New York-based developers Muse Games have today unveiled Hamsterdam, a brawling “hamster-fu” beat ‘em up designed for Nintendo Switch.
The once peaceful town of Hamsterdam – a strange, alternate Amsterdam that is populated by Hamsters – is in grave danger, with the vile chinchilla Marlo and his Rodent Gang wreaking havoc and terrorising the local rodent residents. You’ll be playing as the hamster hero, Pimm, who must harness his mightiest martial arts powers and kick some tail through district after district, all on a journey to take down the Rodent Gang, save his grandfather, and restore peace to the town.
Game Features: – Gestural controls – Rhythm game mechanics – 3D fighting animations – Hamster-style kung fu – Earn and equip new gear – Idiosyncratic story and setting
The game blends rhythm and precision with good old-fashioned button mashing, aiming to provide classic arcade brawling mechanics alongside a whole host of martial arts combos. A Kickstarter campaign has kicked off today to support the project, hoping to reach a total of $8,000. If you’d like to learn more and pledge your support to the game, you can check it out right here.
Before you go, though, why not let us know your thoughts on this one in the comments below. Will you be backing Hamsterdam?
Nintendo has revealed a brand new Nintendo Switch bundle featuring two games in one handy package, coming exclusively to Walmart in the US.
Mario Tennis Aces seems to be the star of the show, dominating the box cover, but 1-2-Switch is also finally included to add to the multiplayer appeal. The Switch comes with the Neon Red/Blue Joy-Con, and will become available starting next month on the 5th September.
The bundle will set you back $359, essentially costing the full retail recommended price minus that of 1-2-Switch. We’re not surprised to see 1-2-Switch be included as a free bonus in a Switch bundle, but wow has it taken a long time for that to happen.
If you’re interested in grabbing one of these for yourself, make sure to keep an eye out for further announcements on the day. This package could be a great option for families or those who like to play together with friends.
With Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate‘s western Switch release date rapidly approaching, Capcom has announced that it will be offering a free demo for those eager enough to get stuck into the action early. The best news? It’s available tomorrow.
No extra details were shared about the demo – such as all of the lovely things you’ll be able to get up to – but if it’s anything like the Japanese version you’ll get access to 14 different weapons, three fighting styles, and three monsters to challenge.
Just in case you’d somehow forgotten, the full release is scheduled to hit Switch on 28th August, acting as an expansion to Monster Hunter Generationson the 3DS. Capcom also recently revealed that the Breath of the Wild DLC package made available in Japan will be available for the western counterpart, too, allowing you to dress up as Link for yet another adventure.
On a scale from 1 to ‘oh my googly goodness’, how excited are you for this latest Monster Hunter release? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
The Fullbright Company and Annapurna Interactive have announced that Gone Home, a critically acclaimed interactive adventure, will be released on Switch next week.
If you’re unfamiliar with the name, Gone Home is a first-person exploration adventure set in 1995. Taking the role of Katie, players simply explore their surroundings, with no clear goals or pathways presented at any time. Events unfold in a house in rural Oregon, full of interesting and everyday objects for you to examine. As you do so, you unlock a series of journal entries that help you to figure out the recent events that took place there.
Gone Home was originally destined to arrive on Wii U but, despite eventually making it to PS4 and Xbox One, the Nintendo version sadly never came. As mentioned above, however, it went on to receive critical acclaim, going on to secure a Metascore of 86 on review aggregator Metacritic with some very attractive full-points scores being obtained along the way. The game was mostly praised for its approach to storytelling and for providing a different experience to those commonly found in the gaming world.
The game will be available to purchase directly from the Switch’s eShop on 23rd August, celebrating the original release’s fifth anniversary.
Did you play Gone Home on other systems? Will you be checking this one out now that it’s made its way to Switch? Tell us below.
The RTS genre is a tricky one to pull off correctly on consoles due to the limitations imposed by the much smaller number of available buttons on a controller. Still, games like Pikmin have shown that it can be done smartly, and there are ways to infuse RTS elements into another genre, like Tower Defense, as CastleStorm has done. Though CastleStorm struggles with its controls, it proves to be an enjoyable, deep, and content-rich action game that has the capacity to appeal to fans of a wide variety of genres.
The premise is simple, sticking to a Saturday morning cartoon-esque plot that follows the century-long battle between the Kingdom and the Vikingland, while building up a lore around these two warring tribes as it reveals that neither side is perhaps as bad as the other one would think. The story is mostly relegated to (admittedly cheap-looking) cutscenes told before or after each level, and is punctuated by liberal amounts of humour and fart jokes, which can be a bit hit or miss. Though the plot doesn’t necessarily get any points for its depth or originality, it still does a great job of setting up the goofy tone that CastleStorm runs with.
