WHEEL OF TIME TV series cancelled after three seasons

Amazon has decided not to proceed with a fourth season of its fantasy adaptation, The Wheel of Time. The decision came after significant deliberations at the streamer, as the show's commercial performance had left it right on the edge of being cancelled or renewed.

The Wheel of Time TV series adapts Robert Jordan's immense, 14-volume fantasy series of the same name, published between 1990 and 2013 (with Brandon Sanderson completing the series after Jordan's untimely passing in 2007). The books have sold over 100 million copies and for many years, until the success of Game of Thrones, were the biggest-selling epic fantasy series after only J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books. The series had been optioned for both television and film several times, by NBC, Universal and Warner Brothers, before Sony Television and Amazon finally got the project across the line.

The show aired its first season in 2021 and subsequent seasons in 2023 and 2025. The show initially attracted mixed reviews from newcomers due to its exposition and lore-heavy approach to storytelling, and from book fans for the large number of changes and compressions from the books, particularly the decision to give one of the characters a wife (who doesn't exist in the books) and immediately killing her to engender sympathy. Despite a strong cast, led by Rosamund Pike as Moiraine, the first season suffered significant production problems resulting from COVID (including one castmember not returning after lockdown and severe limitations on production due to social distancing) and the finale was heavily criticised for not being very clear in its storytelling and an overuse of unconvincing CGI.

The second season saw a marked improvement in critical reception, mainly due to the addition of compelling new actors including Ceara Coveney as Elayne and Natasha O'Keeffe as Lanfear, and a more successful adaptation of the Seanchan storyline from the second novel. Again, a muddled finale attracted criticism.

This year's third season saw a large improvement in the critical reception, particularly the fourth episode which was able to hyper-focus on just a few crucial chapters from the book and delivered them on-screen with skill. The seventh episode was also well-received for concentrating on a single huge battle sequence.

The show's commercial fortunes were more mixed, with Season 1 seeing a very strong performance that dropped off for Season 2. Season 3's performance seemed to be on the level of Season 2's, with a slight dip but then signs of a longer tail developing (the show returned to the Top 10 streaming charts this week, almost two months after the season had concluded). Pre-release commentary suggested that a renewal for Season 4 would be dependent on a marked improvement of the show's Season 2 performance, which did not happen. This is ironic as Amazon apparently considered renewing the show for Seasons 3 and 4 together, but ultimately decided not to proceed.

Even without that, it appears that Amazon were still looking for ways to renew the show. There seems to have been creative affection for the project inhouse at Amazon, and it is a significantly cheaper investment than The Rings of Power, whose second season drop-off in viewers seem to have carried it below Wheel of Time's level, which may spell uncertainty for that show's future after the forthcoming third season (despite an expensive pre-purchasing of the rights to make five seasons). The show also seemed to be a solid performer in several overseas territories, including India (likely thanks to the presence of Indian actress Priyanka Bose in a key role). It appears that Amazon held discussions with Sony on paying a lower licencing fee or reducing the show's budget. However, the show was already seen as a relatively low-budget project shot with fiscal efficiency in custom-built studio facilities in Prague. Lowering the budget further was likely not deemed possible without compromising the show's production value and making it impossible to deliver the massive battles and magical displays from later books.

Sony will also be ruing the cancellation, having paid eight figures to secure the television rights in a 2016 deal with Radar Pictures and iwot (a rebranded Red Eagle Entertainment, who secured the Wheel of Time TV rights in a 2004 deal with Robert Jordan). Sony may shop around the project to other venues but it's very unlikely to find a new home in the current, more fiscally conservative TV environment. Additional Wheel of Time projects including a proposed prequel feature film and video game are in development from iwot, but the cancellation of the TV show is not likely to help their prospects either.

Some may celebrate the end of the TV show as it means a future adaptation can be more faithful to the source material. However, with streamers and studios looking to cut costs and reduce episode counts further in the future, and a faithful Wheel of Time adaptation requiring a much higher number of episodes (at a much greater cost overall), this is an unlikely outcome.

One good piece of news is that the TV show resulted in improved sales of the novels, with more than five million additional copies of the books being shifted since 2021.

The Last of Us: Part II

Four years have passed since Joel and Ellie's epic trip across North America. They have found a safe haven and new home in Jackson, Wyoming, which has been fortified against the threat of the infected, but have grown estranged. A chance encounter outside the town with a woman named Abby, a member of a group based in Seattle called the Wolves, sees Ellie making her way to that city in search of revenge. But both young women are being driven by circumstances to make harsh choices to survive.

The Last of Us: Part I is regarded as one of the best video games ever made, its combination of a strong narrative, some of the best voice acting in gaming history and survival-horror-combat mechanics being quite compelling. Inevitably, its massive commercial success and critical acclaim demanded a sequel, which Naughty Dog Studios finally delivered in 2020, with a remastered version for PlayStation 5 and PC now available. The question is if they could satisfy the orbit-high expectations for that sequel.

