Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Liam and I have been playing looter shooter Remnant 2 in our spare time, as we realised we both couldn’t stop thinking about it. Having been burned out of Destiny 2 and most live service games, we discovered Remnant 2 delivers all the benefits of blasting gangly creatures for skill points without all the live service baggage. What a refreshing thing.

Thing is, if two out of the three major bosses we’ve faced so far took us to court for cheesing them, we’d lose. And it brings us no greater pleasure, knowing we’ve carved powerful new weapons out of their remains. God, it feels good to be totally undeserving of any credit whatsoever.

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Multiplayer survival sandbox Scum has dropped its 0.9 Smokin’ Hot update today to add more of the expected guns, monsters, and balance tweaks. But the update’s called Smokin’ Hot because it makes all the guys in the game, well, smokin’ hot – if you’re into men with a Gears Of War workout routine, that is. Following the revamped female character models last year, developer Gamepires continue their early access tour with a refresh for every male character in the game which may or may not include a touch up for the Danny Trejo DLC skin. Take a look at the new beefcakes and beefy mutants below.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 came out earlier this evening. It couldn’t be pre-loaded before launch and having already installed the Early Access version wasn’t an alternative, which means a lot of people were trying to download the 122GB RPG at the same time.

Steam held up to the onslaught – mostly.

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Dave The Diver is an unusual mixture of deep sea exploration, sushi restaurant management, and a thousand other ideas. It’s also been a smash hit since its release from early access in June.

In a new update video from developers Mintrocket, they seem as surprised by its huge success as anyone, while also outlining their roadmap for coming quality-of-life updates.

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Radiant Silvergun, widely considered one of the best shoot ’em ups ever made, is finally coming to PC. Developed by Treasure, who are perhaps best known for Silvergun’s successor Ikaruga, it’ll arrive via Steam on August 18th with local co-op, online leaderboards and downloadable replays.

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Studios like Rockstar can capture the essence of New York in a video game, but New York is a city full of famous landmarks. SCS Software, by comparison, have become masters at capturing the essence of places of no significance. The long freeway, the vacant parking lot, the anonymous storage warehouse, the nowhere town; all are rendered with such care and detail in American Truck Simulator that they become as compelling to me as any virtual Times Square.

The latest example: Oklahoma, now available in ATS’s latest DLC. Watch the launch trailer below and see if it doesn’t make you want to take a road trip.

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It is once more that time of year when the searing heat drives us underground, to subsist on raw snacks, re-read The Book Of Phoenix, and play this year’s Low-Intensity Strategy Game For When It’s Actually Refreshingly Temperate And Rainy Out But We’re Committed To The Bit Now.

Myriads Colon Renaissance is not quite the break from the 4X that I’d tried to get us, but it is a hybrid. You build up a city, explore and conquer new lands, unlock research and ultimately push everyone’s faces in, but its other main pillar is tower defence, a genre I very rarely align with. Which is a good sign, right? Two good reasons not to choose it, but I am anyway.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 is launching with a relatively clean bill of technical health, so long as you’re playing it on an honest to goodness Windows PC. Larian Studios’ RPG also happens to have earned Valve’s Playable rating for Steam Deck compatibility, which usually signals a game that’s most fine on the SteamOS handheld – it might just have some small text, or no 16:10 display support.

That Playable certification will have been granted off its early access performance, and now that I’ve wandered around the review build for a few hours, I can confirm that playable it most certainly is, with some especially smart control tweaks to accommodate a lack of mouse and keyboard. Actually getting to that point, however, was a minor nightmare, plagued by hard crashes that took one of the Steam Deck’s most obscure tools to fix. As such, before we get into how Baldur’s Gate 3 runs on the Steam Deck or which settings you should use for it, I hope you’ll afford me a rant.

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Portal 2 is obviously brilliant, in part because each of its chapters possesses a distinct charm. GLaDOS’ return, for instance, is a stretch of pure puzzling with just a dash of dread, while your first steps into the abandoned 1960s Aperture facility interrupt a fairly hopeless tone with an upbeat sense of discovery. For me, though, Portal 2 peaks late. So late that by the time it begins, your journey through the ‘true’ puzzle chambers are essentially over, leaving you as little more than a loose end in the big glowing eye of a former buddy. It’s Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You! Mmm, love that part.

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Diablo 4 is walking back several changes from its big Season 1 patch which had made the game an even bigger slog and proved to be overwhelmingly controversial with fans. Blizzard had previously spoken about the upcoming 1.1.1 plaster update during a developer livestream, but the new patch notes detail everything we can expect, including crucial fixes, tweaks to mounts, and big buffs for the Sorcerer and Barbarian classes. The patch drops on August 8th.

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