The World of Ashen Comes to Xbox One and Xbox Game Pass

The World of Ashen Comes to Xbox One and Xbox Game Pass

The World of Ashen Comes to Xbox One and Xbox Game Pass

The wait is over! The dark world of Ashen will finally see the light and launch on Xbox One and Xbox Game Pass on December 7… and what a journey it’s been to get here!

To celebrate the upcoming launch of Ashen, the ID@Xbox team recently visited our studios in Wellington, New Zealand to find out more about our open-world, action RPG that Xbox gamers around the globe will soon experience. We’re excited to share a snapshot of that visit here, and a preview of Ashen as we get ready to welcome players to a mystical world to discover, defend, and share with each other.

Thrown into a world of darkness, Ashen follows the story of a fantasy world with no light, that is suddenly reborn with an explosion of sunlight. It is your role to understand and protect this light, fighting the evil and darkness in stamina-based action combat, either independently or with the help of helpful strangers through passive multiplayer gameplay.

Your journey through Ashen will have twists, turns, and magical moments as you discover both the enemies of the light, and the strength of a community that creates amazing moments together. With passive multiplayer in Ashen, you’re only ever alone if you want to be – you’ll never die or battle alone, because you’ll have a helping hand next to you from others in the game…. if you need it.

But that’s not to say you won’t be challenged. Whilst accessibility has been key to our design, players who seek brutal boss fights and challenges will find a wealth of worthy battle sessions in the game.

Our virtual studio tour video above will give you a snapshot of our journey, our partnership with the ID@Xbox team, and the excitement we feel finally bringing this game to launch on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox One and enhanced for Xbox One X. While the game’s first preview at the 2015 Xbox E3 Briefing set us on the path to an exciting trajectory of development and new ambitions in the games design, what’s most exciting is finally getting the game into the hands of players.

We’re excited to welcome you as you join us in Ashen!

Ashen is available December 7 on Xbox One via the Microsoft Store and for Xbox Game Pass members with an active subscription. Ashen is an Xbox One X Enhanced title.

Overwatch League 2019 Regular Season Schedule Revealed; Tickets On-Sale Now!

Overwatch League 2019 Regular Season Schedule Revealed; Tickets On-Sale Now!

Overwatch League 2019 Regular Season Schedule Revealed; Tickets On-Sale Now!

Hello,

Mark your calendars! The Overwatch League 2019 regular season kicks off on 15 Feb. 2019 AEDT/NZDT, with opening day featuring a marquee Grand Final rematch between reigning champions, London Spitfire, and runner-up, Philadelphia Fusion.

Fans can now view the full match schedule and buy tickets for all regular season matches played at Blizzard Arena Los Angeles via OverwatchLeague.com/schedule. The complete schedule can be downloaded here:https://overwatchleague.com/news/22823900/

New to Overwatch League’s 2019 season is the introduction of Homestand Weekend events. Three teams – the Dallas Fuel, Atlanta Reign and Los Angeles Valiant – will host regular season matches in their respective territories, giving more fans their first taste of live professional Overwatch before all teams move into their home venues in the future. Tickets for Homestand Weekend events will be put on sale by the individual teams at a later date.

Check out our trailer here: https://twitter.com/overwatchleague/status/1072884059427221505

The 2019 season will also have a revamped playoff structure and end-of-season format. For the 2019 season, the league’s top six teams will automatically qualify for the postseason, with the Atlantic and Pacific Division winners receiving top seeds. Two final playoff spots will be decided via a play-in tournament in August. The tournament will feature teams that finished seventh through twelfth in the overall standings, with the top two teams from this tournament advancing to the postseason. This play-in tournament will replace the Stage Finals at the end of the league’s fourth and final stage.

The prize pool will be increasing from $3.5 million USD to $5 million USD in 2019. Details on prizing, and the map pool for Stage 1, are available now on OverwatchLeague.com. Specific dates, formats and other information for the All-Star event, playoffs and Grand Finals will be unveiled next year.

Tickets for regular season matches at Blizzard Arena Los Angeles are on-sale now at AXS.com/OWL. New this season are team-specific ticket packages that will allow fans to attend player signings and other promotions for each of the league’s 20 teams. Special ticket packages from the 2018 season, including season tickets and more, will continue for the 2019 season.

