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In a metaphor far too on the nose to turn into any form of fiction, at least without the writer getting mercilessly cyberbullied, a game about finding a needle in a haystack has now become the genuine needle at the heart of a pile of imitators. A pile so large, in fact, one copycat game stands accused of ripping code from another. Read more
The second big expansion coming to Crusader Kings 3 this year finally has a proper release date. Silk and Silver, the gold-clinking sibling of recently released Church-centric DLC By God Alone, will arrive on November 17th. Just a couple of days before that which shall not be named, but has resulted in a lot of studios opting to give mid-November a wide berth release-wise. Read more
Helldivers 2, a game that still appears to be missing in action from Steam here in the UK, is switching anti-cheat software. Developers Arrowhead are keen to tighten up security and crack down on the use of cheat mods that can influence the bug-slaying experience of folks beyond the person who's installed them. Read more
Despite being a lover of the King of the Monsters, I was unfortunately too young to experience Pipeworks Software's Godzilla trilogy of 3D kaiju-fighters back its PS2/Gamecube-era heyday (there was a PS2 in the house as a young child, but I also had no agency to ask for games or money to buy them). As such, I'm not necessarily the intended audience for Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered, a remake of Pipeworks' first entry back in 2002, but I can gladly tell you thanks to my time with the Steam Next Fest demo that nostalgia is not needed to enjoy this classic made anew. Read more
Star Wars: Galactic Racer has been fucking everywhere recently, seemingly both due to its actual quality as a game and also due to vast swathes of people falling in love with little mole guy Biddy Blas. The success of Fuse Games' Galactic Racer follows on from the similarly warm reception of Bit Reactor's XCOM-esque Star Wars Zero Company (though that success didn't prevent staff furloughs, which are at least starting to be undone in some cases), making it clear that there is a market for Star Wars games outside of just the blockbusters like the Battlefront series. The vice president of Lucasf
Arc Raiders is still going strong almost a year after finding viral success, and it's all thanks to Embark Studios' one-two-punch strategy of launching a huge new update, Frozen Trails, to coincide with a free weekend. Read more
PEGI, the European video game age rating agency, has started raising the age ratings of digital games that feature loot boxes to 16. The rollout of this new, stricter approach, is expected to occur throughout October. Read more
One of my very favourite things to do in Switch Sports Resort isn't, technically, a sport at all. I can't get enough of Prop Plane's free-play mode, taking to the skies, and watching Wuhu Island do its thing below. Swing past the art museum or the shopping precinct and you'll see all sorts of little people milling around; take a wrong-way dive into a tunnel and here come the cars whizzing on by. Out on the water, racers whip and twirl; on the archipelago's sandiest beaches, holidayers recline in the tropical sun. Fly over the stadiums and sports arenas and you'll see matches in progress - furi
Subnautica 2 has begun its "voyage to Early Access 2.0", developer Unknown Worlds has said, with the revelation of a new update containing the "scariest" region they've ever made for the underwater game. Delightful. Read more
Right, let's get one important thing out of the way first: I've played a fair bit more of Dawn of War 4's main campaign, after my initial impressions of a single mission last year, and I think it is very good. The action is as screen-filling as ever, the Orks are a delight, and the combat director, which sees individual combatants lock onto each other with bespoke animations when groups fight in melee, remains a genuine feat of RTS engineering. I'll have much more to say on that front soon, though I'd like a little more time with it first. Read more
And lo, mushrooms! This is what I imagine an old timey tour guide might say while on a hiking trail, but we aren't on one of those, so get that wonderful fungi image out of your brain. No, today is the day that Mycopunk has arrived into 1.0, an online co-op looter shooter about embodying robot rejects fending off hordes challenging champignon. Read more
Bracingly moist open world survival game Subnautica 2 is embarking on the "voyage to early access 2.0" - this being developer Unknown Worlds' excitable term for the next round of updates, which will include a new region, creature, and Tadpole chassis, plus some tweaks for biomods and creature behaviour. I like Subnautica 2 and am happy that Unknown Worlds appear to be enjoying some stability, after all the firings and ChatGPT-abetted lawyer-wrestling over publisher earn-outs, but I really hate "early access 2.0". I know other teams use nomenclature like this, but seriously, what even is time a
I may have set my expectations for Dawn of War 4 too high, but it's a series that, to my mind, never retreads the same ground. It's therefore been disappointing to feel, having played it across two its campaigns that this long-awaited sequel may have taken too few risks - or been too reverent of the games that came before. Read more
There is this idea that, for a long-running series to remain as consistently popular as Forza Horizon has been, it needs to diminish itself somewhat with each new entry, gradually losing more and more of its edge in a bid to appeal to the widest possible audience. Read more
Monopoly Go players have been looking forward to a major crossover event for what felt like months, and though most of the details ended up leaking, nothing actually beats official information. Read more
Arrowhead Game Studios will only make a Helldivers 3 if it's lightyears apart in style from Helldivers 2, or if Helldivers 2's playercount falls through the floor. This is my takeaway, at least, from a recent chat with Johan Pilestedt, chief creative officer, in which Pilestedt touched briefly on the studio's next unannounced game, while assuring me that there are still no plans for a Helldiver threequel. Read more
Last week, Creative Assembly and Sega pulled Total War: Shogun 2's remastered Complete Edition from Steam, after an avalanche of complaints about technical problems and some AI-generated art. Now, Total War vice president Roger Collum has written a personal apology, while pinning some of the blame on an unnamed external partner. He's also clarified Creative Assembly's stance on generative AI, conceding that the studio do use it to help with "analysis, debugging, or speedy prototyping", but that they're against using it to generate game assets and art. Read more
In one of the happier endings to occur in games this week, impossibly enormous resource management sim Factorio has just released its last-ever major update – version 2.1 – on its stable branch. As previously heads-upped by developers Wube Software, 2.1 doesn’t make any big new additions to its planets or tech trees, but does sneak in more than 30 quality of life improvements and minor new features for both the base game and its Space Age expansion. Including, they say, "the things we wanted to do for 2.0 but didn't have time for." Nice to get a few final pieces out the door before it closes,
World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has been extended until this Friday, much to the joy of the community of early players. Read more
Masahiro Sakurai has spoken about the pitfalls of generative AI use in game development, saying that while he believes the technology will result in a surge of unoriginal video games, human creativity - such as that shown by designers like Ico's Fumito Ueda - can't be replicated. Read more
