If you feel a bit overwhelmed by the slew of Resident Evil 5 downloadable content and repackaged versions of the game coming in the next few months, here's a crash course: Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmares is the first of four downloadable add-ons for Resident Evil 5, and it is one of two add-ons that contain additional chapters. Desperate Escape, which launches in early March, contains another chunk of story-driven gameplay, but the other two DLC packs only contain costumes and characters for a new Mercenaries mode called Mercenaries Reunion.
All of this content will be included in the upcoming Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition, so if you don't have RE5 yet, it's probably best to wait until March 9th when you can get it all in one neat package. For those who are still in possession of the Resident Evil 5 disc, you have the convenience of grabbing only the DLC you want, which is cool, since many RE5 fans who would like to explore the additional story segments, like Lost in Nightmares, may not necessarily want to play dress-up with Chris and Sheva.
Lost in Nightmares is a short "bonus chapter" that explores the back story of Resident Evil 5. It runs just over an hour in length and isn't particularly in-depth, but at $5.00, devoted Resident Evil fans should definitely check it out. The segment follows the original Resident Evil duo, Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield, to a deja vu-inducing estate owned by Umbrella founder Ozwell E. Spencer, the man behind the mansion in the first game. The first half of Lost in Nightmares is almost a parody of classic Resident Evil, with ample in-jokes and nods to the roots of the survival horror genre. You'll spend more time finding crests and cranks than engaging in combat, although the latter half features an occasional shoot out and a boss fight.
While the aforementioned boss fight may feel recycled to RE5 veterans, the penultimate portion of the DLC is probably the best reason for checking it out. In this section you play a game of cat-and-mouse with a new breed of enemy. A lack of useful weapons has you setting traps and baiting the creatures instead of outright blasting them away. It's all rather old-school and fits well with the theme the add-on establishes.
Unfortunately, the story comes to a halt right when it seems to be picking up, and the content falls short of Resident Evil 4's bonus Ada missions in their excellent ability to extend the main game. However, Lost in Nightmares also includes the first installment of the revamped Mercenaries mode (an arcade-like mode in which players take on waves of zombies) called Mercenaries Reunion, which certainly bolsters its value to anyone who didn't get their fill of Mercenaries a year ago.
Of the two included characters, Barry Burton and Excella Gionne, the latter is the most interesting, with an arsenal that includes an awesome automatic pistol, flash grenade launcher and a surprisingly lethal backhanded slap. Pairs of additional characters will be made available in each installment of the forthcoming DLC, but you can play all of the original Mercenaries levels with these two characters all you want by merely investing in this pack.
Fans of RE5's co-op experience will be happy to know that you can play Lost in Nightmares' story mode and Mercenaries Reunion with another person in split-screen or online. To add a bit of additional replay value there are leaderboards for both modes -- in story mode you can collect hidden Score Stars to augment your rating, which is a nice touch. There are also a handful of new Achievements/Trophies linked to the story mode and the option to play as Jill instead of Chris to make a second playthrough worthwhile.
While the Tom Clancy brand dominates the genre of realistic military shooters, it's going to get some competition from a legendary Navy SEAL. Bethesda and Zombie Interactive are currently working on Rogue Warrior, a tactical shooter for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 that's based on the fiction novels of the same name by Richard Marcinko, a former Navy SEAL commander whose best-selling autobiography is also titled Rogue Warrior. However, the game won't be based on Marcinko's real-life exploits in the Vietnam War. Instead, the plot, which could almost be ripped from today's headlines, is set in modern-day North Korea.
In Rogue Warrior, you'll lead Marcinko's four-man SEAL team deep into enemy territory. The game's plot has you infiltrate a North Korean submarine facility to get intelligence data on that country's nuclear capabilities. However, while you're busy doing this, North Korea launches a massive invasion of South Korea, and war erupts. Since all friendly forces have their hands full, you'll have to find your own way out of North Korea, which means you must escape and navigate through enemy territory.
