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Fans of Bannerlord's multiplayer component, in particular, will benefit from a long list of improvements, although other aspects like singleplayer, user interface, and performance have also received some attention. Although the tone is odd, especially the creepier stuff with the Zurks, the game seems to be aimed primarily at casual gamers and as such it’s a good primer for many common elements, including platforming, shooting, stealth, and fetch quests.After a few months from Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord's last big update, the game's latest round of additions and changes is a significant step forward. It does provide the opportunity for some perfectly enjoyable stealth elements, which involve such stalwarts as staying outside of an enemy’s zone of vision and hiding in boxes. Midtown looks absolutely amazing, like the best Blade Runner adaptation never made, but there’s less to do in it than the opening hub area and the whole surveillance society angle is severely undercooked, with no indication of who’s in charge or what they actually believe. The Zurks only seem to lurk in the sewers though and once you’re through to Midtown they’re completely forgotten about and instead the threat becomes overzealous security robots. Stray – a very strange cyberpunk adventure (pic: Annapurna Interactive)Īs it is, early on in the game you meet a little drone who attaches a backpack to George and helps by translating the robots and acting as a gun to deal with the Zurks (they don’t like ultraviolet light). Despite George being an ordinary cat he not only seems to understand everything said to him but he happily carries around things like buckets and power supplies in his mouth, to solve physics based puzzles like an ordinary video game character. That is to say, there’s a major disconnect between the story and what you actually do in the gameplay. We do hate to use the term, for obvious reasons, but Stray has one of the most extreme cases of ludonarrative dissonance we’ve seen in a long time. There’s some inconsistencies in terms of what surfaces are reachable but generally this works very well at maintaining the illusion you’re controlling a real cat, and not a cartoon character that vaguely looks like one.
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There’s no jump button as such but as long as you’re close enough to a platform George will automatically leap there.
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Stray is essentially a puzzle platformer. There are two or three open world hub areas in the game, where you’re in no danger, while the other sections are more linear but still with a few hidden secrets. For a game about a cute furball, Stray has a peculiarly melancholy atmosphere, with the virtual immortality of the robots having forced most of them into a state of lethargic ennui.Ī few have rebelled though and it’s these that George befriends, as he journeys through the sewer system, the dystopian Midtown, and onwards towards the city’s administrative centre. The idea seems to have been to lock everyone inside until nature has had a chance to repair itself, but humans have long since died out and the only inhabitants of the city are robots, who also live in fear of the Zurks and have begun to believe that the outside world is just a myth.