Aircraft carriers, majestic caravans of the sea, are apparently home to all sorts of winged wonders. A combination of being disturbed by having no land in sight and a terrible fear of being shot at means I’m unlikely to pilot any carrier-based aircraft in real life, so perhaps the addition of nine such warriors into World of Warplanes provides my best chance to take them for a spin. They’re all from the US Navy and include the “Grumman F2F and Brewster F2A Buffalo, the first biplane fighters with retractable undercarriage, as well as the boldly designed Chance Vought F5U and Vought F7U Cutlass fighters, both of which pioneered the use of turbojet power.” This isn’t Flare Path and none of that means much to me, I just used a picture of the funniest looking one. The rest are idling in the trailer below.

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Before A Valley Without Wind was released I excitedly emailed Jim to demand we discuss the game verdict-style after he’d told everyone wot he thought. I was bewitched by the idea of exploring the worlds it built and was even determined to be that guy>, the one who actually liked the graphics. Once I read Jim’s words and played for a while myself I realised that we were of similar mind so a verdict would involve us nodding sagely at one another over a decanter of port, occasionally ‘harrumphing’. I couldn’t even make myself like the way it looked, even as an exercise in contrarian lunacy. Version 1.1 promises significant changes though and Arcen might just be on to something.

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Ankama (Wakfu, Dofus) are making a lovely-looking leafy platform game called Fly’n, and you can see a lavish trailer (or as they quip, a “treeler”) for that below. It’s all looking a bit Botanicula, in that it’s about a tree’s residents protecting themselves from nefarious forces. This, however, is a multi-aspect platform game, with different characters playing different roles, and using various abilities to defeat the levels ahead of them. Ankama’s nine-man Fly’n team promise exploration and puzzles, as well as a “dreamy” experience. It looks like they might deliver.

The game is due in the autumn. (more…)

Or, to give the new game its full title, Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Conflict. This was its own project until fairly recently – simply Nexus Conflict – but now this game of online capital ships has become a multiplayer RTS spin-off from F2P space MMO, Black Prophecy. Hence, Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Conflict. Got all that? Right, good, because the beta for this RTS is taking sign ups. In it you’ll pilot a gigantic battleship and duke it out with other players in heavyweight star-sluggery. There’s also a conquest meta-game, with player teams fighting over 22 conquerable regions of the galactic map.

Possibly unrepresentative trailer with long sequences of capital ships pounding each other, below. (more…)

First-person puzzle game tends to mean something Portal-like these days, though I find genre definitions a lot like clouds – any recognisable shape is often in the eye rather than the form itself, and they’re hard to grasp and occasionally dampen my spirits. Xing is a first-person puzzle game that reminded me of Myst when I first saw the trailer, although in the sense that it has a beautiful make-believe land laden with puzzles and weird technology rather than because I didn’t want to play it ever. Maybe it would like to be called a first-person adventure game? It doesn’t really matter, but perhaps the game will. Let’s take a look.

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If I’ve played just enough of the ingenious Gateways to know one thing; if I play much more my brain will end being the shape of a pretzel. It’s the game that John raved about while describing time travel conundrums so defiantly opposed to the natural flow of reality that even reading about them made me feel less like a professor of puzzles and more like a hobo of the brainsphere. A cerebum, if you will. As of today, the game is available to buy at the official website for $9.99 (there’s also a demo). I’m going to step back in because it’s the first puzzle game since SpaceChem that I’ve felt justifies the mind-knots that I’ll spend the morning after unpicking.

Rift may have its shortcomings, but goodness, it can do the big beasties well, can’t it? Unsurprisingly, then, the first gameplay trailer of the upcoming Storm Legion expansion follows a typical day in the life of a colossus stomping around on somebody else’s stomping grounds. And that’s pretty much all it shows. It’s kind of eerie, actually. There’s no music or fancy film editing razzmatazz – just a colossus shrugging off spark-sized fireballs, doing his best Godzilla impression, and awkwardly bellyflop-leaping onto a bridge. He’s pretty clearly destroying the city, though, so this ought to make for quite the world event.

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Skyjacker has been a regular appearance in the Kickstarter Katchup – the new regular post that’s taken the nation by storm. The free-roaming space combat game has had one aborted attempt to raise its cash, but is back with a far more concerted and concentrated effort, and a much more realistic chance of reaching its goal. And I think that’ll be an even more realistic chance once you’ve watched the videos below. Crikey.

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This edition of Flare Path is dedicated to Gerda Hampson, the SOE agent known as ‘Hawk Moth’ who on June 22nd 1942, charmed her way into The Berghof posing as a Swiss entomologist, and surreptitiously changed Hitler’s personal difficulty setting from ‘easy’ to ‘ironman’. The sly switch wasn’t discovered for two and a half years by which time, of course, there was no way back for the red-faced Führer. (more…)

1C and Men Of War men Best Way are making a post-apocalyptic RPG called Nuclear Union. This is basically party-based STALKER/Metro in the Men Of War engine.

Uh huh.

It’s as if they sat down in a meeting and said “What would really make Jim Rossignol’s head explode on a Friday afternoon?” Well, they came pretty damned close. A bit more on this, including the first trailer, below. (more…)