Update: Physical release confirmed.
Update #2 :
It’s been confirmed a physical version of Raiden NOVA will be released for the Switch. It will be arriving at some point in November this year. Once again, the digital version of the game will arrive on the Switch eShop on 31st October 2024.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Freedom Wars, the fan-favorite multiplayer action game frequently hailed as one of the PlayStation Vita’s best games, is officially coming back. Bandai Namco announced today that Freedom Wars will be getting a remastered version on modern platforms, bringing with it 4K resolution, 60fps support, and other enhancements.
First released on Vita back in 2014, Freedom Wars is a dystopian third-person multiplayer action game similar to Monster Hunter that supports up to eight players. It was originally developed by the now-defunct Japan Studio, which was merged into Team Asobi in 2021. Freedom Wars’ servers were turned off that same year. The remastered version is being developed by Dimps Corporation, which was able to gain permission from Sony to use the license.
Despite Freedom Wars’ status as a niche favorite, it was able to develop a cult following and earn a spot on our list of the 25 best Vita games.
“Freedom Wars’ emphasis on fighting, looting, and upgrading creates an addictive gameplay loop for Vita owners. It certainly isn’t the only Monster Hunter clone available on Vita, but it’s perhaps its most successful one,” we wrote at the time. “The staying power of its addictive fight-loot-upgrade cycle is enhanced by deep gameplay, customization options, and a really interesting online component made it one of our favorite portable releases of 2014.”
In addition to graphical enhancements, Freedom Wars Remastered will feature an overhauled weapon crafting system and additional difficulty settings, among other additions. Nevertheless, we wrote in our hands-on preview that it feels similar to how it was 10 years ago.
“Part of me sees Freedom Wars Remastered more as a novelty – a Vita classic that is now at least playable on modern platforms with its most important parts unsullied, for better or worse. It’s fundamentally the 2014 game with some quality-of-life necessities,” our previewer Michael Higham wrote. “It was a perfect fit for Sony’s last handheld, and a blast to sink hours into, competing with other Panopticons across your region and reducing your prison sentence in futility. I’m not sure if it’s going to take the same way it did 10 years ago, but I do believe this is a big win for preservation and making a cult classic much more accessible in a faithful form.
In the same preview, director Takashi Tsukamoto calls the remaster a neccessary first step on the path toward eventually make a sequel.
“We’ve been wanting to create something like this for a long time, but we really didn’t have the opportunity. As Dimps [the development team], we’ve been looking for opportunities to release something, maybe a sequel – something related to Freedom Wars. However, it was very difficult to set up a team and nothing was really lining up. At some point, we said maybe a remastered version of the original would be good.”
As for why it’s taken this long to revisit Freedom Wars, Tsukamoto said, “The opportunity never really presented itself until now. We were able to come to an agreement with Sony regarding the license and they were able to partner up with Bandai Namco, and it just so happens that it’s about 10 years later that all of it started coming to fruition.”
Tsukamoto says he hopes the new remaster will be successful enough to “take the next step into potentially releasing a sequel,” adding, “As much as we’d like to share it with you, we don’t know if there’s going to be a sequel yet of course, but if there is a sequel, we have tons of ideas we’d want to implement into said sequel.”
Freedom Wars Remastered is set to release on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam, and Nintendo Switch on January 10, 2025. In the meantime, check out our list of the best 2024 games so far.
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
Ah yes, Freedom Wars, the seemingly last bastion of the PlayStation Vita, is finally moving onwards from Sony’s retired handheld. With the help of Bandai Namco, developer Dimps (partially made up of members from the original Freedom Wars development team) is bringing the Monster Hunter-style action-RPG to modern platforms. It became a hit as a Vita exclusive in 2014 for its unique persistent world mechanics and dystopian sci-fi premise that made it more than just something that played off its influences. And I can tell you first-hand that there’s a certain excitement to Freedom Wars Remastered since it’s as true to the original release as you could possibly expect.
I had the chance to get roughly four hours of hands-on time with a preview build of Freedom Wars Remastered on PlayStation 5. After spending about an hour with the tutorial to shake off the decade of rust, I jumped back into high-level operations. In the following three hours, I cleared several instanced missions hunting massive monster-like machines and rescuing civilians from their clutches – and unwittingly tacked on extra years to my prison sentence by acting a fool back in the Panopticon you call home.
