Joe Donnelly has been up to his old tricks, by which I mean finding GTA Online roleplay servers and having an amazing time. His latest adventure took place on a flight sim server, where he had to disarm a bomb at an airport before the President's plane landed. Wild times.
Fraser Brown played the beta for Mars Horizon, which hasn't actually added Mars yet. You can however get to the moon in this space management sim, which sounds like it's more easygoing than Kerbal, and also more focused on research minigames than hardcore rocket physics.
Emma Matthews has been playing the demo for Roki, an adventure game based on Scandinavian folklore. You play a girl named Tove who sets off into the wilderness to help her family, but is kind enough to stop and help out some animals along the way. There's lots of snow, and wolves, and snow.
On the subject of snow, Andy Kelly has been playing Arctico, an Early Access base-building game. It started life as a more traditional survival-crafter called Eternal Winter, but has shifted gears to be about exploration and constructing solar panels to get your base powered up.
Chris has been playing Predator Hunting Grounds, a game in the Evolve/Friday the 13th/Left 4 Dead tradition of unequal multiplayer, only it's not unequal enough. As Chris found it, the Pred-head is at a disadvantage when you'd expect things to be the other way around. In an ideal world the Predator would descend into the middle of a game of PUBG or Warzone and hunt unsuspecting players, but in the absence of that it would be nice if Hunting Grounds game him the unsporting chance of victory he deserves.
Harry Shepherd has been playing XCOM: Chimera Squad, and while I'm sure the tactics side of it is fascinating, what he is mainly gripped by is the efficiency of its transport infrastructure. The roads, he's into the road. And what roads they are! PC games are mostly about maps, as everyone knows, and Chimera Squad certainly has one.
Pretty much all of us have been playing Gears Tactics. It's like a regular Gears game in that it's quite brown and no man may have a neck, but the ways its Gears-iness interacts with the tactics are fascinating. There's an ability called intimidate which cancels enemy overwatch and flushes them out of cover, which is literally just your guy standing up and shouting insults. The grubs get mad, jump up to shout back, and all your mates on overwatch eviscerate them. It's a very Gears moment, but also a clever move when used at the right moment.
Enough about us. What about you? Have you been inspired to pick up a Star Wars game in time for May the 4th, or has the Assassin's Creed Valhalla announcement made you want to pick up an old AssCreed? Are you playing Streets of Rage 4, SnowRunner, or Landlord's Super? Let us know!
