The best shooters endure. While the state of the art moves on in other genres and leaves old designs in the dust, it’s as fun to fire a well-made shotgun from an early 90s FPS as from one released today. For that reason, this list runs the gamut from genre classics to those released in the last year. There’s bound to be something for you inside.
Competitive games like League of Legends, Dota 2 and Overwatch are at their best when you play them… competitively. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of fun to be had tooling around in casual play – relaxed environments are great for hanging out with friends, or just being silly. It’s how I spend 95% of my time playing those sort of games. That other 5% of the time though? Those comparatively brief periods where I’ve been playing with a full team of people who I know, all on voice coms, all trying their hardest to secure a win? Those are the times when those sort of games have truly shone as games.>
That’s why I think League’s upcoming tournament mode, Clash, is going to be a big deal. Starting on May 25th, each online tournament will cost a small amount to enter, run every fortnight, and take place over a full three days of the weekend. I’m a Dota man through and through, but Riot’s plans are starting to make Valve’s automated tournaments look a bit rubbish. (more…)
I’ve had Artifact on the brain these past few weeks, so I’ve mulled over the phrase “Dota-inspired card game” more times than I count. But what does Dota-inspired really mean? Artifact has lanes and creeps and heroes and also some nifty rectangles if you haven’t heard, but that just makes it a MOBA-inspired card game. What makes it a Dota game? I spoke to Artifact programmers Bruno Carlucci and Jeep Barnett to find out. (more…)
Sometimes you need a hand to hold, so we ve updated our list of the 25 best co-op games to play on PC with a headset-wearing friend or a muted stranger.
Everything’s better with a pal or two in tow, from collaborative puzzle solving to sublime double stealth takedowns. Equally sublime are when those takedowns go awry, your partner shrieks in panic and all hands are needed on deck to clear up the mess. Whether local or online, co-op games offer some of the best fun you can have in 2018.
With Dota 2‘s huge annual tournament, The International, drawing near-ish, Valve have launched a new Battle Pass to help boost the prize pool. Dota 2’s Battle Passes are multi-faceted doodads including access to new modes, challenges, a sticker album, progression tracks to grind through, and oh so very many cosmetic pretties to unlock and collect. This year, it includes a battle royale-soundin’ mode. Battle Passes cost 7 to start, though you can pay extra to skip ahead in the unlock grind, and 25% of the proceeds go to The International 2018’s prize pool. (more…)
Collectible card games have been around for decades, but they’ve really been running hot ever since Blizzard unleashed Hearthstone four years ago. Since then, we’ve seen Shadowverse, Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Duelyst, Faeria – there are a lot of these things, if you haven’t heard. They all put their own spin on rectangles with numbers on ’em, but they also universally take cues from Hearthstone and, just as often, each other, and as a result they regularly run into similar problems, the biggest two being how to balance a competitive system and how to price card packs fairly.
Artifact, Valve’s upcoming Dota-inspired card game, is definitely using some pages from the same books, but it’s also doing enough things differently that it has the potential to solve a lot of those problems. (more…)
Hullo! John is preoccupied with wizards right now, so I’m taking over for the rundown of last week’s top ten on Steam. It was an interesting week, bringing back some welcome old games and slamming in some shiny new ones. Largely, it’s all about robots and survival.
Kevin ‘Purge’ Godec is an ex-pro Dota 2 player turned analyst, commentator and coach, and I recently went to an event in London where me and a few other journos (*puts on Red Bull Esports voice*): “trained under Purge .
We played a couple of games against people who were far better than us, then listened to a man with near comprehensive knowledge of a stupidly complicated game brutally highlight our every misstep in front of a large crowd of people.
I loved it, though not because of the valuable advice. I loved it because it felt like stepping back into a world that I thought I d left behind, and realising that I m eager to get back to exploring. I also hated it, because it brought me face to face with some of that world’s unpleasant inhabitants in a way that I never have been before.
You’ll often see characters in sci-fi stories play seemingly incomprehensible games like multi-dimensional space chess, and that’s basically what it’s like playing Artifact, Valve’s upcoming Dota-inspired card game. It’s an ambitious hybrid of the studio’s MOBA and Magic: The Gathering, and it works shockingly well. So much so that it only took two games for me to understand and get on board with Valve’s vision. (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…)