Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

As everyone in Britain knows, you shouldn't turn your heating on until October at earliest. November, ideally. But if you give up in September, you're a coward. Even if autumn does seem a whole lot more miserable than you remember. Time to dig my layers out the back of the wardrobe, I suppose.

What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

Up until now, it sure felt like we didn't know a lot about "looter-slasher" Godfall aside from the fact that it's an action game that looks quite colorful and shiny. Well say no more, Gearbox Publishing and Counterplay Games have gone and dumped a whole trove of combat details on the ground. I'm going to spend about as long sorting through information about these various attack types as I likely will my in-game inventory.

Despite being very, very bad at its turn-based tactical survival, I quite enjoy Overland. I always welcome a reason to jump back in and utterly fail at surviving an apocalyptic road trip across the country. Finji have given me another fantastic reason to get back behind the wheel. In its newest update, Overland adds an "all dogs" setting that guarantees your squad will only be made up of furry friends. Also there are pugs now.

Spelunky 2 launches on PC next week, but you'll be tackling its randomised platformer dungeons solo for a few weeks after that. "Our online multiplayer had a bit of a rocky start on PS4," Mossmouth say, and they've decided to hold that element out of the PC release temporarily instead of delaying the launch of the game entirely. Mossmouth and BlitWorks anticipate that online multiplayer will be ready for PC within a few weeks.

Maxis have given some new details on their commitment to fixing dark skin tones in The Sims 4. An October update will address existing graphical issues with darker skin tones while a later update in December will add one hundred new skin swatches and additional customization controls for Create-A-Sim.

Of course Amazon is launching a cloud gaming service. How did I not see this coming? Amazon Luna is the company's upcoming service for playing games on most of your favorite screens via subscription packages to different libraries. They've opened applications to the early access version of the service currently available in mainland United States.

Call Of Duty: Warzone is kicking off season six next week and you'll want to check the schedule before you hop back into Verdansk. The train schedule, that is. COD's looty shooty battle royale is getting a working metro system to carry you around the map. The trick is that you'll have to play nice on board. No fighting back there or this train isn't leaving the station, squad!

Solid Snake, Revolver Ocelot, and all their wacky mates return to PC today with re-releases of the first two Metal Gear Solid games popping up on GOG, after years hiding in boxes. The stealth series was clunky but ahead of its time in a lot of ways (and I'm as alarmed as anyone by how prescient their politics now seem) so I'm quite curious to see how the vintage tactical espionage action actually holds up. It's not going to be super-great, is it, but I'm game. GOG have dug up the original Metal Gear too.

This was to be the week Bungie launched Destiny 2: Beyond Light but, like everything else this year, the expansion ended up delayed. This week has at least brought news about installing Beyond Light come November, both good and bad. Good news: thanks to some revamped technoguts, the game should take up less drive space and Bungie should be able to patch any urgent problems faster. Bad news: you'll need to download the whole game again when Beyond Light arrives. We'll get a few hours' head-start to preload, at least.

For eighteen years, I've been unable to escape a stubborn earworm: the smooth jazz of Django Reinhardt's Cavalerie, from the car radio in Mafia. I had thought that I might be able to shake it loose by returning to the city of Lost Heaven in Mafia: Definitive Edition, the remake which launched this morning, but I've now read that song didn't make it in. If I play Def Ed without first exorcising Cavalerie, will I shut the door and have it stuck in my head forever? A serious concern for the remake of a pretty decent game.

If you've been thinking about upgrading your CPU recently to pave the way for one of those shiny new graphics cards coming out soon, then you're in luck. There have been several price drops on both Intel and AMD CPUs this week, making it a good time to pick up a good bargain. Below, you'll find all of the cheapest CPU deals from around the web in both the UK and the US, covering all of our top gaming CPU picks. Whatever type of PC you're looking to build, here are the best 9th and 10th Gen Intel CPU prices and best AMD Ryzen CPU deals going on this week.

Eight years after its last major content update, Left 4 Dead 2 has mutated all sorts of newness with The Last Stand. Made by fans but released officially by Valve, the huge free update has added a new mini-campaign based on the first game's lighthouse Survival mode map, dozens of new maps for Survival and Scavenge modes, new weapons, and loads of wee tweaks and touches. With Valve saying as recently as this year that they're not making L4D3, The Last Stand may be the co-op shooter's last stand for quite some time.

