The full lineup includes SteamWorld Dig, SteamWorld Dig 2, SteamWorld Heist, and SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. Don’t let the names throw you off; these are very different games set in the same steampunk robot world. The good news is that they’re all great in their own right. 

SteamWorld Dig and SteamWorld Dig 2 are 2D Metroidvania-style action platformers. The kicker is that, on top of standard upgrade-driven exploration, you can also dig and create your own paths with your trusty pickaxe. This adds a whole new dimension to exploration, and as you dig deeper into the inviting depths, you have to balance your loot haul with your lantern fuel. Think Dig Dug meets Guacamelee, but with robots instead of lucha wrestlers. 

SteamWorld Heist, meanwhile, is like a 2D take on XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It’s a turn-based tactics game which lives and dies on ricocheting bullets – a mechanic that lends incredible depth to its technically flat levels. Finally, SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech is a deck builder not far removed from Slay the Spire. It’s a card-powered RPG set in a world that marries fantasy elements to the robots of SteamWorld, and like everything else on this list, it’s quietly brilliant. 

Image & Form is a lot like Klei Entertainment and ’90s Rare in that it nails every genre it tries with clear, recognizable style. The SteamWorld universe has given us nothing but classics so far, and it’s great to see it come to Stadia, a platform in dire need of must-play games. 

SteamWorld Dig 2 and SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech will be available via Stadia Pro, and all four games will be be on the Stadia store “soon.” 

Here’s how Google Stadia’s promises line up with the reality of its launch (opens in new tab).  

The post Google Stadia gets four great games thanks to the SteamWorld franchise appeared first on Game News.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 

While later entries in DICE’s shooter series have had their moments, the truth is that Battlefield has never been as good as it was in 2010 with Bad Company 2. Sadly, Electronic Arts’ absurd aversion to remastering anything in its back catalogue means the game is currently only playable on PC, and – even then – the remaining userbase is hardly sizeable enough to sustain a long-term commitment to its online firefights. A re-release on Stadia could be exactly what’s needed to bring hundreds flooding back to Bad Company 2’s multiplayer servers, allowing us to relive the glory days of the multiplayer FPS while DICE gets to work on Battlefield 6 for the next generation of hardware. Oh, and more selfishly speaking, I’d finally have another chance to pull of my own RendeZook stunt (opens in new tab) too. I’ll get it one day, you’ll see. – Alex Avard 

Metal Gear Solid 3 

No, I’m not joking. I already own the game on PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, and PlayStation Vita. I’ve never owned five copies of the same game, so that’s worth it right there.

Mostly, though, having only poked around and had a brief look at what Google Stadia can do, it seems really well suited to Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece. Not only could I fire up what is probably my ultimate comfort blanket in mere seconds, the little Google Assistant feature means I could learn a whole lot more about the library of Cold War references, shoutouts, and in-jokes to films that I’m fairly sure don’t even exist.

In my own little dream world where Kojima and Konami are BFFs again, he’d also add in a few fun little Easter eggs for the Stadia version. Imagine Googling “How to kill The End” and he starts redacting all the results to do with your system clock? Perfect. – Bradley Russell

A remastered Mass Effect trilogy 

Imagine Mass Effect with remastered graphics in 4K resolution living on a cloud, never touching your precious hard drive. A fully remastered Mass Effect trilogy would give Stadia another exclusive while allowing it to show off its purported capabilities – it would drive everyone wild, but imagine if it was a fully remastered PC version that was a timed exclusive on Stadia? If the streaming service ever has a sales lag, this would sort that out right quick. I’m evil, I know. There’s not many things that would make me personally buy Stadia, but a completely rebuilt and re-beautiful Mass Effect trilogy would do the trick. – Alyssa Mercante

Resident Evil 4 

I’ll be honest, there’s not a thing Google could realistically do to make me interested in Stadia. We’ll pass sensible climate change regulations before streaming tech outpaces local hardware, and quite frankly, I like the platforms I already own. Also, my internet is good, but not that good. That said, Google Stadia is a golden opportunity to put Resident Evil 4 on another platform. Last I checked, Resident Evil 4 has been ported approximately 11,000 times, and this fact never fails to make me laugh. Google, let’s make it 11,001. I can’t stress enough that it won’t make me buy or play Stadia, but I would really appreciate it. – Austin Wood  

