Bronco. Every. Time.

This has been my motto while playing the preview build of Forza Horizon 5, the latest iteration of Playground Games’ open-world racing series. Horizon is the chill, microdosing cousin of Forza Motorsport, with festival vibes, ridiculous race tracks set in lush environments, and, of course, a virtual garage full of gorgeous vehicles.

Playground Games

Horizon 5 takes place in a fictionalized Mexico, which makes it the perfect stomping ground for the 2021 Ford Bronco, an SUV that I’ve been drooling over for more than a year in real life. It’s the first new model in 25 years, it’s styled after the first-generation Bronco that Ford rolled out in 1965, and, best of all, it comes in a cactus gray colorway. However, for a multitude of reasons — the global chip shortage, supply-chain slowdowns and the sheer expense of it all — I’m not likely to get my feet on the pedals of a new Bronco any time soon. That’s where Horizon 5 comes in.

Horizon 5 begins with a yellow Bronco Badlands strapped to the floor of a plane, ramp lowered behind it with clear sky soaring by. Starting the game drops the vehicle out of the plane, parachuting you onto the rim of a snow-capped volcano. Immediately, you’re driving at high speeds, following a trail down the fiery mountain and getting a feel for the Bronco. It moves like a heavy piece of machinery, tilting on quick turns and cannonballing down the road, sturdy yet sensitive. (The obligatory, “I like my partners the way I like my SUVs” goes here.)

And then the next car drops from the sky — a zippy 2020 Corvette Stingray Coupe that drives much differently than the Bronco, turning on a dime and floating over the road. After a few minutes with that, a 1989 Porsche 911 Desert Flyer parachutes past a herd of flamingos, zooming down forest trails with fantastic handling. Finally, the Mercedes-AMG One, a superfast hybrid sports car, finishes the ride by racing an airplane.

Playground Games

Each of the starting vehicles has its own sensibilities and strengths. They all finally land at the Horizon Festival, a massive music and racing extravaganza held in the Mexico desert. This is the main hub of the game, and it’s a party atmosphere filled with bright pink signs, crowds of cheering fans and a ceaseless barrage of fireworks, confetti and hot air balloons.

This is where you’re given the chance to pick a vehicle for the first time, and it’s the origin of my Horizon 5 mantra: Bronco. Every. Time.

It’s not that the Bronco is the fastest or smoothest vehicle in the game, but it feels right rolling through the rugged desert landscape. It’s the vehicle I want to be driving in real life, and it’s incredibly satisfying to maneuver it up winding mountain roads, along charming city streets and into the heart of massive dust storms.

To be fair, I don’t actually pick the Bronco every time — there are some races that the SUV simply can’t win, given its top speed and wide turns, and for these I’ll happily use one of the sports cars. But when it comes to exploring, I’m all about the Bronco.

That said, all of the vehicles in Horizon 5 are magic. They get cracks in the windows and dents in the doors, but they’re truly indestructible and no matter how many backflips they do, they always land tires-down. Plus, if you mess up a turn or run into an immovable object, you’re able to rewind time. In the end, Horizon 5 is a cactus-lined fever dream of racing, leaping and crashing, and then resetting and doing it all again.

The preview includes the first 90 minutes or so of Horizon 5, offering a world map with a handful of races to complete and bonuses to earn by driving around and smashing up the environment. There are multiple layers of customization in the game, from character creation and accessorizing, to vehicle designs and purchases. The preview ends as you unlock your first house of the game, a beautiful pink casita surrounded by cacti and mountains.

I’m playing Horizon 5 on Xbox Series S, the mid-range platform for this title. It’s heading to PC, Xbox Series X and S, and the Xbox One family of consoles, and the main difference among these platforms will be graphical fidelity and loading times. Xbox One players will see loading screens, while PC and Series players won’t, since those platforms can take advantage of SSDs. There’s also no raytracing on the Xbox One versions.

On Series S, Horizon 5 runs smoothly and looks beautiful so far, maxing out at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and 60fps without raytracing. The final version will be capped at 30fps with raytracing, but this feature wasn’t live in the Series S preview build. Playground Games promises the raytracing mode will be in the Series S edition at launch. Even without the boost, Horizon 5 is a treat to look at, with four distinct biomes, dynamic weather and seasons, and dense, lived-in environments.

