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The Orange Box is a decade old, but it only seems like yesterday that Valve’s five-game compilation, which included Half-Life 2 and its two continuations, Episode One and Episode Two; Team Fortress 2; and Portal, was hitting shelves.
It’s strange to think that, back then, Portal was something of a mystery. Half-Life was still going strong (those were the days) and Team Fortress had already amassed a following, but no one had any idea what to expect from the quirky, reality-bending puzzler. Not even Valve.
Despite being an unknown quaniity, Portal soon became the talk of the town. And while the portal-flinging mechanics were truly special, it was the game’s robot antagonist, GladOS, that emerged as the star of the show.
Now, in a recent interview with PC Gamer, Valve designer Robin Walker has explained how the cake-loving maniacal machine came to be.
“In any game’s development, there are too many decisions to count, and many of them will ruin the game if made incorrectly,” says Walker. “One decision that ended up being very important was the one behind GladOS.”
Walker recalls how after a year in development, the team had 14 levels ready for playtesting. There was, however, no GladOS, and players moved from puzzle to puzzle without any real sense of narrative progression or reward.
Playtesters still responded positively to that GladOS-free experience, but many kept asking “when does the game start?” Without any story beats to hit or emotional adversity to overcome, most felt the core levels were tutorial missions leading to something bigger. That’s when Valve became worried.
“Considering the entire game was really just a process of learning about the core gameplay mechanic, this scared us a lot,” continues Walker. “We talked about various solutions, and in the end decided that introducing an antagonist made the most sense.
“The antagonist could start as a narrative tool for introduction and reward, and over time become the thing that pushed back on the player, eventually giving them the core goal of the game. We had little in the way of art production on the team, so it being a character that largely spoke to you via voice over was a straightforward production solution.
“In the end, there are many important decisions after this that were critical to GladOS working as well as she did, such as her entire personality. But her genesis begins with a straightforward process of us trying to solve the core gameplay problem in Portal.”
The full interview goes into more detail and is well worth a read. Check it out over on PC Gamer.
Bandai is reviving its Tamagotchi virtual pet to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the brand.
Created by Akihiro Yokoi, the pebble-shaped toy launched in Japan in 1996 and North America a year later, and sold millions. Each was equipped with a crude LCD screen, and the objective was to hatch a virtual pet and look after it. These pets would evolve depending on how well you performed that task.
Bandai is launching a new model in North America this November for around $15 (around £11).
Several revisions of the original toy have appeared over the years (we even got a host of video games on Nintendo systems), but this model sports a more basic design in order to appeal to those who grew up with Tamagotchi back in the ’90s. It’s smaller than the original, but doesn’t have a backlight. Retro.
Were you one of those kids? Will you be buying one of these?
The Switch eShop already has a number of retro games available through the HAMSTER Neo Geo and arcade ports, while a number of titles can certainly be described as having a retro style. Hyper Sentinel will eventually add to the latter list, with its goal of bringing its own ‘Neo Retro’ approach to the shoot ’em up genre.
Publisher Huey Games has now released a video showcasing the game running on the Switch hardware itself, also demonstrating the control schemes and different visual filters that can be applied.
For those of you in the UK, it’s worth noting that it’ll be playable on Switch at this weekend’s PLAY Expo event in Manchester.
So, are you interested in this one?
The release of Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon is just over a month away and, to prepare for these new entries to the series, the Pokémon Global Link will soon be undergoing some rather major maintenance.
From November 10th until November 17th (the release date for Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon) the Pokémon Global Link will be down meaning that players will not be able to access the site as usual. It also means that functionalities such as the QR Code Rental feature, Online Competitions, and Ratings Battles will not be available during that time. Some particularly good news to come from this, however, is that if you register your new Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon games to the service when it re-opens you will receive a “special gift”.
This maintenance is fairly standard procedure; when new Pokémon games are released the Global Link goes through various changes to support the new titles. Eventually support for older titles is discontinued but online functionalities within the games themselves can still be accessed as usual.
Do you use the Pokémon Global Link? Are you looking forward to the newest Pokémon titles? Let us know all your thoughts in the comments.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice developer Ninja Theory is marking World Mental Health Day by donating all proceeds from today’s sales of the game to mental health charity, Rethink.
