Long before indie outfit Capybara Games made a name for themselves with Sword & Sworcery or Below, they made a puzzle-strategy game with the Might & Magic license for Ubisoft. Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes was a surprise delight on Nintendo DS in 2009 and an HD release made its way to PC in 2011.
Now it's getting a Definitive Edition release courtesy of Dotemu, with updated character art, quality-of-life improvements and rebalanced multiplayer.
Samsung's Pro Plus memory cards are our top pick for the Steam Deck, so I thought you'd like to know that the giant 512GB cards are now down to £39.99 at Amazon UK, making it a good time to upgrade your Steam Deck game storage if you haven't already.
Samsung's 970 Evo Plus 2TB SSD is an almost legendary SSD, offering great real-world performance at a reasonable price. Recently the largest 2TB size has dropped from £145 to £99.99, making it significantly more affordable to add a ton of fast NVMe storage to your PC or laptop.
Between the spooky reality tears of Oxenfree II: Lost Signals and the chrono-bending clue hunts of Crime O’Clock, we at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast have had time travel on the brain. Clever game mechanic, or narrative copout? Maybe both? Maybe neither? Or maybe it’s just a reason for Nate and I to gush about Titanfall 2’s singleplayer campaign while Alice considers the temporal implications of save scumming. To know the answer, you yourself must travel back to the past, specifically Tuesday, when we recorded it.
For me, developers Deconstructeam are the GOAT at fleshing out characters through the subtle art of conversation. Whether it’s revealing the dark secrets of corporate espionage from the mouths of loose-lipped employees after a cocktail or two in The Red Strings Club, uncovering the cut-throat life of a hitman as he arranges beautiful bouquets in Eternal Home Floristry, or unravelling the personal philosophies of an old man who claims he can speak to God through a radio in Interview With A Whisperer, their games are detailed portraits of complex people. And after playing through an hour-long preview build of the team’s next game, the fresly unveiled The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, I can already tell that this adventure is one of their most complex portraits yet. This time, folks, we're dealing with divination, cosmic gods and sweet, sweet revenge.
RTS-FPS hybrids aren't a new thing, but they also haven't been the most historically successful ventures. Well, Arma 3 developers Bohemia Interactive are taking a punt at blending the two genres with Silica, in the hopes that you can both shoot and command things with equal levels of good. It's the first project to hatch from Bohemia's incubator program, which helps indie devs make cool games.
Silica is largely the work of one developer, Martin "Dram" Malicharek, who was previously the lead on Bohemia's Take On Mars. Having given Silica a whirl for over an hour, I struggle to see whether the RTS, FPS hybrid can truly offer the best of both worlds. It does, however, make being a crab extremely good.
“Why am I so slow”, complains my partner, minutes into being cajoled into playing Dota 2 for the very first time. “Ah, you’ll need to buy boots,” I say, with the hard earned wisdom of someone who’s spent over 4,000 hours clicking on wizards. “I have boots,” she says, somewhat indignantly. “Those are slippers,” I reply. “What?” she asks, somewhat more indignantly. “They don’t give you move speed,” I respond. I see a flicker of anger in her eyes, as well as maybe, just maybe, a spark of interest.
A new Dota patch came out last week, and it’s a biggun. Is it a good time for lapsed players to jump back in? Yes! Is it a good time for entirely new players to dip their toes in, while experienced players are still befuddled by a map that’s 40% bigger, featuring dual Roshan pits, new minibosses and a host of other changes? Perhaps! It’s certainly a good opportunity to test your relationship.
When I meet Jake Solomon at GDC, it's his third day of unemployment. The XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns director and designer announced he was leaving Firaxis back in February, but his final day at the studio where he made his name and worked for more than twenty years was still very fresh in his memory. "It's surreal," he says. "For probably the next ten years, I'll refer to it as 'we' when we talk about Firaxis, and it's sad to think it's not the right pronoun anymore. It's exciting, but a little terrifying."
On the face of it, that panic might seem unfounded. Over the last decade, Solomon has become one of the most revered names in turn-based strategy games. Having cut his teeth on many of Sid Meier's Civilization games in his early years at Firaxis, he went on to become the designer who spearheaded the revival of XCOM with Enemy Unknown in 2012, before going on to direct its even more beloved sequel XCOM 2 and its War Of The Chosen expansion a few years later. Most recently, he was creative director on Marvel's Midnight Suns, which allowed him to marry his life-long love of Marvel comic books with the thrilling tactical combat he's so well known for.
Solomon's next adventure, though, won't have the certainty of Midnight Suns' supercharged attack cards, or even the tease of an XCOM hit percentage backing him up. For not only is it Solomon's third day of unemployment when we speak; it's also the day after he revealed his plans to leave turn-based tactics games behind altogether. Instead, his sights are now set on the life simulation genre, a move that, at first glance, seems at odds with his career as a strategy designer. But over the course of our hour-long chat, it becomes increasingly clear that life sims have been a life-long obsession for Solomon, and he might have even made one by now had the development of XCOM 2 gone a little differently.
Forgive me, I'm someone who's recently got a Steam Deck and I'm going through the honeymoon phase. Except it's a phase which is unlikely to end? Anyway, it's proven to be an excellent way to rinse Vampire Survivors, a game I wouldn't - I have nothing against those who do - play upright on a monitor. Survival is best served on the couch, curled up like a shrimp with the blood draining from my arms as I hold the TV slab at some atrocious angle.
Anyway>, I've come to realise that Vampire Survivors might be a game about running away, but actually peaks when you come to a standstill. There's a special kind of joy to be had when you're able to stop and idle.
It's been possible to find tiny SSDs for the Steam Deck for a little while, but yesterday Corsair launched its 1TB MP600 Mini SSDs which ought to offer better performance than other options. Here are the cheapest places to find it in the US and UK!