The boys are low-poly now. As someone with a fairly fancy PC, it’s easy to forget sometimes that not everyone has the GPU muscle to run the likes of Final Fantasy XV. An alternative presents itself today (for Windows 10 users, at least – it’s OS-exclusive, sorry) in the form of Final Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition, a low-fi demake of the game designed for mobile devices, but now available for less beefy desktops. There’s even a demo.
Human civilisation has been in the slow lane since prehistoric times, when Sir Isaac Newton created gravity and suddenly we needed wheels to push around anything (e.g. potatoes, geese, other people, parts to create more wheels). But racing games like Wipeout offer hope of a future where we might perhaps close Newton’s Pandora’s Box, rid ourselves of gravity, and zoom around mega-fast and upside-down as our ancestors did. You can experience a taste of this future in the free demo for Antigraviator, a new hover-racing game which will launch in full next week. Go on, stick it to Newton. Read the rest of this entry »
1994’s Descent was a game before its time. While other FPS’s of the era were only beginning to ask people to aim with the mouse, Descent demanded full 360-degree rotation and strafing on every axis. Perhaps now the time is right, as the original developers have reassembled as Revival Productions to deliver Overload, a true return to form for the free-flying shooter. It’s out today, and having played a preview build to death this past week, I can confirm that this one is very good indeed.
RPS Feature Put the AA in aaaargh
Driving is not relaxing for me. I failed my driving test nine times before passing, so statistically-speaking, only one in ten driving instructors think I should be out on the roads. I don’t like those odds, and I imagine pedestrians don’t either. When you’ve failed your driving test so prolifically the basic idea of sitting behind the wheel is scary enough without a car of ambiguous meat monsters trying to ram you off the road. But here I am, playing Beware, a survival horror game set inside a single vehicle.
I am in continual awe of what tiny independent developers are capable of these days. While jetfighter action game Project Wingman may boast a couple of additional names on its credits, it’s primarily a one-man project. Given that it looks, sounds and plays every bit as good as Namco’s Xbox 360-era Ace Combat 6, if not better, that’s nothing short of mindblowing. Better still, the lengthy 3-mission demo (which led to the project’s Kickstarter being funded in mere hours) is just the tip of the iceberg of this gorgeous tribute to a favourite series.
You know that feeling of being really excited that a survival game coming out but that also means that you have to play that survival game and now you can taste acid in the back of your throat along with a little bit of the Caesar salad you had for lunch? Well. That’s where we are. And I’m certainly thrilled about the whole ordeal, because Beware — the indie survival horror driving experience — is something I’ve had my eye on for quite a while. Now, with our small glimpses of development in the rear-view, I can finally accelerate(? eh.) into a full demo. So park yourself– you know what, I’m not going to do this. You don’t want it, I don’t want it. Let’s reverse.
“Give the guy a gun and he’s Superman,” Humpty Dumpty said. “Give him two and he’s God.” I’d like to add to this, “Give ’em five guns stacked up and clicked together into one huge megagun, and they may well be playing Mothergunship.”
That’s the next bullet hell first-person shooter from the creator of 2014’s Tower Of Guns, and this time it’ll have players build our own guns. A bit like Serious Sam: Double D, we snap bits and bobs into honking great guns covering half the screen. You can see quite how that works in the ‘Gun Crafting Range’ demo released today. Read the rest of this entry »
…and if you haven’t yet, then you probably should. We named Torment: Tides of Numenera as one of the best games of 2017 for a reason, you know. You can play Inxile Entertainment’s fascinating RPG until Sunday at 9PM BST through Steam, and pick it up for 60% off until Monday.
Oh go on, here’s a peek behind the curtain – I basically named it one of the best games of 2017, by chucking loads of my voting points at it. And it turns out I wasn’t even playing it right.
Say, have you played The Curious Expedition, the turn-based colonial-era exploration game which we declared our favourite roguelikelike of 2016? You can’t all have, as otherwise developers Maschinen-Mensch wouldn’t have released a demo today. It contains two expeditions. So whoever you missing-outers are, go on, get in, give it a go. You needn’t even download anything special to play, as the demo runs in your browser. Read the rest of this entry »
They really don’t make space combat games like Solar Warden anymore. Come to think of it, they never made them like this, unless you count the wonky X-Com Interceptor. Currently in its last week of crowdfunding via Kickstarter, Solar Warden is a strange but exciting blend of X-Com style Geoscape management, real-time fleet command and action space combat with the promise of some Descent-inspired encounters in the full game. You can (and should) try an early demo build right here and now.
A demo is out now for Viking survive-o-management RPG Dead In Vinland, inviting us to play through one in-game week and see if we can hack life on a mysterious island.
