Five years pass - an age in video games - and in this time Activision's Modern Warfare series rises to prominence, knocking Halo down the most-played charts. A time of crisis; a time for an old hero to take back old ground. It's the start of Halo 4, and Cortana unsheathes Master Chief.
But while this one-man army has renewed purpose and a new crisis to tackle, that lack of humanity is hidden in plain sight. For a game so focused on saving the universe, the Halo series is curiously devoid of people to save. It's filled with others to destroy, of course, this time in the form of the Prometheans, an alien race of bipedal insect knights and exploding robot dogs that fight against (and alongside) Halo's more familiar enemies, the Covenant.
They provide the ingredients for the sprawling three-way battles the series is known for and - while their ability to warp and fly is an irritating combination - in their assured design new developer 343 Industries shows that it's up to the task of expanding the boundaries of the Halo universe. And it's a universe filled with weapons, more weapons than ever before, the Prometheans adding their armoury of esoteric rifles and machine guns to the already enormous array of killing tools. But people to save? You won't find many of those here.
Vehicles glide along invisible roads in the sky. Cars are borne out of twitchy, twisty clouds of darkness. Groups of police cruisers perform coordinated donuts, twirling about like dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical. In the creative and unusual pre-race sequences throughout Need for Speed: Most Wanted, you get the sense that the city of Fairhaven is a surreal land with dreamlike logic that might allow anything to happen at any moment. It's striking, then, that the actual game here is so typical and unsurprising, and that although it delivers plenty of the hard-hitting, white-knuckle racing Criterion is known for, it doesn't do so quite as well as some of the studio's earlier games.
The first game Need for Speed: Most Wanted may make you think of isn't a Criterion game at all; it's Need for Speed Most Wanted, the 2005 game with almost the same name. But while both games take place in open-world cities and involve plenty of police chases, the similarities aren't as significant as you might expect. One of the earlier game's most memorable elements was its hilariously over-the-top tale, told using some cheesy cutscenes, of a newcomer to the city of Rockport who has a personal vendetta against local street racer Razor Callahan. The premise gave you a terrific motivation for rising through the ranks of Rockport's street racing scene and taking Razor down.
The game spans some 30 years, which, with the Assassin’s Creed team at the narrative reins, lends itself to the epic story that ensues. Ubisoft has not only packed in the expected yet awesome fictional and historical stories and crossovers, they’ve redesigned the protagonist’s movement and combat mechanics as well as adding brand new environments through which emerges new game modes and mini games in each.
The first thing to leap into, or off, depending where you are in the world, is definitely the environments. If you’ve been saving yourself for the game and have resisted seeing any trailers and reading any previews, then stop reading here. If not, you’re already aware of the game’s setting and what that explores: Boston and New York, the Frontier and the Eastern Seaboard. All entirely unique, with the city settings the most familiar but still very different from the previous games.
Hell, by Painkiller's estimation, is other people running endlessly towards you. Mad axe-monks, skeletal WW1 soldiers in gas masks, children splayed in two by shotgun blasts and men eternally trapped in their duvet covers come laundry day: all desperate for a meet and greet with hero Daniel Garner's whirring blade.
Hell & Damnation is a modern reincarnation of what Polish developer People Can Fly, now responsible for Gears of War: Judgment, ushered onto our mortal plane back in 2004. Theirs was a deranged shooter that saw Serious Sam infused with equal parts of Hieronymus Bosch and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Lunatic fire-and-forget gameplay, back-flipping hoodlums, goliath bosses and some astoundingly beautiful panoramas of the underworld all conspired to create a game that was, arguably, a more direct successor to Doom than the (then forthcoming) Doom 3.
The Football Manager carnival is back in town, bringing with it hundreds of new rides and thousands of new employees. Sports Interactive has even gone to the trouble of making it look all different when you first enter. Those who've been here before will be in their element in no time, while first-timers will be eased into all the new attractions with handy guides and a bit of selective 'streamlining' to get them right to the heart of the fair.
Like with last year's Football Manager, large numbers of changes are being championed in the 2013 update, ranging from minutiae tweaks only the most hardened obsessive would notice to the addition of whole new modes of play for the first time ever in the series. Yes, I’m ignoring the handheld versions when I say that.
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