GameCentral gets to play over three hours of the follow-up to It Takes Two, in what is some of the most enjoyable co-op action ever seen.
Split Fiction is unlikely to split opinion (EA) GameCentral gets to play over three hours of the follow-up to It Takes Two , in what is some of the most enjoyable co-op action ever seen. When we interviewed Split Fiction director Josef Fares recently, the one question he had no answer for is why other companies haven’t tried to copy him.
His previous title, The Game Awards 2021 Game of the Year winner It Takes Two has sold over 23 million copies, and yet it has had no discernible effect on the overall number of co-op games being made and there have been no direct clones. Instead, Swedish developer Hazelight Studios has been left to do everything itself. It Takes Two was preceded by the more grounded A Way Out and is now going to be succeeded by Split Fiction, which has a similar approach – in terms of only being playable with a second player – but is in all other ways a completely different game, with new characters and story. The game got a new trailer during the State of Play on Wednesday but a few days earlier we had the chance to play three hours of gameplay and speak to Fares about it and the industry in general. We enjoyed both experiences a great deal and the good news is that Split Fiction is out in just a few weeks’ time, at which point we expect it’ll be just as successful as its predecessor. The plot for Split Fiction is a peculiar one and revolves around two young novelists, named Zoe and Mio, who are invited by a very obviously evil techbro to test out his new virtual reality machine. The idea is that it allows you to visualise and explore your own stories and imagination, which immediately goes wrong when Mio and Zoe’s worlds become conjoined. We’re not sure where the story is going with all this, as while there are allusions to corporations taking advantage of creatives it’s all very on the nose and seems to lack subtlety. According to Fares, the main theme of the game is friendship, and you can definitely see that in the burgeoning relationship between Zoe and Mio, although it’s still fairly by-the-numbers from a narrative perspective. The gameplay conceit though is that, because Mio writes sci-fi and Zoe fantasy, the pair keep ping-ponging between different imagined worlds and that works great. Even if you have to question just how good the pair are as writers, given Zoe’s worlds are ultra generic Tolkien-esque fantasies and Mio’s are a fairly straight cross between Blade Runner and Tron. As a game though it works great, in terms of offering up an experience that is both hugely varied and, despite the constant changes in setting and gameplay style, impressively consistent in terms of quality. Although you can play online (like It Takes Two, only one person has to own the game) we were playing split screen with Victoria Kennedy from Eurogamer. Hearing that Hazelight games feature multiple different game styles, that are constantly switching around, might lead you to assume that they’re necessarily shallow, but that’s not the case at all. Although there are exceptions, the default gameplay is that of a third person action platformer, complete with double jumps, dashes, and 3D movement while swimming and flying. Right from the start, the game’s difficulty is not trivial, with some difficult jumps and proper puzzles – many of which involve one character doing something to help the other progress, from simply pressing a switch to jumping on a seesaw. This is absolutely not Mario Party with a story and our only concern is what happens when you try to play along with someone else of a very different skill level. That wasn’t the case in our preview but if we’d had to sit there trying to explain you have to move the camera with the right stick, because we were playing with a casual gamer friend, it would have been a very different experience. There’s also a lot of wall running in a lot of the levels (EA) As it was though, everything was extremely entertaining, with little punishment for failure. The controls were also very intuitive, which is welcome considering what the various buttons do is constantly changing, depending on the level. After a couple of tutorial-ish stages, one in each world, things were immediately taken up a notch as the game started playing around with gravity in new sci-fi levels, allowing you to stick to walls and ceilings and run along them. Mio (who we were playing as) gets a katana and Zoe a whip thing that allows her to grab objects and throw them, although both have grappling hooks that enable them to swing through a Fifth Element style traffic jam of flying cars. A boss battle then involved Mio releasing explosive barrels that Zoe could whip into the air and throw at the bad guy. As we understand, the game doesn’t have any It Takes Two style mini-games but instead there are a number of side stories, which are full length levels but with a twist.
SPLIT FICTION CO-OP GAMES HAZE LIGHT STUDIOS JOSEF FARES IT TAKES TWO VIRTUAL REALITY GAMING NEWS GAMEPLAY
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