Titanfall 2's latest free DLC pack launches today, and it comes with a couple of new maps, a new execution, and the addition of a third weapon slot. This pack comes alongside an update to the game which tweaks and fixes certain parts of the game.
The most significant addition is the War Games map, which is a remaster of two different maps from the original Titanfall. According to a post on Respawn's website, War Games features "the civilian shops, city streets, and tall buildings for window-to-window fighting from the Battle of Angel City," but it also contains "the large, open tank garage facilities for hand-to-hand Pilot combat from the Battle of Airbase Sierra." War Games has a VR simulation aesthetic much different than the original maps. You can see it in action in the video below, and be sure to watch our livestream of the DLC here.
The pack also comes with a new map for the Live Fire mode, which pits pilots against pilots without Titans. The map is called Traffic, and it is set in "a weathered test site where pilot positioning is pitted against mobility across two busy thoroughfares," the post states.
In addition to the two maps, the DLC adds a shadow-boxing Pilot execution, Titan Brawl as a permanent game mode, and a third weapon slot. Previously, Pilots only had access to a primary weapon and either a sidearm or an anti-Titan weapon. Now, they can carry a primary, a secondary, and an anti-Titan weapon.
The new patch contains several quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes, such as a decrease to Amped Weapon damage and a change that makes the dropship leave as soon as everyone is on board. You can see the full list of patch notes at the bottom of this article.
Free-for-all with a twist. Collect 3 batteries to call in a Titan. Battery locations are placed around the map. Pilots drop batteries on death.
Titan Brawl now added as permanent mode in mixtape matchmaking.
Titan Damage in now tracked in the scoreboard.
More Private Match Settings
Round / Score Limit
[Round] Time Limit
Pilot Boosts [On, Off]
Pilot Boost / Titan Meter Multiplier [25% to 500%]
Pilot Boost / Titan Meter Overdrive [On, Off, Only]
Pilot Health [25% to 500%]
Respawn Delay [0 to 40] seconds
Titan Core Meter Multiplier [25% to 500%]
Game Improvements
Evac ship will now leave immediately once all living players are onboard.
Additional performance optimizations on Xbox One.
Added an easter egg to Glitch.
Game Mode Adjustments
CTF HUD
Replaced flag icons with stacked score bars.
A permanent flag icon is now displays the status of each flag [Home, <player name> / You have the Flag, SECURE / RETURN].
Flag status no longer displays after the winner is determined.
Display team Titan status.
Running over Stalkers with your Titan will now cause damage.
Miscellaneous Bug Fixes
Fixed exploit on Exoplanet where players could get under the map.
Fixed bug where stealing a battery from a rodeo would not give player any Titan meter.
Fixed issue in CTF where the flag would appear to be unreturnable.
Fixed issue with Legion shield not appearing sometimes.
Fixed a couple spots on Eden where Pilots were able to hide inside geometry.
Fixed issue with Tone where reload would happen during her execution.
Fixed issue where Ronin Prime execution played wrong audio.
Addressed issue where Pilots couldn't enter evac while in phase state when using Phase Shift. The trigger to enter the evac will now be activated when the player exits phase state.
Monarch no longer gets two Electric Smokes when using her Upgrade Core.
Boost Balance
Reduced damage of Amped Weapons and put on 30 second timer
As previously detailed, the other major components of update 2.6.0 include Challenge Rifts (weekly static dungeons that have you playing as a set character), new zones (The Moors and The Temple of the Firstborn, both found in Act 2 in Adventure mode), and new Realms of Fate bounties (which are located at new waypoints on the map).
Now that the update is available, Blizzard has released the full patch notes. Aside from the new content mentioned above, the bulk of these deal with item changes and adjustments to Set bonuses. There are also some quality-of-life changes, including a very welcome one for Greater Rifts. When you die when playing on your own, you can now resurrect immediately and the remaining time on the death timer will simply be removed from the amount you have left, and cooldowns will adjust accordingly. In other words, this spares you from having to sit there, doing nothing, without actually impacting the way a death affects a run.
Players looking to play as the Necromancer can pick up the Rise of the Necromancer pack for $15. Console players who don't yet own the game can pick up Diablo III: Eternal Collection, which bundles the pack with the existing Ultimate Evil Edition. This carries a price tag of $60 but will be available for a limited time for $40.
By Anonymous on Jun 28, 2017 12:00 am This month you can grab Grow Up and Runbow on Xbox One, plus Kane & Lynch 2 and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean on 360.
Activision kicked off the Call of Duty Days of Summer event starting today. Coming to Infinite Warfare, Modern Warfare Remastered, and Black Ops 3, the event is beach- and summer-themed, adds a whole bunch of items, a couple of maps, and a game mode, and is completely free. It runs for the next five weeks, ending on August 1.
