Have you heard the one about Lichtspeer? I doubt it, and that's the point. While the world listens to the stories of the games which made it - the Minecrafts, the Fezs, the Braids - a thousand other stories go unheard. For every overnight millionaire there are a countless many for whom dreams and livelihoods are swept away by the relentless oncoming wave of new games. We are alright, a new documentary by Polish filmmaker Borys Nieśpielak, is the brutally ordinary story of indie game development.

It follows game-making duo Bartek Pieczonka and Rafał Zaremba in the months leading up to the launch of their spear-throwing indie game Lichtspeer, as they cope with the pernickety frustrations of PlayStation certification, the wearying grind of bug-fixing crunch, and the terrifying prospect of 'what if no one cares?'.

We are alright is a fascinating look at the other side of the coin. It shows two people's stark existence while they put relationships and other people's savings on the line to realise a dream we all buy into daily, one way or another. It shows Pieczonka and Zaremba as people like us, striving towards making something meaningful, and the toll it takes upon them.

Read more…

You'd think that a few more hours out in the wilds - trotting through the scrub, listening to the world as dusk spills across the sky - would be enough to take the edge off those rough first impressions of Wild West Online. The sad truth, however, is that the more time you spend galavanting around in this world, the easier it is to spot its flaws, and the harder it is to overlook them. For all its bluster and promise, Wild West Online is a desperately hollow, cheap experience, and wholly unworthy of those three little letters: MMO.

Having pulled back on its promise of a PvE experience, the Steam store description of Wild West Online does, in fairness, now tout this as a PvP adventure, insisting it "isn't a story-driven MMO with deep narrative and AI opponents to solo-grind" but rather a "PVP action MMO game where you duke it out with other players in a persistent PVP combat world."

That said, it's important to remember that this is now considered a full release, entirely out of Early Access. And that's what makes all the rough-edges - the placeholder text, the imperfect graphics, the shallow gameplay, the glitches and crashes - all the more difficult to endure. Add on to that the game's incessant demands that you shell out more money to unlock some pretty fundamental features, and everything starts to feel more than a little unpleasant.

Read more…

Rare's first big content update for Sea of Thieves, The Hungering Deep, is here, and available to download on Xbox One and PC now.

The Hungering Deep is, by Rare's own admission, the smallest of the six Sea of Thieves content updates planned throughout 2018. It still offers a decent amount of stuff, however, including a major new AI threat, new tools to facilitate more varied interactions between crews, new cosmetics, a new instrument, and an intriguing, if brisk, new campaign quest binding the whole thing together.

The flagship new feature of The Hungering Deep is undoubtedly the new AI threat. At this point - given the plethora of pre-release teases and blatant iconography surrounding the update's launch - it's probably not a spoiler to suggest that it's very much on the enormous shark side of things, albeit with a somewhat fantastical Sea of Thieves twist.

Read more…

UPDATE 4/6/18: PUBG Corp has announced that it will be extending the current testing period for Battlegrounds' new tropical-themed Sanhok map on PC.

Sanhok's fourth and final round of testing was originally scheduled to run from June 1st to June 4th. However, testing will now come to a close on Thursday June 7th, at 4am PDT / 12pm in the UK.

As a reminder, anyone that owns a copy of Battlegrounds on Steam can get involved in Sanhok's testing. To do so, you simply need to launch the PUBG: Experimental Server, which should automatically appear in your Steam Library.

Read more…

Capcom has announced that Mega Man 11 will be heading to Xbox One, PS4, PC, and Switch on October 2nd.

Mega Man 11, the latest instalment in Capcom's beloved, now-three-decade-old series (and the first new entry in eight years), was announced last December. It combines familiar side-scrolling action-platforming with a vibrant, but divisive, new art style, trading Mega Man's classic sprites for a blend of hand-painted backgrounds and 3D character models. You can see more in the new trailer below.

Mega Man 11's main addition is the Double Gear system, granting players two new abilities - Speed Gear and Power Gear - that can be activated at any time. Mega Man will overheat if they're activated too rapidly though, and they'll be inaccessible until he's cooled down.

Read more…

Get Even developer Farm 51 has announced a serious-about-realism multiplayer shooter called World War 3. In one mode it's like Battlefield, with big battles and tanks, and in the other, a battle royale game like PUBG.

