Now, a new gameplay trailer depicts a far more polished Fury flame-whipping and double-jumping her way around the suitably "ruined Earth" locale. And it looks lovely.
Have a gander:
With that, traversing the treacherous Hollows—a skeleton footsoldier-filled, lava-spewing cavity—looks tough enough, never mind being forced to go toe-to-toe with the odd Lava Brute as showcased above. I mean, for a beast that appears to lack a head and eyes, it swings that hulking hammer with some pretty determined precision.
Protagonist Fury is up to the challenge, though, with some elegant whipping and evasive cartwheeling. Before long, the Lava Brute is felled—but not before the cheeky beggar explodes upon death.
Working alongside Gunfire Games, most of whom worked on the original Darksiders, THQ Nordic said this of the forthcoming venture earlier this year:
Return to an apocalyptic planet Earth in Darksiders 3, a hack-n-slash action adventure where players take on the role of Fury in her quest to hunt down and dispose of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Charred Council calls upon Fury to battle from the heights of heaven down through the depths of hell in a quest to restore humanity and prove that she is the most powerful of the Horsemen.
As a mage, Fury relies on her whip and magic to restore the balance between good and evil. The expansive Darksiders 3 game world is presented as an open-ended, living, free-form planet Earth that is dilapidated by war and decay, and overrun by nature. Fury will move back and forth between environments to uncover secrets while advancing the Darksiders 3 story.
Darksiders 3 is as yet without a concrete launch date, however is expected at some point in 2018.
In the wake of its latest Aberration expansion, Ark: Survival Evolved has now launched on the Windows 10 Store as an Xbox Play Anywhere game.
Much like other games that have walked similar paths—like, say, Fallout Shelter and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard—this means PC players who access Ark via the Windows 10 Store can now join their Xbox counterparts on the same servers as friends or as foes.
"Tied to the players’ Microsoft account, Ark survivors can now pick up their adventure where they left off," explains a statement, "switching between their Xbox One and PC while taking their saved progress, Gamerscore, DLC, and achievements with them."
In his review earlier this year, Ian Birnbaum described Ark's post-Early Access release as "a bloated, grindy mess, but [is] so packed with options that a better game is hidden inside it."
Check out Ian's thoughts in full in this direction, and watch moving pictures of Ark's new Aberration expansion below:
Call of Duty: WW2 has announced The Resistance, the shooter's first portion of DLC that promises three new multiplayer maps, a new War Mode and the next chapter of its Nazi zombies offshoot, named The Darkest Shore.
From front to back, the three incoming maps include Anthropoid, Occupation and Valkyrie. Set in Prague, Anthropoid depicts the titular Operation Anthropoid assassination attempt of two high-ranking Nazi officers in 1942. This map includes a central dividing river with long-flanking paths, perfect for ranged sniper attacks.
Valkyrie, on the other hand, is inspired by Hitler's Eastern Front HQ, otherwise known as The Wolf's Lair. Here, expect a medium-sized map with a "dangerous centre lane" targeted by mounted machine guns. Lastly, Occupation is a remake of the classic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Resistance multiplayer map—complete with long, winding streets and storefronts fit for hiding out in.
The Resistance DLC's War Mode, Operation Intercept, tasks players with rescuing resistance members being transported by train. Here, you'll free the fighters, take down communications equipment, and, ultimately, halt the train.
More on that is detailed here:
As explained above, The Darkest Shore zombie mode kicks off in Mittelburg wherein your crew learns that Doktor Straub is operating on an island north of Germany. "Blanketed in fog, this island is surrounded by Nazi air and sea power," so reads this post, "and crawling with the Undead." Good luck with that.
Call of Duty: WW2's The Resistance DLC is without a concrete PC launch date, however is expected to follow its PS4 debut on January 30. The base game also rolled out a PC update yesterday, targeting ranked play and multiplayer, among other things. Check out its patch notes in full over here.
Biomutant is a post-apocalyptic RPG that stars adorable kung fu animals who love to beat the crap out enemies with swords, guns and mutations. At the PC Gamer Weekender you’ll be able to find out insider details about the making of Biomutant during its stage session, then have the chance to indulge in the blend of melee, shooting and mutant ability action the game itself presents.
Biomutant was one of the best demos at Gamescom in 2017. In its final form there will be 16km of open world to explore. The mutation systems promise interesting, involved progression and the fast travel system has your little critter wee against a post to mark their territory. GOTY 2018?
