The word "door" appears no less than five times in the first patch for Aliens: Colonial Marines. It's a hefty day-one update for Gearbox's FPS, tweaking issues encountered in the campaign, co-op, and multiplayer, but the fact that more silly-sounding problems—NPCs passing through welded doors or bullets not passing through an open doorway—are being quashed just after the game's launch suggests Gearbox's smart-guns met trouble when targeting bugs during development.

The full patch notes continues the door dilemma with fixes for dead xenos breaking doors, AI companions trying to open sealed doors, and doors that just simply refused to work. Who would ever expect simple hatchways as a source of befuddlement for both battle-hardened soldiers and alpha hunter xenos?

On the multiplayer side, Gearbox restored the Spitter xeno's acid spray to its mouth as opposed to... wherever it came from before. Respawn and warping troubles were also resolved.

Brief yourself on the the patch's entirety at Gearbox's website. We recently emerged from the metallic warrens of Colonial Marines covered in xeno sweat, gunsmoke stains, and the ichor of disappointment.

Skyrim after being modded all the way to crazy town.

What will the Games of Tomorrow look like? Will they be virtual reality dreams designed in collaboration with J.J. Abrams? Maybe. As RPS points out, adventurous ideas were plentiful at this year's D.I.C.E. Summit. Skyrim director Todd Howard, however, told the site that good ol' fashioned graphical improvements shouldn't be undervalued.

"Everybody always wants more power," said Howard, sadly not followed by a guttural "uuueehhh?" and irresponsible use of power tools. Instead, he said that while more powerful PCs have a variety of benefits, he thinks "people discount graphics."

"They’ll say, 'Well, the gameplay's what really matters,' and it does. But I do feel that graphics and your ability to present something that feels new, real, and believable puts people in that environment where they can really enjoy what they’re playing."

So what new, real, and believable world will Bethesda present next? "There are certain types of fantasy that appeal to me," said Howard, "but there are also period pieces, and if something was good in the modern day, I’d want to do that as well. Writing anything off at any point in time is silly."

Well, it's been narrowed down to "anything." Read all of Howard's comments at RPS.

Guns are a constant character in modern games, but we don't typically take the time to deconstruct their personalities. How a gun animates, its behavior, and what we hear in our headphones has a lot to do with how much we enjoy a shooter. In service of highlighting some of the best examples of good design, Evan, Logan, and T.J. sat in front of a camera to talk about which game guns they like the most.

The six or seven guns we mention are a sliver of PC gaming's armory, of course. What rifles, blasters, launchers, or cannons would you contribute to the discussion?

If you've been holding off on buying Civilization V in the hopes of snagging all of the released content in one package, your day has finally arrived. Civilization V: Gold Edition includes the Gods & Kings expansion, along with all of the map, civilization, and scenario packs for $50. That's $10 cheaper than buying just the base game and the expansion separately on Steam. Of course, this won't be the complete collection for long if the rumors about the upcoming One World expansion are true. But it's still enough content to keep you busy for a while. (180 hours, in my case.)

Compared to vanilla Civ V, you'll be getting Korea, Spain, the Incas, Denmark, Babylon, Polynesia, the Celts, the Netherlands, the Mayans, Carthage, Byzantium, the Huns, Austria, Ethiopia, and Sweden. Not to mention some pretty cool scenarios, including my personal favorite, Fall of Rome. If you'd like to see Gods & Kings in action, check out my Civilization V Chronicles, our review of the expansion, and the Steam demo.

Tim "of Legend" Schafer ascended Double Fine mountain today to proclaim that Brütal Legend has been freed from the dark magic which has imprisoned it in consoles since 2009. The heavy metal adventure will release on PC February 26th, and is available now for discounted pre-purchase on Steam. Those who join the Order of Early Adopters also gain access to the multiplayer beta, which is live now, and two Team Fortress 2 crossover items.

The action-adventure/RTS stars satirical rock icon Jack Black, and was generally well received by 2009's critics. It marks the complete transition of Double Fine's major games (that is, excluding Kinect and iOS games) to the PC.

