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The developers of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 have released an update to the third-person shooter that reverts a lot of tough difficulty changes made in a previous patch. Turns out upping the spawn rate of the vicious Tyrannid baddies across all difficulty modes was not welcome among the meathead murder boys of the Imperium. And this change wasn’t the only one that caused enough ructions to justify hasty recalibrations from Saber Interactive.
To be fair, there are several, far more substantial additions teased in Total War: Warhammer 3 design director Mitchell Heastie’s latest blog on the strategy game’s upcoming Patch 5.3. There’s also some interesting insight regarding design decisions, and the systems CA are hoping to tweak in the future. We’ll talk about that in a moment, but first, I must draw your attention to this magical map. I’m very excited about it. Not so much for what it does on its own – more for what its design philosophy represents and could mean for future additions.
I’d rather command a small troop of ruthless husks to fight my battles than do the dirty work myself – and in the game [Weyyyyyy! -RPS staff]. That’s reason number one as to why I’m interested in Skull Horde, an “auto battler dungeon crawler” which casts you as a necromancer in a tiny pixel art world.
Reason number two is that it’s coming from the developers of the explosively moreish Bore Blasters. Find a teaser trailer below.
Ghost Bike, the upcoming cycling ’em up from Nidhogg makers Messhof, is now called Wheel World. The name change is designed to reflect some substantial changes to the game itself – and there’s a new trailer to show its current condition as a seemingly chill game about tinkering with bikes and riding them around pastel-coloured worlds.
One of my favourite internet jokes is: “I enjoy video games because they let me live out my wildest fantasies, like being assigned a task and then completing that task”. Wilmot’s Warehouse felt like that joke made manifest, putting you in the shoes of a tiny warehouse working squareboi. This puzzle-solving sequel, Wilmot Works It Out, doesn’t come packaged with its predecessor’s wry humour, nor the same sense of compulsion. Instead, it exudes a calm and homely sense of idle comfort. For me, that ultimately makes it less compelling, even if it is thematically the entire point. This is about a warehouse worker doing jigsaws on his day off.
Velvet 89 is a free hidden object game that tells the story of communist Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” in 1989, which brought an end to 41 years of one-party rule and led to the founding of a parliamentary republic. The game released earlier this month, and you can find it on Steam, iOS and Android. I know nothing about the Velvet Revolution, but I do have some quick thoughts on the use of a format I associate with Where’s Wally to capture a process of extraordinary political change.
Developers Dreamlit have piped over fresh footage of their open world ecotribal extravaganza Towers Of Aghasba. It’s an abbreviated but generous display of equatorial exotica and vaguely prehistoric wildlife, home to such key verbs as “exploration”, “village-building”, “gardening”, “creature-nurturing” and “murdering megasloths with a lump of wood”. And look at that, there’s a release date perched on top – 19th November 2024.
Over the past week or so, you may have caught wind of Denuvo – the makers of anti-cheat and anti-piracy software – embarking on a PR campaign of sorts, intended to combat negative public perception of their software. In case you’re unfamiliar, Denuvo’s wares have become infamous for allegedly sabotaging the performance of all sorts of video games, from Resident Evil: Village to Tekken 7, though accounts of the severity vary, and there is an on-going shortage of independently supplied raw data.
Denuvo’s attempts to clear the air include opening a Discord, which they say “ is a key step in fostering closer relationships with game developers, publishers, and players, offering a dynamic, real-time platform for meaningful interaction”. On Monday, Denuvo’s media team reached out to me to offer an interview with Denuvo’s product manager, Andreas Ullmann. Here’s that interview, edited for brevity.
RPS: In a recent public statement you said “we will stop letting every claim about our product go unanswered”. What claims are you referring to?
Andreas Ullmann: It’s basically really about the stuff that’s posted by the community. So you just need to check out Steam forums, for example. Very toxic, very hostile environment. If a game announces to use any of our products, if you check out the Steam forums, all the claims are popping in. SSDs are destroyed by our solution. The usual performance topics, and we simply don’t want to leave the floor to these people who are posting all things about us anymore. We want to also be there for a person who has not heard about us before. We also want to share our view, our opinion on these topics, and also act as a trusted source of information.
“Move over Hollow Knight,” declared Katharine (RPS in peace) in our Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown review, summarising this freshly-honed hunk of POP art as “a deep and challenging Metroid-like with some of the best platforming this side of Moon’s Ori games.” Sadly, for all the plaudits, the game doesn’t seem to have earned sufficient megabucks to justify keeping its development team together. Earlier this week, French journalist Gautoz reported that Ubisoft had disbanded The Lost Crown’s core dev team after turning down proposals for a sequel and further expansions. Speaking to RPS this morning, Ubisoft have confirmed that “most” of the Lost Crown’s dev team have moved onto other projects, while noting that there have been no layoffs as a result.