If you’re not familiar with Freedom Wars, or need a refresher since it’s been quite some time, it takes place in a dystopia set in the far future where the surviving population fights over limited resources. People are either wardens running a Panopticon or prisoners (aka Sinners) stuck in indentured servitude and forced to fight for “a greater good.” You play as a Sinner, and by taking on operations and contributing resources to your Panopticon, you shave years off your…1,000,000-year prison sentence. Aside from sending yourself to instanced hunts, there is a story that develops as you get deeper in operations and learn more about fellow Sinners on your prison block.
You’re also under constant surveillance by an android companion, called an Accessory, who applies disciplinary action, and you earn little bits of freedom as you clear more missions. Something worth noting here is that the remaster features expanded voice acting and English audio – that includes the androids, which has been done oddly. Android characters are voiced through a primitive text-to-speech style modulator that clearly mispronounces words; it’s said to be intentional to add to the creepy dystopian vibe, but it comes off rather tacky. Overall, it’s a dark premise, for sure, but it’s satirical in a way that has only gotten more bleak as time goes on.
I talked to Takashi Tsukamoto, the original director and now producer for the remaster, and Tetsunosuke Seki, the director for the remaster, and they reflected on the commentary of Freedom Wars. Tsukamoto saw new developments in Japan as inspiration for the dystopian vision of Freedom Wars’ story, saying, “When the original version came out 10 years ago, there was a thing called My Number in Japan, similar to the US with social security numbers. This was a very new concept in Japan 10 years ago. Citizens of Japan didn’t have a social security equivalent and since it was a brand new idea coming up, there were a lot of people who were against it. Like, don’t put a number on us. I guess living in a first-world country like Japan, they always have your information on hand. You’re on file. It’s kind of like you’re being in constant surveillance. When you’re walking around the city, there’s cameras everywhere. There’s a little bit of a parallel between that and this game. Obviously, we’re not in a prison, but the idea of being in constant surveillance and people having our information was a very strong concept we wanted to work with when creating this game. In the game these people are prisoners with million-year sentences, it’s not a one-to-one, obviously. I mean, I hope I’m not a prisoner!”
The story and premise remain intact in the remaster, exactly as it was in the 2014 release, and that faithfulness extends to the gameplay mechanics, for better and worse. Aside from the control scheme being updated to make sense for modern gamepads, the gameplay is pretty much one-to-one as I remember it. Lock-on targeting, third-person shooting, melee combos, the Thorn system, all of that is unchanged – so if you thought it was janky back then, you’ll definitely find it janky now. Don’t come in expecting it to be streamlined or revamped to feel like a new release. However, there’s a novelty to the way Freedom Wars experimented with unique mechanics and brought it all together in a fully fledged action-RPG on Vita.
While every character has a melee weapon for basic light and/or heavy attack combos and a firearm to take shots from a distance, it’s the Thorns that made Freedom Wars standout. Thorns are akin to hookshots or Spider-Man’s webs – you can attach these to enemies to slam them on the ground or zip right onto them to get in melee range. It’s also the key to traversal, letting you reach high-up places or quickly dart around the battlefield to stay nimble. Considering it’s a little sticky since it remains unchanged, it still works really well as an intuitive gameplay mechanic and a premier feature that made Freedom Wars a ton of fun to begin with.
There’s still a thrill to attaching your Thorn to a specific part of a beastly machine, frantically mashing the circle button to pull it to the ground, leaving it staggered and vulnerable to melee combos. And it’s also a novelty to use your Thorn to pull yourself toward a towering robot to mount it and sever one of its limbs before backflipping off to avoid getting tossed down, not unlike the rush we all got that same year scurrying up the backs of the Titans in Titanfall. Thorns serve other functions as a means for utility on the battlefield, like setting up traps, throwing out area-of-effect heals for your party, or casting powerful shields. It’s not terribly complex, but there’s beauty in its simplicity, and I still got a kick out of it while playing the remaster.
It remains my favorite thing in Freedom Wars – using my Thorn to latch onto the pod of an Abductor to rip out the hostage it’s captured, and jumping off of it with the hostage in your arms before dashing back to safety. Not only are you caught in the fray of your party fighting this huge robot, but you’re risking heavy damage if you can’t execute it swiftly enough. And man, it feels good to get away with it scot-free.
