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You ever do that thing on a fairground ride or rollercoaster where you sort of pull your neck and face back in preparation for extreme motion? Welcome to kick-exalting FPS Anger Foot. Violence is brutal and cartoonish. Slight mistakes kill you instantly. The soundtrack slaps. There’s an easy Devolver labelmate orientation point here, but if Hotline Miami was a cocktail of chemical euphoria and gut guilt, like realising you’ve accidentally pocketed someone’s lighter at a festival, Anger Foot is doing whippits out of balloon animals then having a great time rhythmically headbutting a portaloo for a few hours. Similarly, it’s also a bit of a masochistic ordeal to put yourself through. But, man. What a buzz.

Spiders and Nacon's new fantasy RPG Greedfall 2: The Dying World will launch into early access for PC via Steam on 24th September. Find beneath these words a trailer's worth of folk in facepaint glowering at burning battlefields, garlanded with preview excerpts along the lines of "ooh, I like what they've done with the curtains".

In hindsight, I feel like I wronged Neva – the upcoming action-platformer from Gris devs Nomada Studio – by allowing my first thoughts on its reveal trailer to be "I bet the dog dies at the end." A new, obviously gorgeous adventure with serious platforming pedigree and that’s your response? Grow up, me.

"It's going to be a good, good, good, good day," sings Frontier's announcement trailer for theme park simulator Planet Coaster 2. Not for me it isn't, because now I have to compare my shabby flat, in which there are exactly zero waterslides at the time of publication, with Planet Coaster 2, in which you can expect such aquatic attractions as "meandering lazy rivers", "adrenaline-pumping wave pools", "looping flumes" and "exhilarating water coasters". Please watch the trailer while I yet again revisit the possibility of sneaking into Stoke-On-Trent's Waterworld and trying to pass myself off as the resident ghost.

If you're a strategy game aficionado who has yet to cast a monocled eye over Hooded Horse's catalogue, 1) which map hexagon have you been skulking under? And 2) you're in for a treat. Founded in 2019 with the signing of Terra Invicta, and led by Dallas, Texas-based chief executive officer Tim Bender and chief financial officer Snow Rui, Hooded Horse have spent the past five years grabbing up original strategy games and strategy RPGs like a smaller civ quietly steamrolling bandit fiefdoms, while larger empires like Creative Assembly and Paradox Interactive bleed each other white in the centre.

New indie action JRPG Tako No Himitsu: Ocean of Secrets - customary disclaimer: "JRPG" is a contentious term which some feel fetishises Japan culture, while others define it more neutrally as a specific style of role-playing game - is set in a world shadowed by a long-ago war between Human and Octopus. This in itself would be borderline post-worthy, but it's also heavily inspired by Game Boy Advance RPGs such as Golden Sun, and features music created by Golden Sun composer Motoi Sakuraba alongside Terranigma composer Masanori Hikichi.

I too desire to eat the moon. In Skate Story, you are made of glass and you will burst into a thousand miniscule shards if you bail. You have signed a four-page contract with the Devil, cursing you with this fragile body yet blessing you with a fearsome skateboard with which to fulfill your quest to digest Earth's only natural satellite. I've only now got hands on a demo shared earlier this year at Tribeca games festival, and I'm reverberating with pleased energy at the dreamlike atmosphere of this demonic kickflip simulator.

As a quick glance at my Papa John's account will tell you, I’ve enough of an addictive personality that I’ve consciously avoided Vampire Survivors and its -likes, in the fear that the carefully balanced professionalisation of my dedicated goblin lifestyle will tip over the edge. As such, I don’t have enough experience to tell you whether the currently free Pizza Hero is an especially interesting or innovative riff on the formula. However, I am simple-minded enough to enjoy the epic bacon 1.5 humour of a sentient pizza slice with a dog for a companion upgrading itself one topping at a time. This action roguelike reeks of concentrated internet like a week old-slice nestled amidst a stack of free AOL disks. But! It’s cute and fun and free, and that’s enough for me.

An Unreal Engine developer has got classic Doom running in Fortnite, in a manner of speaking broad enough to justify a series of headlines about it, including my own. Jackson Clayton honoured the proud tradition of getting the 1993 FPS to run on things where no Doom should be by porting classic opening stage E1M1, via level editor Ultimate Doom Builder, into Fortnite’s Unreal editor as a 3D model. Welcome, newcomer Fortnite, to the vaunted halls currently occupied by gut bacteria, jar-grown rat neurons, lawnmowers, teletext, electric toothbrushes, Windows notepad (sort of), and a pregnancy test.

Greetings once again from the RPS Anti-Prime Day deals guide, where you’ll find all the sharpest price-slashings on PC gaming hardware strictly from outside the Amazon shopping empire. Prime Day itself isn’t until July 16th-17th, but there are already a bunch of good early deals on deserving gear, with more to come.

