200 rounds a second. The clips themselves take up the entire length of the gun, so it takes a little while to reload – but ensures your enemies stay dead.

Not only that, but Prophet’s suit can now use Ceph weaponry too – enabling you to harness that blue plasma fire against your enemies. There’s only one shown in the gameplay trailer – the Heavy Mortar – which has two firing modes.

Both modes are explosive, however the secondary mode will obliterate anything in its wake. The primary mode spits out large discs that strike that explode on contact, kind of like a grenade launcher.

Whenever Prophet picks up a Ceph weapon, however, the HUD distorts as the nanosuit tries to incorporate it into its display.

Interestingly, however, these Ceph weapons won’t have endless supplies of ammo – the idea being they’re a temporary boost to Prophet’s power to enhance the feeling of being superpowered, but require careful use of supplies to make the most of the weapons.

Each district will have a distinct style and theme.

Crysis 3’s New Enemy Types

The Cell are still a major focus of the game – they’re the ones that built the nanodome around New York after all – but now the Ceph have a few more enemies in their midst.

Most prevalent in the gameplay trailer is the new Scorcher enemy, who crawls towards its target then raises itself into the air to shoot a beam of fire.

It’s a quadruped too, resembling the Hunters of the original Crysis except on a smaller scale.

There are others teased through the gameplay demo not clearly seen in the trailer, such as an armoured beetle-like enemy that buries its head into the ground, creating a shield for its allies.

Towards the end of the demo Prophet is ambushed by a large contingent of Ceph troops – some of which don’t resemble any previously seen. There’s a large quadruped with a flat back, and a bipedal heavily armoured unit too.

Whether these will be permanent fixtures or not it’s hard to say, but with Crysis 2’s watered down set of Ceph enemies, Crysis 3 certainly looks set to mix things up a bit.

CryEngine 3 is undoubtedly a capable engine.

Prophet’s New Abilities In Crysis 3

One ‘enemy’ we didn’t mention was the implementation of automated turrets. These are intended to defend certain areas or corners, as you might expect, but can easily be bypassed with Prophet’s new abilities.

Hacking is the easiest way of bypass these turrets but Rasmus pointed out that this was one of the simpler means of hacking, causing the turret to turn on its owners.

It was all automated, so whether this means more complicated actions have an associated mini-game or that there’s a choice of how to affect machines through hacking it’s not yet clear.

Rasmus also highlighted another feature not shown in the gameplay trailer or in the demo. The ability to intercept will be a new feature for Prophet’s suit, but it’s not yet known if that means hacking and stopping rockets mid-flight or simply intercepting enemies quickly.

Believe it or not, but SimCity remains one of the most fan-requested games in EA's back catalogue. There’s a diehard community out there absorbing themselves in the world of SimCity, as well clamouring for a new one.

But what is so interesting about this brand new SimCity? Will it appeal to hardcore fans only, or is there still hope for newcomers who might have forgotten all about SimCity? 

NowGamer had an early look at Maxis’ most innovative city building game yet, and it’s clear a lot of work has gone into mixing up the tried-and-tested formula. Read on to find out why this could be the best SimCity yet:

How Are SimCity’s Visuals?

Bret Berry, VP of Maxis, was keen to emphasise that what was being shown was still very early visuals and not nearly a representation of the final thing. But honestly, he was being a little modest.

SimCity looks more charming that ever. There’s been much chatter about SimCity’s unique tilt-shift camera style, but it is the bright, colourful buildings scattered throughout the pre-made city that appealed the most. 

Sure they were a little rough around the edges and animations weren’t complete, but as a base for the visuals this could easily become the most recognisable and appealing SimCity yet. It’ll be exciting to see it all come together. 

This is just art, but it's a good representation of the bright and cheery visuals already in place.

The Playful Nature Of SimCity

Tying into the charm of the visuals and capitalising on the humorous nature of the Sim franchise, Maxis has made the latest SimCity the most playful yet.

New structures such as power plants are dragged onto the map, and crash into the ground with a satisfying billow of smoke. Dragging residential zoning across a curved road clicks into place, sounding like a stick being scraped across a fence. Power lines pop into place, stretching as the cables reach maximum tension and, finally, snapping if you place the lines too far away.