After five years in early access, multiplayer tactical shooter Squad finally launched this week. Up to 100 players can romp around big levels on foot and in vehicles, in action which sits somewhere between Battlefield and Arma on the simulated soldier seriousness scale. It was started by some of the folks behind Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality, y'see. Though just because the game's now out of early access, doesn't mean the devs are done with it. They've laid out plans for new modes, maps, and more that stretch into at least next year.

Square Enix today announced an April 23rd release date for Nier Replicant Ver.1.22474487139..., the confusingly-named new edition of the 2010 action-RPG. This game is set millennia before Nier: Automata, the first game in the series that came to PC, though it does have a few familiar faces. The new version is tweaked, expanded, and prettied-up a bit, supposedly enough that Squeenix call it an "update" or "modern re-telling" rather than use simple and helpful terms like 'remaster' or 'remake'. Come enjoy some nice landscapes and sad music in the new trailer below.

Rocket League went free-to-play yesterday, which, naturally, caused loads of new players to hop into those funky little football cars for a few matches. The game's new competitive season began, too, bringing in a load of returning players as well. Unfortunately, Rocket League's servers did not like this. Not long after the game updated, the servers went down and players struggled to connect to its online features.

Total War Saga: Troy launched its first DLC today, Amazons. It introduces badass warrior queens Penthesilea and her sister Hippolyta to the Trojan War, along with their all-female armies, new focuses, faction mechanics and more. Better yet, you can nab it for free for the next two weeks.

Now, each of these Amazon leaders have slightly different goals - Hippolyta is out to take back sacred regions and gather Amazonian treasure, while Penthesilea will be exploring the world with a Horde army to capture new settlements.

Update: many retailers are now out of stock of the RTX 3090, so here's an update on UK and US availability.

Nvidia's monstrous RTX 3090 is upon us. Launching today at 6am PT / 2pm BST, Nvidia's so-called "BFGPU" will allegedly bring 8K gaming to the masses - a rather pointless endeavour if you ask me, especially since the only 8K displays you can actually buy right now are mostly extortionate 8K TVs. Still, if nothing but the best of the best will do and you don't care how much it costs to get there, then here's a list of everywhere you can currently buy an RTX 3090, as well as where you can get your hands on that all-important 8K display to go with it. RIP your wallet.

Microsoft announced during their Tokyo Games Show stream today that Japan will be the next country to get touched up by hand in Microsoft Flight Simulator. The first "world update" is coming next week with six Japanese cities rebuilt using 3D photogrammetry, along with six airports, a new elevation map for the country, and loads of bridges, temples, castles, and other landmarks. The update's due next Tuesday, and you can see a bit of Japan now in the trailer below.

Mike Morhaime, the co-founder and former CEO of Blizzard, has opened a new video games venture with two studios stacked full of fellow ex-Blizzard folks. Dreamhaven is the company name, under which sit two studios, Moonshot Games and Secret Door. Open their doors and you'll find folks including longtime StarCraft II game director Dustin Browder and original Hearthstone game director Eric Dodds. What are they working on? It's a secret, for now.

Among Us has been a bit of a surprise hit over the last few months, managing to rack up a whopping 1.5 million concurrent players earlier this month after becoming hugely popular on Twitch. The developers, Innersloth, had planned on making a sequel, but since the first one's popularity exploded, they've decided to cancel Among Us 2 in favour of focusing on the original game. Now, all the new things they'd intended on putting in the sequel will go to Among Us 1 instead.

Nvidia have issued their second apology this week, this time for the launch of the RTX 3090. The so-called "BFGPU" isn't due to go on sale until 6am PT / 2pm BST later today, September 24th, but Nvidia's apology confirms previous reports that there will be a "limited supply" of GPUs available when it goes on sale. "We want to apologise upfront that this will be in limited supply on launch day," Nvidia said on their GeForce website. "We know this is frustrating, and we’re working with our partners to increase the supply in the weeks to come."

Vrom vrom football's gone free-to-play and that's far from the only change in Rocket League today. The explosive car sports game has another season of its Rocket Pass, overhauled its Challenges system, and moved to the Epic Games Store.