Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Bestest best roguelite city builder Against The Storm is getting invaded by bats. Not the kind that swoop and screech and dive around your car in New Games Journalism articles that lean a bit too obviously on Hunter S. Thompson - bless our hearts, we've all done it - but the kind who labour at the forge and rejoice when their colleagues crumble and may even drive other workers out in order to make themselves feel better.

On the whole, I think I prefer the Fear and Loathing variety. Anyway, here's the trailer for Against the Storm's second DLC expansion, Nightwatchers, which will release on PC via Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store on July 31st.

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Big piratey thing Sea of Thieves will be getting custom servers as part of a paid subscription service in "early 2026", developers Rare have announced during a first-ever community direct for the game. That's far from all of the studio's plans, with wider shakeups also in the pipeline.

This outlining of plans to make sure the good ship SOT is not only seaworthy, but can successfully broadside the many other vessels competing for its players' attention comes with some depressing and un-piratey context. It follows Rare being one of the studios affected by Microsoft's mass layoffs earlier this month, with Everwild being among the number of in-development games cancelled as part of the cuts.

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Having taken a Dilophosaurus to their Dennis Nedry-esque plans for AI-generated scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution 3, Frontier are back to talking about a more wholesome form of generation - dinosaur sex. The game's latest trailer is a brief glimpse at the new breeding features, which allow you "to synthesise male and female variants, each with visible dimorphism" and have them do the ole horizontal tango "to shape the traits and markings of future generations." Please close the curtains before clicking play.

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Capcom are fine-tuning the live service of livestock-murdering game Monster Hunter Wilds by making the Arch-tempered monster hunts a permanent fixture, rather than time-limited seasonal content quests. It's a bid to address the FOMO element that has dragged the game down to an Overwhelmingly Negative Steam user review consensus, though there are other things to blame for that, such as dodgy performance.

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As a faction, the strength of Total War: Warhammer 3's Bretonnia lies in their knightly calvary. The peasant infantry is basically just there to squishily hold the enemy in place for charges. However, I'm feeling revolutionary today, so we're staging a serf uprising. Let's see how long we last. Pretty simple rules here, then. No knights. No horses. Conquer the entirety of Bretonnia. Defeat every horse I see in one-on-one combat.>

We were in a bad way. Rats to the south. Goblins to the east. A dwindling stockpile of gold reserves. Worst of all, the lady of the lake herself had shunned us, stripping us of her blessing for no other reason than the cheeky bit of cowardly retreating we'd done from Masif Orcal. No appreciation for self-preservation tactics, that one.

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Morsels is a game best enjoyed by poison tasters. A roguelike pixelart shooter from Furcula and Annapurna Interactive, its world is a relentlessly aberrant waste dump in which it often feels like the only sure> way to differentiate objects is to pop them in your mouth, and hope they don't rupture, ignite or wriggle down your throat.

Video game science has yet to devise and normalise control devices that are operated with your tongue, despite notable efforts, so during my hands-on, I'm forced to fall back on my untrustworthy eyeballs. It's an adventure. Developer Toby Dixon has to step in frequently to point out that some of the game's oozing anomalies are there to empower me, not harm me. It helps that we meet at the end of Summer Game Fest and are both exhausted. It also helps that Dixon doesn't seem entirely certain what some of the creatures are himself.

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Amazon’s throwing out some serious gaming headset deals for Prime Day 2025, but today is the last chance to grab one. If you’ve been meaning to upgrade your audio setup, this is your sign. Discounts are hitting as high as 45% on top-tier brands like Corsair, Logitech, Razer, and SteelSeries. Even if you’re not a Prime member, you can still snag the best prices by jumping on Amazon’s free 30-day Prime trial. No strings, just faster shipping and early access to lightning deals while it lasts.

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Subnautica 2 publishers Krafton have accused three recently ousted leads of "abandoning" their duties on the game, suggesting that this is to blame for it being delayed. That statement was almost immediately followed by one of the former Unknown Worlds bosses, co-founder Charlie Cleveland, writing in a Reddit post that a lawsuit's been filed by the trio against the company.

These are the latest twists in an ongoing saga that began with Striking Distance CEO Steve Papoutsis being parachuted in to replace Cleveland, fellow co-founder Max McGuire, and CEO Ted Gill earlier this month. That kicked off a war of words between the two sides, punctuated by a report from Bloomberg which alleged Krafton's call to delay the game was made just before a $250 million bonus was set to be paid to Unknown Worlds staff.

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Former RPS sealife correspondent Nate once described the game Maneater as "an ecstatically violent simulation of being a fool's idea of a shark", which stuck with me. The Jaws Effect is a reasonably well known phenomenon coined in a paper that explores the impact the 1975 film had on Australian policy response to shark bites, although the term is now used a bit more broadly to refer to how sharks are villainised in pop culture - villainisation obviously being an absurdly human and dramatic concept to apply to a hungry or scared fish.

Jaws did actually result in an increase in shark culls, but its lasting legacy has also been argued to be more insididous. Depending on whether you're looking at stats from the UN or from conservation charities, the number of sharks killed or mutilated and harvested each year for fins and other parts ranges between about 10 and 100 million, and it's been argued this continues with relatively little pushback as compared to similar wildlife atrocities due to wide-reaching perception that ranges from apathy to vilification. A sharknado of lies, if you will.

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It's time to get totally radical, dudefolks. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, the latest nostalgia-fest about avian athletes artfully acing acrobatic boardiness, drops in full today, July 11th. Though, thanks to pre-order early access meaning the game sort of released three days ago, its modding community is already off and running.

If you've spent the past few months watching old X Games reruns and thinking to yourself that all the shreddage might be better if Bob Burnqvist were an Edwardian nanny, a train chaser, or a gabagool enthusiast, I've got some good news.

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