Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Overwatch 2’s third season is right around the corner and, as always, that means we’re getting a new map. Blizzard have treated us to our first look at the Antarctic Peninsula, an icy-themed control map launching alongside Season 3 on February 7th. The Antarctic Peninsula is a big deal since it’ll delve into Mei’s backstory, it’s the first natural environment in an OW map, and it lets you fish. As in catching fish. At an ice hole. As in, you can catch fish at an ice hole in Overwatch 2.

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The last few weeks have been messy for The Day Before, the survival MMO that was Steam’s most wishlisted game for much of 2022. Last month, The Day Before’s Steam page was quietly removed from the storefront following a trademark dispute. Developer Fntastic also delayed the game from March 1st to November 10th at the same time, just days before they promised to show some raw gameplay footage of it in action. The whole debacle led to accusations on Reddit and Discord that the game didn’t even exist, but at long last, that promised gameplay video has arrived. And... it’s merely fine.

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The makers of Command & Conquered Remastered have announced their new WW1 RTS The Great War: Western Front will be releasing on March 30th 2023. It's also getting a Steam Next Fest demo next week on February 6th, which gives you access to its chunky tutorial and the early portion of its campaign, plus the Historic Battle of The Battle Of Passchendaele, which is the mission I got a chance to play at the end of last year. As it turns out, I've also had a sneak peek at the Next Fest build, too, and there's a heck of a lot to sink your teeth into. Here's a small glimpse of what to expect.

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Fishing mini-games make just about any game better. There’s something meditative about being close to the water, waiting in silence for a catch, and mashing buttons to reel them in - plus I don’t need to deal with the horrendous smell from behind the safety of my desk. The indie game Dredge subverts what I like about fishing games, with an eerie eldritch horror waiting beneath the ocean’s surface. We won’t need to wait long before we see what's under there as Dredge releases on March 30th.

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Developer Velan Studios have announced that their team-based dodgeballer is being, well, knocked out. Season 9 of Knockout City will be its last and online services will be shut down on June 6th at 12PM GMT/6AM CST/7AM ET. Dodgeballers won’t be able to play Knockout after this date, but Velan have promised that a standalone, private-server version of the game will be coming to PC sometime after.

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While the patch notes for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s 4.01 update claim it "improves the overall stability and performance of the game", if you’re not using the recently added ray tracing settings, it might well do the opposite. I gave the patch a whirl to try out its PC-specific changes – namely a new 'Performance' setting for RT global illumination and a fix for the broken screen space reflections setting – only to find that non-ray-traced, DirectX 12 performance has been utterly knackered. Again.

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I tend to find that a lot of rhythm games hold back from going completely beast mode. It definitely comes from a place of accessibility, where an onslaught of timed bars and coloured symbols can be intimidating for casual players. But what about the rest of us who want to be pummelled to death in time with a catchy beat?

Good news! TinyBuild's new action-adventure game Rhythm Sprout: Sick Beats & Bad Sweets does not hold back. I'm not even halfway through the game and I’ve had my butt completely kicked by its barrage of oncoming beats, and all in perfect time to its soda-pop EDM.

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AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors offer incredible gaming and content creation performance, though high prices have stifled their adoption. Now, these CPUs - and their accompanying motherboards and RAM - are starting to become more affordable, with the high-end Ryzen 7 7700X dropping from a launch price of £440 to just £312 at Amazon UK as of today.

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Dell's S2721DGFA is one of the best 1440p gaming monitors on the market thanks to its use of an LG Fast IPS panel, blending the plus points of both TN and IPS displays. Normally this monitor costs north of £300, but today it's down to £279 at Dell UK, a great price that can be dropped further to £251 if you have a student or Dell Advantage employee account.

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Co-op zombie smasher Back 4 Blood won't be getting any new content. Developers Turtle Rock say that River Of Blood, the expansion which launched in December 2022, was it's last as they're now working on a new game.

