Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You’ve played through countless immersive sims as a cyborg, a thief, and a cyborg thief. Now, try doing it as a scuttling demon dominatrix. Brush Burial: Gutter World is the sneaky and frenetic new dollop of squalor from Knife Demon Software. It casts you once again as Fennel, a swamp devil with a pronged tail you can use as a whip and a grapple, knocking props around and swiping crossbow bolts out of midair.

Fennel seems as agile here as in the previous, excellent Brush Burial, pouncing from head to head like a tic, but they’ve bolstered their moveset with an injection of overclocked koppōjutsu. You can snare foes to perform sinuous, bone-crunching takedowns, the catch being that you’re vulnerable during the execution. It’s deeply, moreishly unpleasant. Those little fatal jerks at the end of the animation are more visceral than anything in Doom Eternal. I’m not sure I can bear to watch the trailer again. Here it is.

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As I wrote in our King of Meat preview, I’ve long since fallen out of love with looting games. After thousands of hours rinsing RPG dungeons, I gaze upon even the shiniest and most temptingly crenelated of treasure chests with frigid contempt. But I’m not unenticed by the clanky and colourful, Deathloop meets The Division stylings of Arc Raiders, Embark and Nexon’s third-person extraction shooter, which is getting a three day open playtest this weekend.

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Marvel Rivals is finally getting a PVE mode, pitting five of the game’s 42 stylish and bizarre, caped or capeless crusaders against… zombies. Ah, zombies, the real heroes of any videogame looking to phone in a quick co-op wave attack mode (while dabbling in a little cross-promotion). The AI and character design are supposed to look basic, stoopid. The experience is supposed to feel like punching a bucket of porridge, you ass. These are brainless shamblers, not the Sinister Six.

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Attention, folks who like the idea of flinging a fire-breathing Group B monster down some dirt tracks. Assetto Corsa devs Kunos are bringing out a rally sim. It’s called Assetto Corsa Rally, therefore instantly winning the inventive video game name award for this year.

As with road racing AC successor Assetto Corsa EVO, the studio and co-developers Supernova Games Studios have opted to go the Steam early access route for this selection of Scandinavian flicks, with a release penned in for November November 13 this year.

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The Crew 2‘s offline mode is now live, ensuring that the racer “remains accessible for years to come”. Well, assuming you’re not bothered about playing online, which would still be deep-sixed if Ubisoft opted to shut down the game’s servers, as they did with its predecessor. Odds are that won’t happen at least in the immediate future, due to the player feedback the publishers have credited as the impetus behind this addition.

That acknowledgement very much looks to be a way of nodding to the Stop Killing Games campaign, who rose to prominence following Ubisoft’s shutdown of the first Crew’s servers – thereby rendering it totally unplayable – without naming them directly.

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Former Assassin’s Creed series lead Marc-Alexis Côté’s departure from Ubisoft after 20 years in various roles was announced earlier this week, and the developer’s now put out a post in which he says that leaving wasn’t his choice. Instead, Côté asserts that it came after he was asked to step aside as Assassin’s Creed boss by Ubisoft as part of a corporate restructure, then offered a reduced role as part of the company’s Tencent-backed Vantage Studios subsidiary.

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Too many Battlefield 6 rounds of Conquest have been ending in a dissatisfying time-out, Uncle EA have found, with rival teams failing to completely devour each other’s supply of spawning tickets. We’ve all known engagements like that – tit-for-tat exchanges between mostly AFK recon players. Irresolutions that might yawn forever were it not for everybody’s real enemy, the clock. The gutsy response would have been to retitle Conquest “Bathos”, or “War on Terror” if they wanted to sadden George Bush, or “Waiting for Bravo” if they wanted to amuse the Beckett fans, or “Deadlock” if they wanted to tweak Valve’s whiskers. Instead, EA have taken the coward’s way out and chopped the allowance of tickets on a per map basis.

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iRacing‘s always scared me a bit. Not just because you pay for it with a subscription that I’ve never felt committed enough to proper online sim racing in one place to sign up for, but because it’s serious. No giggling allowed. Obey the track limits, spend hours playing around with damper setups, do not touch my bumper or I’ll call three different police forces level of serious. A 42 page-long official sporting code doc for members level of seriously serious.

iRacing Arcade, its new sibling with a Steam Next Fest demo, is thankfully not as serious.

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Huh. It turns out Quantic Dream, makers of such decision-heavy dramas as Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, haven’t just been tinkering with their long-teased Star Wars: Eclipse. They’re also taking a sharp turn into competitive multiplayer, announcing Spellcasters Chronicles: a 3v3, third-person, free-to-play MOBA full of aerial magefights and big stompy demon lads. Huh.

It’s hard to imagine a starker departure from the studio’s previous work, or a riskier one. The modern Multiplayer Online Battle Arena isn’t so much a genre as a graveyard, with League of Legends and Dota 2 ambling around and occasionally sharing a knowing look between the headstones. Still, Spellcasters Chronicles seems determined to try, offering shorter, punchier matches and bigger maelstroms of hero-shooter spectacle.

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The lawyers in Sony and Tencent’s ongoing legal fracas over alleged Horizon homework-copier Light of Motiram continue to dish out the words. Letters, phrases, and sentences are being flung to and fro with reckless abandon. Sony are the latest corp to take a swing, not only calling Tencent’s defense “nonsense”, but accusing the Chinese conglomerate of playing shell company hide-and-seek.

If you need to catch up on the tale of this copyright clash, it began in July, when Sony brought about legal action accusing Tencent-published post-apocalyptic open worlder Light of Motiram of being a “slavish clone” of their Horizon series. Tencent battled back, filing a motion to dismiss the case last month. “Sony’s effort is not aimed at fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property,” Tencent claimed at the time. “It is an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it Sony’s exclusive domain.”

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