STACK NZ July 2016 Issue 75

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Day Two.
Los Angeles began its Wednesday
morning shrouded in a veil of ‘June Gloom’
cloud, but the mood within the Convention
Center couldn’t have been more different.
STACK kicked off its day with a look
at Carmageddonand the World War II
shooterSniper Elite 4; the slow-mo sniper
kills are still uncomfortably satisfying.
It’s a credit to Microsoft that just about
everything on its booth was hands-on. Forza
Horizon 3, based in the diverse environments
of our own great country, was a standout on
the new slim Xbox One S; racing through
Byron Bay has never looked so good.
Like the aforementioned Microsoft, all
of Ubisoft’s titles were playable in a press
area just off the main booth. Thankfully we
were spared the horrendous Just Dance
live demos this year, meaning we could
actually hear everything the devs were telling
us. Watchdogs 2and Ghost Recon
Wildlands were the picks from a
quality line-up, after a solid half hour
with each.
Square Enix have possibly the
biggest slate we can recall seeing
at E3. The dark Deus Ex: Mankind
Dividedplaythrough demonstrated
how the hacking difficulty has been
increased in the game, and how
diverse the combat options will be
when it releases this August.
Day two concluded with a trip
Onto the maddening throng of E3 itself.
Three hours with Sony offered a closer
look at Gran Turismo Sport(possibly the
first racing game over the last decade
that we haven’t crashed into a wall within
20 seconds), and theatre presentations
including Detroit: Become Human , thrilling
new IP Days Gone,and of course the
mighty God of War, replete with a new
Norse mythology setting.
The day concluded with Call of
Duty: Infinite Warfare . We were
hoping to get some hands-on here,
but the meeting consisted of visual
presentations only, in which an
additional mission set in
Geneva was shown
alongside the space-
themed demo
unveiled at the Sony
Press Conference the
evening before.
You’re always going
to get the haters
when ‘Call of Dooty’
is even mentioned,
but we’re eager to
see what Infinity Ward
are going to deliver here,
because what we’ve seen
of it – albeit purely visual – looks
interesting, including the off-rails
space battles that resemble Ace
Combat on steroids.
A final treat was watching a
play-through of Crew Expendable – the
second mission from the classic Call of
Duty: Modern Warfareremastered for
this generation of consoles. It looks, as
you would expect, incredible, and despite
completing the entire game innumerable
times since its first release nine years ago,
this is one title you can be sure we’ll be
playing again come November.
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18 JULY 2016
GAMES
That's an E3 fact...
A staggering audience
of 42 million watched
E3 content on Twitch.
Call of Duty: InfiniteWarfare
Sniper Elite 4
God ofWar
That's an E3 fact...
More than 1600
products were on
display.
That's an E3 fact...
From the 70,000
attendees, 50,300
were video game
developers, analysts
and journalists.