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Some of my favourite games involve visiting a fantastical town, befriending the residents, discovering their stories, and trading with them. Too often those same games also have too-difficult turn-based murderfests in-between, though. Here comes Townseek to fix that. It's an adorable and "relaxing" exploration-trading game in which you pilot an airship, customise your balloon, and visit eg. some sort of bee kingdom, as per the screenshot above.

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Dwarf Fortress selling half a million copies on Steam in just a few weeks already indicated that its creators, the Adams brothers, were due a windfall. Now the latest earnings report from Bay 12 Games is here to put an exact dollar figure on that success. Here's a tease: revenue in January was up over 462x since December.

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It's great that games are now regularly updated post-release, but it's also common for me to long for those halcyon days when I first fell in love with a game. It's good news then that Deep Rock Galactic is celebrating its fifth anniversary by making it possible to play it exactly as it was at release in early 2018.

Of course, that's just one way they're celebrating the milestone, alongside an anniversary event and new DLC.

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It's a new month, which means there's a new wave of games to join and leave Game Pass. As of today, we know of a new set of leavers, and it includes head-turning action platformer Skul: The Hero Slayer and the wonderfully destructive Besiege.

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I've never actually finished a game of Stellaris. I doubt I'm the only ardent fan of the game that hasn't done so. The best thing about it, as is so often the case with 4X and grand strategy games, is the very beginning. That opening half-hour of limitless potential and giddy curiosity is utterly spellbinding. I don't know if any strategy game does it better.

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Now that The Sims 4 has babies and toddlers, the family unit is complete. Perfect timing too, as the game’s next expansion is all about growing up with family. The Sim 4’s Growing Together Expansion Pack is out March 16th and it’s planning to expand the way your Sims change over time and relate to other Sims

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Can I tell you a secret? I'm terrible at Battle Brothers. I'm still terrible at Battle Brothers, even after playing it on and off for a few years. It's a bit like Blood Bowl, oddly, in that it's all about mitigating risks. And like Blood Bowl, despite having a decent head for tactics and planning on the fly, I am hopeless at sticking to them when I see a new idea, thus: terrible. At it.

But since an update last March looks likely to be its last big one, it's about time to get over myself and gave it a proper look as a complete package. It's long overdue, in fact. Although I still struggle to fully enjoy it, Battle Brothers is an unusually good tactical game, and the one to beat for the burgeoning subgenre of mercenary management sims. That's partly because it sticks so resolutely to its guns. Where Bannerlord faltered by throwing extraneous stuff unrelated to the core combat that should have defined it, and other open world games typically take a varied but shallow "do and be everything" approach, Battle Brothers resists dilution of that core concept.

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Capcom’s monstrously big Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak is receiving its fourth free title update on February 7th. Sunbreak’s latest update adds new Event Quests, Anomaly Research content, paid DLC, and two new Elder Dragons to hunt. I don’t think any of these additions are as exciting as the giant Sweetcorn weapon introduced last year, but I digress.

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The Electronic Wireless Show podcast returns in 2023 with a new friend and a new format. We ran out of themes, so we're going to flip to a magazine-ish show, where we discuss some current events as well as the games we've been playing. This week we talk about games on film, with everyone bloody loving The Last Of Us TV show and reports that Lara Croft will be hitting the small screen too. We also discuss the reasons a developer might have to come out and clarify that their game is, in fact, real. Plus: "try cutting off their limbs"; what is Forspoken, and why so graphics?

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Little fluffy stuffed friends exert a strange and unknowable power over me. These days we only occasionally get offered free stuff as part of our jobs, because we are not YouTubers or Twitch streamers. When I first started websites would get sent a lot of stuff - you know, statuettes and toys and doodads. I don't like these things, and I always wished PRs sent me cake instead. Neither thing would make me like the game more, but at least I can eat cake, and the same cannot be said for a figurine of some kind of big-titted space samurai holding a sword.

I have, however, discovered that plushies of game characters I like are an exception to this.

