Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Like many free-to-play live service games these days, Overwatch 2 loves its skins. Occasionally though, Blizzard stumble with their cosmetic offerings, rather like they’ve tripped over an invisible dog. Players have been taking to Twitter and Reddit to voice their irritation with support hero Moira’s rather uninspired new legendary skin, based on the classic black and white look of mime artists everywhere. Just like mime artists themselves, it’s not very popular.

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It’s always nice to find a recommendation-worthy Black Friday deal on a piece of PC kit I’m currently using myself. The HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless is by far my favourite gaming headset of 2022, the one I employ right now for everyday use, and as part of Amazon’s early Black Friday sales is down to £100. That’s a £90 saving on the RRP, and the cheapest that this set of wireless cans has ever been in the UK.

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One No Man’s Sky player has made a standalone app that lets you construct bases by moving, snapping together, and colouring parts ready to slot straight into the game. Technical artist Charlie Banks has popped the base-building app up on NexusMods, and has used it to create a massive robot that looks a little like the Iron Giant squatting down. Banks compares the base-building app’s simplicity to Oskar Stålberg’s procedurally generated hamlet-crafter Townscaper, although it seems a bit more complicated than that game.

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Upcoming sci-fi horror game The Callisto Protocol will have 25 death animations locked behind its season pass, but developers Striking Distance Studios have insisted these aren’t being held back for DLC. Striking Distance CEO Glen A. Schofield took to Twitter to try to reassure players that work hadn’t even begun on the animations yet. You can watch The Callisto Protocol’s slightly early launch trailer below.

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Two years on and I’d more or less forgotten what a fairly priced RTX 3080 looked like. Yet on the eve of Black Friday 2022, a couple of early deals have presented that most elusive of sights: Nvidia’s best graphics card for 4K, down to a perfectly reasonable £700 / $700.

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The United States’ consumer watchdogs, the Federal Trade Commission, are considering filing a lawsuit against Microsoft over the company’s proposed $68.7 billion (£57 billion) buyout of Activision Blizzard. US newspaper Politico report that three anonymous sources with knowledge of the potential antitrust lawsuit have claimed it could happen in December, although any such lawsuit isn't guaranteed. The four FTC commissioners haven’t voted to decide on a complaint yet, and haven’t met with Microsoft or Activision Blizzard lawyers, two of the sources said.

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Age Of Empires 4 is the first RTS I've taken seriously. I've practised build orders, memorised specific civ counters, watched pro matches and agonised over key bindings. I have gone down into the nitty gritty of sheep micro, just to shear off microseconds from early villager gathering times, but I've never seen a good reason to build half of the landmarks in the game. It's a blessed relief, therefore, to see "landmark improvements" on the roadmap for Season 4, alongside a new mode and a funky purple-looking biome.

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War never changes, but sometimes it arrives on a generous games subscription package. Battlefield 2042 is now available on Game Pass, along with a new map, specialist, weapons and Battle Pass gubbins for Season 3. Most folks seem to regard 2042 as a misstep compared to the triumph of Battlefield 1, but hey, Game Pass is a great way to check if they're right. You can't shoot railguns in the swedish wilderness back in WW1, can you now.

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Spaceship looter shooter Everspace 2 has launched one last update at the final frontier, with today's Ancient Rifts update constituting the sixth and final major early access content drop. The full game won't be out 'til next year, but what's there now includes an endgame where you head through rifts to blow up lost pirates "who've succumbed to madness". I'd leave 'em be, if I were you. Who are they going to pirate on in rift town?

Developers Rockfish Games also promise new missions, legendary items, and a "significant overhaul of our level-scaling approach".

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We just got our first look at The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's much-delayed free "next gen" update, by which they mean current gen, and which yep, looks like a looker. Vanilla Witcher 3 still looks gorgeous for a nearly seven year old game, but the upcoming update will add ray-tracing options, ultra+ settings and a suite of other visual and quality of life updates.

It's not out 'til December 14th, but you can peek at it below while the devs natter in the background.

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I'm a sucker for a good romcom. As soon as the fateful meet cute happens, you'll find me curled up with a blanket swooning over the blossoming romance. Bumping into someone while getting on the train or getting in an elevator might be a minor part of your day, but for a romcom protagonist, it ignites the love story they've been waiting for. They were ready to fall in love and probably hoped for a meet cute because they wanted a surprising story that they could tell everyone about. Like a good romcom, State of Decay 2 often has ways to generate unexpected stories that we're secretly hoping will happen. Let's call it a meat cute.

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Vampire Survivors is a game where you control a little pixellated person who auto-attacks periodically. Your aim is to survive for as long as possible as hordes of slime and bats close in around you, and it's an excellent time. So excellent, in fact, that it's already seen a few spin-offs.

