There’s no doubt Microsoft has an exclusives problem or, at the very least, a quality exclusives problem. State of Decay 2 is not going change that impression but it would be a shame to dismiss it as another low-key exclusive as it’s one of the most enjoyable sim-style games I’ve played either solo or cooperatively in years. For those who’ve played the first game, you’ll discover a lot of familiar mechanics, with some new additions that increase the scope and complexity of the experience. Once again, the third-person exploration, melee combat, shooting, and driving are all secondary elements that serve the core gameplay loop of building and maintaining a community in a zombie-infested apocalypse. That said, all elements feel more refined this time around and the game is less of a technical mess… 95% of the time anyway. A short tutorial kicks off proceedings, offering up several starting pairs this time, each with a bit of backstory to get you invested in their fates (or at least their unique skills). Once you’re done, escaping with your newly-formed four-man crew, you pick one of three massive maps, offering up visually and geographically different settings – Plateau, Foothills, and Valley, albeit all still variants of rural America. The opening hour is a flurry of tutorial prompts, tentative exploration, clunky combat, and achievements popping up every other minute as you succeed and mess up, hopefully not losing anyone in the process. If was to be cynical, this is a great example of the core gameplay loop! Scavenging remains vital throughout the game, even once you've got your home base suitably jacked up. Introduced from the get-go is another new feature/potentially lethal complication, “plague zeds” and “plague hearts”. With red glowing eyes and pulsating flesh, these zombies can infect a player character with the “blood plague” if they take too many blows, sending that character to the med-bay to halt disease progression while you hunt for plague tissue samples to craft a cure. This requires taking down more plague zombies or destroying a plague heart, a tough organic mass that infects several structures across any given map, summoning plague zombies when attacked, but also instantly cleansing the area of them when destroyed. As you move away from your home base or interact with other survivors, it becomes essential to clear out these infestations and establish safe zones. Clearing the map of these zombie-spawning hives is also one of the new end-game objectives. To complicate the issue, every plague heart you destroy toughens up others in the region, ensuring careful planning is essential as you progress (pro-tip: fireworks to distract and explosives). State of Decay 2 has an overall story arc but the missions are not character-specific. Aside from a linear string of “primary” missions, which are identical regardless of your starting pair or who dies, each character has an individual quest related to their own interests, often necessary to gain enough influence to promote them to a community leader (with a ton of benefits as a result). Equally important are quests to aid other survivor communities, which now play a more important role as they offer substantial rewards – such as calling in backup over the radio – and can even turn against your group if ignored or attacked. Although a rare occurrence – most communities will simply depart from the region if you repeatedly ignore them – hostile survivors are far worse than any zombie threat, especially when firearms are involved. Time-limited sidequests to save survivors in danger or meet with wondering traders – who pack some of the best gear – pop up frequently but can be safely ignored if you have more pressing concerns. Honestly, I’d recommend sticking to one map for your first playthrough and not over-investing yourself. Managing your own community needs and individual quests, coupled with more than one or two other communities (plus random sidequests), turns the game into an absolute nightmare of never ending tasks. However, if you’re feeling ambitious and don’t feel like playing out the main story on a single map, you can “scout” to reveal the other maps and move your community between them, albeit at the cost of dismantling and rebuilding your facilities on arrival. From humble beginnings, you can build up a sizeable community with sufficient supplies and recruits. Quickly delving into the core gameplay loop for those who skipped the first game, you’ll be scavenging far and wide for satchels of basic supplies – think construction material, food or meds – to keep your community happy and, with the right location and community skillset, expand to be self-sufficient by building facilities such as farms, water stills, or workshops. Upgrades allow you to establish distant outposts, ideally locations such as gun stores or pharmacies that’ll provide daily resources, and provide drop-off points for scavenged gear while in the field, all of which goes into a Resident Evil style storage chest. Deciding where and how to expand, relative to your home base or allied communities, is key to surviving in the mid- to late-game. Almost every choice, from home base location to recruiting new community members to building facilities, comes with pros and cons. A huge base with a large community and facilities that keep you self-sufficient is also going to be a noisy base, drawing more frequent zombie attacks; balance is everything. When played solo, you can take one companion with you into the field but missions often come with temporary companions that bulk up your team to a maximum of four. One quirk that I have to mention is the lack of a simple “quick switch” button when you’ve teamed up with another AI character. At the very least, they could have made the first highlighted dialogue option “Take control of this character” rather than “dismiss follower”! In combat, melee involves mashing "X" until you or the zombies are in pieces, with blunt weapons more efficient at knocking them down for finishing moves and blades able to instantly dismember. Stealth is a viable option and surprise shankings are great for