the essential guide to XboX 360 and XboX one

THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE #129

Issue 129 October 2015 www.gamesradar.com/oxm

eXclusive access
fallout 4 > doom > rise of the tomb raider > metal gear solid V

get ready for 400 hours

in the largest rPg ever!

20
new games tested!
rise of the tomb raider
assassin’s creed
syndicate
mafia iii

metal gear
solid V rated
Is The Phantom Pain
Kojima’s masterpiece?

why XboX one

owns 2016
issue 129 october 2015 £5.99
Scalebound, Crackdown
and Quantum Break
lead the charge
Welcome…
a world 1
of clouds
and chaos
You expect two things when you
visit Cologne: bratwurst and that
impressive cathedral. You do not
expect a glimpse into the future,
and yet there I was, slack-jawed
as Dave Jones talked me through Crackdown 3,
showing how cloud computing could level a bombs, brutality and butlers:
skyscraper with a level of persistent detail I’ve exploring fallout 4
are we really only two months away from a new bethesda
never seen in a videogame. As exciting as the rPG? contain yourself and read our all-new info (p28)
rest of 2015 is for Xbox One – and with Forza 6,
Halo 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider it’s exciting
as hell – my eyes are firmly fixed on 2016.
Of course, we’re travelling to a very different 2 3
future for our cover star. In Fallout 4’s wasteland
there aren’t many skyscrapers left to topple, but
this doesn’t mean you
“you’ll find won’t find incredible
incredible adventures amid the
adventures amid rubble. Bethesda hands-on with rise of metal gear solid v: the
gives us a tour of its the tomb raider phantom pain reviewed
fallout 4’s rubble” biggest game to date Who needs uncharted when you’ve Kojima goes out with a bang (c-4) and
got the majestic lara croft? (p36) a whimper (the guards) in MGS V (p68)
on page 28. And if this talk of the future scares
you? Let Kojima whisk you back to 1984 in his
Metal Gear Solid swan song, The Phantom Pain. 4 5
I struggle to contain my love for it on page 68.
Back here in the present: enjoy the mag!

SubScribe
and SaVe!
turn to rare replay remembering
reviewed gears of war
email matthew.castle@futurenet.com page 54 do 30 years of games stack up? developers reveal how the epic shooter
live oXm Pesto twitter @mrbasil_pesto alex delivers his verdict (p76) changed the gaming landscape (p92)

@oXm the official XboX maGazine / 3

 #129

contents
SubScribe
Save up
to 50%
See p54

features
page

56 28 the nuclear option

We explore the wastes of Fallout 4, which are looking
very grim indeed. that’s a good thing.

page 56 hell & back

28 hands on with DOOM’s intense team deathmatch.
62 halo 5: What you need to know
not sure what a ‘master chief’ is? our faQs have you
covered.

previews
36 Rise of the tomb Raider
40 tom clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
make room for doom page

36 42 homefront: the Revolution

chainsaws + Super Shotguns = bliss 43 Star Wars battlefront
44 lego Dimensions
rare replay 46 aRK: Survival evolved
Worth (re)playing? 47 mirror’s edge: catalyst
48 hitman
50 fifa 2016
51 assassin’s creed Syndicate
52 Previews round-up
reviews
page 68 metal gear Solid V: the
76 Phantom Pain
74 Submerged
page
76 Rare Replay
62 80 King’s Quest: a Knight to
Remember
82 game of thrones episode 5 -
a nest of Vipers
page

92
83 life is Strange episode 4 -
Dark Room
page 84 the binding of isaac: Rebirth
68 86 Prototype: biohazard bundle
87 beyond eyes
88 online: World of tanks
89 online: Rory mcilroy Pga tour
90 call of Duty: advanced Warfare
- Reckoning
91 batman: arkham Knight - a
metal gear solid v matter of family
Kojima’s peak, or Phantom Painful?
91 mortal Kombat x: tremor
@OXM the official xbox magazine / 5
 Meet the…
OXM cOnTribuTOrS
The people behind, and in some senses also under, the UK’s biggest games mag

Alex Dale Emma Davies Tom Stone Joe Skrebels Martin Kitts
Deputy editor Production editor Staff writer Community manager Contributor
Live chocoboofDoom Live oxm emma Live oxm tom Stone Live oxm Joe Live Private
Twitter @SporadicDaler Twitter @emcetera Twitter @thetomStrange Twitter @2plus2isjoe Twitter n/a

this month we asked the
team which Metal Gear
character they’d like to be.
no surprise that old man
alex plumped for ancient
sniper the end. “he gets
so much sleep!” he drooled
through toothless gums.
“liquid Snake,” says OXM’s
resident word-fixer-upper.
because you’re a dangerous
sociopath? “no, so i can
possess the arm of the next
guy who mixes up ‘its’ and
‘it’s’ – and make them crash
their bike into a ditch”. okay.
“i like how Para-medic
relates everything to old
films. i’d like to give that
a shot.” but tom, she’s a
movie buff and you’ve only
seen one film in your life.
“this reminds me of a scene
in Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2…”
“the Pain – who wouldn’t
want the power to spit
bees from their stomach
on demand? but i’d open
my guts to other insects.
imagine impressing a date
by belching a chorus of
butterflies.” imagine.
martin might look like a
two-bit thug who’d mug his
own gran for a second-hand
copy of Sunset Overdrive,
but actually he’s a softie
deep down, as evidenced
by his choice. “SKUll face!”
forget we said anything.

OFFicE PLAYLiST > WHAT WE’VE SPENT OUR TIME ON THIS MONTH

rare replay rare replay rare replay rare replay

Not playing it, you understand; Not playing it, you understand; Not playing it, you understand; Not playing it, you understand;
listening to the theme tune on watching all the cute pop-up enjoying featurettes on legends okay, maybe a bit of playing it. Has
a loop. Press A! Hooray! animations on the intro screens. like, er, the KI announcer. anyone ever beaten Slalom?

OXM on GR+ the world’s best games

magazine also squats in a
corner of the world’s best
OXM on iPad
games website – makes sense, if rowdy seagulls are
doesn’t it? head to gamesradar. always swooping out of
com/oxm for the latest xbox the skies and pilfering
news and reviews, many of your copy of OXM, why not
which are online exclusive. try reading it on a bulkier,
recent highlights: ghost more seagull-proof
games explains why Need for format? our digital edition
Speed is always online / Watch is enhanced with
Assassin’s Creed’s evie turn exclusive videos, galleries
invisible / Lords of the Fallen and audio commentary
dev details new RPg, The Surge from the team.
bit.ly/ipadoxm

6 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm

xBOx nEws, AnAlysis, CulTurE, OpiniOn & MOrE

Time-distortion powers
stubbornly refuse to move
us closer to April, and
thus Quantum Break.

C O M E B A C K i n s TA l l E d

XBOX ONE
REGENERATES
Backwards compatibility, Windows 10
and 20 times more power. Xbox One is
finishing 2015 a whole new machine…
8 / the Official XBOX magazine WWW.gamesradar.cOm/OXm
 Needling its way into our wallets
Buy the Halo 5: Guardians pink Mist
Edition for just £449.99 and you’ll get
a 1TB xbox One and a replica needler.
Complete with lEd lights, accurate sound
effects and pink crystals that move up and
down when you pull the trigger.
Killer Instinct gets a nasty Rash
Between rare replay, shovel Knight and
now Killer instinct, rash of Battletoads
should be buying his agent flowers. if
you’ve bought Killer instinct dlC, or own
rare replay, he’ll join your roster now. A
taster of the third season due in March.

//You know You’re watching

a confident presentation
when a release date for
Quantum Break is announced//

Anyone think this beast looks more

realistic than the CGi lizards we’re
enduring in Game of Thrones?

E
3 could have been a disaster. it’s easy to scoff
now, this safer side of June, but the teething
years for Xbox One have been continuously
difficult – and microsoft had no way of knowing
how its biggest announcements would go down
with the fans. Would Xbox 360 compatibility be
seen as a step backwards? Would the game
Preview programme be taken as a concession to last year’s
habit of unfinished game being released at full price? Would
Halo 5 be booed by angry Master Chief Collection owners?
Okay, Guardians was a pretty surefire hit, but as it turns
out, so was practically everything microsoft announced on
the stage. Just two years ago, Xbox One was pretty much
the console that wouldn’t let you play pre-owned games.
now it was going to play some of the biggest hits from our
Xbox 360 collection. the Preview programme means not
just access to in-development games, but also ports of Pc
behemoths such as Day-Z. it sounded too good to be true.
sadly, in the games industry, that usually means it is.
if e3 was the wild promises, gamescom was the reality.
far from being the depressing wake-up call we feared, we
actually got concrete details. there were no controversies
to contend with, like the initially mixed response to Kinect
or backlash to always-online modes. microsoft was instead
able to double down on the Xbox One’s new features, with
fan support behind it in a way that hasn’t been seen since
the peak years of Xbox 360. now we’re seeing the well-
received innovations of e3, smartly executed.
gamescom gave us got solid release windows – some
tantalisingly close. Backwards compatibility launches
in november, with over 100 Xbox 360 games supported.
november will also see the launch of the new dashboard,
replacing the current dated interface with a sleek new
design. so long, summer: november’s now the only month
that matters on our calendar. heck, you know you’re
watching a confident presentation when a release date for
Quantum Break is announced. no offence, remedy, but your
games have an unfortunate habit of slipping forward in time.
We’ve explored the announced games elsewhere in this
issue, but new surprises were slim – with the biggest being
Halo Wars 2 and that Koji igarashi can’t use a whip. But
the Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night creator was able to
announce co-op play between Xbox One and Windows 10
Pc players of his upcoming Castlevania-in-everything-but-
name adventure. no one’s ever not wanted it, but few of us
have been brought to tears of joy by Windows 10 support.

@OXm the Official XBOX magazine / 9

 Resi 2 lurching to new-gen consoles
Following the well-received Hd remake of the very
first resident Evil, Capcom has announced that 1998’s
resident Evil 2 will be remastered for the first time.

This is the average amount

Yet announcements such as this and of carnage Crackdown’s you can partake in its multiplayer by
Cobalt showed cross-play’s massive multiplayer promises. the end of 2015 on Xbox One.
potential. already we have full Xbox so if 2015 was the comeback year,
One game streaming, so hopefully what of the future? Well we finally got
we are looking at a future where to see more publishers picking up the to see some of the games teased all
multiplayer between Pc and Xbox One fan-pleasing habit. the way back at e3 2014 (and we’ve
games will become the standard. the Xbox game Preview programme been promised Quantum Break since
everyone playing peacefully side by added a third title – Sheltered – to a 2013). as if having a dragon onside
side? enough to bring a tear to our eye. library that’s still looking far slimmer wasn’t enough, Scalebound now has
than we’d like, but it’s also smartly four-player co-op. Crackdown goes
lOOK BAcK fONdly turning some of 2016’s biggest games even further, using cloud computing to
a trailer for backwards compatibility into 2015 releases. along similar lines, utilise processing power 20 times that
gave us brief blink-and-you’ll-miss- you’ll have to wait far into 2016 to play of the Xbox One. suddenly we’re seeing
’em glimpses of boxart from the likes Homefront: The Revolution on Ps4, but city-wide destruction and collapsing
of BioShock, Dark Souls and Driver: the announcement of a beta means skyscrapers that would make Just
San Francisco. We’d mention all we
saw here, but we’re hoping ending on
Driver: San Francisco might somehow
subliminally persuade more of you
to play it. none of these games have
been officially confirmed (not even
your favourite, Driver: San Francisco)
but why would microsoft include
games that wouldn’t be backwards
compatible in a trailer for that very
feature? it was also confirmed that
all future Xbox 360 games With gold
freebies will be run on Xbox One.
following Fallout 4 and Rainbow Six
Siege, Just Cause 3 is the latest 2015
release that will also come with its Everyone knows that
Xbox 360 predecessor in the box. We Beats headphones are
hoped these generous bundles would key in dragon battles.
start becoming the norm, and it’s great

10 / the Official XBOX magazine WWW.gamesradar.cOm/OXm

 Xbox One getting mouse support?
“yep, keyboard and mouse support for xbox would
need to be there for this to work, those aren’t far
away,” tweeted phil spencer. sounds mouse-y to us.
what monsters would
show off these games,
only for them not to be
backwards compatible?
Cause 3 weep. Quantum Break not only
has cool time-twisting gunplay, but now
boasts Game of Thrones’ aidan gillen
as a villain. so we’re getting littlefinger
versus time itself. investing earlier in
developers has finally given Xbox One
the definitive first-party lineup.
BREAKING fREE
this was the focus on new ideas which
we’ve been crying out for since the
new console generation began. not
only did the show open with Quantum
Break, but almost a quarter of all the
games shown were new productions.
it’s a vital transition following an e3
that, while great, was conservative in
its reliance on previous big-hitters.
Halo, Tomb Raider, Gears of War – all
great games, but wheeling out what’s
worked before will only get you so far.
Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, Dead
//listening to the fans has
revitalised the console – an
xBox one that’s never felt more
accessiBle or uniQue//
@OXm
this month
we learned...
13
p
how to stream Xbox games to Pc
with Windows 10.
14
p
how cloud computing will let us
destroy an entire city.
16
p
Rising, Saints Row – these were some
of the biggest-selling series of the
previous console generation. they also
all started out as new series on Xbox Why some glitches are best left
360, and we’d argue we’re yet to see
their alternatives for the current era.
unpatched, if you asked us.
Will the likes of Quantum Break and
Scalebound become sequel-spawning
hits? no one knows yet, but these
18
p
are the essential risks that have to
be taken going forward. listening to
the fans has revitalised the console,
giving the audience what they wanted
– an Xbox One that’s never felt more
accessible or unique. the new-gen
entries in some of our favourite series
are looking absolutely essential, but
now it’s time to start taking risks, to that more fantasy games should
start challenging that audience again
with games that would never have
have a drum and bass soundtrack.
been possible on Xbox 360. if those
risks involve investing millions in an
original game where you play a cocky,
20
p
Prodigy-loving youth who befriends a
dragon, we’re all for it.
TOM STONE
that we really, really want to time
travel to 5 april 2016.
the Official XBOX magazine / 11
 tHIS MontH:
Ten hOW tO GiVE A liCEnSED GAME
pro BACk tO thE FAnS
TIpS Disney Interactive producer Mathew Solie explains
why it’s important to keep playing with toys
EAStER EGG American animator John Lasseter has another great love other than toys, and that’s Hawaiian shirts. Mathew Solie reckons Lasseter has over 600 of them.
1
Don’t take no for
answer…
The original idea for Infinity
was to make it the spiritual
successor to Toy Story 3’s Western
Town, where all the Pixar
characters could interact with
each other. So we asked Pixar’s
John Lasseter, but he said: “No –
it makes no sense, Buzz Lightyear
is six inches tall and Sully is eight
feet tall.” The Avalanche Software
guys thought, ‘Well, why don’t
we just make everything toys?’
Turns out Lasseter loves toys,
and said it was genius.
2
…because Avalanche
didn’t
We were first told ‘no’ five
years ago, but what we have in
the Toy Box is the ultimate goal
realised. We have everything in
here – people laughed at us when
we first pitched it. We finally did
it. We have feature animation,
feature film, Marvel, Lucas, classic
Disney – everything can live here.
3
Don’t be afraid to
change
We’ve always wanted online
multiplayer, but we didn’t want
kids to have to look at screens
full of text while waiting in dull
lobbies. So we created a toy
box on an island. Next to the
palm tree was an old-fashioned
12 / tHe offIcIAL xbox MAgAzIne
capsule toy dispenser, and inside
those capsules could be a sticky
hand, or some blocks. And that
would be the queue to get into
multiplayer. But in testing,
the kids playing were having
more fun messing around there
than they were getting into the
multiplayer. We thought, ‘Hang
on, this could be what we do’.
4
Realise the power
of cinema
There’s now a spline tool,
so players can make an object or
camera go on a certain path for
their own cutscenes. This came
from something we saw in Disney
Infinity 2.0 where players were
using a weather vane, which
shoots you in a certain direction –
people were linking these together
to make an artificial rollercoaster.
5
Go to the best…
Who do you go to when
you want sword combat?
Ninja Theory. We were joking
about getting them in years ago
when we were thinking about
lightsabers. Turns out they loved
Infinity, so it was a great bond.
They added to all our characters –
my favourite is Rapunzel’s frying
pan, which acts like a lightsaber
so you can do this great air juggle.
“This time we’re
open galaxy, not
just open world.”
BACkGROunD
ChECk
nAME Mathew Solie
JOB titlE Producer, Disney
Interactive
BiO Mathew Solie joined
Disney Infinity with the goal
of being able to recreate
his childhood memory of
tipping all his toys onto the
carpet and have them play
with each other in a bizarro
battle royale. He’s doing
that after working on a wide
range of games, from being a
production tester on Quantum
of Solace at Activision, to
dabbling with other toys
with Transformers: Revenge
of the Fallen at Luxoflux. He
even worked with Warren
Spector and the world’s most
legendary rodent as part of
the Epic Mickey team.
6
… because they are
the best
Studio Gobo, which worked
on Guardians of the Galaxy and
Pirates of the Caribbean wanted
to do Rise Against the Empire.
That makes sense as it’s vehicle-
centric, so they helped rewrite
the flying engine. And there’s
another Marvel playset coming
that United Front Games is doing
for us – extrapolate from that
what you will. We’ve also got
Sumo Digital on board.
7
Embrace your
community
One of our fans, Patrick
Efird, was a school teacher. We
got in touch with him because
he was one of the best creators in
our community, and little did we
know at the time he was getting
married. So he cancelled his
honeymoon, flew out the Monday
after his wedding, had the
interview, and he’s now working
at Avalanche Software!
8
Open it up
My personal favourite
addition in Main Street is
Flynn’s Arcade, where everyone
can check out the best user-
created Toy Boxes. In 1 and 2 you
had to be friends with someone
to try out their creations – that
wasn’t working, so we changed it.
9
Ask the audience,
dream big
We asked people who they’d
like to see in Infinity. Lots of Peter
Pans, Darkwing Ducks, everyone
has a favourite – John Vignocchi,
VP of Production, wants Captain
EO. I’d love to see him moonwalk
and shooting lasers.
10
Celebrate the
competition
Skylanders, LEGO,
Disney Infinity – they’re all
different games. They do well, we
do well. We’re offering these true-
to-story experiences and allowing
others to make their own. This
time we’re open galaxy, not just
open world, as in Star Wars we
can go from planet to planet with
ship-to-ship combat. This is the
kitchen sink game. OXM
WWW.gAMeSrADAr.coM/oxM
 DVR recording on Xbox One
It’ll require an external hard drive,
but DVR recording for Xbox One owners
DAsHbOARD
will be free and launching in 2016.

STREAM TO PC
If you see this
purple cloud
between your Xbox

WITH WINDOWS 10
One and PC, you’re
doing it wrong.

Xbox One games on our PCs? So long, windows of opportunity

getting any work done How to stream to your PC

I
t’s something that’s happened to us
all. You’re just about to complete one
Most games are playable, with only Kinect
features disabled (even if you have the
1 Start on your Xbox One. From the
Dashboard, go into Settings, then
Preferences and make sure ‘Allow game
of The Witcher 3’s epic side quests, PC version of Kinect). Streaming is pretty streaming to other devices’ is ticked.
you’re finally leader of the pack in Forza, instantaneous, with lag only noticeable
or you’re just about to unmask your
nemesis in Arkham Knight, when a member
of your traitorous family
on more advanced games or if you have a
poor internet connection. Playing a Telltale
game will work fine, for
2 Launch the Xbox app on your Windows 10
PC, then select Connect. If you don’t have
a Windows 10 PC, sorry, you won’t be able to
demands to use the //You don’t even instance, but if you’re stream your games. Hold back your tears.
television. Previously this
have to sell Your playing Halo online – and
would have meant the end
of your night’s gaming,
soul to make
broadcasting through
Twitch – it might not be 3 After clicking Connect, a list of available
consoles should appear. Select yours, and
then press Connect. Select another console
and the beginning of your the ideal setup.
evening’s snooze fest
through Downton Abbey or
it work// In order to benefit
from the best streaming
to snoop at what your neighbours are playing
(sadly, that won’t actually work).
Coronation Street. performance, you’ll want to use a wired
That problem has finally become an
irritant of the past, now Microsoft has
connection and you’ll need to have a
Windows 10 PC with a 1.5GHZ CPU, that has
4 Use a USB cable to attach your Xbox One
controller to your PC, then select Stream.
You can now play Xbox One through your PC.
launched full Xbox One streaming onto at least 2GB of RAM. If you didn’t understand As a bonus, you won’t even have to switch the
Windows 10 PCs. Magic, and you don’t even a word of that, welcome to the terrifying Xbox One on. We celebrated by smashing our TV.
have to sell your soul to make it work! world of PC gaming.

In numbeRs > DATAPOInT: news In numbeRs > DATAPOInT: news In numbeRs >

20 14 10,000
The record number of servers used Number of publishers Total Gamerscore in Rare Replay.
to power Crackdown’s technically already supporting backwards 9,999 of that should be for successfully
jaw-dropping levels of destruction. compatibility on Xbox One. completing Battletoads.

@OXM THe OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINe / 13

 dasHbOard
absOlUtely cracking
One man army
While the offline
single-player campaign
doesn’t feature building
destruction, it’s still a
giant leap forward – aptly,
considering the focus on
superpowered bounding –
for one of Xbox 360’s
best sandboxes.
DeaD in the clouDs
How Crackdown 3’s online co-op turns Xbox One
into the most powerful console ever made
What’s the story?
Imagine taking apart an entire city
with physics-based destruction
with not a crumb of concrete
vanishing from the world. Where
machine guns dig doors through
crumbling masonry and entire
skyscrapers can be toppled, and
leveraged as weapons as they
topple. Now imagine four Agents
co-operatively performing these
tricks at once and Xbox One
somehow handling it without
melting. This is Reagent Games
and Cloudgines’ bold vision for
Crackdown 3’s cloud-computed
physics; a vision our hands-on
demo proves to be reality.
14 / THe OFFICIAl XBOX mAGAzINe
Why should i care?
Because it surpasses anything
the Xbox One could do alone.
The co-op city – distinct to the
single-player campaign’s – is
divided into sectors, each policed
by a different server. Fire a gun
in an area and the calculations
are beamed to its server and
the crumbly results sent back
to the Xbox One. If one area’s
material falls into another, the
server hands responsibility to its
neighbour to share the load. When
Crackdown’s creator detonates
bombs planted around the city,
we see up to 14 servers whir to
life to render the apocalypse.
cOnditiOning
fabric
much of the city is
covered with what dave
Jones calls ‘digital fabric’,
a layer of holograms that
lets designers weave HUd
elements into the agent’s
suit, and plaster their
vehicle with damage
indicators.
What happens next?
Dave Jones – returning to the
series he created (his assured
touch was missed in Crackdown
2) – and his team have to prove
the game works outside of its
test environment. He tells us that
online play is being optimised for
a 2-4mbps connection which is
far less than we’d expected based
on the scale of information being
shared. If it can work consistently
in the wild it’s a genuine game-
changer for Xbox, rendering some
of its specs irrelevant and inviting
developers to set their own
boundaries. The sky’s the limit. Or,
at the very least, the cloud is.
WWW.GAmesRADAR.COm/OXm
 a Rare number one
rare replay is the studio’s first Uk number one since
1998’s banjo-kazooie – and the first Xbox One-exclusive
game to top the charts ever. Pats on the back all round.
Hate
males
as in the original
crackdown your main
objective is to kill crime
lords. rather than dwell out
in the open as before, they
now need to be tempted out
of hiding by first drawing
their ire, represented on
the new, and cleverly
named, Hate
meter.
@OXm
uppeRs &
DoWneRs
this month’s
temperature, taken
WHat’s HOt?
With great
(computing)
1
power comes great
responsibility, so…
let’s burn things!
Metal GeaR soliD V
so hot it features a man made out
of fire. It’s like Kojima knew we’d
write this hot/cold column.
2
staR WaRs BattlefRont
Han shot first, but then we got to
respawn and shoot Han. serves you
right, mister smug.
electric
avenUe 3
crime bosses can hijack
the city’s digital fabric
to taunt agents. this
way the narrative follows
you, countering (valid) MiRRoR’s eDGe catalyst
criticisms of crackdown’s Free-roam is so good it inspired Tom
lack of story without to enter the office by a third-floor
breaking the action’s window. Funeral next week.
hands-on flow.
WHat’s nOt?
1
Pieces Of
Hate
each tier of hatred
that you hit evokes ever MattheW’s GaMescoM Diet
more violent retaliation, Day one: smarties. Day two: gummy
causing attack squads of bears stolen from demo booth.
increasingly violent thugs Day three: death.
to come after you and the
city’s innocent citizens
until you draw out the
boss and finish him 2
for good.
yaRny’s hiDDen aGenDa
Unravel’s cute, but are we the only
mecH ones that think its hand-woven doll
my day looks like satan?
crime bosses aren’t
the flimsy meatsacks of
old; one villain storms
a port in a giant mech
suit, sending the terrified 3
dockworkers screaming for
their lives. Well, until
the agent goes and drops
a shipping container
on his head.
this Bullet-shapeD
MeMoRy stick
A cool design to celebrate 20 years
of Remedy, but a horrible shock for
airport security.
THe OFFICIAl XBOX mAGAzINe / 15
opinion

The abiliTy To paTch games is

fanTasTic – buT unTil updaTes are
a manageable size, maybe some
gliTches should go unfixed
Slow dow nload speeds and tight HDD space m ean
updates can be m ore trouble than they’re wor th

S
tep out into the world
of your favourite game
for a moment and soak
it in. Feel the breeze
of the cool evening
air dance around you
as bushes and reeds sway; sit
in quiet contemplation as the
Sun sets and the entire world
is drenched in an orange haze.
Game worlds built with today’s
tech are so rich and immersive
that it’s easy to forget the whole
place is built out of maths.
But built on numbers and
algorithms they are, and that
makes games more fragile things
than you could ever know. Any
tiny gap in the logic can tear even
the most robust game world clean
apart. Donkey Kong and Pac-Man
are among the famous old arcade
games that literally cannot be
completed; eventually, on screens
117 and 256 respectively, the
maths behind the madness gets
tangled and the game glitches out
in spectacular style.
That’s endearing of an arcade
cabinet that’s ( just about) old
enough to be a grandad; not so
much for a cutting-edge piece of
software that costs the best part
of £50. That’s why big companies
spend such vast sums on quality
assessment, and why testing
games for a living is nowhere
near as glamorous as it seems
(er, does it seem glamorous?).
Much of QA’s time is spent not
embarking on thrilling speed
runs, but rubbing along the edges
of the game world, doing weird
stuff in an attempt to unlock the
magic combination of events that
cause 10,000 watermelons to rain
from the sky.
But games are huge, complex
things these days, so as you
can imagine, even if you had
the entire country of Belgium
working around the clock, a
few glitches are going to slip
through the cracks – which then
Fancy playing The Evil
Within without borders?
You don’t? That’ll be
a mandatory 5GB update
anyway, my friend.
glitches of modern times occurs
in Wii launch title The Legend of
Zelda: Twilight Princess – save
your game at a certain point and
you’ll be stuck in the room for
the end of time, instantly wiping
out 30+ hours of progress, unless
you’re nursing a second save or
are willing to download one and
muck about with SD cards.
But things are different now,
aren’t they? I know people
don’t tend to write poetry about
patches, but it’s pretty magical
Now at nearly 70GB, The
Master Chief Collection
is to your Xbox what the
Flood is to Halo.
//ONe Of The big draws Of
that bugs can be ironed out after
the game’s release, isn’t it? But it’s
a balancing act, too, and one that
I think Xbox One isn’t getting
right at all. One of the big draws
of gaming on a console over a PC
is supposed to be the immediacy
– the notion that you can buy a
game, jam it in the disc drive and
it’ll be up and running within
seconds. Mandatory installs
have already stripped this latest
generation of some of its instant
punch, but that’s a necessary
evil with where we’re at at the
moment – there’s no way sluggish
Blu-ray disc read times can be
expected to keep up with today’s
lush game worlds.
Patches, on the other hand,
are another matter. Updates are
impossibly massive on Xbox
One, and download times are
notoriously slow (even more so
for me – despite living in one
of Britain’s largest cities, fibre
optic apparently isn’t available
in my street). Settling down for
a quick evening gaming session
has become a nerve-wracking
experience; I’m scared to click
on any game I haven’t booted up
for a while. Six months’ worth
of Destiny updates has to weigh
at least 16GB, right? Even the
stuff I am playing manages to
trip me up. Just the other night,
Forza Horizon 2, a game I’ve
been enjoying for over 50 hours
without a single bug, decided
to balloon by another 300MB.
While I was waiting, I thought I’d
give Jetpac Refuelled a whirl, only
to be denied again – 500MB this
time, seemingly just to add the
words ‘Rare Replay’ to the game
icon. In the end I decided to just
read (gasp!) a book.
Until Xbox One updates
are wrestled down to a more
manageable size, I think it’s time
developers were more judicial in
deciding which glitches are big
enough to justify rolling out these
disruptive, hard-drive guzzling
updates. I’d rather a case of
‘glitch stops play’ than play never
beginning at all.

inevitably surface on YouTube

within hours of the game’s
gamiNg ON a CONsOle Over PC is nexT monTh Tom on how spinning
on the spot helps pass the time
release. One of the most infamous suPPOsed TO be The immediaCy// while NPCs drone on at you.

16 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm

 Mighty No 9 Delayed until 2016
Keiji Infanue’s Kickstarter-funded game will
now be out in the ‘Q1 2016’ window. Apparently
dAshboArd
extra time is needed to fix online issues.

the crew of the

spirit of fire
return in hw2.
this brute looks
new though.

Halo WarS getS

creatively reaSSeMbleD

eaSter egg With just five staff at its inception, creative assembly now hosts a team of more than 300.
The Total War team are revamping an Xbox 360 classic

S
ometimes the planets of
the games industry’s solar
system align so perfectly,
you can almost hear atoms
screeching under the strain.
Creative Assembly signing on to
develop a sequel to Ensemble’s Halo
Wars is one of these occasions.
New to Halo Wars? It’s one of the
few genuinely playable real-time
strategy games on console, a cunning
alloy of Ensemble’s Age of Empires
series and the unit relationships of
the numbered Halo games. CA, of
course, is the developer of the Total
War series – the armchair tactician’s
Call of Duty – and Alien: Isolation,
a game that demonstrates both a
mastery of Xbox One’s innards and
a talent for squeezing genius out of It’s not just a question of smart
externally-owned property. Stir all controls, with group select commands
this together, and you’ve got the basis on the shoulder buttons, and a cursor
for the finest exercise in living room you can expand by holding a face
generalling since Alexander the Great button. Halo Wars also slims down
had Napoleon the conventions
Bonaparte over for
a round of Twister. //EnsEmblE’s of base-building
– you still get to
CA has said that
HW2 won’t be a
takE on consolE choose between
research and
reskinned Total War
– it’ll be “Halo Wars
stratEgy has yEt unit production
facilities, but
taken to the next
stage”. What this
to bE EclipsEd// everything slots
into a preset base
amounts to remains to be seen, but it template, so there’s no need to worry
strikes the right note. Total War’s micro- about niceties of placement. If CA can
management would be a nightmare improve on that formula – perhaps in
on a pad, and Ensemble’s take on the the form of a proper Covenant campaign
console RTS has yet to be eclipsed. – it’ll have a classic on its hands.

you’re fIred! > Quotes of the month > blAh blAh > he sAId whAt? > yAddA
“the energy inside Xbox “dinklage was awesome to “we don’t use any other game
right now, is incredibly work with but we needed in the same sentence as
high. we feel, ‘okay, the someone who is more Grand theft Auto. It is the
foundation is in place, let’s available. nolan north is a industry’s standard-bearer.
surprise people in ways that pro, this is his thing.” It’s not up for comparison.”
aren’t just fixing things.’” Bungie explains the decision to re-record all Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick ‘gently rebuts’
Phil Spencer on Xbox One’s current fortunes. of Peter Dinklage’s Ghost dialogue in Destiny. comparisons between Mafia III and GTA V.

@OXm ThE OffICIAl XBOX mAGAZINE / 17

 DaSHboaRD
DRawn to ScaLe

DRagon DRagon
ReboRn meet
Don’t fret, Platinum towards the end
fans: those famous of the demo we see a
flashy skirmishes aren’t tease for four-player
completely absent. Store up co-op, with multiple
Drew’s energy meter and you Drews, each accompanied by
morph into a half-dragon a very different thuban,
form – at which point he descending on a hydra.
goes berserk while the but Platinum is keeping
Prodigy blares over schtum on the finer
his headphones. details for now.

RetRain
youR DRagon
experience points
can be used to customise
thuban’s appearance and
armour. this affects how
he fights. a heavy weapon
affixed to his tail packs a
punch, but also weighs him
down and slows his moves.
elemental moves can
also be added.

out
on a Limb
For reasons (as
yet) unknown, Drew
has a single dragon arm,
which can be used to scan
enemies for their elemental
weaknesses. it also changes
colour when your dragon is
near death – your cue to
get healing. if thuban
dies, Drew dies.

DRew’S
comPany
while thuban is
endlessly customisable,
levelling up leaves Drew
relatively unchanged, bar a
few stat buffs. makes sense;
he’s the brains of the outfit
to thuban’s brawn, and he’s
best kept at a distance,
offering support with
ranged attacks.

18 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm

 Dinklage’s Ghost is toast
got star Peter Dinklage is being retconned out of Destiny. He

Rumour &
voiced robo-orb ghost, but due to scheduling issues, nolan north
has taken over for year two and will be re-doing all dialogue.

speculation
//thuban is thE Five of the
biggest bits
battLEfiELd of Xbox gossip
wiLdcard, but a this month
tamEabLE onE//

1Halo
master chief
unmasks in
5 to show
he was… Locke
all along?!
ExcitEmEnt: 10/10
LikELihood: 3/10

2 Rise of the
tomb Raider’s
last level, a
british seaside
town, sees Lara
swarmed by
giant seagulls.
ExcitEmEnt: 3/10
LikELihood: 8/10

Epic scalE! 3gears

not to be
outdone by
, FiFa 16
how to explain your dragon: hideki Kamiya will ship with
gives us a five-minute runthrough of xbox one’s digital copies
scalebound – a Platinum game like no other of every FiFa
game ever.

