Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Back in February we posted a deal on Logitech's K400 Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo device, which offered a convenient way to control Steam Deck, media PCs and other gizmos that don't come with built-in desktop-friendly controls.

Today we're back with a similar deal on the Logitech Wireless Starter Kit, which bundles a K380 keyboard and M185 mouse for £40 (down from £50). Both elements are surprisingly high-quality for the price, with a nicer-looking and better-feeling scissor switch keyboard with circular keycaps and a compact 2.4GHz mouse that provides better speed and accuracy than a trackpad.

Read more

The Dell Alienware AW2723DF is one of the best 1440p 240Hz monitors on the market, and now this popular model has dropped to £430 after a 20% discount at Dell's UK store. If you're a student or your employer's part of Dell's discount scheme, the monitor becomes even cheaper - just £408.50.

Read more

Last time, you decided that cool spellcasting gestures are better than seizing control of a rolling boulder trap. I assume you have very cool gestures to conjure a magical meteor or other big rock on command. Maybe a dramatic dragging-down (or up) with two tensed arms and clawed hands? Very cool. As we continue our scientific process, this week I ask you to choose between two things which combine help and hurt. What's better: heals harming the undead, or voice chat?

Read more

Microsoft had already announced their annual not-E3 Xbox Games Showcase, but now we know when exactly to tune in: June 11th at 10am PT/6pm BST/7pm CEST. Microsoft are promising “new surprises and first-looks” from both Xbox-owned studios and third-party teams, but I'm sure most people will be tuning in for the (also previously announced) Starfield Direct, which is airing immediately after the Xbox show.

Read more

Wishfully’s scenic platformer Planet Of Lana has received a fast-approaching release date: May 23rd. Planet Of Lana has been on the RPS Hivemind’s radar since its announcement thanks to its hand-painted art, evocative soundtrack, and comparisons to Ori and Inside - two excellent platformers in their own right. The newest trailer (embedded below) is just an extra treat.

Read more

Any premium supporters who're missing out on a good theme park sim may have cause to rejoice this week, as the good folks at Bandai Namco have given us a blast of codes to give away for fantastical theme park 'em up Park Beyond's upcoming closed beta test, starting this Friday, May 5th. Park Beyond is not just a complex theme park management sim, or a physics-ish coaster builder (although it is both of those), it's also an anti-physics weird-ride expando-game, allowing you to unlock increasingly unrealistic upgrades for rides in a process the developers Limbic Entertainment call "impossification". Deets on how to get your code for the closed beta below.

Read more

A Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map is being used to sneak information about the ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Russian gamers. Players can download the de_voyna map, which recreates an abandoned Eastern European city that’s not too dissimilar to the war-torn streets you might find in other multiplayer maps. The difference here is a secret underground room that contains information about the invasion: headlines, maps, newspaper clippings, and images of the war.

Read more

RTS-FPS hybrids aren't a new thing, but they also haven't been the most historically successful ventures. Well, Arma 3 developers Bohemia Interactive are taking a punt at blending the two genres with Silica, in the hopes that you can both shoot and command things with equal levels of good. It's the first project to hatch from Bohemia's incubator program, which helps indie devs make cool games.

Silica is largely the work of one developer, Martin "Dram" Malicharek, who was previously the lead on Bohemia's Take On Mars. Having given Silica a whirl for over an hour, I struggle to see whether the RTS, FPS hybrid can truly offer the best of both worlds. It does, however, make being a crab extremely good.

Read more

We’re one episode away from being in the double digits, folks! Whoop! But for now, let’s dive into episode nine of Indiescovery. This time we're chatting about our biggest Steam sins. That’s right, we’re revealing it all: shamefully ignored indie gems, outrageous playtimes, and games that we promise we’ll return to one day, honest! We also get into what we’ve been recently playing and then end, as always, with our hyperfixations.

Read more

Marvel’s Midnight Suns ends its post-launch tour with the long-time X-Men leader Storm, who’s joining the roster on May 11th. The weather-controlling mutant will be available as part of the Blood Storm DLC pack, which also includes new missions, hero outfits, and upgrades to The Abbey.

