Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

"So, all the lights in the heavens are our enemies, huh?" - a Gurren Lagann quote, but it's what pops into my head every time I see maximalist RTS AI War 2, which entered early access today, but was previously open to Kickstarter backers. Sequel to Arcen Games's cult favourite AI War, it's a solo or co-op space RTS about taking down a massively more numerous and powerful foe. While still played on a 2D plane, this sequel adds 3D graphics, making for some spectacular battles with thousands of little spacecraft shooting and exploding at once. Below, a launch trailer.

Old-school first-person shooters will always be my jam, and Project Warlock has already got my foot tapping. It's a retro FPS by Buckshot Software with chunky Wolfenstein-inspired blocky maps, but more modern-styled combat, and due to make its debut (as a timed GOG exclusive) this Thursday, October 18th. While it's hard to get a feel for the game without playing around with its weapons and grungy pixellated monsters, the launch trailer below definitely looks and sounds the part.

Fire the (plasma) broadsides, launch (nuclear) torpedoes and splice the (warp?) mainbrace - free-to-play heavyweight space naval shooter Dreadnought is out now after years in beta. Playing like a blend of World Of Tanks and World Of Warships with less gravity and more lasers, it's an online team shooter developed by Spec Ops: The Line folk Yager and lesser-known outfit Six Foot. While Dreadnought has been available to play in beta one way or another for ages, it made its version 1.0 debut yesterday. Check out the release trailer below.

Some might tell you that the latest Dragon Quest XI patch sounds great, lifting the cap on framerate and adding more key binding options to the game our Noa called "a beauty of a JRPG". These people are incorrect. The patch has introduced a grave injustice by allowing people to leave their horses behind. Just think of the sort of monster that would leave a digital horse alone in a land of slimes. The game previously punished such monsters by sometimes making the game crash but now Squeenix say that was a "bug" and they have "fixed" it? So people can abandon their horse without consequence? Terrible. Terrible patch. Terrible news. A terrible precedent.

John Carmack and ZeniMax Media have settled their legal disputes with each other, the Id Software co-founder has said, closing one front in the sprawling legal war between ZeniMax and Oculus. ZeniMax own Id Software (along with Bethesda, Arkane, and others), see, and claim that Oculus Rift cybergoggles benefited from work Carmack did at Id before he left for Oculus. That matter is still not fully settled but Carmack's own beef, that ZeniMax owed him $22 million related to the sale of Id, now seems resolved. I welcome all legal settlements that make my job simpler when I have to write about this mess.

I'm no history buff, but I know an awful lot of 'em. When I listen to my friends enthuse about what famous generals liked best on their toast, I'm thinking about how my favourite memories of Paradox games have been formed by escaping stuffy old history and pretending to be a Lannister.

Luckily for me, Paradox are building tools that will make it much easier for modders to replace carefully modelled authenticity with fictional gubbins - or just twiddle with historical simulations, whatever floats your trireme. Those tools are part of a new engine what will make everything run better, look nicer and sound snazzier, but will also let people mod games while they're running. To some extent.

Lawyers from Lucasfilm have shut down Apeiron, a fan remake of BioWare's 2003 RPG Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic (one of the best PC games, according to us). It's little surprise that The Suits have stamped this out, though of course it is a bummer - and doubly so because Poem Studios put three years of hope and work into Apeiron before it caught the The Suits' cruel eye. The Suits even want them to destroy all their work. Our Alec seemed hopeful (well, by his standards) and called Apeiron "extremely pretty" back in 2016, but so it goes.

Yesterday, a flood of pink gnomes took over World Of Warcraft, racing from the starting area of Gnomeregan to the pirate harbour of Booty Bay. The Running of the Gnomes has grown over its nine annual iterations, now seeing thousands of participants log in to celebrate and raise money for breast cancer research.

