Gaming
Clandestine Review – A Solid Indie Stealth Adventure
Clandestine is the latest title from the creators of Expeditions: Conquistador. The stealth-hacking game, currently in Early Access, is the company’s first title outside of the Expeditions series and goes in a fairly different direction to those games, though it does feature quite a strong tactical element. Logic Artists have gone for an asymmetrical game style, with players taking on the role of either spy or hacker (or both, in single player). It’s not a perfect system, but it brings a lot to the stealth-genre table.
First, the good. Clandestine has a lot of potential as a co-op game. One player takes on the role of spy, while the other player takes on the role of the hacker. The spy spies and the hacker enables the spying by opening doors, finding passwords, disabling cameras, and so on. The reliance on the hacker makes the experience thoroughly exhilarating, which is how a good stealth game should feel. Both players are also forced to pay attention at all times. If the hacker loses track of their spy, things will go pear-shaped fairly quickly.
But if you’re more interested in a single-player experience, as I was, Clandestine also has that. The single-player mode essentially just has one player take on both roles. Playing alone isn’t terrible, but it’s clear the game wasn’t designed with single-player in mind. Having to manage both the spy and the hacking makes things… clunky. Shifting into hacker mode pulls you out of the action of being the spy, and going back into spy mode will quickly make you lose track of what you were doing as the hacker – which, as mentioned before, is something you’ll really want to stay on top of.
Hacking mode
The main problem with single-player is that you can’t do two things at once, which makes things jarring at best and frustrating at worst. While hacking, your spy might get caught and killed before you even realise what’s happening, and while spying, your hacker might be kicked out of the network you spent so long breaking into. It’s not necessarily the fault of this game in particular. It’s more a problem with translating multi-player games into single-player experiences as a whole – one person can’t be in two places at once.
Of course, Clandestine is still fairly early in development so there are plenty of other issues. If you like to play with a controller, it’s a patchy experience. Controllers are supported, but all prompts and tutorials are for mouse and keyboard-users only, so you’ll have to guess which buttons do what. And there are some buttons that didn’t seem to have any controller options at all. Movement felt a little clunky and activating options such as closing doors was frustrating at times. But these are all issues that will, hopefully, be fixed in due time. As far as hacking goes, however, mouse use is so heavy that it’s unlikely a controller will ever be an option for this mode.
Clandestine is a promising game. Seen in the context of Early Access, there’s a lot of potential here for a seriously fun stealth experience. If some of these kinks can be ironed out, the single-player experience could be vastly improved. The multi-player experience is already a exhilarating exercise in stress management (in the best possible way). This is a game to keep an eye on.
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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