Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Splendid spaceship-dismantling sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker is winding up to leave early access this spring, with the developers saying the next major update will see the game blast off to a full launch. After entering early access in June 2020, they're getting ready to wrap up the story campaign with its final act. Who knows, maybe we'll actually make enough money from salvaging spaceships to escape our crippling debt?

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It's probably more trouble than it's worth to sidestep around comparisons to Mount & Blade with Sands Of Salzaar. It's mostly the structure. Sands Of Salzaar drops you into a world of dynamically warring factions. You can join or compete with them by founding your own, or ignore them to beat up roving bandits, clear out combined dungeon/random encounter sites, and do odd jobs for named NPCs. Some of those figures are powerful, unkillable, and recruitable, although you may have to win them over with favours or gifts. You'll likely do a bit of everything, but mostly you'll be smashing armies into each other in 2D skirmishes.

It's no clone, though. While its component parts are familiar, Salzaar does enough of its own thing to win my affection, and its odd but sincere personality shines despite some muddy edges.

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The studio co-founded by former Valve writer Chet Faliszek and former Riot designer Kimberly Voll have released The Anacrusis into early access today, a Left 4 Dead-like set in 70s space. Much like its undead predecessor, this is a game where four players team up and pew pew through waves of alien nasties. But it’s not as despairing as its zombified brethren. This is upbeat and colourful and at times, really quite silly.

Yes, it's still pretty similar to Left 4 Dead, but is home to a few things that help separate it from its zombified brethren. To test this stuff out, we had a full team of four in our hands-on preview session at the very end of last year – myself, Imogen (RPS in peace), Katharine, and Chet himself, who steered us through encounters with supreme patience. All in all, we sampled a ‘full run’, so a total of four levels, each with lots of, “Oh god, oh no,” moments. And it’s safe to say we had a lot of fun with it.

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Nine months after its debut on Nintendo Switch, Monster Hunter Rise today launched on PC. Capcom's latest lizard-skinning simulator is a good'un, and what we played of it pre-release seemed like a solid PC port. However, now the game is out in the world, some would-be players are being blocked out by a bug which doesn't let them even start a new save. Still, the majority of folks seem to be quite happily hollowing out dogs to make slippers.

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Watching the trailer for upcoming craft-o-survival game Forever Skies, I now understand how people who fear the ocean must feel about Subnautica. While I'm at my happiest in water, I know depths and strange sealife give many others the heebie-jeebies. However, heights make me pray for death. So a game about exploring the skies and skyscrapers above the ruins of human civilisation in a customisable airship, ah yes, I would like to die now, thank you very much.

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Watching the trailer for upcoming craft-o-survival game Forever Skies, I now understand how people who fear the ocean must feel about Subnautica. While I'm at my happiest in water, I know depths and strange sealife give many others the heebie-jeebies. However, heights make me pray for death. So a game about exploring the skies and skyscrapers above the ruins of human civilisation in a customisable airship, ah yes, I would like to die now, thank you very much.

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Valorant Episode 4 has kicked off, bringing with it new agent Neon who - like that famous blue hedgehog - goes fast. They're able to sprint and slide around maps at blistering speeds, which might seem at odds with the game's tactical pace, but they fit into the roster nicely. Thing is, you've got to be brave enough to get the most out of their move set, which rewards ballsy plays over careful corner turns. It's safe to say I struggled to break out of my tentative shell, but when I did? Hoo boy, what a thrill.

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Given that we've still only seen scraps of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 after years of development and with launch supposedly mere months away, I suppose it's not a surprise to hear the game is delayed. The developers, GSC Game World today announced that they've pushed the launch back by seven months, giving the first-person explore-o-shooter a new release date of the 8th of December. It's the usual perfectly sensible reason: they want it to be good, and they think it needs more time to be good.

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Fatherly axe-‘em-up God of War is out on PC this week, and I’ve been dragging my disappointing son around the Nine Realms to see how it copes with the jump from PlayStation to Windows. The answer: pretty well! Like previous marquee Sony port Horizon Zero Dawn, this is a game that already looked lovely on console, and the extra muscle of even a modest PC rig can deliver sizeable boosts to both visual quality and frames-per-second.

