Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

Far Cry 5 continues Ubisoft's on-paper rather charming habit of adding DLC to its games that completely transforms them into something else. Vietnam-themed Hours Of Darkness rather passed us by, but Lost On Mars joined us last week so I thought I'd take a look. It's... it's really bloody awful.

A question for you: What should one do when one is reviewing a game, but it's far, far too hard for one to get anywhere in? I'm asking for a friend. A friend who's reviewing the early access for To Hell With Hell (THWH), a pixelly bullet hell roguelite that's tough as really bloody tough nails.

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Yoku’s Island Express [official site].

It wasn’t as if the tester was having a bad time. He was a pinball fan, after all. It’s just that every time he tried to reach for his coffee, the intensity of the game he was testing kept pulling his hand back to the controller. Half an hour later, he finished playing, picked up his cold coffee, and said he’d enjoyed the game. As he contentedly walked away, he couldn’t know that he’d brought about a turning point for its developers, who turned to each other and said, ”Did you see what happened there? This is not the game we want to make, right?”

This was the moment that made Villa Gorilla realise their game had lost its way, the moment that led to the game’s transformation into the smart and charming Yoku’s Island Express, a game that mixes platformers, adventuring in a freely explorable world, and pinball.

Over the past several weeks I have sent a lot of interesting people who work in the games industry an email containing the following scenario:

"You enter a room. The door locks behind you. From a door opposite another you enters. This other you is a perfectly identical clone, created in the exact instant you entered the room, but as every second ticks by they are creating their own distinct personhood. The doors will unlock in 90 minutes. Nobody will ever know what happens in the room. What do you do? (assume the materials you need for whatever you want to do are in the room). Please show your working, if able."

After three hours with Two Point Hospital I see similarities with Jurassic World Evolution. Okay, Frontier’s game sees you putting more people in hospital than getting them out the door, but it’s a similarly welcoming management game. You can read that as simplified and slow (as Fraser did in his Jurassic World review), but as an abysmal multitasker I appreciated a campaign that drip-fed ideas that could later stretch their legs in sandbox mode. Two Point Hospital’s career is similar in the way each new site introduces a wrinkle to keep you on your toes, and is one area where it clearly steps up from 1997’s Theme Hospital. The other areas? Why, they would be handily condensed in a video feature.

After testing what seems like 387,001 monitors with AMD FreeSync support, I've finally got another honest-to-goodness Nvidia G-Sync one on my desk today, the Acer Predator XB241H - and boy, it's a good 'un. Part of Acer's XB1 range, this particular incarnation is the 24in, 1920x1080, TN model. It also comes as a 24in, 2560x1440 jobber and several different permutations with 27in, 28in and 32in screen sizes, but the main attraction of this particular string of letters and numbers is its lovely 144Hz refresh rate that can be overclocked up to a massive 180Hz for ultra-high frame rate gaming.

We're just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we've shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you're reading right now this second.

And what games they are! 2018 has been a great year so far, and our top picks run the whole range, from hand drawn oddities made by one person, to big mega-studio blockbusters that took the work of hundreds. And each of them is special to us in some way. Just like you are too. Click through the arrows to see the full spread of our faves so far. Better luck next year to the games that didn't make the cut this time.

After 3 years of updates, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege has 40 operators - the game's classes - to choose from. That's 20 attackers and 20 defenders, each with their own skills, gadgets and weapons for you to get your head around. This guide will go through them in their entirety, as well as making recommendations about whether or not to use them.

With over three years worth of additions and balance changes since its launch, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege could be quite the daunting game to get into for new and returning players. So to get you up to speed, this guide has been prepared with sections dedicated to ensuring you're playing optimally and know some of the more basic tactics that can be utilised going into each game. There are also some important things to know when specifically playing as the attacking team or defending team, as well as more in-depth stuff on each operator and the specific maps being added as the game continues its long run.