Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

R.E.P.O is a six player co-op extraction spooper that currently sits atop Steam’s best seller charts, having amassed around 70k players the week following early access launch on Feb 26, and another 160k since then. That’s around 230 thousand players avoiding knifey chef frogs and persistent ducklings while extracting valuables to fill a cash quota. It’s a bit Lethal Company but even heavier on the absurdity.

As far as I can tell, this popularity comes down to two things. Firstly, the game is a verdant flub factory, stuffed with the sort of chaotic physics mishaps that translate very well to short video clips. Even the loot extraction point can kill you if lingered in too long. Secondly, the ‘Jim Henson does Nier Automata’ robots you play as flap their mouths in time to your mic chatter, making even the most bowel-curdling fear shrieks from your teammates look like a hammy comedy routine.

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Back in Total FebWar, the Total War: Warhammer III team penned a desperate missive in entrail fluids, full of scrawled warnings about the changes coming to the strategy game‘s AI. With their last ounce of strength, they rolled out a beta test for the planned tweaks. Now, the results are in, circling in the eerily fallow wake of over 50,000 campaigns, like carrion crows with tangible datasets grasped tight in their beaks. Thanks, death crows!

The new query system worked well, with foes no longer cowering from lone enemy agents as if they were doomstacks. The tweaks to faction aggression and potential were shakier, causing some unintended consequence. As such, the upcoming 6.1 patch won’t include changes to how fighty or flourishing your foes are. “Faction Potential changes made minor factions significantly easier to defeat for major factions,” reads the blog. “This in turn caused Elector factions to perish too early and to be ineffective even when brought back”. Makes sense. Can’t summon the dead, unless you’re one of the several Warhammer factions that can actually do that quite easily.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Three weeks! Three weeks is all it took before Booked For The Week patron saint Gene Wolfe got mentioned again. Welcome back Gene. It’s like you never left.

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I get that in-world the whole appeal of Dune’s Arrakis is all of that spice it harbours, but to be honest the giant sandworms are a bit of a dealbreaker for me. Even still, I have to admit that Dune: Awakening looks pretty neat even with that ever present threat, and a new trailer all about exploring the desert planet that dropped this week has helped pique my interest a little further. For starters, that desert bike looks pretty nifty, my time in Sable taught me that I love a good zoom through beautiful, sandy vistas, and this looks to be similar, even if Dune: Awakening’s world is a bit more hostile.

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Remember when Nvidia announced that Half-Life 2 RTX mod way back in, crikey, 2023? Yeah, I didn’t realise how long it had been either. To be perfectly honest I thought it had already come out, but apparently not, because just this week Nvidia shared that Half-Life 2 RTX is getting a demo next week on March 18th. No, the full mod still doesn’t have a release date, but when do any game projects ever release quickly after they were announced?

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A new week, a new Avowed update, and a pretty hefty one has arrived at that. Before we get on to some of the more notable changes, over on Obsidian’s forum pages where you can read the full patch notes, the developer shared that in the coming weeks it plans to release a roadmap that will “go over some of the plans we have that will be coming to the game over the upcoming year.” Whether that be DLC, free content, or just some planned gameplay changes, I couldn’t tell you, your guess is as good as mine.

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People love to go on and on about how good Titanfall 2’s campaign mode is, and they’d be right to do so, but really we all know there’s one specific level we have in mind when it comes to the sidelined shooter: the time travel one. I don’t care for shooters all that much, online or offline ones, yet I still gave a go because the time travel level really appealed to me mechanically. Dishonored 2’s similarly structured time travel section wooed me similarly, so I was very pleased to discover the newest trailer for Tenet of the Spark this week, an action-adventure game that is basically Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2’s time travel levels made into an entire game.

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Earlier this week, you might have seen the abomination that was an AI-powered version of Horizon series protagonist Aloy. It came as part of a leak that showed Sony experimenting with the ability to chat to video game characters that use OpenAI and Chat-GPT to respond, though Sony quickly saw to scrubbing any evidence of footage using the power of copyright laws. Notably the voice behind this AI version of Aloy was not that of her voice actor’s, Ashly Burch, but the voice actor has offered up her own thoughts on the whole situation.

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I don’t much enjoy sports sims, but sometimes an imaginative spin on a sport will sneak past my guard. Electro Bop Boxing League has spins aplenty. You probably could have stopped at robot boxers, Developer Dob. You didn’t have to give it a swaggering electro swing soundtrack as well. Special moves depicted as old-timey computer punched cards? Soldering limbs back on between rounds with a Repair-o-Gun? Little eggheads in lab coats clinging to the back of my gymrat C3PO as he pounds some would-be Megatron to shrapnel? Referee counts presented as a rebooting sequence? Developer Dob, you are spoiling us!

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In my hectic pursuit of a scoop, I have spent a non-zero amount of today peering at a smudgy image of a London bus sign from a Tides Of Annihilation trailer, trying to work out whether the new gooner-baiting Arthurian slasher has screwed up its portrayal of Britain’s public transport network. If it had, you’d best believe that’d be a headline. I’d have broken the internet with it. “Never mind turning the Dread Knight Mordred into a waifu,” I’d have written, hissing like a kettle. “Those absolute tourists at Eclipse Glow Games have made a mockery of the sacred N19 route from Finsbury Park to Clapham Junction.”

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