Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. Well, on Tuesday this week, thanks to the four-day Easter weekend. But the games look just as attractive and interesting as they did on Saturday, so what’s the hurry? Check these out!
Like an aggressively competitive thane at a reindeer-piss guzzling contest, 2D tac-and-slash roguelite Sons Of Valhalla never lets up the pace for even a moment. Whether you’re charging across its pixel-art battlefields slashing and burning increasingly tough-to-crack strongholds, or making quick decisions to get the upper hand in its tug-of-war tactics, the only times Thorald is not doing cool violence, commanding others to do cool violence, or upgrading his camps so that he may act in cooler and more violent ways, is when he’s restoring stamina with a cool slug of mead or violently gnawing at health-boosting meat.
Viking Thorald Olavson is a man possessed. A rival Jarl burnt his village and nicked his wife Raya. In his quest to find her, he’s prepared to do anything – even visit England. As Thorald, you’ll butcher your way up a chain of command in your search for Raya across six stages, each of which sits somewhere between the side-scrolling tactics of Kingdom Two Crowns, the lane strategy of a Warpips, and the slashy/blocky/shooty/dodgy of any 2D ARPG you care to name.
So, how was everyone’s long weekend? I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think I may have even sensed the fading ghost of an immeasurably whisper-thin ray of sunshine at one point. Enough! Says a new patch for co-op shooter Helldivers 2. You know who else enjoys basking in the pleasant glow of mildly enjoyable weather when there’s freedoms that need fighting for? Bug sympathisers, that’s who. As such, the developers have gone and added new planetary hazards in the form of blizzards and sandstorms, alongside the usual balance tweaks.
Alongside these reminders that the war for democracy is never comfortable, the efficiently-named Patch 01.000.200 also includes a host of tweaks. Notable among these are balancing changes to the mission type ‘Retrieve Essential Personnel’, which now sounds more manageable. Enemy spawn points have been placed further away from the objective, “to give players a fairer chance of defending the location.” Additionally, fewer civilians are needed to beat the mission on higher difficulties.
If you’re partial to the grim delights of Phasmophobia and not averse to the sicko enjoyments of Lethal Company, you might like new horror game Content Warning, which kind of blends the two and has the additional virtue of being free on Steam till 9am PT/5pm UK on 2nd April.
In this spooky co-op treat from Landfall Publishing, you play a bunch of amateur filmmakers – or tubers, as the kids possibly still insist on calling them – who must board a spaceship, travel to another planet and film anything monstrous they stumble on.
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Final Fantasy 14’s crossover with Final Fantasy 16, as teased last year, arrives tomorrow. The crossover between the MMO and latest single-player entry in the RPG series has the usual selection of goodies up for grabs, including a very cute minion, a not-so-cute (but still kind of cute) mount, some Clive-cleavage armour and more.
XDefiant, the free-to-play arena-shooter – a la Apex Legends, Overwatch 2, Valorant or the multiplayer team-based game of your choice – built around classes and factions from across the Ubisoft universe games from Splinter Cell and Far Cry to Ghost Recon and Watch Dogs, has been delayed. Originally outlined for a launch before the end of March – you’ll note that we’re now in April – the upcoming FPS will apparently now decide a release date after an upcoming stress test for its servers.
CD Projekt Red are no stranger to releasing buggy games, but they’re less keen on microtransactions – at least for singleplayer games. In an interview with a Polish investor site, CDPR’s chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said that they “do not see a place for microtransactions in the case of singleplayer games”, but they wouldn’t rule it out for multiplayer.
The Oculus Quest launched back in 2019, just five years ago, but come May new apps released in the Quest Store won’t be playable on the Quest 1. This isn’t because the Quest 1 isn’t powerful enough to play them anymore, but because developers will no longer be able to upload them and players won’t be able to see them.
It’s part of the planned obsolescence of the Quest 1 which Meta announced last year.
TimeSplitters Rewind, a fan-made remake of the zany shooters’ multiplayer in a single game, might well represent the last gasp of the beloved first-person shooter franchise following the closure of resurrected original developers Free Radical – who were working on their own TimeSplitters reboot – at the end of last year. With over a decade of work already invested in the fan project, however, the team have now released a call for help to overcome development hurdles caused by the ongoing troubled state of the games industry.