Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When I see a game that seems to be chasing the coattails of another, it’s hit or miss whether I’ll be put off or captaining the ship. Here we have Population Zero that, when you watch the trailer down below, you’ll immediately get the No Man’s Sky environment design vibes mixed with the base-building and wildcard PvP of ARK. Seemed like a heavy miss for me, honestly. I dug in anyhow and found that apparently when Population Zero’s early access begins in May it will actually reset (to a degree) every week. I don’t know if I’m ready to stand by that as a good idea, but it’s certainly a brave one.

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Sony and Facebook have cancelled their appearances at the Game Developers Conference this year, both citing concerns about the new coronavirus. The yearly conference for game industry workers is typically a source of new information each year, with presentations about the development of influential games and interviews with studio members. Both Sony and Facebook are stepping back this year based on concerns for the health and safety of their workers.

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First announced back in 2018, Othercide is back with a new trailer today. The mostly grey tactical RPG is full of horrific creatures with plague masks and spindly limbs mixed with splashes of red. Gives me somewhat Bloodborne vibes  seeing those long hunter cloaks and broads fighting monsters in red pumps and scarves. Or maybe it was the organ playing in the trailer wot did it. Anyway, it’s got grimdark vibes—the trailer bangs on things like “suffering” and severed hearts—and is coming this summer.

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Bungie still haven’t even revealed the name of the new Destiny 2 season starting in three weeks, let alone what’s new in it, but they are opening up about what it’ll do to the old meta. On top of the sword changes discussed a few weeks ago, they have big plans for weapons including sniper rifles, long-range fusion rifles, and the exotics Lord Of Wolves, Izanagi’s Burden, and The Last Word. I’ll be sorry to stow some current favourites in my vault but I am theoretically glad for the freshness of a new meta for a new season.

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This week’s free games on the Epic Store will have you murdering unsuspecting Englishmen and playing cards against your friends on a magical hex board. That’s right, it’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Faeria! I’ll let you figure out which description goes with which game.

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Ever since Minecraft got us hooked on surviving its deadly nights and sinister, snickering foes over a decade ago, there have been wave upon wave of new survival games to scratch our deepest masochistic itches. Attempting to tackle them all at once, however, would probably lead to an early grave, so we’ve put together this list of the very best survival games on PC to help satisfy those cravings for Darwinian supremacy. Whether you love punching trees, surviving against the elements or simply stuffing your belly with as much grub as you can manage, there’s a survival game with your name on it.

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There’s big news in the draw pile for Hearthstone, apparently. The collectible card game’s three-a-year expansion cycle tends to run from April to April, and if last year’s timings are anything to go by, we can expect a reveal of the next year’s theme, plus an idea of upcoming content, in the next week or so. What’s making this a bigger deal than usual is the small army of streamers and the like Blizzard called to their big castle in Stormwind this week, for a “community summit” that left some big names – and some other chumps – tweeting serious hype. A certain amount of “this will blow your mind” is to expected from such events, but it certainly seems more intense than usual this time around.

Hearthstone’s Year Of The Dragon, currently coming to a close, was pretty good. Blizzard pulled off their plan to link together three updates in a narrative sequence, and in the process knocked out not just three card sets that dragged the meta away from the polarised monotony it had been stuck in, but three single player expansions that had a lot of sticking power (even if they still weren’t as good as the Kobolds & Catacombs dungeon run). There was a real sense – particularly by the time Descent of Dragons, the third expansion, dropped in December last year – that Blizzard’s Team 5 had really turned the game up to eleven for the Year Of The Dragon, from the power level of the cards, right through to the weird, Warcraft-but-it’s-a-Saturday-morning-cartoon vibe of the game’s lore. So where is there to go from here? Here are my predictions:

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CD Projekt say The Witcher 3 has now sold enough on Steam to qualify for the biggest sales cut available on Valve’s platform. Hitting $50 million (£38m) means Valve will only take 20% – which is still more than Epic take from all and any sales from any game. Congratulations to The Witcher for reaching that 80% cut, but it is wild that even a game this big has taken so long to score Steam’s best deal.

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This week, Sea Of Thieves introduced some very angry treasure chests – appropriately named Chests Of Rage. These chests are pretty needy, if you don’t pay attention to them they blow up, engulfing everything around them in fire, and letting out a hearty scream as they do so. As it turns out, that scream is the voice of none-other than the game’s award-winning composer, Robin Beanland, and he’s treated us Sea Of Thieves fans to a lovely video of one of his recording sessions.

It’s literally just a recording of a dude yelling his head off.

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The greasy realm of the videogame is not always the best place to look for good writing. For every Disco Elysium there are roughly 800 Detroit: Beyond Humans. But it is a good place to look for wondrous, over-the-top nonsense. I’m talking about character dialogue so flamboyant and exaggerated, you could insert some line breaks and it would instantly become a verse in a glam rock anthem. Here are the 12 most extravagant, exuberant, and intense lines of dialogue. In games, subtext is just whatever’s written on the side of the nuclear submarine.

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