As if 2020 couldn’t get any worse, this week I discovered that House House have added two player functionality to Untitled Goose Game. As if climate change, the rise of fascism and the shrinking size of Quality Street tins weren’t enough signs of the apocalypse we now live in, now there are two horrible geese to worry about.
But what have we been playing while the world burns? …
If we did classic scores rather than Verdict’s, The Outer Worlds would have been given that classic 7/10 score. A rating which indicates a game is well rounded and generally pretty good, without being outstanding. You know, something you might pick up when it’s on offer. Funnily enough, The Outer Worlds has just landed on Steam and GOG after a year of Epic exclusivity with a two week 50% off deal, and for £24.99, I’d suggest it’s something worth your while picking up. …
While scrolling through my Twitter feed the other day, I saw someone mention that The Order 1886 was on offer on the PlayStation Store with a hefty 75% reduction. It’s a game that I was interested in checking out on release, but was put off by the price and rumours of a five and a half hour playtime. Now though, for less than a tenner? I was in.
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. …