Latest Articles

I've given the free demo for third-person looter-shooter Outriders a whirl, and it is very much what you'd expect from a game that requires shooting, alongside some looting. Although I did crash to desktop a lot, and the strength of the motion blur gave me a headache. That was less good. Thankfully, a patch for the demo is on the way which is set to fix these issues and some other annoying bugs too.

Every day I wake up craving a new game that will fill the Hollow Knight-shaped hole in my heart, and I think Aeterna Noctis might just about do it. It's an upcoming 2D metroidvania that will have you slicing your way through evil baddies in settings that look like they're straight out of Hollow Knight. You're not a bug in this one though, you're a human man with a cool shadowy sword who's trying to regain his kingly powers.

While Diablo 2: Resurrected is giving Blizzard's seminal action-RPG a honking great 3D makeover, the game beneath is similar enough that apparently you can even load your old saves to continue playing. If you have them. And if you'd want to? I think it would be in your best interests not to.

Introversion, makers of Prison Architect and Uplink, are running a Fail Masterclass. Each month they reveal a new prototype for a game they've decided not to make over on their YouTube channel, and then make the prototype available to buy. All the money goes to the charity War Child.

This month's cautionary tale: Nanotech, a game about building microscopic creatures in a petri dish and giving them simple, gobbling behaviours. It looks neat.

Artifact, Valve's collectible card game set in the world of Dota 2, has ceased active development. That means that Artifact 2.0, a reboot intended to rejuvenate the 2018 game's fortunes, will never be finished.

It also means that Valve have made Artifact, including every card, free for everyone.

I've said it before, but Teardown is that rarest of things: a technological gimmick with a game that utilises it to its full potential. It's a first-person heist 'em up set in an entirely destructible world, in which you must smash and explode routes through buildings to grab your targets and escape before a timer runs out.

Now it has Steam Workshop support, with over 100 mods already available.

Modding seems to be in rude health in 2021, as industrious players crack open game eggs to whisk and scramble their insides whether developers release tools to help or not. There's no shortage of player-made tweaks and fixes, of modest additions, or even of total overhauls.

This is cause for celebration, but more importantly, it's cause to argue. I ask you: what PC game has had the best modding community, past or present?

Elite Dangerous's next expansion is Odyssey, which is adding first-person shootybangs to Frontier's galaxy-sized space sim. This much we knew already, but now Frontier have announced that the expansion's alpha will begin on March 29th, and there's an extremely stiff-looking playthrough of it below.

All right, the title is a bit misleading. I do not think everything in The Eternal Cylinder, a very weird upcoming survival game by ACE Team, looks like a willy. I think some of the things look like fannies and bums as well. But according to people I have shared these thoughts with, they are not accurate, and are an indication that I am deeply strange.

Loop Hero is a new world-looping, deck-building RPG that launched today. It drops you in the shoes of a little adventurer, caught in an infinite loop by an evil Lich. As you travel around in endless circles, you can collect items and alter the world to attempt to escape. Over the last week or so, I've written about a fair few new indie roguelikes (because I love them), but I reckon this one is the most interesting of the bunch.

Last year, a lawsuit put a common FIFA fan theory into legal action. Three people sued EA for allegedly using a technology called 'Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment' to make good teams underperform in Ultimate Team mode, leading to players buying more loot boxes so they can build better teams. EA have always denied that. Well, now that lawsuit has been dropped, apparently after speaking with EA engineers about how the game works.

My friends and I are still continuing our odyssey in Viking survival game Valheim. Despite still-minimal progress towards an advancement of civilisation, namely into the Carrot Age, we march on. We are hardy folk, and we must persevere, even when we cannot fathom how to grow just one (1) of our five (5) a day.

We had booked in an appointment with a mysterious baddie who lives across the sea, but one of our clan, Dunder Mifflin, was absent for this planned trip (tattoo removal, an unfortunate double-booking). To prep for our kinsman's return, we attempted a little practice sail instead. A pleasant skim across the ocean, which left us naked... and afraid.

At the end of last year Razer announced a new conservation partnership with Conservation International to save 100,000 trees with the launch of their Sneki Snek plush (pictured above), a cute, wiggly mascot version of their famous snake logo. Having comfortably beaten that goal in less than two months, Razer are now extending their Sneki Snek campaign to save a million trees, and will be shortly announcing brand-new Sneki Snek merch to go along with it (and I'm putting it out there now, I'm calling dibs on a rainbow-coloured Snek in honour of Razer's Chroma RGB).

Protect your glowing red weak spot, reader, because this week the Electronic Wireless Show podcast is on the hunt for the best bosses in games. I'm actually fairly sure we've done this topic at least once before, but I'm the boss of the podcast and I say we do it again!

This does actually result in some fairly sensible dicussion of bosses and what we think of them as a concept, which I know will come as a great surprise to you all. We were surprised our own selves. There is, however, a lengthly discussion on the 2010 film Wolfman, and an anecdote about pizza from Matthew. We shall circle back to his opinions on cured meats, never you fear.

If the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 represents the very best of what gaming laptops have to offer in 2021, then the Gigabyte Aorus 15G is probably what you'd call the next step down. It still has one of Nvidia's powerful new RTX 3080 graphics chips inside its slim black chassis, but it's the 8GB variant rather than the top 16GB one you get on the Scar. It also only has a 1920x1080 resolution display, albeit one with a higher 240Hz refresh rate, and its CPU is a fraction older as well, with Gigabyte choosing to stick with Intel's still very fast Core i7-10870H instead of opting for one of AMD's shiny new Ryzen 5000 chips. That's still a formidable set of specs, of course, and it's a potent combination for those after a top-notch 1080p gaming experience that will last for many years to come.

