Hot Lava

Don't Starve developer Klei Entertainment's avoid-the-floor parkour platformer Hot Lava will be springing across the upholstery and out onto Steam next Thursday, 19th September.

Hot Lava, as you've no doubt already guessed, takes inspiration from the classic children's game in which players must scramble across a makeshift obstacle course consisting of home furnishing/priceless nicknacks/pets in order to reach a designated end-point, all while avoiding stepping on the ground. Because it is lava and therefore death.

Of course, in Klei's video game reimagining, the floor actually is lava (or toxic waste or bottomless pits), and touching it will most definitely lead to death.

Read more

Spyro™ Reignited Trilogy

It's been just over a week since Spyro Reignited Trilogy first glided onto PCs, which means there's already a bunch of mods for you to try out. Somewhat hilariously, many of these (and indeed the most popular) are ones that seek to make the remastered Spyro games appear more like the original titles. We have come full circle.

Also, someone's replaced the Spyro model with a Shibe from Nintendogs. Do it for the memes.

Over on Nexusmods, the current most-popular Spyro Reignited Trilogy mod is Aveean's Classic Spyro mod, which takes the new model and gives it the retro Spyro colours. According to the mod description, Aveean was inspired to create this following a Reddit request - and simply because they liked the original colour. Aveean has altered the main Spyro skin to have "less pink on the body, unsaturated horns and belly, dark red wings and light scales", all of which give Spyro a slightly cooler shade. Here's my purple boi before and after the mod:

Read more

Autonauts

Autonauts starts simply enough. Craft a bot, train it to chop down a tree, watch it trundle off to do your bidding. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out, quite a lot - because these robots are only as smart as you tell them to be.

"We had something like this the other day," creator Gary Penn tells me. "The Scunthorpe problem." You can teach a machine how to do something and it will do it to the letter - without human intuition to stop when necessary. In the most recent case, it was developer Denki's own profanity filter used to double check the names players give to Autonauts bots. Such systems are notorious for deciding certain clusters of letters - such as those in the name of that particular North Lincolnshire town - are enough to set their ones and zeroes flashing.

But Penn is a veteran of dealing with such things. Starting as a games journalist, he later worked at DMA Design, the studio which would become Rockstar, making Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings - perhaps the closest game to Autonauts on his CV. After that, he helped found Denki, the team behind the Xbox 360 and mobile puzzler Quarrel - a brilliant kind of Scrabble meets Risk. That game hit the Scunthorpe problem, too.

Read more

Eurogamer

PES 2020 is a weird game. At times I couldn't help but think, is this the best PES ever? Gameplay wise, I mean. The ball... PES 2020's ball is a thing of beauty, the best video game football I've ever virtually kicked. It feels weighty, it bounces realistically and travels through the air in delicious arcs David Beckham birthed in his pomp.

The animations... PES 2020's player animations are a joy to behold. Outside of the boot flicked through balls to overlapping full-backs, no-look crosses, deft chips, and, when players collide, realistic scraps for possession. The fluidity of motion in this game is something else. It's rare that you'll see a player do that jarring sports video game thing of sliding into place to force an animation to meet the ball, or jerk unnaturally as he realises his atoms should be in one position over another.

But then, there's a lot that's not great about the on-pitch action in this year's PES. I'd even go as far as to call some aspects of the gameplay broken.

Read more

Sep 13, 2019
Eurogamer


Welcome to another week of Five of the Best, a series celebrating the lovely incidental details in games we tend to overlook. So far we've celebrated hands, potions, dinosaurs, shops and health-pick-ups - an eclectic and specific bunch! The sprinkles of charm games are tastier for. Here's another five for your Friday lunchtime. Today...

Maps! Lovely old maps where be dragons. The spellbinding tease before a story. Maps promising ornate cities, bushy forests and bumpy mountains. Maps with dark caves, smouldering volcanoes and strange beasties. Maps of great adventure and excitement yet to be had.

The first map I really remember was The Hobbit. I'm sure it's the same for many of you. That simple map drawn by a dwarf. That simple map followed by dwarves and hobbit and wizard, there and back again. It's not the fanciest map - it's not as detailed and sprawling as The Lord of the Rings' map - but it had all the mystery and intrigue it needed to glue my eyes to it, to wonder when - if - we'd ever get to the end, to Smaug.

Read more

Eurogamer

Steam has an issue with discoverability because there's loads there and things get buried. But Valve is working on improving it. Case in point: an update rolled out yesterday to improve the diversity of games being recommended to you.

There were a few problems with how it worked before, apparently. There weren't enough games showing in the 'More Like This' section; the 'Recommended for You' algorithm tended to prefer popular games; and the 'Similar by Tags' section was dominated by top-rated games - a list which doesn't change much.

