Those with Nvidia GPUs are the biggest winners here: DLSS, fresh from being patched into fellow PlayStation alumnus Horizon Zero Dawn, will require a GeForce RTX card in exchange for cranking out extra frames-per-second through AI-powered upscaling and anti-aliasing. God of War will also take advantage of Nvidia Reflex on PC, potentially reducing input lag, though luckily you won’t need the very latest and greatest graphics cards for it. Any Nvidia model from the GTX 900 series onwards can enable Reflex....

Here’s the latest dev update showing these new winged creatures in action. I’m a big fan of the fireflies, not only because they light up the night sky making it all pretty, but because they can actually lead you to dew drops. One of the more annoying things I found in Grounded is that getting fresh water requires players to find these dew drops hanging off the top of grass stems....

If you’ve not played GTA Online in a while, yep, it really does have futuristic jetbikes now. Introduced with the After Hours update in July 2018 (the one adding nightclubs), the Oppressor Mk II is the beefy kid brother of another skybike. But while the original Oppressor was a motorbike with the ability to boost and glide, the Mk II just plain hovers - and is easier to fly than most aircraft....

This is the first time Guild Wars 2’s been available through a third-party launcher. Don’t worry if you already play on the first-party client though, because you’ll still be able to mingle on the same servers as Steam players. From August 23rd, Guild Wars 2 will start dishing out in-game character rewards such as classic outfits and experience boosters through Twitch Drops too. Although the game is free-to-play, the expansions will set you back real currency....

On this page: What is Hades God Mode? What is Hades Hell Mode? What is Hades God Mode? God Mode in Hades is a setting that you can turn on if you are struggling with the challenge of the game, or if you want an easier time for any other reason. Turning God Mode on gives you a permanent 20% damage reduction buff, and each time you die with God Mode enabled, that buff will increase by 2%....

In RPS’s Half-Life: Alyx review, Graham has certified Valve’s prequel as one of our bestest bests. He says that Valve clearly haven’t forgotten a single thing about making solid Half-Life games, though that won’t stop them from making Alyx just a bit better by tweaking and adding some settings for you. Your ability to move around City 17 already has several different control schemes. You can use Shift motion or Blink motion which both teleport you to a new location that you indicate on the ground....

Given it’s just come out, the Half-Life Alyx workshop is pretty thin right now. Rough early maps sharing shelf-space with combat encounters, firing ranges, and the sort of meme-y garbage that unfortunately floods the Workshop ecosystem across Steam. But then you’ve got horde modes like Xen Thug, the mandatory VR lightsaber trainer (pictured above), or a simple small room from which to practice the piano. Many of these mods were developed before official tools launched, using awkward hacks and workarounds....

“The exploration was a big deal in terms of how much—when we were watching people play it—how people consumed the actual content at a much slower rate and really dug through stuff for items or world fiction,” says Valve’s Jim Hughes. “So we tried to densely pack it to match player’s expectations.” “At the end of the day, the currency we have to spend in the game is the player’s attention,” adds Valve’s Robin Walker....

Half-Life: Ray Traced is made by Sultim “sultim_t” Tsyrendashiev, building on work by others. “This project is a reengineered version of https://github.com/w23/xash3d-fwgs, which is ANOTHER port of HL1 to ray tracing,” Tsyrendashiev explains. Complicated chain of development history, but simply: it’s Half-Life with raytracing. “With the hardware accelerated ray tracing, it is possible to calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects with interactive framerates,” Tsyrendashiev says....

So of course I hired the beggars. I hired the “cripples”, the falsely accused servants, and the oddballs. I gave them decent food and a place to belong. Sure they’d all die horribly, etched with debilitating and ever-mounting physical and emotional scars, mangled and torn by blades and bludgeons, screaming themselves awake from the horror of killing for a living. But until then they were heroes. Crap heroes, for the most part, admittedly....

The point is: they wouldn’t just… wait. But that’s what video game characters regularly do when players are given dialogue options. NPCs shut their traps, eagerly awaiting the cue line that allows them to open their mouths again. The teenagers of Oxenfree don’t do that. Their chats are interruption-filled messes. And it’s pure magic. Time doesn’t stand still when you’re given the option to speak your mind in Oxenfree. Other characters in the scene will often be nattering away, and it’s up to you whether you want to interject....

There’s no point in fact-checking any of this because the one thing I’m certain of is that the story is shite and not the reason anyone should ever play Prototype 2. Luckily the game more than makes up for its lack of narrative weight with its ridiculous over-the-top video game violence, though. It is incredibly stupid. And thoroughly enjoyable because of that. Heller is a superhero man who has big, strong arms that can transform into humongous blades, stretchy tendrils and Wolverine claws....

I mean, it didn’t redefine what it means to be a Breakout clone by adding a compelling narrative or anything; you must still hit blocks by whacking a ball with your paddle. Still, it does make pretty big changes like sticking your paddle in areas of the screen that aren’t the bottom… It’s not a morality system, but it’s definitely different. The biggest change to the formula is that you can manipulate the ball’s movement beyond just twatting it....

Slipways touts itself as a grand strategy game in miniature, where playthroughs last an hour instead of a month. Your aim is to colonise planets, each of which needs to take in certain resources in order to produce certain other resources. You can direct resources from planet to planet via “slipways” so that all your colonised planets are supported and happy. It’s a puzzle game in essence, but a forever unfurling one which gives me as strong a sense of discovery while exploring as I’ve felt with any big name 4X title....

It is a very good and original book and yet I would not be surprised if Turton had gotten the idea from The Sexy Brutale. The Sexy Brutale is a time-loop mystery where you (a priest) are trapped in the same 12 hours at a masked party in a mansion-slash-casino, where all the guests keep getting murdered. Think the sort of house that contains a theatre, a bar, and a vivarian with a huge man-eating tarantula....

As soon as I jumped into the wild world of Sega’s open-world brawler I knew I was playing one of my favourite games of all time. Its hefty street punch-ups reminded me of Streets Of Rage, the earnest yet ridiculous story brought me back to the first time I played the original Metal Gear Solid, and the mini-games… well, those are just Yakuza, aren’t they? As you get older, there isn’t as much time to fully immerse yourself in something....

Blizzard’s announcement introduces the new Frenzy keyword for minions, which triggers an effect the first time they survive damage. It might attack a random enemy, add a random spell to your hand, or punch every enemy minion. They’re also introducing Spell Schools, elemental classifications (Arcane, Fel, Fire, Forst, Holy, Nature, Shadow) that can trigger synergies. The Spirit Healer, for example, gives a random one of your critters two health after you cast a Holy spell....

Yeah, right. Sure I will. I might as well be Gollum, claiming his favourite item of jewellery is “a watch”. Because I know, just like everyone else knows, that when the working day is over, I’ll caper back to my dingy games hole and continue to croon over the Precious. Or rather, the Preciouses. Because despite my every effort to snap out of it, I’ve been stuck for months playing the same two games over and over again: Age Of Empires 2, and to a lesser extent, Hearthstone....

Here’s this new fella, a thieving little snitchbug: As with last week’s riddle, players were given a rhyme-y clue. The answer “grindle,” was also the password to a locked .zip file. Seems likely that’s this little fella’s name. Also like last week, the above .gif and image came with some text: In RPS’s Hollow Knight review, John Walker found it to be good, just not quite as good as some of the other tough-as-nails platformers from the same year....