Vermintide 2 beta update has brought in numerous quality of life changes and a double XP weekend
- By Ash
- in News
After a rather long period of silence, Vermintide 2 has now suddenly been updated with a beta patch that brings with it numerous quality of life improvements, as well as a double XP weekend. The bots are now smarter and easier to control, there is a new Social Wheel to help you communicate on the fly, numerous enemies and weapons have received slight changes, and perhaps most interestingly of all, the much-anticipated Veteran (red) item crafting system has finally manifested itself... though not without some problems.
The way the new Veteran item crafting system works is quite simply - you need to sacrifice five Veteran items in order to create a specific one. A bit expensive, sure, but it's a pretty good way of getting ride of tons of duplicate necklaces and turning them into something that's actually useful. The only problem is that these crafted Veteran items do not come with the fancy blue glow, meaning that they are basically the same thing as your everyday orange items, thus making the whole exercise a bit pointless given the costs involved.
Overwatch Halloween Terror event has arrived alongside some excellent skins and balance changes
- By Ash
- in News
After quite a few teasers, Overwatch's third annual Halloween Terror event has now arrived. It brings with it Junkenstein's Revenge as a co-op focused PvE mode, an assortment of new and rather good-looking cosmetics, as well as spookier versions of some of the previous maps. It's all highly enjoyable content, but just don't expect anything too out of the ordinary as this event is fairly similar to the one from last year.
To be fair, that's not exactly true as this year's Halloween Terror has a pretty damn awesome trailer to back it up. Have a look, especially if you're interested in what all of the new cosmetics look like in-game:
After many years in development, the utterly captivating colony sim RimWorld will be releasing this October 17th
- By Ash
- in Indie Games
RimWorld is one of those games that are heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress, which should immediately let you know what depths of complexity, creativity, strategy and madness lie within. What you might not expect is that the premise is remarkably simple - all you have to do is keep your small band of survivors alive for long enough to construct a rocket with which they can escape the hellhole of a planet they have found themselves on. What could possibly go wrong?
Unsurprisingly, the answer is pretty much everything. Your characters are probably going to go crazy and start beating the ever-living daylight out of each other because they're constantly cooped up in small houses, frequent bandit raids and bizarre random events will leave many of your favorite characters with significant and long-lasting wounds, while harsh environmental conditions will often force your survivors to resort to some... creative methods in order to find stuff to eat.
The recently released Mega Man 11 is a refreshingly faithful successor to the original game
- By Ash
- in News
If you've been snuggled comfortably under a rock for the past week like I was, you may have missed something rather special: Capcom has finally release another 'proper' Mega Man game! Perhaps more importantly, the newly launched Mega Man 11 has ended up not only being a refreshingly faithful successor to the original, but also a pretty darn solid game in its own right.
From what I can tell, all of the classic elements are present: you can pick and choose which boss you want to square off against, each boss drops a weapon that is incredibly useful against some other boss, the difficulty is cranked up to 11 but you have plenty of tools to overcome it, and the list goes on. The only real divergence appears to be the new Double Gear system that lets you slow down time and power-up your weapons, as well as the modernized visuals and extra challenging Superhero difficulty mode.
Gwent's absolutely gigantic Homecoming update is available for testing until October 9th
- By Ash
- in News
Gwent's Midwinter Update, while certainly ambitious, ended up causing a lot more problems than it solved. The whole situation culminated a few months later when CDPR announced that they are banning the most overpowered cards from constructed play as a sort of band-aid fix, and that they are planning to go on a 6-month hiatus in order to bring "Gwent back to its roots".
Quite a lot of time has passed since then, and if you're wondering what exactly CDPR has been working on all these months, you might be interested to hear that the much-anticipated Homecoming update is now live on the PTR (Public Test Realm). It will only be available until October 9th, however, so if you're curious, do make sure to give it a try while you still can.
Telltale's The Walking Dead: The Final Season will be finished by Robert Kirkman's Skybound Games
- By Ash
- in News
Despite their last two games both getting some rather favorable reviews, Telltale Games have unfortunately ended up closing down their doors due to poor sales and internal problems. With the company filing for bankruptcy and most employees being laid off, the future of The Walking Dead: The Final Season and other Telltale projects was looking pretty damn grim.
While it still doesn't seem like we'll ever get our hands on the much-anticipated The Wolf Among Us 2, I am at least glad to announce that The Walking Dead: The Final Season will be finished as Skybound Games and Telltale have managed to reach a deal. While Skybound Games and its parent Skybound Entertainment are both publishers with seemingly no game development experience, it is important to mention that the founder of the company is none other than Robert Kirkman - the writer behind the actual The Walking Dead comic!
The XCOM inspired Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden now has a lengthy new gameplay preview
- By Ash
- in News
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is an upcoming video game adaptation of the 'Mutant' pen & paper RPG that has been kicking around since the 1980s. The whole premise is about as simple as it gets - Humanity has managed to nuke itself into oblivion, thus leaving the planet populated only by the titular mutants (deformed humans and animals alike), killer robots, and plenty of old-world ruins to scavenge for supplies.
As for the gameplay itself, Mutant Year Zero is a mixture of XCOM styled turn-based combat and real-time exploration, along with a bit of stealth thrown in for good measure. What this means is that you're able to freely roam across the world and explore it at your own pace, sneak around problems and scavenge for resources, and then when you inevitably mess up and raise 15 different alarms, transition to a rather familiar turn-based combat system.