Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s been a little under a year since the vehicular combat racing game Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks launched into early access, and yesterday developer Caged Element Inc. announced that it’ll be receiving its 1.0 launch next week, May 22nd. There are a couple notable changes that come with this launch though. For starters, Wired Productions are taking over from Plaion on publishing duties. As the devs explained in a Steam post, the reason this matters to you is the second change, which is that you’ll have to pay for it when it arrives next week. Some of you, anyway.

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These days, when there’s so many games coming out that I feel like an overwhelmed dog with free reign in a butcher’s, there’s no sweeter sentence to me than “this game will take you no longer than two hours.” I know for some people length is everything (don’t), but personally I love a short, good time (seriously, leave it out). So the second I saw Formless Star, an eclectic little creature cataloguing game, and read that it was one to two hours long, I was immediately in.

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At a time where there is constantly word of this or that game shutting down, even successful ones, it will never fail to surprise me that Final Fantasy 11 is still going. You can’t play it on PS2 anymore, but there’s still an active community on PC even now. The MMO just celebrated its 23rd anniversary yesterday in fact, with a new update video and letter from the producer Yoji Fujito released to highlight some of the new and upcoming features.

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Earlier this week, it was leaked and then later confirmed that Stellar Blade, that Nier and Bayonetta-esque one with the jiggle physics cranked up to the max, would be coming to PC next month on June 11th. This was obviously welcome news to the kind of people who enjoy that sort of thing (more or less no judgement here). But it quickly became apparent that there was a bit of a caveat: the action game isn’t available to pre-order in all regions on Steam.

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Bungie aren’t having a very good week are they? First there were those accusations of Marathon using assets without permission from the artist 4ant1r34l (Antireal), which Bungie admitted to taking place. Then yesterday there was a livestream featuring game director Joe Ziegler and art director Joseph Cross which was filled with chat messages about said asset usage for practically the entire stream. Ziegler and Cross did at least address those messages, but with the response to the shooter already being quite mixed thus far, it doesn’t amount to much right now.

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Blades Of Fire is the latest dark fantasy smackeroo from Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow developers MercurySteam. It takes place in a world where steel is a divine substance passed down to humanity by the mysterious Forgers. Some sinister young queen has, however, cast a spell that turns everybody else’s steel into stone, granting her followers a near-monopoly on all the butt-kicking.

Playing as bleak and burly beardyman Aran “We Have Kratos At Home” de Lira, your job is to chase down that queen, murder her minions, and craft a whole bunch of Darksiders-esque weaponry. Aran is accompanied by Adso, a juvenile sidekick in the vein of Atreus, who catalogues the game’s “over 50” enemy types and can also translate lore written in the ancient Forger language.

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I’ve arrested someone who did not deserve it. The chump was carrying counterfeit jewellry and I lazily slapped on the cuffs without reading my police handbook. I’m about to get that book thrown at me. When I sit at my desk at the end of a shift in cop sim The Precinct, I will get a chunk of XP deducted from my earnings for detaining this dude for a minor infraction. When The Precinct’s action ramps up and it transforms into a top-down blaster, it becomes ponderous and clunky, but its quieter moments of police pretending encourage a strict dedication to the role of petty rules enforcer. It’s a game of quibbles and quirks, imperfect in many ways, but there’s a sense of commitment underneath it all that I can respect. Even if I don’t respect the badge itself.

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I have a minor but unwholesome obsession with fire that extends from Far Cry 2‘s self-propagating blazes through the pyropoetics of Andrea Brady to, most recently, Rescue Ops: Wildfire. In the latter, single and multiplayer firefighting sim, you must save people and battle dynamic blazes on large, countryside maps. Inspired by the increase in wildfires thanks to climate change, it was developed with input from real-life French firefighters, and seems both frantic and strategic. Here’s a trailer.

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Labyrinth Of The Demon King is the concentrated awfulness of Silent Hill and Amnesia: The Dark Descent thrown into a toilet bowl with the stamina-based combat of From Software’s old King’s Field RPGs. Released this week, it is squalid, lumbering, vicious, desperate and untrustworthy.

The setting is “mythical feudal Japan” – a time of devilry, manual savepoints, and dither filters. The story objective is to track down and slay the yokai boss who led your lord into an ambush. I do not greatly rate my chances. Currently, I am exploring a house full of bloated, whispering fungus and screechy little filthbastards with abbreviated limbs. The filthbastards all want to butcher me but they are no less keen to murder each other. As far as they’re concerned, I am just another filthbastard among many.

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An artist has accused Bungie of plagiarising her designs and using them in upcoming first-person shooter Marathon. The artist, who creates futuristic posters under the name Antireal (or “4nt1r34l”), posted images of her own work alongside screenshots from Marathon’s recent alpha playtest, showing that some designs have been copied. Bungie have confirmed this is the case, but lay the blame on one former artist at the studio.

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