Because this is a faithful remake, I found the structure of operations – the instanced missions that mainly drive the gameplay loop – to be somewhat repetitive. Even at Code 4 operations, which are several hours deep into the story, many of the maps and enemy types are reused. Different missions pop up to add variety, such as hostage rescues, wave-based encounters, or straight-up brawls of attrition against hulking damage sponges that’ll take 10 to 15 minutes to conquer. However, it tends to fall into a routine after long sessions; not that it’s absolved of its shortcomings that were apparent back in 2014, but the repetition was better suited as a handheld game played in shorter bursts.
Freedom Wars doesn’t necessarily evolve fundamentally as it goes on, and from what I can recall from my time on the Vita version and now with the remaster, you settle into a playstyle and stick with it throughout. You’re still upgrading weapons with the materials you gather and earning new ones from mission to mission. There’s a decent amount of weapon types to mess around with before settling on what works for you – personally, I loved the chainsaw sword for chunky melee damage and the burst-shot rifle that could melt fodder from a distance. The one quality-of-life change worth noting here is that weapon crafting and upgrades are streamlined to take the old randomized aspects out of the process. This aligns with crafting systems seen in modern games, and this was a deliberate decision according to Tsukamoto and Seki.
The biggest idea behind Freedom Wars was the persistent world aspect of Panopticons. Players would sign onto their own Panopticons based on region and the missions they take on would all contribute to its status, and you would be ranked against rival Panopticons in perpetuity, as if it was this ongoing multiplayer competition without having to do direct PvP. That remains intact with the remaster. Traditional multiplayer and co-op was a major part of the original Freedom Wars, though, and it’s also being preserved. Although I didn’t get to try it out, Tsukamoto and Seki both said that matchmaking has been revamped to reflect that of modern games, which will be a vast improvement over the original’s system.
Part of me sees Freedom Wars Remastered more as a novelty – a Vita classic that is now at least playable on modern platforms with its most important parts unsullied, for better or worse. It’s fundamentally the 2014 game with some quality-of-life necessities. It was a perfect fit for Sony’s last handheld, and a blast to sink hours into, competing with other Panopticons across your region and reducing your prison sentence in futility. I’m not sure if it’s going to hit the same way it did 10 years ago, but I do believe this is a big win for preservation, making a cult classic much more accessible in a faithful form. Freedom Wars was experimental for its time, and it tried new ideas that are great to see holding up relatively well – even just constantly adding years to your sentence for minor infractions as you roam your prison block was an annoying but good goof that fed into the game’s overall themes.
Novelty or not, both Seki and Tsukamoto stated that remastering the original game is the necessary first step in hopes of revitalizing the series. Tsukamoto said, “We’ve been wanting to create something like this for a long time, but we really didn’t have the opportunity. As Dimps [the development team], we’ve been looking for opportunities to release something, maybe a sequel – something related to Freedom Wars. However, it was very difficult to set up a team and nothing was really lining up. At some point, we said maybe a remastered version of the original would be good.” As for why it made sense now to revisit the series, he continued, “The opportunity never really presented itself until now. We were able to come to an agreement with Sony regarding the license and they were able to partner up with Bandai Namco, and it just so happens that it’s about 10 years later that all of it started coming to fruition.”
I followed up by asking about how they’ll define success for the remaster and how a sequel would factor into their plans in the future. Tsukamoto said, “What success would look like is for this game to do well, and well enough that we could take the next step into potentially releasing a sequel.” He continued by saying, “As much as we’d like to share it with you, we don’t know if there’s going to be a sequel yet of course, but if there is a sequel, we have tons of ideas we’d want to implement into said sequel.”
It’s pretty wild to see a Vita game remastered with many of its assets true to what they looked like in original form. On PlayStation 5, Freedom Wars Remastered runs at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, which is really nice, although it does create a sort of uncanny valley effect when the character models, animations, and environments haven’t gotten a makeover. I also played a bit of the Nintendo Switch version in handheld mode and though it’s considerably lower resolution and only ran at 30 fps – it’s still very much playable, but it’s a bit disappointing to see a former Vita game struggle on Switch. While it’s definitely not a technical marvel by any measure, everything that made the original a Vita classic either remains intact or has been touched up to mitigate frustrations not present in modern games.
