Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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Co-op horror prequel The Outlast Trials is out now in early access. Playing under-the-bed peekaboo with brainwashed killers can be an overwhelming ordeal, so now you can drag along a friend and spread out the trauma. This time, those snotty shakycam Blair Witch-type chases are set in a Cold War-era facility where you’ll be put through some gruelling experiments. The early access launch trailer below lays out some of the titular trials you can expect.

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Developer Strange Scaffold have announced another genre-blending adventure, Teenage Demon Slayer Society, this time mixing turn-based strategy combat with some character action flare. The game follows teen figurines, who are already struggling with the hellish world of high school crushes when an army of demons invades their world. Demonic invasions and teenage angst are – as we all know – a match made in heaven. Or hell. Either way it looks cool.

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Ergotron make some of the best monitor arms around – reliable, capable and generally brilliant – but they’re also pretty pricey. That’s probably why Amazon hit up Ergotron to make its Amazon Basics monitor arms, which offer the same excellent quality in unbranded form for considerably less money.

Today though one of these arms is even better value than usual, as there’s a ridiculous 40% off voucher available on Amazon’s take on the Ergotron LX, dropping this high-end monitor arm from £81 to just £49. That’s a brilliant price for an arm that can support monitors up to 11kg in weight with full tilt, swivel, rotation and height adjustability.

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Free is free and spooky shooter Metro: Last Light is currently free to keep from Steam. It has been made available by developers 4A Games in order to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The catch, sort of, is that this is the Complete Edition, a version that does not normally even show up in Steam search results. The slightly-improved Metro: Last Light Redux will still cost you a few quid or bucks.

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A sequel to Hawken was certainly not on my 2023 bingo card. Five years after the multiplayer mech FPS shut down on PC, now requiring a fan-made fix even just to play offline against bots, I didn’t expect to ever again dash around its cool sci-fi cityscapes as a charmingly scrappy little stomper. So I was excited when publishers 505 Games announced singleplayer follow-up Hawken Reborn on Monday then launched it into early access two days later. Having now played it, oh dear. You know, it’s okay for the dead to stay dead.

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