RPS 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 snickering things in the hour-long video below.
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RPS Feature One soldier, one turn, countless kills
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 turn of a mission), one soldier covers almost the entire length of the map, ‘wakes’ pretty much every enemy on it, kills around 15 of them, winds up at the main mission objective and then proceeds to take zero damage on the alien turn. Meanwhile, most of his team never even leave their starting position. All in one turn. It’s bonkers. This is War Of The Chosen.
RPS 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 different weather and light conditions. It’s only a fraction of what’s in the game but the video has the added bonus of you not needing to wonder whether you’re about to die of hypothermia or wolves or food poisoning or any number of other things!
RPS Feature A walk Thoreau the woods
I decided to make a little video to show you what I like about Walden, A Game [official site]. There’s a bit of Thoreau eyerolling, admittedly, but I’m trying to be reasonable and not judgy (WHICH IS MORE THAN HE DID), plus there’s an OWL! And a BLUE JAY! I refuse to go into the town of Concord but I do show you how you can purposely injure Thoreau’s hand. Swings and roundabouts, really… Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Home on the ranch
It sounded like people enjoyed looking round my Subnautica base a while back so I decided to make a video tour of my Slime Rancher [official site] base as well! It’s absolutely full of creatures and resources you won’t discover for ages as well as the more basic parts of the game so SPOILERS AHOY. I’d say only watch it if you don’t want to play the game or if you have played a really significant amount and have seen most things! Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Commentated playthrough of Prey's first hour
Here’s the second and final part of my hour-long narrated playthrough of Bethesda and Arkane’s upcoming shooter-me-do, Prey [official site]. N.B. Contains spoilers for the opening hour of the game, but nothing beyond that.
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The RPS gang sits around in our secret treehouse every day, chatting about the things we’d like to post more of to the site. One of those things is, “Nice things what we read/watched/heard elsewhere on the internet.” Sure, we already have the Sunday Papers, but wouldn’t this be a more interesting, enlightening, day-brightening corner of the internet if we occasionally pointed and yelled, “Look over there!”
So here, look at YouTube series Game Maker’s Toolkit. Particularly, look at this video of Mark Brown explaining what Mirror’s Edge Catalyst should have learned from Burnout Paradise.
A fair few people said they wanted a little tour of my Subnautica [official site] Volcano Base so I’ve made a quick video to show it off – especially the garden which is packed with bioluminescent plantlife!
I like careful, reflective journeys in as much as Alec does, but my other great vehicular passion is tossing cars down mountains and slamming them into brick walls. There’s no greater game for that than BeamNG.drive [official site], which although still in alpha has the best physics and damage model of any driving game I’ve ever played. To prove the point, YouTube channel DragCarTV recreated common crash testing scenarios in the game and then put the footage side by side with real crashes to see how they matched up.
RPS Feature Bury it at sea
After its extraordinary trailer, I’m glad to report/sad to say that Coast Guard is everything we could have hoped for. I struggled through the first hour of this wave-protecting simulation, videoed it all, and edited that horror down to the twenty minutes that’s safe for you to watch.
RPS Feature It's a contender
Jim emailed the other day. “Galactic Hitman appears to be the worst game on Steam, by Steam reviews. Might be worth a look?” The cunning temptress. Of course that’s worth a look. But what to expect? Mediocrity to which people have overreacted? Revenge reviews because the game had a girl in it? Nope. Just a stupendeously dreadful game. I videoed myself playing it from start to finish – in forty-six minutes. And then edited out the filler to halve that length. You can see it in all its glory below.
RPS Feature I'll be cutting down, thanks
The long-promised first-person horror thing Caffeine [official site] is now out, so intrigued by a world addicted to coffee and something about space, I thought I’d take a look. And when everything I touched started spinning around the rooms, I thought I’d better video it. Yeah.
RPS Feature Chasing Bambi
Having returned to The Forest last week, I really didn’t want to stop playing. I ended up spending an afternoon I’d booked off as holiday back in front of it, and recorded half an hour or so of that. To share! After spotting a giant sinkhole, and being so excited I had to hit record, it’s safe to say there’s some early disappointment. But then as I keep exploring, there’s lots of new things to discover, and indeed needlessly hit with an axe. You can watch it below.
RPS Feature The Last Dinosaur
Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] is the survival game du jour, and not without cause. While others have tried to create games that combine dinosaurs and the crafting, progression, and violent encounters typical of the genre, ARK’s early access release seems to come the closest to pulling it off. To explore it a little more, we asked Andro Dars to make a video playthrough to show what works and what doesn’t. Part five is below.
In part five: leading a dinosaur procession, exploring some giant player bases, and visiting a dinosaur motel.
YouTube Gaming is due to launch today. The service is YouTube’s answer to Twitch and is designed primarily to support video game streaming, as well as providing a dedicated interface for people to browse and watch videos of games.
A beta has been in the hands of some since the service’s announcement in June, but as reported by Ars Technica, the service and app should be available to everyone later today.
RPS Feature Sleeping Beauty
Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] is the survival game du jour, and not without cause. While others have tried to create games that combine dinosaurs and the crafting, progression, and violent encounters typical of the genre, ARK’s early access release seems to come the closest to pulling it off. To explore it a little more, we asked Andro Dars to make a video playthrough to show what works and what doesn’t. Part three is below.
In part three: waking up without any clothes, taming a dodo named David Cameron, and breaking into houses to steal the… person inside .
RPS Feature Making signs.
Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] is the survival game du jour, and not without cause. While others have tried to create games that combine dinosaurs and the crafting, progression, and violent encounters typical of the genre, ARK’s early access release seems to come the closest to pulling it off. To explore it a little more, we asked Andro Dars to make a video playthrough to show what works and what doesn’t. Part two is below.
RPS Feature Poop On Demand
Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] is the survival game du jour, and apparently not without cause. While others have tried to create worlds that combine dinosaurs with the crafting, progression, and violent encounters with other players typical of the genre, ARK’s early access release seems to come the closest to pulling it off. To explore it a little more, we asked Andro Dars to make a video playthrough to show what works and what doesn’t. Part one is below.
RPS Feature Let's Play
Hey! It’s a new and sporadic video series from Quintin Smith called Early Excess, re-visiting Early Access games to see what they are, how development has progressed, and whether they’re any good.
First up: 50 minutes of Darkest Dungeon [official site], a fantasy RPG in which you’re managing your squad’s mental state as much as their stats and inventory.
RPS Feature BOSS COG
Hey! It’s a new and final episode of COGWATCH, a weekly video series in which Quintin Smith examines one mechanic in one game. This week, the BOSS COG that is miserabilist, boat-bound roguelike Sunless Sea [official site].