The upshot was repetition, so Valve made some changes and rolled them out to five per cent of the userbase in the past few weeks. The result was people discovering and engaging with more games suited to their tastes, so it was a success, and as such has been rolled out to everyone else.

Read more

Sep 13, 2019
Eurogamer

Remember Anthem? It's been over seven months since BioWare's underwhelming multiplayer first launched, but the game has already found itself added to the EA Vault, and is now available for EA Access and Origin Access subscribers.

If you're a standard subscriber, you'll be able to get your hands on the standard edition on all three platforms where Anthem has been released (PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4). If you have the PC-only Origin Access Premier tier, however, you can access the Legion of Dawn edition - which gets you extra armour sets, a weapon and a soundtrack. The basic EA Access subscription costs 3.99 per month, while the monthly cost for the PC premier version is 14.99.

Games added to EA's Vault have typically been out a fair while, when they're no longer a hot commodity. Given Anthem's disappointing launch and concerning news such as lead producer Ben Irving's departure, its addition to the Vault doesn't come as much of a surprise. BioWare's still working on improving Anthem with updates and events, and its introduction to the Vault should bolster player numbers, but it feels like Anthem needs a more major re-launch if it wants to really win back its audience.

Read more

Eurogamer

The Game Awards, hosted and organised by Geoff Keighley, has steadily become a fixture on the annual gaming calendar. This year will be its fifth and will air a few days later than usual, on Thursday, 12th December. It's usually a late night in the UK, what with the US time difference.

Keighley hasn't said what will be there but expect some genuine exclusives - he has a knack for securing them and the wind in his sails. Last year, Keighley managed to convince Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo - Shawn Layden, Phil Spencer and Reggie Fils-Aime, respectively - to get on stage in a show of solidarity for gaming together. It was a remarkable and welcome sight.

EA also used the stage to tease Dragon Age 4, and I squealed with excitement. It's still my desktop image, that one of the elf and the shadowy wolf. I wonder if we'll see more this year...

Read more

Blasphemous

Guilt! Ecstasy! Agony! The corruption and correction of the flesh! Blasphemous is all of these things and m- no, wait. Blasphemous is only these things: all else is heresy, fit to be thrown on the pyre. A gruesome pixelart hybrid of Castlevania and Dark Souls, it casts you as the Penitent One, a musclebound chap in a pointy helmet, who must cleanse a fallen civilisation on behalf of a quasi-Catholic deity known as the Miracle.

You wake up on a charnelpile deep in a crumbling vault, immediately get into an argument with an ogre wielding a candelabra and, well, everything goes downhill from there. Right the way down, that is, to the bottom of a church bell large enough to encompass an entire level, in what feels like a nod to Soul Reaver's Silent Cathedral. Here you'll encounter toxic mist, goblin folk who are annoyingly good at jumping over your swings, and spectral fencers who vanish after every thrust. And then all the way back up, through slippery chasms where both the wind and the statuary are your enemies, to a convent where an undead abbess has been taking lessons from bullet-hell shooters.

It certainly covers some ground, does Blasphemous, and given a little tolerance for spike pits and irredeemable squalor, there's fun to be had massacring the denizens of this unholy world. Inspired by Francisco Goya's torrid religious paintings and the Gothic monstrosities of the developer's native Seville, Cvstodia is a place of twisted steeples, bloodied gold and the unrelenting spectacle of bodies in pain. The enemies live up to the spaces that contain them, their lavishly animated sprites a mash of bone, chains and sacral cloth. Some can be taken down with combos and evasive slides; others must be parried or jumped over before you can land a blow; still others hang back off-screen, activating terrain traps till vengefully quashed. Full to bursting with wickedness, Cvstodia's inhabitants don't so much die as crescendo, shredding themselves with a screech or erupting into oily flames.

Read more

Eurogamer

Pets have finally arrived in Sea of Thieves as part of this month's Smuggler's Fortune update, and with them comes the game's new real-world cash store.

The Pirate Emporium, as Sea of Thieves' microtransaction marketplace is known, has been a long time coming, with Rare revealing its intentions to introduce cash purchases to its multiplayer pirate adventure well before its release last March. Now that the store is finally live, however, we can see just exactly where it lies on the ol' microtransaction exploitation scale.

We had a few hints of how Sea of Thieves' microtransactions would stack up earlier this week when, during Monday's developer livestream, Rare displayed US pricing for its premium currency, Ancient Coins. Now though, we can see UK prices for Sea of Thieves' awkwardly sized Ancient Coins bundles, used to purchase items in the Pirate Emporium:

Read more

...