Summer Game Fest Play Days featured a ton of new titles this year, with developers and publishers giving lots of chances to see, and play, a variety of games coming to PS5. I visited SGF Play Days this year to see these upcoming titles in action, and go hands-on with many of them. Here’s everything I played and saw at Summer Game Fest.
Publisher: Daybreak Game Company | Developer: Cold Iron Games
Set five years after the events of the Aliens: Fireteam Elite, the sequel continues to capture the feeling that you’re seconds from being overwhelmed by hordes of sleek, deadly xenomorphs, just like in the 1986 movie from which it draws inspiration. We played a mission from the middle of Fireteam Elite 2’s campaign, in which we were tasked with making our way through a derelict spaceship overrun by aliens and aggressive Weyland Yutani androids.
Fireteam Elite 2 expands your cooperative third-person shooter squad from three to four, but you’ll face huge hordes of creatures as you make your way through missions. Our fireteam faced off against some familiar enemies, including standard xenos, huge and powerful Drones, and hidden, stalking Prowlers, as well as baton-wielding synthetics and more capable synths equipped with rifles or riot shields. But we also faced a few new enemies, including xenomorphs with huge acid sacs growing from their heads whose goal is to get close and explode on you, and armored, spider-like robots that take quite a bit of firepower to put down.
To aid in your battle, you can find weapons and items as in the last game, like sentry turrets and health packs. Scour each mission and you can also nab new ammo types, such as incendiary rounds, cryo rounds, and electrical rounds, which make your weapons more effective against certain enemies — at least until they run out.
Developer Cold Iron Studios has made some changes to character classes, but it sounds like they’ll be even more customizable than they were in the last game. I played a medic, which had the capability of dropping a portable healing device that could help my teammates deal with their injuries, but only temporarily since it dispensed health that would slowly decay over time, and an Overclock ability that sped up the reloading and weapon switching of anyone nearby. I saw a few other abilities in action, too, like the Machinist’s deployable flying drone, as well as grenades that could freeze enemies or hit them with electrical bursts.
It sounds like Fireteam Elite 2 is making a lot of changes that were requested by fans of the first game, while maintaining the first’s white-knuckle action and challenge. fully expect to get overrun by the universe’s greatest killing machine when the Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 is released.
Publisher: Sega | Developer: Sega
Crazy Taxi World Tour revitalizes Sega’s beloved arcade driving franchise, and it even brings back at least some of the killer ’90s bands that helped define the series. In a hands-off presentation from Director Kenji Kanno, we got a few more details about what looks to be a big expansion on the ridiculous original.
The main focus in Crazy Taxi World Tour is on its story mode, which spans five locations in five different countries — hence the “world tour.” While Kanno wouldn’t share many details, we do know that the story kicks off when the protagonist Axel’s car is stolen, kicking off his globe-trotting adventure to retrieve it. With World Tour, the development team is taking the opportunity to build on the characters of Crazy Taxi, expanding on their personalities and backstories, as well as the lore of the series overall.
As in the original games, a big part of the action will be picking up passengers and delivering them to their destinations, with the speediest, most ridiculous driving you can manage. Your taxi is decked out with new abilities, like boosting and reversing with the quick back dash. But there’s more to the experience than earning CRAZY money. You’ll also meet different characters and help them out with special activities, like helping deliver a huge stack of pizzas without losing them all over the street, and using your taxi to help a fisherman cast his line ridiculously far, and then hitting reverse to haul in some monster catches. Some of those activities will be silly, and others will be a little more serious, but they all play into Kanno’s vision of creating cities that feel alive with people as you drive, drift, and crash through them.
World Tour is also helping the Crazy Taxi developers realize some features that never made it into past games — namely multiplayer, which they couldn’t manage in Crazy Taxi 2 or 3 because of technical limitations.
