Category: Video Games

In honor of 2024 marking the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, S-Game has revealed an introspective and suspenseful Phantom Blade Zero anime trailer called Rain & Blood that recalls Phantom Blade’s history–and its upcoming future as a third-person action game.

S-Game is celebrating the Year of the Dragon as dragons are a pillar of the phantom Blade universe, embodied by the mighty Loong (meaning “dragon”) Clan. In Phantom Blade’s timeline, the Loongs have been honored, even worshiped, as the vanguard of justice for over a century, until the clan collapsed in a history-making event. Within Phantom Blade Zero, players will find some of the Long relics and feel their lingering influence. This alignment between the game world and the real world makes this an apt opportunity to recollect, reflect, and get ready for the next step forward. The journey from an indie game to a self-contained universe of six games took 15 years, and S-Game is ready to take a step forward.

S-Game dropped the Rain & Blood anime trailer, featuring a high-stakes duel that seamlessly transforms a storm-lit sword fight into traditional ink and paper drawings, and back again as sworn rivals and former comrades Soul and Zuo Shang try to cut each other up. The clash calls back to 2008’s original Rainblood, the game that launched the franchise and its distinctive “kung-fu punk” aesthetic that’s equal parts Chinese history, fantasy/mythology, and contemporary pop culture.

S-Game’s history spans well over a decade and has leveraged some of China’s most renowned 2D artists to capture and amplify the speed and power of kung-fu fighting with striking style, blending traditional martial arts with visual dynamics that appeal to a modern audience. The opening of the Rain & Blood trailer takes viewers through their distinct history, cutting from the franchise’s 2D roots to 3D space powered by Unreal Engine 5, showing Soul slicing his way through enemies. Despite this change in visual aesthetics, the dark, ominous atmosphere and choreography of intricate kung fu moves remains. If you’re a fan of Blue Eye Samurai, Karas, or Afro Samurai, it may be right up your alley.

Observant fans might notice the latter half of the trailer is captured on PlayStation 5, which will accompany PC as the platforms Phantom Blade Zero is designed for. Players can dive into a playable demo coming sometime later this year.

Keep up to date with Phantom Blade Zero’s release on its official Twitter account, or join the Phantom Blade Discord. Then watch Rain & Blood one more time for good measure.

In honor of 2024 marking the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, , S-Game has revealed an introspective and suspenseful Phantom Blade Zero anime trailer called Rain & Blood that recalls Phantom Blade’s history–and its upcoming future as a third-person action game.

S-Game is celebrating the Year of the Dragon as dragons are a pillar of the phantom Blade universe, embodied by the mighty Loong (meaning “dragon”) Clan. In Phantom Blade’s timeline, the Loongs have been honored, even worshiped, as the vanguard of justice for over a century, until the clan collapsed in a history-making event. Within Phantom Blade Zeroplayers will find some of the Long relics and feel their lingering influence. This alignment between the game world and the real world makes this an apt opportunity to recollect, reflect, and get ready for the next step forward. The journey from an indie game to a self-contained universe of six games took 15 years, and S-Game is ready to take a step forward.

S-Game dropped the Rain & Blood anime trailer, featuring a high-stakes duel that seamlessly transforms a storm-lit sword fight into traditional ink and paper drawings, and back again as sworn rivals and former comrades Soul and Zuo Shang try to cut each other up. The clash calls back to 2008’s original Rainblood, the game that launched the franchise and its distinctive “kung-fu punk” aesthetic that’s equal parts Chinese history, fantasy/mythology, and contemporary pop culture.

S-Game’s history spans well over a decade and has leveraged some of China’s most renowned 2D artists to capture and amplify the speed and power of kung-fu fighting with striking style, blending traditional martial arts with visual dynamics that appeal to a modern audience. The opening of the Rain & Blood trailer takes viewers through their distinct history, cutting from the franchise’s 2D roots to 3D space powered by Unreal Engine 5, showing Soul slicing his way through enemies. Despite this change in visual aesthetics, the dark, ominous atmosphere and choreography of intricate kung fu moves remains. If you’re a fan of Blue Eye Samurai, Karas, or Afro Samurai, it may be right up your alley.

