Shoulders Of Giants is out today on the Epic Games Store. When we first saw the trailer for Shoulders Of Giants, a few people on team responded with murmurings of “What the hell is this?”, which increased in frequency and volume as more bizarre things appeared on screen. I sort of did what the Goonies do when they first find the map to One Eyed Willie’s treasure, or what anyone in Pulp Fiction does when they open the briefcase: “Wooooaaaah.”
Consider the progress of information. It’s a sci-fi roguelike best played, I think, in 4-player online co-op. You play a sword-wielding combat mech. You also control a small frog standing on the mech. You drop onto proc-gen planets overrun by a kind of magical accelerated entropy, that turns everything black and pink and grey. By destroying totemic altars orbited by floating eyeball robots, you start to re-energise the planet, so areas have grass and butterflies. Eventually you will destroy enough totems to get to a planetary boss fight, which might be against, for example, a giant ghost samurai or a floating purple hand with an eyeball in it. It’s mad, but I sure do wish more games were like this.
Imagine Fire Emblem went through kind of a moody, emo phase and started reading a lot of dark fantasy novels and you’ll have some idea what to expect from Redemption Reapers. This turn-based tactical RPG, from the developers of the excellent and unsung side-scrolling 2021 Soulslike Ender Lilies, puts you in command of the moody Ashen Hawk Brigade. Your task is to fight back against the Mort, an army of mysterious and murderous humanoid fiends who seem to care for nothing but the constant slaughter of innocent people. So, you know, you should probably do something about that.
Admittedly, I didn’t get too much of a sense for the shape of the world or what the larger arc of the story is going to be after playing through the first seven chapters. We still don’t know where the Mort came from or if there is any greater purpose to their terrifying rampage. That served as an interesting question that pushed me to seek answers, but it can also lead to the plot feeling a bit aimless. My band of beleaguered fighters was simply traveling from village to village trying to solve smaller problems in the wake of a seemingly all-consuming invasion, which left me asking if we were really making a difference at all. And maybe that’s intentional. But I longed for some clearer, long-term goals.
The characters mostly come across like anime archetypes who rarely showed any hidden facets or surprised me by playing against their surface-level traits. Lugh is an edgy spear-wielder who enjoys the thrill of battle and bloodshed. Urs is a beefy barbarian type with a stony demeanor. We do get a few hints that our protagonist, Sarah, blames herself for some past failure in the war against the Mort that still haunts her. But in this small slice, it’s merely alluded to.
All of these characters are elevated by a great English voice cast.
All of these characters are elevated, however, by a great English voice cast. Allegra Clark (aka Dorothea from Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Bloodhound from Apex Legends) voices the plucky archer Karren, and David Lodge (Three Houses’ Jeralt and Persona 5’s Igor) lends his gruff tone to the aforementioned big boi, Urs. The direction is pretty strong across the board as well. It sounds like a well-done, big budget anime dub, even when some of the lines are so tortured and melodramatic that they read as almost goofy.
Road to Redemption
The tactical combat takes a while to come together, but I ended up really enjoying it once the proper pieces were in place. Melee attacks, whether against you or an enemy, almost always provoke the risk of a counterattack. Thus, maximizing the chances you’ll be able to strike back and preventing your enemies from doing the same is a major concern. Party members in range of an enemy you just attacked also have a chance to perform a follow-up attack, which can be chained together if you have the foe completely surrounded. These are triggered by a timed button prompt, which adds just a dash of reflex-based tension to the normally methodical battles. I honestly enjoyed that.
In addition, characters can gain Determination from certain situations, such as taking damage, that gives them extra action points on their turn. Putting this all together, Redemption Reapers really rewards thinking carefully through each turn and figuring out how you can do the most damage while taking little or none yourself. Attacking with characters who are immune to counter attacks first, then finishing off the enemy with a chain of follow-up attacks is far more effective than simply trying to grind out a win. And all of the Ashen Hawks are quite fragile, so reckless tactics can lead to a full party wipe. This bleak world is somewhat forgiving in those situations, though. There is no perma-death, and as long as you can get to the end of a mission with one Reaper standing, it still counts as a win.
Art of War
In between missions, you can stock up on and upgrade gear, and spend skill points. The weapon system is fairly similar to Fire Emblem: every sword, bow, and spear has a durability rating, and repairs can get expensive, so you’ll feel the squeeze of keeping up your equipment even if you’re acing every mission. Starter weapons tend to have high accuracy and high durability, but low damage. The more advanced a weapon is, it will gain damage while losing accuracy and durability. So progression mainly follows a routine of upgrading someone’s weapon when they level up enough to use it without missing all the time. But even then, you’re signing up for higher repair costs if you want everyone wielding the deadliest gear available. It’s a simple but effective layer of strategic trade-offs that adds just the right amount of pressure.
