Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Overthrown is a city building game made by and for people who can’t work out whether they love or despise city building games. In this curious concoction from developers Brimstone and publishers Maximum Entertainment, you are a chirpy anime monarch equipped with a magic crown that confers the ability to seize entire buildings and throw them away because aaaararargahragrhagh, I am sick of this dang sawmill. I am sick of perfecting the infrastructure. I am sick of stockpiling food for the winter. I am sick of my hard-working peasants and their happiness levels. I am going to pick everything up and hurl it into the sky.

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I have significant reservations about Avowed, Obsidian’s first-person Pillars Of Eternity spin-off RPG, but those reservations are significantly offset by the fact that I can be an undersea mushroom woman called Mystic Meg. In Avowed, you are the god-touched envoy of a distant emperor, sent to an island realm known as the Living Lands to investigate a mysterious blight. “God-touched”, in this case, means “fungal and a bit mermaidy”. It means that you can make rainbow toadstools sprout from your eyesocket in the character creator. It means that you can accessorise your cheekbones with what look like bracket polypores, or deck your ears with staghorn coral.

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Valve have unveiled a new policy about season passes on Steam, which aims to ensure that developers release all the individual DLC involved on time and share adequate details about each DLC pack in advance. It specifies that developers can delay release of a season pass DLC just once, and by no longer than three months. In the event that a developer postpones DLC release by longer than three months, Valve may take such corrective actions as removing the season pass from sale or refunding players.

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Two theme parks are being planned based on Minecraft. Mojang are partnering with Merlin Entertainments to open the destinations, including rides, hotel rooms and shops, in the UK and US in 2026 and 2027. Merlin are the operator of existing theme parks and attractions including Alton Towers, Legoland, Sea Life, and Madame Tussauds.

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Valve said that they want to make a new Steam Controller back in 2022, but such a thing might be getting closer to production, according to dataminer Brad Lynch.

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I’ve been looking forward to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 since it was announced, but I might wait a while longer before trying to play it. It launched yesterday and currently sits at “overwhelmingly negative” Steam reviews due to long loading times caused by server issues.

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Gang Beasts is one of the games I think of when I recall the golden days of video game expos, before Covid rolled up and nuked the business model. It casts you as one of several jellybaby pugilists, fighting for dominance over such locations as Ferris wheels and the tops of speeding vans. All of the characters are 1) seemingly drunk, and 2) subject to real-time physics. Your abilities consist of 1) punching, headbutting or kicking people, perhaps knocking them out for a few seconds, and 2) grabbing people and things and either hoisting them skyward like a wrestler, or hoisting yourself skyward like a toddler climbing onto Mummy’s head. The only way of defeating people is to hurl them off-map.

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One of my proudest pictures of a 2018 trip to Croatia wasn’t of me and my pal. No, it wasn’t of the beautiful scenery or the glistening sea either. It was of many cats lying in the sun together outside a little church. I hadn’t seen that volume of cats in my life, nor that volume together in one spot, all hanging out. Now, you too can live this magic: there’s a demo of this upcoming sidescroller called Neko Odyssey on Steam, and it consists of you taking photos of cats for internet clout. It’s nice!

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Shadow Of Chornobyl is out today. As you may have read, it’s on the buggy side. Buggier than a bucketful of locusts. Buggier than Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In our S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Shadow Of Chornobyl review, wasteland wanderer James called it “easily the most borked FPS I’ve played in years”, detailing such issues as HUD elements disappearing, stuttery performance, flashing textures and character mouths not working properly.

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Did last week’s paranormal body-swapper Slitterhead leave you cold? Do you consider its brain-jacking of rando cityfolk for monster-hunting purposes a sad waste of potential? Perhaps you’ll prefer RAM: Random Access Mayhem, in which you’re a fugitive AI hopping between warlike robot bodies in top-down view.

Yes, the subtitle involves both a colon and a dad joke, but the demo is entertaining – Nuclear Dawn meets Ctrl Alt Ego, in short. The one major criticism I have after 20 minutes or so is that the flat pixelart perspective makes walls and walkable surfaces look interchangeable, and this feels more like a question of acclimatisation than a real complaint.

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