I first played co-op third-person shooter Glitch Busters: Stuck On You at Summer Games Fest last year, and came away really impressed. I played with couch co-op with two members of developers Toy Logic, which was lighthearted, slightly chaotic fun; everything couch co-op should be, right?
So, I thought I’d give the game a whirl but as a solo player. How would a game built for up to four players cope when there’s just one person taking the reins? Well, sort of fine for a bit, then quite agonising, actually. That’s not to say it can’t be a fun time, but bots definitely aren’t a substitute for real people.
The underwater scares of Dredge are about to run even deeper. Developer Black Salt Games have revealed a roadmap for their spooky fishing game, promising four new bits of content coming over the next year including a chiller passive mode, nice quality-of-life additions, and a larger paid DLC pack with a new non-eldritch horror threat.
In the incredibly rare circumstance that you might have had a Kinder Egg as a kid, was the toy ever your favourite part? It sure wasn’t for me. I was all about the chocolate. Sure, I’d crack open the yellow canister inside, let out some variation of, “Oh, an elephant!”, and promptly toss it in the bin and walk away, its destiny consigned to landfill. In the landfill of my brain, I’m currently carving out new space for Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode. It’s available to try now in demo form on PC and consoles, but I’ve been able to play a larger build of it that covered the first two chapters. Sadly, I can’t say it left much of impression.
In case you’re equally bemused by what SF6’s World Tour actually is, this is a new, open world, RPG-style mode in which you make a custom fighter, run around small areas of Metro City and other locations around the globe, and level up. There are moves to learn, side quests to complete, and you can even do mini-game activities such as making pizza. Between all of that, you fight people. Other fighters, unruly gang members, random folk making their way to work in the morning. You can punch almost all of ‘em! There’s a glimpse of the Street Fighter you know and love here with its side-on 1v1 bouts, but everything else around it is unnecessary fluff. In other words, World Tour is the token toy inside the more delicious Street Fighter chocolate.
Turning Attack On Titan’s giant enemies and grapple-hooking sword combat into a video game seemed like a tall order (pun intended), and one that a budget Koei Tecmo treatment seemed doomed to fail. And yet. As I explained in my Attack On Titan: Wings Of Freedom review back in 2016, the game absolutely nailed the series’ action.
As of this week, both it and its sequel are permanently cheaper.
Redfall is Arkane, developers best known for singleplayer immersive sims, trying to take a vampiric bite of open world multiplayer pie. It’s out next week and we now know its system requirements. It’s also, perhaps surprisingly, already Steam Deck Verified.
EA now say that they’re “aware that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor isn’t performing to our standards for a percentage of our PC players, in particular those with high-end machines or or certain specific configurations.” They’re working on fixes.
The Star Wars Jedi: Survivor experience on PC is, at least here on release day, a generally pleasurable Far Far Away fantasy marred by some ugly performance issues. After a few hours’ worth of attempts to get it running on the Steam Deck, I can now – with a face similar to that of Ewan McGregor cry-laughing over child murder – report that Jedi: Survivor is in even worse condition on the handheld. It’s unplayable.
Valve revealed a swathe of new features coming to Steam’s desktop client beta last night, and there are lots of new features that caught my eye. They’re overhauling things like the in-game overlay, creating a new toolbar to house achievements, friends chat and discussions, and creating a new hub that shows you everything that’s happened in the game’s community since you last played it. It also introduces a cool pin feature that lets you stick overlay windows on top of your game – handy if you’re following a guide, say, and don’t want to keep alt-tabbing out. But there’s one thing I’m quite upset about, and that’s the new Notes app. I love a good notebook game, you know? Fiddling out puzzles in Tunic, remembering patterns in The Witness… Notebook games are great. But I fear this new Notes app will kill that kind of note-taking dead. And that makes me sad.
I quite enjoy the vwing-vwing lighstabering at the heart of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which is why it now pains me to have an extended moan about the PC version’s technical troubles.
Despite the odd glimmer of joy, like better-than-expected performance on its lowest system requirements, much about playing Jedi: Survivor on Windows suggests it could have used a little more time in the bacta tank. Sluggishness and stuttering are problems on higher-end graphics cards, even before adding the strain of ray tracing effects, and FSR upscaling often fails to deliver a significant performance boost.
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