Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

Do you remember Rage 2? It had this whole wacky pink-neon punk vibe going on before launch. For a hot second, I was pumped to become some mad blue-haired lass battering the wasteland with a baseball bat. Turns out, nah, you're some future cop called Walker (who in a cruel twist, drives around more than they walk) out to ruin the party for everyone. Rubbish.

Avalanche Studios probably aren't gonna rebuild a whole game just for me. But they are going to try to tempt folk back with some bloody hard new modes, a truckload of quality-of-life changes, and stickers.

Livonia. The Baltic frontier. These are the voyages of gruff digital army cosplayers. Their continuing mission: to drive tiny robot trucks. To seek out new assault rifles, new combat arenas. To boldly go where... hold on, is that a ruddy alien? Sergeant, there's a bloody great extraterrestrial in my area of operations. I've seen films before, sir, you can get this one yourself.

Grab your tinfoil hats - Bohemia's dead-serious war simulator Arma 3 has gone interstellar in its latest expansion, Contact.

It's normal to have a little dice-rolling in a game. Putting them in the hero's chair, not so much. Dice are normally the silent judge, deciding clutch victory from horrific failure on a whim. They're what separate mission success from a pile of dead XCOM squaddies. Maybe it's time to put those bones through the wringer themselves. See how they like it.

Dicey Dungeons is the latest project from a team of talent headed up by hexagon masochist Terry Cavanagh, reunited with musical bleep-bloop maestro Chipzel. It's random, it's tactical, and it's out in three weeks.

An apparent Team Fortress 2 glitch seems to be making certain rare items far more common than usual, those 'Unusual' items with unique particle effects. If you want some pretty particles, now's a great time for you. But because TF2 is part of the sprawling Steam economy of trading, hoarding, and selling items as much as it is a multiplayer FPS, this is sparking panic right now too. One hat that was selling for £60-127 in the past month, for example, is now common enough to go for £24. Some traders are trying to band together to slow the harm, uncertain if Valve will fix it. But, y'know, if you do want yourself a nice hat...

You wimps. So what if there's a terrifying eldritch beast spooking about the ocean: you're still Vikings, aren't you? A Norseman without a longship is laughable. Though I have to admit your replacement fisheries look rad. And the kraken does seem nasty.

RTS Northgard has added the Clan of the Kraken as paid DLC. They're a motley non-crew of squid-worshipping, Valkyrie-training spellcasters. I've spent too long away from Northgard's shores, and whacking a kraken right next to them is a promising way to tempt me back.

After a decade of waiting, a delay of another three months for MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is but a blink of the eye. Wait! Don't blink just ye- aw for. Now you've done it. You've blinked a fly into your eye and now its six legs are tickling your sclera and its wings buzzing against your eyelid. You'll be fine once it's out, I'm sure, but that's an irksome surprise to have while waiting for MechWarrior 5. A bit like how the delay announcement also came with word that developers Piranha Games have signed the game up to the Epic Games Store as another of those exclusives.

It's twenty years after Blaskowicz's last big bash. When a night-out goes wrong on a foreign business trip, BJ's gone and done a runner in Paris (it's lovely this time of year). This summer, Twin kids Jess and Soph are on the case in Wolfenstein: Youngblood. The Blazkowicz sisters are about to take on a Nazi-slashing road trip from hell across the city of lights. C'est la vie!

We'll have a full review up on the site tomorrow, once our reviewer's worked out how many dead Nazis is enough dead Nazis.

Pros: A bright makeover; ruin porn aplenty. Cons: Risk of revolution; mayor is creepy voyeur. In brief: Get back amongst it like you never left. Rating: ★★★★★

While cheap air fares have opened up far-flung places like Mexico and Thailand to stag & hen parties, there's a lot to say for celebrating your last weekend of freedom somewhere familiar. After larging it in Miramar, Sanhok, and Vikendi, we found ourselves reminiscing about favourite spots on Erangel, old banter-related accidents, and one particularly rowdy night out round Rozhok. It was decided: we would return to the traditional hen heaven of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds to see how it's changed over the years.

What on earth is a Frogpig? You can't drop the word Frogpig in an update post without telling me more. Show me more. Show me where you're keeping the Frogpigs, Dustwind. I'm sure you're excited about this whole story thing you're dropping, but you're not going anywhere until you tell me where the Frogpigs are. I'm warning you.

Where were we? Right: Isometric tactical bloodbath Dustwind dropped a big update today, bringing the multiplayer-only game a singleplayer campaign full of blood, guts, dogs and a gun-toting leading lady.

Epic Games started out giving away one free game per fortnight to lure people into their new Store. Then they moved to weekly giveaways. Now, this week, they have two games free for keepsies. I don't know where this acceleration of freebies ends, but I can tell you that you have seven days to grab This War Of Mine and Moonlighter.

I love fighting game characters nonsense. I guess you have to have a Ryu knock-off by law, but look at this Fantasy Strike lass. Can you imagine how much of a nightmare those colours must be to maintain? Gosh, this bloke just turned into a dragon. That four-armed goop frog (my new son) just kicked the sense out of a panda. Absolutely smashing stuff. Well done all around.

Bloody Norsemen. They don't know how good they have it, up there on those tiny frozen islands. Here I am, sticking another water bottle in the freezer and they're still up there bashing each other into a bloody pulp over a pile of snow. Typical. It's about time someone went up and gave them a good shake-up. Things might be grim up north, but Bad North is selling a convincing pitch to head back - and we haven't even talked about today's big update.

Despite costing a whopping $999 / £919, Valve's Index VR headset has been in high demand ever since pre-orders went live at the beginning of May. So much so that the headset sold out within half an hour of pre-orders opening in the US, causing Valve to push back the Index's original shipping date of June 28th to the end of September. Now, however, it seems Valve have finally got their VR ducks in a row, as the 'full kit' Index (which includes the headset, controllers and two base stations) is "now available for immediate shipping in the US".

Kagachi understands the freelance life. It's tough stuff, I know: trading out jobs, pushing yourself to breaking point. Allowing haunted fiends from beyond the grave to possess you and change your career goals. Don't believe me? You can put in an hour-and-a-half right now.

Oninaki is the latest game from Square Enix's Tokyo RPG Factory - the bit of Squeenix that makes more of those old-style home-grown JRPGs like I Am Setsuna and Lost Sphear. This time, the team's taking a more action-first approach.

Given that Google have a long history of shutting down their own products, platforms, and sites (I mourn Google Reader to this day), it's mighty hard for me to trust their upcoming cloud gaming platform, Google Stadia. I've been sceptical of cloud gaming, not just because I already have a gaming PC, and the idea of paying Google in particular for a game that's only useful as long as they're interested in keeping the platform going is... no thank you. I'm doubly discouraged after seeing Google's Stadia product director, Andrey Doronichev, recently make a real half-arsed attempt to deflect concerns about a hypothetical shutdown.

Sigma, Overwatch's new floaty man, is now live on the test servers. He's a tank who uses gravity magic to chuck quantum pebbles at people, an energy vortex to transform incoming fire into shield juice, and a highly mobile barrier to protect himself and his team. He's also a thematically boring mad scientist, but let's not hold that against him. His ultimate is great fun.