Fantasy survival team-shooter sandbox Rend enters early access

Survival sandbox games aren’t exactly rare, but the Norse myth-themed Rend has my attention, thanks to its intriguing structure. Similar to Ark: Survival Evolved, players build, craft, level, fight (or tame) monsters and expand. The big difference here is that the players are split into three rival factions of a few dozen players online at time with an ultimate, server-resetting goal in sight. No getting ganked by random jerks here – you and your faction are in this boat together, and after watching some streamed gameplay (and asking the devs a few questions), this one is on my radar.

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Premature Evaluation – Islands of Nyne: Battle Royale

Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser’s getting hunted down by streamers in Islands of Nyne: Battle Royale. It’s a sci-fi FPS in a lovely alien theme park that also happens to be a massive murder arena full of angry supersoldiers.

Islands of Nyne bills itself as a battle royale for the competitive crowd – specifically the FPS lot – so as I hurtled into my first game, it felt a little bit like I was crashing a stranger’s party. The third-person, messy battle royales that are sprouting up everywhere leave a lot of room for luck and second chances, but Islands of Nyne is all about precision, speed and being shot in the head by a Twitch streamer. It’s been a struggle.

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Sea Of Thieves’s skellington-crewed Cursed Sails update is live

While aesthetically lovely, online swashbuckler Sea Of Thieves probably didn’t have enough meat on its bones at launch. Today’s update, Cursed Sails, is a bit paradoxical then – its roaming crews of evil skeleton sailors add a major new NPC threat to the oceans, just ironically without flesh. Adding a new time-limited quest, plus a goodly chunk of new things to see and do to the base game, and it’s live right now and free for all you scurvy sea-dogs.

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What makes an Overwatch MVP?

When the Overwatch League’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) award was handed to Jjonak of the New York Excelsior, no one was really surprised. His Zenyatta play has undoubtedly been immensely valuable; a key factor in New York’s impressive 34-6 win-loss ratio. The amount of damage he deals far outstrips every other Zenyatta player in the League, and often that of DPS players, too – all without neglecting his healing duties.

Nonetheless, the definition of “valuable” is a subjective one, and the accolade is a useful lens for thinking about what parts of the game and its culture we consider to be of value, and what parts we tend to dismiss or overlook. (more…)

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Retro FPS rework Forsaken Remastered parties like it’s 1998 today

Descent-like hoverbike FPS Forsaken rides again today, remastered by Nightdive. A fascinating relic from an era of over-filtered textures and lurid coloured lighting, Forsaken Remastered takes the ‘6 degrees of freedom’ concept and makes it faster, louder and dumber. Fun, too, especially in its many messy multiplayer modes. While most of Nightdive’s remasters have been as authentic to the source material as possible, this one breaks from the norm, combining the remarkably different PC and N64 versions of the game into a single gestalt whole.

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Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice added VR support today

“More than once during Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice I had to fight the urge to rip the headphones from my ears,” Samuel Horti wrote in his Hellblade review, noting that “as a portrayal of how harrowing it is to live with psychosis it undoubtedly succeeds.” Yeah yeah, but what if you could jam your eyeballs inside psychosis too? Now you may, as developers Ninja Theory today added official support for VR goggles for free. Even if cybergoggs did work with my peepers, I think I might steer clear of jacking into Celtic hallucinations. Though I spent much of last night hugging the toilet while drifting in and out of sleep, so perhaps I’ve already lived it.

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Turtle Beach Stealth 300 review: Great sound, awkward setup

The new Turtle Beach Stealth 300 is a bit of a weird one. It’s a wired headset that comes with a 3.5mm audio connection, but due to its built-in bass amplifier, it also needs to be charged via USB every 40 hours or so – something that, normally, you only need to do if it’s wireless.

Straight off the bat, then, the Stealth 300 is more of a faff than almost every other wired headset on the planet – except, maybe, the Steelseries Arctis Pro and its slightly convoluted GameDAC setup. Are the extra bass beats worth the extra hassle to make it one of the best gaming headsets around? Let’s find out.

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Donut County to swallow us on August 28

Stealing trash is all fun and games until someone loses a town, as Donut County will demonstrate when it at long last launches on August 28th. Greedy racoons with remote-controlled holes are sucking up trash, see, but we get a bit carried away with it and… turns out, trash pandas can be a real force of nature when they’re bored on the toilet fiddling with their iPad. The curious object-swallowing puzzler is coming from Ben Esposito, of Arcane Kids fame, and a new trailer below introduces us to the consequences of this mischief. (more…)

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This Is The Police 2 busts down the door and launches two days early

Sooner than expected (better than delayed because they forgot to press the button, I guess), This Is The Police 2 – sequel to morally messy police management RPG This Is The Police – is out now. Below, the rather intense launch trailer, suggesting that things might be a little more Fargo than Northern Exposure up in these colder climes. Just because you’re out of the big city doesn’t mean things are any simpler.

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Frozen Synapse 2 kicking in the door to August

Turn-based tactical squad shooter Frozen Synapse 2 should launch some time in August, developers Mode 7 Games announced today, seven years after the first came out. The sequel is still focused on squad-based tactical action where all units and sides play their turns out simultaneously, but now it’s built into an overarching strategic level of protecting a whole procedurally-generated futurecity and placating its many factions. Mode 7’s Paul Kilduff-Taylor nods to X-Com: Apocalypse as an inspiration in a new half-hour gameplay video, while also showing off the turn-based murders and faction-juggling. Here, watch it below.

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AMD’s AM4 motherboards get a mid-range face-lift with new B450 chipset

When AMD launched their 2nd Gen Ryzen+ CPUs earlier in the year, they made a pledge that their AM4 motherboard sockets would continue to receive support until the year 2020. To that end, AMD have just announced a brand-new mid-range chipset for AM4 motherboards, the B450. Read below for the full low-down.

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Explosions aplenty in new Fortnite Battle Royale event mode

This week’s Fortnite Battle Royale is a real double blammy, re-adding the exiled guided missile launcher and launching a new event mode filled with explosives and jetpacks – always a sensible combination. 100 players leaping and rocketing around while launching rockets, piloting missiles, and phlunging grenades makes for some silly fun, from the rounds I’ve played. And I’m not just saying that because long-dormant Quake skills have re-emerged to rocketmurder many more people than I usually bag in a round. But that does help.

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Chasm crawls out of the depths and onto Steam

Chasm is that dungeon ‘sploring action-adventure game set in a Metroidvanian mining town where all the civvies keep disappearing, dragged into the depths by bad things. You play as a knight who is investigating this unsettling trend, descending into the caverns and catacombs to see what’s up. It first dug itself in on Kickstarter in 2013 but it’s finally finished and has crawled out of its rocky hole, covered in pixels. Come on, clean yourself up, mate.

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