You play as Will, a pilot based out of Nassau, Bahamas, who takes a job from a former lover, Ava, in 1938. While flying through the Bermuda Triangle, you witness a UFO when a freak storm erupts that transports you to another dimension controlled by a race of beings called the Watchers. These aliens claim that the Earth is theirs and that humans are nothing more than a slave race for them. Shortly after crashing, you lose track of Ava and spend the rest of the 14 levels trying to find her, help the shipwrecked humans fight for their lives and stave off an alien invasion of Earth.

Dark Void is your typical third person shooter. Find bad guys and shoot them. The main difference from other games of the genre is the flight mechanics of the jetpack that you receive shortly after losing Ava. Instead of platforming by jumping, you have to use the jetpack to fly around the massive levels. Flying can be a bit tricky and does take a bit of getting used to, but the challenge comes from the “vertical fights.” There are parts where you have to control Will through a series of ledges while fighting the Watchers. Basically, you hang from a ledge while firing your weapons up or down toward the enemy depending on your point of view. While a great idea, which caused a lot of talk last year, there weren’t enough segments in the game that this type of fighting could really cause a WOW factor.

While progressing through the three episodes you meet allies such as Nikola Tesla, a scientist, and Atem, native of Dark Void. They give you information about where you are and what needs to be done to not only protect to inhabitants of the Void, but also Earth itself. As you play, you will pick up six upgradable weapons. Each weapons and the jetpack can be upgrade three levels to increase damage, range, power, etc. The best gun is a Watcher grenade launcher, which can usually kill with one shot, but you will most likely end up using the Watchers rifle due to better odds of ammo drops.

Also, be on the lookout for the 57 journals of survivors spread out over the levels. These journals tell the story of Dark Void’s inhabitants and survivors such as Amelia Earhart. Collecting the journals gives you a sense of story and an achievement, but other than that, they are useless.

If you are looking for a game that will give you a lot of gamerscore in a short playthrough then consider picking up Dark Void. You will seriously finish this highly anticipated game in less than 7 hours, but at least you’ll have fun for those few hours.

ESRB Rating: Teen
Avg. playtime: 7 hours
One-time playthrough Gamerscore: 805
Replay value: moderate
Multiplayer: no

-Tim Fischer
Managing Editor
Gamertag: porkroll1711

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“The grapple hook attaches to anything with collision now – buildings, trees and even people,” says Johansson. “There are no grapple points whatsoever, so you’re really free to work on your own tactical style.”

Rico’s new favorite toy can also be used to tether things together. To demonstrate this, Johansson uses it to attach an enemy to a telephone pole and hoist him off the ground. Then he starts machine-gunning away. The man shrieks as his body jiggles about in the air, like a puppet on a string. An electrically charged string. Made of pain.

The island of Panau, where talk is cheap and machineguns are very reasonably priced actually.

Other inventive ways to commit murder with the grapple include tethering a man to an oil barrel, then dragging the two towards each other before blowing up the barrel and by association the man. “My personal favorite use of the grapple? You can lift a jeep under a helicopter and use it as a wrecking ball,” says Johansson. We don’t get to see this in action, unfortunately.

The grapple isn’t just there for the nasty things in life, like hooking a man up to a blocked drain and shooting him in the legs till they look like ketchup-covered dog food. It’s also handy for getting around the South-East Asian island of Panau, where Just Cause 2 is set.

At around 400 square miles the island is massive, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. One of the biggest complaints about the first Just Cause was the amount of traipsing around you had to do, covering large tracts of dull terrain between missions. The gameworld in Just Cause 2 is still huge, but now there’s a lot more work to be getting on with.

Even more convenient for getting around than an Oyster card.

“To give you an idea of just how big the world is and how much there is to do, this is the entire map of Panau,” says Johansson. A top-down view of the island appears on the screen. “This area here,” he continues, pointing to a tiny dot in the bottom left hand corner, “Is the harbour area where you just saw me play through that entire mission.” There are gasps from the demo audience. Listening back to the Dictaphone recording later you can hear one person go, “Wow.”

The map is peppered with hundreds of tiny icons. “All the different items you see here are activities for you to do,” says Johansson. (“What?” says someone, presumably the person who said “Wow”). “Key missions, faction missions, stronghold takeovers, challenges and over 300 different settlements – every single one of them packed with game play and activities.”

Rico’s main objective is to hunt down and kill Tom Sheldon – his former boss, friend and mentor, now mental. But there’s an awful lot on his to-do list to get through before that, such as – in the mission Johansson is demoing for us – rescuing an alcoholic informant called Karl Blaine. Having barricaded himself into the skywalk between two soaring casino towers, Blaine finds himself under attack from both sides with nothing but a bottle of gin for protection.

