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Frontier Developments are doubling down on their success in management sim games, following weak sales for recent Warhammer RTS Realms of Ruin and a lack of success in attempting to break into other genres.
The core premise of manga-turned-anime series Attack on Titan has always been fantastic: humans armed with swords and equipped with mechanical grapple guns that basically turn them into Spider-Man take on enormous naked giants who are trying to eat them. With the series’ action built around the incredible manoeuvrability and momentum of the Omni-Directional Mobility gear, the genuine unnerving threat of the titans, and the relatively fragility of its human heroes, it’s just primed to be mined for video game inspiration.
Marvel Snap developers Second Dinner have reassured players of the digital card game that it will continue to “operate and flourish in the future”, in the wake of reports that publishers Nuverse are set to step away from the mainstream games space.
Extra-large news for aspiring ultrawide enjoyers: the Lenovo Legion R45w-30, a titantic 45in, 31:9 gaming monitor, is £100 off in the Cyber Monday sales. With its 5120×1440 resolution, overclocked 170Hz refresh rate, and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro support, that’s £699 for specs that can very easily set you back over a grand. And, unlike buying the combined labours and livelihoods of the entire RPS team, there’s no months-long bidding process for this curved screen – you can just order it off Currys.
I know this doesn’t have the clickity-clack, heavyweight mechanical-ness of the gaming keyboards I’d normally be highlighting this time of year, but the Logitech K400 Plus looks like it could be a sweet little Cyber Monday deal. Amazon UK has it down from £45 to £24, a tasty 47% saving.
Fewer games than I’d like have captured that feeling of everything getting really out of hand. Not just getting harder, but putting you in a situation that’s truly deteriorating all around you.
Last Train Home has an intriguing premise: taking the Czechoslovak Legion home from the Eastern front via an armoured train directly through the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Its unusual mixture of survival sim, RPG, tactical skirmishes, and narrative history holds together, I think, precisely because your efforts to make it all work provide such a contrast to what an incredible mess the world around you is becoming.
In another lifetime, SteamWorld Dig could have easily ended up as SteamWorld Build. When Image & Form first released their 2D digging platformer back in the depths of 2013, its moreish loop of carving out rocky chasms, finding gems and treasure, then upgrading your pickaxe and burgeoning township back on the surface was instantly captivating, and its 2017 sequel continues to be one of my favourite platformers of all time. Now, a decade later, SteamWorld Build has reimagined Dig’s core ideas as a handsome citybuilder, placing equal focus on managing your rustbucket town up top, while plundering its depths via an abandoned mineshaft to find treasure, resources and (most importantly) rocket parts, so you can escape your crumbling planet and find a new homestead up in the stars.
Despite the threat of annihilation hanging over the horizon, however, SteamWorld Build is one of the most relaxed and easy-going building games I’ve ever played. This is a game that’s more concerned with keeping your economy running like a well-oiled, uhh, machine than turning a profit, for example, and it merely dips its toe in the genre’s wider, ongoing obsession with building up defences to fend off oncoming hordes of malicious town hall-eating nasties. If the scales do get thrown out of equilibrium, the worst that will happen is you get lots of angry little red robot faces appearing above your houses. You won’t go bankrupt, you won’t get turfed out for being incompetent, and you definitely won’t see any kind of game over screen if the aforementioned nasties end up running amok in your mining levels. The stakes, then, are quite low, which is probably a good indication of whether you’ll get on with SteamWorld Build, and how much you’ll get out of it.
Good news, fans of dire implications! Daniel Mullins, developer of RPS bestest best horror comedy Inscryption and the equally acclaimed/diabolical Pony Island, appears to be making something new.
Almost all of Cyber Monday’s best gaming monitor deals were also up for grabs on Black Friday – so if you spent all of the latter away from your desk, or on holiday, or locked up in someone’s car boot, good news! You can still upgrade your screen to one of these RPS-approved gaming displays for less. A lot less, especially where ultrawide and 4K monitors are concerned.
