Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Swashbuckling third-person action-RPG Flintlock: The Siege Of Dawn is, amongst other things, a gentle homage to New Zealand, developer A44 Games’s country of origin. You do have to look for it, mind you. The game’s art direction at large is an elegant hodgepodge of inspirations that deserves to be unpicked carefully after release.

Main character Nor Vanek – who is on a mission to massacre various escaped underworld gods – is kind of a Napoleonic superhero. Rakishly attired in braided frock coats and knee-high boots, she can use sparking “blackpowder” pistols both to inflict damage and to double-jump or dodge while performing snappily choreographed, one-handed sword and axe combos, straight out of God of War. As regards locations, there are pale medieval citadels with stained-glass windows, coffee shops run by eerie, many-armed “Hosts” that glean from the ambience of Turkish bazaars, and certain other fantastical areas and characters – including Nor’s spectral fox sidekick Enki – that are influenced by ancient Mesopotamian mythology.

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Maintaining the thrum of a finely-tuned citybuilder has to be one of the most satisfying acts of video game plate-spinning around. Nursing that constant flow of foot traffic, produce and profits, all of them teetering on a carefully honed knife-edge, that’s the good stuff right there. Of course, it’s not always the threat of imminent and total collapse that fuels these mighty engines of urban planning. Sometimes it’s the simple pleasure of building itself, watching a scrub of dirt track rise up into an advanced superhighway of architectural wonder. The best of these more relaxed kinds of citybuilders – your Dorfromantiks and your SteamWorld Builds et al – still involve plenty of plate-spinning; it’s just that they won’t ever fall over if you take your eye off the ball for a moment.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles sits at the citybuilding crossroads of ‘relaxed’ and ‘something more’. It wants to be an easy-going kind of builder, as nothing fundamentally bad happens when the wheels stop turning for a moment. For the most part, you’re free to build where and however you please, constructing imposing fortresses jutting out into the ocean from mere scraps of rock. But it also gets more bogged down in the minutiae of resource flow, worker management and conquest and expansion via muddy, ill-defined combat procedures than it probably should. It always feels on the precipice of becoming something bigger, bolder and more boisterous than it ever really achieves, dipping its toes into the murky waters of its lonely Ursee without truly ever getting its feet wet.

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Journey developer thatgamecompany have announced the PC early access release date for their social MMO Sky: Children Of The Light. Having already built up a substantial community on both mobile and consoles, PC players will now be able to join in on April 10th on Steam. There will be some special PC-themed goodies available to celebrate the occasion, too, including a Companion Cube prop from Portal, a Journey cosmetic pack, and double rewards for sending Heart gifts to other players.

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Palia, a cute-looking life sim MMO inspired by e.g. Stardew Valley, has been in beta since last year, but now it’s officially out on Steam, where many more people can download and play it. With this launch comes a pretty substantial update – Patch 0.178, full notes here – which adds a new questline and Temple to explore, new furniture, and a bunch of new spring flowers and trees to grow in your garden. There is also a giant plushi frog, listed under ‘Adjustments’. The patch notes say simply “What does he want? Does he come in peace?” which makes him sound way more sinister than I think he is, but as you can see from the screenshot, he isn’t not sinister.

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Remember when Ark: Survival Evolved was announced to be getting an animated series with a star-studded cast including the likes of Michelle Yeoh, Russell Crowe, Elliot Page, David Tennant and Malcolm-bloody-McDowell? I sure didn’t! That was over three years ago during the heights of a worldwide pandemic, though, so I think we can forgive ourselves a little. Anyway, Ark: The Animated Series has now arrived out of the blue, dropping its first six episodes on streaming service Paramount+.

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Generative AI is one of the biggest debates raging across not just video games, but art and culture as a whole at the moment. Into that debate has waded the CEO of graphics card giants Nvidia to drop a prediction that can only be described as searingly flammable: we’ll see games where everything seen on-screen is fully generated by AI, in real-time, within the next 10 years.

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Everyone likes Dragon’s Dogma 2, it seems. Except everyone also seems to dislike one specific part of Dragon’s Dogma 2: the fantasy sequel’s microtransactions. But that one dull spot has already been polished out by modders, who are offering more convenient (and less expensive) ways to pick up items that you’ll either need to potentially grind or cough up real money for.

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It’s been nearly eight years since the launch of Civilization VI, which is the longest gap between mainline Civ entries the series has seen since the first game appeared way back in 1991. It’s the perfect time for a new contender to rise and claim the historical 4X throne, and indeed, many have tried, and some have even come close. Soren Johnson and the gang at Mohawk Games struck gold in Old World by zeroing in on the ancient era and opening up the personal lives of rulers and generals as fields of play. Humankind let you fuse and blend cultures over the arc of time like a world-historic Doctor Moreau.

Millennia is perhaps the Civ-like that’s clung most tightly to the genre’s apron strings. It has a few new ideas that sound interesting on paper, but even as back-of-the-box features, they’re clearly not meant to significantly disrupt the established order. This is a strategy game that very much wants to be like Civilization, and has a lot of enthusiasm for the subject matter. Unfortunately, it isn’t a particularly good student.

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If ever there were a game not to play on a Monday when you’ve had minimal sleep and basically want to crawl under the table and eat three-day-old pizza, that game – or rather, “tech demo” – is Fractal Sailor. The work of Struct9 founder Matej Vanco, it hands you a distressingly unwieldy and roofless hovership and cuts you adrift in a vast ocean of malevolent mathematics.

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On top of announcing the release date for Final Fantasy 14‘s next expansion, Dawntrail, at PAX East over the weekend, producer Yoshi-P set Final Fantasy tongues wagging even further by mentioning the words “Final Fantasy 9” and “secret” in the same sentence. Many of the pre-order and special edition bonus items players can get with the upcoming Dawntrail expansion are suspiciously FF9-themed, you see, but when pointing this out to PAX-goers, Yoshi-P said “the reason is a secret” for now, sparking fresh rumours about Square Enix’s supposed Final Fantasy IX remake/remaster.

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