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15 years ago (somehow) I visited Belfast whilst they were filming the GAME OF THRONES pilot

The Internet informs me that (mostly) celebrated medieval fantasy TV show Game of Thrones entered production just over fifteen years ago, despite it clearly actually being twelve minutes ago. Although I was unable to wrangle a set visit, I did get to meet many of the cast and crew at special events hosted by George R.R. Martin for fans in Belfast that week.

On 3 November 2009, he arranged a book signing in Easons Bookstore in Belfast, Northern Ireland, near the main set at the Paint Hall Studios (aka Titanic Studios). Ostensibly this was for his newly-released fantasy anthology Songs of the Dying Earth, a tribute collection to the classic fantasy author Jack Vance (fellow author Matt Hughes was on hand as well), although obviously most fans turned up with copies of the (then) four Song of Ice and Fire volumes in hand.

George R.R. Martin and Matt Hughes, authors in SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH.

Sophie Turner & Alfie Allen

Kit Harington

Ron Donachie & Richard Madden

Maisie Williams & Sophie Turner

Ron Donachie, Alfie Allen, Kit Harington, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Richard Madden & George R.R. Martin

Multiple Game of Thrones actors stopped by and were happy (if slightly bemused) to sign books: Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark), Maisie Williams (Arya Stark), Richard Madden (Robb Stark), Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy), a very tired Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Ron Donachie (Ser Roderik Cassel). Rory McCann (Sandor Clegane, the Hound) stopped by briefly as well, but alas too quickly for me to snap a picture.

That evening we repaired to McHughes, a bar in the city which had been booked out (for "G.F.F. Martin," apparently). We were joined by Esme Bianco ("Red-Headed Whore," soon to be renamed at George's insistence, "Ros") and several members of the crew, including extras, stunt coordinators and some of the vfx team. One fan even proposed to his girlfriend (she said yes) and George R.R. Martin was proud to announce that Richard Madden had been officially crowned "Best-Dressed Man in Scotland", in absentia because he was obviously filming in Winterfell.

Sophie Turner, Esme Bianco & Maisie Williams

Esme Bianco, Richard Madden & George R.R. Martin

Ron Donachie & George R.R. Martin

George was unusually forthcoming and let us in on some juicy plot info from the upcoming Dance with Dragons, but further revelations were curtailed when Ron Donachie joined us and immediately engaged George in discussion about American football. This was one of GRRM's blog posts come to life.

The main points of discussion were some nervousness, as the pilot was expensive and HBO had not done fantasy before. Everyone agreed the books were great and if they were adapted well, the show could find some success. But I think if you'd told anywhere there that it was going to become The Biggest Show on Television, arguably worldwide, for the next decade, and spawn multiple spin-off projects, I think you'd have been laughed out of the room.

But, of course, that's how it went down, and for the next few years fan gatherings would be held in Belfast to celebrate the show (initially ad hoc but then turning into the more formal TitanCon convention, which ran annually until 2019). The first spin-off show, House of the Dragon, moved production to the Warner Brothers studios at Leavesden, just outside London, but A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has returned to the original production base in Belfast to resume filming there.

It was a great night and a great set of memories to have.

MechWarrior 5: Clans

AD 3049. Almost fifteen hundred light years from Terra, the self-exiled Clans, heirs to the fallen Star League, live lives of ritualistic combat and the pursuit of honour. The arrival of an exploration vessel from the Inner Sphere shocks the Clans, who hold themselves to be technologically superior and safe from the constant infighting of the Sphere. Faced with the threat of the Inner Sphere powers discovering the Clan homeworlds and attacking, the Clans resolve to strike first, launching a massive invasion of the Inner Sphere which throws the Lyran Commonwealth, Free Rasalhague Republic and Draconis Combine into chaos.

Clan Smoke Jaguar is assigned the task of sweeping through the lightly-settled Periphery and then driving hard into the Draconis Combine. Their first target is the independent world of Santander's Bay, followed by the Combine world of Courchevel and then a determined strike on Luthien, the Draconis capital. A newly-assembled Star (five-mech unit) under the command of Jayden is tasked with helping the Smoke Jaguars seek victory...but their leaders' utter ruthlessness, indifference to civilian casualties and seeking honour only when convenient to them leads Jayden and some under his command to question what they are fighting for.

