Namco Bandai Preview Day

In a large office block in Hammersmith, Namco Bandai UK holds a treasure of merchandise and playable games. Ready Up was invited to the preview day, to try out a few of Namco’s upcoming offerings! From the moment you enter the office, there is a wealth of Namco merchandise on display: Pac-Man plushies adorn red sofas and statuettes are proudly on display inside glass cabinets. Oh and let’s not forget these guys, waiting to greet you!

First up was Ridge Racer Unbounded. This was Namco’s lead title for the day, and the one that everyone spent the most time on. Ridge Racer Unbounded steps away from its racing roots to take on a slicker, ‘underground racing’, ‘crash and burn them all’ style reminiscent of Burnout and Need for Speed. Click on the thumbnails below to see the beautiful screenshots in their entirety!

Ridge Racer Unbounded brings new locations for you to conquer with each city or region offering different styles of challenge as well as the usual races. The first thing we did, though, was launch into some domination racing, which of course forms the core part of the game. The key to Ridge Racer has always been successful drifting and this is no exception for Unbounded. Drifting is necessary to go round corners, but drifting successfully builds up power which you can unleash for a short time and use to smash your car through scenery to create new shortcuts that could make all the difference to the race. The track is really only a guideline since you’re actively encouraged to make the most of breakable walls and buildings. It requires timing ,though, since power only lasts for so long. You don’t want to do what I did: activate power too early, head straight for a brick wall intending to smash through, only to have your power run out, leaving your car to crash straight into the solid brick wall and fall into last place as a result. Smart! Power can also be used to hit other players and make them crash, known in this game as ‘fragging’. It’s cruel but incredibly funny and this playful, yet competitive streak runs throughout the game.

The other modes available are challenges involving building up points through drifting or, my favourite, using a giant truck to frag as many police cars as possible. Oddly satisfying, using the whole spread of your vehicle to smash four other cars off the road at once. All of the game also took place to some awesome, techno-centric, high speed music which was absolutely perfect for the shiny and speedy graphics.

After racing and smashing came running and gunning. Well, kind of. If you suggest to a dedicated Armored Core fan that the game is simply about ‘shooting things’, be prepared to get a well-deserved lengthy and stern lecture.

Armored Core V is the latest in a prestigious line of mecha sims/third-person shooters. Mention Armored Core to someone and you get one of two responses. The first is, “Armoured what?” and the second involves a long stream of the pros and cons of various robot parts. Armored Core is serious business with a lot of dedicated fans; as a newcomer faced with endless pages of said customisable robot parts, I almost felt as if I had no place even looking at the screen. Left what? Right what? Why can’t I have that gun? What do you mean it’s too heavy? Before anyone starts foaming at the mouth due to my ignorance, I’ll hurry on and describe the gameplay. You control a mercenary in a mecha, going through various battlefields and trying to complete the missions to the best efficiency.

I played the first mission and part of the second, which involved controlling the armored core, essentially an armored robot, a mecha. Think Gundam, but mostly on the ground. You navigate your mecha through a broken-down city battlefield. Targeting things and shooting them was super easy and fun until you realise that running and gunning isn’t the point – do this and you quickly run out of ammo and are screwed over until you find a place where your dropship can replenish your supplies. At a price, of course.

The story was a little obscure, in typical Japanese fashion, but the experience was dark, involved lots of shooting and was fun. As for the customisation, there’s enough there to make stat nerds insanely happy. Do more missions and do them well to unlock more parts so you can really start customising your core. My first step was to make my robot an obnoxious shade of pink.

There definitely wasn’t enough time to get into Armored Core V properly, but there was definitely enough time to get sufficient a glimpse of Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations. Put simply, you won’t be interested in this game if you’re not a Naruto fan. It’s a Naruto fighting game, but it’s a Naruto game first and a fighting game second. The opportunity was a little wasted on me since there are other members of Team Ready Up who are much bigger fans of the series.

Briefly, the game boasts a massive roster with 72 characters and 15 support characters you can summon in a pinch. The cell-shaded animation is attractive, the special move sequences are pretty fun, the controls are easy to grasp and this is definitely a game that’s geared towards the fans who probably have all the other games in the series but will get this one anyway.

The final game of the day was Inversion. We were among the first in Europe to play it, which meant technically that whoever finished first in the deathmatch was one of the best players in Europe. It wasn’t me but I’m proud to say that I didn’t come last! Inversion was described as a ‘buddy-cop style adventure’, but we played multiplayer, so the buddy cops were pretty much running around shooting each other in the face.

The twist to Inversion is… the inversion. Players can control gravity and blast other players so you may find your character hovering hopelessly in the air while they get shot to pieces. You can also run up walls and across ceilings, meaning that what started off as a 15-minute multiplayer deathmatch on a flat battlefield actually expanded to take in all spaces of the environment once everyone worked out that you could run up continuously. It also meant that you had to have 360 degree awareness. “Where’s that shooting coming from? Arrgghh that guy’s on the wall, son of a— Ah, crap I’m dead.”

It would have been nice to see the single-player mode for Inversion to see how the changes of gravity would work in a story context but multiplayer was still a difficult but fun challenge. Especially when you weren’t really told what the controls were and spent a few minutes working out what button did what, and what it actually meant to be in High Gravity mode or not. Or maybe that was just me. I’d love to see another day where Namco preview their casual, quirky stuff. This day was about Namco’s heavy hitters, the titles you’re likely to hear a lot about in the coming months but it’s an impressive and varied lineup which should appeal to any and all types of gamer. See you on the racetrack or the world without gravitational limits, with the star anime ninjas and the heavily armoured mechas!