Devil’s Third

Six years, four game engines and two publishers later, Tomonobu Itagaki’s latest could generously be said to have endured a problematic gestation. And yet, setting aside the fall of THQ and the shift to a new console, it’s always seemed to be a game built upon precarious foundations. On a fundamental level, its combination of FPS gunplay and thirdperson melee combat simply doesn’t work. And when you shoot the leg of a man standing a good five feet away from the nearest cover only to stifle a chuckle as his head inexplicably pops off, you’ll wonder if Devil’s Third would have been much better under ideal conditions.

Satellite Reign

Driving rain. Neon skies. The hum of plasma in the air. The warmth of a nostalgia stretching back to Syndicate (the 1993 game that introduced a generation to the joy of cities as playgrounds, not the quickly forgotten 2012 shooter). On the surface, Satellite Reign looks like the sequel fans have been waiting for since 1996’s Syndicate Wars, and in many ways this Kickstarted spiritual progeny is just that. In execution, though, something fundamental has gone missing – and it’s not just the adverts for Ghost In The Shell.

Until Dawn

Horror’s a fine fit for a Heavy Rain-style game, and teen slasher horror seems to fit the mould even better. While Until Dawn was beaten to the whole jump-scares-and-QTEs thing by The Walking Dead, tension in Telltale’s game comes from the fear of a known quantity: shuffling undead that bite and kill indiscriminately. In Until Dawn, the fear stems from ignorance – you don’t know what’s out there, what it wants, or what form the attack will come in, if it comes at all. The fear of the unknown is a powerful thing.

Heat Signature

Gunpoint’s creator still has a way to go before signing this off

Spinning through the vacuum of space in a recently extricated urinal block isn’t a situation we planned for today. It’s the stuff of Douglas Adams-fuelled nightmares and came about as a result of being a little too bold at the helm of what was, until recently, a considerably larger vessel. Luckily, our personal pod can be remotely controlled, so after leaping clear of the space lav, we’re soon back in an oxygenated environment.

Scalebound

Xbox One’s exclusive action-JRPG doesn’t want for scale

Hideki Kamiya starts his presentation of a pre-alpha Scalebound by stressing that, even though the session will focus on combat, this isn’t a traditional action game, but an action-RPG. The game channels Kamiya’s work on Okami as much as it does Bayonetta, then, and we’re promised a vast world in which to showboat.

Ark: Survival Evolved

This survival-RPG crossbreed has escaped containment into the hands of modders

Open-world survival mixed with crafting and available now via Early Access: it’s the call that millions who by now might know better still find themselves helpless to ignore. Ark: Survival Evolved sold over one million copies in its first month and yet is built on a familiar formula. Anyone bailing on Rust or Stranded Deep in search of something less rough-and-ready will intuit the rules, punching trees for wood, rocks for stone, and dodos for meat. They’ll take these materials and use an in-game recipe book to spawn tools that beget bigger, pointier tools with which to fend off dinosaurs and provoke the neighbours.

Star Fox Zero

After a radical change to the Arwing’s controls, Fox resits his pilot’s exam

The last time we squeezed into an Arwing cockpit, it was far less complicated than this. It takes a few flights in Star Fox Zero just to feel like a borderline competent pilot again, and we scrape our fuselage across plenty of scenery in the process. Partly, that’s down to Zero’s esoteric split-view approach, the GamePad displaying Fox’s in-cockpit perspective, while your TV is reserved for a more traditional chase-cam setup. Aiming is handled by tilting the GamePad, and you’ll need to make effective use of both of your viewpoints in order for Fox McCloud to live up to his formidable reputation as a fighter pilot, flipping between the small screen for pinpoint targeting and the main one for tactical awareness. It’s exhausting at first.

Parvum S2.0

Ikea, eat your heart out. Flat-pack customPCs for all!

What can two guys operating out of a farm in Essex bring you? Well, some of the most custom-designed cases you can imagine, for starters. Parvum Systems is widely renowned for its stunning bespoke cases. Custom-built from the ground up for enthusiasts, its innovative designs come flat-packed, ready for assembly. The custom-cut acrylic panels comprise the exterior and interior of the chassis, allowing for a multitude of different layering effects and colours.

Streacom F12C

You could run out of ideaswhere to stick the fans and drives with this one

Streacom may be a newname to some, but the companywith its head office in Holland andmanufacturing plant in China has been around since 2010. It’s made its name in SFF cases and passively cooled bits and pieces, which makes its latest product, the F12C, a bit of a departure, as it’s been designed to support ATX motherboards.