Paradox’s space 4X strategy game Stellaris is getting a new Astral Planes expansion, in which you send ships through rifts to “completely different realms of existence, where fundamentals that were certain at home may not always be true”. I’ve read a few sci-fi novels in my time, and have come to the conclusion that tunnelling into other dimensions is seldom a wise move, but there’s no turning back at the threshold when you’re nurturing a mighty galactic empire, I guess. Find a trailer below in which some poor science ship pilot gets his brain fried by a crackling window of purple impossibility.
Activision Blizzard rolled out Diablo 4‘s Season 2, also known as the Season of Blood, this week, together with an absolute deluge of quality-of-life improvements across console and PC. The publisher have also now launched the hitherto Battle.net-based PC version on Steam, and are trying to attract newcomers with a discount on Valve’s platform and a free 10 hour trial this weekend (that’s 19th-22nd October) for Xbox players.
Have the Season 2 updates – which you could summarise as “slay vampires to get vampire powers” and “spend less time and have more fun grinding/farming for loot and levels” – salvaged Blizzard’s action-RPG from the ashes of Season 1? I’ve been trawling the reactions this morning, and while the new Diablo appears to be evolving in the right direction, the big picture is still of a game with just as many raters as haters.
Cor, it sure is good to be back in Commander Video’s running shoes again. I know Bit.Trip Runner and Choice Provisions’ assorted Bit.Trip rhythm games have been available on Steam for absolutely yonks (and still are, in fact), but my memories of these are all on the Nintendo Wii. That’s where I encountered most of the games firs – and I haven’t really been back since. I dabbled in Runner 2 on the Wii U, but positively bounced off the 3D-ness of Runner 3 when it came to PC, preferring instead the clean, simple lines of its stark pixel sprites.
It’s with some surprise, then, that I’ve had such a good time with Bit.Trip ReRunner, the recently released fancied up version of the auto-running original that brings its rhythmic courses kicking and screaming into that third dimension. But it’s really more of a compilation game than anything else, packing in extra protein in the form of EP soundtracks and freshly-created course selections from all eight games in the series (mashing tunes from Beat, Core, Void, Fate, Flux into a Runner-style format), as well as lots of new tricks and abilities up its sleeve. But the crown jewel in ReRunner isn’t so much the joy of getting a fresh dose of OG Runner again, but seeing what its player base has already started making with its brilliant Runner Maker level editor. Yep, much like Super Mario Maker before it, Bit.Trip has opened itself up to the whims of would-be game making audience, and they are running with it (sorry).
There’s fierce competition in the 2230 NVMe SSD space right now, as these pint-sized SSDs are the only ones that will fit in PC handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. Previously Sabrent were offering the cheapest option available at the 1TB price point at £85, but now Scan has reduced the price of the WD SN740 to just £80. This is a good deal on a PCIe 4.0 2230-size SSD, offering speeds of up to 5150MB/s on the ROG Ally and around 3500MB/s for the PCIe 3.0 Steam Deck.
Lords of the Fallen developers Hexworks are still busily carving a path through the game’s various bugs and performance issues. The latest Lords of the Fallen update, Patch v.1.1.207, is a thrilling litany of technical gremlins that have now been tracked down and slaughtered.
Amongst other things, the developers have turned off collision detection for an entire library, to avoid tanking the frame-rate when you – for reasons best known only to yourself – attack the books. In other news, the game will no longer crash itself in “revenge” when you hit walls too often (a rare, and rather amusing-sounding bug – best be wary when looking for secret rooms I guess). Hexworks have also identified the source of a crashing problem when playing Lords of the Fallen on Steam Deck, though the fix for that particular issue hasn’t yet passed QA. Oh, and they’ve made the continue button “sexier”. Look, don’t ask me, I just work here.
Please ignore that I erroneously call this episode 34 at the start of the episode. In episode 35 of The Electronic Wireless Show podcast we briefly discuss Just Stop Oil’s game-themed protest at EGX this weekend, as well as re-highlighting a guide from the Arma 3 devs so you can tell when someone is trying to share fake war footage (originally created during the early weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but now relevant again with the spread of fake Israeli-Palestinian conflict videos). For our larger theme we discuss games that flip-reverse their theme when you least expect it, which is usually seemingly-cute games becoming horror – much like Harvest Island.
Plus: James gives us a rundown of fun games he tried at EGX, which sound very cool!
After busting down the castle door with their chaotic, siege-based citybuilder Diplomacy Is Not An Option last year, the last thing I expected to see next from developers Door 407 was a chill, meditative puzzle game that’s just about, well, building tiny cities. In Urbo there are no sky lasers, no oncoming hordes. Nothing. Just dinky little grid-based maps, and an endless stream of tiny adorable buildings to plonk down on them in the pursuit of sweet, sweet point scores.
This being a puzzle game, the aim here is to place three buildings of the same type altogether, either in a line or right-angled cluster, at which point they’ll all shzooge together to level up to the next building type. This is where the Threes comparison comes in, though you can zhuzh more than three of the same building together if you’re smart to earn more points. But it’s not quite as simple as that. You see, your buildings will only shoump onto the tile you placed down last, and careful city planners will likely want to think about placing their buildings in reverse so they end up with their fancy new house in the place they actually want it, not in an awkward middle spot that cuts off two precious tiles from play, or awkwardly sits in the middle of another chain of dwellings accidentally. And yep, that’s where the Dorfromantik connection comes in, and I really do like it very, very much.
Recruit an army of soldiers, accountants, demons, dogs, dog-catching robots, nanite grey goo, zombies, priests, slimes, whales, fires, nuclear bombs, vampires, and other oddities to liberate the United States in Million Monster Militia. It’s a roguelikelike deck-building strategy game where you draft units who drop onto a grid in random positions, enabling all sorts of abilities and combos depending on where they all land. It’s kinda like the roguelikelike slot machine Luck Be A Landlord dressed for a Halloween party in a turn-based tactics costume. Million Monster Militia is ropey in its current early access stage, but I have enjoyed discovering weird builds and I am cautiously curious about its future after some updates.
343 Industries’ and Microsoft’s well-reviewed, but fan-derided and far from chart-topping sci-fi FPSHalo Infinite is experiencing a slight revival, and it’s all thanks to the magic of, er, Pokemon. Pokemon being one of several new custom gametypes knocked together by intrepid Halo players using the Forge map editor’s new AI toolkit, added in the Halo Season 5: Reckoning updates, which allow you to bring campaign AI into Forge maps and tweak its behaviour at length. I choose you, Master Chief!
Following three years solely on the Epic Games Store, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2’s recent Steam launch was a largely happy occasion – save for it carrying over the same always-online requirement as it has on Epic. Yesterday’s 1.1 patch for the Steam version has now made offline play possible, but in a move that simultaneously makes loads of and absolutely no sense, it’s only available on the Steam Deck.
