Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“Coming off Turbo Overkill has been great,” Trigger Happy’s Sam Prebble tells me over call. “That game’s development… I mean, it worked out. But it was very messy because it was my first game and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I found myself, when it came to pumping content out, I was like: oh, shit. This code base is fucking awful. Like, I can’t put stuff together easily. I’m running into bugs everywhere. But now shit just works!”

You might know Sam Prebble as Trigger Happy Interactive, the solo developer behind frenetic FPS Turbo Overkill. Before that he went by a different name, attached to a very different project. Total Chaos, first released in 2018 under the moniker Wadaholic, is a total conversion mod for Doom 2. With its focus on a thick survival horror atmosphere of tension and disempowerment, it’s about as far removed from Turbo Overkill’s manic, Doom Eternal-inspired action as a game can get. As Prebble puts it, the only thing the two projects have in common is the first person perspective. Even so, he found himself returning to Total Chaos after wrapping development on Turbo Overkill, resulting in the standalone remake.

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Ah Starfield, the game that left the collective consciousness long ago. In her review, Alice Bee (RPS in peace) said that it was such a large thing it ultimately felt “small, cold and unlived in”. I remember thinking the same. Would I have thought differently if it had copious amounts of gore? No. But would I have had a better time? Probably yes. Well, a former senior artist at Bethesda has revealed in an interview with Kiwi Talkz podcast (cheers VGC for the spot) that they’d originally planned for it to have decapitations but decided against them in the end.

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We often get sent so many games from publishers and developers that we simply don’t have the time or capacity to play. But ’tis the start of the year and I felt like I had a duty to give some of them a proper whirl and see what’s what. Thus I was lured once again into the roguelike genre, for which I am an eternal sucker.

Developed by Wave Game, Magicraft sees you play as a kid who’s isekai’d into another dimension (or at least, I think he is, because I chose the option to “skip the story” when I selected new game and only later deduced the situation) and tasked to mince all the demons within it. It’s typical fantasy fare with an interesting twist: you can combine any number of spells within your inventory, which made me feel very clever, even if I had no idea what I was doing.

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Here be your first moving-picture look at The Blood of Dawnwalker, the dark fantasy RPG in the works at Rebel Wolves – the studio founded by a bunch of former The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 devs. As hinted at a couple of times over previous years, when it was known simply as Dawnwalker, you’ll be playing as a vampire, employing various spooky powers to fight militiamen (and, it seems, at least one giant mechanical spider-thing) amidst a deadly plague outbreak.

Unsurprisingly, in retrospect, the trailer also has big The Witcher vibes. The stringy orchestral music? The dramatic monologues? The horrible things happening to armoured grunts? This thing’s really playing the Polish fantasy hits.

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The “spance” of Annihilate The Spance is apparently “an ancient, roiling storm of matter and energy” that harbours both “extreme and inexplicable phenomena” and “unfathomable riches”. I’m happy to discover this explanation, because at first I thought that “spance” was just a litigation-avoiding, supermarket rebrand of “space”. I was bracing to send the good news to developers Skyglow Softworks that, so far, nobody has managed to copyright “space”, though I’m sure somebody’s tried. Maybe, um, God?

It’s a relief to know that God won’t be suing Skyglow Softworks for breach of copyright, because off the back of two demo missions, Annihilate The Spance is worryingly compelling. It’s a mixture of space RTS and autobattler, wherein you construct bases that produce spanceships who autopilot towards the nearest and largest concentration of enemies. According to the developers, it’s inspired by the 2011 Flash game Obliterate Everything by CWWallis (RIP), which I dimly recall playing while I was running a browser game blog for AOL. Anyway, here’s a trailer.

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Destiny creators Bungie are reportedly making a team-based MOBA that takes hefty inspiration from Nintendo’s Smash Bros series. Or rather, they were. Codenamed Gummy Bears, the project is now apparently in the hands of another, newly founded PlayStation studio, with 40 Bungie developers sticking around to work on it.

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Don’t be fooled by the simple synchronicity of the headline above. We have selected our 24 favourite games from the past year every year since 2008. We reveal these beloved games across the month of December in the RPS Advent Calendar, each game behind a new door.

This article collects all those wonderful games and our writings about them in one place, for a post-New Year reading experience that requires you to click less.

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MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries support studio Toadman Interactive have been shuttered by parent company Enad Global 7 as part of “cost-saving measures“. This follows the studio closing down offices in Stockholm, Visby, and Oslo last November, as well as a number of redundancies at their Berlin studio. Toadman – who also developed soulslike Immortal: Unchained and provided support work for Helldivers 2 – employed 69 people at the time of closure.

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EEK3 is the alternative showcase of small horror game creators that amalgamates every year like a shell of flies around the corpse of E3. It’s a lot of fun for people who enjoy ye olde PS1 aesthetics and foggy throwback horror. The 2024 showcase was supposed to happen in time for Halloween, the night when the spirits of old platformer mascots rise from their graves to gift polygons to small children. But it was postponed due to technical problems. Only now has the 2-hour showcase of game trailers emerged, culminating in a new Haunted PS1 demo disc packed with upcoming games. “The curse,” say the organisers, “is lifted.”

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Dynasty Warriors: Origins. Finally, a game brave enough to ask: “what if everything cool that went down in Romance Of The Three Kingdoms was thanks to you, a magical, beautiful boy that no-one’s ever heard of?”.

It’s a great premise, honestly. The slate wiped clean, what if you got to be mates with everyone from all sides in this grand ensemble tale of warring states? A battle might take eight minutes. The three consecutive bonding cutscenes before the next might take ten. Origins is just as much about fighting thousands at a time as it is about eating lunch with Zhang Fei or discussing the meaning of heroism with Zhou Yu. There’s a parallel story about your character and his role in a magical order of destiny godlings I didn’t find the least bit interesting, but the rest is thrilling because Romance is already thrilling. The parts that Origins bogs down with its wordier take on already wordy source material are enlivened again by anime vibrance, hijinks, and melodrama.

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