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Feature: Judgement crawl
Each week Marsh Davies wriggles free of his shackles and flees, filthy and naked, from the dank imprisonment of Early Access, bringing you stories of the depravities he endured therein. This week he’s playing Dungeon Souls, a frenetic top-down roguelike in which the player battles through successive tiers of peril, nipping between abruptly spawning enemies and hails of magic bullets. Titan Souls, Twin Souls, Crystal…
Feature: Narrow guage
Each week Marsh Davies boards the Steam locomotive as it chugs its way through Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find and/or is cannibalised by rabid commuters while delayed in a siding. This week he’s played Train Valley, a chirpy but challenging rail construction sim. My attempts to run a railway system make a good case for nationalisation: the absurd delays…
Feature: Hole Kaboodle
Each week Marsh Davies plays unfinished and broken games on Early Access and usually tries to come up with an introductory sentence which says exactly this while using imagery appropriate to the idiom of the given week’s game. But the idiom of this week’s game is being an unfinished and broken game! So, job done. It’s The Magic Circle [Steam page], a game set within…
Feature: Drunken Master
Each week Marsh Davies lurches drunkenly through the dank cloisters of Early Access and brings back any stories he can find and/or spasms like a misfiring physics object caught in a doorway. This week he wobbles and flails in the low-fantasy RPG Exanima, a smaller standalone “prelude” to the Kickstarted open world game Sui Generis. Exanima isn’t like other RPGs, the Steam store page tells…
Feature: Of Mice and Men
Each week Marsh Davies bleeds for you in the cold, accursed alleys of Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find and/or a repulsive corruption born of arcane mutagenic powers. This week he and his band of rat-men scuttle through the streets of Mordheim: City of the Damned - a turned-based tactics game set in the world of Warhammer. Fellow Skaven-fancier Adam…
Good news if you've been waiting to see how Big Stubbly Man and Chitin Stilettos Woman managed to defeat timeless evil once and for all until the next sequel: the third and final chunk of StarCraft II is very much on its way. In fact, beta invites for the Protoss-focused Legacy of the Void are due to go out before the end of the month.…
Feature: Better Than Scrap
Each week Marsh Davies plunders the ravaged hulk of Early Access and smuggles out any stories he can find and/or succumbs to the terrors of the interdimensional void. This week he murders robotic wait staff and asset-strips sci-fi dungeons in space salvage RPG StarCrawlers. It goes on sale tomorrow. Is it any wonder that some members of the gaming community nurse a persecution complex when,…
Edit: That was quick. All keys have been claimed, I'm afraid. Enjoy if you managed to grab one! Fancy an early jaunt in an upcoming game? This weekend, the folks at Splash Damage are performing a stress test of their multiplayer FPS game, Dirty Bomb [official site] and we have a pile of keys to hand out to our readers. All you need to do…
Feature: From the Tron side of the track
Each week Marsh Davies revs his engines and tears off into the nightmarish neon digiscape of Early Access and returns with any stories he can find and/or skid marks. This week he speeds into the distance in, er, Distance - a hallucinatory “Survival Racing” game. “Survival Racing” say the developers. It’s an ominous appellation that suggests players might have to rumble along the verges on…
Feature: Survival Of The Fattest
Each week Marsh Davies voyages into the uncharted territories of Early Access and comes back with any stories he finds and/or hypothermia. This week he packs his pickaxe and pith helmet, and sets out for Frontiers, an ambitious firstperson survival-RPG. How much can I bench? I can bench an actual bench. I’m benching it right now, and maybe forever, not only because I can, but…
Survival and crafting are strongly linked concepts in gaming. Here in the real world, I survive by writing about toys (and the occasional art-toy), an onerous duty that is deemed worthy of financial reward. I use the dosh to buy chips and fizzy pop, and somehow that seems to be enough to keep my tiny engine running. Truth is, I've never crafted anything in my…
Mighty No. 9 is Mega Man and Mega Man is Rockman. I don't know if it's better to be mighty or to be mega, but I do know that when it comes to platformers, it's generally better to be Shotgunman than Rockman. It's hard to jump if you're a geological anomaly and there tend to be plenty of things to kill between the platforms and…
Feature: The life, death and rebirth of the party
After publishing my thorough conversation with Pillars of Eternity lead designer Josh Sawyer, I realised that I hadn’t actually expressed an opinion about the game. I was curious and hopeful but hadn’t had a chance to play it, and see how well all of the elements came together. The backer beta, which launched yesterday, is a huge relief. Pillars is shaping up to be worthy…
BattleBlock TheatER is The Behemoth's well-received follow-up to the side-scrolling beat 'em up Castle Crashers, which contained gaming's most recognisable defecating deer. I don't know if BattleBlock continues the proud tradition of cacking Cervidae but the trailer announcing the Steam version does have one sadly unexpurgated scene of extreme expurgation. Whether you're keen to see a cartoon trouser-mess or not, you should watch the trailer…
New Tropico games aren't appearing as quickly as my brain thinks. This is simply that I now perceive time at such a pace that the world is a dizzying blur around me. If you'd held a knifegun to my headthroat and demanded a release date for Tropico 4, I'd have tried to second-guess myself and suggested late 2012. It was in fact August 2011, and…
Listen! This weekend, the beta for Wildstar is opening up and 40,000 keys are available right now. First come, first served. Our first feature about the sci-fi MMO went live in August 2011, which is approximately fifty seven years ago in blog years. Since then, we've had interviews, hands-on previews, news stories aplenty and one last interview. It's am ambitious game, not quite shattering the…
During the long hours of a League of Legends or DOTA 2 session, do you occasionally grimace and howl at the bright colours flashing across the screen? Would you like your champions to be drawn from a pool of necromancers, skellingtons and leather-clad vampires, with not a wisp or an elf in sight? Deadbreed could be the MOBA for you. From a veteran team of…
Feature: Procedurally awesome.
Starbound is a procedurally-generated universe, where you have a ship, a star-map, and an infinite number of planets to visit and plunder. It is a game that makes almost no definition between single and multiplayer, allowing you to bring your character across the void and back again, visiting the same places online and offline, and sharing those worlds with friends. Its first beta just welcomed…
Beta signups are now open for Drums of War, a turn-based tactical combat game set in a world of "magic and mythical creatures". They mean fireballs and orcs. Looking through the screenshots, I was convinced I'd seen the game before but a quick trip to the RPS archives left me covered in dust and regret, but I found no evidence of these particular drums. I…
Feature: Beta Late Than Never
Wonderful news from the tweet-o-dodecagon today: Wasteland 2's beta finally has a release date. After it slipped from October into daaaaaaaates unknown (woooooooooo), inXile CEO Brian Fargo has claimed the Kickstarter darling is only two-and-a-half weeks out. That in mind, I got in touch with Fargo to find out what took so long, how much of the game will be available in the beta, whether…