Each character’s skill tree is specialized toward filling a specific role in combat, which often plays off one or more other characters to create deadly combos. Urs is an incredible tank who can shrug off blows and punish aggressive enemies, while Sarah’s talents focus on getting lots of hits in without risking counterattacks. It took me some time to really get a grasp on how all of these characters can be used together to overcome the most difficult challenges, but it felt awesome when I did.
Each character’s skill tree is specialized toward filling a specific role in combat, which often plays off one or more other characters to create deadly combos.
While I may not be entirely sold on Redemption Reapers’ fairly generic dark fantasy setting or brooding stock characters yet, the interesting and challenging tactical combat speaks for itself. I’ve only scratched the surface of the unfolding story, and I’m intrigued enough to want to know what else lies below the grimy surface. And the superb voice cast goes a long way toward selling the overall mood and vibe, when it would have been easy to slip into edgelord territory. We’ll all be able to catch up with the Ashen Hawks and continue their journey next month.
Dead Space. With some small but welcome exceptions, Dead Space is a one-to-one remake of the 2008 original.
Your opinion on whether that is a good thing or not will depend on how you feel about the endeavour of remaking games from fifteen years ago in the first place. As far as I’m concerned, this remake allowed me to replay one of my all-time favourite games in a lavish new form, and in that sense, Dead Space is extraordinary.
Season: A Letter To The Future begins with a goodbye. You wander around your home for the last time, choosing five objects which inspire deep memories that spur each of the five senses. You then place them into a cauldron one by one, your mother keeping a watchful eye. The ritual comes to an end and the result is a small glowing pendant that will protect you from the dangers of the outside world. “You must promise me never to take the pendant off,” your mother says. The Goodbye ritual is finished, and you leave, knowing you’ll never see your mother or your hometown ever again, all as the prophecy foretold.
It’s a fantastic – if sad – start to Season, and gets straight to the heart of the adventure ahead of you. This is a world where prayers, rituals, and prophecies hold great weight, and where you’ll be exploring the fragility and fickleness of memory. Underpinning everything is a deeply profound sense of melancholy – and here I was expecting some relaxing two-wheeling through lovely-looking landscapes. Well, turns out Season is a lot more than a pretty travelogue.
With the closure of the 3DS eShop fast approaching, it’s got us feeling a little bit nostalgic here at Nintendo Life — particularly for games that we never got our hands on here in the West.
It’s a tale as old as time at this point. Many Japan-only games never get localised, and that’s been the case for a long time, but the 3DS has some truly special and unique titles that we’ve been begging for over the years. We’ve talked about Virtual Console games in Japan before, but now it’s time to look and pine after those that were available both on the shelves and on the eShop, but that we were never lucky enough to see get an official English release.
Today marks the apex of a long journey exploring the boundaries of what a strategy game can be. We are bringing our upcoming funky title Backbeat to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. When we started working on the first prototype in the spring of 2020, I knew there was a lot of potential in the project. It was our tiny indie studio’s second title, and we wanted to add some of the things that were cut from our first game, Hexagroove: Tactical DJ — an onboarding system to introduce our mechanics slowly over the course of the game, a story full of colorful characters, and an experience that feels as good as it sounds. Now refining our release candidate for launch this winter, I’m thrilled to have all those things possible on PlayStation.
When we started designing the foundation for Backbeat, we wanted to carry over some principles from Hexagroove and introduce new ones as well. The game fuses the spatial challenges of a sokoban-style game along with the squad-based resource management of a stealth strategy title. Your challenge is to move a band of four characters through a series of isometric maps within a limited number of turns. How you spend those turns and which paths you choose affect a number of shared resources which grow and shrink over the course of the level. Each of the characters’ timelines are controlled separately but are interdependent. Opening doors and deflecting enemies must be done for the benefit of all four or they will preclude your squad’s successful strut to the stage.
To contrast with the synth-fueled EDM soundtrack of Hexagroove, Backbeat is built on a vast pool of live music riffs, improvisations, and solos recorded from the finest funk masters in Stockholm. Changing direction in the map, interacting with doors, or blowing enemies away with a mighty saxophone all enqueue unique audio clips which are played back together in sequence upon completing a level. This gives your unique solution its own personalized victory song. Every strum, bang, and toot sounded so good I just had to find a way to help them shine extra bright. After experimenting with the dev kit, I realized the PlayStation 5’s DualSense wireless controller was the perfect instrument to back up our studio musicians.
