Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

After weeks of discovering new layers and playstyles, I have no idea how to summarise Rise of the White Sun, except perhaps “It’s 1920s China! Good luck!” Playable factions include major political blocs, conventional military behemoths, petty warlords, peasant uprisings, foreign stooges, and multiple communist cells (particularly in the recent DLC). There’s even a police chief, and my inevitable favourite, the angry mountain lady who cares for none of that, and only wants to raid everyone’s cattle.

This is an absurdly rich and complex grand strategy wargame. But where that usually means an unmanageable deposit, White Sun’s greatest design strength is fitting its possibilities into a framework where they feel comprehensible, and remain manageable at any scale.

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Another day, another Borderlands 4 update aiming to smooth out more of the performance problems which have plagued the looter shooter since launch, especially on PC. Unfortuntely, this latest patch looks to have led to an uptick in stuttering for some players, with Gearbox recommending some shader messing around as a potential fix.

In fairness to the studio, you can’t say they haven’t been working hard to get Borderlands 4 running a bit more smoothly since problems in that department became apparent, with this being the third post-launch patch targeting performance in the past couple of weeks. One of them was confusingly noteless, but hey.

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After much hemming and hawing, Asus and Microsoft are finally ready to talk pricing on their handheld PC team-ups, the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. It’s nothing too egregious in the King’s sterling, with the Xbox ROG Ally confirmed at £499.99 and the Xbox ROG Ally X at £799.99 – while hardly chump change, these are pretty standard prices for entry-level and premium portables respectively.

Those in the US, however, will be paying $599.99 for the ROG Xbox Ally and $999.99 for the ROG Xbox Ally X, the latter representing a big increase on Asus’ current ROG Ally X model.

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Vroom. Vroom vroom. Vroom vroom vroom. Ahem, sorry, dunno what happened to me there. Assetto Corsa EVO, the three-letter-yelling follow up to one on Steam’s long-reigning top racing sims, has just gotten its third early access update. It adds in online multiplayer, plus a bunch of fresh cars and tracks to hop into moments before you’re unceremoniously punted off by a random.

I’ve been playing a bit of a waiting game with AC EVO since yapping about it at length for my old home when it first debuted in early access at the start of this year, but this might be the point I hop behind its wheel agaion and see how devs Kunos Simulazioni have managed to flesh it out so far. After all, they’ve now added in a 90s Merc 190E, which is pretty much square German saloon kryptonite for my will to hold off on checking things out.

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Tasty-looking space games fill the atmosphere nowadays like satellite launch debris, but perhaps you’ll find room in your weirdly adapted magnetic fishing net for one more – Kaigan’s Nullspace. I came across it in yesterday’s Indie Fan Fest stream, and I quite like the cut of its torpedo bays.

Nullspace grabs me for a couple of reasons. One is its “retrofuturistic universe”, which strikes me as both sleek and cosy. It’s kind of chibi Homeworld. The kitbashed ships come alive with swivelling turrets and manoeuvring jets, but something about the way they’re proportioned, patterned and lit also makes me think of freshly piped cake icing. I also quite like the Star Fox-style jabbering heads of unit commanders in the bottom corner.

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A former developer on massive Elder Scrolls mod project Skyblivion who called its current 2025 release goal “unachievable” has suggested March 2026 as a “fitting” release window for the task of remaking Oblivion in Skyrim‘s engine.

Around the time of the mod’s most recent showcase, ex-Skyblivion level and world designer Dee Keyes put out a tweet accusing its project lead and implementation lead of rushing the mod out the door to meet a 2025 release goal that Keyes dubbed “pointless and unachievable”. The modder also accused the pair of mismanaging the project by not keeping up communication between leads and other developers in terms of key decisions. Keyes’ claims and very public split from the Skyblivion team naturally led to questions being asked of the remaining Skyblivion devs, with the mod’s comms lead telling fans: “Our aim is that it will be by the end of the year, if we as a team decide that it isn’t we will be sure to share that.”

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Firaxis and 2K Games are working on a Civilization 7 update that revamps the game’s map generation, while adding a couple of city states and rounding out Napoleon’s skillset. It’s slated to land sometime in the week of September 29th. Why am I writing about it right now? Because senior graphics engineer Ken Pruiksma has just posted a little blog about the intricacies of strategy game map generation that caused Beethoven’s Ode To Joy to play tinnily in my head.

This is almost certainly a reflection of emotional diarrhea brought on by minor insomnia brought on by a nagging foot injury. Still, there’s something… uplifting about the motions of plate tectonics as approximated by computer code. Perhaps you, kind stranger, will be similarly moved.

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Bruce Lee is in Hitman now. Unfortunately, you don’t get to play as him. Fortunately, you do not have to fight him. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Agent 47. You might be the last word in swatting people with Wet Floor signs, but I’ve yet to see you perform a credible one-inch punch. Perhaps you’d get the drop on Bruce Lee if you threw up on him after swallowing an irradiated carbon rod, but I don’t fancy your chances in the context of a proper Bangkok martial arts tournament – like the one depicted in Hitman’s latest Elusive Target mission, the Dragon. Here be trailer.

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Microsoft’s next Forza Horizon game is set in Japan, going by an Instagram ad that appears to have been posted ahead of reveal. The post has been taken down, but one of the internet’s many screen-grabbing Eyes of Sauron has preserved it for posterity. “The Horizon Festival is heading to Japan,” it reads. I imagine that Japan is also where Microsoft had planned to announce the game – they’ve doing a showcase at Tokyo Game Show 2025 in around an hour’s time. Microsoft have previously indicated that the next Forza will launch in 2026.

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Much to my surprise, the overgrown garden setting of Infinitesimals is not especially indebted to any Dreamworks and Pixar films about insects. Nor is the game’s steel-jawed space flea protagonist, Captain Awkney Relinrake, directly inspired by Buzz Lightyear. Instead, he channels the stately, swaggering Englishness of Jean Luc Picard and Richard Sharpe, aka Napoleonic Sean Bean.

This last revelation slightly disappoints me, in that Relinrake seems a bit ridiculous, with eyebrows the size of aviation flaps, and I’d like the game to own that humour in a more obviously Toy Story-ish way. But what most catches me out, during my 30 minute hands-on with Cubit Studios’ deceptively toony action game, is that it takes a fair few cues from milsims.

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