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With the world continuing to disintegrate around us in real-time, it can be tempting to cast our eyes skyward in the hope of finding a better future. If KeokeN's Deliver Us games are anything to go by, though, life in outer space isn't all that peachy either. In Deliver Us The Moon, you may remember the scientists in charge of the moon's Earth-saving energy beam tech ended up having a bit of a Rapture moment, sabotaging all their good work (and the future of Earth in the process) and buggering off to goodness knows where to start life afresh in their newly birthed utopia. In its sequel, Deliver Us Mars, you find out those rogue astronauts didn't actually go that far at all. Yep, they hopped on over to the red planet and set up shop there, and when a strange transmission comes through revealing their location, it serves as the catalyst to send yet another crew into space to go and investigate.

This time, though, you're right at the heart of its central conflict. By casting players as Kathy, the daughter of one of those rogue astronauts, Deliver Us Mars tells a much more fraught and personal tale of what kind of future humanity should be pursuing: should we, in fact, be turning our efforts toward a life in outer space, or should we be doing everything in our power to try and save the dire, pretty much almost dead husk of a planet we call home?

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While I rob dark dungeons and luxurious castles, in my free time, I often think about how easy it would be with a friendly ghost to help me out. Spirited Thief allows you to play out that fantasy in a series of top-down, turn-based, stealthy heists. Better yet, it’s sneaking onto PC this summer and has a demo available now.

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If you spent a portion of the 90s going cross-eyed to look at Magic Eye 3D pictures of dolphins, elephants, and sailboats emerging from fields of noise, you might enjoy the new platformer from indie developer Daniel Linssen. It's called Stereogram, because it's made of moving stereograms. Let your eyes go slack and gaze into the distance of an optical illusion as you jump around pretty little Magic Eye levels in this platformer which reminds me of VVVVVV.

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Delete After Reading is a delightful looking text-based puzzler that will be familiar to anyone who’s played Simogo’s excellent (albeit sadly iOS-only game) Device 6, only with fewer spooks this time. Like Simogo's surreal thriller, most of Delete After Reading plays out like you're reading a novel, where scrolling through paragraphs of text will reveal images, clues and puzzles you can interact with. As the devs put it, Delete After Reading is a “game you can read, and a book you can play,” and looks and sounds really quite rad. Even better, it’s releasing on March 14th.

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Okay, we all agree that the ocean is kind screwed up right? Like, we’ve all seen that YouTube video showing how deep the sea is and unanimously agree that it’s, like, terrifying? As much as I love relaxing subaquatic city builders and exploring underwater alien worlds, I want games about stuff in the sea that makes my skin crawl to think about. Enter Full Fathom.

So, Full Fathom isn’t out yet, or even has an official release date, but I just love the idea and look of this game. Being developed by Daemon House, this is an oceanic survival horror where you’re trapped in a derelict submarine that has sunken to the depths of an abyssal sea. You need to navigate your surroundings and keep the sub up and running to make your way back to civilisation, aka a rusty tin can is your last lifeline.

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Last night was a restless one for the Steam Deck. In addition to a huge client update for the handheld PC, Valve pushed out a Proton Experimental update to fix a crashing problem with games that use the Ubisoft Connect launcher on Steam.

Ubi’s launcher had received an update of its own, sadly one that interfered with the ability of Proton – the layer of software that helps made-for-Windows games run on the Linux-based SteamOS – to keep it compatible with the Deck. Indeed, just like the 2K Launcher last year, with the added irony that the affected games (which include The Division 2, Watch Dogs Legion and Ghost Recon Breakpoint) only arrived on Steam in the past few weeks.

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Fans have been clamouring for a sequel to Titanfall 2 since its release in 2016, but it looks like we might need to put those hopes on hold for a little longer. According to a report from Bloomberg, EA have cancelled an unannounced project codenamed Titanfall Legends, a single-player mash-up between Titanfall and Apex Legends - Respawn’s battle royale, set in the same universe. Around 50 devs were working on the game before its cancellation earlier this week. EA are reportedly trying to find other positions for the devs, but those that aren't rehired are being laid off with severance.

