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Invisible Inc and Don’t Starve developers Klei Interactive have announced Away Team, a 2D base-building game from the same universe as Oxygen Not Included. I have yet to play Oxygen Not Included, but Klei seldom miss – their Mark Of The Ninja remains one of my favouritest ninja shankfests – and Away Team already seems very appealing for putting a deeply inhumane emphasis on traitorous physics. Here be trailer.
PlayStation have finally come to their senses and rolled back a lot of the unpopular PC region locking that’s been stopping folks in various parts of the world enjoying a bunch of games. It looks like one of those titles, Helldivers 2, could finally be getting a cape players have craved for a year or so as a result.
Yep, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani has teased deploying the review bomb-themed cape that first emerged as a meme following the backlash to PlayStation attempting to change the game’s PSN account linking rules last year. We’ve known the cape was a real item the studio had made for a while now, but with the region locking still ongoing, Arrowhead have opted to keep it locked away for months on end.
Shogun: Total War is 25 years old this year, and Creative Assembly are holding a multi-month long celebration kicking off in August with livestreams, interviews, sales, and multiplayer tournaments, all culminating with a showcase in early December. This will be the first showcase of its type they’ve done, and it’s billed to feature announcements for “new games” in the strategy series. That’s more than one, as the discerning pluralisation understanders among you have no doubt sagely clocked.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! No cool industry person this week. Instead, you are stuck with me. In an elevator. And I have eaten nothing but cabbage-wrapped beans for a week. You’ll doubtless want something to keep your mind off that, so let’s talk about books instead.
I feel like money laundering is one of those concepts you see in a lot of crime TV shows but it’s not really something that seems to come up much in games. I certainly can’t think of any games that feature money laundering as an actual mechanic, but I’ll be able to add one to the list next week: GTA Online. The multiplayer game is getting a new update this coming June 17th called Money Fronts, and is literally all about buying up small but generally lucrative businesses that you can sneak some money through.
I’m not much of an MMO person, I’ve dabbled over the years like with RuneScape in my youth, and a bit of Final Fantasy 14. These days it’s the level of commitment that puts me off, even though I really do love being able to partake in what feels like living, breathing worlds, the hustle and bustle of actual people going to and fro. Luckily, I think I have a lower-key way to get this kind of feeling in the upcoming action roguelite Starlight Re:Volver.
It’s a crossover episode! Like the great team-ups of the past (Scooby-Doo and Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman), Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Content Warning developer Landfall, and Another Crab’s Treasure developer Aggro Crab have come to make Peak. As in it’s literally called Peak, not a qualitative descriptor that’s been more widely adopted into Gen-Z slang that you have to Google because you’re not a spring chicken anymore.
Sony have been making a lot of mistakes over the past couple of years, including things like mistakenly thinking they could release 12 live service games by 2026, but the more immediately annoying one is its whole PSN thing. I probably don’t need to remind you of that whole Helldivers 2 fiasco, where they tried to make logging into a PSN a requirement for those on PC and later scrapped this because it went down horrendously. However, there has been one other snag that came with all this PSN nonsense: region locking.
There’s still a few days to go until Remedy Entertainment’s latest entry into their Connected Universe, FBC: Firebreak, is unleashed onto the world. Whether it’s any good or not in its entirety, we probably won’t know for a while yet given that online shooters of its ilk are always guaranteed to receive numerous patches to iron out some kinks. Our own Nic found a good bit to like about the game in his preview, ignoring the at the time rubbish guns, at the very least.
PlayStation’s bigwigs are content to stick with their current approach to multiplatform releases for now, making it unlikely we’re going to see a sudden switch to day-and-date PC ports of Sony’s big single-player games anytime soon.
SlayPtation have been bringing their studios’ multiplayer and live-service games to PC at release for a while now, it making sense with the likes of Helldivers 2 and, er, Concord, to try and ensure the maximum potential player base possible right out of the gate. On the other hand, for single player stuff like God of War Ragnarok and Ghost of Tsushima they’ve been content to wait a year to bring over to the other video game boxes.
