Fancy a kickabout? After launching in the much warmer June (why is it already so cold, it's only bloody September), Rematch has finally received its first proper season, elevating it into a true, blue live service game. This comes with, as you may have guessed, a season pass, which comes with a pair of themes for your football stadium, one being iceberg oriented, the other providing a volcanic atmosphere, alongside some new cosmetics too.
Ananta is a bit of an alarming game to look at. The open world game is so clearly an anime-esque riff on GTA, with some Spider-Man style web swinging thrown in for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. All of that's been obviously more or less since its announcement. But the game just received its first gameplay trailer at Tokyo Game Show, and it looks scarily… expensive.
Earlier this year, I had a good old time with Jump Space (née Ship)’s Steam Next Fest demo, in part because the demo's spaceship crewing and on-foot FPSing seemed to be in better technical shape than previous jaunts into the starry wastes. The bad news is that in the light of a full early access release, it’s become easier to spot the cracks in the hull and the improperly fastened screw heads in the life support system. The good news? It’s still good enough at inducing a high-fiving co-op buzz that I am, at the very least, willing to give it the time to tighten up.
This week, a streamer attempting to raise money for their own cancer treatment instead lost $32,000 to malware added to a new Steam game after release. The Steam game, BlockBlasters, has now been yanked from sale, and the malware distributors reportedly identified and confronted by free-roaming cybersecurity nerds. The streamer in question, RastalandTV, has also been compensated for the theft. It's a happier ending than you often get from malware infection stories, and a reminder to be wary of random free games on Steam.
Unlike Battle Brothers, there's no hoofing it across an overworld map in the hoo-rah space marine tactics of Menace. Instead, you'll build your squad and deploy them across strings of missions on what I assume at this point are multiple different planets. I'd love to be able to tell you more about the context surrounding the battles, since that context was what, for me at least, made Battle Brothers interesting. Edwin's got you somewhat covered there, anyway. For now, though, I can tell you that Menace feels intricate in its detail and occasionally cinematic in its skirmishes, with a focus on terrain, positioning, and line of sight that evokes a particularly chaotic and deadly tabletop miniatures game.