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New Cities: Skylines 2 developer Iceflake Studios is celebrating 11 years of the series with a free anniversary update, and it’s joined by two more creator packs. A lot has changed in the past 12 months, with original dev CO parting ways with publisher Paradox, who in turn has handed the struggling city-building game to another team. While it hasn’t been a completely smooth handover, with dramatic visual bugs creeping into the early patches, there’s still a sense of a fresh direction, and maybe some hope for the future. The new Cities: Skylines 2 update isn’t a huge one, by Iceflake’s…
The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin is three things. Firstly, it is available now on Steam. Secondly, it is a splashy fantasy open world anime confection, all Disney towers and fluttering windmills and jaunty sailboats and some kind of porcine Space Hopper that transforms into a buzzard. Thirdly, it is a free-to-play game with gacha elements. I do not like gacha elements and other habit-forming randomised rewards, but I do not think that games featuring them are automatically abominable. Put it this way: our former EIC Graham Smith liked Genshin Impact, and he is both a protective father and…
Thomas the Tank Engine was a fundamental part of my upbringing. Every time I was at my grandparents’ place, you’d find a tiny, follicly-fuller version of me glued to yet another VHS re-run. Yesterday, Thomas and Friends Wonders of Sodor pulled into the station, and everyone, myself included, is going loco for the locomotives. Forget Crimson Desert. Who cares about GTA 6? It’s time to choo choo like it’s 1999, baby. Thomas and Friends Wonders of Sodor is an absolute dream for nostalgics, letting you get in the cab of the iconic British kid show’s starring cast. Developer-publisher Dovetail Games…
Marathon’s set to see how well it can cater to folks who only have one friend, with Bungie having announced plans to add an experimental duos mode to the extraction shooter. It’ll stick around for two weeks or so, be “a bit jank”, and hopefully give the studio a firm idea of whether they should put resources into developing a fully fleshed-out version of paired play going forwards.
Verdict Crimson Desert is huge, and it’s beautiful, but it can’t pull itself out of the bog standard narrative trenches. Combat feels clunky, especially when facing off against one of the many frustrating bosses, and there feels like there is little reward for exploration. I wanted to like this, but it left me feeling empty. Crimson Desert starts well. A story of revenge is something I can get on board with; it’s simple and effective, and gives me a real focus. The big guy there, he’s the one who ruined everything, and he’s the one I have to get to.…
RAMnarök, the ongoing memory shortage which keeps fuelling price hikes and has had us watching whether Steam Decks are out of stock like hawks, continues to cause headaches. MSI are reportedly planning to hike up the prices of their hardware by 15 to 30% as a result of the shortages.
I wake in a messy apartment, empty cans and bottles lining the floor and clothes strung across the furniture, with a dry, raspy throat and a pounding head. I let out a little groan at the missed call and voicemail from my agent wanting to give feedback on last night’s song submission. With a desperate need for caffeine, I trudge to the kitchen, wading through my own tangible hopelessness, wallowing in the only sort of tortured pity a creative could conjure. After a brief phone call and some hard truths from my surprisingly encouraging agent, I’m off to a cabin…
Oh, it wasn’t a dream. Nvidia really did announce DLSS 5 last night, its central feature not being better upscaling or frame generation but a “real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials.” In practice, the primary function of this model appears to be looksmaxxing, transforming Resident Evil Requiem’s traumatised wallflower Grace into a smouldering ScarJo lookalike and, erm, lightening the skin of Starfield’s PoC characters. DLSS 5 isn’t launching until this autumn but I can tell it’s going to be just the thing if you secretly want all your games to have the same aesthetic,…
If I could simply write ‘just buy Metaphor: ReFantazio’, I would. The best RPGs of all time deserve few words, as typically, they’re just iconic experiences that people will speak about as time goes on, looking back on them fondly, like Final Fantasy VII, The Witcher 3, and Mass Effect 2. Sadly, Metaphor: ReFantazio hasn’t got that household appeal just yet, so it falls on fans like me to spread the good word of this instant classic, and with it being cheaper than ever, now’s your chance to finally see what makes it worthy of the aforementioned big names I…
Update: Arrowhead have just shared a graphic outlining what’s coming in the next couple of months of Helldivers 2 updates. April’s Terminid-themed update 6.2 will deliver two new biomes, fresh galactic war campaigns, and a new enemy variant. May’s update 6.3, meanwhile, will come with a single new biome and its own fresh galactic war twists. Both months’ll also boast the usual warbond and bug fixing patches. Arrowhead have opted against sharing too much in terms of what the future holds in Helldivers 2 so far, ostensibly to avoid galactic war spoilers, but it looks like this sort of roadmap…