Like A Dragon: Ishin rewinds the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, both by returning to real-time brawling and by being set in Edo period Japan. It's great for it - and now a little better, since patch 1.03 fixed some PC-specific bugs.
I have no problem believing that PowerWash Simulator is as smart and engrossing as people say. That's why I don't play it, lest my actual home fall into a state of muck-slick neglect.
If you're braver than me, you now have new venues to clean: the free Final Fantasy VII crossover is out now, and it lets you clean up Midgar like Cloud never could.
I had a brief, intense relationship with Vampire Survivors last year, but a steady stream of early access updates and now post-release DLC has kept other players in its thrall for much longer. Those updates have been successful enough that its developer says that they'd only make a sequel if it offered "something radically new."
Meta are lowering the price of their VR headsets. From tomorrow, you'll be able to pick up the Meta Quest 2 256GB for $430, down from $500, and the recently launched Meta Quest Pro for $1000, down from $1500.
If you're looking for something to play this weekend, maybe hop on Game Pass to play the stylish rhythmic violence of Hi-Fi Rush. It'll be the focus of the first session of the RPS Game Club, so all the hepcats will be bashing baddies to the beat. But I should ask: what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
HyperX's Pudding Keycaps, a popular choice for upgrading mechanical keyboards to blast out the RGB and improve the typing experience at the same time, are heavily discounted at Amazon US today. This full 104-key set normally retails for $25, but today you can pick them up in black for $15 or white for $20.
Last week, I attended a hands-off preview for The Sims 4's upcoming Growing Together expansion pack and its supporting free base game update. This was obviously a real treat for me as RPS' resident Sims fanatic, but I'll admit I went in with my expectations parked in neutral. After all, the theme of this new-content duo is young families, and that just isn't part of the game I engage with too much these days.
Leaks are the bane of every publisher's existence, forcing marketing plans to shift, change, or just get scrapped. But that's partly why I'm enjoying EA's approach for advertising the Skate. reboot. Footage from the open-world skateboarders’ playtest leaked last September, and EA have since responded by releasing their own janky videos. These clips give us a taste of the whacky ragdolling happening right now, and it's probably the most entertaining way of marketing a game while simultaneously sucking the air out of leaks.
I've recommended a pretty wide variety of genres over the years, but I didn't expect a brick breaking game to surprise me like Destructure Colon Among Debris. It's not that I dislike them. They've just never really made much impression (possibly because I don't see all that many)
Destructure blends in a hint of shooting, resource management, and leans into the sheer fun of destruction, replacing bricks with "structures" that aren't meant to be anything specific, but give the whole feeling an impression of combat, an assault you're carrying out rather than a reacting, abstract geometry game.
Also it feels and sounds great to hit stuff. That's probably the bigger reason.
I'm going to Japan in a couple of weeks, and I am beyond excited. It's been 15 years since I last visited family in Yokohama, and my last memory is one where I'm miserable and I'm staring out of a cab window going back to the airport. I didn't want to leave. It sounds corny as heck, but I can't wait to sucker punch that memory with a swing that's been building for 5478 days, then jab it full of happy ones. Really, I imagine what will happen is I'll get weirdly emotional as the plane touches down and my mate Simon, who I'm going with, will be like, "Get a hold of yourself you buffoon".
I got LINE recently - a Whatsapp equivalent that's big in Japan - to arrange some meetups with friends and family. Those arrangements have happened, which brings me great joy. But in a surprise plot twist, it meant I got back in touch with a guy called Sam. Now Sam, he's a good bud and we go a long way back. All the way back to the original Gears Of War days. And I think we've arranged, as is custom, to play Gears 6 whenever it arrives. Such is the bizarre way of things.
In the lead-up to the original Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, the team at Ninja Theory released 30 development diaries, delving deep into every aspect of the game: the art inspirations, the myths they were remixing, and more. It was an insightful look at the nuts and bolts of game dev, so I’m glad Ninja Theory are returning to the concept for the spooky action sequel Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga. The first episode takes a look at Iceland - the sequel's setting - and the team's painstaking commitment to recreating it as realistically as possible. The photogrammartry tech on display is seriously impressive, and following the team to Iceland feels like watching a British travel series, without the crude humour.
