Call of Duty: Ghosts will be damned if you peek away from your screen. Boredom is absolutely not allowed as the campaign pelts you with action vignettes—including a scene directly snagged from the opening of The Dark Knight Rises—and repeats its mantra ad nauseam: “Keep moving!”

I’m in space, I’m underwater, I’m piloting a dog, I’m piloting an Apache, I’m driving a tank that handles like a Lamborghini—all without ever really learning a new skill. The Apache, for instance, is magically repulsed from the ground—it’s like piloting an air hockey disc—so finesse is unnecessary. On-screen cues tell you what you need to know as you’re plunged into an airstrike: fire flares when an enemy locks on, left mouse button to fire your cannon, hold down the center mouse button to lock on with missiles. Then go to town.

It’s fun in that it’s something exciting to see and do: a theme park ride where I’m given an airsoft rifle to pelt the animatronics with. And it’s a brilliant ride. There are pyrotechnics, car chases, submarines, and drone strikes. Once scene has me rappelling down a skyscraper and shooting guards through the windows—and then the skyscraper collapses while I’m in it. It’s every action scene Hollywood has imagined for the past 20 years packed into five to six hours of super-stylish interactive montages, and wrapped up in a goofy, inoffensive story about brothers trying to live up to their dad’s super-soldier status.

Call of daddy
 
It’s fun, but it’s not engaging—Ghosts’ campaign is even more passive than Telltale’s recent point-and-clickers. In The Wolf Among Us, I have choices. In Ghosts, I do the Right Thing or fail. Frustratingly, even the decision to follow the constantly barked “keep moving” order can get me killed. That repeated flavor dialog should be ignored: save heroics for the scripted moments, stay crouched, and pop up sporadically to shoot at the bad guys.

Blowing up boats while remotely piloting a drone is fun and not at all challenging.

In rare instances, I was able to part from my squad, flank the enemy, and wipe them out with the advantage, but that kind of tactical planning was a sparsely present treat. It appeared once more in a jungle mission which put columns of guards between me and my squad, arming me only with a silenced pistol and sensor to detect nearby enemies. That was the only time I was given a goal and left to achieve it without explicit instructions for every action.

That was also the only time I got a magic bad guy sensor, and that’s another of the campaign’s failings: it fires off interesting ideas and then instantly forgets about them. Near the beginning, I’m introduced to my canine companion, Riley, and I can mark targets for him to quietly de-jugular. I did that once, when ordered to, and never again. Later, I get to use a remote-controlled sniper rifle to clear out a stadium. It’s a great gadget that I’d have liked to plop down on my own a few times, but it never shows up again. Both weapons are like toys that I get to demo in the store, but never get to take home.

Sgt. Shark is awfully testy today.

But we get bored of toys after we take them home, whereas if we stay in the toy store, poking at everything that requires batteries, nothing needs to do more than light up and make noise to keep us entertained. And you won’t ever be bored, because Ghosts’ novelties are brilliant and bright, full of life and then whisked away before they can be broken open and revealed to be little electronic tricks.

If you buy Ghosts just for the multiplayer, I will say that you should at least play the campaign long enough to get to the first obligatory space scene. It’s fantastic. It’s Gravity with guns. I wish the whole thing had been in space.

Call of shooty
 
The multiplayer is more Call of Duty® Multiplayer. It’s about flanking, out flanking, and milliseconds of animation that determine who lives and who dies. The maps are circular arenas dressed in gray military garb, pulling assets from the dullest bits of the campaign’s setting. Instead of a space station and tropical shipwreck, the maps are Busted Up Train Yard and Overcast Snowy Place.

In most modes, death nearly always comes from behind or upon rounding a corner and shooting too slowly to avoid a knife to the gut. There’s no front line, so every kill is likely to instaspawn your foe somewhere behind you, making matches a dizzying circular chase sequence.

Getting knifed from around a corner is something I excel at.

Guns are plentiful and nuanced, though every vital stat, from how long it takes to raise the iron sights to recoil and spread, is experienced in milliseconds of surprise action. Everyone swirls around the map like disoriented flies, and I either catch glimpses of their feet under collapsed steel girders, or run face first into them as our beelines intersect, reacting with spasms more often than cool tactical awareness. At pub levels, Ghosts’ multiplayer is whack-a-mole to Counter-Strike’s chess game.

