I know I know. The game doesn't come out until April 8th, but Xbox Game Studios and Compulsion Games gave us a sneak preview of their new day one game pass title. South of Midnight was on my list as something that would be underrated this year. This is a preview build, so I cannot really say anything super critical, to be fair. So I'll skip the story and go right into how it felt to play the game. That's what we're here for. All this was played and captured on the Xbox Series S, so keep that in mind.
This build just wants you to get your feet wet, and that's exactly what it does. Primary character Hazel has your third person jumps and double jumps. She also has a glide to get her further than her regular hops can muster. Hazel felt like a lighter 3D Prince of Persia at some points, and sometimes felt a little clunky, but once you got used to her, it felt a lot better.
The Preview build took me through Chapter 3 of the campaign, where you meet "Catfish". Catfish will tell you the next thing you need to know after a small tutorial. While the navigation tutorial is pretty good, the battle tutorial in this build was not followed. I just reverted to my action adventure roots, and it pulled me right through. In battles, Hazel can push and pull her enemies, and even throw enemies at other enemies. She has a dodge, too, and if you dodge at the right time, it causes damage. A parry of sorts. She can even bind her enemies and whale away, but none of this is taught to you.
In fact, the first thing the game teaches you is the pull and throw technique, and I want you to forego this tip. Just fight. All the things they want you to use have a cooldown that seems like forever in the heat of battle. When you defeat an enemy, you have to finish them off by unraveling them. I don't know if that will get old, but at least you get some life back.
You can go down the beaten path, and clicking the right stick will show you where to go. Feel free to explore, to find more in-game currency, called "floofs". You can use these floofs to upgrade your arsenal. I suggest trying out the new stuff, and again, leaving that pull and throw tech alone until you get faster cooldown. Fight, unravel, fight, and then unravel the knot in that section, and move on.
The game has beautiful potential. Mostly sticks to 60FPS, if you care, but I turned that motion blur off - I often wonder if people really like it. The stop motion opening sequence is pretty cool to look at, and the cutscenes, all voiced, are pretty good too. I had to keep telling myself it was a preview build, so I won't get super technical. I will say that while the music is good, there is a terrible song that plays toward the end. Art is subjective. My ears were not happy.
Other than that, the game looks like it'll be a fun romp through the Macabre Fictionalized American Deep South, and the Catfish, though gross looking, is animated very, very well. Check the video below for a more in-depth look, and be sure to look for more info when South of Midnight weaves it's way to you on Steam, and Xbox, day one on Game Pass.
MY.GAMES has announced that free-to-play PvP mech shooter War Robots: Frontiers will launch on March 4th for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. The game is also currently available in Steam Early Access for $14.99, if you cannot wait to get your hands on it.
War Robots: Frontiers is a team-based competitive shooter developed on Unreal Engine 5 that puts players in the cockpit of their own mechanized war machines. Piloting your mech, you will feel the weight of the massive machines as you move across the battlefield, as well as the recoil of each weapon thanks to advanced physics and ballistics systems. As for customization, your mech is your mech, with a wide variety of parts, weapons, and cosmetics to make it your own.
At launch, you can expect cross-platform play, multiple unranked and ranked game modes, and some pre-built mechs if you just want to hop in and play without all the tinkering.
Check out a new cinematic release date trailer below:
If you love having your living quarters under the biggest rock you can find, then this article is for you. Mai is out, and people are loving her. The #1 Japanese Shiranui ninja is now the new hotness in Street Fighter 6. Behind Terry, Mai will go down in history as the second guest character in a Street Fighter franchise. I don't know what this means for the future, as Elena has been teased to be right around the corner. What I do know, is that Mai has been dominating Street Fighter 6, as this isn't just your run of the mill DLC character. She is THE DLC character, with an invincible taunt that nullifies some supers and critical arts!
Check out the video below as I take on some Mai's, then try to take people down as Mai, and then check the taunt in question from Youtube content creator desk. No one will use it in a real match, but it's a lot of fun to watch!
Aye Meow Mateys! Have you ever dreamt of traveling the high seas as a swashbuckling pirate on the hunt for buried treasure? Of course you have! But have you ever thought about doing all of that while embracing the feisty feline lifestyle of a cute lil kitten? Who hasn't?!
The great news for your kitty questers is that The Gentlebros, makers of Cat Quest III released a free new upgrade on all platforms today, titled "Mew Game" (Yes, the puns within this game are plentiful and worthy of a giggle or two).
If you're a Cat Quest fan, you're in luck, because achieving success within the Mew Game, you'll receive brand new equipment to adorn your kitters with. Which is an incentive that should make all of your dreams come true.
