Load you blasters and whip out your lightsabers, because Star Wars Battlefront 2 is the Epic Games Store’s big freebie next week. I think I quite liked that one, it had a well fun mode where you got to run around and beat people up as General Grievous. You’ll be able to claim it from Thursday the 14th January.
Before we get there though, this week’s free game is the tactical roguelite, Crying Suns.
Ian Hitman is imminently to return in Hitman 3 and, like Bourne off of Bourne, he faces near insurmountable odds in his struggle against a giant secret society that controls the world. Except who cares about that, really, because with all due respect to the writers, the overarching plot of the Hitman series was never the most fun or interesting bit. Hitman is about exploring big complex levels to learn all about them, and then killing someone in a ridiculous and elaborate way, without being noticed. Possibly whilst dressed as a clown.
A preview of Hitman 3, comprising the first two levels, indicates that this is still very much the case. Although the second, an excellent level set in Dartmoor, which gave me the most fun I think I’ve ever had playing Hitman, has convinced me that Ian “47” Hitman missed his true calling as the detective protagonist of an Agatha Christie novel and/or ITV daytime series.
Donald Trump’s Twitch account has been suspended, following the violent pro-Trump riots that took place at the US Capitol on Wednesday night. He isn’t fully banned, mind you – Twitch says they’ve only disabled his channel for now, and will “reassess” the account after his presidency ends. I do hope that assessment ends in Twitch deplatforming a man who incited a coup mere weeks before the end of his presidency, but we’ve been let down before.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: your grandfather’s farm was once the jewel of the valley, but it’s in ruins and tatters by the time you arrive to take over. So you set about rebuilding the farm, renovating the house, acquiring new tools, and rearing new livestock, by yourself or with pals in multiplayer. Oho, but in this Stardew Valley-esque farm ’em up, it’s all first-person, and it’s got a bit of grit too: you’ll have guns to hunt as well as defend your herds. Come see Ranch Simulator in this new trailer.
Many game studios and their production schedules have been slowed by the pandemic, and this time it’s Path Of Exile 2’s turn to get a big tick in the “You’ve Been Delayed” box. According to Grinding Gear studio head Chris Wilson, Path Of Exile‘s sequel-shaped expansion probably won’t arrive until 2022.
Pack your bags, wrap the presents, put your scarf around your neck. And then sit down because, I’m sorry, you’re going nowhere. It’s bad, yeah. Even yours truly, a respected list goblin of note, could not make it back to his family in time for the holidays due to the ongoing vengeance of mother nature. But listen. What if I told you: “video games”? They have always had something for us in the past. What wonderful surrogate families can we join in this time of loneliness and separation to ease our troubled minds? Here are the 10 most wholesome families in PC games you may look to in this hour of need.
You all remember Her Story, right? The video-clip detective game that launched a thousand FMVs, none of which were quite as good as Her Story? Developer Sam Barlow followed up with Telling Lies, which is another video-clip detective game that is probably not quite> as good as Her Story – though it is much more polished.
At the beginning of December, the developers of Prison Architect started a “Fail Masterclass”. It’s a monthly video series in which Introversion’s Chris Delay and Mark Morris show a game they tried to make and explain the reasons why that project was cancelled. You can then donate money to the charity War Child in order to play all the abandoned prototypes for yourself.
Last month’s game was Order Of Magnitude, a space game about building a interplanetary colony. This month’s game is Spacebots, a, uh, space game about building things – only this time you do it using programmable robots.
Earlier today, we got a glimpse inside Ian Hitman’s head with a trailer for Hitman 3‘s new VR support. Except we> didn’t, really, because support has thus far only been confirmed for the PSVR and not for our superior PC-based virtual reality headsets.
So it’s got me thinking. Is there anything to be excited about in VR gaming in 2021?
seems like it’s riffing a bunch of games I’ve never played. It’s a topdown RPG about a group of friends, living in a small town and tumbling into a strange fantasy world that alternates between colourful and creepy. You, a learned reader, might look at it and reference EarthBound or Undertale or Yume Nikki. I, an idiot who has not played those games, have simply been looking at its ‘overwhelmingly positive’ Steam reviews and watching Twitch streams while slowly realising that this is something we should all be paying attention to.
