Is there anything a katana charge can't solve? Well, yes, obviously, but it's always nice to have the option, especially in a multiplayer shooter. Fix World War 2 with foolish but unnerving charge attacks in the standalone expansion for Red Orchestra 2, Rising Storm. Banzai charges grants Japanese soldiers speed, bolshiness under fire and war cries that suppress enemies. US soldiers counter with superior hardware, but are prone to exploding under the volatile spuds of Japan's portable mortars.

The lopsided conflict encourages unusual strategies, as Evan discovered when he went hands-on recently. US soldiers can claim dropped katanas as trophies, but Japanese soldiers can bury grenades to create impromptu landmines and booby trap their loot. Can Tripwire successfully balance these asymmetrical opponents? It's impossible to tell from this GDC trailer, but there's lots of screaming and running with katanas to enjoy.

It's not a MOBA, the devs have made that much clear in interviews, but Magicka's 4v4 multiplayer spin-off looks a bit like one. Going by glimpses at GDC, it's a game of territorial control in which two teams tussle over spawn points - and you can even bring AI goblin minions along to help. In action though, it retains the same accessibly splashy and chaotic combo spellcraft that defined the original game, albeit with a few streamlining tweaks. We'll be bringing you a heartier preview soon, but here are the first few tidbits of info.

You still use the same stackable eight elemental spells to build up combos, but the modifiers that let you differentiate between area-of-effect, direct attacks and self-cast spells have been stripped out in favour of simply changing the spell type depending on whom you target. I'm not sure how this will change the way, say, beam spells are cast - since previously you didn't need to select a target, but could sweep your gleaming eldritch laser back and forth across the enemy.

Still, if it's being simplified in some respects, it's getting depth in others: staff sidegrades now boost your abilities with a certain element, but make you vulnerable against others, while the powerful spells learnt from scrolls now occupy one of several pre-equipped slots, and require lengthy cooldowns.

The game's some nine months into development at Paradox North, rather than at Arrowhead Studios, the original Magicka creators. No payment model has been confirmed yet, but though the abundance of unlockable hats point to F2P as an easy option, the developers have made positive noises about the paid-alpha model epitomised by the likes of Mojang. With a Wizard Wars alpha promised in the imminent future, we'll likely find out soon.

Scrolls, Mojang's turn-based card collecting strategy, is finally set for a public release. You'll be able to tear open the game from the shiny foil wrapper of the internet next month - with the launch planned for some point around the end of April. Initially releasing in beta, Mojang are planning a discounted version for early adopters. It makes sense: they did the same for Minecraft, and that's now made about 25% of all the money in the world. Probably.

Speaking to Polygon, Mojang's Jakob Porser talked about sales expectations in the wake of Minecraft's roaring success. "That's hard, Minecraft is doing so well," he said. "People have asked, do you feel like this is a difficult second album and it's a valid question."

"The way we approach it is this is the game we wanted to make. We realize it's a narrow genre compared to what Minecraft has become. I have no expectation that Scrolls is going to sell way beyond Minecraft, absolutely not. What I would like is for the game to find a core, a bunch of players that actively love the game. The beautiful thing with Mojang and the success of Minecraft is that we really don't have that pressure, that every game has to sell x amount of copies or we're going to go bankrupt. So we're in a good position that we can experiment and try some of the stuff that we want to do and we are going to do that."

"We don't want to screw people over by saying, ‘Here is Minecraft 2, it's exactly like Minecraft 1, but give us more money."

In the interview, Pilsner also reaffirms support for free updates to Scrolls, saying the developers see the game more as a "service". He also talks about monetization, saying that Mojang are considering purchases for avatar customisation or deeper stat-tracking, but reassuring that, "we want to keep as far away from monetization as possible."

Thanks, The Verge.

Oof, that's dangerously close to a fart joke in the headline. In my defence, it's accurate - this no-nonsense GDC demo of Age of Wonders III pre-alpha footage does feature an in-depth attack on a bone dragon that spews knight-bothering clouds of toxic gas. We also get to see an already impressive degree of spells and battle tactics from a game so early in development, along with a taste of the potential options in the overworld.

It's a strong start from the re-imagined turn-based strategy sequel, no doubt helped along by the investment from the Bank of Notch. Age of Wonders III is due out later this year. You can see the previous announcement trailer here, or read up on Triumph Studios' plans at the game's website.

Following a leaked trailer and screenshots that snuck onto the web earlier today, EA has published the first official footage of Battlefield 4, a 17-minute snippet from the game's campaign.