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In the eight year gap between 2010's more conventional sexy gore fest God Of War 3 and this new and improved action-dadventure God Of War, the angry Ancient Greek warboy Kratos handed in his god-killing badge and gun to live in Norse mythology's woods with his wife Faye and their son Atreus. When Faye dies, Kratos & Son go on a journey to scatter her ashes from the top of a mountain. This becomes a micro rumination on familial relationships, a macro world-saving epic of legendary proportions, and a hack and slash fest that'll have you grinning from ear to ear. On balance, then, I am Team Fridge Faye.

I played this God Of War on its previously exclusive release on PlayStation in 2018, and it lived in my memory as a 70 hour poetic battle between gods and monsters. Revisiting it again on PC, it turns out that it's actually only about 20 hours long, but it looms so large as an experience that turning it off at the end feels like stumbling into daylight, having spent many weeks in a firelit, sweaty hunting lodge in a Norwegian pine forest, slamming mead and singing songs about warriors tearing goats in two. There are a lot of big warriors in God Of War. There are a lot of very big things in it in general: statues, dragons, big angry rocks. And a big man, because the titular Kratos, as a yardstick to measure size, is already incongruously big, just so many sacks of salted beef held together by leather armour.

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Much has been made of how long games take to complete this week. After Dying Light 2 developers Techland boasted that it would take 500 hours to fully complete the game over the weekend, the internet's collective groan over the revelation was reportedly heard from the far reaches of space. Personally, I think it's a preposterous figure for a single-player game, but as someone who also maintains an active spreadsheet of all my various playtime stats (yes, really), it also got me thinking. Is 500 hours really so nonsensical in the grand scheme of things? I asked the team what their most played game on Steam is to find out.

And as it turns out, Dying Light 2's 500 hour completion time ain't got nothing on some of our favourite time hogs...

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Seminal battle royale shooter Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is now free-to-play, inviting all stag and hen parties to parachute into holiday resorts for paintballing which accidentally uses real guns. Folks who previously paid for PUBG: Battlegrounds (the new-ish official name replacing Plunkbat) have been grandfathered into the new Battlegrounds Plus account tier and receive receive some edgy virtual clothes too. Everyone else, hey, in you come.

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To celebrate anime series Attack On Titan and its impending final series and Call Of Duty's next big update, they both decided that a totally normal crossover was in order. Soon, Call Of Duty: Vanguard and Warzone will play host to a cursed set of Attack On Titan cosmetics, including gun bits and an Operator skin. They are frightening and confusing. Please avert your eyes.

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Wordle has engrossed me for a couple of weeks, along with much of the rest of the internet. It's also a free, simple word game, meaning it's relatively easy to recreate. Naturally, other developers are building their own twists on its core.

Among them, Absurdle is my favourite, an "adversarial version" of the game where the winning word changes as you guess. I'm also fond of Sweardle, however, a version designed for four-letter words.

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Microsoft don't intend to do away with selling individual games anytime soon. That's the takeaway from Xbox head Phil Spencer's recent interview with the New York Times. "The retail market continues to be very strong and grow. So let’s make sure we offer our customers choice between subscriptions and transactions," says Spencer.

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We know a little of what season two of Hitman 3 will contain, including the PC debut of VR, something called Elusive Target Arcade, and the arrival of one Mr. Ray Tracing. All of this will be revealed in earnest in just two days time though, with a "reveal stream" on January 13th.

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Halo Infinite's Big Team Battle mode has been unplayable for many almost since the shooter's release. 343 Industries tried to address the issue last month without success, and then holidays hit and delayed things further. In an update posted yesterday, 343 say they now have a fix in testing and hope to release it as soon as they can.

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After trundling across the desert with a wee sandskiff in the delightful Far: Lone Sails, developers Okomotive will soon invite us to sail above and below a strange ocean in the sequel. They announced today that Far: Changing Tides will launch on the 1st of March and oh goodness me, it's another anticipated indie that will be available through Game Pass from the start. (Anticipated by us, anyway—it's one of our most anticipated games of 2022.)

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Ever since Alice Bee first played Strange Horticulture, she's raved about the mysteries and merchandising of running a weird plant shop. Lots of studying and cataloguing plants, serving customers, and feeling proud of your wee business. Plus solving mysteries in ways only an occult plant shop owner can. Not long to wait now, as the makers announced today that the game will launch on the 21st of January.