This isn't technically a review, because who would review a game mode for Total War: Warhammer 3? What’s next, a title screen review? A lengthy personal essay about an attract mode clip? Can my cat get a review? First off, yes. Captain Waffles is a visceral tour-de-force that no fan of the genre should miss. 10/10. Secondly, you should know that Immortal Empires is, as far as Total War: Warhammer goes, the game mode. More importantly, this ridiculously expansive, years-spanning grand-strategy project exists as tangible proof that sometimes, the limitless hubris of man is actually rad as hell, despite what the ancient Greeks said. Euripides nuts, more like.
Multiplayer horror Dead By Daylight is apparently coming to Hollywood in the form of a new film adaptation. The two production companies involved are longtime horror fixtures Atomic Monster (who have made The Conjuring, Annabelle, and Malignant) and Blumhouse (the company behind Paranormal Activity, M3GAN, and Get Out.) The film doesn’t have any talent attached right now, but the two companies are currently looking for a director and a screenwriter. Blumhouse says, "it’s imperative we find someone who appreciates and loves the world as much as we do, to help us bring the game to the big screen".
Capcom have announced their very own digital showcase, set for next week, where the publisher will show off upcoming games - including Resident Evil 4 Remake, Exoprimal, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection, and more from Monster Hunter: Rise. So, pop March 9th on your calendar if you want to catch the Capcom Spotlight show. The showcase will begin at 10:30pm GMT/2:30pm PT and will run for approximately 26 minutes. There’s also a pre-show airing 20 minutes prior.
Amazon have quietly dipped their first toe into PC componentS, listing the Amazon Basics Computer Cooling Fan: a single-fan, RGB-lit air cooler. Judging from the manual it supports the very latest socket types for Intel and AMD’s gaming CPUs, and being under the Amazon Basics brand, it's dirt cheap at £21 / £27.
It’s unlikely, though, that Bezos and the gang have been secretly funding R&D into an all-new line of PC gear. As Tom’s Hardware spotted, the Amazon Basics Computer Cooling Fan appears to simply be an existing budget cooler, the Cooler Master Hyper H410R, without the CM badge.
Dead Island 2 seems destined to be a competent but unoriginal take on the zombie smashing genre. I am undecided if I find the prospect an entertaining diversion or a mind-numbing waste of time, but a new, extended 14-minute demonstration might help you make up your mind.
We already know all the major features of the Minecraft 1.20 update, including the audience-voted Sniffer mob, plus cherry blossom biome and archaeology activities. We didn't previously know its name, though: the Trails & Tales update.
The Crucial P5 Plus occupies a unique place in the SSD ecosystem, offering high-end PCIe 4.0 performance while costing less than commonly-cited alternatives like the WD SN850x and Samsung 990 Pro. Today the 2TB size of the drive is down to £163, a 34% reduction that makes it particularly tempting to pick up.
Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard is likely to be approved by EU regulators, according to a report by Reuters. Three people "familiar with the matter" have apparently said that the offer of licensing deals to rivals, such as Nintendo, Nvidia and Sony, have succeeded in addressing EU antitrust concerns.
The Alienware AW3423DWF is a monitor we've talked about a few times, as this 34-in ultrawide QD-OLED manages to outperform almost everything else on the market - albeit with a four-figure price tag that also eclipses almost every alternative.
Now though, this 3440x1440 165Hz gaming OLED has dropped in price by a sizeable 26% or £310. That brings the monitor well into three-figure territory at £880, still pricy but a reasonable value given that this Dell monitor is head and shoulders above its IPS, VA and TN opponents.
Somehow, it's been almost a decade since the last numbered Age Of Wonders game. Despite dipping their toes into the sci-fi realm with Age Of Wonders: Planetfall three-odd years ago, developers Triumph are now returning to their fantastical 4X strategy roots with Age Of Wonders 4, due out on PC in just a couple of months on May 2nd - and what a homecoming it's shaping up to be. I've spent the better part of a week and half playing an early build of AOW 4, getting to grips with its enormous array of customizable factions and hero types in its generous crop of single-player realm maps.
