Telltale has provided the first look at the gameplay of its upcoming The Expanse: A Telltale Series.

The title was revealed last December (2021) during The Game Awards broadcast when Telltale announced it had partnered with award-winning development studio, Deck Nine, and Alcon Interactive Group to create a narrative game based on Alcon Television Group’s, popular Amazon Prime sci-fi television series and James S.A. Corey-penned books.

The Expanse is set in the future where humanity has colonized the solar system and the people of Earth, Mars and the Asteroid Belt have long been in opposition with one another. When the crew of the Rocinante uncovers an ancient alien technology, a vast conspiracy begins to emerge, one that will bring the solar system to the brink of war. The series follows a group of protagonists as they uncover and become involved in a conspiracy that threatens the fragile balance.

The first new IP announced by Telltale since the company re-formed in 2019, The Expanse: A Telltale Series is set prior to the events of the TV series.

Players take on the role of Camina Drummer (played by actress Cara Gee in both the game and TV series), the leader of a scavenging crew on the hunt for a mysterious treasure on the edges of The Belt. As Drummer, players must work with a mix of powerful personalities, square off against a bloody mutiny, explore locations beyond The Belt and, most of all, make tough decisions that will decide the fate of The Artemis crew.

“The Expanse world is rich with complex characters that grow and change, so it’s a wellspring of compelling stories and difficult choices,” said Matt Saia, vp of creative for Telltale. “Camina Drummer is a character who is strong but fair, with an unexplored background and tremendous story arc, so it was an easy choice to make her our main protagonist. Cara Gee brings the same powerful, nuanced portrayal of Drummer to the game that made the character a fan favorite in the show, and we think players will enjoy discovering this world from her perspective.”

The Expanse introduces several new gameplay elements that go beyond what people experienced with past Telltale games. Players have greater authority over the action. The ability to communicate with the crew over radio at the player’s discretion keeps the plot and dialogue choices moving forward simultaneously with the player’s exploration, and all those character interactions affect the story’s conclusion.

Gravity is a crucial part of the game’s setting and mechanics.

While investigating shipwrecks beyond The Belt, players will use mag boots to walk on walls and ceilings and utilize Zero-G thrusters to float through the void. As they fly through sections of ships, players can interact with objects in the world and converse with members of their crew. These dialogue options will play as they navigate so they get to learn more about the world and their shipmates.

“Part of the space scavenger experience is exploring massive wrecks deep in the void, and gravity represents such a huge part of immersing people in that environment. In recreating that reality, we needed to make areas larger for players to discover and interact. As a result, The Expanse has the largest and most immersive exploration of any Telltale game to date,” commented Deck Nine’s game director, Stephan Frost.

“In the end, this is a story about leadership,” said Zak Garriss, vice president of narrative for Telltale Games. “In Drummer’s mag boots, the player has to contend with the unforgiving brutality of space, the politics of a corrupt solar system, the animosities of her crew, and even her own conflicting passions balancing personal desire against her responsibility to the greater good. There is no right or wrong path – only the player’s choices and the consequences they unleash.”

The Expanse: A Telltale Series is expected to be released for PC and leading consoles in Summer, 2023.

The post THE EXPANSE: A TELLTALE SERIES FIRST appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

A grand slamm’in hitter for PC, 2K Games’ Borderlands series is readapted to a narrative based play by Telltale Games and released on consoles.

Telltale Games takes this dangerous and ragged world and brings to it unlikely characters and story. Though heavily based on decisions and passive actions there is still plenty of mayhem and death.

Tales from the Borderlands has had a full rework for the console version and includes all presently available DLC.

You decide the outcome of the game by way of selecting the narrative in time constrained choices.

Action sequences also fare this same route, for the most part – but make sure you get the timing right – and for a good lengthy play be careful of what choices you make.

Keeping true to the cell shaded style of the original Borderlands games, Tales from the Borderlands features various fast paced action sequences that really put the pressure on to possibly make or break a given scenario.

While the main focus is exploration and the ever stressful conversation decisions, the sporadic action sequences break what might be for some, a monotonous experience.

