Latest Articles

Capcom have announced that there will be no further new live service content seasons for Exoprimal, the rad dino-slaying co-op shooter which everybody adored except for stinky RPS reviewer Edders, who branded it "dull repetition for most" and castigated the game for its "baffling disrespect for one's time". Are you reading this, Edders? Look what you did. Look what you did. I hope a massive planet-extinguishing asteroid flies out of nowhere and lands in your tea, you Triassic tryhard, you blundering diplodocus.

The final minutes of Kerrang! TV - shut down this week alongside four other music channels in a cost-cutting effort by Channel 4 - saw a reel of clips that showed a channel frozen in time. I don’t think any of the songs were more recent than fifteen years old, and many were much older.

Kerrang! as a magazine, and a brand, has continued to champion emerging artists throughout its lifecycle, but the channel’s final moments felt like a guttural declaration that it had tattooed its name in a heart alongside its favorites a long time ago, and everything that came after was just iron-ons and pin badges. That the beating heart of the channel was always placed at a specific moment in time (always more about nostalgia than revolution) albeit one continually referenced and playlisted and occasionally revived in retro callback trends since. Deftones were always too interesting to be lumped under nu-metal, to be fair.

I'm not sure if this applies in other countries, but in England we have this thing where you'll stroll down some random suburban street without a care in the world, and stumble on a house that has been absolutely overrun by garden gnomes. A house on which garden gnomes have either settled, like the avian hoodlums in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, or from which they have erupted, like the malignant mushrooms of Annihilation.

A hundred clay and plaster eyes catch yours, unblinking; a hundred figures seemingly freeze in the act of pushing a toy wheelbarrow or smoking a pipe. The tune you were whistling dies in your throat as you hurry past into the reassuring shadow of the relatively gnomeless bungalows to either side. Gardening sim Horticular is like that, but with an even greater sense of contrast, because it asks you to resettle a desolate planet. There is no generic urban scenery to hurry onto, here. There is only bare, cracked earth. And the gnomes.

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 had several open betas and, according to a new and rather vague roadmap, should release sometime post this coming November. Here’s said infographic - more pork scratching-stained napkin scrawl than sat-nav.

Elden Ring's got another patch out and it's tinkered with Shadow Of The Erdtree weapons, fixed some bugs, and still not done anything about the game's performance issues. That perfume bottle and lightning combo? Binned off. Everyone's favourite summon Blackknife Tiche? She's seen a certain health-regen bug fixed, so everyone's not being duped into thinking she's been heavily nerfed since the Shadow Lands sprung forth.

Obsidian have spent a lot of time tuning up Avowed's combat in response to negative reactions to the new action-RPG's initial reveal footage at an Xbox developer direct, with gameplay director Gabe Paramo conceding that the team could have oiled the hinges and buffed the contacts a little more before showing the game off.

Dagon: by H. P. Lovecraft developers Bit Golem announced this week that they’ve raised 200,000 złoty (around $50,000) towards humanitarian aid charities aiding Ukranians, including the Polish Red Cross, Save the Children, and Voices Of Children. Dagon itself is a free game, but has several pieces of paid DLC, all of which are currently on sale.

"Dune is unadaptable! It could never work as a film," I cry, placing defiant fists upon my hips. "But what," says Denis Villeneuve, "about two?", shattering my physical form into one trillion shards. I have a difficult life.

But wait! What about as a strategy game? Denis glances nervously at the inexplicable open pools of molten steel all around us. I've got him now. He hasn't even played Spice Wars. Except... I think Spice Wars is about as good as an adaptation could be. Imperium too. Damn it. Alright Denis, let's have a truce and sort this one out.

Can you believe we didn't have a best JRPG list until now? Baffling. To be fair we did once tackle this topic with a preliminary blast of recommendations for those completely new to the genre. We also have a few familiar fantasys in our list of the 50 best RPGs on PC. But until now we haven't addressed the genre in its own right. In an act of contrition, we offer you this: our list of the best JRPGs you can play on PC this year, according to our own tastes.

Tiny Garden is bringing back the spirit of Polly Pocket with a cutesy farming sim game set inside a virtual plastic clamshell inspired by the nineties toy phenomenon.

