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Feature: Tactics and hacked bits
I’m not sure if Bad North is a strategy game for the inept or the lazy. It does a lot that speaks to both: the islands you’re defending are small, you’ve only a few units to guide and those instructions don’t extend beyond ‘go there’ or ‘hide in that’. When they do get ‘there’ they auto-attack any marauders in reach and pursue the stragglers. It…
Feature: A metaphor for something sad, probably
Video: Platformer Gris is so delicate I won’t spoil it with my honking voice
I imagine many of you see the word video in the headline and assume it’s just going to be Noa or me gabbling over game footage. And while gabbling/footage hybrids do make up 98% of its output, the RPS Video Department knows when to put a sock in it. One such occasion is the arrival of Gris, a wistful adventure that new Spanish outfit Nomada…
Feature: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Swoon
Video: Perilous platforming and jaguar extermination makes Shadow of the Tomb Raider classic Croft
I often wonder what freakish individuals were enlisted into focus testing to give publishers the idea that everyone wants things mean and moody. Had they invited me, there would be more games set in cheery pubs where you win by having the best bit of nostalgia about early noughties television. Also, the health system would be built entirely on the consumption of floral gums. There…
Feature: I fought the law and the law fell into a big custard pie
Video: This Is The Police 2 is like trying to win XCOM with the cast of Police Academy
As a great scientist once said (or maybe it was Jeff Goldblum): “A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.” Meanwhile, in This Is The Police 2 an idiot cop empties pepper spray into their own eyes and a woman burns to death because I don’t have enough law enforcers to answer her distress call.…
Feature: 21 years older, 21 years wiser?
After three hours with Two Point Hospital I see similarities with Jurassic World Evolution. Okay, Frontier’s game sees you putting more people in hospital than getting them out the door, but it’s a similarly welcoming management game. You can read that as simplified and slow (as Fraser did in his Jurassic World review), but as an abysmal multitasker I appreciated a campaign that drip-fed ideas…
Feature: Short but sweet
I’ve been playing the endless Assassin's Creed Origins, a game so gargantuan that the time on my save file lasts longer than Ancient Egyptian civilization did. This is a revenge mission stripped of all urgency by the simple fact of being five million hours long. Whatever big bad awaits at the end can rest easy knowing there are 800 fortresses to clear out before I…
Feature: On the horizon: zero yawns
Has it really been six months? 2018 is passing in a blur of frozen architects, drug-pushing prophets and accordion duets. Hell, six months ago the RPS Video Department was but a glint in Graham’s eye. You may also recall a gathering of the most exciting games of 2018, a rundown of the year as it looked back in January. With E3 done there’s a clearer…
Feature: E3's hidden gems
Now that the festival of bellowing that is E3 2018 has come to an end, we begin the arduous process of making sense of it all. This means sifting through mountains of press releases and trailers to find all the curious games that lurked outside the spotlight glare of the larger publishers. And we find such treats as Maneater (Jaws RPG where you play as…
Feature: Red thread redemption
Video: Two creepy yarn beasts are better than one in Unravel 2
The existence of Unravel 2 was a pleasant surprise at an EA showcase depressingly short of them. Even better, you can play the game right now. Er, if you don’t mind using Origin. I adored Unravel’s physics-based platforming, even if the horned, red figure of Yarny himself is clearly demonic in nature. It’s those dead eyes. Brrr. Making the sequel twice as unsettling is the…
Feature: Where's the goat?
Video: Watch dino fights and raptor escapes in Jurassic World Evolution
Remember the bit in Jurassic Park where John Hammond airlifts a live Ceratosaurus into the food court? No? That’s because it didn’t happen, which was a huge failing of imagination on Spielberg’s part. Hammond was all about show business, after all, and business doesn’t come showier than a dinosaur eating tourists as they exit a burger joint. Obviously, the makers of Jurassic World Evolution don’t…
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…
Feature: A flipping disgrace
Many things are easy in games that I struggle with in reality. A light jog. Climbing ladders. Carrying stuff (my limit’s an eight pack of Pepsi Max Cherry, let alone five axes and a wheel of cheese). But House Flipper, a first-person handyman ‘em up and current chart champion, is based on my bete noire: keeping a house clean and healthy. I stink at cleaning…
Feature: Two go mad in the country
Video: Watch us kill zombies (and a few survivors) in State of Decay 2 co-op
Zombie survival adventure State of Decay 2 lurches on to PC next Tuesday - though it’s out today for those who ordered the Ultimate edition - and Brendan kindly put aside his endless shopping trips to help me test co-op mode. Opt for a multiplayer session and you appear as visiting survivors in the host’s game, in this case, Brendan’s. You can help said host…
Feature: Flipping out
Video: Yoku’s Island Express is a bit Metroid, a bit pinball and a bit good
The pinball platformer is an idea developers like to feed quarters into every so often. If a character is round (Pac-Man, Kirby) or can bunch up into a ball (Sonic, Samus, enslaved Pokémon), then they’ve probably been bashed about by flippers at some point. But these games tend to be reskins of traditional pinball; few reflect their source material. Yoku’s Island Express doesn’t have a…
Feature: 20 CCs of nostalgia, stat!
Video: How does Two Point Hospital compare to Theme Hospital?
Do no harm, goes the Hippocratic Oath. So it’s with trepidation that I approach Two Point Hospital, a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital that could all too easily do harm to fond childhood memories of Bullfrog’s heal ‘em up. Thankfully, Alec’s recent visit to these shiny new wards have put my mind at rest - it sounds like the team has successfully transplanted the heart…
Feature: Puts the ice in advice
Video: 8 toasty tactics I wish I’d known before starting Frostpunk
With just ten hours left on Frostpunk’s clock, the people of my city decided to steam me alive. I got those ingrates just ten hours away from the final daybreak, and they treated me like human dim sum. Some of them even clapped with prosthetic hands I had built for them during the harshest of winters. The last thought that popped into my boiled mind?…
Feature: We played for 3 hours
Come the zombie apocalypse the jugglers are the first against the wall. What to do with an unemployed children’s entertainer is one of the tamer dilemmas thrown up in the three hours I spent with State of Decay 2. But it’s indicative of Undead Lab’s slightly goofy take on zombie survival, one that has you desperately scavenging for supplies one second and weighing up the…
Feature: Residential evils
Last week I popped off to play Bethesda and Tango Gameworks' upcoming survival horror sequel The Evil Within 2, which adds open world elements to its stomp through a town filled with science-gone-wrong monstrosities. You can read what I thought about it in my Evil Within 2 impressions here, or alternatively you can watch what I did and how many times I got killed by…
Feature: One soldier, one turn, countless kills
One absolutely, perfectly ridiculous turn in XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen
I had a whale of a time with XCOM 2: War of the Chosen [official site] (out today), despite finding its tonal ping-ponging between gritty resistance saga and preposterous superheroics a little jarring. Speaking of the latter, here's a video I made showing just how off-the-chain crazy the various new abilities, weapons and features can be. In the space of a single turn (the first…
Feature: No survival necessary
While playing the sandbox survival mode of The Long Dark [official site] I often feel the urge to share the beauty of the in-game sky and weather effects, or just the really lovely sense of time passing. Screenshots conveyed some of the magic, but not really the desolation or the subtle shifts so instead I've opted for videos. They're from different times of day and…
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