The action sections usually consist of quick-time-events and occasionally the actual aiming and shooting at enemies. So despite being a more interactive dialogue type game, there is still that over-the-top insane pandemonium that the Borderlands series is known for.

There are two main protagonists, Rhys and Fiona.

You go back and forth playing between the two and slowly discover the two sides of this particular story. Rhys, an employee of Hyperion, is just trying to work his way up the corporate ladder, which in order to do, he needs to “acquire” an elusive and highly sought after Vault Key.

To his dismay, one dubious decision leads to the next and Rhys soon finds himself caught up in more than he bargained for.

Fiona soon jumps in with her side of events on Pandora.

The game makes many references to the original games and even throws in a few cameos of well-known Borderlands characters. The most notable of these, the infamous Handsome Jack, who plays a pivotal role in this game.

Tales from the Borderlands is definitely amusing and certainly captures the humor and general fun tone the Borderlands series is known for. The story itself takes many twists and turns, though some predictable, overall it was a story that contained a bit of everything and the characters carried it well.

Being a fan of the Borderlands series it was certainly nice to revisit a familiar world from a very different perspective.

Those who may have never picked up a Borderlands game need not worry as Tales from the Borderlands does carry its own quite well.

However, there will be some references that may be lost on you and there are likely to be spoilers if you retroactively play any of the Borderlands games (excluding Borderlands 3 which released after).

Any gamer of almost any genre should give Tales from the Borderlands a serious go and for the Borderlands fans out there, well its Pandora like you have never experienced it before.

The post Tales from the Borderlands (Xbox Series X|S) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

When I sat down to write my review of Batman: A Telltale Series, after 11 hours or so with the game, exploring its narrative and becoming familiar with its characters, I drew a blank. Like a particularly middling episode of a sitcom, it feels like nothing was really accomplished. Nothing was lasting. The villains rose, they fell, and now all is about the same as it was when it started. Perhaps it’s because I’ve played quite a few of the Telltale series now, and now the formula is showing through a little too clearly.

That, combined with the sheer volume of the developer’s outputs – Minecraft: Story Mode, Batman, and two Walking Dead series over the course of just one year has led to a general feeling of malaise. With little gameplay innovation, the games have had to increasingly rely on just the franchise’s individual appeal, and it’s storytelling chops. Unfortunately, Batman falls short on both accounts. A rushed, yet packed story left me cold and did almost nothing new to make use of the Batman licence beyond the bright lights and dark capes of the spectacle.

The five episodes of Batman are set near the beginning of the Dark Knight’s reign. Batman is new and unsure in his place. The police don’t yet trust him, but, he has hardly any serious competition. Harvey Dent (later Twoface) is running for Mayor as the clean candidate. Oswald Cobblepot has just returned from the United Kingdom with plans for revolution, and a third mysterious force is making itself known in Gotham City.

Of course, this all falls apart over the course of each episode and Batman must make amends, repair the ruptures the city has given itself. This is expected. But what was less expected was the amount of time you could spend as Bruce Wayne. There are even times where you can choose to appear as one of your alter egos. The choice usually seemed to come down to talking (Bruce) or action (Batman), but in either there was far too much politicking. Telltale have put in a lot of narrative in each episode, which generally means listening to far too much exposition as characters extemporize about their various predicaments.

Batman has long been known as the city’s greatest detective, and in certain areas you do get to take part in some sleuthing. These parts were a relief from the monologues. In them, you link together bits of evidence to form a story about what happened in a crime scene. While this was better than the standard exploration in other Telltale games, I often found myself knowing what happened far in advance of my ability to actually deal with it in-game and progress the story. Still, they were slightly different and a welcome addition to the stable of things to do in Telltale’s series.

Other gameplay innovations were slight, seeming limited to using two buttons for quick time events. This isn’t good enough. The action sequences were clearly straining the limits of the game engine, and if the studio is going to go further towards including action sequences it needs to replace the movement system wholesale.