The answer is, sort of? The Last of Us: Part II is larger and longer than its forebear, with way more action setpieces, massive explosions and furious last-ditch battles than you can shake a stick of dynamite at. It also ramps up the emotional and storytelling stakes with shocking deaths, brutal injuries and hardcore moral questions which don't have pat answers. The Last of Us: Part II is a lot to take on board, and some of its ideas work incredibly well whilst others fall flat on their face. At its worst, Part II is bloated and messy, not always confident of what it's trying to do or trying to say. At its best, it's a compelling horror story where the horror doesn't come from its slightly expanded repertoire of fungoid-zombie monsters, but from humans and what we are capable of.

The game divides its 26-ish hour narrative into four distinct sections: an opening section in Jackson where we touch base with the characters from the first game (and some newcomers), followed by two sequences in Seattle and an epilogue taking place elsewhere. The core of the game takes place across three days, which we see from both Ellie and Abby's perspectives. From Ellie's view Abby is a monster who needs to be eliminated, whilst from Abby's her actions are fully justified in retaliation for some of the more questionable things Ellie and Joel did in the first game. The game switches perspectives to allow the player to experience both points of view. This is an interesting device as I can't remember too many games that allow you to play as the protagonist and antagonist; Grand Theft Auto V flirts with the idea through Michael and Trevor's opposing viewpoints but doesn't fully commit (both being frequently forced to team up against much more threatening, obviously outright villains).

Much more common are those games where the player commits heinous acts which they try to justify through self-defence or the ends justifying the means, but this doesn't stop the moral corruption of the soul from such heinous acts. Far Cry 2 and 3, Grand Theft Auto IV and, most notably, Spec Ops: The Line, all explore this moral murkiness in a full-on manner. The Last of Us: Part II isn't quite as alone in this space as it seems to like to think.

Graphically, the game is beautiful, with impressive character models (that extend to more than just the main protagonists this time around), outstanding scenery and very good lighting. It's not quite cutting edge (and some of the skybox city backgrounds feel distinctly archaic), but still impressive, with responsive controls. The game's PC port isn't the most technically stable, though, with my play-through blighted by a memory leak that caused it to crash every two hours or so without fail. It doesn't seem like a universal problem, though.

From a gameplay perspective, things are pretty similar to Part I. You move through an area looking for the way to progress forwards, whilst evading or defeating enemies and scrounging for supplies, ammunition, collectibles and new weapons. Areas can be large or small, sometimes relentlessly linear but sometimes a more open area consisting of multiple houses, shops or rooms. Part II encourages thorough exploration, although sometimes at the expense of logic: the narrative constantly urges you to get a move on, so it can feel weird to take ten minutes out to thoroughly explore a laundromat, sliding through a skylight to open a locked door and toing and froing between neighbouring buildings to solve a puzzle to open a safe filled with supplies. The game has a good stealth system, allowing you to distract and eliminate enemies silently, even the mushroom-fuelled undead, but this can be a bit hit and miss at times. The game continues to cheerfully (and stupidly) refuse to let you move bodies, meaning you have to either trick enemies into going where you want them or "steer" them there whilst holding them at knife-point.

Direct combat is more satisfying this time around, with a more robust shooting model and a better selection of weapons, including silenced SMGs, pistols, revolvers, crossbows, shotguns and longbows. You can also create tripwire-bombs and shrapnel grenades as well as molotovs. If anything, the game gives you so many options for direct combat that it's often faster and more efficient to simply cause some noise and obliterate the enemy as they converge on your location, especially since looting enemy troops is also the best way of acquiring ammo.

This combat-heavy focus is a bit bewildering after the first game, which emphasised stealth and made most encounters with both human and myconoid enemies tense affairs throughout the game. Part II by contrast turns both Ellie and Abby into action heroes, each fully capable of storming a camp of a dozen or more highly-trained enemies and eliminating all of them in short, bloody order. It's hard to invoke terror in your horror game if your characters can fairly casually blow that horror away with a shotgun firing napalm shells like something out of The A-Team. However this does result in the very fun roguelike optional challenge mode, where you guide a character through several maps in succession before fighting a boss, unlocking new characters and weapons as you go.

Whilst the gameplay is solid, this is a story-focused game and it's fair to say that the game has been divisive. The game is not particularly interested in giving us too many likeable characters or sympathetic factions: the Wolves and Seraphites have very different motivations but ultimately are two sides of the same coin, and the late-emerging Rattlers are just cliches. The characters are also put through the ringer so much that some scenes start to feel like torture porn. The Last of Us: Part I was a story driven by hope, but Part II is fuelled by rage and vengeance instead. It's a darker game that flirts with outright nihilism, like writer Neil Druckmann wants to be the Cormac McCarthy of video games but doesn't have the chops for it, and sometimes risks being the "late-stage Walking Dead showrunner of video games" instead. Similarities between the two franchises are inevitable and sometimes possibly intentional, but I'm not sure that's what he had in mind. It largely falls to our protagonists' sidekicks, Dina and Lev, to keep some kind of beacon of light shining for them, but it's a mighty thin light at times.

The game's length (half again that of the first game) and structure is also a bit questionable. When we switch perspectives, we rewind three days and play through those days again from Abby's point of view, but it takes a good seven or eight hours of gameplay for her storyline to synch back up with Ellie's, which is a long time to leave a cliffhanger dangling. Abby's storyline is pretty good, and paced better than Ellie's (though you might feel like you could go a while before visiting an aquarium ever again), but it doesn't feel like the structure entirely works. Maybe intercutting between the two would have been better, though that may have impacted the mystery that Ellie is investigating in Seattle.

