While  Final Fantasy 7 Remake  remains mostly faithful to the original game, it still introduces a handful of new elements and characters along the way. Most of the  new characters  only play small roles but are able to stand out in big ways. The best example of this is Roche, an unhinged SOLDIER who performs ridiculous motorcycle acrobatics from the moment Cloud meets him. Roche fans are in luck as the character seems to make a comeback in  Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth . Square Enix’s latest trailer for  Rebirth  is short, clocking in at just one minute. But at the 20-second mark, you can see Roche riding his bright red motorcycle for a split second. Until this point, we’ve had no way to know whether Roche would ever appear again. Roche appears in Chapter 4 of  Remake  when Cloud and Avalanche break into a Shinra warehouse. However, we never see Roche again past that chapter aside from a small little cameo in the Episode Intermission DLC. ...

  It's been a rocky start for Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. After an   initial leak , the game was   officially announced by the studio   in August 2020, though this arrived in the wake of   sexual harassment accusations . Since then, the game was delayed, the studio's   co-founders left , and   reports of a battle pass   became a hot debate. Last year we finally got a look at the game in action during Sony's PlayStation State of Play, but the reaction was somewhat negative and   once again it was delayed . More recently, an alpha tech test took place in December but spoilery footage   swiftly leaked . "It's always disappointing when you have leaks. I think it's unavoidable in this day and age," Suicide Squad game director Axel Rydby told me at a preview event for the game. "The short answer is that it's a bummer, but at the same time, we know that the game is really good. And we know that it's a very unique game. ...

  Activision has claimed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is seeing record engagement levels compared to its predecessors. “Thank you for a historic launch,” it said on Tuesday. “Just two weeks in, MWIII has already set records with the highest engagement in the new Modern Warfare Trilogy!” According to the publisher, the game has seen “more hours per player overall” than 2019’s Modern Warfare and last year’s Modern Warfare 2. It also called the game’s Zombies mode “the most engaging third mode in MW history”, and said campaign players have put in “more time per player in MWIII then the previous two instalments”. What’s probably more telling than the game’s engagement stats is what hasn’t been announced – sales figures and revenue generated. Activision has traditionally been quick to publish sales figures when new series entries have performed relatively strongly, although Modern Warfare 3 has tough footsteps to follow in. Modern Warfare 2 topped $1...

  Alan Wake II   is a fantastic game. It tells a twisted, serpentine story of paranormal murder, shifting realities and demonic possession, with two brooding investigators at its core. Developers at Remedy Entertainment are masters of mood and   Alan Wake II  is their latest showpiece, highlighting the studio’s eye for psychedelic terror and complex mysteries. This game is packed with monsters, ghosts, cults, Old Gods, rock operas and mind-bending perspective swaps. And on top of all that, its character models and set pieces are absolutely gorgeous. Even though it just came out at the end of October, it’s no surprise that   Alan Wake II   is nominated in multiple categories at The Game Awards, including Game of the Year. There’s a lot more than clue-gathering going on in  Alan Wake II . The game regularly mixes full-motion video with CGI in a way that doesn’t feel silly or contrived; set in a universe of broken realities, the visual styles bleed into e...

  Great horror RPGs are more difficult to find than you might think. Despite clever innovations like the sanity stat, role-playing designers still tend to favor swords and sorcery over everything else ( just ask sci-fi fans ). That doesn’t mean there aren’t some perfectly scary RPGs out there, though. Whether they feature raw psychological horror or more traditional werewolves and vampires, there’s plenty of spookiness to be found in the role-playing genre. So on this, the spookiest day of the year, here are five great RPGs to play on Halloween Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines Troika was an RPG studio that was aptly named. Led by Fallout developers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who would later go on to work on The Outer Worlds, Troika produced a trio of classic RPGs – Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Bloodlines was barely more than half a game when it launched, rife as it was with bugs and hidden...

  Baldur's Gate 3  has 17 different "narration styles", according to actor Amelia Tyler. As part of her role as the narrator of  Baldur's Gate , Tyler says that she and the team created all of these different tones and variations on the lines spoken in the narration to reflect all of the playable characters, better suiting the internal monologue that tells their particular story. This reveal comes from the Baldur's Gate 3 panel at EGX London this week, bringing much of the cast together to walk us through their performances in the game. Here, Tyler broke down how she approached narrating such a dialogue-heavy game, revealing that the workload was even larger than we thought, as lines had to be repeated in different tones, or reworded altogether to match the player character. "A lot of people that are on their first playthroughs don't realise there are distinct narration styles, depending on who you're playing as," says Ameilia Tyler. "So we ...

  onsidering Considering  the massive worlds, endless side activities, and propulsive “numbers go up” progression systems of recent Assassin’s Creed games, it can be easy to forget that the series began as a detective game.  Assassin’s Creed Mirage  seems hell-bent on reminding us. Touted as a return to the franchise’s roots in social stealth and investigation,  Mirage  also strikes me as a reset, maybe even an attempt at a course correction, before whatever comes next. I played two and a half hours of Ubisoft Bordeaux’s upcoming release, and while much of it served as a pleasant reminder of Assassin’s Creed’s past, just as much reminded me why the series evolved to begin with. My time with the game was split between three non-consecutive chapters. In the first, I explored the streets of Baghdad as Basim Ibn Ishaq, who many players will remember as their mentor in  Valhalla . Being a prequel to the Nordic adventure,  Mirage  ca...