Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

Tekken 7 gets just that little bit weirder on February 28th, as live-streaming pugilist Julia Chang gets extremely online in the ring. Baseball-bat swinging warlord Negan from The Walking Dead makes the leap along with her. Together, they wrap up the second season of the Bandai Namco arcade fighter's DLC. In any other fighter these two would probably seem like oddballs, but Tekken 7's cast is plenty weird already, so they fit right in, or at least don't stand out. Take a peek at some of their moves (and Negan menacing Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada) in the trailer below.

All mathematics is devilry as far as I'm concerned, though numeric rituals are rarely as explicit as in The Devil's Calculator. Made by the fella behind word puzzler Synonymy, The Devil's Calculator is about solving equations backwards on a spoOoky graphing calculator to reach the number 666. The satan in the calculator has scrambled the functions of logical operators, see, so we need to... look, I live a chaste life free of algebra so I didn't even know the game's symbols were fake. These runes look as real to me as A† or ≜ or A⊗B or any other 'real' symbol I had to Google and must now flush out my brain with a neti pot of holy water.

The game's director leaving to start his own studio may have sunk most DLC plans for Final Fantasy XV, but there's still one last story to be told. Due on March 26th, Episode Ardyn will put players in the shoes of the game's dapper arch-villain and lead him on a high powered rampage through the streets of the capital city. Still, Ardyn isn't Kefka, who mostly just burnt the world for shits and giggles - Square Enix want you to know his tragic backstory presented in the form of a free anime short. Below, twelve minutes of extreme melodrama followed by a trailer and spoilers.

Daybreak Game Company have delayed the launch of PlanetSide Arena for the second time since announcing it in December, doing sterling work to counter the unrealistic expectations of air travel efficiency fostered by other battle royale games. No, you don't queue for a plane for twenty seconds, take off on time, then land exactly where you want. You will, in reality, wait indefinitely to even see a plane, with each short-notice delay making you wonder more if you'll ever even get anywhere. Thank you, Daybreak, for delaying PlanetSide's battle royale spin-off until this summer and, in doing so, teaching kids that the real-world answer to "Where we dropping?" is "700 miles away from your luggage."

A pilot in Elite Dangerous has been stranded in the deep black void beyond the known galaxy for months. The adventurous pilot, commander “Deluvian Reyes Cruz”, zoomed off the edge of the galactic disc in an attempt to set a new record and become the person who has travelled the furthest distance from Sol. But when he was nearing the point of no return, he sipped too greedily from his fuel tank. 42 days into his journey and he was now stranded, with not enough fuel to make the jump back. He's been floating out there since November last year.

But now, there's a rescue mission afoot. Five pilots of the Fuel Rats (a group dedicated to saving marooned commanders) have been heading out to the explorer on a 600-hour rescue mission. It's their most ambitious rescue yet, and they’re due to complete it this weekend.

The post-apocalyptic murderisland of Rust is one of those virtual lands I'm always interested in hearing good stories from, even if I'm unlikely to visit it myself (because it is a murderisland). The best I've heard in a while is a heist committed by YouTuber "Welyn", who set out on a revenge mission to sneak into a clan's heavily-fortified base and rob it blind all by himself. His edited highlights, with added commentary and some natty editing timed to the music, make for a cracking wee heist movie.

What do you call a bunch of sixteen-year-olds skiving off school to play a tactical team-based shooter? G Siege-ees.

Wait, come back. I need to tell you about how the Rainbow Six Siege devs are invading Australia with Operation Burnt Horizon, the first event of Year Four. Early next month, you'll be running around a new map called Outback with two new aussie operators.

Ubisoft Montreal have also revealed how they're handling their next year of #content. As well as the expected eight new operators, we'll see three map redesigns, a newcomer queue to help ease in fresh players, and an anti-teamkilling system that makes would-be arseholes actually off themselves.

