Real-time tactics games have had a resurgence over the past five years, and that can be almost entirely credited to Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun. It's a gorgeous Commandos-style stealth-and-stab 'em up set during Edo period Japan. It's also currently free via the Epic Games Store.
Two Point Hospital allowed for modding via the Steam Workshop, but it only extended as far as being able to add wallpapers, rugs and a handful of other graphocs. Two Point Studios announced today that they have grander plans for their collegiate follow-up Two Point Campus. They're working on adding modding to the game, and it will include being able to add and amend in-game items.
Prison Architect continues to expand. Just a short while since the arrival of the undead comes the "Future Tech Pack". It adds a set of new technology with which to surveil and track your inmates, as well as robot dogs. You'll find a trailer below.
It's easy to place Dark Souls 2 in your crosshairs and take aim at its differences. Its map doesn't intertwine like Dark Souls 1 or 3. Lots of bosses do that thing where they summon in some mates and it's quite annoying. The atmosphere lacked that magic glaze. And yet, its quirks and frustrations make it one of my favourites.
I toyed around with this intro a lot, because I didn’t want to start with a super pessimistic bang. But, for lack of a nicer way to put it, I’ll simply say things are looking pretty scary out there, huh? Capitalism is failing, the economy is crumbling, and normal people have nothing left to give. It’s something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but I don’t really talk about it. I keep it all inside, like a microwave holding a ball of tin foil while it spins on full power.
At least, that was the case until I played Citizen Sleeper. It’s a rather simple RPG inspired by tabletop roleplaying games, giving you a limited number of action dice that you can spend each day to receive consequences. Mechanically, it doesn’t stretch much further than those actions and consequences, meaning I can instead focus on connecting with characters. In its simplicity, I found a cathartic way to process my thoughts on lots of scary stuff happening in our actual world. I also realised that Starfield, the big space game looming on the horizon which I was previously pretty excited about, just doesn’t seem appealing anymore.
Lunistice is a 3D platformer inspired by the PSX/Sega Saturn era, but its high-speed movement reminds me of Sonic’s 3D adventures, in a good way. Out today on PC and Switch, it was originally developed by solo dev A Grumpy Fox as a small 30-day project, but it quickly ballooned into something larger. It's now been over a year since A Grumpy Fox first started work on the game, but I think you can agree from the announcement trailer below, it's been time well spent.
You know who's cool? You, obviously, for listening to the Electronic Wireless Show podcast. This week we're talking about games that make us feel like proper cool people, just like you - who, I emphasise again, are a very cool person. Matthew is not cool enough to be here this week, but I am joined by Nate, who is the king of cool (and crabs).
There's a Cavern Of Lies to test Nate's coolness, and we check in with Henry "The Vit" Cavill, but first, of course, we must litigate the different kinds of cool we feel, what counts as cool, and which games make us feel the coolest.
Halo Infinite’s Forge mode has only been out for a day as part of the winter update, but fans have already created some seriously impressive stuff. Players have forged remakes of classic Halo maps and entirely new designs that give us a peek at what’s possible in the engine. If you’re unfamiliar, Forge is a long-time Halo feature that allows players to create and edit their own maps and modes, leading to some of the most fun experiences in the franchise. Let’s take a look at the community’s creativity.
RuneScape publisher Jagex have announced a three-game publishing deal with Snowcastle Games, the studio behind the 90s-inspired RPG Earthlock. All three games will take place in Earthlock’s fantasy universe, starting with Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure, a crafting spin-off that's currently in early access. Jagex will also support the existing Earthlock along with development of the previously announced sequel, Earthlock 2.
I’m of the strong and perhaps completely nonsensical opinion that any game is better when it’s set on an island. School me in the comments, please do, but I suspect that Escape Academy: Escape From Anti-Escape Island, new DLC launching for the puzzle game today, might lend my claim some extra weight. That could always be the baggage plummeting from the sky over Anti-Escape Island though, where a summer vacation for the students of Escape Academy has gone very, very wrong. Check out the trailer below.