But here comes Rico to the rescue, swooping in using a stolen attack helicopter. He fires a hail of bullets into the glass panels of the skyway to create an opening, then attaches his grapple to the base of the copter and swings down to Blaine’s side. Rico realizes they’re outnumbered so, flinging a few grenades as he goes for good measure, he grabs Blaine, leaps off the skyway and parachutes over the waterfall below.

Yes, the parachute is back, but it’s been updated so it’s more fun to control and easier to use for stunts. You can also use it in conjunction with the grappling hook to navigate quickly across terrain. Or you can choose from more than 100 vehicles in the game, including cars, trucks, boats, planes and helicopters. The next part of the mission we’re seeing involves Blaine’s car, which he’s drunkenly run off into a ditch – so Rico uses the grapple and a handy nearby tractor to pull it back onto the road.

Blaine gets behind the wheel and advises Rico to go up top. “Nice Just Cause 2 logic – get up on my roof, you’ll fight better from there,” says Johansson with a smile. The car starts speeding along and Rico starts shooting away, as they’re inevitably followed by a load of enemies in jeeps.

Welcome to the jungle! This is where we keep the exploding oil refineries.

“You’re completely free to move around and develop your own style and tactics for dealing with these pursuers,” says Johansson. He blows the tires out of one jeep to send it spinning and flipping across the tarmac, then leaps onto the other. Rico clings to the back of the vehicle, using the tailgate for cover and popping out to fire at enemies. With enough of them dispatched he leaps up, pops a bit of C4 on the roof, opens his parachute and sails clear before shooting at the explosives. The car blows up with a nice big boom.

Back on the roof of Blaine’s vehicle, Johansson can’t resist showing off that grapple once again. He attaches an enemy to the tailgate so he’s dragged along as the car speeds down the road. Just for good measure Rico starts shooting him too, and the man splutters, screams and convulses for much longer than anyone in real life would.

In Just Cause 2, your car is your weapon and your shield. And also your car.

But that’s the whole point about Just Cause – no one’s ever pretended this is the series to go for if you want a gritty, authentic simulation of real-world military combat. Just Cause is about big guns and silly stunts and cartoon kills and huge explosions. It’s about cruising in a super-fast speedboat across a beautiful tropical sea, then zooming up a beach and off a ramp and parachuting into the azure sky, as the speedboat heads straight into a giant oil tank and explodes in a cloud of fire and thunder.

Avalanche hasn’t lost sight of this, thankfully, and it’s clear they’re working hard to fix the problems with the first game. Just Cause 2 certainly looks prettier than its predecessor, and judging by the map it’s bigger. But perhaps the key to making it better is really to focus on what this series is all about – and make it stupider. So far, so good.

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Seeing the game in motion at a recent EA press event, with a developer running through a few missions, it becomes apparent that there’s another layer of familiarity at work, too. Beneath the reanimated corpses and golden eagles with flaming exhaust ports sticking out of them, Brutal Legend takes a lot of cues from Hyrule Field and the Legend of Zelda. Once again, you’re plonked into a large, rolling landscape filled with set-piece locations and boasting a comforting framework of steadily evolving powers to lead you through them, and once again each mission we’re shown throws in a handful of delightful new toys, while every fight is enhanced by an instantly recognizable no-fuss left-trigger targeting system. There’s even an Epona of sorts, if you can look beneath the flaming panelling, eight-ball gearstick, and massive, steroid-enhanced tyre treads of The Deuce, the snarling custom hot-rod Schafer’s team has built for you to race around the countryside, leaving a trail of shattered bones and smoking feathers in your wake.

Black’s lines don’t disappoint, but will Brutal Legend have anything to match the “Slowy Joey” exchange from Psychonauts?

So while Brutal Legend bills itself as an open-world game, don’t expect the identikit streets and boroughs of a dozen crime titles, where the locations are simple templates for a brace of different mission types. Instead, it’s the open world of a fantasy novel’s end-papers map: a rangy, echoing place, taking in 64 square kilometers, where specific landmarks are built with specific purposes in mind. It’s a setting to be patiently explored, each new tool placing a little more of the map within your reach, and, despite the fact that the whole thing looks like Skull Island renovated by Albert Speer, it’s a setting you’ll hopefully come to love during the process.

