Hanging in the balance.

Eight years is a long time to wait for answers, and the opening scenes of Dreamfall Chapters understand as much, providing a tearful gut-punch that is as much of a conclusion as it is an introduction. This is the universe that has occupied my thoughts and fantasies since 1999, when The Longest Journey was released and earned rightful praise as one of the best adventure games ever made. It was a game about balance: the balance between the mundane and the magical, the head and the heart. Its sequel, 2006's Dreamfall, found new worlds to balance--those of waking life and dreams--and Dreamfall Chapters returns to this same theme soon after its emotional opening. Returning Dreamfall heroine Zoe Castillo has remained comatose, but she has not allowed her body to serve as a prison.

Those earlier games provided another kind of balance: that between a slow-paced opening and meaningful narrative tension that rose as the stakes grew higher. The first episode of Dreamfall Chapters provides the former, laying the groundwork for a potentially rousing adventure, but too little rises from that foundation. Those eight years between Dreamfall and its sequel were long--but I suspect that the wait between the Dreamfall Chapters' first and second episodes will feel just as lengthy, even if it's a matter of months and not years. As part of a long-term arc, Book One: Reborn may prove highly effective; on its own, it plays at a measured adagio that rarely quickens. The episodic format doesn't seem a good fit for the series' long-term storytelling, and I felt stranded by the abrupt ending, as if I had been invited to an opulent dinner only to arrive and find no one was home.

Zoe has a knack for getting in over her head.

Dreamfall Chapters may begin with an answer, but it is more concerned with questions--questions that you can add to the growing list of Longest Journey mysteries. The nature of the Tower being built in Marcuria, the relationship of the Undreaming to the dream machines, the identity of the white dragon: these lingering wonders are left to occupy your thoughts while you navigate Book One's more pressing themes. Zoe's spirit has been left to wander the Dreamtime, that otherworldly dimension first introduced in Dreamfall, even as her body rests in hospital. Here, she helps those stranded in the Dreamtime, people in the waking world that are connected to WATIcorp's dream machines, which provide on-demand dreams as entertainment to the masses.

The subsequent level provides both an intriguing setting and an effective tutorial, putting you in control of Zoe from a third-person perspective, and having you assist lost dreamers in finding their way home. A selection cursor automatically hones in on interactive objects in your field of vision, flipping between choices as you move and look about, and indicating the type of interaction available with an appropriate icon. This system is a natural progression from Dreamfall's selection cone, making both controller and keyboard-and-mouse setups viable options.

Two characters, two prisons.

More importantly, this sequence familiarizes you with Dreamfall Chapters' dialogue mechanics, which allow you to choose responses that suit your vision of Zoe. One of the game's successes is how it allows you to set a path, but ensures that all paths are authentic to this lovable woman who captivated me and so many others years ago. Zoe has always been gentle but aimless, making her indecision during these conversations an authentic aspect of her character, and not a game-ish contrivance that contradicts the earlier games' linear tales. When faced with a choice, Zoe thinks each choice aloud as you hover over it, speaking every line with a thoughtfulness and sincerity that should easily win you over. "I'm not ready to wake up, to face myself again," she thinks to herself. "I'm scared of losing what little I have left." Having found a purpose in this supernatural zone, it is no wonder she would have reservations about leaving. But because her choices--and therefore yours as well--occupy different places in the same emotional spectrum, none of them contradict what we already know of her.

Zoe ultimately finds her way back to the real world--well, the real world the series calls Stark, in any case--but her memories of the past are left behind in the Dreamtime. Months after her revival, Zoe has made a home in Propast, another of the series' rich and gorgeous locales. It's a multicultural neighborhood, far removed from the dystopias science-fiction stories typically depict. Propast is a future that rose from a past and present we understand; that the city should be home to people with American, European, Asian, and African accents is perfectly reasonable. This is the global village the age of the Internet has produced. Gorgeous lamps sway above you as you traverse the Chinese district; just blocks away, neon signs written in German ("Sonnenschein" consumer goods company) and English advertisements ("Cloud Nine Prosthetics") peacefully coexist. Food carts sell every kind of food you can imagine from the world over. You have never been to this city, but it sure feels like home.

Choice leads to consequence.

The relationship between technology and culture isn't always so peaceful in Dreamfall Chapters, though your earlier choices determine how you approach that dichotomy. In my time with Zoe, I learned about her job as a laboratory technician, and set about testing synthetic algae with the help of a little hovering robot called Kidbot. Other players have told me of a mechanical friend called Shitbot, but my choices never led me down a path that included him. I don't regret my time with Kidbot, however: her playfulness is cute but never grating, a difficult balancing act that Dreamfall Chapters gets exactly right, thanks to adorable dialogue and fantastic voice acting that conveys innocence without ever becoming saccharine.

Dreamfall Chapters thus reflects the series' history with its imaginative settings and empathetic characters. There are puzzles to solve and tasks to perform in your time here, but the episode is short on brainteasers: the obstructions you encounter are easily surmounted. The few inventory items you accumulate have intuitive uses and are quickly disposed of, making the first episode as much of an extended tutorial as it is a meandering prologue. Episode one is not short on glitches, however; the game struggles somewhat with its lens flaring, sometimes streaking your screen with distracting lights and colors, and in the game's final and curious scene, I walked right through a door and out of the level.

The super-city of Europolis sprawls across what used to be entire countries. Propat is just one part of the whole.

That final scenario isn't just intriguing from a story perspective: it also puts you in control of an unlikely protagonist with a particularly charming way of interacting with the world. Earlier in the game, you also take control of Kian Alvane, so the world of Arcadia does not go unacknowledged, though a prison is the only setting you get to explore there. Kian's chapter is light on challenge, but the thematic ties to Zoe's story give his section heft regardless: just as Zoe refuses to let her comatose body cage her, so too does Kian embrace the opportunity to flee his cell. Both characters are getting second chances, just as the series itself has risen from the crevasse Dreamfall left behind.

The Longest Journey crafted a protracted story arc that featured an equally leisurely opening, but grew into one of the genre's greatest citadels. The first episode's flat narrative structure may not be entirely satisfying, but Dreamfall Chapters' diverse and endearing cast, nuggets of political and personal tensions, and glimmers of the poignancy that made the previous Longest Journey games so memorable make me hopeful for the futures of Stark, Arcadia, and the Dreamtime, wherever those places might take me.

The impact of numerology over the names

Whenever an infant is born into a family, it’s a norm to first assess him/her with a name. The name of a person is just not a word to be referred to them but actually is the definition, a description of their personality and the briefing of their traits. It should be made very sure that while naming a person all the necessary measures are taken care of. They say that labeling of a product is done properly to define the quality of that product. The same theory can be applied upon assessing names to the young ones too. The better the name the more illustrative would be the definition.

 

While a lot of people who believe in ancestry, name their children on the basis of their legacy or the family trees, while others who believe in Numerology have different opinions. The people who believe in numerology work and practice a lot with numbers before naming their kids. In numerology each letter of your name is said to have an individual corresponding number. Cornerstone is said to be the first letter in your name while capstone is said to be the last one. Under Numerology the first vowel is also given sheer importance, as it is said to fulfill all your urges and dreams in life. Each and every letter in this section has a meaning of its own and preparing a name with all those combine meaningful letters will eventually make out the best desired result. The sum of the numbers in your birth date and the sum of numbers you make out while naming a person displays a great deal in the character, the future, the strengths and the weakness of an individual. Numerology helps in standing and fighting against all these weaknesses and odds. Believers say that numerology make you achieve whatever you want in life, and not just infants, a lot of people change their names in the later stages of their life too after realizing the problems they are suffering in their lives and in order to fight against them. This concept of Numerology was initially brought up by the Babylonians but gradually everyone started practicing it and eventually it became so popular and effective that now it is practiced across almost all over the world. There might be no scientific proofs about the authenticity of these numerology charts, but people still have faith in ample numbers about the relationship of words and numbers.

 

People also believe that in Numerology the on goings and the redemption is based upon three major factors; the date of birth, the name given to you on your birth and the name you use currently. The third factor can well be managed according to the needs and necessary requirements by the Numerology charts. There are ways to work over your names even if you’re a grown up in order to get over the grey shades you are going through in your personal lives. So everyone needs to go through that Numerology chart while assessing their young ones with new names.