But enough about the rewards, let's talk about the other fun modifiers you'll find in this upgrade. You only get Nine Lives before your file is fur-ever lost to the high seas, you'll have Ruffer Enemies to beat, Naked Paws for fiercer cat fights, Magic Spells with quick replenishing mana, Fast Furwards to keep the game moving at an engaging speed, No Leveling OR Upgrades, and a Ship that only allows one damage. ONE DAMAGE!!!
So catch your cat naps early, because this upgrade sounds purrfectly intense. Check it out:
Cat Quest III is available now across Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC (via Steam), with Mew Game mode as a free update for all players. For more information visit: https://thegentlebros.com/catquest3/
Team Jade’s hit free-to-play shooter, Delta Force, is getting a premium Black Hawk Down PvE campaign on February 21st for PC. The new campaign mode is being added to the overall package of Delta Force and is an Unreal Engine 5 reboot of the 2001 film of the same name, as well as a re-imagining of the 2003 video game, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down. Everything clear as mud, so far?
This new Black Hawk Down campaign will take players directly into the events that took place in Mogadishu, Somalia when American military became pinned down and outnumbered. In the campaign, you will choose your class, customize your loadout, and work as a unit to survive the legendary battle.
On a macro level, Delta Force is a free-to-play suite of multiplayer modes, which will now add the pay-to-play single-player campaign to its roster. While currently only available on PC, the game is still supposed to release in its entirety for mobile, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, presumably at some point this year.
The new Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Monster Manual has Elementals. They're not only from the elemental planes—Earth, Air, Fire, Water—but also from the mashups in between: Plane of Ooze, Magma, Ash, and Ice. These are the fundamental building blocks of the Inner Planes, the planes that house the Material Plane, Feywild, and Shadowfell.
Ok, that's a lot of proper nouns. But that just goes to show that there are lots of Elementals. They're either made of a primary element at the heart of one of those planes, or is at least in some way suffused by it. Some examples of Elementals:
Just like many monsters in the Monster Manual, some have played musical chairs with their creature type. Many of these come from the drastically shrunk Humanoid category—but had enough of the Elemental Planes in their makeup to make the move make sense:
CREATURE | OLD 2014 CREATURE TYPE | NEW 2024 CREATURE TYPE |
Merfolk | Humanoid | (Water) Elemental |
Aarakocra | Humanoid | (Air) Elemental |
Lizardfolk | Humanoid | (Earth) Elemental |
Azer | Elemental | (Fire) Elemental |
You see that the Azer was already an Elemental. They're just in the chart above so you can see how developer Wizards of the Coast started with them as an example as to how to round out the Elemental family with Merfolk, Aaracokra, and Lizardfolk.
They also fill in a big gap that exists in the older 2014 Monster Manual: an apex big bad creature to sit at the top of the Elemental pyramid. That new apex creature is the Elemental Cataclysm.
High Challenge Rating (CR) creatures for Elemental Earth, Air, Fire, and Water already exist in the Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse sourcebook.
But the Elemental Cataclysm was created to top them all. And it's a fun creature for Dungeon Masters to run, because the DM gets to roll each turn to find out which element—Earth, Air, Fire, Water—will dominate the round and release its particular type of elemental destruction.
Since the Elemental Cataclysm is Chaotic Neutral, there's no malice involved in what it does. It's just a disaster. It's a tidal wave, a hurricane, a firestorm, whatever. It doesn't care about you, and probably cares little for itself. But even as the Elemental Cataclysm has passed, the world is often renewed or changed in some elemental fashion. That's awesome. And its writeup says, "The End and Beginning of Ages." That's incredible.
While many of us may see a dragon-like creature with multiple heads and think: Tiamat, the Elemental Cataclysm is not Tiamat. It's a Voltron of the four apex Elemental creatures in Monsters of the Multiverse: Zaratan (Earth), Elder Tempest (Air), The Phoenix (Fire), and Leviathan (Water). Considering the Elemental Cataclysm was inspired by being a mashup of those four major Challenge Rating creatures, it's absolutely the extinction-level event I'd love to bring to my table.
The new D&D 2024 Monster Manual goes on wide release on February 18.
Fiends are the "most classic villains of the D&D multiverse." There have always been a ton of Fiends, ever since the very first Monster Manual. Whereas Aberrations are strange, gooey villains from the Outer Planes, Fiends are the burbling-inside-everyone villains of the Lower Planes—and sometimes even the inner self. But don't worry if your players have other priorities: evil turns on itself. So Fiends are fighting each other as often as they're fighting normies on the Prime Material plane.
