I’ve said it before, but I really keep meaning to play Ctrl Alt Ego. Released last year, it’s a sci-fi immersive sim built all around classic abilities of the genre: remote control and possession. You bounce your digital consciousness between robots and devices and ach, I hear it’s great. I’ve bought it. I’ve installed it. I’ve played the first part of the tutorial. And then, who knows. One day. One day very soon. But right now, for people who have played it, good news: a free update has added a Sandbox mode generating squillions of new levels.
After giving us an early glimpse of its unstoppable raptor hordes in a closed beta test last summer, Capcom recently let us loose with the opening hours of their upcoming dinosaur multiplayer shooter, Exoprimal. Its final release isn’t far away now – its July 14th launch fast becoming the sole highlight of an otherwise desolate month – and I was excited to finally play the game that RPS vid bud Liam literally hasn’t been able to stop talking about ever since he first clapped eyes (and his thumbs) on its somersaulting T-Rexes. (You should also read his excellent interview with the devs while you’re at it, too).
I’ll hold my hands up now and say I didn’t get to play as much of Exoprimal as I would have liked, but the handful of missions I did play really are as daft and brilliant as Liam described last year. I won’t waste time repeating its fundamentals (you can read them here), but the basic setup is thus: in a world plagued by dinosaurs that periodically pour out of strange portals for some reason, you play a rookie dino hunter that gets pulled into a time-looping wargame set up by your company’s clearly psychotic AI called Leviathan. In order to gather valuable ‘combat data’ for its simulations to fight said dinosaur threat, Leviathan endlessly ropes you and other rookie exosuit wearers into deadly feats of speed and skill. It’s a neat, if patently preposterous setup for its 5v5 PvP multiplayer missions, but the thing that struck me most wasn’t its gloriously silly dinosaurs or Leviathan’s perfectly pitched ham lines. It was its bot companions, because heck, they’re great to play with, but absolute fiends if you’re on the wrong side of them.
Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has said he thinks “Maybe it’s time we removed the numbers” from Final Fantasy games. In an interview with GQ, he talked about the baggage that inevitably comes with having a 35-year-old series with soon to be 16 numbered mainline games in it (not including the sequels and spin-offs, I might add), and the confusion it continues to create with new players. “Every numbered title we release in the series, we have to go into it like, ‘It’s OK, you don’t have to play the rest of them,'” he said, and removing them is “something that I’ve discussed with the higher-ups”. It’s an understandable problem, for sure, although I think I’d be quite sad to see the numerals go entirely. As long as they don’t pull a Mortal Kombat and go back to 1, though, we’re good.
Last july I was given the opportunity to play an early beta for Exoprimal, Capcom’s upcoming multiplayer shooter that pits you and a bunch of your mech suit-wearing buddies against unstoppable raptor hordes. In the nine months since I took command of a T-Rex and did a sick backflip, my life has not known peace. “I’m really excited to play Exoprimal” I’ll say to colleagues, unprompted, in important meetings unrelated to anything prehistoric in nature. “From what I’ve played, it blends PvE and PvP gameplay into a single multiplayer mode that feels very unique and hugely entertaining”. My tax return was voided because I drew a big stegosaurus on it. I have renamed the cat “Sniper Neosaur”, and I am disappointed that she has yet to emerge from a gooey purple orb.
It was my delight, then, to be given the opportunity to sit down with key members of the game’s development team to discuss Exoprimal’s inspirations, its inevitable comparisons to Dino Crisis and how Capcom plans to use it as a template for their live-service games moving forward. Alongside a fresh opportunity to check out the game, I hopped onto a Zoom call with Exoprimal’s director Takuro Hiraoka, technical director Kazuki Abe and art director Takuro Fuse.
In today’s Forza Horizon 5 livestream, developers Playground Games offered details of the open-world racer’s free “Explore The Horizon” update. It’ll launch tomorrow and includes six new cars, new photo mode features, and new pathfinder challenges.