Read more

After an excellent discussion about dice and pizza making last week in our Betrayal At Club Low liveblog, we've decided (that is, I have decided) to stick with the dice-rolling theme this month to crown the excellent Citizen Sleeper as our next pick for the RPS Game Club. We named Jump Over The Age's dystopian RPG one of our favourite games of 2022 last year, and seeing as the game is also celebrating its first anniversary this month, it's the perfect time to return the rag-tag world of Erlin's Eye.

Read more

Persona is a series with plenty of choice as you balance your alternate dimension demon-slaying responsibilities with your high-schooling social life. Playing as a student, you're free to decide how to spend your free time, which characters to spend it with, and who to inevitably romance by the end of the game. Plenty of options, for sure, but Persona 3 Portable was the last time we could choose our protagonist’s gender in the series. Until now. Thanks to the simply titled “P5R Female Protagonist” mod, you can now replace the default male protagonist Joker in Persona 5 Royal with a she/her Joker. On paper, that would seem like a novel change in a lot of games, but in the mammoth-sized Persona 5, a change like that requires some very impressive modding.

Read more

The new Apex Legends season, Arsenal, looks exciting from watching the new trailer. The 17th season is set to launch on May 9th, and features new character Ballistic, a competitor in the Apex Games' predecessor the Thunderdome Games, now making a comeback as the new legend. The popular World's Edge map is also getting some healing, and there's an Apex Museum within the map that celebrates Apex's past, present, and future. Although the theme for this season seems to be nostalgia, there are still some new features to look forward to, particularly the updates to the weapon system and upgraded Firing Range.

Read more

It's rare to see discounts on compact keyboards, and rare to see discount on wireless keyboards, but today we're got a cracker on a mechanical keyboard that is both compact and wireless. It's the Cooler Master SK622, a gaming-optimised 60% design that offers low profile switches, a UK layout (with optional RGB backlighting) and the flexibility of wired (USB-C), Bluetooth and lower-latency 2.4GHz wireless.

The CM SK622 retailed for over £100 back in the day, but now it's available for half-price: £49.98. That's an awesome deal for any mechanical keyboard, much less one from a name brand with wireless connectivity!

Read more

Good news, everyone! The blindingly quick Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor has dropped to just £440 at UK, a fair bit better than than the £450+ price points and poor availability that greeted the launch of the CPU last month. You can pick up the 7800X3D for this price at Amazon, Ebuyer and Overclockers, so you have a fair few options too.

Read more

We've been writing about Skywind for nine years. The ambitious modding project aims to import the entirery of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind into the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim engine. To celebrate the 21st anniversary of Morrowind, the Skywind team have released a 21 minute video of a single quest in Skywind.

Read more

Is there worse box art than that for the first Age Of Wonders, back in 1999? Probably - but I still wouldn't have seen it and bet on the series continuing 24 years later.

Yet here we are. Age Of Wonders 4 is out today.

Read more

Each game in the Super Mega Baseball series strips the sport back to its fundamentals: pitching, batting, and making its big-headed players cry. That makes it a baseball series that someone with no understanding of the sport can enjoy - and I would know.

Now Super Mega Baseball 4 has been announced, and for the first time it's got a roster of pros to play with - or former pros, at least.

Read more

No one on RPS having much fun with Redfall so far, but perhaps you want to try Arkane's open world vampire shooter for yourself. Game Pass would be a good way to do that, particularly if you have a free trial.

As of today, any Game Pass subscriber can offer up to five friends a 14-day free trial to PC Game Pass. So I guess it's time to bug your friends.

Read more

So far, I wouldn't say Redfall is a "mess". A mess, to me, implies an excess of things that become a horrible, overwhelming tangle. Having played the vampiric FPS for a clutch of hours now, I'd say it feels more like an "absence". Arkane's latest strikes me as an open world shooter with a few simple strands that never seem to go anywhere. Occasionally, there are flashes of a team that - as we all know - are capable of brilliance, but Redfall has me following a path of irritation, and feeling a slight sadness for what might've been.