 

Browse through name meaning, rankings, other people's comments, ratings, and other statistics in addition to the name meanings.

 

Let’s Fairize, guys! Or not.

Conceptually, Fairy Fencer F would seem to be a return to the roots of the JRPG genre: a traditionally-styled game with a distinctly Japanese story and aesthetic. Consider the alliteration in Fairy Fencer F’s title, which calls Final Fantasy to mind, or the game’s development team, which includes composer Nobuo Uematsu and artist Yoshitaka Amano, both of Final Fantasy fame. How unfortunate, then, that Fairy Fencer F is no glorious return to the heyday of the JRPG, but rather a strange, distorted effort, terrifically fun in bursts but plagued by unfortunate technical issues.

Fairy Fencer F is the story of young warrior Fang and his fairy partner, Eryn. Fang's excessively cynical and derogatory attitude is likely to grate within mere minutes of starting the game, in which he constantly complains about his new path in life. You see, as the game begins, Fang is told by a shopkeeper that if he is capable of pulling out a strange sword embedded in a rock, he will be granted any wish he desires. All he wants is tasty food (a running obsession that becomes unfunny almost instantly), but, upon yanking out the sword, he is greeted by semi-amnesiac Eryn, told he is a legendary fencer, and asked to free the world's Goddess from her stasis by finding and using Furies, fairies trapped in mythical weapons. Fang’s annoyance at having such a burden suddenly dropped on him is understandable, but his continued whininess and apathy is exceptionally irksome. Eryn is more likeable, though the moment another female appears on the scene she goes into (similarly unfunny) jealous-possessive-angry mode.

Fairy Fencer F's least irritating character.

I soon met Tiara, a stuck-up, bratty fencer who harbors a genre-standard terrible secret. She also doubles as an exposition machine, teaching you about the plane beyond reality where the Goddess and evil deity are sealed and giving you a free inn to recover at--when she's not being bossy and condescending. Notice a theme here? The majority of Fairy Fencer F's cast was ripped straight from the pages of Anime Character Tropes You Can Implement Easily. Suffice to say, it takes a fair amount of time before a truly likeable character joins the troupe. Certain party members become more tolerable as time goes on, but it's hard to shake those awful first impressions.

Saddled with a party of people I would have liked to punch in the face given the opportunity, I ventured out into the exploration portion of Fairy Fencer F. Much to my relief, exploration and combat are a fair bit more energizing than watching barely-animated character cutouts complain to each other. Combat is turn-based with positioning elements: You and your enemies move around a small field and trade blows with each other, launching area-of-effect spells and utilizing strategic positioning to your advantage. The basics aren't tough to grasp, and as you earn more weapon points in battle, you can customize your stat boosts and add multi-hitting combo capabilities to your characters' strikes.

This kind of cringe-worthy dialogue is par for the course.

The majority of Fairy Fencer F's cast was ripped straight from the pages of Anime Character Tropes You Can Implement Easily.

A neat addition to the formula is the tension gauge: as characters attack and use skills, their tension increases and multiplies the damage they deal. Once tension reaches a certain point, characters can "fairize," transforming into quasi-robot-armored fighters with access to special, super-damaging techniques. However, playing overly defensively--using lots of healing items and spells, retreating from enemies, running away from battle--reduces the tension, and if it dips below a certain point, your combat efficacy will suffer. It's a neat system that makes the combat considerably more engaging. It's quite fast-paced, as well--the handy L2 button allows you to skip a lot of long-winded combat animations.

You can find new dungeons to explore at set points in the story, where you'll find some Furies to collect (along with the fairies that inhabit them and/or possibly another fencer). Once you've got a Fury/fairy combo, you can summon the pair to remove one of the binding blades sealing the Goddess and the Vile God. Doing so upgrades the abilities of the fairy, who can then either be assigned to one of your party members or to a dungeon via a process called "world shaping." While the stat bonuses fairies can provide to party members are nothing to be sneezed at (and they also level up through combat), world shaping is particularly cool: by assigning a fairy to a dungeon, you also get persistent effects throughout that dungeon, i.e. an experience boost when defeating enemies. This helps make sub-questing less of an out-and-out grind, as it helps tailor some dungeon settings to your liking. The dungeon romping itself is also more engaging than developer Compile Heart's previous endeavors, with multi-level layouts and traps.

This still frame is only a little slower than the game's average frame rate.

As much as I enjoyed the fundamental combat and dungeon-crawling, it was sometimes difficult for me to enjoy them. In many of the dungeons, Fairy Fencer F suffers from an atrocious and varying framerate, frequently dipping into the sub-20 frames-per-second range. Compile Heart games tend to suffer from this problem, even though the visuals aren't terribly complex, but Fairy Fencer F is particularly awful, to the point where dungeon crawls can lead to motion sickness and headaches.

The irritating cast and miserable framerate dips aside, you must also contend with sudden difficulty spikes, recycled environments, and an inconsistent art style. Even the much-touted Yoshitaka Amano and Nobuo Uematsu’s contributions are disappointing. Amano's contributions are a handful of art concepts, while Uematsu's--or more specifically, Uematsu's team of musicians, the Earthbound Papas’--music is uneven; some tracks are absolutely fantastic, while others are entirely unmemorable. Yet there are glimpses of a game that could have been consistently entertaining: combat, when it's not running like a slideshow, is satisfying; there's a lot of customization available to the player; and that butt-rock theme that plays during fairizing is rousing in much the same way Uematsu's Blue Dragon boss music was.

Fairy Fencer F has its bright spots, but it's not a game I can heartily recommend--there's too much detritus to dig through in order to get to the fun bits. Compile Heart has announced a sequel, so here's to hoping the move to more recent hardware will solve their games’ lingering technical problems--and here's to hoping the resulting games will be better as a result.

Blocks the material, design by imagination

Minecraft is about the big things, just as much as it favors the small. It's almost impossible to think of Minecraft without envisioning the picturesque structures, from castles to cities, that have been constructed by fans. But Minecraft is also about the minor touches, and sometimes they are what you remember the most--that feeling of awe as you peer across a forest of snow-capped oak, nearly out of sight, the sense of relaxation as you watch the sun set behind a distant mountain, and the sharp intake of breath as you stare deep into an underground mine lit by glowing pools of red-hot lava. Minecraft: Xbox One Edition offers both worlds, large and small, as well as the tools to create your own voxel-constructed paradise.

As if climbing a ladder, you start at the bottom and work your way through technology. Spawning a procedurally generated world in Minecraft's default survival mode for the first time places you at the bottom rung, where your goal is to seek tools, shelter, and food. The humorous term "punching trees" was popularized by Minecraft, as your earliest task involves hammering away at the nearest oak or spruce tree for blocks of wood. From wooden tools and weapons, you soon move to stone, then iron, and then, if you're fortunate enough to find it deep in the earth, diamond--not unlike rising through the tiers of the ages of man. Killing animals such as cows or pigs yields food, which staves off hunger, at least for a short while.

With the crafting menu, you turn wood into planks and then create a crafting table, the backbone of your Minecraft experience. The crafting table in Minecraft's console versions hasn't changed since the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, for which the options are vastly different compared to the game on PC. Here, all items, from tools to decorations, are available for you to investigate. If you have the material to construct a certain item, it will be fully colored in; otherwise, it remains slightly opaque. On the PC, however, crafting requires a method of trial and error, where you place materials such as wooden planks and sticks on a nine-by-nine board to create new items. On console, you need only have the necessary material in your inventory to craft items. The process is more streamlined, and it prevents you from constantly rubbing several things together in hopes of creating something useful, as well as from looking up crafting recipes online, so you can get to building your blocky empire more quickly.

Undead!

As your knowledge grows, so does the complexity of your projects and the scope of your adventures. A small hut awkwardly cobbled together from blocks of wood and stone is a strange thing to take pride in, and yet it's hard not to feel some accomplishment in its creation. It's small, it's ugly, and there's a good chance the floor is made of dirt, but it's yours. As you learn the odds and ends of creation in Minecraft, that motley shack will be traded in for a cabin deep in the woods or a castle high on a mountaintop where you can survey the land through its windows. Or it could become something else, anything else, as your hand is guided by your imagination, your only limit on what you can accomplish.

