Frostpunk 2 was an ambitious gambit. With survival achieved, and the introduction’s excellently sinister advisor whispering evil Tory ideas, the whole city you built in Frostpunk is now just the headquarters for a sprawling expansion effort, and your rule is no longer absolute. Rather than retread the same “prepare for ultra-Winter” ground, your biggest obstacle will likely be your own people, now formed into shifting political parties, and looking outward with colonial eyes. The result is a complicated, laborious survival citybuilder that’s two parts compelling, and one part frustrating for the wrong reasons.
I really wanted to like action adventureThe Plucky Squire more than I do now, having given its charming 2D to 3D platforming a proper whirl. Yes, it’s lovely to look at. Yes, hopping out of a storybook and making friends with an illustration on a coffee mug is cool. And yes, everyone can have a mildly fun time with its puzzles and fights. But that’s the problem: who is everyone? At first I thought, “This game is for young kids and that’s fine!”, given its relative simplicity. Then I hit some puzzles and thought, “Ain’t no kid figuring this out”.
Then it hit me. It struggles to balance the fine line between being approachable for tiny tots and layered enough for people who’ve graduated from “goo goo ga ga” to “oo oo aa aa my back hurts”. And that’s down to how plucky you’re allowed to squire at any given time, because it can be surprisingly limited and, sadly, a bit underwhelming.
You can’t travel back to the 1980s. But what if I told you it was possible to gently warp your memories of that time? UFO 50 is a kart of 50 games that once existed for an old computer system, all lovingly restored by a gang of coders. The old console, of course, is a fiction. The LX-I never existed. But it’s a fun pseudo-history against which to create a grab bag of small games (some throwaway, others mighty) all designed with a distinct 80s look. It’s an exercise in adhering to an aesthetic. Like an oil painter working with a limited range of colours, the developers of this bundle have stuck to a 32-bit equivalent of the Zorn palette. Yet play a little of each game, and you start to sense the smirk of chronos. These games aren’t stuck in the past, but they are enjoying a holiday there.
Strange Scaffold’s newly released FPSI Am Your Beast is very fun for quite a few reasons, but chief among them is a deep appreciation for the poetry of good videogame violence. I’m not using the big P word just to throw out an overly worthy comparison to something we might associate with craft or beauty, but as a nod toward the game’s playful application of what I previously called ‘a euphoric splurge of murderous game verbiage’ one morning where I had clearly eaten my wordy Weetabix. The way its hurled knives and curb stomps and inexplicable decapitations flow together have an assonant, almost Suessian quality to them.
But it’s also, well, just a bit like Mad Libs. You play as Harding, a man who’s mythical lethality is established very early on. The showing is there in the moment to moment, but the telling is conveyed through cute tricks like how everyone you meet is so deeply afraid of Harding that they loudly keep track of exactly what weapon he’s holding at all times. The Mad Libs comes in through the fact that you can draw Harding a route between A and B, and it’s a given that multiple heads are going to come unstuck from necks along the way. You’re sort of just casually filling in the verbs that seem the most fun to you in the moment. One of the verbs is ‘hornet’. Hornet is a verb now.
I started playing and enjoying battle royale wizarding sim Spellbreak just in time for Spellbreak to get shut down. Developers Proletariat, Inc announced plans to yank the servers back in August 2022 in the course of being acquired by Activision Blizzard, bringing an end to many happy hours spent skating on conjured ice ramps and hurling boulders around like bunny rabbits. Yes, I am the kind of wizard who hurls a bunny rabbit, if there are no boulders to spare.
Happily, it transpires that Proletariat have resurrected their creation and handed it over to posterity in the shape of a free standalone Community Version, available on Itch.io. You’ll need to host your own server or join another group if you want to play multiplayer, but all the same, this is a lovely gift and one I’m delighted to transmit unto you, the active and efficient Magenauts of Rockus Paperus Shottegonne.
Having shot up the near-future in Battlefield 2042, DICE and EA are using a modern-day setting with the next instalment of their military FPS series. According to EA studios group general manager and Respawn chief Vince Zampella, the new, currently untitled shooter will be one of those “back to basics” sequels that tries to rebottle the lightning of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 – these being the “peak” Battlefield games, in Zampella’s view.
I am sure gladiator roguelike RPGWe Who Are About To Die’s latest update is very nice, and its accompanying 30% celebratory discount even nicer. You can find the full patch notes here, and I’d be interested to hear how significant they are from the more fascina-pilled among you. They mean nothing to me, however, because We Who Are About To Die has been taunting me from my wishlist since it launched in early access a few years back. Well, no more. Throw me to the lions! Oh, this one has a Steam demo in its mouth. Great stuff.
In theory, vampires and immersive sims go together as naturally as bats and caves. Immersive sims tend to involve a balance of stealth, acrobatics, raw strength and crafty manipulation, and vampires are celebrated for all of these things. Despite this, actual vampire-themed immersive sims are rare. My list starts with Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines… and sort of ends there. In a devastating betrayal, Arkane Austin’s Redfall wasn’t an immersive sim but an open world co-op shooter (a not very good one). The much-delayed Bloodlines 2 was recently downgraded from immersive sim to RPG by new developers The Chinese Room. Arkane Lyon’s Blade adaptation seems promising, but it’s a ways off.
Here to paper over the immersive vamping gap in the market is Byte Barrel’s Trust, “a new first-person shooter with immersive sim elements”. It takes place in a world where the vampires are hunted for their blood, which has become an everyday human energy source, used for everything from car batteries to streetlights. The irony! I feel like, in the circumstances, the ideal solution would be for humans to let vampires suck their blood in return for vampires letting humans use their blood for electricity, but that wouldn’t make for a very thrilling shooter. Anyway, here’s the trailer.
If you’ve played Battle Brothers, you’ll know that Overhype Studios have a way of making you care for an underling, no more so than when you inadvertently send them onto the wrong end of a sharp blade. Menace, their upcoming turn-based tactical RPG, will also put the wellbeing of your chosen fighters at the forefront of your mind – along with a dramatic shift from 2D medieval sprites to the fully 3D battlefields of a unruly space frontier.
To survive in looter-booter Pacific Drive you have to keep the paranormal station wagon you drive around in good nick. You’re constantly repairing corroded doors and swapping out busted engine parts with cobbled-together technology. But maybe this tinkering was a little too much. Our review praised the game for its “trunk loads of atmosphere” but called the constant need to craft stuff “laborious”. If you also felt this, then good news. An update now lets you fiddle the difficulty options a generous amount, say developers Ironwood Studios, making the game easier and bringing crafting needs right down.
Buuut… if you thought the opposite – that the game wasn’t hard enough – you can now tick a box that makes hitting yourself with the trunk door kill you stone dead.
