Liam and I have been playing looter shooter Remnant 2 in our spare time, as we realised we both couldn't stop thinking about it. Having been burned out of Destiny 2 and most live service games, we discovered Remnant 2 delivers all the benefits of blasting gangly creatures for skill points without all the live service baggage. What a refreshing thing.

Thing is, if two out of the three major bosses we've faced so far took us to court for cheesing them, we'd lose. And it brings us no greater pleasure, knowing we've carved powerful new weapons out of their remains. God, it feels good to be totally undeserving of any credit whatsoever.

Read more

It is once more that time of year when the searing heat drives us underground, to subsist on raw snacks, re-read The Book Of Phoenix, and play this year's Low-Intensity Strategy Game For When It's Actually Refreshingly Temperate And Rainy Out But We're Committed To The Bit Now.

Myriads Colon Renaissance is not quite the break from the 4X that I'd tried to get us, but it is a hybrid. You build up a city, explore and conquer new lands, unlock research and ultimately push everyone's faces in, but its other main pillar is tower defence, a genre I very rarely align with. Which is a good sign, right? Two good reasons not to choose it, but I am anyway.

Read more

How does one make a sequel to a basically perfect game? 2007's physics-platformer-in-a-weird-science-facility Portal is a lodestar piece of game design from top to bottom. It's one of my favourite games, and I went into 2011's Portal 2 with many a reservation. But it's very good! And there are so many things I love about Portal 2 that it's quite hard to pick just one thing to write about.

I could do "the joy of Portal 2's retro science", where you fall through the floor into the old school Aperture Science labs and see the 60s-ish version of all the big buttons and testing chambers you were put through in the first Portal. I could do "the joy of the corrupted personality cores in Portal 2", a group of corrupted AI spheres including Rick The Adventure Sphere, which is largely just Nolan North making up his own action theme song. I could even do "the joy of potatoes in Portal 2". And then I realised that most of the things I like about Portal 2 also intersect with Stephen Merchant's character Wheatley, a weird little guy (in the most pejorative sense).

Read more

The Seagate FireCuda 530 is one of the best NVMe SSDs for PC and PS5, and today you can pick up the 2TB heatsink model for just £126. That's an awesome price for one of the very fastest SSDs on the market, one that's on par with our favourite favourite PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming, the Samsung 980 Pro and WD SN850. Normally we'd expect to pay closer to £160 for this model, making it a solid £30+ savings.

Read more

Update, and a rather important one at that: The crashing issues I’ve had with Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Steam Deck have been, as far as I can tell, fully fixed. No more collapsing back to the Steam library on startup, and no forcing the use of Proton Experimental – it should launch and work straight away. Valve have even upgraded Baldur’s Gate 3 from Playable to Verified for Steam Deck play, reflecting its newfound handheld-readiness.

This means you can safely ignore the first part of this article, where I whinge about software instability as if it’s the the most heinous atrocity humankind has ever inflicted on itself. All the stuff on general performance, settings, and battery life still applies.

Read more

Hello folks. It sure has been a while, hasn't it? Huge apologies for that. I would say it's been an unusually busy year, but then again, it's always a busy year>, so I really have no excuse. Sorry about that. But! After some much appreciated feedback on how I can improve these Letters From The Editor, I return to you today with some notes and thoughts about how we're going to cover Baldur's Gate 3. I'll tell you now, it's going to be a while before you see our review, as review code only arrived a couple of days ago.

Read more

The distance from the roof of the Counting House to the nearest building in Baldur’s Gate is vast, by design. The waterfront bank where the city’s great, good and gangster store their gold stands with its back to the sea, while a long and well-guarded bridge extends from its maw, like a money-hungry tongue. Legend says its top two floors are entirely without windows, the House an eyeless god to the citizens who reside on the hillside that slopes down toward the docks. So how was Gale, the wizard prodigy, able to bound from a faraway balcony to the brim of the bank, as if stepping lazily out onto his porch with a mug of coffee? Some say strange sorcery was afoot, but I’ve seen his character sheet, and so can be more specific.

Upon levelling up, Gale multiclassed as a sorcerer - an odd choice, but one that allowed him to unlock the ability to throw magic from a great range. Suddenly, while casting a teleport spell, this hybrid mage was able to reach across the wide moat of the Counting House and land safely on a high ledge. It’s one of many obscure class synergies via which, Larian imagines, you’ll be able to break their level design in unexpected and entertaining ways.

Read more

Guess what? James and I, and a lot of other folk at RPS, are all learning the importance of rolling for initiative this week, because we're playing Baldur's Gate 3! Larian's take on what is essentially the official cRPG version of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is out of early access today and boy, is it a doozy. So we answer your questions and Nates, and talk about animal forms and rolling for initiative and why the DM is a git. Plus, James has been struggling to get the game working on Steam Deck. Sometimes it does!

Read more

If you’ve been resisting Baldur’s Gate 3’s early access run to save yourself for the full release, there’s good news for both of us: you can fill your knowledge boots with this guide to the launch build’s PC performance and best settings, and I get to avoid feeling like I’m just giving advice to people who’ve been playing this gigantic RPG for two years longer than me. Hell yeah.

Read more

Portal 2 is obviously brilliant, in part because each of its chapters possesses a distinct charm. GLaDOS’ return, for instance, is a stretch of pure puzzling with just a dash of dread, while your first steps into the abandoned 1960s Aperture facility interrupt a fairly hopeless tone with an upbeat sense of discovery. For me, though, Portal 2 peaks late. So late that by the time it begins, your journey through the 'true' puzzle chambers are essentially over, leaving you as little more than a loose end in the big glowing eye of a former buddy. It’s Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You! Mmm, love that part.

Read more