FanExpo Canada Videogame Previews

The editors of Paper Droids spent the past weekend at FanExpo Canada, one of Canada’s largest geek culture conventions. Several game companies had booths at the con, with either playable demos or preview videos. Here are some we checked out, and what we thought about them.

Avengers: Battle for Earth

This is the Avengers fighting game from Ubisoft that was announced a few months ago. It was developed right here in Canada, and uses either the Xbox Kinect or the Wii U system. It’s a pretty basic fighter with great graphics. The one thing that makes it fun is the kinect system, since you have to move around in order to play. Surprsingly, style editor Nikita and I did not smack each other by accident while playing this. It’s a fun game, but I’m not running out the door in excitement to go preorder. I would probably wait until it was on sale to buy it.

Metro: The Last Light

4A Games and THQ’s sequel to Metro 2033, based on the Russian horror series of the same name by Dmitry Glukhovsky. The main premise of the game is that Russian has been destroyed by nuclear bombs, but some people managed to survive by taking refuge in Moscow’s massive metro system. I only saw a non-playable demo, but what I saw was impressive.  The demo consisted of a mission to the surface, where you kept finding dead bodies, some more recent than others. It was very atmostpheric, very creepy, and reminded me a lot of Fallout 3 meets Resident Evil. The graphics were stunning, and post-apocalyptic Moscow was pretty impressive. It culminated in finding these giant mutated cats (not sure what they were mutated from, but they looked kind of like zombie sabre tooth tigers) running in a massive herd.

Assassin’s Creed 3

They had both a multiplayer AND naval demo, of which I played both. We’ll start out with what I thought about the naval demo. Fun story is, I managed to break it (it’s my superpower), and so didn’t get to finish the last part of the mission, but I got the gist. I wasn’t super impressed with the ship, as all you really did was chase around other ships and shoot at them, and that’s about it. You didn’t even get to board! Which I am like 80% sure is how naval battles work — if you can get close enough, you board that other ship and kill everyone on board, and I got close enough to do so several times. But all I could actually do was go full sail, half sail, or use the cannons or muskets. It was a bit boring I’m afraid. Plus it was really annoying, because the reason I broke it is because one of the ships I had to destory went out of bounds into unsynched territory, and I got stuck on some rocks trying to find my way out. I DID manage to destroy it in the end, because it came close enough that I could shoot at it, even though it was still technically in the unsynched zone.  But I could not move after that to get the last ship.

The multiplayer demo was a kind of capture the flag type game, where each team has to capture and defend disputed areas. Whoever had the most area and the most kills would be the team that won. I also didn’t really love this. Part of the reason is that the setup really didn’t show you all the things you could do (there wasn’t even anything really to climb, although the one time I was able to it was much smoother and faster than in past games) — no cart assassinations, no eagle viewpoints, no new weapons. It was also hard to tell who was on the opposite team and who wasn’t. I did really like the costumes for the female avatars you could use though.

So for this one, I wasn’t super impressed, but it had more to do with the nature of the demos I was given than the actual game itself. Plus I was sad because there was nothing for AC: Liberation. Oh, but I did learn one secret from (possibly) Connor himself at the Video Game Voice Acting panel on Sunday: there’s gonna be a sex scene folks.

Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale

It’s Super Smash Bros but with Playstation characters, pretty much exactly. Fun enough, but again not something I am running out the door to preorder.

Other games I got a short glimpse of include: God of War: Ascension (but it was just a playable version of the demo we have here), ZombieU (which looks pretty great),  and Just Dance 4 (which looks very, very fun, and provided lots of hilarious moments for those of us who went to watch).