Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

After many months of dogged campaigning in the face of zealotry, atrocity and propaganda about fake WMDs, the heroic avatars of the Illuminate have finally invaded Super-Earth. In just a few short days, the humans and their fanatical and clownish “Helldiver” enforcers may be wiped from the face of the galaxy, ushering in a brave new era in which the surviving bots, bugs and squids link clamps, mandibles and tentacles and dance around singing. You ever hear an Illuminate sing? Literally mind-blowing.

All of which is to say that Helldivers 2‘s Heart Of Democracy update is upon us, following teasers earlier this month. It lets the game’s sordid playerbase of perfidious human stormtroopers blow the shit out of some ace nano-tech molluscs on the streets of planet Earth. The new Earth maps are also full of NPC human soldiers who can be left to fight for themselves or enlisted as cannon fodder. There are crowds of panicking civilians, too. The PlayStation blog post announcing the update’s release suggests that you’ll be “punished” for accidentally shooting them, but that’s not the impression given by the below orgiastic trailer.

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“What if Resident Evil and Frogger had a boomer shooter baby?,” teases the trailer blurb for FPS Frog Legs. Stop, stop. You had me at Frog. Then you had me again when I saw the frog using a super shotgun, and then once again when they used a BFG. Then, inconceivably, you had me twice more reading the Steam page. Once when I learned the game was about 40 minutes long, and then again when I noticed it costs two quid. Trailer? Yes. I already said there was. Please, keep up.

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Now we’re cooking with asbestos: Warhammer Skulls, the yearly power armoured excite-o-thon hosted by Boltgun actor Rahul Kohli, returns this Thursday. It’s traditionally a time of reveals and revelry, with the Mechanicus sequel a likely contender for the spotlight this year. You can watch it live on TwitchHam at 17:00 BST/12:00 EST/9:00 PST. Here’s a teasytrailyhypeyshouty in the meantime.

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Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a “Slow Life RPG” in which you live out 14 different lives in… hold on, record scratch and/or Gru’s Plan fourth panel – let me run that premise by myself again. I have to live 14 different lives? How is that “slow”? I have a hard enough time keeping up with one life in the amateurishly designed role-playing game we call reality, with its saddening shortage of rideable dragons.

Ah, but of course developers Level-5 are merely being cute with their framing. By “lives” they really mean classes or character jobs. In this blend of open world boglin basher and island town-builder, you will switch lives like you’re, well, exactly like you’re putting on different coats and hats, going by the trailer. Those 14 lives are split between three self-explanatory categories: under Gathering Lives we find farming and fishing, while Crafting Lives include blacksmithing, alchemy and such, and Combat Lives are all about ending them.

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Sending my trading vessel to sail the seas of Anno 117: Pax Romana offers up a cornucopia of dangers and discoveries. Dastardly pirates. Lush islands. New leaders to barter and play diplomacy with. Most of all though, it allows me to discover hitherto unknown depths of petty jealously, as I realise how much nicer everyone else’s city layout is compared to mine. Time to go demolish several family’s houses and rearrange them in a slightly more aesthetically pleasing manner it is, then.

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In classic me fashion, I swanned off for a few days just as another graphics card fracas has spilled out into public view. At the centre this time is the previously unassuming RTX 5060, which you may have noticed is due for launch today yet only has a handful of “hands-on previews” to tell you how big of a graphics it does. Allegedly, that’s because Nvidia have been keeping hold of the drivers needed for full reviews, only providing them at the eleventh hour to press outlets that have previously run these previews. No preview? No review, at least until the drivers release publicly later today, and what’s more, the same reports say that these previews were only offered under strict testing provisos set by Nvidia themselves.

According to VideoCardz and Hardware Unboxed, the mandated test conditions supposedly range from only allowing certain games for benchmarking – judging from the previews currently online, these were Doom: The Dark Ages, Avowed, Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy and Marvel Rivals – to the more egregious demand that RTX 5060 performance figures would focus on DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation (MFG). And, in turn, would only be compared to results from older XX60 GPUs that lack DLSS frame gen support entirely.

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“What morbid force is calling you deeper into the heart of the caves?” asks the Steam page for The Cave Diver. It ain’t calling me, developer Ovsko. I read the opening words of your description and immediately started running away from my laptop. I’m still running, in fact. This article is being breathlessly dictated to Oisin over the phone. I’m somewhere in the vicinity of Luton, now, and hope to make it all the way to Scotland by the weekend.

After that, there’ll be the problem of securing naval travel as I continue my headlong flight. Then I’ll have to worry about frostbite as I gallop past the North Pole and begin my long traversal of the Pacific. At some point I will reach New Zealand, which – according to this handy antipodal mapping site – is approximately as far away from The Cave Diver Steam page currently loaded on my laptop as I can get without venturing into outer space. I do not rule out venturing into outer space, which is notable for its complete and categorical deficit of caves.

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Despite the best efforts of all concerned, there are once again new PC games this week. See how they frolic among the days ahead, trampling all over our life commitments and need for tranquility like boisterous, fugitive oxen. Please equip yourself with a broom, weighted net and klaxon and help me herd them back into the pens, for proper disassembly. Here are a few I’ve rounded up already.

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If internet videos with titles like “Supersonic Golf Ball to the Forehead” have taught us anything, it’s that a slow motion chthonic mace to the dome is a weighty chthonic mace to the dome. So goes the thinking being Doom: The Dark Ages liberal dolloping of slow motion effects all over its melee attacks and parries. The FPS does away with the series’ canned glory kills, so it’s nice to take a split second of mud time to catch your bearings where you can. Still, the game isn’t exactly shy about its application.

I was watching a Doom 3 retrospective last night that talked about how the original copies of the game came with a note explaining that “Doom 3 is not for cowards!”. By contrast, the amount of accessibility options and sliders in The Dark Ages, alongside Id saying that it was ” a game for all Slayers!” is, you know, at least one nice reminder that games are far less twattish than they used to be. In some ways, at least. One thing those sliders don’t allow for, however, is removing the abundance of slow motion effects. Once again, modders have our backs. Thank you, modders. That’s my favourite back and I’d strongly dislike having to replace it.

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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 (I’d like requests though. No Classical Gas), but I want to get back into the habit of posting the column regularly regardless, since the comments are always a medium good time, which is the maximum amount of good time allowed on a Sunday.

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