E3 Games Special: The 10 Best New Games

The 10 best new games set to give your thumb ache over the next six months, from last month’s LA geek conference…

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Out: Nov 16; PC, PS3, X360 It’s just like an assassin to sneak up on you when you least expect it. Another sequel within a year of the last one, a franchise expanding at a ridiculous pace, spreading to some six titles in under three years – heading into LA’s annual E3 expo you can see why expectations weren’t all that high for Ubisoft’s latest tale of historical hit men. Which is perhaps why the sly multiple daggers of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood calmly muted many before the words “milking it” could even pass their lips. Clever boys.

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Fears of this instalment being nothing more than a multi- player expansion pack were put to bed early by the breadth and depth of Ubisoft Montreal’s vision: more than 15 hours of single- player campaign for AC II’s Ezio to tip-toe around, a fully realised city of Rome to slowly reduce the population of, an entirely new way of playing with a full assassins cohort to call on and, yes, online multi-player for the first time.

In fact, FHM had to be dragged off the addictive ‘Wanted’ mode, which has eight players stalking each other round Rome in a tense slow-burn that’s a welcome antidote to the frenzied gunfire, senseless slaughter and braying American accents of most online death matches. Yet, in a bizarre twist, as the clock ticks down, the game subtly shifts from Splinter Cell-esque stealth to a kind of Mario Kart mania, as you find your scoreboard reign dethroned in the dying seconds by the luckiest of kills. Not that we’re bitter or anything.

But it’s a testament to Brotherhood’s excellence that multi-player is far from its most exciting addition. With Ezio now a master assassin rather than a young upstart, he’s a bit of a celebrity and so is finding disappearing into shadows ever trickier. Luckily, he can recruit faceless young assassins to the ‘Brotherhood’, train them up by sending them on coming-of-age murder sprees abroad (oooh Germany!) and then utilise their ever-increasing killing skills. “So it’s kind of like Football Manager but for stabbing?” We put it to one of the crew as he takes us through a behind-closed-doors debriefing. We read his silence and confused look as a yes.

But then as his Ezio is cornered and outnumbered by a veritable army of tooled-up guards, a quick button combination from Mr Confused sees three covert assassins pop into the picture, wreak havoc on his assailants, then disappear from the game as if they were never there. “Just like Football Manager,” he smiles. Killer in every sense of the word.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2011

Out: Oct 15; Wii, PC, PS3, X360 Konami had it all its own way in the football stakes for far too long. Sure, EA’s FIFA always sold bucket loads, but PES was the real beautiful game. Yet a mix of complacency – and FIFA 10 being better than anyone could have hoped – turned the tables quicker than an England World Cup exit. And now PES is left playing catch-up. The good news is it’s going the right way about it, completely overhauling the attack and defence systems. As well as 360° passing, every action you make is now accompanied by a power bar for pinpoint precision, encouraging you to create space and craft your own through-balls rather than lazily jabbing one button and letting the computer do the rest. It’s tricky to master, but the rewards are palpable – which was always the point of PES in the first place.

Rapstar

Out: October 5, 2010; PS3, Wii, X360 Def Jam top dog Russell Simmons described Rapstar to us as being “less about what gaming can do for hip hop, more what hip hop can do for gaming”, and it was no idle boast. On the surface, yes, this is a rap cash-in on the ludicrously popular SingStar karaoke series. Yet it’s the online community where things get really interesting, as you can make your own ‘hype’ clips, create ‘crews’ and start ‘beef’ with rappers who have ‘dissed’ you. Developer 4mm Games rather fittingly calls it the “50 Cent dynamic”; we’re calling ourselves MC Fur-Q – want some?

Nintendo 3DS

Out: TBC (before April 2011)

Nintendo’s promise of 3D gaming on the move without the need to take the title of Nerdiest Man On The Train seemed unlikely, but its new hand-held does indeed bin the ‘kick me’ glasses. It favours an ‘kick ass’ screen that messes with your mind to produce a three-dimensional effect which is quite staggering, while full of a kind of toy-like charm we’ve come to expect from Mario’s inevitable reinventions of Mario Kart, Zelda et al are sure to be the must-owns.

