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Half Life 2 RTX, the Nvidia-backed graphical overhaul mod for Valve’s seminal FPS, has a Steam demo out today. It covers both the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt chapters, for an extended look at how much ray-slash-path tracing, RTX Remix asset remastering, and DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation is being packed into the decades-old shooter.
Two years since the first gaming-focused PCIe 5.0 SSDs showed up, there are some encouraging signs that these drives might eventually develop something approaching a point. Consider the Crucial T700, one of the first 5.0 SSDs to escape the data centre and make a break for our PCs: more expensive than the best PCIe 4.0 models, and slower than them at loading games. Useless. Now, though, we have drives like the PNY CS2150 bringing down the entry fee, as well as the new Samsung 9100 Pro to finally – finally – deliver a performance improvement.
Still, there’s a way to go before PCIe 5.0 storage becomes the new standard, and honestly, that could take another two years or more. For all the CS2150’s cost-cutting and the all the 9100 Pro’s speed, neither make for compelling all-rounders like their 4.0 cousins do.
It was around the time the sigil-ridden corpse hooked up to a breathing tube pooped out a slithering, smiling garden gnome, and shortly after I had to sacrifice my arms, legs, colours and voice to a bunch of hideous trees that I realised that, hang on, this isn’t my current lunchtime favourite Bracket City. This is the demo for Moroi, a top-down “dark fairytale” from Violet Saint and publishers Good Shepherd, in which you are a horrible little man in a world of talking meat grinders, plughole maggots, and clamp-faced crawling things.
Metro 2033 turned fifteen this month, prompting a blog from 4A Games celebrating the FPS horror series’ past while looking forward to the next entry. The unnamed Metro 4 surfaced again last January as part of a reveal for VR title Metro Awakening, following a 2023 blog detailing the studio’s experience under the Russian invasion.
“We do want to reassure you that work is continuing on both of our projects despite missile strikes, air-raid sirens, and terror still raining down on Ukraine,” reads the new blog. “These circumstances are incredibly challenging, the situation remains dangerous and not within our control, but we are currently as safe as possible, and we want to manage your expectations around the reveal of the next Metro title, it will be ready when it is ready, and we can’t wait for you to see it”.
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So you’re after an AMD Radeon RX 9070 / XT? While the price is great, trying to seemingly find one at retail price is about as easy as finding a PS5 in 2020. Instead of paying inflated prices, I’d instead recommend picking up a prebuilt gaming PC—and these Skytech options are some of the best I’ve seen.
Silent Games and Secret Mode have announced that their acrobatic, pensive action-RPG Empyreal will launch on 8th May, with a demo still available on Steam. I hadn’t come across Empyreal before, but I already have Opinions, mostly positive. Firstly, the fonts for damage number pop-ups are… weirdly stringy, given the heft and colour of the character models and environments. There’s barely any meat on them. It makes me feel like I’m beating up a checkout machine, not thwacking golems.
Secondly, I quite like the looks of the game’s four biomes, which “reflect certain philosophical principles”, in the words of game director James Rogers. Going by fleeting glimpses from the below seven minute overview video, there’s a Nature world and a Technology world and a dessicated biome that reminds me of Rime, with a scalding blue sky that consists of tumbledown hexagonal plates.
What’s going on in the world of Marvel Rivals, the NetEase hero shooter that is forecast to get two new heroes every three month season, and thus stands to double its starting roster of 33 heroes providing it stays afloat for at least four years? The word on the street is that they’re adding new Team-Up skills in Season 2, beginning 11th April – and when I say “the word on the street”, I mean it’s been officially confirmed by game director Guangyun Chen. I apologise, I will try not to sound like a cool reporter again.
In a post last week about Steam’s unhelpfully vague generative AI disclosure policies, Nic touched on “that most insidious side-effect of GenAI”, the culture of paranoia it has bred among players who find themselves peering at every remotely uncanny piece of video game art, hunting for signs of machine-learning metastasis. Given the lack of transparency about the latest genAI tools, these AI-watchers often do their communities a real service, but there’s the risk of art that is merely generic or worse, simply unusual being flagged as generated. The problem goes well beyond games, of course: I’ve been accused myself of faking whole articles because I’ve done counter-intuitive things with the framing that read a little like the output from a text scrambler.
We’ve been working on something that we hope you’ll love — especially if you’re the kind of gamer who has a wishlist longer than a Final Fantasy cutscene (guilty as charged).
R.E.P.O is a six player co-op extraction spooper that currently sits atop Steam’s best seller charts, having amassed around 70k players the week following early access launch on Feb 26, and another 160k since then. That’s around 230 thousand players avoiding knifey chef frogs and persistent ducklings while extracting valuables to fill a cash quota. It’s a bit Lethal Company but even heavier on the absurdity.
As far as I can tell, this popularity comes down to two things. Firstly, the game is a verdant flub factory, stuffed with the sort of chaotic physics mishaps that translate very well to short video clips. Even the loot extraction point can kill you if lingered in too long. Secondly, the ‘Jim Henson does Nier Automata’ robots you play as flap their mouths in time to your mic chatter, making even the most bowel-curdling fear shrieks from your teammates look like a hammy comedy routine.
