Chivalry 2's latest update is called "Duel of the Fêtes", which makes me wish I could drop the chef's kiss emoji into RPS posts. It gets even better, though. Aside from adding new maps, "skill based team balancing", and quality-of-life improvements, the update also adds unofficial server support, for players who want to tweak game rules and party like it's 1999.
Meta keep emailing me to tell me my Oculus account is going to be deleted on March 29th. It's only today, seeing other people talking about it, that it occurs to me: this is not personal. Meta is perhaps going to delete your> Oculus account on March 29th as well, if you have one.
You've got until that date to migrate your account, and if you don't you'll lose all your purchases.
Before I sat down to play three hours of Dragon's Dogma 2 at a Capcom event last month, I gave myself two broad objectives. The first was to discover if there's anything genuinely different about this undeniably enchanting but very familiar sequel to one of the happiest, barmiest action-RPGs of the past 20 years. The second was to royally screw myself by fielding a party consisting exclusively of magic-users.
In Dragon’s Dogma 2 as in Dragon’s Dogma 1, you lead a gang of up to three AI-controlled "pawn" characters – one permanent main sidekick who levels up alongside you, plus two auxiliary pawns created by other players, who are either summoned at Rift stones or spawned into the open world as hired help. As in most RPGs, the ideal party setup is a mix of pure melee, ranged and magical DPS or support classes, but given the whimsicality of Dragon’s Dogma’s sorcery, with its levitation spells and lightning whips, I’ve always wanted to try a whole playthrough as a posse of unescorted occultists.
It's been rumoured for a while that mechs were on their way to Helldivers 2, thanks to leaks and, y'know, official trailers. Well, now it's actually confirmed: the official Helldivers 2 Xwitter account shared today that they were "ready for deployment on the battlefield soon".
A little while back, Embracer Group sadly shut down Timesplitter's studio Free Radical Design in a typical case of Embracer-led restructuring. After the closure, a former Free Radical developer revealed they'd worked on a "clone" of Fortnite before it transitioned to a remake of Timesplitters 2. And now footage has emerged of the cancelled project, which certainly does look like a team shooter reminiscent of Epic's epic.
Berserk Boy is the legally distinct lovechild of Sonic The Hedgehog and Mega Man X, on account of how it fondly emulates the Blue Blur’s speedy momentum and the Dorky Mega’s various power-altering suits. That anatomically tricky relationship is enticing by itself, but even if those retro action platformers just register as historical relics in your memory, Berserk Boy does enough that’s new and interesting that it doesn’t need to rely on aping its inspirations. My only beef is that credits rolled before I was properly given a chance to test my newfound robo-bashing muscles.
If you dislike getting stabbed in the back in first-person games, you might not like Voin. If you like ravaged Gothic masonry and dramatic evening skies, you might like Voin. If you dislike fighting fireball-lobbing demons with a sword, you might not like Voin. If you like open-ended, changeable levels full of loot and secrets, you might like Voin. If you are confused about whether you'll like or dislike Voin, you might want to try it for yourself during the first public Steam playtest on Friday, March 8th.
Having spent all of 30 minutes with an early playtest build, I'm cautiously impressed. I suspect there are cooler, less-known inspirations at work, but this feels like a Demon's Souls-ified Doom Eternal that doesn't quite have Doom Eternal's swagger and precision, probably because it is the work of just one developer, Nikita Sozidar, rather than hundreds.
Considering it’s one of the most gawwwwjuss> games you can get one o’ them PS5 machines, Horizon Forbidden West’s upcoming PC version has some pretty fair-looking system requirements. The newly released specs, which you can find below, suggest that pushing the open world, robosaur-slaying sequel to its most extreme settings will take a burly graphics card – but likewise, lower settings and resolutions can get by with much creakier hardware.
Readers with good memories may recall that I was delighted to see Games Incubator and PlayWay moving away from "cleaning abandoned industrial buildings" and towards "magical pets" in their sim games, when they revealed My Horse: Bonded Spirits. I played the prologue to the game today (which is about 40 minutes long) and discovered that you have to level up your horse before you can gallop. Sir: no.
As someone who finds games about cars wot go fast only intermittently interesting, I'd expect a game about cars wot go slow to be positively soporific. Speed is, ultimately, the modus operandi of a car. It gets you where you need to go faster than a horse, and doesn't do annoying things like pooing on your patio or dying (also, potentially, on your patio). Surely, then, playing a game about cars moving at the speed of a dead patio horse defeats the point, like playing a first-person shooter where all the guns fire backwards.
Expeditions: A Mudrunner Game demonstrates this not to be the case. This bouncy, slimy off-roading simulator is the most fun I've had with an imaginary car since 2018's Jalopy. This is partly because it is as much a physics puzzler filled with limitless conundrums as it is a game about driving, but also because, like Jalopy, it envisions the car as something more than a way to boost egos by doing a big circle.