Minecraft doesn't include a story to follow or missions to complete; your quests are set by you, but the journey can be just as rewarding as those found in other games. There are many sights to see, from the aforementioned sprawling oak forests covered in snow to mucky swamplands with vines and water flecked with green lily pads. Your adventures often carry a similar tone to those found in Fallout or Elder Scrolls games, where a trip through the desert on a hunt for crafting materials is stopped short as a village materializes in your peripheral vision, luring you with villager trade, books to steal, and crops to harvest. In that same desert, you could stumble upon a half-buried temple, where beneath its floor lies secret treasure--as well as an untimely end for brazen travelers who ignore the hidden trap.

Some familiar Xbox franchises get the Minecraft treatment.

There are dangers in Minecraft that stalk every dark corner and winding tunnel. At night, vicious creatures roam, threatening you with poisoned fangs and sharp arrows. You can protect yourself with armor and weapons, crafted from materials ranging from leather from slaughtered cows or iron discovered embedded in stone. But even the most seasoned Minecraft veterans can fall prey to the many enemies that haunt the land. Cave spelunking is often quickly ended by an undetected creeper, its blood-curdling hiss the last thing you hear before the inevitable explosion. I have been knocked into a river of lava by a skeleton archer just out of range more often than I care for, once even during the course of this review. The loss is always a bitter pill, but you can always respawn and try to recover any lost items. That is, unless they fall into lava, in which case it's time to start over (I hate those archers so, so much).

It's not expected that you will raise a castle or stretch railways across the land overnight, but Minecraft: Xbox One Edition does well in easing you into the basics as you move along. Enabled by default, tooltips inform you of the uses of the many blocks that surround you. You learn that throwing blocks of sand into a furnace will result in glass or that nether quartz, found in Minecraft's hellish nether, can be crafted into blocks of marble. The in-depth tutorial mode is like a game itself, and it is here that you learn everything that Minecraft is about. The tutorial takes you from learning how to construct small structures and tools to spending gained experience points on enchanting tables to add extra bite to your sword or efficiency to your pickaxe. Minecraft: Xbox One Edition does a fantastic job of blending useful information and advice into its design, allowing you to play the major role in its lessons.

Minecraft: Xbox One Edition surpasses the Xbox 360 Edition with cleaner, sharper visuals, and a farther view distance, and it runs at 60 frames per second for complete smoothness.

In Minecraft, you don't need to take on adventures alone. Killing skeleton archers drops bones, which you can offer a wolf for the chance that it will become a friendly dog that stays by your side and protects you from enemies. In the wild and bright-green jungles live spotted ocelots, which have a chance to transform into adorable house cats after being fed a fish. But if it's the comfort of fellow humans you seek, you can bring along up to seven friends on Xbox Live to join you on your journeys. Minecraft is an excellent social game, one where ambitious projects no longer seem so laborious when more hands are added to the fold. You can also play with a four-player split screen, where family or friends can tackle any undertaking together.

Minecraft on the Xbox One is similar to its PlayStation 4 iteration in both performance and accessibility, with only a few notable differences. Both versions allow you to load saved files from their prior console generation, though your old map is still unfortunately limited to its original size, surrounded by invisible borders. The latest versions are much larger, featuring map sizes roughly 37 times larger by volume than what the prior games boast. However, the size is not unlimited; there is still an impassable wall, but the land within is enormous nonetheless, so it's improbable that you will see and do everything too soon. Minecraft: Xbox One Edition surpasses the Xbox 360 Edition with cleaner, sharper visuals, and a farther view distance, and it runs at 60 frames per second for complete smoothness. The game also includes a creative mode, which allows you to create without the limitations of materials. In this mode, you can fly around the land and construct anything you desire.

Look familiar?

Where the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions differ the most is downloadable content. Both ports feature multiple skin packs, but they star different characters. On Xbox One, you can purchase packs that allow you to play as the Master Chief or Gordon Freeman, while the PlayStation 4 offers characters from God of War and The Last of Us. Minecraft: Xbox One Edition, however, includes resource packs with theme block textures to match Skyrim, Mass Effect, or Halo, which are not currently available on PlayStation 4 (though I don't expect to see a Halo motif any time soon for Sony's console).

Like the PlayStation 4 version, Minecraft on Xbox One plays second fiddle to the game on PC. The latest iteration of Minecraft on PC includes horses that populate grassy plains, fluffy rabbits, as well as updated flora, and stained glass. However, it's better to view the PC experience not just as a better or different Minecraft but as a vision of what the game will soon become for consoles. Minecraft: Xbox One Edition offers dozens and dozens of hours' worth of entertainment, and as time goes by, updates will include even more to see and animals to interact with. Much like going from a rustic shelter to a statuesque castle, Minecraft: Xbox One Edition will only offer more in time, with future updates adding even more hours to a game already brimming with near-endless potential.

Stand before the Lords.

His name is Harkyn. He exits conversation not with a goodbye, but with a gruff "I don't care," as if he can barely be bothered to embark on the quest at hand. Harkyn may not be delighted by the adventure he's been thrust into, but I can claim no such apathy: Lords of the Fallen is a dark-fantasy pleasure, cut from the same cloth as Dark Souls, yet distinct enough to earn its own spotlight and, perhaps, to earn your affection as well. Harkyn himself is not easy to love, but ultimately, he doesn't matter as much as the world he serves and the hammers he swings.

"World" might be too generous a word, actually: You spend most of your time in corridors and combat arenas, not gazing onto spacious landscapes. Lords of the Fallen's dramatic citadel and hushed monastery are suffering from the invasion of otherworldly flesh-monsters and armored behemoths. Snowy peaks may rise in the distance, but you will not be breathing in their refreshing air. Lords of the Fallen means to choke you with smoke and poison, and to crush you between the stone slabs that line its monumental suspended bridge. The view from this bridge says more about this world than words can convey. Ahead of you lies the gaping maw of a demonic temple hungry for your flesh. The massive chains that connect your destination to the bridge must have taken hundreds of hours to forge. Two colossal soldiers are carved into the mountain on either side of the entrance, warning you of the blood that will soon be spilled. This is Lords of the Fallen: ponderous and unwelcoming. There is no hiding from its dangers.

Unwisely, the game insists on trying to weave a coherent story into these spaces, with each of Harkyn's cohorts and various audio logs tossing up a word salad that does little to get you invested. In time, the story begins to make sense, but this cliched tale of the balance between good and evil isn't the reason to press on. Instead, it's better to let the frozen walkways and giant braziers speak for themselves. You may begin your adventure in a holy sanctuary, but this place seeks to murder you. Consider the titles of the bosses you fight. Guardian. Beast. Champion. Who needs proper names, when "Annihilator" gets the point across? These titans and their lesser cohorts have no other purpose than to kill.

You fight several such rivals in the first few hours (out of 20 or so) alone, though it takes time to reach the most formidable ones. In the meanwhile, you roam the game's corridors from a third-person perspective, swinging an axe or sword, dodging or blocking incoming attacks, and occasionally calling on the gods of magic to give you a hand when you most need it. It's almost impossible not to draw the obvious comparisons to the Souls series here. An energy meter depletes when you block, roll, and attack, forcing you to closely manage your defenses lest you leave yourself vulnerable to damage. Different melee weapons require different approaches, but Lords of the Fallen gives each of them an authentic sense of weight. Combat requires understanding of how long it takes to swing that humongous greatsword you carry, and how much time that fire-breathing thing you're fighting takes to prepare its next blow.

Lords of the Fallen's dramatic citadel and hushed monastery are suffering from the invasion of otherworldly flesh-monsters and armored behemoths.

