BATMAN: ARKHAM SERIES

Gotham’s villains have been trying to kill the Batman for as long as he has been around, and the Arkham series has some fun with the moments where, for whatever reason, you do send the Caped Crusader to an early grave. Whatever villain it is that you’re going up against will show up on a black screen, look down at your corpse, and hurl insults at you. Some, like the Joker’s are funny in a twisted sort of way, while others, like Killer Croc’s, just seem a little excessive. Either way, it’s a cool spin on the classic “game over” screen.

The year is almost over. The decade is almost over. It’s wild to think about, maybe a little depressing, a little exciting, who the hell really knows at this point. But one thing that continues on is the free games from various services, including Xbox Live and its Games With Gold. Next month has quite the selection, with a certain superhero headlining it.

The most notable game given away in January is The Telltale Batman Series, a narrative adventure following the Dark Knight as he grapples with an unexpected revelation from his past. It will be available on Xbox One systems from January 16th to February 15th. Sticking to the shadows there’s also Styx: Shards of Darkness, a stealth based game that will be available on Xbox One systems the entire month of January.

On the 360 side of things you can fight things out with Tekken 6, and chill out with some Legos with Lego Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy. Those games will be available on both all 360 systems as well as the Xbox One.

The free games will go live starting at the beginning of next month to kick off the next year.

Game over- always a sign of temporary setbacks, but some games and developers know how to have fun even in these dire circumstances. Sure, a plain old screen telling you that you’re dead or that you failed your objective does its job perfectly well, but why not have some fun while doing so? In this feature, we’ll be taking a look at fifteen games with some of the most creative and fun game over screens. Without further ado, let’s begin.

SEGA RALLY CHAMPIONSHIP

If you remove the audio from this one, it’d pretty much be the most boring, drab, cookie-cutter game over screen of all time. It literally just says “Game Over” on a white screen. But it’s the audio that makes it so special. Because that screen is also accompanied with a weirdly cheerful person singing the very words on display. Why? We don’t know. Would we have it any other way? Absolutely not.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Yes, the story-telling was uneven and the ending was kind of disappointing. However, Kojima Productions’ Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain absolutely delivers on the promise of systemic stealth gameplay. Guide a robot arm into a guard’s face. Sabotage convoys with horse dung. Wait till dark for more cover and exploit every aspect of the environment to succeed. All of this only scratches the surface of what’s possible with Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.

Lawbreakers

In a way, you have to feel bad for Lawbreakers. This was Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski’s return to the games industry after a long sabbatical. It was supposed to be the perfect union of hero shooter and arena shooter. Sadly, Lawbreakers was handicapped out of the gate with a market dominated by Overwatch. The actual game had a paucity of content with poor matchmaking and weird balance issues. Of course, the high skill ceiling, lack of personality to its heroes and outright lameness didn’t help either.

Star Wars Battlefront 2

On the surface, it seemed like Electronic Arts had learned its lesson with the first Star Wars Battlefront. People don’t like expansion passes? They’re gone! People want a campaign? They get it and you get to play as the Empire! More maps, proper class loadouts, space battles – it almost seemed like a dream come true. Of course, in true EA fashion, it turned into a nightmare. The campaign was barely worth experiencing. The game’s loot boxes completely ruined progression, leaving the min-maxing of loadouts to random luck of the draw.

Friday The 13th: The Video Game

Friday The 13^th: The Video Game suffered from many of the same expectations as Star Wars Battlefront but on a smaller scale. It was the first time we’d get to properly play as Jason Voorhees. With an asymmetrical multiplayer approach, everything seemed like it was on track even with some delays. Sadly, the actual game was riddled with bugs and server issues that made it nigh unplayable at launch. Though such issues were resolved later, Friday The 13^th: The Video Game was still just a fairly okay game and not the murder-a-thon we expected.

Mass Effect Andromeda

Mass Effect Andromeda was doomed from the EA Access trial with horrible facial animations, poorly written dialogue, glitches, an odd set-up and strange design choices. The full game was worse with severe performance issues, game breaking bugs and glitches, a total waste of a new setting, the squandering of any potential that the premise could have had and don’t even get us started on the co-op multiplayer mode. Mass Effect Andromeda’s combat was up to snuff but everything else makes us think that the series died just so we could have an amazing year of games. Was it worth it? Hmm.

Marvel vs Capcom Infinite

A hilariously bad story mode, low-rent roster, lack of additional features, idiotic new mechanics and terrible graphics – at this rate, you’d wonder why we had any expectations from Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite. Well, this was the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and to a series that we thought was generally dead and gone. To think that we went from “Take you for a ride!” to this nonsense is just sad.

Need for Speed: Payback

Electronic Arts just couldn’t catch a break in 2017. It’s not like we had too much to hope for Need for Speed Payback until its reveal. Over the months, we thought its open world approach, introduction of Heists and three playable characters might finally offer something cool. Expectations were tempered to say the least. Unfortunately, as with Star Wars Battlefront 2, EA ruined it with Speed Cards that could be earned either in-game or with microtransactions. Again, it’s not like the game is suddenly better without microtransactions – customizing your vehicle this way is simply asinine and completely up to RNG. The story was horrendous, the open world didn’t offer much by way of fulfilling gameplay and for an industry that needs microtransactions to fund triple A development, Payback didn’t look particularly good either.

Sonic Forces

When Sonic Forces was first announced, there was cautious optimism. A sequel to Sonic Generations with some kind of war setting? Hurray-ish. Then it was revealed that Sonic would be working alongside all his critter friends. Then all his past enemies appeared as well. And for some reason, Sega thought to throw a customizable avatar. All these bells and whistles aside, Sonic Forces takes everything Generations did right with its gameplay and messes it up. Present Sonic is meh and the Avatar levels are boring. The experience is underwhelming at best and disappointingly idiotic at worst.

NBA 2K18

NBA 2K titles used to walk a fine line between love and hate. Virtual Currency has been an epidemic for a while but the games were generally well built on the basis of their gameplay and campaign. NBA 2K18 looked like it would be even better with its Playgrounds and Career mode and whatnot. Then, like most everything else this year, it was ruined with microtransactions. Customization options are severely gated by Virtual Currency and the game would reward very little of it, pushing you towards microtransactions even more. What could have been a great game is ultimately a decent one that demands way too much money from you past the initial $60.

WWE 2K18

Visual Concepts and Yuke’s haven’t really given us much in terms of quality wrestling for the past few years but past WWE 2K games were at least somewhat decent. WWE 2K18 beats that streak, mixing in a number of amazingly stupid glitches along with a nonsensical MyCareer mode. Though the loot boxes included aren’t purchased with real money, they still severely limit customization and lean towards RNG luck than any kind of actual freedom. This year’s iteration is the best-looking yet but that can only get you so far when everything else is so fundamentally bad.

Styx: Shards of Darkness

Styx: Master of Shadows wasn’t exactly the next Assassin’s Creed (which doesn’t mean much since the current Assassin’s Creed is so different). However, it offered a nice little offbeat fantasy stealth adventure that players could sink their teeth into. Styx: Shards of Darkness sadly failed to build on that. Level design was better this time around but instead of paying homage to the old-school while streamlining gameplay elements, the game stubbornly stuck to it. Stealth is very easy to cheese, which makes you wonder what the point even is and the humour just doesn’t click.

Winner: Star Wars Battlefront 2

It started with the realization that Star Cards could upset the balance of gameplay in multiplayer. Fans were irate that a $60 release introduced pay to win elements. Naturally, DICE responded and promised changes. However, once Star Wars Battlefront 2 hit the early trial stage, the costs of various heroes proved to be the tipping point. The “sense of pride and accomplishment” comment by EA’s community management team became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history. It eventually snowballed into microtransactions being removed and EA experiencing severe falls in its stock prices.

But that’s not what made Star Wars Battlefront 2 a disappointment. It’s the fact that the campaign is a few hours long and fails to deliver on its promise of an Empire state of view. It’s the fact that the multiplayer would suffer severe rubber banding and latency issues, making matches unplayable. It’s the fact that progression makes no sense and is so heavily gated by randomness that you’ll probably never get rewards for the classes you enjoy the most.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is the most disappointing game of 2017 because EA took what should have been a winner with its graphics, presentation and sound design and utterly ruined it out of pure greed. That it accomplished this even after Star Wars Battlefront (2015) was so heavily panned is remarkably sad.

Note: GamingBolt’s Game of the Year categories, nominations and awards are selected via an internal nomination, voting and debate process. You can check the rest of categories and the respective winners here.

That’s not to say that it’s a game mired in old-school simplicity and lacks any sort of meat to its bones. The level design, first and foremost, is absolutely excellent here, and is probably the best thing about the entire game. Levels are big, open and sprawling environments with multiple layers and a number of environmental booby traps and hiding places for you to make use of while you play. There’s a number of ways to go about your objectives, not to the extent that it becomes a completely open ended game where you decide how to get from point A to point B entirely, but still enough that it promotes replays and player freedom. We do have one pretty significant issue with the level design though, as in its last few hours, Shards of Darkness starts reusing its levels. While it’s mostly fun to make your way through new areas in old levels, or to do so with new abilities and what have you, it’s ultimately disappointing to see same areas being reused again instead of seeing new, open, well-designed areas.

"You also have a number of other moves at your disposal, such as creating a clone of yourself to distract guards, or poisoning your enemies and hiding their bodies in chests and trunks."

And sneaking your way through these levels is, for the most part, really enjoyable. The green goblin and titular character Styx has a lot of moves up his sleeves, like squeezing into cracks in walls to hide from enemies, and grabbing them from behind cover to slit their throats. Make too much noise, and your enemies will hear you, and get too close to a certain type of enemy unit and they will be able to smell your foul and easily recognizable goblin stench.

You also have a number of other moves at your disposal, such as creating a clone of yourself to distract guards, or poisoning your enemies and hiding their bodies in chests and trunks. A number of elementary mechanics all come together for a pretty meaty stealth experience on the whole. Add to this the fact that the game also features a crafting mechanic for you to make potions and items, while also giving you the ability to make incremental yet ultimately quite useful upgrades to your abilities, and you have a pretty solid foundation for a stealth game. What’s disappointing, though, is that the AI is not always up to scratch.

Enemies often behave weirdly. Often you might notice some of them walking into walls, or crashing into each other or other objects that are lying around, or failing to react to booby traps that you may have set in the environment. These glitches often take you out of the experience and make the sneaking aspects of the game much less satisfying than they ought to be. And while a lot of these gripes are related to technical glitches, the AI itself at its core isn’t the brightest. Enemies have traditional vision cones, surprisingly enough, and what’s even worse is that these cones are often too small, meaning that while visually on the screen you may only be a short distance away from your enemies and in plain sight, they might not be able to notice you because you do not fall within their cones.

"Visually, the game is well, well below the expected level, so much so that oftentimes it almost gives literal weight to the argument that it’s an old-school stealth title."

Another major issue in the game is with the sections that involve platforming or traversal, since the mechanics in play during these sections are wonky and unwieldy. Styx doesn’t always jump the way you would expect him to, oftentimes falling to his death, while at other times he is simply unable to grab onto ledges or platforms that he should have been able to do. Thankfully, the majority of the game is built around the stealth sections, which are mostly solid and enjoyable, but the platforming sections still manage to be a significant gripe.

The one area where the game is surprisingly better than many would have thought it would be is its writing and its story. Don’t get us wrong, this is no storytelling masterpiece. The narrative in here is serviceable at best, and you will likely forget about it sometime from now, but it keeps things moving along at a nice place and manages to be interesting enough for you to actually care about what happens next.

A large part of that is thanks to the likeability of the character of Styx himself. He’s a nasty, foul-mouthed creature who should be utterly repelling, logically speaking, but he’s been written so smartly and voiced so well- surprisingly enough, for a game that features voice acting that is mediocre at best and horrible at worst- that you cannot help but root for him. Styx, both the game and the character, can be downright hilarious at times, sometimes with snarky, callous quips, sometimes with surprising fourth wall-breaking moments, and other times with funny pop-culture references. Often, the writing feels like it’s maybe trying too hard to be funny, especially on the game over screens where the jokes often don’t land as well as the developers would have hoped, but there’s a good chance that Shards of Darkness will get a number of chuckles out of you.

"Styx: Shards of Darkness is a funny, charming and enjoyable game, but one that is as much a victim of its old-school feel as it gains from it."

Visually, the game is well, well below the expected level, so much so that oftentimes it almost gives literal weight to the argument that it’s an old-school stealth title. It runs on the Unreal Engine 4, however still manages to have a number of technical glitches and texture pop ins. We rarely noticed any framerate drops, though, so at least there’s that.

Styx: Shards of Darkness is a funny, charming and enjoyable game, but one that is as much a victim of its old-school feel as it gains from it. While it has some outdated mechanics, technical issues and a few gameplay flaws that keep it from greatness, excellent level design and some smart and funny writing come together to make for a decent yet ultimately forgettable experience.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Styx: Shards of Darkness is the follow up to the flawed, but endearing, 2014 fantasy stealth game Styx: Master of Shadows. The game builds upon the solid foundation of that game to deliver a far better outing than the first one. It’s also a game that’s far harder than the average game on the market, challenging its players to think about what they do before they do it.

Of course, this means you are likely to get stuck while playing the game at least once. And if that happens, then you may need help moving past where you are stuck. In which case- here we are! This video walkthrough that you see below will guide you through the entirety of Styx: Shards of Darkness. Of course, remember that there are other ways to get past where you are stuck, as well- you can always try other things if this walkthrough doesn’t do it for you.

The original Styx was a bit rough around the edges, but it still went on to become somewhat of a cult classic. Its sequel, Styx: Shards of Darkness, is hopefully a game that realizes and builds upon the promise of the original game.

No matter how great it is, however, you will not be able to enjoy it in glorious 4K- or any resolution beyond 1080p natively, at any rate. Speaking to WCCFTech, Cyanide’s  Julien Desourteaux, Lead Level Designer confirmed that for now, no PlayStation 4 Pro enhancements are planned for the game. He also confirmed that the game’s main quest will run most players about 15 hours- which is a decent, respectable amount of time for a game of this nature.

“Regarding the length of the game we did a lot of playtests. The average player will complete the main campaign of Shards of Darkness in around 15 hours, but that’s not including the completion of every secondary objective and emblem,” he said.

So there is more for you, should you choose to pursue it. If not, at least the game won’t outstay its welcome. Styx: Shards of Darkness launches on March 14th for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The original Styx may have been a flawed game, but it had some genuinely good ideas. We’re excited to see where the sequel goes with them, and whether or not it can knock off some of the rough edges the original product had.

In this brand new trailer for the upcoming sequel Styx: Shards of Darkness, Styx’s various abilities that allow him to sneak effectively are showcased. Styx also adds crafting to his arsenal of abilities, and exploring each level will find you materials and items that you can sue to craft new, deadly additions to your repertoire that should help you be even more effective and lethal.

Styx: Shards of Darkness is due out this April for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. You can check out the new trailer for the game for yourself below. Are you excited to pick it up? Let us know in the comments section.

GamingBolt recently had a sit down with Julien Desourteaux, Cyanide Studio Game Director and Lead Level Designer to answer some important questions we’ve been hoping to clear up.

"We have multiplayer – it’s all about improving the mechanics that we had in the first one. For example the movements are much more smoother and we added some ropes and pipes to get more ways to interact with the environment, and showcase more versatility and the feel of more danger."

What is Styx’s story this time around? Is it a simple matter of retrieving a scepter or does he set in motion events that he’ll probably regret?

No. It’s funny because we have the trailer about the scepter – the scepter is just the call of adventure. When the heroes join the circle it’s just the call of adventure. The player will be caught by the adventurers of the special contract. You will encounter new characters; you will see a lot of different places like in Master of Shadows. In Shadows of Darkness there is more diversity within the environment; for example we have some aircraft, and then you would go to a dark elves city. It’s just a call of adventure.

What new features and mechanics does the sequel bring, especially with the larger production values to do more?

We have multiplayer – it’s all about improving the mechanics that we had in the first one. For example the movements are much more smoother and we added some ropes and pipes to get more ways to interact with the environment, and showcase more versatility and the feel of more danger. We have some boss fights – you can see one of the huge monsters which is 100 times the size of the goblin; and it’s all about playing with the gameplay mechanics we have and pushing them to the limit.

How does Styx: Shards of Darkness improve on the original game, especially in terms of the sequences that players will engage in?

In the level of the signed the major improvements are diversity in the missions. There you have some investigation to do, listen to some dialogue to learn something; sometimes we have missions where you have to be undetected. It’s all about diversity to have a better player experiences during the game.

What can you tell us about the RPG elements in this iteration?

With the RPG mechanics, we still have the skill tree. We have cloning, crafting, assassination, detection, and five or six branches. It’s up to the player to choose what play style you want to have. So by choosing a branch you set up the character. And as well we have some new powers you will have later in the game, because you will have a new material that can give you special abilities.

Is combat still heavily quick time oriented? What changes have been made to its since the base game?

We have a introduced big improvement in the combat system. In the first game when you enter combat mode, it wasn’t the players that chose to do that it was automatic. Right now it’s up to the player to choose, “I want to fight this guy – I will wait for him to try and hit me, and then I will have a small move to do to parry him. But I will not kill him, I just will stay on him a little bit so I can finish him or I can dodge him.” But you can do that with only one character.

"We are not like the others because you are not a badass guy who shoots everybody when he’s detected. "

Level design is one of the most praised aspects of Master of Shadows. Will we see the same huge levels in Shards of Darkness and how does Unreal Engine 4 help bring them to life?

Totally. I have the same team for the level design. I have the same team as the one on Master of Shadows. We know what is good in our game. We saw a few [things] that were not very good in the first one, we improved them. For example it’s much more smoother now to jump from ledge to ledge, it’s quite easy to achieve. We still kept the verticality and multiple passes.

Just everything is so much better?

Yes. It’s because of Unreal Engine 4: The shaders, technically it’s much more beautiful, and it’s better as well. We have some cut scenes in the game. It’s good for the story because we can have realization. Because in the first one the story was told through a 2-D drawing. Now it’s 3-D cut scenes because of the engine.

What is being done to fix the edge detection issues that plagued the launch of the original game?

It’s much more better right now. It will be very technical, more things that say, “can I do that? Ccan I grab that?” Now you can turn on a corner, you can jump from a ledge, it’s easier to grab an anchor. It’s much more better. It’s much more fluid. But you still need to be a little bit skilled to travel the distance. It’s not like in real life but it’s much more comfortable for the player to have this.

Medieval fantasy stealth is still pretty unrepresented despite some very good games in the genre. What are your thoughts on the same and how will Styx stand out among other stealth games?

First, you are a goblin. I haven’t seen any goblins in this area except ours. Second, we are not like the others because you are not a badass guy who shoots everybody when he’s detected. You have to flee, you are small, you have to use your special abilities. He’s fragile. So direct confrontation is not a good option in our game. It’s all about skills, it’s about not being detected to achieve that special trick. To know the mechanics, exploit them, and be creative with that.

When can we expect Styx: Shards of Darkness to release? Is it still on track for this year?

It will be released in the third quarter of this year.