Ubisoft’s fast-paced battle royale Hyper Scape launches its second season today. It’s your standard sort of update for a game of this genre: they’re adding in a new weapon, new abilities, some limited-time game modes, and other fun bits and pieces. And yet, considering this is a fairly big deal for the game, it just doesn’t feel very… exciting, does it?
Whether weaving inches away from asteroids or losing TIEs in the guts of a space station, Star Wars: Squadrons wants you to feel like you’re pulling off stunts ripped straight from the films. For one pilot, however, it wasn’t the trench run that needed recreating, but the moment a doomed rebel pilot smashes his hatchback-sized starship into the bridge of a Star Destroyer.
Turns out, that’s a perfectly valid way to win a round of Squadrons.
As much as I enjoy Yakuza games for crime drama, beating up punks, macho poses, and being a great dad to everyone I meet, I cannot deny the action and drama which excited me most in a new trailer for Yakuza: Like A Dragon was a shareholder meeting. Running a cabaret club was my favourite minigame in Yakuza 0, see, and I hope running a confectionary company in Yakuza Lad has that same weird pull. I am well up for having outraged shareholders shout “Hold on!” and tell me “I won’t stand for a business that doesn’t understand the importance of a proper facilities.” That’s the crimelife I crave.
Boots on the ground. Hah, “boots on the ground”. That’s so last gen, so, I don’t know, basic. Armored Royale is the hotness in Call of Duty: Warzone right now, and it’s all about boots on the clutch. It’s a mode in which you care and nurture for an armored truck like it’s your child. As long as it stays alive, your team can respawn back into its waiting, metal embrace. If it explodes in a hail of shrapnel, your ability to respawn is severed. And thus, you must roam Verdansk vulnerable and shaken without your big four-wheeled boy. So, it’s important to keep your truck well maintained – as the old saying goes, “the team with their truck still in tow often wins, hoo-ah!>“.
What to do when you’ve completed a Crusader Kings 3 campaign? You could start over as a new ruler in a new place, I suppose, but isn’t that negligent? A truly responsible leader would steer their nation through the middle ages, the Victorian era, and World War 2. And you can do that thanks to a tool which transfers a CK3 world into Europa Universalis 4, picking it back up in the Paradox grand strategy game set in the following era. You could also then use another tool to take that from EU4 into Victoria 2, then into Hearts Of Iron 4 with yet another tool, converting the same world across one millennium-long ‘megacampaign’.
Intel’s new 10th Gen Comet Lake chips
are some of the best and most powerful gaming CPUs around, but they also cost an arm and a leg, especially when you factor in the cost of the new Z490 motherboard you’ll need to go with it. Happily, Newegg have got some handy CPU and motherboard combo deals going on at the moment, including a Core i7-10700KA and Asus ROG Strix Z490-F Gaming bundle that saves you $150 compared to their normal price. Plus, since the Core i7 is a special Marvel Avengers edition (hence the extra ‘A’ on its model name), you’ll also get a copy of Crystal Dynamics’ new Marvel Avengers game thrown in for free, too.
Today’s the day for the return of an RPG classic, with Baldur’s Gate 3 launching into early access at 6pm (that’s 10am Pacific). Well, it’s not made by the same people as ye olde games, nor is it really the same sort of RPG, and it’s set a century after their story, but it is in the same Dungeons & Dragons fantasy world. Perhaps more importantly, it’s coming from the makers of Divinity: Original Sin, and what we’ve seen of it so far is good. Larian Studios have also confirmed at short notice that hey, it’ll be on Mac today too.
Wraith’s days of flinging her arms back, leaning her head down, and sprinting like Naruto are over. Apex Legends‘ Aftermarket event update went live this morning, adding cross-platform multiplayer and a new limited-time game mode. But, more importantly, it also kicked the most popular Legend out of the anime club, giving her a new sprint animation that doesn’t hide away her already-tiny hitbox.
The TIE Fighter is one of the most recognisable shapes in Star Wars, and we were all expecting to see a fair few TIE Fighters in every Star Wars Squadrons match before it came out. Instead, everyone’s playing as Interceptors and Bombers – and for good reason. But a TIE Fighter can still be viable with the right build, and our best TIE Fighter loadout in Star Wars Squadrons is not just viable: it’s the Interceptor-killer.
I do love a good techno pricing gaff and the latest one comes courtesy of Currys PC World, whose [cms-block] pre-order page currently lists four such GPUs for a whopping £3070, making Nvidia’s upcoming mid-range GPU more than twice as expensive as their top of the line [cms-block]. Still, I think we can all see what’s gone wrong here, can’t we?