Gameplay is rather complex once you have full access to your entire suite of moves, and the game does a great job of easing you into the various mechanics that are at play in a typical fight. The goal of most stages is to either destroy your enemy’s castle, or to break down their gate and successfully run their flag back to your own castle. You primarily take control of a ballista affixed to your castle gate which can shoot a variety of projectiles – from simple spears and harpoons to Mjolnir itself and an exploding apple – and these are used in both offensive and defensive ways.
Castles are built in an Angry Birds-like way of being precariously balanced on stilts and stone walls; destroy the supports with the right bombardment, and you can watch the whole thing come crashing down in a glorious bout of screams. However, your attention will frequently be divided between attacking the castle and defending your own from the battle taking place on the middle ground, which is populated by a plethora of deployable units dead set on stealing the flag.
With each passing second, food is passively generated, and this can be used to send out myriad soldiers to do your bidding. These can range from being the standard cannon fodder enemies that can be spammed in huge numbers, to dragons and stone golems that are virtually unstoppable. The action happening on the ground can often decide the outcome of a battle, but if things aren’t quite going your way, there’s yet another element to combat to further deepen the strategy elements.
At any point in time, you can choose to deploy spells which grant a variety of offensive and defensive changes for the action happening on the ground, and the most important spell is represented in your Hero character. Activate the Hero, and you can choose where to deploy a controllable unit on the ground who absolutely torches the opposition, cutting through all but the hardiest of units with extreme ease. The Hero, and all other spells, are fortunately limited by hefty cooldowns which prevent them from dominating a match, making them more of a last resort for when you need that extra push.
It sounds like a lot to manage, and it is indeed a lot to keep track of, but it’s rather remarkable how well CastleStorm balances these three primary elements in combat to achieve a fluid system that encourages and necessitates usage of your full moveset; ignore something for too long, and the battle can end quite abruptly. It helps, too, that the pace of battles overall is kept to a relatively slow and plodding speed. You’re given ample time to assess a situation as it’s unfolding and respond accordingly, yet it seldom feels like a battle is dragging on or not throwing enough new challenges and threats at you. From the game design perspective, then, CastleStorm is solid, but there are issues with the way controls are handled.
Most of your direct control in battles is handled via the ballista, which is rather clumsily controlled by the overly sensitive left stick. There’s no way to turn the sensitivity up or down (although you can make minor adjustments using the D-pad buttons), which makes for a rather frustrating experience when trying to land headshots on incoming enemy fighters or to hit a specific room in the other castle. Zooming in the camera helps to alleviate this somewhat, but it feels like a band-aid for a much bigger problem and, when combined with the stick and the D-pad buttons, makes aiming feel like an overly complicated affair.
One would think motion controls would come in to save the day, but they’re puzzlingly only utilized to pan the camera left and right, making them feel utterly useless when they offer no notable benefit over just using the right stick to control the camera. The touch controls do help a bit with accuracy, but it’s still pretty easy to ‘fat finger’ shots and miss your target by a few inches. Now, these control issues certainly do not ruin the experience – it’s simple enough to adjust to the bizarre set up after you fight through several battles – but they do hamper it somewhat, and feel like an unnecessary drawback that could’ve been easily avoided.
Control issues aside, it’s extremely easy to get sucked into the masterfully constructed gameplay loop that CastleStorm uses, encouraging repeat plays of levels and giving players a constant sense of empowerment and progression. After each battle, the player is given a generous amount of gold which only increases with excellent performance, and this gold can then be invested into upgrades for the various units that make up the army. Health points can be raised, cooldowns lowered, damage increased, and most of it is cheap enough that you can purchase about two or three upgrades per visit to the barracks. This provides a tangible reward for good performance, and encourages you to play “one more battle” just to see the new upgrades in action.
On top of this, the castle itself can be tweaked in an editor that lets you drag and drop rooms to suit your needs. Each room in the castle grants passive benefits over the course of a battle, whether it be faster food generation or more units on the field at a time, but these benefits are lost if that room is breached by enemy ballistae. This creates an interesting dilemma for how one should design a castle. Should filler rooms be placed up front, taking the brunt of enemy fire at the cost of more upgrade rooms, or should you double down on upgrade rooms and plan on only half of them making it? It’s fun to experiment with different castle designs and see how they can affect the outcome of a battle, and though the castle editor feels a little hokey when you’re doing some serious renovation, it’s nonetheless a welcome feature that adds yet another layer of strategy.
