Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier (PS4/PC/Xbox One)

[Hero-of-Time]

 

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Debut developer Imaginati has revealed Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, a standalone cinematic adventure game set between the events of 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and this year’s War for the Planet of the Apes. It will be released for PS4, Xbox One and PC this fall.

Published by the new games division of The Imaginarium - the performance capture studio behind the recent Apes films - and executive produced by its founder, Andy Serkis, the game is even being developed on-site at the company’s historic Ealing Studios headquarters, making use of the same performance capture technology facilities as the film series it’s based on.

Set around a year after Dawn, the game centres around a breakaway faction of apes who take refuge in the Rocky Mountains from the ongoing human-ape war, but are forced to descend into a human-owned valley as Winter draws in and food depletes. The story takes its cue from the films, aiming for a morally ambiguous take on the ensuing conflict, with no black and white decisions or clear heroes and villains. Players will take control of both humans and apes - who, because of the game’s standalone story and cast, can live or die based on your decisions - with multiple endings possible depending on their actions on both sides.

Looks to be a Telltale style game. I love the films, as well as TT games, so this has certainly got my attention.

[Fierce_LiNk]

What the fuck? Where did this come from?!

Huge fan of the series, old and new. Good opening trailer. I just pray that it's any good!

[killthenet]

Wow, out of nowhere! I'm very interested in this, a little bummed that it's Telltale style but then I've never played a Telltale game outside of a bit of Back To The Future, is there much action in them these days or it is all conversation options mixed with exploration? Regardless I'm really interested to see how the Apes franchise translates to gaming and this trailer sets a great tone. Fall 2017 too so not long until we hear more concrete details.

[Fierce_LiNk]

1 hour ago, killthenet said:

Wow, out of nowhere! I'm very interested in this, a little bummed that it's Telltale style but then I've never played a Telltale game outside of a bit of Back To The Future, is there much action in them these days or it is all conversation options mixed with exploration? Regardless I'm really interested to see how the Apes franchise translates to gaming and this trailer sets a great tone. Fall 2017 too so not long until we hear more concrete details.

Give the Walking Dead games a try. Definitely worth playing and I rate them highly. I've just finished Season 3 and loved it.

Do eeet.

[killthenet]

2 hours ago, Fierce_LiNk said:

Give the Walking Dead games a try. Definitely worth playing and I rate them highly. I've just finished Season 3 and loved it.

Do eeet.

Seems to be a sale on Telltale games on the PS Store at the moment so have just bought the first season. 

[Fierce_LiNk]

11 minutes ago, killthenet said:

Seems to be a sale on Telltale games on the PS Store at the moment so have just bought the first season. 

So jealous that you get to experience this for the first time. I had such a great time playing through it and was sad to finish the season. Amazing game.

Enjoy!

[Ganepark32]

For those interested, this is apparently set to release on November 21st, in both the US and in Europe. Apparently, it'll be $20/20Euros/£16 which isn't too bad. Definitely thought it would be releasing at a much higher price. Really looking forward to getting hands on with it. It's looking a lot more cinematic than gameplay oriented, with a lot of the sort of Telltale games style choices which seems to be wrinkling a few the wrong way but I'm excited to see where they take the game and it's story. As much as a full blown open world title for Planet of the Apes would be amazing (and it would, imagine swinging through the trees, doing raids on human encampments and the like), a good story will more than make up for the absence of strong gameplay elements if it manages to capture the quality that both Telltales and Dontnod/Deck Nine have done.

[Hero-of-Time]

I completely forgot about this game. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, @Ganepark32

[Fierce_LiNk]

This will be one of those games where I'll be listening to the thoughts from people on here before I get it myself. The idea of it sounds great and it's actually a bit of a shame that we've never had a good game in this series before. In fact, have we ever had any?! There's tons of potential there, imo. It's a really interesting setting and one of my favourite from classic science-fiction.

[Ganepark32]

I managed to get an hour aside to start this last night and so thought I'd give some initial thoughts. First, on the technical side anyone looking to pick it up will need to have at least 40GB of space on their HDD. The PS Store says it's half of that but when I went to pre-load on Monday, I was shocked at how big the file size was as it's larger than full seasons for any of TellTales' games or the Life is Strange games. I'm guessing they've not really compressed much of the stuff to make the file smaller so it was just as well that I'd made a bit of space on Monday for it.

