The Pokemon Company has shared another trailer for Nintendo Switch’s upcoming Pokemon RPGs, Let’s Go, Pikachu and Let’s Go, Eevee. This new video, which you can watch above, showcases some areas in the Kanto region we haven’t seen yet, along with a couple of brand-new moves your partner Pokemon will be able to learn during the adventure.
The trailer begins with a look at Secret Techniques, new field moves that your starter Pikachu or Eevee can use to open up blocked pathways around Kanto. These techniques replace the HM moves you previously needed to teach Pokemon in order to fully explore the region in the original Yellow version; the Chop Down technique clears certain types of trees from the overworld, while Sea Skim allows you to hop on a surfboard and travel across the water.
Pikachu and Eevee will also be able to learn a handful of new, exclusive attacks that they can unleash during battle. Pikachu can hop on a surfboard to deliver a new Water-type move called Splishy Splash, which also has a chance of paralyzing your opponent. Eevee, meanwhile, can learn exclusive Water, Electric, and Fire attacks called Bouncy Bubble, Buzzy Buzz, and Sizzly Slide. Each deals damage and has a secondary effect; Bouncy Bubble restores HP, while the latter two are guaranteed to paralyze and burn the opposing Pokemon, respectively.
The new trailer also provides a brief tour of Celadon City, one of the largest areas in the Kanto region. Celadon is home to Erika, the fourth Gym Leader you’ll encounter on your journey. She specializes in Grass-type Pokemon and battles using a Vileplume. Celadon also features a towering department store, as well as a Game Corner, which has been converted from a casino into an arcade. You can read more on the official Let’s Go, Pikachu/Eevee website.
The Let’s Go titles launch for Nintendo Switch on November 16. They’re releasing alongside the Poke Ball Plus, a Poke Ball-shaped controller that can be used to play the game and carry a Pokemon around with you. The pair require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription in order to battle and trade against other players online, but the games won’t support cloud saves, one of the other benefits of subscribing to the service.
If you don’t already own a Switch, Nintendo is also releasing adorable Pikachu and Eevee-themed Switch consoles on November 16. Each bundle retails for $400 and includes a digital copy of either title, the aforementioned Poke Ball Plus, Pikachu and Eevee-themed Joy-Cons, and a Switch dock adorned with Pikachu and Eevee designs.
Insomniac’s Spider-Man has swung its way to the top of the UK sales charts. Not only was Spider-Man the best-selling game of last week – despite only being out for two days – but it’s the fastest-selling game of the year in the UK, reports GamesIndustry.biz.
Far Cry 5 previously held the distinction of being 2018’s fastest-selling game, making Spider-Man’s accomplishment all the more impressive considering Far Cry 5 launched on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Spider-Man is a PlayStation 4 exclusive, and it blew away the year’s previous best-selling exclusive, the PlayStation 4’s God of War, by nearly twice as many units sold.
The Halloween series is one of the longest running and most successful franchises in horror. Nevertheless, it’s been nearly a decade since the last movie–Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2–and even longer since a movie that was well received by fans and critics. While Zombie’s two remake/reboots attempted to do something different with the series, for many, it was 1998’s Halloween: H20 that was last great Halloween movie.
Next month sees the release of a new film titled Halloween. This is a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 original and ignores all the sequels, remakes, and reboots in-between. It’s directed by acclaimed indie filmmaker David Gordon Green and co-written by comedian/actor Danny McBride, with Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role as Laurie Strode from the first movie.