It really emphasises the sandbox nature of SimCity, making it immediately satisfying and fun to play, but never ignoring the complexity of the tools available. It’s easy to see how newcomers and hardcore fans will both find SimCity’s new style instantly appealing.

Everything In The World Is An Agent

There have already been a number of videos detailing the new agent system underpinning SimCity, but seeing it in action really highlights how innovative it really is.

Take, for example, the citizens of your city. Each and everyone of them is an individual person with needs: at the base level this is the need for electricity and water, but then they’ll search for work and, failing that, visit a park or head to the commercial district.

You could – quite literally – follow an individual citizen around your city as they travel from point to point. It’s fascinating, and an element that has long been needed in city management games.

But more than this, agents can be electricity or water ‘packets’ sent out to housing and businesses, products created from your fully-functional industrial system or pollution created by your busy factories and power plants.

Not only does it help create a city that feels like you’re having an impact on it, but it provides logic to everything. Using the different overlays will remain as important as ever, but even a quick glance at your city will tell you exactly what’s wrong and how you can fix it.

Night is particularly impressive with the glare from homes and the flashing lights of hurried police cars.

What About SimCity Multiplayer?

You won’t be able to join a friend and build horrible industrial zones inside his carefully planned and pristine suburbs, that much is certain. Instead, SimCity’s multiplayer will be a little more passive-aggressive.

Neighbouring cities – whether a friend, some random internet guy or computer controlled – will provide a global ecosystem. What happens in their city can bleed over to affect yours, sometimes positively and other times negatively.

For example, if a nearby city has become a thriving hub of criminal activity, some of that might edge over into your city – perhaps causing arsonists or thieves to search your idyllic haven for potential targets.

Conversely, agreements can be made to provide services, such as police coverage, to your city. This frees your city of the costs of reducing crime to let you concentrate on something else entirely.

It won’t matter if this partner isn’t always around either, since cities will survive in stasis when offline and any arrangements will remain intact.

The Dangers Of Economic Chains

Multiplayer will also come in the form of trading on a global market. Got plenty of coal but refuse to utilise its dirty polluting nature? No problem: just stick it all on the global market to earn your city a few extra simoleans.

You can use combine resources in different ways, however, and the higher up the chain you go the better value your products will become. Selling oil is fine, but combine it with various other industries to create cars and its export value will increase massively.

This adds a little more economic strategy to city construction – something that has been missing from SimCity for far too long – and means you can utilise your city’s resources to its greatest potential.

But that resource becomes a chain; if any links in the chain are disrupted, for whatever reason, then that system falls apart, rendering your carefully planned economy useless. It’s a tantalising concept for prospective city planners.

Guild Wars 2 is something of a big deal for ArenaNet – the developer claims its upcoming MMORPG can evolve the genre into hitherto unknown areas, with talk of social communities, a new level of engaging combat, new mechanics, branching storylines based on player choices and dozens of other features new to massively multiplayer online gaming.

Character creation, player choice

Cause trouble with environmental weapons in PvP.

The format is streamlined, but engaging, with matches zipping along. With minimal adjustment we could imagine online shooter fans getting a kick out of Guild Wars 2’s PvP. Unfortunately we weren’t able to sample the touted World vs. World PvP mode – each match cycle lasts two weeks – but if you can imagine battles on a larger, deeper and longer scale, you might be somewhere to realising ArenaNet’s vision. Which, much like the rest of Guild Wars 2, appears destined to evolve the traditional MMO in some fundamentally significant, but also hugely entertaining, ways.

More Guild Wars 2 on NowGamer:

• Guild Wars 2 Interview: ArenaNet Talks Release Date, Beta, Level Cap, Personal Stories, eSports
• Guild Wars 2 Beta: Hands-On With Competitive PvP - Video
• Guild Wars 2 Beta: Hands-On With The MMO Campaign - Video
  

XCOM: Enemy Unknown was always going to be a risky project for Firaxis. Staunch fans of the 1994 original would undoubtedly blast the developer if the game strayed too far from its strategic roots, while the action-hungry generation would probably become turned off if there was a lack of explosions and gunfire.