The exclusive TF2 pre-purchase items are leading man Eddie Riggs' hair and his guitar Clementine. Peter McConnell's original score is also available on Steam, bundled with the game or separately, and an art book is coming to Double Fine's store shortly after the release. Double Fine understands that heavy metal is not about making one announcement at a time. \m/

This preview originally appeared in issue 249 of PC Gamer UK.

There are a few ways of responding to a name as silly as Warface. You could roll your eyes, and declaim it as evidence that the machine that stamps out military first-person shooters in the basement of every major publisher has finally become self-aware.

You could laugh and interpret the nod to Kubrick as a sign that Crytek are approaching the Call of Duty sub-genre in the way Full Metal Jacket took on the Vietnam War. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Warface is a free-to-play multiplayer shooter produced with a clear awareness that modern military shooters are the biggest games in the world. On the other hand, the developers are also conscious of the oversaturated and overserious nature of the genre they’re taking on – and one way of responding to that, it turns out, is to call your game Warface.

“We think it’s awesome,” executive producer Peter Holzapfel told me when I asked him about the name. “The tone of the game is not serious; it’s not geared towards realism. It’s a first-person shooter – have fun! It’s not completely over-the-top, but it’s exaggerated. A bit of humour would be healthy, I would say, for the industry.”

Equipment and clothing choices can alter game mechanics.

While visiting Crytek’s headquarters in Frankfurt, the game was initially demonstrated to me running on a conference room PC – the kind of enterprise computing setup that you wouldn’t expect to be capable of handling a shooter of any fidelity. In the absence of dynamic lighting and post-processing effects, it’s not a pretty game – but it works, and Crytek’s success in cramming the game onto hardware this restricted is an impressive technical feat.

"Fitting Crysis 2 onto a console is now paying dividends for the developer on PC."
“We optimised the hell out of the engine for Crysis 2,” Holzapfel explains. “We took it further for Warface and made it run well on lower system specs – we made it scale with the other features.”

Warface is a decent-looking game on a more powerful system. Not stunning, but it takes sufficient advantage of CryEngine’s lighting tech to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the majority of full-price shooters. When you bear in mind that the most popular FPS in the world runs on the same basic tech now as it did in 2005, Crytek’s decision to set the bar lower with Warface makes sense.

There’s also an irony in the fact that the efforts undertaken to fit Crysis 2 onto a console is now paying dividends for the developer on PC.

Your team arrives in hell by Chinook helicopter.

As a competitive shooter, Warface sits somewhere between Counter-Strike and Call of Duty – although the technology underpinning it is flexible enough that larger, Battlefield-style maps are a possibility further down the line. Its offering of modes, levels and weapons tick all the boxes you’d expect in a modern military shooter: free for all, team deathmatch, and an attack-and-defend mode that’s a little like a smaller scale version of Battlefield’s Rush.

Players move with a lot of weight but bring weapons to bear quickly – this is a game of cautious exploration and sudden action, with a lot of emphasis on positioning and observation. The first map I played in team deathmatch was laid out as an open field with a river on one side, a small area of streets on the other, and each team’s spawn behind some buildings at either end. The firefight concentrated around the spawns and streets, with individual players scrapping out in the open for the chance to flank the enemy and clean up.

Later, in free for all, an urban map played very differently – with multiple interior, exterior and elevated routes, I was just as likely to spot an enemy far down the street as I was to suddenly bump into them. Claymores and other deployables helped campers hold on to territory, but I found a varied, exploratory approach more effective. I won, so I’m probably right about that.



Warface understands, and caters perfectly to the simple pleasure of shooting stuff.

Assault rifles, pistols and SMGs handle well, and I also got a kick out of a silenced semi-automatic sniper rifle. When the game’s weapons lack punch – as in the case of certain shotguns – Warface compensates with the largest hit indicator I’ve ever seen, a great big flashing X rendered in red that leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that you’ve just shot a man in the face.

There’s an unabashed willingness to provide the shooter player with what they want, particularly in terms of feedback. Crytek understands that feeling rewarded for playing well is just as important as having the tools to do the job. Warface works best when thought of as a service – a readily accessible supply of gunpowder and dopamine, separated out from the unnecessary extras that are tagged on to the average boxed shooter.

