Dan Marshall of Size Five Games, developers of such greats as The Swindle, Lair of the Clockwork God and Behold the Kickmen has today teased a new game from the two-man team. It features a dinosaur, is dystopian, and like all Size Five Games will be set in the same Dan and Ben universe of their other games. …
Right or wrong, Formula 1 came back this past weekend with a stonking good race in Austria, and this week Codemasters also return with F1 2020, a tour-de-force of a racing game.
It’s been a few years since I last delivered my Verdict on one of the F1 titles, but with a raft of eye-catching new features lined up for F1 2020 I had to take a closer look. Normally I would have been playing this on the PC, but the new splitscreen mode made my choice of platforms for me, PlayStation 4 it was. …
Hardspace Shipbreaker is certainly not the first game to concern itself with reducing spaceships to their component parts, but it is certainly one of the most methodical in its approach. The usual method generally consists of flying around high intensity combat situations, dodging missiles and lasers and to be honest, sometimes it can feel like a bit much. …
At first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking that Escape From Tarkov (EFT) was just another Battle Royale game jumping on the bandwagon of popularity. And while the core experience may have some aspects that are similar, the game as a whole is much, much more.
Last week Ion Storm’s classic first-person RPG Deus Ex turned 20. The week before that I had written about the game for the first time, having played it through again over the winter, totally unaware of its imminent birthday. I don’t know why it took me just shy of two decades to write about given its enormous influence on my creative life (I first picked it up in…2002, by which time it had made its way into the Sold-Out Software range). It might be that I owe it something of a debt.
But so much has been written about Deus Ex over the years that I knew there was little value in going over the usual talking points. I decided instead to explore what it was like to be a part of this most immersive of games, with its rich, conspiracy-laden world. It meant venturing into the margins of its story, where a surprising amount of Deus Ex’s…let’s say purpose resides. And it meant talking about two characters that have always stuck with me and to whom I wished, in some small way, to tip my hat.
So, here it is. Happy birthday, Deus Ex. This was for you, in more ways than I knew.
So following the unfortunate (though highly predictable) delay of CD Project Red’s highly anticipated new title CyberPunk 2077, they threw us a bone in the shape of a new trailer, and oh my, isn’t it shiny. And neon. But mostly of shiny.
“This is not how death is supposed to be.”
So intones the recently deceased William Mason upon finding himself in purgatory and not…where, exactly? Collectively, we’ve lots of ideas on what the afterlife – should there be one – has in store for us. But we don’t know. It’s what makes this mortal plane of ours such a terrifying thrill.
Not so with video games. We know where death leads us: back to the last checkpoint or a swift return to the previous quick save. Death is a momentary impediment to progress, which is just as well because there’s often a shitload of baddies determined to scrub us from existence.
Weep for William Mason, then, who certainly didn’t bank on the afterlife being chock full of gun-toting ghouls and monsters. But then he probably hadn’t expected to look like a stylish cross between Ghost Rider and Overwatch’s McCree, either. You could do worse. Swings and roundabouts ‘an all that.
Slipping into Mason’s dusty boots I push my way into an empty saloon, which serves as the gateway to purgatory: a waiting room within a waiting room. I’ve little idea of what’s in store for me. I came here for West of Dead’s striking cel-shaded aesthetics, which create a world that often feels like a thick layer of ash caught in a time loop – forever frittering away without losing an inch. There’s farms and mines and towns, but in the words of one of our latter day cowboys, they’re more like someone’s faded memory of farms and mines and towns.
And that’s it as far as my knowledge is concerned. I was just excited to play something new.
The saloon’s sole occupant, the barman, doesn’t give any hints. He might have said “roguelike” and provided a definition, but instead seemed merely content to muse there’s east and there’s west.
East for the good souls.
West for the bad. Of course.
I’ll be going west, then. …
Earlier this week, we had a massive preview of Nighthawks, the vampire RPG with a narrative drive reminiscent of Sunless Seas and Skies. In the first part of our interview with creator Richard Cobbett, we covered Richard’s influences and the Kickstarter campaign. This time, we dive into the NPCs of the Nighthawks world, that crucial part of any vampire story…sex. We also cover life as a nightclub owner and talk more about the story of Nighthawks. Hit the break for all of part two. …
Last week, I brought the key news that in Nighthawks, the vampire RPG from Richard Cobbett, has a scene where a rat can kill you. Important information, I’m sure you can all agree that shaped my massive preview. That though was just one part of an extensive conversation I had with Richard, one so extensive that I’ve split it into two parts. In this first part, Richard talks about the influences behind Nighthawks, the Kickstarter campaign the allowed him to focus his efforts on it, and of course we cover combat and the aforementioned rat. Hit the break and find out more.
Following the recent unveiling of DEATHLOOP Arkane Lyon, I felt that a return to Dishonored was on the cards. A few things struck me, but foremost was just how well the prison break that opens the game proper lays out some aspects of the playstyles on offer, and alerts you to the type of world you will encounter outside the walls of Coldridge Prison.