Spring has finally arrived and Tools Up! is back with an all-new DLC, Tools Up! Garden Party. Gather your friends or play it yourself on PlayStation 4, but hop to it because these gardens need your help!

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The DLC consists of three, separately-released episodes, each with 15 unique levels, new tools, and mechanics, as well as a challenging opponent. While episodes 2 and 3 are coming soon, Episode 1: The Tree House is ready to play now.

What is waiting for you in Episode 1?

What is one of the most important things in any garden? Beautiful and lush green grass of course! It’s so nice to lie on it and look at the blue sky, right? Tools Up! Co. love it too, but there’s lots of work to be done before anyone can rest.

In Tools Up! Garden Party you’ll grow grass from seed. To get the best results though, you’ll have to first pull up any old grass and prepare the soil well for planting. And of course you’ll have to water your seedlings too.

Have you been getting a lot of rain? Because it looks like your lawn is completely out of control! No big deal, just start the lawn mower and give the grass a trim. Wait—we said no big deal, but you know to not run over your friends right? Right? 

If you find a lawn mower to be too difficult a tool, get back to the basics and use scissors or even your hands. Experiment to discover all the ways different tasks can be completed.

Hey PlayStation friends, Simon here from the Roll7 team. It is great to be back to talk about our new game OlliOlli World. Some of you may remember us back when we launched OlliOlli and OlliOlli2: Welcome to Olliwood on the PS Vita, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4. It was amazing to see the reception to our games, and, not going to lie, it wasn’t bad winning a few awards along the way. 

While we’ve released other games, we’ve always wanted to return to our roots with another OlliOlli. One that really nails that feeling of laying down a perfect line of seemingly endless tricks while lofi tracks beat in the background creating a harmony of euphoria and endorphins. We knew if we were to make a new OlliOlli, it would have to be bigger, better, and stronger, err I mean brighter than before. We’ve been working on OlliOlli World now secretly for years, and it is so great to finally be able to show it off. 

Real quick recap for everyone: OlliOlli World is an action platforming game in which you bust tricks with both sticks through a bizarre and whimsical world attempting to achieve high scores, unlock various customizations options, meet wacky and peculiar friends, and ultimately search for the skate gods of Gnarvana. You will need coordination, timing, and some practice to lay down monster combos. Skateboarding can be difficult and while we didn’t want to shy away from that, we wanted to make sure that it is approachable, and you are comfortable cruising around. There is this exhilarating feeling that comes when you stick a hardflip over an especially massive stair set and we want everyone to enjoy that. We hope you get that same feeling in OlliOlli World; the only difference is here those stairs might be over a gushing rainbow river that is home to a colossal squid. Because of course it is…

If you are a fan of our previous games, one of the first things you will notice is the big shift in the art. We loved the retro-pixel feeling of our previous titles, but we knew with OlliOlli World we wanted to pursue a bolder, more vivid, animated style. The world is a bit quirky, and we wanted to take the game in a new visual direction that really allowed us to show it off while also emphasizing this is not a sequel, but a totally new game. A major inspiration was to pull in skate culture, street art, and all the unique crossroads that develop around skating. There is a fascinating intersection of psychedelic elements and trippy influences across these communities. We wanted to create a world in which embodies and shares that essence, yet also feels purposeful despite all its oddity. You’ll see walking ice cream people, business frogs, Milk Shake pools, tubing Grizzly Bears, and other bizarre inhabitants. The locations have some real-world influences but then we injected a heavy dose of offbeat humor that we hope brings a chuckle. 

Another big addition to OlliOlli World is the ability to take multiple different paths through levels. We wanted to provide a new level of freedom to explore this weird and wonderful world so now certain paths will branch off into separate directions. This means you’ll be able to cruise down different paths discovering new side quests and more epic trick opportunities really adding to both the variety and replayability of the game. There are hidden ramps, sneaky jumps, quarter pipes, and other spots in which you can just take a moment to c

Hi everyone! We are very excited to be approaching the launch of Returnal, on April 30, and we wanted to share a few more details on Selene’s journey. This time we wanted to talk about some of the hostile forces she will encounter on Atropos. 

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The planet of Atropos is a dark and mysterious place, and each environment will provide its own unique set of enemies to overcome: from the organic and parasitic creatures inhabiting the Overgrown Ruins, to the cosmic or corrupted entities roaming the sands of the Crimson Wastes, and the mechanical automatons that endlessly patrol the haunting Derelict Citadel… Players will encounter a large variety of different foes, which aside from their unique aesthetics will also provide their own unique gameplay flavor and special attacks.