While it’s clear that XCOM: Enemy Unknown needs to tread a fine line between these two values if it is to earn the attention of the paying masses, there is no doubt that Firaxis has found the perfect balance.

It might have taken the studio many years to reach this point, but the wait has been worth it. Read on to find out why.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown delivers a wealth of tactical options

This wouldn’t be an XCOM game without squad tactics, and Firaxis was more than happy to give us a taste of the tactical options open to players. Responding to a report of alien abductions in an American city, the XCOM team takes to the skies in their dropship and sets down to investigate the scene.

The area is swarming with a pack of Sectoids – small aliens that fans of the original XCOM series will recognise. The Sectoids scarper behind cover as soon as they see the XCOM team, and the game’s turn-based strategy system kicks into action.

Being turn-based, you will really have to think about your actions several steps ahead, as well as anticipating what your alien attackers will do.

Each turn involves moving your squad members behind cover, hunkering down behind cars and petrol station pumps automatically to hide from enemy fire.

You must always consider that squad members can only move a little then perform an action skill, move over a longer distance and forfeit their action skill, or stand on the spot and use more powerful skill. This choice will become crucial when faced with difficult odds on the battlefield.

Line of sight plays a huge role in each alien encounter, as you must always consider if your enemies will be able to line up a shot at your team, and vice versa.

Ideally, you’ll want to keep as low a profile as possible at all times to avoid getting squad members killed, because when they die, they never come back.

You also have to consider the fog of war that looms around undiscovered areas of each map, as you never know what massive and potentially lethal alien threats might be lurking in the darkness.

Sniper classes come in handy here, as they can use their grappling hook device to rappel up to high vantage points, giving them a clearer shot over the area, and giving you clearer visibility over your surroundings.

But if you do come face to face with an alien with no option but to fight, the action ramps up considerably, without moving away from the tactical approach. If anything, the game gets even more tactical when both sides start shooting each other.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s action is big and strategic

Engaging the Sectoids in battle, the XCOM squad can approach the situation in many different ways. You can skirt around cover in the hopes of getting a clean shot at them, or suppress targets, which can lead to a number of neat effects.

Heavy gunners are great at suppressing targets, causing aliens to cower in the same spot in fear. Meanwhile, you can move in for a flanking kill or – if a Sectoid happen to be hiding behind a car - lob a grenade at the vehicle to blow it up, killing the alien in the process.

Then you have sniper class soldiers who can provide highly efficient support from a distance. Running in fear from the heavy gunner’s suppressing fire, another Sectoid ran into a nearby diner, peering through the window every so often to keep an eye on the squad. 

With no way to get a clean shot on the little rogue, Firaxis moved its sniper class soldier to the roof of the opposite building, allowing them to sniper the Sectoid through the window at a height. 

XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s character skills give battles depth

Basic shooting, movement and suppression aside, all XCOM members can be kitted out with a range of class skills as they level up. However, all squad members can enter a state of alertness called Overwatch, and this is a real game-changer.

Putting a solider into Overwatch causes them to sacrifice their turn, but it means they will shoot enemies on sight. So, if you do happen to flush out a Sectoid with suppressing fire, and they happen run into your Overwatch soldier’s cone of vision, they’re going to get shot instantly.

This creates a neat combo chain of attacking moves that sees our squad working together as a well-oiled machine. Snipers can also unlock a heightened state of Overwatch that means their turn never ends as long as they keep on landing hits on enemies.

Then you have smoke grenades that conceal your squad in a dense plume. These start off basic, but can be advanced so that the cloud of smoke is laced with combat drugs, giving all soldiers in the area a significant stat boost.

Heavy gunners can also unleash a volley of tracer beam rounds. Any aliens unlucky enough to be struck by one of these bullets will receive additional damage every time another XCOM member shoots them. The possibilities are vast.

