Author: Trafficblast

The mighty luchador Juan already had a devil of a time in the first Guacamelee, but that’s nothing compared to his second round. Guacamelee 2 is the best kind of sequel, doubling down on everything that worked in the original. Though it’s diabolically challenging, it always feels fair, letting its meticulously crafted level design and self-aware humor shine through.

It begins a few years after the original, with Juan, now married to Lupita (El Presidente’s daughter), raising two precocious kids in a tiny house on the outskirts of Pueblucho. At least, that’s what’s happening in the good timeline. In the Darkest Timeline, one of dozens of parallel dimensions in–ahem–the Mexiverse, Juan actually dies trying to defeat the previous big boss, Carlos Calaca. A hulking meatslab of a lucha named Salvador is the one who finishes the job, and he hopes to use a sacred, arcane guacamole recipe meant only for the gods to merge the land of the dead with the realm of the living. That has dire consequences, of course, and Juan once again must mask up and trek all across Mexico for the power to defeat Salvador and his minions.

Though there are some new additions, the fundamentals of Guacamelee haven’t undergone any sweeping changes. The clean look of the first game has been upgraded with some beautiful, evocative lighting effects, and the score has more variety, weaving hooks and catchy breakbeats with a wider range of Latin melodies, but that’s about it, aesthetically. The atmosphere is still firmly in the realm of eye-catching and dazzling cartoon aesthetics, but even just those minor tweaks add just the right touch of looming dread to fit Guacamelee 2’s intensity.

Structurally, Guacamelee 2 maintains a balance between Metroidvania and side-scrolling beat-’em-up, and it doesn’t feel like either genre is being lost in the mix. Just strolling into a room to lay the smackdown on skeletons still feels big and brutal, the way a wrestler slamming an opponent into the pavement absolutely should. A split-second fiesta in the upper right-hand corner that rewards you for big combos is the chuckle-worthy cherry on top of a savage job well done. Hours upon hours later, it never gets old watching the numbers rack up.

The magic lies in how the deadly physicality of your moveset directly feeds into where and how you can explore. Every new move–a frog slam, a flying uppercut–is more than just a way to lay waste to the undead menace, but the keys to mastering your environment. Taking care of a stone barrier between you and the next room, where the solution isn’t some key you picked up clear across the map but the overkill of a big, booming punch or a massive headbutt, is satisfying like little else–especially coupled with the innate Metroidvania joy of being able to backtrack into an area and open up a route you couldn’t take before with extreme, gratifying prejudice.

Guacamelee 2 retains the physicality of the original, but it focuses more on letting you use your physical moveset as a means of traversal and staying off the ground. Along with Juan’s punches, kicks, and grab-and-slam maneuvers, a new magical grappling mechanic can shoot Juan off into different directions, which, until you earn the ability to fly, is the primary way you get through vertical sections of the map or areas where the ground is a hazard. Juan is once again able to turn into a chicken, but what was a cute, occasional gimmick is now integral to gameplay and the touchstone of all of the most delightfully absurd elements of the plot. Chicken Juan now has a high-powered moveset of his own, including firing himself diagonally into enemies and obstacles, sliding through tight spaces, and floating through the air.

As it turns out, staying off the ground is a job requiring more finesse than fight, and finesse is a trait for far more lithe and wiry wrestlers than Juan. The challenges of traversal you face are demanding, but it can absolutely be done, and the greatest challenge of Guacamelee 2 is looking at every obstacle and determining how to execute each of Juan’s abilities–only some of which were designed specifically for traversal purposes–to get to a very precise target. Later challenges even require you to change from lucha to chicken Juan and back again for the same obstacle. Guacamelee 2 will frustrate those who don’t cultivate the skills, but the exhilaration of succeeding and opening up a giant chunk of the map as a result is a wonderful motivator.

While you can now access upgrades at any time–rather than only at checkpoints–obtaining upgrades isn’t just a matter of having enough gold but also performing feats in-game. Want to upgrade your health? You’ll need to have found and opened a certain number of chests. Want more power out of a certain move? You’ll need to have killed enough enemies with the basic version first. The side effect is that you’re given further motivation to explore your environment and engage with even the easiest fights. Gold is still needed to make the purchase, however, and things do get mildly unbalanced there as the game goes on–after a few key upgrades, you’ll be able to earn more gold than you can spend just from getting into one fight with a low-level goon.

Straightforward hand-to-hand fights usually aren’t terribly difficult. Every enemy has a weakness, and once you figure out what attack leaves them wide open, it’s just a matter of you learning how best to capitalize. The danger comes from the placement. To the game’s great credit, no gauntlet of enemies in the game is unfair or unbeatable, they just require a keen eye for picking up the numerous, sly visual cues that tell you exactly what’s possible in a given area.