Rethink is a UK organization that supports and campaigns for those severely affected by mental illness. The group wants to help those affected by the invisible illness by challenging and changing attitudes.
Hellblade’s protagonist Senua, suffers from psychosis, and both critics and fans have praised the way the game delicately and intelligently represents the condition.
Ninja Theory has put together a new game trailer for the occassion, but instead of featuring buzzwords and marketing jargon, this one spotlights messages sent in by Hellblade players keen to share their own mental health experiences.
Donations will only be taken (after sales tax and platform fees) from PS4 and PC purchases made on October 10, so if you’ve been waiting for a good opportunity to dive into Hellblade, now’s the time.
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Written by Max Röhrbein-Kling and Johannes Kuhlmann
This is part three of our series of blog posts on our experience with bringing Galaxy on Fire 3 – Manticore to Vulkan.
Our posts follow this structure:
Before we dive into the matter, we would like to point out once more that the focus of our Vulkan renderer was to ship a game. Thus, it is more pragmatic than perfect and we have mainly done what has worked for us – so there is no guarantee that our best practices will also work for you. We do believe, however, that our implementation is still reasonably versatile and well done. And we hope that you can learn a thing or two from our approach.
This third post covers a bunch of little problems we encountered while implementing Vulkan support and getting it to work on different devices.
One of the things we learned when bringing our Vulkan renderer to different devices and GPUs was that it is very important to pay respect to the targeted devices’ limits, properties, and capabilities. With Vulkan, almost anything can be queried. Most things you have to query before you go ahead and do it. Some things we knew about, some came as a surprise. To shed more light on this issue, we are now going to discuss a few examples that struck us as the most important ones.
One such example is maxMemoryAllocationCount of a Vulkan device. This number tells you how many VkDeviceMemoryallocations can be live at the same time. Per spec, the minimum is 4,096. As it turns out, there are numerous devices out there that have a maximum of 4,096 (Adreno GPUs, for example) – a number we are apparently able to exceed with all the vertex/index buffers, uniform buffers, textures, and so on. So, as most Vulkan tutorials recommend, you should think about memory management early on and not make one allocation per buffer.
We also had problems with the alignment of our data. There is the device’s minMemoryMapAlignment and then there is the alignment you get from vkGetBufferMemoryRequirements(). In some cases, we had to take the maximum of the two in order to get the correct alignment.
You will also want to check the API version of the device you have. Make sure it is actually the one you programmed against. We had some Vulkan implementations where the major version was 0 and things like the VK_KHR_swapchain extension or validation layers were not available at all.
A Vulkan implementation must support one of the following texture compression methods: ASTC, BC, or ETC2. If you want to be compatible with all Vulkan devices, you better support all three texture compression formats. However, on Android, we have gotten away with only supporting ETC2 so far. This is due to the fact that all devices we target support it (presumably due to it being required by OpenGL ES 3).
The framebuffer formats also vary from device to device (be it RGBA or BGRA, or whatever). And depth and stencil formats are wildly different between GPUs, too. They can also be combined or not, for example.
Additionally, there are some other small things like the alpha compositing mode (VkDisplayPlaneAlphaFlagBitsKHR) or the surface transform (VkSurfaceTransformFlagBitsKHR) for which different values are supported by different devices.
If you have worked with Vulkan, you have hopefully also used its validation layers. These layers basically stand in-between your game/application and the Vulkan driver, making sure your usage is valid. The layer concept is not exclusive to validation, but it is normally the first use case you come in touch with. There are different validation layers that focus on different areas where problems might occur. For example, there are layers for parameter validation, API state, and correct threading. The validation layers are Open Source and can be found on GitHub.
The beauty of the layer concept is you can enable error checking and validation when you need it and disable it to have zero overhead when you do not need it. We would like to emphasize that you really should use the validation layers whenever something is wrong. Make them super-easy to enable (without rebuilding) and maybe even run with them enabled by default if performance permits.
The validation layers are still constant subject to change. Even which individual layers there are and what layer does what is not set in stone yet. Therefore, you should get them from GitHub and build them yourself if you want the latest checks.
You should load the validation layers in order. Contrary to what we had assumed in the beginning, the validation results may be influenced by the order you specify the layers to be loaded in. There is a recommended order which can be found here and here.