Naturally, this sort of competitive game is well suited to multiplayer play, and CastleStorm leans into this by including both local and online multiplayer. Split Joy-Con play makes it a cinch to start up a game with a buddy on the go, and there’s a variety of modes to keep the two of you occupied. Versus mode sees each of you taking control of your own castle in a battle for supremacy; Survival sees one player manning a ballista and the other controlling a Hero in an endless battle against waves of enemies; while Hero Survival sees you both taking control of Hero characters to see how many waves you can endure. Even when playing in portable mode, we didn’t notice the framerate suffering much, and though the controls are still less than ideal, they’re simple enough to teach to newcomers.
As for presentation, CastleStorm manages to impress, going for a chunky, World of Warcraft-like style that’s packed with all kinds of color and detail. Though you’re mostly just staring at the same battlefield for several levels before moving on to the next one, Zen has made sure to pay plenty of attention to detail, throwing in background things like flying machines, soccer fields, and radiant sunsets to keep the action feeling lively and visually appealing. Although animations look stiff – even more so when viewing them up close during the cutscenes – this doesn’t detract hugely from one’s enjoyment of the visuals in the moment-to-moment gameplay. Matching all of this is a perky and upbeat soundtrack that provides great backing for the battles taking place, filling the air with Renaissance-style strings and flutes that further reinforce the lighthearted atmosphere.
It must be said, too, that there is a staggering amount of content to be found in CastleStorm on the Switch. Each level you face has up to five earnable stars which are decided by your chosen difficulty level, ballista accuracy, and mission fulfilment, and you most likely won’t come anywhere close to collecting all stars right away. Couple that with the fact that there are actually four campaigns here – the two that made up the original release and the two that were later added as DLC – and there’s a considerable amount to get through before truly hitting that coveted 100% mark.
Conclusion
CastleStorm is a wonderfully well-rounded package that offers up enjoyable RTS gameplay in an approachable fashion, with a high skill ceiling that caters to players of all skill and interest levels. Although we do wish the control scheme was better thought out, the addictive gameplay, appealing art style, and hefty amount of playable content make this an easy recommendation for anybody looking for a solid strategy game on their Switch. Zen Studios may have made its name on its excellent pinball franchise, but CastleStorm proves the studio has the chops to tackle more genres in high-quality, fun and creative ways.
Atlus has revealed that Etrian Odyssey Nexus – known as Etrian Odyssey X in Japan – will be heading westward in February next year.
The game was released in Japan on 2nd August, acting as the final game of the series on Nintendo 3DS. Atlus has already teased future titles – seemingly coming to Switch – but it’s great to see this final hoorah for the series on Nintendo’s little 3D wonder. The game will be available on 5th February and pre-orders are said to be live right now (although, at the time of writing, Atlas’ link isn’t working correctly).
FEATURES: – The Definitive Etrian Odyssey Experience – With more classes, characters, gameplay systems, and labyrinths than any other game in the series, Etrian Odyssey Nexus is the ultimate dungeon-crawling adventure. – Customise Your Perfect Exploration Party – Create and customize characters from 19 playable classes, then take on the dangerous creatures of Lemuria’s labyrinths with your perfect party! – Both Newcomers and Veterans Welcome! – With the ability to swap between four distinct difficulty settings, auto-mapping settings, and a grand standalone story, there’s something for everyone from series newcomers to experienced veterans. – A Love Letter to Etrian – Longtime series mainstays Yuji Himukai (Character Designer), Shin Nagasawa (Monster Designer), and Yuzo Koshiro (Composer) have come together to create the preeminent Etrian experience for the series’ final installment on the Nintendo 3DS.
With several months sitting between now and release, we’re confident that we’ll hear much more about this title and what we can expect to find in the game. If it’s anything like its predecessors, though, including the magnificent Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth that arrived in the west last year, we’re very hopeful for another success story here.
Are you a fan of the series? Are you glad to see this game make it to the west on 3DS? As ever, share your thoughts with us below.
If you live in the UK and want to enter the Splatoon 2 competitive scene, or even if you’re already a pro-fresh-ional Squid looking for more prizes to be had, you may be interested to know about this online qualifier coming up this weekend.
WIth the juicy prize of qualification into The Splatoon 2 UK Championship 2018 Series up for grabs, this early online competition will pit some of best players in the country against each other to see who can come out on top. The grand final will be taking place in Birmingham on an as-of-yet undecided date in November – and it’s sure to be a blast.
To qualify, you must have a team of four eager Splatoon 2 players who are currently residing within the UK or Ireland. All of the sign-up information you’ll need is right here, along with the format and schedule for how the gameplay rounds will be going down. Things get started at 3pm BST on Saturday, so make sure you’re definitely available on the day!