You can find out more about Biomutant on its website, Twitter and Facebook, while you can keep up to date on PC Gamer’s coverage of the game right here.
Biomutant will be joined by many more speakers, games and booths, all at the PC Gamer Weekender, which is being held February 17-18 at the Olympia, London, in the UK. For more details see the site, and follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news. Tickets are available now from £12.99. Use the code chr1stm4s to get 20 percent off before January 5.
Niko Partners analyst Daniel Zhuge has turned the spotlight on a new game that appears to be in the works at League of Legends studio Riot Games. The game is called Teemo's Adventure and it was revealed in a list of GPC-approved games, which indicates that it has been given the green-light for sale in China.
Teemo, "The Swift Scout," is a League of Legends champion who is widely hated by LoL players. Not because he's bad at what he does, but because he's so good at it: Like pests in the NHL, Teemo's true strength lies in his ability to drive opponents into apoplectic fits, which leaves them prone to making mistakes.
"If used properly his kit can create tsunamis of rage that echo throughout Summoner’s Rift," we explained in our recent analysis of why everyone hates Teemo. "This is due to the global taunt that manages to annoy his opponents to the brink of insanity, and even his own teammates when he inadvertently steals a kill via one of his Noxious Traps."
But he really is cute as hell too, which makes him ideal for a standalone game. Zhuge said Teemo's Adventure will apparently be a PC game, but beyond that there's no indication of what's cooking: Maybe it's a full-on spinoff, possibly signaling the start of a new series of single-hero LoL Adventures; or maybe it's the next Blitzcrank's Poro Roundup.
For now, Riot isn't saying: A rep said the studio has no comment on the report.
Nantucket is a strategy RPG set in the early 19th century during the rise of America's whaling industry—or, to be more precise, a few years after the events of "Moby Dick," Herman Melville's classic novel. It takes place in the same universe and even stars Ishmael, the narrator of Melville's masterwork and the only survivor of Captain Ahab's Pequod.
As Ishmael, you build a ship, raise a crew, and plot a course and take on whales and pirates alike on your quest to bring resolution to Ahab's fatal obsession. Developer Picaresque Studio says Nantucket features RPG elements like stats and skills, as well as turn-based combat. The gallery on Nantucket's official site shows combat is also somewhat card-based.
The release date announcement trailer released today (watch it above) focuses on the game's fastidious ship customization, which ranges from upgrading individual components like rigging and sails to to tailoring passive benefits. You can get a closer look at Nantucket's systems in the images below.
Nantucket is scheduled to release on January 18, 2018.
Viscera Cleanup Detail recently received a long-awaited update (v1.092) which adds a new level and new stuff to clean up. The update released earlier this week on December 17—exactly one year after the game's previous update, developer RuneStorm says.
The new level, 'uprinsing,' continues the game's punny traditions while making one big, filthy addition: graffiti. In addition to blood and viscera, players can now scrub some good old-fashioned vandalism. The update also makes significant changes to several speedrun times, which are detailed in the full patch notes.
New ways to dirty your mop are a pretty big deal for a game that's basically competitive tidying up, but RuneStorm says there's more in the pipes, both for Viscera Cleanup Detail and unannounced projects.
"Indeed, that's a small update for a year's worth of work. This is because we're mostly working on other projects," the studio says on Steam, hinting that Viscera Cleanup Detail's next update (v1.1) will bring far more "stuff." Can't have too much stuff.
"One major project we hoped to reveal, as it's seen a lot of attention, won't be happening just yet. This is because we've been pursuing multiple things, and at this point, we've got a number of interesting projects being explored, so we cannot say which will be chosen in the end. This is good though, because it'll allow us to settle on something we feel is both really interesting and can also be done right."
As previously reported, you can also get Layers of Fear and its soundtrack for free. However, while it is included in the indie mega week sale, it's only free through 10 am Pacific tomorrow, Wednesday, December 20.
Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.
Durante keeps making PC gaming better. The modder who fixed Dark Souls, has analyzed PC ports here at PC Gamer and written about the features all PC games should have, has more recently been working with localization studio XSeed to improve their PC games like Little King's Story and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. He's also working on the PC port for Trails of Cold Steel 2, coming in 2018, and posted a short Youtube clip of an in-progress feature that I instantly want in, oh, practically every PC game. Durante added a second launcher option for Cold Steel 2, available as a right-click option in Steam, that automatically loads your latest save. Instantly.