Art posted to Civilization 6’s mobile site has revealed an as yet unannounced Leaders Pass DLC, which seems to include classic leaders from older games in the Civ series. Former US President Abraham Lincoln and Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II are clearly visible in the artwork. Alongside them are Ngola Nzinga of Ndongo, and someone wearing a ruff that I’m going to have to assume is either Queen Elizabeth I or Mary, Queen of Scots, because That Hair. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Last night’s Nintendo Indie showcase gave us fresh looks at many exciting indies. Chief among them was Storyteller, a narrative-puzzle game we first saw ten years ago, and has now confirmed a release date of March 23rd. The game’s comic-strip puzzles let you remix classic stories, like Dracula, using various props, verbs and nouns. A game for all the literary nerds out there.
It seems my working days must now begin and end with Disco Elysium, which feels quite Disco Elysium. In a statement to GamesIndustry.biz, ZA/UM - the studio that developed Disco Elysium - confirmed the reasons several employees were fired last year. These include "limited to no engagement in their responsibilities", "creating a toxic work environment", "verbal abuse and gender discrimination", and attempting to sell ZA/UM's IP to other companies.
Co-op vampire slay ‘em up Redfall might be opening itself up to an invasion of beta testers, if a Bethesda EULA dug up on Steam is anything to go by. Still, it’s one to take with a pinch of salt, which probably wards off the undead too. There’s been no word from devs Arkane on whether rumblings of a Redfall beta are legit yet, but The Game Awards are only a few weeks away so we might see something announced there.
Say what you will about Square Enix's ill-fated ventures into NFTs and mildly embarrassing follies with live service games recently. Their commitment to remaking, remastering and generally sprucing up their ageing back catalogue from decades past is an admirable one in my eyes, even if they are making you pay through the nose for them almost every single time. As we all know, though, some have made more successful transitions than others. The dream, of course, at least for me, is the Final Fantasy VII Remake approach for literally everything, no matter how unfeasible, impractical or physically impossible that would be for Squeenix's enormous game library. Alas, the reality is often a lot more modest. Best case scenario: you're a 90s SNES game getting a lovely HD-2D makeover like Live A Live. Next on the rung: some added 3D zhuzh a la Final Fantasy VIII Remastered (although even that was by no means perfect).
Activision have laid out their Season 1 roadmap for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 along with the upcoming Warzone 2.0, which launches on November 16th. As that’s less than a week away now, it’s a good job there’s loads of info about everything, from the game’s battle pass overhaul to the incoming story-based DMZ extraction mode. Have a read to get yourself ready to head to Al Mazrah next week.
It's been a good week for monitor deals, but a lot of what we've looked at has been fairly expensive, from a 42-inch LG OLED for £779 or a 34-inch QD-OLED ultrawide for £943. These are great monitors, don't get me wrong, but you could spend a fraction of the money and still get a brilliant monitor.
That brings us neatly to the subject of this deals post: the Dell S3422DWG, a 34-in ultrawide gaming monitor that sits at the comfortable crossroads of refresh rate and resolution: 3440x1440 and 144Hz. Rather than expensive OLED, this monitor comes with a curved VA panel, offering excellent contrast, great colours and good motion handling, while costing significantly less: just £351 when you use code GSGALLMON10 at the checkout, down from £390.
LG's C2 OLEDs are brilliant gaming displays at any size - and the 42-in and 48-in models are just small enough to fit onto an average to large-sized desk. That technically makes them "cool gaming monitors" and therefore well within my RPS deals duties. Both are now discounted from Crampton & Moore via Ebay, with a 25% off coupon ("FLASH25") that maxes out at a pretty sweet £150 discount.
That means you can pick up the 42-in for £779 and the 48-in model for £848, both of which are the best prices we've ever seen for these highly recommended TVs.
Composer Mick Gordon has published a rebuttal to an open letter by id Software executive producer Marty Stratton concerning Doom Eternal's soundtrack. Stratton's post was written all the way back in May 2020, and Gordon's response is a doozy. “Marty lied about the circumstances surrounding the DOOM Eternal Soundtrack and used disinformation and innuendo to blame me entirely for its failure,” Gordon said in the post on Medium. Gordon claims that Stratton later offered a six-figure amount if he never spoke about the matter, but Gordon insists he turned the money down.
Just over two weeks ago I predicted the ZA/uM situation would only get messier, so slap my face and call me Mystic Meg. Disco Elysium's game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov have, at least partially, offered up their side of the story on why they were fired from Disco dev studio ZA/UM in a Medium post titled 'TO FANS OF DISCO ELYSIUM, CONCERNING THE SITUATION AT ZA/UM'. Short answer is: they allege fraud.
