The Football Manager series is well known as a simulation of real world football, not a full blown RPG, but FM21 coming out this November will come with a heap of new features, including one that will go some small step towards letting you live out your Crusader Kings come Football Manager dreams.
Oh dear, it looks like it’s a Monday, and our impressive sequence of only publishing Our Week in Games on a weekend has come to a crashing end. Not to mention the gap of a few years that we had before restarting this old chestnut of course. The gaming world seems to be in a pleasant sense of tranquility at the moment, Sony and Microsoft are drip feeding tidbits about their new machines, but nobody around the business is making any huge PR blunders (or worse). Writing that on a Monday though probably jinxes us for the rest of the week, but don’t blame us!
Anyway, read on for The Witcher TV show ramblings from Chris and find out how Kevin has progressed with Red Dead Redemption 2.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York weaves a familiar tale. Yet it is not a tale familiar out of triteness, but rather in its bleak and despairing contemporaneity. Shadows of New York artfully depicts our 2020 hell-scape, holds it up as a mirror and doesn’t so much ask whether or not we’re fucked as yell it in our faces.
It is a tale of a debauched, grotesquely wealthy elite presiding over a city of broken, desperate people, haunted by an impending apocalypse—climate-induced, technological, viral, pick your horror—precious few seem inclined to curtail, let alone prevent.
And this apocalypse cares not a whit for whether you’re human or vampire; after all, Kindred were once human themselves, and its ruling body, the Camarilla—so intent on maintaining the status quo at all costs—a potent metaphor for a global system that refuses to change, adapt, or evolve.
Even when everything is at stake (soz).
Gaming can be a funny old world at times. You spend ages developing what you hope will be an amazing game full of potential, only to find player counts drop significantly mere weeks after launch. This is the situation Square Enix/Crystal Dynamix find themselves in with their latest Marvel’s Avengers game.
As Far As The Eye (AFATE) is a procedurally generated strategy and survival game based on a hexed map in which you build, gather resources and achieve set objectives before moving onto the next area and eventaully to the center of the map and final objective ‘The Eye’.
They say the Devil, or perhaps the WompRat, is in the details. I don’t think there’s a game I’ve played recently that epitomises this as much as Star Wars: Squadrons (SW:S) does. There’s just something in the way your avatar flips switches in the cockpit, the way they punch the console when trying to reboot or the little between-mission conversations with your wing-mates that makes the whole experience something greater than the sum of it’s parts.
But what is the final tally then….?
For a long time I’ve wanted a game based on War of The Worlds. Not the 2005 Hollywood blockbuster featuring Tom Cruise, but something that follows the original novel by HG Wells. I’ve wanted a game that allows me to first-hand experience the terror of alien cylinders crashing into the landscape and disgorging a terrifying force of gigantic unstoppable machines. It would be a game where you spent your time not battling an alien menace, but running for your life, desperately searching for food and shelter as you make your escape.
Believe it or not, someone appears to be making precisely that. …
It may well have been a week turned on its head by the hospitalisation of Trump, but here at Reticule Towers we’re focused on the games. This week we have tales of abandonware, political intrigue, climactic boss battles and Kevin being under the hilarious misconception that he’s anywhere near the end of Red Dead Redemption II. …
Set during World War II, Partisans 1941* has you controlling Alexey Zorin, a member of the Red Army who escaped from a German prison camp as he builds his band of Partisans and fights back against the German occupation of Russia. The game mixes ideas from a number of genres but primarily consists of real-time strategy, stealth and basic resource and base management.
I’ve been playing the Dual Universe Beta, by Novaquark studios and I’ve reached a point where I think I can comfortably give you my verdict on the game as you’ll likely find it, were you to jump in now.
My initial work-in-progress thoughts on the Beta can be found here.
So then….. what DO I think?