PC Gaming
I’ve been hooked on Hell Clock since it was released last month. Few games nail what I want out of a loot-driven action RPG like Diablo, and Hell Clock pulls it off while also having the roguelike-driven improvisation of games like Hades. Hell Clock is a game that wants you to break it, and its…
Balatro is beginning to seem like less of a game and more like an all-encompassing cosmic force that stretches along inscrutable dimensions until everything is folded within it and reshaped into clowns, cards, and hypnotic chillwave. Today, we have yet more evidence thanks to new crossover content for Rusty’s Retirement, the delightful robotic farming idler…
One year after surprise-launching Doom + Doom 2, id Software and Nightdive have done it again—this time with the classic fantasy shooters Heretic and Hexen, which have been bundled together and updated with performance improvements, an “enhanced” soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult, local and online multiplayer, built-in mod support, and more. The new Heretic + Hexen…
There are those games I fondly remember from my school days, and then there are those games I remember being a problem from my school days. Castle Crashers, first released on the Xbox 360 in August 2008, was nearly one of the latter. It took over my college apartment for at least a month, with…
AI is supposed to be helpful, honest, and most importantly, harmless, but we’ve seen plenty of evidence that its behavior can become horribly inaccurate, flat-out deceptive, and even downright evil. (Yes, that last link is the MechaHitler thing.) If you think I’m being hyperbolic by using the word “evil,” I’m not: a new paper on…
I’ve played an excessive amount of survival crafting games this year, and while I knew I could be a bit of a pain in the ass to play these things with, it was never more clear than when I was juggling Dune: Awakening, Abiotic Factor, and Valheim, and tutting at my friends’ creations in constant…
A month after Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees, cancelled multiple game projects, and closed The Initiative, Avalanche Studios says work on its 1970s-themed smuggling sim Contraband—which was being developed in partnership with Xbox—has been halted. “Over the past several years, Avalanche Studios Group and Xbox Game Studios Publishing have collaborated on Contraband,” Avalanche wrote. “Active…
Listen. I understand the irony of using this headline given the state of this page for anyone on a mobile browser without an ad blocker. That’s the world we have. It wasn’t always like this. It can be hard to remember, but it was once possible to know peace. There were ads, sure. The pop-up…
15 years after being shuttered by Activision, original Guitar Hero publisher RedOctane is back, with the slightly changed name of RedOctane Games and now a part of catastrophe conglomerate Embracer Group. The revived studio is being headed up by Simon Ebejer, the production director on numerous Guitar Hero games developed by Neversoft, and also has…
Marathon’s grand unveiling earlier this year did not, I suspect, go as Sony hoped. Gameplay reveals were met with overwhelmingly negative reaction. Then, a scandal over stolen art and a subsequent report of morale at the studio in “free fall”. Finally, an indefinite delay, with a new release date to be announced in the autumn….