Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ahoy maties! King Of Seas, the action RPG set in a procedurally generated pirate world, is out now. Hoist your anchor and pour your grog, as you traverse rock-infested waters en route to legendary pirate status. Think a bit Sea Of Thieves-y, but top down. After playing the free 60-minute demo, I thought that King Of Seas provides a colourful world, but the fundamentals of its sea battles are tedious.

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There's less than 24 hours to go before Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Storm Ground hits Steam, but you can now watch about 16 mins worth of new footage from the game thanks to a new, last-minute developer video. The turn-based strategy game set in the rather maligned Sigmar setting looks kind of neat. The strategy isn’t grand at all. It’s full of tight, hex-based battles in deadly dioramas, and even has a touch of Into the Breach about it.

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Overwatch 2 might be the more exciting name in recent headlines, but it seems Blizzard still have at least one big plan for their original hero shooter. Earlier this week, Overwatch developers answered questions about the series during a Q&A on Reddit. While there were plenty of lore queries I could go on about for hours, some more interesting titbits came out too. Game director Aaron Keller said a "large feature" for the first Overwatch would be announced "somewhere in the timeframe between soon and really soon".

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Like a giant Katamari made of scabs and jump scares, Dead By Daylight has collected another classic horror fiend to stalk its servers. The upcoming Resident Evil chapter will, unsurprisingly, bring the Umbrella Corp's Nemesis to the multiplayer horror game. The new beast won’t be turning up on his own, though. Leon S. Kennedy and Jill Valentine will be added as survivors for the meat-weapon-gone-rogue to chase.

The ghastly collab was announced to celebrate Dead by Daylight’s fifth anniversary. The asymmetric multiplayer game, where teams of survivors try and outlast a singular enemy during a round, is packed with classic horror icons, and the Nemesis fits right in alongside Leatherface and Pyramid Head.

A new stalking ground, based on the Raccoon City Police Department from the recent Resident 2 remake, rounds off the new add-on. You can see that below if you skip to "50:49 Resident Evil Chapter Reveal".

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It seems like I've been harping on about the stupidly good value WD Blue SN550 since time immemorial at this point, as it really is one of the best SSDs for gaming I've ever tested. Happily, the arrival of Kingston's KC2500 SSD on my testing bench means I can finally widen my repertoire a bit now, as this is another astonishingly good NVMe drive that's so darn fast it can actually rival the speeds of much newer and more expensive PCIe 4.0 drives.

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Valve’s next hardware adventure could be a portable PC dubbed the “SteamPal”. A recent update to the Steam Client beta, including mentions of "SteamPal Games", a "quick access menu" and a "power menu", was spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik. There's a lot more speculation, but the rumours have been rumbling away for a while now.

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Like so many others, I watched the Queen's Gambit recently and very much enjoyed it. I've never been that into chess, but it made the game exciting for someone clueless like me. But now that I've seen arcade puzzler Chessplosion, I do wonder if the show could've been elevated by transforming each chess piece into a bomb and the main protagonist into a small duck.

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The headline is a compliment. Strangeland is a psychological horror game and I am a giant wuss; something would be wrong if I didn't find it actively repulsive.

You, though, you might be made of stronger stuff than me, in which case you'll be glad to learn the Wadjet Eye-published point-and-click adventure from the makers of Primordia is out now.

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Cloudpunk has changed dramatically since its release last year, with updates that let you explore its neon voxel cityscape in first-person, and then drive its cabs from the cockpit. Now its "sequel-sized" DLC City Of Ghosts is out, adding a second protagonist to the game.

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AMD's Ryzen 5000 processors launched to universally positive reviews, so it's perhaps no surprise that these CPUs were like hen's teeth for months afterwards. Now availability seems to be gradually improving, and we've even started to see discounts on the less in-demand 5600X and 5800X. Today, we've hit another milestone: the Ryzen 9 5900X, the flagship model that faces off against Intel's Core i9 11900K, is finally in stock below its launch price.

