I genuinely don't like sucker-punching video games the second they're announced, but playing Glowmade's King Of Meat is three hours of my life I won't get back, and every second I spend writing about it extends that total, dragging me closer to a regretful demise. Here's the stuff I'm more positive about: buried at the core of this spurting interactive snarkfest there is a moderately OK third-person dungeon-crawler for groups of up to four.
Now, I never played quite as much as our Brendy did of the original Splitgate. But I had a fun time with its mixture of Halo-esque trigger pulling and portalling around! So I was intrigued to give the alpha version of Splitgate 2 a go and see if it had a little more substance to it than its initial reveal, which gave off a, "it's Splitgate but with more money" feel.
Well, I think it's… a bit serious? It certainly has more polish and some extra additions, yet I didn't come away from it thrilled by its more competitive, class-based FPS leanings. I think it just needs a bit more time, perhaps, for a portal to open and some silly rocket launchers and baseball bats and zombies to come tumbling out of it.
MachineGames have made a decent living as the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you'd expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, there's rather less of the bloodshed.
Silent Hill has a messy, up-is-down relationship with time and history, so let's go about this hands-on with the Silent Hill 2 Remake in a messy, up-is-down way. Developed well over two decades ago, the original Silent Hill 2 is the magnum opus of Polish horror stalwarts Bloober Team. Running on then-innovative "Unreal Engine 5" technology created by Jazz Jackrabbit publishers Epic MegaGames, it's a wonderful abyss of a game that remains perfectly playable today, given a certain amount of tolerance for the quirks of the era.
It begins with your character, James Sunderland, descending from the road towards the eponymous Midwestern nowhere-town. Like many games of the period, Silent Hill 2 uses a third-person, over-the-shoulder manual camera, which allows you to glance fearfully up at the monstrous pine trees that fringe the path - each rising from a bulging tide of fog that menaces with the suggestion of approaching figures. There is moisture everywhere, gushing from drain pipes and dribbling down concrete barriers. As you amble into the murk, deathly chords and groaning, unmechanical motifs reverberate from somewhere deep underground.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! You know books, right? They’re like RPS articles, but slightly better for piling under a flock mat to make little hills for your plastic spacemen. Fitting, then, that this week it’s plastic spaceman enthusiast, writer on Absolver, Nightingale, Gladius, and Total War: Warhammer 3, and Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us author, Dan Griliopoulos! Cheers Dan! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Sundays are for cat. I’m currently in the process of acquiring a gorgeous white and ginger kitten for the local shelter. I have seen four seconds of footage and I’m already smitten, kitten. Before I spend the weekend getting very excited about big stretches, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)
Good job, everyone! The cat talk in the comments has never been stronger. I miss my cats back in England very much. Though I did visit a cat cafe recently, and I got to boop some sphinx kittens on the nose. Life pretty much peaked then, so I'm in a bit of a slump right now. So do me a favour and sound off even more than usual about what your fur babies have been up to lately! And also, if you feel like it, let us know what you're playing this weekend too. Here's what we're clicking on!
Unlike Ed, I wasn’t deemed important or youthfully handsome enough to get Black Myth: Wukong review code, leaving my only hopes of conducting some hardwarey performance investigation with the recently released benchmarking tool. The one that, by the admission of developers Game Science themselves, "may not fully represent the actual gaming experience and final performance at the time of the game's release". Monkey nuts.
In the grim heatwave of the midsummer, everyone you know would love to come hunch over a table and roll dice for six hours, actually, but they’ve got that thing> on. You remember that thing>, right? Plus, no-one’s got a big enough table. Or the new errata. Also, Trevor’s been banging on about lady Custodes for five months straight and nobody wants to be around him right now. Thank the Omni-trevor, then, for the three-player co-op of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. “Warhammer with the boys?” said Horace as he stretchily dished out preview keys from an entirely different postcode. James, Edwin and Nic were initially all booked-up for the week, but Horace repeated himself, making it absolutely clear that it wasn’t a question.
Vroom vroom. That is the sound of 11 rivals revving their engines as they blink the sweat out of their eyes and exhale years of self-doubt from their lungs. Today is their day. We have lined up these racing games on a starting grid and are interested to see how things shake out. Will the realism-obsessed driving sims take the lead with their sublime physics engines? Might the futuristic combat racers simply destroy the opposition with explosive rockets? Or perhaps a nippy arcade crowd-pleaser will soar to the finish line, propelled by the sound of roaring cheers. It's all to play for here at our incredibly messed-up grand prix with a worrying lack of rules or regulation. Start your engines, everyone, these are the 11 best racing games on PC. 3! 2! 1! ...