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Feature: Gone but not forgotten
I can't disentangle my memory of the IL-2 games with the fact that it was nearly always my brother playing it, not me. He was the true pilot of the family, completing all the missions, bombing all the airbases, keeping track of fuel reserves. Whenever I played the game myself, I'd always do exactly the same thing: create a custom scenario with a single Ace-level…
The beautiful sheeple: cyberpunk brainwashing RTS Re-Legion out today
I've been keeping half a retina on techo-noir strategy game Re-Legion for a few months now, lured by an elevator pitch that is effectively 'what if they made a whole game based around Syndicate's Persuadatron?' In it, you establish a new opiate of the masses and recruit weak-minded civilians to do your bidding - including, naturally, disputing the preachings of rival such cults. With guns,…
Being a cyberpunk cult leader in Re-Legion doesn't look easy - for starters, where do you get so many tastefully coordinated purple robes? And then there's the problem of assembling your flock. Unlike most real-time strategy games, Ice Code's upcoming RTS (now due in 2019's first quarter) makes people your primary resource. You can't just click on a barracks and magically spawn soldiers, right? You've…
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.
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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