Number crunchers and fans of true strategy will simply adore the wealth of defensive and attacking options open to players, and this is exactly what Firaxis had to achieve to make this game worthy of the XCOM mantle.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown boasts a nail-biting atmosphere

One of the classic staples of the original XCOM was the sense of dread that came with fighting a new, unidentified and potentially lethal breed of alien for the first time. The same applies here.

Once XCOM has dispatched the Sectoids, a pack of hulking Berzerker warriors floods out of a nearby store and instantly rushes and kills a member of the squad. Again, there is no resurrection here – the soldier is dead and gone, along with all of the skills he learned along the way.

This threat of ‘perma-death’ will keep wise players suitably cautious and wary of what lies around each corner. Hiding behind the wall of the store, XCOM: Enemy Unknowns ’s destructible scenery kicks into play, as the Berzerker simply charges through the wall, flattening the soldier in one hit.

Firaxis stresses that there is no shame in retreat throughout XCOM: Enemy Unknown – in fact, it’s sometimes the only way to progress, depending on how you play. 

Sometimes it’s better to kill one new enemy type then retreat to further research that species’ unique weakness, than to get our whole squad killed against an enemy it knows nothing about. 

Like the original XCOM, research is vital to learning how to kill new alien breeds, and thankfully, Firaxis has brought this feature back big time, and expanded on it in a significant way.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown delivers game-changing research options

Aliens killed in the field will drop gadgets or artefacts, and their bodies can be autopsied to learn more about each species. This, in turn, will open up new gear for your squad to give them an edge in the field.

Researching alien elements can help you create tougher metals for armour, or new firearms that are more effective against specific enemy types. All of this research will feed into your ever-expanding XCOM home base, as well as the equipment and skills employed by your squad.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown lets you create a huge home base

Returning from the original XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the home base system lets you create a sprawling underground facility, full of management, research and squad training options to help you save the Earth from invasion.

True to the original, you have a global view that lets you survey alien activity across the globe, intercept flying UFO craft and dispatch a squad to engage aliens on the ground. The more alien material you bring back from these missions, the bigger your operation becomes.

In the home base you can upgrade your dispatch airships, create new equipment at the cost of time units and train individual soldiers with new class skills.

Each time a soldier levels up, they can choose a new skill from a choice of two, and while this might sound restrictive, these choices make a huge impact.

One example of new facilities you can build is the Officer Training School, which is a classroom where your veteran squad members will pass down skills to new recruits. These squad-wide abilities affect your whole team, giving them a collaborative edge in battle.

From the turn based combat and strategic movement options, to the home base development and research opportunities, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a massive achievement, giving players many things to think about at any one time.

Strategy fans will love it, while those new to the genre will enjoy the engaging action scenes that play our during each alien encounter.

It hasn’t been easy, but Firaxis has succeeded in reviving a cult classic without letting down the long-time fans. We’ll have more before the game launches later this year.

We recently visited Creative Assembly’s studio in the heart of West Sussex to go hands-on with the upcoming stand-alone Shogun 2 expansion, Fall of the Samurai, and to find out exactly why the Total War series has remained in Japan for the second year running.

You can read our interview with Fall of the Samurai’s developers for more insight, but we’ve laid out our impressions and more on the game’s considerable new features below.

Shogun vs. Imperials – Tradition vs. Technology

Fall of the Samurai is set during the end of the Shogunate - 300 years after Shogun 2: Total War’s endgame - which sees the arrival of three new factions on Japanese soil, the British, Americans and French.

With them comes the onset of modern technology (gunpowder weapons, vehicles) and ideas (capitalism) which helps forge a brand new backdrop on top of which Fall of the Samurai plays out; an epic battle between tradition vs. modernity with the old school Shogunate clinging to power while the Imperialists attempt to overthrow it. Even the background music will become more western as time rolls on.

New Map, Units, Weapons and Technology

Yes, the latest Shogun 2 expansion is still set in Japan, but that’s not even the half of it - with the new foreign factions come the latest 19th century inventions; pistol and rifle-bearing cavalry rub shoulders with rapid-fire Gatling guns and cannons available in your tech tree along the line as the sword and spear age comes to an end, and the firearm era comes to Japan. There are pros and cons to the new technology though.