G
ame of Thrones fans know all too
well that no matter how strong
the bond between human and
dragon, those surly serpentines
are notoriously hot-headed (and,
more to the point, hot-mouthed), and would
just as soon char you to a crisp as help you
in battle. that’s really what Scalebound, an
open-world rPg from Platinumgames is all
about. co-stars drew (a headphone-sporting
dude with a very punchable turn of phrase)
and thuban (an ai-controlled dragon, the
last of his kind in the world) are bound to
each other by a magical force called the
Pulse; if one dies, the other perishes, too.
so human and dragon will have to learn to
coexist if they want to survive.
in combat you control drew directly, and
can boss the lumbering thuban about in
broad strokes by directing him to a location.
but in the beginning, at least, what he does
when he gets there is up to him. during
the gamescom demo, things seem to go
smoothly enough. drew commands thuban in ExcitEmEnt: 4/10
the direction of an enemy base; in one swipe,
the rebellious reptilian totals the structure LikELihood: 6/10
in seconds. other times, thuban won’t be
so accommodating. he’s the battlefield’s
wildcard, but a tameable one – as the story
progresses and trust builds, thuban’s
mood will soften and more elaborate team
4andHomefront
sees the uS
Korea patch
manoeuvres will unlock.
Scalebound comes with an incredible
things up.
pedigree – director hideki Kamiya has ExcitEmEnt: 8/10
spearheaded some of the most incredible LikELihood: 1/10
action games of recent times, such as
Bayonetta and Devil May Cry. this is a stylistic
departure, however; instead of being about
chaining together flashy combos, this is
more about managing space around you,
and knowing when to back out of the fight
5 in year
three,
Destiny’s ghost
and allow your dragon to take centre stage,
with drew reverting to a support role on the
will be voiced
edges of the action. Kamiya hasn’t made a by Hulk Hogan.
dud yet – but then, he’s also never made a ExcitEmEnt: 10/10
game quite like this.
LikELihood: 0/10

@oxm the official xbox magazine / 19

 DashBoaRD
quantum thEoRy

RigoR
moRtis
Enemies killed in a
stutter don’t hit the
dirt but slow down in their
moment of death, cluttering
the battlefield with corpses Casio?
contorting in pain and
floating cadavers leaving smashio!
bloody vapour trails. Joyce meets his
it’s really quite the match in enemies armed
looker. also: with stutter-resistant
horrible. suits. shooting their magic
backpacks or, even better,
tearing them off with your
bare hands forces the saps
inside the fancy duds to
get violently pulled
back into normal
time.

spEak
Easy
Remedy’s knack for
lovably daft dialogue
continues. Favourite
line from the demo?
“time’s ending and you’re
having a fucking party?!”
Coincidentally, this is
exactly what matthew said
to the team on oXm’s
last deadline.

20 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm

 I’ll be back (no, not you, Hogan)
WWE has played host to clowns, trash collectors and now…
cyborgs? pre-order WWE 2k16 and you’ll unlock arnie’s
terminator. Foul-mouthed hulk hogan has been removed, however.
lanCE
haRmstRong
the trio of leads is
joined by other stars of
the (mostly small) screen,
notably lance Reddick, best
known for his stick-up-the-
ass commanding officers in
the Wire and Fringe. here
he gets to hit people
with said stick, as
the villainous mr
hatch.
THe TeST of TIme
time waits for no man as
Quantum break reveals all-new
cast and an easter release
p
ity the Jack Joyce of
2014, not so much
a man trapped in
disintegrating time as a
man erased from it. the
slightly generic dude from last
year’s gamescom is now shawn
‘iceman from x-men’ ashmore,
part of a spate of digital body-
snatching that sees the entire
cast given a hollywood overhaul.
aiden gillen (Game of Throne’s
littlefinger) is the villain out to
exploit fracturing time; dominic
‘lost’ monaghan the scientist
who broke time in the first place.
this is what happens when you let
actors play with time machines.
face transplants aside, this
year’s demo gives Joyce’s time
powers a better airing in a larger
battle. he runs circles around
slowed foes, fires entire clips
into frozen bodies and avoids a
similar fate by sucking up bullets
in a protective time bubble. the
arrival of a looping time ‘stutter’
puts those same powers to use in
light platforming. as a transport
frigate collapses and rebuilds on
repeat you dart through pipes in
@oxm
How To
Speak
gamEsCom
spECial!
Developer
your guide to
translating those
interview gems
thE
haRD sEll “We’re glad to
Ever wondered what a
microsoft-produced tV be back in
show would look like? For Europe – it’s our
one, the villains all use
surface pads. okay, showing a favourite market!”
hostage threatening pics of mostly because you
her family isn’t an ideal suckers are willing
product placement, but
snaps do look great on to pay $80 for a
that screen. six-hour video-game.
you’re putting my kids
through college! and
also my dog.
“We’re fully
optimising our
product for our
European fans.”
We’re thinking we
might not just get
it running by adding
big thick borders and
slowing the action
down by 10% this time.
the seconds they decrumple and ”We’re super-
clamber up shipping containers
before they rewind back into
excited about
place. it’s gorgeous – fracturing facing the unique
like an ice cube dunked into warm challenges this
water – if slightly hand-holdy. region presents.”
You’ll go hands-off entirely for
remedy’s weirdest innovation:
how many bloody
a filmed tV show that interrupts languages has this
the action to show these events continent got? We’re
from the villain’s perspective. going to have to
intriguingly, moral decisions remove level two just
made in the show will later reveal
their repercussions in-game.
to make room for our
we’re shown a bound activist Estonian dialogue.
who can either be executed,
sparking a protest encountered “Being here, in
in a later level, or setting her
free to one day partner up with
the beautiful
Joyce. it’s impossible to know city of Cologne,
how jarring the transitions will gives us plenty of
be without sitting down with
the finished game, but it hints
inspiration for
at a welcome step away from future projects.”
remedy’s linear shooters of old. What if our next game
of course, Game of Thrones was a shooter set
fans are only interested in one in post-apocalyptic
branching path: where the hell
will aiden gillen’s accent go
Cologne? and what if
next? find out when Quantum Cologne was new york?
Break releases 5 april next year.
the official xbox magazine / 21
 dasHbOaRd
updates – NeW iNfO ON tHe big games

Publisher 2K GAMES / DeveloPer HANGAR 13 / Format XBOX ONE / eta 2016

maFia iii
Or ‘The Joy of Feeding People to Alligators: The Game’
so it’s back to the
1930s for more italian
mafia shenanigans?
Mafia III’s actually set in
1968 New Orleans, and
has an excellent sense of
time and place. Driving by
jazz clubs, seeing people
being wrongly harassed
by over- eager cops, and
people in flares wrongly
not being harassed by
cops. We’re promised an
actual open-world this
time. If the level of detail
we saw is consistent
throughout, this’ll feel like
slipping back in time.
so how did mafia ii’s vito
scaletta end up in the
big easy? Jazz fan?
Possibly, though he’s
not the lead this time.
Mafia III’s protagonist is
Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam
veteran who’s out for
revenge. Clay’s friends
were killed by the Italian
mafia, so he’s killing them
right back. Clay’ll have
help along the way from
three of his ‘lieutenants’
– one of whom is Vito
Scaletta, presumably
switching sides after the
events of Mafia II.
lieutenants? i prefer
to work alone.
Then you’ll miss out on
some of the game’s smart
new spins on the crime
sandbox. When you’re
trying to evade cops, you
can use payphones to call
in favours from lieutenants.
They might bribe the cops
into leaving you alone,
or lend you some extra
firepower. You earn these
by giving your lieutenants
the establishments (e.g.
nightclubs) that you
snatch from the Italian
mob’s grasp.
sounds good to me, as
long as things don’t get
too violent.
Oh boy. Mafia III is brutal.
The announcement trailer
showed a man being fed
to an alligator, and an
early nightclub encounter
has Clay getting past a
bodyguard via a whole lot
of face-stabbing.
There are multiple ways to
enter a mob den, Hitman-
style, and a variety of
options when it comes to
‘dealing’ with people. Like
when Clay tortures a drug
dealer in his car.
torturing someone in our
car? easy, i’ll just stick
on some skrillex.
The sixties were blessedly
free of that abomination.
You actually drive
recklessly until he decides
to talk, then you can
choose to let him go or
shoot him in the head. It’s
a brutal world, one that
may not have the scale
of GTA’s Los Santos, but
has style in spades. And
we’re not just saying that
because the publisher
threatened to feed us to
the alligators. Oh God.

update

Lacking firepower? You

can ring a friend for
backup.We’ll just take
out our mobile phooOH NO
it’s 1968.

22 / THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE WWW.GAMESRADAR.COM/OXM

 a future where everyone
looks vaguely like Channing
tatum. that doesn’t sound
dystopian to us.

back in the sixties,

most roads were on
fire. apparently.

update

Publisher ACTIVISION / DeveloPer TREYARCH /

Format XBOX ONE, XBOX 360 / eta 6 NOV

Call oF DutY:
blaCK oPs 3
The future is hell. Unless you like
fun games. Then the future’s lovely
so what kind of weapons
do we have in 2065? they
invented magic yet?
Not quite, but we have the
next best thing. The Spike
Launcher lets you blast
cannonballs into enemies.
Spiked ones, perfect for
sticking to targets. Then
you can remotely detonate
them. So if the spikes/
cannonballs to the
noggin don’t get you, the
explosions will.
so no magic then? i can’t
point at a droid and scream
Do as i CommaND?
Actually, yes. Cyber cores
are hacking powers that let
you take over robots. You
can either keep them around
as a helpful ally, or send
them on suicide runs into
groups of robots. Drones,
tanks and other vehicles
can also be hacked,
meaning more options on
the battlefield than ever.
What if i don’t want
ai help?
You can play through the
whole campaign in co-op
with a regular flesh-and-
blood human. All levels are
accessible from the start,
so if your friends are further
ahead, you can just skip
to that part of the game.
Unlocked weapons can be
shared between players, so
no one feels left behind.
i’m more a lover than a
fighter. anywhere i can
hide like a coward?
Well you do get your own
safe house. Here you can
choose your loadout and
appearance, practise in
training simulations – either
alone or with a friend - and
even spend currency you
earn in-game to build new
weapons. With plenty of
customisation options, this
could potentially be a series
game-changer.

in 2065, the world is consumed by conflict.

still, at least the weather’s still nice.

@OXM THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE / 23

 dashboaRd
updates – new info on the big games

there are 148 different

update racing surfaces in
the game. this one, we
guess, is tarmac?

publisher MicroSofT STudioS / Developer Turn 10 STudioS / ForMat XboX one / eta 18 Sep

Forza Motorsport 6
The rain in Spain makes you mainly aquaplane
it never rains but it
pours, huh?
You could say that. our
windscreen wipers got a
decent work out in Forza
Horizon 2: Storm Island,
but this is inclement
weather on a whole other
level. Torrential rain thuds
down the windscreen
while a thick mist hangs
in the air, obscuring your
view; this is some of the
most realistic weather
we’ve seen in a racer.
there are 450 fully modelled cars on show. at
£5 a pop, carwash trips could get pricey.
Can’t imagine all that
wet stuff does much for
the handling, either…
nope. racing drivers call
rain ‘the great leveller’,
and you can see why.
Tear into a corner at
inappropriate speeds, or
brake too soon or too late,
and it’s all too easy to
glide off into the shubbery.
rain adds a new spin on
old tracks, literally. And
the rain will settle just as
it does on real tracks.
hmm, sounds like it’s
gone a bit ‘scientific’.
You’d be right, Turn
10 has poured a large
chunk of its research and
development budget into
exploring ‘porosity’ – that
is to say, the rate at which
rainwater is absorbed
by the race track. 148
different surface types
have been simulated, with
puddles pooling on tracks
as they would in their real-
world equivalents.
the home straight isn’t so bad – it’s out in
the wilderness that the night-frights kick in.
tell me more about Night time? spooky!
these so-called ‘tracks’. What’s that like?
This is a beefier offering Who said that? oh, it’s you.
than Forza 5, with 26 Listen: night-time racing
tracks in total – ten of is a complete nightmare.
which are new to the With visibility reduced
series, including brands to near-zero, you have
Hatch, daytona, Monza to rely on your instincts
and the circuit of the and knowledge of the
Americas. indianapolis track to make it round in
has also been rejigged, one piece. it’s a nerve-
mirroring its real-world wracking ordeal, even on
redesign. And, of course, tracks you know like the
you can race ‘em at back of your hand, such as
night time as well. the nürburgring, which is
appearing in its 10,000th
consecutive racing game.
Turn 10 Studios tells us
rain and night racing have
long been Forza fans’ two
most requested features,
but it didn’t want to
include them until it was
sure the tech could do
its vision justice. now,
finally with Xbox one, the
studio has been given the
tools to create a racer
that definitely isn’t for
fairweather fans.

24 / THe officiAL XboX MAgAzine WWW.gAMeSrAdAr.coM/oXM

 S Av e t h e D At e S
XBOX
T O-D O
L IS T
the guIde
Septe m ber is her e! A nd w ith it, the ninth m onth
of the year brings a nonet of ga ming goodies …

28th Aug 1St Sep

02InfInIty
beyond
and
03hIt
max
the road,

Settle those pub debates After the triumph of Fury

about what would happen
if Darth Vader got into a
fight with Mickey, as Disney
Infinity 3.0 brings Star Wars
to the toybox.
Road, our hopes for petrol-
crazed post-apocalyptic
tie-in Mad Max are as high
as the blokes swinging
about on those huge poles.

1St Sep 17-20th Sep 18th Sep

01 fInally, v IS comIng to 04land 05euro-nly

of the
rISIng fun lIve once
Lovers of serpents, authority figures and myriad
There may be no Microsoft Pro Evolution Soccer 2016
adjectives rejoice! After agonising months of suspense,
booth at Tokyo Game Show, emerges from tunnel today.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain lands on Xbox
but you can still expect Konami has bagged the
One and Xbox 360. Expect supreme open-world stealth,
buckets of new info on a licence for the Euro 2016
idiosyncratic narrative and more exclamation marks than
bunch of third-party titles tournament, but it won’t be
you can shake a cardboard box at. For our verdict on the
to wet your whistle.. ready to play at launch
series’ sandbox swansong, see page 68.

18th Sep 24th Sep 29th Sep 2ND OCt

06It’S all forza

you, baby 07PuttIng
boot In
the
It’s pedal to the metal in
Forza Motorsport’s biggest
entry yet. Want to crash
the latest Ford GT months
before those real-life
plebs? Of course you do.
It’s not just updated teams
and kits in FIFA 16, you
know – there are whole
teams of female players,
too. We only have two
words: about time.
08StayIng
the ball
on
Wish you were a little
bit taller? Wish you were
a baller? NBA 2K16 will
definitely be able to help
you out on at least one
of these fronts.
09Start a baIl-
out fund
If you know your kickflips
from your Christ Air, you
clearly spent your teenage
years playing Tony Hawk
games. Let’s just hope 5
is more ‘rad’ than ‘Ride’.

@Oxm the OffiCiAl xbOx mAgAziNe / 25

 Messages
love letters, death threats,
and some stuff about
games… your comments
on the mag and on xbox
OXM, 5 Pinesway Industrial Estate, Ivo Peters Road, Bath

CONTACT US f facebook.com/oxmuk t @oxm e oxm@futurenet.com w gamesradar.com/oxm

S
eems like the thing that’s
got the majority of your
knickers in a twist this
month is the prospect of
backwards compatibility available
on your Xbox One. Old games, new
games – frankly we’re just glad
that our various games collections
are on the verge of playing nice
all together. Some of you feel
differently, however…
Replay or repay? Most Xbox 360 games are sold pre-owned

Star Letter
I am stoked about backwards
compatibility for Xbox One. Enlisted
in the Preview Programme, I am
already enjoying Geometry Wars and
Prize: Rare Replay Viva Piñata once again. However, I
The best piece of correspondence am concerned that the catalogue may
wins a game from Matthew’s goody bag be restricted by shrewd publishers. I
never completed Dishonored on the
360, but would love to return to it on
NX-BOX ONE? the One. But with a definitive edition
Nintendo is only being kept alive by the fact everyone being released on Xbox One, do you
loves Pokémon and the Nintendo 3DS. If it weren’t for think it likely that the publisher will
that, good ol’ Bill Gates could get his wallet out and prevent the release of the backwards-
buy Nintendo outright. Imagine, Super Mario Kart on compatible version?
Xbox, the whole system base of the handhelds to get Nigel Witney
achievements on the… er, Xbox 3DS? Well, I can dream. I
think it’d be amazing to get achievements on The Legend If you bought Dishonored on Xbox 360,
of Zelda, and a massive backlog of Nintendo games that you get the Xbox One version half price.
could be bunged on the Marketplace. Ideally, we’d be able to just stick the
I’ve also included a piece of art that I drew. It’s Link original into our beloved big black box,
with an Xbox controller – can’t fault that! but it really is up to the publisher.
Tony Curtis Ziemianski
What a con(spiracy theory)
Oddly enough, thanks At E3 Microsoft finally announced
to Rare Replay, you backwards compatibility. YAY!
can now get more Everything’s good, everyone’s happy,
N64 games on Xbox right? Wrong! Because of the absence
One than you can on of backwards compatibility at launch,
Wii U. Weird, huh? everyone decided to sell their huge
Microsoft actually collection of Xbox 360 games. With
contemplated buying everyone’s old games gone, Microsoft
Nintendo around put its plan into action and announced
2000, but the planets backwards compatibility, so now
sadly never aligned. everyone has to buy the classics again.
Disappointing, but at You better start buying the games
least we’ll never have cheap now, because come December
to play Mario Party the old games will cost more money.
Kinect. Thanks for Well done, Microsoft; you have finally
the picture, though. made everyone poor.
Kai (last name withheld)
now, so people buying classics isn’t going
to boost Microsoft’s sales. We don’t think
prices will shoot up either – a quick look
around still shows rock-bottom costs. £2
for Gears of War 3! We handed over £40 for
that. Our wallets weep at the memories…
OXM: Skitchin’ Edition
Just wanted to let you know I am
looking forward to your 140-page
‘bumper issue’. What is a bumper
issue, anyway? Is it like a bumper
sticker? Am I going to have to pry it
from the back of a fast-moving vehicle
like some sort of Skitchin’ mini-game?
Perhaps I’ll have to fend off other eager
readers to claim my prize? Because I’m
fine with that.
Adam Austin
Proud as we are of the premium issue we
put out last month, we kind of wish we’d
gone with Adam’s idea. Maybe next year.
Too many/no games!
It’s that awful time of year again to be
a young gamer. It’s just so expensive
nowadays, and all the great games are
coming out now! I think this season
where all the triple-A games are being
released needs to stop – all the games
come out as I’m going back to school,
so I won’t have time for them. And
why don’t we have an indie season?
Jay Swagdon
Summer has proven to not be a great
sales period for big releases. Something
to do with people wanting to go…
‘outside’? Ugh, sounds awful.

26 / The official xbox Magazine www.gaMesradar.coM/oxM

YoUr which was The besT
xbox one exclUsiVe Hot topic
VOTE shown aT gaMescoM? gears of war: Ultimate
edition will include all the
CRACKDOWN
SCALEBOUND A deserving winner. previous games. hooray?
A game from the creator This superhero
of Bayonetta that has a sandbox was always a
flyable dragon in it? No cult favourite and now iTs coMPleTelY oVer
offence, democracy, but it’s a jaw-dropping now!! They just dropped
this should have got 100%. showcase for what a hydrogen bomb for the
Xbox One can do. gaming world on xbox one.
Dorian Bumpas

i am listening to the Gears of

War soundtrack and i open
face book to find this? i
think i’m in love.
Noah Rutland

will there be a Gears of War

edition xbox one? i had the
crackdown – 39% Gears 3 xbox 360 and would
loVe an xbox one with a
qUanTUM break – 29% Gears theme.
scaleboUnd – 26% Kimberly Wolfe

halo wars 2 – 6% i teared up a little bit

reading this.
Brandon Wright

don’t mind me. Just air

thrusting to the great news.
Juan Aguirre

Gears is love. Gears is life.

My life’s been over playing
Gears everyday and now i’m
gunna be rotting even more.
sounds good to me! leT’s
QUANTUM BREAK do This!
Excellent time-manipulation gameplay, Megan Parrish
Hollywood actors and an actual release
date. We reckon Quantum Break would’ve The Gears of War
scored even higher had you not been
community is going to
forced to wait so damn long for it.
expand like never before!!
Dustin P Goodell

The Annotated… Star Wars Battlefront – Blast mode More like the Gears of War
Your response to the new 10v10 team deathmatch mode trilogy and a Call of Duty
game in disguise.
Benjamin Hughes
10v10?! This is
next-gen gaming,
so it’s like Halo: The
Star Wars: Master Chief Collection.
and that’s all they
Battlefield Edition.
Devan Lawrance
can do. i’ll stick with Gears of War: The Delta
Planetside 2.
Scott Chambers
Team Collection.
Billy Tran

it’s not only the Gears

collection but the fact we
looks like get a true remaster of the
fun to me. even
i’m excited and if it has a couple of first game is awesome.
can’t wait for this Battlefield Isaac Vasquez
release. don’t care mechanics in it,
about the haters. i won’t care.
Joshua Almond Matthew Birdzell so will you be able to get
these achievements again
or no? i know everybody
i hope it can be played dice is ruining my wants to get seriously and
offline with bots. childhood… seriously 2.0 again.
Alexander Ruotimaa John Vasquez
Masson Smith

@oxM The official xbox Magazine / 27

 fe at ure

28 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm


the
nuclear
option
fallout 4 doesn’t just develop old rPg templates – it
razes them to the ground and builds something bigger,
better and brighter in their place. exclusive access to the
most explosive – and expansive – game of the year!
Words: David Houghton
T
here’s more than one way to go
new-gen. it’s not just about
presenting your ideas via the
medium of graphics that – as they
are wont to do every five years or
so – stun their incredulous
witnesses into crying witchcraft,
wizardry and general dark magic.
all of that works of course. it’s the guaranteed,
immediate way to be clear that the new iteration
of your series is indeed new, if not necessarily
improved. but it’s immediate because, by its
very nature, that’s the surface-level way of
doing things. true evolutions – the games that
stick around as landmarks long after the flashy,
forgettable, year-one tech demos have had
their moment of vapid glory – are often subtler
than that. they’re not simply products of one big
aesthetic flourish, but of many quieter, smarter,
deeper ideas that give a more tangible sense of
progress. that’s how you make a game that will
continue to resonate and continue to engross.
as such, it’s a great approach for, say, an epic,
open-ended rPg with a defiant lack of level-cap.
that’s where we come to Fallout 4. bethesda’s
first toe-dip into the xbox one gaming pool looks
increasingly akin to a multi-limbed plunge into
deeper waters. this isn’t Fallout 3: Extra Pretty
Edition. it isn’t Fallout 3: Super Big Edition. it’s
@oxm
fa llou t 4
a granular, holistic upgrade that makes the
entire Fallout experience greater in every way
that matters, while quietly – but deliberately –
addressing the specific flaws of its predecessor.
war, some have said, never changes. but the world
left behind by war? that can change quite a lot.
You’ll notice it most immediately in the
look and fabric of Fallout 4’s boston-centred
commonwealth wasteland. this isn’t the same
washed-out, dust-encrusted wreck we know from
before; it’s not Fallout 3’s ramshackle heap of
roughly hammered constructions, grave-robbed
from the desiccated corpse of the old world. it’s
hardly metropolis, that’s for sure, but at the same
time, it isn’t a place mourning what it used to be.
it isn’t a tombstone for civilisation, an epilogue
to humanity. it’s the here and now. it’s a place
of colour, and life, and vibrancy, whose people
are not scrabbling around in the dirt, praying for
a saviour, but just, well, getting on with living
their lives. there are cities among the wilderness.
technology is rising again – surely only fitting in
an apocalypse founded on the scientific optimism
of the 1950s – as airships and high-rise buildings
provide visual accompaniment.
no one is begging for non-lethal drinking water.
the wet stuff is everywhere, flooding in from the
sea, sitting deep in the swamps, and feeding the
returning trees, grassland, and maybe even a
the official xbox magazine / 29
 fe at ure Start your day as you
would any other: building
your face in the bathroom
mirror. We opt for stud
with a hint of hulk.

few resurgent farms, dutifully tended
by dilapidated farm-bots. Yes, the
world as a whole was knocked down
by the bomb, but the commonwealth
represents the parts that got back up.
a nuke can destroy a target, and many
nukes can change a way of life, but
nothing can stop life itself.
Rising from the Fallout
as Pete hines, bethesda’s VP of Pr and
marketing tells me when we discuss
Fallout’s healthier looking new future,
the attitude of Fallout’s society has
changed since we last dropped in.
“there’s this notion: ‘this is our home.
this is where we live. it doesn’t matter
what it used to be like before. we’re
not going to rebuild the world like it
used to be. this is just what life is like
now. this is my house now. i’m not ever
going back to the saturday morning
with the nicely mowed lawn and the
white picket fence. that world is gone,
this is what life is like now.’ and so
there is a bit of a vibe that you get from
the game, more a sense of normalcy.
this is now what normal looks like. this
is now what life looks like. whereas in
Fallout 3 you had a little bit of the bleak
and the feeling of hopelessness, and
the main quest had to do with trying to
restore some hope to it. this game has
gone past that, and it’s levelled out.”
but whatever the philosophical
reasoning, the end result is obvious.
this is a Fallout you’ll want to explore.
while Fallout 3’s wit, humour, even
outright goofiness, could often be
masked behind a blasted, bleak,
resolutely uninviting countenance
– many players tragically never
discovered the warmth of the game’s
personality after being put off by the
coldness of its look – Fallout 4’s intent
is to create a world that’s enjoyable
to simply be in, whether or not you’re
currently hooked by investigating that
latest intriguing thing on the horizon.
not that this is a Fallout that has
forgotten its past. far from it, in fact.
for once, the game actually starts
before the nuke, when chrome-plated
convenience and pastel-coloured
bliss reigned supreme. You’ll initially
wake up not in a deep, subterranean
shelter, but in a ‘50s-style home in an
idyllic ‘50s-style neighbourhood, coffee
poured at the perfect temperature by
a flawlessly gleaming mr handy robot
butler, and your partner present as
you customise your character while
cleaning your teeth in the bathroom
mirror. it’s not long before all of that
goes away – though you’ll run into a
less pristine handy a long, long time
later, on a much less chipper version
of your street – but this actual,
tangible connection to the previously
mythologised world-gone-by currently
looks not to draw post-apocalyptic
boston as aftermath, but as continuity.
while bethesda is hiding most
details of Fallout 4’s story, we do
know how you’ll interact with it. and
‘interact’ is now a very apt word – this
time around, your character won’t
remain a meaningless shell for your
real-world input, a roving camera
stuffed full of stats. this time, you’ll
have real presence, a powerful change
effected by a million small details.
the biggest and most striking is the
gift of a voice. no longer will your
apocalyptic avatar interact silently, by
way of text box selections directed at
static, staring mannequin-men. every
conversation is fully performed, and
every chat is an engaging, dynamic
scene, whether you choose to play it
out in first or third-person.
not that you’ll even be forced to
take part at all. forget those eerie
encounters of old. meeting and
greeting in Fallout 4 is less a dialogue-
infused stare-out contest, and much
more akin to downtime in a modern
fPs. get bored, and you’re free to
wander off. get annoyed, and you
can happily cut the talk short with an
impromptu bullet to the other party’s
face. Fallout has always been a

t h e Sto rY S o fa r …

alternate hiStorY the enD of the WorlD DucK anD coVer

fallout is set in a universe
where america never discovered
rock and roll, and the scientific
breakthroughs promised in the 1950s
were 100% accurate. So while we’ll
still be doing the charleston in
2077, we will be doing it with our
robot butlers. Sounds good to us.
We probably should have mentioned
that fossil fuels are running out,
which has culminated in a worldwide
resource war. china and america
finally clash over the alaskan oil
fields and on october 23, 2077, the
war goes nuclear. our wind turbines
don’t look so silly now, eh?
the uS Government built Vaults
to protect american citizens.
But almost all these vaults were
actually social experiments to
test people’s behaviour as they
adjusted to vault life. earth burns
in nuclear fire, while many of the
vaults fail to keep people alive.

30 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm

 fa llou t 4

po W er a r M ou r

ah, memories
of that first-
day-of-school-
in-oversized-
uniform photo
your mum kindly
insisted on.

pitiful arMour real Steel

When you first leave Vault
111, you’ll be lucky if the
blue jumpsuit you’re wearing
protects you from a radroach
bite. there’s all sorts of
protective equipment and
clothing to be found in the
wastes, but serious survivors
will want to invest in some
power armour.
in previous games, power armour was
just an outfit you equipped. one that
offered great defence and took up a lot
of inventory space, but not much beyond
that. this time it’s a mechanical iron
Man-style suit you step inside of.
Better yet, the separate parts can be
mixed and matched with other power
armour models to your heart’s content,
and modified for extra perks.

the SKY’S the liMi… oh

the jetpack is by far the best mod we
saw. is there a videogame, or indeed
a single part of everyday life, that
isn’t improved with one? any concerns
we had about this not being a truly
new-gen fallout game shattered when we
saw this mechanical beast take to the
skies. Stuff that wearable pip-Boy, why
wasn’t this getup a pre-order bonus?

the effects of the bomb

reign over all, but life
is starting to move on.

leaVinG the Vault

luckily, you’re the sole survivor
of Vault 111. Sure, you lost your
family, child and everyone/thing “this is a
fallout you’ll
you’ve ever loved, but you can’t
have everything. emerging from the
vault 200 years after the bombs
drop, how you survived and why you
didn’t age remains to be seen... want to explore”
@oxm the official xbox magazine / 31
 fe at ure
t h e co M pa nionS
coDSWorth
“You’re two centuries late for dinner! ha ha!”
Your robot butler before the Great War, still
hanging around town when you leave the vault
200 years later. though it’ll be nice to have
a cheerful companion - and capable cook - in
the harsh wastes, it’s a shame he’s missing his
flamethrower attachment in 2277. Wait, why did
our butler have a flamethrower again?
DoGMeat
“Bark! Bark!”
Man’s best friend and the namesake of a
fallout 3 favourite, Dogmeat is found at the
red rocket gas station. like all companions,
Dogmeat is immortal this time. he’s also a lot
more helpful than he first appears, capable
of taking commands from the player, including
searching fresh corpses for loot. Good boy!
piper
“i’ve an idea for an article you’d be great for.”
piper’s a journalist running her own newspaper,
popular occurrences. here at oXM, we’re
relieved print journalism has survived another
few centuries. Much as we like the idea of piper
writing about our wasteland adventures, we’re
hoping there’s nothing about what we did to
Megaton in fallout 3 in the paper’s archives…
preSton GarVeY
“Man, i don’t know who you are, but your
timing’s impeccable.”
the future’s not all robot butlers and dogs.
preston Garvey, leader of the commonwealth
Minutemen, is still fighting to keep humanity
alive. that’s not going too well when you meet
him. he’s holed up in the Museum of freedom,
where raiders have already killed 15 of his men.
32 / the official xbox magazine
game concerned above all else with
accommodating any way you want to
play, but now that provision works on the
level of intimate, moment-to-moment
interactions as well as the big stuff.
in fact, those worried that a more
explicit in-game personality might lead
to a loss of control from time to time
can relax. according to hines, not even
a character detail as fundamental as
your gender will steer things for you,
despite your in-game representative’s
now overt verbal presence.
“there are some slight differences,
but as far as the basic experience of
playing the game, we wanted it more
to be a part of who you want to be,
as opposed to locking you into this
or locking you into that because you
decide to play as male or female.
whether that be who you can have a
relationship with, or the choices you
can make. we want that to be pretty
open-ended so that the player is more
in charge of who they are, as opposed
to the designer making a decision that
the player wasn’t involved in.”
and when it comes to nuanced
interaction, none is as important – or
seemingly as improved – as Fallout 4’s
new combat model. the Vats system
– that time-stopping, target-picking
purveyor of pornographic headshots
and dismemberment – returns, but
like everything else in Fallout 4, is
redesigned to maintain a more dynamic
connection with the world around you.
rather than freezing time, it simply
slows it, maintaining urgency and a
certain sense of reality, while also
demanding that you keep track of a
strategically evolving situation rather
than survey a static tableau.
not that you should need to use
Vats half as much as before. Fallout
4’s real-time shooting has been vastly
upgraded, by way of a little help from
bethesda’s very qualified friends.
much has changed at the house of
dragonborn since 2008, after all.
fPs pioneer id software, creator of
Doom and almost all of gaming’s most
www.gamesradar.com/oxm

protectrons
return in
fallout 4.
the fat Man’s
back, but
foes like the
Behemoth will
challenge it.
satisfying shotguns, has joined the family,
“it may be a viable as has machinegames, the zesty young
upstart responsible for Wolfenstein: The
shooter now, but New Order and The Old Blood. both studios
have helped shape Fallout 4’s combat,
it’s still 100% rpg”
and it immediately shows in practice.
more feral enemies, such as ghouls,
still have a habit of getting right up into
your face, but retaliation is no longer
a case of frantically backpedalling
while hoping for the best. with smooth,
precise, flowing aim, it now looks more
feasible to duck, weave and improvise
to one’s heart’s content, though of
course levels, stats, probabilities
and gear quality will still underpin the
whole affair. Fallout 4 may be a viable
shooter now, but it’s still 100% rPg.
@oxm
fa llou t 4
even better, Fallout’s environmental
design seems to have taken a major
shot in the arm in order to accommodate
the upgraded action. the quality of
your guns is, after all, only half the
story of making a good fPs. choke-
points, smartly-placed cover and new
tactical opportunities look to be rife.
and, of course, there are exploding
barrels. every combat scenario seen so
far – whether in the cramped, winding
environs of Fallout 4’s picturesquely
cluttered residential wrecks, or played
out as part of a roaring, multi-layered,
open-air stand-off with snipers, ghouls
and gunships – has felt exhilarating,
unpredictable and truly dynamic.
much more than before, there’s a
real sense of possibility to Fallout 4’s
violence, now that the shackles of
stiff aiming and lumpy control seem to
be off. this isn’t the whirling battle of
Halo transposed to a crumpled, post-
nuclear wasteland. not by any means.
and of course stealth, crunching melee
hits and non-violence are still entirely
viable. but when things do kick off –
should you choose to play that way
– the more immediate-looking control
opens up a vast wealth of accessible
diversity. hand-cranked laser muskets,
the return of the fat man mini-nuke
launcher, chainsaw-modded daggers,
long-range rifles, hackable robots… all
these and many more can be thrown in
to create genuinely emergent, rapidly
escalating, and often blackly hilarious,
limb-bursting carnage.
Top dog
and of course, there are always the
loyal teeth of trusty old dogmeat, your
canine wingman. modelled on and
mo-capped from river, one of the devs’
own dogs – and entirely indestructible
this time around – he brings another,
very personal level of ambient
connection to the world, whether
scrabbling around in the background
for supplies as you pick a lock, or biting
through a bandit’s shin ready for you
to drop the killing blow. You’ll feel
a much greater sense of your own
presence in Fallout 4 as a matter of
course, but dogmeat will extend that
presence and connection yet further.
not that he’ll be your only friend.
not at all. the commonwealth seems
a greatly more populated place than
we’re used to – organic, multi-faction
fights seem par for the course,
bringing as much sense of life as
strategic diversity – but that goes
for the friendlies just as much as
the aggressors. Fallout 4 will have
12 potential companions, including
dogmeat and a mr handy, and in a major
change for the series, all of the human
allies will be open to romance. again,
gender irrelevant. it’s not yet clear
how that will be initiated, or what the
the official xbox magazine / 33
 fe at ure
t h e W e a ponS
plaSMa WeaponS
Most beam weapons in games can feel disappointingly
weak, like we’re actually playing a harmless game of
laser tag in a war zone. not so in fallout, where a
critical hit is able to melt your victims. fallout 4
also lets you construct a plasma sniper rifle.
BaSeBall Bat
a favourite of raiders everywhere, gleefully running up
to us even when we’re clearly holding a shotgun. a pretty
nasty melee weapon, with modifications including razors,
nails, chains and saw blades. We predict the most popular
decoration will be raider brains.
MiniGun
Subtlety is dead, and so is anyone foolish enough to stand
in your way when this is equipped. heavy, bound to take
up a lot of inventory space, and not the best choice if
you’re trying to come across as a diplomat – but it’s hard
to care when you’re packing this much firepower.
34 / the official xbox magazine
JunK Jet
running out of bullets but rich in tin cans? invest in
the Junk Jet, which happily fires random objects in
your inventory. We’re not sure how much control we have
over what gets launched, although we do like the idea of
shooting a shotgun into someone.
fat Man
We can’t think of a better way of saying ‘i’ve learnt
nothing’ than firing a mini-nuke launcher in the
radioactive wastelands. this is one of the game’s most
powerful weapons – just please think before you start
firing it at close-range.
pipe piStol
constructed from springs, rusty metal pipes and other
worthless tat that we’d never have let dirty our fallout
3 pockets. this gun has a tendency to look weak, but it
can be upgraded into a variation of more formidable pipe
rifles. Better get looting.
www.gamesradar.com/oxm

“the levelling
system has had its
roof blown off”
repercussions will be – some evolution
of Skyrim’s food and income perks
would be a good starting bet – but
given the more intricate, resonant look
of Fallout 4’s world, perhaps expect
the actual relationships to play a more
overt part in the story, mission events,
and maybe even your options for future
character development.
our favourite companion so far? has
to be Piper. first met trying to break
into a locked-down diamond city – the
teeming town-within-a-town fortified
within boston’s fenway Park baseball
stadium – she’s the firebrand editor
of the local newspaper and a giant,
rad-mutated thorn in the mayor’s side.
she’s sneaky, witty, and referred to
by her critics as a “devious, rabble-
rousing slanderer”. there’s every
chance that marriage is on the cards.
speaking of character progression,
Fallout 4 is set to liberate you in that
area, too. as previously mentioned, it
has been confirmed that there will be
no level cap. whatsoever. not only that,
but following the entirely justifiable
backlash to the way Fallout 3’s last
mission locked down the game, this
one will stay wide open for as long as
fortify
your land to
protect from
raiders.
@oxm
you want to play. the main story will
just be one of the hundreds you’ll be
able to create for yourself along the
way, and finishing it will have no effect
on your ability to continue on your
endless adventure.
Power of choice
and endless it might well be. You see,
while the levelling system has had its
roof resolutely blown off, it has also
filled out. and once again, it’s all to the
end of giving you more options. You’ll
still level up via xP, and each level
increase will still give you a point to
spend on a perk, but now those perks
have varying xP levels of their own. it’s
perk-ception, essentially, and means
that, should you theoretically play
long enough to max out every tier of
every single one – gaining untold buffs
and no doubt all kinds of horrendous
real-world illnesses in the process
– you’ll top off with a total of 275.
completionists, thine nemesis, and a
comfy hospital bed, awaits.
that said, there are going to be
comforts of sorts available in-game
as well. Fallout 4’s grandest grasp for
connection goes beyond dogs, details,
fa llou t 4
You’ll get destruction and domestic bliss. now,
to hear your your endless wanderer can truly have
character’s somewhere to lay their battered,
voice for the slightly scorched hat, and rather than
first time.
an adopted shack, it will be a home
entirely of your own making. or, for that
matter, a fortress. or a weaponised
chicken farm. or a deathtrap labyrinth,
or any one of a multitude of inevitably
penis-shaped structures you dare
dream up. finally, you can put that
plethora of discarded junk to good
use, as Fallout has gone the way of
Minecraft and developed an entirely
new system of crafting and building.
everything from architecture to
furniture to decoration is totally
customisable once you find the right
plot of land to work with, by way of
an incredibly robust and versatile set
of tools. the inclusion of building in
Fallout 4 is no mere half-measure, like
Skyrim’s underwhelming Hearthfire
expansion. this is the real deal. build
what you want, out of whatever you
want, and then live in it. or trade from
tricksy it. or invite new shopkeepers to join
Deathclaws you, and evolve into a bona fide trading
can kill you post. and set up brahmin caravan
instantly. trains to link up with other settlements.
fortify it. defend it. make it yours.
because that’s what Fallout is all
about, really. an experience that’s truly
yours. and it’s something that, with its
themes of resurgence and reclamation,
and finding comfort in the new world,
Fallout 4 couldn’t be clearer about.
not only is its world more open, more
nuanced, more welcoming, responsive,
and rewarding to your presence, but
it’s now offering up a part of itself to
reclaim and rebuild entirely as you wish.
Fallout 4. welcome home indeed. ■
the official xbox magazine / 35
 Preview

Scamper up to higher ground and

Lara can pounce on the unknowing
goons below. A survivor is born?
Nah, a ruddy psychopath is born.