Fortnite  

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Fortnite is the obvious pick here. Epic’s free-to-play Battle Royale is pretty much the only thing I play consistently, and if Stadia allows me to play it at PC quality anytime and anywhere, I’m in. In fact, it’s almost staggering that Fortnite isn’t a launch title. Why wouldn’t you want one of the most popular games in the world on your platform? I can only imagine Epic said no – wanting to keep everything within its ever-expanding ecosystem of launchers – but if the two can find a way to make it happen I’ll happily play Fortnite exclusively on Stadia provided I can carry my account over. – James Jarvis  

Something I couldn’t play anywhere else 

Google Stadia technically has at least one exclusive game: Gylt. But Gylt looks like it could just as easily run on a PS4 or an Xbox One, and it probably will once the exclusivity agreement Tequila Works presumably signed with Google expires. What I really want to see on Stadia is a game that I couldn’t play anywhere else – something that uses all that cloud power Google’s been talking up to create a truly unique experience. Maybe that’s a big-budget action game with all the connected play and permanence of an MMORPG, maybe it’s a deep social experience that’s like PlayStation Home or Second Life but less weird and full of load screens, or maybe it’s something I can’t even imagine right now. Even if it’s something I don’t want to play personally, just knowing that Stadia has allowed a new kind of game to exist would instantly make me excited for the platform. – Connor Sheridan 

The post What game do you want to see on Google Stadia and why? appeared first on Game News.

And listen, I get that these are early days for Stadia and that there’s still plenty of room for improvement and optimisation in the coming days, weeks, months, and years ahead. But the truth is, your experience with this new cloud-streaming technology is only going to be as good as the access you have to super stable, really reliable, heavenly high-speed internet. Google has been relatively forthcoming with that information since the beginning, but it’s only when you attempt to install Stadia in your life that the reality of what that actually means is made clear.

Shattered dreams

My dream of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 (opens in new tab) with my six-year-old laptop in my favourite bar was over before it had even begun. The Stadia controller won’t connect to the Wi-Fi in my second favourite bar either, nor would it let me play in a medley of coffee shops and cafes in the city of Bath, United Kingdom. The future is here, and it is straight-edge. 

Stadia also doesn’t work in the GamesRadar+ offices; my secondary dream of pretending to do work while secretly playing Destiny 2 (opens in new tab) at my desk is dead and buried. Stadia wouldn’t work in a hotel I was staying in last week, it didn’t like the hotspot I found as I descended into the London Underground, and it definitely didn’t like the internet connection offered up by First Great Western trains – which means I sat there looking like a total idiot with a mechanical mobile gaming grip attached to my Pixel 3a XL (one of only a handful of Google-sanctioned phones Stadia works with at launch) for nothing. 

And that’s all fine, I suppose. I understand that it isn’t entirely the fault of Stadia – that the reality of the service Google is offering here is clashing up against my expectations, and of the Internet service we have access to here in the UK. The alluring pitch of “one place for all the ways we play” had made it sound as if we would be able to play wherever and whenever without restriction, but that’s simply an impossibility in 2019. You don’t realise how bad the network infrastructure in your local area is until you want to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider (opens in new tab) anywhere but your apartment – the United Kingdom lives up to its famously terrible reputation in this respect, and our download/upload speeds are rarely ever as good as advertised. Stadia also doesn’t work over mobile networks at launch, and hell, even if it did, 5G connections and truly uncapped data limits are nowhere to be seen, so what would be the point?

For the time being then, Stadia (for me, at least) is an apartment-bound experience. That also means that I’m struggling to see how it would fit into my life, as somebody that already spends four-six hours a day playing games. Admittedly, it’s not all bad, because unlike an Xbox One or PS4, Stadia has let me play AAA quality games at a mostly stable quality both in bed and in the bath. Yesterday, I played a couple of rounds of Mortal Kombat 11 (opens in new tab) in the kitchen while I waited for some food to simmer. Last night, when I discovered that my Xbox One X wanted to update and my Switch wanted a charge, Stadia let me immediately jump into Kine within seconds. It might not seem like much, but the rate at which can play (not to mention the speedy load times offered within once you start playing) is truly impressive. There’s something to the instant accessibility of gaming on Stadia that really piques my interest. 