With gold at the centre of all your endeavours (even farms are now income-producing assets) the most powerful weapons are also, naturally, the most expensive. During our hands-on we found horse-drawn heavy weapons slow to move and assemble, meaning even low tech, fast moving units have their place. And as usual, if you can use the terrain - such as a deserted town in the historical battle we played – you can overcome the odds.

The new railway network changes everything.

Steampowered Japan

With the arrival of Western technology comes a genuine campaign-changer – a railway line which snakes up the middle of Japan through specific territories, enabling the holder of said areas to improve trade and move units large distances across the map far quicker than usual. Control the railway, and you’ll have a huge asset at your disposal.

A powerful navy can win the war

Modernisation hasn’t just hit Japan – it’s hit the water around Japan too. While Shogun 2 included naval engagements, the ensuing battles were fairly tame. At least they were compared to the gunpowder-fuelled fights in Fall of the Samurai – we played a mission that called on us to defend our destructive ironclad ship while it underwent repairs, and required us to fire volleys of standard, explosive or armour-piercing rounds across long distances.

Brilliantly, it’s now possible to aim and fire your artillery from a new centre-of-the-ship, third-person perspective – ship mobility is suitably sluggish (depending on your vessel), so you’ll probably want your fleet to simply follow your orders, but the rush of firing the killer volley from your ship’s guns in third-person mode is a welcome touch. You’ll also be able to take third-person control of artillery weapons on the battlefield too.

More importantly, increased firepower and range also means your ships can rain-down projectiles on some in-land settlements too, adding additional strategic opportunities.

Explosions are now commonplace n Fall of the Samurai

Fall of the Samurai will improve Shogun 2

With Fall of the Samurai set for backwards compatibility with Shogun 2, Creative Assembly has promised a huge update for last year’s Total War entry - it won’t only make all of the new and old units work together for cross-game multiplayer, but also massively improve the AI in the older game. In addition, both games will also require you to think much faster with improved AI speed in the turn-based part of the campaign map.

Fall of the Samurai is bigger – and better

Following our extensive hands-on with Fall of the Samurai, we’re convinced that there’ll be plenty here for existing fans and newcomers alike to sink their teeth into.

Creative Assembly has taken the time to ensure  that not only does Fall of the Samurai integrate perfectly into Shogun 2, but that it includes all the little tweaks, ideas and a ton of new features that the developer has been saving up. We’re not sure ‘expansion’ will do Fall of the Samurai justice, either - it’s stand alone, yes, but almost all of the changes double as improvements: 40 vs. 40 battles instead of 20 vs. 20, multiple new units, 24 campaign-map turns a year and an estimated 100 hours of gameplay ensure you won’t be finishing it anytime soon.

New ships, such as Ironclads, will take the fight onto water more than ever.

Guild Wars 2 is an immense prospect. Billed by developer ArenaNet as a true triple-A online RPG experience that puts similar contenders to shame, the studio certainly has the rest of the industry in its crosshairs. 

We’re inclined to agree with them, as Guild Wars 2 delivers the goods with confidence – from high-end visuals, fast paced gameplay, hard hitting combat, as well as hours of solo and social play across the sprawling world of Tyria - it’s clear that ArenaNet isn’t cutting corners.

Although the 2012 launch window is looming fast, Guild Wars 2 continues to impress through unexpected reveals late into its development. The most recent reveal focuses on the incredibly tactical Mesmer profession.

The eighth and final profession on offer, Mesmers are masters of illusion and deception, capable of creating Clones and Phantasms of the caster and calling them into the fight. From what we’ve seen of Mesmers in action so far, the range of tactical strategies – both offensive and defensive – are vast.

Getting two illusions to cover your back is a great strategy.

For example, if you need to get in close and take down an enemy you fear is far too powerful for you, simply cast two Phantasms of your character that are holding pistols. This means that they will batter the enemy from a safe distance while you rush in to deal heavy melee strikes. 

Or you could be sneaky by creating two portals on the ground – one in front of your target, and one behind. As the enemy charges at you for the attack, you can run to the first portal, and reappear behind them at the second, giving you the option of dealing a massive back attack. 

