Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin is finally out. As Ed said in his review, it’s a game that begins as a “slow slog” but eventually transforms into a “satisfying number cruncher.” If you are considering a purchase, there’s one final step you can take before plonking down a big pile of monster cash: grab the free dmeo, which is now available alongside the main game. I hear there’s a lot to it, though it does have the dreaded Denuvo monstie hiding in its files.

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For decades now, developers have taken flack for either turning popular movies into subpar video games, or for trying to make their games more like what you see at the cinema. Two fair points.

But, if you're flinging muck at those in the interactive space, an equal amount should be reserved for the directors and screenwriters that have tried to turn video games into films.

With that in mind, let's now celebrate those video game movies in this week's Mystery Steam Reviews!

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Chicory: A Colorful Tale is probably one of my favourite games of the year so far. It's a gorgeous top-down adventure about a dog called Pizza (or whatever your favourite foodstuff is) who suddenly comes into possession of a magical paintbrush one day after the titular character and brush wielder Chicory gives it away. What follows is an affecting and humbling tale about the highs and lows of being artistic and creative, and it's all backed by some truly stunning music by Lena "Celeste" Raine. Indeed, away from the puzzles and its endearing story beats, it's Chicory's soundtrack that continues to make it such a speical game for me, so let me tell you about some of my favourite tracks.

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Let me be clear up front and say that I don't think Watch Dogs: Legion, Ubi's hacktion-adventure game set in near-future cyber-London, is not fun. After all, who wouldn't enjoy zooming around on a big construction drone and taking screenshots of the nice neon hologram art? However, its standalone Bloodline DLC that came out this week is arguably too much fun. It makes regular Legion look very dull by comparison. And the reason for this is pretty simple: Bloodline lets you play as actual characters again.

Even worse - or better, from my point of view - is that it has one of my favourite characters ever. Though the headline character returning here is Aiden, the protagonist of the original Watch Dogs game, we also get Wrench aka The Wrench aka Reggie aka the best boy supporting character from Watch Dogs 2 - and it is so refreshing after the main game's "play as anyone" shtick.

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Medical malpractice physics box Surgeon Simulator 2 is finally making its way to Steam. Having served its residency on the Epic Games Store, Surgeon Simulator 2 Access All Areas will be returning the series to Steam in September, with a story mode, four-player co-op and a lot more head bowling than the last game.

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Yesterday saw the release of Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness onto Netflix, a standalone four-part CGI animation based on Capcom's favourite survival-horror-action series of games. I binged it all in one sitting last night (it being collectively less than the length of the average Marvel film) and let me tell you: that was the best evening I have had in a while, and you should definitely watch it. It is simulataneously really well written and really badly written, and I'm still struggling to get my head around it.

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I've had my eye on the time-bending FPS Deathloop ever since it was first revealed, so I was very excited to see more of it at PlayStation's State Of Play last night. And how do I feel having now seen the latest nine minute gameplay trailer? I'd say mainly excited and a touch apprehensive. Now I better wipe this drool off my chin.

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I didn’t have the time to watch the two-hour larping session that they themed last night’s Baldur’s Gate 3 announcement around. Thankfully, developers Larian Studios have bundled the update’s changes into a mere 9-minute update video. July 13's update will let you influence skill checks and role-play just a little bit more.

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Sony showed off a new trailer for Death Stranding's recently announced Director's Cut last night, giving us a better idea of what to expect from the upcoming expanded version of Hideo Kojima's postal hiking sim. As well as new story missions, the Director's Cut will have enhanced melee and shooting combat, new cargo bots and machines for the BB Boys to play around with (including that rather impressive catapult in the header there), and (of all things) a racing mode. Because why the hell not?

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If you're after a soulslike with incredibly deep combat, then Nioh 2 is the one. Yes, it's brutally punishing and you need to be in a good mood to play it, but trust me, when you've found the weapon for you, it's a nice feeling alright.

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The Logitech G203 LightSync is a fantastic budget mouse at its normal price point of £35, offering a reliable optical sensor, a comfortable lightweight shape with six buttons and RGB lighting. Today Currys are offering the mouse for just £16.99 delivered when you use the code FNDDGAMING to knock £5 off the asking price.

