Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

Shoving people on their arse from long-distance is the superpower of one of the two new characters coming to Rainbow Six Siege with its next free update, and I cannot imagine a wizard more perfect for me. The other new wizard has the ability to electrify deployed wire, shields, and barricades, which is a nice bit of elemental magic but not as good as shoving. Over the weekend Ubisoft revealed 'Operation Wind Bastion', the final update of its third year, showing off the new Moroccan lords and the new Moroccan map one of them calls home. But the important part is: shoving.

The excellent Samsung T5 external SSD is Amazon's Black Friday deal of the day this fine Monday morning (November 19) and you can currently get the 500GB model for just £95, or the 1TB for £189. That's the lowest price both sizes capacities have been in quite some time, according to CamelCamelCamel, but neither is quite as big a saving as Amazon would have you believe.

Every year in December, the RPS team pick the 24 best games from the previous year. We then reveal those games across the month, one a day, and call it the RPS Advent Calendar.

Also every year in December, the Advent Calendar Guessing Game is organised by the fabulous members of the RPS forums, in which readers of RPS trawl through our reviews, features, Twitter accounts, rubbish bins and so on in order to work out our favourite games before we've worked out our favourite games. Anyone can sign up and enter and this year you might win RPS supporter status for the trouble. So why not give it a go?

Since the Overwatch League announced eight new expansion teams for season two, there’s only been one question on everyone’s mind: what colours will they use? At first, it seemed they were all going to be duds, falling back on the sea of blues and reds already dominating the matches. The Chengdu Hunters did something interesting with their yellow kit, but nothing can match the most recent announcement: Hangzhou Spark and their baby pink.

As the dusk draws in, take a minute to poke around at some of the creations from Nina Freeman’s sunset-themed game jam, which tasked developers with making “a game that's romantic, nostalgic, spooky, or anything else that has something to do with the day turning to night” in a little under two weeks.

One part visual novel, one part anti-fascist flesh-mech brawler EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER has released its sixth episode, Hope, wrapping up season one and providing a hell of a tease for the future second season. Questions are answered, questions are raised, and there’s plenty of teeth-gritted, fists-clenched optimism.

Just a quick notice that a bunch of new LucasArts/LucasFilms games have arrived on Steam, including the always splendid Sam & Max Hit The Road. And indeed the far less often remembered management sim, Afterlife. And, er, Episode 1: Racer.

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds’ recent bug squelching period is over, according to its dev team. Executive Plunk producer Taeseok Jang took to Steam to thank players for their “continued support,” give details on improvements to performance and optimisation, and to explain what’s still to come regarding matchmaking, anti-cheat solutions, and the game's 2019 roadmap.

Paradox Interactive have announced that they’re fully integrating tabletop RPG developers White Wolf after they used the suffering of Chechnya’s LGBTQ+ population as set-dressing “in a crude and disrespectful way” in Vampire: The Masquerade. White Wolf will receive new leadership and continue to “develop the guiding principles for its vision of the World of Darkness,” but will “no longer develop and publish these products internally.”

The rest of this post contains discussion of violent homophobia and transphobia, both real and fictional.

You'll often hear Hi-Rez described as a company living in Blizzard's shadow. Sometimes, that rings true. Other times, they go ahead and reveal a black female character for Paladins the week after Overwatch fails to - a character named Imani, a mobile damage dealer that can turn into a dragon. You win this round, Hi-Rez.

They've also revealed plans for the Assembly of Champions, an elected group of eight players who'll collaborate with the devs from the start of next year. I'm at the Hi-Rez Expo in Atlanta, and had the chance to ask Paladins brand director Alex Cantatore about both dragons and democracy.

Story-collectathon Where The Water Tastes Like Wine now has a free companion game, Fireside Chats, which falls somewhere between expansion and demo. The new release includes sixteen fresh stories, each told by one of the main characters that returning players will recognise, as well as the existing first chapter, so new players can get a feel for what to expect if they go on to purchase the main game.

Eternal is probably the strongest of Hearthstone's rivals for the card-game throne, and out of early access today. Dire Wolf Digital's take on the genre is presented in very familiar fashion, but reintroduces many of Magic: The Gathering's more technical concepts without over-complicating things, and eases players in with an escalating solo campaign. Eternal has been in early access for nearly two years, and the road to launch has been "hard and messy", according to its developers, but they're happy to call it done now - just in time to announce yet another 250-card expansion.