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I hope when earth is finally assaulted by an enormous cosmic monster, we as a species come up with a more original name than "Behemoth". That's what Phoenix Point is calling the big fella in the header image, who is added to the game in its Festering Skies DLC, out today alongside a free v1.1 update also called Behemoth.

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Mini Motorways was announced back in 2019, but the road vehicle successor to the puzzling trains of Mini Metro has been in Apple Arcade jail ever since. It now has a release date for its launch on Steam: July 20th. There's a new trailer below, too.

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Final Fantasy 14 continues to prep for the launch of the climactic Endwalker expansion. The latest update, patch 5.55, is apparently the last planned before the expansion's launch. Much like update 5.5, it adds additions to the main quest, more story in the Nier: Automata crossover quest, and a bunch of smaller tweaks and fixes.

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The last time I visited An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs it was still under construction. Still, I met some wonderful pooches. Like Gorby, a friendly black lab who ran a souvenir shop and gave me a gun. Oh how I've missed him. Thankfully, the airport's grand opening is happening right now so I can give him a big pet. And you can meet him too - just be gentle with him, okay?

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I was really looking forward to being a furry little animal in Biomutant. Running around a gorgeous world, shooting and slashing everything that moved, sounded like a delightful time. And while it can sometimes be fun, sadly the game often finds a way of bringing everything to a screeching halt.

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Biomutant has finally sliced its way onto PC, giving us a lush, new open world to ramble about in and lots of fast-paced kung-fu action to sink our teeth into. For the most part, it runs pretty well on PC, catering for a wide variety of graphics cards without being too much of a performance hog. However, if you do find your PC's struggling to maintain a decent frame rate, then I've put together this handy settings guide to help you get the best performance from it, telling you which settings to dial back and which ones to turn on to give you a much-needed frame rate boost.

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Razer's Blackwidow keyboard has been given a fresh lick of form factor paint today, losing both its wires and its number pad to become the (breathe in) Blackwidow V3 Mini Hyperspeed. This new, wireless 65% version of Razer's popular mechanical gaming keyboard takes everything you know and love about the original Blackwidow, including those all-important arrow keys, and shrinks it down into a more compact chassis. It comes in both linear Razer Yellow and clicky, tactile Razer Green switches, and offers both 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth connectivity for up to 200 hours of use. I've been testing the yellow switch version over the last week, and if you're looking to save some space on your desk, this is definitely worth considering the next time you need a new gaming keyboard.

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Curved gaming monitors have become increasingly popular in recent years, with their wraparound displays offering a more immersive gaming experience compared to traditional flat screen monitors. To help you find the best curved gaming monitor for you and your budget, we've put together this list of our top recommendations. We cover all manner of screen sizes in this list, from small 24in screens right up to 49in super ultrawide ones, and all of them come with high refresh rates for super smooth gaming. Whatever type of curved gaming monitor you're looking for, we've got you covered.

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Giant sharks: what a concept. I feel like humans have an obsession with these big toothy sea monsters, and we likely have Jaws to blame. If you fancy playing as one of these bloodthirsty ocean beasts, Maneater came out on Steam today, after a year of exclusivity on the Epic Games Store. It's an open world shark simulator where you gotta eat people and find "shark loot" to grow and evolve. Shark loot.

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Trackmania is a series of racing games where the goal is to get the fastest time possible on various race tracks. Naturally, the game has a healthy competitive scene full of players trying to beat each other's world records. But recently, Trackmania players "Wirtual" and "Donadigo" discovered a cheating scandal in this speedrunning community, where a number of players had been slowing down their games to make more precise movements to get faster times.

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All right, so the embargo is up for Biomutant reviews, an action RPG where you play a strange little squirrel-rat-fox-raccoon mutant... thing in a post-human, post-apocalyptic world that is slowly dying.

I had some problems with Biomutant, which is a fun game trying to do too much, to the detriment of the things that it does well. But one thing that this does not extend to is the animation for swimming, which is the funniest and best animation in my recent memory for a couple of reasons.

