To the untrained eye (eyes that haven’t spent many an hour trained on an exquisitely detailed topographical map, checking on all corners of your immense empire), Humankind probably looks like any other 4X game where you shuffle units around and micromanage different settlements. But according to the hands-off demonstration shown at Gamescom this year, it ain’t.

4X stands for explore, expand, exploit and exterminate, the four key things you have to do to run a successful and burgeoning empire (and in the game?>), and Humankind is Amplitude’s take on a big sprawling historical strategy game. Amplitude’s previous games, Endless Space and Endless Legend, were apparently practise for this, their magnum opus.

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It s strange to go back to a game you vividly remember playing when you were ten. Sat in front of your primary school s computers, cannily placed to give visitors the impression we were modern and hip. Whiling away a lonely lunchtime, eating progressively bigger fish in Fishy.

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The PC requirements for Ubisoft’s next big military shooty game Ghost Recon: Breakpoint were announced earlier today, detailing lots of nice PC-specific things like ultrawide and multi-monitor support, uncapped 4K frame rates, as well as support for Tobii eye-tracking and AMD’s new sharpening FidelityFX tech. However, those looking forward to gazing longingly at the carefully coiffed hairs of Jon Bernthal’s chinny chin chin may find themselves coming up short in the old graphics card department, as there’s a weirdly large gap between what’s required for High and what you’ll need to play it on Ultra.

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What happens if you tie a weight to your ankles and hoy yourself into the sea? Let’s find out! Wee free game Fishbones is a five-minute journey down, down, down to the depths, offering five minutes to see what we can see in the sea before the end of you and me. What we do see is a strange and often surreal assortment of sealife, detritus, oddities, and, of course, fishbones. I’ve sunk to the bottom three times, seeing different things each time, and I’m still curious about what else might be down there.

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Kerbal Space Program 2 was not an announcement that we expected to appear with this year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live event, but it’s certainly one that caught everyone’s eye. This sequel to the much-beloved spaceflight simulator looks to improve upon its predecessor in a great many ways, from multiplayer support to colonisation and interstellar travel.

We’ll go through everything we know about the upcoming Kerbal Space Program 2 below, from release date information to in-depth trailer analysis, confirmed new gameplay features, and more.

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The difference between horror and comedy is largely a matter of timing. For example, when Alex was caught in a storm with his hands tied, trying to dodge sudden flying objects was frightening. A second later, when I realised one of the objects was a frying pan, I determined that my next playthrough would involve a lot of amusing bruises for him.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man Of Medan is the first in a planned series of interactive horror stories from Supermassive Games, the devs best known for 2015’s Until Dawn, a game never released on PC and therefore imaginary. Which is unfortunate, because it’s the best point of reference for this game. Man Of Medan is essentially a visual novel with extremely high production values, multiple playable characters and possible story paths, and a heavy emphasis on the consequences of player and character decisions.

Supermassive emphasise that the game is geared towards multiplayer, with an online two-player co-op mode, and an up-to-four-friends offline party mode taking full advantage of its multiple perspectives and story permutations – and its many possible deaths. We plan to write about those options later, but as official RPS hermit my report on how it fares here is for a single player run through.

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Eleven months after Telltale Games laid off employees and shut down, the company are back. Kinda. Ish. Not really. Holding company LCG Entertainment today announced that they’ve bought a chunk of Telltale’s intellectual properties, assets, trademarks, and technology. Wrapping themselves in the flayed hide of Telltale Games and using their name, LCG Entertainment plan to not only return old Telltale games to sale but make new games in old series too. This isn’t a move by former Telltale folks, mind, more a group of investors. But Telltale are back, baby! Kinda. Ish. Not really.

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The launch of World Of Warcraft Classic this week was faithful enough to the vintage WoW experience that players have again found themselves waiting in digiqueues to join certain servers, some waiting for hours. Some players have even started queueing in-game for their chance to kill the monsters everyone now needs to whack for low-level quests. So how come Blizzard haven’t brought more servers online to meet demand? They say they’re thinking of long-term server populations. If they opened too many servers too rashly now, they say, the players who stick around might be spread too thin and leave many servers half-empty in time. But for now, players may be queuing to join more queues.

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The regular season of the Overwatch League is over, wrapping up with a local event in well, in Los Angeles, where it usually is, but in a different bit of the city. Just a few weeks of playoffs to go until we crown a victor. Then we ll get to thinking about next season, when teams will be shipped all over the globe for similar local showdowns, and we get to see whether that whole thing will stand up logistically or come crashing down spectacularly. But let s not get ahead of ourselves. With playoff season upon us, it s a good time to take a look back at the year as a whole.

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Our former John (RPS in peace) declared The Bard’s Tale IV to be “a shoddy old mess burying some nice ideas” after it launched in September 2018. Faint praise indeed for InXile Entertainment’s revival of the fantasy RPG series. Just under one year later, InXile have relaunched the game as a “Director’s Cut” with a big load of bug fixes, tweaks, new places to plunder, new baddies to bash, performance improvements, and more. Might this clear some off the muck off the game’s good parts and let them shine more? If you bought it the first time around you can see for free, as original owners automatically get the Director’s Cut too.

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