Category: Video Games

In case you missed the news, IGN Fan Fest is back and bigger than ever for 2023! If you hadn’t heard of Fan Fest before, IGN Fan Fest is a two-day event, bringing fans exclusive interviews and sneak peeks from some of the biggest movies, shows and games you all love. (You can see everything announced at Fan Fest 2022 for reference).

What better way to celebrate fans than giving out special discounts this week on the coolest merch from your favorite franchises and beyond? Keep reading to see what deals are up for grabs this week only on our very own IGN Store.

TL;DR – What to Expect at Fan Fest 2023

Just before my group of four young astronauts with major, personal conflicts of interest blast off to the red planet, I’m assured by our team leader that, while some corners had to be cut to get our ship spaceworthy, it should do its job just fine. And it does… kind of. Which is a great metaphor for Deliver Us Mars as a whole. This platforming, puzzle-solving, interplanetary adventure is trying to do too much with too little, and it ends up touching down just North of adequate.

The backstory for our plucky, rebellious, sometimes even endearing hero, Kathy, is that she was separated from her father Isaac just before he boarded a colonization mission bound for Mars. Years later, she’s been through astronaut school on a climate-ravaged Earth and a mysterious transmission from Isaac spurs her and her older sister, Claire, to seek seats on the mission to bring the colony ships back. Periodic flashbacks do a respectable job of filling in the complicated and painful story of their family along the way.

The launch sequence from Cape Canaveral is among the strongest. It has you perform various checks and landing procedures that feel authentic and tactile before watching through the front window as your ship, the Zephyr, leaves Earth’s atmosphere with no cuts or loading screens. You’re not briefed on any of these procedures ahead of time, which led to a lot of me swiveling my mouse pointer around frantically trying to find the highlighted switch for the internal power interval or whatever, but it was neat once I got the hang of it.

Outside these scripted sequences, Deliver Us Mars consists of first- and third-person explorations of an orbital facility and the surface of Mars itself, featuring some fairly simple puzzle-solving and occasional, frustrating platforming. There are several sections where you have to bounce wireless power beams around, matching the voltage on doors and terminals to get to the next area. They’re generally not too difficult, but I found some of the trickier ones satisfying to solve.

What wasn’t nearly as satisfying were these obnoxious climbing wall segments. You have to click the left and right mouse button at the same time to grab onto a wall to begin with, and you have to do so with enough room that you don’t slide off of the climbing surface. But this action is so unresponsive that whether you can get a purchase or not feels more random than anything, especially in some cases where you have to jump at an angle. Also, one of the moves you need to progress in some of the later segments is never explained at all, and I discovered it by accident when I was just trying out random buttons in frustration after I’d been stuck for several minutes. Pro tip: You can hold S and press spacebar to jump to a wall that’s behind you.

This lack of direction even extends to some segments of the main story where you have several different ways you can go, but aren’t told at all which is the right one and can end up wandering way off in the wrong direction. There is an option under Accessibility to always display quest markers, and while I don’t necessarily need a big star constantly guiding my every step, it could really use some sort of middle ground. If you tell me to go to Ark Vita without ever giving me a hint about where it is, that seems like you’re really leaving me to twist in the wind.

At least the characters are endearing. What few of them there are, anyway. Neil Newborn (whom you may remember as Resident Evil: Village’s maniacal Heisenberg) gives a great performance as Isaac, a complex character with conflicted motivations. Kathy herself is brought to life by Ellise Chappell, who gives a convincing performance with a wide emotional range. And the story is respectable, with the mystery of what happened to the Martian colonists pulling me forward at each turn.

The character models can’t really keep up with it, though. They have a very doll-like, uncanny valley look to them – when we get to see their faces at all. A lot of backstory is delivered through these pre-recorded holograms where hairless, faceless crash test dummies pose in place while dialogue plays. It really looks like placeholder art you’d see in an unfinished game, and the developers just never had the time or resources to replace it. There is also a whole chapter toward the end that jumps from one scene to something completely unrelated, giving me the sense that they cut a significant amount of plot without doing a very good job of stitching it back together.

Performance, especially during cutscenes, is also a major issue. My RTX 3080-powered system exceeds the recommended specs, but in many cinematics I would see my framerate drop below 10 fps, even with DLSS on. I had to turn off the per-strand hair rendering altogether because it kept glitching out. In regular gameplay, it’s usually fine. But this is clearly not a very well-optimized project.

The mighty Kemono – the creatures inhabiting Wild Hearts, the new monster hunting game by Koei Tecmo and EA – aren’t easy. In fact, they’re hard enough that even one of the game’s directors has trouble defeating his own creations.