Last time, you decided that RULES OF NATURE is better than feelies. Hey, we've gotta follow the laws of the wild. That's the nature of this entire endeavour. Out here, only the strong survive. This week, I ask you to pick between how you grow yourself and some giant growths. What's better: character creation building backstory, or giant fungus?
Boy, American McGee's Alice really sticks in the mind of a ten-year-old, doesn't it? It resides in the Goldilocks Zone of creepiness: just the right amount of creepy to be considered cool, and not quite creepy enough to cause nightmares. There were quite a few things I loved about the game, but none more than that deliciously haunting opening theme that played in the main menu.
More than 11,000 workers at Meta will lose their jobs, the technology company has announced, a figure that includes some staff working in its VR team Reality Labs. The Company Formerly Known As Facebook broke the bad news to employees via a message CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared earlier today. The job losses equate to 13% of Meta’s entire staff. Redundancies will affect staff across Meta’s global offices, including here in the UK.
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I love tidying up in games, and I’m not just talking about playing Unpacking and House Flipper, either. Any game I play with an inventory gets a regular, satisfying purge. I’m either marching to an in-game shopkeeper and holding my adventuring sack upside down, or just swiftly frisbeeing items straight into the bin. If it’s cluttering my screen, it’s cluttering my mind. Zero regrets. That’s the gamer dopamine hit I’m chasing.
So, as you might have guessed, I love the idea of A Little To The Left, a game that celebrates neatness and tidiness through a string of fun puzzles. If you love the satisfaction of arranging books on your shelf in order of height, or displaying your mugs in order of which can hold the most tea, then you’ll love this game too. Some simple tidying puzzles would have been enough for me, but A Little To The Left takes the idea in interesting directions through smart puzzle design.
What's the mark of a great boss? Cool moves, I suppose. Cool armour. A cool demeanour as you enter their arena. Having previewed both Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Wild Hearts, I've come to discover that the mark of a great boss is one of these things, none of the rest, and 500 pounds of ham. BIG PIGs are in, and they are here to do a high-pitched squeal and charge to the top of the "Trending Bosses" list.
Praise the Sun! FromSoftware have announced that Dark Souls Remastered’s long dormant PvP servers have been reactivated at last. The fantasy action RPG’s multiplayer was scuppered earlier this year when a security vulnerability that could harm anyone playing online was discovered all the way back in January. PC servers for Remastered were taken offline until a fix could be found, along with every other Dark Souls game.
Multiplayer sci-fi shooter sequel Halo Infinite’s big winter update has finally jumped out of its dropship, and developers 343 Industries are committing to shorter seasons for the game in 2023. They’re also touting more frequent updates to an FPS game that’s been relatively Spartan in terms of content, so far. Another game update is planned for later in 2022, which means Halo Infinite players can almost certainly expect something in December.
An impressive video showing Titanfall 2-esque movement and mechs inside Team Fortress 2 makes me mighty excited for the future of mods in Valve's multiplayer shooter. Valve are currently testing new expanded modding features in TF2, letting modders play with the VScript feature supported by games including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Left 4 Dead 2. While it's not yet clear what will happen, a proof-of-concept video mashing in wallrunning, swish grappling hooks, and pilotable mechs suggests great potential. Come watch!
Aloy might not be the only person battling giant robot dinosaurs for much longer if a report that a Horizon MMO is in development is on the nose. Korean site MTN claim Sony are teaming up with Guild Wars publishers NCsoft to create a massively multiplayer take on Guerilla Games’ sci-fi action RPG. This partnership to create new games isn’t just limited to Horizon either, MTN’s source alleges.
The EU’s business competition regulators are deepening their investigation into Microsoft’s planned $68.7 billion (£60 billion) deal to acquire Call Of Duty and Overwatch publisher Activision Blizzard. The intention to conduct an in-depth investigation was announced in a statement on the European Commission’s website, and will focus on how the deal will affect console and PC games, along with PC operating systems. This means that both the EU and UK are now holding further investigations into the potential buyout of Activision Blizzard due to concerns that Microsoft’s acquisition of the company could reduce competition within the games industry.
Ubisoft's Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time remake was supposed to launch in 2021, slipped into 2022, and most recently was delayed indefinitely. Now Ubisoft have created a dedicated FAQ page to answer the question they keep getting: no, they say, Sands Of Time isn't cancelled.