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Sometimes I want to describe games in the most high-brow way possible. I might smugly write something like “it elevates the genre” while sipping wine and eating cheese, musing on how a game pushes the media forward as an art form. Other times I just want to write that a game is really bloody good, actually, and I like it lots.

Hi-Fi Rush falls into the latter category. Developer Tango Gameworks shadow-dropped the rhythm-action game out of nowhere shortly after an Xbox presentation, jettisoning The Evil Within’s murky mental hospitals and Ghostwire: Tokyo's supernatural shinanigans for something markedly different: bright pulsating neon colours and a gang of loveable anime ruffians, where every whack and dodge is underscored by a beat.

Hi-Fi Rush is an action-adventure game with a mechanical core fuelled by musical beats. Protagonist Chai has undergone a risky medical procedure and emerged from the other side with a robot arm and an iPod accidentally implanted in his chest meaning his every waking moment is punctuated by a catchy beat. We too see these rhythmic motions, as Hi-Fi Rush's soda pop-infused world moves to this steady pulse - platforms move in time with the music, lights flash in pleasing rhythmic patterns, and enemies attack to the beat of the drum.

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The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D has hit a new low price in the US, falling to $323 on Amazon. That's lower than the best price we saw during Black Friday last year, and a great value for the fastest gaming CPU available on the venerable AM4 platform.

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The Razer Basilisk Ultimate is a high-end wireless mouse with a ton of buttons, making it a great alternative to the RPS Readers' mouse of choice, the Logitech G502 Hero. It debuted at an eye-watering $169.99 when bought with its optional charging dock, but now it's $100 off at Best Buy and therefore a much better value.

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Last month, Frictional Games announced that their hit horror series would return with Amnesia: The Bunker, taking their signature scares back to the first World War. We now know that the game is releasing on May 16th for PC and consoles.

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I'm running out of pictures to use when I write about Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams because I've only completed two puzzles in it. I've been doing the third one for about a year, because it's, I think, six thousand pieces. I say "i think" because it's been long enough that I can't remember if I told the game to generate it as five or six thousand. But it's a lot of thousand.

I really like jigsaws (I am in the middle of doing a real life one that is a big copy of the London Underground map) but, even though I have one of those special mats to do puzzles on so you can fold them away, they're quite inconvenient. At the same time, though, there are very few digi-jigsaws that capture the kind of tactile experience of sifting and sorting through pieces. Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams really does, though.

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Revisiting Minecraft to discuss whether it deserved the GOTY award back in 2010 is a hard task, in the same way that discussing the importance of sliced bread is hard. It’s so significant that, when ranking the significance of other similar things, we all forget it until someone goes “wait wot about Minecraft” and then everyone unleashes a collective “oooo yeahhh”, guaranteeing it the top spot. To echo AliceB’s sentiments upon revisiting Portal, it’s fuckin’ Minecraft.

In fact, I think I could take her Portal revisited intro, replace every instance of “Portal” with “Minecraft”, and call it a day. It’s Minecraft! Of course it was game of the year. It was arguably the game of the decade, an absolute all timer. I won’t spend many words explaining why it is good, because those words would be redundant fodder, like the bloke fighting a soaring dragon by poking the ground under his feet with a sword. I’ll give it a fair go so that Alice can’t say I didn’t try, and swiftly move on to reading all of your (hopefully) lovely comments about why you also like Minecraft. If everyone brings one thing, we can have a show-and-tell.

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Arkane’s co-op, vampire huntin’ shooter is only a couple of months away, but there's some eyebrow-raising news in Redfall land. On top of being a vampire-filled hellscape, Redfall will also require an always-online connection, even when playing the game in single-player without buddies. This comes courtesy of a Bethesda FAQ page that states a “persistent connection is required” for co-op and single-player, and that a Bethesda.net account is also necessary to play the game. Many co-op and multiplayer games have required a persistent connection as of late, but it’s disappointing in Redfall’s case since the game is playable alone.

