Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You know, I’ve always loved me a sky island in a video game. Can’t really tell you why, I just think they’re neat! So right from the get go I was pretty easily won over by Lost Skies, another one of those open world survival crafting type games. It’s a genre I’m not easily won over by, I don’t care for building things all that much, but the pull of the open air is pretty alluring to me. And I won’t even have very long to see if I’ll bounce off of its craftiness or not, because developer Bossa Studios announced today that Lost Skies is releasing into early access later this month on April 18th.

Read more

I think if you were to show someone the trailer for Mewgenics, complete with cats you-know-whating, a musical number, and a poop joke, they’d probably be taken quite aback. However, if you were to tell them that it’s from the same people that made Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, I’m sure they’d be able to understand much quicker. Aside from coming from some pretty notable indie devs, there still might be the question of why it’s such a big deal that Mewgenics finally got a trailer, and the answer to that is (kind of) simple: it was announced 13 years ago.

Read more

It’s not exactly much of a secret that a lot of indie devs are struggling to stay afloat these days given the economic *gestures vaguely at a world map.* No one has an exact solution either, but last December, just before the release of its latest game Hyper Light Breaker, noted indie developer Heart Machine announced that they were opening a Patreon. I won’t act like this is exactly a novel concept, I’ve seen a few other devs, typically on the smaller or solo size, try the same thing. But it still felt like a sign that Heart Machine needed a bit of a boost to keep things going.

Read more

Fishing! It’s a feature that’s been included in many games over the years, one that varies in quality from game to game. Sega Bass Fishing? Probably top of the line, as long as you have that unique fishing rod controller. Stardew Valley? I like it, but I know plenty of people that hate it. Personally I normally find it quite a relaxing thing to do, particularly in games that are otherwise combat focused. Fallout 76 is one such game that’s more about shooting rather than chilling out, but over on the public test server you can now try out its version of fishing.

Read more

The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are calling on people to cancel Game Pass subscriptions, avoid Microsoft-owned video game properties such as Minecraft and Call Of Duty, and boycott all Microsoft Gaming and Xbox-branded products in protest at the company’s reported business connections with the Israeli military.

Read more

Eremite Studios and Hooded Horse’s bestest best city-builder Against The Storm is getting a free update and a new paid expansion, featuring a new biome, mechanics and faction. Details are thin on the ground, but we can safely say that it’ll involve bats. I know: bats! Let the wannabe Hunter S. Thompson write-ups abound. Back in the halycon days of New Games Journalism we’d have had a field day with this. Come now, help me word this introduction more appropriately: “we were somewhere around the Smouldering City, on the edge of the Blightstorm, when the DLC packs began to take hold…”

Read more

City-building can be an exhausting affair, once you’ve evolved beyond the initial joy of cottage windows lighting up at night and start having to deal with things like traffic congestion and rubbish collectors going on strike. As such, it’s nice to play a city builder in which you can rest easy in the knowledge that any urban sprawl you engineer will soon be obliterated. It’s even nicer that said city builder is free.

Read more

Last year Assassin’s Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois made headlines by revealing that Ubisoft’s latest open world game had a “smaller” map than its predecessor, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. He compared it instead to Assassin’s Creed Origins, which recreates roughly 80 square kilometres of ancient Egypt, next to Valhalla’s exhausting 250 square kilometre expanse of land and sea.

That story sparked a couple of thoughts for me. A surge of relief, of course, because life is short and video games are often far too long. And secondly, the realisation that I don’t really know what “bigger” and “smaller” mean in a video game, and I’m not sure anybody else does either.

Read more

I cannot review Psycho Patrol R in any way that matters. I could approach this mech-piloting, bullet-hungry immersive policing sim like any other first-person shooter with RPG elements, and tell you about its levels, storytelling, and gamey features. Or I could evaluate it on its own terms, as a piece of hallucinogenic hypercapitalist critique wrapped in a kevlar jacket of impenetrable irony whose own €39 price tag appears to be part of the joke. Neither approach is going to work. Psycho Patrol R requires a buy-in of brain rot and an almost memetic openness to mania. You’ll need to play it to better misunderstand it.

Read more

Bungie have broken a silence surrounding their upcoming extraction shooter Marathon to tweet a short video full of cryptic symbols. It’s proven hard for fans to decrypt so far, but the developers have since followed up with a few more teasey posts, including one that certainly reads like a notice to fans that more information on the game will be revealed soon. “The signal is coming. The truth is coming,” says a line of plain text in the marketing spritz. “Are you ready?”

Read more