The validation layers are specific to the device you are running on. Of course, their code is the same for all devices, but the layers ask the given Vulkan device for its limits and capabilities. The layers do their validation based on that information. So, just because you do not have any validation issues on one device, it does not mean you will not have any issues on other Vulkan devices.
One very Android-specific issue we faced was that at some point our validation layers were not found by the Vulkan driver anymore. It just kept looking in the wrong folders. This happened after we integrated the Google Play services into our game. The same engine was able to find and load the layers successfully in a rather empty project without anything from Google Play in it. This bug seems to be specific to ARM Mali GPUs. We have reported the problem and hopefully it is going to be fixed at some point.
One thing that eventually will happen with Vulkan is that you do something wrong. On Android, you will then most likely get the dreaded VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST result which means your driver or GPU had to be restarted. Your Vulkan device will probably not recover after this without a restart of the game. It may continue rendering, albeit with worse performance as the error keeps occurring.
This problem is very difficult to debug because everything is asynchronous. Via the Vulkan API you submit commands to the driver. While these commands may already be processed asynchronously, they will most likely also be executed asynchronously on the GPU. The result from the execution will then again be sent back to the driver asynchronously. If there is an error in this procedure, your Vulkan code will only detect it when it tries to call one of the Vulkan functions that may return the error. So, it is rather difficult to pinpoint the one Vulkan call causing the problem.
If you get VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST, it is best to simplify what you are rendering until the problem does not occur anymore. From there, you might be able to debug whatever problem you have with one specific asset or its render setup.
For us, causes of a lost device included:
Of course, there were certainly other causes as well. But the ones listed above struck us as the most prominent.
Normally, when something goes wrong, we first suspect it to be our fault – a notion that very often turns out to be true. However, this changed a bit when we were working with Vulkan on Android. At various points, we had to accept that it might not have been our fault and that there might simply be problems we could not fix at all.
In addition to the validation layer problem in one of the previous sections, there were two cases where we concluded that the driver must be at fault. Both happened on Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Of course, to say it again, there is still a chance that these problems were caused by something we did. But in both cases, we could work around the symptoms by avoiding the addressed features.
In the first case, our uniform structs were assigned to the wrong uniforms in the shader. So, basically our rendered objects behaved very weirdly as their uniforms did not have any sensible values. We tracked this problem down to our DescriptorSets somehow being wrong. We made sure our binding numbers were correct in VkDescriptorSetLayoutBinding. And everything seemed fine, but our uniforms were still just as wrong as before. As it turned out, the driver was not using the binding numbers to bind the uniform structs, but instead their index in the array of VkDescriptorSetLayoutBindings inside VkDescriptorSetLayoutCreateInfo. A simple sort by binding index fixed that problem after days of debugging.
Another problem manifested itself with lots of flickering of one or multiple objects. The flickering intensified when pulling down the Android menu from the top of the screen. This problem was apparently somehow caused by our usage of dynamic pipeline states. Specifically, we had the viewport and scissor rect marked as being dynamic which results in them not being part of the graphics pipeline state. Disabling these features made the flickering go away. Luckily, we did not really make use of the ability to change around the viewport or scissor rect a lot.
In addition to things simply being broken, we also had problems with various GPUs behaving drastically different from each other. These were problems where we were wrong according to the Vulkan specification, but everything was still working correctly on a lot of devices. On others, however, this was not the case.
For example, we could map a memory buffer twice (using vkMapMemory()) even though that should not be possible. Or we forgot to specify external dependencies for our subpasses (VkRenderPassCreateInfo), but everything still rendered fine on all devices. At least most of the time. On some devices we encountered some objects to be missing occasionally for one frame at a time. Another example is that we specified a depth of 0 in VkImageCreateInfo for our 2D textures and it still worked on quite a few devices. The correct value should have been 1, obviously.
There are lots of little – or not so little – things that can go wrong in a Vulkan application. Luckily, the validation layers report most of these issues.
And then there are issues where you spend ages looking for the problem, have checked the Vulkan standard a dozen times, but everything looks correct to you. In such cases, it might help to assume your driver may not be implementing the standard correctly and see if that reveals a workaround to you.
In the next post, we will talk about some of the challenges we faced when bringing the Vulkan renderer to Android.
