Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It's been a long time since I've found an RTS that recaptures the many hours I spent playing Warcraft 2 growing up, but Diplomacy Is Not An Option gets pretty darn close. I've been playing the hybrid citybuilder/tower defence game's demo this week, and those long forgotten memories of building row upon row of archer towers to nuke incoming orcs, defending my town hall and sending my little workers out to fish, mine and chop wood all came flooding back. Only here, those enemy armies come in waves of increasing size. Fortunately, in addition to the standard sword and bow folk at your disposal, you've also got a bit of magic - including a big fat giant sky laser. Count me in.

Read more

Loads of us were called up by Master Chief to test out Halo Infinite and its Big Team Battle mode last weekend. Going in, I thought there would be no competition between its smaller 4 vs 4 Arena modes and this bombastic 12 vs 12 playground. Surely I'd prefer the latter. In my mind, this would be Halo at its messy best.

But no, I have proven myself wrong. In a strange turn of events, I've decided I actually much prefer Halo Infinite's smaller modes. And I think this comes down to laziness.

Read more

Isn't everything exhausting? Sorry, I didn't mean to tax you with having to think about an answer; I know you're exhausted too. And yet even I, a perpetually exhausted person, was glad to make the effort for the Exhausted Man demo in the Steam Next Fest. It is, like many modern comedy games, about completing tasks by controlling a weird figure with wonky physics—in this case, a man so tired he slithers along like a human slug. I smile every time this horrible slugman crawls up a wall.

Read more

People get well into Starship Troopers, don't they? Back in the before times when I was a teen, a friend of mine went to uni and formed a terrible metal band, and one of their songs was about Starship Troopers (I believe it included shouting "Roughnecks! Ho!" a lot). And don't get me wrong: the 90s action-schlock film adaptation is very good. Replaceable cannon-fodder marines pumping bullets into giant skittering aliens, bombastic Join The Army And Die!! propaganda - It's good stuff. And perfect grist for the RTS game mill! Hence you can play the demo for Starship Troopers - Terran Command right now, in the Steam Next Fest.

Read more

Update 4.35pm: Twitch have confirmed that a breach has taken place, more below.

Original story 1.20pm: Twitch has reportedly been attacked by an anonymous hacker who has allegedly leaked a large amount of data, from source code to streamer earnings. A 4chan user has posted a 128GB torrent supposedly containing the leaked info, and more could be leaked down the line. There's also a suggestion that user passwords might be compromised, so now is probably a good time to change yours.

Read more

Far Cry 6 is a vast first-person shooter that's been constructed from the same mould as its predecessors. You are to liberate a land and leave plentiful bullet casings in your wake, only this time it's the heart of the Caribbean that needs clearing, not the US or the Himalayas. Still, it remains undeniably fun running between map markers and earning rewards, if a bit one-note. A good time is guaranteed, but a memorable one? That depends on whether your brain shelve what feels like 2,000 hours of guerrilla warfare without it being reduced to paste.

Read more

A week after launch New World continues to see hundreds of thousands of players logging on to get a piece of that sweet new MMORPG action. Just this weekend, the game nearly hit a million concurrent players on Steam. But with that popularity has come long queues, and some players are going AFK once they get in so they don't lose their spots if they can't play immediately. It should be harder for them to hog server space now though, because Amazon Games released New Worlds' first post-launch patch last night, changing some AFK rules.

Read more

To celebrate the Ghost Recon games turning 20 years old next month, Ubisoft last night announced Ghost Recon frontline, a free-to-play battle royale shooter. But they haven't entirely forgotten the roots of the tactical shooter series, because they're giving the first game away free for keepsies right now. You've got a few days to grab 2001's Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and remember the good ol' days. Ubi are giving away some DLC for the latest games too.

Read more

How do you take part in New World Invasions? Invasions, also known as Corrupted Invasions, are PvE battles in New World primarily aimed at high-level players looking for late-game content. In this guide, we go through the requirements to take part in Invasions, as well as some tips on how to prevail in them.

Read more

I'm pleased to announce that Battlefield 2042 is indeed a Battlefield game. I went hands-on with the upcoming beta for a couple of hours earlier this week, and yes: there was a very big fight on a very big battlefield. At its core, Battlefield 2042 doesn't surprise at all. But on the surface it's a totally different story.