An exception is Search and Rescue, which gives teams bomb and defend objectives, and players one life per round unless a team member collects their dog tag to revive them. That encourages teammates to stick together, generating group engagements at range that I heavily prefer over darting around like an armed insect.

I also enjoy, as I have in past CoDs, the Ground War mode. With bigger maps and 12-14 players, there’s more room to breathe and more teammates to rely on during firefights. It’s in that mode that I discovered that going prone is practically an invisibility cloak. I was able to camp out by a capture point picking off enemy after enemy for nearly an entire round, often after they ran right over me. It was fun target practice for me, but probably a frustration for the other team, which eventually had to run around the perimeter until it found a back to knife.

Call me maybe
 
Even in the modes I enjoy, I don’t want to stay for long. The “one more round” syndrome just isn’t present for me in Ghosts. In previous CoDs, the drive to unlock and try out a new weapon might have kept me going, but that’s been replaced with Squad Points. Accrued through good play, the points can be spent to unlock any weapon at any time if you save them up. I appreciate that this is more respectful of players’ time, as well as returning CoD fans’ desire to get right to the gun they’re happy with, but it nullifies any sense of accomplishment the progression system once had.

Defending a point is easy when lying down makes you invisible.

But it isn’t just the progression system, or the complex-to-the-point-of-silliness soldier customization, or the boring killstreak rewards that make me tire so quickly of Ghosts multiplayer. It’s that, like the campaign, it’s about constant forward momentum, but unlike the campaign, it never changes. The matches go by too fast to ever develop a rhythm or personality. From one map to the next, it’s run, run, run. There are no nail-biters, no heroics, and no rivalries. There are no brilliant shots that I want to run to show YouTube, unless it’s an accidental trick grenade throw. There are no moments when I pull back from my display, rub my forehead, and say, “I can’t believe I did that.” Moments like that happen all the time for me in Unreal Tournament 2K4, Tribes: Ascend, Battlefield 4, Rising Storm, and earlier Call of Duty games.

Ghosts multiplayer is a game of snap decisions, mechanics, and mistakes—"should have gone prone instead of firing, shouldn’t have reloaded after that last kill, should have turned around instead of sprinting"—and it is freakishly nuanced and can absolutely be mastered. I respect those with the drive to master it, but it’s too bleak and severe for my tastes, and feels like preparing for ritual combat more than enjoying a game.

Actually, delete my number
 
The cooperative Extinction mode is much better: four players versus waves of aliens, with money earned for each kill, and weapons and defenses to buy. It’s a healthy application of a formula we’re used to, but it doesn’t do anything I wouldn’t rather do in Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor, and it feels like a side note compared to the effort put into the campaign and competitive multiplayer. When I started, the keys used to buy my character’s special items—ammo crates, turrets, and so on—weren’t even bound. My options were indicated with a four-way cross which looks like it’s meant for a D-pad, and when I did bind the keys, the menu called them “killstreak rewards.”

The aliens eat sunsets. Give us your sunsets!

That doesn’t damn Ghosts as an icky console port, because my experience was otherwise well-optimized for medium to high-end PCs. I ran it fine on a mid-range build, and on a silly-powerful machine (Core i7-4950X, 16GB RAM, and two GTX Titans) the campaign ran at a silky and gorgeous 100-plus frames-per-second, with water and lighting effects that made me stop to gawk a few times (when I was allowed to). The only technical problem I encountered was sudden framerate dips in the menus, which are a just a nuisance—the same never happened to me while playing.

The netcode in multiplayer is as robust as usual, but not better than previous CoD games. There were still a few times where I swear a hit registered on me before I saw my opponent’s character model round a corner. These details have become a part of serious CoD play—some complain, but others master the nuances to gain an advantage. I’m not in either camp: I’m only bothered when synchronization issues cause frustration or feel unfair, and so far they’ve been too slight and sporadic to bother me.

In multiplayer, you have about 30 frames in which to shoot first.

What does bother me is how tired and cold Ghosts feels. I didn’t touch on the campaign’s story much, but its attempts to tug heart strings are cringe-ably cheesy, and the multiplayer seems bored of itself, changing systems just so they’ll be different from Modern Warfare.