From the NES heyday shoot ’em ups like Gradius, and moving through the console generations with various sequels, Nintendo players have seemingly often had a soft spot for the genre. Right up to the recent tide of Neo Geo classics released on the Switch, including Blazing Star and Alpha Mission II, the genre continues to be well represented; while these titles are good for scratching that nostalgic itch, the contemporary scene is rather strong. With the rise off download stores and smaller studios, the retro classics on the eShop have recently been joined by the likes of Sine Mora EX and Graceful Explosion Machine – each offering their own aesthetic and gameplay twists on one of the most straightforward of straight up (or left to right) genres.
While the shmup’s mantra is often ‘go in one direction and shoot anything that moves’, Thai developer Pixel Perfex’s new title Earth Atlantis reminds us that there can be more beneath the surface. Although it never tries to shy away from its roots, Earth Atlantis is also an exploratory and even reflective experience at times, but more on that later.
Somewhat reassuringly (considering the genre) the backstory is as brief as it is shallow – after a catastrophic global event at the turn of the century leaves 96% of the earth under water and inhabited by a wide range of aquatic beasts, it is up to you to choose a submarine and go about taking them out, one by one. The quick introduction allows players to get straight in and focus on the key elements and mechanics.
Going up, down, left or right at your own pace – and taking in the scenery at times – is a welcome change to the frantic pace autoscrollers in the genre are known for, and all round movement feels good. Use ZL or B to turn your ship around, and A or ZR to shoot. There is only ‘quest mode’ open and one ship available from the outset, but new ships are available after fulfilling certain objectives – how to acquire them would spoil the surprise. Even so, the final number of vehicles available is low with no customisation options. ‘Hunter mode’ opens up after successfully completing the game – essentially a ‘Rush mode’ to kill all bosses on a single life as quickly as possible. There is also a visual log of the boss monsters you have defeated.
The enemies range from relatively harmless minions that regularly drop weapon upgrades – adding firepower and eventually an extra direction to your ships arsenal – to tougher foes, while you can seek out barrels or crates to find homing missiles, bombs or a burst of electricity. The main antagonists of Earth Atlantis are 38 giant ‘boss monsters’. Without spoiling too much, these range from a static biomechanical octopus and a raging, spinning armoured king prawn to more organic types, such as a squid or sea turtle – with many more besides.
The difficulty of these boss battles fluctuates a fair bit, with one taking us over a dozen attempts after a gritty and intense war of attrition; we’d then casually cruise past the next few bosses on the first attempt, only to once more get hopelessly obliterated with an almost instant kill attack from another. It seems like the developer has taken this on board, as a rapid patch increased item drops and weakened certain bosses. While the battles are tough, and sometimes frustratingly so, with persistence and patience slaying each beast is immensely satisfying.
Changing course from the more traditional titles in the genre, the exploration elements of Earth Atlantis are well balanced, opening up new areas after defeating bosses, with ‘bullet hell’ tropes taking a bit of a back seat. That’s not to say that things don’t get hectic – weaving and dodging through waves of enemies feels great and is initially necessary when the one sub to choose from has limited range, but nonetheless is a tense and fulfilling experience due to decent manoeuvrability. The more low key moments are a good mix of open areas and maze like rock formations. The mini map can also be turned on or off with X for a ‘pure’ experience, as it shows boss and power up locations; this reviewer felt that, although useful, this map somewhat imposed on the overall presentation, so the option to disable it is welcome.
Anyone who is reading this review after seeing screenshots or watching any footage has no doubt noticed a glaring omission – the visuals. The game has won Asian video game convention awards since its reveal, and it’s easy to see why. The sepia toned, meticulous line drawing aesthetic is instantly striking, but look a little closer and you’ll realise that there are a wealth of subtle details that make the game stand out. The glorious depth of field and parallax is simply stunning, as broken buildings, scaffolding, famous landmarks and narrow caverns make up the one vast, semi-metroidvania style world. Whether it’s noticing a majestic and docile beast swimming peacefully in the distance posing no threat, or navigating the abandoned structures in tighter areas, the visuals in both handheld and especially docked – as the game felt slightly faster and smoother on the TV – are a delight. Animations are fluid, and the game shows no slowdown during more intense moments.