Observant fans might notice the latter half of the trailer is captured on PlayStation 5, which will accompany PC as the platforms Phantom Blade Zero is designed for. Players can dive into a playable demo coming sometime later this year.

Keep up to date with Phantom Blade Zero’s release on its official Twitter account, or join the Phantom Blade Discord. Then watch Rain & Blood one more time for good measure.

It was always going to be a tall order for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to emerge from the shadow of the mighty Arkham series. From an architectural perspective the game has moved from Unreal Engine 3 to 4, while from an art and style perspective think more multi-coloured Marvel comics than a dark DC tome. From the bright sunshine across Gotham City and vibrant greens, reds and purples, each character and enemy stand in stark contrast to the subtle and muted tones of Rocksteady’s prior games. The same wide-open city is available to you early on, and each of the 4 playable characters have their own unique and fast means of travel. However, this presents one of our biggest issues when it comes to performance.

Available only on current generation consoles and PC, the game comes with a single performance mode on all platforms, aside from separate settings for motion blur, FoV, and other post effects. Thankfully that one mode targets 60fps on all platforms, but the level of success on that front largely depends on the console and area of play, while PC is an entirely different story. Starting with the Series S, performance is good in the earlier, limited sections, with a close-enough 60fps readout as you play, but the game struggles with streaming, decompression, and general memory management once you get into the open city and moving fast with any character. This gives us some low 50s at points and even some 50+ms spikes at times, which cause minor but noticeable pauses. The shift from gameplay to realtime cinematics and back is as seamless as the Arkham games, and generally these run very well at that 60fps target.

The Series X and PS5 are similar but not perfect, again holding a close lock on 60fps but both can still drop frames and stutter into the low 50s. Of the two, Series X is slightly worse, with it having more streaming stutter and hiccups over the PS5. That said, the PS5 can still drop frames, but it tends to hold a higher, albeit largely invisible, level of performance of approximately 10% in like for like sections. Anyone with a variable refresh rate screen will benefit when these areas arise on all formats but the long stutters will still be noticed.

Console Performance

Visually the Series X and PS5 are a close match to the PC version running at the maximum High settings, though with shadows and LoD down a rung and without the ray-traced reflections that PC offers. Both output a full 4K target, but the actual geometry maxes out at a counted 1800p level on both with a low of 2240x1260p, highlighting that DRS is enabled here. The choice between TAA or DLSS is only available on PC, pointing to the fact that PS5 and Series X are likely using TAA also. This does present a far cleaner and sharper image than the Series S, although the huge hike in pixel counts and texture quality is a big reason for that. They both suffer from dithering artefacts and ghosting in the TAA which is why I am inclined to think that they use TAA and DRS. While the Series S relies on a fixed 900p base (from all counts) using FSR1 back to 1080p.

Textures on the Series S are of a lower quality than both bigger consoles, level of detail is paired back significantly in medium to long views, as is the shadow map cascade and resolution. Screen space reflections are also disabled, which removes dynamic reflections and means less light bounce with darker shade to most surfaces along with reduced volumetrics. Overall, the Series S looks closer to a mix of Low and Medium settings when compared to PC. And comparing it to Series X and PS5 it does suffer, with a big degradation in image quality and slightly worse performance. Series X does run with a higher resolution on average – in one long shot across the city, for example, it was a flat 1440p on PS5 and 1620p on Series X. This is more an academic difference than something you would actually notice, but shows that the wider GPU of the Series X is being used to push more pixels.

PC Performance

PC is not such a positive tale of performance, with options that enable a limited level of tweaking. Ray-traced reflections are a welcome but minor boost over consoles, however they are broken on my AMD RX 6800 machine. DLSS will remain the default choice for Nvidia players and the best balance of performance versus image quality. On AMD or Steam Deck you have the choice of TAA or AMD’s FSR1, which means the lower the base resolution the worse the image quality will become. With my RX 6800 and Zen 2 5600x at 4K TAA DRS High settings to match consoles, we see a game that can hold a decent level of 60fps in those smaller battles and is often a full 4K.