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I loved Obsidian’s medieval mystery Pentiment when it released last November, and part of my admiration was for its incredible art style. It was like the dev team had nicked a bunch of 16th-century manuscripts, scanned the delicate pages, and then fully animated them to life.

Pentiment was clearly made by a team who had a deep love for the time period, and the same can be said for Inkulinati, a 2D turn-based strategy game that also uses illuminated medieval drawings. But Yaza Games have taken a bit of a different direction with Inkulinati's vibe by adding a whole heap of cheeky humour. You wouldn't think it would suit the stuffy nature of religious manuscripts, but actually those monks were pretty cheeky blokes, and Inkulinati's humour is done in a way that stays completely loyal to the source material, fart jokes and all.

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As someone who considers Uniqlo an extravagance, the HTC Vive XR Elite might just be the most expensive thing I’ll ever wear. Revealed at CES 2023 and set for launch in March, this is the first Vive VR headset in years with real PC gaming credentials, while borrowing from the more compact design of the mobile VR-minded Vive Flow VR glasses. I recently went to try them out over here in London, with an uneasy thought in my mind: even with a lighter design than the Vive Cosmos series, how could this possibly be worth £1299 / $1099?

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For Hayden and I's Ultimate Audio Bang podcast, we thought we'd do something a little differently this year. Instead of focusing on one theme and yapping on about it for a very long time, we're now splitting the pod into two segments: the first half on the hip and happening, the second on an FPS genre or subgenre that we're unfamiliar with. Our first port of call? theHunter: Call Of The Wild.

In our first sessions with the game, we both concluded that A) deer are incredibly athletic; and B) we're the most impatient people, perhaps ever. More than that, though, we hadn't realised how important it was to fixate on your prey. Not like, track them down. But like, track them down, you know?

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A Bloomberg report from yesterday has revealed new details on the state of the Halo franchise and the turmoil at developer 343 Industries. This news comes after 95 employees lost their jobs, following mass layoffs across Microsoft. The layoffs affected long-time 343 devs, as well as contractors who only had a few days' notice. Halo Infinite has been trying to find its footing after a rocky first year, but this report doesn’t inspire much hope from fans, at least for the series’ short-term future. The report delves into the studio’s switch to a different engine, an upcoming battle royale game, and most importantly, the lack of any single-player content in development.

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Jett: The Far Shore was, like the jagged colossi that roamed its lavender skies, an odd beast. When it emerged on the Epic Game Store in the autumn of 2021, you could see the conflict roiling in its belly - between the linear science fiction short story on the surface, and the freeroaming “Metroid snowboarding game” fighting to get out from underneath it.

“Once the story finished, I hoped an endgame would open up and allow me to play freely in its world,” I wrote in our Jett review. “That I’d have more opportunities to watch great Ghoke, the red sun, rise in real time, and to ponder the Far Shore’s fascinating mysteries at length. Instead, I could only replay previous chapters. If only Jett had embraced a rhythm as organic as its inspired ecosystem.”

When the Jett team read that review, they didn’t disagree. “You put your finger on it more accurately than anybody else, which was, ‘It really feels like this is building up to some sort of systemic-focused, open world endgame,’” says Superbrothers founder Craig Adams. “And internally we were like, ‘Yeah, it is.’” What they knew, and I didn’t, was that The Far Shore was just the first part of a two-campaign story. That journey has now been completed with the launch of Given Time, a bonus 12-hour adventure that coincides with Jett’s long-awaited Steam release.

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Epic Games and Iron Galaxy have announced they’re sunsetting their melee battle royale Rumbleverse, six months after launch. Live services will go offline on February 28th at 4PM GMT/10AM CST/11AM ET. In a blog post from the team, Iron Galaxy shared that Season Two will be Rumbleverse’s last, but it should be receiving one final update soon to remove the game's monetisation. This continues the trend of me discovering a new battle royale game, thanks to the announcement of its death.

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