36 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm


Rise of the
Publisher microsoft studios / DeveloPer crystal dynamics / Format xbox 360, xbox one
Tomb Raider
Lara rediscovers her roots in a tomb with a view
A
s Lara seeks
the secret to
immortality in a
sandy Syrian tomb,
others pursue
treasures of the
earthly realm.
“It’s a dollar a
death!” hoots our
Crystal Dynamics guide as his co-host
mistimes a grab cue and sends Croft
crunching into the valley below. We
wonder if this is one of those ‘look, the
demo’s live!’ tricks that developers are
becoming increasingly keen on, until
we take over the controls minutes later
and discover that yes, it is indeed live
and yes, it is easy to mistime the grabs.
Our personal grab fail is more violently
punished, mind, as failing to scrabble
away from collapsing floor tiles drops
Lara onto a bed of Punji sticks. It’ll
take more than a dollar to fix that.
Spike pits are just one of many
threats awaiting us in Rise of the Tomb
Raider’s first real tomb, a return to
the proper death-trap design largely
@oxm
Preview
absent in 2013’s reboot. Back in Bluffer’s
January, Crystal Dynamic’s creative Guide
director, Noah Hughes, talked us
if Tomb raider
through the fundamentals of building
was the Batman
ancient architecture: the need for Begins of the
dramatic reveals, dwarfing scale and, series, this
crucially, the sense of ‘how the hell do is The Dark
I get from here to there?’. Syria’s Tomb Knight: bigger,
of the Prophet nails the first criteria as smarter,
Lara edges along canyon walls by her darker. And
fingertips only to find a majestic front hey, there’s
door carved into the stone. It brings to even a slightly
freaky baddie
mind the sandstone wonders of Petra,
with scars on
switching us into archaeologist mode his face. wow,
better than Yamatai’s bunkers ever did. this metaphor
Inside – just past the one-dollar really came
death dive – lie further nods to Lara’s into its own at
more studious side. Eyeing up detailed the end, there.
murals delivers handy gobbets of scene-
setting history as well as improving
Croft’s proficiency in Ancient Greek
– one of those hilariously daft game
contrivances you’re just going to have
to roll with. Filling Lara’s head with
Greek knowledge-yoghurt allows her
to decipher tablets and learn about
hidden tombs. It’s basically red key/
the official xbox magazine / 37
 Syria appears to serve as the intro
to the game. when you finally reach
Siberia expect the game to open up
into the more familiar hub areas.

Big piles of bug-filled skeletons

hints at a pulpier tone, bringing
the reboot’s often dour events in
line with Lara’s earlier quests.

The glow stick is more an excuse

to show off lighting and shadow
work than a necessary tool.

even in the more linear climbs

you’ll find crannies that hide
bonus chests and collectibles.

38 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm


red door with a bachelor of arts degree,
but it feeds neatly into the idea of these
being Croft’s formative years, and is
preferable to the seemingly endless
supply of GPS caches we thanklessly
hoovered up throughout the last game.
It’s here in the dingy catacombs
that you appreciate the stunning array
of visual tricks. Lara’s hair hogs the
spotlight with its flopping TressFX
theatrics, but it’s the light itself that
catches our eye. Lighting a glow stick
to illuminate a crawl space bathes
skeletons of past explorers in an
unnatural pallor while simultaneously
picking out the glistening skin of oily
scorpions swarming on the walls. A
later glow stick malfunction sets up
the cheapest of jump scares involving
those scuttling cads, but it’s fun to see
Indiana Jones-style matinee jolts break
up the parade of relative misery. As
Lara kicks her way out, more of that
glorious light comes flooding in - a
visual reward for enduring the murk.
Pushing deeper gives a distinct whiff
of Tomb Raider’s more scripted thrills.
Spike traps swing out and slow time
to a crawl as you try to land one lucky
shot in their arming mechanisms.
Hammering the Y button by a moist
crack in the wall pries it into a gushing
flow and floats a wooden platform,
with Lara on it, to freedom. The most
thrilling scene sees an elaborate trap
ensnare our heroine’s ankle and begin
to flood the room with liquid death.
Fail to hammer B to paddle faster as
you swim, and gulps turn to gargling
death among the collection of decaying
limbs that hang lifelessly in the water.
Emerge from this watery turmoil
and Hughes’ second criteria is soon
ticked off. The circular antechamber
is a vast space, its walls studded with
graves, overlooking a shimmering
pond. Already this feels grander and
deadlier than Yamatai’s catacombs,
even if the use of paint-daubed timbers
to highlight climbable ledges does
feel too user-friendly for a thousand-
year-old tomb. Saying that, raising the
water level to reach the lower rungs
is a puzzle in itself and, once up there,
you have to navigate tangled grips.
If Lara is perhaps still too fond of
auto-climbing to conjure the tension
of Underworld or Anniversary, this is
only the first level – Hughes promises
tougher acrobatics off the beaten path.
The final discipline of our holy
tomb trinity – ‘how the hell do I get
from here to there?’ – is captured in a
later puzzle. A glistening dome peeks
over a spiked fence, offering treasures
@oxm
//It’s fun to see Indiana Jones-
style matinee jolts break up the
parade of relative misery//
galore to those that can combine ropes,
pulleys, two platforms and a sudden
burst of Lara-drenching water into a
viable fence-scaling device. It’s what
the team refers to as a nested puzzle,
a mean conundrum embedded
more organically into the
around it. There are only so
many different combinations
you can actually try with eTA
said ingredients, but the
way it layers tricks you’ve 10 noV
accrued to that point into a
more taxing solution shows
how far Crystal Dynamics’ puzzle
design has evolved since 2013.
Our hard work turns out to be for
nothing as Lara’s enemies, the Trinity
organisation, breach the tomb at the
Metadata
FIx ThIs…
Lara gets a helping hand during
longer leaps, as the game auto-
steers her towards ledges. it’s a
trick repeated from the reboot, but
here it can feel heavy-handed, as if
she were lifted by the hand of god.
Preview
Few Xbox One
games look as
good as this.
we stopped
to gawp at so
much scenary
they should
rename it
same time. Who needs gymnastics Tomb Gazer.
when you’ve got bombs, right? Having
spent 15 minutes showcasing how
tombs have been built up Crystal
Dynamics spends one minute proving
how easy it is to knock them down.
o… poorly with Trinity,
g a quick exit from the
now-collapsing monument.
It’s classic reboot stuff:
jumping between crumbling
platforms, obvious routes
falling away, split-second
changes of plans and, of course,
the obligatory slow-motion leap
of faith. Or, in our case, the obligatory
slow-motion leap into the pit of death.
Having come to terms with, and
really enjoyed, the reboot’s love of
blockbuster thrills, these surprise set-
pieces don’t sit uncomfortably with us.
Whether the re-introduction of subtler
puzzling and exploration may widen
that tonal gulf is yet to be seen, but
there are no obvious warning lights
yet. Well, apart from the one as we
dive into that second pit. That’s two
dollars in the death jar: 58 more and
we’ll have enough to cover a pre-order.
From what we’ve played here, it’s well
worth the sacrifice.
Matthew Castle
The violent cartographer
Bringing a knife to a gunfight
Lara’s appearance in Microsoft’s Gamescom
briefing showcased some murderous new moves
that we had no need for in our temple run. Diving
from a rooftop and using gravity’s pull to drive
a knife through a man’s neck elicited a rightful
‘yeesh’ from the gathered audience, as did the
thuggish application of hard glass bottle to soft
man’s face. That said, as grim as it all was, it was
cool to see how a larger area could be cleared
without engaging in a massive gunfight.
the official xbox magazine / 39
 PREViEW
When everyone wears black, how
do you know who the bad guys are?
Moral: never wear anything.
Publisher UBISOFT / DeveloPer UBISOFT MONTREAL / Format XBOX ONE
Rainbow Six Siege
Hands on with Terrohunt, in the tactical shooter’s new-gen comeback
I
f you lived inside the
average multiplayer
shooter, you’d never diet.
Who cares about long-
term health? Life is cheap
in FPS land. Take a bullet
to the head in the average deathmatch
and you’re practically respawned
before your virtual corpse has hit the
floor. Ubisoft knows we’ve grown soft
and Rainbow Six Siege isn’t having it.
Permadeath is back. One kill
and you’re done, doomed to watch
the rest of the round from smarter
players’ perspectives. It soon inspired
a strategy we hadn’t used for years
– think before you shoot. Go in all
guns blazing during a terrorists vs
counter-terrorists match and the
opposing players will love you. Noise
alone is enough to give you away. Using
Sledge’s mighty hammer to smash
down walls may feel awesome, but
death comes quick to those who don’t
keep quiet. The sooner you learn this,
the sooner you’ll see a whole round.
This makes creeping through the
compound the terrorists have taken
over heart-stoppingly tense. See an
opposing team member, and you’ll be
40 / ThE OFFICIAL XBOX MAgAzINE
Bluffer’s lucky to have half a second to choose
Guide between being shooter or victim. It
The first
captures the horror-game tension of
proper Rainbow searching for an enemy you’re not sure
Six game since you really want to find.
2008’s Vegas Playing as the terrorists,
2. Expect a
Counterstrike-
protecting your bomb/
hostage/pride is even more ETA
inspired,
multiplayer-
tense. After setting up your
defences – barricading 13 OCT
focused windows, sealing off doorways,
tactical
shooter
shooting out those godawful
where gadgets surveillance drones that are happily
and gunplay tracking your location – it’s time to
are only as wait. And wait. And check you’re
important still breathing. It’s rare you’ll wait
as keeping longer than 20 seconds, but those
yourself will feel like an eternity. Destructible
alive. environments, multiple entry points,
gadgets that could so easily slip past
your defences – the knowledge that
absolutely nowhere is safe makes
dying almost a relief. Almost.
We were keen to see how all these
elements worked in the player v AI
Terrohunt mode. A co-op multiplayer
assault on a terrorist-occupied French
Embassy had us on a mission to defuse
several bombs. Protecting the defuser,
of course, takes a lot longer than you’d
like. Waves of AI terrorists are on their
way, but the question is: from where?
Guard all the exits you like – you’re
still never 100% sure what’s coming.
The joy of Siege, in either
mode, is watching your
winning strategy collapse
as the tables are effortlessly
turned against you.
Guarding exits might work
this time, but what’s stopping
terrorists coming in through
the windows? Or shooting through
the floor/ceiling? Or maybe they’re
already here, but just so damn quiet.
There’s less reliance on gadgets
in Terrohunt, with AI foes a little
more predictable than real people.
All the weapons we tried handled
well and felt appropriately powerful,
particularly that hammer. But we were
playing on one of the harder difficulty
settings – and while it makes sense for
enemies to take more bullets, a few AI
foes seemed capable of taking blasts
without a blink. We hope difficulty
hasn’t been lazily raised by arbitrarily
making your shots feel weaker.
Still, Terrohunt is fun, and
randomised terrorist layouts should
www.gAMESRAdAR.COM/OXM

Wait, isn’t this a
screen from our dream game,
When Beekeepers Go Bad?
Hard to tell.
//The knowledge that absolutely
nowhere is safe makes dying
almost a relief. Almost//
keep the experience feeling fresh.
Currently, though, it’s player vs player
that we still see being the main draw
(still no sign of that elusive single-
player mode). The tension of high-
stakes hide-and-seek-with-assault-
rifles feels like a completely different
game. Like the best multiplayer, as
soon as you bite the bullet you’re
already contemplating what you
should have done, and how you’re
Metadata
beST bIT…
Being the one who takes out the
final terrorist/counter-terrorist
and winning the round. Games get so
tense, it’s easy to miss just out
of disbelief that you actually
found someone.
@OXM
PREViEW
Gas is a great way to flush
out terrorists/unwanted
dinner-party guests.
A building
like this
means we’re
the way (this is why none of them are
speaking to us any more).
spoilt for Longevity will rely on the depth of
choice with tactics and options available. We’ve
entry points. seen gadgets such as seeker drones
And exit ones
to be blasted
out of.
and heartbeat sensors before. What’s
refreshing is seeing how well
going to change your plan next time. they’ve been balanced against each
We could crouch on the stairwell, other. Each round felt like coming
then shoot under the door barricades up with a new plan with new ideas,
(this worked). We could shoot at the with over-reliance on old strategies
walls, hoping we hit someone on the punished. If Siege can keep that up
other side (this didn’t). We could lob over sustained play, we’ll have the
grenades continuously, and hope our tensest tactical shooter on Xbox.
team use psychic intuition to get out of Tom Stone
Fighting for free-dom
Buy Siege and Ubisoft will give you two
free trips to Vegas! Sort of!
Not to be outdone by bethesda’s promise of a
free copy of Fallout 3 to those who pre-order
Fallout 4, buying Rainbow Six Siege on Xbox One
will nab you free copies of both Rainbow Six
Vegas and Vegas 2. So that’s three games for the
price of one. If Xbox 360 backwards compatibility
means these old game bundles with new games
are becoming the standard for Xbox One players,
we’re definitely not complaining.
ThE OFFICIAL XBOX MAgAzINE / 41
 PrEvIEW
In future Philly, even
stepping out for a late
night cheesesteak is
fraught with danger.

Hmm, at least they’ve done

up the ECW Arena a bit.

Publisher Deep Silver / DeveloPer Deep Silver DambuSter / Format XboX one

Homefront: The Revolution

A very literal take on the armchair revolutionary

V
Bluffer’s irtual tourism is a key
Guide pull of the open-world
Dambuster
game, be it the historical
takes re-enactments of
Homefront’s Assassin’s Creed, or the
‘Korea invades verdant paradises of Far
the USA’ idea Cry or Just Cause 3.
and drags its Amid this lot, a trip to Korean-
guerrilla occupied Philadelphia is a harder sell,
warfare into especially to the battle-scarred ‘Red
an open world. Zone’ that hosts Gamescom’s demo.
And adds r/c
cars strapped
with C4. As
Here, in amongst the shells of bombed-
out warehouses, the war has already
you do. been lost. Drones pick over the rubble,
scanning for any US citizen dumb
enough to try scavenging for goods and
calling down the might of the Korean
People’s Army when they do. There are
no wing suits or tigers here. Jason Brody
would last a minute before getting a
bullet to the head. So it’s not all bad.
//We sit in an old, rusty bus feeling
Dambuster Studios, a developer
built from the remnants of Free
Radical Design, is rejecting the
sandbox power fantasy of unlimited
freedom in favour of something
much harder earned. In this world of
guerrilla fighters, combat is down and
dirty – more about chipping away at
the enemy’s advantage with raids and
sabotage. Tasked with stopping
a nearby patrol, for example,
we choose to hunker down
on a nearby balcony and
use a ramp to roll flaming
oil drums into the path of a
jeep. Later, we craft a hacking
device to turn an attack probe
against its human masters. Out-and-
out combat is a viable option, but
once the Korean reinforcements start
flowing it seems impossible to turn
off the tap. Escaping on motorbike
becomes a far safer bet.
The concept of botched hit-and-
runs escalating into hectic street fights
is cool, but it doesn’t feel right at the
moment. The guns lack that important
snarl – although the real-time gun
customisation is nicely handled – and
the wide open area design allows
o spread out too far, losing
any intensity. Most of the time
ETA we couldn’t find soldiers to
shoot, instead spending half
2016 the demo fleeing a comically
persistent searchlight from
the reinforcement’s airship.
As we sat in an old, rusty bus
watching a drone failing to squeeze
through the door we felt less like
Rambo, more like Dumbo. It is with
good reason that the game has been
pushed back into 2016.
And we hope Dambuster does
tighten it up, as there are ambitious

less like Rambo, more like Dumbo//
Guerrillas in our mitts
Homefront’s revolutionary tools
Your GTK, that’s Guerrilla Tool Kit, contains the
ingredients of a revolution. Firecrackers distract
smaller patrols, while hacking devices convert
larger vehicles to your cause for a few chaotic
seconds. The IEDs show a pleasing versatility in
the way they can be thrown as grenades, placed
on surfaces and remote detonated or even
attached to a remote-controlled car and steered
into the target. We’d expect nothing less from
the studio that rose from TimeSplitters’ ashes.
ideas at work here. Your fellow
revolutionaries are free agents, going
about private missions and getting
into trouble that you can choose to
help with or ignore. None of it is
scripted, but emerges naturally. At
one point two comrades run into a
sniper – enemies are also procedurally
placed – and call for help on the radio.
Sneaking into the sniper’s nest and
stabbing him doesn’t offer any tangible
reward, but the radioed thanks and the
knowledge that there are two more
bodies for a future scuffle does hint at
a bigger vision for the game. We hope
the studio can pull it off.
Matthew Castle

42 / the official XboX magazine www.gameSraDar.com/oXm

 PrEvIEw
TIE fighters get an added
Press the D-pad and speed boost mapped to the
you’ll perform sharp left trigger; X-wings get
loop-the-loops that to use a temporary shield.
would make even Han Both get their own version
barf up his dinner. of a homing missile. Tasty.

Publisher EA / DeveloPer DICE / Format XboX onE

Star Wars Battlefront

Now, witness the power of this fully operational battle station

O
Bluffer’s urs is not a job that gives allies and rivals rendered as distant easier to do when you lock on with
Guide you many tales to tell coloured dots shrouded by ash. Punch the left trigger, though doing so will
X-wings and
the grandchildren. Hell, through the smog and the fight comes inform the target of your presence.
TIE fighters it’s such a nerdy career into startling definition: ships scream Being on the receiving end of the same
race to 200 choice that it drastically by; blat-blatting red and green lasers alert tells you to get your ass in gear,
points. You reduces the probability criss-cross the sky; and molten red taking sharp turns or dive-bombing
get a few of reproducing in the death floods the planet’s surface. Our towards the canyons between Sullust’s
points for first place. But should the planets eyes want to sit there and gawp, but industrial plants below. This deadlier
splatting align and our progeny one day walk the fingers have other plans, setting lower ground hides various power-
an AI rival, the earth, we’ll certainly regale them us on the tail of a passing X ging from shields to
medium points with the time we almost shot down Piloting is far easier compared faster ability cooldown – along
for a human
and big points
for a supply
the Millennium Falcon. It occurred
above the volcanic plains of Sullust in
to DICE’s Battlefield vehicles
– you steer with the right ETA with torpedoes the TIE
fighter gets a screeching
ship – protect
your team’s
Battlefront’s Fighter Squadron mode,
a ten on ten X-wing versus TIE fighter
stick, set speed with the
left and tap the D-pad for 20 nov speed boost – to hero tokens
that transform you into
at all costs. dogfight, with an extra 20 NPC ships evasive manoeuvres. something a little more iconic.
thrown in for that full cinematic spread. Watching the original trilogy Though we never get the
Even before the arrival of Mr Solo is all the flight school you need. chance to pilot the Imperials’ hero
the scene delivers big on Battlefront’s It’s about sticking to someone’s tail vehicle, Boba Fett’s Slave 1, we do
‘be in the movie’ power fantasy. You and peppering them with lasers or meet the ship that made the Kessel
spawn outside a plume of smoke, your launching a proton torpedo. Both are Run in less than 12 parsecs. When
that dinner plate of a machine blasts
//Our eyes want to sit and gawp, through the clouds we sense a great
disturbance in the force, as if ten voices

but the fingers have other plans//
Skywalker Sound
How audio brings the battle to life
Much has been written about DICE’s
photogrammetry – processing still images into
a high res 3D mesh for authentic 3D modelling
– but it’s the sound that gives Fighter Squadron
such, ahem, force. The eerie whine of the TIE
fighter; the blat-blat of a laser; the fiery pop of
an exploding cockpit – it’s perfect. The nerdy
highlight? Make your first kill as a TIE fighter and
you’re rewarded with a blast of the Imperial March.
Being a baddie has never sounded so good.
suddenly cry out in awe and the other
ten cry out in terror. Our TIE fighter
suddenly feels a lot weedier than it
did before, even in cockpit view with
all the sound effects roaring direct in
our ears. It’s here in the driver’s seat
that we manage to glance a shot off the
Falcon, earning a few condescending
pity points for making the tiniest of
dents. It’s nothing compared to the
laser pummelling we receive in return.
OXM shoots first, but Han shoots
with bigger guns. Here’s hoping Lucas
can resist retconning one of our most
thrilling gaming memories of recent
months. This is something special.
Matthew Castle

@oXm thE offICIAl XboX mAgAzInE / 43

 PrEvIEw
Looks like somebody didn’t
get the memo about capes
being non-optional attire…
Publisher Warner BroS InteractIve entertaInment / DeveloPer tt GameS / Format XBoX 360, XBoX one
Lego Dimensions
The toys-to-life category gets a Minifig makeover
L
ego’s blocky take on the
toys-to-life genre is all
about the fan-pleasing
property mash-ups.
Combining 14 universes,
from Doctor Who to DC
Comics, Dimensions lets you pilot the
Batmobile as Gandalf or trade Marty
McFly’s DeLorean for the TARDIS.
Based on our recent hands-on,
however, those creative pop-culture
collisions are just the beginning.
According to producer Doug Heder,
the game isn’t simply relying on its
cast of iconic characters, but also
innovating Skylanders’ frequently
cloned template. “We want to bring
something new and interesting
with the hardware itself. Players
will interact with the Toy Pad in a
meaningful way in the game, and make
the toys something they actually play
with in the experience.”
The Toy Pad separates itself from
the rest of the pack by continuing to be
an integral part of the experience long
after you’ve positioned your plastic
protagonist on it. Fans of previous Lego
games can still plan on participating in
plenty of comfortably familiar brick-
44 / the offIcIal XBoX maGazIne
Bluffer’s breaking, minikit-collecting action, but
Guide the Toy Pad brings a number of new
Like
elements to the proceedings.
Skylanders We first get a taste of this more
and Disney interactive approach when
Infinity, our demo, beginning on The
but with
more tactile
Wizard of Oz’s yellow brick
road, finds us unable to move ETA
interaction
and a lineup
amid a field of sleep-inducing
poppies. After Batman and 29 Sep
of universes Lego Movie leading lady
that includes
everything
Wyldstyle are incapacitated by
from Back to the poisonous plants, Heder informs
the Future to us Gandalf will suffer a similar fate
Ghostbusters. if we continue down the same path.
It’s at this point he suggests placing
the Batmobile – which comes handily
bundled with the game’s starter pack –
on the Toy Pad and driving it in-game
over the obstacle.
Putting the white-bearded wizard
behind the wheel of Batman’s sweet
ride to solve a simple puzzle shows off
the hardware’s tactile integration on
a small scale. As we learn in the next,
Portal-themed level, however, your
new toy is something you’ll always
want positioned within arm’s reach,
lest you fancy fiddling with it every
few minutes. Like the franchise it’s
based on, the Aperture Science section
is packed with tricky head-scratchers,
most of which involve some sort of
interaction with the game’s various
pieces.
We won’t spoil the specific
puzzle setups or solutions
here, but we will reveal
that we had to complete a
variety of activities that not
only asked us to position our
Minifigs in specific spots on the
pad, but also keep an eye on the plastic
peripheral for new colour-coded and
light-based cues. For example, when a
series of Valve’s iconic portals open up,
placing characters on Pad sections with
corresponding colours teleports them to
the swirling, in-game vortex. Spending
more time with the physical parts makes
those purchases much easier to justify.
As we saw during said Portal level,
many of Dimensions’ puzzles are tied
to five core abilities – Scale, Chroma,
Locate, Shift and Elemental – which
involve using combinations of the
base, characters, vehicles and gadgets.
Scale, for example, enables characters
to shrink or grow depending on where
you place their corresponding figures
WWW.GameSradar.com/oXm

Lego-game puzzles get an
upgrade thanks to more
complex interactions with
Dimensions’ physical pieces.
//Batman confuses the brainless
scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz
with the same-named villain//
on the Pad, while Shift turns those
same segments into teleportation
zones. The possibilities for each ability
are impressive. Having to combine them
or call on them successively opens up
creative objectives that go far beyond
Lego’s usual ‘trash the world’ remit.
Dimensions also introduces actual
brick-building to the Lego games.
Gadgets and vehicles are upgraded
when you reassemble your pieces
into a new, more powerful form. As
we discovered while rebuilding our
Batmobile into the Batblaster, on-
screen instructions helpfully emulate
a real-life Lego instruction booklet.
The Toy Pad’s integration doesn’t
just bring building and some promising
mechanics, but also character-specific
personality – such as lighting Gandalf’s
staff by placing his figure on a lit
portion of the base. Toss in the fact
that said illuminated staff is then used
@oXm
PrEvIEw
Some elements of Dimensions
play out in similar fashion
to previous Lego games.
Metadata
BEST BiT…
Lego Dimensions’ focus on proper,
physical interaction with its Toy
Pad and figures means fans will
occasionally need to put down
their pads to actually play with
the plastic bricks.
both its storytelling and its gameplay.
A highlight of our demo sees Batman
confusing the brainless scarecrow
from The Wizard of Oz with Gotham’s
same-named supervillain. Needless to
Torches can say, an argument breaks out between
stop dinos?
Someone
the Dark Knight and Dorothy when
the former demands, “You’re coming
really ought with me, Scarecrow!”
to have told Thanks to its amazing lineup of
the guys in fan-servicing properties, Dimensions
Jurassic Park. already had our attention. The fact
that it’s also attempting to introduce
to reveal a grappling point for Batman innovative ideas to both the long-
within a haunted Scooby Doo-themed running Lego formula and the
suburb, and you get the mad extent increasingly crowded intersection
Dimensions is going to with this whole between toys and games, though, will
‘colliding worlds’ thing. hopefully make it more than just a
Just as previous Lego titles would clever opportunity to see the Caped
have you expect, Dimensions also does Crusader fight alongside Peter Capaldi.
a great job of injecting humour into Matt Cabral
Plastic with personality
It’s not just beautiful bricks
Despite Doctor Who, Portal, The Simpsons and 11
other brands getting a makeover in Dimensions,
each world is being injected with plenty of
property-specific charm and personality. “Every
world is trying to be as faithful to the source
material as possible,” says Heder. “Even though
they’re still Lego, we do some interesting
things.” We were sold during the Scooby-Doo
level, where a cel-shaded animated look
delivered an authentic ’70s cartoon vibe.
the offIcIal XBoX maGazIne / 45
 PrEviEw

Dedicated adventurers can

grow their arsenals from
slingshots and bows to rocket
launchers and turrets.

Publisher Studio Wildcard / DeveloPer Studio Wildcard / Format XboX one

ARK: Survival Evolved

A survival game that trades zombie-slaying for T-Rex taming

O
Bluffer’s ur first demo of ARK: resource management and character explains that we can regain the poor
Guide Survival Evolved doesn’t progression. Unlike all those games bird’s trust by feeding and caring for
A survival-
kick off with a grand, that have players fighting, building it. Eventually, the process will lead to
focused Spielberg-rivalling set and gathering through the zombie the dodo laying eggs for us. Pursuing
open-world piece, but rather by apocalypse, though, this has dinosaurs. this bird-punching path could also pay
adventure that leisurely exploring the More specifically, the ability to tame off with a whole den of egg-producing
elevates the lush landscape atop a the prehistoric beasts like puppies. dodos, rather than extinction.
expected genre parasaur. Co-creative director Jesse We get a taste of dino domesticating In addition to putting your tribe on
trappings Rapczak guarantees there’s plenty of when Rapczak suggests we slug a a permanent omelette diet, dinos can
– combat, action, but the game’s pulse-pounding passing dodo in the face. Taking as transportation, pack
crafting, moments only make up one part of its his advice literally, we hop mules, resource gatherers
resource
management
– with the
Jurassic-sized adventure.
Dubbed an “open-world multiplayer
from our mount and sucker
punch the clueless creature ETA and attackers. Riding tamed
creatures also gives you
ability to
train and ride
first-person survival adventure”, ARK
has a DNA mix to rival Jurassic World’s
right in the beak. In addition
to being an amusing – albeit 2016 control of their abilities, so
those who enjoy chomping
dinosaurs with Indominus rex. It’s primarily a survival extremely guilty – pleasure, it on their enemies will want
your friends. game, but a well-balanced mix of other turns out the unwarranted act of to train the biggest carnivore
elements have already earned it a large violence is also the first step in taming they can find. Taming bigger beasts
fanbase on Steam Early Access. this easy target. obviously requires more than a slap to
Similar to other survival-focused While we don’t get to enjoy the the skull; medium-sized dinosaurs can
entries, it features combat, crafting, full cycle during our demo, Rapczak be felled with a slingshot, while larger
creatures need to be tranquillised with
//We hop from our mount and a specially crafted arrow.
When not teaching your T-rex new

sucker punch a clueless dodo//
Jurassic arc
Prehistoric beasts meet sci-fi stories
ARK offers a very freeform experience, but
Rapczak promises it won’t be short on narrative.
The story includes a sci-fi element, which
heavily revolves around a trio of mysterious
towers. There’s also plenty of lore and backstory
to discover via messages left behind by the
previous population. While Rapczak encourages
playing with others in PvP and PvE, he also
promises a fulfilling solo experience for lone
survivalists craving an engaging adventure.
tricks, you’ll explore ARK’s vast world.
On top of the sprawling plains, you’ll
find an entire underwater ecosystem,
as well as underground caverns, caves
and a stretching skyscape. Of course,
those who wish to explore the clouds
will need to tame a pterodactyl first.
Our time with Survival Evolved is
brief, but based on our quick peek
at its potential-packed universe, we
look forward to returning to what
promises to be, at the very least, the
only Xbox One game that lets you keep
a velociraptor as a pet. We will get to
try more when it hits the Xbox Game
Preview programme, later in the year.
Matt Cabral

46 / the official XboX magazine WWW.gameSradar.com/oXm

 PrevIew

Combat feels This is fellow runner

faster and more Icarus – he’s your new
ferocious – companion in Catalyst, but
there’s a real to be honest, he can be a
martial arts bit of an A-hole.
film vibe.