Yet apparently there is a new game engine in play, but it has done almost nothing for its animations. Walking and lip-syncing in particular are still woeful, more often than not making the characters look like animatronic toys from a Disneyland ride. Some of the fight scenes on the other hand do look fantastic, but their fluidity is broken up by a prevalence for quick-time events – which give you little time to respond – perhaps meant to put some speed back into the fights.

I had some performance issues with the game on the PC where in some scene transitions it would fail to cut to the next scene properly, leading to some de-synced audio. That said, early impressions of the game were of a fundamentally broken PC version, so it looks like quite a few improvements have been made.

A small thing as well, is that when I finished the game after the last and easily best episode, it almost immediately presented me an advertisement for their telling of Game of Thrones, incidentally one I think that was a particularly poor effort on Telltales part. It’s a cheap, desperate shot at getting you to buy more, and totally unnecessary. Ads for game in other games has always sat uneasily with me, and to show it to me right after an emotional final episode was a little off putting.

So is this series of five episodes bad? Well, not really. But is it good? Again, not really.

It’s exactly the sort of middling effort that smells of a great opportunity passed by, in the same way Ubisoft did so little with the American and French revolutions in Assassin’s Creed III and Unity respectively. This is Batman! To waste one of comic’s great character (And DC’s only solid box office moneymaker) on this boring, politic-ey conversation-fest is a real shame. Telltale can do better, and of them, we can expect more.

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The first season of Telltale’s A Walking Dead was stunning, fresh and a must play for anyone who loved excellent storytelling and zombies. The second season was the inevitable follow-up that was excellent that didn’t quite live up to its fore-bearer. Telltale’s newest entry has perhaps a harder task. Something in between a reboot and sequel, this series of five episodes needs to demonstrate that it has legs and can maintain interest beyond the original storyline.

It’s a task usually more closely associated with prequels or fourth entries (see Star Wars: A Force Awakens, for example), but Telltale have decided now in the third season is the time to take this challenge on. So far, after the first two (linked) episodes they have been successful, but only insofar as they have made a good “Telltale” game, which may not be enough anymore.

To start off this new series the developers have released two episodes, rather than the normal one. But these two episodes are part one and two of the same mini narrative, ending in a somewhat predictable cliffhanger that nevertheless sets up the last three episodes for the usual path of drama and intrigue.

It begins with your new main character, Javi. He, and his family, are introduced on the night of the zombie outbreak, and the first half hour of their story is brilliantly done. It plays interestingly with dramatic tensions, cinematography and dialogue in a way that their recent Batman series could only hope to achieve. In the first five minutes I was more invested in the Javi’s family than throughout all of Batman. This third season offers the chance to enter in fresh without the narrative baggage of the previous two seasons by focusing (so far) on Javi rather than Clementine. Yes, Clementine is a main character but you do not play as her and she, again, so far, has mainly been as a narrative device rather than a main character in her own right.

These types of game, including the likes of Life is Strange and Kentucky Route Zero are soap opera for gamers and so they must adhere to the same set of rules. Never let anything build up hope through shared experiences and conflict, don’t settle down for too long in one place, lest the audience lose interest, betrayals and high stakes are essential means to heighten tensions and build (or lose) trust in your characters. The problem arises when we’ve seen and done this story arc too many times before. It’s a problem also facing the TV adaptation. Be on the road, find shelter, shelter falls apart from an internal or external threat, leave shelter, rinse and repeat Characters are constantly introduced and then discarded, and we’re left with the feeling that almost none of it matters. After seeing this so many times it can all feel a bit rote.

But there’s usually a core of characters who really matter, and it’s for them that the story is being told. Fortunately, Javi is well written, and the story does take a fresher approach than most recent Telltale series. Clementine is there but by the end of Episode 2 she remains on the outer fringe of the group and the narrative. I strongly suspect this will change in the coming episodes, but for now I feel it’s an approach that fits better with a fresh start than simply gathering new friends around Clementine, just waiting for them to be killed off one by one. If you have played the first two seasons, you can import your save from them, influencing Clementine’s character and reactions. If you don’t have your save sitting on your hard drive – or your started on one platform (say, Xbox 360) and finished on a different one, then there’s a way to simulate your choices.

