Upcoming Switch titles ARMS and Splatoon 2 will have their own dedicated tournaments at this years Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles California, Nintendo has announced. Featuring brackets for amateur and professional gamers both tournaments will allow fans and professional gamers to get some hands-on time with both titles before their respective release dates.
2017 Splatoon 2 World Inkling Invitational – Tues June 13 @ 2:30PM Pacific
4 four person teams from different worldwide regions will participate in a round-robin style tournament. The specific rulesets used in the World Inkling Invitational will change as teams progress forward: Round 1 – Turf War, Round 2 – Ranked Mode, Round 3 – Best of 5, Round 4 (finals) – Best of 7. Up for grabs are not only bragging rights but also the chance to have the winners names engraved on a special Splatoon 2 trophy.
The four teams that rose through the local tournaments to come to the E3 finals include:
Deadbeat from USA
Dynameu from Japan
Rising Moon from Europe
Blue Ringed Octolings from Australia
2017 Arms Open Invitational – Weds June 14th @ 3:30PM PST
Nintendo’s other big multiplayer title, ARMS, will have an open competition where any E3 attendees can swing by Ninty’s booth between 10am and 1PM Wednesday the 14th for a shot at being one of the final 4. The four selected attendees will go up against 4 professional gamers for a shot at bragging rights as the winner of the Arms Open Invitational and best ARMS player at E3 2017. Let’s hope those going to E3 got a lot of practice in during the Arms Global Test Punch.
Both of these tournaments will be streamed via Nintendo’s YouTube, Twitch and special E3 website. If you happen to be working or miss one of them – like all of Nintendo’s E3 presentations they are archived on Youtube the same day they are live streamed.
The original Injustice was a fresh idea based around the expanded mechanics of the Mortal Kombat franchise. Adding things such as environmental objects in the background to interact with and scene transitions you could knock your opponent into for extra damage, it had an different feel. Let alone the storyline was incredible, featuring a world where Superman was fed up with villainy and Batman was struggling to keep the peace through justice and mercy.
What felt great back in 2013 has since been given a lot of polish with the sequel. Everything just feels better, and it should since the original was released on last gen consoles. You don’t really notice just how much of a difference it is until you get into seeing the game in action. Facial animations and frame rate are fantastic! Everything has a cinematic feel to it and that really makes Injustice 2 a treat to play!
Story mode will last you around 7 to 8 hours to complete your first time and then some extra to replay some fights as the opposite character when you have a choice. There’s some additional content after that was well but the main game does give a lot. There are even some impressive blocks of that time that you’ll be enjoying lengthy cinematics that flesh out the new story focused on Brainiac taking on Earth.
NetherRealm Studios has gone the extra mile this time to add in collectables to keep players busy even after the story is complete. With the massive roster of characters, you’ll have a lot of goodies to earn with the new gear system included with Injustice 2. To begin with, all of your characters earn experience points and level up. This helps to make them stronger and even improve their hit points. It seems level 20 is the max, but you can also earn gear along the way to continue to improve your characters.
Gear overall can be just enough of a boost to give you the advantage you need in tougher battles. Customizing your characters even allows for additional moves to be added and even shaders to change up their color scheme. The equipment that you’ll unlock throughout the story, but mostly in the new multiverse mode, allows you to change the look of your character as well! Each piece can add a unique look to your favorite fighters. The gear system is quite deep too, allowing you to transmog gear to your favorite looks, unlock loot boxes you’ll earn after combat, and of course improve the stats of your combatants.
All of this sounds like a small adjustment to Injustice’s formula, but it really does open up a lot more to keep you playing. Some of the pieces you’ll unlock may seem similar, but I’m sure there are hardcore DC fans out there that are thrilled with the specific pieces found in loot boxes. I’ve mainly been playing Supergirl and Scarecrow and I’m happy with the mix of gear I’ve earned. The down side is that loot box drops are randomly spread across the large roster of characters, not just for your current fighter. However, I’m pretty sure after a few losses in multiverse I did get a pity gear drop to help improve the character I was playing as and give me a boost.
Multiverse is the bread and butter of the game, even though the story mode is both fun and worthwhile. It should be noted that experience earned in the story mode does actually affect your characters. So it isn’t a completely separate experience. I did dive directly into multiverse with the promise of unique timelines that would give me various rewards. The game does indeed have multiverses that last for a short period of time, some only a few hours. It seems there will be unique gear that you’ll only be able to earn in this mode as well.
The multiverse mode also switches up your opponents gear. They’re from an alternate universe after all! So while you may be used to the typical Harley Quinn from the story mode, multiverse could pit you against a different version looking of her. This is a nice way to see some different gear, and to keep things interesting instead of fighting the exact same looking characters over and over. Each multiverse can sometimes have multiple towers to fight through. Similar to the combat tower setup of previous Mortal Kombat games. Complete the tower, and maybe some challenges along the way, and you’ll earn whatever loot is promised in that towers description.
Most importantly, Injustice 2 is fun. It takes the winning formula of the first game, makes it shiny and new, then gives you content to stick around for. There are new characters such as Scarecrow, Swamp Thing, Blue Beetle, and Firestorm that mix it up with different styles and new moves. I personally found Scarecrow to be very easy for me to get into and he almost felt like a Killer Instinct character with how naturally combos seemed to flow. He’s also voiced by Robert Englund! How cool is that? With each character having separate leveling stats, you’ll have a ton of battles to continue through to power them up. Alternatively some of the in game currency can be used to instantly boost others to level 20 after you max out someone else. There is some gear that boosts your experience point gain as well.