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The Dell S2721DGFA is one of my favourite monitors, as it's right in that current 'sweet spot' of price versus performance. 27 inches, 1440p resolution, 165Hz refresh rate and a 'Fast IPS' panel that offers a blend of TN-like motion handling and IPS colours and viewing angles. Alongside LG monitors like the 27GN850, which use the same panel, it's one of the best monitors on the market right now - even though it hasn't been honoured with an RPS review! Today, both the Dell and the LG are discounted to £300 - a big reduction from their usual prices of £380 to £400.

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The games industry is a land where mad dreams thrive and die. Oftentimes, they thrive - and then they die. I've not yet met anyone whose job involves chronicling explosive fairy dust incidents at a Lisa Frank factory, but I can't imagine it'd be more wonderful and horrifying than writing about games. That's why it's so easy to appreciate Nihon Falcom. The long-lived studio are happy to stay in their corner and whittle new entries for their decades-old RPG franchises, while the chaos of the industry sloshes around them. Falcom is a purveyor of perfectly pleasant games — and yes, they deserve that bit of whimsical alliteration.

You generally know what you're getting into with a Falcom game (unless you're attempting to untangle the politics behind the Tales Of titles, in which case I'll send your next of kin a consolatory ham). If you pick up Ys IX: Monstrum Nox, for instance, you can expect to enjoy a rock-solid JRPG adventure game alongside the red-haired adventurer Adol Christin. In fact, if you're a fan of action RPGs, I'd say the Ys series is a must-play, and Ys IX is as good a place to start as any.

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If you took your driving test in Silent Hill, then Beware would be an accurate representation of how you failed. The sur-drive-al horror game is a three-point turn of dread. A lone driver drifts through a foggy night while cars and trucks try to force you off the road. It's been in development since 2014, but if you’re a one-man development team building a map that’s 144km², it’s going to be a long and lonely drive. Happily, there's now a new trailer for it, so let’s see how it’s coming along, shall we?

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I just didn't get on with Doom (2016), which surprised me. I'm all for FPS games that have you rocketing around arenas like a squash ball, but I hungered for more speed. Yes it was fast, but I never felt the need to reach for my bucket and hurl after each session.

Enter Boomerang X. It places a hand on your shoulder and a bucket by your feet. It says, "Go get 'em, tiger", then tosses you out of the window. But as you soar outwards, you curve back around and miraculously crash back into your room. "Cool, huh?", it says, looking down on your body sprawled on the floor, before you smile, then hurl.

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This week the Electronic Wireless Show podcast is looking at our favourite hub areas in games, which necessitates a brief discussion as Nate had entirely misunderstood what that meant. That doesn't matter, however, because we still manage to mention at least four video games, and tick off a few boxes on your EWS bingo card.

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The fifth Baldur’s Gate 3 patch is out there. Watching. Waiting. That’s as accurate as I can be right now, but there are more details coming later today in developer Larian Studio's latest livestream. At 7pm BST / 11am PT, Larian will be hosting “The Panel From Hell 3 - Twitch Plays: A Most Noble Sacrifice”. But it's no ordinary stream. They're hosting a "LarPG" in which seven actors will be guided through Gravensteen castle by the viewers. Better than a press release, eh?

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Valve’s plans to hold Dota 2’s 'The International' tournament in Stockholm were scuppered last month after the Swedish Sports Federation refused to classify e-sports competitors as ‘elite athletes’. The classification was required to get around the visa restrictions in place during the Covid-19 pandemic. Valve have now moved on and announced that the finals of their competition will now be held in Bucharest, Romania.

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Windows is full of phone-based surprises, lately. For example, Windows 11 natively supports Android apps. It also turns out both Windows 10 and Windows 11 can be installed on phones with ARM and Snapdragon chipsets. And we're not talking about the old Windows Phone OS, either. This is proper, desktop Windows. That’s a route that eventually leads down a certain path. A question asked of all PCs since the mid-2000s, and now one we must ask of modern phones: “But can it run Crysis?”

The answer the OnePlus 6T cockily spits back is, “A bit.”

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Deck-building game Roguebook is enjoyable enough that Nate stopped playing Hearthstone long enough to tell you so in his Roguebook review. The Slay The Spire-alike designed by Richard Garfield of Magic: The Gathering fame brings some swell extra twists to the roguedecklikebuilder genre. After launching last month, it's already teasing its first free game update coming soon with new battles, cards, and and more. You can spot the trailer for that, and its most recent patch notes, down here.

