Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened got a remake back in April, the first game in Frogwares' long-running series to receive a second pass. And you'd better believe that it was like Eldritch Christmas for me, because the 2007 original is quite possibly one of my favourite PC games of all time.
In the market for a pre-built gaming PC? Right now you can pick up a refurbished MSI model with an RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, a water-cooled Intel Core i9 12900KF processor, 64GB of DDR5 memory and a 2TB NVMe SSD for just $1249.99 at Woot. This PC uses standard parts for upgradeability and comes with a 180-day MSI warranty. All in all, it's a ton of computer for the money, and the best-specced gaming PC we can find at this price point.
How do you like your missiles? Do you prefer ones that fire straight up and then swoop down like birds of prey, or the kind that jet off to the sides, trapping the target in a pincer formation? How about a single missile that splits into a swarm of smaller missiles? Perhaps a zig-zagger that leaves a trail of explosive charges in its wake, detonating them like dynamite dominoes once it impacts? Well, whatever your fancy, Armored Core 6: Fires Of Rubicon has a loadout for every occasion. With as many combinations as Dolly Parton's wardrobe, it’s almost a scandal to equip the same gear twice.
Aperture Desk Job is full of unexplained details. Right at the start, as the camera pans down from the retrofuturist reception area to your lowly desk-based workstation, we see all manner of orange tubes, future Grady cores being trained to fool captcha image tests, a giant chicken, and what appears to be the origin point of Half-Life's ammo boxes being constructed. But there's also a pointed shot between the floorboards, showing us a pair of green praying mantises fumbling around over some electrical wiring and a rogue lightbulb.
On its own, this mantis scene is no stranger than anything else we've witnessed in the last 30 seconds. But as your journey through Aperture goes on, things start getting really weird, really fast. Over the course of the next half hour, we'll see these mantises discover electricity, evolve into a society of tiny house-dwelling insects with their own carriages and courtship dances, and eventually a futuristic civilization who have mastered flying saucers and created an eternally self-sustaining power source. All in the same time it takes your supervisor core Grady to come up with a rudimentary prototype for what will eventually go on to become Portal's creepy turret. But you, yes you>, CHARLIE, had to go and ruin it all by dropping the giant metal head of corporate mega-bastard Cave Johnson through the floorboards. What might those mantises have become, if they hadn't been so rudely crushed by your rampant disregard for their wellbeing?
Geoffcom 2023 has crested its initial crescendous wave with Gamescom Opening Night Live. The yearly gaming show has delivered its usual tantalising (and sometimes baffling) smorgasbord of videogame announcements, trailers, updates, news, and more. And now we’ve got a much better idea of what games to expect over the course of the next, oh, seven hundred years.
Below we’ve compiled an exhaustive (oh so exhaustive) list of all 36 trailers and announcements shown at this year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live, so if you want a roundup of everything you missed, you’re in the right place. Deep breaths everyone. And away we go.
If you can't wait for Path Of Exile 2, and you've long since lost interest in Diablo 4, then you might want to cast your loot-hungry eyes toward Last Epoch, an upcoming time-travel fantasy ARPG that's been enjoying a successful stint in early access since 2019 and, as tonight's Gamescom Opening Night Live show revealed, is on track for a full release later this year. The Geoffcom mega show also revealed there's a new mage class called the Runemaster heading to the game next month that's capable of casting 40 different spells on a single attack key, but given this is the first time we've written about Last Epoch, I realise that probably won't mean much to a lot of you. So let's back up a bit and introduce Last Epoch properly, because hoo boy, if you love customisable skill trees, this is the ARPG for you, my friend.
LG's 27GL850 was a legendary monitor, as this 27-inch model was the first to use the Korean chaebol>'s Fast IPS panels - which combined the extremely fast pixel response times you'd expect to see on TN panels with the wide viewing angles and gorgeous colours of IPS screens. This combination proved popular, and today there's a deal on the modern successor to the 27GL850 - the 27GP850.
The 27GP850 is down to $299.99 at Amazon, versus an original price of $429.99. We saw a lot of sales on the 1440p 144Hz 27GL850 when it reached this price, so seeing an even better 1440p 180Hz model at the same point could result in quite a popular pickup.
AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the fastest CPU I've tested (on average across a nine-game benchmark suite), exceeding even the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and the Intel Core i9 13900K. That makes it an awesome choice for a full-fat gaming PC, and today you can pick up this top performer for just $385 at Amazon USA - with a free copy of Starfield included.
Out of all of Supergiant’s games, I feel like Pyre is the odd duck out. Bastion, Transistor, and Hades - all fit nicely into the action-RPG genre (as well as all being absolute bangers) but Pyre is something else entirely. Sure it also has action-RPG elements, but also is a story-rich visual novel and> sports game? And> they not only work together but also compliment> each other?? It’s a magical wizardry mix of genres that still feels fresh today, even though it’s been five years since it released. It’s story following a group of ethereal exiles playing fantasy sports ball in mystical purgatory isn’t half bad too (by which I mean it’s amazing).
The rules of the sport are simple - two teams are placed at opposite ends of a pitch each with a flame (the titular pyre) they must protect. An energy ball appears on the map and the two teams must grab the ball and dunk it into the opponent’s flame until that flame has been snuffed out. Each character has a special ability, movement feels good, and when you pull off a combo you feel fantastic.
As someone whose auto-battler experience has, up until now, only been limited to minor forays into the excellent Alice0-recommended Super Auto Pets, sitting down to play a run of Tales & Tactics was somewhat overwhelming. Recently launched into early access and made by the same team behind Slay The Spire's popular Downfall mod, this is a fantasy autobattler cloaked in the skin of a roguelike. That means that in addition to creating an army of tabletop-esque miniatures to do your automatic bidding on a grid-based board, you'll also be picking from randomly generated opponents on a lightly branching story map as you sword chop your way to your ultimate goal: The Grand Tournament.
It's an intriguing combo, but as a relative newcomer to the auto-battling genre, there's maybe a bit too much going on here for its own good. That's not to say I haven't had a good time with it so far, but there are so many things to juggle in my brain that I feel like I'm fumbling my way through it by chance rather than making confident and informed tactical choices.