Latest Articles (Page 2)

"Kept you waiting, huh?" says Snake. Uh, no, not really. You're actually a bit early this time, mate. The release date for Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater was spotted this week, hiding in the long grass of the PlayStation Store. The fancy-schmancy MGS3 remake is coming out in August, according to the store page. And you can also catch sight of a camouflaged trailer if you go looking under the right rocks.

Hi-Rez Studios have laid off an unknown number of the studio's employees, only one month after launching MOBA sequel Smite 2 as a free-to-play beta. It looks like management has cut at least 20-30 jobs and the full number is likely higher. As a result, three other games that have been long-running staples of the studio will no longer get any updates. Smite, Paladins, and Rogue Company will have nobody to man the code cannons, so they're being left to gather cobwebs from now on. Although they will remain playable.

What great hopes I had for the Christmas holidays. Finally, I thought, I would have time for some of the recent blockbusters I'd not yet played: Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and more would fill those dusty days and nights in the taint of 2024.

Then I mentioned in a review that I liked Picross games, which for me can dissolve hours or entire weekends like sugar in water. "I don't know if that means I should recommend Mark Ffrench's games Proverbs and Mega Mosaic to you, or warn you to steer clear and avoid flowing away forever," responded commenter SeekerX.

You see where this is going. Friends, I played Proverbs for 36 hours over Christmas.

Put your red and white scarf back on the coat rack, football friends. The match has been called off. The entire season, in fact. Football Manager 25 has been cancelled because it has not met a high enough standard in time for its intended release next month, according to developers Sports Interactive. Anyone who pre-ordered the game will be given a refund, they say.

Resident Evil Re:Verse, the multiplayer spin-off announced alongside Resident Evil Village, is being shut down. Capcom say that the game and its DLC will be delisted from stores next month and its servers will go offline in June.

It's not the destination, they say, it's the pickled eggs we slurped along the way. In Keep Driving, a turn-based RPG of swishing scenery and smooshed roadkill, you are on a road trip in the early 2000s that will see you gulping coffee and stuffing cheap snacks into your mouth, all in an effort to get to the other side of the country in time for the big concert. It is a hypnotically involving game of picking up hitchhikers and battling tailgaters, a pixel art drivealong with tactile, chunky buttons and perfectly suited sound effects, as much fuelled by nostalgia as it is by gasoline. At first, I thought it was too loose and open-ended to elicit any deep feelings. But then I had to sell my guitar for half a tank of petrol, just to visit my dying grandmother. Dude, this is a game that goes places.

Earlier this week, a plastic bag blowing in the wind made me question all I knew about the world, but in whatever way the opposite of life-affirming is. Less blowing, actually. More taunting me from my screen maddeningly like a middle finger salute from a man with no hands. It was a baffling piece of licensed merch from Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM and Atelier, who I assume are three hyenas in a board room sniffing each other's crotches for eternity.

I couldn't tell you exactly where I first saw the bag - which has actually been on sale for a few months now - but I soon realised why it had likely entered the zeitgeist again: an extensive set of a documentary podcasts by YouTube creator The 41st Precinct, the latest of which interviews writers Dora Klindžić and Argo Tuulik for more time than I have ever spent on anything. Here's a clip on Atelier and that fucking bag.

True to the word of Capcom’s German social media marketing, Monster Hunter Wilds has a new, generally less extravagant set of PC system requirements ahead of its February 28th launch. There’s also a standalone benchmark tool that you can download from the game’s Steam page, so you can see for yourself how the beast-biffing RPG will run on your hardware.

In theory, these are great developments. Lower requirements mean a more widely accessible game, and the benchmark tool – which covers a good six minutes of combined cinematics and simulated free roaming – brings reassurance and accountability to this otherwise hype-reliant prerelease period. Sadly, there are two problems. One, the benchmark confirms outright that Monster Hunter Wilds will run like stagnant goulash on low-end PCs, and two, it does so to the extent that I’m not sure that the revised minimum specs are even reliable.

Paradox are buying Bulgarian game developer Haemimont Games, the developers of strategy games including several in the Tropico and Jagged Alliance series. The two companies previously worked together on Surviving Mars, which was originally developed by Haemimont and published by Paradox Interactive.

The creators of sci-fi corridor explorer Duskers are making a "spiritual successor" to the 2016 space game. The studio revealed their plans in a video showing three prototypes they're currently working on. The working title for this one is "Humanity 2.0" and it'll see you carving up derelict ships to build your own vessel and sometimes defending that ship from pirates trying to take it over. It sounds like you'll still be the sweaty cybermaster of a bunch of glitchy drones, who now might suffer "fun personality quirks" when you install upgrades, "like not wanting to go down narrow corridors because it's now claustrophobic".

Sad, busted-ass space robots just trying to get by? Yes, I'm interested.

