Previews// PAX Round-Up: Dungeons: The Eye of Draconus, Enter the Gungeon and Eon Altar

Various weapons are available and all have a limited amount of ammunition. This can result in some very tricky situations, as running out of ammo never ends well for the player as they must downgrade to a less favoured weapon in order to carry on dealing damage to the seemingly endless wave of foes.

Another aspect of Enter the Gungeon is the means by which bullets are dodged. Rather than simply running from them Enter the Gungeon encourages the player to run towards them and then just at the last moment, jump and roll. As the player does this, they leap over the bullets in Max Payne style with a poof of smoke emitting from underneath them as they do so. I found this mechanic to really satisfying and actually likened it to the barrel roll found in 1942, a very old Capcom up and downy shoot'em up.

The visuals are the highly-pixelated yet fluid graphics that are very common in Rogue-likes with the exception of the vast array of bullets that fill the screen. The animations of the players and the environment around them is stunning and is really eye watering to look at when it's in full flow.

I found Enter the Gungeon to be a cracking game that I really will be looking out for when it appears sometime next year for the PS4, Windows PC, Linux and Mac.

Eon Altar
Developer: Flying Helmet Games
Format(s): PS4, Windows PC, Mac & Linux

Eon Altar is a game I first stumbled upon at PAX East 2013, where Flying Helmet Games was attempting to merge tabletop RPG's with the digital age. Wait, that sounded pretentious didn't it? 'Digital age'? Who even says that anymore? People from the 1980's certainly but not those of us who are living in the 21st century where we carry phones that have the power to turn on lights and watch videos of cats!

Speaking of advanced smart phones, this is the very thing Eon Altar uses in order to control the characters on screen, besmirching the traditional controller in favour of a second screen that almost everyone has.

Two years after I first saw Eon Altar much has changed with the removal of the need for a large tablet device, which no one owns, to be replaced with a traditional PC that displays the gameplay on a TV screen. This screen cannot be directly interacted with, resulting in all of the touch controls of the original iteration of Eon Altar largely transferred to the mobile device used to control and manage characters. By making this change Eon Altar suddenly becomes a much more viable title thanks to people already owning the technology the game requires.

I played Eon Altar at PAX Prime 2015 for a good 30 minutes as I went my way through the demo at the show floor. The communication between the iPad Mini that I held and the PC running Eon Altar was extremely stable, despite the vast array of WiFi signals flying about the expo hall.

Testing it again at home based on the first episode of release on both my iPad Air 2 and iPhone 5S I had no problems playing it and found it to be even more responsive when played in a controlled environment. So much so that I'd love for other games to adopt this technology as it is very revelatory to have a dynamic controller than can also provide information to the player during play. The closest I have seen of this is the PS Vita and Nintendo Wii U systems offering some form of second screen control, but none have come close to what Eon Altar provides.

The interaction between the main screen and secondary one is seamless, as movement is via the touch control creating a marker on the screen that is similar to a mouse pointer. If an enemy is targeted then an attack can be launched based on the player character's abilities. These are selected on the second screen device via a radial icon menu and a description of the enemy being attacked. The various abilities are easily available, removing clutter from the main screen.

After playing this latest iteration of Eon Altar I came away excited and wanted to play the game much more after I had left the booth, which is very much to Eon Altar's credit. The fact that it works so well in a controlled environment is also a massive boon to what is ultimately an unproven concept, until now that is.

Eon Altar is out now for Windows PC and supports Android and iOS devices that are no older than 3 years. Note that the controller app is completely free and the player is only required to buy the actual game itself in order to play.