Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve only just read Sin’s thoughts on Akuma Kira’s Lunacid and lo and behold, the PS1-styled, first-person dungeon crawler has now released out of Steam Early Access, to considerable rejoicing. Lunacid is a homage to classic FromSoftware games – no, not that juvenile upstart Dark Souls, but King’s Field and Shadow’s Tower, which date back to the late 1990s.

I played one of the King’s Field games as a sprog and found it to be an extended cave system full of lava, demons and torment. Lunacid sort of applies the perspective and medieval fantasy combat of that series to a story reminiscent of Demon’s Souls – the From-alike that spurred the Japanese studio to international fame – with a world that has been flooded with toxic mist by a “sleeping old one below”. Your job, as some unfortunate outcast chucked into a pit, is to journey downward and confront this mysterious creature, using any and all combinations of rapiers, clubs and fireballs. Off you go then.

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Fresh from the release of Alan Wake 2 – and apparently with a view to driving me nuts, because I haven’t had a chance to play Alan Wake 2 yet – Remedy have shared some titbits about future projects. These include the modestly-known about Control 2, a sequel to the paranormal Brutalist telekinet ’em up that is seeing “good progress”, and the forthcoming remakes of Max Payne 1 and 2, on which Remedy are collaborating with GTA and Max Payne 3 developer Rockstar.

Further afield, there’s the mysterious Condor project, a co-op multiplayer Control spin-off (pictured above) that builds on Remedy’s experience crafting the single-player component for wayward service-based shooter CrossfireX. And at the very edge of sight, there’s the faint outline of something called Codename Vanguard, about which naff-all is known. Could it be that “crazy, huge budget, dark gothic fantasy” Remedy’s creative director Sam Lake would like one day to make?

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You know what’s pretty great? Good video games. You know what makes good video games even better? Not having to pay a penny for them. Well, I come bearing great news for lovers of good video games you can play without paying a penny: Planet S is totally free and by all accounts pretty darn good.

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Fans of Counter-Strike: GO’s Gun Game successor Arms Race rejoice: you will be able to play the popular mode in Counter-Strike 2. Eventually, that is. Valve have promised that more modes, weapons and features are headed to Global Offensive’s full-bore sequel, but they might take a little while to arrive as they respond to what players are asking for.

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Corsair’s 4000D, 5000D and 7000D cases are all brilliant options with plenty of airflow, nice tempered glass side panels and a ton of nice design and usability tweaks. Normally the mid-size 4000D Airflow costs $105, but today it’s down to $80 at Amazon – a great price for a case that’s easy to build in and provides excellent thermal results.

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Crytek have no plans to make a sequel to sweaty monster-culling FPS Hunt: Showdown, and will thus hopefully avoid the publicity problems currently faced by Activision-Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 and Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 – both presented as sequels with fancier technology, but in practice, more like service-game content seasons arbitrarily upgraded into replacements, with the ‘previous’ games, Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, being taken offline to avoid splitting the playerbase.

Speaking to me in an interview about Hunt’s evolution since its launch out of early access in 2019, the game’s general manager David Fifield observed that while Crytek may yet make another Hunt game it won’t be a straight Showdown follow-up – and it certainly won’t come at the expense of your ability to play the original game.

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Back in June, when our Ed got a 30-minute hands-off glimpse of Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, he had suspicions that Ubisoft’s next big open world-athon was hiding some dark, terrible secret beneath the surface. It was almost too good, and too lovely-looking to be completely true, he proposed, and the brief tour of this rather enormous-looking game wasn’t quite long enough to really dig beneath the surface to see if Ubisoft’s lofty promises would hold up to closer scrutiny.

Now, just over a month from release, I’ve finally been able to put it under a proper microscope, playing two hours of the thing from around the 25% mark of its campaign. And it really is as visually impressive as Ed suggested all those months ago. At long last, this is a game that looks and feels like an actual “next-gen” blockbuster (or as much as a game can, at least, when we’re already several years into the current generation cycle). But Ed was also right to feel a wee bit suspicious of Frontiers Of Pandora. Perhaps not in the way he expected, but enough that I heard the same thing being muttered over and over again by almost everyone at the end of my preview session at Ubisoft’s UK offices: “I can’t work out where the heck I’m meant to be going, or what I’m supposed to do.”

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As the end of October approaches, it’s time to gather in the RPS Game Club space port to talk about this month’s game pick: Starfield! We’ll be assembling in our traditional liveblog format on Friday November 3rd at 4pm GMT (9am PT/12pm ET) to chat about our intergalactic adventures, catalogue all the grey rocks we’ve landed on, and generally have an earnest (and hopefully fun!) chinwag about Bethesda’s latest. So come along with your favourite biscuits and beverages as we discuss all things Starfield.

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An Itch.io game bundle launched to fund medical services and support for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Lebanon has raised $200,000 in five days. Organised by Esther Wallace of Oak Grove Games, and due to run till 9th November 2023, the Games for Gaza bundle includes 256 videogames, physical games, assets, soundtracks and books from 140 designers for $10, with all proceeds going to the UK-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

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Apologies to the chief, but there’s a not-entirely-accurate bit in Katharine’s post announcing Starfield as October’s RPS Game Club game. I, of the RPS Treehouse, do truly love Starfield, and have only been quiet about it because admitting you enjoy The Grey Bethesda Game but couldn’t get into Baldur’s Gate 3 or Elden Ring feels a bit like going to the Savoy Grill and only ordering chips. No one will ask you to leave, but they’ll probably start questioning your judgement.

But dammit, I like chips, and I like Starfield! I like its roving space captain fantasy, I like its utilitarian aesthetic, and I like how its click-clacking guns sound like extremely violent mechanical keyboards. Especially if I get to fire them at floating pirates, while I’m also floating, and said firing punts me upwards into a ceiling.

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