By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), General Manager

Ask anyone focused on the online gaming side of E3 and they’ll agree, Bethesda coming out of left field with a free to play online battle arena was likely the biggest surprise of the show. With the entire Bethesda spotlight on the recent Elder Scrolls Online launch, this one flew under our radar entirely. We barely managed to sneak in during the closing hours of Thursday to get some hands-on time with the game, and while recording our session was blocked, Zelus and I had a serious blast during the two matches we sat down for.

What we experienced was incredibly smooth and fluid for an alpha. It seems Bethesda focused on getting the engine working flawlessly and then brought in some distinctly Dishonored graphics courtesy of the beautiful mind, Viktor Antonov himself, to create a sonic-speed gore fest with that kind of visceral satisfaction only a twisted mastermind of violence can envision. The downside of course was that only one map was ready for testing and only three of the teased five classes were currently selectable.

The UI took some getting used to before I feel in love with it. I spawned in round one as an Archer fighting for the Royal Marines against the Prussian Cossacks. Though mentioning a little backstory might be needed to help you envision the world of Battle Cry. You’re in an early 20^th century Europe following a monumental treatise that outlawed gun powder. Due to the horrors of a World War that was truly the war to end all wars, nations flourished, advancing technologically far beyond what we imagine of this time in history. Now with tensions on the rise, conflicts are decided more diplomatically… in designated arenas pitting the military elites of each nation in gladiatorial arenas to fight for territorial control for their nations. Oh and did I mention they’re paid for their sacrifice in iron? Imaginative.

Playing the archer roll in the current alpha state can be a rough life. You’re the squishiest class while also requiring the highest amount of skill of the three possibilities. I was cut down twice before I even understood what was happening by the rogues that carried the ability to go invisible for long durations of time before striking. Once a melee is on you, trading blow for blow is a sure fire method to lose 80% of the time. That’s where rolling comes into play.

Taking a queue straight out of Zelda, the fastest way to get around on a flat featureless surface is to jump and then hit the space bar a second time to perform a diving roll. This roll is slightly higher than your current max speed though, meaning if you were already attacking someone and taking damage, your roll is going to be pitiful. However it’s a nifty feature for the archer class to clear some distance and have a fighting chance before you’re back on the respawn screen.

Everything happens incredibly fast in Battle Cry. If you’re the type who tends to freeze under pressure during competitive gaming sequences, this game won’t have much to offer. Adrenaline junkies, on the other hand, should be ecstatic about the pacing on offer. On average it will take four to five strikes from melee range to down you. This can happen even faster if your opponent has built up some adrenaline from fighting already and chooses to unleash it. Adrenaline builds up in bar chunks, and allows you to unleash a powerful special attack at your next strike. Should you choose to save up (and survive long enough as the charges are lost on death), to reach a full five bars of adrenaline, you can choose to expend the entire bar on an ultimate ability. This involved a super speed and damage buff for archers and an electrically charged dagger finish for the rogue. To say the full adrenaline charge powers are a nice boon is a terrible understatement as I managed to dismantle three combatants by myself on a rogue at one point.

The current win conditions are simplistic yet satisfying for the given gameplay. First to 75 kills wins. No worries, it goes by fast! Roughly ten minute matches, thanks to the rather small map we experienced in a five versus five deathmatch mode. Map design overall offers plenty of platforming options, including grapples to allow you to quickly swing over chasms and speed booster platforms that let you rocket around the map. Both are ill advised if one is not in a pinch as nothing reveals your position like flying through the sky in a bright red or yellow jumpsuit.

I’m still a bit iffy on the skill system in Battle Cry. At first the skill use in combat seemed rather pointless. Enforcer skills seemed pointlessly defensive in such a strike first setting. Archer skills required far too much time to properly aim when a foe is dismantling your face. And most rogue skills either jumped you past the enemy you needed to cut apart, or let your motionless long enough to offer up a free kill.  Meanwhile ranged attacks were fast and deadly and melee attacks packed a homing assist to them that made spamming auto attack a surefire win if you were first to engage.

Although I feel there is still plenty of balancing to make the skill system work, I found it to be a beneficial inclusion even at this state of the game. It’s just not the type of game where spamming skills as soon as they are off cooldown is the ideal route to victory. The archer’s awareness ability letting you spot silhouettes of enemies through walls is invaluable on a class that needs to keep its distance at all times. Teamwide map awareness was also a key piece of the victory puzzle. Their explosion arrow when used to support a friend also landed me a few double kills thanks to the heavy reliance on melee in the current build. And though I wasn’t practiced enough to manage it, a well-timed pushback arrow could toss a foe into a bottomless pit when chased along the narrow upper ledges of the map.