Some of my cohorts had a chance to see Battlefield 4 earlier tonight at the Game Developers Conference in downtown San Francisco--we'll have more thoughts and information to share soon. I wasn't there, so I'm unhelpfully unfamiliar with the context of this video, but one thing I do notice and appreciate is the use of both optics and iron sights on the player's weapon (seen at 5:00), a mechanic we've also seen in Red Orchestra 2 and Arma 3. The rest of the trailer is a mixture of infantry and ground vehicle sequences around broken industrial areas around a fictionalized Baku--at the risk of sounding jaded, I didn't see anything that deviated from of the encounter templates we've seen in military FPS campaigns for years. It's an underwhelming, familiar introduction to Battlefield 4.

The unexpected use of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" had me scrambling to figure out which tab was playing music, though. Hopefully EA will follow-up soon with video and information about BF4's multiplayer, which it's fair to say most of us are more invested in.

Update: The trailer's been pulled by EA from YouTube in record time. Check back in soon for our thoughts on Battlefield 4 after seeing the game at GDC tonight.

A 30 second gameplay trailer for Battlefield 4 has leaked on YouTube, and it appears to focus on the game's single player campaign. The footage corroborates earlier hints that the fourth installment will feature water combat, and there's also the promise of a gargantuan 17 minute gameplay video on the Battlefield 4 website, though that has yet to emerge.

Battlefield 4 is being officially unveiled at an event in San Francisco later today, but that hasn't stopped three new screenshots leaking earlier today. Stay tuned for the details as they come through. In the meantime, feast your eyes on the trailer:

Marvel Heroes is set to strap on its spandex and do that cool snikt noise with its adamantium claws on June 4, when the Diablo-inspired MMORPG hits PCs for free. Those who plopped down some dough for one of three Founders pre-order packs can jump in a week early on May 28.

Marvel Heroes boasts some powerful names driving its content at Gazillion, including Diablo designer David Brevik and Marvel comic writer Brian Bendis. Instead of creating a custom hero, you'll step into the boots of an iconic character from the comics and take control of their unique ability sets. At launch, you'll have access to Daredevil, Storm, Thing, Scarlet Witch, and Hawkeye for free, and spending in-game currency unlocks additional do-gooders to, er, do good with such as Wolverine, Thor, and Deadpool.

Every year at GDC we end up sprinting back and forth across San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center from one amazing talk or pre-arranged demo to another, trying to make it on time to each one, or at least not be embarrassingly late. We’re running so fast that people start looking all red-shifted and wrong and we don’t always get a chance to stop and chat with indie developers wandering the floor, laptops in hand. Fortunately, the annual MIX event (Media Indie Exchange) brings journalists and small, one- or two-person developer outfits together in the same room to mingle, drink beer, and play games without the need for appointments or athletics. It’s a bit like speed dating as opposed to getting set up by a mutual friend.

Here are snap judgments on twenty of the unreleased games I played last night in various stages of development: betas, alphas or even epsilons. You can check them out for yourself as well as at the event's official website.


Escape Goat 2
The game that I'm keenest to start a relationship with. You play the part of a magic blue goat imprisoned for witchcraft, who must rescue his witch-sheep friends from a puzzle dungeon with the help of a mouse. The retro hand-drawn look is charming and the puzzles are nicely challenging, with the difficulty levels represented by harder-to-reach exits from each level.

 


Paradise Perfect Boat Rescue
This is a simplistic passenger ferry game. Players have to get Darwinia-style passengers from one island to another, struggling against the realistic wave physics which threatens to scuttle your ship. Also features bizarro quotes and island names.

 


Distance
A strange stunt-driving game. It looks like a swank, futuristic racing game with genuinely impressive graphics, but it plays like Tony Hawks or Burnout Revenge, with your car performing all sorts of tricks mid-air and on the track.

 


Dark Side of the Moon
Love’s Eskil Steenberg is the developer behind this 2D RTS with a cute darkness mechanic. The design is reminiscent of N and the mechanics of Darwinia: two players control morphable units on the dark side of a planet that’s stopped turning. It’s heavy on the micro and has some nicely flexible and original unit types. Still very early in development.

 




7 Grand Steps
A genre-buster inspired by penny arcade games. Take generations of your family through the ancient world by balancing resources and skills, and get back stories about the family as time goes by. Hugely inspiring and strange. A must-play.