And having sampled a couple of Vampire Survivor-likes, it's made me appreciative of the game's visual clarity. Yes, things can get messy, but at least you're able to make out what's happening on screen. I don't think it's something the subgenre has quite grasped yet.

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Sometimes you just gotta play the hits, which Amazon are very much doing with their early Black Friday keyboard deals. The Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless is an enduringly comfortable, responsive, and strikingly slim gaming keyboard that’s a regular feature of sales events like Black Friday and Prime Day, and once again it’s on sale now – both in the UK and in the US.

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.

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Not content with your telly or your tablet, Netflix has begun making moves on your PC. The streaming giant is recruiting people to work on “a brand-new AAA PC game”, seeking those with knowledge of Unreal Engine and “experience with FPS and/or third person shooter games”. The ad for their lead engineer specifically refers to the game as a third-person action RPG.

The new hires will join former Overwatch executive producer Chacko Sonny, team lead at the newly formed Netflix Games Studio. Who knows if they'll make anything good, but at least it'll probably come free with your 'flix.

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Fantasy doesn’t really do guns very often, preferring to stick to the ol’ sharp pointy metal things that don’t fire bullets instead. I do enjoy when the odd boomstick appears in magical realms though, so I’ve got one eye trained on tactical CRPG Dark Envoy. Putting you in the gunpowder-loving shoes of a refugee adventurer exploring the fantasy world of Jäan while total war rages, you can also bring a pal along in a similar way to Divinity: Original Sin’s campaign co-op. Watch a little of Dark Envoy’s isometric steampunk world in action in the trailer below.

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Last time, you decided that dynamic music is better than hex grids. Heart won over mind, and honestly I myself would struggle to know which to follow. Given that hexes aren't going anywhere and dynamic music is scarce, sure, let's celebrate dynamic music and hope for more. This week, I ask you to decide between two very different types of attack. What's better: overwatch reaction attacks (not Overwatch the game, okay), or the ridiculous gunfire overload that is dakka?

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I had to check this particular Black Friday deal three times to make sure the specs were right, but yes, you can indeed get an RTX 3080-equipped version of the Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop for £1200. That’s hundreds upon hundreds of pounds less than the average RTX 3080 laptop, even during the current season of early Black Friday offers.

Until Nvidia get around to making a mobile version of the RTX 4080, this is the second-most powerful RTX laptop GPU you can get, so it’s much more commonly found inside £2000-plus models. Suffice to say, chances to secure yourself such a graphics chip for £1200 are very rare indeed. And it’s not like the other components are guff: the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H is a perfectly adequate octa-core CPU, and the Nitro 5 ignores slow mechanical storage to equip itself with a 1TB SSD.

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It's that time of year again, folks, where we come to you, cap in hand, to ask: "Please, dear reader, can you fill out our RPS Readership Survey for us?" The whole thing should only take between 5-10 minutes of your time, and it will be a big help to both us and our corporate siblings in the wider Reedpop multiverse going forward. Thank you in advance!

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I've known for a long time that becoming an astronaut was never going to be my life's calling. My eyesight's terrible, for one, and I guarantee I'd be vomming all over the walls if I was ever put inside one of those whirly burly machines to simulate the experience of launching into space. Indeed, if the two hours I spent playing Deliver Us Mars last week were anything to go by, I don't think I'd even make it through the doors at NASA. They'd take one look at me and turn me away on the spot, because man alive, even my fingers were aching after tackling a couple of different sections from early in the game's story.

There's a good reason for this, though, and it's one that actually enhanced my experience of the game as opposed to detracting from it. You see, while heroine Kathy might look like an auto-climbing Lara Croft-stronaut, with her pair of pickaxes dangling off her suit, in practice she's anything but. In fact, when she's climbing up and down walls, Kathy has more in common with Grow Home's little BUD bot than anyone else - albeit with a significantly higher polygon count. As she carries out her quest to look for tech to save Earth from an impending climate crisis, players manually control her climbing movements with pushes and squeezes of their right and left mouse buttons, plotting a course through the game's gnarled mess of girders and metallic bulkheads one axe stab at a time. It's a slow, but wonderfully tactile process, and it all adds up to launch Deliver Us Mars straight out of the trad, third-person action canon, and into the altogether starrier realms of platforming pioneers.

Not long ago I watched my Warzone Legacy, a two-minute-long compilation of my best stats from the first game, which included my K/D ratio and hours played and the like. It was undoubtedly produced by AI to feed the social media machine, yet the cold, hard numbers transported me back to the warm embrace of Verdansk, a battle royale map my mates and escaped to almost every evening as the pandemic raged. The silly 120 second video shot me right in the feelings.

