.jpg/BROK/resize/1920x1920%3E/format/jpg/quality/80/asus-rog-zephyrus-g14-2022-(1).jpg)
Aha, another gaming laptop that conveniently lets me do a three-in-one review. The new Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is a more mature-looking replacement for the 2021 version, while also introducing two brand new components from AMD: the Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU and the Radeon RX 6800S graphics chip. Much like the key internals of the MSI Raider GE76, then, these components are up for first-time testing as much as the rest of the laptop is.
Welcome back to the third edition of The RPS Time Capsule, a monthly feature in which the RPS Treehouse puts their hivemind together to pick their favourite, bestest best games from a specific year to be preserved until the end of time. In the spirit of keeping you on your toes, this time we've set our sights on the best games from 2014. Which games will make the cut and ascend to the realms of the PC gaming elite? Find out below.
The makers of cooperative Warhammer FPS Vermintide today finally announced a release date for the far-future follow-up, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. Its ragtag gang will start rooting out Chaos on the 13th of September, which, yes, does mean the game is delayed again. But this time they're committing to an actual date.
Diablo meets The Boys is the four-word elevator pitch of Stitch Heads and Raw Fury's new isometric hack and slasher - and judging from the amount of loot, blood and minced limbs I saw in my hands on demo last week, I'd say they're pretty bang on the money, albeit with an extra dash of Borderlands thanks to its cel-shaded comic book visuals. Whichever way you slice it, though, Superfuse makes a striking and violent first impression.
Perhaps it's because I'm playing as its Berserker class, a large walking slab of man muscle whose axe and (comically large) fists can pulverise anything and everything standing in its way. Or maybe it's because the devs have given me free rein of the game's extensive skill tree, letting me pile in dozens of points into attacks, abilities and power-ups normally reserved for later on. Superfuse may be a loot-driven hack and slash with hundreds of different weapons and armour components to pick from, but its skill tree is equally vast, giving you as much flexibility in how your attacks play out onscreen as your various wardrobe choices - and some of its effects are deliciously gory.
“Graveyard’s full,” says Timothy Hall, the man prodding the bones of the piano at the saloon in Grackle. It’s a concise expression of everything the town’s been through: the rampaging bandits, the cannibal kidnappings, the swirling tornados. Filling the graveyard has been a solemn bid for order in the wake of so much chaos.
It’s not that way in Bripton, the next town over. The graveyard there is uncannily empty, save for a similarly bare tree. But you can change that, should you so choose: shoot up the bank or fight a duel and, the next time you return to that settlement, new plots will have appeared for every life snuffed out. Weird West even suggests you head to the local cemetery to loot any bodies you’ve missed - though its reputational system implies you should ensure nobody’s watching first.
The Russian studio behind Loop Hero have encouraged would-be-players to pirate their game if they're unable to buy it due to the sanctions against Russia. Access to some payment systems has been lost following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, so the devs say if you can't figure out a way to buy it, hey, just download it. The route-building dungeon-crawler's publishers, Devolver Digital, have supported this.
Nightmare Reaper is rad, which is something I didn't think I'd say. DOOM and its DOOM-like spawn don't often do it for me. Bouncing around an arena and carving demons into hunks of meat gets a bit repetitive for my tastes. Which is weird! I love FPS games and repetitive things, like dying in Hades over and over again.
I'm into Nightmare Reaper because it's repetitive... but not. It's a roguelike DOOM-inspired shooter where you blast through procedurally-generated levels and their demonic denizens, earn cash, put points into a skill-tree, and get as far as you can. The quest for loot has elevated this from a potential "Meh" to a solid, "Oh yeah".
Intel are at last ready to share more about their Arc Alchemist graphics cards, with a major live event set for today (March 30th). It’s going to focus on Arc’s mobile GPUs for laptops, rather than the long-awaited desktop graphics cards, but either way we could get our first extended look at Intel’s new hardware in action. And since we now have our fancy liveblog thingy, why not watch along here, reading my hot takes and sharing your own?