I don’t doubt that every gun, perk, and killstreak reward in Ghosts was implemented and tweaked with a fine brush, but painting in every individual eyelash of the Mona Lisa wouldn’t make it a better painting. That’s what’s been happening to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare since 2007—little bits have been scraped off and painted over again and again. With a broader brush, Activision and its studios might stop noodling around in the corners of Modern Warfare’s greatness and paint something actually modern.

Ironclad Games' Sins of a Solar Empire came out in 2008, and the space-faring real-time strategy game has since had three expansions—the last of which was Rebellion in 2012. Its newest DLC is a much smaller affair, but still adds new content for only a little bit of money.

The Stellar Phenomena pack adds six new deep space anomalies and 11 random events to the existing game. According to Ironclad's news post, the DLC lets players "exploit what resources remain in these dangerous sectors while you can," which sounds like it's priming the game's player base for a future in unsustainable oil-drilling. The anomalies include starship graveyards and antimatter fountains—a bite-sized bit of content that will only set you back $5.

Earlier in the year, Ironclad's Blair Fraser lamented the status of the RTS as a niche, going so far as to call it "done." But Ironclad still supports its five year-old RTS and Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson just announced a new studio dedicated to RTSs. "Niche?" Maybe. But that's not stopping developers from succeeding as RTS-only developers. Nor is it stopping them from starting fresh in 2013.

Following the release of their tribute to the pirate life, a handful of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag developers took to Reddit and addressed a few burning questions from fans. They avoided addressing where Ubisoft would take the series post-Black Flag, but that didn't stop them from sharing where they thought the series wasn't going.

Lead Writer Darby McDevitt had a hard time believing Ubisoft would set an entire AC game in the present. “I doubt we would do a modern day AC," he writes. “There are just too many mechanics we would have to develop to make it believable... vehicles, plausible modern cities, a huge array of ranged weapons, etc. The modern day will most likely remain as a ‘context’ for all future games, something to tie them all together.”

McDevitt also noted that recently delayed Watch Dogs would help “scratch the itch” for players interested in a modern day Assassin’s Creed. We’ll have to wait until spring 2014 to see if that’s actually the case.

You can never have too much of a good thing, and a good thing is donating to charity while getting new games. DRM-free gaming store GOG is holding a bundle sale where you can pick up three games for a $5 donation to the World Wildlife Fund, Gaming for Good, or Worldbuilders.

You must pick at least three games from a selection of 10, including FTL, Incredipede, and Botanicula. Each additional game will cost you roughly $2.30 more, or you can get all 10 games for a donation just under $17.

The charity of your choice will receive 100% of the proceeds, and all of the games are DRM-free. Go check out the donation page and chip in a bit for a great deal on games.

In case you guys weren't quite sure, Jack (of You Don't Know Jack fame) is a difficult person to get to know. You can ask him where he’s from or what his hobbies are, only for him to ignore those questions ask you trivia questions. It’d be more of a problem if his trivia games weren't so clever, and now they've never been so cheap.

The You Don't Know Jack trivia franchise just hit its 18th birthday, and is kicking off the celebrations by releasing most of its games on Steam at $2.99 each. You can save about six bucks and buy the nine games for $20 (the same price as the 2011 You Don't Know Jack remake, which isn't included in the pack). You won't save much in the long run (about $5.92), but other game shows have taught me that a few extra bucks can really screw over your fellow contestants.

And isn't that what trivia games are all about?

Scale, a new first-person puzzle game created by developer Steve Swink, features a young girl armed with a potent power: the ability to scale anything up or down almost infinitely. Currently raising funds on Kickstarter, Scale looks a lot like a Portal-alike, with its female protagonist and sci-fi Game Mechanic gun, but it’s a comparison that Swink categorically rejects.



“Yeah, we’re busy redesigning to the gun to be less Portal-like as I speak," he tells PC Gamer. "It got chucked in there quickly before PAX. It’s the obvious comparison to make, totally understandable, but the game is about exploring and discovery… rather than a linear series of puzzles that show how much I’ve explored the mechanic and how clever I am as a designer.”

Set around 40 years in the future, Scale follows the protagonist, Penny, a brilliant young physicist. While working to study elementary particles, Penny loses patience with the hit-or-miss world of supercolliders and settles on a different plan: a device that can enlarge anything so she can just zap an electron, make it as big as a minivan, and take a look. Naturally, she destroys the entire east coast of the United States.