Warface’s original ideas mostly manifest in terms of the way you negotiate the map. The most enjoyable of these is the slide, which allows you to dive out of sprint and scoot along the ground on your backside while unloading with whatever weapon you have to hand. In my time with the game, I fell in love with this move a little bit. Sliding past an enemy while firing a pistol is one thing; sliding into an enemy while swinging an axe is another, and sliding off an overpass while firing an anti-aircraft missile launcher at a circling helicopter in co-op mode is firm proof that Warface’s tongue is at least partly in its cheek.

The horror... the horror.

Then there are co-op mantling points, highlighted areas on each map that two players can climb by working together. This involves one player giving the other a leg up before being hoisted up themselves, and it unlocks extra routes and unique vantage points that can help teams bypass choke points or flank the enemy. While playing Warface’s attack-and-defend mode, myself and another sniper took advantage of a climb point to move around the side of the defenders and prevent them from bedding down in cover around the objective.

"Warface isn’t so much about survival as it is efficiency."
Full co-op Warface, however, is a different animal entirely. Teams of five players race through linear sections of the map, completing objectives and wiping out every enemy they see, racking up points as they go. Initial impressions suggest something analogous to Left 4 Dead or Payday: The Heist, but that isn’t quite right: Warface isn’t so much about survival and exploration as it is about efficiency, speed, and the primacy of the massive score combo multiplier that sits in the front and centre of the screen.

A better comparison would be a lightgun game like Time Crisis. Each map begins with the team arriving via Chinook helicopter, blasting enemies from the windows before haring off down a series of streets and narrow courtyards, joining back up with the helicopter, and being shuttled to the next section. Opposing soldiers pop out from behind cover and appear on rooftops with no heed for their own safety and little discernible strategy. Snipers and grenadiers might hold back and harass your squad from a distance, but the majority of troops will bunch up and push towards you in groups – groups whose implicit purpose is to be shot apart for precious, precious points.

Slow and steady wins precious points.

The basic mechanics, weapons and loadouts of the game carry over from competitive play, so sliding around picking off foes with a shotgun is a viable way to earn bonus points. Class and weapon choices make a big difference: having a medic on your team allows for in-field revives, and the rifleman’s ammo resupply pack keeps you moving when bullets run dry. Fallen teammates are revived automatically at checkpoints interspersed throughout each stage, but if you’re all wiped out then it’s game over.

The arcade sensibility suits Warface, and the basic satisfaction of shooting people makes co-op an enjoyable diversion. I did find, however, that my choice of weapon greatly affected the score I was able to achieve. Armed with a versatile assault rifle or light machine gun, I was capable of dealing with enemies at multiple ranges – slowing down to line up a headshot on a distant sniper, then taking out a group of enemies mid-slide with full auto fire. With a shotgun, however, the only way was forward – and this led to situations where I’d either run in, get killed and need reviving, or hop around in the street attempting not to get shot while my teammates caught up and cleared out further-off enemies for me.

Then there are the boss battles. I saw two variants in my time with the game. In one, the team comes under attack from a helicopter and has to rush between missile launcher caches to whittle the chopper’s health bar down, while regular enemies pile on from the sides. In the other, a single massive enemy appears wearing a combat exoskeleton. He’s almost invulnerable from the front, so one player needs to distract him while the rest shoot at the glowing generator on his back. It’s the most videogamey thing in the world, ever.



Boss battles can go on a bit long.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course, but I found that both encounters lasted just a little bit too long. When you’re running headlong through the streets with your finger on the trigger, the game’s simplistic AI isn’t an issue – these aren’t real combatants, they’re satisfying kills waiting to happen.

When you’re locked into a single location circling a single foe, however, the curtain seems to fall away and you have time to wonder at the absurdity of what you’re actually doing. There’s every chance that more competent teams will be able to clear these sections faster, of course, but it’d be good to see the pacing tweaked for the game’s Western release.

