Now that our resident football knower is gone, the rest of Team RPS have to stare each other down whenever there s football game news. Today, I blinked first. The makers of FIFA 18, a digital recreation of the famous foot-based sport, have announced that a World Cup mode will be added as part of a free update, allowing players to score both stunners and blinders as one of the 32 power-hungry nation states taking part in the competition. It s launching May 29. (more…)

From my vantage point, there s something enchanting about the snow-capped palisades of Dinefwr. Although I imagine its majesty is somewhat lost on the seven hundred exhausted Welshmen I ve just ordered to breach the stronghold s walls, with nothing but battered wooden shields between them and a typical British forecast of flaming arrows. I d like to pretend their sacrifices come at the bitter end of a long, failed diplomatic campaign. Truthfully though, like so much of the conflict in history, they had something shiny, and I decided I wanted it. (more…)

Life isn’t great for Overwatch‘s Symmetra at the moment. Her auto-aiming default attack and Do-It-Themselves turrets can make her a good pick for newer players, but conventional wisdom holds that she doesn’t have a place when things get competitive: she’s the only hero that’s never been picked in an Overwatch League game.

So, how do you solve a problem like Symmetra? According to lead designer Geoff Goodman, you attach rockets to her turrets and turn her teleporter ult into a normal ability that can transport Torbjorn turrets and D.VA ults. You also maker her left-click beam attack much more powerful, and transform photon barrier into an ultimate that creates a wall which is “INFINITE in size” (my over-excited emphasis). None of these changes to Symmetra’s upcoming rework are set in stone, but they sound WILD.

(more…)

Though Fallout 4 will let you fiddle with all manner of aspects of your character’s visage, creating your very own post-apocalyptic mumsona or dadatar, the words coming out their mouths always sound the same. That can change with the Player Voice Frequency Slider mod by “CDante”, which adds options to fiddle with the pitch of your character’s avatar and make them sound different. Obviously it’s not as good as having lines recorded with wholly different voices–such as the delightful mockney accent option of Saints Row–but it seems to allow some decent variety in personality. It’s pretty good too; listen to this teenager. (more…)

As I drag my groggy-faced body to the monitor at 6.30 each Monday morning, I click the bookmark for my Steam Charts RSS and scrunch up my face so my forehead and nose curl over my eyes. How bad will it be? How familiar will the list of five-year-old games be? How will I think of… BUT WHAT IS THIS?!!?! FOUR new entries! Far Cry 5 taking up only one slot! No Witcher 3! No Skyrim! It’s like Christmas, where Christmas is a day you just about get through without things being as bad as they were last year. (more…)

The daddifcation of video games continues with aplomb, but what a terrible waste parenthood is, collecting genetic material to make a mewling idiot who can’t even drive. It’s time for this to end. It’s time to be your own dad. Or your own mum in the case of Beacon, a roguelikelike top-down shooter where a crashlanded spacewarrior collects DNA from defeated enemies to feed into her ship’s clone bay so her next clone spawns with strange new mutations after she dies. That, I’m into. Beacon today launched a “first access” version, earlier than early access, for those truly behind the cause. (more…)

Bits are both the joy and bane of board games. You know, bits – those fiddly counters, miniatures and cubes of plastic, wood or metal (oooh, fancy). On the one hand, the tactile sensation of slamming down a plastic train in Ticket to Ride, cutting off your opponent s train route to their howls of anguish, is one of life s greatest pleasures, and a feeling that s near impossible to replicate in videogames. On the other hand, what a motherclucking pain in the posterior they are. When they re not being eaten by the dog, they re being ricocheted off the walls by a careless dice roll or nudged into oblivion by inebriated players slamming into the table on their way back from the loo. Harold, you absolute numpty, what have you done? Can anyone remember how much wool I have?

Terraforming Mars suffers more from calamity Harolds than most board games. This massively popular strategy game was released in 2016, and it s currently sitting at number five in the BoardGameGeek top 100. Now, it’s coming to PC. (more…)

There is only one game I ever purchased on Desura and it was Project Zomboid, way back in 2011. This cool little indie isometric game strove to bring a Romero-esque slow zombie apocalypse to life by mixing survival skills, community management, close quarters combat, exploration, mental health, and a lot of good moaning sounds. It was a project I was backing but also getting in on the ground floor for, as I watched the developers list off exciting features they hoped to introduce, and work alongside the gaming community. Project Zomboid finally hit Steam Early Access in 2013… and it has been stuck there ever since.

But stuck isn’t the right word for it. Or at least I’m hoping it isn’t.

(more…)

If you’ve played through The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3, you’ve spent hundreds of hours with the character of Geralt of Rivia. But have you ever taken the time to go back to the beginning? I… absolutely have not. But I played enough Witcher over the years to have encountered people and quests from the first title that I had to fill in via Wiki work later. So I can see the value in going back to figure out where they all came from.

Today (and possibly tomorrow, there’s no end point listed), you can get the first game in the series for free from GOG, along with a card keg for Gwent — which contains five free cards. The process should only take one minute of your time and we have the details below.

(more…)

Video games love to take us to Chernobyl. We’ve covered a weirdo terrorist attack game set there, the battle royale title disaster, and of course the granddaddy of em all. Last year, I finally got to take a spin with Chernobyl VR, which was a fascinating, mostly educational look at capturing a part of the Earth that we simply should not be messing around in. Well, turns out the team behind that VR experience was using their research to help craft a new survival horror title set in the same irradiated territory. Today, The Farm 51 announced Chernobylite.

(more…)