Though Left 4 Dead 2 still exists, and has a reasonably healthy if sodium-infused community, it’s still stuck in its 2009 ways. It's exciting, but it lacks proper personalisation. Back 4 Blood, the spiritual successor from the original-ish developers of L4D, is fully embracing 2021 by letting players and the AI game director throw down some game-changing cards before each battle.
Ah, autumn. Crunchy leaves, snuggly jumpers, and the sort of weather that makes you want to cosy up with a good tabletop RPG - or a digital adaptation of a tabletop RPG, I suppose. Owlcat Games are pandering to my ideal autumn evening by giving Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous a September 2nd release date. There's also a second beta available right now for Kickstarter backers too, so they can try out some new quests and systems before the game's full launch.
Ray tracing might be the big, hot graphics tech of 2021, but of all the ray tracing games that have come to PC so far, only a handful of them have actually blown me away in the old graphics department. I can count the number of games worth buying a ray tracing-capable graphics card for on a single hand - Control, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Minecraft at a push - but the good news is that we can now add Resident Evil Village to that exclusive list, as Capcom's latest survival horror game really capitalises on its atmospheric lighting to make it one of the best ray tracing games yet.
Resident Evil Village is a blended smoothie of horror, one that covers a spectrum of flavours to suit various tastes. Those first couple of sips are delightfully complex. Dark and brooding. But as you drain the glass, it begins to taste a bit too fiery, a bit too wild, until you can't taste anything. In fact, it's spilled all over your shirt. Again?! Urgh, this happened last time.
If, like me, you were one of the many excited players eager to jump into Apex Legends last night to try out all the lovely new things added in the battle royale's ninth season, you likely had a rough time logging in. A menu screen telling me there were no servers, the queue for Arenas mode being infinitely long, and losing access to all but the base characters were but a few of the problems I ran into myself. While these things seem to have been fixed now, it's fair to say the Legacy update had a rough go of it.
If the Resident Evil Village demo wasn’t scary enough, just you wait. I have something that’ll give you the absolute heebies. Mods have already snuck out for Capcom’s horror game, extending the demo’s time limit, but I wasn’t ready for what was to follow. Prepare yourself for the nightmare fuel that is this Lady Dimitrescu/Thomas the Tank Engine mashup.
Games where you get to play as tiny people and creatures have always delighted me, and now there's a game that throws mechs into that mix - a match made in heaven. Stonefly is an upcoming game made by the developers of Creature In The Well, where you play as a tiny inventor who flies around in bug mechs. It has a gorgeous art style and a colourful world, and it comes out on June 1st.
Egosoft have just released X3: Farnham’s Legacy, a free game in their incredibly long-running space sandbox series (the first was released way back in 2005). The game was crafted by the Egosoft community, and is free to owners of X3: Albion Prelude. Hey, I own X3: AP! Yay for me! And hopefully yay for you, too.
The Epic Games vs Apple antitrust trial started on Monday, and a bunch of internal documents that the companies probably didn't want to be leaked online have been made public. It's not just Epic and Apple's private info being revealed, however. Confidential emails found amongst the court documents detail Walmart's plans for their cloud gaming service, Project Storm, which they pitched to Epic back in 2019.
At first glance, Welcome To Elk looks like the bright and breezy cousin of Die Gute Fabrik's alien soap opera Mutazione. Both feature young women travelling to a new island community for the first time, and while Elk swaps Mutazione's balmy tropical forests for the frozen hunts of a small Arctic fishing village, each game plays out in a very similar fashion.
You spend a lot of time getting to know the locals, and every now and again you'll play a small, reasonably inconsequential mini-game to advance the story. But beneath Welcome To Elk's cheery cartoon exterior lies a tale of surprising depth and human tragedy, as the tales you hear and the people you meet aren't just made-up creations of developer Triple Topping. They're all people and events that are based in fact and have happened in real-life, and the resulting story is as affecting as it is disarming.