You’ll be able to start serving and working time off of your 1,000,000-year sentence when Freedom Wars Remastered launches on January 10, 2025 for PlayStation 4 and 5, PC via Steam, and Nintendo Switch.
EA is preparing to launch an ambitious new social app that it is says will use its existing technology to mix real-life and virtual sports.
Announced during today’s Investor Day, the new app functions similarly to existing sports apps from companies like ESPN, featuring news, scores, stats, and highlights. The main hook, Chief Experiences Officer David Tinson says, is its tie-ins with EA’s various sports games, including the possibility of unlocking prizes like Ultimate Team cards based on the sizzle reel.
“Our thesis is simple: With the right products, features, and capabilities, a significant portion of hyper valuable consumer attention is available for a fraction of the cost,” Tinson says.
Ultimately, Tinsons says EA’s goal is to create a social app that allows fans to follow their favorite sports and teams while integrating in-game rewards and community elements.
Tinson showcased a number of features that incorporate EA’s technology, including a system that appears to seamelssly translate real-life moments into virtual highlights that can be viewed from any angle using the EA Sports FC engine. EA is also introducing predictive simulations that not only simulate upcoming matches, but can also questions like “who would win between 85 Bears and the 07 Patriots.”
Based on Tinson’s presentation, the app appears to make heavy use of AI, featuring prompts that allows users to create its simulations. Generative AI was a big part of EA’s overall presentation, and was touted repeatedly in relation to franchises like The Sims and its sports games.
The EA Sports app will initially be focused around soccer, making it an extension of one of EA’s most popular and successful sports sims in EA Sports FC. Support for other sports will also be added over time, with the NHL, NHL, F1, and NCAA Football all highlighted at various points.
The new app will soft-launch in Space this fall, and will be supported on iOS and Android devices. In the meantime, EA Sports FC is set to enter early access this week, with a full release on September 27. Check out our full list of global release times right here.
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
Behaviour Interactive is canceling Project T, a four-person co-op title set in the world of Dead by Daylight.
The studio announced the news with a post on its X/Twitter today, saying that it came to the decision after hearing feedback from those who participated in its Insiders Program. Project T had begun testing with insiders earlier this year.
“Following the playtest in July, we ran through internal risk assessment from a product and commercial perspective,” Behaviour said in the statement, which you can read in full below. “While a number of players expressed appreciation for what they played, unfortunately, the outcome of this deep analysis yielded unsatisfactory overall results.”
— Behaviour Interactive (@Behaviour) September 17, 2024
Behaviour revealed a behind-the-scenes look at Project T back in May, but little was known about the horror action-shooter otherwise. It was to be set in a region called The Backwater, and Behaviour promised it would expand the world of Dead by Daylight with “new characters, gameplay, and settings – as well as a few familiar elements for those in the know.”
It was being developed by Midwinter Entertainment, but had never set a release window, with the FAQ on its website saying it was still “currently in the very early stages of development.” “It is not our goal to use the Insider Program to finetune a nearly complete game, but rather to create it alongside you at a stage where your feedback can matter most,” it added.
No further details were revealed regarding other projects at the studio, although Dead by Daylight continues to get new content. It added a Castlevania chapter late last month, and teased a number of other big additions during its 8th anniversary stream in May.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Patch notes galore.
Digital Eclipse has released a substantial update for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on the Switch, adding in a bunch of new features and bug fixes.
Released on 23rd May 2024, Wizardry is a complete remake of the original 1980 classic, adding in revamped visuals and modern conveniences, yet retaining the same brutal difficulty and unmatched depth. We gave it a resounding score of 8/10 in our review, noting a few pacing issues and an inability to skip certain combat animations (which, by the looks of things, seems to have been resolved entirely with the new update).
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
The doors of the Empyreum Hotel are opening! Step into a world of madness and fun with Welcome to Empyreum, an exciting cooperative game for up to four players that promises laughter and unique challenges. Developed by the Madrid-based studio Tapioca Games, Welcome to Empyreum will arrive on September 20 on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
From cleaning up puddles and vacuuming dust, to taking care of alien babies, watching over kleptomaniac penguins or serving food to jelly bears, players will never know what to expect in this hotel full of surprises and original guests.
