Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

The game once known as 'Fortnite' will not leave paid early access and launch free-to-play this year as planned, Epic Games have said. They've delayed Fortnite: Save The World's F2P launch as they want more time to make sure it's proper good and stable for the hordes of potential players expected to flood in when it switches. It did seem that Fortnite might vanish without a trace after its early access launch in July 2017, charging £35 to play the beta of a bland base-building zombie shooter, but then Fortnite Battle Royale hit and now everyone's heard of Fortnite. So there may be surprising demand for co-op PvE.

It's a little-known fact that when Justin Timberlake told Mark Zuckerberg "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars," he was talking about how expensive a good VR PC should be. Just jokes, there, some laugharoonies. But for plain ol' millionaires whose VR experiences are bumpy, a little more help is coming. Valve have introduced a 'Motion Smoothing' beta feature to SteamVR, which should let slower PCs jack in with less trouble. Similar to Oculus's Asynchronous Spacewarp tech and SteamVR's own Asynchronous Reprojection, it works by sometimes estimating new frames rather than properly rendering them. Estimates aren't as pretty, but are smoother than the alternative.

It's no secret that GTA Online has a big cheating problem. Rarely can I play for a few hours without encountering someone who insta-explodes other players, rains hacked money, sticks a Christmas tree to my body, or traps me in a burning cage watched by a dozen Jesuses (hackers are sometimes creative, I will give them that). It's absurd that this still happens. And even more absurd that it looks like hackers recently managed to interfere with people playing Grand Theft Auto V's singleplayer campaign, remotely sending commands to kill their crimeman. Players report that Rockstar seem to have fixed this now but sheesh.

It's not all sunshine and roses over in World War 3. That's a Battlefield-like that entered early access last Friday, not a global calamity you're only just learning about on RPS.

World War 3 was supposed to kick off on Friday, but server issues meant that nobody could actually start warring until the following day. A stream of patches has since brought at least some people into the game, but the horrors of war are still closed off to many - including me. I'd wait a bit, budding soldiers.

It’s just ten short nights until Halloween, and so I bring you the spooky gift of Kitty Horrorshow’s latest collection of brief experimental games, bundled together as Haunted Cities Volume 3. It’s got it all: candle lighting, spinning out your car at night, and the most terrifying flickering I’ve ever experienced.

Valve’s Dota-based card game Artifact is due out November 28th, but it seems that its beta has been pushed back from this month to the second half of November. Specifically, it’s been re-scheduled for the 19th, but somewhat tentatively.

Delicious dinner simulator Hot Pot Panic is all about making the tastiest food and then stuffing yourself with it. I’d tell you more, but playing it has made me very hungry, so I’m off to go raid my fridge first.

Advance Wars-style strategy game Wargroove doesn’t have a firm release date yet, but developers Chucklefish say that you should no longer expect it this year. On the other hand, they’ve also given us a bunch of details about its planned content, including various modes, map creation, and music.

What if battle royale but wizards? Okay, Battlerite Royale, sure. But what if battle royale but wizards and big flashy magic spells hurling whirlwinds and rocks and giant walls of fire and spaffing special effects all over? Ah, for that you'll want to look to Spellbreak, an upcoming battle royale starring cool wizards. Mate, even if you're not interested in battlers royale, you might want to see this new trailer for the fancy spells these wizards are tossing off.

Somewhere, deep in the darkest recesses of the Uncanny Valley lies a strange, jagged sinkhole. Nobody knows how deep it goes, or even if it has a bottom to reach, merely that its pixellated walls seem to vibrate and shimmer as you move around them. Welcome to the PlayStation Zone. the Spooky Retro Bundle 2 on Itch is a collection of seven (mostly) PSX-styled games that channel the spirit of this particularly unsettling era in 3D graphics into something deliberately unnerving. Below, trailers for the bundled games, plus some additional scares to start your weekend with.

I'm not entirely sure why, but there are some people who really liked the Battlefield games when they were at their most gritty and pseudo-realistic. World War 3, released into early access today and developed by Necrovision studio The Farm 51, is for them. Destructible maps of Warsaw, Berlin and Moscow, customisable guns and a realistic armour system for both infantry and vehicles give this one its own distinct edge. Below, the release trailer, featuring some guns that probably don't explode like that in the game itself.

My brain is not up to playing Executive Assault 2 today. I could maybe handle a basic RTS, or maybe an FPS but not this complex hybrid of both plus space combat. Making its early access debut yesterday, it's a sequel to Hesketh Studios's 2015 Executive Assault. In the first game, players commanded a robot army RTS-style to take down your corporate rival's CEO, leading from the front in FPS combat. In the sequel, you're juggling all that and the third dimension as the battle moves into space. Below, a little video peek at the game, including some impressive fleet combat.

As Halloween horrors go, a genetically-engineered megamurderer who knows dozens of ways to kill and will wear your clothes to replace you in your everyday life already seems pretty spooky to me. He's a dark one, that Ian Hitman. But to celebrate the season of Goth Christmas, IO Interactive are making him even spookier with new themed contracts for H1tman and treat-not-tricking everyone by making the full Colorado episode a free trial for the next fortnight. This isn't for keepsies, unlike IO did with some earlier episodes, but it is an opportunity to get spooky for free.

It's the weekend for a lot of you already, so here's a little something free for the next few days. Four somethings, even. Five, if you've got a VR setup. There's probably a few more lurking around that I've missed, but there's a bundle of free weekends running concurrently on Steam right now: RTS spinoff Halo Wars: Definitive Edition, baseball fighter Lethal League, physics puzzler Crazy Machines 3, co-op hack n' slasher Eden Rising: Supremacy and for VR gunslingers, Hover Junkers, all accompanied by steep discounts.

Valve are starting to clearly disclose the odds of receiving a rare bonus wizard costume in your Dota 2 loot box of wizard hats, adding an in-game pop-up stating your chances. This is for the "escalating odds", which go up as you open more and more of a certain loot box, and will always track your current chances. The odds were vaguely available before in a roundabout way, as Chinese law requires companies to disclose loot box odds, but seeing it in-game is easier than tromping across the Internet in search of translations of Chinese blog posts.

It's never fun to report on a game launching at the start of the week and the developer making major staff cuts before the weekend, as is the case with Dreadnought developer Six Foot. As reported by Game Informer and confirmed by Six Foot's Chief Operating Officer, the Dreadnought studio (working in collaboration with Spec Ops: The Line outfit Yager) has let go "about a third" of its workforce. According to Game Informer's sources, the game has struggled to bring in the money required to keep everyone at the studio paid.

Less than two months after finally launching Dirty Bomb in full, Splash Damage have announced they are stopping development on their free-to-play FPS set in merrye olde Londone tahn. The servers will stay up as long as enough players keep on playing, they say, but don't expect any big future updates. Splash Damage say that, despite a big effort to renovate and finish it, the Enemy Territory-style shooter simply wasn't making enough money to justify continuing live development. So it goes.