EA and Dice made a big deal of the game's weather and I was like, "Yeah, it rains all the time here too, heh", but you know what? The way these battlefields chop and change when storms roll in really do make a huge difference when you're there with your boots on the ground.

Read more

Everyone is aflutter from the Disney boy joining Smash Bros, but I've never played a Kingdom Hearts. I did, however, spend many hours as an early teen watching Hey Arnold! and CatDog. I am therefore more excited about today's release of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, a Smash-like platform brawler starring Nickelodeon characters including Spongebob and Invader Zim.

Read more

Wasteland 3's final DLC is out now. Cult Of The Holy Detonation features two mutant cults who worship a nuclear explosion in stasis, and as usual it's your job to chat with them and probably choose between them, in between turn-based battles. You can find the launch trailer below.

Read more

Back 4 Blood may be the successor to Left 4 Dead we've long waited for, and as a launch day arrival, logic dictates that I should be excited about its inclusion in Xbox Game Pass. But among October's haul of new additions, it's today's arrival of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator that interests me more.

Read more

Ubisoft have announced Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Frontline, a new free-to-play first-person shooter about 100 players dropping into an open world in teams of three. Yes, yes, Ubisoft are once again asking you to please give them a live service success. You can find the announcement trailer and details about its modes and first beta test below.

Read more

Two of Acer's best monitors are heavily discounted in the US today, courtesy of discounts at Amazon and Ebay. The Nitro XV272U hits the current price/performance sweetspot with a 1440p 144Hz spec and $248 price, thanks to a $52 discount at Amazon US. Meanwhile, you can pick up a manufacturer-refurbished Acer Predator XB273K for just $484, a great price for a 4K 144Hz monitor that originally retailed for over $1000.

Check out the links below to get the deals, or read on for our detailed explanation!

Read more

The Alienware AW2721D is part of a new breed of 27-in 1440p 240Hz gaming monitors, based around Fast IPS panels that provide great all-around performance. Normally it retails for £699, but today this G-Sync screen costs just £549 after a 21% price cut over at Amazon UK.

Read more

Storyteller has been in development for an age - over a decade, at the longest estimate. That's a very long time. That's about a third of my entire life. Invaders Must Die came out the same year developer Daniel Benmergui first started work on his fairytale puzzle game. To be fair, Invaders Must Die is a pretty bangin' album, so logic would therefore dictate that Storyteller is going to be a pretty bangin' game, too. Alice0 is certainly enamoured with the current demo you can play as part of the Steam Next Fest this week, and I'd strongly recommend you give it a go as well while you can.

Read more

After countless Xbox Game Pass plugs, a lot of Dooming, and the arrival and subsequent disappearance of Greta Surname, The PC Gaming Weekspot is coming to an end. But, before we go, there's time to highlight some of our favourite games of 2021.

Read more

Now that the Steam Deck has gained Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) and BattlEye compatibility, the way is clear for more of Steam’s most-played multiplayer games to achieve full it-just-works-ability with Valve’s handheld. In theory, anyway. Developers still need to enable their respective anti-cheat tech to work with Proton, the compatibility layer that permits Windows games to run on SteamOS. That raises the question: who will?

Read more

With Far Cry 6 launching later this week, what a great time to dredge up old arguments and declare once more that Far Cry 2 was the best one. Also dredging up old thoughts, Far Cry 2 creative director Clint Hocking has confirmed an old fan theory: the man we hunt in FC2, the Jackal, is indeed meant to be the fella we played in the first Far Cry. So despite the wildly different tone and seemingly unconnected plot, it really was a sequel after all.

Read more

Oxenfree II: Oxen Free Or Die Hard (known to squares as Oxenfree II: Lost Signals) was announced earlier this year, a sequel to the much-loved spooky coming-of-age adventure Oxenfree. Did you like the naturalistic conversations and dialogue options you got in the first game? The story of self discovery? The spine-tingling creepiness that is inherent to half-tuned radios? Then I have some good news for you about Oxenfree II.

Read more

We still don't know when Hollow Knight's long-awaited sequel Silksong is coming out, but the demo for upcoming Metroid-like Haiku The Robot has been scratching that Hollow Knight itch for me like nobody's business this week. Available now as part of the Steam Next Fest, this challenging, side-scrolling action-adventure game sees your little bot pal Haiku explore a vast, apocalyptic scrap heap that's been corrupted by possessed machinery and other nasty robots - all without a single squishy bug in sight. Lovely stuff.

