When I wrote about the CityCopter mod for Cities: Skylines earlier this month, it was just a video of a prototype which hoped to introduce a little SimCopter to the now reigning city builder champ. In the comments on the post, reader Beanbee wrote, “Way to miss a trick mod. Why on earth is Ride of the Valkyries not playing with random emergency scanner background laced in?”

Well, Mr. Beanbee, the mod is available to download and play now, and the launch trailer below meets half your request.

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The First World War is a not a common setting for first-person shooters. This perhaps isn’t a surprise, given that guns were a bit rubbish then, most deaths came from being shelled while huddled in trenches, gas was a grinding terror, and tactics often didn’t seem much more advanced than “Run quickly towards the enemy while yelling and hope they don’t machine gun you all.” That said, I’ve heard good things about WWI FPS Verdun [official site].

After almost two years in various forms of open beta and early access, the tactical multiplayer FPS today officially launched. It’s on Steam for 15.29/19,35 right now.

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D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die is an episodic adventure directed by Hidetaka Suehiro, who you may know as SWERY, creator of Deadly Premonition, gaming’s very own Marmite. I hate Marmite and you can figure out how I feel about Deadly Premonition by reading my review.

Last time I read about D4, SWERY had mentioned poor sales and fans were trying to help with promotion. Exclusive to Xbox Uno, the game released without any fanfare and then withered on the vine. I remember thinking a PC port might help and now, here we are.

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Horror fans: you can stop mourning the cancellation of Silent Hills now. Developer Scott Cawthon has teased “The Final Chapter” of his Five Nights At Freddy’s series, which suggests that Five Nights At Freddy’s 4 [official site] is on the way. And if the teaser image is to be believed, it’ll arrive on October 31st, 2015.

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If there’s one genre I’ll always get overly excited for, be too keen to hope for the best in, and be disappointed by, it’s supernatural survival horror. Silent Hill has been rubbo for years, and hopes for Silent Hills and its first-person teaser PT are crushed after Konami confirmed they’ve cancelled the Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima game (not that it was announced for PC). Quick, Alice: pin your hopes on something new! Look, look at Ashen Falls [Facebook page]!

The survival horror starring a teen girl in a spooky abandoned town is still quite firmly in pre-production, with only a load of concept art to show for itself, but what concept art!

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Watching the gameplay reveal trailer for Just Cause 3 is like watching the ambitions of every guns, vehicles and explosions game made real. It’s the ludicrously overblown action blockbuster that Uncharted’s scripted events and cutscenes invoke. It’s Far Cry with the stabilisers taken off. GTA V with many of the best mods you can imagine included as standard. It has sunk its grapple hook into my heart.

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Final Fantasy XIV [official site] may have launched in a sorry state, but I’ve heard good things from MMOers since its revamped relaunch with the A Realm Reborn subtitle. A big ole chunk of newsness is coming in June with the first expansion, Heavensward, and you can have an in-engine peek at that now running on your own computer thanks to a new benchmarking tool.

The free Heavensward benchmark will run through a few scenes showing off new things in Heavensward. It also includes the character creator so you can play with the new race in advance, and save your toons to use in the full release. Two months is about how long I need to perfect characters I create anyway.

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Valve are known for their odd experiments, from Team Fortress 2 hats to – heck! – Steam itself, but they tend to roll with them no matter what the reception, polishing these oddities up with force of will and years of refinement. Their plan to support selling mods through Steam, however, has gone back to the drawing board.

They launched a pilot scheme last week with Skyrim, and had planned to start letting other devs enable paid mods for their own games if they wished. Instead, they’ve removed paid mods from Skyrim, refunded everyone who bought mods, and confessed that “it’s clear we didn’t understand exactly what we were doing.”

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Each week Marsh Davies swings gamely into the haunted temple of Early Access and brings back any stories he can find and/or tumbles indecorously onto a bed of wooden stakes. This week: third time s the charm (maybe) for the triply protagonist d physics-platforming sequel, Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power.>

Frozenbyte have really tripled-down on the rule of three: three games, three protagonists and, now, three whole dimensions. Preceding games in the series have reserved the x-axis for set-dressing, sumptuously parallaxing behind the co-op-enabled chaos unfolding in a fixed plane, left-to-right. Now they ve added depth, at least in a literal sense, and they want fan feedback on how well this works. To whit, a roughly hewn slab of game is now available on Early Access, reuniting the game s three interchangeable but asymmetrically-talented heroes for a little over two hours. It s unabashedly buggy and part-implemented – the proposition phrased as though it were a tentative proof of concept or a wild experiment. This is a reasonable use of Early Access, I think, although not an especially cheap one for eager beta-testers, and, given the quantity of the existing game and the predicted late-2015 launch date, it doesn t look like an experiment from which Frozenbyte could now easily back away (along the y-axis, one assumes).

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When we think about how politics tends to affect video games, it tends to be along the lines of ratings, censorship, and bans. The effects of economic sanctions don’t often come to mind. After Russia annexed and took control of the Ukranian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 – which the United Nations General Assembly doesn’t recognise – the USA put many sanctions on the area. In short, a lot of US businesses pulled out. This included game companies, impacting everything from League of Legends to Steam for folks in Crimea.

A fascinating article on Kotaku UK goes over the situation and how it changes games for folks. It’s a good read.

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