Having gained this understanding of using skills as support options rather than immediate win buttons, I quickly transformed into a killing machine in my round 2 rogue match.  Utilizing the jump through skill as an escape rather than initiation skill got me out of most any unwanted 3v1 situations. The stand and fire electric attack served as an excellent finisher for archers that reacted and ran after suffering too much damage.

While I feel it likely goes unnoticed by most participants, the decision of how to portray health in Battle Cry may be its most distinct feature. Rather than an obvious numerical health bar, players see blood splats splash across their screen, blocking their field of vision. The color of the game distorts into orange hues and sound fades ever so slightly as well. Hard to describe as it is, the experience subconsciously puts you into this state of teeth gritting ‘oooooooooh sheeeeeeit’ mental state that left me pausing in bewildered confusion after winning a couple extremely close face-offs. Then as your mind begins to regroup, your screen recovers and returns to normal. It’s a level of immersion I have not experienced in games outside of VR thus far.

While we’re still a good year out from open beta testing of Battle Cry, my brief experience already has me pining for more. The emphasis on persistent territorial struggles, Harry Potter-esque end of match reports, and mysteries held within the currently unavailable armory menu will be invading my dreams for weeks to come.

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), General Manager

One of our most anticipated titles of E3 and 2014 in general, Rise of Incarnates looks and feels like something designed for a next generation console fighter. Yet gamers will be able to access it free of charge on Steam later this year!

So what is the deal with Rise of Incarnates? Well from what we’ve put together on the free online web comic being released on a monthly basis, there is some kind of pandemic occurring in which humans with supernatural abilities  (often involving epic transformations into alter-egos) are battling it out for survival from each other and from an unauthorized group of mercenaries dedicated to hunting down Incarnates known as the Wild Hunt. With the government taking a seemingly neutral role in the overarching affairs, every Incarnate is left to fend for themselves. This all takes in what appears to be a very near future Earth setting as actual destroyed cityscapes are promised locations in both the comic and game. Unfortunately the story is still convoluted in flash backs within flash backs so the real plot isn’t too clear just yet. But in all honesty the crowd interested in these kind of games is more concerned with how big the explosions are and how fast the gameplay is. Well the answer is massive and moderate!

Yup you read that right. Despite how the initial trailers made the game appear, my actual experience with Rise of Incarnates was much easier to follow than I had anticipated. Granted the controls are still decently complex with plenty of hidden combos and boosted attack follow-ups to reward repetition and mastery, but you won’t need the eyes of a professional Dance Dance Revolution player to understand what’s happening as your more experienced opponent beats you to a pulp.

At the core, the concept is simple. You can jump just like a normal fighting game. Just here your jump can send you rocketing (well floating is a better descriptor) higher into the sky than you’ve probably ever experienced in anything outside of perhaps a Dragon Ball fighter. At any point while floating up you can choose to dash towards your targeted enemy, which a quick button push being all it takes to rapidly switch your focus between your two targets. The trade-off is the higher you fly, the less you can dash, forcing you to find the right balance while constantly reacting to both opponents as quickly as you can.

Attacks consist of simple ranged attacks and inappropriately labeled short attacks. Rather than playing a proverbial game of chicken as you and your opponent dash across the cityscape preparing for a freight train collision, Rise of Incarnates more commonly features a series of dodges as you duck behind debris in attempt to chip away at your foe’s incredible amounts of hp with cheap ranged shots while limiting your person damage in the process. There’s no limit to how many ranged shots you can shoot out, and the only real penalty for doing so in my test runs as Lilith and Mephistopheles was a slight movement speed penalty while shooting, so it’s often best to blast away at foes eager to rush into melee range with you.

The real challenge comes into play thanks to the 2v2 battle system and chaotic map layouts. It’s surprisingly easy to lose track of one of your opponents while zeroing in and dashing through the air to engage the other. As such all three matches I experienced boiled down to a sort of four player gank fest as each participant was going after one target while trying to stay a step ahead of their own pursuer.

Melee attacks are the name of the game in this punishing system. Once you activate your short range attack, your character will utilize any remaining dash if you’re in the air, or charge if you’re on the ground, to home in on a target. If they connect, a fast grapple occurs often resulting in a special attack that can be pretty brutal if you don’t break free fast enough. Even if you do, you usually end up on the ground, and that’s bad!