Read more

One of 2022’s bestest games, tabletop-ish RPG Citizen Sleeper is now being turned into an actual tabletop game called Cycles Of The Eye, designed by series’ creator Gareth Damian Martin and long-time TTRPG smith Alfred Valley. Indie book publisher Lost In Cult have launched their latest campaign to crowdfund Cycles Of The Eye, as well as their next art book focused on the game's dystopian cyberpunk world.

Read more

It was a Wednesday in March, and the Dreamworks dream team of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen had flown into Seattle to join Bill Gates for a press conference. The four men, seated on tall Hollywood director’s chairs, were estimated to be worth a combined $11 billion - and that was in 1995 money.

Together, Dreamworks and Microsoft were going 50-50 on a new game studio, investing a total of $30 million. “I’m spoiled,” said Spielberg, as recorded by the LA Times. “I worked with the best studios and the best actors, and it would be silly to get into the interactive business without Microsoft. They’re the best company in the world. It does seem like a marriage that was destined to happen.” It was a marriage that would produce a famously strange child in Jurassic Park: Trespasser.

Read more

The Kingston NV2 is a budget PCIe 4.0 drive, designed to be assembled from the cheapest available components to deliver a decent baseline of performance. That makes it often an aggressively priced SSD compared to others at similar speeds, and today Box are offering the 2TB model for just £77.50. That's the lowest price we've ever seen for a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD and a deal worth writing up, IMO.

Read more

AMD's Radeon RX 6800 graphics card is one of the firm's best mid-range to high-end options, with excellent 1080p and 1440p performance that saw it get a warm write-up here at RPS. Now, MSI's RX 6800 Gaming Z Trio is down to £480 at Ebuyer here in the UK, a good price for a GPU of this calibre - if not quite as good value as the new RTX 4070.

Read more

Marvel's Midnight Suns may be a turn-based tactics game first and foremost, but it also has a substantial RPG element that drives both the story and the interpersonal dramas of its superhero teams between missions. When you and your squad head back to your Abbey HQ, there are side stories and quests to investigate around the Abbey grounds, items to find, and more. It's a sizable part of the game, but at one point it was even bigger, creative director Jake Solomon tells me at GDC.

"It's crazy, if you go online, you can see all the Midnight Suns cutscenes and they're three hours long. That's as long as a movie," he says. But during the last year of development Solomon reveals "we cut 30 conversations from the game, like 30 scenes. We cut a ton, because we realised this is just simply too much."

Read more

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s PC has had a particularly bumpy launch on PC with our hardware boss James concluding that “sluggishness and stuttering are problems on higher-end graphics cards, even before adding the strain of ray tracing effects.” EA have now released their first post-launch patch, aiming to fix a host of issues.

Read more

I first played co-op third-person shooter Glitch Busters: Stuck On You at Summer Games Fest last year, and came away really impressed. I played with couch co-op with two members of developers Toy Logic, which was lighthearted, slightly chaotic fun; everything couch co-op should be, right?

So, I thought I'd give the game a whirl but as a solo player. How would a game built for up to four players cope when there's just one person taking the reins? Well, sort of fine for a bit, then quite agonising, actually. That's not to say it can't be a fun time, but bots definitely aren't a substitute for real people.

Read more

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday (or Tuesday, after a holiday weekend like this), I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by weird musical contraptions, a quiet moment on the balcony with a cup of coffee, chill building, frozen sledding, and the ability to skip a game's tutorial so hard that it sinks to the bottom of the sea. Come admire all these interesting and attractive indies with me!

Read more

Social media surfers may have already caught a glimpse of side-scroller Scarlet Deer Inn, which recently went viral over the weekend for its fully embroidered animations. Yep, embroidered as in using needles, thread, and fabric to stitch together every animation in real life, from the protagonist's big jump to a sheep’s wagging tail. This stitching is then scanned into the game by developers Attu Games, creating a uniquely beautiful platformer with a slightly physical touch.

Read more

The underwater scares of Dredge are about to run even deeper. Developer Black Salt Games have revealed a roadmap for their spooky fishing game, promising four new bits of content coming over the next year including a chiller passive mode, nice quality-of-life additions, and a larger paid DLC pack with a new non-eldritch horror threat.

