Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Two years ago, developers Fntastic debuted their “open world survival MMO” The Day Before with a fairly lengthy trailer (which has since been scrubbed from their official YouTube channel, but it’s been preserved by IGN and Gamespot). It shows a couple of players scavenging a post-pandemic American city slick with detailed lighting effects and reactive zombie hordes. There’s crafting, cracked glass, and even a horror tease as a player peers around a corridor with a torch. It was an MMO that promised a mixture of The Last Of Us and The Division, and it quickly became the most wishlisted game on Steam.

Now, days after releasing into early access, developers Fntastic have shut down and you can’t purchase the game anymore. Does it come as a surprise? Not really, considering the final product wasn’t what they promised – not even close. Instead of an MMO, it was barely an extraction shooter. Consider my words below a record of a rancid time had across its short-lived early access release, then. A time when I would’ve rather handed a stinging nettle £40 to line my socks than spend another minute in this empty husk.

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Of course I was going to insert myself into the recent Tribes 3: Rivals alpha playtest – as a Tribes: Ascend player who’s mourned its demise for years, the reveal of a new, heavily Ascend-inspired ski-shooter was like seeing a long deceased pet rabbit miraculously come back to life. Cured, judging from Rivals’ more palatable monetisation plans, of the myxomatosis that killed it in the first place.

From what I played, Tribes 3 can definitely bring back happy memories of zipping around, nicking flags and copping Spinfuser blasts, and the finished article may well have the chops to create some new ones. At the same time, the playtest build was conspicuously short on much of what makes Tribes really feel like Tribes.

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You’ll need to limber up and do some warm-up stretches before attempting to open today’s door on the RPS Advent Calendar, otherwise you’ll risk getting an instant KO from the burly brawlers waiting inside.

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The party poppers are out, the finger food is ready and waiting to be served, and the guest list for Doom‘s 30th birthday party is well and truly set. Well, it would be if Doomguy ever lowered the drawbridge to his flying space castle high above the Earth’s orbit. I did try and get a radio signal out earlier, but the grumpy sod never responded. Probably too busy organising his trophy case in his man cave, to be honest. But let’s face it. Doomguy wouldn’t be much fun at a birthday party anyway. He’d be too busy ripping and tearing into his presents to give anyone the time of day, let alone a polite thank you, and then he’d be working on ripping and tearing apart said presents in a display of strength and machismo.

So Doom’s hellspawn have got together to throw their own party for the occasion, and let me tell you, they’re having a riotous good time all by themselves. Well, most of them are, anyway, as there are some demons here that wouldn’t know how to have fun even if was seared across their skulls with the beam of a BFG9000. Here’s every classic Doom enemy ranked on a scale of the most miserable wallflowers to the life and (undead) soul of the party.

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New Blood Interactive have released a free HD DLC remaster for their reputation-making retro FPS Dusk, almost five years to the day since the original shooter launched on Steam. Honestly, the idea of remastering an alt-history “199X”-style homage to Half-Life and Doom does a number on my sense of time – which multiversal branch are we in now? Still, those gibbable demon Klansters certainly look swish. Find a comparison trailer below:

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Doom co-creator John Romero has marked the seminal FPS’ 30th anniversary by releasing his second unofficial campaign for the hell-shooter. Sigil 2 follows on from Romero’s previous expansion for the Doom engine – released in 2019 for its quarter-century celebrations – by adding nine new levels that you can go and grab for free right now.

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Less than a week after The Day Before’s disastrous launch on PC, following multiple delays and becoming the most wishlisted game on Steam, the makers of the zombie-survival shooter have announced their closure.

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It’s been a good few months since Final Fantasy 16 was properly confirmed as coming to PC. While we’re yet to get a release date, development of FF16 on PC clearly continues apace, as the game’s producer has teased a few more details – including the fact you’ll need an SSD to play.

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Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden is a game of twos. It has two protagonists and two broad ways of playing, leading to two broad narrative outcomes, and is created by a company who, as Don’t Nod’s lead narrative designer Elise Galmard explained to me at a preview event last month, feel like they make games for two different audiences – fans of noodly narrative intrigues on the one hand, and of fantasy combat games on the other. Among the game’s challenges, of course, is to blend these halves convincingly.

A spiritual (hah) follow-up of sorts to 2018’s fairly well-received Vampyr, it takes place in the alt-historical realm of New Eden, which is kind of 17th century colonial North America through the lens of Dragon Age: Inquisition with a pinch of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. The titular Banishers are a ghost-hunting couple, the Scotsman Red MacRaith and the Cuban Antea Duarte. Antea is killed at the very beginning of the game, during a battle with an especially noxious spook, but she soon returns as a spirit, and your overall story objective is to either resurrect her body or help her “Ascend” to the afterlife.

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In just over a month’s time, the entire mainline Ace Attorney series will finally be playable on PC with the arrival of the Apollo Justice Trilogy. Launching on January 25th 2024, this collection bundles together the fourth, fifth and sixth games in Capcom’s excellent lawyer ’em up – Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies and Spirit Of Justice – which originally launched on the Nintendo DS and 3DS across a ten year period between 2007 and 2016. It’s been funny revisiting the earlier cases of these games after so much time has passed. Apollo’s name may be the one on the box, but the series’ original cover star Phoenix Wright is never far from the front lines – not only does he get tangled up on the wrong side of the law in Apollo’s own debut outing, but he’s back as a full-time defence attorney on the (w)right side of the legal bench in the other two.

At the time, poor old Apollo always felt like he got the short end of the stick as Capcom tried to figure out what to do with the series, and to some extent, he still does – for he never quite gets out from under Phoenix’s shadow to completely hold court on his own two feet. But now, after 2021’s excellent Great Ace Attorney Chronicles proved that neither time, setting or its lead defence need to be set in stone for the series to carry on, the pressure does feel ever so slightly less intense on a second visit. There’s no denying Apollo still has a bit of an uphill climb on his hands, but if, like me, you’ve been waiting for these games to be freed from their Nintendo-bound prison, this is arguably the best glow-up Capcom’s done to the series to date.

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