Posts tagged “hands on”

I want to explore. Like, everywhere. I didn’t expect that to be the main takeaway of my Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order hands-on preview, but here we are: amongst the windswept vistas of Zeffo, or careening down its ice caves, or clambering around the crumbling red stone of a temple on Dathomir. The team behind Titanfall 2 have built some more beautiful worlds for me…

Tagged with Chewbacca sound, Electronic Arts, feature, hands on, LucasArts, Lucasfilm, preview, Respawn Entertainment, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

League Of Legends developer Riot Games are making a collectable card game called Legends Of Runeterra. I got to speak to some of the developers and do some shuffling myself at their Dublin offices a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve got the scoop: Yes, there are poro cards, yes, you can build a deck to synergise with them, and yes, the board features a…

Tagged with feature, hands on, preview, Riot Games, League of Legends, Legends Of Runeterra.

ScourgeBringer is a game that exists in your fingers. It's an action roguelite fidgetspinner about bish-bash-boshing across single screen levels of enemies. The protagonist Kyhra has a sword for slashing, a drone that can fire a blast of bullets, and a set of movements that feel sublime to control. I've been playing an early alpha ahead of an early access release planned for later this…

Tagged with Dear Villagers, feature, Flying Oak Games, hands on, preview, ScourgeBringer.

"We all die, everything dies, every living thing dies." Nicolas Guérin is reassuring me. He's the creative director at Thunder Lotus Games and they're working on Spiritfarer, announced at E3 2019 as a "cosy management game about dying." I need reassuring because I've played a 15-minute demo of Spiritfarer and I'm worried that a game that treats death lightly will make light of the suffering…

Tagged with E3 2019, feature, hands on, preview, Thunder Lotus Games, Spiritfarer.

The plan was idiot proof. One of us would lob the flares we’d snagged from the church tower to distract the bipedal machine almost as imposingly tall as the church itself, while the other sprinted toward a nearby car and dumped out a backpack full of gas canisters. The firearms we’d collected were so many makeshift plastic straw pea shooters against the hulking automaton’s thick…

Tagged with Avalanche Studios, feature, Generation Zero, hands on, preview, Generation Zero.

I was nervous, sitting down to play A Year Of Rain. I don’t have a lot of experience with real-time strategy games, and even though technical director Nick Prühs had explained some of the accessibility features, it still looked intimidating. Plus, as a co-op and a competitive game, it has twice the number of people available to embarrass myself in front of. As I dug…

Tagged with Daedalic Entertainment, feature, hands on, interview, preview, A Year Of Rain.

These days, a lot of people love Nikola Tesla. Tesla deserved Edison’s success and recognition, they say, and should not have died penniless and obsessed with pigeons. His achievements remained pretty obscure for many years after his death, so the resurgence in Tesla-mania over the past couple of decades is fortunate for Close To The Sun, a fact acknowledged by Joel Hakalax, game designer at…

Tagged with feature, hands on, interview, preview, Storm in a Teacup, Close To The Sun.

Did you ever read about the Ship of Theseus? I'm sure you have – the RPS community is, after all, a bastion of scholarly insight, where people can write about things like digital museums and heraldic devices and attract comments like “actually, Liu Bei's supposed Han ancestry has minimal DNA basis and I'll thank you to use the Harvard referencing system”. But on the off…

Tagged with feature, hands on, Paradox Interactive, Triumph Studios, Age of Wonders: Planetfall.

Katana Zero is much more than it first appears. And it first appears to be plenty. A side-scrolling reflexy beat 'em up, painted in very pretty pixels, with a character who cannot take a hit. It's a surprisingly interesting weakness to give your ninja-esque mass murderer, who is fast-paced, all dashes and slides, rolls and manic combat. And yet on top of that there's the…

Tagged with Askiisoft, Devolver Digital, feature, hands on, preview, Katana ZERO.

I was told before playing Metro Exodus that, as with the previous Metro games, it is important to think before you act. Seize every quiet opportunity to craft another med kit, a molotov, another filter for your mask. Continually take stock of your, er, stock. And it’s true, there is grim satisfaction in sneaking up behind a weird anti-electricity pseudo-Christian cultist and knocking him out…

Tagged with 4A Games, Deep Silver, feature, hands on, preview, Metro Exodus.

