GAMING

E3 2015: Day 2 Coverage

Photographs by Daniel Boczarski.

We had a chance to look at Drawn To Death, from David Jaffe’s Bartlet Jones Supernatural Detective Agency comes a PS4 exclusive free to play arena shooter. The game’s art-style and world can be described as a high school kid’s notebook drawings, everything has a very chaotic pen drawn look of a bored student sketching during class. The characters are fun and varied, from a punk rocker to a cowboy demon woman, to a shirtless psychopath with a squirrel head costume reminiscent of something you’d see at a kid’s party. Each character has their own visual  style as well as their own special attacks and movement abilities, they all were a blast to play. The weapons were similarly as imaginative, imagine the top half of the high school bully in dodge-ball class hanging on your back as he throws dodge-balls at your enemies. Or the “America F*** Yeah!!” rocket launcher that gets stronger the longer you hold your prey in its lock on gaze releasing a patriotic explosion of fireworks and American eagles at the end. On top of that every character also shared a special set of moves involving the author of the drawings reaching into the world, it’s safe to say when you see a giant hand come through, run! The developers are also making sure this is the game fans will enjoy by constantly communicating with them on their forums (http://forums.drawntodeath.com/), taking in feedback and showing tons of behind the scenes footage weekly! At this time there is no concrete release date but we definitely look forward to the game.

After a long time absence, the Need For Speed franchise is getting a reboot. Simply titled Need For Speed, the game looks like a re-imagining of the Need For Speed Underground series of games, which are known for being set in the underground street racing car culture. Our demo featured a few minutes of car setup and customization, being able to customize your car from the looks to the handling, you can make a fully drift or grip style car or anywhere in between. Right away the graphics are gorgeous, the car in our garage had an impressive rained on look, while the streets are equally interesting to look at. After getting out of the garage we participated in a street race which lead us into the open world. The game is online only to facilitate always on multiplayer sessions. People will come into your world and race, drift, or get chased by the police regardless if you’re in an event or not, very reminiscent of Burnout Paradise. The objective of our demo was to accumulate reputation points. By driving fast, drifting, driving recklessly, and other things will all come together to reward you with turbo boost and points, like the burnout games this game aims to reward your risky driving and make sure you look stylish doing it. Need For Speed is slated for release November 3rd 2015 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.

From CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online, comes EVE Valkyrie a first person space combat simulator which is played using the Oculus Rift. The 6 minute demo had us sit through a peaceful launch sequence before being met by enemy fighter ships. I spent some time getting the feeling of combat as well as taking in all the particle effects and sounds around me, made richer by the new positional audio headset on the current Rift design. After I enjoyed some combat I decided to test the limits of my head movement by flying dangerously close to the enemy cruiser ship. As I looked straight up, the sheer scale and awe of my close experience gave me chills; as I looked down I appreciated seeing my body react naturally to my head positions. The current version of the Rift we demoed felt light and the screen was much clearer than previous versions. I was able to look up at the stars and below at my body which leaned accordingly to my head position. EVE Valkyrie on the Oculus Rift gave me a great sense of actually being in a space fighter ship.

About author

Gaming writer at Live in Limbo. When Mihai isn't reading code on a computer sceen, he sits in front of other screens playing games. Don't let the picture fool you, he's since lost all his hair trying to be a tetris grand master.