Read more

In the incredibly rare circumstance that you might have had a Kinder Egg as a kid, was the toy ever your favourite part? It sure wasn’t for me. I was all about the chocolate. Sure, I’d crack open the yellow canister inside, let out some variation of, “Oh, an elephant!”, and promptly toss it in the bin and walk away, its destiny consigned to landfill. In the landfill of my brain, I’m currently carving out new space for Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode. It's available to try now in demo form on PC and consoles, but I've been able to play a larger build of it that covered the first two chapters. Sadly, I can't say it left much of impression.

In case you're equally bemused by what SF6's World Tour actually is, this is a new, open world, RPG-style mode in which you make a custom fighter, run around small areas of Metro City and other locations around the globe, and level up. There are moves to learn, side quests to complete, and you can even do mini-game activities such as making pizza. Between all of that, you fight people. Other fighters, unruly gang members, random folk making their way to work in the morning. You can punch almost all of ‘em! There’s a glimpse of the Street Fighter you know and love here with its side-on 1v1 bouts, but everything else around it is unnecessary fluff. In other words, World Tour is the token toy inside the more delicious Street Fighter chocolate.

Sundays are for cheersing the air with a beverage of your choice. Before you raise a glass to yourself, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

Read more

Turning Attack On Titan's giant enemies and grapple-hooking sword combat into a video game seemed like a tall order (pun intended), and one that a budget Koei Tecmo treatment seemed doomed to fail. And yet. As I explained in my Attack On Titan: Wings Of Freedom review back in 2016, the game absolutely nailed the series' action.

As of this week, both it and its sequel are permanently cheaper.

Read more

Redfall is Arkane, developers best known for singleplayer immersive sims, trying to take a vampiric bite of open world multiplayer pie. It's out next week and we now know its system requirements. It's also, perhaps surprisingly, already Steam Deck Verified.

Read more

Vampire Survivors, aka the best game of 2022, might be getting an animated television series. Developers Poncle have announced that they've partnered with Story Kitchen, a media company headed a Sonic movie co-producer and the creator of John Wick, to make it happen.

Read more

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor could have used "a little more time in the bacta tank." That was James' conclusion when he looked at its performance on PC.

EA now say that they're "aware that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor isn't performing to our standards for a percentage of our PC players, in particular those with high-end machines or or certain specific configurations." They're working on fixes.

Read more

We're having another long weekend, thanks to the May Day bank holiday on Monday, so we'll not be properly back until Tuesday. I trust, reader dear, that you will pinch and punch yourself on my behalf for the first of the month. And even if you do think "yes returns", you'll only have youself to pinch and punch in retaliation. But what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

Read more

The Star Wars Jedi: Survivor experience on PC is, at least here on release day, a generally pleasurable Far Far Away fantasy marred by some ugly performance issues. After a few hours' worth of attempts to get it running on the Steam Deck, I can now – with a face similar to that of Ewan McGregor cry-laughing over child murder – report that Jedi: Survivor is in even worse condition on the handheld. It’s unplayable.

Read more

With 30 million-odd pre-registrations under its belt prior to coming out, Honkai: Star Rail was always going to be a pretty big deal when it eventually launched. The turn-based anime RPG did exactly that earlier this week, and it's already been downloaded over 20 million times in just a single day, according to a tweet from analyst Daniel Ahmad. Perhaps not surprising for a free-to-play game, but still. That's a lot of people. I must admit, I could never quite gel with Genshin Impact, another very anime RPG made by the same developers, but Honkai's turn-based battles look a lot more up my street. So I downloaded yesterday, which I guess makes me part of that enormous 20 million number. Are you planning on giving it a go as well?

Read more

Hargh blargh games are bad, roguelikes are worse, whinge moan complain. It is that time once again. You know whether my complaints will bother you, so consider this a massive recommendation if they dont: Shardtide Verminp... Punktide Verminsha... Shardpunk... goddamn it. Hang on.

Shardpunk Verminfall is, as Graham reported, an excellent mash-up of several familiar games and concepts, yet doesn't feel like a knockoff of any, or lack its own identity. I would resent it a lot less if it wasn't also a roguelike. Even with its standard mono-save system and unlocking things and "repeating the whole thing from scratch ad infinitum" though, I can't pretend I don't enjoy it anyway.

Read more