Clones and Phantasms can also be used as decoys, letting you move across ground quickly, by swapping in an out between them. There is a real twitch-gaming feel to how Mesmers work, and at first it can seem a little bit disorientating to understand them, as they are to watch in action. 

But another neat offensive trick is using your illusion decoys as living weapons. For example you can send a pack of weak clones into the frontlines as fodder, then detonate them to create a large damage radius, stun nearby enemies for short time, or sacrifice them to create a huge protective barrier around the caster.

Finally, Mesmers can also use Mantra skills, which are special buffs that can be used to charge up existing magic, giving them greater attack power and other properties. Already it’s clear that the Mesmers are a powerful profession, but one that will take some practice getting used to.

When size truly doesn't matter.

But then again, this depth underlines the overall appeal of Guild Wars 2 perfectly. It’s a huge title with eight intricately balanced and enjoyable professions spread across each race.

It’s understandable that making each of these roles as appealing as the last is no small feat, but then this is the reason Guild Wars 2 has taken so long to get this close to a release. 

The balancing between races and professions is impeccable, and was a huge focus of recent beta testing across both PvE and PvP. The last time NowGamer spoke with ArenaNet, we learned that beta feedback would be instrumental in nailing down a solid release date. 

This is a real testament to ArenaNet’s dedication to the Guild Wars fan base. There is a proper ‘leave no man behind’ attitude from the development team, and every time the ArenaNet speaks about the game publicly, you can really see a keenness to satisfy every single fan.

You can't satisfy everyone of course, especially in this industry, but Guild Wars 2 seems to be taking all the right steps to at least try. The Mesmer profession will undoubtedly be another perfectly honed part of this ambitious and grand project. Now then ArenaNet, how about that release date?

There’s something of a stigma surrounding PC racing games. Console gamers tend to assume that PCs play home to the driest, most nit-picking simulations, a world of complex settings, impossibly challenging handling models and barren racetracks albeit one that looks gorgeous.

But there are some games that want to make a stand against such misunderstandings, none more so than TrackMania – a game more light-hearted, arcadey and downright fun than the majority of console racers.

That’s because TrackMania doesn’t rely on having the best handling, the prettiest graphics or the most sliders in its menus. Instead, its focus is on social gaming and customisation as is evident from the beta which is currently running.

Allowing players to fiddle around with a small portion of the game’s complex yet user-friendly track editor and partake in all kinds of multiplayer shenanigans, the beta represents only a fraction of the final game but even so, there’s more potential here than in a number of full price games.

The editor has been cleaned up and given plenty of new functionality, though it still takes a little getting used to. While so many track creation tools simply let you lay down Scalextric-style tiles to make flat, dull layouts, TrackMania’s creation element is more like Rollercoaster Tycoon in that the final product can loop, twist and dive like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Every insane corner can be either the turning point (no pun intended) in a well-fought race or an accidental launch pad for the driver with less regard for the highway code and if you thought courses in the older games were over-the-top, just wait until you see the kind of silliness Canyon will let you throw together.

On top of courses, there’s creative freedom elsewhere in TrackMania 2 and better yet, it’s all been unified to make it even easier to share your creations with friends.

Painting your cars is as simple as taking the mouse pointer to them in the colour of your choice though you can slap image files on them as well if you don’t trust your brushmanship, something which is bound to be abused.

It's like an Escher painting. In race form.

And when you’re done creating a set of tracks, cars and settings, the whole thing can now be shared as one handy package – if you’ve remade all of the Mario Kart tracks and done up all your vehicles to match, for instance, that one file can be distributed so that all your mates (or even the rest of the world) can go nuts on your homemade mod in multiplayer.

This focus on user-generated content is something that will carry over into ManiaPlanet, Nadeo’s ambitious shot at bringing this same kind of creativity and freedom to RPGs and shooters in QuestMania and ShootMania respectively. It’s a shame Beatmania was already taken, really.

Still, Trackmania 2 looks set to be another revolution in user-generated content just like LittleBigPlanet before it and if you just can’t wait, you can get in on the beta for yourself now by pre-ordering the game from Ubisoft’s web site. Splendid.

