Sonic Frontiers is the next attempt to make Sonic work in a 3D world, with Sega referring to it as the blue hedgehog's "first ever open zone" game. Now there's a first teaser trailer of it in action, showing Sonic zipping around a seemingly vast world and bashing giant robots to bits.
Our Iron Harvest review referred to the real-time strategy game as "Company Of Heroes with mechs", which is a strong pitch. A future update is planning on borrowing yet more ideas from mid-00s strategy games, with the addition of a campaign world map.
Euro Truck Simulator 2's next DLC was going to be headed to Russia, with signifcant work on creating the vast country already finished. Now developers SCS Software say that they've decided not to release the expansion, "so that it is not perceived in any way as being in support of or tolerance of the aggression."
Here we have another AOC gaming monitor, except it’s not just by AOC, but by posh car makers Porsche? It’s the Porsche Design AOC Agon Pro PD32M, a premium 4K / 144Hz beast of a display, and is in fact the second hardware collaboration between these unlikely bedfellows.
It’s also far more ambitious (and expensive) than 2020's AOC Agon PD27. It’s flat rather than curved, but goes for both a higher resolution and a larger 31.5in IPS panel. Its DisplayHDR certification also rises from 400 to 1400, fuelled largely by a switch to more advanced Mini LED backlighting: the same sort as the Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX, one of the best 4K gaming monitors. As a gaming screen, then, it’s got all the right tools, but what exactly about it is Porsche-like?
Perspective puzzlers Monument Valley and Monument Valley 2 are heading to PC this summer. They'll be expanded - not just for bigger screens, but also "with more intriguing impossibilities than ever before."
It's a bold play, releasing a Soulslike in the year of Elden Ring. Let me rephrase that, actually. It's a bold play releasing a Soulslike in any year, let alone the year of Elden Ring. You could snap open any twelve month span like a bulrush and watch many thousands of little Soulslikes disperse into the atmosphere, with only a select few really making an impact.
Steelrising is one of these Soulslike seeds hoping to sink into our screens, sprout, and take root not only in the innards of our Panasonics, but our minds too. From what I've seen, it stands a chance of survival in a saturated land.
Devilish MMOARPG Diablo Immortal is set to launch later this week - but not everywhere. Players in Belgium and the Netherlands won't get a release, likely because the game's microtransactions clash with their gambling laws.
It turns out that free-to-play MMO Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds, which recently launched worldwide, is tied up with the blockchain. Developers Netmarble have also said that they're looking to implement NFTs in to the game by the end of the year.
Vampiric survival crafting game V Rising has been a runaway hit since it entered early access a couple of weeks ago. The developers over at Stunlock Studios have now laid out their current priorities for the game's progress, emphasising that it still has a "journey" before its full release.
Readers may remember my delight over the demo for Little Witch In The Woods, and I'm happy to report that game is now out in early access. It's already much more polished than the demo, with more yet to come. It's a life sim with a bit of a Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing vibe, except instead of farming you are a witch called Ellie (size: small) living in a biome (type: forest).
In the story you start to free the nearby village from cursed vines, and this requires that you catalogue and collect ingredients for spells, and thence expand your repertoire of witchy recipes. At the same time you can trade spells and magical candy with locals for currency, which you can use to improve your little machines - a roaster, a caldron, a press for ingredients - to make even better things, more efficiently. It's a satisfying process of mastery and exploration. But that is not the important bit. The important bit is that Little Witch In The Woods is disgustingly adorable.
To be honest, I found Computex 2022 kind of underwhelming; this is usually the biggest event in the PC gaming hardware calendar, and had returned to Taipei after an all-remote 2021 show, but ended with only a smattering of major announcements in the bag. We got nothing on Intel’s Arc graphics cards, and Nvidia’s keynote revealed some new DLSS games but otherwise went light on GeForce deets.
That said, this year’s show wasn’t a bust either: there was fresh AMD Ryzen 7000 info, Corsair’s first crack at a gaming laptop and, at long last, some PCIe 5.0 SSDs you can actually buy. One day. In the future. That’s in addition to the wackier, moon-shooting tech on display, without which it just wouldn’t be Computex. So, in descending order - from the interesting and sensible to the blinking ludicrous – here are the PC gaming highlights from Computex 2022.
I feel a bit sorry for Crossfire: Legion, which appears to have suffered the worst launch imaginable for a fast-paced competitive RTS game. Since releasing last week, its all time peak of concurrent players is less than 400, and the average daily concurrents have slid down to around 100 people in only a few days. Worse, a fair chunk of this already dwindling community has been sorely narked off due to an apparent misunderstanding over how one of Legion's key features work.
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Megacorp Embracer Group has announced that they are building a games archive, to preserve games culture and save it for the future. The project is in the early stages, but they've already got 50,000 games and consoles stored up waiting to be catalogued.
Sundays are for watching a delivery van reverse into a bollard. Before you hear the crunch, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
Fast Four Word is a clever idea. It's a Wordle-like in which you begin with a four-letter starting word and must enter a new word which changes just a single letter. So if the starting word is AHEM, as it was yesterday, you could change the first letter and enter THEM.
From there, you have 44 seconds to chain together as many new words as you can, with plenty of other twists to make it more challenging.
I'm always interested in card games that stretch beyond pure combat and are used to convey narrative. That's what Foretales does. It's a card game filled with anthropomorphic animals in medieval garb in which you can sneak and barter before or instead of scrapping. Find the trailer below.
Elden Ring is too intimidating for a coward like me, but that only makes the idea of playing it with mates more appealing. The Elden Ring Seamless Co-Op mod enables just that: the ability to team up with a friend, ride your weird horses, and go muck up some bosses together. It's out now in early beta.