It’s been a good while since we last got a proper Transformers video game, with the four years since the XCOM-ish Transformers: Battlegrounds in 2020 only seeing long-in-the-works MMO Transformers Online finally biting the dust. That’s about to change, with the reveal of a curious new combination of racer and roguelike starring the robots in disguise.

We've had the enshittification of Google, Facebook and the public internet at large, now for the enshittification of GTA Online. What do you mean, "it was enshittified to start with"? Take it to the comments please, because first I need to tell you about the latest GTA Online update, which allows you to collect cash accumulated in safes, request vehicles and replenish ammo using your in-game phone - but only if you pay up $8 or $7 a month for a GTA+ subscription, which is currently not available on PC.

The developers behind cyberpunk bartending gem VA-11 Hall-A have revealed their next game, and it looks a doozy. .45 Parabellum Bloodhound draws its inspiration from PlayStation masterpiece Parasite Eve in offering a mix of real-time and turn-based combat dubbed as “active time action”.

Surgent Studios, developers of this year’s fetching Afrofuturist platformer Tales of Kenzera: Zau, have laid off more than a dozen staff. The cuts come just over two months on from the release of the debut video game release from the multimedia studio founded by Assassin’s Creed Origins star Abubakar Salim.

Me again, the Destiny 2 person (someone needs to fly the flag now that Alice0, RPS in peace, has sadly left us). Over the last few weeks Liam (also RPS in peace) and I have dunked lots of orbs, made numbers go up, and have almost come to terms with the fact The Final Shape is actually a verb. That means we've started ironically using it in situations like, "Wouldn't surprise me if we get Final Shaped", as, I don't know, our country's election happens tomorrow. So uh, anyway! What have we made of the game's latest expansion over the last few weeks?

Yeah it's leagues ahead of Bungie's previous effort Lightfall, owing to things being a fair bit zanier.

There's no genre like the open world for inducing choice paralysis, so it's fitting that I've been agonising over how to begin this irregular article series on open world games for months. I have a lot of material, oodles of interviews with developers of all shapes and sizes - big shops like Remedy and CD Projekt, smaller studios like Ace Team and Awaceb, all holding forth on such topics as whether Elden Ring or Zelda did bandit camps better, and how you make a forest feel endless. There is so much you could talk about, so many trails heading off in all directions, but perhaps it's best to begin with the more personal and superficial question that inspired this investigation: how did the open world game get so boring?

You might have seen that £10 will go a long way in the Steam summer sale, but let me do you one better. Indie game store Itch.io has begun its own summer sale, and for those willing to delve into its rainbow-coloured heap of throwaway toys and fun experiments, plenty of deals await.

Wuthering Waves, that recent gacha RPG of anime styling and impenetrable jargonblasting, just didn’t work on the Steam Deck when it launched in May. It also doesn’t work right now. But for one brief, debatably glorious day on June 29th, it did. And thus, Deck owners who’d persevered through a slightly fiddly installation process (explained here by YouTubesmith Deck Wizard) could finally take their first joyous steps into Wuthering Waves like a David Hasselhoff-buoyed East German in 1989.

Unlike the Hoff, it wouldn’t last. Within hours, Steam Deck players were being booted back out of the game by a hitherto-unseen anti-cheat failure. What gives? Or gave?

Nexon's free-to-play looter-shooter The First Descendant - "Nexon's Warframe", as the wags are calling it on Steam - launched this week and has encountered a few snags and snaffaroos, including beta rewards not showing up, Easy Anti-Cheat not running correctly, frame-rate drops for people who downloaded in advance of release, and players finding their merry way to servers where no other players exist. Nexon are even now patching the game, and have plied players with in-game bonuses and cosmetics as an apology for the inconvenience.

Alongside the usual standard and nightmare modes, upcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard (née Dreadwolf) will ship with a fully tweakable set of difficulty options called ‘Unbound’, letting you customise everything from parry timings to invincibility.

A UK employment tribunal have ordered Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium to pay around £27,748 - approximately $35,230 - in compensation for discriminating against former senior programmer Paul Ah-Thion, who was dismissed in 2022 after his requests to work from home following an office move were denied.