At Final Fantasy 14's fan-festival today, Square Enix announced the third expansion for their increasingly popular MMORPG. Shadowbringers ups the ante, story-wise, promising players the chance to finally take on the technologically advanced Garlean empire directly. Of course, there's yet another world-ending threat to contend with too. On top of the usual new classes and a raised level cap, Shadowbringers is also introducing the "Trust" system, bringing NPC party members outside of dungeons. Check the cinematic trailer and a peek at the Blue Mage side-class below.

I've previously described Fractal Softworks's space sim Starsector (primarily the work of solo dev Alexander Mosolov) as 'Mount & Blade: Warband in space'.  High praise at the time, but as of today's version 0.9a release, I feel it might be selling it short. Today's update (patch notes here) is over a year in the works, and vastly broadens the scope of involvement you can have in its still-expanding procedural space sandbox, including colony management. The excellent real-time tactical combat has been improved too, including new battles against enormous orbital platforms.

Two weeks ago, I was sat in a dive bar so scuzzy it was practically underwater. It was there my friend told me he spent nearly all his time playing Paladins on his Xbox, and I learnt two things. 1) Paladins must be bigger than I thought, and 2) platform restrictions can make me sad.

Today, in the opening announco-blast of Atlanta's Hi-Rez Expo, Hi-Rez announced that cross-platform play is coming to Paladins, Realm Royale and Smite.

Sunset Overdrive, Insomniac's silly semi-open-world platform shooter has arrived on PC after a long stint as an Xbox One exclusive. It's bright, loud, dumb and the PC version launches at budget price, including all the previously-expensive DLC. There's just one horrible mutant fly in the ointment: Our version is single-player only, and misses out on the excellent eight-player Chaos Squad multiplayer mode. Still a good game, but it's a pity to see such a major part axed in the transition. A familiar (but slightly sharper) trailer is below.

While some nerks will wang on about the golden age of games writing from magaziners like Karen Gillan, the 90s words I most adored were Digitiser on Channel 4's Teletext [For non-UK readers: Teletext was like a website but on the telly -localisation ed]. With relentless jokes and foolishness, it was huge influence on my own writing. After resurrecting Digitiser as as a website a few years back, now editor Paul "Mr. Biffo" Rose and pals have made a TV sort of thing. Digitiser The Show is a weekly YouTube series which includes old people joking about old games, and my god it's worth it all for the live-action Duck Hunt.

Mega Man X, Metroid and Bloodborne are an odd set of inspirations, but from the demo I just played of Lore Finder, a Lovecraft-inspired exploration platformer, they blend surprisingly well. Developed by Kitsune Games and currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, Lore Finder is halfway funded after just one day, and backed up with a 'vertical slice' early demo which you can play here. While condensed (compared to what's planned for the full game) it's a fun bit of running and gunning with a bit of LGBTQ representation in its cast too. An ominous trailer lurks below.

Who remembers the Marble Blast games? Brilliant little 3D physics platformers, a bit like Super Monkey Ball but with a jump button, some clever power-ups and often non-linear levels. Marble It Up is a spiritual sequel from many of the original developers, now operating under their own namesake - 'Marble It Up LLC'. It's out now on PC today after a well-received debut on Switch. Today's new incarnation includes a PC-exclusive level editor and Steam Workshop support to share your creations with the world. Roll on the launch trailer below.

Delightful deck-building dungeon-crawler Slay The Spire has added a semi-secret fourth and final act in this week's early access update. At long last, we'll get to give that dastardly dungeon heart a proper kicking. You'll need to make an extra effort to face the final boss, let alone defeat it, but I believe in you.

Further trivialising the use of nuclear weapons in Fallout 76, canny players have made tools to bruce force decrypting its nuke launch codes. Players will still need to gather partial codes by defeating high-level enemies, collect keycards, then fight to the silo control room, but the description tools save a lot of time guessing at ciphers. Nukes are mostly useful in the online survival sandbox for irradiating areas so real big nasty monsters spawn for your raiding pleasure, and this helps people get to that faster. Which could be good or bad depending on how you feel about end-game challenges?