Sweet liberty! One of my favorite PS4-era shooters is back with a whole new perspective and it’s up to me and my friends to defend Super Earth in glorious co-op! After going hands-on with Helldivers 2 for three hours, I’m sold on the bold pivot from the original’s top-down view to the sequel’s new third-person perspective, the appetizing roster of deadly gadgets, and the outrageous comedic tone that expertly channels the low-budget action film vibes that pair perfectly with the developer’s live-service ambitions. I’m a bit concerned at the moment that it won’t have enough content to go the distance long term, with only two enemy factions (so far as we know), procedurally generated levels that can feel a bit one-note, and no real live-service roadmap at launch, but with such a strong, effortlessly fun foundation, it’s definitely off to good start. With all the over-the-top gore and patriotic pageantry of Starship Troopers, Helldivers 2 is the kind of wonderfully silly shooter that me and my friends could easily lose many Friday nights to.
The Cub Review
17.01.2024 - 18:11 / thesixthaxis.com
In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Mowgli is left in the jungle as a child and taken in by a pack of wolves, raised as one of their own. Mowgli adapts to jungle life, able to survive its dangers and communicate with the animals that live within it, while other humans become alien to him. In The Cub, the boy is left on Earth following the Great Ecological Disaster and is raised by wolves, adapting to survive the dangers of a collapsed civilisation. The Cub wears its narrative influence on its sleeve, but adapts it enough to create a new story accompanied by great visuals and an engrossing soundtrack.
The Cub is a 2D platformer set in the ruins of the city of Alphaville and the overgrown wilds around it. It’s set a few years after the richest of the rich fled Earth on rockets to settle on Mars, leaving everyone else to deal with changes in the environment and ecological collapse. The majority of humanity did not survive, with Earth becoming a mass graveyard. The Cub is an orphan who has adapted not just mentally to the world, but physically, enabling him to handle the new atmosphere. He leads a generally peaceful life, until the humans, now known as Martians, return to assess Earth’s living conditions. The Martians are not able to survive long on Earth without suits, the planet having turned against those who fled it while the animals that stayed behind adapted. What starts as a research mission turns into a hunt, with The Cub as the target.
The gameplay experience consists of navigating levels, finding paths amongst the debris. There are an array of hazards in the environment from mutated animals, such as giant hedgehogs that can fire their spines to electrified plants, and high falls. The Boy is relatively fragile and contact with any hazard is instant death, but the checkpoint system is forgiving enough that you’re never sent too far back from where you died. There’s also a decent amount of variety in The Cub, with the game not just limited to running, and climbing. One section requires players to leap from minecart to minecart over broken tracks, while another has you soaring through the air avoiding birds and missiles. It’s safe to say, these sections require precise timing. Generally, there’s trial and error involved when navigating the levels and while there is some difficulty, nothing here is an insurmountable challenge. Even with the number of deaths during my play-through, the time it took to get from start to finish was about two and a half hours.
Where The Cub really shines is through the environmental storytelling, using both collectibles and the soundtrack to give context to the world. The audio is not just comprised of music but stories too. The Cub finds a Martian helmet and through it
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F1 23 is on Game Pass now, so play one of the best sports game story modes
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