Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Even as Nic spent this morning writing lovingly about frogs, I was watching trailers of frogs disintegrating beneath an unstoppable ant tsunami. The game in question is Empires Of The Undergrowth, an RTS from developers Slug Disco and Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse. The 1.0 version launches on June 7th, after almost eight years in early access during which Empires Of The Undergrowth has accumulated positive user reviews with truly antlike meticulousness. Here’s the release date trailer, which you should not watch if you dislike seeing various larger insects and small animals getting eaten alive by ants.

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Fans of Helldivers 2 have started a petition asking developers Arrowhead to reinstate a fired employee in charge of community management. The employee, “Spitz”, was let go following the fiasco in which Sony told PC players they would need to link their Steam and PlayStation Network accounts to continue playing the shooter. Sony and Arrowhead changed their mind about that after player backlash in the form of 100,000+ negative reviews on Steam. The kicker? Community manager “Spitz” was low-key encouraging players to continue the review bombing. This doesn’t seem to have gone down well internally.

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Vampire shooter Redfall was to receive an offline mode via update this very month before Microsoft staked creators Arkane Austin, according to a report. To spell it out, the cancellation of the offline functionality means that Redfall will now be officially playable for only as long as Microsoft run the servers. Another win for videogame preservation!

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You know what will really set off your soft furnishings and put further strain on your relationship when you’re already worried your girlfriend is more angry about you leaving crumbs around the toaster than she would be if all were well? A 10-foot-tall statue of a video game character to cram in the corner of your living room! To celebrate the impending release of massive gloomy RPG DLC Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree, Bamco are running a competition for players to edit together a cool trailer. Best trailer overall wins Big Messmer – the lad in the header image up there. I’m sure he’ll make a great home for many happy spiders and their cobwebs.

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Heading Out is a driving game not about finishing first or delivering freight. Instead, you’re on a road trip across America’s highways in which your collisions, detours, and police chases shape your story and the characters you meet along the road. It’s out now.

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Remedy have called it quits on the project codenamed Kestrel. The co-op multiplayer game was an original IP being made with the backing of Tencent, but now Remedy say they’ve cancelled it to allow them to focus on “other games in our portfolio”, all of which are based on “existing franchises”.

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After a month or so of testing, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s offiical mod tools REDkit will launch on May 21st. It’ll make it easier for players to make new quests, items, weapons and so on for the nearly nine-year-old RPG.

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Microsoft are shutting down multiple game studios including Redfall developers Arkane Austin and the creators of Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks. The news was delivered via an email to staff from Xbox boss Matt Booty which has since been seen by IGN. Booty calls the decision a “consolidation of our Bethesda studio teams, so that we can invest more deeply in our portfolio of games and new IP.”

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Hardcore tactical FPS Gray Zone Warfare is proving to be yet another of 2024’s unexpected successes, shifting over half a million copies when it launched into early access last week. Unfortunately, in its attempt to eat Escape from Tarkov’s lunch – a timely one, given that game’s self-inflicted DLC misery – it’s currently choking on the wishbone of some truly dire performance issues. Even players with tip-top graphics cards are seeing heavy stuttering while out in the field, and none of the updates released thus far, including today’s Hotfix #3, have done much to soothe it.

Said hotfix does include some fixes for other widespread problems, including a second attempt at preventing players from becoming headless when rejoining a server (an amusing though resilient glitch, given a previous hotfix had also tried to nix it). But having played a bit of this third patch on a usually reliable RTX 4060, there’s clearly an awful lot of work left to do before Gray Zone Warfare performs acceptably.

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I’m not sure how to classify Leila, a hand drawn, sort of point and click, sort of puzzle adventure out this summer. I’d say it’s maybe a Gorogoa-like, but the demo is also a series of little vignettes that sort of reminded me of Edith Finch, but way less in depth. It’s about a middle aged woman navigating her past and present by taking a closer at her mind, which means sorting through a load of magical realist meldings of memories. It’s very pretty, and I liked the demo a lot.

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