“When you’re working on annual iterative titles, it is difficult,” says Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. “You’re always going to get people turning around saying ‘you haven’t added anything.’ And no matter how much you add, you’re still going to get people saying that.” That’s the challenge that the Football Manager series faces every year. It remains, as it always will be, a…

Tagged with feature, hands on, impressions, preview, Sports Interactive, Football Manager, Football Manager 2015, Football Manager 2016, Football Manager 2017, Football Manager 2018, Football Manager 2019, Football Manager Touch 2017, Football Manager Touch 2018, Football Manager Touch 2019.

The HP Omen Mindframe headset is quite possibly the most bonkers piece of audio equipment I've ever seen. It's called MINDFRAME for a start, which is both brilliant and ridiculous in equal measure, but what really sets it apart from other headsets is pretty damn cool - as in literally cool thanks to its thermoelectric ear-cooling earcups. I'll admit I was a bit skeptical when…

Tagged with feature, Gamescom 2018, hands on, Hardware, Headsets, HP, HP Omen, preview.

I have never seen Twin Peaks. That’s alright, though, because a lot of people I know really like it. I’ve been around them going on about cherry pie and the red room for long enough that when I am told “And of course there’s some inspiration from Twin Peaks, too!” I know to read it as “This is going to be weird; will probably feature…

Tagged with btf, feature, hands on, Headup Games, Truberbrook.

Out of all the gaming laptops I've tested so far, there have been very few that have justified their often extortionate prices. In fact, the only one I'd consider buying myself right now is Dell's Alienware 13 - and even that's not completely free of flaws. But after seeing the new HP Omen 15 laptop in the flesh, it looks like we might finally have…

Tagged with feature, hands on, Hardware, HP, HP Omen, laptop, laptops.

I won't lie. When HP announced a string of new Omen peripherals at this year's Computex show in Taiwan, the thing that really caught my eye was its supposed ear-cooling gaming headset. It even had a cool-sounding name and everything. The HP Omen MINDFRAME. Sadly, that was the one thing missing from the HP Omen demo day I went to last week. I did, however,…

Tagged with feature, hands on, Hardware, HP, HP Omen, Keyboards, mechanical keyboards, mouse, mouse and keyboard.

I didn't realise how much I'd missed Metro's ball bearing rifle till I spent two hours with Metro Exodus, the third in 4A Games' cult series of post-Soviet, post-apocalyptic shooters. Goodness, that rifle. The sheer delight of cranking its Super Soaker handle. The vicious snap of escaping air when you pull the trigger. The rush to make the most of those few seconds of maximum…

Tagged with 4A Games, E3 2018, feature, hands on, Metro Exodus.

Collectible card games have been around for decades, but they've really been running hot ever since Blizzard unleashed Hearthstone four years ago. Since then, we've seen Shadowverse, Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Duelyst, Faeria - there are a lot of these things, if you haven't heard. They all put their own spin on rectangles with numbers on 'em, but they also universally take cues from…

Tagged with feature, hands on, preview, Valve, Artifact, Dota 2, Duelyst, Faeria, Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, Hearthstone, Shadowverse CCG, The Elder Scrolls: Legends.

You'll often see characters in sci-fi stories play seemingly incomprehensible games like multi-dimensional space chess, and that's basically what it's like playing Artifact, Valve's upcoming Dota-inspired card game. It's an ambitious hybrid of the studio's MOBA and Magic: The Gathering, and it works shockingly well. So much so that it only took two games for me to understand and get on board with Valve's vision.

Tagged with card games, collectible card games, feature, hands on, preview, Valve, Artifact, Dota 2.

In the course of 45 minutes with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft gatecrashes a fiesta, scales a cliff, wrestles an eel, levels a temple, steals a magic dagger, murders a bunch of dudes in Mariachi skullpaint and drowns a city after triggering the apocalypse. That's quite the evening's work, especially if you factor in all the times I accidentally impaled her on rebars,…

Tagged with feature, hands on, preview, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Square Enix.

Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War is an unconventional 4X game that doubles down on the perpetually gloomy universe’s penchant for conflict by cutting out diplomacy entirely. The Space Marines, Astra Militarum, Orks and Necron are all at each other’s throats, leaving them no time to work things out at the negotiating table. War, then, is Gladius’ raison d'être, with Dreadnoughts, Tankbustas and Necron…

Tagged with feature, hands on, Proxy Studios, Slitherine, Warhammer 40000: Gladius - Relics of War.