There is, however, another way to earn the enhancements you’ll need to take the fight to Salvador: Challenge Rooms. These tricky, self-contained obstacle courses with a treasure at the end are numerous in Guacamelee 2. The challenges themselves are wickedly conceived and executed, often designed to get you bouncing off walls, flying across rooms, and barrelling towards the ground at maximum speed, just barely missing a fatal hazard. Typically, you’ll need to use every single available move in your repertoire to emerge victorious–anything less than surgical precision and command over the physics and minutiae of everything Juan can do will get you instantly killed.

The issue with the Challenge Rooms is that the reward at the end can vary. When you survive a rough room, and you’re rewarded with a heart piece that extends Juan’s life, you can walk away knowing it was all worth it. Getting through a difficult room but only receiving 400 gold, can feel like a slap in the face, especially when money is no object.

Thankfully, with infinite lives and the game’s generous checkpoints, you’re never too far from where you started should you fail. You will scream and curse at the screen often, but there’s no luck, glitches, or happy accidents involved in conquering Guacamelee 2’s most stringent tasks; there’s only deft, acquired, well-practiced skill.

But there’s more than just steel-hearted challenges waiting in the dark corners of Guacamelee 2’s world, and many of its secret areas hide the best jokes in the game. There’s an RPG dimension where all of Juan’s fights are turn-based and, probably the best of the bunch, a hilariously spiteful take on lootboxes where Juan must spend enormous amounts of gold to simply open a closet door in a poor family’s home to get his reward for saving their lives. Choozo statues–calling back to Metroid’s Chozo statues–are still where Juan gets his main powers, and the script consistently has fun with the idea that smashing each statue is smashing up Uay Chivo’s private and precious property.

Everything about Guacamelee 2 comes off as smarter and more thoughtful than the first game, even while indulging in its self-aware shenanigans and Rick & Morty-esque dimensional hijinks. The game never stops finding new ways to hook you in, to the point that even the most painstaking and intensive playthroughs feel like they just fly by. Saving the numerous timelines in Guacamelee 2 is just as much about partaking in a marvel of devious, meticulous game design as it is about saving Juan and his family from peril.

It’s official: Shenmue III will release on PS4 and PC on August 27, 2019. The news comes from an announcement made by publisher Deep Silver at GamesCom 2018.

First announced in 2015 alongside a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the game, Shenmue III went on to rack up $6,333,295 from nearly 70,000 backers–a record for the most money raised for a video game on the crowd-funding platform. Once the Kickstarter ended, developer Ys Net set up a Slacker Backer campaign to keep collecting money from anyone who wanted to contribute.

Ys Net was originally aiming to launch the the game in December 2017, but wound up delaying it to the following year. In August 2017, Deep Silver signed on to publish Shenmue III, and soon the game was delayed again to 2019. A statement on Deep Silver’s website read, “The extra time will be used to polish the quality of the game even further, to the high standards it deserves and release the product in the best possible timeframe.”

The series kicked off in 1999 and received a sequel in 2002. If you want to see why so many people are fans of this series, you can pick up a collection of Shenmue I & II now on PS4, Xbox One, or PC.

Released in 2011, Rage from id Software was the Doom developer’s first foray into open-world gameplay. Focusing on a survivor’s exploits in the middle of a dangerous post-apocalyptic landscape, with bandits and other threats looking to carve out their own stake on the dwindling resources, you’d face off against dangerous factions and trick out your vehicle to stand up against the many dangers of the land. But upon release, Rage didn’t quite hit all the marks it needed to, and it mostly was forgotten after launch–outside of its notoriously abrupt ending. But shortly before E3 2018, Bethesda and id Software revealed plans to give the series another shot with a far more exuberant and visually vibrant approach compared to its more serious predecessor.

Set 30 years after the original, Rage 2 moves far away from the first game’s lackluster climax, opting for a fresh start in a more colorful and appealing post-apocalyptic setting. Co-developed with Avalanche Studios–the team behind the Just Cause series and Mad Max–the sequel will channel the developer’s strengths for open-world thrills and shenanigans, coupled with the punchy action of id Software’s style of gameplay. During QuakeCon, we spoke with id Software studio director Tim Willits about what’s new for Rage 2, collaborating with Avalanche Studios, and the important, if painful lessons they learned from the previous game.

Can you talk about how the reception has been thus far for Rage 2? It seemed like people had to overcome their surprise with seeing Rage again before becoming interested in what the sequel has to offer.

Tim Willits: Yeah, the reception really has been great because people can see that Rage 2 will deliver on the promise that we had with Rage 1. With the original game, one of the issues we had was that the technology was preventing us from having a true open world. So you had your levels load in your first person, your levels load in racing, and your levels load into the wasteland. Whereas in Rage 2, it’s just all open. There’s no level loading, you just go. You go to your objectives, your missions, you jump out, and you just play.