Imagine a mysterious hotel where you and your friends lose what you love the most…
In Welcome to Empyreum, players will take on the role of one of the newly hired employees. Their goal? To keep this enigmatic hotel clean while cooperating (or not) to earn the best reviews from the guests.
Although their personalities and stories are very disparate, the four main characters have one thing in common: they all lost something when they arrived at the hotel! Tommy has been transformed into a humanoid lizard, Miriam can’t remember someone very important to her, Apolo can’t play the piano anymore and everything seems to be going wrong for Elisabeth – what a way to start a new job!
Making beds, vacuuming, or mopping are tasks you’ll need to agree on!
To recover what they’ve lost, they must work their way up through the hotel, floor by floor, until they reach the director’s office, Beatriz, facing unique challenges in each scenario. From washing sheets to make the beds, vacuuming, spraying carnivorous plants, or feeding gummy bears, anything is possible! You and your friends must be ready for any unexpected situations.
Some guests will test your cooperation.
The players’ progression involves not just cleaning rooms but also uncovering the mysteries of the Empyreum Hotel and its intriguing director, Beatriz. Talk to the guests between levels or take the opportunity to change outfits; each character has their own story and motivation for working at the hotel, adding an extra layer of depth and humor to the game.
Romantic suites for couples of cats, a spa, a nursery and even a medieval castle haunted by ghosts – the Hotel Empyreum is designed to meet the needs of all types of guests, and there can’t be a single upset customer!
The hotel’s stage is one of the hotspots for our guests. Don’t miss the chance to chat with them!
Welcome to Empyreum combines the best of party games with a unique and captivating setting, offering a gaming experience that promises to be as fun as it is challenging.
Are you ready to check in? Welcome to Empyreum will arrive on September 20 on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. Whether solo or with companions, are you up for the challenge?
Tapioca Games
Imagine a place where action, strategy, and simulation intertwine in an amazing way. With characters like Tommy, the narcissistic influencer; Miriam, the desperate mother; Elisabeth, the fortunate girl; and Apolo, the depressed musician, you will embark on a unique journey in this enchanted place that takes away what they want the most.
To recover it, they must work there, floor by floor until reaching the office of the director, Beatriz. Tasks range from making the bed or vacuuming to other hilarious jobs like taking care of alien babies, running away from ghosts, fumigating carnivorous plants, or feeding jelly to gummy bears – get ready to live unforgettable moments!
Welcome to Empyreum offers a party experience like no other, bringing the best of party games to a unique setting: an enchanted hotel full of comical and improbable situations. Team coordination and communication are key to maintaining order and controlling the madness of this place, but remember, the customer is always right (even lazy sloths and candy-loving gummy bears)!
Book your room for an individual experience or bring your friends to enjoy team action. Up to 4 players can immerse themselves in this world full of challenges and laughter, where the better the cooperation, the cleaner the rooms, and the happier the hosted customers. Do you like games that appeal to both children and adults alike? Look no further, because Welcome to Empyreum is the ultimate choice for experiencing unparalleled moments with your loved ones!
The post Co-op Fun Awaits– the Chaotic Welcome to Empyreum Arrives on September 20! appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Most sequels to successful games are safe, conservative iterations on the ideas of the original, but not here: Frostpunk 2 is a bold follow-up that takes an almost entirely different approach to its city-building strategy. It’s set in the same bleak, iced-over world where people struggle to survive, but it’s refreshing that we’re not retreading the same frozen ground. Everything from how you place buildings to how you manage resources and heat your city is a new spin, and its political system is a creative way to interact with the people of New London that does a great job of conveying a sense of quid-pro-quo negotiation in a representative democracy. The zoomed-out perspective does mean that we lose a lot of the feeling of intimacy that made the first game truly stand out, but there’s no shortage of morally questionable decisions to make as you’re building your society.
A frosty atmosphere is strong, thanks to bone-chilling weather effects and dramatic music that swells as tension in your city increases. Coming from a replay of the first Frostpunk, I was initially missing the ability to see people walking in the streets. That said, they do pop up with comments on your actions and an announcer on the loudspeaker gives occasionally amusing remarks on current events, so it doesn’t feel like a ghost town. The map itself is obviously fairly uniform because it’s covered in white snow and ice, but there are features like mountains and cliffs to give each area its own look, and as you build it becomes much more colorful thanks to intricate districts and the automatically created power lines which pulse red when tension runs high.