Though Penny has a story she’s following, the exploration and puzzles are self-directed. In a gameplay video, Swink shows one where the player needs to cross some water to an island. Penny hops on a landlocked sailboat and then enlarges the moon, causing the seas to rise. I ask him how else it could be done. Penny could also stand on a flower and scale it until she just steps onto the other island, or just scale the boat itself until it’s big enough to be a bridge.

It seems that every new game with an experimental mechanic has to follow the Portal formula, so it’s nice to see a game with the ambition to set players free. Scale has a few days left on Kickstarter before it continues development for a planned December 2014 release.

Oh, it's about the Abrahamic religions. I had entirely the wrong end of the stick. I'd assumed Sons of Abraham would transform CK2 into a game in which you played as Tad Lincoln - fourth son of Abraham - running around the White House and getting into comedy scrapes. Come to think of it, an overhaul of Christianity, and the introduction of playable Jewish characters, makes a lot more sense for the medieval grand strategy soap opera. A new development diary provides a complete overview of what Paradox hope to achieve with this latest expansion.



Papal plotting! Papal patronage! Papal palpitations! Today's top tip: say papal more. It's a really good word. It should also make for a good system, providing yet another avenue of familial scheming with which to gain a political upper hand over your enemies and relatives.

For more on Sons of Abraham, check out our announcement post, carefully noting that its URL is "Crusader Kings II: The Something Something Announced". Indeed it was, URL of the past. Indeed it was.

Article by Edward Lewis.

Project Zomboid is a 2D isometric zombie survival RPG set in the town of Muldraugh, Kentucky. Players have to fend off hordes of zombies, while seeking out robust shelter, crafting items for survival, scavenging for food and (importantly, given the horrible apocalypse) keeping your character in high spirits. The zombie apocalypse survival game is currently one of the highest rated games on Steam Greenlight, and fans take to the forums in their thousands to offer strategies for survival and promote new mods (some of which have made it in to the official build). So why is co-designer Andy Hodgetts still concerned about this Friday's Steam Early Access release?

"I don’t like to get excited by things because I don’t want disappointment," he says. "All you can do is the best you can possibly do and hope that it works out, but we have no expectations on this. We are working on a niche game for a niche set of people, but we think it’s pretty cool."

The early access build will be a different creature to The Indie Stone's early 2011 tech demo. Character designs and their animations have had a complete overhaul, new lighting effects have been implemented, the map has been given an extensive up-scaling, and game-changing features have been added, such as an agriculture system and an item crafting mechanic. "At the moment we’re tinkering the engine for optimisation reasons," says Andy. "It’s very important to us that the build is stable, and that it performs as well as possible. When you release on Steam, it opens it up to a potentially wide audience. We don’t want something horrible to happen."



Some elements have been stripped back, too. Earlier builds of the game contained a rudimentary story, with a set of NPCs the player could interact with, but the decision was made to remove their "crude" designs from the game in order to launch sooner rather than later. That meant that the story and tutorial had to be removed too, something that Andy worries could break the game for new players. "We are itching to put the story back in, but we can’t do it without NPCs,’ he says. "If the Steam release turns out to be a disaster, a lot of that will be levelled at not having that story. I think it sells our game. It’s a risk and a worry that it’s not in there."

Future plans also include sleeker animation sets that will refine existing mechanics. "With the action of sneaking in the game at the moment you can walk a bit slower, but we want the character to press their back against the wall, sneak around the corner, the sort of mechanics you don’t usually get in an isometric game."

Andy also wants clothing to become more important. In the current build, clothes are largely cosmetic, with a couple of exceptions - a thick jumper causes you to dehydrate in the hot weather, for example. In future, Andy wants your character’s clothing choices to have a larger impact on their survival chances. "You’ll be able to dress in appropriate clothing as you would in an actual zombie apocalypse, cover yourself to minimise the chance of being scratched or bitten - a leather jacket will have more protection than a t-shirt.’



Modders have played an increasingly important role in Project Zomboid's development. From day one, Andy and Indie Stone co-founder Chris Simpson wanted to put an emphasis on community involvement. "The farming that we’ve got in the game began as a mod," says Andy. "We also have a mental hardcore reloading mechanic in there as an option. That also started as a mod; it was popular and it got integrated."

The team have hired one particularly talented modder, Romain Dron, who works on code from his home in France. "The thing we’re most proud of isn’t something we’ve done; it’s the development of the community and the extent to which the modders have gone to improve things," says Andy, adding "It gives us immense pride that we’ve attracted these kinds of people to our game, and that outshines anything that we can contribute ourselves.