Publisher EA / DeveloPer DicE / Format XboX onE

Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst

Faith’s first outing includes no guns, but more fun

T
Bluffer’s he most amazing thing Mirror’s Edge was pretty one-way. orders. While you could simply climb
Guide about playing the new Catalyst’s open world immediately up the sculpture-covered walls, we see
Taking the
Mirror’s Edge is quite feels like an improvement. Even while returning lead, Faith, jumping between
original simply how similar it playing set challenges – take down suspended office pods, effortlessly
game’s concept feels to the original. The a squadron of security guards, or vaulting walkways and eventually
and, ahem, fluidity of movement, race to a specific point – the game’s clinging onto the bottom of a moving
running with the moment-perfect handing off control to you. It creates elevator like a lithe Daniel Craig. It’s
it, Catalyst finger gymnastics needed to keep your a world where every single edge and not because you’ll necessarily unlock
is an open- parkour flow at top speed, the glorious surface is interactive and could be more or find secrets this way, it’s
world prequel interplay of bright white architecture useful to you in some way. because it’s more fun.
that tasks cut through with red Runner lines. Runner lines are now a The same goes for combat,
you with
first-person
parkour in a
The entire problem with the first game
was that DICE got so much right, and
suggestion of how to proceed,
not an optimum path. In a eTA the other much-needed
improvement. With access
beautiful,
rotten
then layered in a couple of elements
that didn’t quite work. This prequel
hands-off demo showing
one of the game’s main 23 FEb to firearms now forbidden,
Faith is forced to disarm
future-city. already feels like it has stripped back missions – climbing the floors guards up-close and personal.
those weaker elements, leaving that of an out-of-hours office block That can be done by simply
still-fresh feeling to bloom. to steal corporate data – the game’s jogging up to them and pressing X to
For a game that touted its free designers show us how there are far play out a short, whirling animation,
expression of movement and a more inventive ways to approach but it’s far more interesting to leap
broadness of approach to its levels, objectives than simply following onto one from a full storey above,
perform a combat roll, then wall run
//With guns forbidden, Faith’s forced into a colleague’s solar plexus. It’s
faster, too – every action performed on

to get up-close and personal//
Green means stop
When Faith has to stop running,
the game changes
In its more directed moments, Catalyst seems
to be moving for a slightly more puzzling vibe.
Like the last game, when an area swaps its red
highlights for green, you’re more than likely
being tasked with finding a way out, as opposed
to simply running through. Faith’s not gained
too many new moves, but the new Mag Rope (a
limited-use grappling hook) could make these
sections far bigger. We can’t wait to find out.
the move keeps you travelling at full
pelt, so don’t be surprised to see some
violent time trials coming your way.
It feels as though the game’s quietly
urging you to try new things, to push
Faith to her limits, even if it means
seeing those horrific moments where
you get ‘falling dream’ drops to the
concrete when you fail. Whether that
can be married to a story mode that still
wants to push you in a single direction
is yet to be seen, but Catalyst already
feels like a realisation of the promise of
the original. Among the wealth of new
ideas coming in 2016, this old one still
feels one of the most modern.
Joe Skrebels

@oXm thE oFFiciAl XboX mAgAzinE / 47

 PrEviEw
Publisher Square enix / DeveloPer io interactive / Format xbox one
Hitman
You are cordially invited to kill some very bad people
H
ave you ever tried using
a memory palace? That
peculiar idea that if you
visualise a location, and
assign a fact, name or
attribute to the objects
in that imaginary place, you can walk
between them freely, never forgetting
the ideas you’ve stored away? IO’s
created its own palace to show off this
back-to-basics new Hitman – a gaudy
Parisian museum dreamed into the
middle of the Seine, in whose walls you
have to find and eliminate two targets
putting on a fashion show.
48 / the official xbox magazine
Bluffer’s As you pilot Agent 47 around (in
Guide a rare bit of luck, he’s actually been
The big, bald
invited to this party), you’ll notice
daddy of the waiting staff carrying trays of food,
stealth genre crowbars left by packing crates,
returns in drainpipes, crowds of party
classic form,
asking you
guests, open windows and
mechanical controls. You’ll
to execute
targets in
have the option to interact
with all of it, a jumble of 8 Dec
any way you information that you need
see fit.
to collate, sequence and, most
importantly, remember. IO, in effect,
has crafted a game out of memory
palaces – you spot an item, ascribe it
Levels, upped
Baldly going where no dev has before
Hitman’s notable for adopting a Witcher 3-style
free updates philosophy, but pushing it further
– the game’s single-player will update over
months. Seifert’s keen to point out that this is
because the game will be well-stocked: “We
already know that when the game is complete,
it will be bigger than Blood Money, regarding the
single-player. Then when the game starts, we
will have weekly updates. We think that, when
we’re done, it will be by far the biggest Hitman.”
Agent 47 has gotten spry
since Absolution – he can
now shimmy up buildings to
aid breaking and entering.
a meaning (a non-lethal instrument,
distraction tool, something to poison)
and fit it, coglike into your plans.
Of course, this is nothing new
Hitman – the series has
always thrived on open-
ETA ended executions – but that
seems to be the point. IO is
exploiting new-gen tech by
filling that palace with more
of everything.
The Paris demo is enormous
– it takes studio head Hannes Seifert
a good ten minutes just to fly around
the level showing us its key locations.
Then there are the 300-odd NPC
characters filling it (Absolution
managed around 60 max), all with
procedural, reactive AI and many
with specific and varied roles. Every
window and door of the museum can
be opened, meaning every room of its
three floors is fully modelled. There
is stuff everywhere, from the banal
(boxes to hide weapons in) to the
ornate (a coin-operated battlefield
exhibit that can be used to give a
flighty fashion director a little fright).
This is its beauty – any approach is
rewarded with things to do, buttons
www.gameSraDar.com/oxm

Your enemies are all awful,
but some are worse than
others. viktor Novikov here
is a patsy for higher powers.
//Hide a bomb in a reporter’s
camera, detonating it when they
go to interview your target//
to fiddle with, and experimentation is
key. Seifert grins as he shows me how,
by placing a bomb behind a security
guard and turning him around by
flicking a coin at his heels, the goon
will find and disarm the explosive,
then carry it away to an armoury –
inadvertently showing you where
it is, and smuggling a bomb into the
museum for you. It’s a neat trick, but
Seifert is keen to explain that it’s a
Metadata
THe predicTion
Eyebrows have been raised at the
incremental release, with new levels
appearing well after the initial
digital release, but on the strength
of this demo, exhausting all options
before moving on seems welcome.
@oxm
result of the hundreds of mingling
processes at work, not a set-piece.
You could walk in front of a news
reporter’s camera enough times that
they give up reporting while you’re
around. Then, when the cameraman’s
not looking, hide your bomb in the
camera, detonating it when they go
to interview your target. Or upgrade
your bomb so it can’t be disarmed,
turning any guard who collects it into a
walking weapon. Seifert’s key metric is
“potential deathtraps per square metre”
– it appears to have increased a lot.
Learning how these places function
is paramount, because there are now
more ways to be caught than ever.
Disguises are more dangerous, with
costume-specific Enforcers able to see
that you’re actually an angry-looking
man with a screwdriver. Non-violent
NPCs summon violent ones if they see
you acting shady. The entire level runs
PrEviEw
As ever, newspapers reveal
how your hits are being
reported to the public.
There are
multiple
points of
concurrently, meaning your timing is
as important as creating gas leaks.
escape from And, of course, it all makes
the Paris replayability a key element. Seifert
level - says that pre-alpha players have been
stealing your
target’s own
helicopter
spending four-to-five hours on a
single run of the Paris level, but the
is the most final game will reward you for playing
stylish. multiple times. “You always get a
reward when you play,” he explains.
“When you find items… you have them
in your inventory, you can bring them
to the level the next time around.”
That should be most interesting in
the returning Contracts mode, which
allows you to pick any NPC and – as
long as you kill them unseen – lets
you set that action as a challenge to
any other player who cares to try.
It makes for some interesting level
design – certain characters have been
specifically placed in incredibly hard-
to-reach spots, and creative kills will
be even harder to replicate.
That we emerged from the demo
already formulating our own horrible
plans says it all – Hitman’s a memory
palace we want to spend more than a
little time getting to know intimately.
Joe Skrebels
the official xbox magazine / 49
 PREvIEW
Nine new stadiums include
Dynamic Crossing sees your player arc his run to strike the homes of Borussia
the ball rather than hit it all awkwardly, like. Mönchengladbach, Norwich
City, Olympique de
Marseille and Watford.
There are 50 in all.

Publisher EA SPORTS / DeveloPer EA CANADA / Format XBOX 360, XBOX ONE

FIFA 16
Let’s talk about FUT baby, let’s talk about you and Messi

T
Bluffer’s here’s an advert doing Draft is Ultimate Team’s biggest Draft is a good way to test rare
Guide the rounds of everyone’s addition since FUT’s inception in superstars (you’ve less than 1 in 75,000
EA performs
favourite bickering FIFA 13. Here you’re given five top, of finding a Ronaldo card usually), and
a balancing Sky Sports pundits, top players to choose from in each argue with mates, even if your house is
act worthy Gary Neville and Jamie position before selecting a formation dingier than the Carragher-Neville’s.
of Cirque Carragher, sitting on a and a manager, and then playing four How has FIFA 16 improved since
du Soleil by couch picking players matches against other drafters online. our last hands-on though? In a word:
introducing for their Draft team. “I never look at The more you win, the better your balance. Defenders plug gaps better,
subtle Mascherano,” says Carragher, in that prize. We only manage a single victory but power passes can exploit space
improvements weird tense footballers use. “I look at but take home a Silver, Jumbo Tacklers have a swing
without Varane,” says Neville, slotting him into Silver, and Gold pack to keep, step to prevent being too easily
toppling the
whole act
over in a
their shared squad. It’s a cheesy but
effective demonstration of the mode’s
which is more than enough
impetus to try again. “Quite ETA turned, but dribblers can now
perform off-the-ball body
clownish mess. pub chat brilliance, its ability to spark
controller-snatching debate.
often [games] have this
tail-off period where you do 24 SEP feints. Defenders can tackle
the ball at awkward shin
“There’s this whole conversational it for a while then stop,” says height, but fresh animations
culture that blurs the line between Shaikh. “But we spent a lot of let attackers more naturally take
real football discussion and football time making sure people could play for it from any angle. Intelligent keepers
games,” says Adam Shaikh, FIFA the whole year if they wanted to.” more ably save troublesome shots, but
Ultimate Team Creative Director. You’ll have to pay an entrance fee, this doesn’t kill the satisfaction of the
“We’re taking exciting, interesting mind, but at 7,500 coins/300 points strike. A series of smart checks and
game mechanics then tying it back to (about £2.50), that’s the same as a balances keeps FIFA 16 engaging.
something that people have a deep premium Gold pack, so it’s a fair price. Although it’s easy to be dismissive
passion and strong opinions about.” In both single-player and multiplayer, of FIFA 16’s lack of game-changing
features, subtle improvements have
//Draft is Ultimate Team’s biggest taken root, and the results are flowering
across the pitch. What first seemed

addition since FUT’s inception// like an off year is, in fact, very much on.
Ben Griffin

FOUR U LT I M AT E TEAM LEGENDS EXCLUSIvE TO XBOX

GEORGE BEST
With a whopping 94
dribbling, George
Best also happens
to be the best new
Legend. Is that a
coincidence, or...magic?
Answer: coincidence. There
is no magic in this world.
RyAN GIGGS
Another Manchester
United golden boy,
nippy midfield
catalyst Ryan
Giggs has 90 pace
and very thick chest hair
that we here at OXM often
think about.
DECO GENNARO GATTUSO
Former Barcelona Rhino man Gattuso,
and Chelsea man formerly of
Deco is rated AC Milan, is a
89 for passing, gladiator with a 92
renowned for his physical rating.
creativity, vision, and He once fought Tottenham’s
ability to fully rotate assistant manager, so
his head like an owl. you’d better watch it.

50 / ThE OffiCiAl XBOX mAgAziNE www.gAmESRADAR.COm/OXm

 PrevIew
It’s always a good idea
He’s got chills, to keep chaps with knives
they’re multiplying… safely at arm’s – or
indeed leg’s – distance.

Publisher Ubisoft / DeveloPer Ubisoft QUebec / Format XboX one

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

Lock, stock and two smoking hay bales

U
Bluffer’s p until Gamescom, All this malice is in aid of reaching nearby Templar spies. Stalking a target
Guide the most horrendous one bad apple, Templar Lucy Thorne, across the rooftops is made easier with
Pair of twins
crime committed in the who’s holed up in the central White Evie’s Chameleon skill, the power to
take back Tower of London was Tower. Grappling up to a vantage point flop a hood over her face and vanish
London one the pricing of its gift triggers a cinematic pass of the area, when crouching still. Watching a lady
borough at a shop chocolate (closely highlighting potential approaches: a turn invisible on the spot is massively
time. He’s followed by those two guard with jangling keys, rebel soldiers contrived, but it isn’t the game-breaker
a bloodied murdered princes). But in 15 minutes in a nearby prison and a double agent you might fear. She can’t disappear in
brawler; in our hands-on as lady Assassin Evie infiltrating the Beefeaters’ ranks. Bet an enemy’s line of sight, for one, and
she can turn Frye – the sneakier of Syndicate’s twin he doesn’t even eat beef, the t move. It’s best used to
see-through. protagonists – we do enough horrible cad. It conjures a Hitman-ish scope out places where Evie
Christmas at
their house
must be a
things to make even the legendary
ravens get the hell out of the vicinity.
sense of freedom; something
hinted at in a few of Unity’s eTA can’t move freely, letting us
spot a dangling barrel (that’s
laugh riot. We pull Beefeaters off turrets, stab
them behind manicured bushes and
branching killings, but
never as clearly explained 23 oct Templar number one dead)
and two towers ripe for a
pounce on them from Evie’s handy or executed as it is here. The zipline (that’d be his friend).
grappling-hook zipline. One royal level’s designer tells us we can With the coast cleared, Evie
guard even gets a barrel dropped on expect a greater focus on these stages - can now pose as the double agent’s
his head – doubly painful when you they call them ‘black box’ levels - too. prisoner and transport herself to an
consider that big, silly hat he has to We opt for the double agent method, audience with Thorne. Eagle-eyed
wear getting compacted into his skull. first having to earn his trust by offing Templar agents can see through the
ruse if you wander too close or too fast
//Turning invisible on the spot isn’t – your sphere of fakery is represented
by a stealth circle beneath your feet –

as game-breaking as we feared// so climbing the tower requires gentle

Zippy and bungled
Is the grappling hook a killer, er, hook?
The rope launcher is a hybrid of Batman’s grapnel
and line launcher. Like the latter, it lets you link
level vantage points with a zipline, creating new
aerial assassination opportunities. But it’s a poor
imitation of the former: grappling is worryingly hit
or miss this late on in development. The grapple
cue often wouldn’t appear where we needed it,
and its range is never quite clear. There’s nothing
worse than staring helplessly at a distant gutter
while guards fill your body with musket balls.
easing of the analogue stick and no
sudden movements. Gaining access
to Thorne’s chamber triggers some
dramatic scoffing from our target; a
quick-time event puts a stop to that,
and her, for good. This is what the
game calls a ‘unique kill’ – a more
cinematic event that feels like the
‘canonical’ version to us.
All this is pretty solid, recognisable
stuff, lent an endearingly cartoonish
sheen by the setting. Whether killing
Beefeaters can carry the whole game is
yet to be seen. For today, at least, it’s as
sweet as overpriced gift shop chocolate.
Matthew Castle

@oXm the official XboX magazine / 51

 PrEviEw
on the
radar
The other games
you should know
about this month
Publisher aCTivision / develoPer Robomodo,
disRupTive Games / Format XboX one, XboX 360
Tony Hawk’s
Pro Skater 5
fter ill-fated experiments Ride and
A Shred, the Tony Hawk series is returning
to its roots. Pro Skater 5 is intended to
look and feel like the fondly remembered early
games, only with a few contemporary twists.
The Xbox one version will support up to 20
players online and shareable skate parks of your
own making. These are good ideas; we’re rather
less convinced by the inclusion of power-ups
and the ability to shoot projectiles.
perhaps stung by (understandable) criticisms
of its graphics, activision decided to reveal
a new art style less than two months ahead
of launch – which hardly inspires
confidence. Wikipedia currently has
ETA a ‘series decline’ section covering
oCT Robomodo’s three entries to date;
will this be four flops in a row?
52 / The oFFiCial XboX maGazine
Publisher Compulsion Games / develoPer Compulsion Games / Format XboX one
We Happy Few
S
poken word nursery rhyme? Creepy
music box backing? We Happy Few’s
latest trailer deploys some well-worn
horror tropes, but does so expertly,
conjuring an ambiance that instantly
tells us bad stuff’s about to go down in a
BioShock-meets-The Prisoner way.
This survival horror adventure ETA
takes place in an alternate-reality
post-war british town where most 2016
of the population walks around in a
state of medicated delusion, trying to
forget the atrocities of the conflict. You must
either attempt to blend in, or sneak around
undetected by the paranoia-ridden townsfolk.
The alpha version has been released to backers
Publisher mojanG / develoPer oXeYe Game
sTudio, FaTshaRk / Format XboX one, XboX 360
Cobalt
hat’s right: the folks what make
T Minecraft are publishing a game from
a third-party dev, whose members
include one jens bergensten, also known as
the man who took charge of Minecraft when
notch decided to give it all up to live in a
giant house filled with jellybeans. nepotism!
luckily, Cobalt’s looking very good indeed: it’s
a side-scrolling action-platformer that’s been
refined over several years, with particular focus
on its four-person multiplayer. There’s sliding,
slow motion, sliding in slow motion and lots
of jumping and rolling. Rolling is particularly
important, as it allows you to not only dodge
incoming projectiles, but to deflect them back
at whoever fired. Controls are refined
and responsive, and the action, dare
ETA we say it, is reminiscent at times
oCT of a 2d multiplayer Vanquish. We’re
quite excited by this one.
A few jabs with
something sharp
should wipe that
creepy smile
off his face.
of its crowdfunding campaign, and despite a few
rough edges it’s got plenty of promise. stealth is
relatively forgiving. suspicious townsfolk will get
aggressive when they feel threatened by your
presence, but they aren’t especially persistent,
usually run from trouble. Flight
is often the more sensible option given
that death is permanent, and hand-
to-hand combat is rather inelegant –
though things take a turn for the better
once you’ve located a weapon.
The systems need some fine-tuning,
but already this is a richly atmospheric survival
game. as an added bonus, you’ll get to try this
unsettling adventure before the end of the year,
as part of the Game preview programme.
Publisher FullbRiGhT /
develoPer FullbRiGhT / Format XboX one
Tacoma
one Home was rightly lauded for
G switching up genres on you when you
least expected it. We’re hoping its
follow-up surprises us by doing no such thing.
playing with the microgravity of an abandoned
space station, Fullbright continues to focus
on environmental storytelling – letting you see
the minutiae of living in space – but matches it
with what seems like a greater focus on puzzle-
solving. jumping between floor and ceiling to
get to maintenance and restart the station’s
ai made up the bulk of our demo, but it was
punctuated with miniature interludes, as creepy
primary-coloured aR recordings of the lost crew
chatted away. once we saw a corrupted ghostly
version performing nefarious deeds, we
began to believe this could be a full-
ETA on horror. expect far more under the
2016 surface, but don’t even try to guess
what it might be.
WWW.GamesRadaR.Com/oXm

Publisher supeRhoT Team / develoPer supeRhoT
Team / Format XboX one
Superhot
emember bullet-time? it was everywhere
R after The Matrix was released. some game
designers managed to use it better than
others, but rarely was it employed particularly
creatively. it might have looked cool, but the
novelty quickly wore off. Superhot, an expanded
version of a browser game, uses it brilliantly.
Time only advances when you move, and so
what looks like a stylishly minimalist Fps is
actually more of a strategy or a puzzle game:
you look around as you enter a room and plot
the most efficient path through it while dodging
incoming bullets and firing off your own – or
running opponents through with a katana, if
you’re feeling particularly brave. Formulating a
ight take a minute or two,
but the whole thing is technically
ETA over in seconds. irresistibly cool,
WinTeR this could be the slickest indie
hit of the year.
Publisher eleCTRoniC aRTs / develoPer ColdWood
inTeRaCTive / Format XboX one
Unravel
second glimpse of one of e3’s best
A surprises gives us a chance to
appreciate how ColdWood’s charming
platformer actually plays. Woollen protagonist
Yarny has to make it to the end before he runs
out of yarn; as a coastal stage progresses, we
see him getting ever thinner, until he finds a
fresh supply of red thread. some of these extra
yarn balls will be left in seemingly unreachable
spots; happily, Yarny can tie knots to two objects
to form a bridge, which doubles as a trampoline
to bounce to higher platforms. This is used to
transport a buoyant boat fender over obstacles,
so Yarny can negotiate the waves that flow
from background to foreground without getting
washed away. it’s dangerously close to
being a little too twee, but as Yarny
ETA tenderly clutches a fish made from
2016 felt, we think Unravel is on the right
side of the aww/ugh divide.
@oXm
Publisher Team 17 / develoPer Team 17 /
Format XboX one
Worms WMD
n shocking news that has rocked the
I games industry to its very foundations,
Team 17 has announced that it is
making a new Worms game. by our reckoning,
this is the 246th entry in the series, assuming
it comes out before the mobile Worms game
Team 17 is also working on. in case you’ve just
woken from a 20-year coma, Worms is a 2d turn-
based action-strategy game in which teams of
annelids with the kind of unrestricted access
to dangerous ordnance that would make ban
ki-moon soil his strides compete to blow one
another into teeny-tiny chunks. The twist this
time is that there are two twists. Firstly, you can
use vehicles – such as a tank that rattles off
ots in a single turn. secondly,
you can enter buildings for cover.
ETA That, so far, is all we’ve got. it’s
2016 Worms, only a bit more explode-y.
it’ll probably be quite fun?
Publisher TeRRible ToYboX / develoPer TeRRible ToYboX / Format XboX one
Thimbleweed Park
U
se nostalgia on backers: it’s no real
shock that a new point-and-click
adventure presented in the style of
an old point-and-click adventure,
from two of the genre’s pioneers,
was a crowdfunding success. as the
game’s co-directors Gary Winnick and
Ron Gilbert reminisced about their time ETA
at lucasarts, Winnick suggested that
the two should team up again and
make a new adventure in a similar style.
2016
little is known about the story so far
beyond its setup. several plot threads will
intertwine, but central to it all is a murder in the
town of Thimbleweed park, a sleepy backwater
settlement with just 81 inhabitants. make that
Maniac Mansion was
one inspiration.
PrEviEw
Publisher paRadoX inTeRaCTive /
develoPer Colossal oRdeR / Format XboX one
Cities: Skylines
ities: Skylines’ Finnish developer
C was a tiny studio with a big dream
– but expanding its transportation-
focused business simulation Cities in Motion
wasn’t really on the cards while SimCity
held domain over the genre. but with maxis
widely considered to have royally stuffed up
the latest entry in the series, Colossal order
saw its chance to capitalise, and publisher
paradox gave it the nod to try and outdo ea’s
behemoth. it tried, and almost everyone agreed
it succeeded, trumping maxis in scale and
scope. it wasn’t merely a critical hit, either, with
many players shifting allegiances from SimCity,
helping Cities: Skylines sell a million copies
within a month. now it’s about to make
its console debut on Xbox one, with
ETA a planned launch at some point
2016 within the next 12 months. Whoever
said dreams can’t come true?
80. a fresh corpse soon turns up, with a male and
female detective asked to investigate. elsewhere,
there’s a brewing family feud, an amnesiac ghost
and a cursed clown. The pitch is “an undiscovered
lucasarts adventure game you’ve never played
d it certainly looks the part.
one mild concern is that Gilbert has
promised to satirise True Detective,
which could be a challenge given the
second season’s regular lapses into self-
parody. still, with Gilbert on script duties,
at least we’re certain to get better dialogue
than the Tv show’s infamous “it’s like blue
balls in your heart.” That the teaser closes with an
attempt to use a balloon animal WiTh the corpse
suggests there’ll be lols, and plenty of them.
The oFFiCial XboX maGazine / 53
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@OXM the official xbox magazine / 55

 fe aT ure

HELL
The Cyberdemon
was Doom 3’s
most powerful
monster –
it’s safe to
say he’s not
looking any
easier this
time around.

& BACK
We dive into DOOM’s lightning-
quick Team Deathmatch mode
and discuss the game’s other
fast-paced offerings with id
Software’s Marty Stratton
Writer: Matt Cabral

E
nter the phrase “Bruce Lee with a
shotgun on a skateboard” into your
search engine of choice and you’ll
quickly discover it’s the favoured
description id Software’s executive
producer Marty Stratton likes to use
to sum up DOOM’s aggressively paced
gameplay. While the colourful catchphrase’s
implications should please loyal but sceptical fans let down
by Doom 3’s slower, survival horror-inspired style, we were Satisfied with – and a bit frightened by – Stratton’s giddy
determined to dig a bit deeper into the imaginative analogy. clarification, we jump into a six-minute, six-versus-six match
Before diving into our demo of DOOM’s blistering new Team (yep, that’s 666) on the game’s Heatwave map. Featuring a
Deathmatch mode, we ask Stratton – who prefers to refer to heavy industrial vibe and lots of hot liquid magma, the arena-
the upcoming title as a “new start” rather than a reboot – to style area should feel comfortably familiar to anyone who’s
elaborate on his infamous elevator pitch. “It’s really the way ever thwarted an otherworldly threat against an atmospheric
our combat feels,” he begins. “Areas feel like skate parks, backdrop of coughing machinery and spitting lava pits.
and the way you move, the speed at which you move, the
fact enemies shoot projectiles at you and, in many cases, Hands-on in hell
you’re actually faster than them and you’re weaving back Of course, pausing to soak up the immersive surroundings
and forth between them and choosing between every gun in for more than a second or so isn’t an option. Soon after,
your arsenal... it’s all of these things working together. It’s Stratton warns, “If you stop, you die”. We do exactly that. It
just freaking really, really fun.” takes two more unceremonious deaths before we realise

56 / THe OFFICIAL xBOx MAgAzIne

 DOO M

NEW TO DOOM?
In the decade since we’ve had a new
Doom title, fPS franchises such as
Call of Duty and Battlefield have
dominated and defined the genre. But
executive producer Marty Stratton
believes that DOOM will please
seasoned demon-slayers and new
recruits alike. “for people who play
DOOM, it will feel familiar, but
I think for people who just, say,
bought an Xbox One and it’s their
first time playing anything related
to DOOM, they will find it super-
fun, super-fresh, and it will be
a new bar for them on how they
expect other games to feel.”
 fe aT ure

DOOM has essentially rewritten the is now, according to Stratton, “the

definition of ‘Hit the ground running’. ultimate player power-up”. During this
Following a few quick re-spawns, we particular variation of TDM, players
shelve our meandering sightseeing of can swipe a randomly spawned demon
the id Tech 6-fuelled environments in rune to transform themselves into this
favour of double-jumping, mantling and table-turning terror. Snatching up the
generally not staying still long enough pentagram-like power-up not only
for anyone to get a bead on us. grants the gift of flight and rocket-
Armed with a Super Shotgun, Static propelled grenades, but also gives its
Cannon and Frag grenades, we run lucky bearer twice the life of their foes.
like hell and frantically spray hot lead Our few encounters with a rival
at anyone who crosses our path. As Revenant leave us horizontal on
fun as this is, Stratton suggests we Heatwave’s catwalks, but Stratton
swap from the punch-packing Super ensures all hope isn’t lost when this
Shotgun to the Static Cannon for a true hell-spawn is unleashed. In addition to
taste of DOOM’s need for speed. “This utilising quad-damage and invisibility
gun actually gets better the more you power-ups, players can even the
move,” he says excitedly. “It charges odds with the gauss Rifle. Appearing
up as you run through the environment. as randomly as the rune, the super
If you stop, it will de-charge, so it’s weapon, which Stratton says can
kind of like a rail-gun that gets more “wreck enemies”, takes down human
powerful as you move.”
Swiftly navigating the map’s
vertically inclined layout while
wielding the motion-powered
hand-cannon proves an
effective strategy...
until the Revenant
joins the fray.
equipped with a
jet-pack and
shouldering a
pair of rocket
launchers,
the classic
DOOM
baddie

not good; it’s just not good going to go in a different

DOOMED TO BE
BETTER
BeTheSDa SOfTwOrkS’ VP Of
Pr anD MarkeTIng PeTe hIneS
DISCuSSeS DeVelOPIng DOOM
In a POST-CarMaCk wOrlD
OXM: Can you talk a bit
about DOOM’s protracted
development cycle?
Part of the reason DOOM is
where it is in development
is because id Software, a
long-standing, well-known
studio, looked at the early
version and said: ‘This isn’t
good enough. not to say it’s
enough. we’re capable of much
more and we think we can make
this an even better game.’ So…
they demanded better.
OXM: what’s been improved over
that earlier version?
The single-player, they pushed
a lot on the multiplayer, and
they came up with SnapMap,
which was them coming up with
this idea and concepting it,
and working on it, and making
it a reality. It’s something
that’s very true to id,
but still something that’s
fresh for the industry… not
something a lot of other
folks are doing.
OXM: was there additional
pressure on the team to prove
themselves after John Carmack
departed in 2013?
absolutely. But they really
took advantage of that
situation. id Tech 6 was born
entirely out of his departure
and the tech team said: ‘we’re
direction than John was going
because we think this makes
our game better.’ They were
a bit freed up from that
standpoint, because John
wasn’t around to sort of
dictate where they were going
and what they were doing. It
was kind of left to the rest
of them, and they seized the
opportunity instead of burying
their heads in the sand.
OXM: are id excited about the
prospect of re-introducing the
world to DOOM?
They’re hungry to prove
they’re legit and that they
still have the chops, and that
they’re really good at what
they do. This is a big deal
and they want to be spoken
about amongst the best of the
best first-person shooter
franchises. If anybody’s
talking about the best
first-person shooters
out there and the studios
making them, they want to be
in that conversation.

58 / THe OFFICIAL xBOx MAgAzIne WWW.gAMeSRADAR.COM/OxM

 DOO M

DOOM: the home of

ultraviolence and jazz
hands. It’s 18-rated
for a reason.

GRAPHIC, GORY, GORGEOUS

In its day, 2005’s Doom 3 was considered
one of the prettiest games to ever appear
on Microsoft’s original big black box. id
Software aims to earn similar accolades on
Xbox One with its id Tech 6-powered reboot.
featuring id Tech 5-shaming dynamic lighting
and shadows, eye-popping effects, and an
unmatched level of atmospheric immersion,
DOOM’s as pretty as a postcard... sent
straight from the depths of hell.

adversaries with a single shot and
Classic puts a Volkswagen-sized dent in most
monsters like demons’ health meters. As we witness
the Cacodemon
during the lightning-fast round, the
return to the
fray – albeit appearance of both the Revenant and
with a few more the only weapon capable of quickly
pixels than sending him back to Hades injects
their 1993 the familiar TDM formula with a fresh,
counterparts. frantic dynamic, while the seat-of-the-
pants pacing packs plenty of thrills into
Stop for just a second and the moment-to-moment gunplay.
you’ll die. we guess this
guy didn’t get the memo. Three ways to play
Our six minutes in hell is sadly all too
brief, but Stratton says this pre-alpha
slice barely scratches the hot molten
surface of what’s to come. DOOM’s
dedicated multiplayer component,
which also includes the previously
announced Freeze Tag and Clan Arena
modes – as well as some yet-to-be-
revealed goodies – makes up just a
third of the game’s total offerings.
In fact, according to the 15-year id
veteran, the final package will feature
a tasty trio of fully-fleshed, content-
packed components: “We really
are approaching the game as three
pillars. equally important to us as the
single-player campaign experience, is
the multiplayer and SnapMap. none of
these should feel lacking to the player.
I would hope that people sit down and
play all of them and enjoy all of them,
but if they just choose to play one,
that’s £50 worth of entertainment.”
Those betting all their hard-earned
bones on DOOM’s single-player
campaign can plan on their investment

“we run like hell

paying them back in more blood and
guts than they can shake a chainsaw
at. If you’ve spied any of the previous
and spray hot lead peeks of the game’s story mode, you’re
well aware DOOM’s wearing its 18-rating

at every monster” like a blood-drenched badge of honour.

That said, its over-the-top violence

@OxM THe OFFICIAL xBOx MAgAzIne / 59

 fe aT ure
id Tech 5 wowed us in games like
wolfenstein: The new Order and
The evil within, but id Tech 6
is something else entirely.

isn’t just about shock value. Sure,

having a big, scary hell-spawn beat
you to death with your own graphically
detached limbs might provide fodder for
future nightmares, but the horrific act is
all in the service of storytelling. Sort of.
Stratton isn’t oblivious to the fact
people play DOOM because it’s one of
the few games that allows them to
halve hell’s monsters with chainsaws,
but he also feels there’s room for some
meaningful narrative to be delivered
through that primal filter. “We know
players are coming to the game to kill
demons and we’ve tried to apply that
to how we approach the story. A nod
to some of the things we’re doing is
when a demon smashes a guy into a
console and you later find that guy and
have to tear his arm off to get access
to an area. That’s certainly not the
extent of our story, but we try to do it
in interesting and clever ways that stay
out of the way of somebody who just
wants to blow stuff up and kill demons.”
Whether you’re following the story

or simply slaying baddies, DOOM’s
campaign, like its multiplayer, rewards
those who don’t stop to smell the
cooked flesh. Calling it “way faster” than
Doom 3, Stratton elaborates on how the
next instalment is “widely” different
than its slower-paced predecessor.
“From a game development perspective,
you’re always learning from what you did
in the past. When we started this, it was
about figuring out the quintessential
essence of DOOM. We hit on some really
good things and it boils down to the
way the guns feel, the way the enemies
feel and, yes, the movement and how
that works together as a package.”
“the over-the-top
That cohesive package is also
complemented by some design
decisions that could initially leave the
Call of Duty crowd wondering where all
the conveniently-placed waist-high violence isn’t just
cover points are. As Stratton explains,
though, DOOM’s steeper, more nuanced
difficulty isn’t about frustrating players,
about shock value”
but promoting adrenaline-fuelled fun.
“We love combat where you dive in and
attack the enemy. Does regenerative
health fit into that? Hell no. Taking
cover? nope, that doesn’t fit either.”
When queried about DOOM’s strict
no-reloading rule, Stratton is equally
enthusiastic: “every time I pull the
The Mancubus
needs to lose
a few pounds,
but his vast
gut doesn’t
prevent the
brute from
unleashing
XXXl-sized
drubbings.
trigger, I want an amazing, explosive
experience. Reloading does not fit into
that, because when I’m out of ammo
and I pull that trigger and hear ‘click’,
that’s the worst feeling ever.”
On top of never running dry, DOOM’s
death-dealers have been fine-tuned for
optimal enemy-eviscerating fun. The
arsenal, which Stratton calls “Varied,
distinct and responsive,” includes
plenty of unique options, all with very
specific purposes. In addition to the
aforementioned ass-kickers, fans can
plan on blowing bad guys’ faces off
with various shotgun types, plasma
rifles, heavy assault weapons, and
chain-guns. Complementing the ability
to reduce hell’s hordes to hamburger

FIREBALLS VS BULLETS HELP FROM HELLIONS

DOOM’s enemies’ fireballs are just as unpredictable as one of the hardcore granddaddies
as bullets. according to Marty Stratton, the prolific of the first-person shooter genre,
use of the fiery projectiles adds a different dynamic DOOM doesn’t hold your hand or
to DOOM’s slickly-paced combat. “In lots of games you regenerate your low health. Its
are fighting soldiers carrying guns, so bullets are attacking demon hordes, however, will
hitting you. But DOOM is very much about enemies that often drop health bonuses upon hitting
throw fireballs; when you see the fireball coming the floor in a bloody heap. In fact,
through the air at you and you’re making these really some of the game’s most adrenaline-
fast, split-second decisions... well, your movement spiking moments come from scoring a
is just so key in your ability to evade that stuff.” life-saving health pick-up just as
expect to find OXM in a melted pile in the corner. you’re about to gasp your last breath.