The five-chapter Story mode serves as something of a tutorial for the sandbox Utopia Builder mode, though aside from a few short cutscenes there isn’t a whole lot of plot driving it. There’s little here beyond a direct bridge between the events of the first game and this one as you take over the city of New London, with the vast majority of story coming in brief, affecting vignettes about life in the frozen wastes. There’s a lot to cover as you learn to place and expand multi-tile districts for housing, food production, resource/fuel extraction, industry, and logistics, each with its own set of upgrade buildings, plus single-tile hub buildings with adjacency bonuses.
It’s an interesting city-building puzzle with a couple of questionable quirks: The frostbreaking system, which requires you to first clear out batches of tiles before you can build on them, makes sense in the fiction but feels like busywork that just slows down how quickly you can act on a plan. It’s also frustrating that you can’t reposition any single tile without demolishing the entire district and starting over, but at least you get all of your resources back so all it costs you is time.
When you zoom out to the vast and even more barren Frostlands map, the main features are the very Game of Thrones-inspired clockwork icons for your colony and outposts. Your scouts discover these as you send them on dispatch missions to explore and bring home many of the resources and population you’ll need to keep your colony going. It’s much more built out than the original’s version of the Frostlands, in that you must connect the resources you find there with roads to bring back a steady stream of them, then found and upgrade more outposts and even full satellite colonies to keep New London going. It’s very much a side activity, but the rewards there are so crucial to building your population that I was motivated to check it frequently and keep the resources coming.
The main thing that bothered me here is that you can’t see your factions at the bottom of the screen when you’re not in your main city, so if things start going wrong as you’re off building your resource operation it can get out of hand before you notice. I’d also have loved to be able to zoom out further, since the Frostland maps can get huge and scanning for where my scouts just finished a mission takes too long.
The challenge of feeding your colonies’ central generator’s need for fuel and keeping the city supplied with heat, food, and materials is fairly conventional and straightforward for supply chain games, though in a few major ways it does become more complicated at times. For one thing, massive Whiteout storms hit every so often and shut down the entire Frostlands map, disrupting supply chains and leaving you to subsist on your stockpiles for months at a time. That means you can’t just produce enough to keep the lights on – you need to overproduce as hard as you can to avoid having your people freeze to death by the hundreds.
Speaking of freezing, I did hit a couple of bugs with the interface, such as where I had to click on certain dialogue choices a bunch of times before they’d register. Sometimes the buttons on the UI would overlap and clicking it would register on the button underneath instead of the one that was more visible on top. It’s also a little annoying that it locks up for several seconds during an autosave, but there was nothing severe. It’s worth noting though, that – as with most games of this type – the higher your population goes, the more performance is prone to decline.
Arguably the centerpieces of Frostpunk 2, though, are its faction and government systems. This is where you must strike a balance between opposing groups of citizens by keeping promises around how they’d like to see you run the place. You don’t lose by having your colony wiped out (it would be quite a challenge to get the population down to zero) – instead, you have to worry about your people losing trust in you or the tension level rising to the point where they boot you out of office. It’s all too easy for a shortage of any of the resources to send you into a downward spiral where everybody’s mad at everybody else and society collapses.
My first time through I made the rookie mistake of assuming I could blow off one faction entirely if I kept the others happy, and at first it seemed to work. You can research whatever technologies you like with the push of a button (and a small fee) but passing laws – often needed to actually enact what you’ve unlocked through research – can only be done through the Council, which is made of 100 representatives of your city’s factions. Frostpunk 2 has a fun way of displaying the votes, where members’ seats light up as they cast theirs, and any vote you don’t lock down in advance is a roll of the dice. Bribing – or rather persuading – a faction to vote your way is a matter of making promises to do something on their behalf. Most of the time they want you to research a specific tech or pass a law that aligns with that faction’s worldview, but sometimes they’ll take cold, hard cash (ironically called heatstamps). Even so, factions won’t negotiate at all if a proposal is against their worldview, so some votes are still nailbiters.
