Mechanical keyboards can be pretty cheap these days, but I've not never seen one on sale for as little as £4.99 - especially not for a full-size RGB model available for a brand I've actually heard of before! That is indeed the case at GAME though, who are selling the Trust Gaming GXT 865 Asta for £4.99 plus another £4.99 in shipping - that's £20 less than this keyboard normally costs!
Nose around Helldivers 2's Galactic War map and you might notice that there's a lot of empty space. Around half the celestial sphere is given over to the dominions of the Automatons and Terminids, leaving ample room for another enemy faction to be inserted via free update or paid DLC. What could that next faction be? Surely it can't be any worse than a horde of giant bugs or a legion of robots. Surely it can't be, say, a highly advanced elder species of teleporting illusionists equipped with lightning guns and cloaking devices. Oh dear.
Playing Pacific Drive reminds me of an army recruitment advert shown on British TV about 20 years ago. A group of soldiers are travelling along a road at night in a Land Rover, when suddenly they spot the enemy ahead. The front seat passenger starts barking orders at the driver: “Get off the road! Kill the lights! Through the trees!”. You sense the panic as the camera, inside the vehicle, jolts with the suspension on the rough ground, and the driver fights the steering wheel to stay in control. It’s a scene you reenact quite frequently in Ironwood’s survival game with roguelike trimmings. Well, except, instead of a Land Rover you’re behind the wheel of a rusty station wagon, and instead of military opposition, you’re scarpering from paranormal phenomena.
Inflexion's fantasy survival sim Nightingale releases into Steam early access today. Our pre-launch impressions? Well, the procedurally generated landscapes are engrossing, a blend of British fairytale influences with many a hushed forest, spidery swamp and tempting ruin. We're also pretty keen as a team on the game's Realm cards system, which lets you shape those fairytale worlds both before and after you portal into them. But we were less enthralled by HUD and user interface elements such as the crafting menus and hotbar, which we found ornate and circuitous to the point of confusing.
Speaking to me after our co-op hands-on - in which guides writer Kiera made friends with a tree monster only for somebody> to shoot it - Inflexion's CEO Aaryn Flynn explained a bit about how the game will evolve during its early access period, which Inflexion estimate will last 9-12 months. Thankfully, it sounds like fine-tuning the UI is a priority, though Flynn is "cautious" about committing to a full-blown roadmap.
Every year, there are a couple of game soundtracks I become properly obsessed with. In 2022, I more or less had the music of Tunic and Citizen Sleeper on repeat whenever I left the house. In 2021, it was Chicory. In 2020, it was Coffee Talk and Signs Of The Sojourner, and in 2019, it was all Mutazione, all the time. 2023 was a pretty great year for game music as well, as we not only got Alan Wake 2's exquisite musical set-piece that's honestly just been getting better and more insane as time's gone on, frankly, but also the toe-tappingly brilliant soundtrack of Cobalt Core, which has somehow risen even higher on my forever playlist after revisiting it for this month's RPS Game Club.
Composed by Aaron Cherof, Cobalt Core's music alternates between high-energy battle tracks and calmer, more relaxed ambience. It's so dang good, and an absolutely perfect backdrop for sliding in and out of oncoming missile fire in its roguelike spaceship fights. So come along and jam to some of its best tracks with me below as I pick out some of my musical highlights.
A colossal new update for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader launched last night, hitting the grimdark space-aristocrat RPG with so many changes that the patch notes are almost 17,000 words long. Fitting for a game that our Rogue Trader review called "engrossing, obscure and absolutely exhausting". It adds loads of new voiced lines, fixes everything from wonky abilities to broken quests, reworks balance, improves performance, and so much more. Enough is changed that developers Owlcat are giving everyone in your party a free respec to adjust to what the game has become.
Last Epoch, a Diablo-like action-RPG from Eleventh Hour Games that's been in early access since 2019, finally arrives tomorrow as a full release. And to celebrate, there's a colossal 1.0 update that could take you an hour to read in its entirety. To spare you the time commitment, its highlights include new Acolyte and Rogue masteries, new Item Factions, a full offline mode, controller support, and plenty of visual tweaks.
The latest Assassin's Creed Mirage update is giving me flashbacks to that inglorious period in game design when every other action game had an insta-fail stealth segment to wind people up between cover-based shoot-outs and, I don't know, three-part glyph puzzles or what-have-you. Out today for PC at 12pm UTC, 1pm GMT, 7am ET and 4am PT, the 1.07 patch adds Full Synchronization Challenge, a permadeath mode (originally teased last year) that not only permakills you when you're slain by enemies, but also deletes your save file when you commit crimes such as slaughtering civilians, or going outside of "authorised map locations".
Xenonauts 2 received its biggest update yet last night, adding a bunch of new things to the early access X-COM-like that will be sure to please your rude Chief Science Officer Gaius Baltar James Callis whatever his name is SMUG FACE. Alongside a brand-new Cruiser UFO to pilfer for new technology to help fight back against your alien invaders, the Milestone 3 update also brings new story missions, weapons and vehicles, extending the campaign's play time from 180 in-game days all the way up to 260.
My experience with Warhams isn't flat zero - I had some minifigs when I was a teenager and played a few of the Dawn Of War video games - but I haven't actively checked in on it for a while. I know enough to make "[x] for the [x] throne!" jokes, basically. My experience with cleaning-stuff-sim PowerWash Simulator is extensive, though, and I was excited when the crossover with Warhammer 40K was teased a while back. Last night we got a full trailer and release date of Frebruary 27th - next week! - and I'm now earnestly very> excited. The trailer is both very funny and shows off massive things to clean. Win win, innit.