This was the week that the heavens finally opened to deliver sweet relief from a muggy British summer. It was as if the skies wept for the departure of Matt Cox, who this week left RPS after three years. There’s still time to say goodbye to him.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
There was a bit of mumblin’ and grumblin’ when long-awaited Spelunky 2 got a PS4 release date announced without mention of a PC date. The bad news is there’s still no date. The good news is that Mossmouth have given their goals for a timeframe and hey—it’s soon! Spelunky 2 may be emerging on PC in October.
Last week all you Apex Legends players got the stylish animated introduction to Apelegs season 6 “Boosted”. Now it’s time for a look at how you’ll be actually playing the newest shootin’ and lootin’ character Rampart. There’s a bit of everything we’d already heard about in here: the new Legend, new SMG, and new crafting system. Check it out with your own peepers below.
Spooky deck-builder Inscryption has drawn and played another trailer to tease you into its weird mashup of card, critters, escape rooms, and like five other genres probably. Brewing up a genre stew is apparently something of a thing for developer Daniel Mullins Games who you may know from past games Pony Island and The Hex. A new trailer for Inscryption lets on that it’ll be just as wild a ride when it launches in 2021.
I don’t know how many folks are said to have fought in the Trojan War but I wager it’s fewer than those about to participate in its digital recreation. Ancient strategy romp A Total War Saga: Troy launched yesterday and folks were able to grab it for free for the first 24 hours. Either there are a lot of historical strategy buffs in the house or folks just really really like free stuff because Sega say that 7.5 million people snagged a copy yesterday.
Escaping Tarkov is difficult enough, I gather, when you’re fighting against NPCs and other players who’re better geared than you without also competing at a meta level against being mistaken for cheating. That’s just what some Escape From Tarkov players believe is happening to them, getting banned for breaking rules that haven’t been clearly communicated. Players are asking Battlestate Games to lay out the real rules for sharing items with friends.
Colourful Blizzard card battler Hearthstone is now a week into its new expansion, Scholomance Academy, whose theme appears to be “Harry Potter, but there are orcs as well”. As ever, the injection of a bunch of new cards into the game has shaken up the meta, and there’s the usual frenzy of analysis going on to determine which classes and archetypes are going to be behind the big win rates this season.
But as ever, I don’t have the energy for winning. I just want to to chuck birds at people, and spend hours trying to pull of a conga line of enraged dinosaurs. So I had a chat with James Law of our sister site Metabomb, to talk about where the really fun> decks are in the post-Scholomance world, and we identified a few right little treats. If you have a similarly laid-back approach to the game as me, and especially if you’ve not played in a while and want to know where to dip in to the new expansion, these may be the decks for you:
If you’ve been hounded by technical problems in the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn, I have some good news for you. Today, Guerrilla Games released a small patch for the formerly PS4-exclusive dinobot adventure to fix a bunch of performance issues. Crashes, random bugs with Steam and Windows profile names, and broken slowdown mechanics are but a few issues this update has addressed. Guerrilla plan to release another patch next week to fix more lingering problems.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your PC recently, then today’s the last day you can use Ebay UK’s 15% off voucher to get up to £60 off a bunch of PC components. I’ve already highlighted some great graphics card deals and some top notch SSD bargains, but the other big thing going cheap today is a bunch of AMD’s new B550 and X570 motherboards – perfect if you’re after a new motherboard that will ensure future compatibility with AMD’s Zen 3-based Ryzen CPUs further down the line. There are plenty to choose from, too, so let’s get on down to those sweet, sweet mobo bargains.
EA have explained more about customisation in Star Wars: Squadrons, both the meaningful loadout decisions of different weapons and equipment as well as the purely cosmetic bits for pilots and ships. Tuning a ship sounds simple but maybe satisfying. And while EA claim cosmetic bits are “authentic” and made in collaboration with the Starlords of Lucasfilm, they’re making a concession to people who just want multiplayer spacefights to look like regular ol’ Star Wars: an option to not see other people’s cosmetic ship bits. That’s nice.