Infinite Warfare Will Let You Live the ‘Top Gun’ Fantasy
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will allow players to pilot a transforming fighter plane that can be upgraded and customized.
The fighter, referred to in the game as a Jackal, "can transform between atmospheric flight mode and zero-G flight mode for when you have to dogfight in the vacuum of space," Infinity Ward design director Jacob Minkoff explained in an interview with IGN.
According to Minkoff, Infinite Warfare will offer a seamless experience in which players are fully invested in not only their character, but also their vehicle. "It's kind of the Top Gun fantasy," he explained, noting that "it's your fighter that you get to upgrade and customize. You get to walk along the flight deck and have the flight crew preparing it for you and saluting you and you get into it and you fly out into these crazy missions that you chose to go to."
Uncharted 4 Multiplayer DLC Roadmap Revealed
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End's multiplayer content has been detailed on the PlayStation blog ahead of the game's May 10 release date.
Developer Naughty Dog implemented a new philosophy with its multiplayer content—and that includes making all Uncharted 4 multiplayer maps and modes free. Maps and modes will be available immediately, with all "vanity and gameplay in-game store items" unlockable through gameplay.
Uncharted 4 Multiplayer: Roadmap infographic
P.O.L.L.E.N Review
At their heart, adventure games are about delivering a narrative. They're mechanically simple. At their most complex, they offer puzzles that give the player some agency in the world, and slow their progression so they don't just blast through the narrative content. This means that in order to be successful, adventure games need to precisely execute on the few attributes they offer. There isn't anywhere for developers to hide weakness or inexperience.
First-person adventure games have received a lot of attention over the last couple of years. Releases like Firewatch, Gone Home, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter deliver strong, emotional narratives through high quality writing and environmental design, with artfully crafted atmosphere.
The recently released P.O.L.L.E.N (or Pollen for short) by Mindfield Games fails in this regard.
Pollen tells the story of a nameless protagonist sent to Saturn’s moon, Titan, to investigate a corporately-controlled research base studying something called "The Entity." The game opens with you sitting in a dark room at a retro-futuristic computer terminal. A robotic voice asks you to answer a series of personality test questions, each answer causing another row of pips to be added to a punch card produced by the computer. The scene quickly establishes the corporation, Rama Industries, as large and powerful enough to ask entirely unreasonable things of its employees, dressing the requests as boons or favors handed down to the "lucky" employee.
The introduction then moves to the interior of a lander craft on approach to Titan. Over the intercom comes the voice of a Rama Industries representative from HQ, reciting a well-rehearsed schpiel detailing the mission. Their tone artificially jovial, at odds with the perilous activity of hurtling toward the ground. After a successful landing, you head to a nearby comms array in order to make contact with the ground team, who seem surprised by the arrival. As they begin to explain why, the Rama rep's voice returns, drowning out the details with extraneous mission parameters. Immediately you're taught that something is amiss on Titan, and this ominous obfuscation of the details cleverly makes you aware that Rama would prefer for you to remain in the dark.
Pollen’s atmospheric introduction sets the tone for the rest of the game beautifully, but what follows fails to live up to its example. From there you’re asked to explore the research base, to investigate and uncover what’s really going on. All exposition is delivered via audio logs, cassette tapes found throughout the environment. Audio logs are a tired expository method, made even more frustrating in this instance by forcing the player to stand still next to immovable cassette players in order to listen to them.
You don’t encounter any other humans during Pollen--all exposition is delivered via disembodied voices. This is a limitation that other games have used to great effect. But in Pollen, it feels counterproductive. You quickly discover that The Entity is causing people at the research base to go insane, and to kill themselves and/or one-another. You only ever discover remnants of these encounters, meaning that your level of patience and attention to detail will determine whether or not you fully comprehend what had happened. Without ever witnessing the effects of The Entity first-hand, the impact of Pollen’s premise is greatly diminished.
Pollen’s primary interactive mechanic is an unexplained phenomenon which allows you to travel between two alternate versions of the research base. You can leap forward into the future, to sometime after the Entity’s effects have reduced the crew to a single mourning scientist. This allows you to transition between timelines in order to solve traversal puzzles, such as bypassing otherwise locked doors by moving into the dilapidated future, or returning to the past to bypass debris. This mechanic is a neat departure from simply traversing a static environment. It's still clearly a linear experience, but changing timelines provides the illusion of a more complex path. An explanation of the how and why of the ability however, is strangely absent.
As the game’s two to three hours wind on, three separate methods for destroying The Entity are teased in audio logs. The tools for enacting these methods are also provided, but it seems none of them were viable. No matter what was tried, The Entity remained unperturbed. Perhaps this was intended as a statement about the inevitability of the events that transpired, or about the unknowable nature of The Entity. Unfortunately, it merely resulted in frustration. The teased solutions are presented like foreshadowing, but were little more than flavour.
