I always knew I would one day be tempted to return to Destiny 2. After three years and several thousands hours of playtime, last February I hit my limit on the garbage MMO that this phenomenal FPS is trapped inside and uninstalled. But I still adore parts, including its striking sci-fi landscapes. So when I heard the latest season was returning to the alien ocean moon of Titan, one of my favourite spots, I was tempted. Oh I was tempted! But now Season Of The Deep started yesterday and Titan is here and no, it’s not enough.
Swedish developers The Bearded Ladies certainly have a type. If you’ve played the memorably odd Mutant Year Zero or the largely forgettable Corruption 2029, you’ll know it by now – a blend of real-time stealth and turn-based tactics, where you quietly pick off stragglers from enemy squads before confronting the rest in a team scrap. Now here’s Miasma Chronicles, the Ladies’ third effort, and let’s just say they’re clearly happy to stick with what they know.
While the patterns of play are to a great extent the same, though, Miasma Chronicles is a more ambitious project. Addressing criticisms that those earlier games weren’t substantial enough, it’s a broader, denser beast, in which you could easily spend twice as long – 30 hours or so – seeing all the sights and shooting the nasties that populate them. That means there’s a lot more space available for this game to coax out varied strategies and introduce more elements, which is great. But it also means the weaker elements of the formula are left more exposed, which isn’t.
WD’s SN770 SSD is one of the very best value options on the market, combining a PCIe 4.0 interface, sequential read speeds up to 5150MB/s and an aggressive pricing strategy that makes it extremely affordable to add to your PC or PS5. Today this drive has dropped to a new low on Amazon UK, where a 1TB model will cost you £43.99 and the 2TB size is just £99.98. Either way, you’re getting a great value SSD that performs impressively for gaming.
Blue Protocol is an anime MMO with some gorgeous environment art. It looks like the kind of game I’d ignore right up until the moment when I wake up and discover it’s the most popular game in the world. That day will have to wait a while longer, though. Developer Bandai Namco and publisher Amazon Games have announced that its western release has been delayed until 2024.
F1 Manager 2023 will cross the finish line this summer. Frontier announced the motorsport simulation sequel earlier today, with a trailer and promises that the new game would feature “deeper management systems, more dramatic racing, and an even greater commitment to authenticity.”
Intel’s Arc series of GPUs has continued to improve following the launch of the A750 and A770 last year, and now these RTX 3060 competitors have hit a new low price point in the US: $199.99 at Newegg.
That’s an awesome deal for an 8GB graphics card that delivers excellent RT performance for its tier, AV1 encoding/decoding and a solid upscaling solution in XeSS. If you’re in the market for a GPU that can handle 1080p gaming with a relatively modern motherboard that supports the Resizeable BAR feature, this is an awesome pickup for the money.
The next Total War game will be taking players to the Egyptian New Kingdom period, Sega and Creative Assembly have announced today, with the reveal of Total War: Pharaoh. Releasing in October 2023, Total War: Pharaoh will see the three great cultures of the people of Egypt, Canaan and Hittite battle it out as they determine who will be the next pharaoh. And it’s all set against the backdrop of the Bronze Age collapsing in on itself, with natural disasters to plan for, foreign powers to defend against, and the general unravelling of society as we know it. Lovely stuff. Come watch the reveal trailer below.
I’ve said it before, but I really keep meaning to play Ctrl Alt Ego. Released last year, it’s a sci-fi immersive sim built all around classic abilities of the genre: remote control and possession. You bounce your digital consciousness between robots and devices and ach, I hear it’s great. I’ve bought it. I’ve installed it. I’ve played the first part of the tutorial. And then, who knows. One day. One day very soon. But right now, for people who have played it, good news: a free update has added a Sandbox mode generating squillions of new levels.
After giving us an early glimpse of its unstoppable raptor hordes in a closed beta test last summer, Capcom recently let us loose with the opening hours of their upcoming dinosaur multiplayer shooter, Exoprimal. Its final release isn’t far away now – its July 14th launch fast becoming the sole highlight of an otherwise desolate month – and I was excited to finally play the game that RPS vid bud Liam literally hasn’t been able to stop talking about ever since he first clapped eyes (and his thumbs) on its somersaulting T-Rexes. (You should also read his excellent interview with the devs while you’re at it, too).
I’ll hold my hands up now and say I didn’t get to play as much of Exoprimal as I would have liked, but the handful of missions I did play really are as daft and brilliant as Liam described last year. I won’t waste time repeating its fundamentals (you can read them here), but the basic setup is thus: in a world plagued by dinosaurs that periodically pour out of strange portals for some reason, you play a rookie dino hunter that gets pulled into a time-looping wargame set up by your company’s clearly psychotic AI called Leviathan. In order to gather valuable ‘combat data’ for its simulations to fight said dinosaur threat, Leviathan endlessly ropes you and other rookie exosuit wearers into deadly feats of speed and skill. It’s a neat, if patently preposterous setup for its 5v5 PvP multiplayer missions, but the thing that struck me most wasn’t its gloriously silly dinosaurs or Leviathan’s perfectly pitched ham lines. It was its bot companions, because heck, they’re great to play with, but absolute fiends if you’re on the wrong side of them.
Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has said he thinks “Maybe it’s time we removed the numbers” from Final Fantasy games. In an interview with GQ, he talked about the baggage that inevitably comes with having a 35-year-old series with soon to be 16 numbered mainline games in it (not including the sequels and spin-offs, I might add), and the confusion it continues to create with new players. “Every numbered title we release in the series, we have to go into it like, ‘It’s OK, you don’t have to play the rest of them,'” he said, and removing them is “something that I’ve discussed with the higher-ups”. It’s an understandable problem, for sure, although I think I’d be quite sad to see the numerals go entirely. As long as they don’t pull a Mortal Kombat and go back to 1, though, we’re good.
