I enjoyed the BBC’s Peaky Blinders so much that I nearly went to its official festival. They do up Digbeth to look like post-war Birmingham, and recruit bands like Primal Scream. Everyone walks around in tailcoats. I am a fool for not going when I had the chance, but at least I’ll soon get to tour pretend post-war Birmingham in a videogame. Peaky Blinders: Mastermind has been announced for this summer, and it looks like a vaguely Shadow Tactics style sneak ’em up. You choreograph heists by coordinating gangsters on easily-tweaked timelines, getting them to distract guards and slip each other keys through fences.

It’s a genuinely interesting idea, even without the branding.

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The Crucial P1 was one of the best value NVMe SSDs I tested last year, but now Crucial are expanding their P family of NVMe drives with the budget-friendly P2 and high performance P5 – and the good news is that they’re both even faster than the P1.

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Gandhi is one of the most unique figure in history. His adherence to non-violence, his establishment of a full-fledged philosophy behind it and, above all, his success>, are practically without precedent. Kings, empires and leaders can often blur into each other. The locations change, the dates are different and the numbers differ, but the essence remains the same. Gandhi was something completely different, and yet games try to represent him with the same pieces they use for everyone else – and so they always make him something far less than he was.

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The best virtual reality game, probably.

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Industries Of Titan has a refreshing attitude towards dirt and grime. Most city builders prefer to clutch their pearls when it comes to the unpleasant matter of pollution, chastising mayors as they construct the elaborate sewage networks required in order to pump vast quantities of human gunk into whichever unfortunate body of water happens to be farthest from your town hall. Hand-wringing civic advisors wag an accusatory finger as you redraw the boundaries of your landfill site, wider and wider, before delicately placing incinerators on top like it’s a big brown birthday cake.

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Y’know, sometimes I can be difficult to amuse. At other times, I install a mod that reduces everyone’s size in Mount And Blade 2: Bannerlord by a third, and that’s all it takes.

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As eager telescope wielders might have spotted if they were watching our Sea Of Thieves stream yesterday, there’s a new vid bud aboard the good ship RPS. It’s Colm Ahern, former editor and video star of VideoGamer. Please join me in wishing him a warm welcome in the comments below – and read on for some more team news.

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Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord has a whole bunch of quests that give you a good direction to head into when first starting out. However, these are not the only quests as the local villagers and nobles also give you requests that can help improve your renown.

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Kojima Productions today announced they’ve delayed the PC launch of Death Stranding by six weeks, pushing it back to July 14th. With the company offices closed by the pandemic, and working from home evidently causing a few hiccups, they’re taking a little more time to get it right. Ah go on, I’ll wait.

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VR headsets have always been quite an expensive proposition for a lot of people. Oculus may have been slowly driving down the price of VR over the last couple of years with their PC-based Rift S headset and standalone Oculus Quest, but HTC’s Vive headsets have remained firmly at the higher, more prohibitive end of the VR gaming pool ever since the very first Vive came out in 2016. At first, it was all to do with delivering a superior experience to Oculus’ respective headsets thanks to HTC’s superior tracking technology, room-scale VR and higher resolution display, but the onward march of technology has meant that upgrading a Vive headset has become increasingly more costly with every new iteration.

The HTC Vive Cosmos attempts to rectify that problem with its modular faceplate design. Instead of having to chuck out the entire headset when a new one comes along, all you need to do with the Vive Cosmos is buy a new tracking faceplate and snap it onto the front. It’s a brilliant idea in theory, and one that’s just beginning to come to fruition with the upcoming release of the even cheaper Vive Cosmos Play and the more advanced Vive Cosmos Elite headsets. I’ll be reviewing the HTC Vive Cosmos Elite in a separate piece very shortly, but needless to say, buying a new faceplate for £200 / $200 is a lot easier on the wallet than shelling out almost a grand for an entirely new headset. Is it an ecosystem worth buying into, though?

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