Ultimately, The Last of Us: Part II (***½) is a game that doesn't make life easy for itself. Turning in a cookie-cutter sequel of "moar adventures with Joel and Ellie" would have been safe and easy. Instead, embarking on this Heart of Darkness trip of duelling demands for revenge and "whose righteousness is more righteous anyway?" was a riskier path, and easily more interesting. Games don't take enough risks, and taking this kind of risk with a major AAA franchise is impressive. Structurally and in terms of pacing the game can be a bit of a mess, but its action is far more satisfying than the first game. Whether players are prepared to put up with 26 hours of bleakness and moral murkiness is another question, one that five years of (at times, combative) discourse has failed to fully answer.

The Last of Us: Part II is available now on PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC. The Last of Us TV series is currently airing its second season, based on the first half of this game, right now.

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

Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut

Tsushima Island, 1274. A quiet Japanese island lying in the straits between Korea and Japan is suddenly invaded by an expeditionary force of the Mongol Empire, led by Khotun Khan. Lord Shimura leads a stalwart defence but is captured in battle; his nephew Jin is defeated and left for dead. Rescued by Yuna, a thief, Jin vows to help liberate the island, rescue his uncle and drive the invaders back into the sea.

Ghost of Tsushima is an open-world, action-adventure game that was originally released on the PlayStation 4 and 5 in 2020. The game has now been reissued on PC in an enhanced format, with its expansion Iki Island included.

The game plays like a lot of other open-world games of this type. You control a dude with a sword and have to direct him around a map covered in icons, committing spectacular amounts of violence. The game mixes together main story missions, as Jin continues his operation to liberate the island, with stand-alone side stories. The game also has a mechanic where Jin builds up a band of loyal companions and can undertake further quests to solidify their loyalty and learn more about their backstories. Finally, the game sprinkles in optional activities like bamboo-cutting, archery contests, shrine-visiting and, er, lighthouse-igniting.

Mixed in with this is combat. A lot of combat. Jin is a samurai skilled with his sword and the game goes all-in on depicting the complexities of sword fighting, at least as much as it can. Jin can make light and heavy attacks, dodge and parry, but also has four stances of differing utility: he has a solid stance for dealing with swordsmen, a fluid one for getting around people with shields, a dodge-based one for dealing with pikes and a stance that combines weapon and unarmed moves to take down larger enemies. These mechanics can feel a little daunting at first but the game's learning curve is solid enough to let you get to grips with them. Jin can also use two types of bow and an assortment of tools and weapons, including smoke bombs and, slightly incongruously for a 13th Century-set game, a grappling hook as good as any you'll find in a contemporary-set stealth game.

The key thematic conflict of the game is that Jin has been trained to be honourable, to only face his enemies head-on in direct, fair combat. But to take down a numerically superior enemy of astonishing brutality, Jin soon finds this is not practical. His rescuer Yuna encourages him to learn the ways of stealth, moving quietly, stabbing enemies in the back and luring enemies into traps, skills which Jin learns reluctantly but soon realises are necessary. As the game continues, the invaders become more brutal and merciless, forcing Jin to become the same, until some of his former allies no longer recognise who he has become.

Nothing hugely new here, but the execution is superb. In fact, Ghost of Tsushima's crowning success is that it doesn't really do anything new at all, but it looks and plays so well you don't really care. Graphically the game isn't throwing around as many polygons as a 2024 release, but the art style is so vivid and often beautiful that it's irrelevant (with the bonus that the game plays incredibly well on even older hardware). Sure, you're running around doing a lot of busywork, but that busywork is thematic: finding fox shrines, locating inspirational spots to compose haikus, challenging a local warlord to a tense duel or liberating enslaved villagers. Presentation and, as the youngsters say these days, "vibes" go a long way to making a very familiar structure really enjoyable. You can enhance this further by playing the game in Japanese with subtitles (my preferred approach) or even in black-and-white "Kurosawa mode" (although I found this to be more satisfying as a gimmick rather than for long-term gameplay). My main problem with the game was one of my own making: I played this game in close proximity to Horizon Forbidden West, a completely different game in terms of setting and story, but virtually identical in terms of structure and format, and that occasionally left me feeling a little burned out on visiting another question mark on a map.

Combat is pretty good, with some great setpiece battles, but even swordfights with random raiders can be enjoyable. The game is certainly not Dark Souls, but it's fiendish enough in that enemies will anticipate attacks if you just spam the "hit" button, forcing you to change stances on the fly and adapt to circumstances as they evolve. Combat can be surprisingly tactical as you weigh up stealthy and loud approaches. In fact, more than a few missions made me feel like I was playing a zoomed-in version of 2016 classic Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, such was the wealth of options at hand for infiltrating a castle or enemy camp in an underhanded way. The game throws in boss fights on occasion where the normal combat options go out the window a bit and the game almost turns into a beat 'em up with large enemy health bars and very specific tactics being needed to take them down. The expansion even adds cavalry and mounted attack options which spices up the endgame.