Activision announced the Days of Summer event on its blog, detailing that there are a number of content drops coming to the three most recent Call of Duty games. Highlighting the event are two DLC maps that you can play for free. The first is a redesigned Bog map for Modern Warfare Remastered. Called Beach Bog, it now looks like a cool, sunny beach spot rather than a nighttime battleground. This event also comes with four new weapon camos that you can unlock on Beach Bog, although you'll have to complete their related challenges by August 1 to get them.
Infinite Warfare players, meanwhile, can try out the Turista map from the Continuum Map Pack for free. It's only available until the Days of Summer event ends on August 1, however.
Beach Bog
The other big addition is the return of the Prop Hunt game mode to Modern Warfare Remastered. In this mode, some players can turn into inanimate objects on a map; their goal is to hide and avoid being spotted by other players who are trying to kill them. This new Prop Hunt adds a bunch of beach-themed props like sand castles and beach balls.
Black Ops 3 players have a chance to unlock a special Pack-A-Punch camo, and they can also play the maps from the Awakening Map Pack for free. These Black Ops 3 perks go live on July 11 and end on August 1.
There's a lot more coming in the Days of Summer event, and you can learn more about it in the video above or over at Activision's blog post.
Ubisoft today made a surprise announcement of a new Assassin's Creed game for mobile. Called Assassin's Creed Rebellion, the official description and a brief glimpse of gameplay suggest this is essentially the franchise's take on Fallout Shelter.
Rebellion is a free-to-play strategy RPG coming to iOS and Android phones and tablets. It tasks players with building an assassin brotherhood and managing a fortress in Spain during the Inquisition. Your headquarters is built room by room and can be used to train characters and craft equipment. As you progress, more room types and items will become available, and characters--who take the form of assassins from the series and new ones created for Rebellion--will be able to take part in various missions.
These missions come in multiple forms, including those that are meant to gather resources that allow you to upgrade characters, while others reward you with crafting materials. Characters have different skills that Ubisoft says will work better for some types of missions than others.
The teaser trailer above focuses on highlighting the game's art style, which is quite a bit different from that of other games in the series. Toward the end, you can briefly see some gameplay; the HQ itself certainly looks a lot like the shelters found in Fallout Shelter. That comes as little surprise, as the game is being developed by Behaviour Interactive, which co-developed that game with Bethesda.
An exact release date for Rebellion was not revealed; Ubisoft said only that it's coming "soon" worldwide. You'll want to be running at least iOS 8 or Android 4.1 on the device you're planning to play on. We don't yet know if Ubisoft has any plans to eventually bring the game to PC or consoles as Bethesda did with Fallout Shelter.
By Anonymous on Jun 27, 2017 11:30 pm Join us as we relive the classic hero the Necromancer making its way back to Diablo III. We'll go live as soon as the Necromancer Pack becomes available.
Spinning off a well-established game series into a different genre is always a risky move. On one hand, if the gambit is successful, you'll simultaneously introduce the franchise to a new group of players and give existing fans something new to reignite their passion. On the other hand, you also risk alienating those same fans with a game they don't want and didn't ask for.
Valkyria Revolution is such a gamble. It's an alternate-universe take on Sega's Valkyria Chronicles tactical RPG series, reimagined as an action-RPG with a few strategic elements intact. While it has a lot going for it, the game ultimately fails to gel into a cohesive experience, resulting in a game that, while fun at times, never fully comes into its own.
The setting is Europa, a continent based on the real-life Europe with some fantasy twists (and, notably, a different Europa from the one previously seen in other Valkyria Chronicles games). The world is powered by a mystical mineral called ragnite, and the alchemic sciences associated with it drive technology and advancement, yielding a new era of prosperity for Europa. But the small kingdom of Jutland has been cut off from the rich ragnite of other nations, suffering under the thumb of the oppressive Ruz empire. Conflict erupts into all-out war, and casualties begin to sharply rise.
Revolution's story is defined by political intrigue, scheming, surprising revelations, moral quandaries, and interesting twists. It's occasionally exciting and surprising, but also largely held back by its mediocre presentation. Too many cutscenes go into excruciating detail, making you watch characters talk about their schemes and political maneuvers for long stretches at a time, particularly toward the beginning of the game.
This might not be so bad if these scenes were actually done well, but they're profoundly bland--they frequently amount to painfully drawn-out sequences with robotic characters spouting long-winded info dumps. There's little attempt to make these scenes feel as intense and exciting as the story wants them to be, turning a potentially great story into a dull mess.
Once you finally get through a stretch of story sequences at the start, you'll be able to hop into the thick of combat. While the original Valkyria Chronicles was a turn-based strategy game, Revolution has you lead a squad of four characters into enemy strongholds in real time. You only command one character directly at a time--the other members of the squad are under AI control, though you can issue blanket squad commands like "Offense" or "Support" or give a single direct order if needed.