Pig Eat Ball
If this game got any more retro, it’d lap time. It’s a top-down game involving individually-controlled space pigs eating balls fired into the void by floating tennis serving machines. If you needed any more convincing, the whole thing is inspired by Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Jazz Punk
Frankly, this confused me. It appears to be a first-person comedy game, where you wander a retro-cyberpunk city of cartoony saturated Lego-like color. Has a Thirty Flights of Loving feel about it.

Soundodger
As the name implies, this is a game about dodging music. The walls of the screen shoot syncopated missiles at the player situated in the center of the screen, who has to avoid being hit by them. It looked cute, but will need a few other mechanics to shine like, say, Hundreds.




Citizens of Earth
You’re the Vice President of the world. You recruit regular townsfolk like the doctor, baker, teacher and so on. You then take them to JRPG-style battles, where they level up, which makes them better at their day job back in town. Has a cute art style and interesting premise.

Toki Tori 2
An extremely-polished so-cute-you’ll-vomit platformer that’s the sequel to 2001’s popular Toki Tori. Surprisingly, the developer’s main reference is Metrovania, where you unlock ideas about the game as you go through it.

TowerFall
This was the most popular multiplayer game on the floor. Mingling Joust, archery and Smash Brothers, four players take part in a lethal shootout. With a neat replay after the final shot and a co-op mode, this will be hugely popular online when the netcode is sorted out.

Future Unfolding
Looking much like Oblivion’s wonderful painted A Brush With Death, Future Unfolding is an impressionistic top-down roaming game where you explore a dangerous, beautiful world.




FRACT OSC
This is a first-person abstract exploration game inspired by synthesizers. Yeah. You wander the world, rebuilding and creating in a way that looked absolutely amazing and completely incomprehensible on-screen. Could be the next Proteus.





Mushroom 11
A strange game where you cut and regrow a giant fungus across a landscape. As you erode part of the mushroom, it grows back elsewhere. The mushroom can be completely split in two by your actions, leading to a range of physics puzzles. A good effort but doesn't really put the fun into fungus.

Tengami
A exceptionally beautiful and original papercraft world which folds up like origami and blossoms open like a pop-up book. I'm not so convinced by the storytelling, which seems slightly plodding, but I love the design of this. Up there with Apotheon in terms of appearance.

Cannon Brawl
An extremely cutesy, polished and colorful 2D artillery game with RTS elements. Huge explosions, destructible terrain and a range of gadgets to deploy (and blow up). Made by a former Spore developer.

Storyteller
The ingenious Storyteller hands you a scenario ("Adam rejects his former lover," for instance), and in order to solve the puzzle you must rearrange different characters in comic strip-like panels in order to produce that outcome. It's whimsical, vexing, morbid, and hilarious—often all at once.

Aztez
It’s a combination of a turn-based top strategy layer and a strange beat-’em up, and it’s all in black and white, for the colorblind like yours truly. From Team Colorblind, purveyors of Off-Road Velocriraptor Safari.

A trio of Battlefield 4 screenshots have been fished out of a DICE media directory by hawk-eyed NeoGAF users. All three shots boast environment effects and textures powered through the meaty Frostbite 3 engine—features particularly apparent in the first-person outdoor view of a massive cloud of birds flying lazily about in a sunny afternoon.

Battlefield 4's official debut at GDC is only hours away, and we'll be on deck at the event to provide all the new info we learn about DICE and EA's fourth-quel.

They aren't death fortresses, but neither are WildStar's player houses something you'd spot in a suburban cul-de-sac. Carbine wants your abode to play an important role in your travels across Nexus beyond four walls and a roof for your baubles, and the developer's latest trailer describes what you'll get for staking a claim on the frontier.

Surrounding your home are "plugs" to add extra buildings such as a forge or an ore pit. With enough work, your patch of land can eventually turn into an all-in-one crafting, collecting, and transport hub. Carbine seems to be looking to infuse a few more social elements in housing activities instead of isolating everyone into individual pockets of existence, as you and your buddies can freely hop into each other's area to assist with gathering resources or fighting off the occasional monster pack.

You'll nab plenty of personal benefits for spicing up your house, of course, such as rested XP rate boosts from the amount of swag loaded up into your crib. Carbine explains it all in the trailer, but my plans are already set—I'm decorating my pad with as many bales of hay as possible and call it "The Fortress of Straw-itude."

WildStar doesn't have a solid launch date beyond sometime this year, but we've seen enough of it to share some thoughts in a preview.