Thonk… UUUUURRRRRGGHHHHHH!
Thonk… HHHYYAAAHRRGGGGHHHH!
You know it’s a proper tennis sim when Nadal sounds like he’s laying an egg the size and shape of the Taj Mahal with each swing.
Obsidian have done well supporting piratical RPG Pillars Of Eternity 2: Deadfire, but adding an entire (optional) genre shift is a cut above. As of today’s update – Patch 4.1 – starting a new game will prompt you if you want to play the seafaring adventure with Baldur’s Gate style pauseable real-time combat, or tactical and turn-based. Looking a bit like The Temple Of Elemental Evil or (more recently) Divinity: Original Sin 2, the new combat style opens up a lot of options for tactical planning. Below, Deadfire director Josh Sawyer explains how and why this mode came to be.
Do not pursue Lu Bu, because he has shotguns – you should probably snipe him instead in Overwatch‘s Lunar New Year event, starting now and running until February 18th. Celebrating the Year Of The Pig in China, most of the cast are dressed up again as characters of Chinese myth and legend, including a few choice picks from Romance Of The Three Kingdoms. This event also features the return of Capture The Flag mode, a personal favourite and now on more maps. Have a look at the event trailer and some choice costumes below.
A fourth campaign and dirty gert fleets are in the works for Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2, which officially launched today, though the first post-launch priority is to, ah, finish its cooperative mode. Right now that’s officially classed as “in an early access state”, basically due to running out of time, with the polished and de-bugged mode expected to follow in a few months. Beyond that, they’re looking at adding a new mode with huge fleets, tweaking balance, and so on. While the unfinished co-op is a bummer, considering Armada II is otherwise pretty decent for spacechurches and meatships blowing each other to heck in an eternal futurewar, the additions sound good.
Robopocalyptic co-op shooter Generation Zero – latest from Just Cause studio Avalanche – arrives on March 26th. The open world shooter may have previously drawn comparisons to Left 4 Dead, but after playing around with a beta version last year, I think this one stands out from the crowd by being a far more open, quieter and more tactical shooter. Chunky industrial-looking robots have taken over a Swedish island, and only a band of four very 80s youths can scavenge up the firepower to clear out the machines, one hot-zone at a time.
Kids and superpowers are an obviously bad combination, a fact that Life Is Strange 2 seems to want to reinforce in its second episode – Rules – out today. Dontnod’s adventure series continues as young runaways Sean and Daniel hole up with their grandparents for the winter, all while trying to avoid getting spotted by the cops. While they’re settled down, there’s powers to be trained, codes of conduct to be established, and an exuberant kid next door that looks mighty familiar to anyone who played free prelude chapter The Awesome Adventures Of Captain Spirit. See the launch trailer below.
Battle royale games. For a long time the RPS treehouse was unable to comprehend these chaotic, destructive influences on society. Shooters, yes, we understand. Survival games, we get it. But 100-person death marches in a shrinking zone of hate? What s so good about that? Well, this week we ve got a young person* to help us decipher this most murderous of riddles.
The Darkness II is a game about being a mafia hitman, shooting everyone, and feeding the hearts of your enemies to the black abomination coiled inside your chest. But it s also a game about fighting your darkest self, doubting your own mind, and finding salvation in love. When John reviewed it, he said: I was genuinely expecting a brash, stupid shooter, noise and bluster and shooting at heads. That it s so smart is a fantastic surprise .
The Darkness II (like its console exclusive predecessor) is actually based on a comic book series, first published in the nineties.
Spectral space-spies and mushroom people have arrived today in Endless Space 2 and Endless Legend. The two expansions – Penumbra and Symbiosis, respectively – each add a new playable faction to the already-massive 4X strategy games, plus a major game-changing new feature that can impact everyone. Below, a developer stream taking an hours-long dive into both expansions.
Those new to the Endless universe (a sprawling sci-fi setting shared by all of Amplitude’s games, including Endless Space 1 & 2, Dungeon Of The Endless and Endless Legend), all the games in the series are free to try on Steam for the weekend, along with discounts to keep. Endless Space 1 is forever if you sign up and link your Steam account over on their Games2Gether site here.
The latest freebie from Epic Games in their attempt to demonstrate that there’s more to their new store than Fortnite is The Jackbox Party Pack, a brillo bundle of silly party games from the makers of You Don’t Know Jack. For the next fortnight, nab it and you’ll have it for keepsies on your Epic account. While Jackbox make the Party Pack games for people playing in the same room, everyone using phones or laptops or tablets to enter their answers and such through a website, you can also use screen sharing to play online while giggling with your cyberpals.