Image: Infinity Ward/Activision
Lawyers allege Activision is ‘chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters’
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Image: Infinity Ward/Activision
Lawyers allege Activision is ‘chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters’
Bellwright, an open-world survival game set in a medieval realm ruled by a brutal ruler, will hit Steam Early Access in the beginning months of 2024, challenging players to claim the throne and forge a better kingdom for all. Bellwright offers co-op support and features town building, intense combat, an extensive villager recruiting system, a wrongfully accused murder and so much more.Unravel the Truth and Clear Your NameMany open-world survival games are built around you and your friends discovering their secrets. With Bellwright, the developers aim to give the story much more of a spotlight as you soon find yourself framed for the accidental death of the prince and punished with the death sentence. Forced to live undercover, you must protect yourself from hidden attacks from unexpected places.Was it bad luck that you became a suspect or is there more to the story? To clear your name and uncover the truth, you have to become the Bellwright and lead a rebellion against your homeland’s oppressive Sovereign, delving into your family’s true history and unraveling the dark mystery surrounding the prince’s murder.Survive, Build, and Prepare for WarLeading a rebellion isn’t easy, but it certainly can be fun if you prove yourself a worthy leader. The world of Bellwright in the low Medieval times, is a harsh, but not impossible world to live in. Learn to survive, and build a home for yourself and those who are deeply loyal to you. To do so, you’ll need to gather resources, hunt, build, and craft to foster a bustling settlement that can withstand not only the Crown and its Royal Army, but bandits, nature, and more. Don’t worry though, as you won’t have to do this alone. Bellwright is all about liberating and freeing oppressed people and recruiting them to your cause. However, people won’t just come running to your side. You’ll have to build enough Renown by constructing buildings, completing quests, and taking down enemies to prove yourself to others. Once you recruit a villager, they will come with their own individual abilities, strengths, and weaknesses and can be given tasks like constructing a building or gathering food and other resources. They can also be placed into a squad in your army. Want to create a cadre of archers to keep you safe from a distance? Go right ahead. Want a group of shield bearers that can clear you a path to take down the heart of an enemy encampment? You can do that too. Lastly, each villager can have a profession like Worker, Soldier, or Guard. Familiarize yourself with the villagers and identify any professions that may be lacking to best utilize their skills in your town. Build up the perfect team to protect your home and then go out and take down the Crown.Recruit or Conquer those Around You to Become More Powerful Don’t get too content with just your settlement, however, as that won’t be enough to clear your name and help the kingdom. Along your journey, you’ll need to handle threats both large and small in different regions to claim them for your own. These victories will earn you “Insurgency Points” and new resources that will allow you to learn advanced technologies to grow your home and strengthen your forces. Some of these outposts and towns will remain functional after you conquer and liberate them from the Crown, however their responsibility will now fall under you. You’ll need to build, manage, and upgrade these outposts and towns with recruits, ensuring their resources are plentiful so they’ll be ready when called upon for battle.There are Bandit encampments littered around the map that will also pose a huge threat if ignored. These camps can either be easy, medium, or hard, and each has a Radius of Threat that you can see on the map. This red area is one where bandits can attack your villagers gathering resources, attack your settlements, or guard valuable resource nodes. So, if you want to build something in one of these areas or have an outpost nearby, make sure to clear out the camp first!Take caution though, as the bandits will get increasingly more angry as you take out their camps, causing the Raid Threat meter to rise. Once the meter is full, the bandits will launch an onslaught on your settlements, killing villagers, stealing resources, and damaging buildings if your defenses aren’t up to par.Lead Your Armies to Victory Alone or With FriendsOnce you are confident in your forces or ready to risk it all for the ultimate glory, you can leave the comforts of your home and take to the battlefield to secure a victory for the ages. Combat in Bellwright is described as directional combat, meaning you can choose where your attacks will land on an enemy. With a sword and shield in hand (or other weapons like axes and bows!), you can charge head-first into battle, feeling the weight of every swing and defending yourself against every strike.You won’t have battle alone as you can bring squads of your villagers with you. While you are taking down foes left and right, as the powerful leader you are, you can also direct your squads to follow you into the fray, charge and lead a path, move to a specific spot, or attack a group of enemies while you focus on another.While Bellwright can be played entirely solo, it also allows you to bring in a few friends! Build and fight together because, as it’s always said, it’s more fun with friends!Bellwright is coming soon to Steam Early Access and will continuously update as it approaches its launch. For more, wishlist Bellwright on Steam or check out Bellwright’s Discord. Creators interested in covering the game prior to its Early Access release can contact bellwright@noiz.gg.