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Over the weekend, Dying Light 2 developers Techland boasted that it would take "500 hours to complete the game". This turned out not to be the exciting selling point they expected for the open-world zombie-mashing parkour-o-shooter. Many found this claim exhausting because oh my god 500 hours is over 20 days, what do you think we do with our lives, and how much of that is busywork? After initially backtracking to clarify that 500 hours is how long it'd take to do absolutely everything, Techland have now explained that you can finish the game's main story in 20 hours, or 80 if you hit every side quest too.

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The director of Moon and Warcraft is still dreaming of making a movie version of Full Throttle, the classic LucasArts adventure game about rough 'n' tough bikers and lovers. A year ago Duncan Jones released a tentative script he banged out in a fit of procrastination, and in 2022 he's still thinking of the smell of asphalt. In a cheeky wee tweet over the weekend, he asked fans to bug LucasOwners Disney to let him do it.

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These days, you can't shake a stick without bouncing brown beams around the room. Raytracing has been a hot high-end graphics trend for a few years, with new games boasting support for the complex lighting simulators and old games being retrofitted with shine. This year, a new Half-Life mod will add raytracing support to Valve's seminal shooter, and even as someone usually perfectly happy with old games looking old, I think it doesn't look half-bad. See for yourself in the new video, below.

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The RPS team is expanding! With Imogen's departure at the end of last year, RPS is now looking for a new News Reporter to join us - and you can apply right here.

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The first-paced first-person face-shooting of Serious Sam 4 will soon spread to Siberia in a standalone expansion, publishers Devolver Digital announced today. Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem will launch on the 25th of January, boasting newness including new missions, new monsters, new weapons, new vehicles, and more. See some of the violence in the announcement trailer, below.

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As we’ve already seen from the demo, the PC version of Monster Hunter Rise spruces itself up considerably from the Nintendo Switch original. It’s not a match for Monster Hunter World on overall visual fidelity and detail, but the upside is that it’s easy to go a-huntin’ at high frame rates even if you’re on low end hardware. To whit, Monster Hunter Rise’s PC requirements go even lower than World’s, only asking for a GT 1030 or Radeon RX 550 at minimum.

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After the roaring success of Monster Hunter: World back in 2018, the idea that the next big PC entry in Capcom's dino pants craft 'em up is a game that originally started life on the Nintendo Switch is bound to ruffle a few feathers. But far from being a step down from World, Monster Hunter Rise is every bit its equal - and Capcom's stellar work with this PC port has given it a much-needed buff and polish to really make it shine. Not only does Rise offer the same seamless and expansive environments as World, but it also adds a few new twists to make tracking down its titular titans even more enjoyable.

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Zynga, the company whose games made being Facebook friends with your family even more annoying, are selling to Take-Two. The owners of Rockstar and 2K plan to buy up Zynga shares in a deal that'll value the company at $12.7 billion (£9.4b). Take-Two hope to use Zynga's social and mobile expertise to make more games based on their games. Sure sure, #business and all, but I'd rather spend that much money on 9.8 billion Greggs sausage rolls instead of Grand Theft Autoville or something.

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One of the presents I got for Christmas this year was a copy of PS5 exclusive Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had about a week where I was completely by myself this year, and I spent it being Spidey and self-yeeting around New York. It's a great game on many levels, and I especially liked that one of the outfits you can unlock through story missions is a scarf and ear warmers. Mostly though, it's just made me think that web-swinging is the most fun way to get around in games, and more games should do it. By "more games", I mean "every game".

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I briefly posted before the new year about WorldBox - God Simulator, and Graham wrote about it over the weekend, too. It is a world simulation game that has no resource costs or goals, just simulated events. You make a world, plop some animals and fantasy races into it (and if you want, a bunch of dragons and wizards) and see what happens. I cannot stop playing it. And I wanted to give some more detailed examples of how the simulation works, especially if you just leave it running with little intervention.

I am a WorldBox scientist, you see (though merely a BSc at the moment), and my first experiments suggest that every civilisation, along a long enough time scale, is basically doomed. Big 2022 energy. In the case of WorldBox, this may be because at some stage the scientist running the experiment will get bored and drop in e.g. a tornado. That's okay, because there are almost infinite experiments to run. I hope that isn't how the simulation I am living in is being run. Oh no. Don't think about it.

