Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Bear with me on this, but I adore how swordfighting works in Dune. Ubiquitous wearable sci-fi shields repel any attack that comes in too fast, so everyone has to learn this unique, overtly dance-like form of close-quarters combat where every thrust and parry is necessarily slow and considered. Picture it: careful judgments of your movements, weighing up the right time to strike, every measured jab part of a wider strategy that culminates in the kill.

MOBAs are like that. Both in the fights themselves, sort of, where probing lunges lead up to bursts of lethality, but more broadly in each match as a whole. They’re map-wide knife fights, where a thrust is a well-judged lane push and a parry a savvy item buy. At first, playing Smite 2 felt akin to watching on helplessly as my opponents repeatedly shoved their crysknives through my ribs. After 30 hours, it often still feels like that – but I am enjoying myself. Mostly. Despite Valve’s third-person elephant in the lane.

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Blue Protocol is a Bandai Namco-developed anime MMO which released in Japan last year, and was meant to arrive in the west at some point this year courtesy of Amazon Games. Alas, that’s no longer the case – and the game is also shutting down in Japan early next year.

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Back in July, No Man’s Sky reached version 5.0 with the Worlds update, which refreshed its planetary generation to introduce more variety alongside more detailed water, clouds, and weather. We didn’t write about it at the time, because I suppose re-writing the very fabric of the galaxy seemed small-time.

Today’s new update, however, adds fishing, and I can’t not write about that.

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Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation is a “postcolonial 4X game”, which might sound like a contradiction in terms. While approaches to 4X and grand strategy vary hugely between games, factions and players, the genre as a whole is firmly wedded to imperial conquest, both structurally and at the level of narrative aspects and set-dressing. Many 4X games are triumphal re-enactments of specific periods of colonial settlement and expansion. All of which is to say that Syphilisation is fascinating. It’s a reworking of the genre which dismantles and reconstructs concepts such as diplomacy, research and production. It’s also just left early access – find more details and a playthrough video below.

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It’s been 13 years since the first Space Marine came out. While it wasn’t outstanding in the grander landscape of gaming, enough Warhammer 40K fans seem to have cherished the escapades of bulky blue boltgunner Demetrian Titus for the action game to merit a sequel a decade later. It left its story on something of a cliffhanger, with said hero being dragged away to face untold tortures by the Inquisition, the most zealous sect of this preternaturally paranoid sci-fi universe. Today, Titus is free again. Free to stomp towards hordes of alien foes, blast them with a plasma incinerator, and shred the stragglers with a chainsaw sword. Space Marine 2 is an often-satisfying scrapper that has me convinced of 40K’s merit as a crafting ground for excellent-looking environments and creatures, even if I’m not particularly moved by the bland character of Titus and his fellow Ultramarines.

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If somebody grabs you from behind and turns you into a human shield in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6, they can drag you around for about five seconds before you die, assuming they don’t execute you early. Here are 12 things you can do in those five seconds:

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Babbdi was a game of stark and severe Brutalist aesthetics, and also, a game about playing scales with a trumpet, walljumping with a baseball bat and using a leafblower to fly. Snuck out over winter 2022, it was a sombre but delightful freebie with immense though well-hidden imagination, in which your only explicit objective was to find a way out of a small concrete city.

Now, developers Lemaitre Bros are making a gott-dang 1v1 FPS called Straftat, slated for release on 24th October 2024 with over 100 arenas. It’s similarly in love with concrete, but it also has blunderbusses, dual-wielding, Gatling guns, corner-peeking, curved swords, cowboy hats and beehive hairdos.

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Concord, that 5v5 multiplayer first-person shooter about Guardians Of The Galaxy-like space persons, will be taken offline on the 6th September. Anyone who bought it is being offered a full refund and it’s been wiped off storefronts. All of this comes just shy of three weeks since the game dropped, with Sony citing a launch that “didn’t land the way we’d intended”.

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When I catch word of a chocolate-and-peanut-butter blend of genres such as “cyberpunk survival horror RPG”, my eyes light up. Literally, they light up like the pilot lights of flamethrowers, like glyphs on a cursed monolith that has been exposed to fresh blood after a billion years of dormancy. When I hear that the aforesaid RPG is set on a “dying space station”, I begin to emit a monotonous reverberation, like the mysterious banging recently heard aboard the Boeing Starliner. And when I hear that it’s being made by the people behind Shadowrun and Battletech, I extend dozens of independently cognitive motorised tentacles and begin writing a news article.

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Keeping your eyes on the road isn’t easy when the horizon hosts crackling azure nebula; when the voluminous nightglow from the planet below makes even the gargantuan industrial indicators look like so many tiny, twinkling cat eyes. I, a terrestrial chump, cannot help be taken in by it all. But I get the sense all this spacey wonder is just so much unremarkable grease pooling at the rim of a diner plate for my Star Trucker. He’s seen a couple things, that’s for sure. Taken the long way round the spiral arm to slip past security checkpoints and offload cases of booze for off-the-record cash. Seen reduced-to-clear Ginster’s wrappers glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Hummed that Freebird solo a thousand times while waiting for the traffic to thin out near the shoulder of Orion.

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