Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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Thank the gods, Total War: Pharaoh will have a dedicated tutorial campaign

“Usually, when a player is going through a strategy game, they figure out how things work by trial and error,” Total War: Pharaoh‘s game director Todor Nikolov tells me at this year’s Gamescom. “And once they do, they feel the urge to start a brand-new campaign because they’ve already figured out that portion of the gameplay.”

Sitting across the table, these words ring frighteningly true for me. Unbeknownst to Nikolov, he has just described the exact experience I had playing the 50-turn campaign preview for Pharaoh a week earlier to an absolute tee. Unlike the far more knowledgeable brain of frequent RPS contributor Nic Reuben, I am a complete babe in arms when it comes to the Total War juggernaut machine, and it took me attempting to play two other games in the series (Three Kingdoms and Troy) and several restarts in Pharaoh itself before I felt just about confident that I (very vaguely) knew what I was doing. At the time, I thought, ‘Man alive, how is Total War still so rubbish at teaching players how it works?’ But when I speak to Nikolov a week later, he has some very welcome news for me: there’s going to be a dedicated tutorial campaign where players can (hopefully) find their feet. Music to my ears.

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Mythforce review: Saturday morning skeletons and familiar roguelike comforts

The opening theme of Mythforce is a wonderfully observed 1980s positivity ballad in the style of Jayce and The Wheeled Warriors. This song believes in you, aggressively so. “MythForce! MythForce! Everyday people become heroes! / MythForce! MythForce! You and me, we can defeat evil!” The roguelike dungeon dallying that follows doesn’t take that “you can do it!” Saturday morning cartoon flavour to its comedic conclusion in the same way an Adult Swim animation might, or a Devolver game would. Instead the real focus seems to be function over flavour, resulting in a skeleton-battering jaunt that is competent and comfortable, yet never fully embracing the silliness promised by the sick guitar riffs of the theme.

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Assassin’s Creed Mirage harks back to Ezio’s glory days, for better and worse

I don’t know about you, but after spending 100+ hours in both Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I’m well up for an AC game that reins its open world in a bit and goes back to the sort-of single city stab-athon the series used to be. The ones where stealth actually mattered, and you felt like a proper assassin working from the shadows. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is all this to a tee – as Ubisoft have taken great pains to remind us over the last year as they gear up to celebrate the series’ 15th anniversary.

And after spending three hours playing some of its early mission sequences, I can confirm this is very much a game whose sole purpose is to scratch that nostalgic itch good and proper (before we inevitably hurl ourselves into the still very ambiguous void of whatever the heck Assassin’s Creed Infinity is). If, however, you don’t have much fondness for those older games, and prefer the more action-oriented RPG-ing of recent Creeds, Mirage is probably going to feel like a step backward from all the things you know and like – and you may be better off waiting until the next big open world entry set in feudal Japan pitches up instead.

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Dell’s entry-level 1440p 165Hz Fast IPS monitor is down to £209 after a £90 discount

Earlier this week we saw a great £209 price on a 1440p 165Hz monitor from lesser-known brand X=, and now there’s another deal with similar specs from Dell at the very same price. The Dell G2724D is a well-reviewed 27-inch monitor that sports a better Fast IPS screen, a DisplayHDR 400 certification, FreeSync/G-Sync compatibility and even works with consoles at 1440p 120Hz. What’s not to like?

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This RTX 4060 Lenovo Legion gaming laptop is down to £1150 with this discount code

Lenovo’s Legion laptop line looks lovely, and today the Legion 5 Slim gaming laptop with an RTX 4060 graphics card and Ryzen 7 7840HS processor has been discounted from £1500 to £1150 with code MEGADEAL111. That’s one of the best prices we’ve seen for this spec – if not the outright best; that’s reserved for Black Friday – and well worth considering if you’re in the market for a high-end gaming laptop.

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Screenshot Saturday Mondays: Grappling lines and grappling tongues

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 cool fog, several grappling lines, and honestly just a great moody first-person animation for sitting down in an immersive sim. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!

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The art of the pause

Hitting pause in a video game is like dropping a wall across it. On one side of the wall lies what is called the diegetic space of the game, aka the fictitious world, which is generally the aspect that receives the most interest, the aspect that tends to attract the weasel word “immersive”. On the other side of the wall lie menus, settings and other features that form a non-diegetic layer of bald operator functions – technical conveniences and lists of things to tweak or customise, from graphics modes to character inventory, that are cut adrift in a vacuum outside of time.

In theory, the pause screen and its contents are not truly part of the game. There is no temporality, no sense of place, no threat, no possibility of play, no character or narrative, no save the princess, no press X to Jason or pay respects, no gather your party before travelling forth. As the scholar Madison Schmalzer points out in the paper I’m wonkily paraphrasing here, “the language of the menu itself emphasizes the menu’s position as outside of gameplay by labeling the option to continue as ‘resume game.’ The game world is always privileged as the site that gameplay happens.”

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