Sometimes, in Hearthstone, your entire deck hinges on a single card. Also sometimes, you can overdraw, causing those cards to be burned away. And, once in a while, you burn your key card on stage in a championship decider match, right after the production crew cuts to signs in the crowd predicting that you’ll do exactly that.

Be warned, I’m going to spoil the moment and the match below. Let’s start with the clip:

While we’re all busy digging into ancient Greece, Ubisoft haven’t forgotten last year’s Ptolomaic playground, Assassin’s Creed Origins. During development, they partnered with Egyptologists, and in doing so they apparently discovered that translating hieroglyphs is very difficult and time consuming. In response, they started looking into ways to streamline the process using machine learning, and this week, they presented their initial progress.

Take a look at their introductory video explaining what they’re trying to achieve:

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 may have its differences from its many predecessors, most notably its inclusion of Battle Royale mode Blackout, but it’s still a first-person shooter at its core. Except, players have been using emotes to activate a third-person view, giving them a good look around them and potentially an advantage over their opponents. Treyarch say they’re already working on a fix.

When thinking of holiday destinations, Fallout 76’s irradiated wasteland might not be the first place that springs to mind. But the state of West Virginia wants you to focus on the landscapes, scenery, and terrifying mutated creatures folklore, and consider heading out to see them in person. They’ve put out a video of a Vault-tec bobblehead hanging out next to the state capitol building to entice you in:

Ubisoft’s melee-dramatic, vaguely historically inspired For Honor has always been a speculative thing, mashing together unrelated factions for the fun of it. With the pending release of the Marching Fire expansion, they’re taking it one step further and asking: what if knights vs. samurai vs. Vikings, but now everything is burning? See for yourself below:

As if holy wars weren't bad enough, Paradox are making them more complicated than ever before in their expansion, Holy Fury, for historical political life-sim Crusader Kings 2. Announced back in May, the expansion now has a release date - November 13th, just one month away. Leaders can become saints, successions are to become thornier, and pagans can forge their own custom path instead of bowing to one of the other trendier religions. This one's going to be bigger than past expansions, and include random world generation too. Below, a new story trailer.

The sheer audacity of Greywolf's Pax Nova is impressive - not content with tackling Civilization-scale 4X strategy as shown above, it stretches out to spacefaring scale as well. Just announced and looking like a hybrid of several major 4X strategy games smushed into a shared hex-and-turn-based format, Pax Nova enters early access "soon" and is to be published by Iceberg Interactive. You can check out its teasingly brief debut trailer below.

Gwent - Geralt of Rivia's favourite collectable card game - now steers the fate of nations in Witcher spinoff Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. CD Projekt Red have just released a 37 minute walkthrough of the card-RPG, introducing us to its characters, and the tweaked version of Gwent that the game uses to resolve its conflicts. It's genuinely interesting stuff, with the player's deck-building skills tested in battles that go far beyond the usual formula of the card game. Thronebreaker launches in a little under two weeks on October 23rd. The walkthrough video lurks below.

Some time after Gunfire's apocalyptic hack n' slasher Darksiders 3 launches next month, whip-cracking heroine Fury gets to poke around some Serpent Holes. Nothing to do with Brendan's horny lizard-folk, but rather one of two planned bits of DLC for the game included in the Deluxe Edition's price.

The first DLC - The Crucible - has Fury return to the survival arena from Darksiders 2, while Keepers Of The Void re-purposes the Serpent Holes from the original Darksiders - formerly a fast-travel network, they're now full of puzzles, monsters and loot. Below, the latest trailer.

The prospect of Hitman 2 has seemed to be 'more of the same good stuff, in new places' but with the game's launch now only one month and a day away, developers IO Interactive today announced that--surprise!--it'll introduce a 1v1 competitive multiplayer mode. Ghost Mode, as it's named, isn't about two hitmen trying to whack each other. Instead, they'll compete to off the same random targets fastest in different instances of the same level, existing in each other's world only as a faded 'ghost'. Ah you'll understand if you watch this new trailer below.