In Jagged Alliance: Rage, I pause before taking the final shot in each mission. If you were to examine my face during these moments, noting the hollow look in my eyes as my cursor hovers over a button labelled Do it , you might suspect some crisis of conscience. Perhaps I ve started to doubt the cause my small team of mercenaries has been fighting for? Maybe killing hundreds of nameless soldiers in exchange for cash is part of the problem? Nope. That s not it. Far from it.

What holds my trigger finger is the knowledge of what comes after I ve taken the shot. Just like its predecessors from the 90s, JA: Rage is a game of two halves. It s a turn-based strategy affair in which your small team of elite, grizzled mercenaries trudges through a hot jungle. They take on entire armies of laughably evil bad guys while making quips about how good they are at doing exactly that. But it s also a game about ensuring your mercs remain armed to the teeth over the course of what will be a long and trying campaign.

(more…)

Battle Chef Brigade is really >good. You should play it, especially if you like JRPGs or cooking or food in general. If tossing ingredients into a pot in something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild scorched your Bokoblin horns(?) then this game is for you.

(more…)

The trolls are at it again. Not content with getting a Hearthstone expansion, they’re muscling in on World Of Warcraft‘s latest update. Patch 8.1 – Tides Of Vengeance – features a troll-filled new raid, the Battle Of Dazar’alor, as its centrepiece, with plenty more. A new Warfront, new Island Expeditions and an assortment of new missions have popped up on the War Table, assuming you’ve got the latest expansion. There’s a good bit more for everyone else though, including an estimated, hefty 25% reduction in the time it takes to level up to 110. The update trailer lies below.

Update: While they’re the focus of the trailer below, the new raid, Season 2 for PvP and Mythic Keystone Dungeons won’t be unlocked until January 22nd.>

(more…)

They must have been shipping eggnog, mistletoe, tinsel and other festive goodies to the Blizzard store in bulk, as they’re kicking off seasonal events in multiple games today. Team FPS Overwatch and crossover MOBA Heroes Of The Storm are getting especially daft for the season, while Bungie are playing it a little more straight in shoot n’ looter Destiny 2. Not that they haven’t found time to dress up the occasional Ghost as a snowman, or assemble a small fleet of sleigh-styled hoverbikes. Check out some of the trailers jingling their bells around below.

(more…)

Desert Child feels like being an ordinary Joe making ends meet (legally or otherwise) in the offbeat sci-fi world of Cowboy Bebop. In fact, it’s launch trailer doubles down on that, riffing directly off the classic anime’s opening. Part arcade shooty race ’em up, part life sim, the other (and arguably larger) half of Oscar Brittain’s brainchild is spent wandering the streets of its future cities, eating cheap, meeting the locals, getting into sketchy deals and sometimes just stealing other people’s bike parts. I think it’s time we blow this scene, as the game is out now – check out the trailer below.

(more…)

The past couple years have been an adventure for Jon Shafer, lead designer of Civilization 5, but one thing has been a constant – his slow-burn personal 4X strategy project At The Gates, now due to release on January 23rd under the banner of Conifer Games. Looking like a more condensed take on Civilization, it has players leading their dark age tribe from nothing to (hopefully) usurping the mighty but unstable Roman Empire. It has a smaller, more human focus, with your clan leaders within your faction having their own traits, and your people needing food and shelter to survive harsh winters. Below, a release date trailer.

(more…)

Despite being part of the same series as MSI’s console-like Trident 3 8th PC, the Trident X is a much more substantial kind of gaming desktop. It’s much larger for starters, although its 396x383x130mm dimensions still place at the smaller end of the desktop PC scale, and its fixed base means it has to stand vertically instead of having the option to lie it on its side.

The 9th part of its name also signifies the presence of one of Intel’s new 9th generation of Coffee Lake CPUs – in this case, the eight-core 3.6GHz Core i7-9700K. Paired with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080, 32GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe SSD and a 2TB HDD, MSI’s Trident X 9th is a pint-sized powerhouse that means business. It does, however, cost an arm and a leg, with a particularly bum deal for anyone in the UK.