Despite the soundtrack being hand picked from licensed music, the boss battle tracks in particular are suitably orchestrated, brutal and epic, akin to something from Shadow of the Colossus. Disappointingly there’s only a single overworld track, but it’s appropriately ambient with a light sprinkling of more modern electronica sound effects.
Even if you’re not a 2D ‘shmup’ veteran, or are looking for something a little off the beaten, sidescrolling track, there is plenty to enjoy here – we have tight controls, plenty of unique monstrous bosses to defeat and exploration of a broken but beautiful submerged world. While it lacks a few options, has occasional boss fight difficulty spikes and is not the relentless action that some genre fans prefer, Earth Atlantis has enough old school shoot ’em up substance to back up its glorious and organic style.
While a little bare at launch, Nintendo Switch’s library of eShop titles has exploded in recent weeks, now making it a virtual hotspot for new and exclusive releases. Joining the party with a few titles of its own is Merge Games, a game publisher that has been working with a number of different indie developers to bring some of the best and brightest new titles to the Switch eShop. We recently caught up with Merge Games to give some of its upcoming releases a go.
Release date: October 11, 2017
Physical release: November 16, 2017
Imagine, if you will, a world in which the Global Postal Service has failed to such an extent that drastic measures have to be taken. You may wonder how we could ask you to imagine such a dire situation when it is so far removed from reality, but know that developer Prospect Games has come up with the perfect solution – sentient, self-delivering packages. In an attempt to put this theory to the test, Prospect Games created Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure, a mail delivery simulator disguised as a colourful, humorous, 3D platforming adventure.
Originally released on Steam in September of 2016 and bouncing its way to home consoles throughout 2017, Unbox fits comfortably as part of the resurgence of the 3D platformer genre that was so popular in the polygonal days of the ’90s. Drawing obvious inspiration from titles such as Banjo-Kazooie and Super Mario 64, this title encourages exploration and collection while simultaneously guiding the player through its open world with objectives and missions.
Well, we’ve actually been able to publish our Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure review ahead of its release, so click the link for our full lowdown on its positives and negatives.
Release date: October 18, 2017
Just in time for Halloween and the spooky season, developer Baroque Decay has a treat for action and horror game fans who have a preference for pixel art. Borrowing gameplay elements from early Legend of Zelda titles and combining them with stealth horror, Switch owners can look forward to the upcoming release of The Count Lucanor. While at first it may look like a brightly coloured adventure title, what lies beneath the surface is a dark and at times unsettling story of survival.
Taking on the role of a young boy named Hans, players are tasked with exploring the titular Count‘s labyrinthine castle, picking up clues that will help in revealing the Count’s true name. In order to move forward in his quest, Hans must solve a series of puzzles and find hidden keys strewn about the castle. The exploration felt a bit like going through the world map in a Metroidvania game, where each time we opened a new door or unblocked a passageway it seemed to connect to another untouched part of the castle. This aspect of the exploration made us genuinely want to keep digging deeper, with the knowledge that if we found one more key then we might be able to get to that treasure chest that’s just out of reach.
From what we saw there doesn’t seem to be any combat involved, requiring players to solve puzzles and escape enemies using stealth and by keeping their wits about them. The most important tool at our disposal was a pocket full of candles that could be held or placed strategically throughout the castle in an effort to illuminate potential threats. The candles were also useful in marking the paths that we had already explored to circumvent any potential backtracking. While we never felt like Hans was growing stronger as you would expect of the hero in a more traditional exploration based game, we did feel as though we were becoming more resourceful with each new inventory item that we picked up.
Our time with The Count Lucanor was short, but it was just enough to get a feel for what the full package had in store. It’s an adventure game that looks inviting from the outside, but it definitely has a dark side to it waiting to be explored. Assuming this one hits the projected release date, it’s definitely a game we’ll be looking forward to playing in time for Halloween.
Release date: Q4 2017
Starting at the top with Unbox and working our way down, we can safely say that we’ve landed on the darkest of Merge’s three upcoming Switch titles with The Long Reach. Developed by the small team at Painted Black Games, The Long Reach is a side-scrolling adventure game that explores the human psyche through a sci-fi and horror narrative. It’s also pretty funny at times, making good use of well-written dialogue and gallows humour necessary to get you through what would otherwise be an entirely bleak drama.
