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It’s dark outside and I can hear the distance wails of a screaming fetus. One of my children has been accidentally blown to pieces, my wife has been decapitated and there’s an old lady with a knife slowly wandering round my house trying to kill me. I am most definitely back at Lakeview Cabin.
Dirt 5 is a visual tour de force, and anyone who will be picking it up on the next-gen machines is going to be in for a treat with a racer that offers you something new to look at around every corner. But scratch beneath the shiny exterior, and what’s left? …
A few months ago I reacquired my boxed copy of IO Interactive’s Freedom Fighters, which had been languishing at my mother’s for close to a decade. The game had a huge impact on me back in 2003 (inspiring the game idea that eventually became A Place in the West, which is a Half-Life comic I write for) and I longed to revisit it. Unfortunately, but also predictably, Freedom Fighters was no longer compatible with my machine.
So it was something of a delight when IO unexpectedly dropped the game on digital stores last week. I had a bunch of other titles lined up to play, but I just couldn’t stop myself from diving back in to see if the game I’d fell so in love with as a kid was just as I remembered it.
For the most part the answer is a pretty decisive “yes”.
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. …
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.
While Chris was reviewing The Persistence, he made a passing comment that it wasn’t as terror inducing as the Shalebridge Cradle from Thief: Deadly Shadows. It sparked a conversation in our Discord about our time with Thief, and more specifically The Cradle. As good games journalists, we decided that sharing Our Tales of the Crade with a wider audience would be worthwhile.
The release of Project CARS 3 caught me slightly off guard, and that shouldn’t be of much surprise as recent racing game focus at The Reticule has been on art of rally, F1 2020 and Dirt 5. Development has again been handled by Slightly Mad Studios with Namco Bandai handling publishing duties, even though Slightly Mad are now part of the Codemasters empire. Having sunk a few hours into the game, I wonder whether the change of ownership of Slightly Mad has had an impact on the game itself with a few elements not quite hooking up as they could have done. …
The news that Nvidia are releasing a new set of GPU’s labelled ’30-series’ has been a hot topic over the past week or so. Having built my last two PC’s I like to keep up to date with the new tech but try not to get too excited because I know deep down I don’t have enough cash to upgrade every time something new is released. The starting price of £469 for the RTX 3070 in the UK is very tempting however and much cheaper than I’d have imagined a card that outpaces the 1080 Ti to be.
Oh, and there was also the small matter of the Xbox Series reveals and Nintendo stealthily unveiling some more Zelda.
I’m sure most of us are experienced in one way or another with online multiplayer gaming and the highs and lows that go hand-in-hand when playing with other real people.
This week gamers have proven that community spirit still survives even in competetive enviroments when they banded together to eliminate a cheater in Fall Guys. This is just one example of many you can find on social media but it appears that until the developers implement better cheat detection, the community have got it sorted.
The love is even spreading to Escape From Tarkov where one PMC managed to heal a passing traveller (another PMC) and be on his merry way without a single shot being fired in each others direction, sacriledge!
As our weekly Our Week in Games feature has returned, so has my Football Manager habit. I’m big proponent of playing in the Welsh league system especially as Football Manager 2020 includes the JD Cymru North and South. And with the next game in the series expected to be coming later than normal (understandably all things considered), but normal football resuming, a top five list of challenges in the Welsh leagues seems fitting. …