I started by working with our composer Pete Fraser to bring a strong musical element to the most interactive parts of Backbeat: when you crash into something, warp through an oncoming car, manipulate time… I feel these brief moments of interaction, when you push a button and immediately something succeeds (or fails), these instants should all be gratifying… and musical! I copied bursts of chords, fanfares, strums, and drum hits all sampled from the studio musicians and fed them into the DualSense controller authoring tools to produce a haptic, musical harmony that reinforces the sound effects used at the same points in the game. Next, I adjust the vibrations using a stack of filters, amplifiers and equalizers to draw attention to the frequencies that we associate these kinds of flourishes with. After these small adjustments the DualSense controller plays a perfect chorus in time with the music and effects echoing from your hi-fi or headphones.
Great music is only part of the experience I wanted to deliver in Backbeat. The game takes place in 1995, paying homage to the great 32-bit arcade and console games I grew up with in smoky restaurant backrooms and our family den. We worked this in to not only the retro low poly style of our characters and environments, but the iconography and sound effects as well. Time manipulation is the key to understanding the core of Backbeat’s challenge, so we embraced analog technology and integrated sampled video cassette tape skeuomorphism into the UI and feedback. When you change characters, the game fast-forwards or rewinds to the point of time the active character has advanced to. This is accompanied with audio-visual tape distortion, and holding the rewind button in the game loops cassette samples including a speed up and slow down at every interaction. This is another fantastic place to use DualSense to increase the immersion and visceral nostalgia we’re going for in Backbeat. Hold down the circle button and commune with the soothing vibration of DualSense controller, built directly from those chunky, white, rotating spools.
Today we’re bringing you a small taste of the full experience that is soon to come to PlayStation. I hope you feel some good vibes from this short trip through some of the first levels of Backbeat, and follow along as we approach the crescendo of our studio’s sophomore title. Enjoy the show, you’re part of it.
Backbeat Demo Tape is available today on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
If you somehow thought the Like a Dragon (formerly Yakuza) series wasn’t over-the-top enough already, a new addition to the upcoming remake of Like a Dragon: Ishin! might just turn the tables…or flip them. Developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has revealed that wrestler Kenny Omega will be making a cameo appearance in Ishin as a summonable character to aid in battle, complete with a wondrous crossover of a move: One-Winged Angel. He’ll be joined by Midnight Mass star Rahul Kohli.
Omega and Kohli’s appearances will take the form of a “Trooper Card,” effectively a summon similar to the Poundmates used in Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Trooper Cards are a feature new to the remake that allows players to summon other characters to aid them in battle with special abilities, attacks, or temporary stat boosts, and will include both celebrity cameos as well as visits from other characters across the Like a Dragon series.
Kohli’s Trooper Card is titled “Essence of Firestorm” and its in-game description reads as follows: “A chivalrous man who’s traveled through space, time, and reality to serve the Shinsengumi. Draws upon his experience in law enforcement to keep the peace.”
Meanwhile, Omega’s Trooper Card is called “Essence of the One-Winged Angel” and bears the description: “A strapping fighter who’s traveled through space, time, and reality to serve the Shinsengumi. It’s said that his elite skills can summon the stars themselves.” It’s a reference both to Final Fantasy 7 as well as Omega’s in-ring wrestling finisher, One-Winged Angel.
That said, wrestling fans shouldn’t expect it to look anything like his actual in-ring move, as he told IGN ahead of this announcement.
“It’s completely different,” Omega says. “It’s not a wrestling hold. It takes into account that we are heavily influenced by swordplay, magic, and gunplay. I thought it was a chance to do something a little different. As much as I do want, hopefully someday, to have some of my actual wrestling maneuvers in a game, for now I’m more than happy and thrilled to have a very unique and original attack that feels like it belongs in the universe.”
The AEW World Trios Champion is a known gamer and RPG fan, and has been a massive fan of the Like a Dragon series since he was a kid. He’s played every entry so far except for two: Kurohyō, a PSP game that was only released in Japan, and the original Ishin.
His favorite? Omega loves Yakuza: Like a Dragon because it’s an RPG, but he also wanted to shout out Yakuza 2.
“I feel like there’s a nostalgia factor, and I feel like that captured my imagination the most,” he says. “I knew so much about Tokyo and the sights and sounds, so to take the adventure to Osaka and then see just how quirky and cool and fun Osaka was without ever having a hope of going there. Yeah, it always has a special place in my heart.”
It was Omega’s love of the series that netted him the cameo, too. He was initially just helping out with advertisements for Ishin, but that opportunity eventually evolved into a Trooper Card. His appearance in a Like a Dragon game has been rumored since last fall, when Omega shared on Instagram that he had his likeness scanned into the engine. And the wrestler is clearly stoked, comparing his love of Like a Dragon to Yakuza: Like a Dragon protagonist Ichiban’s love of Dragon Quest.
