Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

American Truck Simulator‘s first released version included only the state of California, and its developers have been working their way eastward with each new state added via DLC. Work is currently ongoing on both Oklahoma and Kansas.

SCS Software have got better at replicating the long roads and countryside of the United States, however, so they’ve also been going back periodically and revamping their very first. Five cities in northern California were updated last year in a second update, and work is ongoing on a third phase of revisions that should arrive soon. SCS Software this week shared screenshots of their new Santa Cruz, which has been “revamped from the ground up”.

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Crypt Of The NecroDancer developers Brace Yourself Games have laid off around half their staff. Employees began tweeting about being affected cuts yesterday, with Brace Yourself Games later confirming the decision to “lay off a portion” of staff. The studio had around 43 employees before the cuts, according to LinkedIn.

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Extremely high-speed DDR5 memory is becoming eminently more affordable, with this DDR5-7000 kit costing just $125 for 32GB at Amazon US. That’s an awesome deal, especially for a RAM kit with RGB lighting addressable via Corsair’s popular iCUE software.

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Razer’s BlackShark V2 X is an incredible value gaming headset even at its £60 RRP, but today you can pick it up in a fetching white colourway for just £37 at Amazon UK. That’s by far the cheapest we’ve ever seen this model and a pretty much unbeatable bargain for a gaming headset of this quality.

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Kujlevka is a strange, clever game about an ageing village bureaucrat already troubled by political upheaval and dreams about death and trauma, suddenly given responsibility for communicating with and controlling access to what appears to be humanity’s first contact with an alien intelligence.

All those themes suggest a heavy, self-serious game. But Kujlevka’s great strength is its levity. While not particularly funny, its consistent wry humour perfectly counterbalances all the talk of political chaos, existential futility, and petty greed. Its opening should have been a clue, really, considering you hang out with skeletons while drinking and commenting on the food on a train in outer space.

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Of the various corporatised fictional universes out there, Star Wars is the one I’m most emotionally invested in. But my affection for George Lucas’ brain-baby is less about the stories and characters, and more about the general vibe of the galaxy itself. I love its retro-futurist junkpunk style, the rusty spaceships, dusty planets, and fusty aliens. That’s why I’ve more fondness for games like Dark Forces and KotOR than any of the films or TV shows, as they let me poke around locations like Tatooine and Ord Mantell at my own pace.

Hence, the idea of being properly, immerse in Star Wars, to be physically surrounded by it and able to touch it, is probably my ultimate VR fantasy. Sod the imaginatively inert virtual spaces of Horizon Worlds, if Mark Zuckerberg really wanted to sell the Metaverse to me, he’d build the whole thing out in Mos Eisely chic, and let me run my own virtual cantina selling NFT space-drinks to legless bounty hunters and idiot Web3 prospectors.

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Ten years after its initial release – and about three years after it came to PC – former Wii U exclusive The Wonderful 101: Remastered is getting some much deserved love. Platinum Games bought their mini superhero game to PC through crowdfunding, where backers blew past several stretch goals including one that promised a future DLC drop. Today, the game received its first bit of free new content in the form of a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up called The Wonderful One: After School Hero.

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“Does that pommel horse have a grenade launcher?” is one of many bizarre questions I found myself asking while playing HROT. This Slavic shooter revels in the strange, straddling the line between hyper-bleak Soviet satire and goofy memetic joke factory. This isn’t the best thing about HROT, we’ll get to that in a couple of paragraphs. But the balancing of these two personality strands is what defines HROT’s quality. At the outset, they exist in perfect symbiosis, but the relationship becomes less stable as the game goes on.

The year is 1986, and something is seriously wrong in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. What that might be isn’t explicitly stated, but given the year, the ambient chatter of Geiger counters, and the soldiers vomiting through their gasmasks as they prowl the abandoned streets, a nuclear disaster at an infamous Ukrainian power plant isn’t a vast stretch of the imagination. In any case, anyone who wasn’t killed by the fallout is now being hunted by an army of (presumably Russian, but again, it isn’t explicated) soldiers. Emerging from a bomb shelter beneath Prague’s Kosmonautů Metro Station (now named Háje), you take it upon yourself to defend your glorious homeland from these invaders.

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Take a deep breath! Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance Of The Slayer is releasing on June 1st with a simultaneous Game Pass drop. It’s an old-school shooter set in the same retro-futuristic universe as Hypnospace Outlaw, but this time the focus is on fan-favourite character Zane Lofton, who actually “made” Slayers X in the fiction of the game.

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I’ve been playing a lot of The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom this week. It’s good. Really good. I know you’ve all been waiting for your favourite PC gaming-focused website to offer their take on it so there you go. It’s properly, properly good. The best open-world adventure since Elden Ring, except arguably better because it doesn’t pull your trousers down and point out the colour of your underwear every time you dare to explore a forest or watch a sunset.

As you’ve probably seen, the game’s biggest new draw is “Ultrahand”, which allows Link to pick up loose objects and glue them together. Three logs make a raft. A plank and four wheels make a car. Two stones and a log make a… Ahem. You get the idea. In addition to this are “Zonai Devices”, components that give life and movement to your doohickeys. A fan pushes your raft across the lake. A steering stick lets you manoeuvre your little car. It’s a marvellous construction system that leverages the pre-existing physics engine seen in the game’s predecessor, Breath Of The Wild, to startling results. Does this all sound familiar?

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