Co-op mode is delivered to the player as a series of daily challenges. A selection of maps will cycle in and out as time goes on, with a full range of difficulty levels and time-limited rewards to match. “Once they’ve played the maps with their friends they move over to PvP, and then come back the next day,” Holzapfel explains. “This takes away many things that could confuse or frustrate the player.” It’s also, Crytek are keen to stress, a way into multiplayer shooters that is less intimidating than going up against human opponents.

Things look pretty shabby in Warface's take on the future.

The influence of the arcade is apparent in other ways. In Russia, players are able to buy instant respawn coins that allow them to revive in the field in co-op mode rather than wait for the next checkpoint. Crytek see this as the equivalent of pumping more tokens into an arcade cabinet – while the very best players will be able to clear stages on a single credit, microtransactions are there for everyone else.

"In Russia, players are able to buy instant respawn coins."
The structure of the store in the European and North American version of the game is yet to be confirmed, as are prices. Respawn coins seem likely to make the transition, as they support the basic mechanics of co-op mode.

In general, though, expect to have to shell out for experience boosters, skins, and equipment for your character.

Weapons and weapon attachments are an obvious example, but the clothes you’re wearing also alter the game’s mechanics – a particular set of boots might slow the detonation time on enemy mines, for example, while a pair of climbing gloves will allow you to traverse co-op mantling points by yourself if you haven’t got any friends.

I hope that's not my team's transport.

The comparison to make here is Team Fortress 2, and the way that item builds have added variety to the way individual classes approach the game. The onus is on Crytek to ensure that these paid-for – and earned – advantages don’t undermine the rest of what the game
is trying to achieve.

“With the free model, it’s really just about delivering a good experience,” Holzapfel says. “Otherwise people will just leave, because they didn’t invest anything in it.” The thing that impresses me most about Warface is Crytek’s understanding of the kind of game they’re making, and where it fits into players’ lives.

The last few years have seen the systematic breakdown of the old methods of making and selling games, with the only real exception being the most mainstream experiences – sports games and shooters, specifically. By making the shooter more accessible and cheaper while remaining fully featured, Crytek have a chance to challenge the amount of money people feel they need to spend to get their lunchtime deathmatch fix.

One way of responding to a name like Warface, then, is relief. It shows that, at long last, the shooter is figuring out exactly what it’s for.

In a first for the company, Valve let go an unspecified number of employees across multiple teams including hardware and Android development, according to a report by Gamasutra.

Valve hasn't released official word on the number of departures or how this affects its Steam Box project, but Gamasutra says it's hearing such descriptions as "great cleansing" and "large decisions" from those let go. "We've seen the number '25' tossed around, but are unable to confirm this," the Gamasutra article claims.

Yesterday, hardware hacker Jeri Ellsworth, who was hired by Valve to join its hardware team, tweeted a sudden announcement that she'd been fired and was moving on to "new and exciting projects." Elsewhere, the LinkedIn profile of Ed Owen, a senior mechanical engineer, shows an end employment date of February 2013 at Valve.

Though layoffs happen from time to time in the industry, Valve's reputation as one of the most secretive (and lucrative) studios in the business underscores the peculiarity of this development, especially when the terms "layoffs" and "fired" aren't normally associated with a company known for its free-form work philosophy.

We've reached out to Valve for an explanation and for further confirmation about how many people have been let go. We'll update this story if more information arrives today.

UPDATE: Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman tweets the appearance of a number of differences on Valve's staff page seen through Diff Checker. The comparison tool indicates the removal of nine employee bios from the People section of Valve's company page, listed below:

Moby Francke, Half-Life 2 character designer and Team Fortress 2 art lead
Jason Holtman, director of business development for Steam and Steamworks
Keith Huggins, character animator and animator for Team Fortress 2 "Meet the" video series
Tom Leonard, software engineer for Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead
Realm Lovejoy, artist for Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. She was also part of the original DigiPen-turned-Valve team that created Narbacular Drop, the inspiration for Portal
Marc Nagel, test lead for Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and patch updates
Bay Raitt, animator for Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal
Elan Ruskin, engine programmer for Left 4 Dead, Portal 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Matthew Russell, animator for Team Fortress 2 "Meet the" video series


UPDATE: Valve boss Gabe Newell sent along his response to Engadget: "We don't usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about some recent changes here, so I thought I'd take the unusual step of addressing them. No, we aren't canceling any projects. No, we aren't changing any priorities or projects we've been discussing. No, this isn't about Steam or Linux or hardware or . We're not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn't working here."