I had a lot of fun with the fact that, if you play your cards right, you can often be rewarded for doing what you’re planning on doing anyway. The interface helpfully tells you which version of each research item (most have different options that might, for instance, cost less to build and boost production but pollute more or create tension) is supported by which faction. Armed with that information, you can go to them and see if they’ll ask you for it, and if they do you’ll build extra trust when you research it. Similarly, it’s always hilarious to promise a bothersome faction they get to choose the next law that’ll be voted on in order to get their relationship bar out of the red, only to then whip votes against it and see them get nothing out of it.
So I could usually pass any law I wanted with a supermajority of support, ignoring the extremists who were upset when I pushed through policies like Free Essentials to feed the people or Accept All Outsiders to boost my population, whether they could work or not (hitting population numbers is one of the main goals). However, there’s a catch: until you unlock some of the heavier-handed and authoritarian policies, that approach leaves you vulnerable to protests that shut down production in your districts, injure bystanders and destroy equipment, and of course raise tension through the roof. That means you’ll have to come back to the table and negotiate, which can be difficult to do while riots are slowing everything to a crawl. You do get more tools to deal with dissenters as you go, up to and including rounding them up and leaving them to freeze to death in outdoor prisons (I eventually won the story campaign by finally deporting the troublemaking faction to their own colony) but many of those cause tension to rise and trust to fall when used. There’s no easy answer, which makes it a compelling problem to solve.
My first run of the Story mode took about 15 hours, including a restart when I figured out exactly how bad my initial decisions had been. I’ve since put in another 20 in the Utopia Builder sandbox mode with objectives like founding multiple colonies with 10,000 residents or building tall with 50,000 in your home base, and there’s a promising amount of replay potential in Frostpunk 2. Not only are there six major factions (and their radicalized offshoots) to mix and match – and seven different Frostlands maps to play on – but there are different paths you can take by leaning into different philosophies that unlock different radical ideas. Doing a run on a higher difficulty than Officer – the one recommended for Frostpunk veterans – would certainly require spending more time getting to know the factions’ preferences than I did on my first successful run to avoid angering them unnecessarily.
I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost something important, though, in expanding from the small-scale perspective of the first game to a multi-colony big picture – one where you can only see your people when you hit a button to do a close-up to observe a handful of them milling around. For instance, seeing a message pop up that 93 children died in a mine collapse doesn’t really hit the same when it soon vanishes without obvious repercussions. It was a lot easier for me to think of those kids as just stats on a spreadsheet when they never even had names that I can view in the graveyard, like I could in Frostpunk. Frostpunk 2 is just too big for that.
“Back up a second,” you might say. “What were 93 children doing in a mine in the first place?” Well I’m glad you asked. In one of my smarter decisions as Steward of New London – one that was enabled by my choice to go with an apprenticeship system instead of mandatory schooling for children because it increased my workforce – I opted to send them in to gather coal that was inaccessible to full-grown adults. The other option was to blast the way clear, but that would’ve given me less coal. No one could’ve foreseen anything going wrong with that plan!
Forstpunk 2 is always throwing decisions like that at you and then serving up consequences, often making me feel a little dirty for picking the one that gave me the boost the spreadsheet said I needed despite the human cost. So while it might not land the punches as effectively, it certainly takes a lot of swings, and those add up.
Frostpunk 2 was an ambitious gambit. With survival achieved, and the introduction’s excellently sinister advisor whispering evil Tory ideas, the whole city you built in Frostpunk is now just the headquarters for a sprawling expansion effort, and your rule is no longer absolute. Rather than retread the same “prepare for ultra-Winter” ground, your biggest obstacle will likely be your own people, now formed into shifting political parties, and looking outward with colonial eyes. The result is a complicated, laborious survival citybuilder that’s two parts compelling, and one part frustrating for the wrong reasons.
Let me get a peek-at-you.
There’s no shortage of adorable animated Pokémon content out there (heck, most of it is enough to bring a smile to our faces), but The Pokémon Company’s latest effort, ‘Chasing the Moon,’ is one of the best-looking ones we’ve seen in a while.
Released by TPC’s official Japanese YouTube account to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, this new short sees a lonely Pikachu trying its best to hunt down a Lunala and get a good view of the full moon. Okay, it might not be the most riveting story, but the visual style is super cute, with each ‘mon looking almost like it’s made of card against the gorgeous hand-drawn backdrops.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
