Fallen Aces has just enough immersive sim substance to match up to its eye-popping pulp comic style

Fallen Aces is a stylish FPS lead pipe ‘em up with immersive sim elements, published by good gun-knowers New Blood Interactive. Your gumshoe ‘tagonist wakes up, hungover of brain, skint of wallet, and unshaven of face, to discover your apartment – undoubtedly reeking of smokerettes and dehydration wee – is being broken into by foes goonly and mookish. They take a while to boot the door down, which gives you a moment to observe the place and consider which of Fallen Aces’ expansive makeshift weapon selection you’d like to batter them with. Decisions, decisions…

After eating some fridge fruit, I prepare an ambush by flicking off the lightswitch, then hide behind a desk. When they break in, I bravely sneak up behind them and put the frying pan I picked up to work. The sound effects tell me this a quality bit of cookware. Probably cast iron. Barely a dent. In the pan.

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Helldivers 2 developers have big, opaque plans for Galactic War and that black hole you made

Game development studio and intergalactic war ministry Arrowhead have launched a new series of written update posts for players of Helldivers 2 to help keep the war record straight. Mostly, this is the usual case of somebody on the team gathering quotes as the developers batter their fingertips against keyboards to bring you, the video gamer, fresh cannons and what-have-you. But there is some insight into what the conflict-pushers at Arrowhead have enjoyed most about player actions over the last month, including bringing an entire planet to the liberated state of post-existence.

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Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree patch makes Blessings stronger and the game easier

When I finished my review for Soulslike Lies Of P, the devs released a patch not long after that nerfed bosses and made things for ol’ Pinnochio easier overall. Sod’s Law struck that day… and it’s returned with a smirk. Shadow Of The Erdtree has just been patched, making its Shadow Realm Blessings stronger from the off, and in turn, things a little easier for everybody. Such is the life of a reviewer, eh.

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The original Resident Evil from 1996 comes back to PC after decades of gathering flies

With a groan, it rises. The first Resident Evil is a piece of horror game history, and it has just come shambling back to PC after a long time putrefying. Ye olde games shoppe, GOG.com is selling the 1996 survival horror classic as a digital download, so you don’t have to go rummaging through eBay auctions to find an original physical copy anymore. It’s going for £9/$10. But the smile-raiser is the revelation that its sequels, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, will also be getting reanimated in their original polygonal glory.

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You can beat Shadow of The Erdtree’s final boss in 13 seconds using perfume and lightning apparently

The human body is a wonderfully complex organism, and it’s well worth trusting your instincts when it comes to feeling repulsed by certain things. We know that if the milk looks bad and smells bad, it is bad. Do not taste the forbidden yogurt, as much as it calls to you. How, then, to interpret my visceral repulsion to the most disgusting Shadow Of The Erdtree build yet seen? So gross, in fact, that YouTuber SYROBE has managed to beat the Elden Ring DLC’s infamously ridiculous final boss in a mere 13 seconds. Here’s the video. Massive spoilers, obviously.

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Shadow Of The Erdtree mod resets the difficulty to Elden Ring levels and gets rid of Scadutree fragments

Elden Ring‘s Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC yet hovers at Mixed in the blood-encrusted annals of the Steam user review consensus. As Nic wrote earlier in the week, a portion of the negative feedback is aimed at the expansion’s difficulty, which is certainly a Thing To Hear after years of being told by kindly gamers that I only hand out low review scores because I can’t press the buttons in the right order.

As publishers Bandai Namco have sweetly observed, struggling players are perhaps forgetting that you can raise your overall power level by gathering Scadutree Fragments, a system of collectibles designed to ensure a tough challenge even for endgame players, while giving you the option of effectively rebalancing the expansion through exploration. The downside there, as a few people have pointed out, is that some players don’t want to hunt for collectibles before they can topple the bosses.

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Broke Signal Badlands is a pocket Fallout RPG for weird western dice-addled mystics

It’s hotter than the inside of a horse here, so what better time to play an RPG about driving randomly through the desert in search of enlightenment. The RPG in question is Broke Signal Badlands: A World of Desert Adventure, and yes, that’s a very upbeat subtitle for a game in which you can perish after getting your hand stuck in the door of an abandoned Fonts Museum, or while yanking cacti out of your foot. There are gunfights, too, with dice serving as bullets, but so far, I’ve only managed to die of pathetic human error and clumsiness. Consider me unenlightened, but enthused.

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Riven’s remake is out today and makes me feel weird – there’s still a demo, if you’re quick

Cyan Worlds’ remake of their 1997-released Myst sequel Riven launches today on Steam. Word on the reviewvine is that it’s jolly decent, offering free movement around a real-time 3D reinvention of the original point-and-clicker’s shimmering archipelago, with its many murals of crushed and scattered civilisations. There’s still a demo on Steam at the time of writing, a relic of long-ago Next Fest 2024. Demos tend to be removed once the game hits shelves, so I thought I’d rush you a quick post based on 30 minutes with the remake over lunch.

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