(more…)

One of the more intriguing announcements at The Game Awards last Thursday was that of The Outer Worlds, Obsidian Entertainment’s next big singleplayer RPG, and their first non-isometric title since the ever-adored Fallout: New Vegas back in 2010. Now jostling with Bioware’s Anthem for the totally-official title of Most Anticipated Mass-Effect-Like, Obsidian expanded on their initial reveal with a 15-minute gameplay video uploaded over at Game Informer. As a result, we now have enough to do a little prognosticating on the topic of this space-colonist-turned-cyber-western-pistol-demon simulator. Below you’ll find everything we know so far about The Outer Worlds; release date, combat, exploration, story details, player choice elements, and more.

What is The Outer Worlds release date?

Currently the best we’ve been given on the release date for The Outer Worlds is sometime in 2019. It’ll be released on Windows, PS4 and Xbox One. That’s all we know so far, so until further details are shipped over to us from the other side of the galaxy, you’ll have to content yourself with staring at the words and pictures on the game’s Steam page, or checking out the gameplay video from Game Informer below if you haven’t already.

What’s the setting of The Outer Worlds?

It’s a fair question, because there are presumably a number of worlds that are more “outer” than “inner” in the Milky Way galaxy. The idea is that you were one of many cryo-sleepy colonists shipped off to the – ahem – outer worlds of known space, where a corpocratic dual-planet colony called Halcyon was supposedly waiting to receive you. But then Some Bad Things happened and your ship was lost in transit, with the result that you remained a human popsicle for a lot longer than is strictly healthy. Unfrozen at last, you set off on your journey across Halcyon and its two associated celestial bodies.

According to Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the game’s directors, one of the two planets is far cuddlier than the other. The reason is that the latter has not yet been terraformed, which means there is likely to be a whole host of hungry beasties and other dangers on that world. We’re treated to a few glimpses of the untamed planet, and it all looks very No Man’s Sky with its very un-Earth-like terrain and plantlife. There is predictably a far greater semblance of society and civilization on the former, because people tend to prefer to cosy up someplace where they don’t wake up to find big Zerg-y caterpillars gnawing on their ankles. To travel between the two planets you’ll need to find and regain control of your ship, which is where The Outer Worlds starts sounding very familiar to Mass Effect fans, with the ship serving as your home base and rest area where you can get to know your crew and companions, and take stock of your objectives.

There are companions in The Outer Worlds? And conversations?

You betcha! Living breathing companions with unique motives, quests, and attitudes towards life, Halcyon, and you. And you can have in-depth role-playing conversations with them to figure all this stuff out using a dialogue system that is probably most akin to Obsidian’s isometric titles such as Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny. The protagonist appears to be unvoiced (at least for now), but can choose between a variety of options for not just what you say but how you say it. One of the things that the team is really trying to make clear is that role-playing is a very important aspect of The Outer Worlds. And they’ve had some fun with it, too. You’ve got the tried-and-tested dialogue flavours such as “Intimidate”, “Lie”, “Persuade”, and so on; but you’ve also got “Dumb” options a la certain previous Obsidian RPGs, which should lead to some predictable hilarity during NPC interactions.

The companions themselves, we are promised, will also have things to say about the actions you take during your journey across Halcyon. If you cross their line, they’ll abandon you and head back to the ship. If you make a fool of yourself, they’ll make it known. If you deviate from their goals, they will be critical. It’s again walking a path well-trodden by many previous RPGs, but we’ll have to see what new quirks and memorable moments Obsidian bring to the table with this new far-flung roster.

What’s combat like in The Outer Worlds?

The aforementioned gameplay demo gave us a fair estimation of what combat will entail in The Outer Worlds, and it looks like it will appeal particularly to those of us who had a jolly time killing things in BioShock. This is a straight-up real-time first-person combat system, no die rolls behind closed doors that you have to worry about. Weapon and character stats will determine the damage you deal to an enemy, but the only thing that determines if you hit an enemy is your own accuracy. One of the new features the Obsidian folks were keen to show off was the “time dilation” mechanic, which slows everything to a bassy crawl giving you time to line up that perfect headshot. We’re promised a diverse array of weapons with which to dispense your own personal brand of justice, including a selection of fabulously lightsaber-esque melee energy weapons for when gunplay just doesn’t get you close enough to the action (that scythe looks like a great big glowing evil Kevin from Pixar’s Up, and I’m loving it). There are apparently even a class of aptly named “science weapons” which include wonderful options such as shrink rays, so we should all be excited to learn more about that.

