I say I say, my video games have no nose! How do they smell? Ozone, I suppose? Sorta raw electricity? I’ve learned not to sniff too closely after an overclocked GPU fan took the tip of my nose.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
Despite being the resident retro FPS guy, I just realised I’ve not said anything about gun-fu sandbox Maximum Action. Today’s addition of weapon modding is the perfect excuse. Still in early access and a bit rough around the edges, it has some of the most fun slow-mo shootybangs since the original Max Payne. Developed by George Mandell and now with help from Dusk’s devs, the game was recently picked up by publisher New Blood Interactive, the label behind Dusk and Amid Evil. Below, a new trailer, an official Dusk-themed map, and an unofficial weapon pack.
Spooky co-op stealth ’em up The Blackout Club leaves early access on July 30th, after a short but busy run of updates. For those fashionably late (or just on time, really) to the party, it’s a four-player (or five, with invasions) immersive sim about a band of teens investigating a very haunted town. Here, sleeping townsfolk rise with eyes still closed, don masks and perform strange rituals in the streets and the tunnels below the town. It’s developed by Question (The Magic Circle) with a team including talent from Thief, Bioshock 2 and Eldritch – these folks know their sneaking.
Back in the early days of Dwarf Fortress, one of my favourite parts of the game was the ability to use anything> as a weapon, from cups to dead lions. The World Is Your Weapon looks like a whole RPG built around this gleefully daft concept, and it’s out today. Developed by Kagaya, it’s a turn-based dungeon crawl (but not a roguelike) where weapons merchant Weaco can pick up and use almost anything in the world to batter her enemies or sell. Rocks, trees, entire bodies of water (somehow) and even other monsters are up for grabs. Below, a potentially lethal trailer.
Detective adventure Alternate Jake Hunter: Daedalus – The Awakening of Golden Jazz (to use its headline-bloating full title) makes the leap to PC next week, but investigative sorts can sleuth around its free demo today. Prequel to Neilo’s long-running Jake Hunter series (known as Detective Saburo Jinguji in Japan), it’s a conversation-heavy point and click mystery. Released on consoles late last year, the PC version arrives on July 5th, but you can try a slice of it here on Steam right now. If you’re an aspiring Gumshoe fresh off the Phoenix Wright series, it’s worth a look.
It s set in England. That s all I learn about gloomy sci-fi adventure game Somerville while talking to Dino Patti, producer at Jumpship. For all those hiding under rocks which are secretly giant spiders, Patti is the former co-chief of Playdead, the studio who made Limbo and Inside. The flagship games of the sad-boy-goes-right genre. Somerville is likely to have similarities to those quiet puzzle platformers, admits Patti. It will be lacking in overt voice acting, for example. But it will also play with perspective a little, he says, in that it won t be viewed from a solely side-on viewpoint. Apart from that, he isn t giving much else away. Even after a thorough grilling about the mysterious name.
The battle royale game genre has been around for a good decade or so, but in the past year or two it has absolutely skyrocketed in popularity, thanks mostly to the mainstream success of Fortnite: Battle Royale. It’s no understatement to say that we haven’t seen a game enter the mainstream in this way since Minecraft – but it’s not the only battle royale out there, and the genre has never before seen such quantity nor such quality in its games.
We’re gonna go over a handful of our favourite battle royale games like Fortnite below. Each of these games has been picked out from the ever-expanding sea of battle royale games out there, because it takes the genre in a new direction or adds a particular feel or flavour to the genre that we haven’t found anywhere else. If you’re looking for Fortnite alternatives, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better selection than this.
CCP’s Darwinist sandbox space sim Eve Online is at war. Well, slightly more war than usual, and for once it’s not just between player-run power blocs. As reported by Steven Messner over on RPS fan-site PC Gamer, player-made stations out in lawless ‘nullsec’ space are coming under siege. The culprits? The Drifters, a cyborg NPC faction introduced in the Ascension expansion. Until recently, players had been farming them for loot by luring them into range of station defences. Now, hundreds of Drifters are pounding at the gates of the stations that once threatened them, and there’s no end in sight.
Dota Underlords is based on a popular mod for Dota 2 called Auto Chess, and it’s a kind of automated strategy game in which you place your heroes before a round starts and have no direct control over how they perform while in combat. The aim in 8-player matches is to build up your forces to dominate against your opponents before your life total runs out. But there’s quite a few further details that new players should know going in, and these guides will aim to give you the tips you need.
Alliances are one of Dota Underlords’s key strategies. You’ll need to build a team that can not only hold its own in battle, but also use combinations of alliance bonuses to make short work of your enemies. While only one alliance is objectively bad, the rest are either very situational or have some lethal combinations that you’ll likely want to know.