Sometimes, you look forward to a game's release and it's very disappointing. Sometimes, it comes out and it's... fine. Kinda good, even. Only once does the game come out and it's fuckin’ SPIDERHECK WOOOO!

Imagine Nidhogg, cross it with Webbed, give it solid single player options, and throw in one of the sickest game soundtracks I've ever heard. I'd hoped Spiderheck would merely be as fun as it looks. It instead consumed me. Neverjam have united my love for Webbed with my love for chaos, and it's more glorious than I dared to hope.

Read more

Out now in early access, Slime Rancher 2 is the highly anticipated sequel to Monomi Park’s charming farming sim. Beatrix LeBeau has packed up her slime-wrangling gear and has crossed the Slime Sear to Rainbow Island, a new land packed with new mysteries and new slimes.

As a seasoned slime wrangler myself, I was excited to dive head-first into this new, colourful world. Review code didn't arrive until launch day unfortunately, but all week I've been vibrating with anticipation. After spending a handful of hours frolicking with slimes and skipping around Rainbow Island, though, that early dazzle is starting to wear off. Monomi Park’s sequel feels a little too familiar to its predecessor in its early game, and it's put a major downer on my goo-hoovering adventures.

Read more

Out Of Hands is a fairly "does what it says on the tin" title for this, a game where you play a dude who dreams he is made entirely out of hands every night. It also operates as a decent joke, because rather than being out of hands, he, if anything, has too many. So full marks for the name. The game itself is kind of a deckbuilder but not really, and though it also describes itself as a thriller, I can't say my heart rate was raised. In fact, behind the (admittedly very cool) visual style there seems to be a pretty run-of-the-mill "a girl I liked is no longer in my life and I'm pretty cut up about that" story. I guess in the full game it might turn out she was murdered, or she mudered the main character, or the main character murdered her - just, some kind of murder, maybe?

But in the four demo levels I played recently, it seemed like a pretty normal breakup. I was really excited to give it a go, but in the preview I didn't find the contrast between a face made of squirming hands and the well trodden women-be-leavin' plot to be particularly affective or evocative. The squirming hands are cool, though.

Read more

Microsoft Flight Simulator is enhancing its version of the planet’s second largest country for World Update 11. Canada is benefitting from the Flight Sim devs fancy scanning tech for the free update, which is live in game now. Glide over coasts, cities, and mountains while watching the trailer below.

Read more

At this year's Gamescom I got hands-on with Bytten Studio's Cassette Beasts, an upcoming monster-taming open world RPG in the vein of Pokémon, which is far more interesting to me than the basic concept of Pokémon. That's because you're able to fuse together any> monsters you 'catch', but moreso because it's a monster collectathon where you become the monster, essentially fusing yourself with bomb dogs and hermit crabs with traffic cone-homes.

I like the way the game does away with the overdone shonen story of wanting to become the very best there ever was, and instead puts the spotlight on its cast of characters and the relationships you form with your buds. It's looking mighty promising.

Read more

If you've ever wondered what the 1987 film Running Man might look like as a turn-based tactics game (see also last year's Netflix sensation Squid Game, if the Running Man reference doesn't quite do it for you), then Homicidal All-Stars probably comes pretty close. It's the debut game from Artificer, a new studio formed by a bunch of ex-CreativeForge devs who worked on the first Hard West and Phantom Doctrine, and it centres on a woman called Scarlett who finds herself competing in the deadly TV show that gives the game its name. Like Running Man, Squid Game and all those other 'deadly games' you know and love, Homicidal All-Stars is about folks who down on their luck fighting for their lives, where their only consolation prize in these dystopian bloodbaths is not getting pulped at the end of it.

For Scarlett, this means mowing down scumbags in classic turn-based fashion with a bunch of other friendly competitors she's teamed up with, but this is far from a straightforward XCOM-like. Between fights, you'll also be navigating its trap-filled arenas in third-person, dodging sniper turrets, disabling tripwires, and dashing over spiky/fiery/horrible pits to get to the end of each 'episode'. It's a refreshing mix based on an early preview build I've been playing recently, especially when its gameshow hook allows for its malicious host, Orion Ford, to start meddling with your success. "He’s the person behind the worst of the twists," creative director and Artificer CEO Kacper Szymczak tells me. "He’ll start filling the level with poisonous gas, he’ll turn off the lights, drop explosive barrels everywhere, to name just a few."

Read more

For whatever reason, I decided that I'd start last weekend with Roger Federer's retirement speech. I'd literally just woken up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, only to emotionally destabilise my morning with an eight-minute-long video in which one of, if not the greatest tennis player of all time poured out his heart. Even his great rival Rafael Nadal couldn't hold back his tears, which said it all, really.

As one's mind does in momentous occasions, it turned to Nintendo Switch Sports football and how its small roster of players may be one of the best representations of talent in a sports game that I've come across. Come on, humour me here.

Read more

The Elgato Wave:1 is an outstanding USB microphone, offering great sound quality, powerful software and plug-and-play simplicity. It normally costs around £90, its UK RRP, but today it's dropped to just £49.99 on Amazon, making it the perfect time to upgrade your vocals.

Read more

Kingston are one of the few companies that make their own SSDs rather than rebadging someone else's, and their latest content-creation focused drive is the KC3000. This PCIe 4.0 SSD offers sequential reads up to 7000MB/s and sequential writes up to 6000MB/s, making it one of the very fastest drives available, and today it's also one of the cheapest. That's because CCL have discounted the drive to £94.27, some £75 below its UK RRP and a terrific deal for a drive with these high-end specs.

Read more

Turns out early access isn’t just for games. The Amazon Prime Early Access Sale is taking place this October 11th-12th, a full six weeks before Black Friday 2022, and from a PC gaming standpoint will offer the same kinds of component and peripheral deals as that annual pre-Christmas shoppingfest. Just earlier.

That said, the Prime Early Access Sale isn’t purely a prelude to the anything-goes chaos of Black Friday. It’s more like a Prime Day 2, in that it’s an Amazon-only event, with all the best deals set to be require Amazon Prime membership to access. That’s right, it’s one of those>.

Read more