The film has already screened to critics at the Toronto International Film festival and the first reviews are in. So is this just another disappointing addition to the series, or have the filmmakers delivered something worthy of the title Halloween? Let’s take a look at the reviews…
GameSpot — no score
“Halloween doesn’t reinvent the wheel or create a new subgenre of horror. What it does is take the best parts of all the films in the franchise, and deliver the ultimate companion piece to Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece. It’s a film that not only has something to say about trauma and PTSD, but also delivers a bloody, fun time at the theater. Will Michael Myers return again? Who knows, but we sure as hell welcome him home.” — Rafael Motamayor [Full review]
Entertainment Weekly — B+
“A big, funny, scary, squishy, super-meta sequel that brings it all back to John Carpenter’s iconic 1978 original. The movie mostly works because it’s so fundamental, and funny too: Michael still never speaks; his mask and his slow, deadly, deliberate walk say everything they need to. At 59, Curtis seems to have fully arrived in her role as a midnight-madness queen, and she has a great time in jeans and a grey fright wig, swinging her shotgun around and screaming at everyone to get in the safe room.”–Leah Greenblatt [Full review]
Total Film — 3/5
“This humour, and the repeated allusions to the first film (including a couple of particularly satisfying reversals) suggest a film that’s intended to be whooped along to at midnight screenings, and the cracking final sequence ensures audiences will leave on a high. But given all that has been sacrificed to give this franchise a shot of redemption, the end result does feel flimsy and throwaway. The biggest disappointment in this belated sequel is how little new it does, feeling more like an homage than a narrative leap forward. There’s enough ambiguity in the ending to suggest further sequels could be on the way here, but on this evidence there’s not a lot left to be wrung from this well-worn franchise.”–Matt Maytum [Full review]
The Hollywood Reporter — no score
“Green has a good bit of fun with inside jokes and boundary-pushing kills (should we be laughing while that character we like is begging for her life?), and offers more than a couple of gleaming kitchen knives, before he starts pushing the action away from Haddonfield’s civilians and toward the woman who’s been planning for it. [This] kind of gig [was] hitherto reserved for J.J. Abrams and few others, it’s one Green fairly leaps into, delivering both fan service and honest-to-god moviemaking of the sort rarely seen in horror spinoffs.”– John DeFore [Full review]
Screencrush — 7/10
“Green serves up everything we love about the first Halloween, completely playing off our nostalgia for the slasher classic, and to me, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He doesn’t try to mimic what Carpenter did with that movie–after all, no filmmaker can recreate the magic and brilliance of the first Halloween–but affectionately pays tribute to it with buckets of grisly violence, prickly tension, and snarky humor. Not all of it works–a lot of the scares are predictable, and there’s one very idiotic third act twist the film could do without–but the suspenseful finale leaves you on a high.”–E. Oliver Whitney [Full review]
Slant — 1 .5/4
“For all of the film’s attempts to get back to the sinisterly sidling Michael of the first Halloween, his stealth movements no longer terrify because his fixations are less unthinkingly instinctual, more compulsively mortal. It doesn’t help that Green has no evident flair for horror. The latest entry in the Halloween series was probably always a fool’s errand, yet its myriad failures are still shocking given the talent involved.”–Keith Uhlich [Full review]
Nerdist — 4/5
“Forty years after the original film’s release, Green, McBride, co-writer Jeff Fradley, and most importantly, star and big beating heart of the franchise Jamie Lee Curtis, made a film that’s a profoundly feminist re-examination of its psychology of trauma through its iconography. It’s also a rip-roaring slasher flick that’s hands down the best Halloween sequel ever. It’s everything in a Halloween film that inspires us to return, again and again, but the reversal, reimagining and reinterpretation of these elements is what truly thrills in this new iteration.”–Katie Walsh [Full review]
Indiewire — B-
“There’s no getting around some of the messy staging and clunky dialogue that keeps Halloween from reaching greater heights for the bulk of its running time. But Carpenter’s own Halloween was itself a bumpy ride, made on the cheap and carried along by the director’s firm grasp on his potent themes. The new one works overtime to keep them intact, while communing with the first instalment in every possible way–from that famously creepy synth score to the blocky orange credits that bookend the story. In an intriguing twist, Green has revisited this familiar turf less to exhume an old nightmare than to chart a path toward waking up from it.”–Eric Kohn [Full review]
WWE has announced that Renee Young, who filled in for Jonathan Coachman as part of the RAW commentary team on two recent occasions, has been named as the first woman to join the Monday Night RAW broadcast booth full time.
As for Jonathan Coachman, he’s been announced as the new host of WWE’s pay-per-view kickoff shows – which was Young’s old gig.