When creating the organic enemies of Returnal, one of the biggest sources of inspiration for me was looking at bioluminescent deep-sea creatures. In many ways they felt like the most alien lifeforms one could find here on Earth. There is something inherently unsettling and foreign about the deep-sea as an environment for us. The way these creatures move deep underwater, with their long tentacles and bioluminescent highlights, can often appear majestic, beautiful and downright terrifying. It’s also not uncommon for these creatures to use their luminous beauty to allure or distract their prey (for example, with a dazzling display of bioluminescence), and suddenly strike when their prey is least expecting it. This combination of chaotic beauty and nightmarish aggression was something we aimed to capture with our organic creatures’ aesthetic.

Towards this purpose we ended up creating our own special VFX-driven tentacle tech and used it very liberally. These fully dynamic elements bring that chaotic beauty to the enemies we were after, and also created some really satisfying feedback for players as well.

For instance, the bioluminescent emissives on tentacles are strongly highlighted to telegraph oncoming attacks and provide satisfying hit reactions when enemies are shot (or when an enemy is killed, where they blow up in a glorious explosion of severed tentacles). The strong emissive highlights also connect back to our Bullet Hell attacks, whe

The Drone Racing League Simulator, the official game of the Drone Racing League (DRL), the #1 drone racing property in the world, is now on PlayStation 4. If you’ve ever dreamed about flying FPV (First Person View), DRL SIM is the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective way to get the drone skills you’ll need to soar while experiencing the most immersive, out-of-body sensations only FPV drones can provide.

DRL drone and simulation engineers built the simulator with true-to-life drone components, physics, and aerodynamics, enabling players to fly, build and race drones exactly the same as in real life (IRL). The world’s best pilots fly in DRL and train, compete and win professional contracts in the DRL SIM — as seen on NBC, Twitter, Facebook and other premier sports networks around the globe. 

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And now you can, too! Download the DRL SIM today to master these drone skills:

Learn to fly

The DRL SIM features 54 training missions that’ll teach you how to hover, pitch, yaw, and other skills you’ll need to learn to navigate a drone without crashing and breaking the bank on your new drone.

Each mission takes only a few minutes and you can hop around the training as you like, but be prepared: the challenges get harder as you advance. 

You’ll get real-time feedback to help you improve and once you complete the tutorial, you’ll be able to fly high-speed FPV drones IRL nice and smooth — because as DRL pilots know — slow is smooth and smooth is fast. 

Design a supercharged drone

With the game’s interactive workbench, you can choose from real DRL drones flown by the best pilots in the world or design your own supercharged drone through tens of thousands of different combinations, customizing everything from the drone’s size, weight, thrust, prop colors, and more. 

Choose from thousands of motors, batteries and props, licensed from top drone manufacturers, to control the air flow, set top speeds, and control launch-to-flight acceleration rates. Plus, you’ll get to unlock over 50 epic drone skins to cover your quad with a sleek canopy. 

Make your one-of-a-kind drones public to share with other players in the DRL SIM community too, or keep them private and hog that quad for yourself.  

Race like the pros

Race like the DRL pros through a real-time multiplayer m

Welcome back, everyone!

The art of Mass Effect supports and builds a universe in which rich stories and characters can be fully realized. It may sound somewhat counterintuitive, but as artists—especially on this remaster—we want players to be able to experience the trilogy again, or for the first time, without being distracted by the art.

Our goal from the onset was to improve and enhance the visuals while staying true to the original aesthetics of the trilogy that have become so iconic and genre-defining over the past decade. A remaster rather than remake allowed us to build upon the original assets in a way that resembles the polishing phase in a normal development cycle, while also being able to utilize the advantages of much more modern hardware and software.

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Within this blog, we’ll give you an in-depth look at our remastering process with a specific focus on key changes and improvements made to the visuals. Here’s what’s included:

• Building the Foundation
• Modernization Efforts
• Rebuilding Worlds

For those interested in the technical aspects of game development, it’s probably no surprise to hear that changing almost any asset or system can (and will) break something else. When a game is in its final state, it generally resembles a house of cards. The simple process of blowing the dust off, let alone implementing foundational changes like updating the version of the engine, will undoubtedly cause unexpected issues. Remastering a single game is a deceivingly complex process, so creating a proper plan for how best to mitigate risk while reopening three games to full development was foremost on our minds.

We took a three-phased approach to remastering the trilogy.

“The Lazarus Project will proceed as planned.”

Phase 1: Building the Foundation

We started Phase 1 by identifying and cataloguing every asset in the trilogy. How many particle effects, 3D models, textures, levels, GUI (Graphical User Interface) elements, sounds, cinematic movies, etc. actually exist across the trilogy, and on average what are their quality level