Vague one-word game names are out. Bin ’em. Destiny? Anthem? Halo? You sure did come up with some inspired names for running and gunning, eh? None of these names would get the Ronseal approval, I’ll tell you that. Now, Ivan “Nothke” Notaros’s Throw Cubes Into Brick Towers To Collapse Them, there’s a game that does exactly what it says on the tin.
The unstoppable juggernaut that is Fortnite Battle Royale will be making some changes to its matchmaking to make life less tedious for beginners and less-devoted players. I’m sure the internet will react calmly and proportionally.
The headline change, though, is probably given away by the, uh, headline. There will be bots.
Infinity: Battlescape s original concept, back in 2004, was typically ambitious: a procedurally generated universe for space friends to explore and conquer. With seamless travel, huge servers, and fun derived from your own choices, it was another game formed in the cosmic soup of Elite’s big bang.
But it’s been 15 years, and in order to release something playable they ve had to scale back. Elements of its grand vision still exist. The world is still procedurally generated, the transitions from space to planets are still done without a whiff of a loading screen, and you ll be on the same server as hundreds of other players. However, it s all now confined to a single solar system. It s out this week. Here s an early access trailer for you.
The Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 – Operation Dark Divide trailer is all sword fights, floaty crackly lightning folk and mechanical helmets that assemble around people’s faces. Good. With the second Modern Warfare about to drench us all in pseudo-realistic oorah guff, I’m glad that Blops is mucking about with superheroes. I’m particularly glad they’re adding the time-limited “Heavy Metal Heroes” event to Blackout, their battle royale mode, because it includes double jumps, tanks, and a lot of ramps.
Season pass owners will also get two new multiplayer maps and the final chapter of the blando-zombies mode. I’m not a season pass owner. Let’s get back to ramps n’ tanks.
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Before escape rooms leaked into the dread jelly of everyday crises we call reality, they were confined to the flashy realms of Newgrounds and other free game websites. But the one I remember best was The Crimson Room, much more than its clue-hunting follow-up The Viridian Room anyway. Or, heaven forbid, The Blue Chamber.
Ten hours into The Surge 2 I was still finding new shortcuts back to the cybernetic medical bay I called home. This to me is what makes a good Soulslike. I’m now 30 hours deep and have uncovered tons of unlockable gates, hidden paths, magnetic lifts, and zoomy zipwires, all criss-crossing one another like the pastry pattern on a nice, hot pie. The desolated sci-fi city of this third-person action RPG is a twisting urban gut, and you are an undigested bean. But it’s not just that. Between heaving open jammed elevator doors, the limb-lopping combat sees you collecting pieces of fashionable uber-armour by slicing them from your enemies’ bodies, gathering arms and legs as if they were Pok mon. Please ignore the blood on my face, I’m having a great time.
If you’ve been playing Borderlands 3 over the past couple of weeks, you’ll no doubt have come across hundreds, if not thousands, of its supposed billion different gun types. Indeed, so far I’ve seen shotguns that can fire tiny little turrets on legs, rifles that turn into bouncy grenades once I’ve emptied the magazine, and sniper rifles whose bullets magically boomerang back into my ammo reserves if they hit a shield.
They also come in all sorts of outlandish shapes and sizes and have ludicrous names, from the red and silver jaws of my Super Ten Gallon to the rainbow-coloured eyesore that is my Kemik Dayummed Skeksil. Their designs are so out there, in fact, that if you squint a bit, they aren’t actually that dissimilar from some of today’s graphics cards – and until some poor soul eventually catalogues all billion of those Borderlands 3 weapons, who’s to say that some of them aren’t> modelled on actual graphics cards? Because to be honest, if I saw the seven GPUs I’ve listed below turn up as legit Borderlands 3 weapons, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
Old Nate’s Basement of Curiosity might be temporarily closed for renovation, but life and death never stop in Dwarf Fortress. The eternal architects of halfling misery have decided that, despite the rampant bloodbaths, disease, revolt and starvation, there simply weren’t enough shady dealings going on down the mines. It’s crime time, baby – “villainous networks and investigations” are heading to the eternally obtuse management sim
Yes, okay, it’s a Pac-Man game. But there are more reasons why Eat Girl feels like a game out of time. Tesselode‘s latest is torn between two eras – deeply inspired by Namco’s arcade classic, sure, but equally so from the late-00s wave of strange browser games. It could easily be a forgotten gem of Terry Cavanagh‘s (of Dicey Dungeons fame), one particularly in conversation with his web platformer Don’t Look Back.
Like all the best curiosities on Itch.io, however, it does fulfil one expectation. It made me feel quite uneasy, in the best of ways.
Thanks to various life events, illnesses, and an awesome TV show called The Magicians, I ve barely played Borderlands 3. I m still in the opening area while my co-op buddy is off looting things I can only dream of. The real horror here isn t Bloody Harvest, the upcoming Haloween update that I’ve been tasked to write about. It’s the FOMO I m feeling as life goes on without me.