Ambient Studios are something of a Guildford development supergroup. Founded in 2011, the team is comprised of former members of Media Molecule, Lionhead and Criterion. Their first game, Death Inc. - currently seeking Kickstarter funding - is a part strategy and part management sim about spreading plague in 17th century England. It's main character is Grim T. Livingstone, formerly an Assistant Underreaper at the Ministry of Mortality. Fed up with with the Ministry's soulless methods of collecting souls, he breaks out and starts the eponymous Death Inc. In a sense, he's also gone indie.

"It was quite attractive to us in some ways." Jonny Hopper, Director of Ambient Studios. "There's definitely a kind of parallel to our story I suppose. That was sort of part intentional and part coincidence, but it just felt like the right way to do it."

Death Inc. wasn't always the story of a disillusioned Reaper. The original pitch, from Ambient artist (and ex-Lionhead staffer) Jon Eckersley, centred on controlling a horde of zombies. "We were talking about it, but it obviously came up that everyone's done zombie games. He thought of this idea about five years ago and never had a chance to do anything with it."

"We were batting about ideas about what a similar mechanic - which sounded really compelling - but making it in a new way, and just something that hasn't been done before." Eventually the team realised that proliferating a plague would support the idea of a growing infection, but offer a fresher take over gaming's long-rotten zombie obsession.

All that they needed was a setting. The 17th century, during England's last major outbreak of bubonic plague, seemed the perfect time and place for something new. "That was more about the art style than the history, but the history is embedded in it. It's not a period of history that's been covered extensively in games, so that was really attractive to us anyway, because we immediately knew we could do something a bit different. And then, once they settled on the history and the bubonic plague, it just made sense to chuck the reaper into the mix as you."

Infectious

Spreading disease and pestilence through the serfs and peasants of mid-1600s England is a pretty morbid concept. To compensate, Ambient have taken the game's art and tone in a different direction completely. It's bright, colourful, comical and deliberately anachronistic. "I think it was just important to us that we didn't make a dark game. None of us are really into those sort of games. It's fine if you are, but it's not the sort of stuff we wanted to make. I've always said I want to make games that I can show my mum. That's kind of my benchmark."



"They may all have the plague, but they're dancing around and they've got these really cute animations."
It's not just the locations, which are gorgeous, tilt-shift inspired dioramas of cities, villages and castles. Characters have also been designed with an eye to absurdist charm. "The 17th century was a pretty rubbish place to be - especially if you were poor. So they're all trundling around looking a bit upset, and then as soon as they're on your side, they may all have the plague, but they're dancing around and they've got these really cute animations and things. You can put them in a circle and do ring around the roses and things."

Protagonist Grim doesn't fit with the traditional dark, cold Reaper stereotype, either. Ambient have been teasing the character's backstory in a short comic posted on their site. "He's going home and he's got these little scythe secateurs and he's tending his rose bushes and he's baking and stuff like that. He's just going against the grain a little bit."

Grim's colourful side is well represented in-game. He trails a pink pox cloud for his infected wards to merrily follow, and his special abilities are all firmly tongue-in-cheek. There's exploding livestock, plague rats, pigeons and "norovirus brunch," the concept art for which depicts a villager happily puking his guts out. Gross, but kind of adorable.



The inspirations here should be obvious, especially given the Guildford connection. "These old Bullfrog games have got that timeless classic quality about them. And so if we can channel some of that stuff... And they're all kind of comic as well. They're not saying "we are comical", I think, and there's something really good about that, because it's much easier to do that than be a comedy game."

Dead's Army

Behind the lighthearted tone is a set of systems that hold the potential for some complex tactical interactions. The main control scheme has you click-and-drag to "paint" a path across the ground that your infected army will follow. It's a nod to accessibility - allowing players who aren't adept at the intense micro-orders required of a traditional RTS to easily issue commands.

