Rock of Ages 2 boulders onto Steam

Rock of Ages was a mad, brilliant game about rolling a boulder through historic scenery, bashing down turrets and avoiding cannon fire until you careered into your enemy’s base. Rock of Ages 2: Bigger and Boulder [official site] – which came out this week – is a more extravagant take on the same formula. Its new boulders have special traits (one glows red hot and then explodes, for example), the scenery is prettier and you have a greater range of defence options at your disposal.

The game is split into two segments: first, there’s an isometric tower defence bit where you place catapults, Da Vinci tanks and, er, sticky cows that can damage the enemy boulder and slow them down. Then, you race your boulder through the traps that your enemy has set up and get to their castle as quickly as possible without taking damage. The art style looks gorgeously silly, and from what I’ve seen it’s retained the first game’s excellent sense of humour.

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Make colourful blobs hold hands in bizarre puzzler Wattam, out next year

Wattam [official site] is a puzzler from the mind of Keita Takahashi, the chap behind Katamari Damacy, which was that very fun Playstation game where you rolled around making stuff stick to you. Wattam was first announced in 2014 but there’s been radio silence for a while as the game hunted for a publisher after being dropped by Sony. Now, Annapurna Interactive (of the excellent What Remains of Edith Finch) have picked it up and it’s coming to PC next year.

It’s a game full of characters of weird shapes and sizes: some look like bright comedy poo, others giant mouths with lolling tongues, some are just amorphous blobs. It’s your job to corral them all together to solve puzzles. That means making them dance, hold hands, and climb on top of each other.

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Gravity bone creator now helping develop Sub Rosa

Early access game Sub Rosa [official site] is both a blocky, physics-based FPS and a corrupt corporate simulator. You jump into its online multiplayer world, enrol with a company and start doing dirty deeds, like carrying out heists on office buildings or hunting down a limousine containing one of the game’s valuable discs.

What I’ve seen looks promising, and it’s just got even more promising, because Brendon Chung has announced he’s helping developer Cryptic Sea make the game. Chung is the chap behind Thirty Flights of Loving and Quadrilateral Cowboy. Those are good games.

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Nihon Falcom’s JRPG Ys Seven makes the jump to PC

Nihon Falcom’s flashy slashy JRPG Ys Seven [official site] is now out on PC, eight years after it first arrived on the PSP. It’s largely the same game as the handheld version upscaled for bigger screens, just with a refreshed translation from the Japanese original. It should run at 60fps at a variety of resolutions and it supports both keyboard-and-mouse and controllers. All good stuff.

You’ve got control of a three-man party exploring a large world that offers a 20+ hour main campaign. The focus is on combat and, unlike some JRPGs, there’s no split between exploring and fighting. I watched publisher Xseed Games stream a bit of it a few months ago and the combat looked smooth and satisfying.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

The whole RPS staff is meeting up next week so ignore whatever we say about playing video games this weekend: in truth, we’re all bulking up on protein drinks and press-ups to win the Annual RPS Pose-Off.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on. (more…)

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Make a song and dance about Figment on 22 September

Musical action game Figment [official site] wowed Adam when he tried it in April with its hand-drawn art and bosses that perform entire song and dance numbers. Now we know it’ll be chiming onto our screens very soon: 22 September, to be exact.

In Figment, you journey into a person’s mind to confront their fears, which range from teeth falling out to spiders. You have to defeat a series of nightmarish bosses along the way, and between them there’s some light platforming segments, simple combat and straightforward puzzles. But what sets is apart is the sound: everything in the world explodes with music when you interact with it.

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Obsidian on Tyranny’s expansion & writing believable evil

Most games that put you into the shoes of the bad guys are about reveling in evil, gleefully causing havoc and destruction like a toddler who’s got into the stationary box. Obsidian’s RPG Tyranny [official site] is different.

“I find a lot of fiction that centers around good versus evil tends to be unsatisfying, as evil always exists as a strawman for the ill-prepared underdogs to beat up with the power of naïve violence and good intentions,” says Matt MacLean, narrative designer for Tyranny. “I think video games often try too hard to make sure you don’t relate to your victims, and so villains are made unrelentingly villainous, and allies are made into some combination of saccharine hangers-on or tear-jerker red-shirts waiting to be killed in order to shock you into thinking death means serious storytelling.”

But how did it all work out, and what new cruelties will the upcoming expansion expose us to?

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