Pollen’s visual design is beautiful and the atmosphere it creates is strong, but the game falls short when the narrative and storytelling method fail to give it substance. The game ends with a bizarre 10-minute cutscene, which explains little. Short games are wonderful when they leave the player something to ruminate on, but they need to leave the player with something to ruminate on. They can sometimes take on a poetic quality, not in prose but rather in function, a musing on the nature of some aspect of human experience. Pollen seems to want to do this, but is too vague in its delivery to be successful.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Side Missions Provide Rewards
While Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will feature a linear story, Infinity Ward's upcoming shooter will also include non-linear elements that allow the player to earn various in-game rewards.
"As the captain of the UNSA Retribution, which is the carrier that you command, you can order it to go and engage in different missions in a non-linear order," Infinity Ward design director Jacob Minkoff told IGN.
"We are telling a linear story, but along the way you can choose to attack targets of opportunity, and attacking those targets of opportunity will reward you with various items and progression and loot elements that will help you to accomplish the next main mission that you accept from command," he added, noting they "will also reveal optional elements of the story."
Daily Deals: Call of Duty, Xbox One With $100 Credit, Iron Man Movie Three-Pack
You Can Get a Remastered Modern Warfare With the Latest Call of Duty
Infinite Warfare, the next Call of Duty, arrives in November. That's no big surprise, right? Well, what if told you the Legacy Edition comes with a remastered version of the game that started it all, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? And if you use your Amazon Prime discount, you'll get it for $64, instead of $80. Of course, the standard version of Infinite Warfare is $48 with Amazon Prime, in case you don't care about the remaster.
Offworld Trading Company Review
Like failed empires of the past, I found myself caught in a hyperbolic debt spiral in Offworld Trading Company. My Mars-based colonial corporation had invested into energy production, and one of my rivals detonated an EMP through my plants, disabling them. As the market for electricity boomed, I had to purchase it at increasingly higher rates to keep my company afloat. Within a few minutes I'd gone from a solid AAA credit rating with negligible debt to a lousy D and millions in the red. But hope wasn't lost. Even as it seemed like my neo-capitalist empire was on the brink of collapse, I was plotting my comeback.
I bought up some land on prime locations, taking care to keep them far apart so I couldn’t lose control of my critical buildings all at once. Then I built some new geothermal plants--the most efficient and productive energy producers available--before employing hackers to jack up the price of power even higher. Then I used a series of black market options including labor strikes and dynamite to disable the power plants of my competitors. Soon I was the only supplier of power around and I was selling it for ten times what I'd paid just a few minutes before. My debt evaporated in seconds and I crippled my foes, causing their stock prices to tumble. I sold off some assets and bought my competitor's shares up. And it was all over.
Offworld Trading Company isn't like any other strategy game I've played. There's no combat. There is only the free market. You assume the role of a CEO of a new company eager to take advantage of the virgin Martian landscape and turn massive profits. But you're far from the only company on the block. Much like the colonial trading companies from the Age of Sail, your aim is to outsell and out produce everyone else. Stock and commodity prices are your tools, and hostile corporate takeovers your strongest weapons.
In that sense, Offworld works like a microcosm of real-world economies. Your first move is to pick a founding location--and get to work organizing your supply lines. From there you'll sort out which goods would be most productive to crank out given the situation at hand. And just about everything factors into that decision. If you found your company near good supplies of carbon, but you need to send transports halfway across the map to access silicon, you'll need a lot more fuel. More fuel means you need more money to secure the same resources as another company and that cuts into your profits. Even with only a smattering of basic resources--water, power, carbon, silicon, iron, and aluminum--you'll find a complex web of interesting choices and decisions that you'll have to make on the fly.
Offworld's black market system exponentially magnifies your strategic options, making each round different from the last.
A big piece of that is the black market. While trading resources for profits would be great on its own, Offworld mixes in some less than legal tactics that you, and each of your competitors, can bring to bear. Whether it's destroying critical structures with dynamite (everything is fair game except for your opponents' headquarters) or deploying an underground nuke to reduce resource yields for your competitors, there are more than a dozen nefarious options for the unscrupulous trader.
As games progress, the black market and its affiliated thugs become practical necessities. Even if you can maintain your company without the aid of goons or pirates, you won't be spared for long. This is the price of unfettered competition, and while it'd be a frightening reality, in this context it's a non-stop stream of brinksmanship that encourages sophisticated and nuanced tactics. Shady though it might be, Offworld's black market system exponentially magnifies your strategic options, making each round different from the last.
Playing off these options are a series of advanced buildings. Most of your early structures are bare essentials: farms, water pumps, mines, etc. But once you've got your company going, you can start developing patented, advanced technology or create a bunker to house a cadre of hackers that can manipulate prices. These bleeding-edge structures are your proximal goal. They boost your ability to stay competitive and give you an ever-expanding field of options to leverage. If you're losing goods because of piracy, you can research more efficient ways to produce those resources. If prices have tanked on Mars, you can launch oxygen and food to eager consumers in the asteroid belts.
Once you start playing with these toys and blending their abilities with those offered by the black market, games get cooking. If you need to keep your hacking clandestine, you can use an illegal hologram to disguise your programmers' barracks. Or you can disable or wrest control of a profitable Offworld Market to pull in some serious capital without having to invest in the expensive launches yourself.
