Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m still bumbling, tumbling and blundering through the cavernous labyrinths of first-person spelunking sim Lorn’s Lure, in which you are an android exploring a series of enormous machines and sunken artificial habitats. I hope one day to level up from “bumbling, tumbling and blundering” to “running and jumping”. Perhaps I’ll even get as far as “speedrunning”. But in the likely event that I plateau at “blundering”, it’s a relief to know that developer Rubeki Games has updated the game with an Explore Mode that makes certain sections dramatically easier.

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I’ve been trying to work out if I’m keen on Soulframe only because I feel guilty about missing the boat with Warframe. I reviewed Digital Extremes’ hit free-to-play shooter in 2013, back when people were still calling it a spiritual successor to the developer’s boomerang-throwing action game Dark Sector. I didn’t like Warframe much at the time. Think I gave it a 6/10. Warp forward a decade, and that 6/10 game has become a thriving live service phenomenon – fifteenth on the Steam Most Played charts at the time of writing, and profitable enough to spawn its own annual TennoCon expo. It’s also become an intoxicating, confusing morass of dynastic sci-fantasy politicking and genre-shifting expansions, ranging from capital ship mechanics to questions of time travel, wrapped in layers of cosmetics that make Destiny look about as colourful as Gears Of War.

I definitely didn’t see all that coming. I doubt Digital Extremes saw it coming either. Warframe today feels like a lab experiment run amok. I love its appetite for novelty, but there’s a lot for a returning player to catch up on and, frankly, it feels like homework. As such, I had a couple of broad motivations for playing Soulframe’s pre-alpha “prelude”: I’m keen to see what Digital Extremes can do when they aren’t encumbered by 10 years of world-building, and I want to get in on the ground floor before they absolutely swamp this thing in updates.

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Train, one of Counter-Strike’s oldest and bestest maps, has received a sweeping update. Valve’s given the fairly nondescript trainyard a “full visual overhaul” in Counter-Strike 2, making it “60% cloudier” and changing its layout to encourage more tactical play besides just whipping out the AWP and looking down long, narrow corridors.

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Joining the rare but always brilliant category of “games that sound like someone scratched the high concept into their arm at pub closing time with the sharp corner of a Frazzles packet” is Assassinvisible – a stealth game about an invisible assassin that’s so invisible the player doesn’t know where they are. True, games like Invisigun have experimented with this interesting concept before, but in Assassinvisible it’s framed by another – the whole game exists as doodles in a bored student’s notebook. Here’s the Tres-tray:

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! This week, it’s Game Maker’s Toolkit and Mind Over Magnet mechanics knower, explainer, and designer, Mark Brown! Cheers Mark! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Half-Life 2 just turned 20-years-old, and to celebrate Valve updated the game with some new features. They also produced a documetary in which several of its development team look back on their work on the game and its episodic expansions – including the never-released Episode 3.

The documentary includes in-progress footage of the episode in action for the first time, and it shows an ice gun and a new liquid enemy type.

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Half-Life 2 just turned 20 years old, and to celebrate Valve have released an update for their classic first-person shooter. In brief: they’ve recorded developer commentary; they’ve added Steam Workshop support; Episodes One and Two are now part of the package; and there are some bug fixes and new graphics options.

Grab it before the end of the weekend (November 18th at 6pm GMT) and it’s also free to keep on Steam.

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Four thousand words of notes. Hoboy. Field of Glory Colon Kingdoms is definitely thought-provoking.

It was also complaint-provoking in the fairly long period where I didn’t understand what it’s trying to do. Reaching that point, luckily for you, means we can cut out a lot of the “confused whingeing” subsection of those notes. Though it still has its shortcomings, I’ve come to appreciate that I was reading Kingdoms all wrong. Although it talks big about characters, politics, and religion, they’re not what it’s about. It’s about building.

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Thunderful Games, the developers and publishers that make the colourful SteamWorld series of games, have announced a hefty number of layoffs at the company, with anywhere between 80-100 people losing their jobs. It’s part of a “restructuring” that’ll also see an unspecified number of game projects cancelled, said the company in a press release yesterday. As if this is not dispiriting enough, they also say it’s an intentional move that’ll see them making fewer games of their own and instead publishing more work by other developers.

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Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. This is a lie, of course. I haven’t been ‘out’ of strategy autobattler Mechabellum since I started playing around the 1.0 launch back in September. There I was, just starting to get to grips with the card-house-careful balance between each of its units when, bam, makers Game River dropped a Jenga block on top of it. It’s a stealth block, too. Didn’t even see it coming.

Update 1.1’s new unit is the Phantom Ray, which Game River describe as “a medium-sized aircraft with high HP that excels at striking enemies at close range with high-damage missiles”. It’s a mid-tier flier, costing 50 to unlock and 200 to field, and for that you get three of them per unit. As for default tech, you’ve got some range and fire rate unlocks, alongside an oil drop. The headliner here is the stealth buff, which cloaks the Phantom Ray by default until it attacks. When it does, it all gets a nice 40% bonus to damage.

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