Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It's been about eight months since I first had a hands-off sneak peek at the new and about-to-be-rebooted Saints Row, and six since we've heard it was being delayed to August this year. With its late summer release fast approaching, Volition recently showed off a larger chunk of some actual gameplay to press in another remote preview session. It looks almost exactly like what you'd expect it to look like: a fun open world game where you shoot people and smash cars into other cars.

Barring any catastrophic eventualities where this game actually ends up being just a load of bugs propping up other bugs in a fluorescent trenchcoat, I feel almost 100% confident in saying to you that this will be an enjoyable product when it comes out. But I also should be honest and say that the gameplay I saw has congealed into the same kind of sticky morass and blurred whirling lights in my memory as my first all-night benders. It's a big collage of colours and explosions, and words like "cops", "switch car" and "plan", leaving a general impression of fun but, so far, few specifics in its wake. And to be even more frank about it all, I can't think of a nailed on reason why any of it has to be a Saints Row game.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“In a way you could say that we’ve been failing at teaching Eve for 19 years,” says Bergur Finnbogason, the creative director of Eve Online. It’s not the whole story when it comes to new players in the infamous space MMO, but it is the dominant one.

Among the many graphs that Finnbogason presented to the Eve faithful during his Fanfest keynote in Reykjavík this year, one was a colourful standout. It showed Eve Online’s learning curve as a comedy cliff face, so steep that it turned back on itself. Stickmen tumbled from its peak, while others were crucified or hanged from the curve’s mantel - killed by Eve’s notoriously cruel new player experience. It earned a laugh of grim recognition from the audience, all survivors of that terrible climb.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In many ways, AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X processor is the perfect gaming CPU, offering extremely good performance for games and content creation while consuming little heat, working with very inexpensive motherboards and coming with a free, perfectly capable CPU cooler. The CPU's only major drawback on launch was its price: £280. Now, the Ryzen 5 5600X is retailing for just £185 at Currys in the UK when you use the code FNDDGAMING, bringing a heretofore unseen level of performance to this price point.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

505 Games' first showcase has revealed the next game from Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden developers The Bearded Ladies, and it’s another post-apocalyptic wasteland. We were only shown a very small CG snippet of during the presentation, but Miasma Chronicles is going to be a tactical adventure set in a near-future America that’s been done a nasty disservice by an evil titular miasma. Have a watch of the reveal trailer below.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090 Ti are both available at their UK RRP right now at Scan, thanks to Nvidia Founders Edition models remaining in stock. This makes it a great time to pick up either model, as the Founders Edition cards perform excellently yet have much lower recommended retail prices than third-party models which can cost hundreds of pounds more.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Look at V Rising's Steam store page and you'd wave it off in a heartbeat. Middling art sits atop a generic description that does its very best to not> sell the game. "Hunt for blood in nearby settlements... conquer the land of the living." Alrighteyyy, then. Screenshots show what could be any other isometric RPG like Path Of Exile or something – anything.

So, you dive in expecting an average time. One characterised by little more than two palms on the knees once you've closed it down, then a big stand and a wordless stretch. But no! V Rising is the opposite of average; it should be renamed V-ERY GOOD Rising. Forget the art, the description, the screenshots. Just give it a shot.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve always been terrible at games. Truly. Trying to join in with any online multiplayer game has been met with quotes such as, "What on earth are you doing?" and, "Wow, 84 deaths? Really?", to name but a few. This led to scenarios where it felt far easier for me to give up and try something new. But when the point of the game is to continue dying over and over again to up my knowledge, skill level, abilities and unlock new weapons and perks? There I have found a place for my unending death and incompetence in Supergiant's Hades.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

RTX 3060 graphics cards are getting more affordable. Last month we celebrated the RTX 3060 reaching £390, and now an even better model from MSI has hit a new low price at Ebuyer in the UK: £370.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Elden Ring is one of the best PC games of the year - one of the RPS Bestest Bests, in fact - and right now you can get it for free with the purchase of a Crucial SSD. At Ebuyer, there are nine different drives available under the promotion - including the super-fast P5 Plus NVMe drive, the reliable MX500 SATA drive and the great value Crucial P2 budget NVMe.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I am extremely bad at card games, despite the fact that meeting up and playing poker at a friend's house was one of the main entertainments on offer when I was a teenager (because one guy had a full chip set, for some reason). I cannot remember any of the rules of poker, but I do really like the feel of cards, the shick schick shick> of shuffling them and all the business of moving them around in your hand as if that'll change things very much. Card Shark, the latest game from the Reigns devs Nerial, is an ideal card game for me, as it does all the noises of shuffling and dealing and collecting cards extremely well, without requiring any knowledge or memory of the games its punters are actually playing.

Instead, Card Shark is all about the palming and stacking and counting of cards, rather than an actual card game like your classic deckbuilders and such like. It will be out in full on June 2nd, but last week I got to play a larger version of the current Steam demo - about four hours worth of it, in fact - and I discovered that while I'm very bad at card games, I am pretty good at (pretend) cheating at them.

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