With Ray Traced reflections on, the increased BVH management, traversal and data impacts CPU and bandwidth. On this machine, and likely even more powerful ones, it causes horrible performance. As such, I simply cannot recommend ray tracing at all. With mid-30s and large 150+ms spikes when travelling and fighting through the city, and due to the engine trying to improve performance, heavier resolution drops do happen, just as we see on the console version. The GPU utilisation can drop very low and in general any recommendations are moot as the game’s performance appears to be more impacted by the code than the hardware, aside from disabling ray tracing, which helps the worst cases seen here.

A Work in Progress

The lighting artists did an exceptional job here in fill, point and coloured lights. Many sections use distinct hues and shadows to emphasise mood, atmosphere, or the excellent models. Even though they are a step up over Arkham and Gotham Knights, much of this comes down to material quality across all surface types, from the white dull matte paint of Harley Quinn’s face to the sub surface diffuse of Shark’s flesh. The animators also deserve huge praise, with the mixture of performance capture and key framed animation being a highlight. The exaggerated expressions, winks, and teeth gnashing of each character portrays great emotion throughout. Eyes are incredible, with rapid movement, blink, and rolling adding a great deal of realism without crossing into the uncanny valley. The cutscenes shine the most and are the highlight of the game’s visuals.

Sadly, the in-game action falls from these heights, almost as if they were managed by different teams. Compared to Arkham Knight, it does not make any big or even small leaps. The city has less activity, fewer NPCs, and worse art direction – the extensive use of purples and oranges in some sections is drab, and with the overly busy UI feels at odds with some of the more story-focused sections. Add in repetitive and samey enemies and missions that entail travelling around a city with little charm, and the game loses much of the identity that Arkham City and Knight had. Even the water is not as good. Animation cycles and blends are a mix of re-use and awkwardness, such as Harley’s gangly run and swing or Shark’s jump and strike attacks. I found little in the gameplay art or style that impressed me throughout play.

Summary

Killing the Justice League is in the title, but killing the best Batman trilogy in games is something else entirely. The game has some excellent models and humorous moments and cutscenes, but in the roughly nine years since the last Arkham game, it still hangs on to the same core engine and coattails of that great trilogy. Suicide Squad offers little new or impressive elements from a visual, audio, or even gameplay perspective. Performance is good but not great, with classic data streaming stutter, which impacts the PC version the most and is why console versions are recommended over that. Ironically, Gotham Knights also fell short of the Arkham series, but in hindsight it did many things better than this latest entry from Rocksteady.

Logical deduction games are a curious and awkward sub-genre. For the game to be interesting, they need to present a puzzle with a lot of dynamism and moving parts. However, doing so poses a significant problem because unless the players communicate their clues and instructions exactly right, the entire game can collapse. In 2020, The Search for Planet X tried to solve this problem by having an app direct players with their uncovered clues, meaning that any errors you make are yours, and yours alone. It proved very popular and now the designers are back with another, more complex, spin on the concept: The Search for Lost Species.

What’s in the Box

As an app-driven game, the box contents might look a little underwhelming at first because you’ve got an electronic gizmo to download that does most of the heavy lifting. Mandatory apps in tabletop games is a controversial issue, and some gamers loathe the reliance on a third-party digital component that might become unavailable at a later date, rendering the game useless. You’ll have to be happy with that risk if you want to get on board this title. It’s best if each player can run their own copy of the app, but it’s easy to install and smooth to use, although, oddly, it doesn’t save game state, which can be a problem playing solo.

What you do get is high-quality stuff. There’s a double-sided fold-out game board with an island hex map on each side, rendered in clear, attractive art. There are a variety of clean-cut wooden pieces, two pawns in each of four player colors, an expedition leader pawn and some mountains that highlight barriers on the board. A pad of note sheets is also included, and each player has a screen to hide their notes and a set of cardboard tokens behind. Finally, there are two small decks of cards and some timing tokens alongside a slightly bizarre but amusing boat-shaped tray to build and hold them in.

As a game with an ecological theme, The Search for Lost Species takes its green credentials seriously. There’s an information sheet included explaining how most of the materials were sourced in an environmentally-friendly way. The six lost species you can hunt for are all real animals, and all on the brink of extinction, none having been seen for several decades. The paragraphs about them at the end of the rulebook make for sobering reading.