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Summer sure is going fast, as it's apparently Bungie Day already. For those of you looking forward to their next expansion for Destiny 2, perhaps it'll go even faster. Bungie have coyly set a date to talk about upcoming Destiny 2 plans in August. It's not completely clear from the teaser image up there, but folks seem plenty convinced that this is a reveal for The Witch Queen expansion coming in early 2022.

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Go on and write down Atari as the latest company with renewed interest in PC gaming. Atari have now outlined plans to shift focus away from free-to-play mobile games and put future development efforts into PC and console games. New games currently in development will have "an emphasis on revitalizing classic Atari intellectual property for the modern era," they've said. The first of those are planned to launch in their financial year 2021/2022.

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I was looking for cheap graphics card earlier today, and the best I found was this deal: an RTX 3060 and a 700W power supply for £550.

That's not super cheap - the RTX 3060 is meant to cost around £300 in a sane world! - but for a friend that wanted both a new power supply and a modern graphics card at a sane price, it does the job nicely. Here's why this Scan bundle is a good deal - and another option that brings the RTX 3060 down to just £440 when you buy it with a 2TB NVMe SSD.

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Humble's monthly bundle, now called Humble Choice, has arrived for July and it's a doozy. You can pick up one of our 2020 games of the year, Paradise Killer, plus 11 more games for £8.46 / $12. That's with Humble's current sign-up bonus, which gives you 40% off and three additional games this month.

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Summer is heating up in Appalachia, it sounds. There's the radiation, as usual, but today also brings Fallout 76's tense finale to the Brotherhood of Steel storyline that kicked off last year. The Steel Reign update brings new quests and locations to cap off the Brotherhood story, along with a new scoreboard season, legendary crafting, and legendary power armor. Here's what's new in Appalachia with today's update.

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Ever since I reminisced about Screamer, I've been on a car game kick. By this I mean that I gave WRC 9 a go, then swiftly rage quit as I realised I wasn't cut out for "Dark Souls on gravel". So ever since that fateful night, I've fled to YouTube, where I now watch people play rally games beautifully. And I can't seem to stop.

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Last year I experienced a moment of personal generational crisis when I witnessed Tyler "Ninja" Blevins streaming a game of Fortnite while wearing his own skin. Today I was struck much closer to home, as it was reported by Bloomberg, and then confirmed by Ubisoft, that the Assassin's Creed action-adventure-RPG series is going to become a kind of online service - an evolving platform codenamed Assassin's Creed Infinity. I understand this decision, but I don't like it. Because, in a similar way to Ninja's recursive blue hair, it has made me feel old.

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There's no shortage of unlawful mischief to commit in cowboys online, from hogtying strangers to unprompted shootouts, but Red Dead Online is adding Crimes with a capital "C" this month. A new type of mission will send you off to commit holdups, train robberies, kidnappings, and more. Better yet, you won't have to fork over premium currency to take part in these jobs, Rockstar Games have announced. Red Dead Online's Blood Money update arrives on July 13th for your life of crime to finally begin properly.

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My greatest achievement in life is knowing every single word that's spoken in Robocop. In the correct order, too. My mum doesn’t appreciate that talent, but then she also let me watch it when I was eight, so she has no-one to blame but herself. That means I’ve loved Robocop for 34 years. Any game announcement is going to grab me like Robo grabbed Clarence Boddiger at 1:07:04 in the director’s cut. And there was one last night during Nacon's Connect stream!

Robocop: Rogue City was announced by Nacon, from the developers of Terminator: Resistance, a game I did not enjoy.

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Having spent a sizable chunk of my life with turn-based RPG Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin, all that plays in my head when I think of it is an imaginary scene involving Len Goodman in Strictly Come Dancing. A Rathalos has just performed the rumba with its rider Anton Du Beke, and we await the judges' scores. There he is: Goodman. Forever the people's champion. We know what's coming and the crowd swells with anticipation. His paddle breaches the table; say that iconic phrase with him now!

"Seveaaunn!"