60 / THe OFFICIAL xBOx MAgAzIne WWW.gAMeSRADAR.COM/OxM


from behind a BFg of your choice, is a
new gun-swapping mechanic; utilising
a weapon wheel that holds as many
guns as you can find, players are
treated to a slick slo-mo effect that’s
as strategic as it is cinematic.
Of course, those craving the most
graphic kills will want to cosy-up to
their targets before triggering melee
finishers capable of covering the walls
in bloody bits and pieces. Whether
curb-stomping Satan’s minions,
feeding them their own feet, removing
their mandibles with extreme prejudice,
or simply punching their ugly mugs into
a crimson-coloured mist, unleashing
up-close kills is never anything less
than a stomach-churning affair.
DIY DOOM
DOOM’s advanced sci-fi arsenal may
splatter the spotlight, but it’s SnapMap
that’s id’s most ambitious feature. An
intuitive user-generated content tool,
it’s aiming to bring modding – previously
the domain of PC gamers – to console.
Stratton says it “puts the power of
creation in players’ hands,” allowing
anyone with an xbox One and a copy
of DOOM to carve out their own levels,
scenarios, missions and play modes.
Citing his personal inexperience with
modding as an example, Stratton tells
us just how user-friendly it is: “I made
an escort mission that I was playing
for two hours; I’ve made combat
races where two players go off on a
symmetrical map and race through
it, setting traps for each other, and
sending bosses into the other person’s
encounter... it’s so accessible.”
Calling it “deep, yet easy to use”,
Stratton believes SnapMap will please
@OxM
experienced modders with its breadth
of options, but also introduce budding
game designers to a new world just
begging to ignite their creative sparks
(and, in its lava pits, their frail bodies).
Those who’d rather cut a bloody swath
through the existing levels rather than
create brand new ones can, of course,
still reap the benefits of others’ hard
work. Surfing for and accessing fresh
user-generated content is a quick and
painless process that gives all players
access to a bottomless pool of new
experiences. Additionally, because
everyone has the same core assets
and components on their systems,
there are no lengthy downloads or
complicated steps involved in sampling
these shared creations;
simply browse the
content hub, see
It’s always a
mystery to us
how a rotting
skeleton can
still have fully
functioning
eyeballs.
DOO M
Cacodemons are what looks cool, fire it up, and let the
what happens demon-demolishing action begin.
when a space Combined with a brimming slate
hopper turns of online multiplayer content and a
bad. eliminate
lengthy solo campaign for lone wolves,
with extreme
prejudice. SnapMap essentially brings infinite
replayablity to DOOM or, as Stratton
more modestly puts it: “Anybody who
spends their money on the game is
getting something that, literally, you
could spend years with.” While not
every mode will pack the same appeal
for each player, at least one of DOOM’s
three dedicated components should
hook any gamer suffering from an itchy
trigger finger. And at the absolute
minimum, we can’t imagine anyone
who’s ever clutched a gamepad not
being a little curious to discover what
it feels like to bury a buzzing chainsaw
blade between a Cyberdemon’s horns. ■
THe OFFICIAL xBOx MAgAzIne / 61
 FE AT uRE

EVERYTHING
YOU NEED TO
KNOW BEFORE

HALO 5:
GUARDIANS
OXM answers 15 of your frequently asked
questions about the Ha-lore surrounding
Master Chief’s latest outing

E
ven though 2015 is
leaving us spoilt for
choice when it comes
to great new games,
Halo 5: Guardians is
still our most
anticipated Xbox One
exclusive. But for a
newcomer trying to get into the series,
four games’ worth of backstory can be
pretty intimidating. Especially if you
then start including the spin-off
games, tie-in novels, TV series,
ilovebees.com… So we’ve compiled
this list, giving you everything you need
to know to be prepared for Master
Chief’s latest adventure.
15>
WHO IS MASTER CHIEF?
Seriously? John-117, better known
as the Master Chief, is a SPARTAN- 15>
II, a super-soldier working for the
United Nations Space Council (UNSC).
Trained since the age of six to be the
ultimate soldier, John-117’s body was
augmented, improving his reflexes,
strength and eyesight, as well as
giving him near-unbreakable bones.
Despite a description worthy of the
Terminator, John’s no robot – he’s
incredibly protective of humanity and
his other Spartans. He’s a loyal soldier
and a hero, one who’s saved the
universe many times. But in

62 / THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE WWW.TOTALXBOX.COM

 H A LO 5: GuA RDIA NS
Halo 5, Master Chief has gone AWOL.
It’s the game’s first grand mystery:
why would the UNSC’s best soldier
abandon his post?
FurthEr Playing: The Master Chief
Collection will bring you up to speed
on the main series thus far – and it’ll
do so on your Xbox One, to boot.
14>
WHO IS CORTANA?
Being a Spartan gets all sorts of lonely,
which is why Master Chief grew so very
attached to Cortana – his AI partner
and closest confidant. She’s a bit like
the voices in your head that tell you
to shoot things, but somehow not as
worrying. This digital companion who
helped out the Chief was with him for
(most of) the first four games.
But not anymore. During Halo 4’s
ending, Cortana tragically dies, but
not before delivering an emotional
farewell that doesn’t so much tug
at the heartstrings as rip your heart
out of your chest completely. Such
a downbeat ending left Chief more
emotionally drained than we’ve ever
seen him, a state some speculate
could have motivated him to go AWOL.
FurthEr Playing: The perfect excuse
to blitz through Halo 4 again.
<14 13>
WHAT IS THE
SPARTAN-II PROGRAMME?
<12 The original UNSC super-solider
programme sought out children with
extraordinary physical or mental gifts
(John-117 had both, naturally). Then
the UNSC abducted those children,
replaced them with clones so that no
one would know, and put them through
vigorous training until they could barely
remember their former lives. Ouch.
And we thought not getting Halo 2 for
Christmas all those years ago meant we
had the bad childhood.
Benjamin Giraud is a journalist who’s
interviewed several people who knew
Master Chief. His hunt for the truth has
revealed some of the more horrifying
aspects of the SPARTAN-II program,
including said cloning and abduction of
children. Those who want to know more
would be best to start with his work.
FurthEr listEning: Giraud’s nosey
investigations are all chronicled on
the Hunt the Truth podcast.
12>
WHO ARE BLuE TEAM?
Cortana may be gone, but Master
Chief won’t be fighting alone. For
<11 the first time in a Halo game, he’ll
be fighting alongside Blue Team,
@OXM
legendary Spartans who will be familiar
to fans of Halo lore outside of the
games themselves. It means all four
players will have their own individual
character in co-op, and we hope their
backstories will be fleshed out. The
three other members of Guardians’
Blue Team – Fred-104, Linda-058 and
Kelly-087 – were abducted at age six
for the SPARTAN-II programme, and
have known John-117 all their lives.
Interestingly, for co-op to work, Blue
Team will have to vanish along with
him. What could be so vital that four
Spartans are willing to risk their reps?
FurthEr rEading: Halo: The Fall of
Reach is the first tie-in novel, and
marks Blue Team’s first appearance.
11>
WHO IS FRED-104?
Fred’s not an elitist. He’s never liked
the special treatment Spartans get
from humans, and doesn’t consider
himself above baseline troops. While
that’s a nice sentiment… come on,
Fred. You’re widely regarded as
arguably a better marksman than
Master Chief. Those lesser troops aren’t
fit to lick the mud from your boots.
Fred’s skills in combat, strong
leadership and second-to-only-one-
at-most shooting make him worthy
of his own series of games. But Fred
doesn’t compete with Chief, and is
happy for John to take the Blue Team’s
lead. All those skills, and he’s still
gracious? We’re starting to hate Fred.
FurthEr rEading: Novel Halo: Last
Light has Fred-104 in a starring role,
and is out in September.
10>
WHO IS LINDA-117?
If you want the best sniper, look no
further than Linda. She’s the quietest
member of the team – who wants a
loud sniper? – but underestimate her
at your peril. She once took down two
assailants so fast, Master Chief himself
couldn’t tell which she’d shot first.
Often she’s referred to as the ‘lone
wolf’ with regard to her habit of taking
her own path and watching the team’s
back from afar. Basically, if you have a
back, and would like someone to watch
it there’s none better.
FurthEr rEading: The Halo: Fall of
Reach comic adaptation Boot Camp
shows the childhoods of John-117,
Kelly and Linda. They had it rough.
09>
WHO IS KELLY-087?
Kelly was always quick, but then
she got augmented. Now she’s the
THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE / 63
 FE AT uRE
09>
fastest Spartan, which makes her
easily the fastest person in the world
(take that, Usain Bolt). Her speed
gives her a natural advantage on the
battlefield, but she excels in other
areas of combat, too. Notably, she’s
shown an incredible tolerance for pain,
successfully recovering after several
critical wounds. Kelly also has a very
cynical sense of humour – justified
when all you’ve known is war, we
suppose. Should help spice up Halo
5’s writing. Cortana’s relationship with
Master Chief helped humanise him in
the previous Halo games. We expect
the presence of his trusted chums to
have the same effect here.
FurthEr rEading: Again, the Halo: Fall
of Reach comic is best if you want to
learn more about these Spartans and
their gruelling training regimes.
08>
WHO IS SPARTAN LOCKE?
You’re not just playing from Master
Chief’s perspective in Halo 5; you’ll also
step into the role of the Spartan tasked
with hunting down the universe’s
toughest soldier. Jameson Locke is one
of the best field operatives that the
ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) ever
produced – He’s cautious, logical, a
man who can handle himself in a fight
but prefers to resolve conflict through
negotiation. Hey, Deus Ex called – it
wants its protagonist back.
Locke’s distrusting nature and non-
confrontational approach contrasts
with John-117’s all-guns-blazing
methods. Although it’ll feel odd playing
as your opponent, he’s fixing to be a
worthy adversary for the Chief. And hey,
maybe they’ll be pals by the end.
FurthEr watching: Locke is the lead
in the Halo: Nightfall TV series. You can
watch it on the Halo channel in The
Master Chief Collection.
64 / THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE
07>
WHAT IS SANGHELIOS?
The Covenant, a religious and
militaristic order determined to wipe
out the human race, were the main
antagonists of the original Halo
trilogy. They had to start somewhere –
Sanghelios, legendary home world of
the Sangheili race, the origins of the
Covenant and the planet we probably
associate with peace the least. It
was mentioned way back in Halo 3,
but Guardians will be the first time we
get to visit the planet. Being the first
new-gen Halo, which we’re promised
will be the biggest yet, we’re expecting
a world of incredible scale. But
considering his history with its people,
we don’t expect the Chief to receive
the warmest of welcomes.
FurthEr rEading: Sanghelios features
heavily in the novel Halo: Glasslands.
06>
WHO IS THE ARBITER?
Thel ’Vadam, probably better known
as the Arbiter, has had his differences
with Master Chief (to say the least). But
these former adversaries buried the
hatchet during the events of Halo 3,
as the Arbiter learned the truth about
the Covenant’s plans. In the years
08> 07>
WWW.TOTALXBOX.COM
 H A LO 5: GuA RDIA NS
since, the Arbiter has been off touring
the states of Sanghelios, making the
difficult case for permanent peace
between the Sangheili and humanity.
That’s a pretty noble, non-violent
goal – so just why is the Arbiter seen
chatting with Spartan Locke about his
mission to track down Master Chief? If
the Arbiter believes he must be taken
down, it’s hard to know who we can
trust any more.
FurthEr Playing: Halo 2 and 3 are just
as much the story of Thel ’Vadam as
they are John-117.
05>
WHO ARE FIRETEAM OSIRIS?
Locke’s assembled Fireteam Osiris
from a whole new pool of Spartans,
some recognisable to diehard fans
of the series. Most familiar is Buck,
<06 a fan favourite after his standout
role in Halo 3: ODST, making a long-
awaited return here. We’ve already
seen him provide some welcome comic
relief in what was running the risk of
being the most sombre and serious
Halo yet. Interestingly, Buck held off
becoming a Spartan for several years
because he didn’t want to abandon
his battle-hardened crew. We wouldn’t
be surprised to find ‘LOYALTY’ tattooed
across this guy’s biceps.
FurthEr Playing: Halo 3: ODST is
an underrated gem and the perfect
introduction to Spartan Buck. It’s also
<03 just been released as an addition to
The Master Chief Collection.
04>
WHO IS HOLLY TANAKA?
The remaining members of Team
Osiris may not be as recognisable,
but they’re more than worthy of their
posts. Holly Tanaka’s homeworld
was destroyed when she was a
child, meaning she had to grow up
fast. Forced to adapt quickly, Holly
developed a wide range of skills to help
her fellow survivors, but also learnt how
to take on – and beat – a superior foe.
Basically, she got her whole SPARTAN-
IV training before the programme had
<02 even heard of her. Tanaka has shown a
nobility in saving others and refusing to
leave survivors behind. Not hard to see
why that kind of loyalty would appeal to
Spartan Locke and friends.
FurthEr rEading: Halo: Escalation
issues 17 and 18. The ‘Glass Horizon’
storyline covers Tanaka’s origins.
03>
WHO IS OLYMPIA VALE?
Note to self: call future daughter
‘Olympia Vale’ to guarantee offspring
@OXM
awesomeness. More than just a cool
name, Vale is a diplomat, completely
fluent in Sangheili. She prides herself
on her ability to form interspecies
relationships. When an adversary
threatened to activate the Halo array
in a previous adventure, she was
willing to sacrifice herself to save
Earth – always a good trait to have in a
Spartan. Olympia’s more verbal abilities
are an interesting contrast to the
speed-power-sniping prowess of Blue
Team. You can see why Locke would
want someone of her skills on Fireteam
Osiris, especially with their first stop
being Sanghelios.
FurthEr Playing: The novel Halo:
Hunters in the Dark should be enough
to convince anyone of her credentials.
02>
WHAT ARE THE GuARDIANS?
They’re legendary Covenant technology,
apparently back to begin an ‘Age of
Reclamation’. Destroying the universe
to start anew? Yeah, that sounds like a
threat worthy of a new Halo game.
We’d seen a Guardian in the reveal
trailer, but we didn’t expect to see one
in the E3 demo, bursting out of the sea
to take the whole Fireteam by surprise.
Nowhere is safe. Guardians are capable
of concealing themselves underwater,
under lava, and can produce mighty
shockwaves that make short work of
buildings and Covenant aircraft. They’re
colossal in size too, all 1.4 kilometres
of them. The kind of big bad most
games would save for a final boss?
That’s how Halo 5 introduces itself.
FurthEr watching: You can watch the
whole E3 demo – and the initial
reveal trailer where we first saw a
towering Guardian – online.
01>
WHAT IS HALO 5?
Ah, the big question. It’s a sci-fi first-
person shooter. Single-player or up to
four-player in co-op, showing every
other game in its genre how this should
be done. It’s a shooter where every
weapon has a purpose and everything
is perfectly balanced. It’s a hugely
popular PvP multiplayer series, that’s
also yet to have a truly bad single-
player campaign to its name. It’s the
same 30 seconds of fun, over and
over, but now with new-gen power and
scale behind it. Get reading/watching/
listening/playing, because the Xbox
One’s next essential exclusive is just
around the corner.
FurthEr Playing: Halo 5: Guardians.
If you have a copy lying around, mind
letting us borrow it?
THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE / 65
 RE VIE W SThe most important Xbox releases rated

THIS MONTH
IN facTS
WHaT’S IN
THIS ISSUE’S
HIGHEST-RaTED
GaMES?
The horrors of war
children being attacked
Religious fundamentalism
Perfect Dark Zero

NUMBER Of GaMES
WE’VE PLaYED BEfORE
IN RaRE REPLaY
Matthew Tom

25 0

METAL GEAR
Alex Emma

30 18

SOLID V: THE
PHANTOM PAIN
WHaT HIDEO KOJIMa
SHOULD DO NEXT
Metal Gear Solid 6:
Escape from Konami
Can you find our hidden review Penguin adventure 2

of Kojima’s stealth blockbuster? Xbox One-exclusive

Silent Hills:
(Hint: try turning this page) We can Dream Edition

THIS MONTH WE…

Almost dehydrated p68 Nearly drowned p74 Pretended to be royalty p80 Blinded the helpless p86 Helped the blind p87

@oxm the offiCial xbox magazine / 67

 Yep, some of these faces definitely look friendlier than
review others… Ol’ Skull Face is near the bottom of that list.

68 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm

 PuBlisher Konami / DeveloPer Kojima Productions
Format xbox 360, xbox one (reviewed) / release Date 1 seP

metal Gear
soliD v: the
Phantom Pain
“A strong man doesn’t need to read
the future. He makes his own.”

B
ig boss has spent his entire missed – extraditing the commander and
life as the pawn of shadowy the inspector, for example – and watching
puppet masters. there are our fellow reviewers reveals many colourful
the obvious villains of the interpretations. expert marksmen land that
earlier games, those who difficult sniping shot, braver souls go into
manipulated him into killing full-on Heat mode and storm the runway
his mentor and who later with assault rifles. another interrogates a
tried to seize his private lowly goon to learn the planned inspection
army. failing to get their way, route and laces the road with
they dunked his whole operation c-4. one smart cookie goes
into the ocean at the end of even further, identifying the
The Phantom Pain’s standalone car the pair will later drive and
prologue, Ground Zeroes. but the booby-trapping that while it
conspiracy goes all the way to reviewer sits innocuously in the parking
the top, to a game director that matthew Castle lot. and this is only one mission
has led our legendary soldier live oxm Pesto with one set of equipment. as
@mrbasil_pesto
down some notoriously linear big boss’ war machine powers
paths on his perpetual fight for the knowleDGe up and tech trees come into
freedom. now it’s time for our what is it?
bloom, the potential solutions
hero to step into an open world the tale of a one- only branch out further. in what
and show everyone who’s boss. armed man becoming is arguably a Metal Gear Solid
take this mission: kill the a one-man army. first, you are the true author of
commanding officer of an airport what’s it like? your own action spectacle.
during his routine inspection. Metal Gear’s laser- and this is the most
the obvious solution, sniping focused stealth remarkable thing about hideo
him from the other end of the transplanted to a Kojima’s final Metal Gear: how
runway, proves a repeat bust huge open world. little hideo Kojima there is in
– he moves fast and our errant who’s it For? it. here is a director known for
bullets scare him into hiding stealth fans and his cinematic aspirations and
inside an enemy-filled admin those who found the playtime-dwarfing cutscenes;
building. next time we bring older Metal Gears who, when he finally does
along a legendary crack-shot far too chatty. hand over control, riddles his
to handle sniping duties, ordering her up tactical espionage action with so many
a nearby radio tower to fire on our say. hideosyncracies that it feels like you’re
again, lines of sight refuse to play ball and wrestling the guy for the pad. but his
chaos erupts. of course, by now we have phantom digits are far from The Phantom
some understanding of the commander’s Pain. Yes, a barely interactive prologue
behaviour, noting that in the two minutes indulges Kojima’s maddest excess – an
it takes the airport inspector to arrive by explosion of foreshadowed boss fights and
helicopter, our man relaxes in the lounge slow-mo posturing – but it also exhausts
downstairs. this time we book it, hugging it. when our legendary soldier steps into
the perimeter and diving behind crates afghanistan it’s just him, the soviet army
to avoid tiny bipedal mechs that stomp and a toolbox to upset them with.
across the tarmac. hearts pounding, we if anything, it’s such a shift that you
enter the lounge, seize our mark and slit find yourself searching for Kojima’s guiding
his throat. now to wander out of arrivals hand – yet another phantom limb. left to
like a happy, bloodstained holidaygoer. your own devices, how does one liberate a
this is by no means the ‘right’ solution. comrade from a hillside prison or sabotage
a list of bonus criteria appear after the a platoon of mechs? come back, Koj; all is
mission to hint at smarter methods we forgiven. a pair of magic enemy-marking

@oxm the official xbox magazine / 69

 review
binoculars superimposes a modicum of
order on the daunting landscape, but it
remains a dangerously organic world,
far removed from the boxy arenas of
Metal Gear’s facilities of old. in Kabul’s
knobbly terrain, a sudden dip is just as
likely to steer you under prying eyes
as a rubble pile might pop your head
above a parapet for a fatal second.
the orange triangle above a marked
guard says nothing of his psychology,
whether he’ll skittishly glance and
glimpse you bellyflopping into a nearby
bush, and whether he’ll then succumb
to curiosity or radio for a hand to hold.
we’d once have balked at such
unknowns; the beauty of Metal Gear
Solid 1 and 2 was the precision with
which solid snake evaded sight cones
MiSSiOn COntrOl
No two Step 1
missions
are ever the
same, but
here are the
rough beats
they
tend to
follow… pick a buddy: speedy horse,
sneaky sniper, guard-
spotting dog or giant ’bot.
70 / the official xbox magazine
and ran circles around clear ai routines. Fight the
in TPP, trouble bubbles to the surface, urge to forgo
forcing thrilling improvisation. alerting the guns
guards focuses those wandering minds completely:
into a viciously efficient force, as they they’re
flank and dart between cover. crucially, fantastic.
they display none of the supernatural
prescience that makes escape next
to impossible in poorer stealth games.
breaking line of sight offers a chance
for evasion or, even better, using the
unfolding chaos to push deeper into
(now) unguarded territory. we actually
took to rigging peripheral watchtowers
with c-4 in case we later wanted to
shake up an outpost’s patrol patterns
with a surprise demolition.
but this vast sandbox is layered
with so many variables that it’s rarely
Step 2
pick a deployment time. Are
you a brazen sunshine boss
or a creature of the night?
just a case of sneaky man versus
suspicious man. day/night cycles
mess with fields of view and soviet
shift rotations; sandstorms blow in and
blind; rain masks footsteps; prisoner
transportation offers brief windows
for liberation; bears arrive, and do not
discriminate between east and west.
Perhaps the most ambitious idea is
how enemy forces operate as a region-
wide army. do you let the threat of a
sudden supply truck or the tangible
presence of nearby reinforcements
deter you, or do you use that structure
to pull the afghan rug out from under
them? attach a postage label to your
cardboard box and trucks can deliver
you into the heart of a base; clear out
surrounding outposts and there’ll be no
Step 3
Fly to the landing zone,
staring into your buddy’s
eyes/slobbering tongue.
www.gamesradar.com/oxm
 there’s plenty of sneaking to be done – and
avoiding lines of sight is far from predictable. review

Mech tours that death carries a worthy penalty,

– the new instilling a will to live that heightens

“Strategic potential is staggering, Segway for

discerning
the fear of capture that lies at the
heart of every great stealth game.

if the enemy doesn’t use it first”

backup to call on. sabotage the comms
dish and you’ll strangle soviet cries for
help outright. the strategic potential is
staggering, as long as you don’t let the
enemy use it against you first.
teasing opportunities from threats
is what separates The Phantom Pain
from common sandbox games. where
Just Cause or Saint’s Row humour you
with power on tap, Kojima Productions
works hard to prevent its larger canvas
diluting the intensity we expect from
riders.
Metal Gear. big boss is more action-
capable than before, yes, but he can
be torn down by bullets in seconds and
what bombastic assistance he can call
on – an attack helicopter and airstrikes
– takes an age to arrive until you invest
in the support team behind the scenes.
and until you fund helicopter research,
you can expect to see said chopper
repeatedly tumble from the sky like
a flaming sycamore seed. to top it
off, checkpoints are far enough apart
this sense of risk, that actions
actually matter, is echoed by Kojima
Productions’ refusal to fill its world with
meaningless trinkets. side ops offer up
blueprints or the specialists required to
build them, while resources – be they
diamonds, minerals, man or beast (the
latter two yanked from the battlefield
by balloon) – all feed into a revived
mother base. an improved base means
more staff and increased advantages
in the field, but more than this, the
offshore platform acts as a physical
manifestation of your progress. think
of Assassin’s Creed II’s monteriggioni

Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 7

Curse the fact lZ is a mile Skirt around the perimeter reward dog for barking out Body of juicy guard
away from the objective. marking goons. the dog will positions by giving him a alerts fellow juicy
regret not bringing horse. also bark out positions. nice juicy guard to chew on. guards. time to leg it!

@oxm the official xbox magazine / 71

 You can snipe foes yourself, but why do that like
review a chump when you can order Quiet to do it for you?

it’s probably just Halloween

or something, right? right?
[Checks calendar frantically…]

there were a few kinks in the

initial testing runs that
required a bit of ironing out…

Unusual
Suspects
A quick rundown of the
freaks and geeks you’ll
meet along the way
KAz MilleR RevOlveR OcelOT D-DOg D-WAlKeR
even having bits cut off his Years before an evil hand The cycloptic cutie grows Huey emmerich can build six-
body won’t stop him from took over his body, he helps into a monster that prefers metre-tall Metal gears; you
spewing forth exposition. Big Boss save the world. human throats to Bonio. get this mini mech.

QUieT cODe TAlKeR PARASiTe SQUAD THe MAN ON FiRe SKUll FAce
Do try to enlist the legendary Did the writers have a toke When these guys and gals Does exactly what he says Teach this creep why sinking
sniper – her story is some of of whatever he’s smoking? arrive, Big Boss tends to on the tin. You’ll never a legendary soldier’s oil rig
the best in the game. Weirdness abounds. depart. The earth, that is. guess how to beat him… is never a good idea.

to find avenues cut off for no reason.

at the same time, there are linear

“Fighting a grizzly while listening to story missions that serve as perfect

reminders why we’ve spent the past 20

Revolver Ocelot? That’s Koj as hell”
writ large; a snaking network of struts
and towers so large it requires a jeep
to traverse. it engenders a sense of
ownership that brilliantly pays off as
mother base becomes more integral to
the plot in the story’s later, darker acts.
how nerdy you get with base
management is up to you. letting
the auto-assign function handle
conscriptions keeps things in good
health, but we enjoyed tailoring units
to fit our playstyle – and tinkering can
push you further into the tech tree
than you thought possible. on that
topic, you might question the sense in
researching hundreds of gun variations
when the game actively frowns on
going loud in its mission rankings. for
starters, the guns are so tactile it’d
do your thumbs a disservice not to
try them out. more importantly, come
the game’s few action-heavy boss
encounters, you’ll be thankful you did,
as we discovered as we desperately
airdropped in rocket launchers while
sprinting from four mutated assassins.
that particular encounter, and a few
repeat visits from the same quartet,
sticks out as one of the few moments
the Kojima of old does rear his head.
not just in its paranormal silliness, but
in the more prescribed manner of the
mission. after hours spent devising
and executing your own plans, it’s odd
years letting Kojima have his way. Your
first encounter with Quiet and a later
four-way sniper battle in a misty jungle
feel like classic Metal Gear moments;
one musical interlude even channels
the spirit of Snake Eater’s infamously
barmy ladder climb. hey, who can
complain about three minutes of
indulgence in a game that serves up a
good 50 hours – and those are Codec-
free hours – of stealth brilliance?
we’ve heard some colleagues gripe
about TPP’s lack of indulgence. there
are many Kojima acolytes who hunger
for that singular vision: the half-hour
cutscenes, the wild codec tangents,
the fourth wall-breaking jokes, the
ludicrous boss fights and a mythology
so tangled it has longer wikipedia
entries than most real-world historical

72 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm


events. i’d argue that The Phantom
Pain still delivers this, only without
sacrificing its newfound agency in
the process. cutscenes mix bullet-
time badassery and grandstanding
speeches (and occasional perviness),
but are far punchier for their scarcity.
when a mission’s opening credits read
‘written by hideo Kojima’ you can still
anticipate something a bit weird. that
missions have opening credits reminds
you that this is not a vanilla effort. and
Kojima’s hand is definitely felt in the
villain’s james bond-ish scheming and
optional taped conversations that pipe
hours of Metal Gear Solid lore straight
into big boss’s ears. fighting a grizzly
bear while you listen to revolver ocelot
reminisce about the Philosopher’s
legacy? that’s Kojima as hell.
Kojima’s weirder side is there if you
go looking for it, in other words; it’s his
better habits that rise more naturally to
the surface: visual polish, world-class
sound design and a near microscopic
the OXM verdict
Better tHAn…
GrounD zeroes
camp Omega laid the
groundwork for TPP’s vast
plains, but the bleak story
takes sweet characters to an
unnecessarily grubby place.
Thankfully, TPP rediscovers
much of the series’ levity.
@oxm
Also available in ‘glowing gecko’
and ‘agitated parrot’ colourways.
attention to detail. in a world this large,
it’s no mean feat how every potential
interaction is accounted for, from the
way horse poop causes cars to skid to
the simple joy of performing a running
dive into a cardboard box and sliding it
down a hill. or the moment you realise
you can glue c-4 to unknowing guards,
letting them carry bombs towards an
out-of-reach target. or how cheery
’80s pop, pilfered from boomboxes, can
be pumped out of helicopter speakers
to scare guards during an attack run.
making a daring escape to hall & oates’
Maneater is a scene unlikely to be
bettered in 2015. that it is a set-piece
entirely of your own devising shows
how far Metal Gear Solid has come.
and after a solid week of play, we’re
not even close to exhausting its depths.
there’s still a zoo’s worth of animals to
airlift, each beast’s scream raising a
smirk and the question of how exactly
the team recorded it. there are higher
rankings to pursue, codenames to earn
tHe DiFFerenCe On…
XBOX 360
We’re yet to try the 360
version – full verdict next
month – but if ground
zeroes is anything to
go by, expect the same
game with half the
framerate (30 fps) and
considerable pop-in.
review
through unusual play styles and new
So many parts to unlock for customisable logos.
people to early missions reappear in hardcore
neutralise, remixes where every guard carries a
so many ways bazooka, or in terrifying ‘subsistence’
to do it… runs that strip big boss of equipment
and challenge him to source tools in
the field. then there’s the simple fact
that every combination of weapons,
equipment and support buddy – and
there are hundreds – results in an
entirely different experience.
it’s this freedom that elevates The
Phantom Pain over previous Metal
Gear Solids. what it maybe lacks in
the sheer audacity of earlier entries,
it makes up for in being the better
game; mechanics honed over 20 years
interlocking into the most excitingly
emergent stealth game ever made. the
tale of big boss is the tale of a man
fighting the superpowers that would
exploit him. finally, there is a game
that allows him to soldier freely and
make his dream a reality. oXm
wHAt HAppenS OverAll
neXt?
?
10
Metal gear
long-term fans might feel
Online will sad that Kojima doesn’t go
go live with out in a hail of meta-bullets,
its tactical but his restraint lets those
deathmatch play. magnificent ideas breathe,
expect a review of
the online features
resulting in one of the finest
next month. stealth games ever made.
the official xbox magazine / 73
 review A sad sight for theme park-lovers, but
an eye-pleasing one for the rest of us.

Don’t hold
your breath
too tightly:
there’s no way
even a clumsy
oaf like you
will fall off.

PuBLisher UPPerCUT GAMeS / deveLOPer UPPerCUT GAMeS / fOrMAt XboX one / reLeAse dAte oUT now

reviewer
suBMerged
Thankfully, there are plenty more fish in the sea

A
Jenny BAker
Live Private post-apocalyptic exploration
@jennybaker23 title set in the colourful ruins
of a flooded city, Submerged
the knOwLedge is perhaps best described
whAt is it? as a gentle videogame yoga
An open-world tale
session. You’re encouraged to stretch
about a young
girl’s quest to heal
your virtual muscles in a large open
her brother. space, clear your mind and listen to
the soothing sound of whales. It’s fine
whAt’s it Like?
Sail, climb, cutscene,
if you want to wind down and let your
sail, climb, cutscene, mind draw blanks for a couple of hours.
sail – ooh, a dolphin! Playing the part of a young girl
whO’s it fOr?
named Miku, you are responsible for
Virtual-nature lovers taking care of your wounded brother,
who value setting Taku. In order to help him you have to
over story. find crates containing survival items,
such as food and water, using such
tools as a map, a fishing boat and a
telescope. My advice: treasure those
first few minutes cruising through the
city’s natural waterways, because
that’s the highlight of the game.
The crates you need are located on
top of architectural landmarks. To reach
them you just have to ascend each
building Lara Croft-style. Climbable
walls are garishly labelled with red
flowers, while user-friendly ledges are
practically scalable signposts. This is
a simple game with simple mechanics,
so really it’s all about that sea view.
You don’t have to open the crates in a
set order to get the next item, and you
can’t even lose your balance, let alone
your life – it’s an adventure game with
training wheels, and gutless for it.
The biggest problem is the lack of
variety. There are no ups and downs, no
twists and turns – scaling one building
is no different to scaling its neighbour,
and even the ‘destroyed beauty’ grows
monotonous. The storyline itself is
disappointingly flat, as almost identical
cutscenes and dialogue patterns are
used over and over and over again,
while the game’s breaking and mending
theme never truly finds its flippers.
In short, it feels like this title was
released from captivity before it found
its true porpoise – sorry, purpose.
Submerged is a hot and cold affair.
At best, it’s a meditative experience
with some touching story panels and a
solid piece of real estate on the island
of potential. At worst, it’s so mind-
numbingly repetitive that you won’t be
able to look at another dolphin without
weeping. A non-combat title is a great
concept, but this largely sinks without
a trace. A real shame. OXM

The OXM verdict

The besT biT The wOrsT biT DiD yOu OverAll
knOw?

?
5
The character Colourful post-apocalyptic
of Miku exploration with a soothing
was partly soundtrack, sadly let down
inspired by by a lacklustre story and
the heroines of repetitive gameplay. This is
Studio Ghibli and
Boosting your boat’s speed and surfing those Climbing from one identical ledge to the next Arya Stark from more disappointing than a
waves like an absolute pro. – so this is how déjà vu feels. Game of Thrones. pearl-less oyster.

74 / The offICIAL XboX MAGAzIne www.GAMeSrAdAr.CoM/oXM

 The world’s most sci-fi museum is not a place review
you’d want to get stuck in overnight…

This is what
happens if you
take a wrong
turn in a soft-
play area.

Publisher GRIP DIGITAl / DevelOPer TOxIC GAMES / fOrMAT xBOx OnE / releAse DATe OuT nOW

reviewer
Q.u.b.e: DirecTOr’s cuT
Or ‘Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion’, if you prefer

T
AleX DAle
live ChocoboOfDoom his doesn’t just invite and troughs; gently introducing a new But it never quite does. I’m not sure
@SporadicDaler comparisons with Valve’s concept before rapidly turning the if it’s by design, but Q.U.B.E’s puzzles
Portal – it rolls out the red screw. The first puzzles involve zapping are just taxing enough to make you
The knOwleDge carpet. Stop me if any of this coloured panels in the wall to make feel clever, but seldom fiendish enough
whAT is iT? sounds familiar: you wake them protrude indecently. By the end to have you scurrying to YouTube
Block-shifting,
up alone in a sterile, white chamber of the chapter, facile navigational walkthroughs (which are plentiful,
magnet-switching,
ball-shunting,
with no memory of who you are or how puzzles quickly escalate into hellish, as this is a port of a four-year-old PC
light-reflecting you got there. Your only connection Mouse Trap-esque feats of planning game). It’s more an interactive morale
physics puzzler. to the outside world is a one-way as you attempt to shunt tumbling balls boost than anything else; albeit one
whAT’s iT like?
radio through which an unknown onto switchpads by frantically running with fussy controls. Most of the time
Well-paced, with woman, apparently situated on the ISS, around, raising blocks out of the it’s a petty annoyance, but it can make
plenty of variety in its attempts to bumpstart your memory. ground like something out of Fantasia. puzzles that require reflexes pad-
identikit corridors. You’re trapped in the bowels of a giant Then it’s on to the next mechanic; gnashingly frustrating.
whO’s iT fOr? alien structure that’s on a collision switches that rotate rooms; toggle- And that’s why Q.U.B.E’s feeble
People who prefer course with Earth, you learn. Only you able magnets that pin anything not attempt to stretch its longevity – ‘Beat
wordsearches to can prevent the planet’s destruction, nailed down to the wall. And just when the Qlock’ time trials – falls flat. This
Sudoku. by – you guessed it! – solving a you think you’ve got things sussed, is a pleasantly mild brain-tickler with
succession of physics puzzles. a mechanic from earlier gets blended a fantastic twist at the end, but it’s
Rather than getting progressively in. The result is a puzzler that always difficult to recommend a game that
harder, Q.U.B.E. is a gauntlet of peaks seems on the cusp of overwhelming. falls so far from its true potential. OXM

The OXM verdict

The besT biT The wOrsT biT COMPleTiON Overall
ClOCK

7
The puzzles have that
‘eureka!’ moment, but

3 you’re never under pressure

and there’s a sense that,
hOuRS four years after initial
Encountering another voice that plants One chapter switches out the lights. It’s an release, the premise could
doubts about whether you’re even in space. annoyance that adds nothing bar busywork. have been taken further.