The more time that goes by and the more installments we get, the more honed to our reality that the games become.
“That caught me off guard,” he says of the cameo. “Huge surprise. Very, very, very happy about that news. Looking very forward for people to get their hands on the card, and I’m happy to report that even if you’re not a wrestling fan, even if you’re not a Kenny Omega fan — I know, geez, wow, boy, would that ever be sad if you weren’t? — but if you’re not, totally understandable, because I’ve helped design a card that I think will be useful across the board, and just make your time in Ishin a little more fun and a little more overpowered.”
Omega isn’t just thrilled about his own inclusion in Ishin, but about what it means for the franchise. While past Like a Dragon games have had occasional cameos of popular Japanese celebrities and even wrestlers, his appearance coincides with ongoing growth in popularity for the series in the West. That means we might see more cameos from Western celebrities in Ishin or future games…and maybe even more of Omega.
“I do feel like the more time that goes by and the more installments we get, the more honed to our reality that the games become,” Omega says. “We’re starting to see more real-life people. More real-life restaurants, intellectual properties, landmarks. It’s getting to become very similar to the world that we live in, or at least the Japan that we have in our world.
“And who knows? Who knows where their travels will take them? Maybe they’ll end up somewhere else one day. But yeah, for now, the world is starting to feel more and more familiar, and also more and more relatable. So if there’s any sort of collaborative effort, I’m definitely throwing my name in the hat, and hopefully this will not be the end of Kenny Omega in the RGG universe.”
I close our conversation by asking Omega if he thinks he could take the protagonist of Like a Dragon: Ishin!, Ryoma, in a fight, and the champion is surprisingly humble…perhaps even a bit villainous?
“No, of course not,” he says. “I don’t know what kind of answer anyone was expecting. No, I’m just a showman. I’m a bad guy, too. I’m the guy that needs to get his butt whipped, I think.”
Like a Dragon: Ishin! is planned for release on February 21, 2023 for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
Dead Space remake stalks onto PC tomorrow, nearly a decade and a half after the original made us collectively need to buy new pants. Earlier this week, I reported on the possibility of this new take on Dead Space getting an alternate ending. The Reunion ending was leaked by an achievements list for the remake, but now the Dead Space Twitter account has confirmed that the game does indeed feature a secret ending. That’s not all, either.
Call Of Duty: Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer both begin Season 02 on February 15th, and the battle royale will see the return of the first Warzone’s 1v1 Gulag. Raven Software and Infinity Ward have shared details about how that’s going to work in a new blog post, along with some info about more changes to battle royale, DMZ, and Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer. The post doesn’t go over incoming maps, modes, and features that players can expect to see in Season 02, but the devs say they’ll be sharing more on those nearer to the new season’s kick-off time.
CyberConnect2 has revealed that it’s bringing the surprise sequel to its hit RPG Fuga: Melodies of Steel to Switch on 11th May 2023 (thanks Gematsu!). Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2, and its predecessor, are part of the Little Tail Bronx series, and both games act as prequels to the PS1 game Tail Concerto and its DS spiritual successor, Solatorobo: Red the Hunter.
Fuga: Melodies of Steel traded the previous games’ action-based combat for an on-rails turn-based take on strategy RPGs. The sequel uses the same system and looks to build on the same emotive story that the first game employed.
Shoulders Of Giants is out today on the Epic Games Store. When we first saw the trailer for Shoulders Of Giants, a few people on team responded with murmurings of “What the hell is this?”, which increased in frequency and volume as more bizarre things appeared on screen. I sort of did what the Goonies do when they first find the map to One Eyed Willie’s treasure, or what anyone in Pulp Fiction does when they open the briefcase: “Wooooaaaah.”
Dead Space. With some small but welcome exceptions, Dead Space is a one-to-one remake of the 2008 original.
Season: A Letter To The Future begins with a goodbye. You wander around your home for the last time, choosing five objects which inspire deep memories that spur each of the five senses. You then place them into a cauldron one by one, your mother keeping a watchful eye. The ritual comes to an end and the result is a small glowing pendant that will protect you from the dangers of the outside world. “You must promise me never to take the pendant off,” your mother says. The Goodbye ritual is finished, and you leave, knowing you’ll never see your mother or your hometown ever again, all as the prophecy foretold.
Dead Space remake stalks onto PC tomorrow, nearly a decade and a half after the original made us collectively need to buy new pants. Earlier this week, I reported on the possibility of this new take on Dead Space getting an 
Call Of Duty: Warzone 2 and