After the acquisition of French developer Nadeo by Ubisoft back in 2009, fanbase concerns turned towards the potential future of their signature racer, TrackMania.

Fast-forward a couple years and, at a cursory glance at least, the formula for its first full-blown sequel remains thankfully unmodified. The focus once again is undoubtedly centred on the community’s creative finesse when it comes to track construction; providing a playground of toys for modders to manipulate into ludicrous loop-de-loops and hair-raising ramps, all matched with arcade thrills, as you hurtle across dizzying, corkscrewing tarmac aiming to nail that top time.

The gameplay is relatively untouched, as handling the vehicles remains simplistic – with perhaps the weight feeling a touch heavier. While we’re careering down one of the developer-built tracks, jumps and giant half-pipe walls catch us off-guard and, more often than not, send us spinning midair and off the road, biting the dirt.

Not that we’re too bothered: it’s exactly that trial-and-error approach to mastering each track that fuels TrackMania’s fervent competitive nature, and drives the community to constantly create crazier constructs of boundless imagination.

Cosmetically, the series has undergone a huge makeover. While nowhere near as po-faced as other racing franchises, you’d be mistaken for thinking that the visuals don’t match up to any of its petrol-guzzling ilk.

While all the unlicensed cars share the same stats (to keep the game squarely about skill, rather than engine size) each flaunts some impressive detail, showing collision scuffs and shining with glossy finishes.

Meanwhile, the dusty, red-rock setting (hence the title Canyon, duh) looks rugged and barren enough to leave players feeling thoroughly dehydrated – all of which is optimised to look stunning even on a modest PC setup.

TrackMania 2: Canyon also marks the first part of three TrackMania packs being released by Ubisoft, with greener pastures in TrackMania 2: Valley and another diverse environment-based add-on released some time later.

In addition, Canyon also acts as a springboard for Ubisoft’s new multigame platform, ManiaPlanet. It’s with the guiding hand of Ubisoft that Nadeo have been able to expand their vision, stretching outside the realm of racing and creating ecology of titles, with FPS ShootMania and RPG QuestMania soon to follow.

“Ubisoft want to become a strong player in the online world,” says Nadeo’s International Project Manager, Edouard Beauchemin. "TrackMania has been big online for years, so they’re keen on learning new things from us and we’re learning a lot of things about production and quality from them. We’ve had a huge amount of support but have maintained total control over our games.”

For now though, Nadeo and Ubisoft are focusing their attention on Canyon, polishing and enhancing the features to help the community build the experience they desire.

Jumping over to track editing and the revamped constructer screen is well refined, featuring over 240 TrackMania blocks and a swathe of scenery options to toy with, place and modify at a whim.

Simple adjustments, such as the ability to put track pieces down through mountains and other environmental obstacles instead of having to carve a path first, reinforces the ease-of-use system Nadeo seems to have mastered in the sequel. Crucially, jumping in and out of test mode remains seamless, making the whole process painless for newcomers and veterans alike. 

But the series would be nothing without the community, and their involvement has been key to the sequel, with Nadeo snagging some of the most talented modders to work closely with the small studio to improve and generate many of the features in the follow-up.

“The first TrackMania is five years old,” says Beauchemin, “and we’re still amazed about all the ideas that spring from the fans after all these years. Being able to bring some of them into the studio and watching them produce content has been mind-blowing for us.”

And, as many diehard fans will know, the success of TrackMania 2: Canyon won’t be judged on release day, or the week after that. It’ll be months and years of community passion and inventiveness that should make TrackMania 2 a unique competitor on the racetrack.

The Heroes Of Might And Magic series has long been a tumultuous affair. Change has come and gone but, many diehard fans have been so resistant to that change they find themselves committed to the borderline-retro Might And Magic 3.

As games become ever more popular, there’s a need to make them more accessible and that’s exactly what Ubisoft is trying to do with Might And Magic: Heroes 6, much to the annoyance of some diehard fans.

Might And Magic: Heroes 6, has even been given a title restructuring by Ubisoft in an attempt at better branding the series into something more recognisable. The core gameplay remains the same in Might And Magic: Heroes 6, but as we discovered in the demo fans needn’t worry about these changes to gameplay.

