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3 days ago
Feature: Injustice League
Right, quick version: Lego DC Super-Villains is another franchised Lego game, and if you've played any they've made since around 2013, you already know everything you need to know about it. Open city (Gotham and Metropolis to start) mixed with missions, eighty billion characters, nine hundred trillion collectables, lots of silly cutscenes, tons of bugs, abysmal vehicle controls, and enough to do to keep you,…
Feature: They finally Gwent and did it
Thronebreaker has been taking me for a ride. Fighting monsters and blackclad horsemen in this card-game-sorta-RPG is a bit like being on a bumpy mine cart. You’re going up and down and swiping lots of gold along the way, the ride is smooth then boring then exciting then dull. Sometimes it could use a diesel engine. Or something more environmentally friendly? I don’t know, this…
4 days ago
Feature: Welcome to the story farm, we grow disaster
RimWorld is a game of perfect catastrophe. Not simply a homage to Dwarf Fortress, or a skin graft of Prison Architect, it has spent five years of early access becoming its own simulation of farce, hopefulness and inevitable disaster. Today, it's finally "done". It starts as an opaque management game about the marooned survivors of a sci-fi shipwreck. But it quickly harnesses the darkness and…
Feature: Sloth Marines
In the last five years alone, there have been four video game adaptations of the Warhammer 40,000 spin-off, Space Hulk. Plenty of chances to get it right, you’d think, though the first three attempts suggest otherwise. And here comes Space Hulk: Tactics, once again throwing gruesome Genestealers against stompy Terminators in derelict spaceship corridors. It’s not quite a combo-breaker, but it gets very close.
5 days ago
Feature: Get Lit
The Light Keeps Us Safe works terrible magic with its cacophony of disquieting machine noises. Each new killer robot emits yet another nails-on-chalkboard screech that will bounce around in your head long after you’ve fled from their clutches. They’re the sounds of factories and dial-up internet and error messages warped and twisted and remixed inside metal demons. Normally they’re just grating, but here, in moonlit…
2 weeks ago
Feature: Fish friends
Megaquarium's off-screen fish scientists had just unlocked some eels, and they seemed like just what my aquarium needed to draw in the big crowds. Sure, I had some guests, seduced by the promise of clean floors, well-stocked vending machines and at least three types of fish, but I lacked the kind of big-ticket item that put aquariums on the map. So excited was I to…
Feature: Droning on
I've been doing a lot of tinkering recently. Endless iterations of death-dealing drones, flying factories, huge robotic worms and automated weapon platforms - I've lost count of all my experiments in destruction. Nimbatus’ drone editor is a complex, liberating tool where patient engineers can craft a bewildering array of exotic, inventive machines. Then a giant snake blows them up. When my massive artillery drone -…
Feature:
If your time with Assassin's Creed Odyssey has been spent muttering "More like Crashassin's Please Ohgodhelpme", beaming with pride in your wordplay while cussing out crash bugs in Ubisoft's new open-world murder simulator, relief may soon be at hand. Ubisoft said over the weekend that they've identified the cause of several crashes: CPUs which met the game's listed system requirements but don't include support for…
Feature: A dicey adventure
Starting a new tabletop RPG campaign is a bit like joining an complicated polyamorous relationship. You have to make sure you like your companions, but most importantly, you and the Dungeon Master must share the same vision. ANYWAY, my point is that in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, some DMs like to follow the rules by the book, others just use rules as a…
Feature: It's all Greek to me
I have played, now, 30 hours of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which I think means I'm about half way through (the main story, that is, not the entire game, which is so vast it might as well be infinite when set against the free time most adults have). Odyssey is a curious mythic beast. Though there are additions to the core of Assassin’s Creed Oranges, they…
3 weeks ago
Feature: Hats off
Premature Evaluation is the column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser’s been given the keys to Parkasaurus, the goofy dinosaur theme park sim. The real tragedy at the centre of the Jurassic Park movies is that, no matter how many times they escape the park and kill their captors, the dinosaurs are never free of humans for very long.…
Feature: A stick on the moon
Oh, endings. Wouldn't life be better without them? It would certainly last longer. And it would make a lot of games an awful lot better. I absolutely thoroughly enjoyed Deliver Us The Moon, right up until the moment it ended. Now I want to find the developers and kick them all in the shins. But how much does that matter? Here's wot I think:
Feature: Derelicte
Deep Sky Derelicts is a deck-building strategic game for those scared of such things
I'm really not one for deck building games. I think it's primarily a matter of constantly feeling like I'm doing something wrong, always certain I should have a better selection of cards, that if I'd made a different choice I'd be having another experience... it's an anxiety-inducing way to play anything. So clearly I was unsure starting Deep Sky Derelicts, despite liking the sound of…
4 weeks ago
Feature: If you go down to the woods today
Brendan: Hello, Alice. I’ve just been dandering along a quiet highway in Life Is Strange 2. There’s no time-travelling gal pals in this one (at least, none so far) but there is a sad psychic pre-teen and his hoody-wearing brother. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, you just played through it too, and we’re gonna have a chat about each episode as…
Feature: Cars served with some light seasoning
Mostly, I play the more hardcore racing sims. I want to be reminded of my time on real tracks, driving real cars. I want to work on my skills. I want to watch my replay and analyze mistakes and correct my technique. Taking it all a little too seriously is part of the fun for me. However, sometimes I'm bloody tired. I'm tired from managing…
Feature: Gather the tropes
When it first came out a decade ago, Valkyria Chronicles came off as a delightfully odd duck: a sort of doe-eyed strategy JRPG that gave the Western-dominated strategy genre a much-needed taste of pastel anime charm. But its hybrid of third-person movement with turn-based tactics was relegated to consoles until a PC release in 2016. Now, for better or worse, Valkyria Chronicles 4 offers a…
Feature: Memorable
As a collection of puzzles Path To Mnemosyne is a peculiar conflation of ingenious and over-familiar, as well as having a name you'll never remember when you want to find it on Steam later. As a small vignette, it looks beautiful (if slightly held back by clunky controls) offering smart puzzling ideas, in between some of the most hackneyed puzzles you can think of. I…
1 month ago
Feature: Yo dawg, I heard you like RPGs...
Satirical website Hard Drive once ran a story which poked fun at the long, drawn-out nature of most RPGs. In a hard-hitting investigative report, one player was commended for finally “getting to the good shit” at the 117-hour mark of a fictional game, while his roommate scoffed at him for only making it mid-way through the game. Like most RPGs, CrossCode is an immense and…
Feature: It can go whistle
The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep is a shoddy old mess burying some nice ideas
Are you nostalgic for The Bard's Tale? I certainly played them back between 1985 and 1988, but being under 10, that was a very long time ago. I don't really remember them with any special degree of affection. And I'm certainly free of the peculiar reverence of those for whom such cows are too sacred to criticise even the decades-later follow-ups (subtweet). What I've been…
Feature: Just like old times
The Gardens Between is all about reminiscing. It plays like two friends talking about all the adventures they've had, with the conversation flowing as they remember details and go back over stories that’ve grown with the telling. “Do you remember...?” it seems to say. “Oh yes, but before that-!” “And of course there was the bit where-!” This is not a feeling that comes from…
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