The Frosty Rusty Mace of Submission mod plops in a spiky whacking stick that metes out, surprisingly, no physical damage. That isn’t to say the mace doesn’t have any effects, though. Drumfire has endowed this bash-rod with a light sprinkling of frost damage that decreases if your sparring partner of choice’s health gets too low. If their HP dips below 2.5 points then the magical mace begins emitting a level 99 fear spell that lasts a full minute....

This is a post about what you can’t have. Your goal in Slipways is to expand your empire. You do this first by scouting, sending out probes as if throwing stones into a puddle and letting the ripples reveal planets. The planets can then be colonised, which means selecting a type of colony. Different colonies require and produce different resources. So on one planet, you might build a colony that requires people, and produces iron....

There’s something about this trade, captured in its most extreme form by SnowRunner, that encourages dogged persistence past the usual bounds of sense, beyond the normal stopping point of patience, toward a zen-like state of obstinance. It’s like a logic-defying twist on the classic children’s book, We’re Going On A Bear Hunt. Can’t go through it? We’ll have to go through it anyway. The cab might have been repainted, but the simulation engine burbling beneath SnowRunner is a familiar one....

All four Sokpop devs – Aran Koning, Tijmen Tio, Tom van den Boogaart and Ruben Naus – are collaborating on the team’s 100th game. The game was due to release in November but slipped into next month. Although the game isn’t out just yet and we don’t know what it’ll be, it’s expected to release sometime in December now because Sokpop say they’re a bit overworked. They are about to reach their goal of making 100 games though, so well done them....

Atomic Heart’s combat revolves around some superpowered tech called the Glove, which can blast out lightning and lift things into the air. As Major P-3. you’ll be wielding melee and gunpowder-fuelled weapons alongside your mighty mitt to clean up a containment breach at Soviet Facility № 3826. Your character will have to fend off some intimidating automatons, and mutated humans that really don’t seem to be doing very well with their heads anymore....

It’s not clear why this is the case, since Space Warlord Organ Trading is a management game. Partly inspired by Market Crashers, a game developed for the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass system, it revolves around short, intense rounds of play, each representing a day’s trading in an organ market driven by the requirements of Space Warlords. It is played via an eye-hurting yet still pretty green-on-black UI, that looks like an upsetting sci-fi version of an 80s stock trading terminal....

So in Spookware you’ve got the three “skelebros” - Lefti, Midi, and Righti - who embark on a road trip through the afterlife. It’s a bit like WarioWare - complete with a dynamite-loaded timer fuse - but with a bit more story structure and lots of skellingtons. Episode One of this bone-jangling journey is out now, with another three episodes slated for release later down the line. But what does Spookware Episode One hold?...

Digital sales of Final Fantasy XIV will resume on the 25th of January, FF14 producer and director Naoki Yoshida announced today. He explained, “The play time and log in frequency of current players is steadily returning to normal levels.” And they want to welcome new people to the new Oceana data center, also opening on the 25th. The free trial, which was also disabled due to demand, won’t return just yet, mind....

The whole story is briefly rehashed on the developer’s Kickstarter page, with the main issues for the delay including “Health / homelessness / misfortune / trauma / inexperience lock-in spirals out, send project astray and continually hindering recovery. Few false (re)starts, little in the way of meaningful movement.” But in 2018, developer Jessica Harvey helped found Arbitrary Metric and released Paratopic, a short, sharp, narratively driven FPS that creatively and financially “resuscitated” Tangiers....

Valve originally created this filtering system for games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Destiny 2, and Dota 2, and now have made it a feature of Steam itself. This means it also applies to Steam Chat, it can be used by other games which choose to use Valve’s system, and it uses the same options and filter lists across them all. This new version debuted as an experimental Steam Labs feature in August for a spot of testing, then became an official Steam feature last night....

Anyway, yes, there are indeed a few good microSD performers that are caught up among today’s Prime Day deals. Most commonly, the SanDisk Ultra: a good budget pick, thanks to its ability to keep pace with more expensive cards on game loading times. There are various capacities on sale in both the UK and US: UK deals: US deals: While the Steam Deck technically lets you replace the internal SSD – unless you mod the thermals in the process, in which case a Valve designer will ask you to stop – adding a microSD card is far easier and potentially cheaper....

