Friday 3 October 2014

Counterspy

Counterspy

Part-Metal Gear, part-XCOM, part-successful.

Good intentions and clever planning only win you half the battle. None of that means anything if you can’t deliver the goods on the day. An agent for a neutral, third-party spying collective caught in the middle of a thinly-veiled Cold War parody, your task is to infiltrate the bases of the US and USSR in order to stop either side from nuking the moon. Because nukes are bad and the moon is awesome.

Each 2.5D, randomly-generated stage contains up to four of the 20 pieces of the intel required to interrupt Armageddon, so depending on which missions you tackle (you always have a choice of one from each nation), you could ‘finish’ Counterspy in a few hours or a couple of days.

WWE 2K15

WWE 2K15

Will Sports Entertainment’s PlayStation 4 main event suplex the demons of the series’ past? Matthew Pellett travels to SummerSlam to run the ropes with WWE 2K15’s new-gen debut.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages – er, so long as you’re 16 or over in order to comply with the likely PEGI rating, that is. After an extended exile in old-gen territories, the WWE series has finally made its way onto the PS4 card thanks to an alliance between old developer Yuke’s and new publisher 2K’s NBA team Visual Concepts.

WWE 2K14 was too far into development under the THQ badge for significant changes to be made when the license fell into 2K’s hands at the start of 2013, so WWE 2K15 is being billed as the first true title of the 2K era – and before I’ve even thrown my first in-game chop it’s clear this year’s grappler is significantly different from all of those that have gone before. Though 2K’s asset team wouldn’t want you to know it with this meagre selection of screens, the jump in visual fidelity is as big a leap as when WWE switched from standard definition programming to Full HD.