After more than a year of restricted travel and stay-at-home orders across the globe, Horizon 5 is a delightful, easygoing escape. It’s lighthearted yet intensely detailed, with realistic environments and vehicles, and it offers whatever type of challenge you want. There are multiple difficulty settings for each race, but there’s also the option to just ride around, drive up the side of a volcano or cruise along the beach. Horizon 5 is the escape I need right now, and bonus, I get to do it in the Bronco of my dreams.

Forza Horizon 5 is due out on November 9th and it’ll be included in Xbox Game Pass.

Microsoft's software suite is getting an upgrade on October 5th with the rollout of Windows 11, and this includes Office Home and Student 2021, and Office Home and Business 2021. Office Home and Student, which unlocks Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Microsoft Teams, will cost $150. Office Home and Business adds Outlook to that list and grants the rights to use these apps for commercial purposes, and it costs $250.

With this year's launch, some extra tools from the Microsoft 365 subscription service are making their way to Office, such as collaboration features like co-authoring and the ability to send out automatic updates when files are edited. Many of the apps are getting a new look, too, with rounded window corners and a neutral color palette. Programs receiving a digital facelift are Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Project, Publisher and Visio. The updated look will also go live for Windows 10 users.

Microsoft 365 and the Office bundles will feature Teams, the company's video-chat app. Windows 11 already includes Teams, but this move brings the app to Windows 10 and macOS as well.

Microsoft 365, the company's top-tier all-inclusive option, costs $70 a year or $7 a month, with the Family plan for up to six people running $100 a year or $10 a month. It includes PC, Mac and mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, OneDrive, Microsoft Editor, and Microsoft Family Safety, plus Access and Publisher for PC.

Half of the announcements out of Amazon's big 2021 showcase were directly related to home security, including the biggest reveal of the day, a $1,000 robot that can autonomously patrol your home. It's essentially a tablet on wheels, roughly the size of a small dog, with cameras that allow it to detect anomalies in the house, record video, and send alerts to your phone. It also connects with Ring, Amazon's popular personal security system, allowing the robot to roll around on its own and proactively investigate odd events while the homeowners are away. Its name is Astro. Yes, it has eyes.

Astro was the cap to an hour-long event that started with kids' toys and health services, and ended in a stream of dystopian police-state devices, each presented with an Amazon-branded smile. There was the smart thermostat, the interactive camera for kids, and Amazon's own version of the Fitbit, followed by the Ring Always Home Cam, Ring Alarm Pro, Ring Virtual Security Guard, Blink Video Doorbell and floodlight cameras, and finally, Astro, the robot with an extendable arm that can record every inch of your house without any user input. Add a layer of ominous music that slowly creeps up in volume, and Amazon's show was an instant episode of Black Mirror.

Amazon

In Amazon's vision of the future, homeowners are constantly watching their security cameras, tracking delivery people and spying on their dogs, heavily relying on the Ring ecosystem the entire time. Astro and the Ring Always Home Cam, Amazon's autonomous security drone, are the company's most visually striking devices, tapping into science-fiction dreams of robot butlers and AI-powered pets. They move on their own and stream data directly to the homeowner at any time, satiating the persistent breed of home-security paranoia generated by neighborhoods of curbside cameras and Nextdoor threads.

While the robots are the face of Amazon's in-home security business, Ring is the backbone. Ring has been leading the home-security charge in the United States since 2018, selling 1.4 million doorbells in 2020 alone and cornering 18 percent of the market overall. Unfortunately, Amazon has proven to be a near-sighted steward of this massive, unregulated residential surveillance system. 

Since 2018, Ring has signed agreements with more than 2,000 police departments across the US, providing authorities with access to recordings from residential cameras, often without warrants and according to the company's own parameters. In May and June 2020, for instance, the Los Angeles Police Department used the Ring ecosystem to request footage of Black Lives Matter protests from residential doorbell cameras, without noting a specific incident that was under investigation. That's a huge red flag, according to activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

Amazon

"If police request hours of footage on either side of a specific incident, they may receive hours of people engaging in First Amendment protected activities with a vague hope that a camera may have captured illegal activity at some point," the EFF said in February. The report continued, "Technologies like Ring have the potential to provide the police with video footage covering nearly every inch of an entire neighborhood. This poses an incredible risk to First Amendment rights. People are less likely to exercise their right to political speech, protest, and assembly if they know that police can acquire and retain footage of them. This creates risks of retribution or reprisal, especially at protests against police violence. Ring cameras, ubiquitous in many neighborhoods, create the possibility that if enough people share footage with police, authorities are able to follow protestors’ movements, block by block."