As you can see in the video above, it takes about a second to go from desktop to in-game, loaded up exactly where he left off his last save file. It's like the handy resume feature of a console like the PS4 or Switch, but better—instead of simply resuming the last game you were playing when you put the console down, with this feature, you could resume exactly where you left off in any game in your library that supported it.
The caveat, of course, is that implementing an instant resume like this takes work, will require different work from game to game, and probably wouldn't work at all in many games based on how their save systems are structured. It's also far more effective in a game like Cold Steel with very modest system requirements (Durante did lots of work to optimize the first game in the series) than it would be in, say GTA 5, which takes a good minute or two to load up.
But there are still loads of games on Steam that a "Continue from Latest Save" option would work brilliantly in. Hopefully it's such a hit in Trails of Cold Steel 2 that other developers take notice. In the meantime, we'll just keep modding out those 30 seconds of logo videos in front of every big game.
Unlike movies so bad they’re good such as The Room or Trolls 2, you have to interact with a bad game. We can look away from Tommy Wiseau's bare ass or a particularly corny sex scene and the movies keeps trucking along, ready for us when we are. A bad game laughs at you while you struggle with its controls or wade through slow, tedious design. You have to push it along and bear the full weight of its flaws, rarely leaving enough energy left to laugh back. But a few games manage to stay just playable enough, or revel in their badness so much, that they’re still possible to appreciate.
If you’re the type that can see beyond hideous graphics or nonsensical dialogue and still find something to love in a messy game, then we have a few suggestions for your playlist.
Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair
EDF thrives on badness. This dead simple game is about blowing up as many alien bugs as you can with comically overpowered weapons, and it's full-tilt ridiculous at all times. But the great part is that its story pretends to take itself seriously, with melodramatic voiceover and dialogue playing out over every mission while you blast giant ants with a rocket launcher. Ugly, simplistic graphics are its most noticeable quality, but those graphics allow EDF to pack hundreds of enemies on screen. That scale is pivotal to how fun and frantic the sandbox combat ends up being.
The bad English VO is really what does it for me, though. It's either delightfully cliche or brilliantly self-aware, but either way, I love love love the clunky voice command system that lets players sing, line-by-line, the EDF anthem. What a game. —Wes Fenlon
Layers of Fear
Some people will tell you Layers of Fear is a horror masterpiece. I’d guess those people don’t watch much horror. If you don’t know, it’s a first person haunted house game where you play as a tortured artist slowly losing their mind. If anything, I’m less scared of having a psychological breakdown now because I know what to expect: animated baby dolls, hallways that change when you look away, and plenty of messages left on the wall in something that looks like blood. But through its parade of horror cliches, Layers of Fear transcends.
Once you realize everything can be predicted and that the scares are lined up one after another, each subsequent attempt comes closer to feeling like you’re watching a hooded teen showing you the scary magic they learned online. You’ve seen these tricks hundreds of times over, but the earnesty and enthusiasm with which they’re thrown at you is endearing enough to hang around. Sometimes it will be hard not to laugh (especially when one of the baby dolls sprints down the hall and bonks their head on a dresser), but don’t feel bad. It’s effective horror, just not in the way it was meant to be. —James Davenport
Deadly Premonition
I’ll start by saying I don’t think Deadly Premonition is bad by any measure, but I’m in the minority. Many are resistant to its sparse, janky-looking PS2-era open world, not to mention the stiffness of its characters. But I love these things: they contribute to the uncanny, edge-of-reality atmosphere this game is so adept at conveying. The sleepy town of Greenvale, Washington is as dream-like and unreliable as its bumbling, goofy characters, and the way protagonist York brushes through these oddities with the calm, authoritative smarts of Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper (a very obvious inspiration) is hilarious but also, offputting.
Everything is offputting about Deadly Premonition: the weird repetition of its enemies’ groans, the way they’re too high in the audio mix, make this game feel like outsider art more than a piece of designed mass market entertainment. It’s the closest a game has come to capturing the mood of, yes, Twin Peaks, but also a Franz Kafka novel. It’s a masterpiece the way it is, should never ever be fixed, and if you advocate for the latter then please stay away from this very bad but also perfect video game. —Shaun Prescott
Tabletop Simulator
Try hopping into an open D&D server in Tabletop Simulator. It's hilarious, and you will definitely never play D&D. First, the DM will struggle to help everyone manage the custom, editable character sheets. How do you edit your class field? Click on it, which pops a Go piece into existence, then right click on the piece and edit its description in a tiny field that you can't see if you clicked it too near the bottom of the screen. Do that for all the fields. Now find your feature and spell cards in a stack that takes ages to load, but as you're doing that, accidentally drop your character sheet into one of 10 nearby bags and boxes. As the host looks for your sheet, watch their ping skyrocket as they get DDOSed and everyone disconnects. It's D&D, baby!