There are a couple of key things to note about the game. The first is that this isn't a rigidly scripted game, like so many other military shooters. The design team at Zombie felt that the "rails" approach favored in those games (so called because you're basically restricted to a single path) doesn't really capture the essence of SEAL combat. SEALs are the Navy's elite commando units, and they're usually dispatched in small teams to operate behind enemy lines. That means SEALs must be smart, resourceful, and flexible, and to capture this element of SEAL warfare Rogue Warrior will have fairly large levels for a first-person shooter. The idea is that you'll be able to approach tactical situations in the manner that you determine.
For instance, in the example that we were shown, Marcinko's SEAL team approached a North Korean ship-breaking yard (where ships are torn apart for their metal). In this situation, there were three paths that the team could follow, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. One path might be more direct, but it also increases the odds of detection, while a safer option might offer a more roundabout path that takes longer to navigate. The idea is that you can tailor your tactics to fit your situation. However, having this freedom of movement in such large levels doesn't mean that Rogue Warrior will be like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Bethesda's hugely popular fantasy role-playing game. Rogue Warrior's levels are big, but not gigantic. The levels are designed for tactical flexibility, not exploring a huge dynamic world.
There's a popular adage that goes "The future is unwritten," but that doesn't necessarily mean the past is set in stone, either. Plenty of games have played fast and loose with history books to develop an alternate take on any number of bygone eras. One such game we recently had a chance to see is Damnation, a shooter that imagines what it would be like if the American Civil War extended well into the 20th century. You play as Hamilton Rourke, leader of a group of rebels fighting against a powerful industrialist named Prescott, a man who commands an army of mercenaries equipped with technology well ahead of its time
We had the opportunity to see a demo of Damnation's introductory level, which eases you into the gameplay mechanics with a few tutorials. The first thing that becomes apparent is that Damnation isn't a pure shooter. Like Tomb Raider and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, it combines gun combat with liberal amounts of platforming. Just as often as you mow down waves of enemies, you'll be shimmying along ledges and leaping over gaps. This level, which takes place in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, introduces Blue Omega's philosophy of putting you in a wide-open area with a simple, visible goal made complicated by treacherous terrain. In this case, you see a bridge looming in the distance that you need to get to, but with a slight problem: Between you and that bridge is a seemingly bottomless chasm. You need to work your way along the outlying cliffs and through the run-down buildings that stand in the path between you and the bridge.
Rourke begins by shooting down the chains holding up a drawbridge so he can clear the first gap. Once over, his group of non-player characters spies a zip line stretching across an even larger gap. Your team needs to jump and grab the line, one by one, then slide down to the next area. Greeting you when you land is a group of Prescott's forces, soldiers with glowing masks and powerful guns that display the game's steampunk aesthetic. With the gun combat, you manually aim from the third-person perspective, using a variety of fictional weaponry that feels very futuristic for the turn-of-the-century setting. Adding a slight twist to the combat is your ability to engage a spirit vision, which temporarily allows you to sense where far-off enemies are by rendering them in a glowing red hue while desaturating everything else within view.
The space between these shootouts is filled with exploration sequences. Rourke is quite the athletic adventurer, which is good, because he has all manner of towering buildings and natural obstacles ahead of him. Beyond the usual leaping over long gaps, you'll need to perform various acts of athletic prowess, such as holding onto ledges to perform a backward jump, flipping up walls by grabbing ledges above you as you face outward, and, occasionally, just plain diving through glass windows. In our session, we didn't pick up on anything terribly revolutionary about this platforming, but the animation was slick and the level design looked intriguing. At this point, the climbing and jumping portion is looking much more compelling than the shooting.
It's been almost five years since the release of the original Red Dead Revolver, so it's been a long wait for a sequel. That game is called Red Dead Redemption, and it is currently being developed at Rockstar San Diego, the outfit responsible for Midnight Club, Table Tennis and Midtown Madness. We managed to sneak a look at a work-in-progress build of the game at Rockstar's London office, and can report back on what we saw.