Five years ago, Piranha Games released MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, a freeform game where you gained command of a detachment of BattleMechs (big stompy robots) and a starship, and guided them to fame and fortune through a mixture of procedurally-generated missions, handcrafted jobs and a lengthy story campaign. The game was released in an iffy state but was rapidly fixed and then expanded through six DLC campaigns to become a very solid game of stompy robot fun in the BattleTech universe, augmented further by a very healthy modding scene. Whilst the game was very solid, its grindy, freeform nature came in for some criticism, so Piranha decided to address that with a new game with a much more focused, narrative approach.

MechWarrior 5: Clans depicts the full-scale invasion of the Inner Sphere by the Clans, arguably the biggest and most consequential event in all of BattleTech lore. BattleTech games are largely set either in the pre-Clan period, which focuses on political intrigue and conflict between the five Inner Sphere powers, or the post-Clan period when the Inner Sphere's rearranged borders and polities are trying to adapt to the Clans' arrival. By depicting the invasion on-screen for the first time (it has been depicted before in Michael A. Stackpole's splendid novels), Piranha are answering the wishes of a lot of die-hard BattleTech / MechWarrior fans.

The invasion is straightforward enough - these bonkers semi-Klingons from elsewhere in the galaxy are trying to invade Earth (sorry, Terra)! - and takes place early enough in the timeline that newcomers won't be lost either. And it's an interesting stroke on Piranha's part to not only have the players fighting for the Clans (the "bad guys" of this story, but only very relatively compared to the ruthless realpolitik-governed Inner Sphere), but arguably the least-pleasant Clan of them all, Smoke Jaguar.

Extensive cutscenes introduce the plot and cast of characters. You get to know your starmates through surprisingly polished and extensive cutscenes, as well as in-battle banter. As usual in these games (forget the number, this is actually the eighth mainline game in the series, not counting expansions), you can customise your mechs before battle, maybe choosing to switch to different models and then choosing weapons loadouts. If you're fighting on a hot desert world, you may want to ditch those lasers for cooler autocannons, but if you're in an arctic environment, you can go hogwild with the pew-pew. You can also choose how much armour you want your mech to carry, and if you want a cool jump jet or not. Outfitting your mech is supposedly made easier by the presence of Omni-pods which have preset loadouts; in practice I found these mostly useless, and tinkering with the loadouts more directly was often more effective. Newcomers who don't know their PPCs from UACs may find the default loadout for each mission to be perfectly fine and stick with that.

You then hit the battlefield and have to achieve objectives, which are usually some variation of "go here and kill all the things," although occasional pursuit, rescue and defence missions liven things up. When battle is joined and lasers and missiles fly, the results are a splendid feast for the eyes, enhanced by the switch to Unreal Engine 5 for this excursion. Not only do you have to pilot your own mech in battle (from either first or third person), but you can also direct your starmates to hold particular areas of the battlefield, target your opponent or follow you. You can also switch to an overhead battlemap for more granular control of the battlefield, briefy turning the game into an RTS (and makes the heart pang for a new MechCommander game), although in practice I found controlling the battle from this viewpoint to be more confusing than from the cockpit.

The game is linear, but at several moments you have a large choice of different missions to select, which you can approach sensibly (do the missions in escalating order of difficulty) or not (do the toughest missions first to accrue the most honour and resources). There is also a big decision you make towards the end of the game which completely changes the final few missions. But the whole point of Clans is to offer a more curated, story-driven experience with memorable characters; if you want the freeform open-world approach, then MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries (or the classic turn-based tactics game BattleTech) is the place to go.

