What we've been playing - music videos, gaudy zombies and camo grinds
A few of the things that have us hooked this week.
23rd November
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we explore a game that's also a music album, we struggle to be okay with the ultra violence in a supposedly silly zombie splatfest, and we engage in the age-old video game pastime of grinding.
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
Dead Island 2, PS5 Pro
Dead Island 2 is grim. It's an over-the-top tongue-in-cheek depiction of a zombie apocalypse, but it's still grim. I know some people will say that this mixture of slightly absurdist parody and brutal violence makes it easier to swallow, but I think I'm on the opposite end of that thought. If anything, the bright colours, silly characters, and amusing boss encounters make the moments of terror all the more startling. The gaudy nature of the game made me drop my guard, but then a walking corpse with half its face missing, lunging out of an on-suite bathroom, almost made me add a dollop of brown to the vibrant colour scheme.
If this sounds like your kind of thing (the game, not my sense of fear), it's currently available on PlayStation Plus as part of the Game Catalogue on the Extra tier and above, and it's on all tiers of Xbox Game Pass. You can obviously just buy it outright, too, if you'd prefer. Anyway, I'm off to laugh as I punch a hole clean through the head of a zombie and then flinch as I hear the satisfying "thwunk" of a piece of pipe connecting at force with a skull. Video games, eh… such lovely escapism.
-Tom O
Asterism, PC
I like seeing people toy with the idea of what games can do, and Asterism is a good example of this. It's an indie-rock music album discovered through playing a game, because, well, why not?
In the game, if you can call it a game, you're a space researcher of some kind who's picking up strange signals - because that is what all space researchers inevitably do - so you hop in a spaceship to check it out. The signals turn out to be songs, naturally, and each planet you discover them on houses a new interactive music video. It's only loosely interactive, mind you - you move a camera or a character around and that's about it.
The appeal, I think, comes from a distinctive paper crafted look, which has a cute kind of stop-animated vibe. It takes me back to the 80s and the kids TV shows that used to be on then; it reminds me of music videos from around that time, too, using newfangled 'animation' techniques to wow audiences. It's fun to watch.
Whether or not you'll stick with Asterism past the demo probably depends on your love of the indie-rock genre and whether you're patient enough to sit still while listening (I don't think I am). Still, I appreciate designer Claire Morwood's efforts - a name you might remember from Before I Forget and Windrush Tales. Give it a go!
-Bertie
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, PC
33. That's how many weapons you need to cover in gold and diamonds to unlock challenges that lead to the cool "dark spine" and shape-shifting "dark matter" weapon skins in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. My hand-written notes reveal that I've unlocked a little over a third so far; 14 gold (and sometimes diamond) skins, enough to propel me into the third "Prestige" levels in the game and into sufficient mental ruin that I'm actually really enjoying it.
It's been slow, steady work, as I've obstinately started with the hardest and most annoying weapons, the launchers, pistols and melee weapons, with the hopes of finishing with the easy assault rifles and SMGs. Having a meta goal in mind is nice, especially one without any real time pressure, as it means that even in matches where you're getting absolutely blasted from all sides you can still take comfort in the fact that you managed to get a handful of headshots or a nice series of double kills.
Getting headshots is the most laborious part of the various camo challenges, and it's required even for weapons where your precision isn't really rewarded in general gameplay - shotguns, sniper rifles and the like. Thankfully, melee weapons require only a certain number of kills - easily picked up in the smaller maps, despite the baseball bat requiring two hits for a kill (!) - and the same is true for launchers, though there are trickier requirements after you've unlocked the initial military camouflage challenges for each one. For example, using the non-guided HE-1 launcher to take down tiny UAVs and CUAVs flying far overhead took some genuine learning to master.
It's that kind of novelty that I wish Call of Duty's developers would embrace a bit more when it comes to designing these challenges. In past games, for instance, you needed to get kill streaks with the riot shield, something that required an entirely new playstyle mainly based around hiding in the corners of maps, waiting for someone to walk past and then boxing them in, dodging grenades and panicky weapons fire while you slowly bopped them to death with the least damaging weapon in the game.
I feel like there's plenty of latitude for true weapon mastery left unexplored - what if, instead of headshots, you just needed to get kills with a selection of recommended builds that dramatically changed where the weapons worked best, messing with ranges, firing patterns, stealth and mobility? Or if you had to recreate part of a famous appearance of the weapon in cinema? Your ideas in the comments below, please.
-Will