My history with the first game means that I enter Warzone 2 with an embarrassing tangle of emotional baggage and personal investment. It has a lot to live up to. And for the most part, it has been a joy to drop in again. Launch woes aside, the sequel iterates on the first in a way that feels like it'll last in the long run and confirms that there's still no battle royale that does it quite like Warzone.

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2022 has had its PC hardware disappointments, but it’s been a vintage year for gaming SSDs. In the latter half alone we’ve seen the top-class PCIe 3.0 speeds of the Crucial P3, the surprising affordability of the PCIe 4.0-based Crucial P3 Plus, the outstanding premium-tier performance of the WD Black SN850X, and now the Samsung 990 Pro: an NVMe SSD with the fastest read speeds in the land. So say its makers, anyway.

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Free to play superhero card battler Marvel Snap is getting a Power Cosmic update for PC and mobile on December 6th. The big deal with this update is the arrival of Collector Tokens that’ll let you snap up cards you want from the new store. Given the name, it’s not surprising to hear that some fresh, cosmic-themed rare cards are set to land too, including the Silver Surfer and his absolute unit of a mate, Galactus. Watch the dev update video below for more of ever enthusiastic developer Ben Brode talking about what’s coming in the Power Cosmic update.

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GTA Online’s month-long Heists event concludes on November 30th, and Rockstar are setting the game’s community a challenge to steal a total of $2 trillion in-game over the next week. That would be double what GTA Online players managed during the last Heists Challenge two years ago, when the target was set at the much lower amount of $100 billion. Rockstar are promising a “special reward” later this year if the community hits that $2 trillion total in stolen cash. Buy out Twitter in time for Christmas, maybe?

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No Man's Sky has expanded a huge amount beyond its original vision, and last year developers Hello Games introduced a new kind of seasonal update: Expeditions. These are time-limited activities with one-off awards, but although this year's fourth and final Expedition finished back in September, all of 2022's Expeditions are making a shortened, end-of-year return for anyone who missed them first time out.

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Disney Dreamlight Valley's second major update now has a release date. Characters, locations and cosmetic items from Toy Story will be added to the free-to-play life sim on December 6th.

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Valve have been awarded a patent for a new virtual reality motion controller. It looks a lot like the Meta Quest controllers, with a ring design at its top rather than the flat face of the previous Valve Index motion controllers. Its inclusion could be a further suggestion that Valve's next headset will be standalone, without the need to be plugged into a PC.

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Colony sim RimWorld added ideologies in an expansion last year, prompting Nate to force drifters to knife-fight a unicorn (among other things). There have been other RimWorld expansions however, and while each has added a substantial new chunk of content, those systems have previously been unable to interact with each other.

That changed with RimWorld 1.4, which adds "cross-expansion integration", so now you can use the ideology system from the Ideology expansion to, for example, tell stories about people who have ideologies about the biotech from the biotech expansion.

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Crucial's MX500 is a classic SATA SSD, with TLC NAND and a DRAM-cache offering excellent sustained performance only supplanted by newfangled NVMe M.2 drives. Today the biggest size of the MX500, the 4TB model, is down to $269.90 in an early Black Friday sale at B&H Photo in the US - an $80 saving from the drive's usual price.

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Yesterday we covered a great deal on discounted Xbox Series Wireless Controllers at Currys, and today I'm back to share a similar deal that sees Sony's DualSense controller down to the lowest price we've ever seen. Right now you can pick up the PC-compatible controller in white for £40, a £20 reduction from its normal price of £60.

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Here’s an early Black Friday deal for anyone still prodding at a mushy membrane keyboard: in the UK, you can get the all-mechanical Cooler Master SK652 for just £45. If you go for the black model, that’s a £65 saving off the RRP, and it’s £95 off if you opt for the white version, which is £45 as well.

£45! And it's full-size to boot. There are always nice savings to be had among Black Friday’s gaming keyboard deals, but even then, the only way you’d normally see a mech board this cheap was if it was secondhand. And had keycaps missing. And was haunted, possibly by some kind of dismembered hand ghost.

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Lisa: The Painful is one of those games that’s like… if you know, you know. You know? Like, it’s ruthless, stomach-churning, and soul-destroying. I’m kinda joking but also not joking? I don’t know what it is about RPG maker games, but they just hit different.

Set in a post-apocalypse with no women, you play as Brad who one day finds an abandoned baby girl, names her Buddy, and raises her in secret. Years later, Buddy is kidnapped by a militia group and Brad sets off to rescue her. When you put it like that, the story is pretty basic, but it’s so much more than it seems. The absurdist comical world together with the awful decisions forced upon you make this a special kind of bleak RPG.