As the number of police departments with Amazon contracts has skyrocketed, authorities themselves have been pushing Ring devices on the citizens they serve, using materials prepared by the company and earning incentives for getting folks to download Ring's Neighbors app. Amazon has effectively turned the US police force into its own mini marketing squad, blurring the lines between public safety and private-company loyalty.

On top of problematic police partnerships, the Ring ecosystem is filled with unchecked bias. A 2019 study by Motherboard found people of color were disproportionately labeled as "suspicious" in the Neighbors app, a phenomenon that feeds into racism and hyper-vigilance, creating less-safe environments overall.

Amazon

Ring has taken steps to address some of these issues, such as changing the wording in the Neighbors app from "suspicious" to "unexpected activity." Additionally, police will no longer be able to send bulk emails to Ring users who might have footage they want — instead, there's a portal on Neighbors where they can request footage publicly. Of course, these aren't solutions. Changing a word does nothing to temper the breeding ground of suspicion and racism inherent in the Neighbors app, and making police requests public doesn't stop them from happening, warrantless and with broad boundaries that are still determined by Amazon, a massive ecommerce company.

"The network is predicated on perpetuating irrational fear of neighborhood crime, often yielding disproportionate scrutiny against people of color, all for the purposes of selling more cameras," the EFF said in June. "Ring does so through police partnerships, which now encompass 1 in every 10 police departments in the United States. At their core, these partnerships facilitate bulk requests from police officers to Ring customers for their camera footage, built on a growing Ring surveillance network of millions of public-facing cameras. EFF adamantly opposes these Ring-police partnerships and advocates for their dissolution."

As Amazon continues to build out its Ring ecosystem, police partnerships intact, it's clear that the company is not focused on rebuilding public policy, reducing crime or eliminating everyday racism. Amazon is focused on selling Ring cameras; Amazon is focused on making money. Personally, that doesn't make me feel safe.

Nintendo is rolling out a new membership plan for Switch Online, and it'll unlock a library of classic Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis titles. The new subscription tier will go live in October and Nintendo has not shared pricing details yet.

Developing...

At this point in the creeping global takeover of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, most people have a clear idea of who the Guardians of the Galaxy are, at least according to James Gunn. There’s the bald dude who’s a tree, Zoe Saldana in green body paint, the other bald dude who isn’t a tree, Bradley Cooper as a raunchy raccoon, and the guy who used to be on Parks and Recreation.

This isn’t the case in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and that’s a good thing. The game introduces fresh versions of the Guardians and ensures players will get to know them, placing an active emphasis on relationship-building and teamwork, rather than running and gunning. Eidos-Montréal’s interpretation of the Milano crew is familiar but refreshing, and the characters in the game are just as charming as they are in the MCU — if not moreso.

Square Enix

The preview for Guardians of the Galaxy lasted about an hour and dropped me in the middle of chapter five: Star-Lord and his pals are on the Milano, debating whether they should pay a fine at Nova Corps headquarters. They banter and decide to do it, intermittently dealing with a purple-and-orange llama that’s stowed away on their ship from a previous mission. The llama’s name is Kammy. Drax, the vengeful yet simple warrior, calls it “the child.” It’s all very cute.

Star-Lord is the only playable character in Guardians of the Galaxy, but he’s able to interact with and even direct his teammates, taking advantage of their unique skills as needed. For instance, Rocket, the foul-mouthed raccoon, is good at hacking doorways, crawling through vents and fixing things, though he’ll give you an earful while he does it.

By chapter five, Star-Lord has a handful of skills and tools, including the ability to scan his environments for areas of interest or weakness. Using this overlay turns the landscape into an infrared world of neon silhouettes and bright yellow clues. If Star-Lord himself can’t use a particular item, chances are someone on his team can, and he’s able to work with them once he’s found the way forward.

In combat, Star-Lord can instruct his crewmates to use their special moves at any particular time, and they also react automatically to nearby enemy behavior. For example, Star-Lord can freeze an enemy with his ice gun and Groot, the powerful tree creature, will start wailing on the frozen foe, no player input required. There’s also a huddle function that can turn the tide of a big battle — Peter Quill calls the team together and listens to their thoughts on how the fight is going, and then he determines whether to encourage them or check their egos using a range of 1980s pop-rock lyrics. If he picks the right tone, the entire team gets a big boost so they can start spamming attacks; if he picks the wrong words, only Star-Lord gets the damage augmentation.

