‘There are times when you want to put GTA down and pick up something else,’ Samson studio founder says: ‘I think there’s a space for us there’

Samson, the open-world crime brawler being developed by Liquid Swords, looks to me like a Grand Theft Auto game leavened with a healthy dose of Condemned: Criminal Origins. It’s a much smaller-scale project than (relatively) recent GTA games, of course—because what isn’t?—but a tale of a low-level mook making his way in a city filled…

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Our favorite open world FPS indie gem is getting New Game+, Spider-Man swinging, and wallrunning later this month

Echo Point Nova is a wonder. Greylock Studio’s indie FPS enchanted us in 2024 with its high-flying, hoverboarding, hyperchill gunplay, and—if ziplining onto a cloud with an energy grappling hook to shotgun blast an enemy soldier during a slow-motion backflip somehow left any room for doubt—it secured a permanent place in our hearts with a…

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Rust is getting hydro power through water wheels that can also be powered by humans: ‘Before you ask, yes, you can force handcuffed players into them’

Not content with adding one kind of sea power to Rust in February’s Naval Update, Facepunch studios has introduced a whole other way to exploit the oceans in its latest patch for the survival game. The Spring Clean update adds a bunch of small but significant changes to the game, but the one that immediately…

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Petit Planet, the upcoming ‘cozy galactic life sim’ from HoYoVerse, is taking signups for a new beta test happening later this month

If you’re looking for something to do in about three weeks’ time, HoYoVerse is now taking signups for a round of closed beta testing for its next game, Petit Planet, that’s set to begin on April 21. Petit Planet puts players in charge of an entire world, contained within the vast Starsea, where they can…

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Bungie provides details on Marathon’s imminent Recon buff ‘by popular demand’, revealing an improved Echo Pulse and a ‘more aggressive’ tracker drone

Recon is my favourite Shell to play as in Marathon, so I was surprised to learn that she is considered one of the weaker characters in Bungie’s extraction shooter. This is true both for the PC Gamer team and, apparently, Bungie themselves. Yesterday, game director Joe Ziegler revealed that Marathon’s intelligence-focussed Shell would be getting…

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Take-Two has seemingly laid off an unspecified portion of its AI team, including its Head of Artificial Intelligence

Take-Two Interactive has seemingly laid off its Head of Artificial Intelligence, alongside an unspecified portion of its AI team, just two months after CEO Strauss Zelnick said the Grand Theft Auto 6 publisher was “actively embracing generative AI”. Luke Dicken joined Take-Two as its Head of Artificial Intelligence in January last year following a decade…

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A former GameStop exec thought building its Steam competitor would be his ‘forever job,’ but the retailer bet the house on digital distribution being ‘a passing phase’

Before a career second act at Nightdive Studios, the recently-retired Larry Kuperman‘s big project was Impulse. It was to be GameStop’s answer to Steam, but it went the way of the dodo in 2014. Kuperman went into his personal history building up Impulse’s catalogue when we spoke at this year’s Game Developers Conference. Kuperman came…

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