Very much like an assassin sliding a poison needle into your wrist while shaking your hand, Ubisoft have added Denuvo‘s anti-piracy/anti-cheating DRM software to Assassin’s Creed: Mirage in the game’s day-one update, aka patch 1.0.2. We’ve known for a while that the game would use Denuvo, together with the VMProtect software, but what’s baking the noodles of many players is that the Denuvo functionality has been snuck in after the Assassin’s Creed: Mirage review embargo, denying critics the chance to assess its impact on the game.
Kitfox and Bay12 have struck the earth, manufactured a thousand stone blocks, and laid out a roadmap for the Dwarf Fortress Steam edition’s Adventure Mode, together with some forthcoming updates for the existing fortress management mode. Adventure Mode, in case you’ve been living under a rock (which I guess you probably have, if you’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress), is the open world roguelike RPG element of the game, which lets you roam the enormous realm you’ve generated and even tour/loot/disturb the unquiet spirits of your own, abandoned fortress. Alas, there’s no word on a release date for the Steam edition’s Adventure Mode beyond “not this year”.
Another Crab’s Treasure hooked me with its underwater Soulslike premise and cutesy charm. But once you take a closer look at the game’s polluted ocean, filled with plastic shells and weapons, the comparisons to Dark Souls get a little clearer. This is a quiet and kinda melancholy post-apocalypse. We can now find out whether the crustaceans lean on cuteness or sadness more in the game’s new demo, released just yesterday.
The price of Steam Deck SSD upgrades continues to fall, as Integral’s 2230-sized PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD has dropped to £69.95 at Amazon UK. That’s a great price for a drive that more than doubles even the highest capacity Steam Deck sold by Valve, and makes a tremendous upgrade for 512GB and 256GB Steam Deck owners too.
The Hitman series soon turns 25 years old, but Agent 47’s unwrinkled face doesn’t carry the “what am I doing with my life?” stress that normally accompanies such a birthday. Developer IO Interactive is instead celebrating with both new and returning events coming to the stealth infiltration mega package that is Hitman: World Of Assassination.
IOI are dropping the game’s next Elusive Target mission, called The Drop, on October 27th. The forthcoming mission sees Agent 47 enter (infiltrate) a shadowy Berlin club to party until he forgets what day it is. He may or may not murder a DJ who’s secretly also a drug lord while he’s there. Our new target is actually modelled off of real-world deckman, DJ Dimitri Vegas. Returning events include the Bad Boy (available October 13-23rd) and Food Critic (available from October 20-30th) missions.
Should you wish to take the stealthy shenanigans on the go and don’t yet own a Steam Deck, there’s some good news. IOI are also releasing Hitman: Blood Money on mobile this Autumn, with a Switch release following in Winter. Hitman has always played more like a methodical, violent puzzle game for me, rather than a purely stealthy-shooty one, so I can imagine that it probably works well on smaller screens regardless.
Creative Assembly’s Hyenas – the recently cancelled extraction shooter about space Robin Hoods – was supposedly publisher Sega’s biggest budget game ever. New details about the game’s development claim that a lack of direction, slow progress, and an engine change turned the once hopeful “Super Game” into the canned FPS that it sadly is today.
Last time, you decided that improvised environmental weapons are better than skipping across a timeline flowchart. I can’t say I’m too surprised, considering that timeline flowcharts are rare and that I did illustrate t’other with multiple screenshots of Kazuma Kiryu smashing men with bicycles. Now if Kiryu had been jumping between timelines… ah, we can’t speculate, that’s not scientific. This week, I ask you to choose between cutting something unnecessary and adding something unnecessary. What’s better: quick restarts, or a diegetic HUD?
What exactly is The Alters? It’s a question I’ve been itching to get answers to ever since Frostpunk and This War Of Mine developers 11 bit Studios first announced their strange new game at notE3 last year. Until now, all we’ve had to go on is a cryptic CG announcement trailer that showed a gaggle of identical clone-looking men in bright pink medical gowns, all of whom seemingly live inside a giant wheel full of shipping containers. It didn’t really tell us anything about what the game actually is, or how it plays, and we’ve heard precious little about it since.
Happily, I’ve now seen about an hour of The Alters in action at this year’s Gamescom, and first impressions are very promising. This is indeed a game about sort-of clones living in a big wheely shipping container, but these containers are actually modules you’ll be building in XCOM/Fallout Shelter-style chunks to advance the capabilities of your big wheel base as you work to escape the broiling heatdeath that’s slowly enveloping the planet. You’ll also be venturing out onto the planet’s surface to gather resources, all while managing your crew of clo- sorry, alternate selves – as you assign their daily work tasks, and then there’s the fact that, well, you’re all chuffing different versions of the same person and the literal embodiment of what your life might have been like if you’d done X instead of Y, or Y instead of Z. It’s a fascinating blend of ideas, and if 11 bit can stick the landing, I reckon it could end up being something really quite special. Here’s everything I learned.
After 11 years, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been, somewhat unceremoniously, shut down in favour of the newer, shinier Counter-Strike: 2. Whether you like it or not, Valve wants you playing CS2. For those who don’t take their CS all too seriously, CS2 won’t seem like much of a change from CS:GO, besides some grenade changes, more detailed maps, and a disappointing lack of fan favourite game modes. And for those who train their aim on the reg and line up their smoke grenades, CS2 might look the part but lacks the precision of CS:GO’s movement and gunplay.
Still, CS2 captures what makes Counter-Strike tick and even if the foundation seems a little sparse and a touch shaky right now, I’m confident Valve have an FPS that’ll supersede CS:GO in time.
If Starbreeze themselves were actually a Payday 3 heisting team I suspect they’d be verging on putting money back into the vault at this stage – retracing their steps with bulging duffel bags, while apologising to security guards not so much for the whole bank robbery thing as for smashing so many utilities on their way out. Shortly after announcing plans to make the four-player PvE shooter less online-dependent, the developers have announced that they’re also reworking Payday 3’s much-reviled progression system.
