GAMING
What Matthew Vice is playing
Starlink: Battle for Atlas ★★★ Switch, PS4, Xbox One
Does anyone remember the No Man’s Sky debacle? It was a highly anticipated spaceexploration game that offered a feature no game before had: to seamlessly fly through space and onto the surface of planets with no loading screens between. Awesome! But while the game technically delivered this, it delivered almost nothing else. It was dull and empty and boring.
If you’re anything like me, you were probably still hankering for that promised seamless space exploration, but with stuff to do, like space pirates to battle, giant alien monsters to blast and maybe a story to follow. Then hanker no more, because that's exactly what Starlink: Battle for
Atlas provides and, in a way, it can be seen as succeeding at what No Man’s Sky tried to do.
The story in brief is that a crew of space explorers from Earth arrive in the Atlas star system to deliver their stranded alien friend home, only to have their leader kidnapped by an alien warlord, prompting them to mount a rescue mission and eventually battle to free the star system from the warlord’s rule. Players can control any one of the several characters they wish, each of whom comes with a special ability such as missile volleys or time-slowing to aid them in combat. Players can also mix and match several ship parts and weapons to create their own unique spaceship with which to explore the planets and the deepest reaches of space. The main story mission is a bit short if you blast through it, but this is an Ubisoft game, meaning each planet is littered with icons representing side-missions and activities you can engage in until you’ve had your fill. The combat itself is fun, switching to the correct weapons to deal with specific enemy weaknesses and learning how to dodge their attack patterns.
Starlink is one of those “toys to life” games. If you buy a physical copy, it comes with a special controller onto which you can snap collectable models of the in-game ships and physically switch them on the controller, and they’ll change in the game. I couldn’t be bothered with this, but luckily it’s optional. You can choose to play entirely digitally with a normal controller, using in-game menus to switch ships and weapons. Phew.
★★★ Soul Calibur VI PS4, PC, Xbox One
Aquick thing before we start, if you want to hear a funny story, look up Tim Langdell, the man who trademarked the word “edge” and went after anyone using it, causing this videogame franchise to switch from its original name, Soul Edge, to
Soul Calibur for the rest of the series.
Anyway, that’s why Soul Calibur VI is actually the seventh entry in the series.
It’s also a prequel, revisiting the story of Soul
Calibur 1 — but who cares about the story in a fighting game, right? It’s all about the fast, silky smooth, one-on-one melee combat, the clang of steel on steel and the lavishly designed characters spouting bombastic win quotes and posing like idiots.
So what’s the main innovation this time?
It’s called the Reversal Edge, a mechanic that allows players to absorb their opponents’ incoming strikes and counterattack, resulting in a rock-paper-scissors-style mini-game. The winner knocks their opponent flying. Personally, I don’t really care for this new feature, as it seems more based on luck than skill, but others may like it.
The super moves from the previous game have returned, allowing players to unleash a devastating and visually impressive attack once they’ve charged up enough energy. There’s also a decent amount of content for a single player, including an arcade mode, a story mode and a mission mode, which is nice because many fighting game developers think that single-player content is beneath them lately. The online mode seems to work pretty well — mind you, I only played against my buddy who lives a few streets away, so take that with a pinch of salt.
It’s also become a tradition of the series to have guest characters from other games, and they couldn’t have chosen a better one this time: Geralt of Rivia, from CD Projekt Red’s The
Witcher series. Oh yes! And he’s as awesome as you’d expect.
But I still needed to see one more name on the roster to be happy, Tira, my favourite character. She was announced to be in the game shortly before release and I was relieved, until I saw that she’s a day 1 DLC character — yes, on the day of release, you have to pay a bit more to add Tira to your game ... Bandai Namco, see if you can guess which finger
I'=’m holding up.