So far, so Dark Souls then. Compared head to head, Souls games are superior to Lords of the Fallen in most given areas: Dark Souls is more mysterious, more difficult, and more diverse, and Lords of the Fallen features no online connectivity. To call Lords of the Fallen a poor man's Dark Souls sells it entirely too short, however. For one, Lords of the Fallen strikes a different kind of tone. It is moody and oppressive, but rarely terrifying; it is a power fantasy, not a heart-wrenching death simulator that rolls deadly boulders at you as if you are a single, miniscule bowling pin. The art style reflect the difference: armor and architecture is less Medieval, chunkier and excessively ornate, mirroring Harkyn's strength and confidence. Lords of the Fallen has a few challenges, but it's rare for you to feel frail or afraid: the game simply isn't hard enough to make your blood boil. That's at least true in the main world; the visits you make to a shadowy and sinister otherworld are more frightening.

Those visits bring great reward if you can conquer the darkness. Traversing this otherworld is like exploring a foggy dessert during the witching hour: you can barely see further than the tip of your blade, which make the occasional glimpse of light a true ray of hope. There is tribulation to undergo, however, before you reach possible treasure. Your steps into the beyond lead you first to easily-dispatched knights and mutants, which require only that you put the finicky targeting system to good use. Soon, though, you could encounter a rolling fire demon whose flaming carapace will quickly scorch your flesh. Your introduction to this dimension is a limited one, fortunately: you open a few treasure chests in the hope of finding a rune for upgrading your equipment, a new armor set, or an item that temporarily protects you from poison, and then return to the land of women and men. You reach this realm by entering portals that only unlock when you have killed some unknown beast. You will come to identify an available nearby portal by the crackles and creaks it makes as it opens, as if it's made of ancient tendons that haven't often had a chance to stretch.

The grind to level up is minimal, and while death is likely, it's not frequent enough to elicit heartache. When you perish, you leave behind your ghost and (usually) revive at whichever ruby crystal you last saved at. Your ghost contains all the experience you have accumulated since the prior death, but it doesn't remain forever, so it's in your best interests to go retrieve it, and to be timely about it, at least in the early hours. Every fallen enemy will have respawned after your death, but you will be armed with the knowledge of what lies ahead of you. You will also be armed with some spells and a gauntlet that shoots out magic projectiles, spews fire, and helps open new pathways. Selecting and casting spells is a matter of pressing or holding a button: there's no need to switch from a dagger to a wand if you want to punch a demon in the groin with your quake skill. There are no bows and arrows in Lords of the Fallen: it's all swords and sorcery. You can engorge on magic when leveling up and make quick work of the three-legged freak known as the infiltrator if you play your cards right. I prefer the heaviest killing tools, however, coming close enough to my foes to smell their breath.

You will probably not sob when your ghost expires and you leave behind all your experience. Experience can be regained easily, and in the last several hours, you accumulate too little experience from killing enemies to mind the loss. The bosses may parade around their ominous titles and roar with indignance, but most of them are more bark than bite: if you have Souls experience, many will go down on the first attempt. The challenge ramps up nicely during the lead-up to the final showdown, however, beginning with a double-boss encounter that signals trouble to come.

The greatest challenge Lords of the Fallen provides isn't a welcome one: it's easy to lose yourself in the crypts and corridors, unsure of where the game means for you to go. Every region cleverly connects with others, and unlocking a new door often leads you to a familiar area, provoking cries of "Eureka!" That interconnectedness can also be a burden, however, particularly when a loading screen is there to interrupt your travels. Dark Souls has no quest log, yet smartly uses its visual diversity and clear environmental gating to direct you. Lords of the Fallen tells you what you must do, but some areas are so circuitous and same-ish, and some entrances so subtle, that the game can become aimless. Backtracking is sometimes required, so you may not know where the right path lies.

Intriguing subtleties ultimately overcome any resulting tedium, however. You choose whether to save a man's life by amputating his arm--and then, whether to offer him a potion to help heal the wound you dealt him. Offering the potion diminishes your available (and replenishable) health draught count by one, but I was never sure if I had earned any reward for allowing him to live. Soon afterwards, I convinced a fellow warrior to spare a monk's life; I'm not sure there were any repercussions, but I was at least content to know that Harkyn was not always the vile executioner others insisted he was. Later, you get to make a more interesting life-or-death decision, and in at least one case, can circumvent danger entirely. Lords of the Fallen has a brief brush with mystery in these circumstances, inspiring "what if" quandaries. What if I ignore the order to request a group of deserters? What if I go around the monster rather than meet it head-on? Should there be a Lords of the Fallen 2, I hope for more what-ifs, and more-meaningful consequences to accompany them.

The bosses may parade around their ominous titles and roar with indignance, but most of them are more bark than bite.

Superficially, you could call Lords of the Fallen a Souls game for the meek and the uninitiated. But it earns more respect than such a flippant description. Lords of the Fallen isn't about the game that it isn't, but the game that it is. It's about the ghoulish blacksmith, his glowing eyes, and the long tufts of stiff hair that rise from his scalp. It's about the crunches of iron against bone when your hammer finds its mark. It's about taking in new sights and sounds, and about finding new ways to travel to old ones. It's about that suspended bridge, the monuments that guard it, and the creatures waiting within. Harkyn may have no use for these places, but there are riches inside nonetheless.

Take me down to the Sunset City where the monsters are green and the carnage is pretty.

If you're worn out on games with drab palettes and dramatic characters, then Sunset Overdrive is just the game you need to lift your spirits. It's dripping with color and upbeat personality, and its cast is filled with comical caricatures. Sure, its dialogue is vulgar and absurd, but unlike so many games that attempt to be edgy, Sunset Overdrive makes its quips feel natural rather than forced. It never takes itself too seriously, which in this case, is a good thing. It's also a blast to play thanks to it's movement system and over-the-top weapons. It's a liberating game that trades in rules and drama for freedom and pure unadulterated enjoyment, and Sunset Overdrive never pretends to be anything but an excuse to swear like a sailor, jump off of a skyscraper, and blow up a gang of monsters.

As you'd expect, an absurd game like Sunset Overdrive features an equally absurd plot. It's the end of days after the evil energy drink corporation, Fizzco, poisoned the citizens of Sunset City, turning them into violent rage beasts known as OD. On one hand, that means you need to fight your way out of the city, on the other hand, that means you get to fight your way out of the city. As a janitor that's been taken advantage of by Sunset's hedonistic jerks in the past, it's finally your turn dish out the pain, and you get to do it with an over-the-top selection of powerful and ridiculous weaponry.

Before your crusade kicks off, you create a character of your choosing using the character customization system. There's a great variety of options to choose from, but should you grow bored with your character, you're free to go back to the drawing board at any time and revise your appearance. Over the course of your journey, you team up with small factions of survivors to devise your escape plan, and along the way, you go toe to toe with hundreds of monsters, Fizzco robots, and enemy humans known as scabs. Each faction you fight alongside sticks to a theme: there are the lazy, rich, preppy kids, a scout troop, and a gang of LARPers, to name a few. Though the factions' characterizations are slightly mocking and exploitative of the groups they represent, there are also plenty of times when representatives from each group call out and mock the stereotypes that are so often applied to them, striking a respectful balance.

Make no mistake, however: Sunset Overdrive is immature on all fronts. Nearly every character swears up a storm, dropping f-bombs like it's going out of style. Thankfully, unlike many games that take this approach, their foul language feels natural and it reinforces the brash attitude that permeates the game. Largely, the voice actors behind the game's cast do a commendable job of selling their roles. You'd think that everything would be colored by a hint of doom and gloom given the situation at hand, but the survivors you meet seem to take it in stride, giving the game a lighthearted and irreverent quality that's rather uplifting.

Sunset Overdrive is one of the best looking games on the Xbox One, both on a technical and artistic level. The city itself is large, dense with buildings and artifacts, with plenty of variation in architectural style. Everything's coated in a bright, saturated coat of paint, giving the game a cartoonish quality that's easy to love. When you're in the midst of battle, sometimes with what seems like a hundred enemies, the screen fills with explosions, bursts of lightning, and occasionally bright green ooze. Despite all of the chaos on screen, the frame rate remains rock solid. Sunset Overdrive isn't meant to look realistic, but that doesn't disqualify it as a top contender for the best looking Xbox One game. It's simply beautiful to behold.