Unsurprisingly, given the company’s lineage, Double Fine has crafted its story with easy charm. Eddie Riggs, voiced by Jack Black, is the best roadie in the world, and, following a backstage accident which sees him getting blood on his belt buckle (not a metaphor), he’s sucked back to the fantastical Age of Metal, where the men have perms, the women have too much eye shadow, and giant V-8 engines swing from chains above flaming pits. As expected, a complex back-story has left the whole place in the grip of evil forces, and Eddie, using roadie skills such as building, organizing, and hitting people with axes, must gather together and galvanize a team of hard rock heroes to overthrow a nasty gaggle of demonic oppressors.

The developer has presumably spent a long time working on perm physics.

As the developer play through begins, Riggs wakes to find himself stranded on top of a mountainous altar, surrounded by masses of creepy demonic nuns wielding sacrificial daggers. In other words, he’s either wound up in Sittingbourne, or is locked deep in the fiery embrace of a tutorial level.

Combat is split for the most part between melee and magic attacks, the former handled by The Separator, a massive dual-bladed axe. With a charge move that can break through blocks and a range of increasingly complex combos, even a single swing is capable of sending the screen into a mangled blur of claret and waving stumps. Magic, meanwhile, is handled via Riggs’ Flying V guitar Clementine, all of the available attacks resembling stage effects, kicking off relatively sedately with brilliant little eruptions of flame and flickering walls of forked lightning.

The trick, as ever, lies with using magic and melee together for strategic effect, stunning long-distance enemies with lightning, before moving in close to split them in two in a more hands-on manner. It looks like a viciously effective system, the comedy animations as your victims flail about never undermining the pleasing brutality of your attacks. And while the basics are simple, Brutal Legend is happy to pile on the complications even in the tutorial mission, loading you up with combos and eventually chucking in a new character, the large-eyed Goth fox Ophelia, to fight alongside you and double-team on one-liners and special moves, the first of which sees the her launched from Riggs’ shoulders before spinning violently into a crowd of enemies.

With the demonic nuns finished off, it’s time to introduce The Deuce, Riggs’ main means of transportation, and the surprise third pillar of the weapon system. Summoned and upgraded by learning and performing guitar riffs at shrines dotted around the world – the exact implementation has not yet been revealed, but in theory the whole thing sounds similar to the short songs learnt during the Ocarina of Time – players will eventually be able to fit out the Deuce with anything from mounted Gatling guns to flaming side-jets. A convenient boss fight against a gooey, vertebrae-heavy snake-thing quickly follows, highlighting the Deuce’s uses in combat – the short version: it does a mean line in ramming things – and from there, Ophelia and Riggs are thrown into a race down a collapsing stretch of highway, before the tutorial comes to a fittingly thunderous climax.

Lemmy from Motorhead has a speaking part – apparently eager for a videogame role ever since Keith Richards provided the voice of Pac-Man.

To illustrate the kind of things that will follow, as Riggs races around gathering together a resistance army to take on the demons, we’re given a quick glimpse of two missions from later on in the game, the first of which is a simple escort job with a maxed-out Deuce protecting a tour bus full of comrades, while the second, more elaborate, set-up sees Riggs sent into a charming combination of mine and prison to recruit foot-soldiers for his army. The recruits in question take the freakish form of Headbangers: slaves clad in rags of finest leopard print, who boast massively over-developed necks after years of breaking rocks with their skulls. Won over with a special riff from Clementine, they can then be directed around the map with a large cursor, and given a range of orders including attacking, defending, and taking out obstacles. It’s a mini-version of Pikmin with jokes, essentially, and provides plenty of strategic potential as Riggs works his way through the mines: stay back and let your crew take on the enemy themselves, or micro-manage, flitting between magic and melee, hoping you can handle directing your Headbangers at the same time?

It’s a confident demo, and suggests a game that uses its traditional framework to contain a surprising range of different challenges, with a solid focus on brawling and exploration tying everything together. While we’ve yet to see anything that matches the invention of Double Fine’s previous game, it’s worth remembering that Psychonauts’ stand-out moments were often wily spins on tradition themselves – the teasing, claustrophobic brilliance of the Milkman mission was, at heart, a humble chain of fetch quests with wobbly sidewalks flung in, and the magic came with the dazzling presentation and arrangement rather than the mechanics.

The music has been chosen but is yet to be approved. Hint: don’t expect My First, My Last, My Everything.

And in presentational terms, at least, Brutal Legend is shaping up to be everything you could hope for: Black’s trademark mix of mock grandeur and sleazy punning fits perfectly into Schafer’s world, and the bizarre excesses of the design, blending lighting rigs, Roman temples, and strangely enchanting piles of gore constantly throws up unexpected sight-seeing opportunities. There are dangers, after the genre-hopping of Psychonauts, with a structure that allowed individual levels to riff on everything from right-wing TV news to the Napoleonic wars, that such a focused narrative could mean Brutal Legend comes off as an over-extended in-joke for musos. But, while there’s plenty in here for people who can tell Megadeth from standard-issue regular deth, there’s also enough character, humor and thought to suggest that, in amongst the wisecracks, hot rods and golden eagles, almost everybody will be able to find something to enjoy.

