Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launches on Steam and the Microsoft Store today. Developed once again by Asobo – otherwise celebrated for their stinking rat hordes – it builds upon the 2020 game by “[taking] advantage of the latest technologies in simulation, cloud, machine learning, graphics and gaming”, in the words of the launch announcement release

We’ve got a review in the works, but code has landed late, so our write-up might take a while. In the shorter term, I thought you might like to know how, exactly, MFS 2024 makes use of “machine learning” technologies, taking into account the energy cost of such wacky gadgetry and the creeping relationship between increased reliance on automated tools and laying people off. More immediately, you might like to know how much of your internet package it’ll devour as you play.

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A long while ago I wrote about Vampire Survivors-likes needing to stop overwhelming you with visual clutter. I’ve since played a few games of a similar ilk that don’t hammer you with a chaos that’s impossible to dissect with your eyeballs. One of these is Bloodshed, an old school FPS take on the VS formula that actually works pretty well and did have me thinking the treacherous phrase “just one more run”.

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I am a very casual enjoyer of Metal Slug games. I’ve never actually paid for one of these side-scrolling shoot ’em ups, except for all the countless coins I happily pumped into arcade machines as a child. To this day, if I see a rare glittering cabinet running one of these crunchy shmups, I will go ham for twenty or thirty minutes, and walk away satisfied that I have seen a lot of very good pixels. These games, I am convinced, were never really designed to be completed, but to be played exactly like this, as a coin-gobbling invitation to become a bandana-wearing sisyphus, a tiny Rambo pushing a bouncy, juddering tank up a hill occupied by cartoon nazis. You die a bunch and say: “ah, that was good.”

So what happens when you rearrange the molecules of this run and/or gun ’em up into an isometric turn-based strategy game? You get Metal Slug Tactics, an off-kilter nod to Into The Breach and other grid-based turn-takers, but secretly housing the aggressive notions of an unhinged pyromaniac. You still die a lot. And you still walk away feeling fairly happy about it.

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Good morning, how about a nice big bowl of your favourite breakfast cereal: Corporate Consolidation? Sony are in talks to buy Kadokawa, the parent company of Elden Ring developer From Software. Sony is eyeing up the company as a hefty snack because they want the various manga and anime owned by Kadokawa, according to a report by Reuters. But also because they want all the tasty games owned by them too, such as the Danganronpa series, the Octopath Traveler games, and the biggest corn flake of them all, the Dark Souls series.

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It takes a special kind of entitled bellyacher to complain that you wanted a different game from a game that hasn’t even been announced yet, and which may simply be an internet rumour. It’s like the “glass half empty” mindset, but the bartender hasn’t even taken your order and this might not even be a bar. Odds are you’ve wandered into the local antique shop. Well I, friends, am that bellyacher. Here I stand at the “bar”, gesticulating wildly over my non-existent glass.

In this scenario, the confused bartender/antique shop owner is Turtle Rock, developers of Left 4 Dead homage Back 4 Blood. Rumour has it that they’re making a Back 4 Blood 2 – but as I loudly explain to the bartender/antique shop owner, showering the cocktail measures/vintage Toby Jugs in spittle, I don’t want a Back 4 Blood 2. I want a follow-up to 2015’s Evolve, in which four hunters team up to track down a fifth person playing as a kaiju. “A flagon of your finest Gorgon, please,” I roar, thumping the bar, while Turtle Rock tries to sell me a gentleman’s travelling suitcase from the 1920s.

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I’m still bumbling, tumbling and blundering through the cavernous labyrinths of first-person spelunking sim Lorn’s Lure, in which you are an android exploring a series of enormous machines and sunken artificial habitats. I hope one day to level up from “bumbling, tumbling and blundering” to “running and jumping”. Perhaps I’ll even get as far as “speedrunning”. But in the likely event that I plateau at “blundering”, it’s a relief to know that developer Rubeki Games has updated the game with an Explore Mode that makes certain sections dramatically easier.

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I’ve been trying to work out if I’m keen on Soulframe only because I feel guilty about missing the boat with Warframe. I reviewed Digital Extremes’ hit free-to-play shooter in 2013, back when people were still calling it a spiritual successor to the developer’s boomerang-throwing action game Dark Sector. I didn’t like Warframe much at the time. Think I gave it a 6/10. Warp forward a decade, and that 6/10 game has become a thriving live service phenomenon – fifteenth on the Steam Most Played charts at the time of writing, and profitable enough to spawn its own annual TennoCon expo. It’s also become an intoxicating, confusing morass of dynastic sci-fantasy politicking and genre-shifting expansions, ranging from capital ship mechanics to questions of time travel, wrapped in layers of cosmetics that make Destiny look about as colourful as Gears Of War.

I definitely didn’t see all that coming. I doubt Digital Extremes saw it coming either. Warframe today feels like a lab experiment run amok. I love its appetite for novelty, but there’s a lot for a returning player to catch up on and, frankly, it feels like homework. As such, I had a couple of broad motivations for playing Soulframe’s pre-alpha “prelude”: I’m keen to see what Digital Extremes can do when they aren’t encumbered by 10 years of world-building, and I want to get in on the ground floor before they absolutely swamp this thing in updates.

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Train, one of Counter-Strike’s oldest and bestest maps, has received a sweeping update. Valve’s given the fairly nondescript trainyard a “full visual overhaul” in Counter-Strike 2, making it “60% cloudier” and changing its layout to encourage more tactical play besides just whipping out the AWP and looking down long, narrow corridors.

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Joining the rare but always brilliant category of “games that sound like someone scratched the high concept into their arm at pub closing time with the sharp corner of a Frazzles packet” is Assassinvisible – a stealth game about an invisible assassin that’s so invisible the player doesn’t know where they are. True, games like Invisigun have experimented with this interesting concept before, but in Assassinvisible it’s framed by another – the whole game exists as doodles in a bored student’s notebook. Here’s the Tres-tray:

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! This week, it’s Game Maker’s Toolkit and Mind Over Magnet mechanics knower, explainer, and designer, Mark Brown! Cheers Mark! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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