The gameplay is simple, consisting mostly of running back and forth in 2-dimensional settings and interacting with people and objects around you to solve puzzles. In terms of gameplay, The Long Reach isn’t a huge departure from previous titles in the adventure genre, but it recognizes its limitations and makes up for them with a strong narrative. Even though it utilizes a pixelated art style, it is very effective in conveying different environments that feel unique, and the sound design is put to good use in creating an eerie atmosphere. We definitely recommend playing with headphones to enhance the feeling that there’s someone or something lurking around the corner or breathing down your neck.
We were immediately sucked into the story and kept playing with the excitement of always wanting to know what was in the next room or who was hiding around the corner. Without realizing it we ended up demoing The Long Reach for nearly an hour before we were finally told that we were playing the completed game and not just a demo build. It was explained that this is the type of game that is meant to be played in one sitting, so the whole experience only lasts a few hours. It was at this point that we put our controller down at the risk of spending another few hours playing through the entire story. Given the option though, we wish we could have stayed.
So there you go, three more intriguing Switch eShop titles. Let us know which of these will be going on your wishlist.
Despite its incredible popularity in Japan, Koei Tecmo’s Warriors (or, if you prefer, Musou) series has never really captured western hearts and minds in quite the same way. To the outside observer, the series appears to be little more than mindless button-bashing, with no tactical nuance or depth. As fans of the franchise will tell you, this couldn’t be further from the truth and despite the odd bum outing (what series doesn’t have those?), we’ve seen some addictive and compelling adventures over the years – the most obvious of which (from a Nintendo perspective) is of course Hyrule Warriors, which arrived on Wii U and was later ported to 3DS.
Despite being a solid game, Hyrule Warriors didn’t seem to change the western perception of the Musou franchise all that much; when Fire Emblem Warriors was confirmed there were a few grumbles and complaints within the Nintendo ranks about “another” Musou crossover title. However, having played the game over the past week we’re happy to report that such scepticism is largely unwarranted; in fact, by fusing Intelligent Systems’ famous turn-based strategy universe with the combat action the Warriors series is famed for, we could finally have the game which shows the doubters just how deep and involving it can be.
True, the seemingly mindless but incredibly enjoyable hack-and-slash action is present and correct, aided immeasurably by some impressive performance on Switch, even when played in handheld mode. Everything shifts along at an urgent pace, with attacks filling the screen and enemies scattering like rag dolls. This much we expect from a Warriors game, but Omega Force and Team Ninja haven’t lazily slapped the Fire Emblem name on this in the expectation that the characters and lore alone will sell the concept; they have thoughtfully taken elements from the franchise and adapted them into the core mechanics. So it’s possible to issue orders to units from the grid-based map screen, switch between active characters at the push of a button and even team-up for more potent attacks, building your bond level as you go. The all-important weapon triangle appears too, and must be taken into account when attacking certain units.
Fan-service is everywhere in this title, and while it’s great to see so many famous faces and observe how they interact in the bonkers dimension-skipping storyline, it does feel somewhat forced at points; this zany plot was the only reasonable way in which the developers could possibly have Chrom, Marth and Corrin all inhabiting the same battlefield at once, but it pushes the realms of plausibility at more than one point, even for a game set in a magical fantasy realm filled with dragons and monsters. Thank goodness then for the bonus History Mode, which allows you to revisit classic battles from past Fire Emblem games without having to put up with all the portal-based hokum seen in the main Story Mode.
Another big talking point with Fire Emblem Warriors is that it’s the first Switch title to offer players the opportunity to select the kind of performance they want. “Quality” improves the visuals at the expense of frame rate, while “Performance” drops the detail in order to hit 60fps. Having experimented with both we found ourselves favouring the latter, as smoothness always trumps visual fidelity in our book, but it’s nice to have the option all the same. Even when playing with “Quality” mode enabled, the 30fps frame rate is acceptable; however, when playing with two people in splitscreen things become noticeably choppier.
We’ll save a more detailed analysis for the full review, but at the moment Fire Emblem Warriors is effortlessly soaking up the majority of our spare time, which is no mean feat when you consider the abundance of amazing Switch games on offer right now. Hopefully this entry will help the Warriors series gain some semblance of respect amongst western players, because it’s certainly shaping up to be one of the best instalments we’ve ever played.