You can either attack with a basic strike combo, use special alchemic skills derived from the ragnite you have equipped on the character, attack with a long-range gun or a grenade (provided you have ammo), or use an item. Foes react dynamically to the actions you take--by hiding behind barricades or in tall thickets, you can launch surprise attacks. If you really start to shock and overwhelm the groups of enemy troops, you can make them terrified of you, impairing them severely and making the individual members significantly easier to take out.
This sounds empowering, but it makes the basic ambush-and-overwhelm strategy the best way of dealing with most enemy encounters: You surprise the enemy, rush on in, use a bunch of powerful alchemy attacks to take down some troops, then pick off the others when they start quaking in their boots. The only thing that changes this up is when the enemy starts bringing in some tanks and other heavy artillery, but even those aren't too hard to deal with once you know how to debilitate them. While it's at first satisfying to decimate an entire squadron of enemies by making them fear your very presence, the effect has diminishing returns on your enjoyment.
Unfortunately, when it comes to anything beyond ambushing enemies and throwing some healing magic around, your companions have the approximate intelligence of a pile of bricks. They oftentimes blow your cover with ill-planned attacks or stand around in the area-of-effect of heavily choreographed enemy skills like a deer in headlights, no matter what sort of blanket command you issue to them. You can set each soldier's "priorities," which allegedly make them focus on certain factors during battle, such as melee attacks and healing, and you can earn more such priorities via side quests. In practice, however, these feel like they don't have much of an effect. Boss encounters, which provide most of the game's challenge, are the worst in this regard: Your companions frequently use ineffectual attacks and stand around in danger zones, making you feel like a babysitter when you've got a big bad enemy to fight.
The dysfunctional priorities system exemplifies a bigger issue with Valkyria Revolution--many of its gameplay systems feel tacked-on and unnecessary. Take, for example, the ragnite-driven weapon-upgrade system. You'll earn or buy ragnite that soldiers can equip to give them special skills, but you can also sacrifice this ragnite to enhance character weapons via a grid that grants various stat boosts and bonuses. Enhancing these weapons is slow-going for most of the game, and acquiring the ragnite you need to enhance them requires playing a lot of optional missions. Yet in the process of knocking these missions out, you level up quickly--to the point where the slow stat gains from weapon enhancements seem pretty silly. The same goes for making custom clothes for your troops: While some pieces of gear provide tangible benefits, such as increasing ammo capacity, the majority of other boosts--like increasing mobility on certain land types by a small amount--are so miniscule and limited in use that you'll wonder why they're even there.
While Revolution fails to match the high bar set by its predecessors, its best qualities manage to win you over for a time. The soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda (of Chrono Trigger and Xenogears fame) is stellar throughout. The characters in your crew are unique and likeable (save maybe for snooty noble Isaak.) And when the mission structure changes up a bit--giving you a challenging solo mission or a race against time to destroy a group of foes before they summon a Valkyria weapon--the potential of the game's combat shines through.
Taken as a whole, however, Valkyria Revolution just doesn't come together as well as it should. Between the poor story presentation, AI issues, and numerous superfluous systems that add little to the experience, it feels like the game needed a bit more time and planning for all of its ideas to properly congeal. While Valkyria Revolution offers some enjoyment, you're going to have to wade through the trenches to get there.
Planet Coaster's third expansion is out now, free of charge, and it adds new coasters, attractions, and ways to customize your park. The Summer Update's biggest addition will let you create "the ultimate sky-high summer spectacle" by adding fireworks displays to the game, and you can get a look in the trailer above.
The update boasts "the most detailed fireworks simulation ever created for a video game" and will let you create displays for the Fourth of July, New Year, and Bonfire Night, which can be triggered with other park events and even timed to custom music. You can also download custom fireworks displays from other players through the Planet Coaster community.
The Summer Update also introduces new Video and Image Scenery, which allows you to add your own images and video onto customizable wall panels and screens. And there are others ways to change up your park with a new Flatride Sequencer and Painted Wooden Coasters.
Of course, the update comes with the addition of new flatrides, coasters, scenarios, custom biomes and, right in time for the Fourth of July, a Stars and Stripes scenery pack. Creator Frontier Developments is also promising game fixes and quality-of-life improvements, and you can get a look at all of the changes in the patch notes.
Sumo Digital has announced it is discounting its unique puzzle-platformer Snake Pass on the Nintendo Switch eShop, making it the first game to go on sale on the service since the console launched back in March. From today until July 4, Switch owners can download the title for $12, 40% off the game's normal price or $20.