The cutscenes and story are both surprisingly enjoyable. There's little surprising here, the fact that you're playing for the bad guys and become increasingly aware of how evil they are as the game continues makes things fairly predictable, but it's all executed with enough panache and character you can bear the unoriginality. Your five starmates all have their own personality and attitude to things (although I confess I found Ezra and Liam to be a bit interchangeable), and their disagreements are useful in shaping your own attitude to the Clans. The supporting cast are splendid, with a special mention reserved for Cordera Perez, your commanding officer, who is both a spectacularly unrepentant arsehole and has the most outstanding "total dickhead" voice performance I have heard in many years. I am disappointed we don't see more of the famous lore characters, like Leo Showers, the supreme commander of the Smoke Jaguars, who gets a memorable cutscene near the start but otherwise doesn't show up again.

The game is also surprisingly meaty. Normally a game like this - story focus, linear campaign missions - would top out at 10 hours, maybe 15, but MechWarrior 5: Clans lasts around 30 hours of stompy mech action, more if you replay the game to see the alternate ending. This length does mean the game occasionally struggles to keep things fresh - the "shock plot twist" of a late-arriving, heavily armed dropship you have to disarm under heavy fire is used a few times too many - but the campaign moving on between several different planets, the supporting cast changing (as this is a war, and people die) and the story of the war taking several unexpected turns keeps things ticking over nicely. There are several brutal difficulty spikes which may frustrate players, but the ability to switch difficulty levels if a mission is particularly kicking your arse means you can usually find a way of getting past them.

MechWarrior 5: Clans (****½) is a splendidly enjoyable slice of fun. You stomp around in robots blowing things up, against the backdrop of an epic space opera saga which is well-told. The strategy command element adds depth to the game, and you can go down a deep rabbit hole of mech customisation options if you want, to optimise your combat experience. Hopefully Piranha can match the generous DLC they provided for Mercenaries to expand on the war, maybe giving you the opportunity to play for other Clans or maybe crossing over with Mercenaries with a freeform mode. MechWarrior 5: Clans is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, as well as via the Xbox Game Pass service.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

SLAYERS & VAMPIRES: THE ORAL HISTORY OF BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER & ANGEL by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman

In 1997, Buffy the Vampire Slayer started airing. Over the course of seven seasons, it became a pop culture phenomenon and one of the most critically-acclaimed network TV shows of all time. It spawned a hit spin-off show, Angel, which ran for five seasons and did almost as well. The shows introduced a mixture of comedy, horror and character drama that became a template for many series and movies that followed them, but creator Joss Whedon would become an increasingly polarising and controversial figure.

The story of the development of Buffy and Angel has been told before, but Mark Altman and Edward Gross take a slightly difference tack with this 2017 volume by leaning heavily on oral accounts provided by the writing staff and some of the actors. This is a similar format to their earlier two Star Trek books and subsequent volume on Battlestar Galactica (and they have since produced similar volumes on James Bond, Star Wars and John Wick).

Reading in 2024, the book has a slightly different feel due to the well-publicised allegations from 2021 that Whedon created a toxic working atmosphere on Buffy and Angel before he departed both shows (the final two seasons of Buffy were helmed by Marti Noxon and Angel was overseen by a succession of different showrunners, including David Greenwalt, Tim Minear and Jeffrey Bell). These allegations followed earlier complaints that Whedon had bullied castmembers on the 2017 film Justice League, which he'd overseen reshoots on. This book, which just predates those allegations, is surprisingly candid on the fact that working conditions, particularly on Buffy, were often difficult and sometimes unprofessional.

Compared to the authors' other book on Battlestar, this tome is a little more disappointing. This is partially because it tries to cram much more in: twelve seasons of Buffy and Angel, not to mention some bleed-over into discussions about Firefly (the production and abrupt cancellation of which had consequences for Whedon's other shows), as opposed to six seasons of Battlestar (the four for the newer version of the show, the original and Galactica 1980). This means there is less time for discussion of individual episodes, with only the most prominent episodes getting a lot of coverage. Unfortunately there's a lot of repetition here for anyone who's familiar with coverage of the show from web articles and magazine articles back in the day.