Killzone 3

Out: February 11, 2011; PS3 While many companies jumped on Hollywood’s bandwagon of flirting outrageously with bolted-on 3D to turn a quick buck at E3, Sony were the real deal: high-tech, built-from-the-ground-up three dimensions with only a slight feeling of cross-eyed nausea. We’d be inclined to say it was gaming’s James Cameron, except that Big Jim already presented Avatar: The Game with Ubisoft last year, to the collective sound of tears falling at the international price of 3D TVs. The third Killzone’s blend of jetpacks, gun warfare and Buddy Holly glasses (not to mention full compatibility with Sony’s new Play Station Move controllers) is definitely the most impressive effort to date. But still only the most aspirational purchasers and heavy-of-wallet need apply. So that’ll be you, then...

Gears of War 3

Out April 8, 2011; X360 “You’ve gotta see this,” mumbles Rod Fergusson, senior producer at Epic Games, the developer behind the Gears Of War franchise. FHM are in Microsoft’s secret inner sanctum at E3 and his inability to pull off whatever it is he’s attempting is irking the big man. This is his new baby and he’s desperate to show that it can walk and talk.

While Epic put a lot of effort into flogging its swear-happy new gunner Bullet storm at E3, the latest Gears remains king chainsaw among shank pretenders. The story is much the same, except now the planet has begun to ingest itself. Time is running out for your square-jawed group of brutes to do the decent thing and the infected Lambent army is proving even more troublesome than the original Locust, but the back-end has very much changed. Four-player co-op, aforementioned new moves in your kick-ass armoury, all new mutating enemies – design director Cliff Bleszinski once described Gears as the “rock’n’roll, Elvis and dirty comics” of shooters and he hasn’t held back for this final entry.

The most interesting addition is ‘Beast’, a five-player co-op monstrosity that takes Gears 2’s popular ‘Horde’ mode and turns it in on itself, having you control the many ugly faces of the Locust. Playing as the bad guys can be cathartic, stripping a typical shooter of its conventions, but ‘Beast’ ramps up the strategic angle to even greater heights. All levels of Locust are selectable – including the new multi-legged Serapedes and mutating Drudges that can live on even after much dismemberment. The trick is your team choosing a complementary axis of evil to overpower the humans.

With Microsoft as a whole seemingly heading off for a paddle in Nintendo’s warm casual-gamer waters, it’s again been left up to Epic to man the pool marked ‘hardcore’, and it clearly takes its lifeguard role very seriously.

With that, Fergusson finally grabs a Locust as a meat shield, slams a grenade into its head and kicks it away into an on-rush of enemies. Before any of them can move, the grenade explodes in a hail of limbs. “Woo! Bag and tag!” he snorts. He grins large and wide. The grin says: welcome to Gears Of War 3, the biggest, baddest and most brilliantly coarse. future shooter yet.

Kinect

Release date: November 4

While Sony’s Move has merely tightened up the Wii’s motion-sensing magic wands, Kinect – Microsoft’s technology formerly known as Project Natal – represents a genuine vision of gaming’s future. The Minority Report comparison has become a cliché because it’s true, the controller-less interface through a not-so-little camera sat atop your Xbox meaning you sign in with face recognition and select games with a hand swipe. The launch games are a mixed bag so far – Harmonix’s Dance Central is the only one sure to be a post-pub mainstay – but Kinect’s potential is undeniable.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Out Nov 19; PC, PS3, X360, Wii We knew that we always liked playing cops and robbers as kids. Not as much as doctors and nurses, perhaps, but there was something in the thrill of the chase and the topsy-turvy moral conundrum that could challenge even a stolen afternoon with Katy Perry from No 32. What we didn’t expect was, if you put the cop in a Lambo and the robber in a Ford GT40, just how little we’d grown up since. At all, in fact.