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What better way to start your week than to become a high school student who experiences an apocalyptic event that turns Tokyo into a demon world? Today, Atlus released the Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster (which I will refer to as SMT3, because good lord that's a long title), inviting PC players to try out the series that spawned Persona for the first time (alright fine, other Megami Tensei games have been on PC, but this is the first from the main series).

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Earlier this month, Apex Legends added a new permanent 3v3 deathmatch mode, Arenas. It's brilliant, with one glaring problem: leavers. It's never fun to lose a few rounds in a row, and it's even worse a teammate outright gives up and abandons you, rather than sticking around to try and pull it back. Thankfully, a new patch released last night has added penalties for players who ditch Arenas matches early.

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Whoa - the Xtrfy K4 TKL was already a great value mechanical keyboard at its original price of £90, but today Amazon are selling the UK model for just £36.59. That's a titanic reduction and a truly wicked deal for a high-grade mechanical keyboard.

Katharine hasn't reviewed the K4 TKL for RPS just yet, but I have happened to test it out - so let me run through its strong points quickly. It's got high quality Kailh Red switches, which are plate-mounted to improve the typing response. It has thick ABS keycaps, lubed stabilisers and foam padding in the bottom of the case to dampen noise. The key legends are clearly illuminated by the lighting beneath, which can be set to different colours and effects using the keyboard itself - no software needed.

It's hard to overstate how much of a good deal this is. Normally, the only mechanical keyboards we see this low are really obviously budget models with build quality concerns, sloppy printing on the key legends, weird features, that kind of thing. To get a critically acclaimed keyboard from a Swedish peripheral maker, part of the esports organisation Ninjas in Pyjamas, for £37 - it's kind of incredible.

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The time of the month has come for Steam to roll out their biggo blog post and sale page for top new releases on their store for the prior month. Not every month brings a terribly interesting bunch, but this does have a couple smaller surprises. The remasters you were waiting for nabbed a spot as expected, but there are also spots earned by games you might not have heard of—a retro-future hidden role game, for instance.

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Don't look now, but the Tony Hawk series might be about to drop in again. According to the drummer from CKY, who appeared in a Hawk game twenty whole years ago, the rock band's tunes may be making an appearance in "the new one". Activision just released the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 remastered last year, but it's certainly possible they've got another series remaster waiting in the wing. Or hey, maybe there really is a new one—like an actually new one.

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Gigabyte makes some of the best value gaming monitors on the market, and today their popular G34WQC ultrawide is even better value than normal. This 34-in monitor has been reduced from $450 to $400 on Amazon, an excellent price for a monitor of this size and quality.

In terms of the specs, the Gigabyte monitor comes with a 34-in curved VA panel, with a 3440x1440 (21:9) resolution and 144Hz refresh rate. The monitor meets the DisplayHDR 400 certification, meaning it can accept an HDR signal and get reasonably bright (500 nits) to offer good contrast (~3000:1) between dark and light areas. Colour accuracy is also a strength, with coverage of 90% of the DCI P3 gamut and exceptional Delta-E values that makes this a great choice for colour-accurate work (if you have a colourimeter on hand to calibrate it - otherwise it's merely good).

The G34WQC is also a FreeSync Premium and G-Sync Compatible monitor, so you have a low-lag solution for tear-free gaming no matter which graphics card brand powers your PC. There's also a (somewhat rare) Black Frame Insertion feature that improves motion clarity, which can be great for games that run at high framerates. In general, this is a well-equipped monitor that gets great critical reviews and averages five stars on Amazon as well - not bad!

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Rainbow Six Siege's next season is queueing up for June and Ubisoft have now handed out all the details on Year 6 Season 2. The next season, North Star, is bringing new healing defender Thunderbird and is reworking the Favela map so defenders actually have a fighting chance. North Star kicks off on June 14th but you can prep for the changes right now with Ubisoft's list of patch notes.

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What are Rockstar launching this week? No, it isn't Grand Theft Auto V on another platform. It's also not another nightclub inside of GTA Online, but that is warmer. Rockstar have actually partnered with club music event hosts CircoLoco to launch CircoLoco Records. Yes, in real life, not in GTA. The label's first compliation record, Monday Dreamin’, releases on July 9th but they've already debuted the first track off the album.

