Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Glance at a Fort Solis screenshot and you might summarise it as “Dead Space if it were set in a moodier corner of Ridley Scott flick The Martian”. The correct bundle of analogies is actually “Tacoma if it was made by Supermassive Games or Quantic Dream – and also, if it were set in a moodier corner of Ridley Scott flick The Martian”. If you’re unfamiliar with all of those things, here’s the translation: this is a creepy but seldom scary mystery-horror game about a couple of engineers exploring an abandoned spacebase full of quick-time events (aka, “push the button before the prompt vanishes”) and audio/video diaries from the Project X Proceeds Apace School of Ominous Backstory.

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Countless rivals have stepped up to challenge Vampire Survivors in the bullet heaven roguelite arena – Vtuber cats, Nic Cage’s Renfield, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor – but the recently-released Whisker Squadron: Survivor is probably the most unexpected challenger yet. That’s because it’s brave enough to ask the mind-expanding question: what if Star Fox was a Vampire Survivors-like?

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As with Half-Life 2 RTX, Nvidia have taken to Gamescom to make a heap of DLSS announcements. Chief among these is an upcoming new version, DLSS 3.5, which will add to DLSS 3’s existing toolkit of upscaling and AI frame generation with a new trick named Ray Reconstruction. And it sounds pretty clever, if currently limited in application.

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In an attempt to appease the UK’s Competition And Markets Authority (CMA), Microsoft have restructured their proposed Activision Blizzard buyout. Should the deal finally close, cloud streaming rights to existing and future Activision Blizzard games released over the next 15 years will (surprisingly) fall under Ubisoft’s control. Those rights will then stay with Ubisoft “in perpetuity.”

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As someone whose auto-battler experience has, up until now, only been limited to minor forays into the excellent Alice0-recommended Super Auto Pets, sitting down to play a run of Tales & Tactics was somewhat overwhelming. Recently launched into early access and made by the same team behind Slay The Spire’s popular Downfall mod, this is a fantasy autobattler cloaked in the skin of a roguelike. That means that in addition to creating an army of tabletop-esque miniatures to do your automatic bidding on a grid-based board, you’ll also be picking from randomly generated opponents on a lightly branching story map as you sword chop your way to your ultimate goal: The Grand Tournament.

It’s an intriguing combo, but as a relative newcomer to the auto-battling genre, there’s maybe a bit too much going on here for its own good. That’s not to say I haven’t had a good time with it so far, but there are so many things to juggle in my brain that I feel like I’m fumbling my way through it by chance rather than making confident and informed tactical choices.

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Immortals of Aveum is making me wonder whether there’s some kind of gigantic hidden market for floaty magic shooters with overcooked YA dialogue and exceedingly high PC hardware demands. After this and Forspoken releasing within a few months of each other, I’m half expecting Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to open with Captain Price shooting GPU-smelting laser beams out of his ‘tache.

Indeed, this first person sorcery adventure will be hell on your hardware, even if you’ve tooled up with a high-grade graphics card and CPU. This is somewhat more understandable than with the other low-performing PC games we’ve seen this year, as Immortals of Aveum is one of the first Unreal Engine 5.1 games, and makes extensive use of its sparkly new lighting and VFX tech. Sadly, it also aims so high that the only way to get playable performance on lower-end and older mid-range kit it to gut the quality settings.

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A challenge: hold your arm at a right angle to your torso, bent at the elbow so you can see your wrist and hand in the corner of your eye. Keep it there for as long as you can. Hurts after a while, huh? This is the default position for Jak, awesome FPS wizard with a magic gun arm, and possessor of a personality so inoffensive that when I am not playing the game I struggle to remember he exists. I noticed how hard it is to hold your arm in wizard mode when I was about 10 hours into the 20-or-so span of Immortals Of Aveum, and half way through is too early for a game to make me go all Cinema Sins out of boredom.

Despite this, I very much appreciate Immortals Of Aveum taking a crack at a good old-fashioned mid-length action adventure. There are shining moments where it’s great fun (though sometimes by accident; I have never, in my life, laughed so hard at some tiny wee orphans being exploded in front of me), but it’s let down by its FPS combat becoming too repetitive too early, which is the kiss of death for a game built around shooting stuff. It also commits the terrible crime of taking itself too seriously, but then I level that charge at most fantasy I encounter.

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Innocn isn’t a brand that most people have heard of, but this Chinese firm has been pumping out surprisingly well-reviewed monitors for some time now, often hitting niches more well-known companies haven’t reached while being extremely aggressive on price. That’s a winning combination for models backed by positive critical reviews, and today we spotted a deal on perhaps their best monitor yet – the Innocn 27M2V, a 27-inch 4K 160Hz monitor with a Mini LED backlight and HDMI 2.1 ports, providing an extremely good HDR experience and full compatibility with PS5, Xbox Series X and PC.

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Be Quiet’s top-rated PC case, the Pure Base 500DX, is down to $99.90 at Amazon USA today following a $15 drop. This is the best price that this mid tower case has ever reached, and a great deal for a case that includes a mesh front, glass side panel, three Pure Wings 2 fans and RGB lighting.

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I don’t know anything about VTubers, aside from the fact they’re virtual… YouTubers…? What I do know, is there’s a Vampire Survivors-like called HoloCure: Save The Fans that’s entirely fan made, entirely free, and revolves around Hololive, a VTuber agency replete with catgirls. I am taken aback by how good it is.

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