In Shelter, you play a badger. Hilarious! Brilliant, right? Wrong. As anybody with children less than a foot long and a warren in the English countryside knows, badgers have it really tough. It’s that world, where cruelty and necessity occupy nearly the same spot on the venn diagram, that’s explored in the game’s latest trailer.
Cyvasse is the chess-like board game described in George Ah Rah’s similarly chess-like A Song of Ice and Fire novels, and I’m given to understand that somebody’s ‘translated’ it - that is, drawn up a full set of rules and designed pieces gleaned from the spaces between Martin’s words. Moreover, I’m told that advances in the study of magic now enable us to print out those same pieces and play the thing ourselves.
Completely absurd. Am I supposed to believe any of this?
Huh, this is sort of a biggie. Riot are taking advantage of the spotlight already trained on LoL’s imminent All-Stars tournament to show off a prototype arena - the Magma Chamber. The new map is “specially designed for individual and pair competition” - and it's all fire and brimstone
Kerbal Space Program continues to be my favourite thing ever, a build-your-own-rocket physics sandbox paired with a space exploration engine that leaves you with a genuine sense of wonder and awe at the universe through which we are forever glacially tumbling. It's nice, is what it is. Developer Squad have just released a milestone version of the game, version 0.2, which is available on Steam as well as their own site. It addresses a clutch of bugs and adds some new ship and rover parts, but perhaps most notably it introduces flags. You can now claim the heavens under your own custom-made banners.
WildStar is an MMORPG that looks like a slightly demented Firefly universe got sucked into a tumble dryer with some Pixar artists. The promise of actually being able to get into this hot pastel-coloured tumble dryer is quite pants-wettingly exciting in those terms. Nothing is ever as the trailer makes it look.
You know you’re in trouble when you’re applying basic RTS principles to your game’s launch. Maxis countered an early customer rush by diverting all power to their burning servers, and have been battling to match the SimCity players saw in their mind’s eye and in the pre-release trailers ever since. In today’s update, however, they’ve deemed it safe to turn the lights back on in a few of the game’s deserted features: leaderboards, region filters and dynamic global market prices.
It’s a bit of a stretch to think of the various strands of the CoD franchise as parallel universes, but I suppose that’s a consequence of the series’ fondness for near-future cataclysms. Black Ops 2’s second Cold War, it turns out, isn’t compatible with the America-in-remission of Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Records of the meeting between Tesla, Edison, and Franklin have long been lost to the annals of time but the fact that we don’t have lizards that have been bred with lightning stalking the earth is testament that those three lords of electricity once formed a pact against the practice of hybridising animals with electric.
Tamriel was not so fortunate.
Behold the Wamasu.
In Reus, little mistakes can have major consequences. That’s its problem.
It’s a beautiful 2D god game about fostering life on a barren world. You start with a water god: having him create vast oceans, wetting the land enough so that your forest and swamp gods can begin seeding life. Soon, settlers arrive, who’ll build towns. They’ll have needs: resources to build a granary or tool shop. Satisfy that, and you’ll receive an ambassador; a villager who’ll perch on your giants shoulders granting more powers.
It sounds simple. But Reus is interconnected in such a way that leaves you beholden to easy mistakes.
With only a few minutes before the game timer ran out and my minor deities returned to their slumber, I raised a mountain. That dried an ocean. That devastated a swamp and forest. With it, died the two towns that relied on them. I’d killed a civilization while trying to get an achievement.
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Kickstarted back in January, War for the Overworld has marched itself into beta. Celebrating that fact, the developers have released a new trailer and invite non-Kickstarter backers to get in on the malevolent fun of constructing dungeons within which you maim and torture adventuring heroes.
I’ve been following GoD Factory: Wingmen’s development with a cautious eye for the past year now. It’s ticking a whole lot of boxes on the list of good space shooter features - 4 v 4 dogfights, capital ships, ridiculous levels of fighter customisation, mechanics encouraging co-operative teams - and it looks damn pretty, too.
Though all its spikes and colours may not be to everyone’s tests.
And now GoD Factory’s taken to Kickstarter to round off its development,
Waaagh!* Slitherine are developing a turn-based, hex-based strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and it looks as dense and convoluted as some of the old Warhammer games of the 90s - this is a good thing.
War’s not very pleasant. That’s what years of watching the news, televisions series, films, and reading books about the whole bloody mess tends to convey. Games have a somewhat more conflicted approach to its presentation: it is after all the backdrop to a whole lot of fun. The first Company of Heroes game, while making nods to the loss of life and generally grim times had all round, didn't dwell on it.
Relic’s latest trailer for Company of Heroes 2 looks to be going down the ‘War isn’t very nice” route of storytelling instead.
The underlying suggestion of the new Wildstar video is that death will be behind every corner of its colourful MMO world. If you’re a soldier you will be killed in combat; a scientist, you’ll be killed by the things you’re researching; explorer, by the world you’re investigating; and, settler, by everyone else.
It looks like a lot of fun.
Yes, Battlefield 4 will have bullets, explosions, and tanks. We knew that. We expected that. But Dice are keen to show us that there’s so much more to their shooter, it has quiet reflective periods too.
That’s why the latest batch of screenshots show a soldier in a practically Wordsworthian repose.
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Why do PC gamers think they don't need internet security?
Metro: Last Light is a really very good time waiting to be had in a pipe under the ground, if our Steve’s review is anything to go by. But is it such fun that you’ll want to spend all season with it, from now til the leaves begin to fade? Til the last bit of lovely pink blossom has long since been trampled beneath a post-apocalyptic Russian boot? I’ll let you decide that, with recourse to newly announced details of the game’s DLC schedule.
When you played the original Half-Life, it was Marc Laidlaw’s words that instilled that sense of foreboding in your bones as the tram wove its way through Black Mesa. It was his books, The Orchid Eater and The 37th Mandala, that clogged up Gordon Freeman’s locker. And it was by his hand that Alyx Vance became your first embarrassing digital love.
Now he shares an office with Chet Faliszek and Erik Walpaw, where they work on the Portal series, and the shock of Episode 2’s killer twist recedes in the memory. But Laidlaw hasn’t forgotten about Half-Life. More specifically, he hasn’t forgotten about Dr. Breen.
I want you to think of your favourite competitive multiplayer map of all time. Got it? Right, hold it there. Now: can you tell me what the temperature is, on your map? How about the surface gravity? If your map is from a sci-fi shooter, could you name what planet it’s on? Or its relative position in an alien galaxy?
I don’t know whether or not MechWarrior Online’s Canyon Network is going to become anybody’s new favourite map, but you’re about to get to know it very well indeed.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Call of Duty: Ghosts was revealed yesterday, presumably via judicious use of one of those Psycho Kinetic Energy meters from Ghostbusters. It’s another “What if?” oppression fantasy about Americans losing everything and having to fight like the guerillas they’re used to beating. And it has a dog! That’s important.
All of this was conveyed in swirling pools of moving images at a hundred miles-an-hour. You probably can’t even remember most of them. Remember that shot at 10m24s? Exactly. What I have for you here are safe, reliable stills. Look at them now or look at them later, they’ll be exactly the same.
