This year was an interesting one. With less hands on time than ever before at PAX East, our options were wide open and definitely not limited. This is gonna be a long one, hang in if you want some hands-on, eyes-on experience with these games! Ask anything you want too.
We started with The Evil Within. This game from the word "Go" is somewhere between Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 4 and that's a very good thing. The "Zombies" are well designed and the A.I. seems trickable, but this can only be an upside when I'm sure ammo will be few and far between. Puzzles were a huge focus and a boss "Pyramid Head" style was there to make you as nervous as possible. Items have their shimmer in the haze and fog of terror, offering slim hope to defend yourself against this never ending, suicidal menace who always returns after being killed and offs itself to get to you from behind closed doors. This demo was obviously to showcase certain mechanics and not to display a shiny, finished product and from what I saw, I can't wait to be scared to death by this thriller. The graphics were acceptable and it seemed to control fairly tight, but offered glimpses of gameplay tactics of old...not a bad thing, just a thing.
Next was Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and this was a huge surprise. The second we get in and see some major 2K players, we knew this was worth the wait. 2K Australia, the team behind alot of Bioshock's entire series development, was there in full force to show off what they'd done with the new Borderlands game. On the moon, fighting for Handsome Jack as a team of baddies doing "good," and using Oxygen as a resource fueling combat and movement as well as something to keep your survival wits about you. Claptrap made his gameplay appearance as well as some amazing Captain-America's shield style special abilities and the new "Cryo" ammo type making the ability to freeze enemies, a la Bioshock, and Laser guns a Borderlands reality thanks to 2K Australia! This game looks like the "pre" sequel we didn't know we needed but now cannot wait for! After attending their panel, they also gave us the game for free...which is AMAZING (not to mention the 2K afterparty we were invited to and got to meet some of the biggest names behind the Civilization and Borderlands franchises).
A surprising game for me was most certainly Square Enix's Murdered: Soul Suspect. This game narrative started off a little too aware of itself and pushing the Private Detective Noire a little hard and I was wary, but after 20 minutes with this game I was ready to spend weeks with its incredibly fun mechanics to solve mysteries. As a ghost of your former self trying to learn what happened to your former self, you can "possess" people and hear their thoughts as you solve other lingering ghosts' death mysteries on the road to solving yours. Combat is a stealth, line of sight, spastic game of hide and seek with Reapers. You can hide inside ghost's "shadows" and jump between them to get the Reapers off your scent and it makes for some palm sweat for sure as you attempt to approach them from behind without them hear and shred them (like SyFy's Being Human).
Now to the big boy: EvolVe. This game was the Belle of the Ball for sure as a crowd and a line cap was almost constant the whole weekend. My wife and I managed to get through the line quickly when they uncommonly needed a group of 2 to jump to the front! We gladly obliged and were rewarded with wrist bands; mine saying "Assault" and my wife's saying "Support" and we were shown our team of Hunters and our Monster. We were ushered into a room to view a video explaining our classes and the Monster's mechanics. With our knowledge of our arsenal and what we were hunting we then were placed into our battle seats. A rep was there to coach us along and overall enjoy watching us play and ours was consistently impressed with our teamwork as we hunted this monster and ended up asking us to come back and play for a match on their big-screen as they announce over it...perfectly timed Shields from the Support on Assault as Arc Mines blocked the Monster's way, the Trapper cages him in with a dome and Harpoons him still so the Medic can snipe out weak points for the Assault's lightning gun to wipe out his armor in seconds and the Support reigns down an Aerial Drop to put him on the ropes. The Monster flees and we keep tracking as it attempts to evolve to stage 3 where the Hunters have a big battle in front of them to take it down. The Monster wants to destroy the generator and the Hunters want to protect it and kill the Monster. Amazing game with perfect balance, pacing, versatility, visuals and controls. I can't wait to own this one.
From here we played games like Ghost Recon: Phantoms, The Crew, Lichdom, Nosgoth and looked on as Blizzard's onslaught of games were on display (Diablo 3 PS4, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, WoW). Of course there was also the ever rising amount of indie games. Indie games we were enamored with were: The Road Not Taken, Delver's Drop, Hyper Light Drifter, Whoa Dave, Below, A Hat in Time and Hack N Slash. A LOT of procedural rogue-like's this year, but that's not a terrible thing just made the hands-on experience slightly monotonous towards the end, but each with its own unique art style.
We also experienced the amazing concerts and took away another great year with VGO and finally got Anamanaguchi back! Met both groups of musicians and finalized the fantastic PAX East memories. This was an interesting year with some exclusives and TONs of Indie games with RIOT and Blizzard taking huge spots and Nintendo completely absent while Microsoft and Sony had nothing of importance. 2K and Gearbox brought the thunder as well as another impressive year of Bethesda alongside a minor yet impact-full Square-Enix showing. Can't wait for next year. Let's talk it up, what do you want to know more about?