Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

New Polish studio From Chaos consist of former members of Witcher developers CD Projekt Red, Frostpunk developers 11 bit studios and 4X household Paradox Interactive, led by erstwhile Gwent programmer Tomek Dietrich – so it’s no huge surprise that their debut game, Liegecraft, is a big beardy historical strategy RPG.

It’s a hex and turn-based experience in which you play a dinky little despot running around a medieval world building castles, taking vassals, mustering armies, and going on quests that involve branching dialogue. It’s got a pleasant upstairs-downstairs vibe. On the one hand, you get to paint toy towns on hexagons, as in a traditional 4X or Civ clone; on the other, you can smash-cut to a banqueting scene and watch a drunken dignitary throw a goblet at your master of horse. Here’s the trailer.

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Ubisoft Montpellier’s Beyond Good And Evil 2 has been delayed so much that it has transcended the label of “vapourware”, while staunchly refusing to become “abandonware”. Announced in 2008, it has now comfortably outstripped Duke Nukem Forever as the “triple-A” game with the longest development time. I’m sure there are a few indie passion projects that have been bubbling away in the shadows for longer, but nothing on this scale. What’s less tangible than vapour? Ectoplasm? The promises of small children?

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The developers of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 have released an update to the third-person shooter that reverts a lot of tough difficulty changes made in a previous patch. Turns out upping the spawn rate of the vicious Tyrannid baddies across all difficulty modes was not welcome among the meathead murder boys of the Imperium. And this change wasn’t the only one that caused enough ructions to justify hasty recalibrations from Saber Interactive.

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To be fair, there are several, far more substantial additions teased in Total War: Warhammer 3 design director Mitchell Heastie’s latest blog on the strategy game’s upcoming Patch 5.3. There’s also some interesting insight regarding design decisions, and the systems CA are hoping to tweak in the future. We’ll talk about that in a moment, but first, I must draw your attention to this magical map. I’m very excited about it. Not so much for what it does on its own – more for what its design philosophy represents and could mean for future additions.

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I’d rather command a small troop of ruthless husks to fight my battles than do the dirty work myself – and in the game [Weyyyyyy! -RPS staff]. That’s reason number one as to why I’m interested in Skull Horde, an “auto battler dungeon crawler” which casts you as a necromancer in a tiny pixel art world.

Reason number two is that it’s coming from the developers of the explosively moreish Bore Blasters. Find a teaser trailer below.

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Ghost Bike, the upcoming cycling ’em up from Nidhogg makers Messhof, is now called Wheel World. The name change is designed to reflect some substantial changes to the game itself – and there’s a new trailer to show its current condition as a seemingly chill game about tinkering with bikes and riding them around pastel-coloured worlds.

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Minecraft‘s Bundles Of Bravery update has been out for a day or so and I have already created and lost several hardcore mode worlds. I’m having a lovely time.

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One of my favourite internet jokes is: “I enjoy video games because they let me live out my wildest fantasies, like being assigned a task and then completing that task”. Wilmot’s Warehouse felt like that joke made manifest, putting you in the shoes of a tiny warehouse working squareboi. This puzzle-solving sequel, Wilmot Works It Out, doesn’t come packaged with its predecessor’s wry humour, nor the same sense of compulsion. Instead, it exudes a calm and homely sense of idle comfort. For me, that ultimately makes it less compelling, even if it is thematically the entire point. This is about a warehouse worker doing jigsaws on his day off.

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Velvet 89 is a free hidden object game that tells the story of communist Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” in 1989, which brought an end to 41 years of one-party rule and led to the founding of a parliamentary republic. The game released earlier this month, and you can find it on Steam, iOS and Android. I know nothing about the Velvet Revolution, but I do have some quick thoughts on the use of a format I associate with Where’s Wally to capture a process of extraordinary political change.

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Developers Dreamlit have piped over fresh footage of their open world ecotribal extravaganza Towers Of Aghasba. It’s an abbreviated but generous display of equatorial exotica and vaguely prehistoric wildlife, home to such key verbs as “exploration”, “village-building”, “gardening”, “creature-nurturing” and “murdering megasloths with a lump of wood”. And look at that, there’s a release date perched on top – 19th November 2024.

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