May the Force rise to meet you as the priests and altar boys of the Star Wars universe say. In Beat Saber, a VR rhythm game described by its creators as a mashup of Guitar Hero and Fruit Ninja , this is exactly what happens. The Force, manifesting here as coloured panels with glowing arrows painting on them, fly toward you in time to a healthy beat. You ve got to hit them with your laser sword (VR wand things) to keep on bumpin . It looks neat, and much better demonstrated in the following video. (more…)

After four years of nude murders, multiplayer survival sandbox Rust will be declared done enough to leave early access on February 8th. Development will still continue, mind, with future plans including improving farming, adding vehicles from cars to hot air balloons, radios, surrendering, and oh so much more. However, the game has settled into form enough over its time in early access that Facepunch Studios are now happy removing that label and bumping the price. (more…)

It’s been a long time since Far Cry games were how you gave your PC its fiercest work-out, but hell, old habits. Ubi have just put out system requirements for March’s Montana-set Far Cry 5 and they’re pretty reasonable, in the main.

Basically, if you have at least a GTX 670 or R9 270 you’re getting in the door, though if you want to crank it all the way to 4K and 60FPS and don’t already have the high-end cards to do it, it’s second mortgage time. (more…)

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Gorogoa [official site].

Gorogoa is a game about fitting things together. Fitting a detail in one image with a detail in another and see how it produces something new. And in making it, developer Jason Roberts found that making things fit was one of the greatest challenges he faced, whether those things were puzzles into the game’s tiles, sequences into its story, or details into players heads.

Gorogoa is also a game about linking things together. You draw relationships between images and find them leading into and influencing wider themes. And in making it, Roberts found that each decision he made had profound effects on others, the biggest being limiting the game to its two-by-two grid. (more…)

According to the rumour-mills, we may be due another Fable in the world of Albion. A Fable 4, if you will. It’s easy to shrug that off as no big deal. Fable is arguably the series most talked about for what it doesn’t> do rather than what it pulls off, not helped by the PT Barnum level overpromises of a certain Mr P. Molyneux. Plant an acorn and watch it grow into a tree, anyone? Not in this game…

When you ignore all of that> though, and look at Fable as the hack-and-slash RPG that it is rather than the fantasy life simulator it was pitched as, it’s always been a somewhat underrated series with great ideas practically oozing from its pores. Successful? Often not, but if a sequel promises anything, it’s another crack at what could have been great. What does Fable 4 have to draw on? Plenty…

(more…)

Downhill mountain biking sounds like a lark. What could be more pleasant than gliding down scenic valleys and weaving between the pines… at about 80kmh? Ah, yeah, I’d forgotten that bit. Downhill mountain biking sounds awful.

Google tells me that’s the top speed for real world bikers, but the ones in Descenders seem to eclipse that – as we’ll get to experience firsthand when the game launches on Steam Early Access February 9th. This isn’t RageSquid’s first foray into racing – they also made Action Henk, a game that’s sans bicycles but big on butt-sliding.

There’s more going on under the hood here (let’s just pretend that’s a thing bikes have) than in your typical racing game: the action takes place in procedurally generated worlds, which suggests you’ll have to think on your feet/wheels rather than practice the same bends again and again.

(more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

My friends and I have three matching tattoos. One for each heist we pulled. The shooting, driving, rocket-launching and knife-criming sandbox of Grand Theft Auto Online is a jolly lark. But even the four player co-op heists have created fewer memories for me than the silliness of my friends when there s no murdering to be done. (more…)

Dovetail Games have officially cleared Flight Sim World to depart from Early Access International on a red-eye flight to full release, though you might want to hold off if you prefer your planes (games) with all their wings (features). The flight sim, which is built upon the licensed technoguts of Microsoft Flight Simulator X, officially left early access last week but Dovetail say that was only the first phase of development, intended to “cement a stable platform”. Moving into Phase 2, the Train Sim have a big list of features still in the pipeline, starting with dynamic weather next week. (more…)

The Red Strings Club is a narrative driven adventure game that explores transhumanism, AI and morality against a cyberpunk backdrop. If you asked me to choose three things that I like to talk and think about, there s a good chance I d pick out those three – so Deconstruteam would have been hard pressed to not keep my attention even if they d somehow failed to take their subject matter anywhere interesting.

Oh boy, is the Red Strings Club interesting.

(more…)

Subnautica, the underwater survival game about being a space castaway, is crawling out of its early access shell and into a shinier full release shell tomorrow. It s been in development for four years and it is pretty close to done , says Charlie Cleveland, director of Unknown Worlds Entertainment. But there are plans for post-release additions, including the possibility of an icy biome with new creatures and frosty hazards. These plans aren t final, said Cleveland in an interview with us, but he also says they are 80-90 percent sure they re going to make a paid expansion of some kind or another. Read on for more details and essential context that I, a dastardly journalist, cannot communicate in an intro. (more…)