Realpolitiks is the practice of pragmatic diplomacy based on circumstance. Real politics is arguing with your mum’s friend Derek on Facebook about unisex bathrooms. And Realpolitiks [official site] is a strategy game set in the contemporary world with all its international crises and dilemmas. The first two have been around for a while, but the last one just came out today.
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The trailer for Realpolitiks [official site] is spectacular, in the way that someone stepping on a rake and then falling into a pond is a spectacle. The game itself looks like one of those maps and graphs things that I love, with its focus on politics in the modern world, but the trailer doesn’t spend a lot of time with the game. Sure, you’ll see a map around the 30 second mark, but that’s assuming your eyes haven’t already popped out of your skull. “When World Collapses,” sez the trailer, “REAL MEN MAKE REAL POLITICS”. The man in the video rubberstamps a document with blood.
You can watch below if you think you can handle the heat. Read the rest of this entry »
IL-2 Sturmovik blew me away at Gamescom last year. With only a couple of weeks until I fly out to Cologne again, I’m enthusiastic about the prospect of another unexpected champion of gaming emerging from a cloudbank and peppering me with excitement. A year has passed since I took to the skies and development has continued at a steady rate. New planes are appearing and the modelling of existing ones is improving, but it’s the dynamic campaign I’m most excited to see. Glorious great maps. Two new videos below.
The IL-2 Sturmovik series is one of those rare sims which stretched beyond its nerdy remit to attract an audience of people who’d never normally clamber into a virtual cockpit. Now developers 1C Game Studios are teaming with the Russian Military Historical Society to produce ILya Muromets, a new flight sim set during World War 1. It’s set during the Eastern Front air war and named after the first airliner, and one of the first large bombers in aerial warfare. There’s the first set of screenshots below.
RPS Feature Beastie Toys
Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, monster-based monster strategy (again!) with (even more!) monsters King’s Bounty: The Dark Side.
Last week I moaned about not being able to get monsters to work together to destroy humankind. I should have just waited for this week, when King’s Bounty: The Dark Side (or just Dark Side, depending on what you’re reading) gave me the monster team-up of my dreams. Zombies, demons, vampires, orcs, goblins, imps, three-headed dogs, skeletal archers, necromancers, and even dragons, all in the mix, and more importantly all working together for monsterkind.
Resist cynicism or die. Hope. Dream. Think. Act. Be vulnerable. Open yourself to risk or you’ll never truly learn, love, or live. That hip new band may very well drop a cracking second album, I can make that Cronenbergian game controller I’ve been dreaming of, my mum shall stop hinting that I’m going to die alone in a ditch, and King’s Bounty will get an actual proper sequel rather than simply more glorified expansions.
Oh. Well. Maybe the next one after this. The next in the series will be King’s Bounty: Dark Side this summer, publishers 1C have announced. Yes, it looks like another expandalone sort of dealy rather than a game building upon King’s Bounty in bold new ways.
RPS Feature Directly Controlled
Men Of War: Assault Squad 2, or MOWASTWO for short, is now available to those who buy into the ongoing beta. Full release is scheduled for the 20th of March. Needless to say, Jim dove in, headfirst.
I’ll admit that I’m a bit in love with the Men Of War games. It clouds my judgement. The series is flawed, even occasionally lame, but always so beautiful to my eye. Many games have attempted to sell us the idea of War, and even more the idea of Men, but it is only in Men Of War that these two ideas fused together, like desperate lovers, to produce a simulationist battlefield mutant that looks at us with terrible eyes and says: “Aim is in the reach zone!”
I’m sorry, it’s been a while since I wrote anything. All my metaphors seem to have become sticky from neglect.
Jim! Jim! Oh, where is that boy? Oh dear, with our resident Men of War expert on sabbatical we’ve been left ill-placed to cover developments on 1C’s latest instalment in their usually clever’n’careful WW2 squad-strategy series. Well, Men of War: Assault Squad 2 is out now on Early Access, so I guess the brave and the bold can find out whether it’s any cop themselves, if they’re prepared to chance a twenty spot on it.
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RPS Feature Simulation & wargame blather
“Another helping of Enigma machine gibberish from Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s resident sim gimp.” The Coventry Herald
“As usual, Stone switches subjects with the gracefulness of a derailing freight train.” The Aldershot Bugle
“The last time I saw that many commas that close together, I was visiting the National Museum of Printing.” Caravanning Today
“After reading this week’s pieces on IL-2: Battle of Stalingrad and BOMB, the fatwā calls suddenly made a lot more sense.” Contemporary Crochetist Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature A Rift In The Sky
I didn’t believe in the Oculus Rift. Not in the way that I don’t believe in Derek Acorah, the phantom of credibility, but in the way that I don’t believe in matter transporters or eating only one biscuit. The Rift had seemed like an impossible dream, a product of improbable technology and the overly forgiving impressions of excited humans. Now I believe and all it took was a flight over Stalingrad in a Sturmovik.