One month after announcing Street Fighter 6, Capcom have waved goodbye to Street Fighter V with a big patch they're caling the 'Definitive Update'. It sets what I guess is the final meta, overhauling balance by tweaking characters and even giving some whole new moves. It also spruces the place up a bit with new graphical filters and music.
Indie game studio Funomena, best known for working on Wattam and Luna, could close by the end of this month if they don't find investment. This is the same studio that featured in People Make Games' recent investigation into abuses at Funomena, Mountains, and Fullbright.
I've got at least two jobs - three if you count parenting, four if you count eating as many salted cameral brownies as I can - but I still love games about jobs. That's what the latest Steam sale is about. The SimFest: Hobby Edition sale features "games that attempt to simulate a hobby or job", whether that's running a zoo, driving a truck, or making magic potions.
Being able to construct towers and barricades is one of Fortnite's defining features, but the launch of the battle royale's Chapter 3 season 2 posited: what if nah? It removed building entirely, and that was around nine days ago. Now there's a new update which renames Fortnite's main mode to "Zero Build", suggesting the change might stick around for a while.
There sure are a lot of “world’s fastest” gaming CPUs around these days. Just two weeks after AMD confirmed a date and price for their own champion, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Intel have formally unveiled the Core i9-12900KS: a new addition to the 12th Gen Alder Lake lineup that promises superlative performance and up to 5.5GHz clock speeds.
That’s all less than five months since the launch of the original Intel Core i9-12900K, which as far as I can tell actually is the best CPU for gaming right now in pure performance terms. And the Core i9-12900KS is even set to beat the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to shelves, releasing on April 5th to the Ryzen’s April 20th street date. No brakes on the top-tier processor train, it seems.
Those adorable slugcats will return with friends in an expansion for Rain World. Named Downpour, the add-on will include ten new regions with thousands of maps, five new slugcats with their own abilities and stories, and two new modes. I'm certainly interested in the Safari mode which will let us poke around biomes and play as different creatures. Check out the trailer below.
Deep breath. The Cycle: Frontier is a free-to-play PvPvE first-person shooter. Whew, that's a lot of parts smushed together, but think of it like a baby's first Hunt: Showdown. You're a Prospector, tasked with descending into Fortuna 3, an alien planet filled with minerals and plant matter and dinosaurs. Corpos hire you to get these goods and bring them back safely. The catch is other players and inconvenient helicopter schedules. Other Prospectors will murder you for your precious rocks and weeds, so your aim is to get a helicopter out of Fortuna before this happens. It's a setup where success breeds success in its current closed beta form, but failure also begets frustration. In the end, you might wish Fortuna was yours and yours alone.
Remember, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is not a Borderlands game. In fact, it’s so much not a Borderlands game that it has almost identical visuals, PC system requirements and graphics options to Borderlands 3. The odds, right? Still, for seasoned fans of the loot shooter series, this does make the search for Wonderlands’ best settings a treading of comfortably familiar ground. Even if there are wizards this time.
It all started going wrong when I died taking on the old McDuckitt job. In Abermore, you play as a thief making a name for themselves in its titular city. Every day you wake up, leave your apartment and hit the streets, chatting to the locals, picking up a bit of info, even gambling a bit. The folks you meet are from the shadier side of society and they'll hire you for jobs. Sometimes it’s simple burglary, sometimes it's breaking a vase, or snatching a specific bit of loot. There’s even a guy who keeps trying to offer me wet work! It all boils down to the same thing though: sneaking around some rich guy’s place, disabling the security, avoiding or taking down the occupants, and getting out without being caught. Afterwards, I fence the loot and head to bed.
It's all building up to Abermore's central heist: The Feast of the Lucky Few. It's also my only chance to rescue the famous Hanged Man, a dame I met on the boat over here. They're the thief of thieves! A living legend! But the tyrant king grabbed her before we got ashore and she’ll be executed in eighteen days if I don’t break her out. That’s eighteen nights to prepare, eighteen jobs to build the resources, the connections I need for the heist of a life time. A terrible shame, then, that alarm bells started ringing almost as soon as I started playing.