During our chat, Hopper offers an unlikely comparison. "You know the beginning to Dad's Army? The arrows. I love that kind of war-game mechanic of being able to see what is going to happen while it's happening. Because I can then go 'okay, archers to the left and go up a hill,' and you'll be able to see the trail of where they're going. And then you can send your vigilantes down the middle, and your cavalry around the back, for example. And you'll be able to see these paths and you can remember what you're doing."



There's a natural learning curve here. Your army's size balloons out as you 'recruit' more of an area's population. Unarmed villagers may be weak, but if they can successfully infect a troop of archers, your tactical options are expanded as a result. "You can infect the big guys, or the archers, so you're going to get your own group of archers, and you can control them so you can do your own ranged attacks."

"There's a bunch of different classes of people. There's villagers, and there's vigilantes, which are slightly less crap and they've got pots and pans on their heads. Then there's these soldiers, which are these big guys, and archers, and I think musketeers and cavalry. Crazy things, but they all do retain their abilities. So you definitely have this quite varied army."

"Imagine trying to navigate your troops gently through bear traps. It's a little game in itself."
Painting your commands also allows a level of finesse that would be hard to pull off with a more traditional RTS control scheme. Hopper reveals that the team are planning to add bear traps. "Imagine trying to navigate your troops gently through bear traps. It's a little game in itself. Rather than going, 'it's a minefield, I'll click a route round it,' it's like, well actually I can do this. I can send them this way." And with no reliance on AI pathing, get it wrong and you've only yourself to blame.

Physics will also play a part in your tactical options throughout the RTS portion of the game. "Joss is our mega coder. He used to be on the Fable games and did a lot of the combat systems, and AI I think as well. He's incredible. And he just sat there, and one day he turned round and said 'Jonny, I really want to do this thing where all the guys just interact with everything, but physically.' And I said that sounds great, go for it. And he prototyped this thing in like a day."

The example Hopper uses is a trebuchet. By drawing a circular path around a wheel attached to the machine, your troops will spin it, lowering the trebuchet. "And it's not a trick," he reassures. "It's literally turning the wheel because they're pushing on it and you've told them to do it." Once lowered, you can send some troops into the device and others onto the button that fires it - their weight activating the machine and flinging your soldiers over a wall.

"It's just brilliant. Because everything is physical like that, we can do stuff like, if you have a critical mass of people in your horde, you could push open doors for example. Just like water forcing itself through a crack. So there's loads of these things that I've not seen before, and it's going to allow us some really interesting tactical things."

SimSicky

The real-time strategy element is just one part of the game. "We've got this business sim side of it, which is like... in some ways it's a bit Dungeon Keeper-y, it's a bit Theme Park/Theme Hospital-y, but with less of the hospital creation side. You can still do that stuff, but we're not going to go the whole hog, because we haven't got the capability."



"You're starting literally in a basement - and it's Grim's nan's house. And you're starting in his nan's basement, and you expand the basement basically. You use those grave-digging skills."

"You might put in a kitchen, so you can cook up better norovirus."
With no base-building to the RTS part, the sim layer acts as Death Inc.'s macro game. Souls collected from dead humans out in the field are used as a resource to upgrade your business empire. "So you can spend the souls on expanding your office. We've got all these great ideas for how you can do that and the different rooms you can get. So you might put in a kitchen, so you can cook up better norovirus. You might have some table football and stuff for your staff to relax."

The staff you can hire are one of the options for expanding the profitability of the business. "It's a metagame thing where they will go and automatically complete side-missions to give you more resources. It's a different side of that strategy business sim thing. So you can choose to invest a certain amount of resources in that, and it might pay out and it might not."

If it does pay out, your success will be reflected against other reaping corporations. You're not just going up against the in-game Ministry of Mortality, but with other budding death dealers. "We're going to involve leaderboards and stuff like that so you can see how well you're doing. I'd really like that to be a global thing, or if we were using Steam achievements, for example, it could be your Steam friends and how well they're doing in comparison. In that sort of sense, there'll be other fictional businesses going on that you're competing against, but there'll also be the real ones."

