Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In the picturesque Regency town of Leamington Spa, a debutante has entered the local high society of AAA game developers. Named Maverick Games, it’s led by the former director of Forza Horizon 5 – a creative risk-taker named Mike Brown. “Games are made in a very certain way that brings with it real security,” Brown told GamesIndustry.biz in January. “We know that if we do these things in a row, we will hit this date and the game will come out. I think there are other ways where you can still hit that date, but also do a load of new things on the way.”

One of the new things Maverick is backing is Jamie Brittain, lead writer on the studio’s unannounced open world game. Brittain has never worked on a videogame before. Yet any millennial who grew up in the UK will undoubtedly be familiar with Skins, the epochal teen drama he co-created with his dad, Bryan Elsley.

Read more

Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors – a Vampire Survive ’em up set in Paizo’s D&D-adjacent pen-and-paper setting Golarion – launches into Steam Early Access on 14th September 2023, Paizo and developer BKOM Studios have announced. If you’re new to the much-imitated Vampire Survivors format, the idea is to steer an auto-attacking character around a map that is slowly invaded by increasingly hazardous waves of foes, levelling up as you go. Think of it as a bullet hell shooter, but set to the tune of a walking sim. At first, anyway: at higher levels, Vampire Survivors is a perfectly withering experience, for all its initial glacial pace.

Read more

Game designer, sometime Gears of War frontman and nowadays, comic book author Cliff Bleszinski would very much like Epic to make another Jazz Jackrabbit. In case you’re unfamiliar, or disgracefully young, Jazz Jackrabbit was a platform game for MS-DOS, published in 1994 – it was Bleszinski’s first project as a designer for then-named Epic MegaGames. He worked on the game alongside coder Arjan Brussee, who would later found Guerrilla Games before moving to Visceral Studios and finally, reuniting with Bleszinski to launch Bosskey Productions, the ill-fated creator of the generally rather decent Lawbreakers. Cor, people don’t half move around in this industry.

I never played Jazz Jackrabbit – if memory serves, the first in the series launched during a particularly cursed/blessed (delete as appropriate) part of my early youth, when my gaming consisted exclusively of shareware titles on Apple Macintosh. But I can certainly get behind Bleszinski’s follow-up remark that he’d like a potential Jazz Jackrabbit 3 to be a first-person game in the vein of PS1 classic Jumping Flash.

Read more

To The Core is, to borrow its Steam description, “an incremental game about extracting and using resources from planets to buy upgrades.” That’s pretty much it. I’ve played it for eight hours since buying it yesterday, hooked by a progression curve that takes you from an ineffectual mining ship chipping at a single planet’s rocky surface until you explode, to the leader of a swarm of bomb-dropping drones and aerial bombardment lasers that can travel a solar system and devour any planet to its core in seconds.

It’s part idle game, part Vampire Survivors, and it’s out now.

Read more

Word Factori is a conveyor-belt puzzle game in which you plop down structures that bend, mirror, rotate or merge your resources in order to produce something new. So far, so Opus Magnum. The twist is that your only resource is a sans-serif letter “I”, which you’re manipulating and combining to make every other letter in the alphabet – and, in turn, to construct whole words to complete each level. It’s out now.

Read more

The Anno series has never had official mod support, but that hasn’t stopped its community from producing hundreds of mods for Anno 1800 since its release in 2019. Ubisoft have seemingly noticed. They’re now partnering with mod.io to add official mod support to the game.

Read more

Airhead is one of those platformers I really want to like. Freshly announced at tonight’s THQ Nordic Showcase, I’ve been playing an early, hour-long demo build of it this week, and while there are certainly things to admire here, I’m not overly convinced it’s going to be one for the ages. Its colourful visuals and contrasting colour palette cast its deep caverns and sun-drenched mountains in a beautiful, but eerie kind of light, and its strange, scuttling creatures put me in the mind of the night horrors from Dredge and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. But its central premise of you being a headless body carting round an inflatable head to presumably escape to goodness knows where isn’t quite the breath of fresh air I hoped it would be.

Read more

Sad news today, folks. Our excellent guides writer Rebecca is moving on to pastures new. Specifically, pastures that have had the letters and numbers VG247 mown into them, as Rebecca is beginning a new guides journey at our dear sister site starting next week. We wish her all the best in her new adventures, follicking in the fields of Animal Crossing and other console-based delights, although I’ll personally be very sad to lose my fellow Zero Escape and Danganronpa liker (the placement of these games in next year’s RPS 100 is now in serious trouble, folks, I’m telling ya now). But before we get too deep in the doom and gloom, come and bid her farewell in the comments below.

Read more

This AMD Radeon RX 7600 review will explain, I’d hope, a fair bit about the red team’s newest 1080p graphics card. It will tell you how fast it runs games, how hot it gets, how it compares to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 and suchlike. What I can’t explain with it, admittedly, is why the RX 7600 exists.

Read more

One thing I never tire of ranting about is the brilliance of the original Homeworld Mothership – both for its elegant crescent-moon design, and for its more practical function as a giant compass needle shoved into Homeworld’s then-unprecedented 3D volumes, so that players can orient themselves and strategise. I admit, I was a little piqued by Homeworld 3‘s redesigned Mothership, which lies flat as a doormat – an act of blasphemy akin to flipping a crucifix upside down, or wearing a baseball cap backwards in your 50s. But I’ve come round to the new Mothership after reading Blackbird Interactive art director Karl Gryc’s thoughts on its creation.

Read more