What’s in a connection?

BT tells me I have an active 35.7 Mbps connection. Google tells me I have a 21.7 connection. Were I to listen to the latter, this should be enough to run Stadia stably at 1080p/60FPS, with 5.1 surround and HDR active; listen to the former, I should be able to do all that but with a 4K resolution. Either way, my connection should be good enough to enjoy a solid Stadia experience, but the results have been mixed. 

Let’s start with Stadia magic in action. My laptop – a MacBook Pro from 2013 – does not like games. If anything, it actively hates playing them. Last month, I tried to return to indie-supreme FTL: Faster Than Light via Steam and it sounded as if it was about to hit the 120-decibel limit as it introduced my thighs to the concept of scorched earth. Last week, I tried to boot up Disco Elysium, and it crashed entirely. This morning, I sat in bed playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for a few hours in a Chrome browser window over Wi-Fi with little problem. Sure, there was the occasional hitch and stumble, about on par with how I experienced the game the first time around on Xbox One X, albeit without the prerequisite 99.2GB multi-hour download and install first. 

I’ll be honest, not having to mess around with downloads or updates is such a small quality-of-life improvement, but it feels so liberating. I returned to Destiny 2 for much of the weekend and felt positively aggrieved when I went to compare its performance on Stadia to that of the Xbox One X – the 100GB+ download on console an immediate barrier to entry that Stadia has freed me from. That said, with the Stadia mobile app informing me that to achieve the ‘best visual quality’ I could be looking to offset up to 20GB of data per hour – even if I were to cap Stadia to 720p resolution I’d still be sacrificing 4.5GB an hour – so I’m not yet 100% convinced that this is a welcomed trade-off in the long run. 

The reason I felt the need to go back to Destiny 2 on console to compare and contrast its performance is that I found the shooter’s stability to be a little unpredictable when streaming off of the Stadia servers over Wi-Fi. As smooth and crisp as the single-player games ran for the most part – that of Red Dead Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example – I did crash into some stability issues with multiplayer-focused games. 

When streaming Destiny 2 to my TV over Wi-Fi, with the Stadia controller syncing up with a Google Chromecast Ultra, I did experience inconsistent instances of latency, framerate hitching, and complete connection drops. This would range from my character teleporting around an area to sound triggering seconds after an impact on screen – given that Destiny 2 is capable of running at 60 frames-per-second on Stadia (as opposed to the locked 30fps that’s standard on console) it’s a shame to see such a smooth FPS experience blighted by stability issues. This is over Wi-Fi, of course, but it’s still not the smooth, faultless experience I’d have hoped for given that my connection strength supposedly supports Destiny 2 beyond the recommended minimum. 

While these connection disruptions were inconsistent, they did seem to increase the longer a session was active, although I admit that I have no real metric outside of anecdotal evidence to test that. What I do know, however, is that with my Chromecast Ultra connected to my router via an Ethernet cable, Stadia was a different story entirely. This is the best connection available, and clearly, the way Stadia was designed to be played. It does mean that I’m having to make an immediate trade-off; while I can stream games anywhere in my apartment, I’ll likely experience connectivity issues that will ultimately impact my overall enjoyment. So instead I must sit down and play them on my couch, in front of my TV, where the connection can be hard-wired – but then I don’t know why I wouldn’t just switch on my Xbox One X and play one of these games that way. 

That, in truth, is part of a larger perception issue that Stadia still has to overcome. Outside of launch exclusive Gylt (opens in new tab), an indie horror from Rime developer Tequila works, everything else available on the service is available on other platforms. There’s little true additional benefit to playing any of these games on Stadia over other platforms right now; games like Ghost Recon Breakpoint have exclusive Stadia features in the works, but they have missed launch, while the likes of Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 running performance parity with their PC brethren will only turn so many heads. With Stadia Pro – Google’s premium subscription service – offering little more than a resolution boost up to 4K and the promise of free games in the future (starting with Destiny 2: The Collection), it’s difficult to understand the impetus behind purchasing these games for full-price on a new service, especially if you are already invested in the services (friends/achievements/trophies/clans/etc…) of the other rival platforms.  

