However, the cover art for The Last of Us has had the opposite effect in some ways. Because of how accustomed gamers are to The Last of Us ‘ post-apocalyptic world and the characters Joel and Ellie, it’s easy to forget how striking the game’s cover art is, with a young girl carrying a large rifle and a man with a gas mask seemingly unfazed by the car next to them with a dead body ins

An Ōkami cover art featuring on this list is fairly ironic, as the franchise is known for having one of the biggest box art botches of all time. When the Nintendo Wii version of the game was released, eagle-eyed fans noticed that a barely visible IGN logo was included due to the artwork being taken from the si

Greg Foertsh: In the storyline it’s 20 years in the future. It’s 2035 and you lost the fight in the first third of the campaign in Enemy Unknown. It’s where we’re mentally cutting it. So you never developed any of the crazy stuff, you lost early, and for the past 15-20 years you have been underground. Now the time is right and you’ve decided to come back and reclaim Earth.

As well as providing a beautiful view of the game’s landscape, Shadow of the Colossus ‘ cover art is brilliant for two main reasons. Firstly, it shows the game’s “David vs. Goliath” theme in a very striking way with the enormous size difference between the two figures. While the second, very spoiler-heavy reason is that it foreshadows the game’s ending . Wander has his sword out, ready to fight the colossus, while the enormous creature has its back to the playable character, seemingly not interested in fight

Ultimately, XCOM 2: War of the Chosen buries even the most tactically-sound gamer under a mountain of entertaining challenges and adds not only several hours of content to play through, but well-neigh infinite replayability as well – we can’t wait to restart the fight and see how a new batch of soldiers fares against the ADVENT government. Firaxis Games has introduced a veritable mountain of new enemies and experiences to take in, greatly refreshing what was already a deep strategy title with a steep learning curve. With so many layers of new content and carefully balanced gameplay, War of the Chosen (and its accompanying price tag) isn’t for the faint of heart, but it certainly packs more than enough value to back up the pr

However, it’s not just the new Chosen enemies and a few new ADVENT enemy types that these soldiers will be facing. Missions in abandoned cities are frequently overwhelmed with swarms of The Lost, a zombie-like enemy that attacks both XCOM and ADVENT forces upon sight. Any explosions in the map trigger a new swarm of these monsters, and pandemonium can quickly reign as they attack friend and foe al

In the end, the version of XCOM 2 available on either the Xbox One or PS4 is still, unavoidably, the second best crafted by the development team. The good news is that players who prefer their couch to their desktop won’t be missing out on the quality of the experience, even if the level of polish takes a hit. And with every aspect of XCOM 2 contributing to the kinds of investment, tension, and stakes usually relying on players hunched over keyboards, glued to their monitors… well, being a couch potato may have never been a more stressful experie

To combat the new threat, XCOM can recruit 3 new player-friendly factions into the fray: The Skirmishers are direct combat units with multiple actions, The Reapers are stealthier than anyone else in the game, and The Templars’ unique melee and ranged psionic attacks can make a world of difference. As players perform certain covert missions on behalf of these factions, they’ll earn visit the site trust of their respective leaders and be able to activate monthly bonuses, like starting a mission with a turncoat ADVENT on the player’s side, or have enemies drop more loot. As can be expected, learning how to use each Faction to its fullest potential is quite a learning process, and it’s likely some bodies will drop during the proc

While Enemy Unknown ‘s basic gameplay loop saw players taking uneasy steps into hostile territory, unsure of ambushes, it’s the player who now stalks their alien prey. Squad members can be led, one by one, up to the very fringe of monitored areas. From there, it’s possible to identify secondary targets or assets (now a core layer of the mission objectives), and surround enemy troops and traitors before they know what’s about to hit them. And when it hits them… it’s glori

It’s one of those things that plays well with the amount of damage it deals with different percentages and values. It gives that class and soldiers something that’s cool and the abilities grow with that class as it goes.

It was one of those things in Enemy Unknown that we really wanted to do, but there isn’t like another XCOM game out there, so as we were making Enemy Unknown, we had to figure out the game and really figuring out procedural at that point a stone too far for us. So, there were a lot of complications with it and now after Enemy Unknown, we have a lot of metrics, we understand what exactly this is. There are some easy metrics that determine sizes of things and distances, and it allowed us to analyze it and come up with a system that is very robust, so even if we didn’t do procedural, I still would do levels the way I’m architecting them now to save a lot of extra work we did in Enemy Unknown that I don’t think was really visible to the player. But it was something that we felt we needed to do so, we got time of day is dynamic, we got weather, destructible floors and ceilings now, destructible structures. All of that plays into the procedural system.