Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

Shiny spaceship simulator Star Citizen today launched yet another ‘Free Fly’ trial event, inviting all and sundry to check out the female character option and planet-spanning megacity added in Alpha 3.5 in April. The free trial will run for one week. I’ll have a go of that, sure, I’m a sucker for character creators and sci-fi cities. I’ll probably just spend ages wandering the corridors and climbing the spires of the planet ArcCorp, treating it like a glossy and po-faced version of Bernband. God, why can’t more games be more like Bernband?

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Tales of the Neon Sea - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

It is the future and not only have vandals replaced almost all bulbs with pink and green neon lights, someone is doing murder too. Enter us, a former detective now living hard as a private eye, to solve crime in Tales Of The Neon Sea. The puzzle-o-adventure-a-platform game launched yesterday and I cannot deny that a fair chunk of my interest is driven by occasionally getting to play as his catpal, chatting with other cats and exploring places our big trenchcoated idiot can’t reach. Cats: they are good. Crime: it is bad. This game: it sounds like something I want to see more of?

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Katharine Castle)

After years of twiddling our thumbs and coughing impatiently over the sound of our whirring graphics cards fans, we finally have a release date for AMD’s next-gen Navi GPUs. Well, it’s more of a release window than a solid gold date, per se, but given how few concrete details we’ve had about them so far, I’ll take whatever we can get at this point.

Confirmed yesterday during AMD’s annual earnings calls, the first 7nm (nanometer) Navi graphics card is currently slated to arrive sometime between July-September (or Q3, as business types are wont to call it) later this year, which really isn’t that far away now. So in order to prepare you for what’s coming, here’s everything we know so far about AMD’s Navi GPUs.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Matt Cox)

Thanks to the Overwatch Workshop Blizzard released into testing last week, the test server browser is now full of custom games with enticing names like “Mystery Egg”, “Thanos – No Endgame Spoilers” and “Skyrim”. I’ve already told you about the joys of spaceships and Weeping Angels. Now I’m going to tell you about the delights of Turn-based Overwatch.

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Automachef - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

Cooking is a puzzle of chemistry and engineering process, really, the correct application of thermal and kinetic energy to the correct combination of materials in the correct order. Fry ’em ups like Overcooked and Cook, Serve, Delicious channel that into chaotic time-management and now Automachef is coming on an industrial scale, having us construct production lines to create meals en masse. Think more along the lines of Infinifactory puzzling than Overcooked chaos. Have a peek in a new trailer coming alongside the announcement that Team17 have picked it up to publish.

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Mortal KombatĀ 11 - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Brendan Caldwell)

Time-travelling punch em up Mortal Kombat 11 is a good fighting game, if you trust the stupid words of my past self in this Mortal Kombat 11 review. The present-day version of myself will remind you that it has a stingy streak when it comes to doling out its various krypto kurrencies. Rewards for fights are often measly and getting new costumes and gear for your outlandish biffers sometimes feels like a slow climb. Especially in the Towers of Time mode, a series of fights with annoying modifiers and konsumables that make some brawls harder and more fiddly than they should be. Well, developers NetherRealm Studios seem to have heard this kommon komplaint. A patch yesterday reduced the difficulty of the Towers of Time mode, increased rewards from fights, and has given players a sorry gift of 500,000 koins with a K, among other goodies.

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Ritual of the Moon - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice Bell)

Marty The Moon Witch’s thoughts today feel like, once again, Large Emotional States for me. Today she seems to be accepting her exile, or at least muttering to herself over and over again that she totally doesn’t mind being alone. Her ritual mantra, “They don’t control how I feel” sounds a bit like she’s trying to convince herself again.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Jay Castello)

This week of the Overwatch League saw teams travelling to Dallas for what was advertised as The First Home Game (apparently the two separate teams that represent Los Angeles don t count). Four thousand fans packed into the Texas arena, cheering for Dallas Fuel and splitting in two (if somewhat unevenly) when it came to the showdown against Houston Outlaws. It was a dry run, in many ways, for the geolocation that the League wants to pull off next year, which will see every team playing in the city that they re named after.

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Counter-Strike 2 - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Matt Cox)

Thanks to a childhood wasted in virtual velociraptor fighting pits, I will never not hear the words “Danger Zone!” in the chipper yet exasperated tones of a struggling 90’s game show jingle singer. I lured you in with a dash of raptor chat, there, but sadly even after the latest update to Counter-Strike Global Offensive‘s battle royale mode, the dinosaur count remains at nill.

The new map, jumpy boots, springy mines and respawn system counts, on the other hand, have shot right up. I have had a good (brief) bouncy time.

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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Matthew Castle)

How many dead kings is too many dead kings? That’s the question at the heart of The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings. I mean, the clue’s in the title. Perhaps the bigger question is, will you join the ranks of the titular monarch manglers? And it’s a doozy of a question. In a world already destabilised by a rush of regicides, what happens when one of the last reg-es standing is a baddie? It pitches Geralt s king-saving mission against your moral code and makes for one of gaming s greatest moral quandaries. And the really crazy bit? There’s a 50/50 chance you’ll never see it at all.

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