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Techland have achieved something incredible. With a single Dying Light 2 marketing Tweet, they caused the greatest mass exhalation seen, perhaps, ever. Thousands of adults were informed that to "fully complete Dying 2: Stay Human, you'll need at least 500 hours" and collectively sighed at their desks, heads in hands. Even some hurried backtracking from Techland's marketing team couldn't save us from exhaustion.

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Sundays are for emerging from isolation, bleary-eyed and excited to breathe fresh air. Before stretch those legs, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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You know what's good? TFI Friday, RPS's regular roundup of indie games by Alice B. It's where I learned about another good thing: WorldBox, a god sim that entertained me (and my son) over the Christmas holidays.

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To me, Mass Effect ends about six hours into Mass Effect 1, when I get bored and wander off to play something else. I've had ears and eyes long enough to know that people were upset about the ending of Mass Effect 3 however, even after BioWare tweaked it. The original Mass Effect 3 had various "Happy Ending Mods" to change the close of Commander Shepard's story, and now Mass Effect Legendary Edition does, too.

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Time moves so fast now that I remain convinced Games Done Quick happens once a fortnight. True or not, it's definitely happening this week, beginning tomorrow, Sunday January 9th, and running through until Sunday January 16th. This time, the charity speedrunning marathon features several recent games including Deathloop and Death's Door, among many others.

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Developers have good taste in games. That's the take away from each year's Independent Games Festival Awards, which consistently selects shortlists of excellent games. The nominations for 2022 are up, and the contenders for this year's Seumas McNally Grand Prize includes Unpacking, Inscryption, Loop Hero, Cruelty Squad, The Eternal Cylinder and Unsighted. Sounds about right.

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Snow is falling across parts of the UK, and I consider myself blessed to live close enough to snowlands to go play in it, yet not so close that I have to live with it. I look forward to swimming in sight of some snowy hills today then hiking through some snowy hills tomorrow, then returning to my cosy flat. But what are you playing this weekend?

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Video game marketers are eternally trying to one up each other with stupid terms. From the industry which bought you "levelution", the "drivatar", and "gameplay trailers" which aren't gameplay comes a new one: "gameplay lore trailer". The year has barely begun but Ubisoft are gunning it out the gate with the new Rainbow Six Siege trailer. This new gameplay lore trailer—yeesh!—explains why a game set within Tom Clancy's serious world of paranoid jingoistic masturbation is overrun with a weird parasite mutating people into monsters.

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The person who edited Austin Powers into Mass Effect, to the delightful and horror of all, has now spliced up another storm. Their latest video melds Mr Bean clips with scenes from Cyberpunk 2077 and goodness me, he seems thrilled to enter a dystopian megacity. You might fear Night City will eat the rubber-faced fool alive, but maybe he's the only one of us who could survive it. Come watch!

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2021 was the year of the time loop wasn't it? Deathloop topped a lot of charts and made an appearance in our game of the year list. Twelve Minutes: a timeloop thriller. Lemnis Gate: a tactical FPS where you out time loop one another. The Forgotten City, the Outer Wilds DLC, watching a man throw a “traditional shaped returning” boomerang on YouTube. All of them, time loops.

I’m absolutely sick of them. So here’s me hoping that 2022 is the year of the "time skip", instead. Or at least, one of these coming years an excessive number of games built around skipping time. Yes, they aren't without their flaws, but I'd argue they're less repetitive and capable of greater surprise. Alright, at least hear me out.

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CES is a gloriously mad hodgepodge of different tech fields; the kind where smartphone chip makers share floor space with car manufacturers and sex toys. It’s also one of the biggest showcases of PC gaming hardware in the calendar, and CES 2022 has been no exception, with major component reveals from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia along with loads of gaming laptop, peripheral, and monitor announcements.

This year’s show is technically still going for another day, but like a Foo Fighters album, CES tends to front-load the good stuff. As such, it’s basically safe to start rounding up any PC gaming kit highlights. Some of these have been a long time coming – like the GeForce RTX 3050, Nvidia’s first XX50 desktop GPU with full ray tracing and DLSS support – while others might be pleasant surprises or eye-catching, if likely to be witheringly expensive, new concepts.

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