There's also an issue in that actors seem much less willing to take part in the projet: there's a much greater reliance here on stock interviews rather than new interviews undertaken just for this book. Only Charisma Carpenter and James Marsters get a lot of new discussion time, Nicholas Brendon gets almost none and stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz are primarily quoted from pre-existing interviews. This absence sees some Buffy critics called in to discuss the show's meaning and accomplishments, and no offence to their expertise, but there's dozens of books out there which have the space to do that a lot better.

The book does do better with the writers' contributions, with the likes of Tim Minear and Dave Greenwalt having a lot to say about television writing and production. Whedon himself gets quoted a fair bit but did not give new interviews for the book, unlike Ron Moore for the Battlestar tome, which makes for a less compelling read. There is some interesting stuff about the mythologising of Whedon, though, and even his most ardent friends and supporters in the book acknowledge he could be mercurial and difficult to work with.

The most fascinating material comes from interviews with Carpenter, who acknowledges her own faults on-set (getting a new haircut or tattoo mid-filming of an episode) and struggling with self-confidence issues, whilst struggling with her treatment by Whedon, who could be kind and generous to her one moment (like giving her a lead role on Angel in the first place) and harsh and judgemental the next.

There is much in the book that is interesting: Minear's journey in adapting to the writing of the show and driving it forwards, and his take-no-prisoners attitude which fascinated Whedon as much as it could annoy other people, is particularly noteworthy. The book also has a genuine emotional moment as it recounts Glenn Quinn's difficulties working on the show and the attempts by co-stars David Boreanaz and Christian Kane to help him out which ultimately did not pan out, with Quinn dying of an accidental drug overdose in 2002.

Compared to the Battlestar tome, Slayers & Vampires: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel (***½) falls a little flat as it has nowhere near as many cast and crew contributing new material to it, forcing it to fall back on well-known anecdotes and interviews, as well as critical analyses that doesn't feel entirely appropriate to the book. There's also too many seasons and episodes to cover even in the generous 520 pages of material here (the Battlestar book gets 200 pages more, and it feels like the two franchises maybe should have inverted that). But there is enough new material, especially on the writing and production process of both shows, to make it worthwhile to established fans.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, SKYRIM and FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS actor Michael Hogan makes first convention appearance since serious injury

In very welcome news, actor Michael Hogan has made his first public convention appearance in almost five years, since he suffered a serious head injury. Hogan is best-known for playing the role of Colonel Saul Tigh in the second iteration of Battlestar Galactica, and subsequently playing the role of Doc Mitchell in the 2010 video game Fallout: New Vegas and General Tullius in Skyrim (2011).

Image from BSGMuseum via Instagram.

Hogan suffered the injury in February 2020, which happened backstage at another event. He was subsequently given excellent but expensive medical treatment, with his family setting up a Gofundme account. His Battlestar costars publicised the appeal. Fans have since contributed almost half a million dollars towards his treatment and rehabilitation.

Hogan made his appearance at the "Salute to Battlestar Galactica 20th Anniversary" convention in Chicago, appearing alongside much of the cast of the show and showrunner Ronald D. Moore. Hogan made an appearance alongside Edward James Olmos (Admiral Adama) and another alongside his on-screen wife Kate Vernon (Ellen Tigh), sporting an eyepatch and his screen uniform in honour of his character.

As part of his rehabilitation, Hogan had to learn to speak and walk again from scratch, no mean feat for an actor who is now 75 years old. Hogan has been supported in his recovery by his family, particularly his wife Susan who has acted as a spokesperson for him, as well as his co-stars. Impressively, he has already returned to work, recently doing voice work for the children's animated series Sonya from Toastville.

This is of course splendid news, and I believe all of his many fans will continue to wish him the best recovery.

RIP Jeri Taylor

News has sadly broken that television producer and writer Jeri Taylor has passed away at the age of 86. She is best-known for her contributions to the Star Trek franchise, including co-creating Star Trek: Voyager.

Jeri Taylor on the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She was a writer and producer on the show from its fourth season, and executive producer during the final season.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1938, Taylor received her BA degree in English from Indiana University in 1959. She later gained a master's degree in English from California State University in Northridge.

