Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is heading to PC later this year on September 6th. “Waitaminute,” you might be saying, “Didn’t this already come out?” No, you choob, you eejit, you dafty, you’re thinking of one of several other collections of Ace Attorney games.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection comprises two games: Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and its sequel, Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit. Neither game has been on PC before, and the latter has never been released outside of Japan.

Read more

Battle Aces is billed as “a vision of the future for real-time strategy” but if you glance at a screen, you might think you’re staring into the past: another toonified science fiction world of scuffed, shiny nodules, lanes and arenas, an overly functional colour scheme, and hotkeyed hordes of little and large units that appear devoid of personality, even by top-down generalissimo standards. Let’s start by addressing that last complaint: the units of Battle Aces have immense personality. It just doesn’t come across well in screens.

Each is a mix of bug and robot, with a clutch of finely observed, quirky-but-never-gratuitous animations that immediately had me choosing favourites when I played the game at Summer Game Fest. “Our main unit design concept artist, his father was also an illustrator and nature illustrator at that, so he’s already accomplished with animal designs, but he also loves mechs and robots too,” notes Uncapped Games art director Ted Park. “So he’s kind of melded both worlds as much as he can.”

Read more

If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.

Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn’t realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It’s about co-ordinating all your pieces so they’ll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don’t organise its parts. It is… a lot. It’s too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.

Read more

Minecraft is, very often, just a nice place to potter about in. But its call to adventure rings loudly in my square ears, and now that the Tricky Trials update has dotted the underground with action-heavy, loot-filled Trial Chambers, I’m simply powerless to resist.

Read more

Steam Next Fest 2024 has formally ended, we’ve spent a couple of weeks gorging upon demos of all stripes, from oil spill clean-up to dancefloor kendo, and now comes the all-important process of deciding which of those demos Won. Valve have helpfully shared a list of the most played Steam demos during this latest, gravest round of next festivity, and it covers a reasonable range. I mean, I wasn’t that surprised to see an open world survival shooter with monsters at the top of the ladder – why else would we dedicate a bunch of Best Of features to such things? – but I am surprised that number three is a leering parody of neglect. Also, there’s a game about mopping dungeons that appeals strongly to my Dungeon Meshi-watching sensibilities.

Read more

The Remake Of The End Of The Greatest RPG Of All Time, or TROTEOTGRPGOAT for, uh, short, is a game that exists. I normally wouldn’t let such an opaque stub of a description survive outside of a quick Trello reminder to write something better later, but I’m currently finding it fulfilling enough just to gaze upon that title and consider the fully formed art object that may soon emerge from its tantalising promises. Ok, so the visual component helps too. Orientate yourself by means of the trailer below, and let’s dig into this brazen nose-hooker of a head turner of a game that does exist, about another game that doesn’t.

Read more

Life By You, the Sims-like management game previously troubled by several delays, has been canceled by Paradox Interactive, and Californian studio Paradox Tectonic have been shut down. The news of the game’s cancellation came last night through a forum post, with Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja painting a picture of a game still too “lacking” for more development time to fix. This morning, it emerged that Paradox Tectonic, the studio working on the game, have been shuttered, via GameWatcher.

Read more

Starfield’s first expansion, this year’s Shattered Space, won’t be the only major DLC for the sci-fi exploration game, Bethesda bossman Todd Howard has confirmed.

Read more

A Quiet Place is a very solid horror movie that seemed primed for a video game adaptation from the off. After all, it already had all the ingredients of a video game right there: the whole film is essentially one overlong stealth mission with a punishing fail state – any crunchy glass or other noise would immediately draw the attention of deadly alien monsters – and at one point there’s a whiteboard with the narrative equivalent of Dead Space’s “CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS” graffiti scrawled on it. Lo and behold, we’re getting a Quiet Place video game.

Read more

Remember Lords of the Fallen? No, not that one. This one. Last year’s reboot of the 2014 game of exactly the same name – despite the successor originally being a numbered sequel, then at least having a ‘The’ at the start of its title to help tell them apart a little – will now get its own follow-up in a third Lords of the Fallen game. The upcoming sequel doesn’t have a name yet, but I really hope they stick with the bit and just call it “Lords of the Fallen” again.

Read more