I would have written this post a great deal more quickly but I accidentally got Stoned while doing a quick spot of research. Fear not – nobody’s been pelting me with rocks and I haven’t decided that the only way to write about flight sims is in a herbal haze. I did make the mistake of checking the writings of Tim Stone in historical Flare Path briefings and that was, as ever, like entering a world of exciting things that I know so little about. Did you know that pilots in WWI flight sim, Rise of Flight, have sidearms in the cockpit with them? 777 Studios were behind that game and 1C have handed them development duties on the WWII Eastern Front sequel.
RPS Feature Journey into no great mystery
The fourth game in Katauri Interactive’s reboot of olden strategy/RPG hybrid King’s Bounty is out now. Warriors Of The North requires no knowledge of the earlier games, involving a new storyline and a new hero, and a whole lot of Norse mythology-inspired beasts and magic. More of the cheerful same or a new take on what’s become somewhat routine? Here’s what I think.
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Yesterday we reported how gamers in Russia and bordering countries had received a peculiar version of Borderlands 2. It was in Russian only, and region locked so it was not possible to play with people from other countries. That was strange enough, but more odd was that this was also being distributed to non-Russian-speaking former USSR nations, which didn’t much impress people. The good news is, it’s now all being sorted. 2K have ensured that customers both in and neighbouring Russia will have access to the international version of the game as well.
Nuclear Union does look quite a bit like somebody took one slice of Fallout 3 and one slice of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and then made an irradiated sandwich out of them. Holding the post-apocalyptic pastrami together are the binding brains of Men of War developers Best Way. Jim spoke with the team last month to find out about the switch from strategy to RPG and found that the game will have tactical combat, mutants and environmental hazards. At Gamescom I saw a trailer that includes some gameplay and you can now see that same trailer below and you won’t even have to be in a noisy hall the size of an aircraft hangar, unless that’s where you live in which case you should totally apply to be on Grand Designs.
RPS Feature Men Of Post-World War III
In June I was pleased and surprised to see Nuclear Union, a post-apocalyptic RPG, announced by 1c. What was most intriguing about that announcement was that the team making it was most famous for its strategy titles, culminating in the Men Of War games. It’ll even be a new version of the same engine which powers this new game. Therefore I just had to talk to director of game design Julia Romanova, and ask her a few questions about what her team is up to. You can find the answers below.
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1C and Men Of War men Best Way are making a post-apocalyptic RPG called Nuclear Union. This is basically party-based STALKER/Metro in the Men Of War engine.
Uh huh.
It’s as if they sat down in a meeting and said “What would really make Jim Rossignol’s head explode on a Friday afternoon?” Well, they came pretty damned close. A bit more on this, including the first trailer, below.
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Court-martialed officers are given the chance to redeem themselves by signing up to fight alongside their fellow condemned in the bloodiest battles of a bloody great war. It sounds like it could be a science fiction concept, with electrified manacles, guns that are also handcuffs and remote controlled explosive dogtags that bark out orders in the abrasive tones of an angry prison warden played by Malcolm McDowell. No such thing. Men Of War: Condemned Heroes tells the story of a soviet penal battalion during World War II. To the Eastern Front then and a slightly more unusual story of that many-storied war to discover. Trailer below, game due on April 12th.
In retrospect, I should probably have made more of a fuss over the superb Men Of War: Assault Squad, because it was one of my favourite experiences of last year. Yes, it was a co-op/multiplayer remix of the original, and all the DLCs meant the pleasure was sort of fragmented, but actually I spent many meticulous hours playing through this game both solo and with my MoW-playing friends, and the result is always one of the best RTS experiences I can think of. The original game and all the DLCs are now being bundled together in a Game Of The Year edition. 1c explain: “The pack totals 25 skirmishes, over 50 multiplayer maps, 5 playable nations, over 100 infantry weapons and over 200 vehicles.” It only seems to be on GamersGate so far, but I expect it will pop up elsewhere today.
I’ve posted the most recent devs versus game video below to provide the clueless with a taster.
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Also in new screenshot news come these images from Red Orchestra 2: Heroes Of Stalingrad. Due out 30th August, the sequel from Tripwire boasts improved multiplayer, and a Stalingrad campaign using the multiplayer maps, which will let you play as either the Germans or the Russians – two sides that don’t get much attention in first-person gaming. You can see the latest images below, along with a peak of the Rising Storm mod that Tripwire are sponsoring.
RPS Feature The AA Will Not Help You
Every year in the UK, recreational 4WD users crush 33,070 primroses, wake 6,312 dormice, and ruin the reveries of 451 nature poets. They’re a menace and yet irresponsible game companies like 1C continue to glorify their activities through titles such as Off-Road Drive. I was so disgusted by the premise of this upcoming release, that I almost returned the preview code, and nearly didn’t spend most of yesterday happily jockeying Land Rovers and Jeeps through Karelian swamps and Rocky Mountain gorges. Read the rest of this entry »