Leaderboards aside, Hopper isn't willing to speculate on the possibility of multiplayer. "It would be cool, wouldn't it? To have different reapers in the same game. Trying to attack the same castle and get souls for themselves. That's probably about as far as I should go with it." In practice, the decision boils down to the performance of the Kickstarter. As Hopper notes, "That's part of the Kickstarter fun isn't it. You'll know if that's something people want to see."

Incubation Period

For a team comprised of people used to AAA releases, the Kickstarter campaign has been a drastic departure from their norm. Death Inc.'s development began in late-November. Just ten weeks later, Ambient launched their crowdfunding bid, and started showing off their work on the game. "It's so so early, which is so exciting, but it's such a disruption of how games are normally made. I've got a console background, and you work two years on something - eighteen months, two years - before your publisher lets you reel anything. And it's so frustrating because you think, 'it's so fun, it's so good, I want people to know about it.'"



"We're turning that on its head. But it's really scary, because obviously you're really open to criticism. Sometimes it's hard to see what the goal is, and we've got to always keep that goal clearly in our heads. 'What are we trying to make? How are we trying to make it? Do we believe it's going to be good? Yes we do, okay let's keep going.' It allows feedback and stuff as well, which is really good."

Nerves aside, the team are planning to jump feet-first into the depths of community feedback - from Kickstarter and community comments, through to alpha and beta tests, due to take place in June and August respectively. "We really can't wait for that, I think. Seeing people play your game is just the most exciting bit. And on any game, when the beta starts going out, and you start getting feedback and people start getting really invested in it that way - it's just the coolest thing. As soon as we can do that the better I think."

If all goes to plan, Death Inc. will release in October. After that, the game's direction will be decided by the success of the Kickstarter. "The sky's the limit. If people keep supporting it, we've got loads of really cool ideas for what we can do to take it on."

"I'm really excited about the idea of add-on packs that are different historical periods. So the ancient Egyptian pack would be really good. And the Romans ... I've always loved the idea of looking at historical periods and doing things like that. So taking Grim T. Livingstone to the Romans or to Renaissance France could be really interesting."

System Shock 2 would be considered a classic in even the classiest crowds. Check out Tom's System Shock 2 reinstall for a sense of why it was so important, and why it's still worth playing. GOG will release a downloadable version of the progressive survival horror RPG/FPS on their service tomorrow. There's a big countdown on the front page ticking away the seconds until launch, confirming the SS2 rumours that first appeared on Flesh Eating Zipper a few days ago.

The GOG version has been updated by Night Dive Studios to work smoothly with current set-ups and operating systems. GOG's Guillaume Rambourg told RPS that "In addition to the soundtrack, the GOG.com version of the game will have concept art, maps of the Von Braun, a interview with Ken Levine, the first pitch document, and much more." System Shock 2 has been riding high on the GOG community wishlist for a long while. You can lobby for games you'd like to see on the service on the GOG site.

Lykan is a bit like Sleepy Hollow, only with a werewolf instead of a Headless Horseman, and with a Depp rating of a reassuring 0.0. It's also quite a lot like the disappointing Red Riding Hood film of 2011, which was pretty much a lycanthrope whodunit. You're a werewolf hunter in a very purple Victorian town, and your job is to root out the beast - naturally, by firing a crossbow at it - while trying not to harm any innocent civilians. As time goes on, the monster will begin to pick off the other citizens, leaving telltale corpses all over the cobbled streets.

Impressively, Charlie Carlo's game is inspired by the astounding Westerado, which only came out a few weeks ago. As with that browser-based Western, you can pull out your weapon and kill anyone at any time - but if there's a copper around, prepare to be truncheoned to an early death. The trick, as the 'How to Play' screen makes clear, is to observe the civilians' shadows, which give the werewolf's true nature away. This is a lot harder said than done - and when you do unmask the monster, you still have to take the thing down.

Interestingly, you can also change the game settings so that multiple werewolves appear, they show few or no tells at all, or the town is crammed full/mostly clear of civilians. I really hope Charlie builds on Lykan in future, because there's a nuggest of brilliance at its beating werewolf heart.

Thanks to the increasingly excellent Indie Statik.