Fights in chapter five are fast-paced and packed with enemies, meaning the Guardians are often spread across the environment, waging their own tiny wars. Star-Lord’s ability to call in his crewmates’ special powers adds a layer of rapid-fire strategy to the gunbattles, and this system should only become more robust as the game progresses.

Interacting with the Guardian NPCs is a critical component of the game’s non-combat moments, when players have to communicate and solve puzzles to progress. Guardians of the Galaxy uses a Telltale-style narrative system that alerts players with text in the upper-right corner when something significant has gone down — think “Gamora will remember that” — and in conversation, there are often multiple responses for players to choose from, sometimes with a timer attached. Seemingly innocuous decisions, such as whether to respond to an audio cue, can significantly change how the game plays out, for instance jump-starting a battle or creating an opportunity for the Guardians to sneak in.

Relationships are everything in Guardians of the Galaxy. The core theme of the game is grief, according to developers, and even as the Guardians joke their way across the stars, they each deal with a unique sense of loss. This is, ironically, what brings them together. The game's music plays into the emotional mood, with plenty of licensed ’80s hits and an original album from Star-Lord that taps into feelings of being an outcast and finding your chosen family.

It’s hard to say if Eidos-Montréal has captured the right balance of emotion and action throughout Guardians of the Galaxy, but the preview is encouraging. The developers aren’t afraid to let dialogue and puzzle-solving breathe for long stretches of the action, while battles themselves are full and frenzied. At any rate, it already feels way better than Marvel’s Avengers.

Guardians of the Galaxy is due to hit PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, and PS5 on October 26th.

Deathloop is the coolest escape room I’ve ever experienced. That may not sound like much, considering plenty of escape rooms are cheesy monuments to corporate team-building exercises and gentrification, but I mean it as a compliment. Deathloop uses the fundamentals of old-school locked-room mysteries to deliver a rich and stylish universe driven by intrigue, action and strategy. The main difference between Deathloop and an actual escape room is, well, all the death.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a fair amount of dying in Deathloop. Dying is a core mechanic of the game, and it’s the first thing players actually do in the campaign, called Break the Loop. The opening scene has Colt, the main character, on his back with a murderous woman called Julianna sitting on top of him, pressing a massive blade to his chest. After some banter, she plunges the knife into Colt’s heart, and he sputters and dies.

Bethesda

And then the game begins. Colt awakens on a cold, empty beach littered with bottles, and he makes his way to a compound built into the side of the sea wall. As he walks, glowing words appear around the environment, as if a loved one is leaving words of encouragement and warning for him. Colt is confused — he doesn’t even know his own name at this point, let alone how he got here or who’s trying to talk to him.

The identity of the message-writer is just one of a dozen or so core mysteries in Deathloop, and these are the driving force of the campaign. Colt’s job is to explore Blackreef, the island where he’s been trapped in an infinite respawn cycle, and learn as much about its leaders and technology as possible, in order to burn it all down. Blackreef is a retrofuturistic bubble populated by residents who split their time between partying and violently defending their consequence-free way of life, and Colt can either sneak or shoot his way through their ranks.

In action, Deathloop feels a lot like Dishonored (of course), with a chaser of We Happy Few and Quadrilateral Cowboy. It’s mechanically mature and narratively dense, but best of all, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Bethesda

Deathloop is one of the few first-person action games that I can successfully play in stealth mode, silently taking down enemies, hacking turrets and sniping from the rooftops in order to stay alive. Usually with games like this — I’m thinking Deus Ex and Far Cry — I intend to play stealthily, but it doesn’t work out. I get too close to an enemy, or miss my headshot, or forget about that security camera, and I end up just throwing a grenade and emptying my magazine, recklessly running into danger.

Deathloop invites the kind of stealth that I can sustain. The environments are endlessly climbable, offering plenty of vantage points for Colt to survey and mark his enemies, tracking their movements and revealing the kinds of weapons they’re carrying. If something in Deathloop looks scalable, it likely is, opening up the game world in all directions. Additionally, if I accidentally alert the enemies in one location, I don’t feel like I have to abandon my plans and roll in guns blazing. Generally speaking, I can find some cover, pick off the folks that follow me, and return to the rest of the mission in stealth mode. My favorite weapons in these moments are the Tribunal and the PT-6 Spiker, both of which are silent and deliver instant-kill headshots.

