Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When I downloaded Creeper World IXE’s demo, I had it pegged as a bizarre original. It is, in fact, the latest in a series of real-time strategy games in which you position turrets and terraform maps to repel surging, simulated tides of purple liquid. This is a war between flesh and mineral, solidity and fluidity that dates back to the age of Gillen. Alex Wiltshire (RPS in peace) interviewed creator Virgil Wall back in 2019 – amongst other things, we learn that the original Creeper World was based on a “failure” – and Sin has an enthusiastic piece from 2021 about Creeper World 4, the first 3D instalment.

What does Creeper World IXE bring to the party? Well, 1) it ain’t 3D, and 2) it’s billed as an exercise in “dominating” the titular Creeper, rather than keeping it at bay. For too long has this sloshing, coruscating hooligan been allowed to wash over and corrode our precious starports. We will take the fight to it in the shape of an upgradeable 2D starfleet, equipped with lasers we can use to chisel away the geography and re-rout the flow of villainous Vimto.

Read more

Tic-tac-toe, known to British people as noughts and crosses, is a famously boring game that is nonetheless often played by anybody with a sweet wrapper, a pencil and five minutes to burn while waiting for any form of public transport. It’s boring because it’s a “solved game” whose outcomes can be safely predicted regardless of where you place your first nought or cross, allowing the “perfect” player to at least draw their opponent. It gets played regardless because a lot of people don’t know it’s a solved game – specifically, young children you may wish to humiliate using your superior grown-up brain, because when you were a child somebody did the same to you.

How many twisted adults were born from the experience of being bullied via the medium of tic-tac-toe? We’d be better off without this game. But look! Here comes Tic Tactic to shake things up with a touch of Balatro.

Read more

We don’t know yet if the AI revolution of our reality will go full Skynet or simply end with the robots unceremoniously dumping us like a sad Joaquin Phoenix. But at least video games can help us speculate. Heart Of The Machine is a cyberpunk 4X strategy game that will let players choose how a newly awakened AI sentience might behave once set loose upon a big future city. Developers Arcen Games call it a “turn-based sci-fi 4X RPG”, which is a lot of genres fighting for supremacy in one small phrase. It was announced last year, but today it gets a release date and an updated demo.

Read more

Are there any sights more quintessentially Christmassy than a street lit up by warm and glowing decorations, as seen through a snow-graced windowpane? Why, I could gaze through this wonderful window all day. Let’s just hope no-one decides to smash through it, eh? Why, I’d get bits of glass in my lovely warm milk, which would massively downgrade my biscuit-dunking experience. Wait. What’s that? Oh no!

Read more

As Graham pointed out earlier this year, A Difficult Game About Climbing is a difficult game about climbing. A Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It-inspired limb-flailer, where hoisting yourself up a mountain as a bald man is painfully moreish. Well, let me introduce you to A Difficult Game About Driving, a difficult game about driving. Again, you play as a bald man (called Jeff) who sits in a 4×4 bathtub and must ascend a series of difficult roads. There’s a demo out now and let me tell you, it’s awfully good.

Read more

Every now and then, somebody has the marvellous idea of developing technology that makes video games smell. I have never been more grateful for this recurrent Quixotic daydream’s mass market failure than when watching trailers for Urge, an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss.

“But hold your horses, young Edwin,” you sternly interject. “I do not wish to hear about, let alone play an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss, on a website that children might read. It sounds like a cheap, taboo-jabbing gimmick.” Friend, I once thought as you. But then I did a little research, as is my journalistic responsibility, and it turns out Urge’s notions about piss – bladdergold, as they call it in the West Country, or Crusoe Cola, as it’s known in the States – are rather in-depth. I’m still very glad I can’t smell the game, but I definitely have the urge to play it.

Read more

Anyone with the need for a new CPU and even the slightest inclination towards tech envy is currently waiting for new stock of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the unbeatably powerful new chip that our boffin friends at Digital Foundry are calling the fastest gaming CPU ever. If, however, you’re hoping to switch to the 9800X3D from an older system with DDR4 RAM, you’ll need to upgrade that as well as the motherboard, as the entire Ryzen 9000 series only works with newer DDR5 memory.

Cyber Monday won’t help materialise more processors into retailers’ warehouses, but it can help you make this RAM switch on the cheap. Relatively speaking. And I can recommend a nice, fast 32GB kit of Corsair Vengeance DDR5, which is down by £43 in the UK and $22 in the US.

Read more

Netease’s free to play open world gacha RPG Project Mugen now has a proper name: Ananta. As Edwin points out in the Maw, it is very much like Spider-Man meets Zenless Zone Zero, with its mixture of cityslinging and unabashed anime teens with long, flowy hair and a penchant for metal accessories.

Read more

Have you ever been pretty deep into a Steam Deck session playing a very gra[hically extensive game like God of War: Ragnarok and realised just how quickly the battery gets drained? It’s a familiar and frustrating feeling for many Steam Deck owners. Luckily, there’s a solution!

Read more

Got yet another quality PC storage deal for ya, this time courtesy of Cyber Monday and the Samsung T7 – an almost comically dinky portable SSD that can, nevertheless, stuff itself senseless with file backups and game installations. The 1TB model in particular is going mighty cheap, falling to $88 in the US and £67 in the UK.

Read more