When you pack eight players onto a map, you'll have so much corporate reconnaissance and sabotage that it can be a bit tough to keep track of it all.
If I had one complaint from this system, it'd be that when you pack eight players onto a map, you'll have so much corporate reconnaissance and sabotage that it can be a bit tough to keep track of it all. You'll have a news ticker in the bottom right that will try to keep you updated on who's been hit with what, but it's not enough when things get crazy. If you're overwhelmed though, you can always tune the game speed down a bit to help you take control of the chaos, so it's more of a nitpick than a foundational problem.
When all of these systems play together, it's absolute magic. There's a thrill in knowing that no matter what happens, you always have a response. Offworld gives its players an exceptional spread of options so that they can always think their way through a problem. The questions then become, can you think faster than your opponents, and if so, can you adapt as they shift their strategies to match your own?
Offworld is ruthless. It is fast, and it is brutal, and with so many possibilities available at any time, the game teeters on overwhelming. This is saved, at least in part, by a stellar series of tutorials that introduce you to all of the game's major features. It teaches you how to manage hostile takeovers, how to protect your own stocks from buyouts, how to combine the abilities of your buildings for maximum effect, and how to plan your corporate campuses so they run at peak efficiency. And it does all this with an acerbic wit that parodies hyper-capitalistic figures of the 1980s. Item descriptions and character dialogue are a treat If you're a fan of apocalyptic tongue-in-cheek humor. That penchant for cleverness runs through to the core.
The campaign does plenty of heavy lifting to acclimate new players to the game's complex gameplay. It introduces you to some other core concepts, switches up the victory conditions a bit, and gives you a string of skirmishes that help you build a planet-spanning oligopoly alongside your rivals. This lets you test out some of the game's more complex tactics in a scenario that otherwise resembles a protracted multiplayer match stretched over a much longer period of time. By the end, you're well-equipped to tackle ranked games and competitive play. It's a splendid difficulty pitch that serves as the ideal introduction.
Every moment from that initial decision until the final stock purchase is incredible.
I had feared, when I started, that Offworld Trading Company would wear thin after a few games. But that moment never came. I still find every match exhilarating. From the time I bought stock in my opponents, sold them quickly to crash the price and then bought them out a few seconds later, to the time when I managed to keep three launch pads going all at once to reach stupendous riches, every game is memorable. Each map is randomly generated, and with four factions that have distinct strategies that all work with different resource distribution patterns, even the opening is never quite the same. Echoing the classic Civilization question of whether it's best to found your nascent country where your settler begins or to explore for better options, you'll only be able to see certain parts of the map at first. You can either scan for better drop locations, or take what you see. But if you wait, another company can claim vital real estate before you, and you may find yourself with precious few options for critical resources later in the game. Every moment from that initial decision until the final stock purchase is incredible. I haven't even scratched the surface of all that you can do here.
It's a bit chilling to think that in Offworld you're playing out the same obsessive pursuit of capitalism that led to the fall of its finctional Earth--an event hinted at in tutorial dialogue--yet it's so recklessly entertaining and biting with its satire that I couldn’t help but get lost. When combined with truly deep and intricate strategic options, Offworld is a revelation. It's almost unparalleled in the genre. Each and every game is thrilling. Every moment is a challenge. And the brutality of the free market ensures that you can never rest on your laurels, less you be quashed by the invisible hand.
We Can’t Choose Between Battleborn or Overwatch
Well look at that...two big new multiplayer games are crashing onto our radar on the very day when we here at IGN like to stream. Tuesday, the MOBA-inspired Battleborn will finally be out after years of development, and the Team Fortress-esque Overwatch goes into open beta in advance of its release later this month. We couldn't choose which one we wanted to stream more, so we're streaming BOTH...because we're total anarchists with no couth, or regard for authority.
Just so you know, we're going to be livestreaming every Tuesday and Wednesday from 1PM - 3PM PT. We'll focus on new releases and DLC drops, but let us know in the comments what games you'd like to see!
Out This Week: Battleborn
With so many new games and movies coming out, it can be hard to keep up. Lucky for you, IGN is here to help with a weekly round-up of the biggest releases each and every week. Check out the latest releases for this week, and be sure to come back next Monday for a new update.
Note: The prices and deals compiled below are accurate at the time we published this story, but all are subject to change.
Modern Warfare Remaster Won’t be a Standalone Release
If you're excited to play the classic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in its remastered state, you need to prepare to also buy the futuristic new Infinite Warfare.
According to Activision's FAQ for Modern Warfare Remastered, the game will be available as a digital download only to customers who purchase a qualifying version of its upcoming, Infinity Ward developed Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
The qualifying versions are the "Legacy, Legacy Pro and Digital Deluxe" SKUs of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
Space Jam 2 Recruits Fast & Furious Director
Justin Lin -- the director of four entries in the Fast and the Furious franchise as well as the upcoming Star Trek Beyond -- is reportedly in negotiations to direct Space Jam 2, the live-action/animation hybrid sequel starring the Cleveland Cavaliers' Lebron James (succeeding the original film's Michael Jordan).
The script will be written by Andrew Dodge, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Justin Lin on the set of Star Trek Beyond.