“I have quite a lot of difficulties,” Wild Hearts co-director Takuto Edagawa says with a laugh. “When we look at [the toughest Kemono in the game], those ones I die [against]. If I’m not properly prepared, I’ll go in and I’ll be killed.”

But luckily for Edagawa, a helping hand is always close by — literally. His development partner, co-director Kotaro Hirata, smiles and says, “I’m totally awesome at [Wild Hearts], actually.”

The Omega Force division of Koei Tecmo is primarily known for Dynasty Warriors, the wild power fantasy series that sees players effortlessly taking out hundreds of foes at a time. With Wild Hearts, which will seek to capture the appeal of Capcom’s popular Monster Hunter series, Koei Tecmo is well aware it is developing a very difficult game. Edagawa and Hirata want you to fear the Kemono, the nature-infused beasts that inhabit Wild Hearts’ world.

But the development has also been careful to introduce several mechanics to encourage players new to the monster hunting genre to give Wild Hearts a try.

How Omega Force Crafted Wild Hearts’ Karakuri System

What does set Wild Hearts apart is, in fact, crafting. Players will be able to take advantage of the new Karakuri crafting system, which gives players the power to instantly construct objects during the heat of battle. Whether it’s a box to climb on to launch yourself closer to the massive Kemono, or a spring that helps you quickly evade devastating incoming attacks, the Karakuri are designed to give players the edge.

The Karakuri crafting system came about when Edagawa and Hirata realized the beasts were too difficult for players to defeat. Rather than nerfing the Kemono’s abilities, the two decided to give the player the power of the Karakuri to even the score.

“Before [the Karakuri system] came along, the Kemono were way too strong for the players,” Hirata said. “They were just massive creatures with too much power. But then the Karakuri idea came in, and then we realized, ‘the Karakuri system might be too strong now!’… We wanted to make sure the Kemono were really strong and really difficult to beat, because we wanted the players to feel the sense that it was a challenging endeavor. But trying to find that right balance between the actual strength of the Kemono versus the strength of the players was the hardest balance to figure out.”

The directors say the difference between great Wild Hearts players and those who are still figuring it out will be the mastery of the Karakuri system. For players struggling against the nature-infused Kemono, Wild Hearts’ flexible multiplayer support will make calling in help a breeze. Wild Hearts supports online multiplayer for up to three people, and Hirata said watching how more experienced players use the Karakuri can teach rookies very useful strategies.

Unlike Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise, Wild Hearts also supports crossplay, allowing players on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC to tackle the game together.

“[Crossplay] was actually quite a significant decision for us, and it was one of the toughest things we actually had to work with in development,” Edagawa said. “EA actually said that cross platform play is definitely a plus, and so we thought, ‘Then okay, we’ll do it.’ And ultimately we’re very happy that we decided that… When we think of the fact that we want more people to play, and people from more diverse environments to play, it was definitely worth the additional effort that was required to be able to do this.”

A New Hunting Franchise for Omega Force

While Hirata and Edagawa shied away from drawing comparisons to Capcom’s hunting juggernaut (the two didn’t use the word “Monster” during the entirety of the interview, referring to the beasts in Wild Hearts as “Kemono”, “creatures”, and “prey”, exclusively), it’s impossible to not look at Wild Hearts and see the similarities to Monster Hunter. The two titles are cut from the same cloth, both focusing on the central gameplay loop of hunting creatures to improve your gear, and using that better gear to take down even more powerful foes.

Given Monster Hunter World’s sales success, it’s easy to understand why the Dynasty Warriors studio wanted to take another stab at a hunting action game.

Omega Force previously developed the Toukiden series, which saw three games released between 2013 and 2016. The franchise never caught on in the West, causing a long hiatus for hunting action games from the studio.

Wild Hearts is a fresh start in the genre for Omega Force, and the directors have high hopes for the game beyond this week’s launch. The studio will continue to support the game with free, post-launch updates that will add new Kemono for players to face off against.

There are currently no plans for microtransactions, with Edagawa saying, “when it comes to gameplay and content, players will not be charged anything for any of the actual gameplay.”

If the developers do implement microtransactions down the line, it will strictly apply to cosmetics. Beyond that, Hirata said Koei Tecmo wants Wild Hearts to be a new core franchise for the studio.

“We wanted to build a new pillar for Omega Force. I think in the past we had experiences with the Warriors series and also Toukiden as well, but… When we talk about the reach to a global audience, those titles were not quite there yet in appealing to a wider audience. So one of the things we really wanted to work on and one of the things that started off this project was for Omega Force to have a game that had a global appeal, that was accepted more by a much wider audience.”

Wild Hearts is out this February 17 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer at IGN