The worst part of the grapples I’d say isn’t so much the inherently high damage they unleash, but the slow animated sequences that play out, keeping you in one spot for a good deal of time. Against an experienced team (in my case the actual game developers!), this is an ideal opportunity for the uninvolved partner to swoop into position to land an follow up grapple from behind as you’re getting up, or even begin an aerial juggle before you’re fortunate enough to gain your invincibility frames to regroup on the ground. If you foolishly wasted most of your dash prior to the assault, you will have a rough time breaking out of this gang bang, and had better hope your ally is right behind your enemy to offer you some support.

To prevent these kinds of situations, the game offers a limited blocking mechanic that not only prevents grapples, but pushes the foe back and disorients them momentarily. This feature makes face to face grappling far less desirable, as in the best case scenario, the blocker gets some free ranged pop shots on you before you recover, and worst case scenario is your second foe gets the drop on you for free. However the blocking animation only lasts for a little under two seconds, with a short cooldown between activations, meaning if you block too early and your approaching foe is quick to react, they can dash to your side and then continue the melee momentum to catch you just as your shield goes down. It’s a fun game of rock paper scissors made infinitely more intense by the setting and visuals. Getting juggled around by Grim Reaper’s zombie horde can be a pretty trippy experience.  I was particularly blown away by the epic Lilith grapple involving her transformation into a freaky purple demon that kisses your life away until you break free. Sexy weird!

The final piece of the competitive puzzle is of course the epic Incarnates themselves. From attacking or taking damage, you build up a meter until you can eventually unleash your inner demon for a burst of game changing power. Each Incarnate burst has its own uses and weaknesses though so it’s important to be just as aware of what your opponent is capable of as yourself around the time of the match when Incarnate skills start firing off. Granted that isn’t too challenging currently as there are only four playable characters in the beta, but with more being added, some level of knowledge curve may eventually emerge.

The current Incarnates attacks are as follows:

Grim Reaper: He rides a tidal wave of corpses, offering an impressive movement bonus and damn near impossible to dodge attack that overwhelms foes. This skill is ideal for finishing fleeing foes or getting out of one of those tricky gang bang situations.

Ares: Ares’ Incarnate ability probably the most unusual of the current four fighters. He summons an incarnate doppleganger that fights alongside him, essentially turning the battle temporarily into a 3 versus 2. The ability is known as a Deuteros and Ares’ backstory leads me to believe that we’ll be seeing others of his kind introduced to the game in future updates.

Mephistopheles: Probably the most generic and novice friendly ability, Mephistopheles gives into his anger to transform his entire body into his Incarnate self. This leads to a short duration period of pure destruction, as all of his skills are powered up, and being anywhere near him is typically a bad idea.

Lilith: Similar to Mephistopheles, Lilith’s incarnate ability involves a transformation. The difference is hers is only good for one single powerful dash strike, making her much less novice friendly. It’s easy to miss a target with all the dashing going on, but if you can surprise someone by sneaking up from behind, or just catch someone off guard with the unbridled agility of the attack, it’s one of the most damaging strikes in the game.

Most other questions I brought up to the development team were responded to with a ‘too soon’ or ‘in discussion’ style response, though they did seem to tease that the comic book will be used to reveal new characters, perhaps prior to them even being introduced into the game. This is certainly a different take on the MOBA character reveal the now standard Youtube Reveal videos becoming more commonplace by the day.

The game is currently in alpha testing and while it looks and feels impressive, it’s clear the controls still need quite a bit of tweaking before we will see Rise of Incarnates anywhere near Steam. The current keyboard controls are nearly unplayable and feel more like a 1990s PC fighting game scheme being converted into a modern 3D fighter. The complete lack of a mouse shows that work on optimization of the controls hasn’t even yet begun. Still playing with a gamepad is quite satisfying and I wouldn’t be surprised if it remains the input device of choice through beta and into launch.

Special shout-out to Bandai for being one of the few exhibitors at the show confident enough to let us record some gameplay footage of their title. We’ll be putting together a First Look video on MMOHuts’ Youtube on Monday offering a closer look at the combat in action.

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), General Manager

One title that brought quite a bit more entertainment than expected this year was Perfect World Entertainment’ Swordsman Online. While we’ve been following the game officially since its Chinese closed beta test last year, and unofficially since I first encountered the game at E3 2010 before I even worked as gaming press, the actual gameplay of the current polished version is beyond what I had expected.