Devils are Fiends. Demons are Fiends. And Yugoloths are a third group of Fiends they play both sides against each other. There are unaffiliated fiends like Succubi and Incubi but are super into doing evil things.
The unifying theme is Evil. Whether they're Lawful, Chaotic, or Neutral in how they go about it, they're always going about their Evil. As long as the bad guys are winning, Fiends couldn't be happier.
Fiends were already a big group in the old D&D 2014 Monster Manual. In the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Monster Manual—that group is even bigger. Because like many creatures in the Monster Manual, some have migrated out, but even more have migrated in, especially from the Humanoid group.
Creatures new to the Fiend category:
Creature type (e.g. Humanoid, Fiend) not only has mechanical ramifications in the rules, but world-building ramifications as well. From a 10,000-foot view, it was getting hard to discern the differences between this jackal person and that wolf person, this sea creature and that sea creature. So creature type hopefully steers a Dungeon Master in the right direction as to how to discern between all these monsters.
Take two types of sea creatures for example. Sahuagin and Kuo-Toa:
That speaks to their origins in the multiverse, which also means they tend to feed different types of stories.
What's the difference between Demons and Devils within the Fiend family, though?
There's more to it than that, but that might put you on the right track, just knowing those two things. If you want to get familiar with Devils and Demons, play the Descent Into Avernus adventure. Yes, some of those creatures play against type, even in the middle of the endless Blood War ravaging the Nine Hells. But if a Dungeon Master needs an enemy that the players don't have to think twice about destroying, Fiends are a great way to go. Even if your players need to destroy them with wit and wisdom rather than swords and sorcery.
Because they originate from the Outer Planes—the Lower Planes to be exact—there's always room for a fiendish incursion, no matter what D&D world you're playing in. Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Spelljammer, Planescape...you can have a Balor show up and Balrog your entire day. Setting-agnostic foes, such as fiends, are at home anywhere in the Multiverse.
The 2024 Monster Manual gets wide release on February 18.
Who knew there was an audience for a management style game that intertwines the complexities of managing a bar along with the horror of serving supernatural patrons?
Clever Trickster Studio sure did. Enter Blood Bar Tycoon, a new Steam game that launched on February 4th. Blood Bar Tycoon is your standard tycoon style game - in this one you're tasked with creating a profitable business, but the twist within this game is blood. Not just any blood, but the blood of your unsuspecting patrons. You see, not all of the patrons are as they seem, some are - you guessed it - vampires. Keep the vampires happy and watch your profits soar!
As you continue on with your business development, you'll be able to upgrade your bar, both by enhancing the overall aesthetics, but also by investing in new ways to harvest and serve blood, thus building your empire and establishing yourself as the number one Vampire hotspot in Crimson City.
However, becoming rich and famous within the vampire underworld is not as easy as it seems. If you're not careful, your human patrons may walk in and never walk out. The more that happens, the more likely it is that the Vampire Hunters will be on your case. Which, if you've been reading this post, you probably don't want.
Does this sound like the type of game you want to sink your teeth into? Check out the trailer to see snippets of the game in action.
Learn more by visiting the game's website. And order a Bloody Mary, I heard it's A+.
Krafton, Inc. and PUBG Studios have announced that its top-down tactical 5v5 shooter, formerly known by the codename Project Arc, is now called PUBG: BLINDSPOT. The competitive shooter is also getting a free demo for Steam Next Fest beginning February 20th, and its new trailer looks awesome. BLINDSPOT is a team-based shooter with fast-paced gameplay that combines the intensity of tactical shooters with the unique vantage point and vision mechanics of isometric strategy games.
I cannot wait to get my hands on this. I’ve been wanting to play something that is like Rainbow Six Siege, but not Rainbow Six Siege – it’s like Krafton and PUBG Studios read my mind.
Starship Troopers: Extermination is ushering in new rewards and a new perks system to customize troopers with update 1.2, Disputed Sands. Having gone live two days ago on February 5th, Disputed Sands is available now for consoles and PC. The update returns us to the sands of Valaka with new milestones, rewards, and of course lots of bugs to shoot. There are new weapon mods as well for pistols, pulses, shotguns, grenade launchers, and flamethrowers. This update also include server optimizations, introduces company chat, and has other quality of life updates. Full patch notes are on the official site.
Disputed Sands doesn't fix every known issue in the game however. Developer, Offworld, has already announced details for the next update, 1.3, with UI optimizations, fixes to instances where certain buttons become unresponsive, occasional audio distortions, and rare bugs in clearing notification badges. They have also promised further optimizations for PC.
Even though the launch version of the game was a little rough around the edges, it's encouraging to see the game still being avidly supported and enhanced by the development team.