Right now you can pick up a great deal on a powerful RTX 4070 Ti gaming PC over at CCL, equipped with a Core i5 12400F processor, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM, an MSI Pro B660M-E motherboard and 1TB Kingston NV2 NVMe SSD – all for £1260. That’s an awesome spec for gaming at 1080p, 1440p and even 4K – such is the power of this mighty GPU!
To get this price, plus two freebies – a copy of Diablo 4 (£60) and a gaming headset (£30) – select the “No OS” option and use code GAMER40 at the checkout.
You can of course opt to get Windows preinstalled if you prefer, but you can also use a USB stick and any unused Windows keys you’ve already got, including those from previous versions of Windows, to install the OS yourself. And, as the Steam Deck proves, gaming on Linux is getting pretty damn good – and of course, Linux is completely free (as in beer and as in speech).
For the last six years, my Skyrim wood elf has been stuck in some godforsaken cave in goodness knows what corner of Tamriel. I don’t remember why they were there, or what goal they were trying to achieve. It was just ‘one of those caves’ that looked cool and interesting when I came across it and I thought, ‘Yeah, all right, let’s have a go then, shall we?’ But while other Skyrim caves I’d come across could be easily polished off in an office lunch-time – as that was often how I played Skyrim back then – this one was different somehow. It was so large and twisty, so infinitely befuddling, that I seemed to be trapped down there forever. Sure, I could have probably turned back, but I’d been down there for ages, and felt like I’d come too far to simply not see it all through to the bitter end. But the end never came, and I eventually abandoned my save as a result, whisked off by the prospect of newer, more exciting games that didn’t involve trying to figure out how to escape its narrow, bioluminescent hellscape.
Worse still, this disastrous feat of orienteering has now become my overriding memory of Skyrim. For all its great sidequests and its ever-increasing number of excellent mods, all I ever think about are its damn caves. Just the thought of loading up that save file again makes me grimace, and I’m starting to dread the thought of getting stuck in another one whenever the heck The Elder Scrolls 6 comes out. But I’ve been playing a lot of The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom this past week, and cor, I’m immediately jealous of Link’s Ascend ability. As part of his new slate of powers, Ascend lets him instantly woosh through almost any ceiling as long as there’s a traversable bit of terrain above it. That kind of power wouldn’t have been half handy for my poor old wood elf, and it’s precisely what makes exploring Tears Of The Kingdom’s caves so enjoyable. So if there’s one thing The Elder Scrolls 6 should steal take note of, please let it be this.
Logitech’s G920 and G29 wheel and pedals sets are my go-to recommendations for aspiring racing fans, offering a noticeable improvement in control and feedback over a gamepad while costing far less than more advanced direct drive alternatives from the likes of Fanatec. Today both models are discounted to £170, a healthy discount from their usual £240 price point and more than 50% off their UK RRP – nice.
The G920 is the Xbox-oriented model, meaning it works on PC plus Xbox Series and One consoles, while the G29 is for PC plus PS4 and PS5 – so choose what’s most useful to you!
Alan Wake 2 has yet to receive an official release date from developers Remedy Entertainment, but according to the voice actor playing its titular, torch-bearing thriller writer, we can apparently expect it to arrive sometime this October. So far, Remedy have only committed to a general 2023 release for Alan Wake 2, but voice actor Matthew Porretta told the Monsters, Madness And Magic podcast that it’s “supposed to come out in October”. That means it should be well clear of ye olde Starfield, but that “supposed to” also suggests the date isn’t set in stone yet. Here’s hoping we get a more formal date at this year’s Summer Games Fest, perhaps.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. The difficulties of writing a column reliant upon a collapsing platform continue to be felt in a week when the #screenshotsaturday tag became overrun with spambots, but the games still shone through. This week, my eye was caught by colourful driving experiences in run ‘n’ guns and visual novels, multiple terrible squiggly beasts from horror games, a cute N64-style platformer, and lots more attractive and interesting indie games. Come see!
