STACK J#165 Jul 2018

GAMES FEATURE

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Shadow of theTomb Raider

Namco Bandai A ll anyone has cared about since it was announced is Kingdom Hearts III about, and the Disney aspect will succeed in attracting new fans to the franchise. If you’ve never played a Kingdom Hearts game before, this is the one to get in on. Continuing their impressive You. Are. ATOY! Words Alesha Kolbe

Soulcalibur VI

playable on the show floor to general attendees, it was nice to get a more private look behind the scenes at perhaps how a pro would play through the level. One of the highly comprehensive notes we took during the presentation was “Lara’s hair is too clean”, but apart from that everything seemed to be in ship shape. At this juncture, we find a Lara that is terribly familiar with her situation, and overly comfortable in the dangers of the wilderness. She can traverse landscapes and rocky cliffsides with ease, and is able to camouflage with her surroundings. The demo we were shown had a stealthier approach, with Lara using noise to draw out her enemies one by one and assassinate them, rather than engaging in an all out gunfight. It will be interesting when we get our hands on the game to see if it’s easy enough to conduct a chaos playthrough, but there’s never anything wrong with a stealthy raider of tombs.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - September 14, 2018 Soulcalibur VI - October 19, 2018 Kingdom Hearts III - January 25, 2019 Release dates of note:

(the first game with a relatively normal title in who knows how long), and thankfully, it plays just as well as you’d hope. A bunch of all new Disney characters have joined Sora this time round, fromWoody and the gang in Toy Story , to Elsa in Frozen , and even Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean . The good (and unsurprising) news is that Kingdom Hearts III is as good as the series has ever been. The attractions in store in the new game are adorable; we saw the teacups from Disneyland and immediately went ‘aww!’ Its combat is complex enough to keep dedicated gamers interested, with magic and combos to think

showing, Soulcalibur VI was also playable on the show floor. Your standard Calibur (sorry) of fighting game, this one even includes Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher III : Wild Hunt as a playable character! Prepare to beat the living daylights out of your mates in a ‘lighter’ Soulcalibur, with the series hoping to return to its brighter roots. It’s being released to coincide with the franchise’s 20th anniversary (can you believe it?) and is built on the Unreal 4 Engine, so it looks stunning, too. Our last bit of proper hands-on was with the newly-announced

Jump Force , and you should have seen the reaction when this trailer dropped at the Microsoft conference. The anime worlds of One Piece, Naruto, and Dragon Ball have all come together for the ultimate 3D fighting game. Fan of

the series or not, this is going to be one to keep an eye out for. Of course, not everything on the show floor at E3 is playable. Sometimes publishers offer behind-closed-doors walkthroughs of certain levels or sections within a game that certain press and other members of the community can attend. One such meeting was for Shadow of the Tomb Raider . Though

Jump Force

Kingdom Hearts III

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JULY 2018

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