Of course, when you're zipping across town, you're going to miss a few of the finer details, but you'll be having too much fun to care. One of Sunset Overdrive's primary delights is its mobility system, which is loose and flexible in the name of enjoyment. Nearly every object and surface is an opportunity to gain ground, which makes it easy to travel great distances with speed and grace. You can grind along most objects, including telephone lines, ledges, handrails, and the like. Cars, awnings, and exhaust ducts act as trampolines that send you skyward, allowing you to work your way up and over buildings with ease. You can also wall-run indefinitely and, eventually, dash in mid-air and run atop bodies of water.

The only downside to the emphasis on movement is that if you find yourself standing in place in the middle of combat, you're going to be punished. It's easy to become overwhelmed by dozens of enemies at once if you're fighting while stationary, and they can quickly whittle away your health. There are times when your instincts tell you to fight rather than flee, but despite your best intentions, this is rarely the right decision.

Stringing movements together not only gets you to your destination safely and quickly, but it exemplifies what Sunset Overdrive is all about. Sometimes you slightly miss your target, but that's OK, because the game's very forgiving when it comes to timing and aiming. Once you get the hang of each move, you can free-run from one end of the city to another without ever touching the ground. The more tricks you use, the more style points you earn. As you fill up your style gauge, you activate elemental and stat boosts that make you more effective in battle. These "Amps" can be applied to you or your weapons, and are purchased with collectibles that are strewn throughout Sunset City. Similar to the open world game Crackdown, you have to explore every nook and cranny of the city to find them, but you can make it easier on yourself by purchasing maps for each type of collectible.

Sunset Overdrive never pretends to be anything but an excuse to swear like a sailor, jump off of a skyscraper, and blow up a gang of monsters.

As you perform certain actions, such as grinding, using automatic weapons, and air dashing, you earn badges that can be traded in for overdrives. Overdrives are another form of upgrade, which are similar to amps, but they're earned a different way. They can be applied to your character to increase style-point generation, boost weapon strength, or grant you health augmentations. Between Amps and Overdrives, there are a seemingly endless number of ways to upgrade your character and remix their strengths. If you want to explore the full range of options, you're going to spend a lot of time gathering collectibles, and even more time generating badges to unlock the best Overdrives.

Like the movement system, Sunset Overdrive's weapons are wild and varied enough to keep you entertained well beyond the end of the main mission path. Unlocking some weapons requires an absurd amount of the game's energy drink currency to unlock, and your best bet to earn them is to tackle the large selection of side missions, or to replay old missions for better rankings. You take aim with the likes of an acid sprinkler, a bowling ball cannon, an explosive teddy bear launcher, and a gun that bombards enemies with fireworks and illusionary Chinese dragons. Sometimes it's hard to choose which weapons to bring into battle, not because you need specific equipment, but because there are so many great options to choose from.

Unfortunately, one of the few issues with the game is its selection of mission types. For a while, it feels like all you're doing are fetch quests. Someone needs supplies and they need you to go get them. It definitely helps that moving and shooting are so fun, but you still pine for something different after the dozenth fetch quest in a row. Give it time, however, and you'll eventually discover a wide variety of challenges, including a hefty dose of traversal challenges and combat scenarios to keep you busy and beef up your resources.

There are also more than a few great boss battles that challenge your ability to act quickly and move effectively, and these are some of the best moments in the game. Just when you think you're on the verge of boredom, an over-the-top mission appears, reigniting your enthusiasm. If you've always dreamed of taking on a massive inflatable mascot, similar to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, there's a boss battle for that. Maybe you've wanted to chase a train by grinding on rails, or you have a burning desire to ride on the back of a massive dragon that's winding through a vast cityscape. It's not that there's no fun to be had in Sunset Overdrive's typical missions, but the imaginative and surprising boss fights provide an enjoyable and taxing challenge.

You can freely replay any mission at a moment's notice, but eventually you'll want to jump online and screw around Sunset City with your friends. Hop into the Chaos Squad booths around the map, and you and a team of seven other warriors can tackle horde-like throngs of enemies, defend outposts, and put your traversal skills to the test. Sunset Overdrive emphasizes cooperation, but team members are awarded for their individual performance. Throughout the course of the game, you fight alongside computer-controlled warriors, but they're mostly useless fodder. In Chaos Squad, you're working with other tricked out players that are capable of zipping to-and-fro with a cache of arms at the ready. It feels like you're part of a stylish, amoral Justice League. Unfortunately, the difficulty of co-up doesn't scale based on the number of players in your party. With fewer than eight people, some Chaos Squad challenges are simply too hard; with fewer than four, you're almost always asking for trouble.

Insomniac Games has crafted an excellent game in Sunset Overdrive. It's not without a few niggling issues, but you'll be too busy enjoying yourself to care. You can compare it to games like Crackdown, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Ratchet and Clank, but by combining the best elements of those games into a single package and injecting it with an anything goes, rock and roll attitude, you'll never think of it as anything but a singular achievement that stands tall on its own merits. It's one of the best games on the Xbox One, and a refreshing shot of merriment.

Get to Know Halo: The Master Chief Collection's 'Lockout' Remake, 'Lockdown' – IGN First

Lockout is, along with Blood Gulch, arguably the best and most famous Halo map of all time. So what was it like to remake it on Xbox One? What, if anything, needed to be changed? Original Halo 2 lead multiplayer designer Max Hoberman, who oversaw all six of the Xbox One's Halo 2 remake maps, walks us through the new version. And be sure to also click the video below, where Team IGN puts the hurt on Team 343. Our video is from the perspective of IGN's best player, Alfredo "Danger" Diaz.

Also be sure to stop by our ever-expanding IGN First hub page for this ongoing month of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, the one-stop shop for everything we're doing.

Oh, and here are our other Anniversary map tour videos with Max in case you missed them:

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pcgamer.com
ign.com

WWE 2K15 Who Got NXT Mode Announced and Detailed

A brand new game mode for WWE 2K15, called Who Got NXT, was announced today by 2K. The new mode will be exclusive to the last-gen versions of the game.

Who Got NXT centers around NXT superstars Sami Zayn, Adrian Neville, Rusev, Corey Graves and Bo Dallas. Each of the five wrestlers has their own chapter, which consists of four matches. Completing these matches in order, along with each match's stipulations, will unlock each wrestler on the main game's roster.

Completing all five chapters of Who Got NXT will unlock the Proving Ground mode. Proving Ground is described as the spiritual successor to WWE 2K14's Defeat the Streak game mode. While Defeat the Streak pitted players against Undertaker, Proving Ground will put you up against WWE 2K15 cover star John Cena.

The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of WWE 2K15 will release on October 28 in North America and October 31 in Europe. The current-gen versions were delayed to November 18 in North America and November 21 in Europe. For more on WWE 2K15, head over to the IGN First hub.

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gamesradar.com
pcgamer.com

Lyndsy Fonseca Joins Marvel's Agent Carter

Peggy Carter just got a new friend, as Lyndsy Fonseca has joined the cast of Marvel's Agent Carter. Marvel.com broke the news, revealing the Kick-Ass and Nikita alum will play Angie Martinelli, described as an aspiring actress who befriends Peggy.

Lyndsy Fonseca (seen here in Nikita) is joining the cast of Marvel's Agent Carter.

My fellow Nikita fans know that Fonseca more than held her own through that show's impressive actions scenes. We'll see if her role on Agent Carter -- which seems to specifically represent Peggy's life away from her SSR duties -- remains a strictly civilian one, or if some curve balls could be coming.

Jeph Loeb, Marvel's Head of Television, tells Marvel.com, "Marvel's Agent Carter opens up an exciting world of new characters for us. Lyndsy brings a warmth and humanity to Angie, who'll be the friend Peggy needs if she's to survive the dangers that lie ahead."

Agent Carter recently began production on its eight-episode season, which will air during a midseason break for Agents of SHIELD. Fonseca joins Hayley Atwell, reprising her role as the title character, along with Dominic Cooper, back as Howard Stark. Other cast members include Shea Whigham (Boardwalk Empire) as SSR chief Roger Dooley and Enver Gjokaj (Dollhouse) and Chad Michael Murray (One Tree Hill) as SSR agents Daniel Sousa and Jack Thompson. James D'Arcy (Master and Commander) will play Howard Stark's butler, notable Marvel comics character Edwin Jarvis.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely penned the pilot episode, with Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas executive producing the series.

