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Arrowhead have released a new Helldivers 2 update – patch 01.000.100 – which designer Alex K describes as “the first round in a never-ending series of balance changes”. The patch nerfs three of what were hitherto the best Helldivers 2 guns and gear pieces – the SG-225 Breaker shotgun, the RS-422 railgun, and the SH-32 shield generator backpack, all of which break Arrowhead’s pretty straightforward golden rule that “each gun has its purpose and none is strictly better than another”.
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Yesterday I banged out the first in a torrid trilogy of Dragon’s Dogma 2 features, centring on hands-on time with the game’s Mystic Spearhand “vocation” or class. Look out for parts 2 and 3 over the coming week. During the hands-on, I also spent 45 minutes in the shoes of another advanced Dragon’s Dogma 2 class, the Magic – sorry, Magick Archer. You might remember this vocation from the original Dragon’s Dogma; then as now, it combines relatively straightforward bow combat with various breeds of enchanted ammunition, for a surprisingly technical skillset that is enjoyable to faff around with.
Following game concepts including Max Payne with vampires, Kojima’s Strands with witches, organ trading, and an airport for aliens currently run by dogs, Xalavier Nelson Jr’s Strange Scaffold studio are back with another doozy. They’ve announced a release date of April 16th for Life Eater, a game about a modern-day druid who must kidnap and sacrifice people every year to sate a dark god and keep the world from ending. I know what you’re thinking: surely he’s insane in the membrane, insane in the brain. But what if he isn’t?
It’s a new month, which means a new set of games arriving on Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service. The arrivals begin today with stompy, old school shooter Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, and will continue before the advent of spring with the mechs-and-plants craft ’em up Lightyear Frontier and telekinetic adventure Control Ultimate Edition, among others.
Meta keep emailing me to tell me my Oculus account is going to be deleted on March 29th. It’s only today, seeing other people talking about it, that it occurs to me: this is not personal. Meta is perhaps going to delete your Oculus account on March 29th as well, if you have one.
You’ve got until that date to migrate your account, and if you don’t you’ll lose all your purchases.
A little while back, Embracer Group sadly shut down Timesplitter’s studio Free Radical Design in a typical case of Embracer-led restructuring. After the closure, a former Free Radical developer revealed they’d worked on a “clone” of Fortnite before it transitioned to a remake of Timesplitters 2. And now footage has emerged of the cancelled project, which certainly does look like a team shooter reminiscent of Epic’s epic.
Berserk Boy is the legally distinct lovechild of Sonic The Hedgehog and Mega Man X, on account of how it fondly emulates the Blue Blur’s speedy momentum and the Dorky Mega’s various power-altering suits. That anatomically tricky relationship is enticing by itself, but even if those retro action platformers just register as historical relics in your memory, Berserk Boy does enough that’s new and interesting that it doesn’t need to rely on aping its inspirations. My only beef is that credits rolled before I was properly given a chance to test my newfound robo-bashing muscles.
Considering it’s one of the most gawwwwjuss games you can get one o’ them PS5 machines, Horizon Forbidden West’s upcoming PC version has some pretty fair-looking system requirements. The newly released specs, which you can find below, suggest that pushing the open world, robosaur-slaying sequel to its most extreme settings will take a burly graphics card – but likewise, lower settings and resolutions can get by with much creakier hardware.
As someone who finds games about cars wot go fast only intermittently interesting, I’d expect a game about cars wot go slow to be positively soporific. Speed is, ultimately, the modus operandi of a car. It gets you where you need to go faster than a horse, and doesn’t do annoying things like pooing on your patio or dying (also, potentially, on your patio). Surely, then, playing a game about cars moving at the speed of a dead patio horse defeats the point, like playing a first-person shooter where all the guns fire backwards.
Expeditions: A Mudrunner Game demonstrates this not to be the case. This bouncy, slimy offroading simulator is the most fun I’ve had with an imaginary car since 2018’s Jalopy. This is partly because it is as much a physics puzzler filled with limitless conundrums as it is a game about driving, but also because, like Jalopy, it envisions the car as something more than a way to boost egos by doing a big circle.
Crema, the creators of much-liked Pokemon-like Temtem, are teasing a new untitled game set in the same universe – the mystifying Project Downbelow. It isn’t Temtem: Swarm, aka Temtem Vampire Survivors, nor is it Temtem 2. But it will “try out new things we would love to see in a hypothetical Temtem 2”, including a new combat system running on a “stronger” game engine. The tease accompanies news that Crema are making significant changes to Temtem as part of the game’s update 1.7 – for one thing, they’re getting rid of the whole microtransaction system. Temtempetuous times indeed!
