Gaming: Left Alive stealth trailer; Fallout 76 and Anthem next steps; unreleased Sega game to debut

With just more than a week to go before Left Alive arrives with a rare brand of sci-fi survival action that doesn’t involve zombies, Square Enix is showing off its biggest glimpse yet at the actual gameplay.

For a game that bills itself as a shooter, there’s a surprising amount of sneaking around. No one’s going to confuse any of the game’s three protagonists with Solid Snake, but with the stealth and two-legged mechs (spied around the 10:00 mark and beyond), there’s definitely a little Metal Gear flavor to this 22nd-century tale of geopolitical intrigue and robot war machines.

Check out the clip below for a peek at nearly 15 minutes of Left Alive gameplay:

Left Alive comes from veteran developers Toshifumi Nabeshima (Armored Core), Yoji Shinkawa (Metal Gear), and Takayuki Yanase (Mobile Suit Gundam 00, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Ghost in the Shell: Arise) and unfolds 150 years in the future in the fictional Eastern Europe city of Novo Slava, ground zero in a war where “wanzers” — those robot mechs — dominate the streets.

Sharing a story universe with the Front Mission series of military games, Left Alive storms onto PlayStation 4 and Steam on March 5.

Fallout 76 and Anthem — a pair of ambitious, online-only games that some reviewers and players think hit the market a little rough around the edges — are each getting road maps for the coming year that aim to demonstrate their developers’ commitment to refining the overall experience.

Bethesda shared its plans for Fallout 76 in a blog post, outlining a trio of upcoming content and story updates set to roll out between now and the end of 2019. The first, Wild Appalachia — “a series of new quests, features, events, crafting systems and more,” according to Bethesda — is set to arrive next month and will roll out additional time-released content from March through May.

Two other major content events, Nuclear Winter and Wastelanders, will follow in the summer and fall. You can check out Bethesda’s timetable for Wild Appalachia in the graphic below:

Credit: Bethesda Softworks

Similarly, BioWare’s Anthem might have gotten off to a rocky recent start, but developers are already sharing their plans for expansions and improvements down the line.

In a BioWare blog post, Anthem revealed its 90-day road map while teasing more story and events farther into the future, calling its first year narrative “Act 01 – Echoes of Reality.” Details on each of the upcoming additions are light, but you can check out the road map page for a full month-by-month listing of all the enhancements Anthem has in store — including Phase I of this year’s “Legendary Missions,” which is slated to arrive in March.

Finally, how’s this for obscure (and totally awesome)? A previously unreleased 2D shooter originally intended to release for the Sega Genesis is at last making its console debut — more than 20 years behind schedule.

Analogue, makers of retro console reboots like the upcoming Mega Sg, has announced it’s discovered and will release a renamed version of Hardcore, a long-forgotten shooter that never found its way onto the original Genesis system back in the day.

Developed by DICE — the same studio that would go on to make Star Wars: Battlefront for EA Games — Hardcore was a scrolling shoot-‘em-up that got lost in the shuffle of transitioning from one console generation to the next, according to Game Informer. Per that report, the game will be bundled in with the upcoming Mega Sg under a new title, Ultracore, “for legal reasons.”

Analogue’s $190 Mega Sg console — and Ultracore with it — are slated to bring the ‘90s back when pre-orders begin shipping this April.