There's a heck of a lot to get through, but rest assured: this is Age Of Wonders through and through - and thanks to the addition of those new, customizable factions, it's also the most RPG-like entry yet, which is good news for budding D&D-ers looking for a grand, 4X strategy game to sink their teeth into. Heck, I'd even go as far as saying it could be one of this year's biggest and most exciting fantasy games outside of Baldur's Gate 3.
The next game from the studio behind The Surge, Atlas Fallen, was announced last year with a CG trailer that didn’t give much away. A few snippets of gameplay at the end of the trailer revealed speedy action against giant beasts and a semi-open world desert you can slide across - and who doesn’t love sliding in games? We now know when to expect developer Deck13’s latest, as the team have announced a May 16th date for PC and consoles. Publisher Focus Entertainment say a gameplay reveal trailer is “coming soon”, but for now we can enjoy a couple of new screenshots.
Martial arts brawler Sifu has put a date on its upcoming Arenas expansion and Steam release: March 28th. We’ve known about the free update since last April’s roadmap, but developer Sloclap have finally released a trailer detailing the new modes in the expansion. All very exciting stuff for fans of the kickpunching adventure, although, if you’re my kind of nerd, you likely got a kick out of all the film references in the trailer.
March means Springtime has begun and it’s finally time to say goodbye to Winter - and a fresh batch of Game Pass leavers. This month’s leaving soon list is bulkier than usual, with games such as Guardians Of The Galaxy, Goat Simulator, and Undertale all waving goodbye on March 15/16th.
We're three weeks away from the release of the Resident Evil 4 remake, and in preparation of its imminent launch Capcom chucked over a fresh batch of in-game footage for us to talk about. The 17 minute long video showcased various sections from the game, including a late-game boss fight and a greatly expanded early area that sees Leon exploring a series of creepy caves.
As Rock Paper Shotgun's Resident Resident Evil Liker, I took it upon myself to obsessively study each individual frame of this video file to uncover its hidden secrets. Surprising even myself, I was able to extract 17 new details about Leon's refreshed holiday to rural Spain. That's one new thing for each minute of the footage! That wasn't intentional! What a pleasing coincidence!
A new Half-Life mod adds raytracing to Valve's venerable first-person shooter, a shiny slap of 2023 lighting technology in a 1998 game. I normally think such anachronistic upgrades look awful but this one works for me. Rather than just slam fancy modern tech into an old game, the mod wants to change the whole look. And it succeeds in a surprising way: by making the rest of Half-Life look older.
Humble Bundle’s latest is raising money for relief efforts in southern Türkiye and northern Syria due to the earthquakes which have killed over 50,000 people and displaced thousands more. The bundle compiles over 60 games, including some heavy hitters such as Gotham Knights and XCOM 2, alongside some smaller gems like Backbone and Cris Tales. The Earthquake Relief Bundle is available for £25/$30 (or any higher price) until March 8th and all proceeds will be going to charity.
I was a big fan of classic TellTale, the studio that put out episodic adventure games on a conveyor belt. I'm not the new one in sheep’s clothing, because they haven’t released anything yet. Like many, I was especially drawn to The Wolf Among Us, a neo-noir murder mystery set in the same universe as the Fables graphic novels. It would have been quite poetic to return to the series ten years after its debut, but that’s not going to be paw-sibble, as new TellTale have announced that The Wolf Among Us 2 has been delayed out of 2023. There’s no new release window, but maybe it'll be ready in 2024. Hopefully.
It's easy to label Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty as a Soulslike that's basically Nioh and Sekiro mashed together. To some extent, that's true. But I think Wo Long is Team Ninja having sanded off some - not all - of the edges from the overwhelmingly complex Nioh, to craft an action RPG with even crisper combat than its predecessor. And crucially, it's more approachable as a result. Clever ranks and meters reward, whether risk-taking is your jam or you're more of a careful type. It may still be a tricky venture filled with demonic, titanic cows that'll want to pound your skull into the dirt, but this is Team Ninja's most encouraging effort yet.