There are a few bugs/issues with it on a technical level, mainly to do with the visuals and some sound bugs. There are some instances where the sound just cuts, which is more annoying because the soundtrack is beautiful so far (and handily, because I pre-ordered it I have it available as a download) and visually, it doesn't look like they've optimised things because you'll see a lot of instances of textures not loading in properly during scenes and then all of a sudden just loading in. I also had an object shoot across the screen from left to right and then click to position in the background and in the first "action" sequence, I had the bar with instructions that appears as the bottom of the screen remain there once I'd progressed beyond that section. So there's a few bugs there that'll hopefully get ironed out. The texture thing can be a bit jarring with how they've structured the game as it's very apparent at time so yeah, I'm hopeful they'll patch that up.

The game is part of the PlayLink initiative that Sony has going on and before you've even seen any of the publisher logo's leading up to the main menu, you're met with a splash screen for this. And it does seem apparent through playing that it's something that's ingrained into the make up of the experience. It's early days from my playthrough but you can tell with the amount of time that they put in place for making decisions that it's designed so that groups playing through PlayLink have enough time to make their choices.

The game doesn't look massively long as it seems there's a Prologue and 4 chapters following this. I managed to playing through until just about the end of the second chapter in my hour or so last night so very much expect I'll be finished the game when I jump on this evening. It's obviously aiming for people to play through multiple times and given the file size of the game, I expect that there are paths and scenes that'll only come about through making certain choices on different run throughs, though from the looks of the trophies it appears as though there are 3 possible endings.

In terms of what's there and how it all plays, it's a very focused narrative with little deviation from that. So unlike other episodic games, there's no additional exposition that fleshes out characters or previous events and having the gameplay condensed right down to focus on the conversations and making choices gives no room to do that. It's an interesting take on this style of game that TellTale have more or less perfected (though the strength of their work recently shows that it may need to progress somewhat) but I'm not sure if the game benefits from it. They're obviously going for an interactive cinematic experience but from what I've played, I feel like I'd want to learn more about the characters, why I should care for some or not and why I should be fully invested in what's happening in the world. This is something which may come in further in but not having that early on has meant that with certain things that have happened, either through my choices or because it's just how the game pans out, there's not been that immediate engagement with the characters to care strongly about it.

This push to drive you through the story in such a rigid fashion and not develop things is perhaps the most glaring issue I have with the game at the moment. I love the world that's been created around the newer Planet of the Apes films (I've only seen Rise I'm getting the trilogy for Xmas to see the rest) and the game is trying to fit into that, managing in some ways. But it feels like it's trying to be the movies, though obviously giving you some choices along the way to create a personal narrative, and doesn't seem to nail it on the head in terms of what is asked of the genre and of games in general so far. It feels more like Until Dawn and Heavy Rain than it does a TellTale game with what they're doing with the story and the focus on this but could do with what the great games in the episodic genre (the Life is Strange titles, Tales from the Borderlands, Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us) did and allow us to build rapports with characters and give us some additional engagement with the world through moving through it.

As I say, I'm probably just south of half way through so some of my gripes may dissipate through the remainder of the game. I am enjoying it so far it's just that I want more in key areas but I can't tell if they've had to hold back due to limited budget or because they want to go with the whole interactive cinematic experience. Either way, I'm interested to see how my playthrough pans out and will give final thoughts once that's done.

[killthenet]

After @Ganepark32's recommendation in last years GOTY thread I decided to pick this up when it was on sale a while ago. I really love the Planet Of The Apes series, the new trilogy was fantastic and seemed to get better with each film so I was interested in this when it was revealed but the Telltale style gameplay put me off getting it at the time.  I finally got round to playing it a couple of days ago and concur with what Ganepark said in his summary in the GOTY thread, it's graphically really impressive - there are a couple of rendering glitches but the animation is fantastic - and the music and performances are brilliant but it definitely suffers a little in the gameplay department, though the flow of the decisions feels more natural than it does in something like The Walking Dead. The ending was a bit weird, felt like it was setting up for a sequel rather than being a satisfying conclusion but I'm glad I played it and there seems to be a lot of scope for improvements if they make another one. Unfortunately the critical reaction to it seems to be pretty negative and so it seems unlikely Imaginarium will get the opportunity to make more.