The open world map is typically massive, although the game doesn't suffer from the same scaling issues that other games set in real-world locations do. Being able to climb El Capitan in Yosemite and see San Francisco in the distance in Horizon: Forbidden West is a bit silly, but Tsushima Island is much less famous and the massive map is able to capture the 40-mile-long island a bit more convincingly in terms of scale, even if it's not a 1:1 representation. The environmental graphics are absolutely superb, with some atmospheric moments achieved solely through exploration, like stumbling into a forest carpeted with bright flowers with deer running around (or, less fun, a hostile bear).

The story is solid and Jin's characterisation is pretty good as the game unfolds. Your companion characters Yuna, Lady Masako, Sensei Ishikawa, Monk Norio, merchant Kenji and ronin Ryuzo all have elaborate story arcs of their own, including their own enemies and demons they have to confront before they can join you for the final battle. Voice acting is exemplary throughout, and some of the animation for these characters is extremely effective.

One complaint is that the game does not do a great job with reactivity. Throughout the game you explore the problems of being honourable versus dishonourable, but the game doesn't really track what you are doing. If you play the game as honourably as possible, always defeating enemy in open combat, never stab anyone in the back etc, the story doesn't really react to that and instead pretends you've been skulking around the island like a ghost (which becomes your nickname). Alternatively, if you do sneak-murder your entire way through the game, other allies will chide you on being too generous and enjoying the stand-up fight too much, endangering yourself and the cause too recklessly. It's a bit weird.

The game also has an odd approach to difficulty, by making difficulty apply to everyone. Play the game on Easy and you gain a lot of extra health, but the same happens to the enemy, leaving them tedious arrow-sponges that taken an age to kill. Playing the game on Hard paradoxically makes the game easier, as enemies drop in just a couple of hits (so do you, but you can mitigate that straightforwardly with better armour and increasing your health through side-tasks).

These are not major issues. I did find some elements of combat a little questionable, such as un-dodgeable attacks and some wonky physics where you'd be sent flying in completely the opposite direction to where you should be according to actual science. But minor amounts of jank in an open-world game are to be expected, and Ghost of Tsushima is actually better than most at this.

The Iki Island expansion offers an extended coda to the main game as you return to the island where your father died crushing a rebellion, and have to try to ally with the inhabitants (who have not forgotten your family's brutality) against the Mongols, creating a set of knotty moral quandaries. Unfortunately the main villain on this island is tedious, and the expansion has them capture and drug you at the start, meaning you periodically suffer weird-out visions. This sometimes has you trying to find a new dye or archery competition and then suffering some freak-out vision for five minutes that you could really do without. Still, most of the expansion is very good in terms of the story and new enemy types it introduces.

All told, I completed the main game and expansion in a combined 68 hours, which felt okay, maybe a little overstuffed. Obviously you can bring that down a fair bit by not trying to 100% every side-activity, so the game has some flexibility there.

Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut (****½) is a highly enjoyable game. Yes, it is another find-the-question-mark map game, like so, so many others, but a beautiful visual style, excellent voice acting, challenging-but-exhilarating combat and some good writing make it a constantly engaging experience. Just remember not to play it too close to other open-world map games, otherwise you may end up experiencing a little burnout. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 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.

Horizon Forbidden West

Aloy and her allies have defeated the malevolent HADES AI and apparently saved Earth from destruction. But it's clear that their actions may have only delayed Earth's demise, not prevented it. Aloy sets out to track down and eradicate all trace of HADES, aided once more - if only for his own inscrutable purposes - by the redoubtable Sylens. Word of a new threat leads Aloy to the Forbidden West, the lands beyond the mountains, where she discovers the possibility of restoring the terraforming AI GAIA to full function, and with it, Earth itself. But naturally, there are numerous complications standing in the way.

Horizon Forbidden West is the sequel to the excellent Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), a post-apocalyptic open world action-adventure game which posited the crucial question, wouldn't it be fun to fight giant robot chickens and T-Rexes? Forbidden West asks the question, basically, wouldn't it be fun to do that some more but with prettier graphics and I guess in California this time? And the answer remains yes, with some caveats.

As before, you play Aloy, the Nora orphan raised as an exile who ended up saving at least three kingdoms' worth of people. In a slightly comical opening sequence, Aloy loses most of her badass skills and equipment from the last game, forcing you to spend a good chunk of the sequel just getting back to parity with where you were before. This would be more frustrating if it wasn't fully expected. Still, Aloy has access to more gizmos, tricks and options this time around, along with many more upgrades for her weapons and tools. In fact, the array of options on offer in Forbidden West is somewhat overwhelming, even compared to its generous forebear.

Also as before, you wander around the map engaging in a mixture of main story missions which further the primary plot, side-missions of varying degrees of interest and complexity, and various repeatable missions which are helpful in grinding your character's experience and skills, but don't vary much from one to the next. There are also a vast number of collectibles, optional activities and achievements to look at, although Forbidden West does a good job of looping these back into the game's worldbuilding; flight recorders aren't just items to be checked off a list, but they also contain vital information on the last days of the war against the machines before the old world (our world roughly forty years from now) crumbled.

The backstory and worldbuilding was Zero Dawn's greatest success, with the mystery of just why the world is now full of robot goats being explored in tandem with the forward moving plot of the game. With that backstory fully revealed by the end of Zero Dawn, Forbidden West might have struggled to have found something to match it. Fortunately it succeeds: the main storyline of Forbidden West is more compelling this time around, with more factions competing for control of the titular area, each drawn in a lot of detail and with a lot of cool backstory, often diving back into areas that Zero Dawn perhaps glossed over. Forbidden West delves into a lot more detail of the ancient war and fleshes it out with stories about stirring last stands and people whom history now calls heroes, but were just ordinary folk trying to do the right thing.