preserving your weapon durability. Firearms are effective at popping zombie heads and all but vital for some larger special zombie types (you'll recognise them all from other zombie games). Aiming is simple and the auto-aim can be set to high but guns make a lot of noise and you can burn through ammo quickly. A stamina and fatigue meter keeps your ambitions in check, forcing you to play more tactical during melee brawls, resting up and switching characters periodically. As you play, each character will level up their mostly commonly used skills, providing specialization bonuses that'll keep them exploring or fighting for longer. Cars become essential as you push further out, reducing travel time and providing a trunk that can act as a mobile stash (or a transfer stash in coop), just remember to bring spare gas cans and repair kits. They’re also an excellent offensive weapon against most zombie types. With a full crew of AI or online partners, you’ll be swinging open car doors to bash zombies in a rhythmic fashion not unlike an OK Go music video. You'll learn to love and cherish the first car you find and upgrade it over time (and even repair it after it's burst into flames?!). Aside from transport, storage, and zombie-laying, cars never despawn so you can use them as barricades around your base. By far the best addition to State of Decay 2 is the ability to play cooperatively with up to four players. Given the more methodical pacing of the game, this is structured in a way that coop players are simply supporting the host player’s community, the main benefits being the gear they obtain – everyone gets their own containers to loot but you can share afterwards – and upgrades to your characters skills they'll take back to their own community. You accept the invite, pick a character, and you’re off to assist a mate (or even random). In an age where multiplayer, both competitive and cooperative, has become increasingly unbalanced and frustrating for new players, this a great way to give a new player a leg-up, and set them on the path to bringing a high-level character into you own game later when you need help. There are some oddities in coop play that need to be patched, such as not being able to drop supply satchels directly into the host’s storage or use their facilities like the med-bay. This can see you having to swap between your own community members frequently than is necessary. Thankfully, the interface is simple and joining a game, or having someone join yours, usually takes less than a minute. In several hours of coop play, the connection remained stable and completing quests, clearing plague hearts, or simply cruising around in several vehicles crushing zombies was a joy. Slaughtering hordes and helping out on quests is great fun in coop and, as a guest, you get to help a someone build up their own community while not having to worry about yours for a while. The original State of Decay was a technical and glitchy mess that fans would always have to make excuses for whenever promoting the game. Thankfully, the sequel has never crashed on me after hours of solo and coop play, no quests have spontaneously completed or failed, while animation and spawning glitches have been rare, never impacting gameplay. The visuals are, at least on the Xbox One S, no worse than many similarly-priced mid-tier games but far from spectacular. Interiors look great and richly detailed but the exteriors are unremarkable, with pop-in, simple texture filtering, and some repeated structures making the world look bland in the distance. The dynamic lighting is a high point however, especially if you have an HDR display, and combat animations feel brutally satisfying as wail away at a zombie with a pipe wrench and watch them stagger under repeated blows, gore splattering the scenery. The game looks its best when you’re exploring by night, a weak flashlight casting dynamic shadows, and zombie eyes glowing in the darkness ahead. I'm hoping it'll be patched soon but while the framerate stays above 30FPS, even on base hardware, there's no cap, resulting in stuttering in some scenes. On the other hand, sound design is excellent, with groaning and shrieking zombies taken apart with suitable meaty-sounding blows, slashes, and bullet impacts. Dialogue consists primarily of short quips and brief responses – at least outside of frequent radio broadcasts that give you some background into the state of the world and factions within it – coming across as forced in the tutorial section but improving dramatically in the main campaign; just don’t expect a masterfully narrated story. You’ll often be too busy to notice the music but there’s a great selection of acoustic guitar tracks that vary based on time-of-day and threat-level. Moody pieces reminded me of Silent Hill and Dead Island, tense tracks felt ripped straight from Left 4 Dead, whereas peaceful exploration tracks were reminiscent of Borderlands and Darksiders 2. It’s an odd and eclectic mix but excellent when you stop to notice it. Sure, it doesn't have the prettiest visuals but the variety between each location is a plus and it feels suitably atmospheric when paired with the audio and music. This is a title that thrives on interconnected systems that serve the core sim-style community management gameplay. Considered individually, some mechanics and aspects of the presentation are average but, when taken as a whole, come together to form a cohesive and engrossing experience that’s builds on and expands the original concept. For fans of the first game, this is a must-buy. For those that skipped it because of the technical glitches, the sequel is hugely improved. As a AA-style game, going for half the usual cost or free on the Xbox Game Pass service, there’s a ton of value here for both solo and coop players. A few patches are needed to smooth out the coop experience but it’s still easy to recommend in its current state. - You can read my first impressions piece here. - State of Decay 2 was reviewed on an Xbox One S and Samsung HDR UHD TV - State of Decay 2 is a Play Anywhere title so you'll unlock on both the Xbox One and Windows 10.

With BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle around the corner for Japan's 31 May release, and not too far for the West on 5 June, Arc Systems Works America’s YouTube channel began streaming a new trailer on 24 May. The trailer highlights the Under Night In-Birth characters and their various Easter egg interactions. In order, the appearances are: Hyde and Ruby Linne and Platinum Waldstein and Chie Godeau and Blake Carmine Orie Vatista Check out our hands-on article for the open beta that happened last weekend, covering some of the characters, gameplay changes and overall shift for the series from the previous title, BlazBlue: Centralfiction. The game is currently on Steam for South Africa, and is listed at a far cheaper price than most countries; whilst America has it for 49,99 USD, SA has it at R269 for the base edition and R379 for the deluxe edition. Keep in mind, the deluxe edition comes with all the premium DLC characters so it’s very much worth it. The game launches on Sony Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch and the Steam platform for PCs, only Xbox One has been excluded as a platform for release.

E3 2018 is fast approaching, and with less than a month to go, I cannot contain excitement anymore. This is the time of the year when predictions are blossoming, with possible leaks from all over being interpreted by many as definitive proof. Here are my predictions for the Bethesda E3 2018 conference. We are getting The Elder Scrolls 6: Valenwood AND Fallout: New Vegas 2. This is the sentence I would love to write during their presentation, but I doubt we will be getting either of these any time soon, if at all. However, judging from past E3 conferences from Bethesda, there is a trend of announcing new titles one year, and DLC’s for them the next. So, is this the year for a new IP or just DLC content? Well, judging from Bethesda’s fascination with VR, and the fact that the most VR successful games are typically from Bethesda, I think we will see some new VR titles being released. I predict that Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus will receive the VR treatment, whether on PSVR or not, considering their major titles such as Doom, Fallout 4, and, of course, Skyrim, all received VR coatings. Speaking of Skyrim, I anticipate they will announce official support for Casio watches and calculators as well (just kidding). Another big milestone for Bethesda this year is the 10th anniversary of Fallout 3. I don’t believe they will make a big spectacle about this, considering Fallout 3 was not the franchises greatest title, but it was still a big entry point for most into the Bethesda universe so there is no doubt, at least in my mind, that they will be making an Anniversary Edition, with some soft fixes to lighting, image quality, audio, and so on, including DLC and mod support. The Nintendo Switch fast became the world’s most popular console, and Bethesda has been riding its tails since day one. Not long after the Switch was announced, there was already a Skyrim port waiting. I think Bethesda will add a few new editions to the Switch marketplace, perhaps even their Fallout 3 Anniversary Edition being ported to the Switch. Also, I think there is a high likelihood of Fallout 4 being ported to the Switch. I don’t see Wolf 2 or Prey being portable just yet, as they are still relatively new Bethesda titles. We have already seen the announcement of Rage 2 as well, with Bethesda announcing it over a tweet. I think that this was an odd move, considering they had less than 2 months until E3, so they could have waited, but there was also the apparent leak from Walmart Canada and I think they were just weren’t bothered about keeping it a secret. Also, they couldn’t deny the leak and then reveal it at E3, so maybe that was just a PR blunder. We will definitely see it being spoken about at E3 however, confirmed by a tweet from Pete Hines. I don’t believe that Bethesda will be announcing any new IP’s or titles at E3 2018 purely because all of their studios are busy working on their own projects already. Rage 2 is being developed by id Software along with Avalanche, Zenimax Studios are wrapped up in ESO, Arkane Studios are working on the Prey DLC, Machines Games launched Wolf 2 in 2017, as well as Tango Gameworks with The Evil Within 2. There may be a possibility of a Doom 2 announcement, but with most of id Software focusing on Rage 2, I don’t believe they will have the manpower to develop Doom 2 before 2020 at least. However, Bethesda Game Studios could be the ones to release a new IP, with many speculating it to be Starfield, based off the trademark that was filed in 2016. Further evidence is that Bathesda Game Studio's Twitter account has been awfully quiet, very similar to before Fallout 4. BGS’s last big reveal was Fallout 4, a title that has already exceeded the 5 year mark, so there is some hope that BGS will reveal something new, but I am remaining cautiously optimistic. There is also the ‘amusement park’ style map that they released last year, that had two sections ‘Under Construction’. Bethesda has also spoken about how this might be there longest E3 conference to date, but that could mean plenty of time to talk about all the Switch ports they are making, and the new way that Skyrim will be played (on a microwave next. I'm calling it - Ed). These are just my predictions based off of my own calculations and trending patterns for Bethesda. These have not been confirmed in any way and are purely just my speculations on what is to come. Do you have any predictions of your own? Let us know in the comments below.