We haven't written nearly enough about Fallout London, a gargantuan Fallout 4 total conversion that takes place in a whole new map based on England's capital city - the Big Smoke and/or Great Wen, whose real-life incarnation probably harbours at least one nuke at any given moment, though I haven't asked the King about that lately. Best not speculate.

Anyway, Fallout London is a huge effort from modders Team Folon that was recently sabotaged when Bethesda treated Fallout 4 to a next gen update to capitalise on the Amazon TV show's popularity, rendering several mods incompatible and breaking a lot of stuff. Team Folon have now fiddled with the workings and sent a Fallout London build to GOG for QA testing, which suggests that release is imminent. The catch, however, is that you will need to downgrade your copy of Fallout 4 to play the mod, because even with Team Folon's last-minute adjustments, Fallout 4 next gen and Fallout London simply don't get on.

Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka wants to know why the hell Sonic Team haven’t made their own Sonic The Hedgehog RPG yet. He sounds positively hysterical about it, hopping mad, which you know, mate, you’ve been running the show since 2008. You’ve been working on Sonic games since 1994. I too yearn to bound through the Star Post portal and into a world where Sonic has to min-max his trainers and do companion quests for Big The Cat. The spinning ball of spines is in your court, Iizuka-san. The people of Mobius are ready. Mario has had that genre all to himself for long enough.

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is, according to the scratched-in calendar on the wall of my ecommerce cell, soon – so let’s check in on the latest and best early Prime Day deals on PC gaming hardware.

The open world action game Star Wars Outlaws is coming out next month and developer Massive Entertainment have already shown off some of the speeder biking and laser-trading in various trailers. But recently they've spoken a little more about the player's scummy travels across the galaxy, including how big some of the explorable planets will be, and what happens when you piss off the Hutts. In short, you're going to have a price on your head. Makes sense.

Many years ago game designers advised their peers to make their prototypes "juicy". They were talking about the nebulous collection of sensations a player is exposed to when heads explode, coins jangle, and balls bounce. Zenless Zone Zero is a game deeply informed by the philosophy of juice. Like the lootbox hawkers of yesteryear, gacha designers understand the appeal and power of a pleasingly animated gizmo, ker-chunking open and fizzing with potential. This poppy visual and sonic language stretches across Hoyo's latest game, from its cinematic moments, to each character's attacks, to the cute bunny mascots that erupt into gatling guns, to the barista's coffee-making ritual and the recipes of the robo-limbed noodle server. The menu screens, the maps, the free-to-play storefront, everything. It is all very juicy. It is pumped with juice, but only in the same way supermarket chicken is pumped with water.

Microsoft have announced global price increases for their Game Pass subscription business across all existing packages on console and PC. They’re also doing away with Xbox Game Pass For Console, while introducing a new Standard tier for console users which includes the Xbox back catalogue but doesn’t offer day-one access to new games.

A watched pot never boils, so they say - ‘they’ presumably all being dead now after having their minds physically melted after hearing the first kettle click in readiness while stubbornly staring in the opposite direction. Yes, yes, it’s a metaphor, but we don’t have time for all that. Your kingdom is under attack by goblins, and the only way to get your useless underlings to chop the wood, till the fields, and train the guards needed to defend it is to provide constant surveillance. The King Is Watching is a minimalist resource-chain-em-up and wave defense goblin-knocker with a brilliant twist. I'm now a little bit obsessed with it, I think, and what is RPS if not a vehicle for chronicling my many fleeting obsessions?

We already know that you’ll be able to romance all your companions in the upcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Sounds a bit synthetic on the surface, right? Even fantastic games like Baldur's Gate 3 suffered from this overly obliging approach to relationships. A game letting you tell your own tales is dandy and all, but those stories don’t mean much if the cast feel like input/output affection bots, ready to drop trou like a clumsy Levis temp once you’ve adequately filled their invisible bonkometer.

They get knocked down, but they get up again, and you’re apparently never going to keep Eve Online studio CCP Games from trying to make an FPS set in the universe of their Excel(lent?) MMO happen. EVE Vanguard - the studio's admirable fourth crack at it - was announced last September. Since then, it's been in gated pre-alpha, offering weekend playtests to EVE Online Omega subscribers. According to a new and rather vague roadmap, should get a substantial update this November. Here’s said infographic - more pork scratching-stained napkin scrawl than sat-nav.

Prolific fantasy author and number one Ranni stan (“I'll pick the ending where my character gets a waifu”) Brandon Sanderson has been thinking a lot about how to apply Elden Ring and the Souls games' signature storytelling approach to novels. During a recent playthrough on his YouTube channel, he was asked if he thinks there’s a way to replicate Souls-like descriptions in books. “I’ve wondered that. I really have,” Sanderson replies.

Creative Assembly and Sega have slapped a release date on Total War: Pharaoh’s free Dynasties expansion, which outfits the historical strategy colossus with new Aegean and Mesopotamian regions and maps, new factions such as Troy and Babylon, and a glittering, bellowing host of new or reworked units, new mechanics, and new quality-of-life updates. That release date is 25th July 2024. Come stamp your feet and brandish your shields vigorously at the overview trailer below.

