Nose around Helldivers 2‘s Galactic War map and you might notice that there’s a lot of empty space. Around half the celestial sphere is given over to the dominions of the Automatons and Terminids, leaving ample room for another enemy faction to be inserted via free update or paid DLC. What could that next faction be? Surely it can’t be any worse than a horde of giant bugs or a legion of robots. Surely it can’t be, say, a highly advanced elder species of teleporting illusionists equipped with lightning guns and cloaking devices. Oh dear.
Playing Pacific Drive reminds me of an army recruitment advert shown on British TV about 20 years ago. A group of soldiers are travelling along a road at night in a Land Rover, when suddenly they spot the enemy ahead. The front seat passenger starts barking orders at the driver: “Get off the road! Kill the lights! Through the trees!”. You sense the panic as the camera, inside the vehicle, jolts with the suspension on the rough ground, and the driver fights the steering wheel to stay in control. It’s a scene you reenact quite frequently in Ironwood’s survival game with roguelike trimmings. Well, except, instead of a Land Rover you’re behind the wheel of a rusty station wagon, and instead of military opposition, you’re scarpering from paranormal phenomena.
Every year, there are a couple of game soundtracks I become properly obsessed with. In 2022, I more or less had the music of Tunic and Citizen Sleeper on repeat whenever I left the house. In 2021, it was Chicory. In 2020, it was Coffee Talk and Signs Of The Sojourner, and in 2019, it was all Mutazione, all the time. 2023 was a pretty great year for game music as well, as we not only got Alan Wake 2’s exquisite musical set-piece that’s honestly just been gettingbetterandmoreinsane as time’s gone on, frankly, but also the toe-tappingly brilliant soundtrack of Cobalt Core, which has somehow risen even higher on my forever playlist after revisiting it for this month’s RPS Game Club.
Composed by Aaron Cherof, Cobalt Core’s music alternates between high-energy battle tracks and calmer, more relaxed ambience. It’s so dang good, and an absolutely perfect backdrop for sliding in and out of oncoming missile fire in its roguelike spaceship fights. So come along and jam to some of its best tracks with me below as I pick out some of my musical highlights.
A colossal new update for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader launched last night, hitting the grimdark space-aristocrat RPG with so many changes that the patch notes are almost 17,000 words long. Fitting for a game that our Rogue Trader review called “engrossing, obscure and absolutely exhausting”. It adds loads of new voiced lines, fixes everything from wonky abilities to broken quests, reworks balance, improves performance, and so much more. Enough is changed that developers Owlcat are giving everyone in your party a free respec to adjust to what the game has become.
Xenonauts 2 received its biggest update yet last night, adding a bunch of new things to the early access X-COM-like that will be sure to please your rude Chief Science Officer Gaius Baltar James Callis whatever his name is SMUG FACE. Alongside a brand-new Cruiser UFO to pilfer for new technology to help fight back against your alien invaders, the Milestone 3 update also brings new story missions, weapons and vehicles, extending the campaign’s play time from 180 in-game days all the way up to 260.
It’s been eight years since Street Fighter V hit PC. As you might recall, the fighting game landed with the poise of someone shattering both kneecaps on impact, as complaints about a small roster of characters and barebones story mode – to be filled in later with DLC – were made more egregious by a number of technical issues, including bugs and online issues caused by its wobbly servers.
Despite plenty of rumours, we still don’t know when Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree will arrive – it could be later this month, this year or maybe beyond even that. While we’re waiting on the official expansion, though, modders have beaten FromSoftware to offering a substantial new experience to those who’ve cleared every corner of the Lands Between.
New arcade shoot ’em up Nidus first caught my eye with its psychedelic bug blast on Screenshot Saturday Monday. Three months later, it has now launched, and for a mere £6 we can all fill our eyes with so many colourful insects. You’d have to pay at least £57 for that sort of fun down the pet shop.
There’s a particular boss encounter in Balatro that always feels like it’s cheating a bit. In this mesmerising poker roguelike, each stage is made up of three blinds – small, big and boss – with the blind essentially being a high score you have to hit by playing different kinds of poker hands – your traditional flushes, straights, pairs and so on. Each hand has its own number of chips and multiplier bonuses associated with it, and Balatro’s whole deal is about shuffling closer to victory by making the most of the cards you’re dealt. While some blinds are tiny, stretching to just 300 or 450 early on in a run, they quickly start ramping up into the tens of thousands as each successfully defeated boss blind ups the ante and the accompanying stakes. Reach an ante of eight, and bingo, you’ve won a run of Balatro.
The boss blind I keep coming a cropper with, though, is The Flint. This sucker not only halves a hand’s chip score, but it also cuts its multiplier in two as well, and I’ve yet to figure out exactly how to defeat it. Sometimes it appears with a blind of just 600, but other times it’s been an enormous 22,000. In fairness, all bosses have little tricks like this. Some will debuff certain card suites, making them useless in your overall score count. Others may only let you play one hand type the entire match, while the cheeky Tooth will deduct you $1 for every card used. But Balatro isn’t simply about beating the odds with smart and intelligent card plays. It’s about bending, twisting and abusing those odds to your will – also through smart and intelligent card plays. Cheating isn’t just encouraged in Balatro. It’s damn near mandatory, and it’s all thanks to the brilliantly conceived joker cards that give the game its Latin-based name.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by handcrafted art, intense fighting game violence, cosy management, and heaps more attractive and interesting indie games. Check these out!