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Happy Monday - fancy a new laptop? That's the messaging that Dell UK is going for in their weekly deals, where they're offering 31% off on a pair of Alienware Area-51m R2 gaming laptops - plus £200 cashback when you trade in an older model and an extra 10% off when you use code DELLNJPC102.

There are also discounts on more affordable Dell gaming and content creation laptops, but let's cover the Alienware models first!

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Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator developers SCS Software are still at work on their official multiplayer support for both truck sims. The Convoy game mode will let up to eight players hop in a private session together to complete jobs on the open road with synced traffic and weather. It's still in an experimental state, SCS warn, but they've made the first version available on a beta branch for those who are determined to go on a test drive.

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The Mass Effect Legendary Edition has been out for nearly two weeks now, and modders are already making some handy changes to the remastered version of BioWare's space RPG trilogy. Someone has made a mod that lets players bring up the in-game console in the ME1 and ME2 remaster, allowing them to give themselves a cheeky XP or Paragon/Renegade points boost, clip out of bounds, and even add in items and powers.

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In Biomutant there is a crafting system to add values like energy regeneration or elemental resistance or extra armour to your gear. What you do is you take an item of clothing - a hat made out of an old animatronic, say, because the hats are really cool - and you strap different bits of post-apocalyptic junk onto it. The sole of a shoe, or a bit of metal scrap with nails through it.

And to make a Biomutant, you take an open-world action RPG. It's set in a post-apocalyptic future where humans are long dead and have been replaced with mutated mammals living in a culture with vaguely Pan-Asian influences. Cool. Then you strap on a load of different stuff that was popular in games about 5 years ago. And a bunch of it is fun, but some of it is clanking around getting in the way.

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Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, the new expansion for Frontier's space exploration sim, launched in a pretty rough state last week. Players have reported crashes, loads of bugs and performance issues, giving the game's Steam reviews the damning "Mostly Negative" tag. While the devs have already released two hotfixes, some issues are still persisting. On Friday, the studio's CEO issued an apology, saying they're "taking these issues very seriously, and adding that a second hotfix is on the way.

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After much controversy, upset, and harrassment over 'hot tub streamers' who host Twitch streams in swimwear from paddling pools, the company have come to a solution: split them into their own separate category. So yes, they are allowed, but they need to be in the right place. If someone's streaming Minecraft in their togs, you shouldn't see them unless you're looking for them. Far more importantly than all that, through this category I have learned that an animal rescue centre have a Twitch channel broadcasting sea otters playing, sleeping, eating, and being all-round adorable.

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Netflix have been somewhat involved in the video game scene for a little while: with game-to-TV adaptations like the Dota and Castlevania animes, and their interactive shows Bandersnatch and You Vs. Wild. But now it seems the streaming company are looking to create some sort of game subscription service, similar to Apple Arcade. Reportedly, they've already started looking for games industry executives to poach.

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I'm a fan of Call Of Duty: Warzone's bright and colourful 1980s Verdansk. It's a much nicer atmosphere than the dull grey map of old. But I've come to find it's maybe a little too sunny, as the sharp increase in lens flare has made looking out of windows and doorways particularly blinding. Hopefully, I won't need to crack the Ray-Bans out for much longer, though, as a Warzone dev has promised to look into the issue.

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Sundays are for giving your fresh laundry a good sniff. Before you bring nose to cloth, let's read this week's best writing about games.

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Yesterday brought the announcement of Victoria 3, the first DLC for Empire Of Sin, and Royal Court DLC for Crusader Kings 3.

Yet here I am, having my head turned by two tiny packs for Cities Skylines. One adds a bunch of train stations, the other adds some piers and bridges. Gimme.

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Samorost has always been free to play in your browser, but there's now a new edition with enhanced graphics and new music that's similarly free on Steam and Itch. If you've not played it before, there's no better time to check out one of the best free games and one of the all-time classic point-and-click adventure games.

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