@OxM ThE OffICIAl xBOx MAGAzInE / 75

 Let’s make each one of these captions a mini-
review, shall we? That’ll be fun. Let’s do this!
revIew

Atic Atac is a stressful, confusing yet

surprisingly playable maze game. 7/10

Killer Instinct is a deceptively deep

fighter with strong fundamentals. 7/10

76 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm

 PubLisher microsoft studios / DeveLoPer rare
Format xbox one / reLease Date out now

rare rePLay
Ultimate (Re)play the Game

L
et’s begin by addressing the all cutesy platformers and googly eyes;
elephant in the room – or Rare Replay shatters that illusion into 30
rather, the elephant that isn’t individually fascinating little pieces.
in the room. You won’t find that’s not to say there aren’t some
taj, the culturally insensitive big hitters among the ranks. the n64
elephantine host of Diddy cupboard is depleted but far from bare
Kong Racing, anywhere – Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-
in Rare Replay’s hallowed Tooie, Jet Force Gemini, Blast Corps
galleries – his game is just one of dozens and Conker’s Bad Fur Day giving a broad
of high-profile titles that are notable by overview of rare’s output at the height of
their absence in this celebration of 30+ its creative powers. classics of their time,
years of rare games. they still hold up today, but only if you’re
sadly, licensing issues mean prepared to rewire your brain
this was always destined to be – these were released before
an incomplete collection. the dual analogue sticks became
barest exhibit hall of all is also industry standard, and the
the biggest draw: rare’s heyday button configurations can be
reviewer
as a nintendo affiliate in the a little – how shall we put it? –
aLex DaLe
1990s. anything that makes use ‘idiosyncratic’. Jet Force Gemini
Live chocoboofdoom
of ninty’s characters, such as @sporadicdaler in particular is near-unplayable
the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, in its current state, although an
is absent. elsewhere, usage the knowLeDge update (which should be with
rights also deny us n64 classic what is it? you by the time you read this)
GoldenEye 007 – arguably the collection of 30 titles aims to retool the controls for
greatest rare game of all. from rare’s history – modern sensibilities.
these exclusions should from Jetpac (1983) to as for the quality of the ports,
be terminal; instead, i think it Nuts & Bolts (2008). well, that brings us to one of
makes Rare Replay all the more what’s it Like? the more unusual things about
enticing a proposition. without wildly variable, Rare Replay. Perfect Dark and
the same old overexposed glory- obviously, but very the two Banjo games actually
hounds hogging the spotlight, few are out-and-
aren’t included in the initial
out duds.
this 30-game compilation has 11.4gb install – instead, we
space to focus on some of who’s it For? get the xbla versions, which,
retro fanatics,
rare’s success stories that like the compilation’s xbox
obviously, but also
are less often told; tales of anyone looking to
360 contingent, are installed
pilgrimages through gaudy, try something a little separately. if nothing else, it
8-bit jungles; of top-down more offbeat. fills out your games tab nicely.
racers and speedboat shooters; i was put out at first when
of pioneering isometric adventure games i found out Rare Replay’s content is
that basically paved the way for western split over around a dozen downloads/
rPgs such as Skyrim and The Witcher. installs – after all, what is a compilation
there’s this fallacy that has been allowed for if not convenience? but in practice,
to build up over time that rare games are this system is infinitely preferable to

@oxm the official xbox magazine / 77


revIew
lumbering owners with a mandatory
50gb+ install, allowing you to conserve
precious hard drive space by only
installing the games you want to
play. You don’t even need the base
compilation installed to play the xbla/
xbox 360 titles. the only downside to
them being the original versions is that,
well, they’re the original versions. if you
already own them, you’ll find you’ve
already unlocked some (or all) of the
achievements, which detracts from the
‘box fresh’ feel of the package.
on the plus side, the workaround
gives us a glimpse of what we can
expect from backwards compatibility
going forwards – and minor framerate
wobbles aside, it’s very impressive,
with none of the graphical or audio
freak-outs that often marred xbox
1 compatibility on xbox 360. indeed,
revisiting them makes us wish the
native n64 games received the same
upscaling treatment, as the polygon-
78 / the official xbox magazine
early Xbox 360 title Jetpac refuelled rejuvenates
the 1983 original in stylish fashion. 9/10
starved old-timers look a bit ropey
blown up on modern tVs. it makes it
all the more galling – or should that
be ghouling? – that the solitary xbox
1 game in the package, sub-par beat-
’em-up Grabbed by the Ghoulies, has
been given a hd spruce-up.
making an entrance
that said, eyes can adapt to even the
most textureless of environments given
time, and in any case there’s no way
you could call this a lazy compilation;
each game, no matter how old,
decrepit or obscure, is given its own
lavish splash screen on the game-
select menu, complete with pop-up
animations that dart around in time to a
jazzy remix of the original theme.
older games designed for 4:3
aspect-ratio screens get colourful
border graphics to disguise the ugly
black strips at either side of the
screen. if you prefer your golden oldies
Oh snap
Disappointingly, the older games’
Achievements mostly test brute
endurance. This is made up for by
the Snapshots gallery, which offers
bite-sized challenges. Atic Atac locks
you in a room with a demon; RC-Pro AM
transforms tracks into collect-'em-up
challenges. It’s a definite highlight.
An adventure to look suitably naff, however, you can
ahead of its remove the borders and glaze over the
time, Knight action with a grainy crt filter.
Lore isn’t exactly half of the 30 games on show
for those who are drafted in from the primitive 8-bit
like their
era – eight are from the nes, nintendo’s
hands held.
8/10 original home console, and, even more
terrifyingly, seven are ports from the zx
spectrum – a 1982-vintage rubber-
keyed home computer famed for its
garish visuals. typically in compilations
such as this, the really old entries are
little more than makeweights; curios
to be fiddled with for five minutes, and
then discarded. Rare Replay seems
aware that it needs to bully players
into trying out the really obscure
stuff – it chucks out achievements
like sweets just for booting up games
for the first time. like most games
from the 1980s/1990s, although to a
lesser degree than most, rare’s older
stuff is brutally unforgiving, and we’ve
learned from previous retro collections
that chucking in a quicksave option
only mitigates this to a point. rare’s
solution: mapping a real-time ‘rewind’
to the left trigger, is an elegant fix that
enables you to engage and experiment
with the deceptively deep mechanics
of these ancient games without having
to muddle around with save files.
with frustration stripped from the
equation, the older games, for my
money, offer tighter and more focused
www.gamesradar.com/oxm
 Making its console debut, Battletoads
Arcade is a typical 1990s scrapper. 6/10
“It’s when you dig deep that you get
the full picture of Rare’s versatility”
experiences than some of rare’s more
heralded efforts (the Banjo-Kazooie
games, for instance, are often more
concerned with showing off how big
the environments are, than they are
presenting fiendish platforming
challenges). it’s also when you dig
deepest into rare’s vaults that you get
the full picture of the studio’s
versatility. there’s the RC-Pro AM
games, fearsomely playable top-down
racers; Cobra Triangle, a watercraft
combat game that’s constantly packing
in new twists and turns on what seems
a very basic formula; Digger T Rock, an
early precursor to Spelunky; Atic Atac,
a panic-stricken jaunt through a mazy
The OXM verdict
The BeST BIT
Our fave game changes on a daily basis.
Currently it’s 2007’s Jetpac Refuelled.
@oxm
haunted mansion; Jetpac, an
enthralling fusion of platforming
and shooting. more than just googly
eyes, indeed.
revisiting the past allows us to
make sense of rare’s later works. it
might have kicked off the xbox 360
era with a whimper (Perfect Dark Zero
and Kameo were launch titles so limp
and generic, their damaging effects
to the rare brand are still felt today),
but it followed up with a couple of
underrated games that are every bit
as creative and original as its earlier
stuff. Viva Piñata is a gardening
sim of sorts that seems so sweet it
could make your kidneys pack up; it
The wOrST BIT
Lunar Jetman is rubbish, but doesn’t crush
your spirit like Perfect Dark Zero does.
revIew
Nuts & Bolts quickly evolves into a hellish project-
is what you management sim where you lurch from
get if you
merge Banjo-
Kazooie with
crisis to crisis in a vain attempt to
keep your plot’s ecosystem thriving.
Scraphead
Challenge.
meanwhile the newest game in the
collection, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts,
is something of a forgotten classic – a
8/10
puzzle-platform-racer hybrid where you
have the freedom to design your own
vehicles from scratch, allowing you
to devise ingenious workarounds to
straightforward challenges.
this is an impossibly generous
compilation that, without the luxury of
being able to wheel out some of rare’s
safest games, instead decides to revel
in the diversity of its lesser-seen back
catalogue. the result is an unmissable
tour through gaming history. from
zx spectrum to xbox 360, there’s
something here for everyone’s tastes,
and something here that’ll give you a
taste for things you’d never imagine
you could stomach. oxm
DID yOu OverALL
KNOw?
?
8
Rare began
A Rare collection without
life as GoldenEye is like the Louvre
Ultimate Play without the Mona Lisa,
the Game true, but it gives us room to
(hence the pun on appreciate the Raphaels,
the prior page) in
1982 and has made
Michelangelos and, er, just
around 150 games. pick this up, okay?
the official xbox magazine / 79
 review Pro tip: always approach dragons with
caution. They don’t tend to play nice.

Thankfully,
none of your
choices are
subject to
stressful
countdown
timers.

PubLishEr SIErrA / DEvELOPEr ThE ODD GENTLEMEN / fOrMAt XBOX 360, XBOX ONE (rEVIEWED) / rELEAsE DAtE OuT NOW

king’s QuEst:
rEviEwEr
EMMA DAviEs
Live OXM Emma
@emcetera
A knight tO rEMEMbEr
It’ll be all right on the knight

A
thE knOwLEDgE
whAt is it? n ageing gent regaling his
A reboot of a 30- grandchild with tales of
year-old adventure- a weedy-yet-whip-smart
game series. chancer in search of knightly
whAt’s it LikE? glory? No, this isn’t The
Twee in looks, tricky Princess Bride – although it’s clearly
by nature. taken a rather large dash of inspiration
whO’s it fOr? from the classic movie. Turns out that
Anyone who enjoys the gent in question (voiced by the
kids’ films from the dulcet tones of Christopher ‘Doc Brown’
‘80s and ‘90s.
Lloyd) is King Graham, star of the ’80s
King’s Quest games, reliving his past
glories. The series helped to establish
the adventure-game genre, and has
been rebooted in a more modern,
graphically gorgeous fashion.
The game starts out with a retake
of a climactic scene from the 1983
original, Quest for the Crown, in which
you steal an enchanted mirror from
under a dragon’s fire-sniffling nose and
clinch yourself a place on the throne.
It’s a neat way of turning the tutorial
into a nod to the game’s heritage,
bringing you up to speed with both
story and the environmental puzzle-
solving expected of you. In addition to
puzzles involving levers, there’s also
QTE-based combat and racing, and
even a full-on game of laser chess
in addition to the classic point-and-
click combining of unlikely objects to
achieve even more unlikely events. It’s
varied, wrapped up in plenty of family-
friendly puns, and visually resembles
a glorious hybrid of Borderlands and
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
It is, however, also rather tricky in
parts. There’s a fair amount of to-ing
and fro-ing, with new areas not always
signposted especially clearly. We
understand that working all this out
is part of the mental gymnastics, but
sometimes it’s frustratingly obtuse
– and we imagine that effect will be
magnified in younger players.
That’s not to say that this isn’t
rewarding. It’s packed with brilliantly
silly moments (such as catching a feral
badger with raw meat, then setting it
on squirrels terrorising an allotment)
and inventive twists. Although this
is the first of an episodic series, it’s
also far chunkier than the instalments
we’re used to seeing from the likes of
Telltale, and has its own self-contained
story arc. This feels like the kind of
film you’d curl up with on TV on a rainy
Sunday – warm-hearted, whimsical and
thoroughly charming. OXM

The OXM verdict

The besT biT COOlesT CharaCTer DiD yOu Overall
knOw?

?
8
triuMPh The final A substantial chunk of
Your noble game in adventure with plenty of
steed resembles the original variety in its gameplay,
nothing so much King’s Quest A Knight to Remember
as an overgrown series, Mask of feels like a properly
capybara. And Eternity, was
Winning a race on the back of two guards capybaras are released in 1998 – modern reimagining of the
is pure Monty Python silliness. seriously cool. 17 years ago. influential ‘80s series.

80 / ThE OffICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE WWW.GAMESrADAr.COM/OXM

 pro m otion

The Price is righT

Say hello to Beat My Price and you could save up to 12% when buying online

T
he life of an Xbox fan can be an
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www.beatmyprice.co.uk
hOW iT WOrKs
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*2 Personalised discount emailed to you within 48 hours. Limited time period to use discount, usually 12 hours. Shoppers are currently
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 revIeW The way to a man’s heart: wine. always wine.
Unless he’s Joffrey, of course. But still: wine.

“Just wait; this massive

boat will show all of those
dastards who wronged me…”

PubLishEr TELLTALE GAMES / DEvELOPEr TELLTALE GAMES / fOrMat XBOX 360, XBOX ONE (REvIEWED) / rELEasE DatE OuT NOW

gaME Of thrOnEs: EPisODE

rEviEwEr
EMMa DaviEs
Live OXM Emma
@emcetera
5 – a nEst Of viPErs
How to fake friends and influence people
thE knOwLEDgE

P
what is it?
The episode where ity the poor fool who gets on to fight for his family, so it’s off to the contributing to the Forrester effort, but
the pace finally starts the wrong side of Ramsay fighting pits to hire some sellswords it’s been so long that this mysterious
to properly gather. Bolton. Early on in this instead. Oh, and to impress them, he’ll locale was introduced that even the
what’s it LikE? episode, we see everyone’s need to get down and dirty in there – new (and pretty vague) info we receive
Sometimes a bit least-favourite Notherner the ensuing, frantic combat is among this episode wasn’t quite enough to
gory, often a bit disembowel a hapless pawn – who the highlights here. pique our interest.
tense, as it picks up just so happens to be a Forrester Down in King’s Landing, Mira goes up One of our main criticisms of the
momentum. bannerman. Lovely. Pity even more against both Cersei and Tyrion – with series thus far – ill-chosen art style
whO’s it fOr? the poor lord who just so happens to Lena Headey on brilliantly icy form. aside – is that your decisions don’t
People who’ve be courting said pawn’s sister. Talk It genuinely feels like you’re walking seem to have a tangible impact upon
either played the about an awkward situation to have a dangerous tightrope of deceit matters. That changes here, with one
past episodes or are to discuss over Sunday lunch with the between the two, trying to discern choice in particular that you’ll both
willing to. in-laws, and frankly that’s among the which answers are the ones that agonise over and have to live with in
least of Rodrik Forrester’s worries. will prevent the latter from rumbling the final instalment. There are a few
While Rodders may indeed have your true intentions and appease the lesser moments, too, where it feels
drawn the shortest straw in this former enough that she might wield like past decisions are coming back
episode, he’s by no means the only her considerable power to aid your to haunt you. It’s a welcome change,
one in a sticky situation. Exiled brother house’s plight. Out beyond the Wall, albeit one we’d have liked sooner,
Asher has seen the Khaleesi renege on Gared is still searching for the North and makes this finally feel more like a
her promise of an army of Second Sons Grove – ostensibly also as a means of ‘proper’ entry in the Telltale canon. OXM

The OXM verdict

COOleST CHaraCTer WHaT HaPPeNS DID yOU COMPleTION Overall
NeXT? KNOW? ClOCK

? ?
8
CErsEi War, Ramsay We’re still waiting and
is just as devious apparently. Bolton actor hoping for the grand payoff,
and manipulative
as she is in the
HBO version.
What with
that plus the
other plot threads,
Iwan Rheon
was actually
the second choice
2 but – just like winter – it
appears that it might finally
Proceed with we’re not sure how after Kit Harington HOuRS be coming. The strongest
extreme caution Telltale will tie it all to play Jon Snow in episode of this patchy
in encounters. up in time. the TV series. series to date.

82 / THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE WWW.GAMESRADAR.COM/OXM

 Max isn’t much of a partier, but the vortex Club revIew
bash does feature the episode’s biggest laugh.

There’s even a neat physics

puzzle to contend with, as
you’re taken to new places

publisher SquARe enIx / develOper DonTnoD enTeRTAInMenT / fOrMaT xBox 360, xBox one (ReVIeWeD) / release daTe ouT noW

life is sTrange
reviewer
Chris sChilling
live Rockin Stroll
@schillingc
episOde 4: dark rOOM
Is the penultimate chapter fully developed or over-exposed?

T
The knOwledge
whaT is iT? he horrifying climax of Episode
Fittingly, the darkest 3 always seemed like a
episode of Dontnod’s
double-edged sword. Dontnod
time-twisting drama
to date. left us with a doozy of a
cliffhanger, but had clearly
whaT’s iT like?
A downbeat,
wandered into a narrative cul-de-sac.
occasionally It’s no surprise, then, that it takes the
meandering episode, most obvious escape route. And yet
but one studded it’s far from the cop-out it sounds:
with surprises. 45 minutes or so of golden-hour
whO’s iT fOr? melancholia establishes a motivation
Wannabe detectives for Max’s forthcoming actions, while
with the fortitude to deepening her relationship with Chloe.
make tough choices. It all culminates in a particularly
wrenching decision. It raises an
important question that isn’t answered
for the rest of the episode, but may
yet have wider consequences in the
season finale. As you can probably tell,
we’re having to tread carefully here:
let’s just say we’ve never been quite so
relieved to see cash in the cookie jar.
Thereafter, we return to the central
plot, with Max and Chloe tugging
at the various threads connecting
the Prescotts with Rachel Amber,
the Vortex Club, and the seemingly
pre-apocalyptic happenings around
Arcadia Bay. What follows is a series
of pleasant surprises: players who
experienced a successful resolution to
an earlier sub-plot will enjoy a touching
reunion, while a return visit to volatile
dealer Frank has an alarming array of
possible outcomes, contingent not only
on the dialogue choices you make, but
on decisions made in past episodes.
Then there’s a simple but enjoyable
bit of detective work, as all the clues
Max and Chloe have been assembling
are laid out, and you’re invited to pull
out the key pieces of evidence to
work out how everything ties together.
There’s some much-needed levity,
too, including a line that can be read
as a light-hearted jab at critics or a
wonderful moment of self-awareness.
It’s not all good news. After Chaos
Theory, the pacing seems rather
uneven. The script may have improved,
but Max’s puritanical party-pooper act
isn’t entirely convincing, either. And yet
it more than compensates elsewhere.
The tone turns decidedly darker as our
curious pair get close to unearthing the
truth, leading to some truly shocking
plot developments and the most
disturbing cliffhanger to date; let’s
hope we don’t wait long for what looks
like a chilling season finale. OXM

The OXM verdict

COOlesT CharaCTer PrO TIP COMPleTION Overall
ClOCK

8
Not quite as lean as
Episode 3, but Dark Room

Ashly Burch demonstrates serious range as
Chloe, and she’s more than up to the task.
4 is bookended by two
outstanding sequences.
houRS All Dontnod needs to do
now is stick the landing.
There’s more than one way to get into the
Vortex Club’s VIP entrance. No pressure…

@oxM The oFFICIAl xBox MAgAzIne / 83

 rEviEw Enemies are disgustingly imaginative, spewing out
barrages of blood and even giant attacking worms.

PuBlisheR NICALIS / develOPeR NICALIS / fORmaT XBOX ONE / Release daTe OuT NOW

The Binding Of
RevieweR
lOuise Blain
live Shinydemon991
@Shiny_Demon
isaac: ReBiRTh
Cry ’til you laugh in this roguelike of Biblical proportions
The knOwledge

Y
whaT is iT?
A procedurally es, it’s taken its time getting
generated here, but this roguelike
permadeath-packed from Super Meat Boy creator
roguelike set in a Edmund McMillen is finally
world of horrors. on Xbox One and it’s hellishly
whaT’s iT like? glorious. You don’t know it yet, but
Insanely addictive your new favourite game might just
and ready to give you be chock full of faeces, nightmarish
RSIsaac as you play Christian imagery and screaming
long past bedtime. monstrosities. But, yeah, mostly
whO’s iT fOR? faeces. And death. All the death.
Masochists who Poor Isaac is the unfortunate son of
want a genuine a God-fearing Christian single mother
sense of madness who has apparently been instructed
with their deathfests.
by the heavenly father to kill her only
child. (We told you he was unfortunate.)
Thus, you must steer him through his
basement, taking on the monsters
that dwell there with the only weapon
Isaac has: his tears. This is a twin-
stick shooter like you’ve never seen it
before. Throw in three starter hearts
of health, randomised trinkets placed
throughout the dungeon and a slew
of monsters that deliver Silent Hill-like
horrors in a Chibi style, and The Binding
of Isaac is disturbingly unique.
The setup is simple. Isaac enters a
procedurally generated room, murders
the nasties within – be they scuttling
spiders, blood-spewing skeletons
or one of the four horsemen of the
apocalypse – and the door opens to
let you proceed to the next. Lose all
of your shiny red hearts and it’s all
the way back to the beginning for you.
Permadeath is swift and, while initially
frustrating, delivers an almost euphoric
sense of achievement when you take
on your own personal nemesis and win.
Ending story
While you can play on for hours, there
is a story nestling in there amongst the
madness – 16 different endings await
you, in fact. Completing each of the
final bosses will let you see Isaac’s
fate, but you’ll need to get all the way
to Mega Satan and win for the last
cutscene to reveal itself.
Initially, the game has five floors of
rooms – each has its own prize room,
with a unique item, and an end boss
that rewards you a shiny power-up. It’s
these items that make or break your
run, and mean you’ll never have the
same game twice. Perhaps you’ll find
Fire Mind to give you flaming tears,
or maybe a hypodermic of hormones
that’ll up your speed and damage, or
even Pay To Play that’ll let you spend
coins to harm enemies. The item list
is deliciously long, with each new find
layering on top of the others like a
stat-boosting cake of grimness. Got
poison tears and pick up the Inner
Eye? That’ll be three nasty projectiles
instead of one. But be warned; while
some items work in perfect synergy,
others can turn a good run sour in the
seconds it would have taken to look
them up on the game’s essential wiki.
Tears for fears
Yet it’s this very risk that makes each
playthrough unique. The juggling of
keys to get through locked doors,
spending coins in shops, collecting
bombs to blow up rocks or access
stone chests. It all adds up to make
each floor a puzzle – and ruthlessly

84 / THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE WWW.GAMESRADAR.COM/OXM

 Pickups are, er, key. Coins, bombs and keys must
be juggled to get the most out of each floor.
“Soak Spelunky in tears, give it
cheese for supper and you get this”
addictive in the process. Add in secret
rooms to be found, beggars who might
just yield some kind of tasty pickup if
you sacrifice your precious gear, and
rooms that will damage you on the way
in and out and The Binding of Isaac
reveals itself to be far smarter than the
twin-stick shooter it first appears.
And yes, we did say ‘initially’ five
floors. While Mom is the first end boss,
Rebirth actually has 16 unlockable
endings after a series of gradually
more hellish floors and bosses. The five
levels that take you to Mom become
seven to the bullet hell of Mom’s Heart,
and a host of other floors open up if
you can simply survive long enough.
The hilariously named Mega Satan is
the final target, but to reach him you
need to have beaten an alternate
The OXM verdict
OBJECT OF DESirE
The BiBle
Arming Isaac
with the holy
book is a cheaty
way to beat Mom
and later boss
Mom’s Heart with
one use.
@OXM
version of Isaac or Satan five times
before to collect the pieces of a family
photograph. Nothing screams ‘game!’
more than the relentless grinding you
need to do to reach each boss – blow
up two angel statues to build a key
to open a door, you say? – but there’s
a mastery in The Binding of Isaac’s
design that will keep you coming back
for more whether you like it or not.
Soak Spelunky in tears, give it cheese
for supper and this is the addictive
nightmare that you would create.
If the game itself wasn’t enough,
20 unlockable challenges open up to
put your thumbs to the test. The art
of steering Isaac becomes even more
advanced as you’re suddenly tasked
with beating Mom using no tears and
only orbiting attack flies, or perhaps
DEvElOPEr iNSiGHT
“The first time you kill Mom
is just the first unlocking of
the game – and I designed
[The Binding of Isaac:
Rebirth] in a way that
meant it would keep unfolding
the more and more you play.”
edmund mcmillen, cReaTOR
rEviEw
This is a sight you’ll get
horribly used to. Each time
you die you’ll see just how.
Things start only remotely detonated bombs. Add in
off simple. other characters to play as in place of
Just killing
tiny, happy
piles of poo.
Isaac, and there’s a terrifying amount
of game here that constantly requires
Then there’s
the running
you to rearrange your play style.
Somehow, the attractive, retro
pixellated style does nothing to
and the
screaming. prevent the horror from creeping in.
Blood seeps down walls and enemies
get progressively more offensive
and disgusting, despite only having
so many pixels to work with. From
enormous, furious poos to blood- and
spider-puking giant spiders, Isaac
has your nightmares covered with its
perfect horror design. The soundtrack,
too, is equally disturbing – if not quite
as dramatic as the original Danny
Baranowsky PC score.
The Binding of Isaac might not be
for everyone. If you value your sanity
– and other games – then this infinite
offering that we’ve sunk hundreds of
hours into might not be for you. But as
a test of gaming mettle, you won’t ever
find a more challenging or satisfying
roguelike. Sweet dreams. OXm
COMPlETiON OvErall
ClOCK
9
On the surface this might
look like just another
∞ pixellated roguelike, but
enter the nightmarish
HOuRS rabbit hole and you’ll find a
mastery of the genre that is
relentlessly addictive.
THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE / 85
 revIeW Does this look heroic to you?
If so, please never help us.

Graffiti is disgusting
vandalism, so we’re chucking
it away. You’re welcome.

PuBLiShEr ACTIVISION / dEvELOPEr FUN LABS / fOrMaT XBOX ONE / rELEaSE daTE OUT NOW

PrOTOTYPE:
rEviEwEr
TOM STONE
Live OXM Tom Stone
@TheTomStrange
BiOhaZard BuNdLE
Or how to port to Xbox One with a super-zero amount of care
ThE kNOwLEdgE

T
whaT iS iT?
A lazy port of two wo superhero games for the
pretty good Xbox 360 price of one? Why, it almost
sandbox games. sounds too good to be true.
whaT’S iT LikE? Prototype 1 and 2 are sandbox
Playing GTA with a games that drop you in an
five-star wanted infected New York City and give you
level and all the incredible, murder-packed powers.
cheats on. Both Alex Mercer and James Heller
whO’S iT fOr? can run up walls, float through the air,
People who missed have superhuman strength and can
these the first time turn their hands into deadly claws that
around, or don’t own even Wolverine would describe as ‘a
an Xbox 360. bit much’. Slashing through soldiers,
stealing tanks and chucking cars at
helicopters to blow them out of the sky
makes for dumb, delightful destruction.
They’re both fun, in a morally
bankrupt sort of way. Which makes it
all the weirder that both attempt to
portray you as a hero. Spoiler alert:
you’re not. You restore health by
literally eating people.
Moral murkiness aside, though,
these are flawed but enjoyable, power-
fantasies. The original is shallower
than an especially vain puddle, with its
vaguely interesting plot just an excuse
for every mission to be centred around
wrecking everything in sight. Fun, but
it gets repetitive – even when you’re
punching helicopters and blasting
mutants apart with tanks. The sequel
is much better paced, with superior
stealth sections and some smart
extensions of the first game’s abilities
– shooting out your tendrils to cause
gruesome chaos is a guilty pleasure
we’re happy to re-indulge in.
But it’s shocking how poorly they’ve
been ported to Xbox One. Prototype
was an early Xbox 360 game – and
boy, does it show. New York City is grey
and generic-looking, blander than
a bread sandwich, and any attempt
to improve visuals was lost on us. It
runs an impressive amount of carnage
onscreen, but what impressed on Xbox
360, looks dated here.
Prototype 2 fares better, with
detailed buildings and NPCs filling a
more convincing take on a quarantined
NYC. Shame, then, that the visual
boost seems to have come at the cost
of a decent framerate. It chugs when
you’re on the ground and stutters
horribly when you’re airborne. The
same machine that runs Arkham Knight
shouldn’t be struggling here. There are
good games in this bundle, just don’t
expect to see them at their finest. OXM

The OXM verdict

The besT bIT WOrse Than… COMPleTIOn Overall
ClOCK

SaiNTS rOw iv
Okay, so Saints Row IV
ripped off the powers
from these games, but it
did them better. A more
entertaining game that –
Tendril Black Hole lets you crush multiple crucially – never dares to
enemies in a cluster of blood and tentacles. take itself seriously.
6
Two above-average games
receive a sadly below-
21 average port. Newcomers
might enjoy smashing up
HOUrS the city, and can stick on an
extra point if they’re able to
look past technical issues.

86 / THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAgAzINE WWW.gAMESrAdAr.COM/OXM

 looks can be deceiving – until she gets up close, the review
watercolour depicts only what rae thinks she’s hearing.

PuBlisher TeAm 17 / develOPer TIGeR & SquID / fOrMAt XBOX ONe / releAse dAte OuT NOW

reviewer
BeyOnd eyes
Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes

B
Alice Bell
live BabyGotBell eyond Eyes’ heroine isn’t
@BabyGotBell your usual kind of videogame
protagonist. Rae is a young
the knOwledge girl who was blinded in an
whAt is it? accident as a toddler, and the
A gentle walking
story begins when she finds she has to
simulator with
a thoroughly
leave the safety of her garden in order
original concept. to find her missing best friend – a fat
ginger tomcat who goes by the name
whAt’s it like?
Walking through a
of Nani. It’s impossible for someone
watercolour painting with sight to understand how a blind
of the French person experiences the world, but if
countryside. the journey you take in Beyond Eyes
whO’s it fOr? is anything to go by, it can be surreal,
Those interested in beautiful, confusing and frightening –
experiencing things and sometimes all of those at once.
from a different The world you walk through is
point of view. constructed entirely through Rae’s
memories and remaining senses, in a
natural way that makes the concept
abundantly clear. The game starts as a
blank white canvas that blushes as if
painted in watercolour as Rae moves
slowly forwards. Individual sounds and
smells cause new areas to blossom
and die: birds, for example, only exist
for as long as their chirping lasts.
This mechanic serves to make the
world disorientating. You will hear a
river but not know the bridge is there
until you step out onto it. When it rains
the game shrinks to just the island
of colour around Rae as the pitter-
patter of the raindrops drown out the
ambient noise of the world around her.
Other deceptions are much crueller:
what first appears to be washing
flapping on a line becomes, as you get
close enough to touch it, a looming
scarecrow host to cawing crows.
Sounds like these – aggressive birds;
a growling dog; a busy road – frighten
and confuse Rae, and she must find
another way around. During these
moments the whole world becomes
tinged with grey and black, reminding
you that the entire game is filtered
through Rae’s interpretations.
This realisation helps offset any
frustration you might have at Rae. She
moves agonisingly slowly compared to
a standard run-and-gun space marine,
but then of course she does. If you spin
the camera you can see that her arms
are open and her face is lifted, ready
for the unknown world.
If Beyond Eyes has a flaw it’s that it
doesn’t do enough with the concept
it is built around. There are many
touching moments that open a window
to a world most of us will never know,
but yet Rae encounters only a few
moments of genuine emotional tension
over the course of her journey. It makes
you hope for a sequel, if only to see the
boundaries pushed a little further. OXM

The OXM verdict

prO Tip key inFluenCeS DiD yOu Overall
knOw?

?
7
The Probably one of those things
prototype you’d describe as more of
47 43 10 for Beyond an experience than a game,
Eyes was the Beyond Eyes is a beautiful,
graduation project innovative bit of stuff that
47% Painting tutorial of lead developer
Leave no stone unturned – Beyond Eyes 43% Bedtime story Sherida Halatoe, just needed to push a little
has tons of secret Achievements. 10% Cat enthusiasm way back in 2011. harder to truly open our eyes.

@OXm The OFFIcIAl XBOX mAGAzINe / 87

 online reviews

Yikes. if we lived
somewhere grim
as this place,
we’d want to be
blown up, too.