Rules and How It Plays

The Search for Lost Species uses a time mechanism to determine turn order. Different actions you can take demand that you move your pawn forward on the time track different numbers of spaces. Whoever is furthest behind gets to take their turn, until their pawn overtakes another on the time track, and so on. So you’re always caught on the horns of choosing less impactful, faster actions against slower, more useful ones in terms of where others are on the time track.

Your two most common options will be to search the island, either by boat or by foot. In both cases, you choose a range of hexes and either look for empty hexes or select one of the four animal types. You put this into the app, and it’ll tell you how many of that particular animal there were in the hexes you searched. Going by boat is faster, but it’s restricted to coastal hexes and has a minimum search range of four, meaning the information you get is less useful. Knowing there’s one toad somewhere among those four isn’t terribly helpful. As a result, tapping your locations in and seeing the results has a fun frisson of excitement as you’re on tenterhooks to find out if you’ve pinned down some helpful information.

However, from the outset you’re given extra information to narrow down the location of each animal. There’s only one species per hex, and the app starts you off with a few titbits on which animals are absent from some hexes. You can configure this to give more starting clues to particular players, which is a fantastic way to give a leg-up to younger or less experienced participants. Each animal also has some fixed rules about where it lives. The four Lories – a kind of parrot – for example, always live next to each other in a fixed diamond pattern. So once you’ve found two, you can narrow down the other two are very easily.

As well as varying the location of species for each game, the app also offers additional rules about animal locations that vary between games. You can access these via the fastest action, visiting a town. This requires you to spend a town token, of which you only have one, and lets you take a card from a face up selection and do some research. The cards either improve one of the game’s actions or offer bonus points for certain conditions, while the research gives you an extra clue for whatever species you choose. So in every game you know that each of the two toads is adjacent to two empty spaces, but in your particular game you might learn that exactly one of the toads lives in the hills.

Using this drip feed of information, you can make educated guesses about what species lives in which hex. There are a lot of these clues, and piecing them together is fun and challenging. But it’s also weirdly stressful because one mistake can be disastrous. Getting one animal in the wrong hex means you’re going to make errors in following other clues, and misidentify further species, a chain reaction of chaos. But then again, making intuitive stabs based on good odds can pay dividends. The order in which you choose to pick up research or search for species can have a big impact on how your game unfolds. It’s up to you how you piece your game plan together and how much you want to rely on educated guesses.

Every so often, all the player pawns will the expedition leader pawn on the time track. When this happens, one of several things can occur. Most often, players get to place sighting tokens, which indicate hexes where they think particular animals live. You’re allowed to check whether your sightings were correct several turns later, which is both a big source of points and of clues as to the makeup of the island. Before they’re revealed, you can use sightings to guess about what’s on the island: if they put down a token for a python in a hex you know they’ve explored for pythons, there’s a good bet that’s where the python is. They might have made a mistake, though, or even be bluffing. The latter is a high-risk tactic, however, as incorrect sightings not only lose out on the points but are punished on the time track.

Moving the leader can also result in players regaining their town tokens so they can make another visit, or also their camera trap tokens, an additional action that allows you to pinpoint the animal that lives in a particular hex. Finally, on two occasions, the leader will result in all the players getting the same research information about the lost species. This animal, of which there are numerous possible options to keep things varied, has its own placement rules like other species. But it’s so elusive that you can’t ever find it by exploration: its hex will appear to be empty. All you have to go on is elimination, from identifying other habitats, and the various rules that you’re given through research.

Guessing the location of the lost species is the game’s final, and longest, action. If you’re right, you’ll get a huge points bonus and trigger the end game. Other players can still win if they’re close to making the deduction themselves, and they have better sightings than you, but getting their first is a big boost. As a result, once the pieces begin to fall into place, this very cerebral, puzzly game acquires an extraordinary amount of tension. You’re always nervous that your neighbor is just about to declare that big search action and pinpoint the lost species, and there’s a mounting temptation to risk those intuitive leaps and see if you can get in there first. But it’s almost certainly game over if you get it wrong.

Where to Buy

• Get it at Amazon