Rock Paper Shotgun

Rock Paper Shotgun

Brendan Caldwell·Jul 14, 2025

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"Fine" is a funny word. It can mean something is sublimely crafted, but it can also be used in a withering sense. It's fine. This is fine. But there's another, calm and casual sense in which you can say something is fine. Like when a friend handing you some tea apologises…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Brendan Caldwell·Jul 4, 2025

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In Mecha Break you play as a booby anime statuette. She is the one driving the mech. This is a leery game of lasers and ass shots, and sometimes even manages to elicit moments of exciting robo-a-robo combat. You fight other players across a splatter of multiplayer modes, and may…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Nic Reuben·Jun 25, 2025

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Cyber Knights: Flashpoint has some excellent nonsense scenario writing propping up mission design. In one early excursion, you remote activate 'defector tech' to convert an enemy agent over to your side, then have a turn to neutralise the neuro-toxin killswitch in their brain…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Brendan Caldwell·Jun 20, 2025

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I am getting a real kick out of Rematch. As a football game, its closest analogue isn't FIFA or eFootball, but a certain nitro-boosting sports 'em up that has been going for ten years. I've already seen it jokingly described as " Rocket League without cars." An infuriatingly…

Rock Paper Shotgun

James Archer·Jun 18, 2025

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Well, you can’t say Remedy don’t have range. After the screeching survival horror of Alan Wake 2 comes FBC: Firebreak, a three-person multiplayer FPS spun off from Wakeverse stablemate (and excellent action game in its own right) Control. Perspective isn’t the…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell·Jun 18, 2025

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11 Bit Studios have a thing for circles. Their 2018 hit Frostpunk had you plant rings of buildings around a massive coal-fired generator in a frozen crater, picking research paths to steer your fully overlapping class/temperature Venn diagram of a city toward either fascism or…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Brendan Caldwell·Jun 18, 2025

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You are a thirteen year old stuck in the shape of a T, arms aloft forever - what do you do? Well, in To A T, you simply go on living your everyday life. This kid-friendly town explorer is both a low-stakes comic adventure and a commentary on living contentedly with a disability…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Brendan Caldwell·Jun 17, 2025

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A survival game lives or dies on the personality of its world. Subnautica is a wonder because its world is a wonder. Abiotic Factor is a cracking farce because its world is a lab staffed by idiots. Dune: Awakening, meanwhile, has the fortune of coming with a pre-packaged world,…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Nic Reuben·Jun 17, 2025

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I really like the world of Promise Mascot Agency as a place, not so much the things this open world collect 'em up management sim makes me do to see more of it. I feel like I went through much trouble stealing the sticker-coated notebook of the uber-talented eccentric artist kid…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Brendan Caldwell·May 30, 2025

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I have spun out on wet tarmac again and I am furious with myself. JDM: Japanese Drift Master requires a different mentality to most other racing games. Drifting around a corner is not the side gimmick that you'll do a few times during races. Drifting is the race. In this…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Nic Reuben·May 30, 2025

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Although you won't see everything, you can finish Many Nights A Whisper in under an hour. Each day you'll train with your fiery sling, lighting braziers and honing your aim for a looming ceremony where you'll try to hit a distant ritual chalice with a single shot. At night,…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Jeremy Blum·May 29, 2025

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Put me in the camp of point and click aficionados who fiercely believe that 1993's Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers is one of the best adventure games to ever touch a PC. First in a trilogy of thriller mysteries, it featured writing that was a cut above Sierra On-Line's usual…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Nic Reuben·May 28, 2025

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Elden Ring had a starting class named the Wretch that gets a club and some ratty underwear filled with dreams and nothing else, and there's something special about the first few hours in Limgrave playing them, scavenging your first pieces of mismatched armour and build-defining…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Brendan Caldwell·May 28, 2025

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I am falling asleep at the wheel of a big bulldozer. RoadCraft is not necessarily a boring game, but it is so meditatively slow, lumbering, and bit-by-bit that I find myself dozing when I'm supposed to be, um, dozing. Some of this is down to simple tiredness, but there's also a…

Rock Paper Shotgun

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell·May 21, 2025

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The roguelike deckbuilder is a remorseless evil that strives to colonise every dream ever dreamt by the human brain. It is a sparkling, shuffling plague, germinated by Slay The Spire, that threatens to absorb every other mortal pastime, from space travel through poker to…