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Anime action game Stellar Blade has been confirmed for PC release in June 2025. Developed by South Korean studio Shift Up and published by Sony, it’s about fighting monsters on post-apocalyptic Earth by means of combos, parries and gauge-based super moves. It’s got an open world full of NPC quest-givers and creatures designed by Hee-Cheol Jang, the mad scientist behind the menageries of Okja and The Host. It’s also got a protagonist we can summarise as Bayonetta played straight.
Avowed is almost good, but there’s something so resigned and workmanlike to its quest design and storytelling that it often feels like dog-eared chorelist of Obsidian must-haves, ticked off so aimlessly that the result is a bit like having an RPG described to you by someone late for a bus.
And that should be that, really. I’d run through all the ways Obsidian’s latest didn’t quite do it for me, most of you would go play it anyway because it’s on Games Pass, and we’d all go back to patiently waiting for the sun to explode.
But, god, what a devastatingly gorgeous open-zoned world this is. What a triumphantly weird, sprawling playground of fantasy naturalia. What a treat it is to just climb all over, its design ethos captured in the first magical ring I found offering a 15% buff to parkour speed.
Ignore two thirds of the weapons and just roll a wizard to witness the stodgy melee combat of other classes give way to crackling, cackling spell-slinging. There is such a gulf of quality here it’s like playing two different games. I spent 27 hours having a meh ol’ time until a reinstallation of Nvidia’s loathsome app deleted 200 some screenshots and I had to restart. Why not play a wizard? I thought. Why not indeed. Suddenly, I’m frying whole families of lizards at once with chain lightning and grinning like Palpatine in a pet shop.
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Amazon is currently offering LG 27GP850-B UltraGear gaming monitor for $199.99, a 47% discount from its original price of $379.99.
I had Hell Is Us vaguely pegged as an “arty” game, but then I watched the new release date trailer, which begins with Adam Jensen(‘s voice actor) grizzly-grunting that “when the fury of emotions sparks the wildfire of violence, it dissolves our illusions and exposes the fragile structure of reality”. And I realised that, no, this is some glorious nonsense. Maximum ham. High-concept cheeseville. Pseudostravaganza. I mean all these phrases as compliments. Come now – let your illusions dissolve as the fragile structure of your reality is exposed by the wildfire violence of this furious trailer!
Ex Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick’s recent comments on the Grit podcast regarding “fake lawsuits” brought against Activision Blizzard around 2021 are “false”, “insulting” to alleged victims, and “unsurprising”, a spokesperson for the Communication Workers Of America (CWA) has told RPS.
Kotick appeared on venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins podcast earlier this week, alongside former EA CEO and current Kleiner Perkins advisor Bing Gordon. Discussing the above legal cases alongside petitions to remove him as CEO, Kotick spoke of “fake lawsuits against us and Riot Games making allegations about the workplace that weren’t true,” claiming his former company was “targeted” by the CWA in a bid to increase union membership.
We interrupt our regular schedule of fish puns and naughty jokes about holes to warn you that a huge chunk of celestial debris has a 2.3% chance of impacting Earth in December 2032 and wiping out the city of Bradford. I name Bradford because it’s the first city that occurs to me and also, because several of my ancient enemies live there, but the asteroid could hit anywhere. Where do you live? Maybe wear a hard hat when you go Xmas shopping in 2032. Asteroid 2024 YR4 loiters somewhere along our planet’s orbital trajectory, like a rake in the grass.
If this were the 1980s we’d seek comfort in the pages of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which has the words “DON’T PANIC” in large, friendly letters on the cover. But it’s the twenty-twenties and nobody reads Douglas Adams anymore, so instead I’m playing Neal.fun’s free tool Asteroid Launcher, which lets you pick asteroids of different sizes and compositions like you’re choosing brands of cereal, then splat them capriciously against world map data provided by Apple Inc.
Chinese developers Eclipse Glow Games have revealed Tides Of Annihilation, a fantasy hack-and-slash set in a “twisted”, modern yet Arthurian version of London. It casts you as Gwendolyn, a baby-faced blood-letter who must defeat Avalon‘s demi-gods by *checks notes* throwing the Knights of The Round Table at them.
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Tracking down an RTX 5090 has become an exercise in patience, luck, and frustration. With standalone cards constantly out of stock, prebuilt systems are quickly becoming the most reliable way to secure Nvidia’s flagship GPU.
Hunt: Showdown and Crysis developers Crytek are dismissing an estimated 15 percent of their workforce – around 60 people out of 400 – in the face of “the complex, unfavourable market dynamics that have hit our industry these past several years”. This comes after they paused development of mechsuit FPS sequel Crysis 4 last year, with staff shifting over to Hunt Showdown’s live service reboot Hunt: Showdown 1896. Crytek now say they need to cut back in order to remain “financially sustainable”.
Sharkmob have punched the green light, cracked open the hangar doors and launched a public playtest for their windblown open world extraction shooter Exoborne, which I would gingerly summarise as Anthem meets Just Cause with a touch of PUBG. From today till 17th February at 1pm GMT, 2pm CET, or 5am PST, you’ll be able to get your fill of mech-o-looting via Steam. Here’s a trailer’s worth of wiggly whooshes, big bangs and exowotsits to celebrate. Mmm, exowotsits. They used to be 25p a bag in the 1990s.