IGN was recently present at New York Comic Con where the first footage from Agent Carter was shown.

gamesradar.com
pcgamer.com

Todd McFarlane Debuts First Images from New Spawn Animated Series

Image Comics founders sure love teasing adaptations of their projects, even if they may not happen (For example: Rob Liefeld and his X-Force movie). Well, Todd McFarlane now proves that a new Spawn animated series of some sort is in the works, and he has three new images to prove it.

On his Facebook page, McFarlane told fans how he is always asked at conventions: "When is the new Spawn movie coming and when are we going to see more Animation like we did on HBO years ago?" The Venom creator then promptly posted three new images, which can be seen below:

Spawn supporting characters Sam & Twitch are featured among the images, who are also famous for appearing in their own comic book series by a pre-Avengers Brian Michael Bendis. As for the city images, it's nice how McFarlane seems to be retaining the 90's aesthetic with the retro cars in a grungy NYC landscape.

McFarlane goes on to also tease, "there is LOTS and LOTS more I can show you!!!!!! I may even put up some of the voice tracks for you. Oh...and just wait until you see SPAWN himself!"

The HBO series McFarlane refers to -- Todd McFarlane's Spawn -- aired from 1997-1999, and won itself an Emmy (and was featured on IGN's Top 25 Comic Book TV Shows list!)

Keep your eyes on IGN for further developments on all things Spawn!

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computerandvideogames.com
gamespot.com

Project CARS' New Gameplay Trailer is Scarily Realistic

Slightly Mad Studios has released a new trailer for upcoming racer Project CARS showing off a nighttime ride through some tempestuous weather.

The trailer, which you can see above, is made up of gameplay footage and shows off the visual fidelity that the studio is aiming for when it comes to the title.

In case you missed it last week, it was confirmed the game has been pushed back to March 2015, reportedly due to move the title away from "the competitive holiday scene dominated by household names". If the gameplay's half as good as the graphics revealed today however, we reckon it could have held it's own!

In our preview last month, we thought that, in the absence of Gran Turismo and Forza this year, the time was right for Project Cars to make its mark.

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eurogamer.net
ign.com

Fear is the mind killer.

There's an elite brand of horror that, even in these glory days when players are drowning in utterly terrifying interactive experiences, is rare to see, and harder to pull off, and that is the horror of the self. That is, the terror that comes not from a malignant, malicious invader that must be put down, but from witnessing perversions and desecrations beyond imagining, and realizing you're responsible for such terror, and you have to forever change to keep it at bay. This is the territory that Silent Hill 2 occupies, and it's one of only a few games to get it exactly right.

Neverending Nightmares is a solemn attempt to flourish in that territory, and it has the right ideas. It's the story of a young man named Thomas who is stuck in a seemingly eternal Inception-style loop of visceral Edward Gorey nightmares. His own house is slowly overtaken by living, ominous shadows and dolls with frozen smiles whose eyes follow him when he walks by. He finds himself in an asylum overrun by straight-jacketed cannibals and with haphazardly-piled mutilated dead in the hallways. Dead women rain from the sky in a cemetery while birds feed on the corpses. There are common elements in each scenario, but the omnipresent one is the ephemeral specter of a black-haired girl. The girl takes many forms: sister, wife, psychiatrist, daughter, china doll, bride, and, not least of all, bloody, knife-wielding murderwoman. She is both the reason to press on and the reason to want to escape every nightmare Thomas finds himself in. But you don't escape. You simply… persist.

Spot the creepy ghost lady, win a prize.

The devil is quite literally in the details in Neverending Nightmares. As you explore, a room might be little more than a bunch of family paintings, or a benign toy chest in a corner, or a sterile bathroom. Returning to that same room later, the wallpaper might have turned into deathly skulls, or the expression on the doll’s face turned to terror; random blood stains might’ve appeared, or you might hear random whispers, crying, and screams off in the distance. When Neverending Nightmares is at its best, it’s a sort of hellish Gone Home, where opening a new door means falling forever, having your Achilles tendons slashed, ripping out your own veins like string cheese; and making progress towards a new nightmare is indistinguishable from abject failure until you notice the change in the air, a different set of taunting voices. It's a perfect storm of fear: You are free to explore yet claustrophobically trapped, all at once.

This dichotomy would create a distressing combination even if movement weren’t so restricted. Thomas' regular gait when walking is a limping shuffle that makes simple walks down a hallway feel like roaming 40 years in a desert. Yes, you have the ability to run, but Thomas apparently has the stamina of a chain-smoker with one lung, and you can get maybe five seconds of sprinting out of him before he’s exhausted. It adds a nice layer of tension to the game's many terrifying chases, but when it takes forever to get from point A to B, tension turns into flat annoyance.

Worst. Slumber party. Ever.

The monotony isn't helped by the fact that Neverending Nightmares is such a sparse game. After knowing what's scattered around each environment, you can go for stretches where you’re walking in and out of doors with nothing happening, nothing having changed, and with nothing new to interact with. The intent seems to be to give the player breathing room before going in for the scare, but it feels more artificial. Bad dreams typically aren't characterized by moments of lukewarm emptiness, and the fact that there are many here distracts.

What dreams do have, however, is abstraction, and Neverending Nightmares excels here. The game speaks in the broken dream language of trauma and internalized pain like few games do, and the facts of Thomas continually murdering himself, being marauded by defective babies, or seeing the girl dead in so many configurations are meant to walk the careful line between subtext and text. You are meant to put the pieces together, and the more the game feeds you on the far extremes of violence and sadness, the less it makes sense. Are you watching a man who killed a loved one and can no longer rest? Are you watching a brother stuck in purgatory for attempting suicide? Are you seeing the aftereffects of a parent grieving a dead child? The emotions are clearly represented: Fear, grief, surrender, self-loathing, and doubt.

Protip: Anything she found here is terrifying. Please don't follow her.

What those emotions are in aid of is the pertinent question, and it's a haunting one, which the game's multiple endings do muddled work in answering, to both the game’s benefit and detriment. You walk away with heady questions about what you’ve played. What you might not come away with is satisfaction. Despite being only a one-to-two- hour game, it feels like a long way to get to either of the three finish lines; even trying for a second ending feels like work, and at least one of the endings puts far too easy a cap on what came before to feel true to the preceding hour.

And yet, having slept on it, I find myself obsessing over the questions raised, and the imagery foisted upon me by the encroaching darkness, than I have with any game in recent memory. Its frustrations are many, but they are not what sticks in the mind after it’s done. Neverending Nightmares might be a dream only worth taking once, but once is all it needs to work its ill upon you.

Once more into the breach.

It's fitting that the music first greeting you in Legend of Grimrock II is a rousing, bombastic tune that would just as easily be at home in a summer fantasy blockbuster. The sequel is a grand adventure, a far cry from the claustrophobic tunnels of its predecessor's excellent first-person, tile-based dungeon-crawling revival. And while the suffocating atmosphere of the franchise's first entry has been diluted by a focus on exploration rather than escape, its mechanics and well-crafted content have flourished and been improved in almost every way. Legend of Grimrock II is a logical and brilliantly executed next step for the series, exhibiting slight symptoms of too much freedom, but never stumbling for long.

Grimrock II has little to do with the mountain peak in the game's title; rather, it serves as reassurance that the formula defined decades ago, and modernized in the original Grimrock, still elegantly drives the experience. You fashion a party of adventurers with classic Dungeons & Dragons character trappings and step through unexplored three-dimensional terrain one tile at a time. Along the way, you acquire armor, weapons, and artifacts of increasing prowess, outfitting each of your characters to do real-time battle against a bestiary of monstrous creatures. You trigger fatally hidden traps, avoid the obvious ones, and search for vital clues to unlock gates and doorways, while solving riddles and puzzles in a quest for answers to larger mysteries and the almighty pursuit of power itself.

Giant rats are so 1990. It's all about pirate rats now.