I’d like to blame the success of Deathloop’s stealth mechanics on my own skills or the masterful sense of level design coming out of Arkane Studios, but it might just be the game’s hit-or-miss AI. There are times it feels too easy to sneak up on enemies, and moments when they fail to react appropriately to Colt’s presence, standing still for seconds too long, piling up in hallways or ignoring nearby scuffles. It’s not every encounter, and there are still plenty of moments when I’m bested by the NPCs, but it’s enough that I’d classify the enemy AI in Deathloop as OK, rather than good.

Along his way, Colt picks up a variety of weapons and ultra-high-tech artifacts that grant him special abilities and perks. There are Trinkets, which are small glowing items that enhance whatever gun they’re attached to, and Slabs, which give Colt — and his enemies — superhuman powers like invisibility, telekinesis and short-distance teleportation. Once collected, the Slabs are swappable in Colt's loadout, and they tend to be tons of fun.

Blackreef is controlled by eight Visionaries of the AEON Program, one of whom is Julianna, and the only way to escape the island is for Colt to kill them all in a single day, breaking the loop. However, it’s not as simple as speedrunning through Blackreef in order to take them all out. Colt has deep ties to the AEON Program and the Visionaries all keep their own schedules, meaning a successful assassination run will require hours of information-gathering and strategizing. And, it turns out, dying.

Once he gets going, Colt is able to die twice during any playthrough with few consequences; he’s simply transported to a previous location and allowed to keep going, health restored. On the third death, however, he’s sent back to that bottle-lined beach, resources depleted.

He also loses his gear after a full day of activity, regardless of progress. Deathloop is divided into four times — morning, noon, afternoon and night — and after each complete sequence, Colt is beached. Certain missions can only be completed at specific times of day, so players have to plan their attacks accordingly, either shifting time forward or simply delaying until the next loop.

Bethesda

Eventually, Colt gains the ability to carry some slabs, trinkets and weapons with him between loops, though he has to infuse the items he wants to keep with a resource called Residiuum. Colt can harvest Residiuum from the shiny, glitched-out objects in Blackreef, or by killing visionaries and absorbing their energy. Residiuum can then be applied to specific items in Colt's kit, holding them for good.

With all of these trinkets, slabs, weapons, Residiuum, visionaries and loops, there’s a lot to keep tabs on in Deathlooop. The amount of stuff in the game is overwhelming at times, and it’s complicated by an intense plot filled with overlapping, time-bending mysteries. Small scraps of paper and brief audio recordings often contain crucial bits of information, rewarding players who obsessively explore every bookshelf, desk and dead-end with reams of notes and leads. The game does a good job of organizing all of these details in the resource-management screen, but overall, Deathloop demands full and complete attention, lest you completely lose the plot.

For those who pay attention, the story and environment of Blackreef unravels beautifully, with important secrets hidden in plain view, and new parts of the world opening and closing depending on the time of day. From this perspective, the density of things to collect, use and learn in Deathloop makes perfect sense. This game is built on the idea of replaying the same four maps again and again — Colt needs something new to do every time.

Bethesda

Julianna is a charming constant in Deathloop, generally talking shit and fleshing out the background of Blackreef. She’s also the star of the game’s second mode, Protect the Loop. Here, players are able to invade the games of friends or strangers, playing as Julianna and hunting down Colt as he tries to complete a mission. She has her own loadout, trinkets and slabs, including a masquerade ability that lets her trade appearances with allied NPCs — meaning, everyone except Colt.

Protect the Loop is marked by long periods of silence and inactivity, followed by furious gunfire and death. Colt can take any route he wants through the various maps, and Julianna has to actively hunt him down or wait for him to appear near the objective. She may be able to disguise herself, but she only has one life, while Colt has to die three times to make it final. This results in a delicious cat-and-mouse game that’s different with each new player.

That said, Protect the Loop is also where I’ve encountered the most technical issues. I played on PS5, and one round crashed fully right after launching, while two more were completely unplayable from my end, repeatedly setting my Julianna back a few frames until Colt finally showed up and shot her. That’s in comparison with four glitch-free rounds. My recommendation here is to use an ethernet cable, rather than Wi-Fi, and make sure your friends do, too.

Deathloop is incredibly dense, but it’s also inherently forgiving. Relying on death as a mechanic in Break the Loop takes the sting out of failing a cycle or two, since retrying is built into the narrative. Colt uncovers helpful information in most of his runs, even when he ends up dead — like, dead dead — and it feels like there’s always something new to uncover in Blackreef, no matter how many times he returns to the same location. If it does ever get old, there’s always the option to Protect the Loop.