All matches will be broadcast on OverwatchLeague.com, Twitch, and MLG. Select matches will be broadcast in North America on the ESPN / ABC / Disney XD family of networks. The complete regular-season linear broadcast schedule will be announced shortly.

More information on the 2019 season structure, including the All-Star event, Stage Finals, playoffs and more is available here. Keep up with all of the latest Overwatch League news and content on the Overwatch League website, as well as on Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Don’t forget to sign up to receive the latest news, updates, and special offers from the Overwatch League and its teams.

THE PRINCESS GUIDE BRINGS THE ART OF WAR TO PLAYSTATION®4 AND NINTENDO SWITCH™ IN APRIL 2019!

THE PRINCESS GUIDE BRINGS THE ART OF WAR TO PLAYSTATION®4 AND NINTENDO SWITCH™ IN APRIL 2019!

THE PRINCESS GUIDE BRINGS THE ART OF WAR TO

PLAYSTATION®4 AND NINTENDO SWITCH™ IN APRIL 2019!

NIS America is happy to announce that The Princess Guide arrives on Nintendo Switch™ and PlayStation®4 on 5 April for Australia and New Zealand.

About the game:
In a land torn by chaos and war, a new evil rises. Now, four princesses from four different kingdoms must learn how to lead their people to victory. Commence the princess knight training regimen! As an experienced knight, you will choose a princess to become your apprentice. Teach her the art of war, and push back the evil that threatens to take over the land! With your choices directly impacting the way your princess knight fights, The Princess Guide gives military training a whole new meaning!

Key Features:

A Unique Tale Times Four! - Each princess knight has a unique story to tell, and your choice affects how the tale unfolds! Will you train the vengeful Veronica, the gluttonous Liliartie, the chivalrous Monomaria, or the dragon princess Alpana?

Fast-Paced Strategic Battles - The battlefield can get intense! Issue orders to your princess directly on the battlefield, and watch them clash with the enemy forces! Their performance is directly affected by your tutelage!

To Praise or To Scold? - Your princess’s growth depends on you!  During conversations and battles, “Praise” or “Scold” your princess to enhance their abilities on the battlefield!

Look out for more information on The Princess Guide shortly!

Anna and The Apocalypse: Film Review

Anna and The Apocalypse: Film Review

Cast: Ella Hunt, Malcolm Cumming, Sarah Swire, Mark Benton, Paul Kaye
Director: John McPhail

Christmas films are a notoriously tricky beast to negotiate; either they are a syrupy sentimental mix or they're loosely connected to the season and a miss.

So it's heartening to report that Anna and The Apocalypse is a mix of horror, High School Musical, Shaun of the Dead and Christmas edges.

A well cast, and down-to-earth Hunt is Anna, a teenager looking to get out of the small Scottish town she lives in. With a plan to take a gap year rather than go to university, but unable to tell her father (Benton) that that's what she wants, Anna's trapped.

But she finds her world changed when a pandemic suddenly sweeps her corner of Scotland...

In truth, Anna and The Apocalypse is more a fun that's a light and fluffy genre rejoinder to both horror and the musical. Meshing poppy power ballad songs that follow the usual trick of revealing feelings, some impressive choreography and throwing in pop culture references early on, the film's clearly hellbent on being a Buffy-style musical via John Hughes' sensibilities.

However, it kind of works, with a degree of joie de vivre and Edgar Wright quick cut editing homage carrying it through.

It helps greatly that Hunt's engaging and affable, as she negotiates a moping best friend who's in love with her, an ex who's gone from nice guy to bully and a father who doesn't want to see his daughter go. There's a heart and relatability to her performance that's hard to deny.

Occasionally, it lapses close to parody, and silliness, but in terms of the festive season, it sits nicely within the pantheon of Christmas films that are slightly awry from what's expected.

Its goofy edges and self-obsessed teens, wrapped up in their own issues, rather than the global concerns collide nicely to make a charming film that meshes genres to pleasing and surprisingly emotional effect.

