Gaming
Indie Gaming First Impressions: Titan Souls
Sitting down with ACID NERVE’s Titan Souls is an experience I can only describe as nostalgic. Reminiscent to huddling under my bedside-table lamp in a struggle to get as much light as possible onto the screen of my Game Boy Colour. Stepping into its quaintly retro world with nothing but a bow and a single boomerang-like arrow feels like a charming return to the simplicity of the past. This simplicity seems to be the core from which Titan Souls’ gameplay draws from, with only two buttons to sprint, roll and fire your arrow, alongside fully 3D controls with the analog stick or D-pad.
Basics out of the way, I set about heading up the lonely path towards a creepy door adorned with a pulsating eyeball. Naturally, I shot it, and proceeded through the open archway. Standing at the bottom of a huge structure, I was met with what sounded eerily like rhythmic basketball dribbling. You can imagine my disappointment when it was in fact not basketball legend Dikembe Mutombo who greeted me, but a weird, dodgy looking mass of bouncy green slime that proceeded to squish me repeatedly till I learned to kill it. Welcome to Titan Souls, eh?
However! My tentative first steps were not for nothing. From this simple, albeit fun and well-designed fight, I was given insight into how the mechanics of the game work and would continue to work throughout. I learned that my character would die if hit once. I learned that after using my arrow to expose the weak-point of a boss, they too could only handle one hit. My first fight also taught me to be observant and I quickly discovered an interesting theme that linked together the game’s introductory bosses.
Bosses, which similarly to the first, were designed in a way that quietly and sub-consciously teaches players how to deal with the progressively more difficult challenges that fighting these Titan Souls present. Over the course of the next twenty or so minutes, I had defeated the game’s tutorial bosses and opened a gate to the larger world beyond.
It is in this larger world that Titan Souls really becomes quite lovely. A subtle nod to classics of the past like Shadow of the Colossus, I was given complete freedom to roam about wherever I pleased, albeit without my chirpy horse companion. Regardless, I found myself quite taken by the atmosphere of mystery and isolation. The game’s accompanying soundtrack wafts a similar simplicity but remains beautifully orchestrated, fitting each individual environment like a glove.
And that’s that really. My experience thus far with Titan Souls has been rather lovely. Coming off the back of recent heavy hitters like Bloodborne and Battlefield: Hardline, it’s nice to be able to just sit down, chill out and not have the constant threat of painful death loom over my head like a big green slime monster… wait a minute!
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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