For anyone new to to the series, Heroes Of Might And Magic plays like this: navigating the top-down map screen through turns, heroes must gather resources, capture strategic buildings and ultimately defeat their opponents by destroying their capital. Should you run into an enemy while exploring, however, and you’ll be whisked away to an arena for turn-based combat.

The biggest change in Might And Magic: Heroes 6 comes with the loss of the three rarest resources, leaving only wood, ore, gold and crystals to amass. In previous Heroes Of Might And Magic games combat would often take place in these resource-rich areas. While this means some of the key strategic positions are missing from many maps, the emphasis now falls on a more direct attack on players’ capitals.

But this really is far more succinct than previous iterations: by having fewer resources, character management becomes much less of a nuisance. There’s no longer a restrictive need to secure the more rare resources first, in the hopes of opening access to your more powerful units.

Now, with enough deft movement and fast upgrades, anyone can amass an army capable of destruction. Of course, this means your enemy are too – and therein lies the crux of this important change: everyone is on equal footing.

You'll still have to travel back to your town to swap creatures around.

A streamlined tech tree means town construction is less laborious than before and while there aren’t nearly as many options available as previous iterations, the necessary upgrades all appear in a single window. Army building has never been simpler.

Conveniently these menus can be dragged onto the UI for ease of access regardless of the hero’s location, though they will still need to enter the building itself to attach any of the troops to the travelling army.

Sadly, your towns won’t change in appearance, even when they level up. While you may earn walls or additional structures, there’s nothing like in previous games where an evolving town screen showed each settlement’s development – something many fans will decry.

In Might And Magic: Heroes 6 each faction is restricted to only one hero. In previous versions players were given a choice between physical or magical combat heroes. Here though, each hero is competent in both fields, negating the need to choose one ability over the other.

While initially this may seem restrictive, later on, when the tech tree branches out, heroes can specialise in whatever field suits your play style.

With a wealth of abilities covering a range of elements – fire, earth, water, air and so on – and powers and skills, the initial choice is an overwhelming one. But rather than force heroes into specific skillsets – much like the previous games – Might And Magic: Heroes 6’s character management makes the hero customisation all the more empowering.

Artifacts can be found throughout exploration and can be equipped on your hero.

For all its changes behind the mechanics of Heroes 6, the combat remains unchanged. This takes place in arenas, which has players take turns to damage their ‘stacks’ of different units until either force is wiped out.

The arenas themselves are larger, enabling bigger armies; there’s more focus on unit position to keep weaker units safe and stronger units at the head of the pack. Arenas are more dynamic too. For example, the ground in the water-based areas moves, causing creatures to move randomly around an arena and upsetting your plans.

Even multiple campaign-specific battles feature complex combat against defensive structures, such as walls and weapons, which will come in to play when attacking another player’s fortified town.

There are also changes to faction skills and creature abilities, of course, but we didn’t get to play with nearly as many creatures as we would have liked to try this out.

Almost as if taking cue from the recent (and fantastic) Clash Of Heroes downloadable game, the factions themselves have become more individual. In Might And Magic: Heroes 6, players can choose from five factions: Haven, Necropolis, Inferno, Sanctuary and Stronghold.

The choice of faction affects which creatures are available to hire and their unique attributes. Haven, for example, focus on defence so its units can take damage and survive in longer battles. The Necropolis uses armies of the undead to absorb health and cause debilitating effects but has lower health. It’s these types of differences that give the player a lot of flexibility in creating a multiplayer hero that suits their play style.

You'll only have a choice of one hero character.

Regardless of how ‘simple’ Heroes 6 may appear on first play, it still has that depth of gameplay and that ‘just one more go’ appeal that made previous Might And Magics so moreish.

Much like last year’s Civilization V, a smoother UI, easier-to-use construction and a cleverly concealed combat mechanic does not make this latest version simple or dumbed-down. If anything, this streamlining will mean that Heroes 6 will appeal to a wider audience while retaining that necessary level of addiction and skill that existing fans crave so much.