Fear & Hunger is a horror dungeon crawler by Miro Haverinen that makes Darkest Dungeon look cheerful and forgiving. Originally launched in December and still growing, it flew under my radar until earlier this week. It's merciless stuff - you don't level up. You run, as the monsters can often kill you in one hit, or leave you mangled. Dismemberment is a threat for both you and your enemies, and save points aren't safe. It's rough around the edges, but it's rare that an RPG can leave me genuinely unsettled and hurt, but hungry for more. Grab the demo here or see the trailer and thoughts below.

I know Apex Legends has shaken up the scene, but it feels a little bit on-the-nose that Fortnite Battle Royale is literally cracking up under the pressure. Epic's all-consuming last man standing shooter is gearing up for another season, starting on February 28th, which means there's changes coming to its ever-shifting battlefield. Such change has previously been brought about by weird inter-dimensional antics and a wandering glacier, but this one seems a little more mundane - earthquakes, shaking the entire map and leaving jagged tears in the ground.

Anthem is out now, kinda-sorta - assuming you've got an Origin Access subscription. While the game fully debuts on February 22nd, subscribers can play now. Those with the cheap Basic subscription get a ten-hour trial, while Premier subscribers have been set loose on the full game. I'm also happy to say that some issues in the first hour or two aside, the servers appear to be holding up well for people playing the power-armoured loot n' shooter. BioWare have also partly unveiled their first major update for the game, including a big space-storm to wrangle.

It's not uncommon for fighting games to make their way to PC these days, but I'm still a bit surprised to see SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy making the hop from consoles. It features most of the leading ladies from SNK's King Of Fighters, Samurai Showdown and Fatal Fury series's, plus Terry Bogard, who is apparently a girl now. It's a lighter, sillier affair than others in the genre, with as much focus in collecting invariably impractical outfits as fighting. The PC version was announced during the Evo Japan fighting tourney last night, and lands next Thursday, February 21st.

While Fortnite Battle Royale throws concerts and prepares for [block id="635651" title="Fortnite Season 8"], the lawsuits against developers Epic Games that claim they copied various dance for their unlockable emotes rumble on. One of the litigants has suffered a setback though, as Alfonso Ribeiro was denied copyright for the famous 'Carlton dance'. It doesn’t scupper anything entirely, but it does seem to throw a wrench in.

Manga mash-up fighter Jump Force is out today, and I feel there's something almost uniquely off-putting about its aesthetic. Don't be me wrong - I've nothing against anime - but Spike Chunsoft appear to have carefully cultivated a look for their fighter that I can only describe as 'Doofing around in Garry's Mod'. Still, despite the bizarre look, it's apparently not an awful fighter, letting you pit superheroes and villains from Japan's Shonen Jump manga anthology (or your own mad creations) against each other in three-on-three tag fights. See the overly dramatic launch trailer below.

Like everyone else and their irradiated mutant grandmother, I'll be playing Metro Exodus this weekend. I gave 4A's Stalkers-on-a-train opus a quick trial run this morning, but was immediately dismayed by a surfeit of malodorous fromage in its cod-Russian-accented English dialogue. It's not the worst I've heard by a long shot, but it's broad, broad, broad - enough so that it gently undermines the moody, murderous atmosphere.

For all I know, the Russian voice acting is even sillier, but to my heathen ears playing it with voices matching its Moscow setting, translated by English subtitles, makes for a vastly more atmospheric ride on the deathtrain. I wouldn't play Metro Exodus any other way.

Neon bright open-world superpower shooter Crackdown 3 has smashed its way onto Windows today. Making games is hard, and suffice to say that Crackdown appears to have had its fair share of troubles to deal with. But it’s here! Terry Crews can finally appear inside your computer in all his glory, and in playable form at that. Here's a launch trailer showing off some pretty explosions.

I refuse to play Resident Evil 2, because I am, proudly, a coward. But if you’re braver than me, there’s now more game, and you can get it for free. The Ghost Survivors takes players into a “what if” universe, offering alternate stories for three pre-existing characters as they try to escape from the biological disaster that befell Raccoon City. All of them are teased in this here trailer, which I watched at great peril but which happily had no jump scares.