Developer Team Ninja has landed a hit with Rise of the Ronin, with parent company Koei Tecmo touting that the…
When I sat down to play Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves for the first time, I wasn’t sure of what to expect. While SNK has put out a number of fighting games in the last couple of decades, we haven’t had a new Fatal Fury in 25 years. To put that statement into perspective, when Garou: Mark of the Wolves was released in arcades in November of 1999, the Sega Dreamcast was less than two months old, The Matrix was six months old and single-handedly bringing back black leather, and everyone was really, really worried about Y2K. It was a very different time, and fighting games were in a very different place. So what does it mean to be a Fatal Fury game today?The first thing you’ll notice are the visuals. SNK was rightfully criticized for the way that King of Fighters XIV looked, but they made noticeable strides with 2019’s Samurai Shodown and King of Fighters XV, and that trend continues with City of the Wolves. I love how colorful it is. No matter what color you choose for them, the character designs, while simple compared to some other fighters, pop. That SNK is employing some absolutely gorgeous cel-shading, that I think might be the best they’ve ever done, doesn’t hurt. Throw in some flashy super animations, beautiful and arresting backgrounds that are packed with fun details like Neo Geo machines and other nods to both SNK’s history and the Fatal Fury universe, and some of the best particle effects I’ve ever seen in a fighter, and City of the Wolves is gorgeous in motion. It’s not King of Fighters XIII, and no fighting game ever likely will be again, but City of the Wolves is shaping up to be the kind of game that’s always going to look good no matter how much technology changes. That it also makes it easy to understand what’s going on as both a player and a spectator is just the cherry on top of a very well-plated dessert.Oh, and it sounds good, too. From music that’s so enjoyable that I could see myself listening to it for The Vibe outside of the game to crunchy, bone-jarring hits when you land a super, City of the Wolves just nails everything you’d want to see from a fighting game, presentation-wise. At least so far.All right, all right, Will. We get it. It looks and sounds good so far. But how’s it feel to play? Well, that’s kind of a long answer. Let’s start with the characters. In the demo I played, there were five: returning from past games were Tizoc, Hotaru, Rock Howard, and the legendary Terry Bogard. New to the series is Preecha, who is the apprentice of Joe Higarashi.I tend to play shotos, so I naturally gravitated to Terry and Rock (what can I say? I like Buster Wolfing people after I ask them if they’re okay), but even the two of them feel different from one another. Rock has a better fireball and a command run that he can cancel into a number of follow-ups for unique offensive options, while Terry feels like he has a better DP and Buster Wolf.Tizoc, on the other hand, is your grappler, with command grabs that move him forward and the ability to deal massive damage with the right hit. Hotaru’s strong normals, special moves for every occasion, and focus on Chinese martial arts, feels, to make a comparison to another series, a lot like Chun-Li.The thing I love most about City of the Wolves is the systems SNK has built into it.And then there’s Preecha. When I asked SNK about her, they told me that she was designed to be easy to pick up and play: she had fewer special moves than anybody in the demo but Terry, but many of the ones she has have follow-up options, allowing her to do easy combos. She’s a blast to play, easy to understand, sports a cool design, and like most players who pick up City of the Wolves, is new to this world and trying to understand how everything works. I can see her becoming a fan favorite once people get their hands on this game.So every character is fun, and it’s a blast to see how they match up against one another, but the thing I love most about City of the Wolves is the systems SNK has built into it.At its core, City of the Wolves revolves around the REV system. By pressing both light and heavy punch or kick when inputting a special move, you get a REV Art – an amped up version of that move with unique properties. Not only do Rev Arts make your special moves better, they can also be chained together in a mechanic called REV Accel, allowing each character access to unique combos defined by their special moves. The window for REV Accels feels fairly tight, similar to the special cancel window in King of Fighters, but REV Accel feels (and looks) incredible when you manage to pull it off and cash out for tons of damage with a flashy combo.The downside of the REV system is that using REV Arts and REV Accel revs up your REV Meter. If you max it out, you’ll Overheat. While you’re in Overheat, you lose access to your REV Arts and REV Accel, and your Guard Gauge starts to deplete when you block your opponent’s attacks. Run out, and you’ll enter Guard Crush, and take longer to recover from hits. But Overheat isn’t a death sentence. You can get out of it by landing