PubLiSheR wargaming.net / DeveLOPeR wargaming.net / FORmAT xbox one / ORigiNAL ScORe 7/10

WORLD OF TANKS
At last! Batmobile Stealth Sections: The Game!
RevieWeR We SAiD leaving cover in the hopes of of your cash. the huge variety of
Tom Stone “The exact antithesis of Titanfall.” crippling the other tank. Patience tanks can all be upgraded, but
Live OXM Tom Stone is vital, but 15 vs 15 means you’re great balancing means everyone
@TheTomStrange never too far from an opponent. has their own advantage on the

W
e’ll be honest.
given the
choice, we’d
rather drive
our car into
the ocean than
be forced to drive a tank. slow,
cumbersome oblongs with all
the steering grace of a drunk
shopping trolley. no wonder
there’s a cannon on top – it’s
for the inevitable breakdown of
the chump trapped inside. but
wargaming.net knows the flaws
and strengths of its vehicle, and
has embraced those limitations
to make a fun, surprisingly
stealthy multiplayer shooter.
go into this expecting Burnout
with cannons and you’ll be
disappointed. even the fastest
tanks are slower than installing
all of Rare Replay, so you have
to play stealthily to survive.
camouflage yourself against
bushes and obstacles on the
battlefield, and make sure you
spot the opposing tanks before
they spot you. then go for sniper-
style precise shots, or quick
bursts of cannon fire, risking
“Go into this expecting Burnout with
cannons and you’ll be disappointed”
Permadeath multiplayer keeps
tensions high. but when you
perish, you can join another game
instantly and you’ll still get any xP
or rewards you earned from that
initial match when it concludes.
it’s a great touch that helps with
the considerable grind required
to buy new tanks and upgrades
in this free-to-play game. it’s to
World of Tanks’ credit that you
can unlock almost everything
without having to remortgage
your home, or even hand over any
battlefield, regardless of rank.
finding a game is fast, loading
one less so. frustration creeps
in when you wait ages for a
round to start, only to be blown
to smithereens in the first two
minutes. it encourages the
cautious, stealthier approach
essential to mastering the game,
but watching a loading screen is a
pretty lousy way to learn a lesson.
Visually, it’s a decent step up,
with improved textures, lighting
and tank models making up for
the occasional bit of pop-in. Plus,
if you’ve sunk a lot of hours into
the game on xbox 360, all your
progress carries over onto xbox
one. superior xbox one heroes

ARe We hAviNg FuN yeT? Our first hour rendered as a wavy line…
AmAzinG
Loading
Death. This And Winning shot! times starting
EnjoyABlE This definitely
is stupid. this one? to grate.
Victory! This happened.
AnnoyinG Hang on, haven’t
is easy.
we done this
RAGE QuiT map before?

minutes 0 10 20 30 40 50 60

88 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm


what did that poor house
do to anyone? That tank
should be ashamed.
Busy screens scared our
book-hating eyes, but
it’s all surprisingly
easy to pick up.
can even play against their
weaker xbox 360 brethren (no
offence). the biggest issue the
xbox one version has is missing
stuff. deep customisation
options impress, but can’t hide
that there are fewer maps here
than in the xbox 360 version.
World of tanks? there’s barely
enough here for a village. the
action starts feeling repetitive a
lot sooner when we’re battling in
the same locales over and over.
the missing maps are getting
a visual overhaul for xbox one,
so expect them to drop as
regular updates in the coming
months. we’re confident that
this will eventually be the best
console version of World of
Tanks. Until then, you might
want to stick to xbox 360 for the
fuller experience. OXm
The oXM verdict
7 4
Missing maps
hold back a fun
multiplayer
shooter.
But this is
great value
for money.
@oxm
it looks great, but a visual upgrade
wasn’t worth losing 20 players.
PubLiSheR ea sPorts / DeveLOPeR ea tibUron / FORmAT xbox one / ORigiNAL ScORe 6/10
RORy mciLROy PgA TOuR
Finishes on a disappointing four over par
RevieWeR
Tom Stone
Live OXM Tom Stone
@TheTomStrange
i
t’s a beautiful day for a round
of golf. the sun is shining,
the winds are blowing and
the sky is completely clear.
Unfortunately, the courses
are also clear. clear of music,
clear of fun commentary, clear
of applause or booing from
the vanished crowds. the
only sounds you’ll hear are
the occasional swing of your
club and the whoosh of the
wind. listen closely and maybe
you’ll even hear tumbleweeds
bouncing along the fairway.
You could always plug in your
headset, but then you’ll just end
up hearing people mourning the
features that have disappeared
from what was once the king
of golf games. two years ago
on xbox 360, PGA Tour 14 was
capable of 24-player online
without a virtual crowd cheering us on,
what’s the point of being alive?
We SAiD
“Plays as great a game of golf
as ever, but there’s just too
much missing.”
modes. this sprightly new-gen
pretender has smacked it right
into the rough, with online
capped at just four golfers.
each hole has a set time
limit, with everyone playing
independently without having
to wait for other players to take
their turn. while it’s nice not to
have to pretend we’re patient,
it does make for a much more
isolated experience. often it
feels like an offline round, just
occasionally seeing the odd
golfing ghost playing, too. this
wasn’t such a problem when
there were 24 players competing
on a course. but with four or
fewer, it’s easy to forget you’re
playing multiplayer at all. it’s the
loneliest online experience we’ve
had since no one responded to
our match.com profile.
review
country clubs were a new
feature added in PGA Tour 13,
central hubs for you and your
friends to earn points and
arrange tournaments in. a nice
idea, greatly expanded for PGA
Tour 14. so what’s the country
club update this year? burning
them down, apparently, as
they’re nowhere to be found.
that’s not so much burying a shot
in the bunker as it is forgetting
to bring any clubs at all. the
golf club lets you share created
courses online. this doesn’t
even have a course creator.
the core game is still fun, and
daily and weekly tournament
leaderboards provide a decent
challenge for those who feel
they’ve mastered the main
game. but bar the lack of loading
between holes, this is a pale
imitation of what an online PGA
Tour is capable of. hopefully Rory
McIlroy 2017 will remember to
include what made this series
great again. OXm
The oXM verdict
So heavily
compromised,
PGA Tour 14
players might
wonder if
they’re playing
a demo.
the official xbox magazine / 89

on the
latest add-ons and indie games rated
we love it, but has anyone been following the
actual plot of this exo Zombies storyline?
PUBLISHER activision / DEvELOPER sledgehammer games / FORMAT xbox 360, xbox one /
REvIEWER martin Kitts / PRICE £11.59
CALL OF DUTY: ADvANCED
WARFARE – RECKONING
Zombie Malkovich rounds off the DLC season in style
F
illing those final weeks
before Call of Duty fans
migrate towards Black
Ops III’s slightly different
interpretation of robo-
enhanced fighting, Advanced
Warfare gets neatly wrapped up
in this farewell dlc.
Reckoning is a typically
glossy bundle of four multiplayer
maps that offer at least a change
of scenery, if not a change of
pace. fracture, a level set around
an arctic research outpost, is
probably the pick of the bunch.
the wide open spaces and
stylishly coloured scenery make
for an easily memorable layout,
and there’s a special event that
makes part of the level crumble
into the sea, tightening the focus
for the remainder of the round.
overload is another visually
appealing map, although one
whose size means it would
Set in a Korean suburb, Swarm takes
the fight inside as well as out.
90 / the official xbox magazine
download
benefit from a much higher increase the chance of running
player count than the game headlong into another player.
allows. at launch there’s a from there it’s just a question
frequently exploited glitch of who’s got the fastest trigger
area where it’s possible for finger/best internet connection.
one player to occupy a narrow the exo zombies storyline
ledge outside the main map also reaches its conclusion here.
and inflate his kill count by last time saw the addition of
annihilating anyone who tries to bruce campbell, at the expense
follow. with any luck that will be of a summarily executed John
patched out. malkovich. it
next up, //turns out it turns out it
the verticality
of swarm
takes more than takes more than
a headshot to
provides an a headshot to put put malkovich
excellent malkovich down// down, and he
playground returns as a sort
for exo-suit acrobatics, while of glow-eyed zombie overlord.
offering indoor havens for the finale is an assault on
escaping the deadly swarm of malkovich’s lair and, well, we’ve
drones that occasionally renders seen Resident Evil films with more
the outside a no-go area. sensible plots. most importantly,
Quarantine is the weakest though, it’s great fun and a
link, with the action being fitting send-off for the most
funnelled through corridors that original CoD in many a year. OXM
the oXM Verdict
7
Nothing to write
home about,
but the maps
are solid and
the Zombies
episode is the
best yet.
ALsO
rELEAsED
From best to worst,
the latest additions to
Xbox Live Marketplace
1 PINBALL FX 2: ANT-MAN
Everyone’s 1,576th favourite
superhero gets his own pinball table.
Makes sense, being that he can shrink
himself to pinball size.
Price: £2.39
2 BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT –
BATMAN BEYOND SKIN
Play as a more futuristic Batman
with this new skin. We’re still waiting
for that neckless Ben Affleck DLC.
Price: £0.79
3 THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT –
NEW FINISHER ANIMATIONS
Tired of the same old decapitations?
Geralt’s latest free DLC aims to put the
spark back into the slaughter.
Price: FRee
4 PROJECT SPARK – BUILDER
PACK: BIOME MUSIC
If plinky-plonky lift muzak is ruining
your wondrous creations, this pack
of new tunes and backing tracks may
be worth a listen.
Price: £3.19
5 MONOPOLY – MY LITTLE
PONY DLC
The tedium of monopoly meets the joy of
ponies. Will you be trotting around Hayfair,
or destined for Old Kent’s Glue Factory?
Price: £2.39
www.gamesradar.com/oxm
 that’s one of the weirder Pac-Man cameos did the earth move for us?
we’ve seen in a game, we’ll give it that. a bit, we suppose. ReView

FORMAT xbox one / REvIEWER tom stone / PRICE £5.59 FORMAT xbox one / REvIEWER alex dale / PRICE £3.99

BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT – MORTAL KOMBAT X:

A MATTER OF FAMILY
W A
hy is she called ‘batgirl’
not ‘batwoman’? we
wouldn’t dare call the
dark Knight ‘batboy’ to his face
and expect to keep our teeth.
Juvenile naming aside, this is a
prequel to Arkham Asylum that
has batgirl saving her father
from the clutches of Joker and
harley Quinn in an abandoned
theme park. that’s a recipe for a
fantastic game if there ever was
one, and for its
first hour, A Matter
of Family almost //batgirl makes
lives up to it. for a great lead,
Problem is, that’s and she deserved
also its only hour.
those hoping better than this//
for new gadgets
or ideas will be disappointed.
batgirl is limited to a few of
Asylum’s toys, her only unique
feature being some more hacking
options for taking out goons.
batgirl’s also slightly weaker
than batman, but that isn’t such
a bad move. by the end of Arkham
Knight, we felt near-invincible.
batgirl is still a skilled fighter,
but having to do more to take
down foes brings back a welcome
sense of vulnerability. dual
combat bashes with a sidekick,
an underused highlight of Arkham
Knight, are also great here.
the theme park itself is an
excellent setting. a creaking,
neon wreck, it includes an out of
control ferris wheel and a merry-
go-round of beasts that would no
doubt traumatise any child. the
park’s best parts
are suffocatingly
claustrophobic
and bring back
that Asylum
magic of having
no choice but to
continue on into
an enemy’s trap. much as we loved
the open world of Knight, this is a
great reminder of what made bats’
original adventure so special.
it’s just a shame that reminder
had to be so brief. batgirl
makes for a great lead, and she
deserved better. this feels like a
great start to a longer game that
we’re never going to get. OXM
the oXM Verdict
TREMOR
fter crossing over into
hollywood mainstream with
the likes of Jason voorhees
and Predator, Mortal Kombat X’s
five-pack of additional fighters
concludes with a treat for
hardcore Mortal Kombat X buffs:
tremor, a hulking man-mountain
who has made brief cameos in
previous Mortal Kombat games,
but has somehow eluded being a
fully playable character. Until now.
in case
you haven’t
gathered by his //tremor really,
name, dusky really likes rocks.
colourations he likes them
and what
appears to be likes them//
a terminal case
of greyscale, tremor really,
really likes rocks. he likes them
likes them. in fact, he’s into
rocks so much that he’s built
an entire moveset around them.
specifically, he is able to summon
rocks from thin-air and hurl
them at his opponent – either
singularly or, in its strengthened
form, as a shower. tremor can
further live up to his name with
his ground Pulse technique – an
unblockable move that sends
shockwaves through the ground.
but the catch is that it’ll only hurt
your opponent if they’re on terra
firma at the critical moment.
even tremor’s fatalities are
crazy about gravel – in one,
he crushes his vanquished foe
between two slabs of granite,
and in another, our personal
favourite, he
summons three
stalagmites
that spring from
the ground and
puncture the
victim in three
key areas: head,
chest and, er, lower chest.
if we have a problem with
tremor it’s that his three
variations aren’t really all that
different. however, he’s a rangy
combatant who manages to offer
something genuinely different
to the rest of the cast, and
rounds off Mortal Kombat X’s dlc
offering nicely. OXM
the oXM Verdict

6 7
What’s here is Not the most,
good, but doesn’t ahem, ground-
justify the price breaking of
when you’re not fighters, but
even getting for the price
an hour of he adds a new
gameplay. dimension.

Indie roundup - Animal special / A themed look at hidden gems and DIY disasters

FLUPP THE FISH
Escape, survive and rush make
this three games in one. All of
them complete trash. Drown it.
*****
UNICORN MAKEOUT MANIA
Two unicorns making out, backed
by sexual groaning. Now we know
what hell looks like.
*****
ERMAHGERD PONIES!
sick of your child’s love of
ponies? 60 seconds of this
should do the trick.
*****
SNAKEZ GUNZ AND LADDERZ
Average platformer held back by
hideous serpent lead. Made us
want to burn down a reptile house.
*****
SAvE THEM SHEEPS
From robot shepherds, on a sheep-
only planet. A good cause, let
down by fiddly controls.
*****

@oxm the official xbox magazine / 91

 fe at ure

RemembeRing

We speak to the franchise’s creators

plus the developers of Battlefield, Saints
Row and Alien: Isolation about how the
original Gears of War changed the
industry, and why now is the perfect
time to revisit this classic
Writer: Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

92 / ThE offIcIAl xBox mAGAzInE WWW.GAmESRAdAR.com/oxm


Gears soon proved
to be much more than
just “graphics and
production values”.
S
ometime in 2005,
Gary napper –
latterly lead
designer on Alien:
Isolation – was
walking through
the offices of EA
Bright light when
he noticed a group of colleagues
crowding around a desk, ‘mesmerised’
by something on a screen. “The
designers had huge smiles of wonder
on their faces,” he recalls. “The artists
all had looks of dread. Some were
shaking their heads, others had their
arms folded with stern expressions.
This was my first ever look at Gears of
War. It was gameplay footage,
pre-release, and showed a world in the
dark with rain drenching every surface,
as chunky armoured soldiers ran in a
low crouch while lightning flashed
around them. I was astounded.”
Ten years later, it’s easy to forget
the impact Gears of War’s graphical
technology and aesthetic had on other
studios – the tortured photorealism
of its landscapes, the muscular heft
of its characters. “I heard the artists
talking and it was quickly established
that this was the visual quality we
had to beat,” napper goes on. EA
Bright light’s project at the time,
an adaptation of Harry Potter and
the Order of the Phoenix, underwent
“huge changes” to make the grade.
“The designeRs had huge
smiles of wondeR, buT The
aRTisTs had looks of dRead”
@oxm
A major exclusive for the emerging
xbox 360, Epic’s new shooter would
prove no less electric in the hands,
however familiar its mixture of cover-
hugging and peek-shooting may have
sounded on paper. “The moment-
to-moment feel of the game was so
new and unexpected,” muses napper.
“The chunkiness to the weapons and
the feedback of the environment
made the world feel alive.” Adrian
chmielarz, creative director at The
Astronauts and one of the minds
behind the seminal Bulletstorm, was
similarly taken aback. “I thought it
was going to be just graphics and
production values. I wasn’t entirely
convinced about the gameplay. once I
actually did play it? oh my God.” Even
those who didn’t warm to the game’s
tone and universe were impressed
by it. “It’s not a series I had any
Ge a rS of w a r
Letting
pLayers pLay
How DiD GearS evolve in
reSponSe to feeDbaCk, anD
wHat CoulD epiC Have Done
better? we aSkeD bitmonSter
Co-founDer anD former GearS
DeSiGner lee perry
from a design perspective
there were huge shifts in
our attitudes internally
as the trilogy went on. the
most obvious was how the
role of cover and lethality
evolved after we launched.
being in cover, playing
slowly and tactically – that
was our intended play style.
after launch though, so many
players got great at hauling
ass around the levels,
sliding into cover only long
enough to vault away from
it, and running around like
shotgun samurai. we tried to
steer gameplay back towards
the initial vision, but
eventually realised that
these tactics were valid
Creative and needed to be factored
director into the bigger picture.
adrian that experience was
Chmielarz powerful, seeing systems
wanted used in unintended ways, and
Judgment to recognising it’s the player’s
be more of a game, not the designer’s.
Gears: Dark if i had any regret, it’s
Souls edition. not pushing the individual
games to be different enough.
we were on tight timelines
with small teams, but i would
have loved for each title to
have added one new strong
mechanic that’s truly central
to how the game is played.
we just didn’t have the time
to push those new ‘verbs’
for the player, but we
were also overly
cautious perhaps
about betraying
expectations. if
there’s anything
i wish for the
new Gears games,
it’s that they
find a way to
make the gameplay
new and fresh, while
still having the flavour
of the originals.
ThE offIcIAl xBox mAGAzInE / 93
 fe at ure

passing
judg(e)ment
GearS of war: JuDGment
waS tHe firSt proper GearS
Spin-off – anD tHe firSt
GearS Game to be DevelopeD
moStly outSiDe epiC.
we aSkeD former Creative
DireCtor aDrian CHmielarz
about How it went
i was ecstatic to have the
opportunity to lead Gears
of war: Judgment for almost
two years – so many great
memories of the screams and
the guts spilled. my only
regret is that the game
as released and the game
i had in mind are quite
different. we knew Judgment
was a one-off, so i wanted
to use that opportunity to
take some risks. i wanted
Gears: Dark Souls edition, a
really hard, nerve-racking,
‘blood, sweat and tears’
kind of game in which you
felt exhausted after a
battle. there was also one
crucial innovative gameplay
mechanic removed from the
final release, and a few
other mechanics and design
points that were altered to
be somewhat safer.
as an example, Judgment
reveals new enemy types in
a typical way: a cutscene
kicks in and the monster
presents itself and does
something that explains its
powers or abilities. then we
return to gameplay, knowing
what we’re dealing with. it’s
a good solution, but i wanted
the initial confusion. the
player was to be surprised
and unsure about how
to deal with the
enemy. but i
don’t know if
my version was
better. it was
just different. people
say they want innovation,
but what they often really
want is the same, just with
a fresh wrapper. So maybe
epic was right to change
Judgment to be more like
Gears 3.5. who knows?
94 / ThE offIcIAl xBox mAGAzInE
Dark and grey great affinity for,” confesses dan
it may be,
marshall, creator of recent xbox one
but Gears
hit The Swindle. “It’s a dank grey slog
impressed
all round. through depressing environments
and hard-work firefights. It’s sci-fi
trenchfoot and hopelessness. But it
did those things brilliantly.”
In terms of its handling, Gears of
War is hardly a true-blue original.
many of the game’s inspirations were
obvious from the beginning:
capcom’s Resident Evil 4,
cult favourite Kill.Switch
and Epic’s flagship Unreal
series. But Gears
shines, first of all, in
the confidence and
“The momenT-To-momenT
feel of The game was new
and unexpecTed”
So much war, but the team
still found the time for
perfectly crafted facial hair.
grace with which it unifies the efforts
of different development disciplines.
“character art, animation, audio
design, voice direction, systems
design, and even small touches like
well-timed camera shakes – when
all these disparate pieces came
together, the vision came to life,”
says Volition’s Greg donovan, lead
producer on Saints Row: The Third.
“This was the first time for me that so
many disciplines had come together
to sell characters so well.”
There were also flashes of real
innovation amid the muck and thunder
of the gunfights. Take Active Reload,
whereby you can hit a button to
accelerate the reloading animation and
increase damage per round. mistime
the press, however, and you’ll have to
sweat while your character struggles
to fit a magazine into the breach. “It
took an input that was almost standard
in games of that time and turned it into
an emotional experience,” says napper.
“There was a huge feeling of risk
and reward – excitement and panic
within a moment of gameplay that had
become almost routine.”
looking at the fabric of the
campaign as a whole, chmielarz feels
WWW.GAmESRAdAR.com/oxm

there’s still plenty to learn from Gears’
pacing. “The opening segment is
probably still the best opening of all
time when it comes to teaching the
rules of play without being obnoxious
about it,” he says. donovan agrees.
“The devs introduced enemies in a
manner that prevented stagnation
while ramping up difficulty,” he reflects.
“By the end it felt like I was fighting
against ten-plus distinct enemy types,
which is a crazy amount of content
to take on and do well, and there’s
probably more than ten. But I also felt
like I had the tools to be competitive
against them. The final levels were
a nice balance between having a
challenge and feeling powerful, and
that’s difficult to pull off.”
Gears of War’s impact on the
xbox 360’s early fortunes has been
exhaustively rehearsed. Relatively
little understood, perhaps, is how
it reshaped the role of the game
designer within studios. “Gears
changed so much about what our
jobs actually meant,” comments the
independent developer lee Perry,
lead designer at Epic from 2001 to
2012. “We had this awesome new
tool, Kismet. It was like Photoshop,
for bringing playable ideas to life.
We didn’t have to try to convince
programmers and producers to let
us try different things, we could
just open the editor up and make
things work on our own.
“for me, that changed everything
about my job. for the first decade of
@oxm
my career I was basically an artist,
modelling things, trying to come up
with systems for how they would fit
together. I was firmly in the back seat,
hoping the people at the wheel were
taking the projects somewhere cool.
once Kismet landed, my job became
making playable prototypes for
creatures, weapons and systems.”
External developers were able to
use the tool by licensing the Unreal
Engine. napper was among those
who felt the benefits. Years after
seeing Gears for the first time, he met
Epic’s legendary design director cliff
Bleszinski at an event and thanked
him not just for Gears itself, but for
raising the profile of designers within
the industry. “I remember a time when
only producers and marketing people
were allowed to talk to press about
the games we were working on, and
then all of a sudden, here was this
designer, openly talking about his
love of the game.” ■
Ge a rS of w a r
the rivaL’s take
you may reCall tHe
outSiDerS’ DaviD GolDfarb
from HiS work on payDay 2
anD tHe battlefielD SerieS.
at tHe time of GearS’
releaSe He waS workinG on
killzone 2, playStation
2’S muCH-touteD exCluSive
SHooter. How DiD it feel
to play tHe oppoSition’S
offerinG for tHe firSt time?
for me, the impact was
limited to “well this is
how those guys solved these
problems”. there was a lot
to admire and examine in
terms of level design and
mechanics while we were
working on killzone 2. i
originally remember being struck by
intended to the fact that it was very
be slow and much a game with a distinct
tactical, personality, even if it
Gears’ players wasn’t one i immediately
took matters engaged with. you’d never
into their
mistake it for anything else
own hands. and it felt honest in a way
that a lot of other titles
didn’t at the time.
the desaturated palette
definitely found its way
into a million titles
afterwards. i can’t remember
if Gears was the first game
to really lean into that
whole ‘gritty-dark’ trope,
since in reality it was
neither, but it took an
important step in terms of
ramping up
the challenge people’s perception of what
‘gritty’ looked like.
while keeping
that feeling the move to co-op was also
of power big at a time where there
proved an weren’t many co-op games
irresistible at all. i remember thinking
combination. that it was a ballsy move,
given the performance of
multiplayer titles back
then. Gears also came along
at a time where there were
no real alternatives to Halo
on xbox, and it brought a few
new mechanical things that
no one had done quite that
way before. there was the
cover shooting, obviously,
but the innovation inside
reloading was a neat little
rhythmic micro-mechanic
that a lot more developers
should have stolen!
ThE offIcIAl xBox mAGAzInE / 95
 33 rd

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OF THE YEAR!

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 Squeezing more from your machine every month

page

98

98 OXM Investigates
Halo 5’s Guardians are an incredible 1.4
kilometres tall. Got us a-wondering how
the rest of the Xbox gang measure up.

100 Now Playing:

Dishonored
Martin Kitts breaks the habit of a lifetime and
attempts to go a day without killing anyone.

102 Now Playing:

Dark Souls
The much-ballyhooed player vs player mode just
doesn’t cut it for our Tom.

104 OXM Investigates

A guide to the best audio options on the market
today – they’ll bust your eardrums, not the bank.

106 OXM Replay

This month we revisit the weird, forgotten
cousin of the Fallout family – New Vegas.

108 Live Spotlight

Minecraft goes Greek; The Evil Within gets some

100 DISHONORED
page swanky borders; The Witcher 3 gets bigger.

Why discretion is the worst part of valour. 114 Rare Replay games that
didn’t make the cut
Think Conker’s edgy? Check out Oogity Boogity.

page page page

103 106 114

@OXM THE OffICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE / 97
 xbox ExTrA

The Long and

The shorT oF iT
From Claptrap to The Chief – we put Xbox’s greatest
heroes against the wall, draw little lines above their
heads in biro and see how they measure up...

r
ecently, Microsoft released a to-scale
Halo 5 size comparison chart, mostly as an
excuse to show off the awesome size of the 10
series’ latest antagonists – the 4,635-feet-
tall Guardians. But the chart also threw up some
other interesting statistics. The Master Chief, for
instance, stands at a tape measurer-groaning 6’7”.
This put us in the mood to measure every iconic
Xbox star we could get our 18.6cm hands on. To our
eternal chagrin, we were unable to find accurate
heights for Viva Piñata’s Horsetachio or Kazooie
from Banjo-Kazooie, but the ones we could
track down offered a few surprises...

oxm
INVESTIGATES

Uncovering
the other side of
Xbox gaming

4 7
6

2
3
1
5

1) Claptrap 2) Lara Croft 3) Marcus Fenix 4) Batman 5) Master Chief

11”
It’s difficult to get a
handle on just how tall
Borderlands’ talkative
rustbucket is – the
official literature ain’t
saying. So we’re basing
this measurement on
the model that comes
in the ‘Claptrap-in-a-
box’ special edition
of Borderlands: The
Handsome Collection.
5’9” 6’1” 6”2 6’7”
Tomb Raider’s lithe ledge- This surprised us, as Bruce Wayne is truly an And that’s without his
leaper is a whopping six everyone in the Gears inspiration to us all. He’s Super Spartan armour. Once
inches taller than the of War universe looks proof that anyone can be strapped in, according
average British woman, short and squat, as if the a superhero: all they need to novel Halo: The Flood,
according to a BBC planet Sera has ten times is genius-level intellect, Chief stands to the tune
website that we Googled the gravity of Earth, or unfathomable access to of seven feet. But before
just this second. Handy something. But nope – Mr wealth and resources, and you swoon, consider this;
for grabbing hard-to- Surly is actually a very above-average height. Oh, the same novel claims MC
reach platforms, and respectable 6’1”. oh and, indeed, oh. has skin whiter than 1,000
uppercutting uppity bears. Milkybars (paraphrasing),
as he almost never
takes his suit off.

98 / THE OFFICIAl XBOX MAGAzInE WWW.GAMESrAdAr.COM/OXM

 xbox ExTrA

11) guardian
4,635’
Somehow, ‘enormous’
doesn’t seem to do Halo’s
Guardian justice. These unfathomably
mammoth segmented beings rise from
the depths of alien worlds, where they conceal
themselves in deep waters and underground
lava pits. They’re so hulking they’ve broken
our scale – we’re going to need more than a
battle rifle and three grenades to send these
suckers back from whence they came.

6) Big daddy 7) Battletoads 8) Titan 9) aT-aT 10) scarab

7’2”
According to a life-
sized statue produced
by promotional figurine
maestro Studio Oxmox, a
typical Big daddy stands
at a monstrous 7’2”. That’s
more than double the
height of the little Sister,
who comes in at just 3’6”.
The fibreglass statue was
sold in 2013 for the bargain
price of $6,490 (£4,151.47).
6’3”, 6’8”, 7’4”
As stated in their
Battletoads Arcade profiles,
rash, zitz and Pimple stand
at 6’3”, 6’8” and 7’4”. So
Pimple is taller than a Big
daddy. There’s no rationale
for the height discrepancy
between toads, except
perhaps that the profiles
were written by someone
who doesn’t understand
how height works.
21’0” 73.8’
respawn community This is the height of the
manager Abbie Heppe Star Wars universe’s
gladly answered a fan’s gargantuan armoured
question on how tall transport vehicles, the
Titanfall’s Titans stand cover star of our June
during a Q&A session with 2015 issue. You won’t
Major nelson. According to be able to ride them in
Heppe, they’re as high as the upcoming Star Wars:
three and a half six-foot Battlefront, presumably
pilots. 21 feet! because your character’s
feet won’t be able to
reach the peddles.
127’0”
Until now, these vast,
crab-like attack vehicles
were the big boys of
the Halo universe. At
127 feet high (Halo 3
measurement), they are
nearly as tall as they are
long (159 feet).

@OXM THE OFFICIAl XBOX MAGAzInE / 99

 xbox extra

C’mon, does this

now really look like
the face of a non-
p l ay i n g killer to you?

the games we’re

still going back
to, and why

100 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm


Martin Kitts is playing…
Dishonored
beCaUSe… “it’s the thinking man’s stealth game. right?”
Loving the surprisingly high-end voice cast.
D
ishonored is unique among
assassination games in
that you don’t actually have
to assassinate anyone. it was
widely celebrated as such
before its original launch on
xbox 360 – a sandbox with boundaries
so pliable that it was possible to invent
your own path through the entire thing
without shedding a drop of blood. a
couple of achievements even encourage
you to play it that way.
it’s just as well i’ve never been much
of a completionist when it comes to my
gamerscore, because that clean hands
achievement is basically never going to
happen for me. i’ve tried more than once,
but 100g doesn’t seem like a fair swap
for having the bare minimum of fun while
playing. well done – you forced yourself
to ignore the best part of the game for
14 straight hours. clean hands helped
//the sheer amount of awards for
ultraviolence leads me to believe this
is the true way to approach the game//
@oxm
Hating blinking when i actually wanted to summon a swarm of rats.
to ensure that the game wasn’t banned
in germany, which is the usual fate for
anything that might get the teutonic
pulse racing – but it’s a hell of a way to
miss the point.
for connoisseurs of this sort of thing
(anyone?) Dishonored has some of the
smoothest, most satisfying kills in any
game. it’s so slick, so fast, so effortless.
there’s stealth, sure, but it’s incredibly
forgiving – most enemies won’t pay
any attention until you’re right on top
of them, by which time the only thing
you’ve got to worry about is which of a
dozen power combinations you’re going
to use to dispatch them.
every character is a one-shot finish,
so you might as well make it stylish. or,
you could simply attach a proximity
mine to a nearby rat, possess said rat
and then scamper merrily into a crowd of
helpless people. actually, that one can
amazingly enough, the
windblast ability is
nowhere near as crude
as it sounds.
xbox extra
DetaiLS be somewhat self-lethal, so you’d best
save the game beforehand. there’s no
Released rat bomber achievement, unfortunately,
oct 2012 but the sheer amount of other awards
Dev for random acts of ultraviolence (make
enemies kill themselves/their friends,
arkane
Studios murder unsuspecting guards with every
last one of the various gizmos at your
Pub disposal, kill four people in under a
bethesda second with a crossbow) leads me to
Format xbox 360 believe this is the true way to approach
the world of Dishonored. boil a man to
Score 9/10
death in his sauna? nice one – here,
Recap have 10g for your trouble.
teleport your for me, the holy grail of assassinations
way around is one i’ve been thinking about for a
the plague- while, where i slow time, possess and
infected city quickly exit the enemy (which causes
of Dunwall him to be spectacularly ill) and then
as a magic
lop off his head while it’s still spraying
assassin who
has the area’s sick everywhere. it might actually be
rats at his impossible, as i’m having no end of
disposal. trouble removing the head while the
victim is doubled over, blowing chunks.
if anyone does manage to pull it off,
please stick it on Youtube and i’ll award
you an honorary 1,000g achievement
called, simply, awesome. ■
the official xbox magazine / 101
 XBoX EXTRA
Now
P l Ay I N G
Tom Stone is playing…
Dark Souls:
Prepare to Die Edition
BECAUSE… “It really captures the fun of dying alone”
Loving Figuring it out on my own.
F
or me, it is currently that
magical time in every
gamer’s life where Dark Souls
addiction takes over. Little
things like ‘eating’, ‘going
to work’ and ‘attending my
wedding’ take a backseat to battling
through Lordran. For the three people
who don’t know it, Dark Souls is an
action-RPG. Punishingly difficult, yet
ridiculously rewarding. It’s the rush of
exploration mixed with the fear of the
unknown – the closest thing to a Silent
Hill RPG you’ll ever play. So this is what
true love feels like.
But some say I haven’t been getting
the full experience. I’ve been playing
offline. Not because I’m an antisocial
hermit, but because my ancient Xbox
//Narcissist that I am, I enjoy travelling
through Lordran feeling like the only
mildly competent adventurer there//
102 / THe oFFICIAL XBoX mAGAzINe
Hating Realising I’m an idiot and can’t figure it out on my own.
360 still requires a magic internet cable
to go online. This has to be connected
to the console by hand. Desperate to
make sure I was getting the best version
of Dark Souls, I plugged the cable in. A
couple of hours later, I’d yanked it back
out. Never darken my Xbox 360 again,
you grey, bitter worm.
Play online and you’ll see orange
markings everywhere. These are
notes from other players, ranging from
the useless ('Praise the Sun!') to the
incredibly useful ('Hidden wall ahead').
A nice idea, but I feel it detracts from
what makes Dark Souls so engaging.
Narcissist that I am, I enjoy travelling
through Lordran feeling like the only
mildly competent adventurer there. Sure,
I’ve died thousands of times, but you’d
Master magic and the
game becomes… still
harder than titanium
bullets. Aww.
DEtaiLS never catch me getting trapped in a
barrel like those idiotic NPCs. Where is
Released this mysterious enemy who’s apparently
Aug 2012 trying to pickle everyone, anyway?
Dev I’m terrified whenever I enter a new
From Software area, but also excited for the challenge
Pub
to come. Whatever’s out there, I just
know it’s going to destroy me. But it’ll be
Namco Bandai
worth it for that sweet, sweet, fleeting
Format Xbox 360 moment of success. A floor full of orange
Score 9/10 scratchings ruins that. When I’m late for
Recap work, I barely have time to leave a note
The RPG reminding my housemates that I will skin
phenomenon them alive if they ever eat my Coco Pops
that taught again. Seeing notes in-game just makes
us all to me feel like the youngest sibling, a child
fall back in stumbling after the big kids. “Finishing
love with Dark Souls? Pfft, we did that years ago
difficult and it was easy. Here are some hints to
games again. help you catch up, you big stupid baby.”
Kills you
every chance
I’m sticking to offline. It’ll be a
tougher, lonelier experience, but that’s
it gets.
exactly what Dark Souls should be.
Praise the Sun? I’ll stick to praising the
haunting isolation, thanks. ■
WWW.GAmeSRADAR.Com/oXm

Jenny Baker is playing…
Child of Light
BECAUSE… “It’s the fairest in all the land”
LOving The heroine’s magical transformation.
O
nce upon a time in the faraway
kingdom of Ubisoft, there
was a beautiful videogame
princess named Aurora.
Her flame-like hair inspired
jealousy throughout the land, and even
TressFX couldn’t rival her storybook
good looks – okay, I have a confession
to make: I have been bewitched by
Child of Light’s artwork. It might not be
realistic, but it packs a prettier punch
than a poisoned candy apple.
Child of Light uses the finest tale-as-
old-as-time ingredients – a magic mirror,
a wicked stepmother, a pipe-smoking
dwarf – but they’re nothing next to its
epic watercolour landscapes. Inspired by
19th-Century fairy tale illustrations and
the paintings of Yoshitaka Amano, the
fantasy realm of Lemuria is an ethereal
wonderland. Every time I enter a new
region, I feel like I should have a glass
Alex Dale is playing…
Rayman Legends
BECAUSE… “There’s always something new to do”
LOving The Teenies’ saucy dance when they’re saved…
T
here’s always going to be
room for Rayman Legends
in that weird little library
of squares on my Xbox One
Dashboard. The end credits
rolled long ago, but there’s still so
much left for me chip away at when I
fancy a snack-sized break between
Witcher contracts – Lums to collect,
lottery tickets to scratch, creatures
to uncover, Teenies to save, Heroes to
unlock. That’s to speak nothing of the
ever-refreshing daily challenges.
@OXM
HaTing The absence of a true fairytale ending.
of warm milk and a plate of cookies on
standby. Lemuria is a lost continent
brought to life, but that’s not all.
When you fulfil certain requirements,
Aurora gains wings and transforms into
a queen – like a fairy-type Pokémon with
three evolutionary states, each more
radiant than the last. Her crown turns
from gold to glass, her dress primrose to
ivory, her hair ruby-red to sunset-pink.
HaTing …which gets a little old after, like, the 650th time.
But actually, I’m beginning to wonder
if there isn’t a little bit too much to do. I
know how mad that must sound – who
wants less game for their money, right?
But hear me out for a second.
Let’s begin by throwing some numbers
at you. Most of levels have ten Teenies
to rescue – eight dotted around the
landscape and two hidden behind secret
doors. Additionally, you’ll be wanting
to collect as many Lums as possible to
earn lottery tickets, which are the only
way to unlock the Origins levels and
add creatures to your collection. 500 is
enough to bag a gold medal.
Can you see the problem yet? Rayman
Legends’ levels aren’t the biggest,
and yet they’ve got to squeeze ten
Teenies and (at least) 500 Lums into
their framework. This means they’re
absolutely caked with secrets, to the
point that it strips them of any wonder. If
XBOX EXTrA
It’s refreshing to witness a character
evolve without a drop of blood, bead of
sweat or disintegrating outfit.
One of my favourite things about the
visuals is that they’re both light and dark
– flowers and storms alike bleed ink-rich
beauty. And yet it masks a storyline with
as many miscalculated moments as
Hansel and Gretel have breadcrumbs.
Akin to a half-baked gingerbread house,
it lures you in with sugary stained-glass
cutscenes, only to squish expectations
DeTaiLS with a doughy, fruitless ending.
Of course, while Child of Light
Released
might not have a Grimm-worthy plot,
Apr 2014 its artwork is spellbinding. Aurora’s
Dev Ubisoft Cinderella-like transformation and
Montreal Lemuria’s fluid backdrops are proof
Pub Ubisoft that a modern game doesn’t have to be
Format Xbox One realistic to be a knockout. After all, who
Score 8/10 wants gritty realism when you can have
a kaleidoscopic dream world? Not me. ■
DeTaiLS you see a crossroads, you can bet your
bottom Lum that turning left rather than
Released
right will lead you to a Teeny. Similarly,
Feb 2014 where a narrow gap leads off the top
Dev Ubisoft of the screen, there is, predictably, an
Paris opportunity to wall-jump up to a secret
Pub Ubisoft doorway. The accompanying ‘ooooh!’
Format Xbox One sounds almost sarcastic.
Score 9/10 See what I’m getting at? Is having to
collect 500 Lums really more exciting
than finding 300? Or 100? Or even ten?
It just means levels don’t have room to
breathe – with so many collectibles, you
never get the sense that you’ve actually
found anything worth of celebrating.
New Super Mario Bros, the genre’s
benchmark, limited collectibles to three
golden coins per level and is all the more
engaging for it. Like all other warm-
blooded animals, I love Rayman Legends
to pieces – but if ever there was a poster
child for ‘less is more’, this is it. ■
THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE / 103
 xbox extra

Sound inveStmentS?
Want to hear games as they’re meant to be heard?
OXM puts Xbox One’s sound solutions to the test…

t
he pursuit of ever sleeker TV frames has left in-built
speakers in a shocking state, parping out thin, tinny
sound for weaponry and engines that should be shaking
the house to the ground. A decent surround sound
system can cost more than two Xbox Ones combined, so we’ve
gone in search of more modest solutions, looking for the best
balance of performance and price. With the recent Xbox One
controller redesign incorporating a stereo jack (older controllers
are still reliant on the Stereo Adaptor), there’s never been a
better time invest in decent pair of headphones, while those
after a good room-rattling might want to try sound bars instead.

