Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

Cloud gaming may have arrived, but it hasn't yet really taken hold among your average player. Its potential may have opened up now that Valve has announced that Steam Cloud Play has entered beta.

Since their introduction in 2016, citadels have defined the cut-throat politics of EVE Online. Wars are now centred on slugfests like the Battle for X47L-Q, as Keepstar citadels provide insurmountable defences against all but the most determined force. But developers CCP now reckon there are too many of these unassailable bastions floating about unguarded. With this week's Forsaken Fortress update, it's time to let these structures rot.

Keeping track of Call Of Duty: Warzone squad sizes has been something of a nightmare. First there's trios, then trios are quads; but oh, folk liked trios, so trios are back. But quads can stay, and let's not forget solo players either. With the dust beginning to settle, Activision this week rounded out the lineup with a new duos mode, letting you drop into Verdansk with just your closest, most trustworthy comrade.

Always acting, but never quite seen. It seems one of Destiny 2's most elusive antagonists is preparing to finally play its hand. Lurking in the shadows of Bungie's space-knight loot shooter, The Darkness have finally put voice to their long-awaited return by broadcasting an ominous hum on the Destiny 2 Twitter account. Whether as another season or as the game's next expansion, it may soon be time to work out what, exactly, The Traveller's been running away from all this time.

Since the moment Half-Life: Alyx launched in VR, folks have been trying to detach it from its headset requirements. To be fair, I get it - that the first Half-Life game in a decade would be restricted to expensive tech felt a little demoralising. But this weekend, one modder brought that dream closer to reality by quietly releasing Pancake Base, a mod that aims to make Alyx play just like its older siblings by giving our leading lady the sturdy, first-person arms of Half-Life 2's Gordon Freeman.

If you were an Xbox kid around my age, Halo 3 might be the first game you remember arriving with deafening levels of hype. The sole reason most folks picked up Crackdown. The Return Of The King in John Halo's ring-smashing quest, in fellowship with a squid-mouthed Keith David and that cigar-chewing lad from Aliens. Now, developers 343 Industries are preparing the trilogy closer's PC debut in Halo: The Master Chief Collection, with select testing set to take place within the next few weeks.

Maybe it was the dragons that clued you in. There sure was a lot of fire breathing in that opening cinematic Larian Studios showed off for Baldur's Gate 3. Or maybe you've played Larian's last big RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 in which every single fight has, in my personal experience, a 100% chance to turn into a giant inferno. Larian posted a short and hot new video today to begin the process of sharing BG3 news "throughout the month of June." Sandwiched between all the other quick clips is, yes, yer girl Shadowheart standing casually at the center of a a sea of flames.

Guess who's creepin' out with a video game spinoff. No guesses? It's Goosebumps. Remember those spooky books on your primary school shelf with the weird covers where animals transformed into—oh heck that was Animorphs. Sorry, I literally only read fantasy as a kid and still do. Goosebumps are the horror ones, now spawning the "spooky first-person survival horror game" Goosebumps Dead of Night sometime this summer.

Giant automated industry builder Satisfactory has been on the assembly line for a while already, first debuting on the Epic Games Store last year. The Factorio-but-3D builder has churned out new additions to its early access version since then, including giant trains and guns and vertical conveyors. The mammoth machines are reaching another milestone when Satisfactory launches on Steam—still in early access—on Monday, June 8th.

Why did the truck cross the road? Because the bridge was out, obviously. Or at least it will be if you're as bad at the wacko physics puzzle game Poly Bridge 2 as I likely would be. If you are, the second installment, like the first, lets you call in help from Twitch viewers. Poly Bridge 2 is out now with some new juice under the hood over its predecessor.

This whimsical little seaside town builder is another project by Oskar Stålberg whose tiny planet and city builder projects RPS have marveled at in the past. Unlike his prior browser-based experiments, Townscaper is being treated to some extra polish and plans for a paid release. It's been on my mental wishlist since before it had a name, but now there's a handy page on the Steam store to help me not forget. Check out the trailer below for some extremely satisfying pips and pops as the rainbow cities spring from the sea.

We’ve got a lot of time for WD’s Blue line of SATA SSDs - it is, after all, the RPS SSD of choice for our current £1000 RPS Rig build - and the good news is you can currently grab one on the cheap over at Best Buy, where the 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities are all on offer.

If your reaction to the release of Intel’s new set of 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs is to celebrate the lower prices now available on 8th and 9th Gen Coffee Lake models, then this pair of Z390 motherboard deals from CCL might well be for you. One comes with a free SSD, while the other gets you some fairly generous cashback if you buy a CPU at the same time.

You'd have thought people would have escaped from Tarkov by now, but they're still at it. Escape From Tarkov is a brutal, sandbox-ey shooter about scavenging for loot in a warzone where everyone has better guns than you - except for right now! A big update to the current early access build has brought a load of changes, but one of the most significant parts is the character wipe. Tarkov's central appeal lies in looting, and now (not for the first time) all your loot has gone. My friends say they're happy about this, and I still do not understand them.

After teasing their new VR cybergoggles earlier this year, HP have now fully unveiled their new Reverb G2 headset, and it looks an awful lot like the Valve Index. That's probably because it's been designed in collaboration with Valve, and uses the same lenses and speakers that they created for the Index. However, HP's Reverb G2 takes things even further with a higher resolution display and even more tracking cameras. And the best thing about it is that it's not going to cost the earth to buy, either.

It's been a little too easy to write off People Can Fly's upcoming "RPG shooter" Outriders. A particularly beefy Destiny 2, from what's been teased so far. The loot-shooter that's willing to show some heads exploding. But today saw the devs post their first in-depth look at Outriders in what intends to be a series of monthly broadcasts - and there's some fascinating depth behind all the exploding goons and burst heads.

Localisation is a tough task, even when not considering languages English has tried its hardest to stamp out over the centuries. But today's 1.8 update for Dicey Dungeons brings developer Terry Cavanagh's dice-roller a little closer to home by adding full Irish language support, alongside proper gamepad controls, balance overhauls and two new baddies who've been waiting on the sidelines since launch.

Break out the party poppers - Prey and Dishonored developers Arkane Studios turns 20 years old this year. Well, sort of. The studio may have been founded in '99, but who am I to ruin a party? To celebrate two decades of sneaking, stabbing, and all-round immersive sim'ing, Arkane are dusting off the oldest book on their shelf by giving away free copies of the studio's 2002 fantasy debut Arx Fatalis.

So long, Civilization. The latest freebie over on the Epic Games Store is Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, a rather handsome pairing of two Borderlands games to blast your way through without dropping a penny. But Epic's feeling generous this week - today also marks the surprise release of grimy graffiti sandbox Sludge Life, and this filthy bonus is going free for quite a bit longer than a week.