Taylor began working in television in 1976, producing and writing for shows including Quincy, M.E., Magnum, P.I., In the Heat of the Night, Jake and the Fatman and Blue Thunder. On Jake and the Fatman she met J. Michael Straczynski, giving him one of his first writing credits on a live-action show.

She joined Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1990 as a supervising producer, starting with the episode Brothers in Season 4. Her first writing credit was the episode Suddenly Human. She would go on to write or co-write episodes including The Wounded, Night Terrors, The Drumhead, Unification, Aquiel and Descent.

For Season 6 of TNG she was promoted to Co-executive Producer and for Season 7 became Executive Producer and effective showrunner (though the term was not used at the time) whilst Rick Berman and Michael Piller were focusing on Deep Space Nine. During Season 6 and 7 she was also involved in the development of Star Trek: Voyager, contributing enough that she was named co-creator of the show alongside Berman and Piller. She was made Executive Producer and effective showrunner of Voyager for its first four seasons. Taylor was closely identified with the writing and character development of Captain Janeway.

She also found time to work on Deep Space Nine, contributing story material for three episodes in its second season.

Taylor's appearance at STLV in Las Vegas, 2021, alongside Voyager actor Garrett Wang, TNG/DS9/VOY script supervisor Lolita Fatjo (for whom Leeta is named) and Voyager documentary director Dave Zappone. Source: TrekCore

Taylor was a rare TV writer who made the transition to novels, penning the novelisation of Unification before writing the novel Mosaic, which explores the backstory of Janeway in considerable detail, and its later sequel Pathways. Unlike most Star Trek novels, Taylor's books were considered of a higher level of canonicity and reliability.

Taylor chose to leave the Star Trek franchise after the fourth season of Voyager, but accepted the position of creative consultant for the remainder of Voyager's run, offering feedback on scripts.

After Voyager wrapped Taylor decided to retire from television altogether, and mostly shunned the limelight. However, in 2021 she attended her first Star Trek convention in Las Vegas and was warmly greeted by fans and fellow castmembers.

One of the more significant figures in the writing and development of Star Trek, Jeri Taylor was a skilled writer and producer. She will very much be missed.

Franchise Familiariser: Cyberpunk 2077 / Red / Edgerunners (2024 update)

Back in December 2020, CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077. The game allowed players to create a character of their own design and then live a life of crime in the late 21st Century metropolis of Night City, California. After an infamously rocky launch, the game was rescued through updates and a well-received expansion, and has since expanded to include a spin-off TV show, graphic novels, art books and board games.

But did you know that the game and its attendant merchandise is merely the latest part of a franchise which is more than thirty-five years old? If you don’t know your rockerboys from your Arasaka corporate suits from your netrunners, a franchise familiariser may be helpful.

Note: this is an update of an article previously published in 2020.

The Basics

Cyberpunk is a science fiction franchise created by writer and games designer Mike Pondsmith, originally published by his company, R. Talsorian Games, in 1988. Pondsmith named the game after the science fiction subgenre of the same name, which in turn was named after a 1983 short story written by Bruce Bethke. This story was actually published somewhat late in the development of the genre, as several previous works had been important in establishing it, particularly Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and John Brunner’s 1975 book The Shockwave Rider, as well as the 1982 movie Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick’s novel.

Pondsmith and his fellow designers have cited Walter Jon Williams’ 1986 novel Hardwired as being extremely influential on the design of the game, along with Dick and Blade Runner (William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, often arguably cited as cyberpunk’s codifying moment, was not read until later in the game’s development).

To make it clearer that the reader is not speaking about the short story or genre, it’s common for fans to refer to Cyberpunk by one of its edition subtitles: Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk v3.0 or Cyberpunk Red.

Each of the four editions of the game is set in a different decade and reflects the passage of time in the Cyberpunk universe. The original Cyberpunk (1988), now almost always referred to as Cyberpunk 2013, is set in that year and depicts a near-future dystopia where corporations have become as powerful as governments and fight one another for supremacy and where takeovers are more literally hostile than you might expect. The game is predominantly set in Night City, a custom-designed and built metropolis on the coast of Morro Bay, California, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and sees players taking on roles such as mercenaries, corporate players, police officers and netrunners, as hackers are known in this world.

