E3 2011: We catch with up with Warner's crop of games, hang out with Batman and Catwoman, take up the sword, and meet a dodgy sounding narrator...
Ah, E3. It’s a special hell of stabbing lights, ear-bursting music and many, many silicon breasts. However, it’s also a gaming Mecca, and you’ll find more gaming talent and creativity in the square miles of stands, displays, demo rooms and corridors of the LA Convention Center than at any other place you might expect to find a gathering of gaming talent and creativity.
We’re not making much sense – E3 does that to you.
It can also frustrate you, like when you’re staying in a hotel with hundreds of other journalists, and all of them are hogging the wi-fi for their daily video uploads. I bet it’s those heinously well-equipped Japanese dudes wandering around with the expensive camera and steady-cam rig. I just know it…
But, what that means is that we’re already woefully behind schedule on our E3 reporting. That’s pretty much inevitable – it happened to us last year – but this time it’s been a record-breaking performance. However, better late than never.
The first stand we tackled in our great gaming adventure – oh, Christ, there goes the connection again, was Warner Bros Interactive, who had a pretty stellar lineup for serious gamers.
Also a lot of stuff for the less serious gamer, such as the upcoming Sesame Street Kinect game. Trust me, seeing Tim Schafer jumping around pretending to be giant furry monster. Wait a minute…
Anyway, what we saw…
Batman: Arkham City Well, whaddaya know – Catwoman’s a playable character, so guess what we got to see a lot of… Catwoman! And she’s pretty awesome.
You access her by finding sleeping cats hidden around the city, and moving near them activates everyone’s favourite slinky antihero. Immediately, the game becomes very different – her movement is fast and unsurprisingly feline, and while she has similar moves to Batman, such as being able to use her whip as a grapple, she negotiates obstacles faster and more directly. She is very fluid, and very acrobatic.
And, we admit, she’s great to look at.
In combat, the changes are even more interesting. She doesn’t seem as strong, but she is much faster than Batman, and can call on an array of stealth moves, as well as use a heat vision mode – her version of Batman’s detective vision. Choosing Catwoman play will make for a great time out from the more brooding intensity of Bats. She also comes with her own quests and storyline, so Arkham City is looking to pack in a lot of game.
We did get to see a bit of Batman, too, and more of the city itself, and this is starting to look like an absolute blast of a game. It’s big detailed, and full of life – not bad for a crime-ridden metropolis that seems to have a perpetual night. And, finally, we got to see one last villain – The Penguin!
He’s a marvellous rendition of the villain, bit of a bovver boy, very nasty, and very lo-fi, right down to using the bottom of a coke bottle for a monacle. This is looking to be another who’s who of Gotham.
Lord of the Rings: War in the North We got some sweet hands on time with this game, so we’ll likely talk about it more in coming issues of the magazine, but for now, we’re… well, it’s complex.
Like most games, our demo was on Xbox, and to be perfectly honest the combat is a little repetitive. It’s brutal, to be sure, and very bloody, but with just a handful of controls it really is bit if a hack-fest.
However, it’s worth considering that co-op games like this are not at their best when you’re playing with randoms (though we did briefly get to team up with ex-Atomic reviewer, Bennett Ring), and we’ve also not yet seen much of the RPG elements of the game. Perhaps, with a deeper skill system and good inventory management the game will be as good as we’re hoping it is.
One thing is for sure, though, the art direction and music is great. We even got to see the game’s composer conduct a 20-piece orchestra through a whole mess of the soundtrack. That alone makes the game a must-get, for me.
Bastion Now this was a surprise. On paper, it doesn’t sound like much – it’s a rather simple isometric action game, about a boy who wakes up to find the world destroyed, and his quest through the shattered, constantly reforming land around him. But what lifts it is the innovative use of voiceover.
Nearly everything you do is narrated, as it happens. Even better, it sounds like someone doing their best Tom Waits impersonation, even down to pacing and inflection.
This creates a rather interesting – forgive me the game wankery – dissonance between the cute visuals and the gritty narrative presence. That the narration is in past tense is also pretty interesting. It really isn’t the kind of game we normally look at, but we’re pretty happy we did.
There was a lot more on Warner’s stand, but these were the most Atomic-grade games to play. There’s so much to see at E3 that you really have to pick your fights…
Next up, our take on 2K Games’ impressive E3 showing, including Bioshock: Infinite and XCOM.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012