Starting tonight, Renee Young will join Michael Cole and Corey Graves each week on RAW.
Nintendo has announced a new limited-edition version of its latest hardware. It’s the Nintendo Switch Pikachu & Eevee edition, and it decks out the entire Switch, from Joy-Cons to dock, in imagery from Pokemon: Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee. The new edition is coming November 16 and will retail for $400.
The bundle includes a yellow Joy-Con and a brown one, matching the colors of the title characters. The rear of the Switch’s screen is emblazoned with silhouettes of the characters as well as Poke Balls. Even the dock features color pictures of Pikachu and Eevee.
Also included is a pre-installed copy of the game and the Poke Ball Plus accessory. The game is inspired largely by Pokemon Yellow, but it borrows some aspects of the popular mobile game Pokemon Go. In fact, you can even transfer Pokemon from Go to the upcoming Switch game. Let’s Go also brings back Mega Evolutions. Curiously, it looks like Pokemon: Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee will not support cloud saves.
Poke Ball Plus is basically a non-standard Joy-Con for the Switch. It’s a spherical device with a wrist strap on one side and an analog stick on the other. It has motion sensors, so you can “throw” it to catch Pokemon. It also vibrates, lights up, and emits sound effects. You can even “store” Pokemon in it, which will result in in-game rewards for your creatures. In addition to working with the Switch, it can also replace the Pokemon Go Plus accessory for Pokemon Go.
The Nintendo Switch Pikachu & Eevee Edition will be released in limited quantities, so it may be tough to find in-stock. Keep an eye on our Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee pre-order guide to see when it goes up for pre-order.
Valkyria Chronicles 4 marks a forceful but necessary return to the franchise’s strategy roots, much in the vein of resetting a broken bone. The most recent Valkyria Chronicles game in the industry’s memory is Valkyria Revolution, which had a decidedly action-RPG outlook and ultimately paid the price for its experimentation. Revolution was a jagged pill to swallow, but Valkyria Chronicles 4 more than redeems the spin-off’s mistakes. It retreads the central thematic conflict of the original Valkyria Chronicles, which makes for a story that is poignant and comedic in turns without losing sight of what made the series so popular to begin with: guts.
You’re deposited straight into the hot-seat of the Second Europan War as a Federation soldier, Claude Wallace, with your rag-tag bunch of friends including an adorable dog and a number of potential anime love interests. Unsurprisingly, your enemies are the Imperial Alliance, who all sport quasi-Germanic or Russian names and have an overwhelmingly burgundy color scheme for their uniforms. Any real world resemblances here are likely intentional; this is a fictional take on a world war that we’ve all read about in some way, shape or form in our own history books. Valkyria Chronicles has always drawn from a hodge-podge of WWI and WWII to create its own canon, and that mix is more pronounced than ever here. The timeline broadly overlaps with that of the first Valkyria Chronicles game, so be prepared to notice mentions of conflicts that series veterans will already be more than familiar with.
The similarities between the two games are much more substantial than that, however. Valkyria Chronicles 4 is alike in almost every single way to the original except in name. The series continues to stay true to its blend of classic artistic European landscapes; there’s rolling hills, snowy mountains, and vast bodies of water. The gameplay is still a unique take on traditional strategy RPGs which does away with the grid movement system of stalwarts like Fire Emblem, instead preferring to rely on a mix of turn-based tactics and real-time movement and fighting, creating ample room for reactive play and tense skirmishes. You deploy your troops in advantageous positions, move them until their action points are depleted, and fire at the enemy–it’s a satisfying cycle.
Valkyria Chronicles 4 also hones in on the way that the war affects a core group of childhood friends and former innocents, simultaneously decrying violence whilst also thrusting you headfirst into situations where it’s unavoidable. It’s in those moments, where you’re backed into a corner with nowhere to go but through faceless enemy ranks, that the senselessness of the conflict really stands out, and those are some of the game’s strongest moments.
