If you’ve been struggling to hook up with ghost pals in newfangled Soulsian RPG Ashen, you should give your dating profile an overhaul. If you’ve just been trying to play the videogame with them, then good news! Developers Aurora44 have fixed an issue preventing some players from accessing multiplayer, leaving them stuck with AI companions rather than a humans. That’s good, because co-op in the Dark Souls vein (where a silent stranger appears and you occasionally bow at each other) is one of Ashen’s key selling points.

All the other selling points also involve being a lot like Dark Souls, which is either FINE or AWFUL depending on which member of the RPS treehouse gives you the scariest look.

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Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 showing at E3 2018 was uncommonly detailed. We saw more of the game’s Washington, DC setting, we were given details of the new high-level classes, and introduced to the brand new raids. Below you’ll find everything you need to know about the game, from the beta dates and times, to the release date, trailers, and details about each of the five editions – including the ludicrous one that costs over 200. (more…)

As one of the few people who have enough room for a VR setup in their own home, it seems like madness that Bethesda supported the format as much as they did. While other efforts were ports of existing games, retrofitted to have HTC Vive support, Doom VFR was the only one of the three games to be specifically designed with VR in mind. It’s also one that required your room to be of a certain size.

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Strategic MMO shooter Foxhole is an interesting beast. Clapfoot’s isometric shooter MMO is equal parts Running With Rifles and World War 2 Online, with hundreds of players (over a thousand at peak) sharing a persistent battlefield over the course of weeks. It’s been in early access for a while, but today’s update – Foundation Of War – is the biggest change yet for it. On top of a visual overhaul making it far nicer to look at, the game now features building interiors, more complex urban combat, huge tanks that need up to five players to fully crew and a bunch more. The game is also 40% off – see the update trailer below.

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They say that justice is blind, but it’s just the detectives in Unheard, a recently announced “audio driven detective game” from NEXT Studios. Looking a bit like a 2D take on Return of The Obra Dinn with a dash of nineties psychic detective TV, players are out to solve a series of seemingly unrelated but linked crimes by listening in on the past. Unlike Obra Dinn, you’ve only got one sense this time, plus a blueprint map of the crime scene and a list of potential names to attach to the voices you hear. The game launches next month – take a look (and listen) at the debut trailer within.

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Epic Games – they of Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the recently-launched Epic Games Store – have announced that they’ll be rolling out a suite of services and tools (as used in Fortnite) to help studios bridge the gap between platforms. Epic recently made waves by getting Sony to reverse their policy on cross-platform play, and have since resumed uniting Fortnite players and accounts across all systems. Epic say the services will be “free for all developers, and will be open to all engines, all platforms, and all stores”, which sounds brill, and should help more players get together across age-old boundaries, assuming developers choose to use them.

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Joining the crowded ranks of tactical shooters set in the eternal desert war that has dominated this generation, Insurgency: Sandstorm is out now. New World Interactive’s team shooter aims to be realistic without being pointlessly fiddly. Realistic ballistics and some complex reloading mechanics are backed up by simple controls and twitchy, responsive movement. Plus, if you’re not into Counter-Strike or Battlefield-inspired competitive play (there’s maps for either scale), there’s a cooperative mode pitting a small squad against waves of AI grunts. The launch trailer lies below.

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Capcom have added in-game adverts to Street Fighter V, slapping logos onto characters’ costumes, loading screens, and arenas. These ads are optional, are currently only for in-game content and Capcom’s own Pro Tour digital sports circuit, and do offer players a little in-game cash for having them enabled. They also look daft as all heck, covering characters in ugly and incongruous logos, and are an unwelcome intrusion in a game which still costs money to buy.

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Grand Theft Auto Online‘s latest update – Arena War – invites players to join the titular big new televised event broadcasting from the heart of Los Santos. It’s a PvP vehicular throwdown with its own playmodes, progression and special arena vehicles with their own customisation system. While free to dabble in, the real rewards are limited to players who put some GTA-bucks down on an upgradeable workshop allowing them to bolt guns, armour and Mad Max-ian gubbins onto their cars for the next fight. It’s out now, and I hear a trailer revving up below.

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The last thing I was expecting Druidstone: The Secret Of The Menhir Forest to remind me of was a deck-builder. Not least because it doesn’t feature any decks. And yet, there’s something about this deeply tactical isometric RPG, from Legend Of Grimrock’s creators, that contains the same spirit of gradually gaining a deeper and more refined understanding of a limited set of tools, through repeated failure, and incremental improvement.

This is at first glance a very traditional turned-based RPG – much as Grimrock recalled the glory days of the first-person dungeon crawler, this visually suggested memories of late-90s BioWare-ish battling. But playing it, it quickly becomes apparent this isn’t going to be a game that lets you spam your most powerful attacks at repeated mobs, but rather something that’s going to demand a lot more planning, a lot more forethought. This is going to be tough.

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