There’s a substantive upgrade to the lighting system without the same hitches, pauses and other technical issues that besieged the Batman episodes. Episodes also are noticeably shorter than what we have come to expect, at around one and a half hours each, down from two hours. I feel this is a good change, as I was pleasantly surprised when they finished, rather than being stretched to fill a rather arbitrary two hours.

If you haven’t yet tired of either The Walking Dead or the Telltale formula, then you will enjoy this entry too. The genre is starting to feel a little tired, but in moments of brilliance it can shine. The story is good, but not exceptional, and the gameplay is all too familiar. After so many entries, it is truly time for Telltale to be a bit more adventurous with the series’ core mechanics. Walking Dead: A New Frontier is the old style of series refined to a keen knife’s edge, but it’s an old blade, one that needs to be replaced and updated wholesale if the studio wants to continue to be leaders in the storytelling field.

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The post The Walking Dead: A New Frontier – The Ties that Bind (PlayStation 4) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Adventure game veterans, Telltale Games – responsible for the excellent game serial based on The Walking Dead comics, turn their attention to the Dark Knight Detective.

I just can’t get enough of Batman. Behind Daredevil, he is, when done right, my favourite superhero. It possibly gives you an insight into my pent up frustrations that they are both mildly psychotic, very flawed characters.

Batman has had many different incarnations over the years. We’ve the camp Batman ’66 TV show, and its subsequent effect on the comicbook. There’s Denny O’Neil’s 1970s take on the character, complete with Neal Adams’ beautiful art. Then, of course, you have Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns- one book that redefined the superhero genre and formed the darker interpretation of the character that we have today.

There’s been dips and peaks (I’m looking at you Joel Schumacher), and sometimes they’ve gone a bit too far (Chris Nolan). And now we have another on-screen interpretation, the older, more bitter incarnation played (very well, in my opinion) by Ben Affleck.

Batman must be one of the most fluid comic book characters out there.

In the digital realm, the Dark Knight Detective exists in many forms. We have the light and mildly comedic Lego version set in a DC Universe built from the famous toy brand. There’s Warner Games the beat ‘em up version from the Mortal Kombat-inspired Injustice: Gods Among Us.

More in keeping with the darker, 1990s comicbook reimagining, Rocksteady’s Arkham games have managed to take the essence of the Batman and create a new, but familiar take on the Batman mythos.

Batman: The Telltale Series is yet another reimagining of the character, unrelated to any of the previous video games, movies or comic books. Like the previous Batman games, it too takes some liberties with the established canon of the character.

Set toward the start of Batman’s career, the first episode, Realm of Shadows, is as much about Bruce Wayne as it is Batman. Caught up in the shady dealings of Gotham’s underworld kingpin, Carmine Falcone, Bruce Wayne find himself having to enlist his caped alter-ego fight to clear his family name.

The story does a good job of introducing a variety of familiar supporting characters, with Batman meeting Catwoman for the first time right at the beginning of the game. We also have Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s long suffering butler, a pre-Two-Face Harvey Dent, Vicki Vale, the aforementioned Falcone and a young Oswald Cobblepot.

The visuals are of a similar, comic-book, style as Telltale’s The Walking Dead games. It is a shame that they didn’t opt to emulate Neal Adams’ or David Mazzucchelli’s art styles, or even that of Frank Miller and Klaus Jansen. What we have, though, is a very competent look, far slicker that the ‘paper cut-out’ art in their earlier games.

Whilst the characters still move in a very stiff manner, they are given a bit more real estate to walk about it. There’s a lot of cursor hovering to discover interesting items, but the ability to link areas of interest during investigations is inspired. Again, following Rocksteady’s lead, it’s good to see Batman’s detective skills come into play- reminding us that he isn’t just a thug.

Telltale’s Batman is slightly more violent than I’d have liked. Whilst you could put this down to this being the early part of his career, I’m not sure that Batman would be breaking arms to get answers. It seems forced, trying to be gritty but lacking the subtlety.

As a first chapter, Realm of Shadows was a great intro to this new Batman adventure. My only issue with it was that, even though it is a reasonable length, it was over all too soon.

Roll on Episode 2!