Outward is the first game I ve played to capture a feeling I remember from childhood. Waking up so early it’s still dark outside, and being wide-eyed with wanderlust. I ve always loved the hour before dawn, simultaneously blessed with twilight tranquility and electric with promise. It feels like stealing something from the sun, enacting some celestial heist to gain a foothold on the day. In this survival RPG, it s the perfect time to start a journey.
Memories are just one way you can upgrade your attack in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. You can also upgrade with the help of the Mask. Unfortunately it’s split into three pieces and requires you go for a bit of Shinobi style fishing, and the merchants are particularly picky about how many scales are needed to buy the pieces from them.
[cms-block]There is now a dedicated [cms-block] where you can find tips for the many bosses of the game.
Status effects are easy to ignore in The Division 2 – until you come across them, that is, and realise just how powerful and debilitating they can be. Different forms of skills and ammunition can cause you to bleed, burn, become poisoned, and just generally die in a magnificent variety of ways, so it’s important to know what’s what when it comes to all these different debuffs. Our The Division 2 status effects guide will walk you through every status effect we know about, and how they can be used against both NPC enemies and other players.
Tip-top throwback action-RPG Grim Dawn yesterday launched its second expansion, Forgotten Gods, venturing into a fictional fantasy land that’s not at all Ancient Egypt nuh uh to click on new monsters until they explode in showers of gold coins and new loot. The base game and the perquisite first expansion are on sale right now too. Given that our Grim Dawn review noted that Titan Quest seemed as much an influence as Diablo II, hey, nice to see it in more Titan-y lands (I’d say it looks more Egypt than Lut Gholein?).
Livestreaming site Twitch now lets up to four folks form a ‘squad’ to stream together in one window, so viewers can see the perspectives of all their imaginary cyberpals at once rather than having to pick just one. Squad Stream, Twitch call it. Perhaps these four folks are playing Apex Legends together and you want to see what everyone’s doing, or speedrunners are racing each other in a singleplayer game, or… whatever it is, you can now watch ’em all at once. That’s handy.
Few games get me hyped on their concept alone, but Generation Zero did. A promising cross between games like DayZ, Left 4 Dead and Dear Esther that draws comparisons to Simon St lenhag s stunning sci-fi art, you say? That sounds great! Robots roaming the wilderness? Co-operative tactical shoot-n- splodes? 1980s fashion? Heck yes! Has it lived up to its potential? Sadly, no.
The set up looks like this: It s 1980s Sweden. You re a teenager on your way home from a vacation with buddies in the archipelago. But when the ferry docks at an island by the mainland, there s no one to greet you. You head to a nearby house and find it abandoned, except for a gun and ominous machine bits strewn on the living room floor. From there, you stumble upon a police car, also abandoned. It seems that everyone who lived here has left, replaced by hostile robots armed to the teeth, roaming the vast, untamed Swedish countryside. You re lost in an derelict world, trawling across the landscape in search of answers to your questions. Questions like: “What happened?” and “Where has everyone gone?” You know, normal teenage stuff. We’ve all been there.
Tom Clancy’s open-world rendition of Washington D.C. in The Division 2 supplies players with a wide variety of activities and objectives besides the plethora of Main Missions and Side Missions to conquer on your way to Level 30. At any given moment you’re likely to be only a street or block away from some sort of altercation with an enemy faction; a Public Execution, perhaps, or a contested Control Point. Our The Division 2 activities and world events guide will walk you through each of these objectives one at a time, so you know what to expect and how best to deal with each one.
As a fan of giving games with stupid names even sillier ones, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has me stumped. Stumped in name and stumped in-game, where a big drunk man with a sword and poison grog keeps slamming me into the ground until I’ve got a good idea how Loki felt in that scene from The Avengers.
Speedrunner “Danflesh111” is not stumped. He’s beaten the game in 52 minutes. Of course he has.
There is an alien bird in front of me, and it is adorable. It s all pupils and cuteness, a squeaking, big-eyed blob snuffling happily away at my feet. Or rather at the feet of Alex Hutchinson. He’s the creative director of Journey To The Savage Planet, and he’s guiding me through his new studio’s “optimistic and colourful” sci-fi exploration game. It’s about finding a new colony for humanity. About setting off on “a purely positive mission to get out there and find something for people.”
Hutchinson kicks the bird into the maw of a carnivorous plant, then cackles as the sated beast retracts to open up a new path. You don’t always need to visit other planets to find savagery.
Little Big Adventure 2 (which went by the only slightly better name of Twinsen’s Odyssey in the US) was a follow-up to the previous alien action-adventure I’ve already talked about. But this time it’s in 3D. If there’s any lesson to take away from this, it’s that fixed camera angles do not work in 3D, outside of horror games. I recently revisited it and it’s arguably a decent sequel, but with that huge camera-based caveat.