So you can get a sense for, “Yeah, this feels like an id game.” We worked really closely with the Avalanche team on that true id-style combat. And with the Avalanche’s Apex engine and working with their team and seeing what their experience really kind of taught me, specifically how to kind of think in a more open world–where the scenarios are much less linear, and the story is more open–you can kind of go anywhere and do anything. So it’s really been nice working with this new open world technology.

When you look at Rage 2, are you constantly thinking that this is what the original game should have been?

Willits: Yes. When we first started on the original Rage, we thought that the magic of Megatexture technology was going to solve all these problems–but it didn’t. So [Rage 2] was always kind of the vision, we were just never able to execute it. And then Avalanche was like, “This is what we do,” and working with them has been great, and they like working in the Rage universe because it has an established kind of fiction and setting, and people kind of understand it, but we’ve also set the game in the future.

You’re a new protagonist, you talk, and we have a better story with better action, more vehicles, characters, and weapons. So we can go anywhere and do anything, creatively, but we also come from a known place. So people can relate to it easier, people can understand it easier, people can be like, “I get what that was, and now I see what you’re doing with it.” So it’s been nice for us at id Software and for Avalanche to work in the Rage universe. You don’t have to play the original because we set it far enough in the future, and that it’s a completely different kind of standalone experience.

So was having Avalanche Studios come on board in development an absolutely vital part in Rage 2 getting the greenlight?

Willits: Yes. Yes. Yes, we definitely wanted to do it, but we knew we needed that open-world technology, and a company with experience. So yes, I would say they were critical. One of the most exciting things about this game is how distracting the world is. Like the guys will call me, and they’ll say, “Hey we put this mission in, can you go check it out?” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah. Hold on. I’ll call you back in like an hour.” And then they’ll call me a couple hours later, “What are you doing?” I was like, “Oh sorry, I got the monster truck, and I was trying to jump this ravine,” and so there’s just a lot of emergent fun gameplay that you can just go and do stuff. Like you run across a band of mutants walking through the desert, and you can run them over, and then do cool stuff like that.

The style and tone in this game feels more like the Mad Max: Fury Road approach to the post-apocalypse, where there’s a lot more color and personality. Was that a particular thing you wanted to change from the original game?

Willits: Yes. A lot of movies and games set in the post-apocalypse tend to use every shade of grey and brown. So that’s why we wanted to kind of push everything forward, and get away from this post-apocalyptic world, and make it more of a post-post-apocalyptic, and a lot of that has to do with technology again, where we can build forests and swamps, water, and have this vegetation. There’s many different biomes in the game, which brought a lot of richness to the environment, which also helps you identify where you’re going, where you’ve been.

So the more colorful environments led to more colorful characters, weapons, items, and that ultimately led to a more colorful campaign. We have pink, and we just kind of pushed everything. And people really embraced the kind of color in the game. People love it, they love that kind of signature color.

What would you say were some of the biggest lessons you took away from working on the original game, which are more apparent now that you have spent time with the new game?

Willits: Don’t try to make an open-world game with the technology that’s not open world. [laughs] That one. But, people love to experience emergent gameplay, and that’s signature Avalanche style. Rage really was too directed, it was too, “go here, now do this.” There’s much more freedom of choice, freedom of your ability to play the way you want, and it’s actually more approachable. And yes, I know that what you played seemed very id style, and it kind of forced you in this building, but when you get the real game, you get there, you can knock out all the guys upfront, drop mortars, shoot them from a distance. You can go halfway in, and come back and finish it later. You can do that. You have a lot more choice and opportunity than in the previous game.

And you’re free to actually move around in any direction in the world you want?

Willits: So you start in a home base, so we can teach you some basic mechanics and stuff, it’s very typical. And then once you leave the island–then yeah, that’s it. You go anywhere you want. You can even go all the way to the end and try to fight the boss–more power to you. We have some key characters that you interact with, that kind of propel the story, and you need to do certain things to kind of move the progression along, but you can skip a lot of that as well, if you want. There is no real golden path, but there [are] some golden things you should do before you go before you go and fight the boss.

What was one of the biggest challenges you had to face with this game?

Willits: Convincing everyone to do it, really. It was really opportunity meets preparation. I mean how often do you have Avalanche Studios that wrapped up a game, and most companies today, they lock themselves up for years, and then for us, yeah, the bulk of the team is working on the Doom [sequel], but we have guys working on the other projects. So just the timing of catching them at that moment, when we were ready, and they were ready. But you still have to sell it to people that you work with, “I got this idea, Avalanche and id,” and everyone’s like, “that’s awesome,” but even in the first presentation that we gave to the whole company, the second slide was Avalanche plus id, and most people were like, “That’s cool.” I mean you can’t just call up a studio and say, “Hey, let’s make a game.” It’s all huge things have to shift and move and line up. Like planets, almost.