That said, Forbidden West does have a problem in that the primary antagonists don't show up until surprisingly late into the game and aren't given a huge amount of detail (mainly because they're so powerful it's implausible that they'd keep showing up and Aloy would somehow survive). The focus remains on the much less formidable tribal enemies you meet earlier in the game and on the machines.

As with Zero Dawn, the machines remain the main draw of the game. They are fantastically-designed, beautifully-animated and almost always a pleasure to fight. Each machine has strengths and weaknesses, requiring careful analysis before engaging them, and more subvariants this time around means you can't just assume one tactic will work against all machines of the same type. Forbidden West is a more tactical game this time around, requiring some forethought and preparation before the destruction begins. That said, the game does somewhat nerf the first game's more formidable weapons, with Tearblast Arrows now much less effective and vastly more expensive, which feels a little bit of a cheap move from the developers.

The map is larger than Zero Dawn's and the scale is much grander. You start in the Rocky Mountains and make your way to San Francisco (and, in the Burning Shores expansion, Los Angeles), taking in Las Vegas and El Capitan in Yosemite Park along the way. There's a much greater variety of biomes, with snow in the high mountains contrasting with the wastelands of the Nevada Desert, and the skyscrapers of San Francisco and LA becoming a fun, new type of environment to engage enemies in. As before you can proceed on foot, with an enhanced array of parkour moves, grappling hooks and a new paradrop shield which basically eliminates ever having to worry about falling damage again. You also get a new method of travel near the end of the game which is very cool (although it does perhaps expose the artificiality of the map design which is much less apparent at ground level). The writing is mostly solid, aside from the aforementioned lack of depth to the eventual main antagonists, and the characters are mostly likeable.

The game does perhaps falter a tad in pacing. At around 90 hours for a reasonably completionist playthrough (all story and side-quests, most of the collectibles that add story information, but not the grindy hunting grounds), it's a significantly longer game than Zero Dawn and on occasion your eyes may glaze over at how many question marks are covering just the small part of the map around you. Obviously you can motor through the main story much more quickly, but only with the nagging feeling you are leaving yourself underpowered for the main quest by not taking on side-gigs. That said, the story does do a good job of refreshing itself every few hours by introducing new ideas, backstories and characters. The game does have some minor technical issues, like wonky physics (being hit by an enemy and shooting off in a direction never intended by gravity gets old after a while) and occasionally iffy collision detection, but these seem mostly designed to not let Aloy get realistically crushed like a gnat when she's hit by a 15-ton rampaging deathbot, and only occasionally directly inconvenience you.

The game's only other major flaw - if you think it's a flaw - is that it really does not move the needle from the first game's paradigm. Forbidden West is really just more Horizon for people who really enjoyed Zero Dawn, even down to many of the controls being the same. Launching on later hardware, it is a much prettier game, and certainly a larger and more epic one. But it can't quite surprise or innovate in the way the first game did, and I'd hesitated to suggest playing them back-to-back as burnout over ~150 hours of the same kind of gameplay would be a real concern.

The PC version of the game also ships with the Burning Shores expansion, which takes Aloy to the ruins of Los Angeles in search of a new enemy. This is a very solid expansion, adding another ~15-20 hours to the main game with new locations, new mechanics, new robots, new enemies and new allies. It also has the benefit of being much more focused than the base game, with a more constrained map that's easier to 100% explore (despite some new obstacles to travel, but also new traversal options like boats).

Another complaint might be that Forbidden West is the middle part of what is clearly now a trilogy, with the game ending on a major cliffhanger that we'll have to wait quite a long time to see resolved. But there's enough juice in the concept that I think it can sustain a third game to wrap up the saga.

Horizon Forbidden West (****½) can't quite match the original game's freshness or superb backstory revelations, but it's still a compelling and fun action-adventure game (with light RPG elements). It may outlast its welcome, or risk doing so, but for those looking for a game to lose themselves in for a long time with lots of combat, exploration and reasonably effective storytelling, it does the job well. The game is available now on PC and PlayStation 4 and 5.

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

Concept art for abandoned ROBOTECH movie emerges

This was a few months ago now, but Kotaku published a look at some of the concept art created in 2018 for the abandoned live-action movie version of Robotech. The original source was concept artist Col Price, who has also worked on video game series like WipeOut and Battlefield.

Due to various legal issues, the film couldn't use the original design for the Veritech (aka Valkyrie) fighters, so had to create their own. I have to say, these look pretty badass as replacements. In the foreground one of the fighters is in Guardian mode for VTOL and hovering.

The artwork is mostly faithful to the original concept and premise. In the original 1985 Robotech - itself derived from the 1982 Japanese anime Macross - a massive alien spacecraft crashlands on an island in the South Pacific. The world, which is on the verge of a catastrophic war, agrees to together to explore the alien spacecraft. They then decide to rebuild it, and use the technology they loot from the remains to build a whole new military to defend the planet in case the aliens come looking for their missing ship. Over the course an entire settlement of over 70,000 people, Macross City, springs up to support the reconstruction effort.

