Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

There are currently 35 heroes in Marvel Rivals, split between the roles of Vanguard (tanks), duellists (DPS) and Strategists (support). That’s plenty to get your head around, and the roster is expanding rapidly. NetEase have announced that they plan to introduce a new hero approximately every six weeks – in other words, twice per three-month season. I wonder how long it’ll take them to probe beyond the obvious Marvel headliners and start seriously abrading the bottom of the Connected Universe barrel. Nagneto, for example. Or how about J. Pennington Pennypacker, who shoots coins out of his wrists?

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You know when you drop your nice, shiny pen and it rolls under your bed, and you look under there and see it winking from the depths of a stygian expanse of superannuated dust bunnies, lakes of mildew and anomalous debris that absorbs far too much light? Just me? I need to get out the mould spray more often.

OK, how about when you were a kid and you lifted up a nice, round stone and the damp, fertile soil beneath writhed away from you in a fervent knotting of pellucid, boneless bodies and the tickling of a thousand little legs? Right. Anoxia Station is that and also, a turn-based strategy game about drilling for oil. The recently released Itch.io demo is rough around the edges, but I do adore the vibe.

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A quick one: Firaxis have confirmed that Civilization 7 will be Steam Deck verified at launch. It’s a pleasant surprise, given that 2016’s Civ 6 is still only listed as “playable” on Valve’s oversized Switch. I like this news about as much as I’m terrified to realise that Civ 7 is just under a month away. I do not need that much strategy game, this early in the year. But hey, at least I’ll be able to play the new 4X in bed as Sid Meier intended.

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“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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