How it's different from PUBG isn't immediately clear, but a press release called the battle royale Recon mode "tactically-oriented" and said you'll work in small squads to capture high-value targets in hostile territory. The aim is to make it feel like actual warfare, apparently.

The Battlefield-like Warzone mode, meanwhile, combines infantry and armoured vehicles and drones for a bigger-scale battle.

Read more…

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus was a rip-roaring science-fiction romp through an alternate history. It was, as Edwin more eloquently said in his Wolfenstein 2 review, "vicious, affecting, witty, spaced-out, crude, inventive, morbid and for the most part, a success."

But while we all merrily mashed Nazis in 1960s America, developers at MachineGames cringed at a parade of things we didn't see - the "I"s which weren't dotted, the "T"s uncrossed. Andreas jerfors was one such developer, the senior game designer for Wolfenstein 2, and in a talk at Digital Dragons 2018 in Poland last week he outlined what he thought went well, and what he thought didn't.

Take stealth, for instance. The idea was for Wolfenstein 2 to cater to three playstyles: mayhem, tactical and stealth. The first two were fine but stealth was weak. "Sometimes it felt inconsistent," jerfors said in his talk. Enemies discovered you too easily and too often, and you'd be left with no choice but to fight. "We didn't spend enough resources and attention on stealth." He thinks it's because not enough people believed in stealth across the company so it didn't have the creative buy-in it needed to really work.

Read more…

13 years after its original release, GameCube classic Killer7 is getting a new PC version.

Directed by Suda51 and co-written by Resident Evil's Shinji Mikami, Killer7 is a rail shooter where you play as one of seven hitman personalities, each with their own abilities.

Originally intended as a GameCube exclusive and part of the legendary Capcom 5 (Resident Evil 4, PN03, Dead Phoenix, Viewtiful Joe) Killer7 eventually arrived in 2005 for GameCube and PlayStation 2.

Read more…

PlayStation 4 exclusive Detroit: Become Human has beaten Xbox One console exclusive State of Decay 2 to the top of the UK chart.

The latest game from Quantic Dream, the studio behind Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls led by the controversial David Cage, pipped State of Decay to first place.

Microsoft's exclusive, meanwhile, was also released for Windows 10 PCs, though these sales aren't counted as UK numbers company Chart-Track does not track digital PC copies. And it's worth noting a lot of people who are playing State of Decay 2 will be doing so via the Xbox Game Pass, which is download only.

Read more…

You could probably build a fairly tedious argument around the premise that video games have two key parental figures. There's pen-and-paper RPGs on one side, with all the stats, the loot, the character sheets and the narrative choices. And then there's pinball on the other, a sticky bar-room game that favours reaction-time and dexterity and intricate layout design, that rewards you - and draws you in - with glorious sounds and lights. Pen-and-paper RPGs gave us Baldur's Gate and Deus Ex; pinball gave us Mario and GTA (the original GTA actually started out as an explicit riff on pinball, I gather; a little of this survived via the in-game text that aped the wonderfully garish displays of pinball machines). Or, you could forget all that and play Yoku's Island Express, a platformer with more than a little RPG to it, in which you control a dung beetle postman who hops around an island not using a jump button and a dash move, but by bouncing from one point to another while being whacked with flippers.

Gosh, it's a beautiful system. You can move Yoku back and forth with the stick, but to see him truly race across the world you use the triggers, one of which controls a golden flipper while the other controls a blue flipper. Yoku pushes a ball ahead of him - I hope it's a ball - and it's the ball that takes the battering, rolling and bouncing and falling and spinning while little old Yoku hangs on behind it.

The flippers reveal that the game's bucolic island setting is in fact a fantastically well-tooled machine. You scale cliffs by rebounding off twangy drum-like stuff or riding wonderfully sculpted flumes. A little bump in the road will be enough to block off a path, while a hole may give way to a race-track made of wire that carries you miles away from its starting point. This is one of those rare games where moving around really feels like exploration, and each new discovery makes you both aware of your own powers and limitations a little more, and eager to go back to earlier locations and try out a new trick that has just occurred to you.

Read more…