Mary Poppins Returns: Film Review

Mary Poppins Returns: Film Review

Cast: Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Colin Firth
Director: Rob Marshall

How do you solve a problem like Mary Poppins 2?

With the longest gap between sequels ever recorded in cinema history, it seems like the return of the English nanny that so delighted so many decades ago was always bound to be divisive.

So it is with Mary Poppins Returns, a film that is both respectful of its nostalgia and yet also seems to be bound up by it, unsure of its own path to follow.

Set in the Great slump, London is facing a post-war depression with the inhabitants of Cherry Tree Lane in the firing line of the Depression. Newly widowed Michael (Whishaw, in mournful elegaic mode) and sister Jane (Mortimer, perky, but under-used) face losing the family home due to lack of mortgage payments.

With 5 days to find a shares certificate which will give them fiscal freedom, the Banks children and their own children are more in need now of a visit from Emily Blunt's Mary Poppins....

There's a sense of loss pervading lots of Poppins 2; and there's a lot of juggling needed for the tone of the Depression and balancing it with the edges of an old school Hollywood musical. It doesn't always quite work, in all honesty, and the film's blighted with the fact it's barely blessed with some truly memorable songs in the vein of Spoonful of Sugar, Chim Chim Cher-ee et al.

There's one central song that does soar - even if it has Lin-Manuel Miranda's Jack and his lamplighter brigade firing around on bikes like an outtake of a BMX festival - and that's Trip a Little Light Fantastic With Me. This one mixes both the terrible Cockney accent along with a memorable chorus, to produce an ode that gathers speed and is brilliantly translated to the screen.

Blunt's Poppins is a nicely starched character, with moments of eye-twinkling mixed with some sad mournful looks as she realises how far the children have fallen - and how much the London depression has hit.

In many ways, it's easy to see Mary Poppins Returns as a rejoinder to current political climates (the celebration of London, the demonising of the banks, the Depression) within the UK, but the timelessness of the first is what is, at times, missing from this, even if there is a sweet sense of escapism on offer this time around.

Yet, there is magic within Mary Poppins Returns, as it tries to rekindle an "excess of imagination" in both its subjects and the cinema audiences, who are becoming more enamoured with musicals (La La Land, The Greatest Showman).

"She never explains anything," says Miranda's Lamplighter Jack, a dismissive oneliner which says much about Poppins' appeal and the nonsensical edges of the flights of fantasy within. It's a meta line if ever there was one, and one which applies to Mary Poppins Returns - it may hit a younger audience, but an older audience, brought up in the memories of the first replayed through the years, may find it lacks a killer hook to keep you whistling along afterwards.

Aquaman: Film Review

Aquaman: Film Review

Cast: Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Kidman
Director: Jason Wan

The litany of DC movies is scattered with almost-rans.

For every Marvel success, there’s been a thudding DC failure, a reminder that tone and story still triumph in the comic book medium.

So it’s pleasing to reveal that Aquaman goes some way to addressing prior failures, by telling a story early on that packs heart and heft, before the usual rote destructive CGI chaos steps in to clean up in the final act.

At its heart, in terms of plot, Aquaman is DC’s take on the political in-fighting last seen in Marvel's Black Panther.

Momoa is Aquaman, aka Arthur Curry, a half-human, half Atlantian, who's keeping the seas safe from the likes of marauding pirates, when he finds himself hauled into a political coup after red-haired Mera (Heard) emerges from the waters of his long-lost home world.

Warning him that the war that's unfolding at the hands of King Orm (Wilson) will affect his beloved surface dwellers, Aquaman's thrown into a battle over the rights to the underwater throne and a birth right he doesn't potentially want...

Aquaman offers a Tron-like spectacle with an underwater world that's vibrant with life and teeming with visual creativity and depth. Atlantis looks like it's a lived in world, a world that breathes as it floats below, and as various sea creatures float by, with CGI in overdrive to showcase its very best.

Sadly, the same can't exactly be said about the more human elements of the film which are overwhelmed by the script's over-stuffed nature.

Momoa treads a thin line between knowing cheesy dialogue and performing endless action sequences while revelling in the OTT nature; but he has the charisma for Curry (and performs enough hair flips through water to look like he's advertising premium shampoo), and lends Aquaman the kind of reverence - and occasionally irreverence - the DC material affords him.