The concept art gets across the sheer scale of the SDF-1, which is almost two miles long, with Macross City (pop. 75,000, although that starts dropping very quickly) utterly dwarfed by its bulk.

Ten years later, the worst-case scenario comes true and thousands of alien ships belonging to the Zentraedi - towering forty-foot humanoids - enter our Solar system to recover the ship, which by now has been renamed the SDF-1 (Superdimensional Fortress One). The SDF-1 and the Robotech Defence Force mount a ferocious defence of the planet, with the SDF-1 crew planning to hyperjump the ship behind the alien fleet and destroy it in a flanking maneuver. Unfortunately, they don't fully understand how the hyperjump works and end up warping themselves and all of Macross City to the orbit of Pluto. The hyperjump system vanishes in transit, forcing them to recover survivors from the (fortunately airtight) shelters and return to Earth under normal engine power, which takes almost three years. Fortunately, the alien fleet ignores Earth to track down the SDF-1, resulting in pitched battles at Saturn and Mars.

An interesting new idea is having massive rail guns located on rigs in Macross Harbour to provide AA cover for the SDF-1, as this Zentraedi gunship finds out to its cost.

The concept art is from the earliest part of the story, after the SDF-1 has crashed on Earth and the fortress is being rebuilt by humanity. This section is skimmed over in the original source material, which has a series of slides and a voiceover explaining what happened in the interim. However, Japanese prequel series Macross Zero explores this period in more detail.

The CVS-01 Prometheus, a supercarrier manned with Veritech fighters assigned to patrol the area around Macross Island. The Prometheus goes on to play a continuous role in the story (not pictured: its submersible assault sister-carrier, the Daedalus, which has an even more impactful one).

This version of the movie was never made, as James Wan decamped to make Aquaman. Andy Muschietti (IT: Chapter One and Chapter Two) stepped in to develop a different version of the film but he ultimately left as well. In 2022 it was confirmed that Rhys Thomas (Hawkeye) was developing yet another version for the screen.

It has to be said this concept art is extremely impressive, even though this iteration of the script (which reportedly was more of a generic SF flick with the Zentraedi just attacking Earth and the rebuilt SDF-1 defending against them) barely bore any resemblance to the original story outside of the premise, so from that point of view it's probably a good thing the project did not make it any further.

"I feel the need, the need for speed. And to sometimes transform into Jetfire, I guess."

This version was also stymied because Sony did not have access to the original Robotech designs due to ongoing litigation between the Japanese creators of Macross and Harmony Gold, who redeveloped the show as Robotech. Most of these legal issues were resolved in 2021, opening the door to a live-action movie using the original designs, or perhaps at least more faithful versions. It may also be the project might now have more legs due to the success of Top Gun: Maverick; a film which emphasises the fighter pilot storyline more heavily could do well (as an aside, the original Valkyrie/Veritech fighter was inspired by the F-14 Tomcat). Skull Squadron reprezent!

A Robotech/Macross live-action project will probably make it to the screen at some point in the future, but who knows when.

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

The Last of Us: Part I

Twenty years after a fungal parasite devastated humanity, killing billions and transforming millions more into mindless animals, Joel and his partner Tess are surviving in the ruins of Boston, working for and amongst other groups to get by. When Joel is contracted by a freedom-fighting group known as the Fireflies to escort a 14-year-old girl, Ellie, across the country to a research base, his first instinct is to refuse. Convinced to undertake the mission, Joel and Ellie find their journey to be arduous, difficult and beset by betrayal and dashed hopes.

Originally released in 2013, The Last of Us became one of the torchbearer games of its generation, arguably the last classic game released for the PlayStation 3. It was later remastered for the PlayStation 4, turned into a critically-lauded HBO TV series, and it's now been fully remade in the same engine as its successor, and (finally!) given its first release on PC. So how does the game hold up in 2024?

For the most part, reasonably well. The Last of Us: Part I (as this edition is now known) is an effective game combining a linear, narrative-driven adventure with elements from the survival, horror and action genres. The game is played in third person and sees the player controlling Joel - and, occasionally, Ellie - as they traverse each level. Levels can vary from being very tight and linear to more open, with more choices of what routes to take and what side-areas to explore for supplies. Ammo and materials are in low supply throughout the game, encouraging thorough exploration, but some areas are also extremely dangerous, with huge waves of enemies threatening to attack if you linger too long or make too much noise. The Last of Us is an effective game of choices and trade-offs.

Still, those used to the dominant open-world genre of the present day may find the game confining. Although you can go off the beaten path a little, it's not long before a locked door, surprisingly dense hedge or inconveniently-crashed car stymies all progress in a particular direction and you're forced back onto the exact path the game wants you to take. As someone who's occasionally railed against the often-needless bloat of open-world games and felt nostalgic about more directed game experiences, I did find the lack of choice in the game quite old-fashioned. Of course, the game is almost a dozen years old at this point, so it's hard to entirely hold that against it.

