PLAY Xmas 2022 - n.21

How the year flies. Yet even though we’re ready to get festive and take a look ahead at PS5’s great 2023 to come (check out our calendar for a taste of that), we’re able to make room to fight demons at any time of year. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty (p48), from the studio behind Nioh and Ninja Gaiden, is set to be an early 2023 favourite. Not only have we spent plenty of time leaping around ancient China slicing, dicing, and casting magic with an early Wo Long build, we also sat down to chat with Team Ninja about the bold new series. Building on the ‘masocore’ gameplay the studio’s known for, the new setting and faster-paced twists to combat result in something that feels quite fresh. If you want to get…

Getting you closer to PlayStation’s most exciting stories, people, and culture 4K OLED screens, improved motion controls, and more draw you further into the action. Talk of a Zuckerburg-shaped future in which the ‘joy’ of work meetings is translated into a soulless VR void has dominated the virtual reality tech conversation to the point it’s easy to forget these devices already have a fun, mainstream, practical application: videogames! Beat Saber, Astro Bot Rescue Mission, and more are great uses of VR, and PSVR2 is only going to make things better. (You won’t have to pretend to be interested in a Zoom meeting while using it, for one thing.) We went hands-on with the new kit at Tokyo Game Show to learn how it will take us even deeper into the games we…

While MCU fans have come to expect multiple movies a year, proper videogame adaptations of Marvel comics have been relatively few and far between (the PlayStation-exclusive Spider-Man games from Insomniac certainly *ahem* stick out). That’s set to change, as multiple developers are throwing their capes into the ring, giving us some welcome variety. Is deluging us with games the right move? Quite possibly, because one way in which the upcoming slate of games differs from the MCU, as confirmed in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, is that the titles are not connected. Each has the opportunity to stand on its own. WORLD AT WAR Given Captain America was himself the result of an underground experiment during one of the most perennially popular settings in gaming, the Second World War, it’s surprising that we haven’t…

The obvious joke to make would be that we never stopped seeing that town in our restless dreams, and that we still thrash about whenever we think of Homecoming. But, clichéd quips aside, our dreams have finally come true: after more than a decade with little more than a peep from the series, Silent Hill will return. The headline act is Silent Hill 2. Like a Mannequin springing back up after taking a battering, Silent Hill 2 will come home as a from-the-ground-up remake from Bloober Team. Developed using Unreal Engine 5, it will be a 12-month timed exclusive on PS5 during an as yet unannounced release window. In addition to the studio behind Layers Of Fear and The Medium, Masahiro Ito (the original series creature designer) and Akira Yamaoka (the…

Criterion, developer of Hot Pursuit and 2012’s Most Wanted, is returning to the wheel of EA’s flagship arcade racing series after almost ten years away. Titled Need For Speed Unbound, this upcoming entry brings underground racing to the streets of Lakeshore – a fictional region of the US based on midwestern cities like Chicago. Thanks to a striking new visual direction inspired by street art and urban graffiti, this open-world city will be your canvas. Illustration-like driving effects illuminate your surroundings with colourful tags as you zoom around town, adding extra oomph when you hit jumps or perform boosts. The slick results seem particularly impressive in motion, and a renewed focus on car customisation ensures that you will have more control than ever when it comes to how things look on…

One thing Hollow Ponds’ Ricky Haggett and collaborator Richard Hogg’s games have in common is that they’re not easy to describe in a sentence. The latter jokes, “Can we have four sentences please – maybe five?” The duo’s forthcoming game Flock, announced via a trailer during this summer’s Annapurna Interactive Showcase, doesn’t buck the trend. “That video is pretty much a teaser,” Haggett admits. “We’ve never really made a thing that shows less of the game, but we’re also at that point where there’s things about the game that we don’t want to say, partly because we want to hold some stuff back and also because there’s stuff that we literally aren’t sure will make it into the game.” As it turns out, Flock is easier to summarise than afterlife narrative puzzler…