Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You really have to hand it to the publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. They are the absolute masters of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the doyens of stepping on rakes, even as they near the checkered flag. The long-awaited RPG got a new trailer and what may actually prove to be the final release date at Gamescom Opening Night Live this week. The trailer was a feisty show of Dishonored-esque mayhem, and the hands-on verdicts I’ve read (save for stinky uncle Eurogamer) have been positive. Ours is forthcoming.

But then came the revelation that this much-delayed sequel to a quintessentially faction-led RPG from a company famous for downloadable add-ons would sell two of its vampire clans as day-one DLC. How we laughed! How we clutched our faces and chittered like gerbils! How we ran outside, begging for the moon to fall on our heads! Despair springs anew.

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If you’re looking for a solid PC build but don’t want to spend a fortune, you could do a lot worse than this iBuyPower option at Walmart.

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I drop the house into the great maw (not that one). It screams as it falls away from the clutches of my mouse clicker. It disappears from view, but there’s a sickeningly wet crunching that betrays its fate. Oh and the fact that the entity’s jaws immediately flare open once more, teeth and tongue dripping with anguish to cram vegetation, trees, towerblocks into its gullet.

This is In Full Bloom, a game that scores the full 10/10 in the wonderfully ironic naming category. Set in a greyscale universe sucked free of all hope and colour, it tasks you with accomplishing an impossible task. You’ve got to keep the infernal child of constant consumption happy by tossing an unending stream of junk into its mouth.

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2‘s forthcoming Legacy of the Forge expansion introduces a new home customisation system, as part of a story about restoring a legendary burnt-down blacksmith’s joint where your dad once worked as an apprentice.

Out September 9th, the expansion takes Henry of Skalitz back to Kuttenberg to climb the ranks of the blacksmith guild, with unique armour and weapon blueprints. Expect “quirky” requests from clients, but above all, expect a nagging sense of failure, because the aforesaid customisation system “supports over 136 million combinations”, and always, always at the back of your mind, the creeping suspicion that yours is the very worst.

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This week, dozens of Microsoft employees occupied the company’s east campus in Redmond, Washington in protest against the use of Azure and generative AI technologies by the Israeli military, during their on-going assault on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

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Despite the grand sense of wanderlust dripping off its title, Lego Voyagers casts you and a pal not as minifig explorers (or even the tiny brickfolk of Lego Builder’s Journey), but as humble 1×1 blocks. You’ll get one eye each, and be thankful for it. Nonetheless, Voyagers still wants you to venture out and roll your way through its plastic wilderness, with some light puzzling, Split Fiction-style cooperative mischief, and building – usually with your own heads as the cornerstones – along the way. Last week, ahead of its Gamescom showing, Mark and I channeled our inner construction materials to try it out.

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I loaded up a recent Pragmata demo in blissful ignorance – or, at the very least, regular ignorance – of the depth of feeling surrounding its central hacking system. The need to shut down robotic baddies’ defences before giving them the ol’ semi-auto handshake is, it seems, widely enough perceived as a potential dealbreaker that Capcom have recreated it as a browser game. As if to whisper a reassuring “No, look, it’s not that fiddly,” into sceptical ears ahead of release next year.

I get it. Described in the abstract, it does sound like you can have a little third-person shooting, as a treat, but only after you finish your tile-colouring minigame. After actually playing Pragmata, though, I’m firmly on Team Hacking: besides being rich with upgrade potential, it doesn’t interrupt the action so much as conduct it, specifically to a tempo that feels refreshingly unique by over-the-shoulder standards.

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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 got a full release date during Gamescom Opening Night Live last night, along with a fresh trailer. However, there’s one detail that might put a bit of a dampener [dhampir? – Ed] on your claret-tinged celebrations about the game finally overcoming its many bloody delays.

You see, while the base version of Bloodlines 2 offers four vampire clans with different playstyles for you to get behind the fangs of, Paradox have opted to stick a further two behind paid day-one DLC.

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I’d entirely forgotten about Battlestar Galactica. I wouldn’t say hearing the show’s melancholy singsong theme during last night’s Open Night Live gave me Proustian nostalgia pangs, but it did fill me with a vague desire to look up Gunstar mods for Homeworld.

The game announcement in question was for Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, a new tactical roguelite from the developers of Crying Suns. Published by Dotemu, it gives you quasi-isometric control of the human armada racing to escape the sinister Cylon fleet. You’ll divide your time between managing tensions aboard your ships via branching story beats, assigning limited upgrade resources, flushing out new vessels from the planets you visit, and fending off the perfidious toasters in real-time space combat. Here’s a trailer.

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Enotria: The Last Song developers Jyamma Games are making a new action-RPG inspired by and named after Dante Alighieri’s 14th century epic poem La Divina Commedia, aka the Divine Comedy.

Like the poem, it sees you descending through the circles of Hell, each the geological manifestation of a particular Sin. Unlike the poem, it features a set of combat classes, a choice of protagonist genders, a narrative alignment system, procedurally generated extraction dungeons, and customisable weapons and armour. As the poet himself might say: in the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where I had to grind for crafting materials.

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