Cyberpunk 2020 is the second and most popular and well-known iteration of the game, to the point that “Cyberpunk 2020” is often used to refer to the entire franchise. It was originally published in 1990 and remained continuously in print for fifteen years, accumulating a vast array of supporting supplements and adventures. The game’s rule system, Interlock, was highly praised for being customisable and allowing players to much finely adjust their character’s development through skills rather than being tied into much broader levels (the approach favoured by the medium’s heavyweight game, Dungeons and Dragons, for which Pondsmith had worked on some sourcebooks). The setting was also praised for its attitude and punk ethos.

After experimenting with a spin-off project revolving around young characters who get superhero-like powers from technology, CyberGeneration, the game returned properly in 2005 with Cyberpunk v3.0. The game switched to the Fuzion system, advanced the timeline to the mid-2030s and also adopted a transhuman approach, with much more sophisticated SF ideas such as humans downloading their consciousness into robotic bodies and thus becoming immortal. The setting also dropped some of the aesthetics of the original setting, Pondsmith reasoning that fashion and styles would move on. However, despite some praise for trying to move past cyberpunk clichés and explore more advanced ideas, the game had some negative feedback for exactly the same reason, as well as the change in rules.

Cyberpunk Red (2020) tacitly omits v3.0 from the canon and instead serves as a direct sequel to Cyberpunk 2020, with the timeline now advanced to the 2040s but the old cyberpunk styles and ideas are still very much around. The newest edition of the game also acts as a prequel to Cyberpunk 2077 (the tabletop game and the video game developed in tandem), with Pondsmith confirming that a Cyberpunk 2077 sourcebook updating the Cyberpunk Red timeline and rules to 2077 will follow.

As well as the tabletop roleplaying game and the video game, the franchise consists of tie-in novels and graphic novels, several board games, the first edition of the popular Netrunner collectible card game and the Cyberpunk: Arasaka Plot mobile game.

In September 2022, CD Projekt Red collaborated with Mike Pondsmith, Netflix and the Japanese animation studio Trigger to release Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a 10-episode animated TV series set about a year before the game. The show received critical acclaim, and was credited with spurring fresh interest in both the video game and tabletop roleplaying game. The former was updated with a tie-in mission exploring the fate of some of the characters from the show, whilst the latter received a new introductory boxed set based on the TV series. In December 2023, the franchise received a further boost in popularity due to the release of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, a sizeable expansion to the video game.

Future projects are in development. A second Cyberpunk animated show is in the planning stages, whilst a live-action television series has also been proposed. A full sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, codenamed Project Orion, is also in development. The Cyberpunk Red tabletop roleplaying game is also expanding, with a new setting based in the 2077 time period of the video game expected to launch in 2025, alongside the Night City sourcebook.

MORE AFTER THE JUMP

I'm on BlueSky!

Yes, I am at The New Place as well.

I remain active on the existing platforms for the time being, but with a huge number of my contacts setting up shop over on BlueSky, it seemed logical to set up an account there as well.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

The Lost Caribbean, a world between the living and the dead, ruled over by the menacing Inquisition of the Burning Maiden. Several lost souls find themselves drawn to the Red Marley, a forbidding ship, and a quest to find the treasure of the legendary Captain Mordechai. But the quest will be long and arduous, requiring the recruiting of a crew with...unique talents.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is the third stealth tactics game from Mimimi Games, the accomplished team behind Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (and its standalone expansion, Aiko's Choice) and Desperados III. On a basic level, this is a very similar game to those ones, and if you've played those already (and you should, they are excellent), you can jump into this one without too many problems.