When the trailer for BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle dropped, I was actually quite excited because, out of all the Arc System games that are current big, including the likes of Guilty Gear and Dragon Ball FighterZ, BlazBlue is by far my favourite out of them. It’s been confirmed that there will be 40 characters in total, 20 on initial release then Blake and Yang from RWBY will be free at a point, with the rest being sold at a premium. While there was a backlash from fans about this issue, they rectified at the EVO 2018 line-up announcement that the game’s DLC characters won’t exceed the full retail price of the game; in addition, the full RWBY roster will be free for everyone. We’ve seen Arc System rise to commercial success with Dragon Ball FighterZ, featuring a far more simple input system for combos - no character had full circle inputs times two or anything similar, as most of the controls were fairly simple. In fact, most of the characters shared many universal inputs; quarter circle forward + R1/R2 and quarter circle back + R1/R2 allowed you to spend the bar for every character. This basically allowed for a whole array of new players to get into the game and subsequently, the world of 2D fighters without much 2D fighter history, while keeping the skill ceiling available for pro players. I feel like Dragon Ball FighterZ now shares the same feeling of Tekken where two players of any skill level versing each other can have fun, be it from a casual, amateur or pro/enthusiast. With that in mind, accessibility is one of the most important factors I’d attribute to the success of the most recent Tekken 7, and now the simplicity we are seeing in the new BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, because keep in mind after they showed the latest EVO 2018 entry numbers, Dragon Ball FighterZ was the top entered game coming in above the more popular Street Fighter V. Obviously we can’t compare full games to games that aren’t out, but a comparison between the demos is very interesting. First off, Dragon Ball FighterZ did accessibility very well, allowing you to challenge a friend locally, or even verse players online. It also had 11 playable characters for players to try out, compared to BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle’s measly 4, which is quite upsetting. BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle also doesn’t allow for local versus against a human player, only CPU, and no online matches at all - which may bring to light just how poor of a demonstration this was. Luckily, I managed to play it over the weekend, meaning that all the base characters were (accidentally) available to play, and went through all the non BlazBlue characters, so I picked characters from Persona, RWBY and Under Night In-Birth; and I must say, I love how different all their playstyles and attacks feel. While Yukiko has more of a ranged puppet feel with her Persona, You has a more in-your-face attack style. Ruby had some interesting moves, specifically the mobility of being able to diagonally teleport repeatedly or horizontally while on the ground to get in front or behind the enemy. While Weiss had a bit more of a rigid set-up style from what I could tell, specifically one move primes her in an attack stance and from there you can choose an attack. BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle has succeeded in making every character feel superbly different and unique, not only from design aspect, but from the playstyle too. It's a bit sad that after the weekend, the trial reverted to just 4 characters to play with. While for most fighting games, this would be sufficient to get an idea but, I think with a tag game as diverse as this, they should have had at least 8 characters to choose from, but that’s just my personal feelings. Overall, I'm very keen to see what people think of the trial or demo. It's still available for guys to try, so if you haven’t, maybe just give it a quick download. Thankfully, the download is small enough for our South African internet to deal with. BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle is scheduled to release on 5 June for the West; this includes Steam, PS4 and Switch.