Square Enix Presents Roundup – Black Panther, Forspoken And Life Is Strange
Square Enix showed off their upcoming slate this past week in the latest company jumping on the Nintendo Direct bandwagon. The show was fairly tight with a good amount of announcements, and the following is a roundup of everything shown at the Square Enix Presents show from March 2021.
The show kicked off with an extended Outriders, or Outriders ‘101’. I don’t think there was anything new here, it was mainly a trailer to get people hyped for the launch on April 1st. The trailer was well put together and the hype for the game was bolstered in the last couple of weeks with the news it’s coming to Xbox Game Pass on day 1 if you have an Xbox (it’s coming to PC later).
Square Enix then showed off some info about Lara Croft’s 25th Anniversary, mainly with partnership news and they talked about her being in the latest season of Fortnite. There’s also a release of the recent Lara Croft games Trilogy as a package. There was a bunch of mobile news including Just Cause, Hitman Sniper Assassins, Space Invaders Go and a few other Taito partnership titles like Darius and Bubble Bobble.
Avengers was up next with news from Crystal Dynamics and we got a look at Hawkeye in action plus a glimpse of the improved roadmap. Things certainly had gone very quiet for Avengers but it looks like there’s some decent content coming down the pipeline for this one finally. That includes the announcement of Black Panther coming to the game sometime in the near future, in a genuinely exciting moment for the game. I wasn’t too interested in Kate Bishop or Hawkeye, but Black Panther is probably enough to bring me back to the game that had so much promise from 2020.
Balan Wonderland was shown off next, which looks absolutely mad. I am interested in anything co-op these days after having such a great time with Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, but that is a high bar to reach for other titles.
The new Life is Strange: True Colours was shown off at great length, which stars Alex Chen who has to solve the mysterious death of her brother. She appears to have empathy-based powers to understand what the other characters in the game are feeling and why. The trailer really went on and the dubbing was very strange. However, the game does look interesting even though the presentation was odd. The first two Life is Strange games, Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Before the Storm are getting remasters and coming out in autumn 2021.
Finally Project Athia, the PS5 excluisve, was given a new trailer and a proper name with Forspoken. There are Dragons in the game, and we also got a first glimpse of gameplay with the main character traversing across the environment at speed and with agility. I didn’t really have many expectations for this one off the back of the cinematic they showed last year for the PlayStation 5 console reveal, but this trailer certainly got me excited and I’m looking forward to what Forspoken turns into. This one is due to come to PS5 in 2022, then later to PC.
