Understanding any given sentence in Wuthering Waves is like trying to discern sensible meaning from the back of a rain-bleached Doritos packet you found while cleaning your gutters. Last week, players of the character action gacha asked for more freedom to skip story scenes and dialogue. Having sunk a bunch of hours into the game, I can see why. The combat may be swish and the traversal across its rolling landscape flowing and carefree, but the lore-obsessed babble of its characters is mind-numbing. Wuthering Waves has been this month’s lightning rod for hype. But it’s worth dissecting what it’s actually like to play.
Readers, I appear to have locked myself in self-referential language matrix trying to describe the feeling of playing top-down action shooter Kickback. You can only move through the recoil from shooting, you see, which means facing the opposite way to where you want to go. It’s both very counterintuitive and very fun. To call something both counterintuitive and fun seems, well, counterintuitive. But also: fun. Which, as a concept is very fun to think about. But, also, quite counterintuitive. Writing such a incredibly redundant paragraph is quite fun, even though I’m just repeating myself. Counterintuitive, right? I’m going to try to escape this paragraph now. if I manage it, I’ll see you in the one below.
With an effectively infinite universe to fill in No Man’s Sky, developers Hello Games have certainly risen to the challenge of trying to fill it with as much stuff as they possibly can over the last near-decade, still managing to add major new features and modes eight years on from the sci-fi exploration game’s release. Next update Adrift is taking things right the way back, though, by emptying the expansive cosmos of almost everything except you, your ship and planets to visit.
A PC adapter for Sony’s PlayStation VR2 has recently popped up in South Korea, giving a new update – albeit an unofficial one – on the incoming PC support for the PS5 VR headset teased earlier this year.
It’s been a little while since we last heard about the untitled open-world driving game from Maverick Games, the studio opened a couple of years back by ex-Playground Games veterans including former Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown. We still don’t know what the team’s new game is called or when it might hit the road, but we have been given a few more snippets of what to expect and news on who’ll be helping pump up its tires and fill it with fuel as publisher.
Many moons ago, premiere wordsman Nate Crowley reviewed shark ‘em up Maneater, decrying its incurious perpetuation of anti-shark propaganda, and calling it “an ecstatically violent simulation of being a fool’s idea of a shark.” My own frothing penchant for the plan-schemes of Warhammer’s Skaven ratboys has been documented in these pages to the point of rabidity, but I do feel broadly similarly about media that sullies rats – clean, smart and good folk that they are. Lively tactics Trash Of The Titans does not aim to emancipate its villainous vermin. But, like Warhammer, it gets a pass for its evident affection towards its antagonistic dumpster diving scuttlers. Also, it’s just plain fun.
A producer on Kerbal Space Program 2 has confirmed that those working on the space flight sim are being laid off en masse. We already knew that the developers at Intercept Games would be losing their jobs thanks to a closure announcement from Washington State. Until remarks from Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, muddied the waters. Zelnick refused to acknowledge that the studio was being closed when asked by a reporter, even going so far as to claim the opposite. “We didn’t shutter those studios,” he told IGN. But it seems clear from one producer’s testimony that Zelnick’s remarks are inaccurate.
Well, it’s been a long hard road, but since I vowed to only consume alcohol matured while having game soundtracks forcibly blasted into its molecules, giving up drinking has been a lot easier. Now, to take the final gulp of my Snake Eater-theme-reared IPA, and open up my web browser….
I have played many a creepy throwback game that takes inspiration from the ever inadequately named “Golden” (Grimy and Diseased? Cadaverous, perhaps) Age of survival horror on PS1, but it’s rare you play one that invokes the N64, and even less often that you stumble on something horror-adjacent that riffs on Star Fox 64. Ah, Star Fox! The natural companion piece for, say, Eternal Darkness or The Suffering. In fairness, I did always find those Pez dispenser dialogue animations pretty eerie.
To kick off with some extremely half-arsed mytho-geometry, the original Frostpunk was a testament to both the design utility and the inexhaustible political symbolism of circles. When people wish to found a community of equals they commonly form a circle, with each participant visible and audible to the rest. A circle is also the best shape for defending against an engulfing ambient threat such as a global ice age, because it has no weak points, and it makes a great centrepiece for a videogame interface, a symmetrical motif that can be tuned and adorned to either suck your attention into the screen or distribute it evenly in all directions.
Created by Polish developers 11 bit, Frostpunk takes place in the middle of a circle, an Arctic crater with a huge coal generator at its heart. Your city rises in rings around that generator, each additional layer of dwellings corresponding intuitively to decreasing temperature, and the result is one of the most focused and thematically consistent specimens of its genre – a building game that feels as intimate and urgent as tending a campfire. Frostpunk 2‘s new campaign mode breaks the circle open. It starts where you (hopefully) ended, with the crater now fully colonised and evolved into a glaring, blue-orange geode of high-density housing and clustered chimneys. But the view has been pulled back, and construction now unfolds along the plains and canyons beyond the crater, which consist not of circles but of hexagons – another UI designer’s favourite – on which you’ll plot out upgradeable districts rather than assembling individual buildings.