The game's combat and stealth systems are fairly robust. It's possible to fully stealth most missions, and this can turn the game into a very tense game of cat and mouse as you study enemy patrol routes, sneak up on them from behind and take them down without anyone else realising they're gone. There's some awkwardness in how this is done - you can force enemies at gunpoint to relocate to an area where their body will not be located, but you can't carry their dead bodies around - but it is an effective and tense way of picking enemies off without alerting the whole lot. However, once you realise that combat is rarely loud enough to attract enemies from more than a couple dozen feet away, the temptation is go in all guns blazing. The game accounts for headshots (and sometimes tries to stymie them with armoured helmets) and close-range weapons like shotguns can take out all but the hardiest enemies with one shot.

The weapons roster is robust, with pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles sitting alongside knives and the stealthy bow. Depending on the situation (indoors or out), weather conditions and enemy (human, animal or cordyceps), your weapons shine in different situations. The only awkward fit is an assault rifle, which is not very fun to use and shows up so late in the game that they might as well not have bothered.

The narrative is pretty solid, although I found the experience of having watched the TV show first did make the game narrative less tense: obviously the show spoils the general direction of the story and also has time for much more dialogue and in-depth characterisation, which can't help but leave the game's story feel a little undercooked in comparison. It's still a pretty solid story, but does not land as well as it did in 2013. The Left Behind DLC - included here at no extra charge - has better writing and a more refreshing, original structure. The voice acting is, famously, excellent throughout.

The game's status as a remake does create a rather schizophrenic feel. Graphically, it looks amazing with some of the most well-detailed environments you can see in a current video game (only the fantastic Alan Wake II reliably outshines it, with moments bordering on the genuinely photorealistic), and some terrific lighting and weather effects. However, movement and animation can both be clunky, and human characters look decidedly uncanny-valley-ish (the care lavished on Joel, Ellie and a handful of other characters is not shared by the random mook enemies or NPC allies). The suspicion here is that 2023/24-level textures have been dropped onto 2013-era level design and maybe even models, creating a weird duality that doesn't quite work. Don't get me wrong, it looks great and is preferable to playing the OG 2013 version, but the illusion isn't as sold as well as it could be. It also doesn't help that the game's original PC release was blighted with technical issues. These have mostly been resolved, but the game is fairly punishing on modern hardware.

The Last of Us: Part I (****) is a very solid, enjoyable game which tells its story with skill. It's no longer as fresh as it was back in the day and the remake doesn't feel as cohesive as it could, but it's still a thoroughly engrossing gaming experience, with some excellent set-pieces, vistas and voice acting. The game is available on PC and PlayStation consoles now. A sequel, The Last of Us: Part II, is available now on PlayStation 4 and 5, with a PC version expected a couple of years down the line.

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

WARLORD CHRONICLES TV series to air in August

The Winter King, the TV adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's acclaimed Warlord Chronicles trilogy, will start airing on August 20th this year.

The show was only commissioned last September and was put into rapid turn-around, with Bad Wolf Productions (A Discovery of Witches, His Dark Materials, Doctor Who) prioritising the project which they'd been developing since 2015.

The novels take the form of a historically-inspired take on the legend of Arthur, with armour, weapons and military tactics based on real 5th/6th century sources. The books are narrated by Derfel Cadarn, a relatively junior member of the Knights of the Round Table. In the novels, Arthur is not a king but a warlord, a mercenary commander who is chosen to act as regent for the true heir to the throne, Prince Mordred. Britain at this time is a seething morass of competing religious, political and cultural influences, divided between the Roman occupiers whose time is fading, the native Britons and the invading Saxons. Arthur has the unenviable task of forging these forces into a coalition to ensure peace in the islands, aided by Merlin, in this version of the story a lecherous high priest.

The series stars Eddie Marsan (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) as King Uther, Iain de Caestecker (Agents of SHIELD) as Arthur, Ellie James (I May Destroy You) as Nimue, Nathaniel Martello-White (I Hate Suzie) as Merlin, Stuart Campbell (Rogue Heroes) as Derfel, Daniel Ings (The Crown) as Owain, Valene Kane (Gangs of London) as Morgan, Jordan Alexandra (Mammals) as Guinevere and Simon Merrells (Knightfall) as Gundleus.

The series is produced by Bad Wolf and parent company Sony Television, and will air on MGM+ in the United States and ITVX in the United Kingdom.

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered

Eight years into his superhero career, Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man) is a lab assistant working for Dr. Octavius on the next generation of prosthetic limbs. Parker finds juggling his job, personal life and his secret identity as Spider-Man challenging, resulting in his breakup with his girlfriend Mary Jane. Parker finally succeeds in helping the NYPD (via his contact, Yuri Watanabe) take down the dreaded Kingpin, Wilson Fisk. However, the peace does not last long: Fisk's absence results in a power vacuum, which various villains and mobsters rush to fill, leading to a full workload for Parker.

Way back in 2009, Rocksteady Studios hit on the idea of making a really good Batman game, after many years of mediocre titles. They created Arkham Asylum, a superb game that featured great combat, excellent stealth, a strong storyline and outstanding use of the existing Batman canon. Insomniac Games seem to have taken a leaf out of their book in developing Marvel's Spider-Man, the first attempt in a few years to create a definitive Spider-Man video game.

