Last weekend, as Monster Hunter Wilds bore down on us like a stampeding wildebeest, my eye was caught by furtive movements in the leaves underfoot. Behold the creepy extravagance of Microtopia, a strange and engrossing factory builder in which your factories are run by cyborg ants.

Created by Netherlands-based Cordyceps Collective, it gives you landscapes of buglike diodes scuttling about on pin connectors, harvesting bolts and other scrap for a queen who resembles a pregnant clump of capacitors. Insect strategy games are startlingly abundant right now, but Microtopia goes a little further than many both in its eerie Darwinian presentation, and in trying to portray how ant colonies "think" while meeting expectations for management sims.

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In hindsight, we probably should have taken Monster Hunter Wilds’ earlier benchmark tool release as more of a warning. The actual game is every bit the graphics card torture device that standalone tool suggested it might be, and while it doesn’t make DLSS 3/FSR 3 frame generation mandatory per se>, it clearly intends to misappropriate these features, forcing them to act as performance crutches they were never designed as.

What makes this particularly headshakey is that Wilds’ PC version is, initially, quite sympathetic to the format: besides a full set of DLSS/FSR/XeSS upscalers, an unlocked framerate option, Nvidia Reflex support and the like, its thirty-odd individual quality options hint at the finest of fine-tuning possibilities. Yet these, too, aren’t really fit for purpose, with only minor differences in how the highest and lowest settings perform.

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The dust on the yesterday's horizon has become today's stampede. Monster Hunter Wilds has launched and we are all choking on up-kicked sand. So far the action game has hit a peak of 987,000 players on Steam and all my news feeds are nothing but Rathalos screams. This is what we call a "big 'un".

But what trembling critters are eking out an existence in the disturbed ground beneath Capcom's feet? Other games still exist, and some are just unlucky enough to step out of their bolthole the same moment a much scarier freak is on the prowl. Here are 4 games that just released which may be worth a look if you have no time for big beasties.

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I found Phoenix Point difficult to love, despite wanting to. I didn't cover its original 2019 release at all, partly preferring to give something else positive coverage instead, and partly suspecting I'd attached hope to it in a way I seldom do, and was overreacting. Perhaps that was a disservice to you, The Reader. We ponder.

Its final form left me ambivalent, and hoping its new modding support might provide the leg up it still needed. Well. It did. Terror From The Void is a major overhaul that touches on just about all the problems I had, while preserving what worked. And after it consumed me for several months, I'm ready to call it the game that Phoenix Point was trying to be.

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Is it wrong to eat a dinosaur that wants to be eaten? What if it asks you to make a little hat out of its gall bladder? What if the gall bladder has different opinions on the matter? Discover the answers to these and more as our merry band of conservation enthusiasts/trophy hunters discuss Monster Hunter Wilds! >

Nic: Life, the absolute bastard, has kept me away from the Monst. Let me experience it through you. What's the best Monst so far?

Brendan: I am fond of the squiddy critters that slop about. The Nu Udra is a giant gloopy octopus that feels like a stand-out fight partly because of its many, many arms, but also because of the environment you fight it in. It's horrible (in a fun way) to wade about in the oil of this region, and try to avoid the flames that inevitably start to spread. Another later squid-like beast has some horrible knifey hands at the end of its tentacles, but I'll let the readers discover the rest of that creep's tactics by themselves.

Ollie: I'm partial to the Yian Kut-Ku myself. It was the very first monster I ever fought in any Monster Hunter, back in the days of Monster Hunter Freedom on my PSP. And all these years later, I still recognised all its moves, and it made the whole act of beating up the big fire-breathing chicken even more enjoyable and satisfying than it already was.

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I’ve never played 2001’s Gothic, developed by Piranha Bytes, but Sin has an article from 2016 about why it is “more believable than modern RPGs”. In that piece, she paints an absorbing picture of a magically quarantined penal colony, where three factions of prisoners enjoy an uneasy truce. In this crammed ocean vent of a setting, fights generally end in defeat rather than death, reputation isn’t just a points gauge, and the player character’s centrality is an accident. It sounds pretty thrilling.

I am still searching for this RPG in the Steam prologue demo for Alkimia Interactive’s Gothic reboot. There are certainly some intrigues afoot, and I’m quite enjoying the desolate quarry scenery, but I’m distracted by aspects of the presentation, not least the fact that the prologue character looks like a Funko Pop incarnation of Highlander’s Christopher Lambert.

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Fancy a gaming PC deal that makes sense? HP is slashing $800 off its flagship HP Omen 45L RTX 4080 Gaming PC, bringing it down to $2,199.99 from a painful $2,999.99. That's a hefty discount, which includes a $100 off coupon code: SURPRISEPC100. If you've been waiting for a proper gaming rig without selling a kidney, this might be it.

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World Of Warcraft's Undermine(d) update launches tomorrow, 26th February 2025, as part of the long-hauling MMO's War Within expansion. It adds a whirring underground goblin city complete with nickel-plated palm trees and quarrelsome cartels, a new raid, a new four-boss dungeon, a PvP arena and a host of smaller, systemic adjustments. I do not play a lot of World Of Warcraft, so when Blizzard came knocking about an interview, my reaction was a blend of being caught dozing off in history class and being casually asked to defuse a bomb. But Undermine(d) does harbour at least one addition that an Azeroth tourist like myself can understand: cars.

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Attention all eyeball eaters, flesh bicyclists, and shooter enjoyers who also enjoy staring into nightclub toilets! I’ve just noticed that survival horror FPS Golden Light is free to keep on Steam… for the next hour only. The offer in question runs out at 6pm UTC today, 24th February. I swear I have only just discovered this. I swear I’m not trying to give you palpitations for the sake of a traffic spike. But if I am giving you palpitations, that’s an appropriate start to your time with Golden Light, “a procedural dark comedy horror game with roguelike elements and an eerie atmosphere”.

Eerie? Do not sell yourself short, video game. Alan Wake is eerie. Golden Light is a game in which you can swallow a bat’s head just to see what happens. The last time I played I was murdered by a sink clog. The whole world is a deforming colon. Trailer! Quickly!

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Much has been made of the simulation in Monster Hunter Wilds during the beta-filled run-up to its release. The ecosystem is teeming with beetles, fish and geckos. Seasons change. Carnivores go out hunting herbivores, and the herbivores wander around in a way that would make Sam Neill sit down in shock and exclaim that they really do move in herds. But those impressive details haven't had much impact on how I play this beast-whacking action game, or any effect on how my brain operates in the midst of a thoughtless crafting splurge. Pare back the vigorwasps and rockslides and sizzling steaks and what you find is a loot-the-loop straight out of an MMO, complemented with chunky combat that remains satisfying to those with the acquired taste for it and overwrought to those who crave simplicity.

For many, it's exactly what you'd expect and want of Monster Hunter. But if the buzz of bashing beasts for stat-bumps quickly wanes for you, the final hours of its 20-25 hour campaign will pass with diminishing interest. When Monster Hunter Wilds finally lets go of your hand and says "okay, go do your own thing!" I felt like handing in my notice to the guild. I've seen enough of this monster to know that it's beautiful, swole, and not for me.

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