Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

Neon Lights over a crowded parking lot. The steam and sounds of a ramen stand. Billboards glistening in the pouring rain as entire tower blocks tumble in the distance. There's plenty to appreciate in Cloudpunk's towering urban sprawl - but until now, it's always been kept at an arm's length. This week, developers Ion Lands began testing a new first-person mode in Cloudpunk's beta build, letting drivers get up close and personal with Nivalis' gorgeous mile-high neighbourhoods.

Screenshot Saturday Sundays! It's awful windy out, so let's gather around the kitchen table and see what screenshots, gifs, and clips have been offered up by the game development community over the last few days. This week: there's something in the sands, a quiet winter break, wobbly junkyard airships and murderous vocabulary.

Like most post-apocalyptic romps, Wasteland 3's badlands weren't entirely emptied by the end of the world. Speaking in a developer diary this week, studio head Brian Fargo and senior writer Nathan Long ran through bodyguards, crime-lords and presidential death cults the Rangers might face during their upcoming Colorado road trip - and the new conversation system that'll get you right up in their irradiated faces.

When Warframe set up shop in 2012, it was a simple thing. A few rooms, a few baddies, and a good helping of backflips. But with each update bringing increasingly fanciful new designs, the free-to-play slasher's oldest hallways are starting to look rather dusty. That's why the devs are unpacking their toolkits for a little bit of D.I.Y - re-imagining the game's ancient Corpus environments to meet modern Warframe's lavish expectations.

Pack your brolly away, it's clear skies for a few months yet. Risk Of Rain 2 developers Hopoo game released a revised forecast for their swarming early access roguelite this week, pushing the game's 1.0 release back to August this year. After all that time in early access, the devs reckon they'd picked up a little tunnel vision, and are re-thinking their release plans to bring some new and improved features to the colourful bug-hunt at launch.

Much as I'd like to believe, I'm no photographer. But damn if Umurangi Generation doesn't make me feel like a seasoned shutterbug. Released earlier this week, Veselekov's first-person-photographer is a defiantly indigenous photography sandbox packed with sharp looks, smooth sounds and extradimensional giant squids. Heck, you might even learn how to take a good photograph along the way.

As big sports organisations are wont to do, Manchester United are getting touchy about the use of their name. The English Premier League have filed a complaint against Sega and Sports Interactive for the use of the team's name in the Football Manager series. They take issue with how the series may "benefit from an association with the club’s winning culture and its brand values" without actually forking over cash to licence the team's crest.

Since I've ended up incoherently semi-shouting this at several people recently (sorry, Nat), I'll save myself the time and write it down: Connor Sherlock's The Migration feels to me like witnessing an apocalyptic event, and it's great. There you are, wandering around the surface of some desolate world, only bleached bones and warbling synth for company, when the end comes. Or a beginning. Or... a change, definitely. And then the music really kicks in and oh god, this is terrible, this is beautiful, I'm so glad I'm here for it.

Will the real Medieval History majors please stand up? Ubisoft previously tossed out a tidbit on "viking rap battles" that will make an appearance in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Creative director Ashraf Ismail has popped up to say a bit more about how these historically-inspired showdowns will take place in Valhalla. Apparently flyting (or fliting), as it was called by anglo-saxon and norse folks, was like, a whole thing. 

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare is queuing up for season 4 with a teaser video featuring an unnamed "senior operator" in a blurry comms interception. Wait, even I recognize that hat. Looks like yer boy Captain Price is going to play a part in Warfare season 4, possibly as a new operator for Warzone.

Microsoft marked Global Accessibility Awareness Day yesterday by announcing plans for improved accessibility features in Windows 10. The listed changes mainly focus on accessibility features for those with low or no vision, including text cursor customisation and quite a few improvements to the Narrator feature. These changes are scheduled as part of the May update for Windows 10.

The in-world cinema of Fortnite will screen a yet-unconfirmed old Christopher Nolan film for free this summer, Epic have revealed after debuting a trailer for his new film, Tenet. It's going to be Inception they show, isn't it? Gotta be. Inception turns ten in July, it's like a big ol' video game itself, they could add fun in-game effects with folding worlds and slowed time... it'd make sense. I mean, it's probably not going to be Memento, is it? But first, Tenet.

Observation, the game that's akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey if you played the role of HAL 9000, has exited the Epic Games Store airlock after a year of exclusivity. You can find the space thriller over on GOG and Steam now, complete with a tasty debut discount.

Like Newegg, Best Buy are marking this weekend's Memorial Day holiday with a good old fashioned jumbo sale jamboree. For PC gamers, the best bargains are to be had in the mouse, keyboard and headset departments, with big savings to be had on the wired version of Logitech's superb G915 Lightspeed keyboard and our current best gaming keyboard pick, the Roccat Vulcan to name just two of our top highlights. Read on below for our pick of the bunch.

Let's talk about Crucible's launch. Amazon's hero shooter landed on Steam earlier this week, and honestly? It was a bit of a mess. In fairness, a lot of brand new online games face similar issues to what the new third person sci-fi shooter did, with matchmaking and connectivity issues plaguing players as they tried to play their first matches. And though these are fixed now, there are still a couple of pretty obvious features missing from the game that really shouldn't be. I mean, who launches a team-based shooter with no in-game voice chat?

Today is the 30th birthday of perhaps the most iconic PC game of all time, Microsoft Solitaire. On this day in 1990, Microsoft launched Windows 3.0, which came with the card game that would grow to be despised by officer managers and IT teachers alike. Microsoft claim that even now, there are "more than 100 million hands played daily around the globe." So if they're so proud of it, why is their 30th anniversary merch such ghastly garbage? They've missed a huge opportunity to use one of the most striking images in PC gaming history.

Newegg are holding a Memorial Day sale on loads of PC components this weekend, with deals on everything from monitors, external hard drives, Z490 motherboards and more from now until the day itself, Monday 25th May. The discounts themselves are something of a mixed bag, though, so here are the ones worth paying attention to.

After a bumpy journey with daft amounts of grind and a halting bug, Destiny 2's latest quest, The Lie, can be completed. That's the one where our not-so-benevolent AI overlord, Rasputin, wanted us to grind Seraph Towers and shotgun kills. The final step brings a new bit of story, which is quite nice, and a new shotgun you really might want if you play PvP. Aggressive-type shotguns are superhot at the moment, and Bungie are here offering everyone an easy (albeit grindy) way to get a guaranteed good one, Felwinter's Lie.

When Katharine reviewed the excellent WD Blue SN550 SSD last month, she described it as “disgustingly good value." Well, Amazon seems intent on making her sick, because it’s now even more disgusting with sizeable discounts on the 500GB and 1TB flavours.

I'm clearly having a weird Friday morning, because I just clapped my hands together and squealed "ooh, this does interesting things" aloud to myself. I'm also clearly playing a very good videogame. This is Monster Train: a deckbuilding roguelike that wears its Slay The Spire influences on its sleeve, while spinning up a familiar formula in a completely different direction. You're on a train to hell, and have to defend your engine against waves of enemies that come at you on three different levels. It's like Slay The Spire meets Hearthstone meets Plants Vs. Zombies.

I haven't been this excited about a deckbuilder since the Spire itself. Which is great, because it's out right now.