Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“Why am I so slow”, complains my partner, minutes into being cajoled into playing Dota 2 for the very first time. “Ah, you’ll need to buy boots,” I say, with the hard earned wisdom of someone who’s spent over 4,000 hours clicking on wizards. “I have boots,” she says, somewhat indignantly. “Those are slippers,” I reply. “What?” she asks, somewhat more indignantly. “They don’t give you move speed,” I respond. I see a flicker of anger in her eyes, as well as maybe, just maybe, a spark of interest.

A new Dota patch came out last week, and it’s a biggun. Is it a good time for lapsed players to jump back in? Yes! Is it a good time for entirely new players to dip their toes in, while experienced players are still befuddled by a map that’s 40% bigger, featuring dual Roshan pits, new minibosses and a host of other changes? Perhaps! It’s certainly a good opportunity to test your relationship.

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Long-running sci-fi MMO Warframe has just released its biggest update yet, The Duviri Paradox, for free. Jumping into any 10-year-old game can be intimidating, especially an MMO, but developer Digital Extremes say this is the first story-driven update that’s not progression-locked based on skill level or experience with the game. In other words, this is a new experience within Warframe that’s immediately available to newcomers, while also adding weird cool stuff for old-timers.

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After a few weeks in time limbo, Quantum Break has returned to storefronts on PC and Xbox. Publisher Microsoft had said “some licences that expired” were to blame for its removal from Game Pass (for consoles), which was probably the same reason it was pulled from storefronts too. It’s now rewound the clocks, available to buy, and as a nice bonus, it’s joined PC Game Pass for the first time since it was previously only available on the console version of the service.

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It’s been possible to find tiny SSDs for the Steam Deck for a little while, but yesterday Corsair launched its 1TB MP600 Mini SSDs which ought to offer better performance than other options. Here are the cheapest places to find it in the US and UK!

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Confession time, everyone: I’m still only about 2.5 hours into Disco Elysium. Games journalism sin or what? Somehow, despite being primed by the excellent time I had with its demo five years ago, I just bounced off this one. I very quickly got stuck in a frustrating loop of fatally ballsing up no matter what I did – presumably I badly biffed my stats right out the gate to get soft-locked in the first area – and despite deciding I’d restart in a day or two, several years later my play-time hasn’t extended past that first session. Sad times all round, I’m sure you’ll agree, but what’s it got to do with Betrayal At Club Low?

Well, when I picked up Betrayal At Club Low for the RPS Game Club this month, I was transported back to my abortive run at Disco Elysium. It’s not that I’ve never played a stat-check-heavy RPG before. Far from it. But somehow, each game’s presentation resonated together in my weird brain mush. It must have been something to do with the combination of a surreal, seedy, not-quite-our-world-but-still-very-recognisable setting, and the constant presence of numbers reminding me of my character’s strengths stacked up against their many, many weaknesses.

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Developer Young Horses – best known for Octodad: Dadliest Catch and Bugsnax – have released four free games as part of their Free Range collection. They describe the freebies as “the wacky projects we make between games,” which include an ant collectathon and an early prototype of Octodad.

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My name is Katharine and I’m a reformed Pokéaddict. I thought I’d get that out there right at the start, because you can’t really talk about Cassette Beasts without talking a bit about Pokémon. Admittedly, the idea of an open world Pokémon-like might have lost some of its shine now that the actual Pokémon games have finally gone and done it themselves with last year’s Scarlet and Violet releases, but Cassette Beasts, the debut game from UK micro team Bytten Studio, is banging a different kind of drum to Nintendo’s primo monster catcher.

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Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard King has hit a large snag on the road. The UK’s Competitions And Markets Authority (CMA) previously released their provisional findings on the $69 billion buyout, laying out concerns over less competition and innovation for UK gamers. Microsoft were allowed to respond to the CMA’s findings, but it seems they weren’t able to quell the regulator’s concerns, as the CMA have now vetoed the merger.

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Real-time strategy game Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is now exploring the series’ own history with the Return Of Rome expansion pack, bringing back The Roman Empire and every other ancient civilisation from the very first Age Of Empires game. It’s coming on May 16th, and it essentially lets you battle and conquer like it’s 1998 again.

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Honkai: Star Rail throws you into the body of an amnesiac protagonist with unknowable hidden powers who has been awakened from a deep slumber by someone called Kafka. This woman is something of a mystery and seems to have a flair for the dramatic as she kicks off the whole game by playing an invisible violin along to the classic Baroque epic Pachelbel’s Canon as massive, intergalactic monsters invade a spaceship.

It’s an incredibly cool opening, the kind of thing that John Wick would watch to get pumped up before, well, John Wick-ing all over the place. It’s pretty clear that Kafka isn’t a hero, but they’ve woken you up, and since you’ve got no memories, you must be one of the good guys. This setup feels familiar, but there are enough changes to make it feel new and get the blood thoroughly pumping.

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