Sci-fi battle royale Apex Legends is due a "meaningful update" , according to the CEO of Electronic Arts, something he's called "Apex 2.0". To a normal person, adding a 2 to the end of your game's name is the sign of a sequel. But as the attendant decimal and zero suggest, it's not clear if that's exactly what he means. It could mean a revamp with new features, or some other new direction for the existing game. His later words do make it sound more like this is what EA have in mind. Or at least what they're prepared to tell folks in a financial report.

Steam early access games that haven't been updated in a long while will now be more prominently labelled as such, according to reports. As noticed by third-party tracking platform SteamDB, Valve have begun adding warnings to early access info boxes, making it harder to accidentally spend your pocket money on a promising project that hasn't advanced in years.

When I’ve had enough of fighting the dogs in a respectable, straightforward manner, I pick them up with my mind and - with a casualness that has to be extremely insulting if you’re a dog - drop them directly off a cliff. This ends the fight immediately. Sometimes I resort to this low move out of frustration, when a dull fight has dragged on for too long. Sometimes I resort to it out of panic, because I’ve accidentally set fire to every hard surface within ten feet, or frozen myself to a wall. Often it’s just for the pleasure of it.

In Eternal Strands, Yellow Brick Games’ debut title, you play the leader of a "weaver band", a crew of freelance magicians, in a world where something extremely bad happened to magic. Some years ago, the Enclave, a city state acting as the isolationist heart of the world’s magic, exploded in a kind of power surge - one part tsunami, one part blown fuse - and just as quickly sealed itself off from the world outside. Somehow managing to breach the wall, your band finds themselves the first people to set foot inside the ruined capital since the calamity and sets about uncovering the mystery of what exactly went wrong.

Welcome to (a possibly overdue update to) RPS' Steam Deck Academy, where the hot, plasticky vent fumes of knowledge and understanding are snorted directly into the brain-nostrils of the technologically curious. Do you have, or are considering, a Steam Deck or Steam Deck OLED? Want to know how to get the most out of it? Friend, you have clicked on the right link.

Hark, or whatever that is in Czech. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has earned Playable status on the Steam Deck, and it’s a shrewd assessment on Valve’s part: there are some shortcomings that keep the coveted Verified badge out of Deliverance 2’s reach, most notably its cramped UI, but I’ve been bumbling around the medieval RPG for hours now and it is indeed plenty functional in handheld mode. Despite its system requirements arguably suggesting otherwise, it can even manage some decent 40fps-plus performance without dumping all the quality settings to their lowest.

Vendrán Las Aves - "The Birds Will Come" - is a brief, quiet, hopeful game about burnout recovery. Summarised as a "slice of life tamagotchi" and available in Spanish and English, it's a gamejam production from Francisco Riolobos, Chuso Montero and Deconstructeam, the Valencia-based developers behind The Red String Club and The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.

It's free to download from Itch.io, and takes the form of a snowglobe perspective of somebody's one-room apartment. The person in question has just left their job after a rough spell, and has impulsively bought a guitar. They are also, however, totally exhausted, with barely the willpower to do anything beyond getting out of bed, let alone make music. Your task is to help them through each day and rebuild their morale till they feel able to pluck a few chords.

Hoo-eee! The sequel to the rootinest-tootinest gassiest-guzzlingiest racecar rasslin' game is launching into early access in March this year. Wreckfest 2 is the follow-up to smashing racer Wreckfest, which came out in 2018 but which I only discovered last year while listing our best racing games. My friends, it got on the list. Developers Bugbear say they have "overhauled its physics engine to deliver the most intense crashes, deeper component damage, and absolute vehicular mayhem." We can see a little bit of that in a new trailer below, which also gives us an exact early access release date.

I don't end up covering as many classic point and click adventures as I'd like on RPS. That's a real shame, because every time I play a good one, I'm reminded how much magic the genre still has. Developer Blyts (Kelvin And The Infamous Machine) was kind enough to send me over a key for Slender Threads, which is out this Friday. My opinion as a complete non-expert on the genre? Yep, this one's absolutely worth a look.

Call me a cynic if you must, but I'm generally sceptical when someone claims to be "the greatest swordsman of all demons". It's the sort of boast most demon swordsman like to trot out, in my experience. And yet! I have to admit that this Gogandantess lad has a real flourish to him. He's going places, I reckon. Chief among those places being PC at some point in 2025, and he's bringing the rest of Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny with him. Catch him showing off in the below trailer.

Warhorse's medieval muck-o-rama Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 launches today. It's an engrossing RPG, despite developer co-founder Dan Vávra's tendency to throw his weight behind alt-right harassment campaigns. Also, a relatively bug-free one.

In the course of my 51 hours as reviewer, I've encountered only a smattering of more significant technical issues. Firstly, some heavy slowdown while roaming Trosky Castle, the centerpiece of the opening Bohemian Paradise region, which I resolved by quitting and reloading. Secondly, a mildly terrifying moment in a dugout when a wounded soldier I was supposed to be treating struck a T-pose, as though afflicted by lightning early onset arthritis. And thirdly a repeated crash bug which I feel warrants its own article given that, together with Deliverance 2's eccentric saving system, it cost me several hours of progress.

