Codemasters: The '09 Lineup

The key thing to take from our early look at Overlord II is that the game is being designed to let players be a bit more evil. What's the best way to get that across? By having you prove your worthiness as an overlord to your potential minions... by clubbing a baby seal. The game picks up where the first one left off, putting you in the role of the original Overlord's son. You'll get to play a bit at the beginning of the game as a seven-year old before warping ahead to adulthood.

At its core, Overlord II doesn't look like a dramatic change for the series, with basic control concepts carrying over and lots of focus on controlling both yourself and your minions. You'll be able to possess minions and take direct control of one in some cases, and we were shown a bit where your little gremlin-like posse got disguised as Roman centurions in order to walk past some guards undetected. From there, you got control of a catapult, which is used to clear the way ahead (and take out a bunch of enemy troops, if you're into that sort of thing). It looks like precisely the sort of thing that fans of the original game will eat up when it hits 360, PS3, and PC in June.

Our time with Jumpgate Evolution, the upcoming space-combat MMO from Auto Assault developer NetDevil, was admittedly less than ideal. Playing on a machine that wasn't hooked up to a populated test server, outer space was especially vacant, save for the NPC ships that served as mission fodder for us. Our time with the game was also quite brief, as folks were being rotated out every 15-20 minutes. So, it should speak volumes to the game's accessibility and the current speed of the player progression that we still managed to get some small sense of what Jumpgate Evolution's all about. 

Right from the start, the game seems set up to jump you into the action as quickly as possible. The character creation was limited to a single faction for the purposes of the demo, though it didn't seem like a particularly complicated process either way. Since there's no out-of-ship interaction in Jumpgate Evolution, our character was represented with one of just a few painted portraits. Similarly, the giant space cruiser that served as our starting home base appeared as little more than a menu screen. It had immediate effect of making it very easy to get into the game, cash in and take on missions, buy and sell gear, and get back into the outer-space action, but we have to wonder how much these kinds of decisions will undercut how vast and immersive the end product will feel.

When we were actually out in space, dog-fighting with enemy ships, Jumpgate Evolution had a nice action-oriented feel. It was straightforward and moved quickly, with a targeting reticle that would lead your target that made the combat easy to get into. Jumpgate Evolution is looking pretty sharp, though we'll be curious to see how the performance holds up once we're playing on a server that's actually thick with other players. What was being shown worked well enough as a light and brisk Wing-Commander-style single-player experience, though the real test will be when we see it on a populated server. Still, what we played was intriguing enough that we're eager to jump into the game's beta, which should be jumping off fairly soon.

Since Codemasters released the racing games DIRT and GRID over the last few years, you might expect the upcoming FUEL to fall right in with their ilk. It's got a four-letter, all-capital title that refers to some aspect of automotive racing, right? But you'd only be partially right. FUEL, in development at France-based Asobo, is quite different from those other games. It envisions a post-apocalyptic future ravaged by violent climate change where gasoline is scarce. The survivors compete for the remaining gas by racing against each other. So to get fuel, you have to burn fuel...wait, what? Hey man, don't question it. In the future, you do what you have to do to get by. And the future is ugly: It seems the crazy weather will hinder your racing from time to time with the occasional tornado, lightning strike, and so on, though I didn't see any such disasters in my brief hands-on time.

The most interesting aspect of FUEL is its incredibly large open world, which stretches over several thousand square miles of the midwestern United States (or at least what used to be the U.S.; the Codemasters presentation even pointed out the huge gouge in the landscape representing the Grand Canyon). The game's closed-circuit race courses, however, are confined to small areas. I imagine the open world will primarily come into play as you travel from one race to the next, sort of like in Burnout Paradise (only several hundred times bigger). You'll also be able to stretch your legs in all that open space by defining your own races courses, which you can share online for other players to compete in.

FUEL has been in development for the better part of four years, but seems like it's on track to finally hit shelves later this year.