Video-game roundup: Evolve, Dying Light, Grim Fandango, and more

Evolve (2K; PS4, Windows, Xbox One; rated mature) is a different breed of multiplayer game. It’s not player versus player or group against group. It’s four on one.

Design director Chris Ashton told the Georgia Straight the concept doesn’t stray far from the Left 4 Dead games his Turtle Rock Studios developed for Valve. Those games were about four players working together to survive a zombie apocalypse, and at times those players were up against dangerous, powerful zombies. The only difference is that in Evolve, there’s a real person playing the monster.

“Getting it balanced wasn’t quite so easy,” Ashton conceded in a phone interview.

Early in development, the four hunters would spend 10 minutes looking for the monster, then they’d find it, and there would be a two-minute fight to the death. Ashton said what they wanted was for the hunters and monster to fight multiple times before a winner was determined. The solution: make the monster faster and give the hunters the ability to trap it in a 60-second arena where the fight happens.

“It becomes a war of attrition,” Ashton said.

Evolve can be played solo, with the computer operating the other characters, but this game was designed to be played together.

Other things to watch for this month…

There’s a new look to zombie games with Dying Light (Warner Bros.; PS4, Windows, Xbox One; rated mature), both a fighting and a stealth game, with you in peril the whole time. It’s an unconventional first-person experience, so you’re not simply looking through the eyes of the protagonist, agent Kyle Crane, but you see your arms and legs as you run and jump. You’ll be doing a lot of that, too. More than fighting, this game is about using parkour techniques to move through the city of Harran, which is under quarantine because of a pathogen that turns people into “eaters” that can be slowed by ultraviolet light but become rabid hunters at night. The graphic violence and gore threaten to overwhelm, so be forewarned.

Grim Fandango (Double Fine; Linux, OS X, PS4, PS Vita, Windows; rated teen), a 1998 adventure game that mashed up film noir and Day of the Dead calacas, has been released in a remastered edition. Players take on the guise of Manny Calavera, a grim reaper who works in an office trying to sell to the recently dead upgrade travel packages that can speed them on their way to their final resting place. The movement and interaction will seem dated to younger players—the game was developed for 20-year-old technology, after all—but the wit of the characters and humour of the dialogue prove to be timeless.

Owing a debt to 2013’s Gone Home, Life Is Strange (Square Enix; PS3, PS4, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One; rated mature) is a narrative-driven game about a young woman who discovers she has the ability to time-travel. The tale, in five episodes, comes from French developer Dontnod, which gave us Remember Me, featuring a female protagonist as well. That action title also included an interesting game mechanic in which players entered the memories of characters and looked for opportunities to change them. The time-rewind feature of Life Is Strange isn’t nearly as compelling as in Remember Me, though, and does little more than make the episodic game into a Choose Your Own Adventure.

The New Nintendo 3DS XL ($230), which includes near field communication (NFC) for use with Amiibo figures, is now available in North America. (The smaller New 3DS that’s available in Japan and Europe isn’t available here.) Revisions to the gaming handheld include two additional shoulder buttons, to make four in total, and an extra thumbstick on the right side of the device, all of which give the New 3DS the same control scheme as the controllers for home consoles.

The best improvement is to the 3-D effects, the quality of which has always been dependent on how much people move their head and hands when they play. The stereoscopic 3-D system in Nintendo’s new gadgets uses eye tracking to adjust the display so the “sweet spot” of 3-D viewing isn’t so limited.

The New 3DS XL comes with a four-gigabyte microSD card but not a charging cable. You’ll need a screwdriver to swap out SD cards, but it’ll let you change batteries, too. And if you don’t already have a DS charging cable, don’t bother buying Nintendo’s wall plug. Instead, get a third-party cable with a USB plug so you can charge your handheld with any powered USB port.