Each time I play weird and wonderful amnesiac detective RPG Disco Elysium, I fall in love with language all over again, and get properly jazzed up to spill some fancy words. In this case, I've played the new Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, an updated version of the game that has loads of new voice acting and even some new quests. So I’ll pop a cork in my impulse to use words like 'ekphrastic', at least a bit, because I imagine you’ve come here with one of two questions.
Those are: "should I finally get around to playing The Large RPG?" or, if you’ve already played it loads, "is the Final Cut reason enough to do so again?" Please, enter the slide in front of you, and glide, like a graceful brick, into the answer pool below.
The clumsy little Mukodon Abe returns today in Oddworld: Soulstorm, a reimagining of the 1998 side-scrolling platformer Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus. Soulstorm is an action-adventure game where Abe's new goal is to save his pals from being slaves. It's got crafting, molotov cocktails, and will let you complete the game without killing any sligs (evil aliens). Watch out though, because it also has a launch bug that can make Abe fall indefinitely.
After skipping last year due to the pandemic, E3 will officially return in 2021 with a free online show running June 12-15th. The organisers say to expect participants including Microsoft, Ubisoft, Take-Two, and Nintendo. E3 is the biggest marketing event on the games industry's calendar but last year its organisers didn't arrange an online replacement after the pandemic ruled out an in-person show, leading to a weeks-long sprawl of unaffiliated alternatives from publishers and the media. I never thought I'd say it but: I missed E3. Please save us from the endless NotE3.
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.