The glut of “old school” shooters has largely passed me by, not least because I can easily play Doom today if I want to. But Kvark looks to Half-Life instead of the Doomquake clone era, and is all the better for it. You’re a worker/prisoner in a sinister nuclear facility deep under 1980s Czechoslovakia where things, as you might guess, have gone terribly wrong.
The satirical Soviet posters and propaganda reels are here, but used sparingly, and more convincingly than the usual “Russia, haha! Vodka! lol!” fare, and although all its parts are fairly familiar, Kvark feels distinct enough that I had a hard time actually putting it down.
Like lots of people in the RPS Treehouse right now, I’ve been squeezing in bits of Diablo 4 around the various Summer Game Fest streams happening this week. I’m having a decent, if mildly monotonous time so far, mostly because I haven’t unlocked all my Druid‘s abilities just yet, but I’m keen to keep going with it, mostly because I just like turning into a bear and a wolf every three seconds to whack some evil skelly boys, innit. When I was logging off the other day, though, I had a fleeting glance at Diablo 4’s shop. Not to actually buy anything, I should stress. I’m not one for cosmetics in any shape or form. But I just wanted to see what ludicrous things it was trying to sell me for real human money. And one item for sale was, of course, some fancy horse armour, and it cost six English pounds and thirty nine pence. £6.39! For a mangey rope bridle and a bone dagger on its side! (You can see it in the header image up top there). Ridiculous, I exclaimed, and promptly shut down my PC.
The next morning, I was talking about this daft bit of armour with the RPS Treehouse when Alice0 suddenly introduced me to the weird and wonderful world of cheap horse games on Steam. After all, why spend upwards of £6 on a pointless cosmetic item when you could feasibly put that money toward 6 whole horse games that have actually dozens of horses in them? So join me as we discover how many horse games you can buy on Steam for the same price as Diablo 4’s horse armour.
It’s impossible to determine just how long ago 2014 was. Wisdom would dictate it sits around the 9 year mark, but no one truly believes that. Endless Legend? That was no more than two years ago, and I’ll throw hands if anyone suggests otherwise. But apparently enough time has passed that just about every 4X game that came out that year has now been superceded by a newer title in the series. Civilization: Beyond Earth, Galactic Civilizations 3, Age Of Wonders 3, and Endless Legend made 2014 an incredibly strong year for strategy games, but nowadays, who really still plays these older entries?
I don’t mean to sound derisive. It’s a sombre truth. At 233 hours, I’ve put more time into Endless Legend than any other 4X strategy game in my Steam library, and loved every minute of it. To this day it’s still the best in the genre when it comes to sparking the imagination of my chronically fantasy-loving brain. The music, the amazing variety in terrain and units, the sheer quantity of words bringing to life every last quest, minor faction, creature, and environmental anomaly. It’s a simply splendid game. The question is whether it’s still worth playing today.
Welp, it feels like this has been a long time coming. Friday The 13th: The Game will no longer be on sale by the end of the year, due to license expiration. The asymmetric multiplayer game, based on the film series of the same name, has had a rough time over the years. In 2018, it was caught up in the dispute between the original film’s producer and writer, causing publisher Gun Media to halt all DLC plans. In 2020, the game’s dedicated servers were killed, but online play limped on via peer-to-peer matchmaking.
A game of Paradox’s sci-fi strategy Stellaris can take so long that, in all honesty, I’ve never finished it. I always lose interest at some point and start a new civilisation because I mostly want to try out new weird ideas for a new weird empire, not actually rule that empire and fight its endgame wars. That makes me mighty interested in Stellaris Nexus, an upcoming turn-based spin-off which aims to offer a full multiplayer 4X experience in under an hour.
The honestly named survival sandbox ’em up Wizard With A Gun got a chunky new gameplay trailer at tonight’s Devolver Digital Direct showcase, along with the news that you can try it all out for yourself right this second thanks to a hip new demo. If you ever thought Bastion could do with some crafting, this will probably be right up your street.
Tonight’s Summer Game Fest was absolutely stacked with new game announcements and shiny new trailers, so in case you missed it or you just want to recap the biggest reveals from the show, we’ve gathered them all here below for your viewing pleasure. Here’s everything that was announced at the 2023 Summer Game Fest.
Okay, so he’s not (I don’t think) going to be in the full game, and if he is it won’t be loads, but hearing John Rhys-Davies doing his Gimli voice over the trailer for Dwarf mining survival sim The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria is enough to warm the cockles of your 2001 self’s heart, isn’t it? Coming in that old favourite release window of “fall 2023”, Free Range Games’ Dwarf ’em up brought its first gameplay trailer to Summer Game Fest tonight, and we saw not only some examples of the building you can do on your quest to – hear me out – Return To Moria, but also the monsters that can emerge from the deep to stop you doing it.
Some time back I made fun of the preview for Immortals Of Aveum because a) it was quite a silly hands-off preview and b) Immortals Of Aveum is very clearly a game that needs to be played to properly get to grips with it. It’s out on July 20th, so not too far away. Have I played it yet? No! Of course not! But we’re getting closer to a hands on, and after a six-minute video of the magic FPS in action last month, tonight’s Summer Game Fest threw us a big, bombastic boss fight on top of a steampunk Jaeger, or something. I dunno, it was hard to tell over the light show. Those sure are a lot of magical fireworks going off. I like it. Jangle some more keys in front of me, games man.
The video itself is, uh, well, it’s not long, and it’s quite choppy. While I enjoy a good setpiece, my concerns remain the same as before, i.e. the magic shooting, despite the different flavours of magic broadly corresponding to a different kind of gun, looks pretty weightless, and the enemies look bullet spongey. I do like the colours and the traversal, though.
Professional villain Jason Isaacs will voice a character of questionable morality in Baldur’s Gate 3, developers Larian announced today at Geoff Keighley’s Level Up Pool Party. The English actor who played Star Trek: Discovery’s Captain Lorca, Marshal Zhukov in The Death Of Stalin, and a whole load of other baddies has now lent his voice to Lord Enver Gortash, the creator of magical clockwork watchmen. Ooh it is a good voice.
