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It’s been a long week, hasn’t it? The balm for me is that I’m spending Saturday feeding squirrels at one of my favourite Glasgow parks, and then visiting a cat cafe. It’s a good time to be me. I hope you’ve all got a healthy dose of animal in your lives to help get you through these chilly March mornings. Games, too. Lots of games. Here’s what we’re clicking on this weekend!
There have been many attempts to reboot the RTS recently, ranging from throwbacks like the recent Age Of Mythology: Retold to splicey novelties such as Battle Aces. I’m not sure any have managed it, but I’m always glad to see fresh blood spilled in the house of Westwood. Which brings us to Project Citadel, a new space-me-do from Last Keep, a studio founded by former staff of Stranger Things devs BonusXP and Age Of Empires outfit Ensemble. It pitches you against an alien empire, and blends squad mechanics redolent of Halo Wars with a roguelike format that aims to support shorter play sessions, while still supposedly allowing for vintage strategy gambits like booming and rushing.
I knew the RTX 5070 was tricking me. Parked next to the extravagant silliness of the two-grand RTX 5090, this £539 / $549 graphics card looked like a very agreeable deal, offering all the same DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation as its bigger, pricier brothers. Also, an upgrade to the RTX 4070 Super, a GPU that could handle 4K without looking too out of place in a premium 1080p rig. Tragically, though, the RTX 5070 breaks a sacred covenant, a mutual understanding between PC owners and parts makers that’s held strong for decades: if you buy a new version of a thing, it should be faster than the old version of that thing. Look past the MFG illusion, and far too often, it isn’t.
I was towards the end of my Atomfall demo when it clicked for me – clicked like the gravelly report of a shell entering the breech of my rusty yet devastating shotgun. Guided by the deteriorated state of my weapons, and by James’ Gamescom write-up, I’d been trying to play Rebellion’s alt-Sixties open world FPS like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., hoarding my ammo and avoiding unnecessary bloodshed as I crept around an English woodland full of druids ranting about atomic fungus. I’d made it to the heart of the druid encampment – a National Trust castle of the kind that would typically be 30% wedding venue, 50% giftshop – only to reach a dead end in a banqueting hall. I had a key for a lock I couldn’t find. Perhaps it lay in a tent outside the castle, or in one of the surrounding caves?
RoboCop will be climbing an apartment tower full of slimebags in a standalone follow-up to his trudging but faithful 2023 shooter. Robocop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is so over-named it looks like DLC, but is actually an independent sequel from the same developers, and directly follows the events of the recent criminal justice ’em up. It’ll see metal man Murphy going floor to floor as he and other Detroit city policefolk ascend a residential tower after “a group of highly trained mercenaries armed with cutting-edge weapons takes control of the building and turns it into their deadly fortress.” Wait… doesn’t this sound like another cyberpunk dystopia?
Mechy and messy extraction shooter The Forever Winter sees a big update today that addresses the biggest player complaint the game had on launch – the precious water that drained away in real-time, even while you weren’t playing the game. The patch to the early access shooter reworks water so it becomes a currency that you use to infiltrate the game’s brutal maps at different entry points, instead of dripping away and threatening to leave you thirsty and destitute. And this isn’t the only promising news – enemy spawning changes, reworked gunplay, and a new map also appear.
Longdue Games have shared the first gameplay image from Hopetown, their RPG “spiritual successor” to Disco Elysium, coming soon to Kickstarter.
First namelessly teased last October as part of The Great Disco Thrupening, then revealed last month, Hopetown was described as “merging the raw emotional depth and psychological intricacy of Disco Elysium with the philosophical richness and narrative complexity of Planescape: Torment.”
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is getting a major patch on 13th March, developers Warhorse have announced. It will enhance the bracingly mucky RPG with modding tools and a “trove of updates”, including what the devs ambiguously refer to as Barber Mode. Going by the promotional image they’ve knocked together, this is just a selection of beards and haircuts for protagonist Henry. But it is not yet 13th March, so let us dare to dream. Let us imagine that the update will let Henry become a barber, cutting a swathe through the innumerable beards and fringes of 15th century Bohemia.
Trying to run Monster Hunter Wilds on the Steam Deck is a futile endeavour, as is trying to run it on any other PC hardware that might variously be called cheap, old, or otherwise low-end. However, today’s arrival of the beast-stabbin’, consent-grantin’ RPG on Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming platform does enable a sort of bodged alternative: a way to play Wilds on this most modest of handhelds, potentially at a sturdy 60fps.
Monster Hunter Wilds is the fastest-selling game in Capcom’s history. It continues to lord over the Steam charts, with peaks that might cause Counter-Strike 2 to glance momentarily down from its Olympus of user-created hats, and while people are still booting the dung out of the PC version’s performance, verdicts upon the beast-punching as a whole are glowing.
To suggest that now is the time to go back to formula is probably pure contrarianism, but Wilds makes my brain itch. Building on (and hopefully not just recapping) Brendy’s excellently ambivalent Monster Hunter Wilds review, I think the series is balancing on the edges of contradictions that extend throughout its design, from the combat through the user interface to the world and narrative themes. I think it’s been doing that for years, in fact, but Wilds, for me, is where Monster Hunter’s confusion about itself has come to a head.
