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1 day ago
Feature: Funderlords
I'm in a good place with Dota Underlords. We're long past that initial rush, those halcyon days where layers of the puzzle kept peeling away, one after the other. We're past the rough patch, too, when it seemed like we were over. That long plateau. We're comfortable, now. I can see the path that leads from here, the subtle ways I can improve. So what…
4 days ago
Feature: Hover bored
The latest in a long list of topics I have hurled myself into these past two weeks in the naive hope of distracting my anxiety for even just a few minutes, helicopters are all I’m choosing to think about right now. Wow, how do they work? The world is coming to an end. They’re such an exciting way to get around! Hovering celebrity death traps.…
5 days ago
Feature: The Half-Life game you wanted
Half-Life: Alyx is the Half-Life game you've been waiting for, even if it's not the one you were expecting - and even if you'll never play it. Valve's first full virtual reality game is a masterclass of first-person shooter design that makes clear the company haven't forgotten anything about making these kinds of games in the nine years since Portal 2, or the 13 years…
2 weeks ago
Feature: Crumplestiltskin
Don’t ask me to explain in any more detail, but I’m almost completely certain I understand what “soft-body physics” means having watched precisely one YouTube video about it while high in bed one afternoon, my own soft body draped inelegantly across the pillows and speckled in Quorn nugget crumbs, like some forgotten Renaissance masterpiece. Car simulator BeamNG.drive deals in the physics of soft bodies, objects…
Feature: Absolutely gorious
Doom Eternal sucks in the whole of you. Fights plunge you into flow states. They send you wading through demonic maelstroms of gristle and gore. You twist and jump and dash, punching, shooting and chainsawing every Cacodemon that should know better than to cross you. I've danced the bloody ballets of hell and beyond, and I've returned to tell you: they are dazzling. It's a…
Feature: Spit and shine, Mr. Freeman
What is the half-life of Half-Life? I would have long ago described Valve's first-person shooter as my favourite game, but revisiting it last month in preparation for Half-Life: Alyx made clear how many parts of its design have aged. Enter Black Mesa, a fan-made remake of the original Half-Life, inside Half-Life 2's Source engine. Over 8 years since we first reviewed its earliest release, the…
3 weeks ago
Feature: The real murder was the friends we made on the way
Murder By Numbers, which would seem to be tailor-made for a few of the RPS staff, is a murder mystery visual novel, where you gather clues by completing picross puzzles (also known as nonograms or griddlers). Aided by a small, cute robot called SCOUT, who consists almost entirely of a flying CRT monitor screen with a face, actress Honor Mizrahi falls into detecting when the…
Feature: Teach a man to fish
Back in the before times, before the fires and the disease came, you could feed bread to ducks without being cancelled by the bird police. Just grab a sliced pan of wholewheat Warburtons and hurl it into a lake, then watch as every duck, swan and anaemic-looking goose in the postcode descended upon it in a feathery gale, quacking and honking and feasting in a…
Feature: Spirited performance
Ori And The Will Of The Wisps delivers an affecting tale overall, but it teems with small, strange stories: a cutesy little owlet learns to glide along the pockets of air its massive, dinosaur-sized ancestors once sailed. A small man with a skull for a face tries very hard to save a tree that’s already dead. An ancient frog king fights some sort of weird…
Feature: Sycophants and Sick-o-'phants
It's been 28 years since 1992's Dune II, and like many people out there, I'd long ago stopped seriously hoping for another videogame to do justice to Frank Herbert's legendary science fiction series. So it's with surprise and delight, then, that I can tell you the best Dune game in three decades is here... and it's a procedurally generated sitcom, played through a colony management…
Feature: Can't stand the reign
I imagine death is anticlimactic for most people. Maybe even more so for kings. There you are, with your whole life's confusion and doubt and pain cooming to a head, everyone turning against you for unclear reasons, all your efforts accumulated at last, and you still just sort of... stop. After that, all you get is an image of a mildly sad, grey face, and…
Feature: Yabba dabba don't
It’s a little-known fact that the “ARK” in “ARK: Survival Evolved” is in fact short for “arsebark”. And that’s fitting, because that’s exactly what its latest DLC, Genesis, is like: a fart. And what a fart. Not an abrupt, spluttering guff, nor an undulating trouser howl that reduces its culprit to ever more contorted grimaces of shame as it continues. No, ARK: Genesis is a…
Feature: Void if removed
I did level four on my first go. That's my crown and none of you can take it. Level three was a bastard's hump and I struggled to get through it for hours, before I realised that I already had the supplies I needed to repair my ship. Those same supplies are also a requirement for the best weapons. That's just mean, man. Savage Vessels…
4 weeks ago
Feature: Head 'n' shoulders
A side-scrolling roguelike with a pixel art style and an adorable little skull person protagonist, Skul: The Hero Slayer could easily be mistaken for about seven thousand other early access games. After all, we’ve long since hit peak pixel, reaching the stage in society where lovely chunky squares are the mainstream rather than the exception, and aliased edges and bezier curves have to cower and…
Feature: My kingdom for a Powered Large Wheel
If I had to choose a single incident to sum up my time in physics-y medieval build and destroy ‘em up Besiege, it would probably be the time I got 15 steps into its 33-part guide to making a plane, saw that it was asking me to access the “advanced build” menu, despaired for a second, and then realised that I didn't need a plane…
Feature: 'Neon'
My latest big brain critic realisation is that dystopian sci-fi settings are a clever way to make basic (and possibly tedious) elements of interacting with your game, suddenly thematic. “Hmmm, I’ve been clicking on this menu for a while,” You think. “This isn’t very interesting.” And then the screen goes all crackly or whatever, and a disembodied voice materialises and says: “The year is 2483,…
Feature: No bull
Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first. Taur has nothing to do with bulls. I don’t know how many of you may have thought that, but I figured I’d clear it up anyway. It does have a lot to do with towers, which is how I assume the title is supposed to be pronounced. I quite admire the brass of it. It’s…
1 month ago
Feature: Try and triangle again
It would be so easy to call Corruption 2029 "Mutant Year Zero without mutants". That is, after all, the first impression it gives to probably anyone familiar with the same developers' irradiated manduck tales. MYZ had personality and atmosphere, and that helped carry it through its weaker parts. And here I once again come up against the question of how fair it is to judge…
Feature: Twofer Mario
In the streets of a not so distant future, between the public onanism booth, and the bouncer employed ironically by a nightclub's post-millennial owners, stands an enormous phone display encased in concrete. Squint into the solar flare brightness of its 20-foot screen, and you can just about make out some of the messages as they scroll by. Local youths are voting on whether Ben and…
Feature: Oh buoy oh buoy
You’ll have heard of Raft. It’s the best open world survival crafting there is, for the singular reason that rather than having to run around to discover and excavate resources, they’re all swept towards you on a never-ending tide of stuff. Plastic, wood, leaves, potatoes. All you have to do is catch the detritus with a hook on a string and then yank it towards…
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