Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is a maddening game. At heart, it’s a solid addition to the classic Capcom tag-team fighting series. A festival of explosions, colours, superheroic excess and Capcom’s forgotten characters dusted off for a cameo. Unfortunately, it’s also a mess of questionable design decisions and bizarre corner-cutting, letting down an otherwise excellent core experience.
The latest of these questionable decisions is the choice to sell three characters featured in the main story of the game as paid DLC shortly after release. This week on Tuesday, Black Panther, Monster Hunter and Sigma arrived for the price of £6.49/$8 each, on top of the £40 you’ve already paid. Ouch.
One of my greatest gaming regrets of this year is getting about halfway through Team Cherry’s excellent metroidvania Hollow Knight, then getting sidetracked by a pile of work. In order to get properly back up to speed, I reckon that I’ll have to start fresh, although with the rate at which they’re pumping out free DLC I might just wait a little while longer.
We have previously mentioned upcoming expansion The Grimm Troupe, but now it has an official release date: October 26th, and it’s bringing a lot of exciting new stuff to the already densely-packed game.
Saturday night’s alright for fighting, I’m told, and to be honest I would be fascinated to see Elton John fighting. I bet he’s way scrappier than you might expect.
Children are idiots. Left to their own devices, they’ll lick plug sockets, crawl into roads, chug Mr Muscle, charge into the ocean, and generally do themselves harm. Idiots! I know better than to do any of those. Unbelievable. They can’t even drive. But the newly-released Think of the Children will task us with protecting those fools from themselves, playing as parents who need to complete lists of tasks while rushing around protecting their child. Idiots. It does support singleplayer but the local multiplayer mode seems like it’d be most fun, cramming up to four terrible parents onto one sofa. Read the rest of this entry »
At its best, Blizzard’s Overwatch is the place I hope to wake up in when I die, die, die. A superspy sitcom that just happens to be a sublime entwining of FPS and MOBA, it has gulped down more of my free time than any other game in the past five years. It’s also the game where I never speak to anybody, rarely accept a party invite and seldom spend longer than half an hour in ranked play. Some matches, I even try to avoid eye contact. Overwatch’s community has become notorious for abusive behaviour, and while I’m not convinced it’s any worse on this count than, say, Destiny or Call of Duty, the toxicity is completely at odds with the design, which makes it all the more jarring.
After five years of not being sold for download anywhere (and long being out-of-print on disc), the first Mafia has returned to sale. GOG this week dredged the digital bay, hauled the crime ’em up out, and chipped off its concrete boots to re-release it DRM-free. This version has an edited soundtrack with the licensed music removed, mind. Presumably music licenses expiring is what got the game pulled from sale back in 2012. I’ve not played Mafia since ooh it was on CD, so I am tempted to see how it feels 15 years after it came out – and after two sequels of varying quality and direction. Read the rest of this entry »
Inclement digital weather saw the match called off last week, delayed with only a few hours’ notice, but Sociable Soccer today started its pre-season fixtures and launched into early access. It’s a new arcade-y ball-kicker made by Sensible Soccer co-designer John Hare and the Combo Breaker squad. They expect to launch the full version early next year but, if you really want to get kicking now and don’t mind missing features, you can now take to the pitch. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m going to tell you about the time my Bomber Crew accidentally dropped a food parcel on Birmingham. But first, a tragic tale.
A spitfire has gone down somewhere in the English Channel and it falls to my crew to rescue the pilot who is bobbing around in the water. We’ll need to fend off enemy fighters while dumping survival packs into the water in the pilot’s vicinity, but I’m new to this Bomber Crew lark and oh no one of our wings is on fire, and I think our plane is going into the drink. At least the spitfire pilot has some wreckage to cling to. Job done, I guess?
I keep getting beaten up by strangers. Tekken 7 is as traditional a fighting game as they come. You punch, you kick, you get shredded to pieces by a robotic woman’s saws-for-arms. At recent games show EGX, I saw two fighting game pros facing off in front of an audience, knocking seven shades of showmanship out of each other. I sat down to watch, enthralled by the speed at which they pulverised one another. I thought: hey, I could do that.
Sometimes you need a hand to hold, so we’ve updated our list of the 25 best co-op games to play on PC with a headset-wearing friend or a muted stranger.