And then Break the Loop. And then Protect the Loop. And then Break the Loop.

You get the idea.

Sony's September PlayStation showcase was juicy. In just under an hour, the studio showed off more than a dozen upcoming, highly anticipated games heading to the PS4 and PS5, complete with some major surprises and plenty of trailers.

The show started with a bang — the reveal of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a remake of the classic BioWare RPG being built exclusively for the PS5. This is a big deal, considering the original never came to PlayStation platforms. From there, Sony highlighted a handful of release windows and extended trailers for games including Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, the Alan Wake remaster, Forspoken, GTA V on PS5, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Project Eve, Gran Turismo 7 and God of War Ragnarök.

That wasn't even the end of it. The trailer for tropical, open-world sandbox Tchia ended with a beach full of adorable, pettable crabs, and it was an absolute dream.

Oh, and Spider-Man studio Insomniac Games revealed it's working on two new titles in the Marvel universe: Wolverine and Spider-Man 2, featuring Venom. The Wolverine game was a total surprise and Insomniac didn't share many details, but the teaser trailer was succinct and stylish — much like the show itself.

Far Cry 6 doesn't even come out for another month, but Ubisoft is already hyping all the things players will get to do (and pay for) after launch. Far Cry 6 will feature Danny Trejo, Rambo and the Stranger Things crew in a series of additional missions, available for free in the coming year and playable in co-op or solo. 

Trejo's mission involves delivering tacos across Yara with the game's protagonist, Dani, by his side. It's called Danny and Dani vs Everybody. The Rambo-inspired mission is called Rambo: All the Blood, and it features a heavily armed, cosplaying superfan in a story straight out of a 1980s action flick. The final free mission is a Stranger Things crossover called The Vanishing — players have to find their loyal weiner dog, Chorizo, in the Upside Down.

From the jump, Far Cry 6 will also have weekly insurgency challenges and special ops missions available for free. Now, on to the paid content.

The Far Cry 6 season pass will go live in late 2021, and it'll feature three missions starring villains from the series' history, detailing their backstories through die-and-retry mechanics. These missions are playable solo or with a friend, just like the main game. The popular Far Cry 3 spin-off, Blood Dragon, is also included in the season pass. The season pass comes with the gold edition of the game, which costs $100 on PC and $110 on Xbox One, Series X/S, PlayStation 4 and PS5. The standard edition runs $60. 

Regardless of the version you want, Far Cry 6 lands on October 7th.

Insomniac Games is working on Marvel's Wolverine, a standalone game coming exclusively to the PlayStation 5. There's no release date nor many details about the project for now, but the studio showed off a teaser during today's PlayStation showcase. Check it out here:

Insomniac is the studio behind Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Sunset Overdrive and other iconic franchises. The studio is known for building agile, rapid-paced games with slick movements and gorgeous environments, so we'll see how that translates to Wolverine.

Insomniac's head of franchise strategy Ryan Schneider shared how Wolverine came to be greenlit in a PlayStation Blog post directly following today's showcase. 

"Our goal here is to not only respect the DNA of what makes the character so popular, but also look for opportunities to make it feel fresh and truly reflect the Insomniac spirit," Schneider said. "Even though Marvel’s Wolverine is very early in development, from what I’ve seen of its emotional narrative and cutting-edge gameplay (see what I did there?), the team is already creating something truly special." 

Of course, he would say that.

Project Eve is a futuristic action RPG built for the latest console generation, and today Korean studio Shift Up provided the longest look yet at how it'll play. From today's trailer, it feels like a cyberpunky blend of Nier, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta and God of War, with an energetic undercurrent. And bonus, some of the enemies are truly horrifying.

Shift Up showed off the new trailer during today's PlayStation showcase. The studio didn't provide a release date, but the game is certainly looking closer to completion.

The first teaser trailer for Project Eve hit in 2019 and the game has garnered a small yet fervent group of followers, mainly drawn to the impressive-looking graphics. Shift Up published a second trailer in November 2020 and provided the following description: 

"The video depicts 'Eve' and the battle against unknown invaders, NA-tives, to reclaim the lost Earth after its collapse. Intense battle scenes were realized with overwhelming live-action-grade graphics, showing advanced technology of SHIFTUP since the title’s first trailer video. SHIFTUP now operates an independent studio for console games, utilizing technology such as high-density 3D scan system and performance capture system. Development is in progress to show maximum performance on various platforms including consoles."