Legend of Grimrock II shirks the longstanding reliance on subterranean labyrinths that have so-well suited the genre; instead, it pulls a new foursome of characters to the Isle of Nex, and the welcome addition of outdoor locales. From the temperate woodlands of Twigroot Forest to the noxious vapors of Keelbreach Bog, each environment carries a unique personality, and together they create a more diverse setting than the original's endless halls of stone and darkness. Of course, thousands of steps are still waiting to be taken in decrepit dungeons and tight tunnels, but the promise of returning to the fresh air of the surface alleviates the impenetrable gloom of underground life. Even returning to an open sky of a pitch black night--thanks to the great addition of a day and night cycle--feels like a safe haven from the skittering terrors that roam the chasms below."

The openness of the island setting is mirrored in the game's navigation. Shortly after your arrival on Nex, you're free to traverse nearly anywhere you can see, assuming you can unlock the barriers to entry and survive your own curiosity. To that point, there's a naural sense of progression in Grimrock II: it gently guides you through each new zone without spelling out an optimal order for visiting them. Should you somehow decipher the means to wander into territory too dangerous for your fledgling skills, that gentle hand becomes a clenched fist, ready to immediately bludgeon your party for its foolhardiness--but the option exists, and that non-linearity is refreshing.

Returning to an open sky in a pitch black night--thanks to the great addition of a day and night cycle--feels like a safe haven from the skittering terrors that roam the chasms below.

Unfortunately, that freedom of choice and ambiguous direction is where Grimrock II briefly falters. Much of the adventure hinges on the collection of scattered MacGuffins, conveniently spaced and designed to require the exploration of every area in order to chase them all down. In fact, the journey from your shipwrecked landing to the heart of the mystery is largely devoid of overarching narrative until the climax. What little references there are to a grander scheme are delivered in coy notes from an unknown master of this undiscovered island.

It's understandable that a focused narrative pushing you from one area to the next might hamper your ability to freely navigate the isle, but the chosen alternative is a nearly blind journey requiring a herculean effort and an enormous amount of good faith that it's going to pay off in the end--which it thankfully does. Instead, the real story takeaway is found in the immaculately designed riddles, puzzles, and moments of sometimes-not-so-near fatal choice that punctuate every step of the adventure.

Developer Almost Human has deftly crafted dozens of bite-sized, standalone engagements that are often vague, frequently complex, and always clever. And it's in these moments, when you're stuck wondering how exactly the provided clues don't point to the seemingly obvious conclusion, that you might truly appreciate the openness of a world that allows you to go off and perform some other task while you let all the elements of a particularly devious obstacle simmer in the back of your mind.

Word of advice: Don't fall in the pit full of zombies, aka, the Zombie Pit.

Overcoming the many vague riddles in Legend of Grimrock II is occasionally grueling, but to Almost Human's great credit, the answers are nearly always rooted in logic or interpretation, rather than finding some minute trigger on a wall. Oh, there are many secrets on Nex that are only uncovered with a keen eye, say, scrutinizing a sea of stone for the smallest switch, but these instances are almost exclusively tied to superfluous loot rather than vital game progression.

The vein of thoughtful improvement running through Legend of Grimrock II may be most apparent in its intricately designed quandaries, but it snakes through even the most basic elements of the franchise. Character creation, the cornerstone of the dungeon-crawling experience, exhibits a comparable leap forward. Where the original Grimrock opted for a trifecta of class selections--Fighter, Rogue, and Mage--the second offering builds on that trinity, filling the spaces between with new and unique roles. Choose to crush monsters through the Barbarian's brute force, strike a balance between marshal and mystical arts with a Battlemage, or brew life-saving concoctions with collected herbs as an Alchemist. All are viable additions to a budding party, though in practice, some classes are clearly more beneficial than others.

The real story takeaway is found in the immaculately designed riddles, puzzles, and moments of sometimes-not-so-near fatal choice that punctuate every step of the adventure.

In another sly wink poking fun at the tropes of the genre, there's even a Farmer class, which excels in absolutely nothing you'd want in an adventurer and gains experience not by killing enemies but by eating food. It's these small touches of playful meta--for example, some races gain hidden statistical benefits after ingesting their preferred foods, and the new Ratling race has a special affinity for cheese--that paint Grimrock II as a creation that's totally comfortable in its own skin while still true to the dungeon crawling mantle of yore.

But while an old-school spirit might power the core, the vessel is a more modern, expanded take on the experience than even the original Grimrock had to offer. The addition of weapon-specific special attacks adds a welcome layer of depth to combat; by drawing from your characters' energy pools, you're able to trigger devastating blows with titanic axes, or launch a flurry of slashes with a sabre. Moreover, the overhauled spell casting system allows you to quickly swipe across runes to prime a spell, replacing the cumbersome need to click each individual one. Now you can engage in combat that is fluid and interactive, rather than just repeatedly hacking at something until one of you squeals and collapses.

Better still, when paired with the active and passive bonuses of available skills and traits, each character can potentially attain enough unique purpose that fights are often elevated from slugfests to battles of timing, positioning, and resourcefulness. The appointed leader of my party, Arielle the Knight, started as the tough-as-nails tank, but somewhere during my 30-hour adventure she learned to dual-wield rune-adorned scimitars, backstabbing unsuspecting enemies in her impractically bulky armor. Thanks to the untethered skill system, she did it all, and you're free to similarly build any class in any direction you choose.

Poison, petrification, disease, blindness--there's a status effect for everyone!

Combat in Grimrock II is a more refined, empowering, and choice-centric part of the experience this time around, and with good reason: The beasts that inhabit the Isle of Nex are a much more formidable breed. Mainstay monsters that have adorned the darkened hallways of grid-based crawlers for years are well-represented: giant spiders, rats, ogres, and the undead. But new to the fray are creatures that, like your characters, carry their own functional skillsets. The giant toads roaming the bog may seem straightforward, but when one leaps across several tiles, landing behind your party, lashing out with its sticky tongue and pulling your characters' weapons out of their hands, the encounter shifts dramatically in its favor. Wispy elementals patrol the forests and press their attacks, unfazed by conventional weapons and spells, and leaving you helplessly searching for a vulnerability of some kind. And amethyst-hued cycloptic floating squid-beasts spew blinding ink from both ends, disgustingly enough, in the jewel-encrusted mines beneath the surface of Nex.

These functional additions to the bestiary are fairly indicative of what you should expect from Legend of Grimrock II: A well-established foundation revisited and excellently enhanced in the years between releases. Nearly every aspect of this dense adventure has been touched in a positive way, with none of the clutter that often accompanies second-act offerings that try to cram too much in. And despite the lack of narrative, Grimrock II is an outstanding second trip to the nostalgia well. It synthesizes the key elements that made the first game great, improves upon them in intriguing and powerful ways, and uses that as a platform for designing and launching more of the same great content.

Legend of Grimrock II is similar to one of its many well-designed riddles: While solving it may be a long, arduous process, approaching each obstacle with newfound understanding and hearing the victorious click of gears finally turning gives you a feeling of profound pride and accomplishment. Legend of Grimrock II is another glorious glimpse of the past, a window to a genre dead and buried and brought back to life with care and respect, and I urge you to peek through it.

Terra firma.

I am looking at the number 585. It's below the "hours played" tab for my copy of Civilization V and I...well, I'm not sure I want to dwell on that figure. But I can tell you that for all those hours, I've only actually seen a single session with the history-based strategy game through to completion. I'm an absentee world leader: present for my peoples' first fumbling steps towards agriculture, gone again somewhere between the invention of the compass and the internal combustion engine. I get into these obsessive restarting loops, curious just to see what new permutation the game's map-making algorithms spit out. Eventually I'll nestle a few defensible cities into the mountainside, churn through tech advancements until I can fuss over cute little janissaries or hussar units like they're collectible figurines. Then, in a sudden fit of self-loathing, I'll wipe the board clean. It's wonderful, soul-sucking entertainment.

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth shifts the series' brand of turn-based discovery and conquest off-planet, and the sci-fi setting puts a slick, chrome sheen on my old neurosis. But Beyond Earth also calcifies much of Civilization V's vocabulary and play arc. You still situate your capital city, and click it to designate the production of military units or workers that can spruce up your immediate surroundings. You still unlock new technologies and cultural policies that ensure a steady drip of upgrades and benefits. There are the familiar icons for production, food, and culture to illustrate the quantified output of your cities, and a new one, energy, is a reasonable enough stand-in for currency--its icon even looks a bit like a golden coin to ease you into the transition. So despite the new trappings, it's simple enough to slide back into routine. Create, explore, and expand--or, if you're like me, create, explore, quit, and create again.