The Switch sale is only one part of what Sumo has dubbed a "summer of sales" for the game; in addition to that, Snake Pass is on sale for PC as part of Steam's Summer Sale. Steam users can download the title for $10 until July 5. PC players will have a another chance to download the game for $10 as part of a Humble Store sale, which runs from July 5 - 19. Snake Pass will also go on sale on other platforms later this summer.
The sale announcement coincides with the release of a new trailer, which gives fans a quick glimpse at the first DLC in store for Snake Pass. Toward the end of the video below, you can see Noodle the snake climbing up a bamboo shoot to reach a brand-new item, a strawberry.
Snake Pass is a retro-inspired platformer that's quite unlike other platformers. While the game features expansive levels filled with collectibles, it's also devoid of jumping; rather, players navigate stages by slithering along the ground like a snake and coiling around poles to reach higher areas. It also features a soundtrack by David Wise, the legendary composer of Donkey Kong Country.
Snake Pass is available for Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Its first DLC is scheduled to launch sometime this July. Despite some moments of frustration, we enjoyed the game; in our review, we called Snake Pass "a quirky puzzler that innovates while simultaneously evoking memories of your favourite platformers" and awarded it 7/10.
By Anonymous on Jun 27, 2017 10:28 pm We take a look at Titanfall 2's The War Games update. New map, new mode, new execution and most importantly, new weapon slot.
The slow period for new additions to the Xbox One's backwards compatibility library that began in May has extended throughout most of June. But that changes today, with Microsoft announcing that five more Xbox 360 games are now playable on Xbox One.
The biggest name of the bunch is Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the third and arguably best game in the series. It joins five other Assassin's Creed titles that were already available on the backwards compatibility list.
The Xbox One's backwards compatibility feature, introduced in November 2015, lets you play Xbox 360 games on the new console. But what games are available? We've now rounded them all up--and we'll continue to update this post as new games are made available.
It's been four years since the release of the last game in the Splinter Cell series with no solid indications of what's next. E3 2017 came and went without any Splinter Cell-related announcements, but amidst all the noise, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot did provide some hope for fans.
First, during an AMA on Reddit, Guillemot responded to a question about Splinter Cell by saying, "Splinter Cell is a brand we talk about a lot. It's also personally one of my favorite series. We don't have anything specific to share at the moment but teams are working on different things, so stay tuned for more."
Subsequently, he was asked about those remarks in an interview with the Ubisoft blog. "We are receiving lots of sketches and proposals around the brand, and we're going to pick one up," he said. "I think you will be able to see something, but you will have to wait for that."
With just a few days to go until the end of June, Microsoft has announced the lineup of free games Xbox Live Gold members will be able to play on Xbox One and Xbox 360 in July 2017.
On Xbox One, players can look forward to trying out Ubisoft's quirky platformer Grow Up as well as the party game Runbow, in which obstacles appear and disappear depending on the color of the background. Xbox 360 owners get Kane & Lynch 2 and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean; both of these will also be available for free on Xbox One through backwards compatibility.
The month kicks off with Grow Up and Kane & Lynch 2, while Runbow and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean will join later, on July 16. Check out the full schedule below.
And remember that Xbox Live Gold members have just a few more days to pick up some of June 2017's free Games With Gold titles before they return to their normal prices.
Death Note is the upcoming live-action movie adaptation of the classic manga series that is set to premiere on Netflix in August. A first trailer was released in March, and now a new character poster has been tweeted by director Adam Wingard. It shows the demonic Ryuk and takes its inspiration from the film's comic book origins. Check it out below:
Death Note tells the story of a high school student named Light, who comes into possession of a supernatural notebook that allows him to kill anyone whose name he writes into it. Light sets out to rid the world of evil but finds himself relentlessly pursued by a legendary police detective.
It stars Nat Wolff, best known for the hit teen drama The Fault in our Stars, plus Keith Stanfield, Paul Nakauchi, and Shea Whigham. Willem Dafoe will perform the voice of Ryuk. The film hits Netflix on August 25, 2017.
In an interview last year, Wingard assured fans that Death Note would be every bit as graphic as the horror movies he has directed, such as You're Next and The Guest. "We can do whatever we want," he told Collider. "It's an anime film. So, technically, it's a cartoon that you're bringing to life. It was important that you have those adult themes. So, it's got nudity, it's got swearing, it's got a ton of violence."
Death Note ran for 108 issues between 2003 and 2006. These were subsequently collected into 12 graphic novels, which to date have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. There have also been three live-action Japanese films, an anime series, and a number of video games for the Nintendo DS, published by Konami.
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This month you can grab Grow Up and Runbow on Xbox One, plus Kane & Lynch 2 and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean on 360.
Join us as we relive the classic hero the Necromancer making its way back to Diablo III. We'll go live as soon as the Necromancer Pack becomes available.
We take a look at Titanfall 2's The War Games update. New map, new mode, new execution and most importantly, new weapon slot.
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