January tends to be a slow month for game releases. Most games are either released in November/early December to hit the Christmas rush or after January to avoid the after Christmas lull. This year is no different.
New Releases
Tuesday January 14th:
Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC) Metacritic
This game is a re-release of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation on the PlayStation Vita. The game has received a, “complete graphical overhaul, re-mastered music and sound effects, a revamped gameplay experience, and new missions”, according to the publisher, Ubisoft.
Since this is a re-release, you can leverage the information about the original game. For example, the Metacritic score for the original is 70. You can read the reviews from Giant Bomb, Polygon, and Game Informer, to name a few.
I would n0t worry too much about any technical issues those reviewers bring up. Any large issues should hopefully be fixed in this release. The reviews for the actual game should be out soon. These will tell you if the issues are still there or if any news one were introduced.
Rating: Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD is rated M (Mature) for Intense Violence, Blood, Suggestive Themes, Language, and Crude Humor.
The Banner Saga (PC) Metacritic
The Banner Saga is an epic role-playing game inspired by Viking legend. Hand-painted landscapes portray a world eerily suspended in perpetual twilight. Cities and towns begin to crumble into chaos. Heroes abandon their hearths and homes to traverse the snowy countryside, gaining allies along the way to help battle a strange, new threat.
Rating: The Banner Saga has not been rated by the ESRB. You can read more about why here.
News
The biggest video games news so far this year has come out of CES this past week. CES is an electronic show so most of the news was hardware related.
The biggest news for gamers was from Valve. They announced their Steam Machines last year. At CES, they talked more about them, including giving some information about their partners that will be building Steam Machines. Here is Polygon’s recap of the announcement.
I will be writing more about the Steam Machines soon.