Starbound is somehow eight years old, but with its gentle nature, pixelly graphics, and procedural exploration, it hasn’t aged too badly. If it were released today, the biggest issues would be that it feels a little bit empty and underbaked. It needs more things to do, more ships to encounter, more planets to land on. Just more. And that’s what we have here.
Robot-fueled French revolution game SteelRising was first announced last summer and it seems those folks at Spiders may be spinning this one up somewhat soon. They're planning a playtest for their next action-RPG and inviting you along to try it out if you like.
If the PS4 version of punishing action-RPG Nioh 2 is a baby-faced samurai with one or two chest hairs, Nioh 2: The Complete Edition is the same warrior, but after a few years in the dojo. They sport 5 o'clock shadow now, they've mastered three swords, they're nimbler. And, of course, it's still very difficult to beat them.
The WD Blue SN550 continues to be one of the best SSDs for gaming you can buy right now, as it's not only extremely nippy but also excellent value - particularly now the 1TB model can be had for as little as £85, too.
I like little things. I mean, I like big things, obviously, but I also like tiny models almost as much. I had a dolls house when I was little and my favourite thing was the kitchen, because it had tiny beans and carrots in tiny pans of water, and tiny bottles of milk and loaves of bread, and even a tiny mouse because my dolls had terrible tiny hygeine, I guess.
So I love games that feel like minatures, like Bad North, which I love for how small everything is, including the sound design for your tiny soldiers' little marching feetsies. And so I love the little almost-alive dioramas of Tiny Lands.
If you dig the idea of carving out a life on a post-apocalyptic island but are less keen on repeatedly getting your bare arse shot off by kitted-out marauders, you might be interested in Rust's new 'Softcore' mode. The survival sandbox game has introduced servers with friendlier changes including letting players spawn in NPC-controlled safe zones and not losing all their items when they die. The game's had a huge surge of new players lately, so it's good to finally see this.
The fact that Age Of Empires 2 has a fresh expansion pack, more than two decades after it first came out, is something I’m inevitably well happy with. The release of Lords Of The West is clear confirmation that AoE2’s experimental resurrection has been a success: the monster lives, and it’s going to get continued support from its creator and patron, Doctor Microsoft. This feels good. It feels deserved, even. AoE2’s Definitive Edition has dominated my gaming time over the last year, even more than the original dominated my teens, and I’m thrilled at this sign that it’s sticking around.
But however pleasing it is that the expansion exists at all, my feelings are a little more reserved about Lords Of The West itself. I’ve been rinsing it, both in ranked and single player modes, for nearly two weeks now, so I’ve had plenty of time to see how it’s affected the game as a whole. And while there’s a lot about it that’s just as good as I’d hoped for, there are some surprising disappointments too. So there’s a bit of tough love here.
The writer of Disco Elysium has revealed more about the mysterious new quests coming with the detective RPG's big Final Cut update. Four "political vision quests" will explore the game's ideologicial alignments (that's communism, fascism, moralism, and ultraliberal), with consequences that might change the world or even your UI. I think I've already suffered enough consequences from my actions, thank you very much. And in the game, wahey.
Milkmaid Of The Milky Way is a really sweet little 2D point and click adventure about milkmaid whose favourite cow is alien-abducted. The Milkmaid does not take this well. It's got classic puzzle adventure game vibes, beyond even LucasArts stuff - I think it reminded me most of The Legend Of Kyrandia, if that comparison is of any use to you.
It's also entirely in rhyme.
Sundays are for curling up like a shrimp in your chair while browsing good posture practices. Let's sit upright together and read the week's best writing about videogames.