Of all the games I saw at this year's Gamescom, sci-fi team-based shooter Hyenas easily claims the title of "Most Confusing Overall Experience". Bouncing between appointments in this sea of booths and lanyards was jarring, but I'd eventually settle in after a few minutes of reconfiguring my brain to whatever presentation or control scheme was placed in front of me. Hyenas never gave me a chance.
I sat in a 20-minute presentation of the game and tried my level best to understand SEGA's stab at a live-service FPS. Instead, I exited the booth with whiplash... and a sense of curiosity. Somewhere inside the game's insufferable tone is a kernel of cleverness, I just need to get my mitts on it to confirm my suspicions. Otherwise, it's very difficult to really> understand whether it can survive in such a saturated space.
Hallo! Monday is a bank holiday for us here in the UK, so we'll leave you with Alice Bee until the rest of us return on Tuesday (well, aside from those of us taking more time). This is the last big holiday weekend of summer, a traditional time to get out in the countryside or down to the seaside. Could use a little heat and joy with the terrible, terrible winter to come. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Not since the cruelly overlooked Blast-off has a game so accurately pressed the faster!> button in my brain.
Neodash is a type of racing game that pops up relatively often; a time trial crossed with an obstacle course and a little of what I suppose is the endless runner. Picture Trackmania but with the courses condensed into short bursts of high speed dodging and you're basically there. They're often very throwaway and don't really hold my interest for long. Neodash grabs hold immediately.
The WD Black SN770 is a good middle-of-the-road PCIe 4.0 SSD, outperforming PCIe 3.0 SSDs while costing less than the very fastest PCIe 4.0 models. It launched at £125 for a 1TB size earlier this year, but now it's down to £84 where it's rather more fetching. The 2TB size has also been reduced and is even better value at £152. Here's why we rate these SSDs - and where to find them at the lowest price.
Let's do the 'where to find them' bit first. It's quite simple: WD's UK store is offering the 1TB at the best price right now, while Ebuyer is the place to go if you'd prefer the larger 2TB model.
It wouldn't be Gamescom without a Geoff Keighley liveshow to kick it all off, would it? Tuesday's Opening Night Live showcase featured a huge amount of trailers to gawk at, a baggage carousel of content that moved at a blistering clip. Despite its two hour runtime a lot of interesting (and in most cases, new) titles weren't given a huge amount space to breathe, their moment in the spotlight frequently cut short by another trailer waiting impatiently in the wings.
You'd be forgiven, then, for missing a few bits and pieces because you were blinking really fast or distracted by the cat eating something unknown underneath your coffee table. Not to worry though, as I've once again gathered team RPS to tell me in detail about the games that caught their attention during Geoffcom 2022.
Much like our E3 roundup from earlier in the summer, each RPS staffer took ten minutes out of their day to wax lyrical about an upcoming project featured within the showcase. All eight (including yours truly, who thanks to Katharine actually remembered to contribute this time around) chose completely different games. Some picks are more obvious, whereas others are a little off piste. In a good way, of course!
The Steam Deck is a brilliant system, but its internal storage is limited - from anywhere from 64GB to 512GB depending on the model you chose. Thankfully, Micro SD cards are getting extremely affordable, even in massive sizes all the way up to 1TB. Smaller sizes like 256GB and 512GB are better value per gigabyte, but today in the UK there's been a big discount on a 1TB Lexar Play Micro SD card that brings it into contention too.
The Lexar Play 1TB is now retailing for £110 at Amazon, compared to a usual price of £140. If you'd prefer something a little more high performance, the highly-rated SanDisk Extreme 1TB card is also on sale, dropping from £220 to £140.
Minecraft Legends was first announced at Geoff Fest earlier this year, and a smidge more footage dropped again at a Nintendo Direct Mini. But despite both of these events, it's been difficult to ascertain what the game actually, well, is>. Aside from being a real-time strategy spin-off, there's been nothing else to scan with our eyeballs for more info.
Colour me intrigued, then, as I sat in a quickfire presentation at this year's Gamescom and bore witness to some mythical gameplay>. I can now report that what Minecraft Legends appears to be is as mix of real-time strategy and building, made all the more approachable by being set in Minecraft's colourful cube-verse.
Eight years ago Graham (who used to be to blame for all of this) got hands-on with Dead Island 2, back when the game was being developed by Yager, the folks behind Spec Ops: The Line. Since then, development changed hands like a baton at the Olympic relay; Yager left a year later, to be replaced by Sumo Digital, only for Sumo Digital to leave and be replaced by Dambuster Studios. Usain Bolt hasn't expressed interest yet, but there's time.
So going into a 20-minute hands-on with the game in the year 2022, I was a bit apprehensive. What sort of Frankenstinian horror awaited me behind closed doors? But, far from a shambling mess, what I played was a zombie 'em up that seemed close to what Graham saw in 2014, only polished up to a surprising, bloody gloss.
Dunno if you’ve noticed by there’s an awful lot of sci-fi games on the way, most of which – these being games – revolve around shooting space creatures to glowing green bits. Deliver Us Mars, the recently delayed sequel to Deliver Us The Moon, takes a more peaceful option, now blending the original’s puzzling with some Tomb Raider reboot-style platforming. Your deadliest enemy here is gravity, and as far as I understand, you can’t shoot that.
Amazon are intending to announce they’ve made an offer to buy publishing colossus Electronic Arts later today, according to a new report from USA Today’s For The Win, who cite sources from Swedish gaming agency GLHF. No clue yet as to how much they’d be paying, but it’s likely to be ranging in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Maybe just not as many as Microsoft’s $68.7 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard, revealed in January.