Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Last year Assassin’s Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois made headlines by revealing that Ubisoft’s latest open world game had a “smaller” map than its predecessor, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. He compared it instead to Assassin’s Creed Origins, which recreates roughly 80 square kilometres of ancient Egypt, next to Valhalla’s exhausting 250 square kilometre expanse of land and sea.

That story sparked a couple of thoughts for me. A surge of relief, of course, because life is short and video games are often far too long. And secondly, the realisation that I don’t really know what “bigger” and “smaller” mean in a video game, and I’m not sure anybody else does either.

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I cannot review Psycho Patrol R in any way that matters. I could approach this mech-piloting, bullet-hungry immersive policing sim like any other first-person shooter with RPG elements, and tell you about its levels, storytelling, and gamey features. Or I could evaluate it on its own terms, as a piece of hallucinogenic hypercapitalist critique wrapped in a kevlar jacket of impenetrable irony whose own €39 price tag appears to be part of the joke. Neither approach is going to work. Psycho Patrol R requires a buy-in of brain rot and an almost memetic openness to mania. You’ll need to play it to better misunderstand it.

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Bungie have broken a silence surrounding their upcoming extraction shooter Marathon to tweet a short video full of cryptic symbols. It’s proven hard for fans to decrypt so far, but the developers have since followed up with a few more teasey posts, including one that certainly reads like a notice to fans that more information on the game will be revealed soon. “The signal is coming. The truth is coming,” says a line of plain text in the marketing spritz. “Are you ready?”

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The first big title update for Monster Hunter Wilds is upon us like a large, iridescent squirrel dragon covered in bubbles, and when I say a large, iridescent squirrel dragon covered in bubbles I am, of course, referring to the Mizutsune – a new Wilds monster last seen in Monster Hunter Rise.

It and a new, high rank version of the Zoh Shia are the title update’s headline additions. But it’s not all monster hunting. There’s also a new social area, the Grand Hub, wherein you can hang with your mates, bowl exploding barrels and do some arm-wrestling. With your mates, I assume. The changelog just says “Arm Wrestling Barrel”. I assume you won’t be arm-wrestling a barrel.

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I know we’re all about PC games, but none of you will mind if I reminisce about how good PS2 games were, would you? Good, because they were! And Havenhold, the debut game from the Beijing based Wolfpack Games, looks like it could quite easily be one, even if it has some modern sensibilities in places. You play as a Taichu warrior monk, fighting against other players as you all vye for the top of a special mountain, with the catch being that the game’s world completely resets every 14 days.

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Much like many of you, I suspect, I too would love a Dishonored 3, but I’m not entirely confident it will ever happen. Arkane Austin was obviously shut down last year, and Arkane Lyon are making a Blade game, which leaves little room for a Dishonored sequel. But is there any possibility of one happening all the same? Well, still no, probably, but Arkane Studios founder and Dishonored co-creator Raphaël Colantonio did recently say that he could at the very least see himself working on a follow-up.

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Anyone up for a little shindig? NetEase clearly are, as Marvel Rivals‘ second season is all about the Hellfire Gala, a fun little party gone wrong hosted by Emma Frost. As you’ll no doubt be aware, Emma Frost isn’t in the game currently, making her the first of the new characters to join this season, which kicks off next week, April 11th.

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Alright folks, quiz time: what’s the single best feature in the GTA series? I’ll give you a second. Got your answer done? If you wrote anything but the in-game radio, you’d be dead wrong, obviously it’s listening to boppin’ tunes as you crash into lamp posts for the umpteenth time, there’s nothing else it could be. I love an in-game radio, and as it turns out, Dune: Awakening of all games will include one (didn’t know they had radio on Arrakis).

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Have you ever woken up and thought to yourself “I’d like to be a bear, or perhaps a moose, just for like, a little bit”? Oddly specific thing to think about first thing in the morning, but Striden has you covered at least. It’s a looter shooter, yes, it’s a survival game, sure, it’s a team-based game, why not! Except sometimes, for some reason, you can just turn into different animals to fight your opponents, like a radioactive bear, which I think is very silly, but in a wonderful kind of way. And, as developer 5 Fortress announced today, it’s getting an open beta this weekend so you can see what it’s like for yourself.

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GeForce RTX 4090 might be yesterday’s flagship, but it’s still faster than nearly every GPU on the planet—unless you’ve somehow tracked down an RTX 5090 at MSRP, in which case, congratulations on your black-market wizardry. For everyone else, Alienware currently has the cleanest way to get a 4090 system right now without jumping through flaming eBay hoops.

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