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“We feel we owe you all a small heads-up, and our apologies for lack of updates,” said Mika Reini, CFO of Remedy, on the official forums. “We’re still here and working hard on getting Alan Wake for you to enjoy.

“Sure, we’ve been in development for a long time and if everything had gone perfectly smoothly there probably would be a game out for you guys to play already. But designing a completely new game can be hard, and sometimes you need to take a detour to find the best route forward.

“We want to entertain you guys in the best possible way and our team is putting in every effort possible in order for that to happen. That is the way Remedy wants to do things. I’m sure you will enjoy Alan Wake when we’re done,” he added.

Alan Wake was revealed at E3 2005 but subsequently ducked out of sight, causing us all to panic like a haunted author on the run from terrible nocturnal phantoms. Which, incidentally, is a lot like the plot of the game.

Alan Wake is in development for PC and Xbox 360, and is expected, eventually, sometime in 2009.

Head over to the Alan Wake Site for all of the details released so far.

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Each copy of APB’s San Paro – a contemporary, crime-ridden city, a violent playground for gangs of cops and robbers – will host 100 players. By the standards of an online shooter, that’s a lot. By the standards of a thousands-strong World of Warcraft server, it’s small. By the standards of EVE Online’s single universe, it’s minuscule. APB’s claim on the “massive” part of “massively multiplayer” is looking rather slim, especially when the likes of Zipper’s MAG, with its 256-player matches, aren’t considered by most to qualify.

But massively multiplayer gaming isn’t just about numbers. It’s also about persistence, a sense of place, a sense of ownership, and of course, it’s about other people. In a true MMO, the interaction between players – even if it’s no more than the knowledge that you’re sharing a world with them while you go about your own business – is equal to, greater than or synonymous with the game itself.

By that criteria, APB could well turn out to be one of the purest examples of the massively multiplayer online game since EVE.

The only characters you’ll ever fight will be other players, and the clothes you wear and car you drive in the game will probably be designed by other players, if you didn’t make them yourself. You’ll steal from, sell to and shoot real people all the time, even if you never talk to them. APB is 100 per cent player-versus-player, with the game’s missions substituting dynamic, real-time match-making for crafted encounters with hapless AI. This is what developer Real-time Worlds calls “players as content”. It’s quite scary. In a good way.

Enforcers will be able to have just as aggressive a street style as criminals – you’ll know them by their badges.

So if you ask me, APB is very much an MMO. It’s the supposedly easier questions that are harder to answer. Questions such as: when’s it out, what formats is it on, and why haven’t we seen it properly yet? This preview is based on an E3 presentation that, while fascinating, wasn’t much more than a few videos loaded into PowerPoint, and the game itself was notably absent.

PB was first heard of in 2005, a collaboration between Realtime Worlds and Webzen, due on PC in 2007 and Xbox 360 in 2008. Now the Korean publisher has been replaced by EA, the PC version is due in “early 2010″ with closed beta testing starting in August, and “we have not announced a console strategy” (although 360 is certainly still on the cards). At least we can be pretty sure that it’s not turning into GTA Online after all. As for why we haven’t seen it yet, it’s probably best to give the benefit of the doubt. Realtime very much kept its own counsel during the development of Crackdown, and that worked out quite nicely.

APB shares Crackdown’s entirely open city setting, and its loose structure: there’s no narrative as such, just a collection of Enforcement and Criminal factions offering dynamic objectives. If Crackdown was about physical freedom, then APB is about freedom of action and personal style. Going against the online grain, it actually has a lesser focus on character advancement than its offline predecessor.

Real-time wants gamers to earn their names in APB through their skill in combat, and creativity with its extensive and hugely powerful customization tools, not the amount of time they invest. Celebrity is a core concept – one reason for the “quite personal” 100-player limit per city, although you’ll be able to switch cities at will – but you’ll earn it by being the coolest, the quickest or the most cunning, not the most powerful or most dedicated.

It’s the combat side we currently know least about. APB is a third-person shooter and vehicular action game; car theft and territory wars will play a big part. Its RPG elements are apparently very limited. A sense of character advancement is a must, of course, but it’s mostly achieved through unlocking cosmetic options, weapons, vehicles and usable items, and upgrading weapons and vehicles over time from a central pool of tokens. There will be ways to slightly increase your health, say, but Real-time is insistent that there will be “no arbitrary stats”, and strict limits on weapon and item loadouts, to keep the game balanced for all players.