Though there’s a lot we still don’t know, the presentation did show off a few other elements we can expect, like odd jobs to complete and a progression system that’ll have you leveling up as you complete fares and tasks. And Kanno also confirmed that this time, you can drive in the ocean.
gen Atlas | Release Date TBD
Publisher: Epic Games | Developer: genDesign
The next title from acclaimed developer Fumito Ueda received a second trailer during the SGF Showcase, but it’s still just as cryptic as when it was announced last year at The Game Awards. I got to see a little more than what appeared in the trailer in a hands-off demo, and spoke to Ueda about what players can expect from the new game.
In gen Atlas, you awake on a world filled with technologically advanced ruins, with hulking, destroyed mechanical figures scattered across it — a world seemingly abandoned by humanity. What happened here and why everyone is gone is up to you to discover, and as the trailer shows, part of how you’ll do that is by uncovering the head of a giant robot. From what we’ve seen so far, the robot will help you to get around and explore the world, and sometimes allow you to commandeer titanic robot bodies to use for various functions, including solving puzzles and fighting other colossal machines.
Ueda wouldn’t share too much about the action-adventure game, but did say there are a number of different ways you’ll get around and engage with the world, both with and without the help of the robot, striking a balance between exploration and solving puzzles.
While Ueda’s previous games — Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian — formed a sort of trilogy, with similar settings, characters, and ideas, you shouldn’t expect gen Atlas to be another riff on similar ideas. In fact, Ueda said the sci-fi setting and the focus on giant robots were the result of him trying to do something new, different, and unexpected.
“If I put myself in the shoes of the player or a fan that’s been following my own games, I think I would actually want something of a surprise or something that is unexpected of an Ueda game, and I feel the same way,” Ueda said. “If I deliver something that’s sort of on the extension of what I’ve made, I might actually not be as excited, to be quite honest. So I want to keep that sort of excitement and even try to deliver beyond people’s imagination and expectation.”
Ueda said he hopes to be the kind of creator whose audiences can’t predict what he’ll make next. With that in mind, we’ll have to wait to see exactly what kind of experience and mystery Ueda delivers in gen Atlas.
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive, Konami | Developer: Screen Burn Interactive
Developer Screen Burn didn’t provide a chance to play Silent Hill: Townfall at SGF this year, but it did offer a hands-off demo that gave a pretty good sense of how you’ll make your way through its foggy, frightening Scottish town.
Central to the first-person experience in Townfall is its portable TV set, Screen Burn’s riff on Silent Hill’s classic, staticky radio. In past games, the radio’s white noise grows louder as enemies draw close, giving you a sense of when you’re about to be attacked as you make your way through the town’s thick fog. In Townfall, the TV helps you deal with enemies, while also providing you with navigational clues and other useful information.
In the live demo I watched, protagonist Simon could tune the TV to find signals within the static, including a message from a woman called Zoe, which draws him on through the town. The signal provided still images of locations and objects nearby, giving Simon clues as to where he should go. Zoe’s message was coming from a nearby house, and to get there, he followed the images past some stalls and a tree planted in the middle of the concrete walkway, before finding an alley shown in the images and making his way to the house’s back door. Inside, we saw that Simon will be working to solve puzzles in true Silent Hill fashion, including working to reset an electrical breaker.
Later, Simon used the TV for a different purpose: to spot one of Townfall’s hideous, fleshy monsters. Tuning the TV to an enemy’s signal lets you see it through walls, allowing you to gauge where it is in the fog so that you can sneak by. Evasion will be a big part of how you make your way through Townfall — using peek controls to carefully check around corners will be an important way to avoid getting got as you explore.
Soon after, Simon found a plank of wood to use as a melee weapon to show off Townfall’s melee combat, which is fast and brutal. While it’s possible to block incoming attacks as you fight, it took only a few hits for Simon to fall, suggesting that fights like this are extremely risky and might be best avoided.
While my look at Silent Hill: Townfall was brief, it looks like an intriguing and frightening take on the franchise’s formula, and I can’t wait to see more.