Read more

I thought Storyteller seemed promising when I first heard about the puzzle game way back in 2012, after it won the Nuovo award at the IGFs. Now that it's finally almost finished, I am delighted to play a demo in the Steam Next Fest and report back that yes, it's clever and quite delightful. Each puzzle presents you with a cast of characters, a few verbs and nouns, and an outcome which you must achieve by arranging everything in comic strip panels. Simple, clever, satisfying, and surprisingly funny.

Read more

Windows 11 is now out and about, gradually making its way to Windows 10 users as an optional free update. Sadly, Microsoft’s latest operating system isn’t have the most auspicious of starts: besides headline gaming features like DirectStorage not technically being usable yet, cloud gaming platform Shadow is actively discouraging users from updating their systems.

Read more

Which is the best starting zone to get in New World? Unfortunately, at the time of writing, you can't choose or change your New World starting zone. Once you've joined a server and created your character you play through a brief prologue, and then the game randomly spawns you into one of its four starting locations.

Read more

Ahead of the multiplayer open beta test starting this week, you can now preload the Battlefield 2042 client to be ready as soon as war breaks out. The BF2042 open beta starts Friday, though pre-orderers and EA Play members will get early access from Wednesday. It's been three years since Battlefield was last in the near-future, so how do you fancy its return?

Read more

The rumours were true: Asus and cooling specialists Noctua have co-created a new GeForce RTX 3070 design. The underlying GPU already makes for one of the best graphics cards, and Noctua claims their gargantuan custom radiator design and dual 120mm fans make the Asus GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua Edition - to use its full name - “the quietest air-cooled graphics card in its class”.

Read more

EGX 2021 kicks off this Thursday at London's ExCel, and RPS will be there doing what we do best: interviewing developers and uncovering lots of brand-new indie games for you to enjoy. In particular, we're going to be talking to the creators of Sable about the game's art and inspirations, as well as Inkle's narrative director Jon Ingold about the making of their nautical murder mystery game, Overboard. It's going to be a fun time, so if you're making the trip down, be sure to stop by the EGX Theatre stage while you're there. Read on for the full rundown of all things RPS at EGX.

Read more

As it goes with Elden Ring, information is sparse between infoblasts by FromSoftware. We're at an in-between phase right now as that January 2022 launch date is still a few months away yet. In the meantime, one of Elden Ring's producers Yasuhiro Kitao did a quick interview during the Tokyo Games Show over the weekend to reiterate that yes, the game is difficult and also that it's nearly finished. You'd imagine so, at three months out. Kitao also talks just a bit about Elden Ring's map, too, and how the game doesn't use quests to drag you around its open world.

Read more

Accessibility options for games, big and small, have become a more frequent topic of conversation in the last few years. Even just recently, Destiny 2 is adding a full-auto mode while EA are sharing their accesibility feature patents. Depending on what features you need access to though, it can still be a chore to find out exactly what options a game will support. The recently launched Accessible Games Database aims to help catalog games by a list of different accessibility features. It's launched with over 140 games logged so far, and the creators say they're planning to add more every day.

Read more

It's rare to see big discounts on high capacity SSDs, especially when the SSDs in question are also super-fast PCIe 4.0 models - but that's exactly what's happening for today only over at Amazon. PNY's XLR CS3040, a model compatible with both PC and PS5, has been discounted $230 for a massive 4TB size. That cuts the price of the drive down from a whopping $750 to a still significant (but much more reasonable) $520, a 31% discount.

Read more

The Crucial P5 Plus is one of the fastest SSDs on the planet with a peak read speed of 6600MB/s, thanks to its combination of a PCIe 4.0 interface, 1TB of TLC NAND flash and Crucial owner Micron's advanced controller. Today, the P5 Plus is also the cheapest second-gen PCIe 4.0 SSD in the UK, as the drive has been marked down from £157 to £126 on Amazon. That's an incredible price for an SSD that works equally well in a PC or a PS5.

Read more

If you think you're tired of game showcases, this one might just resurrect your enthusiasm from its post-E3 grave. We're being tricked and treated to another "EEK3" showcase of indie horror games hosted by Haunted PS1. Last year's showcase dug up a whole bunch of trailers for new and upcoming spooky games with a lo-fi or retro flair. This year is sure to unearth more of the same when it premieres this Friday.

