I tackled two hours of Steelrising, which saw me battle through the tutorial area, sock it to some robots in a woodland zone, and get on a boat and row over to Paris - where I socked even more robots in a grander setting. Then after a quick intermission, the devs loaded me into a build where I fought a boss and did some extra exploration. Overall I got to play a hefty amount, and with no red tape....
The “Lem” update does all three, changing how tradition trees work, adding new features to old species packs such as 2016’s Planetoids, and rebalancing some Civics and Origins. 3.1’s complete list of changes is expandable over in this forum thread. It’s absolutely vast, though a few highlights are pulled out at the top. They included traditions no longer being hardlocked, so you can choose which tradition trees you want to pursue during a playthrough, and new tradition trees being added to previous Nemesis and Apocalypse DLCs....
Tencent are a large player in the games industry’s attempt to scrunch itself down into a tiny handful of risk-averse companies who own everyone else. They outright own Riot Games, Digital Extremes, Funcom, Splash Damage, Turtle Rock, and more, and they hold sizeable stakes in folks including Epic Games, Grinding Gear Games, Dontnod Entertainment, and Bloober Team. Now, they’re buying Inflexion Games too. “As announced at the end of January, and while we focus our efforts on accelerating in the metaverse, we want to make sure that the games developed by our internal studios benefit from the support of publishers with leading track records of bringing games to market....
Developers Inkle are after short, lightly-interactive campfire stories for their heroes to natter to each other. They’re paying £40 a pop for any that make it into the game. Inkle say each story should be around 500 words, “written as dialogue between two characters, the first telling the story, and the second butting in with the occasional dialogue choice to pace the flow.” You need to submit your story using Ink, which is the software Inkle use to inject words into all their games....
So come and join me for the second instalment of this Death Stranding photo mode diary, where we take naps, have a bath, and make new friends.
I do spend quite a lot of time explaining Blackbird to Nate, but after that we do talk about some cutscenes and cinematics in games (as well as litigating the difference between the two, and Nate tries to remember the first time he saw a cutscene in a game that was in-engine rather than being pre-rendered). And today the Cavern Of Lies is a Cavern Of Justice, after we received a troubling missive from one [squints] Brond Coatwear?...
This is a core conceit of surprise space-murder hit Among Us. But with multiplayer also being a core part of the Among Us experience, muting mics and silence might not seem that meaningful. When you think about it, though, Among Us is all about that isolation coming from an Alien-style disaster unfolding in deep space. Every round is a set of scales perfectly balanced between paranoid quiet and heated debate....
This time, it’s also being joined by its tenkeyless little brother, the G915 TKL Lightspeed Wireless. This shares the same finely-crafted, all-mechanical build and solid wireless connectivity of the full-size model, merely cutting the number pad in pursuit of a smaller desk footprint and a lower price. UK deals: US deals: Both are brilliant keyboards for work and play, and although they’re normally at the very highest end of the peripheral price scale, these Black Friday savings make them more attainable (if still on the premium side)....
Night turns to day in Fallout 76, the sun coaxing new fruit from the tato plants in my garden. There are even seasons of sorts, the West Virginian forest waxing and waning according to its own schedule. But, as in most RPGs, real change occurs only at the player’s convenience. Quests await activation, and the Scorched plague rolls on until I deign to find a cure, playing second fiddle to my ambitions of bringing interior design back to Appalachia....
Get the Asus Zepyhrus G14 for $1350 (was $1650) My love affair with the G14 has been going on for some time, but the latest generation G14 reviewed by James earlier this year represents an absolute pinnacle of achievement by the Taiwanese company. He tested the top-spec version with an RX 6800S GPU, but the overall lessons still apply here - performance is strong, with the machine being plenty capable of running AAA games at 1440p 60fps, while esports titles can make excellent use of the 120Hz refresh rate....
Get ready to save a small world in Webbed! Sin Vega: Webbed makes me happy. I’ve played a jillion games that were fun or engaging, but almost nothing that delivers so much sheer joy as this little tale of a helpful jumping spider uniting the local bugs to rescue her boyfriend. I don’t mean anything daft like Webbed changed my life or cured my depression. I mean it simply radiates joy, in a way that I can’t imagine ever becoming immune to....
You guessed it: our fourth game is blinky-adventure Before Your Eyes! Ed: Writing about Before Your Eyes is hard. Personally, I find it easier just to have a little cry about it. That way you don’t spoil the story for anyone, and it warns those around you of the catastrophic emotional impact it can have on a person. But I’ll try my best, because this game is magic. Like seriously, you blink in real life and the game reacts....
But can you solve the mysteries of The Case Of The Golden Idol with just a snapshot from the moment after they happened? Katharine: Detective games are a tricky beast to get right. Giving players all the right clues to solve the mystery at hand is one thing, but giving them the freedom, scope and choice to draw their own conclusions from them (even if it’s canonically incorrect) is a rare thing indeed....
However, it’s not a straightforward remake of The Sims 2’s wants and fears system. Instead, this latest version of the feature adapts a few familiar aspects of The Sims 4’s Simology into something a little bit new. Confused? Read on below for a full explanation of how wants and fears work in The Sims 4. How do wants work in The Sims 4? At first look, wants in The Sims 4 are much the same as the whims they replace....
Still, in terms of value for money, this TLC drive with a DRAM cache is going to be hard to beat - especially as the only real competitors tend to come with QLC NAND or without a DRAM cache, both of which sacrifice performance to hit lower price points! Get the WD Black SN750 1TB for £86.99 (RRP £190.99) What about going for a faster PCIe 4.0 drive - how much would we need to spend to get a significantly better drive?...
This week, in Headlines and Hot Takes, we discuss all of the news coming out of Geoff Keighley’s Night Of Trailers And Announcements, like the official reveal of the new Perfect Dark, we chat about the very Dead Space-y The Callisto Protocol, and we wonder what’s in store for us after watching the new Mass Effect trailer. But, even with The Game Awards 2020 recap, there’s still time for Tech Corner And, yes, Cyberpunk 2077 dominates Show And Tell....
Are the tiny computer people who write all the information down on the hard disks inside your PC old and tired? Yeah, mine too. Well, I have good news! The superb Samsung 870 Qvo 2TB SSD is the cheapest it’s ever been here in the UK. RPS Supreme Overlord Katharine checked it out way back in 2020 (wait, that’s only last year) and proclaimed it “a bit good.”* According to Katharine, the 870 Qvo is a worthy purchase....
As you may have seen from my weekly round-ups of gaming laptop deals under £1000 last year, finding an RTX 2060 laptop for less than four figures is a pretty rare thing. The lowest prices I’ve seen have sat right on that £1000 line, but today’s deal brings that entry-level ray tracing experience down even further. Having recently reviewed one of Asus’ 2021 TUF gaming laptops - the excellent Asus TUF Dash 15 - I’m pretty confident this model from 2020 will live up to the same great build quality standards....