Are you tired of running a pleasant farm in the quaint fields of Stardew Valley? Then why not don your best plaid shirt, whip out a hunting rifle and get to building your very own homestead in Ranch Simulator. It's an open-world simulation game that launched in early access today, and it seems a whole lot like a gritty, realistic (ish) 3D version of Stardew.

Oh thank goodness, reader. It is almost over. We feel the influence of the mighty Horaszdóttir receding. This is it: the last time this year that we must submit to her will, and receive her prophecy of the games yet to come. One last time for this winter, she draws turkeys from her eternal flock to auger the future from their innards. She comes closer, her breath hot and foul upon our ears, and whispers with a smile (oh! Her bloodstained teeth!) a final word: indie.

Do you ever wonder if your webcam is watching you while you're playing games? Well, there's no need to wonder with Before Your Eyes - it's a first-person adventure that you play by blinking. Arriving on April 8th, this story takes you on a little trip down memory lane as you journey into the afterlife. Each time your webcam catches you blinking, your current memory will fade away, replacing it with a new one.

Ahh Valheim, a viking survival game that literally everyone on planet Earth is playing right now. Including a few friends and I, who inhabit a modest dwelling overlooking the sea. I thought it was rather impressive, but no, it pales in comparison to a player home that I spotted recently. A large part of it is built under rock too, I mean, I had no idea this was possible. I am now the embodiment of jealousy, a living envy-vessel who will shut the door of my home just a little bit harder than usual.

Of all the fighting game series which have made the jump from 2D sprites to 3D, I still think Guilty Gear looks the best. We'll need to wait a while longer to admire the latest, as developers Arc System Works last night announced they've delayed the launch of Guilty Gear Strive by two months. Previously due April 9th, it's now expected June 11th. They say they want to act on feedback from the recent console-only open beta test.

It gets to a point in a pig farmer's life where he has to think long and hard about the health benefits of feeding them chopped-up mob victims. In Adios, you've reached that point - though I imagine the morals of it all are probably on your mind too. Adios is a first-person game about a complicated decision. You don't want to be the mob's disposal guy anymore, but it's the sort of work people don't leave without being disposed of themselves. It looks tense and intriguing and comes out on March 17th.

Try as I might, I cannot view Sins Of A Solar Empire through anything other than the most rose-tinted glasses. Much of it is auditory. The sound of each button press, the wonderful space opera soundtrack, and the endlessly invigorating voice line, "Scouts have found a colonisable planet!"; they're all ingrained in the memories of a 13-year-old playing his very first real-time space 4X game, and loving every second of it.

Puzzle-y adventure platformer Minute Of Islands has a lovely look to it, but we'll be waiting a bit longer than planned to play it. Studio Fizbin have announced that they won't be launching this month due to some last minute bugs found during testing. Unfortunately they also aren't sure what the new date will be, saying they want to wait until they're positive those issues will be resolved before announcing a new one.

Another challenger has entered the action roguelike arena. Revita is now out in early access, a twin-stick platformer where you'll have to sacrifice your health in exchange for items as you climb a mysterious clocktower. You can spot all the action in the new launch trailer that shows off the first three worlds you can start shooting your way through today.

Lovecraftian detective game The Sinking City has been on and off Steam multiple times lately due to an ongoing dispute between developers Frogwares and publisher Nacon. Earlier this week, Frogwares accused Nacon of pirating the game in order to release it on Steam and issued a DMCA notice to Valve to get it removed from the storefront. Nacon have now responded, saying that they have acted within the rights of their contract to make a version of the game available for sale on the store.

The folks behind Scribblenauts have sketched out something a bit different this time around. 5th Cell's new game Castlehold is a competitive strategy game that's just appeared in early access. It's free to play and launched today, so you can jump in and begin scratching your head over its tiny battlefield right now.

Well, here's a nice surprise. Resident Evil Village is getting ray tracing support, AMD announced this evening during their RX 6700 XT reveal event. They only showed off a brief clip of the game's ray tracing in action during their presentation, but from the looks of things we can expect to see beautifully ray traced reflections on its polished mansion floors and maybe some ray traced shadows as well.

The real question, though, is whether the hulking majesty of the game's main villain, the enormous Lady Dimitrescu, will also be treated to some lovely ray traced reflections. After all, big lady vampires aren't meant to have reflections, are they? And if it's not going to give us accurate 9ft 6in reflections of this woman who's taller than an actual ostrich, then really, what is even the point?

Last week, we started our exciting adventure to determine the best thing in video games. Your votes are in and: yes, seeing your legs when you look down in first-person games is officially better than cloud saves. This week, our scientific inquiry continues with a question that's already divided the RPS treehouse. What's better: inventory Tetris, or fishing minigames?

AMD have announced that their nifty Smart Access Memory tech that lets all-AMD PCs get free extra performance is now available on almost all Ryzen 3000 CPUs in addition to their latest Ryzen 5000 chips. AMD say that older Ryzen 3000 CPU owners can now get up to 16% more performance from their PC when paired with one of their new Radeon RX 6000 Big Navi graphics cards - including the newly announced RX 6700 XT - which is definitely a turn up for the books for older CPU owners.

The games groundhog saw his shadow this year, and we all know what that means. There are going to be six more weeks of business season before we can all take off our coats for E3 season. Today's business forecast includes 100% chance of acquisitions. Social games folks Zynga have announced that they've acquired Max Schaefer's Torchlight 3 studio Echtra Games. They'll now be collaborating on an unannounced RPG.

Zynga haven't disclosed the terms of the sale but do let on their plans for Echtra. They'll be working with fellow Zynga studio NaturalMotion on "a new, yet to be announced RPG for cross-platform play."