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Feature: "This is the sequel you have been waiting for"
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is happening! It’s real!
Imagine, dear reader, my delight upon learning that Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, a game about which I have said “...but it’ll never happen” several times, is, in fact, happening. More than that, I have seen, hands off, the first half an hour of it and have spoken to senior writer Cara Ellison (late of this RPS parish), as well as Hardsuit Labs co-founder…
Feature: Ape me out tonight
From the languid tempo that starts each level, to the frenetic bebop energy driving a series of devastating assaults, the soundscape of the indie beat ‘em up Ape Out is all about contrasts. As the eponymous gorilla, Ape Out lets players exact revenge against a battalion of doughy humans who are too feeble to stand directly against your wrath. It’s thunderous centrifuge of jazz and…
Feature: Herding cats
How a Valve veteran and a former Riot designer want to ‘change the culture’ of making games
Stray Bombay are going to make co-op games. Dr. Kimberly Voll, (PhD in computer science and AI, first class honours degree in Cognitive Science, experienced game designer, VR researcher, expert in player dynamics, and former professor of computer science) and Chet Faliszek (man who worked at Valve and has made some games you’ve probably heard of) have co-founded this new game studio. It’s called Stray…
Feature: War makes monsters of us all
A Year Of Rain is an accessible if ambitious upcoming co-op RTS
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…
Feature: Room with a view
The first I ever saw of Eastshade was a single screenshot. In it, the sun stands high in the sky over a glittering river. Off in the distance, past the forest and its imposing trees, you can see what looks to be a city. Eastshade is full of such carefully designed landscapes: forests that invite you to saunter through them; buildings you just want to…
Feature: Dancing with the Lickers in the pale moonlight
Being a toddler in 1998, I arrived fresh to the Resident Evil 2 remake with bright eyes and principled reservations. I don’t like horror games and I’ve avoided them for most of my life. So when I booted up the newest Resi, I was cast into the deep end of the survival horror pool with no floaties. My first playthrough was fraught with thick Geordie…
Feature: Dopamine mine
"Under the hood, too many games are just primarily about finely-tuned reward systems. Nothing more than expertly crafted dopamine injectors which often border on, if not fully embrace their Skinner box-like qualities." Kris Piotrowski didn't want to create a game like that. As the creative director and co-founder of Capybara Games, he and the team spent years working on Below, a roguelike in which you…
Feature: Veiled victories
When it comes to theme, structure, and expectations, the two upcoming wargames Flare Pathed below have flip-all in common. Unity of Command II, the highly anticipated sequel to a WW2 wonder that managed to be handsome, historical, friendly and fierce, is hexy and turn-chopped, a refined relation of that great populariser, Panzer General. Radio Commander, on the other hand, is a real-time enigma, a Vietnam…
Feature: Edison was just an ass who electrocuted an elephant
Close To The Sun is a horror game that’s definitely not BioShock with Tesla
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…
Feature: REMEX's Chris Cheetham quizzed
In REMEX's upcoming gunless flight sim, airliners won't be rare, they'll be non-existent. Dedicated to reproducing the kind of thrilling low-tech aviation in which runways tend to be surrounded by timber and rocks rather than turf and signage, and bear rage is more likely to delay a flight than air rage, the commerce-laced Deadstick is the brainchild of a Brit called Chris Cheetham. Having done…
Feature: You know when I'm down to just my socks, what time it is
Breach was nearly made at EA, but then business happened (twice)
Action RPG meets MMO Breach is currently finding its feet in early access. It’s the sort of thing that will definitely be someone’s favourite game, if only they a) realise it exists and b) can figure out what it is. Currently the main barrier to this seems to be that it’s wrestling with ongoing performance issues; Matt really enjoyed playing its asymmetrical PvP as the…
Feature: Fish markets and snail wisdom
Into the Bruxnerverse: getting to know the frogs and aliens of Grace Bruxner
Grace Bruxner almost delayed the release of her latest game, The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game, which is a cute adventure about a frog trying to find a ghost. But then she changed her mind because she wanted to make sure it released near Hitman 2. Close enough that news stories mentioning both would be on gaming sites at the same time. "Like, it'll…
Feature: It's the mod tools that make it
Hytale is a Minecraft follow-up that remembers the minigames
"When people have looked at Minecraft and tried to understand what it is, they've looked at Minecraft as this game," says Aaron "Noxy" Donaghey. "And Minecraft isn't just a game. Minecraft is a collection of different communities that have all done amazing things with it." Donaghey knows this better than most. He's the content lead on the newly announced Hytale, and Hytale is being made…
Feature: Sea Of Eves
There's a pirate MMO on the horizon, and its sea-farers look ambitious. Atlas is being made by Ark: Survival Evolved devs Studio Wildcard, and sets sail on early access today. It plops 40,000 players into the same fantasy world, where they compete to govern territory and can fire at any ship on the sea. I spoke to project director/lead programmer Jeremy Stieglitz and creative director…
Feature:
Why does Mutant Year Zero use the terminology of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?
I had a fine time with Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden's post-apocalyptic, ducking good blend of real-time stealth and turn-based combat, but one concern dogged me throughout. Used repeatedly throughout the game are two beyond-familiar terms: 'zone' and 'Stalker.' Names scorched into the very soul of anyone who's played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games/seen Tarkovsky's Stalker/read Roadside Picnic. How what why? I asked Mutant Year Zero's…
Feature: Veni, videogame, vici
Imperator: Rome finds the difference between obstruction and intimidation
Bugger me, Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy games are a lot, right? If I could put that even more in bold, I would have fattened up like a sacrificial pig before god-appeasing slaughter, because they really are. My experience with Crusader Kings II, for example, mainly involved me staring at menus for half an hour then crushing half a pack of ibuprofen into a fine powder,…
Feature: I'm so sorry, GLaDOS
Playing Observation has made me question my treatment of rogue AIs
Whenever I ask Siri -- other virtual helpers are available -- to do something for me, I always say please and thank you. I tell people this is because I don’t want to get into the habit of barking orders at Siri, and thus people in real life. The actual reason is that I want Siri to think of me kindly when they gain sentience…
Feature: That'll be the Deimos
Contains some spoilers. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a proper action-RPG, complete with romance opportunities, conversation trees, branching storylines, and bales of soft material to leap into from improbable heights. While well-written and expansive, much of the story’s appeal can be laid at the feet of its charismatic leads. Greek actors Michael Antonakos and Melissanthi Mahut provide the voices and performance capture for Alexios and Kassandra,…
Feature: Finished business
Void Bastards is System Shock 2 meets XCOM and it looks great
I’m really excited about Void Bastards. I mean, it’s a new deeply systems-driven FPS made by some of the people behind System Shock 2, Neptune’s Pride and Captain Forever. Of course I’m excited. You play as a desperate crim boarding extremely hostile derelict spaceships to loot stuff. It’s got cool guns and a striking comic book art style, and it’s the result of some extremely…
Feature: No one can hear you scream
10 years on, here’s how Dead Space went from horror to action horror in three games
The first Dead Space turned 10 years old last month. It took me a month to get through the first two hours when I first played it. Every time I jumped back in and clumped down one of the USG Ishimura’s dark corridors, a monster would pop out of the vents and I’d jump up, smash the pause button and find an excuse to do…
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