The tabletop equivalent of “buying books and reading them are two different hobbies” is surely the difference between buying sexy tabletop RPG manuals and actually dragging your mates on to Discord for a few hours to stumble your way through a module. It’s the dogeared Fighting Fantasy from a carboot sale kid in me, I think. Something about reading worldbuilding snippets organised into numbered tables just hits in a way a novel doesn’t. Such tantalising ephemera is the name of the game in Microprose-published CrossOver: Roll For Initiative. It’s a wave defense where you play match-3 to collect dice, then spend them on fireballs and mace swings to stop tiny bastards from marauding all over your actual character sheet and attacking your stats.

Prime Day 2024 will, no doubt, be rich with deep discounts on PC gaming hardware. But when it gets fully underway across July 16th and 17th, it won’t be the only deals game in town. Not by a long shot. That’s why the RPS Anti-Prime Day guide has returned once more, to bring together all the worthiest hardware offers from non-Amazon retailers in the UK and US.

Capcom spat a little squirt of news bile on us yesterday, like a hideous zombie vomiting up demos and release dates. One of the smaller chunks was a brief comment by Resident Evil 7 director Koshi Nakanishi, who confirmed that a new Resident Evil game is in the works. That's not too much of a surprise - big franchise gonna franchise - but still, it's nice to hear. "It was really difficult to figure out what to do after [Resident Evil] 7," he said, "but I found it. And to be honest it feels substantial."

The Fear & Hunger games are pitch-black horror RPGs quite unlike anything else I’ve ever played, taking aspects of JRPG, survival horror and adventure games and distilling them into something I’d be tempted to call bleakly nihilistic if they didn’t display so much evident love for their craft. They also both start with a content warning listing “extreme violence, gore, sexual violence, and drug usage”. You’ll want to take this seriously, and just to be clear: the third item on this list does manifest in some tasteless, albeit brief, ways in the first game. It’s a frustrating blemish on what is otherwise an incredibly evocative and creative series, though you can download a mod to censor the more egregious bits. You will miss the full effect of critically severing an ogre’s massive schlong, however.

When Edwin disappeared into the hot mists of Summer Games Fest we couldn't know he would return with a crazed look in his eye, raving about "phantasmagorical mulch" and insisting: "As of this week, I am seriously excited by tower defence." That's because he played Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess, the upcoming action strategy game about defending a maiden from colourful monsters and recruiting villagers to cleanse demonic defilement. Developer Capcom released a demo for the game yesterday, ahead of its July 19th release date. So now the rest of us can join Edwin in becoming entranced by the swirling colours of this sword-swinger.

Last week, those teases at Capcom dangled a remastered version of 2006 zombie action gem Dead Rising before the darting, entranced eyes of me specifically. The Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, presumably named so to differentiate it from the 2016 HD Remaster, now looks to be shambling ever closer to full remake territory if the new footage Capcom shared as part of yesterday’s NEXT showcase is anything to go by. Also, it’s coming to Steam! I’ve checked with the rest of the treehouse, and this means it’s also confirmed for PC. Get in!

July already, huh. I suppose that means it’s time for the annual roundup of the best Prime Day PC gaming deals, where subscribers to Amazon’s premium Prime service can claim their very own super-special discounts on all kinds of hardware. Ideally just the good stuff, mind. Hence the list.

We've all seen it. The little spinning symbol cautioning players against impatient acts of powering down. "Don't turn off your system when this symbol is displayed," goes the message seen often while booting up a game (or some other version of these words). The implication is clear. The saving process is delicate and if you interrupt this invisible ritual the data that's being written to some folder deep in your PC's innards will become corrupted, wrecked, banjaxed. You will lose all your progress, all your precious swords and accomplishments.

But is this true? How likely are you to really suffer a catastrophic loss of shotgun shells? To find out, I decided to spend a very annoying afternoon of turning my gaming rig off and on again during multiple games. Was this a good idea? I don't know. I'm a gamer, not an ideas man.

Big large huge RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt recently got a fresh set of official modding tools in the form of REDKit, a powerful bit of downloadable that helps you add whatever you fancy to the game, including entire custom questlines. Not two months on from REDKit’s release, ‘Tuber xLetalis and modder glassfish - a contributor to the cut-content-restoring Brothers in Arms mod - have put together a showcase containing around 20 minutes of cut content from the game’s ending. Cheers, cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer!