Things I have learned about war from the wholly authentic Medal of Honor: Warfighter: #1: Door opening privileges are granted with seniority. #2: A soldier’s sidearm, whether a pistol or a machinegun, has infinite ammo. #3: If you run far enough ahead of your squad, you might see the moment your enemies blink into existence. #4: Bullets won’t kill you if you’re in the middle of a melee attack animation. #5: Tier One operators are total badasses and can kill hundreds of people on their own. #6: War is super-fun, and is a passion for some people, kind of like water skiing or samba dancing. #7: It is totally justifiable to repeatedly abandon your wife and child to go fight in a war. Your wife and child should probably just learn to accept both that and your inevitable death. #8: A lot of types of beard make you look like a bell-end.

It can be unfair to criticise a videogame for failing to live up to its marketing, when developers so rarely control their own. Instead ee should criticise a game for the messages it communicates while we play. Medal of Honor: Warfighter never gets near the “authenticity” it promised pre-release, but it has plenty to say about soldiers, and about war, and all of it is hateful.

Oh hey, a turret section! Great.

The problem – aside from just generally being a bad, boring game, which I’ll get to – is that Warfighter adopts a tone of uncritical reverence for both its subjects and its subject matter. Written by Tier One operators while on active duty – which explains a lot – Warfighter’s story depicts soldiers as superheroes, not “manufactured or purchased” but “born into this life, blessed with a higher sense of purpose”.

You play as two of these superheroes, Stump and Preacher, as they investigate a terrorist operation smuggling explosives across the world, and as Preacher deals with problems at home. They do what needs to be done – gruffly mowing down bad guys in terrorism hotspots, ignoring orders when necessary, and occasionally deploying a hardy “bro”.

These are the men we want/need on walls, as Jack Nicholson described in A Few Good Men. Except A Few Good Men doesn’t deify Jack Nicholson in the way Warfighter fawns over its bland leads. It turns out to be an issue of tone.

A cargo ship sequence? I can barely container my excitement.

You can portray war like a silly, globe-trotting disaster movie, as Modern Warfare does, and you can scrape by without questioning your character’s relentless killing. But when your story is told with stony-faced seriousness, a little critical distance might be a good thing. In fact, isn’t it both dishonest and ethically abhorrent to do anything else? If your videogame is set in the real world and its characters kill hundreds of people without feels or personal injury, and then your videogame unthinkingly applauds those characters, you’ve created a multi-million dollar celebration not of heroism, but of violence and killing.

And the shooting is shit, too. Let’s move away from the moral quandaries and tonal contradictions, just for a moment. The trick to enjoying the mainstream singleplayer military shooter, which includes Modern Warfare and Battlefield, is to remove them from the broader first-person shooter genre. Instead, think of them as arcade rail shooters, and therefore solely about popping out from behind cover, popping heads, and occasionally popping a new clip into your gun. By these meagre ambitions, Modern Warfare 3 was a mildly enjoyable romp – and Warfighter is still a failure.

Slipped and died of embarrassment.

Each of these games split neatly into three elements: the guns, the setting, and the set-pieces. War of Medal: Honorfighter’s guns are the usual fare. You start each mission with what my uneducated mind thinks is a machinegun, but might be a sub-machinegun. You’re then free to pick up AKs or shotguns and myriad other machinegun/sub-machinegun variations from your fallen foes.

I mainly stuck with the weapon each mission gave me, as they tended to have better scopes and iron sight, and because all the guns felt rattly and weak anyway. The setting of the game changes with each mission, and varies in geography if not in detail. Over the course of the game you fight in places like Pakistan, the Philippines, Yemen, and Bosnia, but every locale is depicted without personality. Concrete crumbles, dust fills the air, and men pop up from behind cover to kill you. Even when you visit Dubai, a fascinating urban folly, you could easily mistake it for a movie studio backlot somewhere in southern California.

There’s no artistry in how the game shapes these battlefields. You slide from narrow corridors to open areas filled with crates, boxes, and burnt-out cars. Occasionally the lighting obscures where you’re meant to go, rather than being used to lead you there. Time and again areas that look passable turn out to be unreachable due to invisible barriers. You never interact with the environment in an interesting way.

Trees more indestructible than buildings.

Which brings us to set-pieces, which are normally how these games imprint themselves on your memory. They’re the moments when the game breaks the run-and-gun formula to offer you something different, and they’re a fair watermark for the varying quality of these kinds of games. For example, Modern Warfare 1 has three standout moments: the nuclear explosion, the ghillie suit stealth section, and the creepy, quiet AC-130 mission. By comparison, Battlefield 3 has only one that really stands out, in its fighter jet mission.

Honor of War: Fightermedal has none. It tries. There’s a sniper mission, where you take out enemies while accounting for bullet drop. There’s a couple of sections where you drive a remote-control robot with a machinegun attached. There’s mounted gun turret sections, on a helicopter and a boat. You get to steer the boat at one point and, in the closest the game comes to a unique experience, there are a few driving sections. The best of the latter has you dodging enemy patrols by pulling into lay-bys. It’s a nice idea.

The three previously mentioned elements – guns, setting, set-pieces – coalesce into a tidal wave of apathy, and make the experience of playing Warfighter feel like a kind of spiritual death. How many burnt-out cars have I, will I, can I crouch behind in my life? How many times can I fire a mounted gun, making sure not to hold my finger down too long to avoid overheating? It’s an oppressive, grinding slog.

Wait. Yours or mine?

As some consolation, the multiplayer at least fares slightly better. There are a few different modes, but I had the most fun in Hot Point. Each level has five bomb sites, which unlock in a random order. The attackers must blow up three of those bomb sites to win the match, while the defenders must prevent that from happening at three sites to win. This creates a lot of push-and-pull drama, last minute explosions or defusing, and rounds last long enough for new players to learn the map.

There’s also the neat idea of ‘fire teams’, which works like a small-scale version of Battlefield’s squad system. On any given server, you’ll be paired with a random buddy. You can spawn on that buddy and replenish one another’s health and ammo, and if they avenge your death, you’ll immediately respawn.

It bonds you to a stranger in a fun and immediate way.

Hot Point multiplayer is a rare highlight.

Otherwise, the multiplayer is held together by the same systems of points and medals and unlocks as established by every other game of this type. I haven’t had time before writing this review to advance very far in these systems, so we’ll revisit the multiplayer at a later date. Assuming that there’s anyone else still playing, that is; the servers are already worryingly quiet.

Here are the next two entries on my list of things communicated by the boring, soulless, not-at-all authentic Medal of Honor: Warfighter. #9: Hey, didn’t Call of Duty sell well? #10: There won’t be a new Battlefield game until next year, so I guess we should try to fill that gap.

There is no gap for a game like this. Keep playing Battlefield 3 or any of the other, better games released this year. Or, I don’t know, maybe you could take up water skiing or samba dancing.

Terrorist beard.

Expect to pay: $60/£30
Release: Out now
Developer: EA Danger Close
Publisher: EA
Multiplayer: 20-player, 4 modes, plus ‘real Ops’ hardcore modifier
Link: www.medalofhonor.com

Tyler Wilde, Associate EditorThe first player-controlled action in Medal of Honor: Warfighter is to shoot a guard in the back of the head with a suppressed pistol. I can’t move the pistol away from his head. An icon indicates that I should press the left-mouse button to fire. I don't want to.

After a few missions, I don't want to keep playing Warfighter's campaign at all. It isn't fun. It isn't lonely, either: along with Battlefield 3 and the last couple Call of Dutys, I don't think I like military FPS campaigns anymore. They've changed, but my taste hasn't changed with them.

So I went back to a classic. Ten years ago I loved Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (MOHAA) so much that I saved both discs and the CD key for my future self to play. Thanks, past me! I still love it (no rose-tinted glasses), and comparing MOHAA's opening mission to Warfighter's opening vignettes convinces me that I'm not the one with the problem. Spielberg, the devs who went on to form Infinity Ward, and their old WWII shooter have some lessons for the modern crowd.

Missions vs. puppetry
 
I’m not squeamish about violence. I don’t want to shoot this guy in the back of the head because I don’t have a choice. My soldier is a puppet. I have one of the strings—I can pull the trigger—but Warfighter is gripping the rest and won’t let me move on until I give in. Forcing the player to commit violence can be used for an unsettling effect, but in Warfighter it’s just a tutorial. It callously teaches me that, yes, as in every other shooter, the left mouse button shoots people.

So, why am I shooting this guy again? Because he's there? Oh, OK.

True, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault doesn't let me choose not to shoot Nazis. That's what I signed up for. It can't be played nonviolently, but it doesn't force my hand. It says, “Here are your objectives, and there are going to be a bunch of Nazis who’d really rather you didn't complete them. You’re going to have to shoot them. Good luck.”

You've got to earn advancement in MOHAA. There’s player-directed work to be done before you’re rewarded with the next chapter. In Warfighter, the mission has been programmed into my soldier, and I’m just there to help him aim. When he needs to walk so that a set piece can crumble at the appropriate distance, he walks. When he doesn't feel like holding his gun anymore, he puts it away. Warfighter wrestles me for control because I can’t tell its story competently.

As soon as I'm off the truck, it's all up to me.

Max Payne 3 also steals control when it needs to transition into a cut scene, but it’s consistent. When I’m in control, I have full control and I’m responsible for finding the correct path and shooting the dudes in my way. If I slack off in Warfighter, the puppeteer will take care of the hard work for me, because the show must go on even if one of the marionettes isn't cooperating. I tried playing the first mission firing only when I absolutely had to. I fired twice, and the game took care of the rest.

The M1 Garand vs. the Heckler & Koch HK416
 
In MOHAA, it's shoot or be shot, but I have the advantage that it's completely unrealistic. No one could fire an M1 Garand as accurately as I am while standing still, never mind in mid-sprint. As I invade an occupied French village to rescue a captive SAS operative, I run, strafe, and fearlessly twirl around German riflemen, haunting them like a whimsical, armed specter.

I can still die, but I have time to line up good shots and each hit is a little victory. The pop of my gun and the sight of a Stahlhelm whizzing off a Nazi’s head are great feedback. Clearing an area is a bigger victory, and once I’m sure everyone’s on the ground I’m rewarded with a moment of calm to look around before I charge into the next section.

Realistic? Not at all, but it's fun.

Warfighter isn't realistic either, but its modern approach is all about crouching behind chunks of concrete and watching out for falling set pieces. Any time I take to aim is time that I'm exposed, and as long as I'm exposed, I'm on the verge of death. It's not realistic, but it's a little closer to reality. It's also not very fun.

I’m not suggesting that all shooters be WWII shooters, but MOHAA's M1 Garand is a lot more fun than Warflighter’s 850 rounds/min HK416. Spurting bullets in the direction of bad guys isn't as exhilarating as flipping a helmet with a single shot. And instead of natural feedback, Warfighter gives me a skull icon to let me know when I've scored a headshot, because I probably couldn't tell. It isn't nearly as satisfying.

Just like MOHAA, Warfighter features an early beach landing mission. Unlike MOHAA, it's boring.

Cover shooters aren't fundamentally bad. Red Orchestra 2, another WWII shooter, is more dedicated to realism than either MOHAA or Warfighter. It's a lot of creeping, crawling, and peeking, but at the end of all that, my perfect shot feels earned. Or I miss and it's a huge letdown, but I still feel something. I don't feel much in Warfighter. I just do what it tells me so I can advance to the next scene.

It seems that in an effort not to be called “unrealistic,” Warfighter fails to ask, “But is this any fun?”


Being realistic vs. being real
 
Warfighter's desire for authenticity goes further: it wants me to believe these are real wartime heroics. “This personal story was written by actual Tier 1 Operators while deployed overseas," reads the official description. "In it, players step into the boots of these warfighters and apply unique skill sets to track down a real global threat, in real international locations, sponsored by real enemies. It doesn't get any more authentic than Medal of Honor Warfighter, coming October 23, 2012.”

It's real, real, real, and authentic. It was written by actual Tier 1 Operators. I wasn't there, but I’m highly skeptical that Warfighter depicts real anything. Men planting explosives then dashing through collapsing shipping crates while picking off a shooting gallery of bad guys is not the truth. So what's Warfighter's dose of reality? In the beginning, at least, it's a story about a soldier’s strained relationship with his wife.

How Warfighter handles a gap in between missions.

War is a terrible emotional burden, but shooting a guy point blank in the back of the head is just a tutorial? It's dishonest, and when you make a game about a war we're currently invested in, well...maybe you shouldn't. If you do, it'd better be intellectually challenging, or it'll just come off as jingoistic tripe.

MOHAA has a strong advantage here. It can say "Allies good, Axis evil" and we're fine with it because it's the globally accepted version of the truth. In pop culture, Nazis are equivalent to zombies and murderous robots, so MOHAA can skip all the posturing and get to the mission briefing. But even controversial wars, like Vietnam, benefit from perspective and distance. Battlefield: Vietnam didn't try to prove anything about American heroism to players, it was just a war game set in Vietnam.

How MOHAA handles mission briefings.

I know it's not in the spirit of the series, but what the hell is wrong with fictional wars? Call of Duty and Battlefield get it. The Chinese! The Russians! I'm fine with xenophobic pretend land. People aren't dying in xenophobic pretend land. And who would a truly realistic Medal of Honor be for, anyway? It would probably look a lot more like Arma II, but without the fictional country, and it'd be much more grisly than Warfighter’s glossy action scenes. A Linkin Park song wouldn't quite capture the gravity.

So, what happened?
 
In an early Warfighter mission, I drive an RC bot through a crumbled building, shredding guys foolish enough to point their flashlights at me. It's a cool idea for a scene. It adds variety, swapping constant danger for lack of danger. But it's not fun. Was Ender's Game fun after Ender figured out the game?

I'm still not sure why I'm gunning these guys down...something about illegal munitions?

So why is it there? Is it there to make us say, "Ooh, how authentic"? Maybe I little, but I think it's mostly there because robots are cool. Campaigns have turned into Universal Studios theme park rides. They're only sustainable as entertainment for a few minutes, and they bombard the viewer with every spectacle they can--robots, explosions, whatever keeps them invested. The viewer is under the ride’s control, because no one can be allowed to wander away and miss an explosion.

When I reviewed the first Medal of Honor reboot in 2010, I liked it more than most. I don’t regret that—I was being honest when I said I had fun—but the spectacle doesn't impress present me as much as it did past me. Too much spectacle is the problem. Rather than give us objectives and put obstacles in our way, Warfighter gives us a series of obstacles, and the objective is to watch them blow up. It doesn't work, because we don't have to do the work. We're just along for the ride.

If Warfighter were more like MOHAA, it would be accused of having a dated design, but isn't that better than having a bad design? I'm happy to play one of them ten years after it released, and the other I probably won't finish, no matter how "authentic" it is.

In the word of Dethklok frontman Nathan Explosion: "Brutal." Originally released in March, the Brutal Doom mod furnishes Doom's buckets of blood, steaming guts, and ultra-violence with a critically missing element: more buckets of blood, steaming guts, and ultra-violence. We're talking extreme Chunky Salsa Rule here. A freshly spawned Halloween update provides custom fatality animations as you RIP AND TEAR into Hell's minions.

Helmed by the one-man efforts of Sergeant Mark IV, Brutal Doom doesn't just coat everything in strawberry juice. The mod also augments weapon and projectile behavior to react slightly more realistically—slightly; you're still fighting demonic hellspawn in a box in space—such as inflicting harmful splash damage to yourself if you're too close to a wall. Stealth kills and movable barrels are also possible. Headshots count. Limbs sever.

"Everything in Brutal Doom is extremely intense," the good Sergeant writes. "Everything sounds louder, looks bigger, moves faster, and hits harder. The camera shakes every time something explodes near you. Enemies are harder and smarter, and weapons and explosions are loud as fuck.

"Some enemies will scream in anguish and try to crawl away when near death, and they can be used as human shields. Blood will drip through your visor every time you shoot enemies too close."

Brutal.

Undying is slaughtering zombies, Phantom Lancer is tearing through ghosts, and Roshan is ramping around the map carrying a big bucket of sweets. What the hell has happened to Dota 2?

Diretide is what. It's a newly-added game mode which asks the opposing teams to compete over candy. And it's insane.

Your first game will be enormously confusing, so allow me a moment to explain it to you. A game of Diretide is split into three parts on a specially-redesigned version of the standard Dota map. The map has a bucket of sweets where your side's ancients normally spawn, severed hands wandering around in place of the usual wildlife, and each side's creeps come with Roshlings in place of siege units. Don't be fooled by the name - they're not cute and cuddly. They're huge, stompy, and almost as tough as their paternal namesake.

When a Roshling dies, it drops candy. The aim of the first part of the game is to collect as much of that candy as you can by grabbing it and dropping it in your bucket. When you do that, your team gets gold and xp. But there's a caveat -- carrying candy reduces your health. Holding more than a few bits at once means that you're be splatted into the ground with one hit once the enemy team reach you, and you can be sure they'll reach you. If you die, all the candy you were carrying spills out onto the ground.

No-one's home

After 10 minutes, Roshan awakes. And he's hungry. He'll chase down individual heroes one after another, only changing targets if he kills someone or if he's fed a bit of that candy. From this point on, you'll want to keep hold of at least one bit of candy at all times to feed to him and get him off your back.

After another 10 minutes, whoever has the most candy in their basket wins and gets an item. Then phase three starts. Roshan grabs all the candy, and settles down in the forest on either the Radiant or Dire side to eat it. Your task is now to team up with the other side to take him down as fast as possible. When you manage it, you'll get a second item.

Diretide isn't as strategically balanced as regular Dota -- certain heroes dominate over others. Riki's ability to go invisible is powerful, and saves him from ganks when carrying a lot of candy. Any hero with the ability to move through terrain - like Storm Spirit or Batrider - is useful too. Nature's Prophet, with his teleport, can dominate.

Trick or treat!

I'd love to see some of the professional teams battle it out in a friendly Diretide tournament, but even for casual players, the shower of loot that Diretide brings should be welcome - you'll get at least one item for every game you play, and if you win the first part, you'll get two.

But what's impressive beyond that is how much fun it is to play. If Valve's goal was to create a new game with the same heroes on roughly the same map that's almost as entertaining as regular Dota 2 and much quicker, then they've succeeded.

2K Community Coordinator Marion Dreo issued a pre-deployment briefing yesterday for XCOM: Enemy Unknown's second patch. Assembling in the hangar are a few fixes for game-hanging encounters during Alien Activity and UFO interception as well as improved multiplayer netcode and roof visibility during Abduction missions.

The patch also includes an easier Easy difficulty—let's face it, your KIA roster will thank you—and the elimination of a Snap Shot penalty dealt from Overwatch before moving. Dreo also acknowledged Firaxis' awareness of players encountering a defeat screen after saving the world from an overwhelmingly superior alien invasion ("But at what cost?!"), but didn't confirm the inclusion of a possible fix in the upcoming patch.

2K's official forums hold the full notes for your perusal.

Tear out a man’s throat and steal his bat. Knock a man down with a door and pound his skull into the tiles. Hurl the bat at a third man, climb on top, and pour scalding water on his face to watch him squirm. Take his machinegun and run, dancing, up the stairs towards more killing. Immediately get shot, die, and start again.

It only takes one bullet, stab or punch to kill you in Hotline Miami, but your fragility isn’t designed to encourage caution. Instant and frequent restarts instead lead you towards frantic repetition: it wants you to play recklessly, failingly fast and then urgently try again.

By the time you’ve completed your first mission, you’ll discover two things: first, your movements no longer look reckless. Practice has made your steps purposeful, and your every killing blow is part of a choreographed movie fight scene in which brutal murder is performed to a soundtrack of heavy beats.



The second is that Hotline Miami has indoctrinated you into its way of thinking. Without realising it, you’ve been bolted to the brain of the protagonist: a silent, crummy man performing senseless acts of violence in a neon 1980s acid trip.

Once you’re hooked, it’s easy to get carried away. This game is designed to inspire a fever, and a certain kind of gamer is going to love it. It’s confident, brash and conceptually complete in a way that makes it hard to imagine what its designers might have done differently.

But shake off the bloodthirsty mania and you’ll find a tight, efficient game, content with providing cheap thrills. Slice a man’s intestines out with a samurai sword, then kick his friend’s head against a wall until it bursts. Press your thumbs into a man’s eyeballs until he stops struggling, then shoot his dog. If you die, you’ll do it again. If you succeed, you’ll do it again on another mission. All Hotline Miami wants from you is that you kill, or be killed, and enjoy doing it.



There are hints of something more, but just hints. After each successfully completed mission, it tallies a score based on the method and manner of your killing. Get enough points and you’ll unlock new weapons – ninja stars and samurai swords and beer cans and dozens of others. You’ll also unlock masks that give your character a special power. Dress like Lassie and dogs won’t attack. Slip on a monkey mask and a close-up kill will end with the enemy’s weapon in your hands.

There are also hints at a deeper mystery. Each mission is bookended by brief moments in the protagonist’s life, including a romance conveyed wordlessly via the changing state of your apartment. There are bizarre conversations with three men in animal masks. And there are the phonecalls, their sources unknown, that request your services.

But don’t expect answers to these mysteries. Hotline Miami may well just be about the world’s worst temp, mistaking his assignments for a euphemistic incitement to murder.



This turns out to be a relief. Too often videogames flail around in an attempt to justify the player’s actions. Your wife and young child were killed, which justifies Max Payne’s rampant bloodlust. You’re Skyrim’s chosen one and the dragons are attacking, so it’s probably fine that you kill and steal indiscriminately.

At best, these justifications are nothing more than clichés, at worst they’re intellectually dishonest: a mask we wear in front of the world to hide what we aren’t yet able to explain. In Hotline Miami, you’re compelled to murder by nothing more than a phonecall and a propulsive disco beat.

Expect to pay: £7/$10
Release Out: now
Developer: Dennaton
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Multiplayer: Nope
Link: www.hotlinemiami.com

This is the diary of me attempting to play Skyrim using only Illusion magic: I'm not allowed any weapons, armour, or magical items, and I can't attack anyone directly. The first entry is here, or you can see all entries to date here.

I remember this! It actually shouldn't take long. I mount Sarah the Implausible Horse and canter up into the mountains.

I find it easily and trot up to the gate, alerting a few bandits. As I dismount, one of them runs in my direction yelling, confusingly, "You've beaten me! I yield!" Belrand emerges from behind a stone column and hacks him down. Ah. Hi Belrand!



Belrand is already charging at the next bandit, and to my alarm, so is Sarah the Implausible Horse. I see another bandit aiming a bow at her, so I hit him with a bolt of Calm. He stops, puts his bow away, and wanders off to rethink his life. Sarah rears up and kicks the other bandit, and Belrand finishes him off. We head inside.

I Fury a few bandits and rats into killing each other, and Belrand mops up the survivors. The only trouble we hit is in the giant spider's lair - not the giant spider, but the archway leading to it. It's covered in strong cobweb.

I can't Illusion that away, and I'm not entirely sure if my rules allow me to punch it. I try telling Belrand to do it - you can give followers orders, of sorts. But when I point at the cobweb, the only command I can give him is to try to walk through it.



"Okay, got it!" he says in his chirpy Nordic accent. He walks directly into the cobweb, stops, and looks back at me. "Nope. Not possible." Thanks for trying, man.

My self-imposed rules say I'm not allowed to "directly hurt anyone or anything" - the 'thing' was meant to cover monsters, but I guess a cobweb is also a thing. Can you 'hurt' a cobweb? After careful philosophical analysis, I decide that you can't and put my fist through it.

The giant spider is irrelevant - I'm powerful enough to pacify her with a Calm spell, walk past, and chat to the man stuck in her other web. He wants out, understandably, so I very carefully punch around him to clear the web without causing damage. He runs off, Belrand gives chase, and I stroll along behind.



When I catch up to them, they're both fighting Nordic zombies in a crypt. I run past, and inadvertantly step on a stone that triggers metal rack of spikes to swing out of the wall, smacking the thief and a zombie off their feet. Huh! Well, it might not be illusion magic, but it's not direct violence either.



I was hoping to be able to run straight through the final chamber and escape without a kerfuffle, but unfortunately we need something from the Draugr Scourge in the final crypt. Belrand's only too happy to take care of it, while I keep him on his feet with Courage - the Draugr's a zombie, so I can't cast illusion magic directly on him.

On the Draugr's corpse, I find the dragonstone the Jarl will want. In his crypt, I also find a two-handed axe with heavy damage and a frost enchantment - I pass it to Belrand and he equips it eagrely. Outside, I find Sarah and gallop back to Whiterun.

The dragon's been sighted. They want me to help them kill it. Oh Lord.

Next Thursday: the dragon.

A rather ambitious, currently one-man project is seeking to port the classic shooter Descent into Unreal Engine 3 with the original campaign, new models and textures, and a control scheme that mimics the source as closely as possible. You can find a brief tech demo above that demonstrates flying and shooting, pairing a high-res modern environment with low-poly placeholder models that look ripped right from Ye Descent of Olde.

The developer, identifying himself as just "Max," has put out a call on his website for anyone interested in getting involved in the project. "While it's still in its infancy, the project is moving forward rapidly at the moment since I'm programming the core stuff whenever I can," reads his statement. "I need support especially in the modeling and graphics department right now. I'm making use of the existing community-created content for D2X-XXL, but high-detail robot models are one thing that this game absolutely needs and that doesn't exist yet."

He has also expressed his gratitude for the "overwhelming response" he has received since the site went up, and looks forward to incorporating the community into the ongoing development.

As someone who loved MechWarrior way back when, it has been interesting to get to grips with its new, free to play multiplayer form. For the most part, I think I'm learning that I just like to occupy that universe, to stomp around in a well-rendered bipedal tank thing and breathe in the atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't translate particularly well to actual war. I receive lasers to the face rather frequently. I'd probably be better off playing MechWanderer, or MechWorrier.

In any case, Rich and I have taken the game for a spin for this hands-on preview video, where baby mechs and grown-up mechs alike manage to fall over and explode. At one point, I manage to successfully shooter a bigger mech's arms off. Then, I fire rockets at the floor. It's a learning process.



MechWarrior Online is free and went into open beta on Monday, which means you can play it right now if you like.

Marvellous news for fans of Ragnar Tørnquist's Longest Journey series: there will be more of it! Ragnar teased the announcement on Twitter and it's been officially announced in a press release on the Funcom site. It sounds like it'll remain true to the original games. "#Dreamfall Chapters won’t be an online game," Tørnquist tweets. "It’s going to be a single-player PC/Mac adventure game through and through."

With the Secret World out, Tørnquist has stepped into an advisory role as "creative director," which now gives him the chance to follow up from Dreamfall, released in 2006. It's taken a bit of rights wrangling to get the project greenlit. Funcom have agreed to license the Longest Journey IP to Tonrquist's new studio, Red Thread Games, in return for a share of the eventual profits. Red Thread have to fund production themselves, but have apparently already received a sum from the Norwegian Film Institute to support pre-production.

“I'm very excited to finally have the opportunity to continue the 'The Longest Journey' saga,” Tørnquist says in the press release. “Ever since we ended 'Dreamfall' on a nail-biting cliffhanger, players have been rightfully demanding a sequel, and my deal with Funcom will finally make that possible. I'm extremely grateful to Funcom for this unique and exciting opportunity, and I can't wait to dive back into the universe I helped create more than a decade ago, and continue the story players have been waiting for these past six years."

Funcom say that "Red Thread Games will release more details about 'Dreamfall Chapters' in the coming months."