Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Disco Samurai is a game that’s so difficult I’d have given up playing sooner if it didn’t contain so many of my absolute favourite action game things. Tense, decisive duels. Violence that’s both brutal and a little silly. Scalpel-sharp parry n’ strike back-and-forths. Short stages that dole out chunky progression hits of dopamine, as quickly as they wrest those hits away from you with another humbling beatdown. Perhaps most importantly, it aims to do one thing – rhythm combat – and does it brilliantly. It’s got teeth, but it’s also got groove.

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On a Monday in early 2018, Adam Smith, Rock Paper Shotgun’s deputy editor at the time, handed in his notice. On Thursday that same week, I emailed Alice Bell, a person I’d never spoken to before, to ask if she would consider applying for the role.

Alice thought it over for a week, and then emailed her response: no.

Thank god I was able to change her mind, so I could spend the next six years giving her shit about it. But now Alice is leaving RPS, and you should join me in saying goodbye.

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US labour union the CWA (Communications Workers of America) have filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against Activision QA supplier Lionbridge Technologies. As Game Developer reports, the CWA allege that Lionbridge fired an entire 160-person team in Idaho in retaliation for union-related activities.

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I try to avoid describing video games in mathematical terms, but I can hardly avoid it here. Treasure Planet’s flying galleons plus Spirited Away’s bath house plus Spiritfarer’s gentle building and management mechanics equals Hotel Galactic. Watch the trailer below and tell me I’m wrong.

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Caves Of Qud has been under development for over 15 years, but it’s finally reaching a 1.0 release later this year. Ahead of that happening, it’s received a final major content update which seeks to make the complex, detailed roguelike more approachable. The Spring Molting update, which is out now, makes the user interface work with both mouse and gamepad, adds Steam cloud saves, and more.

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It took over a month of racing and 220 hours of playtime but a Trackmania player has finally beaten the racing game’s most horrendously difficult map. For those of you only now noticing that tens of thousands of Twitch viewers have been religiously watching video game Hot Wheels, let me elucidate. Deep Dip 2 is a fan-made tower of racetracks that was published as a challenge to the racing game’s community last month. It is 16 floors of unfathomably difficult ramps, tunnels, ledges, pipes, and beams. A simple mistake sees drivers plummeting to the bottom, like the sad cauldron man of Getting Over It. The first three players to finish would share a prize pool of over $32,000. Over the weekend, one player has now managed it, and another has since joined him. Third place is still up for grabs but, mate, I wouldn’t recommend it.

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Good news, everybody! Dragon Age: The Veilguard – previously Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, strictly speaking Dragon Age 4 – is not the bantzy heist romp suggested by its debut trailer. Less Good News for returning players: going by the 45 minute segment I was shown at Summer Game Fest, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is more of a single-character action-RPG plus entourage, than a proper party-based affair in the vein of 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. You do get a party, drawn from a retinue of seven, larger-than-life, romanceable companions encompassing a range of classes, abilities and go-faster hairdos, but control of that party has been streamlined, and there’s a God Of Warlike emphasis on booting Fade demons into pits. Hmmm.

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I’ve always loved the art of the Metal Slug series of side-scrolling shooters, so I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the fetching grid strategy antics of Metal Slug Tactics ever since it was first announced. For as long as I’ve been excited, I’ve also been worried. It’s been a polarising experience, like being alternately fed delicious sandwiches and those inedible rotlogs they sell at Subway. Still, I’ve remained cautious: is all this great pixel-art just a shroud pulled over a ho-hum tactics game to rescue it from naffness? It’s with this in mind I hungrily dove into the Steam Next Fest demo, as one might hungrily dive into a bin to eat literal garbage if their only other option was Subway.

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AI nowadays is big business and it’s pretty terrifying, honestly. FACEMINER captures both of these things well, as it sees you build a biometric data processing empire from scratch. And most scary of all, is you’ll relish upscaling your organisation as you mine mugshots. I mean, I went from, “Hmmm, this is dubious”, to a sicko excited by the fact I didn’t have to click much to harvest strangers’ portraits. Nic wrote about it a while back, but I’d like to draw attention to it again as it’s very good.

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What a thrill! Oh, wait, actually no. It’s just a release date. We get those all the time. Still, I’m not entirely un-thrilled to learn that stealth action game Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater could be arriving as soon as the 17th of November this year, according to a hastily scrubbed X post by retailer GameStop. Thankfully, the folks at the (good, handsome) Ian Games Network grabbed the offending information square before it was deleted. Here’s said square:

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