It’s been some time since last we reported from the Rock Paper Shotgun / Eurogamer event known as Rezzed, which has been growing and growing ever since it’s inception back in 2012, which featured among other things, a jolly good look at Borderlands 2, Natural Selection 2, a gameplay walk-through of the soon to be successful XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Peter Mildew making promises about a cube game which failed once again to live up to anything which surprised no-one.

Hooray for us geeks with disposable income!

Since then it’s expanded out heavily to include all other platforms thanks to its Indie remit as well as providing some jolly fun times on the PC platform. This year’s Rezzed presented a great deal to behold over a packed few days at a rather unexpectedly swish looking area of Wapping, the Tobacco Dock.

So without any further dilly-dallying, let’s hit on a few of the different highlights from the show here for your amusement / anger building that we didn’t mention Project Cars or Guild Wars…

Volume

What happens when a game of Tetris turns deadly….

Hidden somewhat away along with several other games in the “Indie Chillout Zone” (which makes it sound like the room in the night club where they play the crap they got for free), Volume is an funky looking stealth-based game developed by Mike Bithell, who previously developed “Thomas Was Alone”.

This was pretty good as a puzzle game as it went, with the first four levels which had been polished on show and it was a very good introduction to how it’s going to work. Once again, the delightful tones of Danny Wallace is brought to you as you navigate through a maze, collecting various gem thingys before reaching the exit point.

But of course you won’t be alone in the military simulator for there are many naughty robots intent on impeding your progress and make you chew your elbows off in the process. You have a limited time of the robot enemies wandering round and then seeing you before you fail and start again from a certain point.

Thankfully, it’s not always the start of the level otherwise you would go nuts. All in all, while not entirely fun to play on the show floor with various peeps breathing over you desperate to give it a go, you could certainly spend a great deal of time on this and never feel cheated out of your hard earned drug money.

Bloodborne

If you live longer than 20 seconds, you’re a god among men.

In what was a real first, Sony brought out the PS4 to Rezzed in order to show off a lovely little family game called Bloodborne, created by those lovable psychopaths which created Dark Souls where you died every few seconds and pretty much left their games feeling like a cold dead husk of a human being afterwards.

Can you guess how I felt after playing the demo of this?

You started after seeing the mind-blowing picture of the PS4 controller with the controls in a dark town type place after you selected one of a few characters which had very few differences between them save for how hard you hit people, and then wander around for a bit. Then you come across a naughty looking scarecrow and then you die as you had forgotten what the attack button was.

And when you died in the demo, it ended the demo so you go back to the beginning. Basically it’s going to be just as hard and annoying as every other souls type game, to the point where you won’t need gamma radiation to show what a monster you can be. But good lord, they have really polished it up.

This was an alpha demo and I couldn’t say it wasn’t like a finished product. We will see if the final product on the shelves of course, matches to what was played here soon enough, with the release currently scheduled for end of March.

Tembo the Badass Elephant

He is indeed a bad ass elephant. Ain’t no mice scaring this mother…

To be fair, who hasn’t already thought about an army elephant saving people while collecting peanuts and ramming walls, enemies and putting out fire with their trunk? I did 23 times today alone. So did the chaps who had taken a lot of cocaine over at Game Freak, who did that Pokemon thing ages ago it appears as they teamed up with Sega to bring this to the gaming dining table, slated for later this summer.

Just have to say, this is an instant purchase if the final product holds up to what was demoed here, which apparently was a very early build and slightly suffering from stuttering but nothing which would really put you off playing.

Just the fact it’s an insane idea alone, let alone a very very enjoyable platform game, with a large amount of charm, people to save / ride on your back to freedom, and the double jump brings with it a cute attempt at flapping his legs to stay in the air longer, yeah, I can easily see it’s appeal.

Raging Justice

I too have a raging…..err….never mind.

Microsoft made an appearance at Rezzed too with their indie range of titles soon appearing on the Xbox One, and a couple of Surface Pro 3’s playing Shovel Knight. Of course they were wanting to show that they had changed massively since the launch of the machine and what they were showing was pretty good considering.

However there was one very welcome surprise among the games which frankly deserves a shout-out here; Raging Justice, being made by a small start-up company called MakinGames, residing in the East Midlands and started only last year by a husband and wife team, who were present at the expo.

Aside from the title which sounds like a 80s cop porn film, it also references it’s obvious influence; the old school silliness that is Streets of Rage, which of course got re-released in various guises over the past year.

The movement animations are there, the ridiculous amount of enemies are there, the weapons to smash over the heads of said enemies are there, the silly 80s music soundtrack is there, the full on terribly cheesy dialogue is there.

Just that roster of features alone was enough to give me a raging….err…..desire to play more. But then you got to drive around a tractor and just run everyone over again and again. Before it took too many hits and exploded for no reason given that metal wins against humans and dogs.

One very much worth visiting when it releases on all platforms later this year.

Did they spend the money they made from YouTubers on this stage for “I am Bread”?

Overall, there were quite a number of good things to see at Rezzed, despite the fact that it’s now somewhat mutated into a far bigger beast than that first show back in 2012. The different variety in the games on show also meant that now more developers than ever had the opportunity to show the paying public their wares.

Roll on the summer when many of these titles will be released and we can enjoy the final products before we realise that we can no longer survive when in direct sunlight. It burns us….