Whether solving puzzles, sneaking, shooting zombies or stabbing mythical creatures in the face, the existence of another player adds an element of unpredictability. You might synchronise your stealth takedowns and execute the perfect plan, but it’s just as likely that your co-op partner will constantly alert the guards and throw your situation into chaos. Luckily both success and failure are more compelling when you can take credit for the former and blame someone else for the latter.
The pretty puzzleheads of Gnog will finally come to PC some time in November. Ko_op’s Gnog traps us inside giant monstrous heads, where I suppose our objective is to escape but that seems a lot less fun than messing about. Like Windosill and games by Vectorpark, solving puzzles feels secondary to poking around, fiddling with things to discover delightful consequences. Here, peep this: Read the rest of this entry »
Subtle slope textures and a lack of unit bases and battle replays make Field of Glory II a tricky wargame to After Action Report. I can’t promise that today’s aggro account will be easy to follow, but I’ll be mortified if it baffles and bores. The fabulous FoGII is to tedium what Domestos, the Greek god of sanitaryware, is to all known germs. Any wargame correspondent that suggests otherwise deserves to be thrown to the lions. Read the rest of this entry »
I am raising my head from the alchemy desk to tell you: Opus Magnum is out now and it is good. It’s the new puzzle game from Zachtronics which crept up on us this week. This studio’s puzzlers have a definite flavour to them. They’re about fiddling with machines, hacking together a solution out of strange gadgets and mental duct tape before revealing a loudly-ticking device and feeling impossibly proud of yourself. This is no different, except that your end results are flipping gorgeous. Read the rest of this entry »
I can only assume that Valve’s Steam Link box (which lets you play your PC stuff streamed to your TV in another room) hasn’t been flying off the shelves, given the discount it’s available for today. Whether it’s just to clear shelf-space or increase visibility, right now you can grab one for 80p plus postage as part of a bundle with well-received Chinese indie action game Icey, totalling £14.49 in all.
As I’d been meaning to pick up the game at some point – being a fan of character-action games and anime excess – I figured now was as good a time as any try my first piece of official Valve-branded hardware. That, and I’ve been looking for a cheap way to avoid lugging my desktop PC and its nest of cables to the TV whenever friends are round, so the price was right for me.
Somehow yet another week has passed us by and the endless march of time proceeds ever forward. I don’t know about you but this week, I spent an exorbitant amount of time playing Shadow of Wardor, in which death is such a trivial thing it’s almost bringing on an existential crisis. I did meet a singing Orc, though, so I can’t really complain.
Anyways, I’m here again to take you through a whole bunch of the best gaming deals from the past seven-ish days, so let’s go ahead and do that, shall we? As usual, we’ve got deals that’ll work in the UK, deals that’ll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places.
Today the Pyro will get a chuffing jetpack in Team Fortress 2 as part of the ‘Jungle Inferno’ update. This is a big’un, bringing one new Valve-made map, five new community-made maps, and the long-promised Pyro class update. All flamethrowers are being improved and the Pyro is armed with four new weapons too, from a beefy single-shot flamethrower to a cheeky slap (hey, it worked in Absolver).
The update was expected to launch last night but Valve delayed it for a little more testing, so it’ll now hit today. Read the rest of this entry »
The most satisfying moments in Overgrowth [official site] take place in mid-air. Rabbits are typically good at jumping, but they’ve got nothing on their anthropomorphic cousin, Turner, the martial arts master and hero of this critter-bashing romp. His leaping ability borders on the power of flight. During those seconds, suspended in the skies above the game’s largely empty battlefields, it feels like anything’s possible. Invariably the landing disappoints. Sometimes fatally. That’s Overgrowth: lots of potential, rarely reached.
Today’s the big day in Civland, or the world as it’s commonly known. The highlight: Civilization VI has launched its big Fall 2017 Update, which chiefly expands religious combat and makes AI opponents a little smarter. Also out today is new DLC for Civ VI adding Indonesia and the Khmer Empire.
Or if you believe that everything old is better and we should shun the new: 1) Civilization III is free for the next two days; 2) But Civ’s whole ‘inevitable march of progress’ sort of thing seems contrary to your ethos? Read the rest of this entry »
What do Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, mythical Norse tree Yggdrasil and comedy ogre Shrek have in common? They all feature in fan creations made for the recent Make A Good Mega Men Level competition. Read on to find out more about these and other strange takes on Mega Man, including the world’s most hazardous ice cream factory.
