Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Of steel is my spirit, of thunder my bones. I am the hawk’s justice, the quadrapedal crucible of oil and atrocity in which the future is forged. BEHOLD, ye strategy simulation enthusiasts. Behold my unabashed phallic symbolism menacing the gates of heaven, while my hissing hydraulics uncipher the coordinates of my prey.

Many are my supplicants, strangers from near and far who seek to beguile me and aim my blessed ordnance, but mine is the judgement, and mine the tactile gratifications of levers and gears and dials. You were getting bored of turrets in war games? Fools! You have never experienced one from the inside. Come, surrender yourself to the dieselpunk folds and surprisingly jaunty background music of my ironclad majesty. (Here’s a trailer.)

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If you’ve been struggling lately with the thought that everybody you interact with online is a closet serial killer, why not fire up Killer Chat, which will remove all uncertainty from your brain and flood it with delicious, sexy fear. Hitherto available on Itch.io, and just released on Steam, it casts you as a reporter researching a book on serial killers.

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Some days, I think I’d rather gouge my eyes out than read another email about a new roguelike or roguelite. This confuses me, because many of favourite games are roguelikes or roguelites, including Dead Cells, Balatro, FTL: Faster Than Light, and the recent Morsels, a reeking procedural dumpsite that speaks to the overproduction of Rogue/rogue derivatives at large.

Roguish games are everywhere right now. According to SteamDB, 1602 games tagged “roguelike” were published in 2024 out of 18567 total, versus 312 out of 9655 in 2020. Stir in roguelites and the countless games that advertise themselves as having “roguelike mechanics”, and I sincerely worry that you’re describing the majority of PC releases from the past couple of years.

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Rejoice, those with nimble wrists or heightened gravity anomalies localised on top of their desks. Logitech’s G Pro X Superlight 2 gaming mouse, which for my money is the finest ultra-lightweight mouse in existence, is getting cut down in the Black Friday sales – so for your money, it’s down from an admittedly ambitious £149/$180 to a far more reasonable £104/$130.

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Pre-release builds of Fallout: New Vegas recently unearthed at a shop in Utah contain rare files which could be “incredibly useful” to expanding what modders can do with the RPG. Well, at least they doe in the estimation of the folks who claim to have found them, a group of preservationists whose current online presence only looks to have popped up last month.

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I will begrudgingly accept that Black Friday, bleak as it is to anyone who didn’t grow up with framed spreadsheets above their beds, is at least a good opportunity to pick up dirt-cheap PC storage. Case in point, today’s sales include some nice, sharp slashings on some of the best Steam Deck microSD cards.

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A trademark for Control Resonant has been applied for in Europe by a law firm who’ve represented Alan Wake developers Remedy on numerous previous occasions. This application’s been lodged not long before The Game Awards and is to permit the phrase to be used in relation to games, but at the moment it’s still a mystery what exact sort of Control-related thing it refers to.

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows probably won’t get a second major DLC expansion on the scale of Claws of Awaji, Ubisoft’s associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois has revealed. It’s a blow to fans who are accustomed to getting a couple of major expansions per Assassin’s Creed, and a boon to people who haven’t even played Shadows yet, let alone the 10-hour-long Claws of Awaji, and are getting dry heaves from FOMO. It’s me, I am people.

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A couple of weeks after arguing that generative AI shouldn’t be considered in videogame reviews, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is calling for Steam and digital storefronts generally to stop requiring generative AI disclosures.

Sweeney’s argument is broadly that all videogames will use generative AI tools at some stage, so you and I might as well stop hearing about it. He thinks tagging things as made with generative AI is only necessary when there’s a formal need to prove legal authorship, or help buyers understand whether they have rights to a piece of digital art. There’s no sense letting regular old videogame players learn that stuff. It will only make us upset, and possibly less willing to play videogames with generative AI in them, like Fortnite.

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Earlier this year, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord‘s War Sails naval expansion had its release pushed back from June 17th to November 26th. You can give it a go right now if you fancy, so it obviously made that second date. Prior to the DLC dropping, I chatted with Bannerlord senior producer Falk Engel about what went into the decision to ditch the initial summer date, and why custom naval battles were only confirmed to be arriving with its launch quite late in the day.

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