The game is, as you'd expect, an open-world title set in a sort-of realistic depiction of New York City. Playing Spider-Man, you can websling between buildings, create ziplines and engage in spectacular amounts of combat against a variety of enemies, both super-powered and mundane. The storyline borrows from the entire Spider-Man canon and sees Parker teaming up with allies like Yuri, Miles Morales, MJ and Black Cat whilst fighting enemies including Mr. Negative, Kingpin, Electro, Rhino, Scorpion and Vulture. The game also mostly presents Otto Octavius as an ally, but of course even a casual Spider-Man fan will know his destiny and the game evokes some impressive tension as he drifts closer and closer to his eventual fate of becoming Doc Ock. The game even has some time for nuance, with Peter having a complex relationship with Mayor Norman Osborn and security contractor Silver Sablinova.

The game's golden feature is its depiction of webslinging. Traversing around New York City as Spider-Man is a delight and for the first time a video game evokes those dizzying memorable shots from the 2002 Spider-Man movie. The game strikes an excellent balance between making movement spectacular and giddying but also allowing you to retain control over what's going on. The PC version of the game goes further with mouse movement allowing for much greater, pinpoint accuracy in where you put your webs, when to jump and when to arrest your movement. The game features the most pointless fast travel system in existence, since just getting around New York is so much fun that you'll never want to use it (apart from the achievement it bafflingly gives you).

As well as jumping around, you'll spend an inordinate amount of time in combat. Spider-Man is not the beefiest guy in the world and can't take a lot of punishment, so combat is very movement-focused, with Spider-Man landing a few punches and then jumping away before he can be crowded. You can use your handy spider-gadgets to help in battle, and as the game continues you acquire new Spider-Suits with various abilities to help you keep up with your enemies' own escalating abilities. You can also use scenery to help in combat (flinging manhole covers into an enemy at high velocity never gets old, although curiously it never kills anyone either), and if fighting on a rooftop you can propel your opponents off the roof, to be webbed to the side for arrest later.

Combat is fun, but there's a recurring feeling that there's too much of it. Spider-Man is not Batman and although he certainly gets into fights with opponents, the massive brawls with up to several dozen enemies at a time do feel rather out of character. Whilst the game tries to keep new enemy types coming at a steady clip, it does feel like most are variations on a theme (small brawler guy, ranged attack guy, massively huge dude who needs to be weakened before being taken down, and then jetpacks!) and as you level up and get new abilities, combat becomes less challenging and more of a chore. It doesn't help that the Arkham series influence here is at its most overt: the sound effect that rings out when you knock someone one for good is identical to the one from those games. Stealth is also undercooked: although Spider-Man can use stealth in some situations to make combat easier, the game usually makes it impossible to 100% complete objectives through stealth alone, which is disappointing.

The game's central storyline is pretty good, though somewhat predictable. It makes solid use of Spider-Man's villainous roster and there's a good mix between very familiar characters and more obscure characters from the comic book. An ingame codex allows you to keep everyone straight and the game's journal system and excellent map both do a good job of keeping you up to date on what's going on. The voice acting, in particular, is superb, though Spider-Man's quips do repeat a bit more often than you'd like.

Where Spider-Man suffers a bit is how it organises its side content. To overcome the problem of a Ubisoft-style game eventually burying the map screen under quest markers, this game doles out side-activities very slowly, and seems to expect you to do all of the side-activities the second they become available. This is doable because they are relatively constrained, such as twenty new "help the police" missions popping up in one go and it being possible to polish them all off in under an hour or two. However, taking this view (and, if you don't, the map really will end up buried under icons) eventually makes you realise you're spending maybe 85% of the game on these filler tasks versus 15% on the actual story. The Arkham games had the sense to avoid this by being happy that it was possible to see off the entire game in under 20 hours by giving you much more meaningful content to enjoy. Marvel's Spider-Man lacks that confidence and keeps throwing filler content at you so it takes over 50 hours to 100% the game's story and side-missions, plus its DLC and filler. The game does risk outstaying its welcome.

But it also stays just on the right side of that gap. Swinging through New York City, stopping a jewelry shop robbery, then tracking down some rogue drones (requiring an exciting chase through midtown skyscrapers) before polishing off another story mission can be great fun. If immersion is a key goal of any game, Spider-Man certainly makes you feel like the hero in a very convincing manner.

You also can't fault this edition when it comes to content. As well as the original game, it includes the three-part City Never Sleeps DLC, which adds up to a pretty decent-sized game's worth of content (even if it does over-rely on similar enemy types to the original game). The game has spectacular graphics and the options for your suits are excellent. You can even put on the OG Spider-Man suit from the original run of the comics which also turns you into a 2D flat character (though everything else stays in 3D, which is disconcerting), or you can put on the Into the Spider-Verse suit to become a more stylised 3D animated figure. A mild disappointment might be that the Spider-Man: Miles Morales stand-alone expansion is not included (that will follow in a separate release at later date), but the package is pretty generous.

Marvel's Spider-Man (****) is a compelling, fun title that might be the definitive Spider-Man video game experience to date, with a great open world, spectacular graphics and a fun, well-acted storyline. It does have perhaps a bit too much filler side-content, resulting in issues with pacing, and some of the combat experiences go on for rather too long. It also wears its Arkham series inspiration a bit too obviously on its sleeves at times, drifting from homage to simple replication. But the game is fun and has a good heart. It is available now on PlayStation 4 and, in its remastered form, on PC 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.