This time, Valve have also updated Steam Deck’s store page with the revised order availabilities, and it’s good news even if you don’t already have an preorder on the way: anyone making a new order will join the Q4 gang, meaning their Deck should arrive by the end of December. Not a bad wait, considering some early reservists had to twiddle their thumbs for nearly a year before they could twiddle those thumbsticks....

Let’s start with the Rival 3. Despite having a 3 in its name, this £35 / $40 right-handed gaming mouse looks to be a direct replacement for Steelseries’ entry-level gaming mouse (and one of our current best gaming mouse recommendations), the Rival 110, rather than the Rival 310. The Rival 3, for example, comes with one of Steelseries’ 8500 DPI TrueMove Core sensors, which is a step up from the Rival 110’s 7200 DPI TrueMove 1 sensor, but not quite as nippy as the Rival 310’s 12,000 DPI TrueMove 3 sensor....

The relentless PR campaign in favour of feudal obligation continues in the next Stellaris expansion, Overlord, which will add new “vassalization mechanics” when it launches on May 12th. Here’s the release date announcement trailer: “Use new vassalization mechanics and specialize your subjects into economic powerhouses, defensive bulwarks, or technological masterminds,” says Paradox’s release date announcement post. “Negotiate the terms of your subjects’ Vassal Contracts, with the ability to subsidize their income, restrict their expansion, construct buildings on their worlds, and more....

If you’re not keen on almighty wizard kings who rule mortals as gods then Age Of Wonders is probably right up your magical alley, because you’ll get to biff them right back through their shimmery portals. Age Of Wonders 4 gives you the chance to fight against these sorcerous invaders using destructive tomes of magic, and armies that you can manipulate into new forms. There’ll be roaming monsters to engage, but your forces can also lay siege to their enemies in large-scale, turn-based tactical combat....

What’s happening on screen in the video below is a weird contrast to the camera on his pomegranate-tapping hands. Zagreus is zipping about all over the place while Rudeism seems to be dancing his fingers very methodically across the poms. It takes him a fair few attempts, none of which are helped by the fact his pom wires occasionally come loose, but in the end he demolishes the game’s final boss with a death defiance to spare....

Expansion #2 is out now, priced at $10 (£8.11). It took me a fair while to get used to this pack when it was on the test server. Compared to the base pack and first expansion, expansion #2 has more options for—and more reliance upon—interesting temporary effects and canny manipulation. It’s heavy on stat boosts which only last a turn, abilities based around moving enemies, abilities which benefit from or help shopping, abilities which are buffed by other pets having a certain type of ability trigger, food with tradeoffs, food with slow gains, abilities which manipulate food, and even one food (the strawberry) which exists purely to activate and target some animals’ abilities....

Perhaps it’s because I’m playing as its Berserker class, a large walking slab of man muscle whose axe and (comically large) fists can pulverise anything and everything standing in its way. Or maybe it’s because the devs have given me free rein of the game’s extensive skill tree, letting me pile in dozens of points into attacks, abilities and power-ups normally reserved for later on. Superfuse may be a loot-driven hack and slash with hundreds of different weapons and armour components to pick from, but its skill tree is equally vast, giving you as much flexibility in how your attacks play out onscreen as your various wardrobe choices - and some of its effects are deliciously gory....

Apparently Hard West 2’s protagonist has robbed a ghost train, and who’d athunk that would turn out to be a bad idea. Now you must chase the Devil across a bleak, supernatural wild west to reclaim your soul. That offers an excuse for some interesting level settings, including those that play out on horseback and on moving trains. The most interesting feature to me is a new “Bravado State”, which rewards you for playing aggressively by replenishing your action points for chaining together kills....

In the new video, Suspicious Developments person Tom Francis walks through a couple tutorial levels for the tactical wizard battler, gets into detail about some special moves, and shows off a boss battle with deadly ghost cars. One character called Witch Cop is a storm mage that pulls off the knockback defenestrations we’ve seen in previous videos. Her lightning bolts can push enemies back or bounce from one enemy to the next, pushing them each back in a chain....