But it’s kind of okay, because games like Overwatch with their silly Halloween events almost provide a sense of normality amongst it all. I’m gutted when I think of all the excellent party themes that have been swiped from under us! Dressing up as hot Greek gods from Hades, or donning colourful spacesuits for an Among Us-style murder mystery. Sure, I’ll get some pumpkin carving in, and yeah I’ll watch some scary films....
The game was released in a terrible state, generating a megathread on Reddit to catalogue an extraordinary pile of issues. This wasn’t just a number of crashes, but the release was clearly unfinished. For example: “The religion interface is straight out of the dev diary, half of the modifiers don’t even have names, and even the convert provinces prompt is improperly cropped.” Johan Andersson posted on the official forums, apologising for Leviathan and the general quality of other releases leading up to it....
I feel there’s a lot unsaid in Paradox’s brief statement that “due to differing views on the company’s strategy going forward”, she “decided to leave the CEO position with immediate effect”. Ljungerud publicly bid a fond farewell. “Ebba has done a fantastic job as CEO of Paradox Interactive,” said Håkan Sjunnesson, who’s replacing Wester as chairman of the board. “During her leadership the organisation, player base and our game projects have been strengthened and grown which give the company a strong base for future growth....
Owlcat debuted a new three minute trailer during the ID@Xbox showcase yesterday to dig into all those above bits. I admit that just about everything else in my brain shuts off when I see ye olde cRPG ground rings so I had to watch it twice to actually absorb any of the information. Just let me gather my party, yes please. You can spot a couple of those mythic transformations in the trailer up above, which Owlcat lay out the list of right here: “As Commander, characters can become a celestial Angel, a raging Demon, a powerful Lich, a cunning Trickster, an otherworldly Aeon, a rebellious Azata, a wise Gold Dragon, an insatiable Swarm That Walks—or remain mortal and walk the arduous path toward becoming a living Legend,” Owlcat say....
Molyneux first mentioned Legacy in 2017, but it was largely unknown until Saturday, when the land sale was announced. Turns out, it’s about business. You design, build, and take care of a company town, whose residents will work in its factories to make the products you invent and sell. And because it’s built on NFTs and cryptocurrency (LegacyCoin, a newly minted cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain), you’ll be able to become a virtual landlord by buying imaginary land in the hope of making real money....
Tomb Raider’s hopped between a few companies as of late. Last year, Embracer Group bought the IP and Crystal Dynamics from Square Enix - along with Deus Ex, Eidos Montreal, and more. It’s become a little impossible to track all of Embracer’s recent purchases, since they seem to acquire a new studio every other month. Most recently, they bought the entirety of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth franchise. One ring to own them all, I guess....
High praise indeed, and it was enough to earn a coveted RPS recommendation - even at its original price. Now you can pick up this delightfully clicky keyboard with low profile mechanical switches, a full-size UK layout and a beautiful metal build for £50 less. Get the Logitech G915 Lightspeed for £119.99 (was £169.99) So what I can I say about the Logitech G915 that hasn’t already been covered in our best gaming keyboards roundup or the full G915 Lightspeed review?...
This is an awesome price for a 3440x1440 gaming monitor with a 1000R curve, 165Hz refresh rate, FreeSync and a VA panel with a quoted 1ms response time. Get the Samsung Odyssey G5 for £337 (was £449) It’s rare to find a comparable gaming monitor with these kind of specs anywhere near this price - the only thing I have in my deals memory banks is the Huawei MateView GT, which is £350 but perhaps doesn’t have the same kind of brand cachet as Samsung despite being a solid monitor in its own right....
There aren’t many things I feel genuine nostalgia for, but the late-’90s/early-’00s era of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network is up there. All-Star Brawl features characters and stages from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Wild Thornberrys, Rugrats, Korra and many more. Each character has their own particular fighting style. There are singleplayer and multiplayer modes, with the latter supporting local and online play for up to 4 players. I couldn’t tell you if it has real competitive legs, but I would like to crowd round a screen and play it with an N64 controller and three friends, please....
At the end of their blog, the devs get mysterious when talking about what they’re working on. “There’s a lot of stuff, not exclusively related to Vampire Survivors, getting made behind the scenes in poncle,” they say. Their wording brings up lots of questions. Is it a brand new game? Something Vampire Survivors-adjacent? What does “exclusively related” even mean? Whatever it is, I’ll have my cloves of garlic ready. I just like garlic....
