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Kalypso today announced their new game in a Gamescom livestream, revealing their ‘city ruler’ game Urban Empire.
Urban Empire is a hybrid of a strategy game, a management game and a city builder which sees you taking the role of an important family, tasked with building and ruling over a new city as mayor. The game starts in 1820 and as time goes by years advance until the game ends at 2020. This means that you pass through at least five different eras, starting from the Industrial Revolution, playing through a national awakening, the time of the two world wars and the decades between, going through the cold war era and finally ending up in the modern time and a little beyond.
Choosing between 3 maps, you build your city by setting out areas to build, setting out a network of roads from a few choices offered and then assigning areas to residential, retail and industrial. Then you place down services and let your city build around the assigned area. The first service you will need to place will be the City Hall where you do most of the political parts of the game, choosing to alter taxes, funding; proposing laws and working with the political parties to try and keep a balance between keeping them happy and also the regular citizens, which are divided into several difference classes as well.
As time goes on, you use brainpower (accumulated through the years with schools) to research new technologies from a ‘web’ that allow for new services, buildings and business to be built. Citizen happiness will have an effect on these as well, with middle-class happiness improving the quality of goods and the efficiency being affected by working-class happiness. Both improve with high happiness levels.
Keeping the balance is important as over the years you risk being voted out of power if you lose favour with enough of the voting public. The first era though has been described as a ‘tutorial’ so that by the time that is a risk, you should know what to do to prevent that.
If you’re interested, the game is already up for pre-order. Currently the release date set on its Steam page is January 20th 2017, so keep your eyes open for more information as we approach that date.
So on the Twitch stream from Gamescom, the developers behind popular asymmetrical killer game Dead By Daylight have revealed that their game is due to get a free update and very soon indeed.
The second ‘chapter’ named ‘The Last Breath’ will contain a new killer, a new survivor and a new map, all of which complement each other.
The killer will be called ‘The Nurse’ and will feature a unique killer ability as do the other killers. The Nurse will be able to teleport or blink across the map, being able to go through walls and obstacles and charging the ability will allow for further distance. The blink will only go in a fairly straight line though, and while the ability is very powerful in combination with the bonesaw weapon they are armed with, it will take a while to learn properly to be as effective as it could be.
The survivor will be similar to most of the other survivors, but given that to escape The Nurse you need to be stealthier she is able to crouch walk a bit faster than the other survivors which gives her the edge on moving while staying out of sight.
The map itself will be a double-levelled building and surrounding area set inside an abandoned asylum. With many walls it’ll be good for survivors to hide in but also easier for The Nurse to suddenly blink through a wall behind survivors to strike them from behind.
As well this expansion will be coming with a patch that will fix up many of the common bugs, tweak some other things and add functions that had been asked for – including the ability to rebind keys.
Sound good? Well, it’s going to be out very soon. How soon? A few hours from my writing this.
Seasons After Fall is a 2D puzzle-adventure game that will let you dive into a captivating universe and explore a land governed by magic and nature.
We’ve had a lot of beautiful looking games over the last few years, one of which, Ori and the Blind Forest, was a favourite here at teh station. Seasons After Fall looks like it will be slotting itself nicely into that group in September when it releases on STEAM and later on consoles.
The game is beautifully hand drawn and has lots of puzzles and effects like changing the seasons in teh game to make the terrain change and thats how puzzles work.
It’s going to be fun to watch on stream for sure and we’re all looking forward to trying this one!
Seasons After Fall is out on 2nd September on STEAM and consoles later on.
Check out the trailer and tell us what you think in the comments below…
After teasing a reveal of the next expansion for their popular city-building game, Cities Skylines, Paradox Interactive streamed out the reveal with a new trailer and some discussion of the features coming within it. Joined by people from Colossal Order, the expansion was revealed to be “Natural Disasters” with a trailer that said “That’s a nice city you have there. Would be a shame if something… were to happen to it.”
The disasters themselves will be a randomly-occurring event in-game, which will affect some part of the city and will require some pre-planning to try to minimise possible damage and then management of the immediate dealing with the disaster and the clean-up aftermath. Fortunately, for those of you who prefer to use Cities as a way to express yourself artistically with beautiful, well-structured cities; natural disasters will be something you can turn off from happening randomly and instead trigger manually if you wish to. That function will also be useful for video-makers as well I dare say.
So far the only disaster we know about for certain is the meteor strike we get to see in the trailer. There will be others coming, but Paradox and Colossal will be giving more details about them later in the year before release. As part of the new things coming to the game there is a focus mainly on city services, with the police, fire and others getting new helicopter vehicles to help deal with a disaster aftermath and an entire new city service will be added in the form of a disaster response force to get in and extract survivors in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
Outside of the city service additions, there will also be a ‘Scenarios’ gamemode added in which you are given a task to complete with clear win and lose conditions set out. As part of that, the game will also get a Scenario Editor for players to create their own, which will be shareable through Steam Workshop and will be added to the game as a free update to everyone who has the base game, regardless of whether or not you buy the expansion. There were also hints at something that they were working with modders on for the future, as well as radio stations coming to Cities which we hope you’ll be able to add your own music and audio streams to.
Natural Disasters is due to release sometime in the Winter 2016 period. Keep your eyes open for more information as we approach that time.
Mother Russia Bleeds is an ultra-violent co-op brawler overflowing with an unmistakable style and unforgettably brutal action for up to four players at once. Set in an alternate U.S.S.R, the story centers on a desperate crew of imprisoned street fighters that must overcome an oppressive criminal authority and crippling drug addictions through any means necessary. Battle solo or alongside friends locally and online in an exceptional story mode campaign or harden your resolve in a multitude of formidable challenge and versus modes.
In an interesting hark back to teh games I grew up with, Le cartel, a small indie in France has teamed up with Devolver digital to bring us Mother Russia Bleeds, a side scrolling beat’em up in the style of final Fight or Streets of Rage.
Showing off gameplay today at GamesCom, we got to see some of the graphically violent gameplay that immediately felt natural for those of us that grew up on those iconic side scrollers.
The graphics are typically pixel based but incrediblt detailed, and the game play flows really quickly.
The game allows for 4 player co-op with the difficulty increasing/decreasing based ont eh number of players in game aswell.
This looks like a really fun game for a few freinds either on console or pc and is out on PC/Mac/Linux via STEAM on September 5th, with console versions coming a little later