Are you eager to play Splatoon 2 competitively? Have you ever took part in a competition? Let us know in the comments.
Nintendo’s Japanese chart success has continued once again this week, with the Switch being the most popular consoleand its games filling sixteen of the top twenty places.
It wasn’t a Switch or 3DS title sitting on top of the pile this time around, as the newly released Yakuza 3 soared to the top with 26,047 sales on PS4, but the overall chart shows a familiar picture. The usual evergreen Nintendo titles are present as always, with a couple of new additions joining the party, too.
Here’s a look at the top 20 (first numbers are this week’s sales, followed by total sales in brackets):
1) [PS4] Yakuza 3 (Sega, 08/09/18) – 26,047 (New) 2) [NSW] Splatoon 2 (Bundle Version Included) (Nintendo, 07/21/17) – 21,630 (2,532,658) 3) [NSW] Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum ‘n’ Fun! (Bandai Namco, 07/19/18) – 21,020 (140,911) 4) [PS4] Fire Pro Wrestling World (Limited Edition Included) (Spike Chunsoft, 08/09/18) – 20,218 (New) 5) [3DS] WarioWare Gold (Nintendo, 08/02/18) – 19,183 (50,201) 6) [NSW] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo, 04/28/17) – 17,795 (1,688,546) 7) [NSW] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition (Microsoft, 06/21/18) – 17,003 (186,221) 8) [NSW] Mario Tennis Aces (Nintendo, 06/22/18) – 16,456 (297,138) 9) [NSW] Pro Yakyuu Famista Climax (Bandai Namco, 08/02/18) – 15,671 (58,517) 10) [PS4] Bullet Girls Phantasia (D3 Publisher, 08/09/18) – 14,396 (New) 11) [NSW] Okami HD (Limited Edition Included) (Capcom, 08/09/18) – 14,089 (New) 12) [NSW] Octopath Traveler (Square Enix, 07/13/18) – 11,390 (175,625) 13) [NSW] Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Nintendo, 07/13/18) – 10,875 (90,123) 14) [3DS] Etrian Odyssey X (Atlus, 08/02/18) – 9,914 (81,860) 15) [NSW] Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and The Millionaires’ Conspiracy DX (Level-5, 08/09/18) – 9,704 (New) 16) [NSW] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Limited Edition Included) (Nintendo, 03/03/17) – 8,300 (1,074,639) 17) [NSW] Kirby Star Allies (Nintendo, 03/16/18) – 7,657 (587,496) 18) [3DS] Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon (The Pokémon Company, 11/17/17) – 6,451 (1,695,264) 19) [PSV] Bullet Girls Phantasia (D3 Publisher, 08/09/18) – 6,441 (New) 20) [NSW] Super Mario Odyssey (Bundle Version Included) (Nintendo, 10/27/17) – 6,016 (1,788,814)
As has been the case for quite a while now, the Switch has taken the top spot in the hardware charts by quite a comfortable margin. Here are this week’s figures, followed by last week’s.
1) Switch – 50,143 (50,799) 2) PlayStation 4 – 16,982 (13,113) 3) New 2DS LL – 7,628 (9,015) 4) PlayStation 4 Pro – 5,044 (5,889) 5) PlayStation Vita – 3,507 (3,339) 6) New 3DS LL – 2,784 (3,010) 7) 2DS – 498 (561) 8) Xbox One X – 43 (53) 9) Xbox One – 31 (21)
Any surprises this time around? Are you happy to see the Switch performing so well in its home region? Let us know with a comment below.
With Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee!‘s release date coming ever closer, the official Japanese Pokémon Twitter account has shared information on the pre-order bonuses available in the region. Needless to say, they happen to be much more extravagant than the western counterparts.
As you can see, Japanese pre-orders will come with a figure – depending on which version you buy – and a lovely looking art book is given to those who grab both versions of the game. It’s worth noting that the figures are only prototypes – hence their unfinished-looking state.
For comparison’s sake, current pre-order bonuses in the UK are made up entirely of these keychains seen below. It’s a welcome addition, of course, but it’s a shame that the figures and art book don’t appear to be making their way to western shores.
Will you be pre-ordering the games? Do you wish you could have the Japanese exclusive goodies? Tell us below.
Start Your Holiday Shopping Early with this Walmart-Exclusive Nintendo Switch Bundle
If you haven’t yet picked up a Nintendo Switch system or are looking to jump start your holiday shopping, Walmart has a great exclusive deal starting on Sept. 5. For a suggested retail price of only $359.99, you get the Nintendo Switch system and digital download codes for two great multiplayer games –Mario Tennis Acesand1-2-Switch– providing hours of family-friendly fun.
