Assassin’s Creed 3

Assassin’s Creed 3 (AC3) appears to take a brand new direction from previous titles, introducing not only a new environment, but a new main character.  AC3 takes place in America during the Revolutionary War.  You play as Connor, a half-British, half-Native American assassin on a quest to bring down the Templars. At the panel, a 10 minute video was privately shown during which demoed some gameplay, all commentated by game developers.  An improved graphics engine allowed the developers to increase the amount of NPC’s on screen from around 500 in previous games to up to 2,500+ in AC3. This was necessary to create an authentic experience where entire armies would literally line up and mow each other down.
After listening to the famous “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” speech, you head to the side of the hill and begin scaling the environment.  Unlike the previous games, where the cities often felt linear and mapped out, Ubisoft appears to have made the trees as natural as possible.  To do so, instead of having trees built to accommodate Connor, they added all-new animations so that Connor may climb the shape of any unique tree.  The tree climbing and movement was very realistic and fluid as Connor utilized his environment to get into effective positioning for an ambush. What happened next had the entire audience cheering.  A British patrol squad arrived, a “rope-dart” weapon was selected.  Connor latched the rope around the enemies neck and dropped from the tree, swiftly and effectively hanging the British soldier from the tree branch.  The audience immediately went nuts, but there were still a few soldiers remaining.
From there, Connor continued his mission, jumping branches and scaling a giant cliff.  After showing off the, again very fluid motions, we arrived at a British encampment.  Another new featurette of stealth via natural bushes was shown.  While in these new “stalking zones,” Connor will automatically crouch and remain hidden from enemies, but you need to walk slow.  This allows you to carefully set up planned ambush attacks. This was all building to the final assassination of a British commander.  At this point, the audience was on the edge of their crates (Very effective setting the mood, by the way), but the fun was only beginning. Ubisoft chose to show off just how fluid the combat is by smoothly jumping from one kill to the next. Connor sprinted into the camp and jammed his hidden blade into the back of a soldier and barrel-rolled forward over his carcass, tackling a soldier and killing him too.  After rapidly getting up, he jumped onto a boulder and lunged toward the commander on horseback, tomahawk in hand, and brutally bludgeoned his neck.

Party of Sin
An intriguing Indie game which finds a 4 player co-op, puzzle based environment in which players must help each other using various characters, all of which represent one of the “Seven Deadly Sins”. “Greed” has a grappling hook to grab [everything] and pull himself and other to otherwise unreachable areas, “Gluttony” can eat blocks and move them around to where they need to be. Each character has the ability to interact with enemies, allies, and objects in various ways, so be on guard for betrayal! Battles and puzzles are designed to be responsive and allow multiple solutions. Cooperation with fellow Sins is vital, but be on guard; in Party of Sin, alliances are tenuous. It’s the nature of a Sin to back-stab its friends for points, ammunition, and glory.
Max Payne 3
While the core gameplay seems to have been created straight from the original mechanics that originally helped to make the series stand out from the rest, the team over at Rockstar has made a number of slight additions, improving the sense of flow and direction that adds more than it changes. Stand-alone graphic novel-style cut-scenes appear to have been completely eliminated, making way for a seemless integration that maintains the game’s fast pacing rather than interrupting it. Max now narrates as the player moves through a scene, with key words and phrases graphically appearing on sections of the environment, such as a closing door or nearby wall. This new method definitely helped keep the player inside each scene, but the digression from the series’ roots may prove unwelcome for some.

Rock Band: Blitz
As if rock band needed more franchises to overrun in the rhythmic games, they now appear to be taking a stab at games like “Amplitude” and “Frequency” with Rock Band Blitz, a new XBLA game slated for a summer release. It takes a very free-form approach to the rhythmic genre by allowing you to play multiple tracks at once, and rewarding multipliers by switching between instrument tracks. The game did feel rather clunky, and I’ll chalk that up to being a demo of an unreleased game, but you have to wonder. If they release a game in this kind of shape, what else are they willing to do to make some quick cash?  “Don’t worry, you’ll probably buy it anyway” is a terrible reason to mass-produce a game.
Borderlands 2

Borderlands was (and still is) one of my favorite RPG games. I was thrilled to hear the game had a new-found sequel. I got a chance to play the co-op demo provided by Gearbox, and needless to say, I was thrilled. I got around 10 minutes with the game after a nearly 2 hour line, but that was hardly anything compared to the game play. The enemies themselves were much more varied than the 100+ different types of skags you seemed to encounter for most of the game, which was certainly refreshing. Graphically, they also look cleaner, as does the game as a whole, really kicking up its unique cell-shaded style with vivid colors and a sharper contrast to the background.
Combat is strikingly comparable to the prequel, but new, slight differences between weapons and enemies have been added to spice things up. The bug-like enemies we fought in the demo, for example, often had weak areas, requiring a small sequence of actions to defeat: a “shoot the hot-spot, bust up the armor, and take it down” sort of thing. It felt very “Legend of Zelda – boss battle – esque”. There will be some other tricks at work in the final game, too. For example, some enemies will fly about, but enter a shell that makes them more difficult to kill if you didn’t prioritize toasting them in their initial state.
Based on my ten-minute experience with Borderlands 2, I think it fair to say that if you played the first, then you should already know almost exactly what to expect with its sequel. Things look cleaner, the pacing is increased, and the action is more frenetic. Otherwise? It’s Borderlands. And if you liked Borderlands, that’s far from bad news.