FIRST PLAY NIER: AUTOMATA

Chances are you didn’t play the original Nier game back in 2010. It’s a cult classic, which is what people call games that weren’t quite good enough to sell by the truckload.

Quietly causing some excitement seven years later, though, is its sequel, which you don’t need to have played the original to understand.

You play as 2B, who, as it turns out, isn’t a giant pencil but a sword-twirling humanoid robot. This being a Japanese game, 2B takes the form of an impossibly stretched femme fatale in stockings, heels and a blindfold. Because that’s what we’d all put on for a day doing battle against an army of machines bent on our destruction, right?

The most common machine you’ll come across looks a lot like the little green man from the Android logo, albeit made of concrete. But don’t be fooled by their chummy appearance. You’ll need to fight off their attacks using a combo of the giant swords on 2B’s back and a sentry gun that hovers over her shoulder, which can be fired independently of the way she’s facing. That comes in handy when the game shifts perspective, becoming a top-down, twin-stick shooter reminiscent of the likes of Geometry Wars. At other times it flattens side-on to become a 2D scrolling platformer.

Most of the time, though, this is a fairly familiar hack’n’slash that’s not entirely dissimilar to Bayonetta – probably because some of the same developers were involved in making both. Some dodgy voice acting aside, Nier: Automata is looming large on our gaming horizon.