Shovel Knight caught our attention from the first time we saw it on a Nintendo Treehouse at a big gaming event. The game has been popular enough on Nintendo consoles that Yacht Club Games decided to release retail versions of the game.

Now however they’ve just announced that not only will the retail edition coming to PlayStation 4, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and PC (in Europe only) be delayed until October 30th in Europe and November 3rd in North America; the retail copy for the Xbox One had been cancelled altogether.

Explaining the situation on their website Yacht Club Games wrote: “The final few steps of the Plague of Shadows content took a little longer than expected, but it was important to us that this update to be on the disc/cart right out of the box. Unfortunately that meant we had to push back the date just a little a bit.” They then explained that the Xbox retail edition had been cancelled for now owing to “publishing policies on that platform that are totally beyond our control.” The digital version is still available though.

The price of the physical copy has also been raised a little, but people who pre-ordered at the original price should have their retailers honouring that original price. The decision to bump up the price was down to limited space to display wares and down to the location of where certain priced merchandise was to be displayed meaning that Shovel Knight might not have been displayed where Yacht Club Games would have liked it to have been. “We didn’t want our ‘bargain priced’ game to go straight to the bargain bin.”

Each physical version will now come with a free soundtrack download to make up for the delay and price increases, and Yacht Club Games have said that updates on the retail Vita version and the Shovel Knight Amiibo are coming soon.

With the game coming out soon, EA has opened up a small slice of Star Wars: Battlefront for beta testing. I’ve taken it for a spin and collected my thoughts for you in a handy video. Check it out below:

Part of the big Fall Update, the new map comes atop of the typical seasonal update to the game and is called Community Operations fittingly. Players were apparently involved in the process from day one; concept to final design. What’s resulted is a fast-paced jungle map with a medical facility, temple and waterfall boasting narrow access point and some infantry-heave zones. Vehicles in the map are of the small and fast variety as you’d expect from such a heavily grown battle area, including bikes and ATVs.

DICE will be revealing some more information about it closer to the release date, which is still unannounced itself. In the mean time, take a look at this playtest trailer of the map to get an idea what it’ll be like to play in:

If you’ve been playing games for any length of time, chances are you’ve seen the Havok logo before. Havok is a middleware company and it’s Havok engine provides all of those lovely ragdoll physics you are used to seeing in various games. It seems that Microsoft has been rather interested in the company, as they have just acquired Havok from Intel for an undisclosed sum.  A corporate article regarding the purchase reads, in part:

Microsoft’s acquisition of Havok continues our tradition of empowering developers by providing them with the tools to unleash their creativity to the world.We will continue to innovate for the benefit of development partners. Part of this innovation will include building the most complete cloud service, which we’ve just started to show through games like ‘Crackdown 3.”

IGN reached out to Microsoft for further comment and recieved a response to several questions, the most pertinent being the availability of Havok to other console manufacturers:

“We will continue to license Havok’s technology to the broad AAA games industry. This also means that we will continue to license Havok’s technology to run across various game consoles including Sony and Nintendo.”

Havok, of course was recently used to power such games as Destiny, Watch_Dogs, and Dark Souls 2.

IO Interactive show us the latest installment of their hit assassination’em up, Hitman!

The developer session kicked off showing us some pretty standard gameplay for a Hitman game, however there are options, lots and lots of options. It seems that as per the words of Travis and Sven, the two employees of IO Interactive who took us all through the Showstopper Level of Hitman,

“You will experience a rich and detailed sandbox, every person has a name”

It certainly looks like they’re correct at least on the rich sandbox part of that statement, the level is very densely populated, the crowds move, mill and mingle around as one would expect a large crowd of posh twats to and the level itself is pretty bloody expansive, including a large manor house with two floors, large garden grounds, numerous balconies (with vantage points of course) and plenty of staff members and civilians with nicely tailored clothes to steal.

Keeping with the whole options angle I mentioned earlier it doesn’t stop there. We’ve been given numerous types of poison, the ability to have weapons and equipment dropped into the level before the player begins and even ways to smuggle weapons and equipment past security checkpoints. Which is something I look forward to utilising, even Metal Gear Solid doesn’t have a feature like that and that’s pretty much the franchise that wrote the book on stealth. We’ll undoubtedly have the usual staples of the series however, I’d hate to see 47 without his Silverballers and Garrotte wire.

But there is a ton to see and do in this level, it isn’t just kill one target, in this Showstopper level we have two. One is the man behind the fashion show and the other is his accomplice who is holding a secret auction to sell off “deadly secrets” to some very unscrupulous people and of course all these options can come into play. Maybe you’ll drop one of your Silverballers that’ll get picked up by a security guard, taken past a checkpoint which you will then bypass and retrieve your gun afterwards which you will then utilise in a trigger pulling fashion to silently kill someone…maybe. There’s even more than one escape option, a chopper or a speedboat though you will have to find the keys. You may decide to get a Sniper Rifle smuggled in, camp out on a vantage point and shoot your way out afterwards or my personal favourite, attempt to bypass everything in a disguise and get discovered almost instantly. Almost mind you.

So allow me to summarise. Options. You need to take out the target, pick a path and get to it.

You can watch the full developer session below, Enjoy!