Last time on the BoC: The War Mayor Dashmob s bombastic drive to militarise the fortress met a grisly end, as a massive mounted goblin army came sweeping out of the jungle. The War Mayor and his entire army died, slaughtered to the last in holding the goblins off. Everyone, that is, except the seemingly indestructible Id. Now, Id and the Basement s other survivors must pick up the pieces, and find a new way to survive.>
Dauntless, the free-to-play Monster Hunter-alike by Phoenix Labs is due to launch out of open beta next week, finding a new home on the Epic Games Store. On May 21st the game officially launches on PC, making its debut on consoles too. Phoenix Labs are aiming for universal cross-platform play eventually (including Switch and mobile versions later on), with PC and Xbox One players sharing servers first, and PS4 players hopefully coming later once negotiations with Sony are over. Below, the developer’s answering some player’s questions in the run-up to launch.
It’s oddly reassuring that the Oddworld series hasn’t forgotten its roots, three and a half console generations later. Today, we get our first hazy look at Oddworld: Soulstorm in motion, and a few extra details after IGN had a poke around a demo level and a chat with devs Oddworld Inhabitants. Abe appears to have learned how to use vending-machine-dispensed guns, and appears to be scavenging random gubbins from bins, but beyond that, it’s looking like familiar 2.5d puzzle-platforming stuff. Below, the trailer, a cutscene from the Unity keynote in March and a fistful of screenshots.
Rage 2 is very almost here on PC, but for a game half-developed by Doom maestros id Software, there is something really quite rotten about the state of Rage 2’s default keyboard controls. For as well as having an arsenal of mildly ridiculous guns at your disposal, you also have various special abilities to help you in the heat of battle, such as the sonic boom-emitting Shatter Strike punch. The only problem is that the default control for Shatter Strike is Ctrl+F.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I’ve got three fingers on WAD and my little finger almost always stuck on Shift so I can move around without> getting riddled with bullets, Ctrl+F is, quite literally, a bit of a stretch. Infuriatingly, the rest of Rage 2’s special abilities are all tied to Ctrl as well. Fancy a Slam? That’s Ctrl+Space. Throw up a barrier? Ctrl+C. It goes on. Fortunately, help is at hand inside Rage 2’s key mapping menu. Here’s how to remap those terrible default keyboard controls so you can carry on playing Rage 2 like a true mohawked champion.
This week, we’re breaking from delving through our back catalogues in favour of a recent game with a still-growing mod community. A Hat In Time is still one of the better 3D platformers on PC, only improved by two big chunks of DLC recently. Developers Gears For Breakfast have gone the extra mile on mod integration, with user-made worlds accessible from a special room in the level-selection hub, and rewarding the player with tokens for cosmetic unlocks. Mods here range from tiny cosmetic upgrades to hours-long expansions, sometimes in entirely new genres. Below, a hat-rack of picks to get you started.
As part of Minecraft‘s tenth birthday celebrations, Mojang have commissioned a virtual theme park celebrating the build ’em up. It’s available as a free map for all players. Exhibitions include a sculpture garden of monsters in a glasshouse, demonstrations of redstone-powered doohickeys, museums, galleries, Easter eggs… it seems real fancy. A season of festivities for a mere tenth anniversary might seem churlish but hell, Minecraft has earned this. It broke into the public consciousness in a way few game games do then was surpassed only by a game it inspired, Fortnite. Take a victory lap, Minecraft.
Y’know that weird problem where Apex Legends matches would sometimes start out in slow-motion? That should now be fixed, or at least a lot better, as developers Respawn Entertainment say they found some servers had faulty hardware that wasn’t detected by normal checks and have removed them. Their state of the game update chat on Friday night also mentioned other performance fixes in the pipeline for their free-to-play battle royale FPS, as well as punishment planned for another class of ne’er-do-wells: ‘piggybackers’ who join squads then do naff all.
If you asked me to guess the weight of Roccat’s new Renga Boost gaming headset, I would swear blind that it’s never going to beat the 210g Roccat Noz gaming headset, because, well, just look at the thing. Its 50mm audio drivers are way bigger and chunkier than the Noz’s skinny little ear muffs, and even the fold-down microphone has a thicker, more substantial boom arm on the left hand side. And yet, somehow, Roccat have managed to shave this headset down to an identical 210g, making this supposed studio-grade headset feel practically weightless once it’s on your face.
If you enjoy the gentle pleasure of bussing passengers around European cities but sometimes wish your bus could drift, jump, and grow hundreds of segments long as it winds past the Eiffel Tower and through the grounds of the Louvre, do have a look at Snakeybus. It is, as its name suggests, Snake-y with a bus. Collect passengers from bus stops, deliver them to destinations, and try not to crash into yourself as your vast bus coils and leaps along roads and over canals and ploughs through traffic. It is delightful.
Mordhau is so good, isn’t it? So rewarding, so bloodlust-inciting, so head-choppingly, limb-slicingly fun. But if you’re a newer player struggling to get to grips with Mordhau’s intricate combat system and you’re constantly encountering Alpha players who block everything you’ve got and never seem to miss, then that fun can be tinged with periods of quite intense frustration. But now you’ve found our Mordhau guide and tips series, and we’re going to give you every trick in the gory, bloodsoaked book of how to win fights and increase your personal skill as quickly as possible in Mordhau.