At first glance, King Of The Castle might look similar to other medieval political sims; something like Reigns or Yes, Your Grace, where you ascend the throne, rule a kingdom, and make decisions that will impact your gold reserves, military strength, or alliances. That political manoeuvring is intact in King Of The Castle, but this time up to 24 of your friends (or thousands of Twitch viewers) can join your campaign, hopping into the shoes of nobles from various regions. All of them have different goals, all of them can vote on certain decisions, and all of them have the potential to support or backstab the all-powerful monarch: you.
A new thing for RPS in 2023 is the RPS Game Club, a kind of monthly book club for games where we pick a game to play each month, write some cool things about it, and have a big all liveblog discussion with you lot, our readers, at the end of it. It's a project I've been wanting to get off the ground for some time now, and finally, the Treehouse Game Club doors have been busted open... and there's some toe-tapping guitar music coming from inside? That's right, we're playing Hi-Fi Rush as our first RPS Game Club game, and we hope you'll join us on this month-long musical journey.
AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D processors are now available (in theory), so we're seeing some big discounts on previously-released options that bring them into newfound relevance. Such is the case with the Ryzen 7 7700X, the middle child of the Zen 4 lineup and an absolutely beastly performer when it comes to gaming thanks to its full-fat eight-core, one-CCD design. This chip launched at $399 but is now $100 cheaper thanks to a discount code at Newegg, where you can pick up the 7700X for $298.99 when you use code BTSCP2655 at the checkout.
The Elgato Stream Deck Mini debuted for £70 or $100, but now it's down to £54.99 on Amazon UK. That's a handy 21% off and a fairly decent cost of entry and a historic low price for a useful macro-pad, with easy integrations for streaming apps, media and general automation.
“I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”
Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.”
Earlier this month, the studio behind Deep Rock Galactic announced that they were branching out (or digging in) to publishing with their new initiative Ghost Ship Publishing. Today, the team held a fifth-anniversary livestream for their hit co-op shooter, and they also announced the first three games they’ll be releasing as a publisher, including a Deep Rock Galactic spin-off, a top-down shooter, and a spell-slinging roguelike - all coming from indie teams based in Denmark.
There's a sometimes hard to define line between a game that effectively establishes and embellishes its fiction (good, righteous), and one that has "lore" (tedious, lowly). It's a delicate art that warrants close consideration. It also warrants some good examples, which brings us to ΔV: Rings Of Saturn. Which, as it gets closer to release, I'm going to be nice to and call either Delta V or Rings Of Saturn. Even though Triangle Vee Colon Rings is more fun.
It's also fun, having played it, to keep up with how it’s doing in early access, not just because I'm looking forward to seeing it take off, but because its dev has spent the last few years writing delightful patch notes in the style of in-world news bulletins.
If you’re a fan of visual novels, you’ve likely come across developer npckc for their work on A Pet Shop After Dark and A Year Of Springs - one of the best visual novels on PC. They’re now bringing Tavern For Tea - a lovely-looking tea-brewing sim - to PC, after it launched on mobile a few years ago.
Congratulations to us! Games have now been recognised as a ‘real’ sport by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the organisation have announced that qualifications begin today for their Olympics Esports Series 2023. The IOC say “the four day-festival will showcase the very best of virtual sports,” featuring esports titans such as Just Dance and Zwift.
It’s 2023 and Cyberpunk 2077 finally works… on the Steam Deck, I mean (it’s worked elsewhere for a while now.) The open-world RPG has always been playable on the portable machine, but it’s now Steam Deck verified - meaning Valve have tested it and used their almighty wisdom to determine it’ll run without a hitch.
On Tuesday, EA abruptly laid off over 200 quality assurance testers at their LA office Baton Rouge, who were primarily working on their free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends. This news comes from a report by Kotaku which says the layoffs happened over a last-minute Zoom call, according to three of their sources. EA later confirmed the news, calling the layoffs part of their “ongoing global strategy” to expand the “distribution of our Apex Legends testing team.”