To recap, these games are played from an isometric perspective with you controlling a group of characters with different abilities. Your objective is usually to pass through an area patrolled by guards using a mixture of stealth and violence. You can sneak up behind people and knock them out or kill them, but you have to be careful to stay out of the view of other guards (guards have "view cones" so you can see if you're in view, out of view but if you cause a big enough commotion you'll become visible, or out of view altogether). You can hide bodies in water or undergrowth. You can also queue up actions for characters which they can execute simultaneously, to take down multiple opponents, or cause a distraction to allow your other characters to sneak past.

Each character has different abilities, and in Shadow Gambit the supernatural setting means these abilities are whackier and more creative than in the other games. One character can dip in and out of another dimension, snatching enemies away into another universe, or hiding in plain sight. Another character can put enemies and allies into a massive cannon on her back and shoot them to otherwise inaccessible locations. Another character has a flute he can use to lure opponents off their patrol routes to isolated areas where they can be dealt with quietly. A ghostly character can possess enemy guards and wander around in plain view before triggering mayhem. And so on.

The biggest shift in this game is that it adopts a more of flexible approach. Both Shadow Tactics and Desperados III had a linear succession of missions, with you moving from mission to mission. Shadow Gambit instead has a world map showing the Lost Caribbean, with several islands available to visit (and later in the game, all the islands). You have multiple missions available at any time and can choose between the next main story mission, a character-based side-mission, or a challenge or treasure-hunting mission. Each of the eight characters (nine including the DLC, ten including the character you unlock right at the end of the game) has their own multi-part, optional mission which explores more of their backstory and motivation.

In addition, between each mission your crew regroups on your ship, the spooky Red Marley. There are activities that can be undertaken between each mission, including various character-based quests on the ship. The result is that there's a lot to do in the game, with a greater variety of activities.

This doesn't come at the expense of focus though. Shadow Gambit more or less matches Desperado III in game length (about 35 hours) if you focus on doing the main storyline and character side-missions, but with the optional stuff it significantly exceeds it, giving you a solid amount of value for money.

As with the prior games, the games have solid, characterful graphics, great music and nicely reactive controls. The story is quite entertaining, and the way it interfaces with the game mechanics (never before has "Quicksave" been referenced so much as an actual in-game concept) is very clever. There are some issues, particularly with the game still sometimes getting confused over whether you are trying to move to or target an area on the same level or above or below you (occasionally resulting in your character jumping into the midst of a group of enemies for no discernible reason), something I'd hoped they would have fixed after eight years. But in most cases this can be avoided by rotating the camera to a more favourable angle.

A more interesting limitation is that the game doesn't feel quite as tightly-designed as the previous incarnations. Because the previous games were more linear, they knew exactly what characters would be available for which mission, and could design fiendish puzzles for the specific make-up of the crew you knew would be going on that quest. Here, because any combination of characters (up to 3 out of the eventual pool of 10) can go on any quest, the missions by necessity have to be more flexible, to allow for a wide variety of approaches. This makes most missions feel a bit easier than in the prior games. Conversely that makes Shadow Gambit more forgiving for newcomers, who may find this game more accessible than Desperados III or Shadow Tactics.

More unfortunate is the news that, after completing this game, Mimimi decided to call it a day on game development and shut down the company (although they did deliver several updates and two new DLC episodes for the game beforehand). They will very much be missed; Shadow Gambit completes a very fine triptych of enjoyable, intelligent and satisfying stealth 'em ups.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (****½) lacks the tight and fiendish mission design of their previous two games, but is still a compelling combination of stealth and semi-justified light murder and body-hiding. The game is available now on PC, Xbox X/S and PlayStation 5.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

SUBNAUTICA 2 gets full trailer

Developers Unknown Worlds have unveiled the full trailer for Subnautica 2, their long-awaited sequel their aquatic-based science fiction exploration game/thalassophobia simulator.

The game is set on a brand-new planet, with an entire team of explorers dispatched to investigate the underwater phenomena on this planet. How, or if, the new game will tie into the story and events of Subnautica and its standalone expansion Below Zero remains to be seen.

The game will launch into Early Access in early 2025 via the XBox partner programme. It's unclear what this means for a potential release, for EA or the full game, on Steam or PlayStation. We should get more information next year.