Read enough of our hardware articles and you’ll eventually come across someone, probably me or Katharine (RPS in peace), banging on about the Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless. After half a decade on shelves, it’s still the best low-profile mechanical gaming keyboard going, and quite possibly the best wireless keyboard to boot – while the tenkeyless version, the G915 TKL Lightspeed, is just as lovely to use.

Between their nimble performance, crisp mech switches, and impeccable build quality, the only way in which the G915 duo underwhelms is their high pricing – very much the kind you’d want to wait for a Prime Day or Black Friday to dull the pain of. Now, though, there’s an alternative: the new Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL. I’ve been using it. It’s good!

That was…slightly cheeky of me. The Tomoe you play in parry-ful action adventure Bloodless is not the same Tomoe that was conspicuously absent from undeniable influence Sekiro. They might be based on the same historical figure, but that’s simply Sek-ulation. However! You can make your mind up yourself for zero money, since Bloodless has a free demo on Steam. Trazzer below.

According to the wikihow page “how to fall safely”, the best way to minimise injury while falling is to stay loose, keep your arms and legs bent, and roll on impact. According to ragdoll-prone shooter Helldivers 2, however, it’s better to stand to attention in mid-air and perform a crisp salute. It’s long been known that the game’s emotes confer unexpected defensive advantages, with emergency hugs sometimes shielding you against artillery fire, but now, one redditor has proven via careful scientific experimentation that they also protect you against the force of gravity.

From Zenless Zone Zero to The First Descendant, we seem to be experiencing a free-to-play explosion. Despair, ye time-constrained adults, for your carefully engineered shortage of pocket money offers no bulwark against the onslaught of games that want a slice of your evening or weekend. Today's big release, Once Human, at least features a giant schoolbus on monster legs, together with a less exciting but customisable van that just has wheels. In this open world survival shooter, you are a "Meta-Human" making your way around a landscape corrupted by Stardust, which has warped the scenery and will slowly drive you nuts.

Ever since the hat was invented by Valve Corporation in 2009, mankind has grappled with questions of fairness, worthiness, and pride – at least as they pertain to microtransations in free-to-play games. Shooty battle royale Apex Legends is the latest to posit an answer, that being "the Battle Pass should cost more money".

The studio-killing fallout of Embracer's acquisition frenzy continues to fall like ash on the industry. The publishing giant has reportedly closed Piranha Bytes, the studio known for cult RPGs like Gothic, Risen, and Elex, according to a worker who spoke to Polish games site CD-Action. The studio's existence had been under threat since early this year, after being targeted in Embracer's purgatorial studio massacre. At that time the German studio were hopeful to avoid being closed down, insisting "don't write us off yet!" Unfortunately, it looks like those who worked at the studio have since been laid off.

I gaze with alarm and approval upon the recent phenomenon of "dark strategy" or "horror strategy" games, a devilish parade of top-down drag-clickers, from The Fabulous Fear Machine to The Tribe Must Survive, that strive to find the fear in a genre that typically places you at a managerial remove. The best-known is probably Frostpunk, with its perpetual raging against the dying of the light, its ceaseless scrape for coal and wood as the temperature falls. Anoxia Station, announced this month, is similarly driven by the gathering of fossil fuels, and similarly shaped by questions of worker death and morale, but it takes you deep underground - into a sumptuous, brutal world of quartz crystals, salt caves, magma lakes, moonmilk rivers, swirling gases and, judging from the below trailer, enormous maggots and centipedes. Larva lakes, amirite.

The Ukrainian city of Mariupol came under heavy bombardment during the opening months of Russia's invasion in 2022, a programme of artillery and air strikes that damaged or destroyed the majority of residential buildings and has killed or dispossessed thousands of people. It has now been occupied by Russia for almost two years, during which, as reported by the Associated Press, Russia has demolished, rebuilt and renamed much of the city, overwriting its Ukrainian heritage.

The Disco Elysium-inspired RPG Hollow Home is a memory of Mariupol from just before the war - not a 1:1 recreation, but a collection of details, colours, personalities and some familiar buildings, painstakingly amassed and offered up in the face of erasure. Speaking to me during a very brief demo at Digital Dragons in Poland this year, artist Anastasia Hlyniana called my attention to the plants jutting from old car tyres around the game's isometric map, which she says are a common sight in Mariupol.

The best microSD cards for the Steam Deck are typically thought of as accessories, like a docking station or an aftermarket case. But the term "accessories" suggests that they’re mere add-ons, when in reality, making such an easy yet transformative upgrade to your Deck’s game-holding abilities feels damned near essential. Especially if you’ve got one of the smaller, original LCD models. The whole idea behind the Steam Deck is that you can take more or less your entire Steam library out and about with you, so why not give yourself the room to fit in as many games as possible?