As we teeter on the edge of January ready to tumble headfirst into a new month, Microsoft has revealed the latest selection of games coming to Xbox Live subscribers by way of February’s Games With Gold, which this time include Never Yield and Broken Sword 5.
Never Yield – or rather, Aerial_Knight’s Never – is a 3D side-scroller in the vain of endless runner that sees players stampeding across a strikingly designed future Tokyo, all to a winning soundtrack created by Detroit Artist. Eurogamer never got around to reviewing this one, but Christian Donlan seemed quite taken with its rhythms a while back.
“It’s gently colour-coded,” he wrote, “which affords an idiot like me an extra bit of help, but what really makes the game special is the things you’re leaping and rolling and sliding to avoid… Drones buzz overhead, vans chase you and then collide, or flip through the air almost taking your head off. There’s a fantastic colourful aesthetic to it, and with its speed and sense of thwarting injustices, I suspect the final game is going to give me Jet Set Radio flashbacks.”
Broken Sword 5, meanwhile, is the most recent instalment in developer Revolution Software’s long-running adventure series (although, in this case, ‘most recent’ means ‘over eight years old’). It sees protagonists George Stobbart and Nicole “Nico” Collard embarking on yet more Templar-bothering, conspiracy laden escapades, all in the classic point-and-click adventure mould. Eurogamer liked this one well enough back in the day, awarding it an old school 7/10.