The alien terrain shows off smooth transitions between tiles.

There are a few welcome touch-ups to smooth over Civilization's old edges, and they first appear in pregame as a series of decisions to make prior to starting your bid for global domination. A first step can be taken towards generating energy, science, culture, et alia, and you can opt to begin the game with a military unit, or a clinic if you'd prefer. There's more freedom afforded when picking out which parcel of land to found your first city on, and there's even a perk that reveals the outlines of the world's land masses. So much for my incessant restarting, then--all things considered, Beyond Earth seems to output viable starting situations more reliably than its predecessors.

But viable doesn't necessarily mean welcoming--this is an alien planet, after all, and colonizing it is going to beget some unfortunate learning experiences on the behaviors of local wildlife as part of due course. Maybe those lessons will come from the sandworm churning up your freshly tilled farmland a few tiles from your capital and consuming any trade expedition you send in its general direction. Or maybe from the creature that's three-quarters mandible, just kind-of loitering ominously offshore. Aliens play the role of the barbarian tribes from the last few Civilization games, as an entity that's not exactly "in it to win it." But they'll mess with your early game plans all the same, utilizing better cunning and more imposing units than their old club-wielding counterparts. Even Beyond Earth's loan translations of the previous entries' forests, mountains, and livestock feel suitably threatening here. A toxic miasma coats about a third of the surface of any map, damaging human units and healing aliens. And while natural wonders are conspicuously absent--robbing players of part of the draw of exploring a new planet--the varied terrain is full of curious features like resource pods, ruins and alien skeletons to seek out. The land is pock-marked with craters and chasms, the grasslands have a sickly cast to them, and I'm still trying to get comfortable with the idea of constructing a paddock for giant beetles.

Beyond Earth's opening cinematic teases colorful cultures that wash out in the gameplay.

But you're probably going to have to manifest some destiny sooner or later, because advancement in Beyond Earth necessitates subscription to a belief system and two of the three available are less than concerned with preserving indigenous species. So-called affinities push your development towards divergent goals: Purity, Supremacy, or Harmony. It's a choice between Terran, Protoss, or Zerg, really. Purity marks a civilization that concerns itself with recreating the comforts of home and preserving humanity in a more-or-less recognizable state. Supremacy is a technocratic zealotry that comes with all the haughtiness you'd expect--really, its units bear names like "Educator" and "Prophet." Harmony is there for us Truffula Tree-huggers, and since it lets you ride an alien like a horse and sic giant space katydids on your enemy's cities, I'd say it's the clear choice for the discerning Fremen. Interestingly, the text that accompanies each new affinity level shifts in tone along with the stage of the game, starting with earnest, innocent theorizing and gradually taking on a more hawkish, proselytizing inflection as the players start jockeying for position near the home stretch.

The Civilization series portrays a history that's not of people, but rather "the State." That is to say, you don't play as Ghandi, or Gengis Kahn: you play as India, or Mongolia, as well as a vision of those peoples united in a singular, millennia-spanning focus on besting all other nations. Beyond Earth expands upon this cult of the state, drawing the series' diverse cast of historical cultures into eight broad, continental coalitions, and rescinding the roles that individual artists, engineers, and scientists had been enjoying in Civilization V. The loss of the latter means a less celebratory, more overtly martial sort of strategy game, and I’m not keen on this step backwards towards the series’ competitive, board game roots. It’s echoed in the relative parity of the eight coalitions, which lack the color and diversity of play-styles that Civ V furnished so adeptly. In Beyond Earth’s eight-person multiplayer (local or online), the terms have never been so even, but some of the fascination went out the door with the asymmetry.

Affinities push your development towards divergent goals: Purity, Supremacy, or Harmony.

It's a brave new world, with new lands to chart, resources to harvest, and goals to pursue. But it's also as cynical as the old one, where most actions serve competitive ends, and even the most cooperative and well-maintained alliances will be shattered by necessity towards game's end. To Civilization, the State is an entity that acts on only the basest and most selfish of desires--consume, grow, and propagate. That's become increasingly ironic, as Beyond Earth's web of discoverable technologies introduces high-minded and esoteric futurisms like "Human Idealism" and "Artificial Evolution." A little barbarism was to be expected back when Civilization's tech tree was largely given over to simply escaping the Dark Ages. But Beyond Earth suggests--and perhaps not wrongly--that advancements like euthenics or microrobotics are ultimately just the new sticks we'll use to club each other over the head.

Beyond Earth's operatic opening short tells the story of a young female colonist who bears at least some superficial resemblance to National Geographic's famous "Afghan Girl." But it's otherwise hard to get a sense of what these people look like, or what their culture entails beyond that brief cinematic glimpse, because only the military gets treated to any real illustration in the game proper. Gone are the works of art, music, and writing that helped to redefine the cultural victory in Civilization V, pared back to an abstract number that's ultimately used towards more aggressive ends. World wonders do reprise their role as larger constructive undertakings, but the bonuses they proffer feel tepid and same-ish this time around. There are quests, though--a first for Civilization. In practice, they're a limited set of binary prompts with a light influence on your direction of progress, but they nevertheless lend some helpful narrative context to the action, and they can branch in unexpected ways. A newly founded independent outpost might turn out to be performing questionable experiments on its colonists, perhaps, or a plant brought along on the journey to the new world might take root and begin overriding the local flora.

In at least one case, you're tasked with spying on a particular city belonging to a rival civ. It's a subtle guiding of the eyes towards Beyond Earth's enhanced spy system, which requires regular management of a small team that can siphon energy, science, or units from other cities in addition to the last game's tech thievery and intel thievery. Successful operations increase the intrigue rating for a city, ostensibly granting access to higher-tier abilities like fomenting rebellion or planting a bomb, but in practice it seems difficult to ever reach those levels. Relocating a spy to one's own city might be too reliable a means of reducing your intrigue levels when you see them spiking.

Gone are the works of art, music, and writing that helped to redefine the cultural victory in Civilization V.

But absent a more subversive method of dealing with your foes, there's always old-fashioned battle. Military units still hold sway over most of the game space, trading turn-based fire between the hexagonal parcels of land and besieging cities. They fall back on Civilization's traditional archetypes: melee, ranged, cavalry, and siege, even as their outward appearances morphs from astronauts with rifles and moon rovers to bipedal robots and giant kaiju. The ones you field depend on your progression towards one of the three affinities, and in a welcome bit of streamlining, the upgrades get rolled out automatically with each new level--no more paying for promotions for each individual unit. Better still, a new, similarly tiled orbital layer plays host to satellites which can be launched for quick industrial bonuses, or support coverage for your armies in the field.

Beyond Earth's combat suffers from some balance issues though, and that's curious for a game that leans so heavily on proven systems. Cities are comically easy to take--most melee units fare much better at city capturing, and you can often halve a city's defenses in a single attack--resulting in situations where cities tediously trade ownership turn after turn. The fragility extends to the units themselves, many of which die in a single hit. By consequence, a small standing army is less tenable than it was back on Earth, and I find myself less invested in the fate of any one unit when it can be snuffed out by an orbital strike at any given moment.

I am finding that I play more games through to completion in Beyond Earth. In inverse of my experience with Civilization V, my favorite part might be the ending, where a civ has to lay its cards face-up in a bid for one of the five methods of victory, and any semblance of "civilization" goes out the window as everyone else tries to drag them back down like the proverbial crabs in the bucket. The three affinity-specific victories don’t play out all that differently, nor does a fourth concerned with making contact with an unseen, advanced alien race. Each entails researching a few specific technologies, then designating your cities to produce a structure or two that sometimes have minor idiosyncrasies, like consuming your surplus energy each turn. But the path to victory is more elegantly interwoven with the early and middle game this time around, and of course, global domination, ever the crude way out, remains as tempting as ever when another world leader shows up uninvited to talk some smack. The more things change, the more they stay the same, then; a journey to a planet halfway across the universe reaffirming the draw of the same old creature comforts--a plot of land, and just one more turn.