INQUISITR.COM / Entertainment

New Video Game Releases for the Week of July 13, 2014

By Jonathan R. Clauson
Published on: 06:33 PST, Jul 10, 2014

The new video game releases for the week of July 13 showcases the barren landscape that is the summer release schedule. The week’s offerings are very limited, even amongst the scheduled PC releases when compared to the previous week’s list.

ATLUS will head up our breakdown of the new video game releases for the week of July 13. Abyss Odyssey is a 2-D action side-scroller which bears similar presentation to Vanillaware’s Dragon Crown. The game is also part dungeon crawler as each of the three characters you can play as must descend into the abyss. The catch is that each floor is procedurally generated, giving the player varying the difficulty as well as layout of the floors. Like many loot based games, the harder the room, the better the loot. Couch co-op as well as online co-op is featured in the game

Abyss Odyssey is developed by ACE Team and will be published by ATLUS.

Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015 is the latest iteration of the popular collectible card game, originally published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. The latest edition of the game marks the 21st anniversary of the game with a story centered around Garruk Wildspeaker, who was cursed by Liliana Vess. The single player campaign directs gamers to build a deck powerful enough to take down the accursed planes walker. Aside for the single player game, there is the immensely popular multiplayer section.

The 2015 edition will feature five different levels: Innistrad, Theros, Ravnica, Shandalar, and Zendikar. Each level will have its own theme.

Speaking to Polygon, brand manager Liz Lamb-Ferro is confident that the breadth of content offered by Magic will be enough to attract the players who want more depth. She stated in the interview:

“If they’re looking for that deep strategy, if they’re looking for something that has a richness to it that goes beyond the immediate action-based card play, Magic has it. Once you get into Magic, there’s the story-line side of it, the strategy of figuring out how to assemble that deck.”

The depth is easily seen in the amount of cards gamers can collect. The base game will launch with a deck of 60 cards with a possible amount of 14,000 cards available total. Even with the tutorial that “walks you through everything” the amount of cards is a daunting total to wrap your head around, especially if you are coming from the most popular game currently available on the market, Hearthstone from Blizzard.

Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015 launches on the Xbox One, Xbox 360, iPad, Kindle and PC for $9.99.