Early Verdict

Google Stadia has its problems. At launch, it’s a messy service that will no doubt be remembered for its missing features, strange launch line-up, and obtuse rules surrounding set-up, optimisation, and core functionality. But behind it all, there’s certainly something special here. I’m still not sure how Stadia fits into my life, the steps I could take to make my home a better environment for it, or even who it is for, but under the right circumstances, it works. 

That is in itself impressive. Google has brought cloud-streaming to market in a way that feels more accessible than it has ever done so in the past. That said, there’s still a little ways to go before it feels like Stadia has a clear purpose, outside of Google proving that streaming games off of the cloud and into your home with surprisingly little friction is indeed possible. If the circumstances are right, if your connection is strong, then Stadia feels like a potential pathway towards the future for this industry and game-streaming feels like magic. I’m just not sure our network infrastructure – or the way the wider industry considers streaming – is there just yet. 

Still, I’ll be continuing to test Stadia across the week as more features and games are introduced. I’ll be putting the Stadia controller through its paces, and spending a lot more time online as more players begin to flood the Stadia servers. 

Want to know how Google put together the technology behind Stadia? Then you’ll want to read this in-depth making of Google Stadia (opens in new tab) feature from our sister publication, Edge Magazine. 

The post Google Stadia review in progress: “When it works, its a minor miracle” appeared first on Game News.

During a roundtable session, we took the question to Harrison: If we were to purchase a game through Google Stadia – as an example, a single-player focused experience such as Watch Dogs Legion (opens in new tab) – what would happen should a publisher – in this hypothetical instance, Ubisoft – decide to pull support from the platform a couple of years down the line? As there are no downloads involved in Stadia as a platform, would I still be able to access and play the game that I have purchased from the Stadia servers? 

“Yes, you will still be able to access the game,” Harrison tells me, reaffirming this point as I ask about playing said hypothetical game without restriction and still being able to access my save data: “yes.”

It wouldn’t then, I continued, be another P.T. situation – wherein the game could just disappear off of the face of the planet? “Now, there may be – as we’ve seen in the past – there may be times where a developer or publisher no longer has the rights to sell to new players. That would mean that the game will not be available to new players, but it will continue to be available for existing players.”

Questions surrounding game ownership and preservation are only going to become more prevalent in the coming years, as both the industry and consumers alike continue to grapple with an increasing shift towards a digital-first ecosystem. Still, we will explore all of that – along with a host of other unanswered Google Stadia questions – in greater depth later this week when our interview with Harrison goes live on site. For now, however, it’s good to know that purchasing a license to play a game through Google Stadia is withstanding even if a publisher or developer decides it wants to pick up its ball and run home. 

We’re tracking all the best Amazon Prime Day game deals (opens in new tab) right here. 

The post Google Stadia games and saves will still be accessible even if they are removed from the platform, says Phil Harrison appeared first on Game News.

Some news can’t wait for #E3. Tune into the first ever #StadiaConnect this Thursday 6/6 at 9AM PT for exciting announcements, games, and more → https://t.co/dKmKakQeQp pic.twitter.com/mZRagFGh4kJune 3, 2019

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We probably won’t get any ooh-and-ahh hardware reveals because Google Stadia doesn’t have a console. It’s a service, and Google is aiming for it to live on just about any device that can connect to the internet (with a screen that’s big enough so you can see what’s happening). The optional, wifi-enabled controller has already been announced, and it looks pretty neat in a white plastic minimalist way.

Google has already confirmed that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Doom Eternal will both be playable on Stadia, but that’s a pretty slim lineup on its own. More than 100 studios already have Google Stadia dev kits, so chances are we’ll see what a nice little chunk of them are up to. And it’s also about time we see the first fruits of Stadia Games and Entertainment, the new internal Google division being headed up by Star Wars Battlefront and Assassin’s Creed veteran Jade Raymond.

We’ll watch the whole thing (while grumbling about how E3 keeps expanding throughout time like a Star Trek plot device) and bring you all the news as it happens right here. Make sure you study our E3 2019 schedule (opens in new tab) so you don’t miss any of the announcements as they start to stack up!

Read our Google Stadia hands-on (opens in new tab) for our first impressions of how the new service works, or watch our latest Release Radar for a recap on everything games and entertainment this week.

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