Lab Rat is a block-pusher (or sokoban) in which your little character will puzzle their way through a series of rooms. After you finish each one, an AI named SARA will poll you for feedback, before making a new room for you to dive into. In an interview with the game’s director (and voice of the AI) Gwen Frey, she told me that they know Lab Rat is going to be compared to Portal, so they leaned into it by writing in a puzzle themed around it....
Potionomics has a familiar flair to anyone who’s played ye olde Recettear or the more recent Moonlighter. Sylvia the witch is the proprietor of a failing potion shop and has to revitalise the store to repay its debts. Sounds familiar, aye? As I understand it, Potionomics does away with the dungeon crawling and instead doubles down on producing and peddling items in your shop. “After using magical ingredients to brew up a bevy of potent wares, the budding entrepreneur will wheel and deal to make sales with a colourful cast of fickle customers, all while tackling fierce competition and an ever-changing economy,” say Xseed....
Alas though, citizens. I come to bury Praetorians, not to praise it. Before the burial, however, since even a ghostly Roman is nothing without their honour, I will begin with at least some praise. Praetorians was a wargamer’s wargame. Its 24 campaign missions were varied and creatively designed, and it had an impressively deep set of tactical considerations. Terrain elevation mattered. Formations mattered. Proper scouting was essential. And the “rock paper scissors” principle common to military strategy games, with each unit being strong against some units and weak against others, was masterfully deployed....
Honestly, it doesn’t bother me that Ubisoft are running roughshod over Tom Clancy’s trash fictional universe. I do think it’s a shame that they’ve turned their backs on the sorts of tactical and stealth action games they used make under Tom Clancy’s purchased name, but I have no attachment to the #lore. Ignoring any heritage, R6 Extraction does look like it could be quite fun. I’m always game for cooperative monster-mashing....
Pong Quest builds upon ye olde paddle ’n’ ball tennising with dungeon-crawling dressing, character customisation, some sort of story, and ballbattles with powers and fights drawing bits from other Atari arcade games like Asteroids and Centipede. It also has a four-player battle mode. The RPG dressing sounds whatever and I do not like how Pong Quest looks but I am potentially up for weird Pong variants. Rebuilding classic rules in a new way can be great....
Following rumblings that Capcom’s spook ’em up would be getting the television treatment, Netflix made the news official in a tweet earlier today, accompanied by a photo of a script written by Andrew Dabb (Supernatural) and directed by Bronwen Hughs (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead). Netflix’s formal announcement describes it as such: Resident Evil, of course, already has a strong history in live-action adaptations. I haven’t seen them, but the Milla Jovovich-fronted films are meant to be pretty good - schlocky, brutal, and gory as hell for sure, but quite good as far as videogame flicks from the 00s go....
“Climb an ominous clock tower in a series of procedural encounter rooms and past challenging boss fights on your way to reclaiming your lost memory,” the developer says. Along the way you’ll unlock new abilities and trade in your health for handy items. “After working on the game for four years and a few alpha tests with fans I’m super excited to unleash this love letter for roguelite fans,” says solo developer BenStar....
You may have seen our notification system in action already, as our tech team snuck it onto the site around this time last week. From now on, when you log into Rock Paper Shotgun, you should see a new button in the top right corner of your screen that says ‘Notifications’, like so: When someone has replied to a comment you’ve written, a little number will appear next to the bell in a nice bright colour, telling you how many replies you’ve had since you last visited the site....
Like most everything about Runeterra, the emotes are nothing new. You click a button at the bottom left of the screen, and up pops a bloke doing a cheery wave, or a ruminating gnome, or a furry creature who is sad and small. These emotes are the only way to communicate with your enemies, and are thus used for trash talk. Emotes are the one medium where I find online rudeness acceptable, because there are limits to how much you can upset someone with them....
Get the Samsung T7 500GB for $59.50 with code EMCEYSB59 (was $100) Katharine reviewed the touch version of the Samsung T7 last January, where she rated the drive highly in terms of performance and portability, but lambasted its fiddly fingerprint reader and high price. The touchless T7, as featured here, solves both of those problems rather nicely, especially at its new discounted price. In testing, the T7 provided 866MB/s read speeds and 856MB/s write speeds over USB-C, pretty close to the advertised 1000MB/s maximums....