With almost no preparation, I was thrown into the role of a rather advanced Shaolin monk alongside our new site engineer Zelus as a female member of the Five Venom school. Although I’d like to discuss the two other schools involved in our press demo, the guys across the table spent most of the fight walking into random corners without contributing much. I don’t entirely blame them though as I’ll get into the control scheme.

Swordsman Online offers three different control schemes in an attempt to cater to a larger audience. Traditional 3D is best described as a traditional point and click MMORPG system and was my default setting when jumping into the game. As a massive fan of games like TERA, WildStar, and Dragon Nest, I will straight out say it felt like a cheapening of the Swordsman experience. The lack of an auto-move when activating skills while out of range just felt clunky and unresponsive. The Action control scheme is closer to a Guild Wars 2 system and essentially puts a higher level of challenge into the game in exchange for the feeling of having greater control of your character’s movements. The Classic control setting was my personal favorite, feeling a lot like the action control scheme at first but offering subtle support mechanisms to help with landing the more complicated skills likely not initially built with an action control scheme in mind.

Beyond the controls, I was further impressed by Perfect World Entertainment’ decision to follow their community’s advice and leave the original Mandarin voice acted cut scenes in for the western release. With the alternatives being either silence or poorly acted and horribly lip synched English, this was clearly the superior decision. Especially for a game so focused on telling an epic Wuxia tale. You can feel the emotion emanating from the main characters, and I can’t wait to play it from the beginning to gain a better understanding of the context of the battles I witnessed.

For those looking for grand freedom in character customization, I can say with certainty that the Swordsman character customization felt like a modern rendition of the original Perfect World International character creator. The fact that our PR rep was recreated as a comical and strikingly Irish wuxia warrior said volumes about the freedom allocated in the system. Fears of a million cloned Asian warriors running dungeons together in this game can be set aside.

The actual demo we were presented with involved the revenge arc of the story to strike down the organization that killed the protagonist’s mentor over a legendary sword. As if the combat itself didn’t play out beautifully enough like a live-action Wuxia film, the transitional scenes between each zone change locked in the feeling. I felt the hair standing on the back of my neck when the evil master welcomed our team of four into a courtyard filled from wall to wall with disciples. The resulting battle is amazing as mini-boss disciples jump into a death square to challenge you one by one as a constant barrage of disciples toss bombs and attempt other surprise cheap shots from all sides to keep your guessing. Each mini-boss is voice acted, and cocky enough to make laying the smack down on him all the more enjoyable. The challenge is also there, and even on our buffed characters we all were forced to utilize our potions to stay in the battle as few mistakes are tolerated.

There seemed to be a great balance between skill cost, cooldown, challenge of use, and power. We were advanced enough in level to utilize stance swaps as well to completely change up our skill bar depending on the situation. For instance my monk could utilize whirlwind tornadoes from a safe distance when the numbers were too overwhelming, or switch to a melee tanking stance in order to gain buffs to my melee strikes and defenses. I was fond of the majority of strikes involving a combo of left clicks followed by a slow aimed power attack via the right click. This simplistic combat kept things nice and fast.

For gamers in love with sparkly ultimate skills, Swordsman won’t disappoint either. Although incredibly challenging to unlock, involving picking up 10 or so rare power orbs dropped from enemies, the effort and patience is worth it when unleashed. We had the pleasure of seeing Zelus turn into a poisonous ballerina of doom as his girl painted the ground purple with poison in a show of extreme whip mastery that left a large section of the square battleground void of life.

After the demo was over, I challenged Zelus to a duel to gain a greater understanding of the controls. Good thing too as the jump/dash system in Swordsman is extremely satisfying! You can literally triple jump and then run in circles in the air while launching ranged attacks at your foe. Rather than having a set number of dodges alongside your UI akin to other action titles like Wildstar and upcoming SkyForge, you have a stamina bar that forms a semi-circle alongside your avatar. Every jump, dodge, and air dash reduces a portion of the bar, and if you hit the bottom, your character’s running speed becomes sluggish. You also will be completely unable to jump, punishing you pretty badly in the dash heavy PvP it turns out.

Those looking for the more traditional MMORPG experience though will be glad to hear that Swordsman Online still packs the traditional vertical progression system. Despite the numerous combos I pummeled Zelus with, his health bar barely moved thanks to his far superior gear. Granted this can be a huge negative to energy junkies wanting to put their twitch skills to the test, so certainly keep it in mind when checking out this game.