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Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters will make its way to Steam on February 19th. It’s a version of 1992 strategy classic Star Control 2 that takes advantage of updates from its long-running open source project, and it’ll be completely free.
Microsoft Flight Simulator‘s free Dune expansion is available now. It features the Royal Atreides Ornithopter from Denis Villeneuve’s movies – with this entire DLC being a marketing tie-in with Dune: Part Two, which releases next month. It includes tutorials, time trials, and a “daring rescue mission”.
Magical first-person shooter Immortals Of Aveum launched last August and by the following month half its development team had been laid off due to poor sales.
In a new report by IGN on widespread industry layoffs, developers who worked on Aveum say it cost around $125 million to make and “no one bought it.”
It seems like just yesterday that we were reporting that the Asus ROG Ally had dropped to £539 in the UK, and now we have a similarly good deal for the US market: the same Z1 Extreme 512GB model for just $599 following a $100 discount at Best Buy.
If you’d been gazing at the present glut of new survival games and bellowing for more, as though engaged in a drinking competition with some kind of cartoon Viking, then rest easy. Gord developers Covenant.dev have announced To The Star, a “whimsical” survival adventure that takes heavy inspiration from Alice In Wonderland, and features a cooking system that lets you blend monster parts with “suppressed emotions”, so as to produce both consumable foodstuffs and weapons.
Helldivers 2 is a third-person co-op shooter that’s centred as much around action as it is comedy. Gigantic insects and red-eyed robots threaten the sanctity of Super Earth and, frankly, this isn’t on. As a Helldiver, you must team up with your compatriots and pulverise these menaces for freedom (a shoulder-mounted laser cannon) and democracy (an aerial bombardment). Seriousness is reserved for the act of extermination, which adds tactility to the familiar motions of a shooter, making for horde management that promotes efficiency and frequent lapses of judgement in equal measure. Helldivers 2 is a slapstick masterpiece.
One of the best things in games is the freeform ability to type commands for another character, then having them respond with voiced dialogue recognising your weird directions. That’s one of the joys of Cryptmaster, an upcoming typing-driven dungeon crawler where one of the first things you can do in the demo is get your disembodied necromancer pal to lick a mysterious metal object to help identify it (it’s a helmet). He’s like if Hand Of Fate’s dastardly dealer was a bit of a dingus and also your only hope of escaping the underworld. I love this guy.
Steam Next Fest may be over for another few months, but dozens of demos are still alive and kicking, it seems – which is good news for me, who still has a good half dozen on my to do list, and also good news for you, as it means you still have time to check out the really quite good demo for Stand-Alone, a fast, 2D hack and slasher where you play as a robot-powered sheep packing a very large sword. Wolves have broken into your home and murdered all your friends, but you play as the one sheep who got away – or rather, a sheep that’s been fused with a surprisingly powerful robot capable of producing a honking great greatsword to make their escape with. Thus begins the wolves’ hot pursuit – not least because this robot also seems to be kind of sleeper agent for them – and your roguelike-shaped quest to avenge your fallen friends.
Much like a lone Super Earther descending from orbit, only to Nope The Heck back to their spaceship after glimpsing the insect hordes, Arrowhead have released and swiftly pulled a Helldivers 2 patch designed to address the new shooter’s server capacity and progression issues. The bugs were too much to handle, I guess! Lord, this news post practically writes itself.
Former Dead Cells lead designer Sébastien Benard is none too chuffed about publisher Motion Twin’s decision to end development of the well-regarded roguelike Metroidvania. A few days ago, Motion Twin announced that the 35th major Dead Cells update, aptly titled The End Is Near, would be its last. Benard feels this is a betrayal of both the game’s community and its current development team, Evil Empire, a spin-off studio who took the reins in 2019.
To be specific, he thinks calling time on Dead Cells is an “asshole move” and “a one-way strategy that leaves people behind” and is designed to clear the decks for Motion Twin’s forthcoming Windblown. Benard initially posted about the news when asked for his thoughts on Discord. Here’s what he wrote, via Eurogamer.
“Since you’re asking me, I’d just say MT did the worst imaginable asshole move against Dead Cells and EE. Having seen first hand the actual situation behind the scene, I can honestly say I’m glad to not be part of this anymore. The official statement is total marketing bullshit, the way this situation happened is on a whole different level. I never imagined my former coop studio would turn out to be such greedy people. I wish the absolute best to EE for their next things, and hope people working there will survive this sudden economic cut.”