“At its best, Dead in Vinland is compulsive, and a great example of systemic roguelike storytelling,” Nic Rueben said in our Dead In Vinland review. But at its worst… ah, it’s good that a demo is out now so people can see for themselves, because the game does have some quirks. Read the rest of this entry »
Whatever your weapon of choice–plasma rifle, axe, M1 Garand, or raw capitalism, baby!–you may well be able to dabble in your favoured violence this weekend for free. The full versions of XCOM 2, For Honor, Call Of Duty: WWII‘s competitive multiplayer (okay, so not really the full version), and Offworld Trading Company are all available in free trial weekends for the next few days – mostly through Steam. Read the rest of this entry »
To Tom and Barbara, the good life means escaping the rat race to farm in their suburban garden and pash. To Kanye West, the good life feels like Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, or summertime Chicago. To Deadly Premonition director Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro, The Good Life is his next game about rural murder and mystery. Swery and his White Owls studio are currently trying to crowdfund the game, which sends an American photojournalist into an English village where people can turn into animals by night and murder is afoot, but it’s still short of its goal. So last night they released a prototype demo so everyone can poke around. Read the rest of this entry »
If you fancy turn-based stealth puzzling in the style of Hitman Go with a more-artistic crime, have a gander at Vandals. Released today, it does Hitman Go-style sneaking but with the goal of spraying graffiti on city walls rather than garroting goombahs. You can even paint your own art in MS Paint-y spraying. It has a free demo too, so you can safely try a life of minor crime. Read the rest of this entry »
Boys, boys, boys, I’m looking for a good time. That’s why I’m downloading the demo for Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, which just launched. The demo contains the RPG’s first chapter so we can meet those boys, boys, boys and see how their road trip starts. And hopefully it’ll let us see how the game might actually run on our PCs, given that the benchmarking tool released earlier this month is wonky and Square Enix say it “may not accurately reflect the game’s final performance”. For now: boys.
I’m a Pacific Rim apologist. I describe it to people as “the best throwaway film I’ve ever seen”, largely because there’s a point in the middle where you can tell the writers said: “Ah, screw it” and embraced how ridiculous the whole thing is. It’s this bit, in case you were wondering.
Anyway! I’ve fantasised about battling monsters in oversized mech suits ever since, which is neat because I’ve just spent half an hour doing exactly that in tower defence game Mechs V Kaijus. The full game will be out in March, say the developers, but there’s already a free demo. I’m not normally a big fan of tower defence, but I am a fan of feeling awesome. MVK’s premise is a quick and dirty way to generate that feeling, but it has a few tricks up its sleeve to help.
I’m almost ready to leave the enticing waters of Subnautica, so I was pleased to find another alien ocean to submerge myself in this morning. I’ve just played the demo of In Other Waters, a narrative-driven exploration game about investigating a strange planet and doing xeno-biology.
Unlike with Subnautica, my impression of what that world really looks like is entirely in my head. All I actually see of planet Gliese 677Cc is a real-time map, with dots and contours that represent the wildlife and terrain. It’s a great reminder that your imagination can do far better graphics than any video game, and developer Gareth Damian Martin is looking for funding on Kickstarter.
Fancy building a little model city to coo at, watching little people and cars zipping around the streets you laid out? You can do that right now with Cities: Skylines, thanks to a free trial of the full game running until Sunday. Colossal Order’s 2015’s game is a pleasant little city-builder, one largely not mega-serious about crunching numbers and honing margins, and that’s nice. Our Alec will tell you it’s one of the best non-violent games but what about the violence of paving over meadows and choking rivers with bridges? Eh, Alec? Eh? You monster. Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to crowdfunded indie games, patience is a virtue that is often well rewarded. Kickstarted back in 2014, we’ve had our beady eyes on Crossing Souls for a long time, and it looks just as tempting now as it did then.
After a lengthy development cycle, the game launches next week on February 13th, but to ease potentially skeptical players into its quirky world of movie-inspired 80s nostalgia, developers Fourattic have released a generously portioned demo to both Steam and GOG.
Going anywhere nice this weekend? Have you considered the irradiated ruins of post-apocalyptic Boston? You might fancy a crack at Fallout 4, as this weekend Bethesda will hold yet another days-long free trial of the full game. The speedrun record is under one hour so you certainly could ‘complete it’ in one weekend, but myself I like the sound of wandering aimlessly. While I find Bethesda’s open-world RPGs quite flat and have never finished the main quest of a single one, I do always enjoy spending a while pottering and seeing sights. That’s my weekend sorted. Read the rest of this entry »