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When Nick Popovich was a kid, his parents ran the Sprague Road Tavern in North Royalton, Ohio. "Everything was a dive bar," Popovich, now co-founder and CEO of Monomi Park, says of the drinking scene in the Cleveland suburb. "It was all working-class, like dive-bar kinda thing. Which is basically what this place was." His mum and dad wanted to do up the joint, make it into something resembling what today would be called a sports bar. As part of this plan, Popovich's father added a game room to the building, filled with pool tables, shuffleboard ("As a result I'm hugely into shuffleboard", Popovich notes) and most importantly of all, a rotating stock of arcade machines.

Back in the day, explains Popovich, the cabinet was the expensive thing. So his dad would find a cheap cabinet, they'd put in a cheap second-hand board and monitor, and paint the outside to make it look like the official version of the game. To the regulars drinking and shooting pool, it didn't matter that the arcade cabinet looked like a bootleg – that Donkey Kong was just a picture of a monkey that Popovich Senior had stencilled onto the side of the cabinet. What mattered was that the cabinet did what it needed to do, and that the game inside was legit. This line of thinking, of making something only as good as it needs to be, was an essential component in the development of Slime Rancher, Monomi Park's massively successful sci-fi farming simulator. "The original Slime Rancher cheated. A very small group of people made it, and it looks like many more people than that made it," Popovich says.

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While XCOM is about as serious as I get with turn-based tactics, I have been curious to try more, so I decided to give Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector a go after seeing it's leaving Game Pass soon. Brothers, it's decent. Familiarity with the rock-paper-chainsword setup of Warhammer 40K arsenals is easing me into the unfamiliar world of retreating attacks and armour calculations. If you're in a similar position and also on Game Pass, maybe have a look before it leaves Microsoft's subscription service at the end of the month.

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I’m always looking for new games to play with my kids, and MegaWobble’s Lil Gator Game seems like just the right combination of harmless and wacky for us. Coming to Steam on December 14th, Lil Gator Game involves most of the core components of childhood, such as displays of reckless acrobatics, pretending sticks are swords, and making friends with every other random child you meet. You can see what I mean by watching the trailer below.

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One of my absolute favourite SSDs for gaming PCs is among the highlights of this year’s early Black Friday SSD deals. The WD Black SN850X is the overall second-fastest NVMe SSD in the RPS benchmark books – with the outright fastest write speeds – and its 1TB model has some sizeable savings going for it, across both the UK and US.

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I’ve been playing Pokémon Violet over the past few days, and fortunately I haven’t suffered many of the glaring tech issues that have gone viral since launch. There are fairly frequent frame drops and a few camera glitches, but nothing that’s ruined my experience just yet. What has caught my eye, though, is simply how small some of the Pokémon are in Paldea. They’re tiny little things, and the onslaught of oddly small critters reminds me that sometimes, size really does matter.

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Baba Is You dev Hempuli has taken that game’s puzzle transforming mechanics and translated them into a form of Solitaire. Dubbed Babataire EX – nice – the game bases its suits on four of the endearing little creatures from Baba Is You. There’s good ol’ Baba, of course, joined by Keke, Fofo and Jiji. Hempuli only seems to have begun the project earlier this month, but you can already have a go for free on itch.io. If you do, then I hope you have better luck than I did understanding what exactly is going on.

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Warzone 2 is many things: battle royale, free-to-play, chock-full of guns. One thing I hadn’t thought of it as, at least until now, was a dance simulator, but then I’ve never used Tiktok. A cunning Warzone 2 player has managed to convince the enemy team to abandon their hostilities and indulge in a spot of shuffling to DJ Casper’s classic turn of the millennium hit Cha Cha Slide. It’s an odd choice, particularly considering they’re jumping around in a cemetery, but each to their own.

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Viking survival em' up Valheim was arguably one of the biggest games of last year, with its Nordic purgatory providing the perfect lobby for hanging out with your pals. It's no secret that for a long while, my friends and I were smitten with its PS1-era graphics, snappy building, and heady mixture of relaxation and sense of dread. Our odyssey was one of carrots and boars, half-naked sails and bees.

So, count me excited when Liam and I had the chance to sample Valheim's next major update Mistlands, which brings with it a smoky new biome, magic, new building bits, and blimps that are actually giant ticks that soar in the sky and spit acidic warheads at you. It was great to be back.

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I didn't think it was possible for Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters' name to get any longer, but today Complex Games and Frontier Foundry have announced that their Bestest Best-rated turn-based tactics game is getting a paid expansion. It's called Duty Eternal, which I seriously considered trying to cram into the headline for a moment there, but swiftly realised I'd barely have room for anything else other than maybe an "is" and a "get" before we ran over three lines, so here we are. Launching on December 6th for £13 / $15, the Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters: Duty Eternal expansion (told you it was a big'un) will add the enormous Venerable Dreadnought combat mech to the game, as well as a new class, new missions and a bunch of other "substantial changes", according to the devs. Have a peek of the all-new reveal trailer (and that giant mech) below.

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