If that wasn’t enough to keep you playing, Injustice 2 even adds guilds to the mix to earn even more loot. This emphasis on collectibles and community really makes the game so much easier to pick back up and play for short sessions. You always feel like you’re making progress. The first Injustice was great, but the sequel steps things up and makes the franchise modern in every way. You can even tie in the mobile version to earn even more goodies!
The only issue I had that still persists is knowing when to interact with background objects. They do have a glow around them when you’re near them, but there has been the odd time that I’ll still think I’m in range and instead my fighter just won’t react. In later story mode and higher difficulties those kind of miscalculations can be very costly. Maybe it’s me, I’ll admit. I might not have a good grasp on the timing. Fighting otherwise flows very well and I found myself being able to get inside my opponents defenses and take the offensive to counter their current stance. This is the evolution of the Mortal Kombat fighting system and it feels crisp and responsive most of the time.
Injustice 2 is easy to recommend. Casual players will get a lot out of the story and probably messing around with multiverse. Fight game and DC fans will easily get caught up in those same modes for the long term. It’s just a quality game, through and through. Fight against the multiverse, fight online, or conquer the story mode! The latest NetherRealms game is here and it’s a blast!
Overwatch’s next new map for both competitive and quick play will take Blizzard’s heroes to the moon with the upcoming addition of the Horizon Lunar Colony. This new map, lore wise, gives us a sense of where the game’s giant ape Winston grew up and the circumstances surrounding his past and an ape uprising on the moon.
Gameplay wise Horizon Lunar Colony will feature a single low gravity section near point A. There is a set of airlock doors that players can move through to experience combat with less gravity – how long do you think Junkrat would let his grenades float around? Like Hanamura, Temple of Anubis and Volyskaya Industries, Horizon requires the attacking team to capture 2 different capture points to achieve victories while defenders must keep attackers at bay until time expires.
Fans of Overwatch lore can be found via new tidbits on computer monitors, the names of scientists and other contextual objects in the map. If you watched the first animated short released when the game was announced in 2014 you might recognize some of the rooms on the Colony.
Modified gravity won’t just be exclusive to the Horizon Lunar Colony map – a special arcade brawl with low gravity will be available during launch week. Also as an added treat gravity sliders will also be added for hosts of custom games.
With the Overwatch anniversary event ending on the 12th it feels like the OW dev team are hard at work on new content to keep us coming back.
The world of Naboo will play host to the gameplay reveal of EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II on June 10th the publisher revealed today. Starting at 12:30 PM Pacific time on June 10th EA will broadcast the world premiere of Battlefront II’s multiplayer mode with a 20 vs 20 all out assault featuring various heroes and units plucked from the entirety of Star Wars Canon.
Confirmed in the reveal post to be part of the Theed map include AT-RT Walkers, the N-1 Starfighters, Clone soldiers, Separatist Battle Droids and even Darth Maul. Theed isn’t the usual “walker assault” map we’ve become used too from the first game either – Rebel forces must work overtime to stop a massive troop transport from knocking down the doors of the palace before the massive transport vehicle unleashes all hell with its deadly cargo.
EA has partnered with several well-known YouTubers and Twitch Streamers such as JackFrags, Darkness429, StonesMountains64 and others.
If you won’t be at EA Play, don’t worry because EA will be streaming the whole thing live.
So Hover: Revolt of Gamers is a game Kickstarted in 2014 (remember this) inspired by Jet Set Radio and Mirror’s Edge. While I have zero experience playing the evergreen classic of JSR, I have a lot of respect for the original Mirror’s Edge and a bit of it for its… requel.
Hover starts us off by waking us up in our customizable avatar from a Cloning Vat, and takes us through a short tutorial that gives us the basic controls in a small controlled environment before unleashing us out in the world of Trash Haven, where the “resistance” is led by… gamers. Yup. Because laws have made video games official contraband. Seriously.
You can find collectibles (like the “Gamegirl” handhelds) or destroy some “anti-leisure propaganda”. The game progresses both to new areas and through whatever story may actually be here through Missions, which are the typical checkpoint-relay variety, or one with the twist of throwing your delivery package “Gameball” at a wall magnet. Added into the mix is the ability to design your own missions for your friends or strangers to play through as well.
Its level design is very cluttered. There are jump-pads that aren’t lined up with anything so you overshoot, there are massive vertical climbs without actually giving you decent pathing to do so. The climbing over terrain itself is quite frustrating, at times I will line up a jump and it’s a coin flip on whether my character will try to climb over the ledge I land on, or instead position to wall jump off of it for no reason (one time I even wall jumped off of a slime waterfall?). These little mishaps will leave you tumbling down, and you either have to spend several minutes trying to climb back up to where you were, or burn through your suit’s “rewind” power (less Braid, and more Overwatch’s Tracer),
For a first/third person platformer that’s all about parkour and jumping, it feels very haphazardly thrown together in that regard and uses the Rewind to try and excuse its own poor level design with zero regards for consistency or fluidity of motion.
It seems to be more trying to be in your face about “We’re here and we’re gamers” over actually presenting a good product, and considering that it was crowdfunded in 2014 over folks “taking your games away”, it feels very much like at least one of its members was part of the culture that created that other “gamers revolt” in 2014. And really, we don’t need any more of that.
Hover: Revolt of Gamers developer provided Brokenjoysticks.net a code for the game for our consideration & Impressions
