The RPS Omnibus: A roundup of our features and reviews

The past week saw the start of the RPS Advent Calendar, our yearly celebration of the best PC games of the year. You can find those and more linked below, among a roundup of our week's features and reviews.

Oh, and if you'd like a newsletter version of something similar to this, then we've now got two of those for you. There's a daily which automatically sends you our most popular stories each day, and a weekly which we handcraft with links and witty insight (or drivel, depending on my mood). You can subscribe to one or both at this handy RPS newsletter page.

Let's start with the Advent Calendar bits. I won't spoil any of the surprises for those who haven't opened the doors yet: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and the calendar itself.

As if that wasn't enough…

Features

Kat wrote a round up of free games focused on space and movement for last weekend's Priceless Play.

Nic Rueben played Imperator: Rome, Paradox's latest grand strategy game that aims to marry Crusader Kings 2 with Europa Universalis IV. Marrying off people is probably the kind of thing you can do in the game.

Alex Wiltshire's Mechanic column took a look at the tiny soldiers of Bad North, and the great lengths the game goes to in order to make those units feel like humans and not schools of fish. We published this on Tuesday this week because we forgot what day it was - true story.

Our podcast this week turned its attention to every game released in November, or at least as many as Brendan, Alice Bee and Alec cared to mention, for a rapid-fire rundown of opinions.

Giada Zavarise started a new monthly column for us called A Panel Shaped Screen, which is about the ways in which comics have influenced games. First up, how Battle Royale went from a manga to a Fortnite mode.

Xalavier Nelson Jr took the time to dig deep on Battlefield V's campaign, which he says is the best Battlefield campaign in years, in large part thanks to its Tirailleur missions.

In Flare Path on Friday, Tim Stone took the new Robinson R22 in Aerofly FS 2 for a spin, calling the helicopter sim fluent, friendly and fetching in the process.

Reviews

We're deep into December at this point, but this was still a good week for new games.

Alec took on the Mutant Year Zero: Too Many Subtitles review, a turn-based strategy game starring a talking pig and duck which he gave a Bestest Bests badge to.

John had considerably less fun in his Just Cause 4 review, finding the normally frivolous action romp had become weighed down by confusing design and many many bugs.

Our Artifact review saw Matt with much to say in favour of Valve's first CCG, aside from the monetisation. In short: it's fun when you're not being unavoidably creamed by players who have spent more money than you.

Ian Boudreau wrote our Parkitect review, a rollercoaster sim that sticks more closely to the Rollercoaster Tycoon formula and contains more meaningful management than Frontier's Planet Coaster.

And John played Katamari Damacy for the first time for his Katamari Damacy Reroll review. Remember: everything comes to PC eventually.

We also published five Have You Playeds. Those were:

Old Man's Journey (Katharine)
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (Dave)
Lumino City (Alice Bee)
Endless Space (Matt)
Outlast 2 (Noa)

Next week: Maybe I'll find the time to dig out the old VW bus that used to be the header for this article, and see if we can find a version of it that's high enough res for the current site design.