But that’s the premise of the latest in EA’s ever-popular racing series, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit – this time developed by the British nuts behind the Burnout series, Criterion Games – and why we’re even more excited about this than Sony’s Gran Turismo 5. If you’re thinking you recognise the ‘Hot Pursuit’ tag, it’s because Need For Speed already ragged it silly back in 1998. But as you’d expect from such superior carnage merchants, Criterion has very much reinvented the wheels.

Multiplayer is, of course, where games earn their keep in this day and age, and like Burnout Paradise – the developer’s last game – connectivity is again key. Slap bang in the centre of Hot Pursuit is ‘Autolog’, an online hub-cum-social network that tracks everything you do – and, of course, everything your friends do. As well as racing each other live, you can compete against specific stats that each other’s performances throw up, such as ‘time spent undamaged’ (not much) or ‘bounty’, the game’s in-built value system that tots up what good and bad deeds are worth comparable points.

Most interestingly of all, though, is that ‘Autolog’ operates across formats – so if you’re all shades of rubbish on your PS3, there’s no hiding from your Xbox-toting mates because of your taste in equipment.

EA let us get hands on with its new beast and it was a satisfying yet humbling experience (we lost quite a lot). The cat and mouse dynamic is often joypad-smashingly tense, as you desperately try to evade or capture, depending on your persuasion, cop choppers and spike strips coming up against chaser nitrous and decoys. But then nothing quite beats jamming a cop’s GPS, hiding in a slip road and watching him set up road blocks for no good reason whatsoever as you shoot off in the opposite direction.

To get audible ‘woops’ en masse at any E3 conference bar Nintendo’s, home of the over-enthusiastic, ever-young fan-boy, is an achievement. To turn an audience into a collective frenzy of pre-pubescent excitement within seconds of the off from a mere trailer – however graphically impressive – is what you can call “genuine buzz”. At EA’s E3 event, NFS: Hot Pursuit did just that. Now, time to look up Katy Perry on Facebook...

Rage

Out: 2011; PC, PS3, X360, Mac We thought we’d had enough Mad Max-esque, post-apocalyptic ‘kill the mutants, collect their life savings’ shooters to make us fill our Tina Turner Thermos with radioactive space chunder. But Quake and Doom developer ID Software has hooked up with Fallout publisher Bethesda, injected us with some kind of over-excitement drug and made us hungry for more. Maybe it’s because it takes the best bits of Borderlands and makes them simultaneously more beautiful and barmy; maybe it’s just that it makes slicing heads off with a spear look so much fun. However, it being ID’s first new franchise in a decade, your guess as to when we’ll get our mitts on it is as good as ours.

Vanquish

Out: Oct 22, 2010; PS3, X360 What would happen if the guy behind the Resident Evil series decided he’d tired of all that shuffling zombie stuff and, instead, wanted to remake Halo with less alien hordes, more US/Soviet fisticuffs over natural resources… on a space station… with a Back To The Future-style knee slide as a special attack… and a Japanese techno soundtrack? Well, you’d likely get Vanquish, the latest from the ever-impressive Platinum Games stable, already home to the likes of Bayonetta and Mad World, and it’s (whisper it) looking way better than Halo Reach in the ‘blowing stuff up in space’ stakes.

Avoid!

Man vs Wild – the game

Ravine traversing, white-water rafting, personal enema dispensing – the potential for a game of the Discovery Channel’s Bear Grylls series is, frankly, quite appealing. Shame that the developers appear to have knocked it up on an old Amiga graphics card wired through a toaster.

Sorcery

With the world converging to see how much the PS Move controllers had improved on Wiimotes, Sony needed to bring out the big guns to impress. Instead, it trawled out a wizard’s wand simulator with such a repetitive control system that it seemed to bore its own developer.

Karaoke Revolution: Glee

You can’t blame Konami for cashing in on this post-modern Fame knock-off.However, you can blame any right- minded male for coming within three feet of it, when a) he could be on Def Jam Rapstar and b) they haven’t rendered Lea Michele into the game for you to play as. Not that we know who that is.

From the September 2010 issue of FHM India.