Drugy-Drug-Drugs will seemingly be a big thing too, both the driving force behind certain missions across Halcyon and also a viable option during combat to help you survive longer or dish out more damage. The leveling and stats system will help with that too, comprising six different skills such as strength and intelligence, and unlockable perks which activate as you pour more points into these skills.

Another big feature that Obsidian have implemented for this RPG – again tying in with their overall role-playing vision for The Outer Worlds – is what they call the “Flaws” system. Flaws are neat little optional traits which are brought about by the game monitoring your experiences throughout Halcyon and noting if you have trouble with a particular enemy or thing>. If this happens enough, you may be offered the option to give yourself a flaw based on this antagonist, which gives you a debuff during future similar experiences. Why would you ever pick this, you ask? Because the game also rewards you with the ability to choose an extra character perk immediately. So if there’s a certain type of beast over on Danger-Planet that you keep dying to, you are given the option to ingrain this shortcoming into your character’s narrative in a way that the game understands, providing a fresh new element to the role-playing genre that we haven’t really seen before anywhere else. According to Cain, he’s been wanting to put this system into a game for years, so evidently he thinks it’ll suit The Outer Worlds particularly well.

How much player choice will there be in The Outer Worlds?

Player choice is always a heavily emphasised notion in most Obsidian games, and The Outer Worlds doesn’t look to be the exception to that rule. The multiple branching paths of each quest make themselves known almost immediately after you start your journey; you are unfrozen by a man who asks you to procure certain chemicals which will enable him to help your fellow colonists. Which you can do, if you choose. Or, you can take the objectively more fun alternative, and turn the poor fellow in to the bureaucops over on the Halcyon corporate board, for what Cain promises will be a “lot of money”. So there will evidently be a fair amount of scope for larger branching paths during quests, in addition to the large number of branching dialogue options and the general open-world-ness of the game which will enable you to choose which location or quest you’d like to seek out next.

Will there be romance options in The Outer Worlds?

See what we did there, making you scroll down all this way for you to find the really important details? Talk about burying the lede. Alas, though Cain and Boyarsky said they considered the prospect of Bioware-esque love- and lust-fuelled chapters of your colonist’s journey, they ultimately decided against it. So for those of you hoping to woo that outlaw, you know, the one with the eyes, or that corporate clone with that distinctive waddle – you’re outta luck. I guess you’ll have to kill them instead. If you can’t have them…>

For now, that’s all we’ve got. But as more news arrives we’ll be updating this page to reflect all the juicy details of Obsidian’s new offering. So make sure you keep checking back here as we soar ever nearer to The Outer Worlds and all that awaits us there.

The very finest game about cleaning, Viscera Cleanup Detail, is now tidying up a spy spoof villain’s secret island base in new DLC. Yes, this dastardly lair absolutely does have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads. And I think we might be able to blow up the moon with a giant ray gun? All in a day’s work for our crack team of janitors. The DLC launch is accompanied by a free update which whacks in three new maps free for all Viscereers, though I don’t believe you get to dispose of corpses by feeding them to sharks in those so what’s even the point?

(more…)

Prey: Mooncrash was already my pick for expansion of the year, and that was before today when Arkane Studios threw in two more games for free. Typhon Hunter is a multiplayer game inspired by Team Fortress 2 and Garry’s Mod favourite Prop Hunt – a team of five shapeshifting alien shadow-spiders attempts to outfox a lone human. Transtar VR is an escape room-styled prologue to Prey for the fancy space-goggles crowd. Anyone who owns Mooncrash should check their Steam library for Prey: Typhon Hunter, which includes both and installs as a separate game. Prey (with its brillo expansion) is on sale, too.

(more…)