But Tabletop Simulator is great. For all its many flaws, get a group of friends into a room and you really can play D&D (I doubt it'd be fun to play with strangers anyway). Or you can play any other tabletop game you can think of, so long as you take the effort to make the custom boards, cards, or pieces you need. It's one of the best multiplayer 'sandbox' games on Steam, and it's infinitely customizable. Just be prepared for when someone picks up an unlocked bowl full of dice and it decides to eject all of them like popcorn for some reason. —Tyler Wilde
Amazing Frog?
Amazing Frog knows what kind of game it’s trying to be—some wacky, unpredictable physics playground for ragdoll frog puppets—but the menus and interactions are so difficult to decrypt that it even fails to be a goofy toy in the way of Goat Simulator. But Amazing Frog somehow works despite itself. Play long enough and you'll eventually get lost in the menus or layers deep into the exploration of its many massive landscapes. Soon, it starts to feel like you’re playing one of the games you see depicted on shitty criminal investigation series.
Amazing Frog is a videogame that looks and plays like the perfect psychic replica of what my dad things videogames might look and play like. It’s a squeaky toy that weighs 1000 pounds and actively hates you. It’s a jungle gym designed only to be observed. It's an lucid dream at the supermarket. It’s pretty bad, and I like it. —James Davenport
Goat Simulator
Goat Simulator's viral popularity ruined it for a lot of people—it got a reputation as just another dumb game for loud men to be loud at on YouTube. And it is a dumb game, but it's a profoundly, wonderfully dumb game. It takes the part of open-world games people actually like—mindless destruction—and makes that the whole thing. No characters, no cutscenes, no driving to the place where the mission intro happens so you can drive from there to the place where the mission actually starts. Goat Simulator is Grand Theft Auto minus the time-wasting guff. Let's go one better: Goat Simulator is Grand Theft Auto, only with a likeable protagonist.
The thing that made Goat Simulator go viral, the performative aspect of it, is significant too. You don't have to be a streamer to realize it's fun to watch. Get a friend who hasn't played it, sit them down with Goat Simulator, and you'll be laughing together in no time. It's a bit sad that simple pleasure is alien to good games and instead has to come to us via this deliberately bad one made as a joke. —Jody Macgregor
Resident Evil 6
I should arguably save this one for a 'games that are so bad they're actually bad' list, but I do have genuine affection for Resident Evil 6. Of its four bloated campaigns, about one-and-a-half are good, and the rest is punctuated by noisy action that doesn't always see the series at its best—the Chris campaign is a particular low point. With some careful editing, Capcom could've had a more refined, balanced action/horror game that cut between the different characters and only kept the best set pieces.
Indeed, the controls in Resident Evil 6 allow for a lot more self-expression and mastery for the player than any previous games. You can slide around, crawl on your back, use deadly melee moves (while keeping a stamina meter in check), perform quick counter shots. It's bad, but it's also good, then. If you've got it in your Steam library, consider giving it a second chance and checking out the Mercenaries mode. —Samuel Roberts
Ricochet
Most people don’t even know Ricochet, Valve’s failed multiplayer experiment, exists. A first person disc-thrower set on a series of platforms suspended in an infinite void, Ricochet looks like baby’s first Quake, but with colored jumpsuits and much less variation. At the edge of each platform are a few arrows that shunt you to the next one, or pinball you up to the second level. There’s little room to maneuver on each, which means to take your opponents out you either need to knock them out of the air or ping them off their platform with a disc or two.
But because Ricochet is so simple, nearly anyone can jump in and start affecting the match. The small play space almost ensures chaos, which is always amusing to watch. Layered over with some lo-fi sound work (and the best death cry in any game ever, maybe), Ricochet may not be much fun to play as a purely competitive FPS, but it sure is entertaining to be a part of, like a loose bolt among a dozen others in a cheap pinball machine. —James Davenport