Each city may only host 100 players, but there will be 1000 AI civilians wandering about.

As for how conflict comes about, that will largely be up to the players. What you do, and how many of you there are, decides who you fight. You might, as one of the enforcers, take a mission from an NPC faction (like the Praetorians who defend the financial district) to take some territory off the criminals. As a criminal, you might steal a car to sell for profit, triggering its car alarm which will then summon player enforcement to respond and bring you to rights.

Your actions feed into APB’s live, lobby-free match-making system which will pair up individual or group face-offs. In many cases this would be a straight one-on-one, two-on-two, four-on-four confrontation, but it doesn’t have to be equal numbers. If the game judges that one skilful and/or well-equipped player is a match for three hapless noobs, it might set that up – or if a gang of criminals evades police capture for over an hour, say, they might end up with multiple groups of enforcers on their tail.

Communication in APB will mostly be through voice chat, Real-time assuming that there won’t be time to type in most situations. It’s partnered with Vivox on a 3D positional voice chat system that will place your barked commands in exclamations in the game’s soundscape – Realtime played an impressively atmospheric and hectic-sounding clip of a gun battle from one of its internal tests – although there will of course be a private channel if you need it.

Players’ ability to make their mark on the soundscape as well as the visual representation of the game is hugely important to Realtime, and it’s gone to some extraordinary lengths to pursue it. A deal with last.fm allows you to project music from your car stereos into the game world; the software will select something suitable from the internet or your own collection according to specific or general settings such as “always project heavy rock”. A full MIDI music creation suite is included, and you’ll be able to set a “death tune” that vanquished players will hear every time you kill them.

That’s just the start of Realtime’s commitment to user-created content in APB. You can see some of the rest in this recording of a show-floor E3 presentation. The game’s 30 or so vehicles can be customized with an editor that humbles Forza Motorsport’s, spannig paint, decals, body parts, wheels, the interior and even the stereo system.

Even more impressive is the character creator, used by Realtime’s own artists to create all the NPCs in the game. The models are extremely detailed, and as well as changing features and body type you can shape hair yourself, design tattoos and body paint; you can change the material, layering and texturing of clothing and customize its zips, buttons and collars. Everything save your features and physical attributes can be changed at will, although gradual physical change might be possible, as might plastic surgery (for a price).

One reason for the 100-player limit is the expectation that entire player populations will face off, and there’s a lot of detail for the Unreal 3 engine to handle.

“This is what we call our crafting,” says the developer, and just like the action, it’s based on skill and creativity rather than set challenges or time investment. Real-time expects some players will be content to become virtual fashion designers, selling their work to others – and given Microsoft’s experience with the Forza car market, that’s not a stretch at all. As far as MMOs are concerned, APB proposes an exciting new form of player-driven economy.

Exciting is an apt description for almost everything about APB. There’s nothing else in development quite like it: perhaps the first true combination of the ethos of offline, open-world, sandbox games with an internet connection. Real time’s willingness to step back from the design and put technology in the hands of players is an extremely bold experiment in a conservative sector of a conservative industry. But it is just that – an experiment. It’s hard for anyone to tell whether or not it will work, especially with the scant information we currently have on the game’s brass-tacks mechanics. But it’s going to be fascinating finding out.

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Valve’s second stab (and bludgeon) at the multiplayer zombie FPS spans five new campaigns in the Southern USA, from Savannah to New Orleans. Left 4 Dead 2 promises a stronger narrative arc across the campaigns as we get to know the four new characters – a high-school football coach, a female cable news reporter, a mechanic and a conman.

L4D2 has all our old infected friends, along with a bunch of new ones. Among the newer infected are the Charger, with his giant mutated arm is good for knocking you through the air, and the Wandering Witch, who still doesn’t like to be disturbed, but doesn’t exactly help herself by stumbling about in a daze rather than sitting down and out of the way.

New melee weapons include the frying pan, chainsaw and axe (slice legs offs!), and there’s also a new semi-auto shotgun and sniper rifle. These new weapons should help push the rank-and-file infected into nice new ragdoll deaths, including a new hazmat-wearing model who’s resistant to fire.

As mentioned last night, Valve’s updated the AI Director so it not only has discretion over level layout and weather effects, but also sets bits of the game (including the New Orleans campaign RPS played) in daylight.

One of the more interesting additions are “gauntlet” moments. In New Orleans’ case, you’re sent across a long, narrow bridge, terrorized by Infected, leaving you to hop between the roofs of cars and vans at breakneck pace to avoid death.

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