Read more

As MMOs often do at launch, New World had busy servers and long queues to get in game last week. That's certainly not stopping folks from attempting to play though, as New World hit another concurrent player record for itself. It was already the most popular game on Steam last week with over 700,000 concurrent players. As of yesterday, New World's peak player count was nearly a million players. We don't know how many of those folks are hanging around in those server queues, of course, but they're all at least trying to play.

Read more

Epic Games are still in the process of getting their store and launcher hooked up with features you're used to from that other big digital games store. Next week they're adding one you might have been waiting for. Naw, it isn't the shopping cart. Not quite yet, anyway. In the nearest term, it's their achievements system that's getting its initial launch. As of next week, Epic will be rolling out Epic Achievements and XP for a handful of games including Hades, Rocket League, and Kena: Bridge Of Spirits.

Read more

Where can you find Saltpeter in New World? In New World, Saltpeter is used to craft gunpowder, which in turn is a key component in crafting musket cartridges. Depending on your chosen character build and the weapons you favour, this could be an absolutely essential resource for you. But exploring Aeternum in search of a specific resource can be an intimidating prospect due to the sheer size of the island, so we've put together this guide to help you find the best Saltpeter spawn locations.

Fortunately, it's easy to predict where Saltpeter is going to spawn in New World. Unlike some other resources, Saltpeter isn't native to any particular region of the map. Instead, Saltpeter Ore nodes spawn in caves across Aeternum. Caves in New World tend to cluster around the coast, as you might expect, but you can find them inland as well, particularly at higher elevations.

The only real drawback to finding Saltpeter once you're inside the caves is that it looks quite a bit like any other rock. Saltpeter Ore is often slightly darker in color than its surroundings, and protrudes from the floor a bit more, but it's not hugely obvious. However, the good news is that within the confines of a cave, you should see the interaction text identifying Saltpeter appear on-screen if there's any nearby.

Read more

If you keep even half an eye on delightful construction game Planet Zoo, you’ll know that developers Frontier tend to release a DLC pack for it every quarter, bringing a bunch of fresh animals into the game from a particular region of the globe. Whenever that happens, I tend to make what could charitably be called a concept zoo, in order to show off the new arrivals in the best possible light.

Since this week’s DLC introduces an octet of animals from North America, there was only one conceivable way to exhibit them: an awkward combination of zoo, performance art and poundshop Westworld, displaying the majesty of nature alongside recreations of sets from the legendary TV show Deadwood. Let’s have a little walk around town, shall we?

Read more

Would you pay an extra 14-ish quid for a purely visual touch-up on a game you can already buy with ease? That’s, as Katharine found in her Alan Wake Remastered review, the biggest problem facing Remedy and D3T’s restoration project. It makes a lot of sense for current-gen consoles, which for various reasons might not have always had access to the torch-and-shoot original, but of course us PC lot could well have been playing it yesterday.

Read more

Upcoming open-world RPG Dread Delusion is, if nothing else, a hell of a mood. Soon after starting the demo that's now available in the Steam Next Fest, I found myself just chilling with the soundtrack and watching the hot pink sun crawl across the sky, fed by tendrils swirling into it and briefly occluded by blood-red clouds. A great vibe. Like a small Morrowind, but in the sort of Hellsville where the local tavern is adorned with the giant skull of a slain god who collapsed upon it.

Read more

Where can you find Petalcaps in New World? Petalcaps are a useful resource in New World, since they're a key component to crafting many of the game's potions. It can be overwhelming looking for resources on Aeternum, simply because there's just so much flora and fauna knocking about (and so many other players looking for the same things). Read on for everything you need to know about where Fronded Petalcaps spawn so that you can narrow your search.

Fronded Petalcaps have a few things going for them in the noticeability department. They are quite large, are a more luminous shade of green than most of the other plants around them, and overall look quite pleasingly like giant artichokes.

The Petalcap is native to the Windsward region of Aeternum, which is a conveniently central location from the very early stages of the game, since it's right in the middle of all four starting zones. Within Windsward, Fronded Petalcaps are fairly common, sprouting up in any area that could be described as remotely verdant, whether it's an open field or a more enclosed forested area. Basically, unless you're in a dry or coastal part of the region, there's likely to be some Fronded Petalcaps relatively close by.

Read more