hits, walking toward your opponent, or blocking just before a move lands and triggering Just Defense and Hyper Defense, which open options to take the offensive with Guard Cancels.The REV system as a whole feels like a combination of Street Fighter 6’s Drive System and Guilty Gear’s Roman Cancels/defensive mechanics.But REV isn’t just an offensive mechanic: it also adds to your defense. Rev Guarding puts a small shield in front of your character, and pushes your opponent farther away from you when you block their attacks. You can also jump and backdash out of REV Guard, which keeps your defensive options open. Best of all, everything relating to the REV system is separate from your ability to use your Ignition Gears, Fatal Fury’s version of super moves, which is instead regulated by the Power Gauge. Using one bar of the Power Gauge gets you an Ignition Gear, but if you wait to spend them both, you get a much more powerful Redline Gear, adding an additional element of risk/reward to a game that feels like it’s constantly forcing you to make interesting choices.The system as a whole feels like a combination of Street Fighter 6’s Drive System and Guilty Gear’s Roman Cancels/defensive mechanics, and when I brought up that I like how many offensive and defensive options players have, SNK assured me that was intentional. City of the Wolves wants players to feel like they always have options, and that the right decisions at the right time can alter the flow of a match while letting players express themselves through their play. That’s something all the best fighting games do, and I can’t wait to see what the REV system lets us do once we get more time with it.Finally, there’s the Selective Potential Gear, or S.P.G., which you choose at the start of each match. You can position your S.P.G. at the start, middle, or end of your life bar. When your bar hits that point, your S.P.G activates automatically. When you’re in S.P.G., your health starts to regenerate, your attacks are more powerful, your Power Gauge builds up faster, and your REV Meter builds up more slowly. You also get access to REV Blows – powerful ground and air attacks that armor through your opponent’s attacks while dealing substantial damage – and your Hidden Gear, your character’s most powerful super move, which costs two bars of your Power Gauge in addition to requiring you to be in S.P.G. Hidden Gears do absolutely massive amounts of damage and completely empty your REV Meter, allowing you to dump all of your resources for a big combo and then resume the offensive immediately if you land them.The thing that SNK thinks might not get the most attention, and should be on everyone’s mind, are feints, which allow you to pretend to do a special move without actually doing it.Being in S.P.G matters a lot, as does where you put your S.P.G gauge. Putting it at the beginning of your health bar means you start the match with it. But the later you put it, the more powerful it is, and the more it powers you up. It’s an additional layer of strategy that forces you to plan your matches out, and take advantage of your S.P.G. while you have it. But the thing that SNK thinks might not get the most attention, and should be on everyone’s mind, are feints, which allow you to pretend to do a special move without actually doing it, keeping your opponent in check and canceling normals for reduced recovery. And then there’s breaks, which allow you to cancel a special move’s recovery, creating more combos opportunities that include other special moves. Kinda like REV Accel, but without spending REV meter.All of this is a lot to take in, but SNK has done a lot to make City of the Wolves as accessible as they can. City of the Wolves has a traditional Arcade Style control scheme, but it also has Smart Style, which maps Punches, Kicks, Special Moves, Throws, and Combos to one button each, allowing you to easily play around with a character and do cool stuff even if this is your first fighting game. Even the Arcade Style controls, for the characters I saw, mostly emphasized simpler motions like quarter circles. Yes, you’ll still have to do a Z to do a DP with Arcade Style and a 360 (or a 720) for certain command grabs, but there’s no sign of King of Fighters’s infamous pretzel motions… at least, not yet. Everything about City of the Wolves that I’ve seen so far feels designed to help ease new players in while keeping the depth long-time fighting game players crave. It’s a hard tightrope to walk, and it’s too early to say if SNK can pull it off, but I’m impressed by what I’ve seen so far.You can tell a lot about a fighting game by how good it feels to sit down and play, and let me tell you, dear friends, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves already feels really good. We’ve only seen a small portion of City of the Wolves’ cast and only gotten to spend a couple hours with its systems, but all I’ve been able to think about since I put my arcade stick down for the last time is how excited I am to see more of it. I didn’t know what I expected when I sat down with City of the Wolves for the first time, but I can’t wait to rev it up again. But in the meantime, I’ve seen enough to keep the faith.