I know we don't give out numbered scores here at RPS, but Monster Hunter Stories 2 is aggressively seven-y. An above average game that grew on me the more time I spent with it, but couldn't quite nudge itself into "great" territory. Instead of the Bestest Bests stamp, I give it an imaginary stamp of Len Goodman's face.

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The next Assassin’s Creed game might be more like Fortnite and GTA Online than a traditional release. Currently codenamed Assassin’s Creed Infinity, this is a project within Ubisoft to turn their stabby franchise into a live service game, somehow crafting a connected game service from their time period and region specific game series.

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I cannot pull myself away. This paragraph started about 40 minutes ago, when I reopened Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic "to check something". I'll do this again several times. You probably know that this is a Soviet-themed city builder. You might know it's complex and big on how your cities are organised. If you've played it, you know that it's a hefty logistical sim (note: W&R includes options to dramatically dial down this side of things if that's your preference).

What you might not know is how brilliant it is when you reject building a large-scale industrial behemoth, and play it as a backwards rural village dependent entirely on horses.

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Watch Dogs: Legion - aka Watch Dogs: Lahndahn, you slaaaaags - and its near-future dystopian vision of our nation's capital grows closer to "Yikes, too soon!" territory every day, doesn't it? But yesterday saw the release of the Bloodline DLC, which brings original Watch Dogs protagonist Aiden Pearce and Watch Dogs 2 best boy Wrench to a standalone story DLC. It has also brought me an unexpected source of absolute joy, and that's ditching Aiden's boring cap and trench and dressing him up in Legion's myriad clothing lines.

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Though this short new look at The Lord of the Rings: Gollum shows more of the producer’s face than the game, there is some new stuff in there for you LOTR nerds. We get to see Mirkwood, which looks lovely. We get to see Gandalf. But, most impressively, we get to see the Mouth of Sauron, aka the Lieutenant of Barad-dûr, who is taking his collar game very seriously. That's very obviously him in the header image.

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Life, as Nacon calls it, is a new series of life sims themed around professions. It is not realistic in any way shape or form. The trailer’s narrator opens a restaurant. She plans out everything from the layout to the menu, and then plates the food for every order. One week later they’re fully booked up and everything is going great. Time to plan for a new career, apparently. “Tomorrow, I’m still deciding whether to become a surgeon or maybe an architect?” is a line directly lifted from the trailer.

Instead of a job simulator, it comes across as a self-actualisation exercise. I fully expected it to end on a record scratch and to find out that she's been sitting on the toilet eating cereal out of a cat litter bin. But no, reality never intruded on Life.

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Look, I know some of you like Aiden Pearce and the original Watch_Dogs. I've seen you on Twitter talking about how it was grittier than the games that followed. You thought Aiden was dark and haunted, like a Batman who fell down a well and landed in a cave filed with baseball caps.

I happen to think you're wrong, but I'm happy for you, really. The new Watch Dogs: Legion Bloodline DLC is out now, and it adds a bearded Capman to the most recent of Ubisoft's hackfests.

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We've seen a handful of videos of SteelRising already. The new game from middling RPG specialists Spiders is set during an alternate history 18th century Paris, one filled with robots. It's a setting that lets you write fun sentences, like explaining that you play as Aegis, the automaton bodyguard for Marie Antoinette.

Below is the first time we've seen the game's combat in action, though.

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The revival of the Test Drive Unlimited series was announced last year with footage of a developer talking and an unfinished 3D car model. Now we're one step closer to a game existing: there's a new CG trailer below, which reveals the game's setting is Hong Kong.

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Chilean developers ACE Team have made a great many lovely games, but their most visually striking remains first-person brawlers Zeno Clash and its sequel. The series has remained dormant since 2013 - until now. At tonight's Nacon Connect, they announced Clash: Artifacts Of Chaos, a new game set in Zeno Clash's world. There's a new trailer below.

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We've covered RTX 3070 gaming PCs before, but they've been unavailable for a good price for a few weeks. Thankfully AWD-IT has today restocked and discounted one such prebuilt gaming desktop, giving you the chance to pick up an RTX 3070 card and a fully assembled and warranty-backed computer for £1130, down from £1478. Whether you're planning to sell on the extra items or use them as the basis for a new gaming PC, going prebuilt makes a lot of sense.

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