Redemption takes place roughly 50 years after Revolver, just after the turn of the twentieth century. The story follows John Marston, a reformed career criminal, who is forced to do the bidding of the newly-formed Bureau of Investigation thanks to an apparently deadly ultimatum. Rockstar was deliberately vague on the details of the plot, but we do know that Marston's quest will take him to three areas in the game: the frontier, Great Plains, and south of the border to Mexico. Rockstar has always had desires to return to the Wild West according to Hamish Brown, Rockstar London's PR representative for the day. He claims that Redemption is just as ambitious as any of the Grand Theft Auto games, with wide open plains and a bigger world than any Rockstar game to date.
Our demo of the game started out in a typical western setting: brown dirt, scrub bushes, distant monoliths, and some suspicious-looking cowboys loitering around the outskirts of a ghost town. It seems that a friend of Marston's, Bonnie, has been kidnapped by outlaws, and in exchange he needs to deliver a sheriff and his prisoner over to them. Somewhere along the way, the deal goes sour and Marston and his posse need to shoot their way through town to rescue Bonnie before she‘s hanged. Thankfully, you have a healthy range of weapons at your disposal, including six shooters, shotguns, carbines, rifles, knives, axes, Gatling guns, and TNT.
Fans of the previous game will be familiar with Dead Eye, which makes a return appearance in Redemption. This bullet time mode allows you to take precise aim at enemies whether you’re on foot or in the saddle. When using single-handed weapons you'll also be able to line up several targets on one or multiple enemies at a time. Redemption features a regenerative health system, so hiding behind cover for a few seconds is enough to heal your wounds. We're told the cover system will be similar to the one in GTA, and the natural environment will provide protection including rocks, vegetation, and even dead carcasses.
While you'll be able to traverse great distances thanks to coaches and trains, horseback will also play a major part. Each horse will have different abilities; if you steal one from town it should be in fairly well-kept condition, or you can choose to rough it and train a wild stallion instead. No game set in the wilderness would be complete without some wildlife and Redemption features plenty of varmints to shoot. A dedicated "ecology" system ensures you'll encounter snakes, armadillos, cougars, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, buzzards and even bears along your journey.
In addition to randomly generated animals, we're told there'll be hundreds of procedural events as you explore the world. On our journey into another town we saw a woman whose stagecoach had broken down. On closer inspection, however, it was actually an ambush with several bandits appearing from behind the coach. Heading down the road, we saw a man being mauled by a pack of coyotes--you can choose to help him, but you risk having the pack turn on you instead. These events take place randomly around the clock but they're not all dangerous--expect to get the occasional friendly invite such as sharing a campfire meal with some pilgrims after dark. If you fancy human companionship, you'll be please to know that a multiplayer mode has been confirmed, although no details were revealed during our demo.
You can trade with merchants in towns, buying and selling a variety of goods including general supplies, weapons and even animal skins you've collected. We strolled into an abandoned saloon during the day, which turns into a rowdy, honky-tonk location at night once the townsfolk have knocked off work. While the sun's up, however, they'll get about their business and you can observe them going about their daily chores if you so desire. While you’re in town you're able to play a range of mini games and gamble your money away in poker. In one mini game, we saw Marston try his hand, quite literally, in a wager of good ol' five finger fillet. Using the A and B buttons for knife stabs, each round gets subsequently faster, and harder, which can easily result in a painful flesh wound. As with all the best Rockstar open-world games, Marston will be able to wreak havoc on the towns, but Redemption will have a robust law enforcement system in place to stop any law-breakers.
Next, we saw Marston take a trip south, where his services were requested by the Mexican Army to protect a supply train. Riding alongside the train, the aim is to take out rebels while defending the train. You can jump off your trusty stead onto the moving train (and back again) or even highjack other horses on the move. The scenery south of the border looks splendid, with rivers, palm trees, ridges, gorges and huge valleys showing off the Rage engine's technical prowess. The draw distances look particularly impressive, spanning huge valleys and finishing in the far distance with majestic mountain ranges. The world will also be populated with forests, rivers, plains, bustling towns, small outposts, Indian reservations, and possibly even some snow. There’ll also be a dynamic weather system and day/night cycle in the game.
