Across the squillion Warhammer games we get these days, we don't see much in Age Of Sigmar, the setting which semi-replaced Warhammer Fantasy Battle in 2015. Hey, look, here comes Warhammer Age Of Sigmar: Storm Ground, with a freshly-announced release date of May 27th. It's a turn-based tactical battler about building an army to duff up other wizards. A new trailer shows a little of what that looks like.
Easter has come and gone now, and here in the RPS treehouse we lounge with bellies full of chocolate chatting about our favourite little surprises in games. Alice O has already asked you, dear reader, what's your favourite video game Easter egg? It appears some game developers have been pondering a similar question on Twitter, and revealing the best Easter eggs they've hidden in their games - from hiding games within games, to live coding an RPG to rewriting an RPG's script live to mess with streamers.
Ever since I carved up aliens in Gears Of War with my gun-that-also-has-a-chainsaw-built-into-it, I've always thought more video games could use inventive saw contraptions. That's why Turbo Overkill has me very excited, as it's an FPS where the protagonist has a chainsaw for a leg. And the gifs which show it off? Yeah, it's a thumbs-up from me.
Directing armies in battles can be such a chore—'go here,' 'kill that', 'retreat there'—when sometimes I just want to see a big daft rumble. That's Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, the game about building armies and just seeing what happens. It gets a touch silly, between the ragdoll physics and a roster of units which includes vikings, cavemen, Roman legionaries, pirates, wooly mammoths, tanks, dragons, skeletons, and angels. After a few years in early access, TABS has finally hit version 1.0, and has added multiplayer too.
It's rare that I'm impressed by graphics anymore, but The Ascent's recent trailer had me stepping through it frame-by-frame just so I could squint at the details. It's a co-op, topdown shooter set in a cyberpunk world, and it bangs, fizzes, smokes, and glistens in pleasing ways.
Final Fantasy XIV's next expansion is Endwalker, which will conclude the story that's been running through the massively multiplayer game since A Realm Reborn launched in 2013. Before that will come update 5.5, which will bridge the gap between Endwalker and the previous expansion, Shadowbringers, and there's a new trailer for it below.
Action RPG Wolcen felt like it burned bright and fast, attracting a peak of over 100k concurrent players at launch last February, and retaining only a little over a thousand a few months later. Bugs and a lack of endgame content seemed to be the issue.
The game's latest patch addresses both. Update 1.1.1.1 adds four new environments that can be played in endgame expeditions, lets you progress 30 more levels in that endgame content, and tweaks and fixes lots of other stuff.
There are dozens of survival games now, but DayZ still feels like lightning in a bottle. No game before or since has done such a good job of creating tension among players, where the occasional sighting of another human seemed filled with possibility and threat.
It's for this reason alone that I'm interested in Icarus, a scifi survival game from RocketWerkz and Dean Hall, DayZ's designer. An eight minute in-fiction 'documentary' did not give me a second reason.
Ed and I have continued to pop into Verdansk for post-work shenanigans despite the wish for more wild events in our favourite danger zone. The zombies have moved to the bank vault, because as we all know, the undead much prefer cash-in-hand for tax purposes.
There was a time when the video game playing public didn't question silent protagonists. It was just accepted that the person you were controlling wouldn't say a word. These days, though, you can't shut them up.
But, we're not discussing the talkative lot on this edition of Mystery Steam Reviews. We're highlighting the strong and silent types, this week.