Several hours in, it’s become apparent that I lack the patience for much of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s much-publicised historical accuracies, like needing to bathe yourself every six minutes or how 15th century Bohemians can take several consecutive sword swings to the neck without dying. Ah well! If you’re going to play it, know that it’s also a decent performer on PC – despite the almost threatening tone of its recommended system requirements – and, as far as I can see, isn’t anywhere near as bug-prone as the infamously unstable original.

If, like me, you failed and failed and failed to get a decent score in arcadey reaction game Super Hexagon, then take solace in this: there are a bunch of other games by the same developer you can fail at. Terry Cavanagh, also the maker of VVVVVV and Dicey Dungeons, is releasing a collection of his freeware bits and bobs on Steam next week, called simply Terry's Other Games. Looking at the games included, it summons a nostalgic giggle just to see just how many of Terry's short games have been intriguing enough to grab the eye of an RPS writer over the years. I mean it literally. One game is called Grab Them By The Eyes.

Peter Akemann - co-founder of Call Of Duty's Treyarch and recent president of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners studio Skydance Interactive - has pleaded guilty to crashing a drone into a firefighting plane assisting with the recent LA wildfires. The crash, which grounded the plane by damaging its left wing, occurred after Akemann ignored temporary drone restrictions in order to survey the Palisades fires before losing control. Thanks, Eurogamer. For first noticing the case, I mean. I'm not blaming Eurogamer for the drone crash. Not this one, anyway.

The drone was traced back to Akemann, who has agreed to plead guilty to one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft. That's a misdemeanour that usually carries up to one year prison time, but he's "hoping to escape the prison term in exchange for 150 hours of community service in support of wildfire relief and the approximately $65,000 USD it cost to repair the plane," write Eurogamer, as part of a plea agreement.

Alice Bee (RPS in peace) covered the announcement for Forgotlings back in 2023. It's a metroidvania by ThroughLine Games, them behind Forgotton Anne - one of my favourites from 2018. Forgotlings, however, managed to completely slip by me until I recently noticed it had a Steam demo. This is such good news I've basically forgiven them for doubling down on the funky spelling.

I was initially sceptical that we'd be seeing dark fantasy strategy RPG Whispers Of The Eyeless any time soon. I follow the game's creator Venris on YouTube. He's co-developing this with Evil Gingerbread Studio but his other big project is the Total War: Warhammer III overhaul mod SFO, and it seems barely a month passes without some huge update to that. Venris once told me he mods for around "eight to 12 hours a day", though, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this cult-shepherding roguelite is now available in Steam early access. Edwin described it as "Darkest Dungeon, but you're running the dungeon". That's better than anything I could come up with, so let's stick with that.

I'm just so tired, man. Is this a dare? Because I'm basically taking the bait just by writing about it, aren't I? "The last carrier bag you’ll ever need," begins the description of this tribute to the plastic bag Disco Elysium's protagonist uses to collect bottles to exchange for cash at Martinet's local off-licence. "Frittte brings reassurance that the bag will serve your everyday needs on the toughest streets."

This nod to people whose main takeaway from Fight Club was how rad Brad Pitt's taste in shirts was is being sold by ZA/UM's collobrative merch store with company Atelier. They've previously put out things like a replica of Kim Kitsuragi's jacket. I'm not going to link them, as a pathetic act of rebellion.

As the man who couldn't afford an ambulance to get the gash on his head sewn up once said, let's try and keep an open mind about this. The bag's Dyneema fabric "is up to 15x stronger than steel on a weight-for-weight basis and provides the highest tear and tensile strength of any competing materials".

I had trouble sleeping last night, due to a combination of press trip excitement, chugging too many complimentary coffees, and my hotel room being opposite a strange, insistently symmetrical building that reared over my dreams like Sauron’s penthouse. So to settle my nerves, I got up and played a game about being a horrible tree. Just the worst tree. A total shit of a tree. That game was Roots Devour - and great news, if you’re having trouble sleeping you can play it too, for there is a demo in the wilds.

Watch out for that falling breezeblock! It's about to-- ah, too late, you've been donked. A clip of loud wreckage, gunfire, and bazooka'd buildings has fallen dustily into our lap via a promotional video for Battlefield 6 (or whatever the developers plan to call the next of these large-scale first-person shooters). Mostly, it's a lot of producers talking a big game about "levelling up" the "core experience", which seems to remain blasting a building you don't like with a rocket-propelled grenade. We can tell from the final 10 seconds of the video, which show some of the game's actual running and/or gunning.

The battle for medieval Bohemia is about to kick off again with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, launching on February 4, 2025. Fanatical has a cracking preorder deal that saves you some coin while guaranteeing your Steam key will be delivered on or before release day. No nonsense, no delays, just instant access to swords, shields, and questionable 15th-century hygiene.

Once upon a time, Alice B (RPS in peace) was frustrated that the villagers in Early Access medieval townbuilder Foundation would not eat their bread and were furiously starving. Then it turned out Alice was the one starving them. Hoho! Pure japes.

Five years later, Foundation has just hit 1.0.