The problem is some of what is populated around him.

With one-note characters like Mera offering mainly exposition (and a clumsy attempt at romance that should have been drastically re-worked at the script level before being committed to screen) and Orm proffering petulance and discord, the film's tonal shifts are seismic in their execution and occasionally jarring as it swims between cornball and seriousness.

Meshing the myth of Excalibur, Karate Kid training, Splash's inter-species love story with a pro-environmental message, and the politics of power and squabbling brothers that we've seen in Thor and Black Panther, Aquaman never really lays any claim to originality - nor would it expect to with some of its utter po-faced dialogue and frankly creepy digital de-ageing of stars like Morrison and Dafoe.

What Aquaman does deliver is spectacle, and radically changes the game for what's to be expected of DC films - it still has the pomposity of the dialogue of Batman Vs Superman and ends up in an utterly messy CGI fight as its denoumenent, but those troubles are inherent to all comic book films, not just the long derided DC Universe.

There's a lack of emotional investment in Aquaman's central character, but there's plenty on show early on in Morrison's heartfelt turn (some of his best work yet) and pre-credits love story with Kidman's Queen of the sea. It's a welcome touch, before the continual shock and awe of the action overwhelms everything and builds to a deafening crescendo.

In terms of cache, there is no denying this is a major step up.

But Aquaman's over-reliance on CGI spectacle, bombast and underwhelming quest a-to-b type story, coupled with a lack of depth on its hero and his glistening abs, means that Aquaman is more a film that delivers on its outlandish promise, rather than holding back a little and running with what sticks to the wall.

The Predator: Blu Ray Review

The Predator: Blu Ray Review

It's clear early on that Shane Black's Predator film is not going to be a serious one.

Despite opening with some sci-fi trappings as a Predator-piloted spacecraft plummets down to earth, within minutes, we're back in Black's trademark comedy way of life. A satellite is smashed as the Predator's ship tumbles to the ground, and this brash, in-your-face opening is really all the 2018 Predator is about.

After being picked off by Boyd Holbrook's sniper Quinn McKenna, the Predator's gear is shipped off to his autistic son (Tremblay) for safe-keeping and to protect Quinn from the authorities. But as the scientists pick at the Predator, he re-awakens, bringing a desperate fight for survival to life.

It's hard to exactly pinpoint why The Predator doesn't quite fully work.

Perhaps it's the abandoning until the end of why the films have worked previously - ie man vs something bigger than itself and slowly losing; perhaps it's the injection of comedy that tips over into the downright unfunny and unnecessary - step forward, a soldier with Tourette's for nothing more than gags or a line about a "retarded" kid that's woefully out of place with 2018 - or perhaps it's the fact that the film lacks any defining set pieces or visual moments of flair.

But all combined, The Predator is perhaps the biggest disappointment of the year when all its parts come together.

Kudos must go to Olivia Munn whose scientist kicks as much ass as the boys, and whose support is more about her skills than anything else; and even Holbrook manages a sort of soldier grunt edge that's hard to beat, even if the human edge is lacking.

There's a climate change message thrown in as well, as Black tries to re-start the franchise with some cunning ideas and reasons why the Predators have been coming here for years, but the threads are so weakly constructed that pulled narratively tighter they simply unravel and make you bemoan the fact more could be on the way.

In the jungle's final sequence, Black reminds us why The Predator has worked, with some smartly and tautly executed kills which fill the quota. It's easy to see why he went for a band of misfits taking on the bad guy, as it's suited to his writing style, but mostly, thanks to misplaced comedy that's out of step with the zeitgeist, this flags badly when it should zag wildly.

If this was an attempt at a reboot of the film, the seventh in the series, and one that was meant to evoke the 80s trappings of the originals, Black has failed The Predator miserably. If it was an attempt to produce something scrappy, something unenticing that lacks a warmth and empathy for its characters, then it's succeeded wildly.

Either way, the set up for the sequels feels like a missed moment, a killer film without a killer edge and a film that in parts leaves a distinctly unsavoury taste in your mouth.