The Last Guardian is a tough act to follow, but Guerrilla game’s new IP, Horizon: Zero Dawn made a solid showing at Sony’s E3 2015 press conference Monday night. This is the first new IP that Guerrilla has shown since Killzone, Sony’s long-running shooter franchise, and sees the studio tackling a very different type of game than the run-and-gunning of Killzone.
Set far after humanity has begun to rebuild after an apocalypse, Horizon: Zero Dawn’s world is reminiscent of an ice-age tundra, where disparate tribes of humans have created new societies. The game features a young female huntress as the main character, and seems to focus on hunting.
However, her prey is not herds of roaming beasts, but instead massive robotic creatures. Armed with a bow and knife, the huntress took down several smaller robots, then she moved on to an enormous dinosaur-like monster, spending several minutes tussling with the mechanical terror. The fight was long and arduous, forcing the huntress to utilize numerous tools such as the aforementioned bow and knife, and even a grappling hook.
The tussle came to an end when the huntress expose a weak point in the bests’ armor, taking it down. How all these items and mechanics actually work or interact with one another is unclear, but it was impressive to see nonetheless.
Other than ambiguous dialogue and a poignant moment where the huntress asked of the beasts she felled for forgiveness, not much else was shown outside of combat. Still, what was shown of Horizon: Zero Dawn looked beautiful and we’re looking forward to learning more. Horizon: Zero Dawn is set to launch on PlayStation 4 some time in 2016.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?