//In-built speakers leave weaponry and

engines sounding thin and tinny. We want 4
them to shake the house to the ground//

1 3

turtle Beach Stealth
500X (£200)
Xbox One’s first wireless
1 headset also debuted Turtle
Beach’s DTS 7.1 Surround Sound,
justifying the jump in price with
the competitive advantage it
might bestow. Plugging it into CoD:
Advanced Warfare better places
gunshots and footsteps, certainly,
but we found the tech could make
some single-player sound mixes
sound thin. Connecting to a PC
lets you download presets
optimised for other games, though
we were happy pumping them
through the 500X’s meaty stereo
mode. That said, a great mic and
pristine comfort clearly mark this
out as more pro-gaming choice.
Kingston HyperX
Cloud (£55)
Cast into the shadows by
2 the newer Cloud II model
and its 7.1 virtual surround sound
– a feature only compatible with
PC – the Cloud headset becomes
an inadvertent steal for Xbox One.
For £55 you get a sturdy medal
band, large ear-nuzzling cups and
stereo oomph to rival most models
on this page. Just as happy
delivering the dainty folk of The
Witcher 3 as it is the militaristic
bass of Battlefield Hardline’s gats,
this is a sublime pick for the price
(even with the required Stereo
Adaptor). Only online pros need
hold back – the slightly feeble
mic is less than ideal.
turtle Beach elite
800X (£250)
These are the daddies, loud
3 where they need to be, but
subtle in design (why do so many
premium headsets look like
something from bad ‘80s sci-fi?).
Sound-wise it builds on the
500X’s 7.1 and presets with a
superhuman mode to draw out
distant sounds and a ‘footstep
focus’ that amplifies smaller
foreground noises. Switch on the
added noise cancellation and
there’s no threat of mistaking
your dog-walking neighbour for an
incoming shanking. All its features
make it a bit fussy to handle, but
for £250 you’re likely looking for a
more tailored experience.
Polk n1 Gaming
Surroundbar (£181)
Don’t want to deface your
4 living room in the name of
5.1 sound? Enter the soundbar. It
also frees you from the anti-social
confines of a headset, sharing all
that deafening gunfire with your
whole family. But what gunfire!
Polk worked with Microsoft on
shooter and racing modes,
signified by Halo and Forza logos,
and they do the job, drawing out
the minutiae of foreground effects
– engine sounds, Master Chief’s
crunching joints – far better than
the simulated surround sound of
many headsets. Now to find a TV
stand wide enough to take all 39”
of it. What a hog!

104 / ThE OFFICIAl XBOX MAgAzINE WWW.gAMESrADAr.COM/OXM

 6 xbox
turtle Beach Stealth
420X (£150)
Turtle Beach’s latest
5 headset ditches the 7.1
tech for a more affordable
wireless stereo headset.
Considering how often we’d switch
the 500X to stereo mode it’s a
great offering: loud volumes, beefy
bass, and cups that’ll adjust to
even the knobbliest of heads. Not
being able to pick out the precise
angle of a bullet’s trajectory
makes them less useful to online
players than the 500X/800X, but if
you just want to flood your ears
with GTA radio stations or the
orchestral sweep of Ori and the
Blind Forest, this gets the job
done in uncluttered fashion.
@OXM
5
official Xbox one
Stereo Headset (£40)
Microsoft’s no frills design is
6 comfortable to wear and
unfussy to use, with none of the
preset tweaking seen in flashier
models. Instead it arrives well
balanced out the box, with crisp
music and voice work in Sunset
Overdrive and enough bass to
give Forza 5’s engines and
clanking Titanfall mechs their
required heft. They hold up less
well with other media – music can
begin to distort at higher volumes
– but as one of the cheapest
headsets around it holds up
remarkably well. As an added
bonus, it comes with the headset
adaptor required to use it.
8
Polk Audio magniFi
(£400)
While not intended for
7 gaming, lacking the
dedicated modes of the N1, the
MagniFi’s pricier tag does get you
an external subwoofer and Polk’s
Voice Adjust tech. The former
adds a rumbling roar to explosions
and engines that N1 simply can’t
match. The latter’s more subtle,
allowing you to emphasise
mid-range frequencies, drawing
out dialogue that can get lost in a
busy sound mix. It’s particularly
noticeable in The Witcher, where
the often busy environmental
sound can drown out a good
natter. Is freedom from subtitles
worth £400? You be the judge.
extra
oxm
INVeStIGateS
Uncovering
the other side of
Xbox gaming
Gioteck HC-5 (£55)
The hC-5 offers two very
8 different experiences
depending on your TV. If you have
Audio Out sockets, you can use
the wireless functions. Powered
by rechargeable battery you get
amplified sound and access to a
bass boost – both solid for the
price, even if the batteries ran out
in about four hours. Without Audio
Out you’re reliant on the Stereo
Adaptor to power the headset,
removing the amplified sound.
Okay, you don’t have to recharge
them, but they are weedier for it.
Neither setup entirely satisfies.
For the same price, hyperX Cloud
is the way to go.
ThE OFFICIAl XBOX MAgAzINE / 105
 xbox extra Weapons get progressively
weirder, escalating from
bladed gauntlets and
boxing gloves to a machine
gun powered by the brain
of a dog.
the oxm
r e p l ay
Revisiting the
resolutionally-
challenged
Fallout: New Vegas
Ben Griffin wanders back into Obsidian’s bizarre wasteland
F
rankly, Fallout: New Vegas was
kind of a mess, a sprawling RPG
held together by duct tape and
Wonderglue. You’re walking
along and BAM! A burned-out
car randomly springs you 35m in the air.
Details Or, mid-conversation, someone’s head
Dev Obsidian rotates 360º. There’s even the recent
Entertainment revelation uncovered by hobbyist
Pub Bethesda coders that, because its predecessor
Softworks lacked functioning vehicles, Fallout
Released 3’s Presidential Metro Train section
Oct 2010
involved slyly affixing a giant piece of
scored 9/10
carriage-shaped armour to the player
and fooling them into thinking they
were riding it.
This, it happens, is the necessary
price of near limitless freedom,
because while other open-world games
of the time such as Batman: Arkham
Asylum, Just Cause 2 and Assassin’s
Creed Revelations were arguably more
polished experiences, none matched
New Vegas’ dizzying scope. Every
item is a physical entity you can pick
up and put down, every person is
//Any technical
inconsistencies simply add
more unintentional humour//
106 / THE OFFICIAL xBOx MAGAzINE
someone you can talk to, steal from
or kill. Fortunately, any technical
inconsistencies simply add another
strain of unintentional humour to a
game already bursting with it.
That’s the series’ legacy – a post-
apocalyptic apple-pie America made
markedly less bleak by talking trees
and pneumatic fists – and New Vegas
takes the concept to miles of Mojave
Wasteland full of extraordinary sights
and sounds. Quests are a series high,
both in terms of player choice and
sheer off-colour comedy. Examples
include Elvis impersonators The Kings
asking you to find a replacement brain
for their cyberdog, gathering a group
of escorts (cowboy ghoul, sex bot) for
a wealthy client with unusual tastes,
recruiting entertainers for the Tops
casino, whipping a gang of unruly NCR
soldiers into shape, stealing eggs from
Mojave wildlife (easier said than done
with roaming irradiated scorpions and
fire geckos), and either preparing or
sabotaging a rocket launch.
All quests have multiple solutions.
Beyond the Beef, for instance, sees
you preventing the son of a rancher
becoming the main course of a
cannibalistic society’s banquet. You
can steal the recipe for an imitation-
flesh pie, drug the wine to render
everyone unconscious, break out the
son and lead another human sacrifice
into the freezer, or frame the father by
collecting blood samples from his son
and planting them in his room.
Missions such as this effectively
demonstrate the network of systems
working furiously under New Vegas’
surface. Karma determines how others
react to you, whether with warmth,
furrowed brows or all-out violence,
based on previous actions. Factions
record your prior interactions with
them, and will reward or punish you
(kill members of Caesar’s Legion and
he’ll greet you with hostility). Dialogue
also varies according to what choices
you’ve made, what you’re wearing and
who your companion is. Show up to The
Kings’ School of Impersonation with
Cass and members might say, “Hellooo,
cowgirl! You mind if talk to your lady
friend instead of you?”
And that’s without getting into the
13 character skills. You can talk your
way out of most anything, or barter for
an important item instead of battling
over it. With a high enough Sneak
ability you can find a peaceful solution,
and with advanced Lockpick or Science
talents you’re able to uncover alternate
WWW.GAMESRADAR.COM/OxM
 xbox extra

LETTE
GAME ROU
Securitrons patrol the mojave like beat
cops, occasionally quoting Daleks,
robocop and Dirty harry. Every month, OxM dips into
its Games Cupboard of Doom
and plucks out a random
game from xbox history. Will
it be a classic or a howler?
Let the balls decide…
this moNth…
sega mega DRiVe:
ultimate ColleCtioN

iNFlueNCeD by… iNFlueNCe oN…
Fallout 3 Skyrim
Similarly offbeat humour Bethesda got even more
in a vastly bigger world. from the ageing engine.
paths. New Vegas is like a school test
where every single question is multiple
choice, but also you get to shoot mini
nukes at people.
Today, the Wasteland feels a
little mechanical, what with robotic
animations coupled with an outdated
conversation system that freezes time
suddenly as your silent protagonist
strikes up a chat. Famously, you can
punch a sleeping person, have him
calmly sit upright, then proceed to
chase you out of the house. It’s almost
as if someone digging into the sand of
Bethesda’s Mojave would eventually hit
the rusty cogs keeping it turning.
But stilted as it is today, New Vegas
should be lauded for its ambition –
a quality this year’s Fallout 4 looks
to surpass. There’s something
oddly fitting about walking into the
unpredictable, sometimes inadvertently
irregular desert as your Pip-Boy’s
antenna picks up Bing Crosby’s crackly
crooning, “Something’s gotta give.” For
better or worse, some things did. ■
F
ancy that! In the same
month that we review Rare
Replay, we randomly pluck
xbox 360’s greatest retro
compilation out of the sack.
What are the odds, eh?
Compiled by emulation expert
Backbone Entertainment,
presentation-wise this is more
like Barebones
Entertainment. //The front end is no-
There is a
little museum
frills like supermarket-
section, with brand rice cakes//
boxart and trivia
and the like, and some basic
visual-smoothing options, but the
rest of the front end is as no-
thrills as supermarket-brand rice
cakes. No matter. The games are
the stars; everything else is just
window-dressing – and the Ultimate
Collection comes on strong with
49 (count ‘em!) near-perfect ports
that span the console’s entire
lifespan. What’s more, it offers a
mouth-watering snapshot of Sega’s
first-party output from the period.
The Mega Drive was Sega’s most
successful console, and it saw its
internal teams at the height of its
creative powers – from platformers
(Sonic the Hedgehog) to beat-’em-
ups (Streets of Rage II) to somewhat
more esoteric offerings (Ecco the
Dolphin), there’s
something here
for everyone.
Uniquely
for the time,
they’ve
aged well – lacking much of the
punishing difficulty that plagued
other games in the late 1990s.
The only downer in revisiting this
games is that the rigid D-pad
controls seem stiff in today’s
analogue stick-dominated age
– something that relegates the
compilation’s lesser offerings,
such as Altered Beast, to one-
shot curios.

What haPPeNeD Next

Fallout 4 promised to boost your
options, with base-building and
a voiced protagonist.

@OxM THE OFFICIAL xBOx MAGAzINE / 107

 xbox exTra
LIve
S p o T-
LIGH T
Reports from
Xbox’s biggest
communities
Minecraft
Acropolis Now: why it’s time to Troy out the Greek Mythology Mash-Up pack
Details Dev Mojang / Pub Microsoft Studios / Reporter Chris Schilling
L
et’s be honest: not all
Minecraft Mash-Up packs are
created equal. You can tell the
contractual obligations from
the ones Mojang was actually
excited to make. Unless
Marvel’s planning an unexpected remake
of Jason and the Argonauts this winter,
We built this! Honest. It this is very much a passion project – and
really wasn’t here before… it shows in one of the most inventive and
just plain fun mash-ups to date.
It turns out the formalised approach
of most ancient Greek architecture
suits Minecraft to a tee. It’s all temples,
giant statues and open-air theatres,
each looking authentically simple yet
striking in their blocky form. Mojang’s
own creations are almost too good –
so imposingly brilliant that they put
most player-crafted efforts to shame.
Naturally, there are plenty of hollowed-
out equine constructions. What was that
they said about geeks bearing gifts?
Beyond that, it’s just a joy to see
existing blocks and creatures given
//It’s great to see
There’s some lovely new
existing creatures given
choral music for building to. a mythological twist//
108 / THE offICIAl XBoX MAGAZINE
The Sun’s
striking new
appearance
is consistent
with its
representation
in Greek art.
a mythological twist, from cycloptic
Endermen to Hadean Ghasts and
Creepers patterned with Greek frets.
on the cLock Villagers all wear togas, some horses
How we spent our sport Pegasus-like wings and spawn
time in the game eggs are now Grecian urns. Hang a
painting, meanwhile, and you’ll get
a randomly rendered work of art,
showcasing Xiphoses, shields, marble
busts and ornamental pots.
There are 39 new skins, too, featuring
classic characters from Greek myth.
In a tough field, Zeus just about wins
40% Pitting the prize for best beard, though the
mythical beasts in blue-skinned Poseidon runs him close,
a fight to the death while Achilles permanently has an arrow
(Cerberus won) protruding from his heel. We’re expecting
30% Trying (and a few complaints about Medusa, mind:
failing) to get a switch to the third-person camera and
winged horse to fly you’ll turn to stone if you stare too long.
20% Getting lost Sure, its mechanical impact is
in a classic Greek negligible, but it’s not aiming to be a
labyrinth
game-changer. Instead, this is possibly
10% Making
the most consistently delightful skin
ill-advised ‘arrow
to the heel’ jokes we’ve seen, its ancient artistry giving
about Achilles Minecraft one of the freshest licks of
paint it’s had in ages. Isn’t that Ionic? ■
If you Do one thIng In MInecRaft
thIs Month, Make It… Spawning
skeletons and recreating the battle
from Jason and the Argonauts.
WWW.GAMESRAdAR.CoM/oXM

Cheer up, Geralt.
The framerate
isn’t that bad.
the Witcher 3:
Wild hunt
Update 1.07 fixes inventory issues, then
gives the game some new ones…
Dev CD projekt reD / Pub CD projekt reD/ Reporter Tom Stone
t
wo tedious words have turned many a wary gamer off even
the most accessible RPGs: inventory management. Who
cares if this game lets you be a monster-slaying stud?
There’s nothing fun about packing a suitcase. The Witcher
3’s inventory wasn’t the worst we’ve seen, but had plenty
of horrid niggles, leaving us tempted to just play naked.
Previously, the book interface was so unintuitive, we assumed
it had been designed by someone who hated reading. Books were
kept in the worryingly ambiguous ‘usable items’ tab, forced to share
space with food and drink. They contain vital info and recipes,
but there was no way
//once library-burningly of telling which ones
infuriating, now as you’d previously read.
Now they not only have
easy as ABC// their own inventory tab,
but the game greys
out the ones you’ve looked at. once library-burningly infuriating,
now easy as ABC. Alchemy ingredients no longer weigh anything,
either. Naysayers might call that a blow for realism, but these are
ingredients for magic. We thought it unrealistic for them not to be
magically weightless in the first place.
Alas, the update does come with some unwelcome new baggage.
Pop-in seems a lot more common and the framerate chugs in some
areas. Nothing game-ruining, but it’s disappointing to see fixing
what was broken coming at the cost of breaking what was already
fixed. Cd Projekt Red has an impressive track record with dlC, so
hopefully this will be addressed in the inevitable update 1.08. ■
If you Do one thIng In the WItcheR 3 thIs Month, Make It…
Pretending to have read all the books you’ve stashed.
@oXM
xbox exTra
No abattoir is
complete without
a gramophone.
the evil Within
More pixels, more problems: why removing
the borders neuters Mikami’s horror
Dev Tango Gameworks / Pub bethesda / Reporter Chris Schilling
o
f late, post-launch patches have become the norm rather
than the exception. Games are frequently updated, often more
than once: features are added, bugs squashed, technical
adjustments made. It’s annoying, but in some cases it’s a
necessary evil. The latest patch for The Evil Within, however,
feels rather less so: you lose 5GB of precious hard-drive space simply to
gain the option to remove the black borders surrounding the action.
It’s a decision taken seemingly as a result of player feedback: many
complained about the letterboxing without considering what the game
might lose in fullscreen. Rumours suggested the borders were present
because the framerate would suffer without them, but in our experience
the difference is at best negligible. Yet switch them off and the game
loses its edge: your very first escape from the chainsaw-wielding Sadist
is much less fraught given
//films often use that you no longer need to
unusual aspect ratios peek over scenery to see
where he is. Similarly, the
for similar reasons// claustrophobic Chapter 10
is nowhere near as tense
with a larger field of view. Mikami knows the most potent horror lies in the
unseen: when we hear groans and scraping nearby but can’t pinpoint their
location. Now, more often than not, we know exactly what’s coming.
film directors often choose unusual aspect ratios for similar reasons:
Xavier dolan shot Mommy in an unusually intimate 1:1 ratio, while John
Maclean’s Slow West used 1.66:1 to focus attention on the characters
rather than their surroundings. In each case, these aesthetic choices
are part of the film’s identity. By removing the borders, we’re suggesting
Mikami’s vision doesn’t deserve to be similarly respected; that we’d rather
all games be presented the same way. You might think it’s just an option,
but this is a troubling precedent to set. ■
If you Do one thIng In the evIL WIthIn thIs Month, Make It…
Learning a new language while the patch downloads. There’s time!
THE offICIAl XBoX MAGAZINE / 109
 XBoX EXtra c u lt u r E

A Girl Walks cornEr

Books
amirpour has
written a back Home Alone
at Night
story for the
girl in comic-
book form.
Starring Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi

A
Price £4.49 (HD to rent)

na Lily Amirpour’s feature debut is Mass EffEct – thE

the best black-and-white Iranian PostEr collEction
vampire western ever made. Lest you
What is it?
think we’re damning the film with a book of 20 Mass
faint praise, it’s so good you’ll forget Effect posters, for
Twilight ever happened to vampires. sprucing up those
Set in the fictional Middle-Eastern backwater boring walls.
town of Bad City, it’s about the blossoming
romance between The Girl and James Dean Why’s it good?
wannabe Arash. He’s the drug-dealing coolest Mass Effect is ace,
kid in town, she’s a centuries-old bloodsucker and now you’ll
never have to stare
who stalks the streets on a skateboard while her
at a flat surface
chador billows in the wind. You know, the usual. again without the
Shot in striking monochrome, and with a killer normandy crew
soundtrack, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night reminding you there
could only be cooler if each copy came with a are better things
free Fab lolly. It’s got atmosphere in abundance, than the soul-
MoViEs and in The Girl crafts a stripy-topped, animé-eyed sapping mundanity
on your icon. The pace could generously be described as of everyday life.
‘sluggish’, but that’s all part of the film’s seductive
XBoX rhythms. Essential viewing. ■
Will it MakE
ME sEEM sMartEr
and/or coolEr?
This month in
uninteractive //So good you’ll forget dish out posters
to pals and watch
entertainment Twilight ever happened your popularity
skyrocket.
to vampires//

Fast and Furious 7 White God Defiance Season 3 Dead Rising:

Starring Vin diesel, Paul
Walker, Jason statham
Price £14.99 (hd to buy)
Not only is the latest F&F
explode-a-thon the fifth highest-
grossing film ever, it’s also the
series’ best entry. Fantastically
stupid it may be, but few films
do glamour and spectacle better,
and none have the heart to go
with it. The last five minutes will
leave you a sobbing mess. ■
Starring Zsófia Psotta,
Body (the dog)
Price £4.49 (hd to rent)
This remarkable Hungarian thriller
starts as a dour drama about a
pooch forced into the fighting
pits, but turns into Planet of the
Apes as the pup leads a canine
revolution. Created without a
shred of CGI, the sight of 250
mongrels terrorising a city is
worth the price alone. ■
Starring grant Bowler,
stephanie leonidas
Price £24.99 (hd to buy)
Remember Defiance? The
ambitious but ultimately pants
MMO shooter is a forgotten relic
on Xbox 360, but the tie-in show
is still going strong. Better yet,
the third season is its best, with
some impressively unpredictable
storytelling. At least something
good came from it all, eh? ■
Watchtower
Starring Jesse Metcalfe,
Meghan ory
Price £4.49 (hd to rent)
This risible game adaptation is
so bad it’ll leave you yearning for
the days of Uwe Boll. The ‘story’
takes place between Dead Rising
2 and 3, but is generic zombie
fare. Where are the psychos? And
the screen-cluttering hordes of
zomboids? Shoot on sight. ■

oXM Pic k s: classic car chasEs

Bullitt
Microsoft Movies & TV
Steve McQueen’s loose-
cannon cop sets a heart-
stoppingly tense standard
few have achieved since.
The French Connection Mad Max 2: The Raid 2 The Blues Brothers
Microsoft Movies & TV The Road Warrior Microsoft Movies & TV Microsoft Movies & TV
Few car chases feel as Microsoft Movies & TV The ultraviolent martial arts The sharp-suited brothers
dangerous as this, in which Fury Road’s 1981 sequel not only features a destroy a shopping mall in
a cop pursues an elevated predecessor is still brutal fight inside a car - it this comedy classic. Would
train… into traffic. thrillingly kinetic. all happens mid-chase. be a great Blast Corps level.

110 / THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAzINE WWW.GAMESRADAR.COM/OXM

 next month
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@OXM the official xbox magazine / 111

 xbox extra
XboX one essentials
Our shortlist of the finest games currently available
1 best RPGs on Xbox One so far.
GrAnd THefT AuTO V
PuBLiSHer: rOckSTAr
What was already an excellent, brutal and beautiful open-
world game is made even more so on Xbox One with a visual
tidy-up, a glut of new content and the addition of first-
person pedestrian-beating.
2 kALiMBA
PuBLiSHer: MicrOSOfT STudiOS
Steer two totem-pole stumps
through a dastardly platforming
gauntlet in the puzzler that’ll tie
your fingers up like Flumps.
3 ALien: iSOLATiOn
PuBLiSHer: SeGA
Pop a Valium and buy some brown
trousers, because this tense
masterpiece will trick you into
thinking you’re safe. You’re not.
4 HALO: THe MASTer
cHief cOLLecTiOn
PuBLiSHer: MicrOSOfT STudiOS
Buffed-up, revarnished and back in
the shop window, leaving us to
wonder if it always looked so lovely.
5 THe WiTcHer 3: WiLd HunT
PuBLiSHer: nAMOc BAndAi
One of the most immersive RPGs
ever, with side quests deeper than
most main campaigns. Beautiful,
rewarding and essential.
6 BATMAn: ArkHAM kniGHT
PuBLiSHer: WArner BrOS.
Rocksteady finishes its Arkham
trilogy on a high. Take the Batmobile
for a spin and you’ll wonder how you
ever explored Gotham without it.
112 / The OffiCial xbOx Magazine
Yours for £10 HALO 4
Discount games Can’t afford The Master Chief Collection?
worth getting You have our sympathies. Or, for sub-£10
you could grab this instead. Much better.
Score 9/10 Buy it £8.15 amazon.co.uk
7 drAGOn AGe: inquiSiTiOn
PuBLiSHer: eA
Enormous, handsome and in love
with the subtleties of world design,
storytelling and combat. One of the
8 fOrzA HOrizOn 2
PuBLiSHer: MicrOSOfT STudiOS
Arcadified Forza fun for those that
can’t tell their exhaust from their
elbow. Tearing up the Mediterranean
brings a tear to our eye.
9 fAr cry 4
PuBLiSHer: uBiSOfT
It’s like a zoo, but with explosives
and guns and dictators and
gyrocopters and homicidal tapirs.
Top-notch open-world shooting.
10 Ori & THe BLind fOreST
PuBLiSHer: MicrOSOfT STudiOS
Imagine a lavish, beautiful
storybook world… that slams
shut on your stupid, bleeding
fingers for seven brutal hours.
11 ASSASSin’S creed iV:
BLAck fLAG
PuBLiSHer: uBiSOfT
Forget those landlubbers: this
pirate-’em-up proves the parkour’s
better down where it’s wetter.
Why you should buy…
THe WiTcHer 3: WiLd HunT
If this list ranked games by how much you
get on the disc, Geralt of Rivia and Trevor of
Los Santos would be sword-fighting for the
tom stone top spot right now. Sadly, that battle only exists
@TheTomStrange in my fan fiction, but there’s still more than
enough to do in The Witcher 3. Monster hunting, exploring,
treasure hunts, bandit raids and even something called the
‘main quest’ – someday, we’ll get around to that bit. Say
farewell to your free time and get this.
www.gaMeSradar.COM/OxM
 xbox extra

12 MiddLe-eArTH: baD but GooD

SHAdOW Of MOrdOr
PuBLiSHer: WArner BrOS
we shoulDn’t
like it, But we
XboX 360 benchmarks
Every Orc NPC can become your fully
fledged nemesis (until you shank
really Do The best in show from the xbox
the life out of them, that is). 360’s ten-year catalogue
best shooter cALL Of duTy 4
13 TiTAnfALL PuBLiSHer: AcTiViSiOn
PuBLiSHer: eA The game that strapped a rocket
The team that brought you Call of to the series and made it a
Duty 4 takes online multiplayer a cultural icon is also still the
large step forwards – and upwards crackdown 2’s one best, with a unique intensity.
– with skyscraper-clearing mechs. new idea is ‘stick
zombies in it’. yet
even a sequel this best rPg dArk SOuLS
14 MinecrAfT lazy can’t suck PuBLiSHer: BAndAi nAMcO
PuBLiSHer: MicrOSOfT STudiOS the fun out of Punishing but rewarding open-
want to go hiking? explore the being a super- world affair, where the limits of
depths of hell? recreate powered your exploration are defined by
Buckingham Palace? go ahead – crime-stopper. skill rather than by numbers.
all possibilities are open to you. Only play it if
you’ve exhausted
the outstanding best oPen-worlD red deAd redeMPTiOn
15 deSTiny original, mind. PuBLiSHer: rOckSTAr
PuBLiSHer: AcTiViSiOn £9.95 amazon.co.uk This emotional tale of the Wild
An insanely addictive MMO West’s dying days takes place in
spaceshooter that’s got some a landscape so authentic, you
of the nicest skies you’ll see this can taste the tumbleweed.
side of your front door.

best Puzzler POrTAL 2

16 SHOVeL kniGHT PuBLiSHer: VALVe
PuBLiSHer: yAcHT cLuB GAMeS Takes the original’s central
Brutal platformer that’s as fun as it conceit of portal-spewing
is punishing (read: very). Packed guns and expands it in brilliant,
with ideas and lets you smack mind-melting ways.
people with a shovel. Sublime.

best action BATMAn: ArkHAM ASyLuM

17 reSidenT eViL reVeLATiOnS 2 PuBLiSHer: WArner BrOS
PuBLiSHer: cAPcOM Tighter and more focused than
Two’s company in this episodic City, this trawl through a prison
survival horror, which pairs weakling made us feel so Batman-y our
with bruiser. We came out with a voices dropped an octave.
whole new respect for torches.

best fighter uLTrA STreeT fiGHTer iV

18 WOLfenSTein: THe neW Order PuBLiSHer: cAPcOM
PuBLiSHer: BeTHeSdA Street Fighter II’s poise and
Just because we want to dual- balance, refreshed and remixed
wield shotguns doesn’t mean we with the technology of today.
don’t also appreciate a good story. Also: mad alternative costumes.
The New Order has it all.

best Platformer SPeLunky

19 THe eViL WiTHin PuBLiSHer: MOSSMOuTH
PuBLiSHer: BeTHeSdA Randomised levels aren’t
Resi creator Shinji Mikami is back, usually classics. But Spelunky’s
and he’s more unforgiving than tightly-governed stages put
ever. This is gory, terrifying and custom designs to shame.
wholly worthy of its legacy.

best racer fOrzA MOTOrSPOrT 4

20 cALL Of duTy: PuBLiSHer: MicrOSOfT STudiOS
AdVAnced WArfAre With more cars and tracks and
PuBLiSHer: AcTiViSiOn less emphasis on draining your
Jetpacks, homing grenades and wallet, Forza 4 is still the serious
other sci-fi gadgetry bring the tired racing sim pace-setter.
template into the (mid) 21st Century.

@OxM The OffiCial xbOx Magazine / 113

the final countdown

12 rare games too edgy

to make the replay cut
Rare has a proud legacy of fun, cute and quirky games, but its cheeky, irreverent characters and
crude humour have often landed the British developer in hot water. Each of the games in this list
was overlooked for inclusion in the Rare Replay compilation for highly controversial reasons…

game about a horse, in which

your only means of interaction
was to smash it about the flanks
with a bit of pipe. The game
didn’t sell well, though the idea
was developed further, eventually
becoming Viva Piñata.

01 Oogity Boogity 2
A colourful
caveman caper
in which you, the titular
Oogity, must collect bones
and avoid spikes. This
sequel was refused entry
due to Oogity’s bizarre
and offensive 15-minute
rant on the thorny
issue of immigration.
Truly prehistoric.
02 Brian’s Bonkers
Birdhouse
A laugh-a-minute cartoon
adventure featuring a cast of
hilarious pigeons, this puzzle
platformer was not included due
to an incongruous scene in which
a sparrow turns to the camera
and says, “If you tell anyone
where I hid the bodies, I swear to
God you’ll be joining them.”
03 Frooby McTooby
In this harrowing,
brutal and unflinchingly
05 Sky Flower Dream Breeze
A touching interactive tale
about a sunflower who is
granted a wish: to be able to fly
and soar among the clouds.
Quite why the flower’s second
wish is to become MRSA and
spread itself throughout NHS
hospitals remains a mystery
that the developer, to this day,
refuses to explain.
06 Maths Mania: Ages 5-8
An educational title for
the original Xbox that sought to
teach fundamental maths skills
to young children, the loading
screens of Maths Mania were
inexplicably filled with terrible
legal advice such as, “It’s fine to
drive about 15mph over the speed
limit” and “Shoplifting is alright”.
07 Moo Moo Cuckoo
Boopity Boo
This cheerful platformer stars
a fun-loving cow on a mission
to collect a thousand hovering
golden udders – and seems
08 Pavlova Panic
Absolutely everybody adored this classic N64
game about a wisecracking, meringue-based
dessert on a mission to be eaten by a hungry crow, but it will
likely never see re-release, as everything from level three on
is just John Hurt reading Mein Kampf in its entirety.
innocuous enough until the in which Woofers fatally
game’s finale, in which the mauls Kitty in a primal canine
camera pans all the way out to rage, ultimately meant it was
reveal that the platforms you’ve unsuitable for inclusion.
been navigating spell out the
sweariest word there is. Banned! 11 GoldenEye 007
Although Rare claims
09 Woofers and Kitty: that complex licensing issues
Crime Detectives with Nintendo prevent them
One of gaming’s most unlikely from including this classic FPS as
pairings, this starred a cat and part of the collection, it’s actually
a dog working together to solve due to the infamous scene in
crimes. A shocking scene two- which James Bond drives his car
thirds of the way in, however, right into an orphanage before
saying, “I meant to do that; I’m

10
realistic platformer, you play Otter Petter glad this happened.”
as an international warcrimes A precursor to stroke-
investigator for the United
’em-up Kinectimals, Otter 12 Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Nations, who struggles to earn A cute and colourful
the respect of his peers because Petter was quickly removed from platform adventure starring a
of his adorable name, high- sale after complaints that the otter, binge-drinking, foul-mouthed
pitched voice and giant fluffy tail. who would grow to five times his squirrel and a cast of Nazi teddy
natural size and flash every colour bears and poop-obsessed
04 Horse Smasher 5000X of the rainbow when stroked, was Scouser dung beetles, this… oh
A strange, needlessly wait. Hold on. This one made it
causing seizures in children.
violent and ultimately pointless in. Our mistake.

next issue of oxm onsale 25 sep. subscribe and save money: see page 54 for details

114 / the official xbox magazine www.gamesradar.com/oxm

9012