Accordingly, making sure that you have a squad that will be able to survive those skirmishes is key to your enjoyment of Valkyria Chronicles 4. You’ll take command of a whole host of different soldiers throughout your journey, and each of them is special in their own way. Whether it’s a brash Shocktrooper who gets an attack buff when he’s around the ladies, or a timid Sniper who can’t quite shoot straight when she’s alone, each person that you deliver orders to is unique in some way. Soldiers have a chance of activating Potentials based on those personality quirks, which are buffs or debuffs affecting anything from unit accuracy to how terrified they are in the heat of the moment. This leads to plenty of friendly chatter on the battlefield that adds depth to your interactions with troops; in the absence of a formal social link system, these moments feel honest and raw when set against their backdrop of percussive gunfire and chaos.
Chaos is really the name of the game when it comes to the broader military campaign, and your first few fights will probably feel that way until you get used to how the game’s battle system handles. Valkyria Chronicle 4’s first few hours serve as a lengthy tutorial, and you’ll still be learning things even after you’re multiple chapters into the main story. Troops work the way you’d expect them to–snipers, anti-tank units, and grenadiers do what they say on the tin, and there will be almost no surprises to those who have played similar Japanese-flavored military titles before. Mechanics are built around things like cover, return fire, and ammo management, and balancing all of those are key to victory. There are some improvements from the original Valkyria Chronicles, primarily in troop variety and quality-of-life niceties, but it isn’t a significant overhaul. Getting accustomed to the way the quirks of your soldiers work in battle is the primary challenge of the game, and figuring out just how you can push the combat system to its limits is another. Those who know the system will find it easy to create overpowered combinations of troops, which can trivialize the early to mid-game experience to a point, if you can be clever enough.
The overarching chaos also comes from the enemy’s single-minded pursuit of the Federation’s destruction, and you’ll meet this beast at every turn possible. The Alliance is both an immediate, militaristic threat and an ideological one that overshadows every encounter and every non-combat interlude. It’s not just a matter of turning the tide on the SPRG field and winning. The narrative drives you into increasingly hostile and inhospitable situations with odds that appear ever tipped in the Alliance’s favor.
You don’t have the luxury of picking which battles to fight, and loading into a battle with flames as high as a barn licking at your troops and screaming coming through the static whirr of your communications device is confronting each and every time. On Nintendo Switch, HD rumble is employed smartly with vibration patterns changing depending on the type of weapon used, and sounding off both on impact and when you fire. Immersion can be affected somewhat by small issues with hitboxes, pathing, and line of sight displaying oddly in cramped conditions, but these instances don’t really detract from the weighty atmosphere that the game works hard to perpetuate.
Valkyria Chronicles 4 really excels in those sobering moments where it makes tough choices and leaves you to pick up the pieces. You feel like a cog in the Federation war machine because you are merely a cog in the war machine, and the story does a good job of hashing out age-old debates around ethics in wartime, necessary sacrifices, and whether or not there are truly any victors. That being said, the day to day operations of the game doesn’t always carry the same big-picture weight, and the pacing is stronger for it. Much of your active time will be spent embroiled in a military conflict of some kind; your superiors point your squad in the direction of something that needs killing, and you do it. Some may see this as a lack of opportunity for true role-playing, but the absence of freedom of choice is arguably necessary in a game where the military hierarchy is a key component of the history that it seeks to reinterpret.
Ultimately, this is a return to form for the Valkyria Chronicles series as a whole. It stays so true to the franchise’s first iteration that it’ll feel as if almost no time has passed in the decade or so since the original game first came out. In revisiting the concerns and the environments of the first, it makes the most of those parallels and invites comparison in a way that highlights its strengths. Valkyria Chronicles 4 doesn’t necessarily tell a new tale, but it doesn’t have to; for all of its clichés and expected twists, there’s a charm to the game’s unwillingness to let up as it drives you and your friends forward at a rapid clip towards its bittersweet end.
This week has NBA 2K19 and NHL for sports fans, plus Shadow of the Tomb Raider for those looking for an adventure.
We delve into the problem of trying to decide which platform to choose for multi-platform games. Do you have a preference? Let us know!