Sonic Pico Park | Release Date TBD
Publisher: Sega | Developer: Teco Park Inc.
The next entry into the Pico Park series sees Sonic and his pals teaming up for some cooperative multiplayer chaos. Along with three other journalists, I played the eight quick stages that make up Sonic Pico Park’s tutorial, which showed off how you’ll control Sonic characters and cooperate to solve various deceptively simple-looking puzzles.
When you jump into Sonic Pico Park with three friends, you’ll each play a different character from the Sonic universe: Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Sonic the Hedgehog himself. All of them are speedy runners and can spin dash when you hit Circle.
Working together is key, since the screen only advances forward when all four characters head to the right, and some obstacles will require all of you to surmount them. We quickly ran into walls that were too high for a single character to climb, requiring us to jump on each other’s heads to make a tower to get one person over, or bridges that would collapse if we didn’t all quickly sprint across them at the same time.
One puzzle needed a character to spin-dash up a ramp to a high platform, and three of us needed to form a wall by standing on each other’s heads so the fourth could use us to dash up. In another, the only way to cross a long gap was with Tails’ flight ability. Tails can carry another character if you hit X to jump up and catch him, and other characters can hold onto the first one — but with all four characters weighing him down, Tails starts to lose altitude from the strain, so we had to quickly cover the gap before we fell.
Classic elements of Sonic games make appearances in Sonic Pico Park’s puzzles. We needed to use spring launchers to cross a big gap in one puzzle, while avoiding the ones that were facing in the wrong directions and could send some of us bouncing off each other. And in true Sonic fashion, sometimes, the solution to the problem is speed.
Where Sonic Pico Park got really fun was in the chaos that four characters trying to work together can create. Even in the first few levels, we saw plenty of trouble as we knocked each other into pits or spikes in goofy fashion, and I can only imagine how more complex levels will create even more ridiculous situations.
Virtua Fighter Crossroads | Release Date: 2027
Publisher: Sega | Developer: RGG Studio
The Virtua Fighter series is more than 30 years old, but it’s getting an entirely new spin with Virtua Fighter Crossroads. The new title combines what fans love about the series — its pitched, 3D fighting game battles — with the storytelling and worldbuilding developer RGG Studio is known for.
Sega brought journalists in for a hands-off presentation with Creative Director Riichiro Yamada that expanded on the trailer launched during SGF. Crossroads takes place 10 or more years in the future from Virtua Fighter 5, and features four protagonists, each a fighter living in the fictional South Asian country of Vilaspara. We’ve primarily seen Cielo, the Paraguayan-American fighter who serves as the beginning, relatable protagonist in the story. But while Cielo’s story is one of personal growth as he works to make a name for himself as a fighter, expect to see the story take darker turns and change tones with the other characters.
Player choice is going to be a major part of the single-player experience, with a branching narrative that can change depending on the things you do, the choices you make, and the relationships you build, like those between Cielo and his friends. And while you’ll meet other legendary Virtua Fighter characters along the way, they may be friend or foe — how they treat you and what happens with them might be dependent on your actions. Above all, though, Yamada said the team wants Crossroads to be grounded and believable within the Virtua Fighter universe.
Combat in Crossroads takes on the classic Virtua Fighter flare, flipping to a side-on camera perspective when you start throwing punches and kicks. You’ll fight in both one-on-one battles and against groups of enemies, but Yamada said the team has worked to mix action-adventure combat with Virtua Fighter’s approach, and to modernize it.
In addition to the single-player campaign, there’s also a one-on-one player-versus-player mode, and Yamada said part of the idea behind Crossroads is to create ways for players to develop their fighting game skills in the campaign, so they can take them into battle with their friends. Above all, he said, the team wants the game to be fun and approachable, whether they’re long-time Virtua Fighter fans or just coming to the series for the first time.
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We’ll add even more games to this list over the next few days, so stay tuned.