Football Manager 2023 is out now. Fully out, that is, after weeks of being available as an early access beta. This also means it's now available via PC Game Pass, for those who want to stick their hand into management experimentally like a virtual Paul Scholes.
The Project Cars games were gorgeous, detail-obsessed, and at first partly crowd-sourced. Then in 2019 Codemasters bought developers Slightly Mad Studios and in 2021 Electronic Arts bought Codemasters. Now EA have announced internally that they won't be making any more Project Cars games, and that they will move staff working on the series into "suitable" roles "wherever [they] can."
Cities: Skylines is getting two tranches of new content before the end of the year. "Tranche" is a fitting word, too, since the largest update of the bunch is a Financial Districts mini-expansion which will let you build a Stock Exchange and invest in markets.
Dell's Alienware AW3423DW is my favourite ultrawide monitor, thanks to its beautiful 34-inch QD-OLED screen that offers perfect blacks, near-instant pixel response times and gorgeous colours. With wide-screen 1440p (3440x1440) resolution and a 175Hz refresh rate, it's both detailed and responsive, and it looks the part too with a very cool space-y design.
I was lucky enough to review one for several months for Digital Foundry - I think Dell forgot about it for a while - so I consider it my duty to inform you that it is now on sale for the first time ever, dropping from £1099 to £943 - still a big chunk of change, but a fitting Black Friday price for one of the best monitors on the market of any description, hands down.
If your favourite PC games are competitive shooters, then a high refresh rate monitor is an essential upgrade in my eyes - the reduced input lag and improved visual clarity makes a huge difference in games like Counter-Strike, Valorant, Fortnite and Call of Duty. 144Hz and 165Hz monitors used to be the norm, but now even faster monitors are becoming quite affordable - including this 280Hz Acer monitor that's dropped to £180 at Laptops Direct, down from an original price of £275.
Rhythm games lose something when they don’t come bundled with a peripheral, I think. There’s something about a physical controller, custom built to emulate the action the game revolves around, that lends games a level of credibility you lose the second you try and play it with a regular pad. Playing Guitar Hero with an Xbox 360 controller feels like trying to paint a bedroom wall using a spoon. You’ll get there eventually, but if anyone spots you through a window they’ll rightly assume you’re some kind of deviant.
Speedrunning charity event Awesome Games Done Quick is returning in January, and there’s plenty of PC runs among its freshly announced preliminary schedule. Notable standouts this time around are PowerWash Simulator, which might well be my personal GOTY contender, and a bonus appearance from cutesy cyberpunk cat sim Stray. There’s also a Google Stadia run of nautical indie action-adventure Wavetale, just a week before the streaming platform closes for good.
The other week I played a short demo for the upcoming Resident Evil 4 remake. You’d think being lucky enough to actually play the damn thing would have numbed my hyper-fixation about it a touch, but, nope. I’m afraid not. It turns out the guy who owns eight physical copies (and four digital) of the original Resident Evil 4 is still pretty excited to play the remake. Who ever could have predicted this?
The day my preview went live, Capcom showed off a couple of additional bits as part of a hefty Resident Evil showcase. Alongside a fresh story trailer the company also discussed the various gubbins you’ll receive if you fork out for the game's special edition as well as a short gameplay demonstration. Surprising no one, I’ve watched these clips so many times I now have a load of thoughts that are not only completely useless but are taking up vital brain space I usually reserve for things like pin numbers and dates. If I don’t vent all of this garbage out of my skull there’s a chance I’ll forget my Mam’s birthday again, something that genuinely happened once when I was 17 and I haven’t stopped feeling guilty about it since. I bought her a plant from a Tesco Express three days later thinking that would help. It didn’t. This event haunts me more than any Resident Evil jumpscare ever could.
Blacktail is a complicated, first-person adventure when you play a lil witch. Well, a witch in training, sort of. A witcheen. Baba Yaga has been forced to live in the forest having been accused of witchcraft, so it seems like one of those self-fulfilling prophecy deals.
It's a very brightly coloured, fantastical world, this forest you live in, and you're dropped in media res. I thought that hands-on preview I got would be quite a casual gadabout talking to a cute dragon and what have you, but in fact it was difficult, and weird, and very opaque in the best way. The res in question included treasure chests with teeth and talking pine-cone spirits, and exploding fireflies. But you're an archer, too, and I really, really hate using arrows in first-person, and I don't think that will change.