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CD Projekt Red, the Polish developer behind The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, has acquired a majority stake in another Polish developer, Spokko, that is making a new mobile game.

There is no word on exactly what Spokko is making for CD Projekt Red, but the Witcher studio teased that it is giving Spokko access to at least some of its intellectual properties.

In fact, Spokko came to CD Projekt Red to pitch an idea about one of the studio’s brands. “They approached us with an interesting idea based on one of our brands–an idea we decided to invest in,” CD Projekt boss Adam Kicinski said in a statement (via Gamasutra). “We want to expand our business with innovative concepts and solutions, and the vision presented to us by the Spokko team represents an entirely novel creative angle. The new studio will be largely independent. We intend to provide it with a distinct identity and creative autonomy, in line with the philosophy which has long guided the actions of the CD Projekt Group.”

Spokko co-founder Maciej Weiss said in his own statement that he is “elated” about CD Projekt’s decision to invest in Spokko. He also teased that Spokko’s new game for CD Projekt is “far more advanced and ambitious” as the more casual titles that the team made before. “

“This time around we want to work on a far more advanced and ambitious project, offering new possibilities for gamers,” Weiss said. “It’s a very exciting challenge.”

Spokko, which is based in Warsaw, is currently hiring for a number of positions. Whatever Spokko is making, it won’t be CD Projekt’s first mobile game, as the studio already released Gwent on mobile devices.

In other news about CD Projekt, the studio is expected to make some kind of announcement about Cyberpunk 2077 this week during Gamescom.

New details on The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red’s ambitious RPG Cyberpunk 2077 will be shared during Gamescom on Tuesday, August 21, the studio has announced.

This will be the first big update on the game since it was finally shown off in more detail at E3 2018 back in June. Gamescom is one of the biggest gaming shows on the planet, so it’s no surprise that Cyberpunk 2077 will have a presence there.

It’s not clear what time exactly the new information will be released, but keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest. As of yet, we don’t know the news will be.

At E3, CD Projekt Red showed a CG trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 during Microsoft’s briefing. The company then showed off gameplay behind closed doors; GameSpot was impressed by it.

Cyberpunk 2077 is in development for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, but it doesn’t have a release date yet. For more, check out all of GameSpot’s previous coverage here.

With Lauren Cohan set to exit The Walking Dead this season, alongside original star Andrew Lincoln, the actress has been careful to note this isn’t necessarily the last fans of her will see on the show. Instead, she says Maggie’s story is left “open-ended.” That’s a massive change of course, given that most departing characters on The Walking Dead wind up dead or turning into zombies.

Now, after wrapping her final scenes on the series, for now, Cohan opened up to GameSpot about saying goodbye to The Walking Dead. “I’ve been really busy, so I’ve been definitely distracted from getting too much into my thoughts about it,” she tells GameSpot while promoting her new film Mile 22. “But I had a lot of time to think about it before I came back to Walking Dead this season. And what the show means to me, what my family there means to me, what my time there has meant, and how this role has impacted my life which is immeasurable.”

As for the decision to keep Maggie’s fate on the series open-ended, she’s quick to note it doesn’t mean she’ll return to the show, though that is certainly a possibility. Instead, Cohan feels like this is the proper way to say goodbye to Maggie, as the show reaches the end of her story at this point.

“It feels like the greatest way to honor it is to keep it open-ended because whether it’s about me going back as Maggie or whether it’s about me just taking in, absorbing, and honoring everything I’ve learned there,” she says. “It never leaves me. It will never, ever leave me. And that is I think the greatest compliment you can give to anything and to any group of people because we all came together to make something that we didn’t know was going to have this success that it did.”

In many ways, she also grew up as an actor on the show. “It taught me to trust in such an important, creative way,” she explains. “I don’t think I can ever shake that. Once you have an experience like that, it really dictates the measure of how you want to connect with people going forward in my work.”

Now, as she looks to life after the zombie apocalypse, Cohan is stretching her acting wings. Whether it’s the espionage drama Whiskey Cavalier she’s starring in on ABC or her new action movie Mile 22, in which she stars alongside Mark Wahlberg and Ronda Rousey, she’s taking on projects a far cry from characters simply trying to survive in a dying world.

“I feel so honored that [director Peter Berg] wanted me to be involved in Mile 22 and that Mark wanted me to be involved in Mile 22,” she says. “It was a quick casting process. I made my tape and then I had a little bit of feedback that Pete liked it and wanted to meet me. And when I sat down to meet with him, he told me there on the spot that I had the part. I was so overwhelmed with pride that he wanted me to be involved in one of his projects. And somebody that I respect so much, I was just pinching myself.”

Mile 22 is in theaters on August 17.