Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You are playing a co-op session with Julian Gollop, Snapshot Games’s CEO and the man who created XCOM. He’s showing you Chip n’ Claws vs. The Brainioids, a real time strategy game where you’ll gather resources, fabricate structures, and give orders to robot minions in battles against an alien menace. The twist? It’s all in third person, with split-screen couch co-op, real time ranged and melee combat, and even a little platforming.

You’re playing as robot cat Claws, and Gollop is plucky spacefarer Chip. He’s zipping around the map hoovering up resources on a hoverbike he’s nabbed from a building that gifts you both special tech. You’ve got a rocket pack that lets you double jump, accessing new structure blueprints hidden in high places. It’s time to take the fight to the aliens, and Gollop calmly suggests building troop spawners near your main structure – it’s got mounted guns, after all.

What do you do?

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Persona and Shin Megami Tensei composer Shoji Meguro is making a turn-based sci-fi RPG about private military companies gunning through the ashes of a nuclear war. He’s working with Ilya Kuvshinov, the illustrator who created character designs for Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045, and Lotus Juice, a rapper who has contributed sick beats to any number of Personae. So if nothing else Guns Undarkness is probably going to look and sound quite fancy.

But how does it play? Meguro has made his name as a musician: I have no idea how well that expertise translates to designing combat systems. It’s something to think about while you watch and listen to the below trailer for the game’s first demo, out on 24th February.

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Buried in Brendan Greene and PlayerUnknown Productions’ billowing, three-part, decade-long effort to build some kind of “3D internet” there is a ramshackle but thoughtful Unreal Engine game about wilderness survival and orienteering. Catchily titled Prologue: Go Wayback! and due for Early Access launch this spring, it’s a game about finding a radio tower on a 64km2 map, generated based on a mix of in-house art and public access landscape data fed through the developer’s in-house machine learning technology.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the Airship library, Innersloth and Schell Games have announced a 3D version of popular social stealth sim Among Us. Or at least, they have taken the existing VR version and made it non-VR. It’s a stab in the back for the Meta Questers, perhaps, but it’s great news for me, a person who has only ever owned the launch model of the PS4’s VR headset, and is currently using its box as a draft excluder.

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One of my Xmas selection box games last year was Withering Rooms, a delightfully frightful haunted house action-RPG that balances mazey Metroidvania level design with the ability to be a witch who can supersize herself and gallop around on suits of magic armour. With a quick glance over my shoulder at our dear friend Sir Eugene Optimisation, I dare to describe it as a bit like Bloodborne, if Bloodborne had been made by a tiny independent developer.

Also rather Bloodborney: the recently revealed Withering Realms, a sequel of sorts in which you play a ghost girl clinging to the back of a customisable combat doll. Sir Eugene Optimisation requests I add here that the doll conceit reminds him of well-received Soulslike Lies Of P. Which is a fair observation, I think, though I would also say the doll’s lipless, one-eyed grimace reminds me of Mouthwashing. How’s that, Eugene – three for three? Anyway, here’s a trailer.

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Sandworm-bothering MMO Dune: Awakening will release on 20th May, developers Funcom have announced, and you can start tailoring your very own Arrakish (I swear it’s a canonical term) adventurer by means of the just-released character creator. Any desert delver you produce with said creator can be imported to the full game at launch.

Inspired by Monster Hunter’s Hunting Horn, I’ve recently gotten into the habit of making characters who look like Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. I’m not sure Dune: Awakening has sufficiently puckish hair to support this – not many big frizzy gingers in the Dune universe, in my experience. But I’m willing to give it a shot, for science. Anyway, here’s a trailer.

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Whatever comes out of Brendan Greene’s sprawling 10-year trilogy of projects at PlayerUnknown Productions, it won’t be a successor to Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, popularly known hereabouts as Plunkbat – the grandfather of battle royales, which Greene developed as creative director at Bluehole, a subsidiary of Krafton.

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Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, the saying goes. (This is why so many games journalists are unemployed – ba-dum tish.) Thankyfully the next expansion for The Sims 4 seems to understand the permeable boundary between passion project and career as purely aspirational. It’s called Businesses & Hobbies and it lets Sims open their own tattoo parlour, pottery studio or – if you have the right complementary expansion – a cat café.

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Answering GDC’s 2023 survey, 78% of respondents said they considered the harassment and toxicity developers receive from the public to be a serious issue. A simple sentiment is often the most effective, and the title of Dragon Age veteran Mark Darrah’s latest video cuts right to the heart of it: “Your $70 doesn’t buy you cruelty.”

You don’t have to like a game, and you don’t have stay quiet if you have complaints, says Darrah. You’re entitled to be angry, and you’re entitled to express that anger. “If you are mad at that Ubisoft game, be mad at Ubisoft,” he says. “Express your anger to Ubisoft or the studio that made the game. But you cross a line when you start being cruel about it.” (Thanks, PC Gamer and GamesRadar)

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We’ve known that HBO’s Last Of Us adaptation was getting a second season since 2023, but now it has a release date. The first episode will air in the US on April 13th.

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