"We believe this is going to be marvellous when we finish, and the more time and the more people that come along for the ride, the better we’re going to make it."

Project Zomboid hits Steam Early Access on Friday and will cost £9.99 / $15.99. You can get hold of the alpha version right now through Desura. That old tech demo is available as a free download if you want to see the project's origins. Find out more on the Project Zomboid site.

Sitting back playing Final Fantasy 14 with a pad in hand is a perfectly fine way to spend time. Square Enix nixed the original (utterly broken) FF14 in 2012, and this new form is as much sequel as relaunch. It’s now a stable, sprawling MMORPG that mixes genre conventions (questing, crafting, raiding) with the trappings of the long-running JRPG series. It’s aimed at people for whom a Chocobo isn’t just another mount, and for whom Cure isn’t just another healing spell. It’ll resonate strongest with people who care about this universe, its music, and its monsters.

Pad control is one of the things that sets FF14 aside. Keyboard and mouse are available too – and necessary for group content – but being able to relax and play it like a console RPG freshens the formula. The combat is flashy and strategically interesting, and a novel class system – which enables you to level up multiple professions on a single character while mixing and merging them – provides a steady sense of progress and a vast spread of potential progression paths.



Rather than retread Final Fantasy 14’s story from the beginning, A Realm Reborn acts as a straight sequel. The events of the original game ended in the type of worldsundering catastrophe that has justified MMO overhauls since time immemorial, and your characters’ relationship with that disaster forms the basis of the central plot. You’ve also lost your memory, but you might have guessed that from the words ‘Final Fantasy’ in the title.

The dialogue is a goldmine for nonsense fantasy words – it broke through years of familiarity with the genre to make me freshly aware of how ludicrous these stories can sound to outsiders. It’s like listening to a talking dog read Tolkien aloud. Actually, no. It’s not that exciting. But it does raise approximately the same number of questions.



FF14’s greatest strength is that it doesn’t feel generic. Its console-RPG heritage bolsters its sense of identity, from the use of series-staple music and sound effects to class names and character designs. It’s an attractive place to spend time, particularly if you have a history with the twinkling MIDI of FF’s score.

It’s less distinctive in terms of structure, but not without fresh ideas. You’ll spend most of your time doing quests in the WoW model, but they move at a pace and travel times are minimal. Then there are FATEs – public quests, equivalent to Guild Wars 2’s dynamic events – and Levequests: timed daily tasks with scaling rewards based on how quickly you beat them. In addition to regular instances, there are minidungeons called Guildhests that allow for quick, cross-server group play in five- to fifteen-minute bursts.



A certain amount of grind is, however, inevitable. You have an individual level for each class, which means that eventually you’ll run out of quests at the lower end and rely on FATEs or Levequests to progress. I like the way that early content remains relevant, but repetition is part of the process.

There is a vast amount to do, which will please players looking to make a serious commitment to a new MMO. The problem is that the subscription fee makes that commitment more or less mandatory. It’s an outdated payment model and it doesn’t suit the game, particularly when there are free and subs-free alternatives that offer much the same experience. It also prevents that laid-back, pad-inhand feeling from being a serious proposition in the long term.

Expect to pay £35 / $50
Release Out now
Developer Square Enix
Publisher In-house
Multiplayer Massively
Link www.finalfantasyxiv.com

Over 250,000 inmates are now being held by Prison Architect, according to the latest sales figures for Introversion's still-in-alpha management sim. That's an impressive amount of people, and an even more impressive amount of revenue: $8,001,530 as of writing. SATIRE MODE ACTIVATED: It turns out the news wasn't lying when it said the prison system was one of the world's fastest growing industries.

"We never would have believed that one of our games would be so popular," says Introversion's Mark Morris, "and we want to thank everyone that is supporting Prison Architect and helping us turn it into a concrete reality."

It must be a happy situation for the inveterate underdogs to find themselves in. Before Prison Architect's alpha release, after the less-than-successful Multiwinia, and the eventually cancelled Subversion, Introversion faced the very real possibility of closure, and - as one of them believed - a prison sentence of their own. You can read the story about the game's inception and development in our recent Prison Architect feature.

Prison Architect is currently available - as an early access alpha - from the Introversion website.