The Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 consoles have been out for quite some time now, each with a new controller. Back in November, Apple confirmed it would be bringing support for these new gamepads to iOS, now six months later, that support has finally arrived.
As part of the iOS 14.5 update, Apple has also introduced support for additional game controllers on iOS, including the Xbox Series X/S controller and the PS5’s DualSense.
Apple began expanding gamepad support on iOS in recent years in preparation for its own gaming service – Apple Arcade. These controllers can also be used for cloud gaming services, which are finally starting to open up to iOS.
Currently, Microsoft is testing Xbox Cloud Gaming on iOS via browsers on the iPhone and iPad. GeForce Now is available on iOS with a similar web-based solution and soon, Amazon Luna and Google Stadia will be joining the ranks.
KitGuru Says: Do any of you use a controller with your phone for gaming, whether it be mobile games or console/PC titles streamed via the cloud?
Become a Patron!
Check Also
Apple Silicon M2 processor reportedly already in production
Apple embarked on a journey to create its own processors several years ago, which culminated …
Mustafa Mahmoud 4 hours ago Console, Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
Godfall was the first game to be announced exclusively for the PlayStation 5. Positioned as the first true next-gen game, the ‘looter-slasher’ received a lukewarm reception – though it was technically impressive in a number of ways. Despite its marketing, it would appear that the game can run well enough on older systems, as Godfall has now been rated for the PS4.
A recent rating on the PEGI ratings board has suggested that Godfall may be coming to the PlayStation 4. The game was a launch title for the PS5 and also came to PC. It was the first game to be officially announced as a PS5 exclusive, making its appearance at the December 2019 Game Awards.
Despite its marketing push, Godfall received mixed reviews from critics with user reviews faring even worse. The game was criticised for its repetitive nature, as well as its general forgetability. This was made worse by the launch price, which was set at $70.
Since its release, Godfall has improved somewhat thanks to a number of major updates. Furthermore, the game has been promised to be getting DLC over the course of 2021, hopefully helping with the game’s repetitive nature. With the developers not giving up on Godfall, it is understandable that they would want to push the game to greater sales success on a platform with over 100 million players.
Of course, with Godfall marketed as a PS5 console exclusive title, it will be interesting to see what sacrifices had to be made to get the game to run on PS4. Hopefully Godfall’s PS4 launch fares better than its PS5 one.
KitGuru says: What do you think of Godfall? Did you play it? Are you surprised to see it supposedly coming to PS4? Let us know down below.
Become a Patron!
Check Also
Razer’s Orochi V2 is a compact wireless mouse with up to 900 hours of battery life
Razer is back with another gaming mouse this week. This time around, the Razer Orochi …
Home/Software & Gaming/Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart gets new gameplay trailer and State of Play stream
Matthew Wilson 1 day ago Software & Gaming
PlayStation’s State of Play stream will return later this week with another episode. This time around, Insomniac Games will be in the spotlight once again, with its second major PlayStation 5 exclusive, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.
The next Ratchet & Clank game has been a major part of the PS5’s launch and year-one marketing. Thanks to the new PS5 hardware, we’ll be seeing instant load times between levels, as well as plenty of visual upgrades, including ray-traced reflections to make Clank shinier than ever.
Ahead of the stream, Insomniac also released a new gameplay trailer, which you can see above. The new trailer focuses on Rivet, the new Lombax protagonist joining Ratchet & Clank on their latest adventure.
We’ll be seeing another 15 minutes of gameplay later this week, with State of Play set to air on the 29th of April. Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: Ratchet & Clank is one of my favourite PlayStation exclusives, but unfortunately, I have not been able to secure myself a PS5 yet so I’ll be missing out for the time being. Have any of you been able to get a PS5 since launch? Are you looking forward to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart?
Become a Patron!
Check Also
SEGA will start selling NFTs
NFTs have become the latest controversial blockchain technology, allowing people to (in theory) sell digital …
Resident Evil Village is nearly here, and Capcom is giving you more time to play a piece of it ahead of launch. The studio originally announced that players on Xbox, Playstation, and PC would have access to a 60-minute demo this weekend for just 24 hours, but after fan criticism, Capcom has extended the demo’s availability to a full week.
Village’s final demo will still unlock on May 1st at 8PM ET in North America, but availability will now end on May 9th at 8PM ET, a two-day overlap with the game’s full release on May 7th. Capcom announced the change along with extended time frames for both the United Kingdom and Europe on the game’s Twitter account. Playtime for the demo will still be limited to an hour, though.
We’ve heard your feedback and are extending the availability period for the final 60-minute multi-platform #REVillage demo.
The original 24-hour window starting 5PM PDT May 1 (1AM BST May 2) has been increased by a week, and now ends at the same times on May 9 PDT (May 10 BST). pic.twitter.com/8VKEU8bMnu
— Resident Evil (@RE_Games) April 26, 2021
The final demo will let you play two sections of the game: the eponymous village and Castle Dimitrescu, home of the tall vampire lady everyone knows and loves. PlayStation owners had just a few hours to check out the village and then the castle sections in 30-minute chunks over the past two weekends, but on May 1st, players on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Stadia will all have a week to play through both sections of the game, as long as they do so within 60 minutes.
This demo follows the first from January, titled “Maiden,” which featured an unnamed protagonist rather than Village’s main character, Ethan Winters.
Resident Evil Village launches on Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and Stadia on May 7th.
Apple has just released macOS 11.3, alongside iOS 14.5. It’s probably worth updating your Mac to it as soon as you can — not only because it comes with some new features, including improvements for running iPhone and iPad apps on M1 Macs and updates to Apple Music and Podcasts, but it also fixes a major security flaw.
The update reportedly patches a vulnerability that allowed malware to bypass many of macOS’s built-in protections, like File Quarantine and GateKeeper’s opening dialog box. While Apple’s built-in anti-malware system could still block malicious programs if Apple were aware of them, enterprise software company Jamf did find evidence that the security flaw was being exploited by attackers.
Apple also details a slew of other security fixes that are included with the latest update on its security update page. Catalina and Mojave have received security patches as well, for those who haven’t yet updated to Big Sur.
Aside from security updates, one of the biggest new improvements in 11.3 (at least for owners of M1 Macs) is the ability to resize iPhone and iPad app windows. Apple’s also added keyboard, mouse, and trackpad support for games that are compatible with controllers.
The infinity symbol in the queue controls the Autoplay feature.
Apple has also added autoplay to the Music app — a feature which is either great or annoying depending on your mood. After you reach the end of a song or playlist, Apple Music will continue playing music that it thinks is similar (thankfully, it can be turned off if you’re just looking to listen to one specific song). The News and Podcasts apps also have redesigned pages to make them easier to use (with the former getting a reworked search feature — something that’s exciting to me, and possibly no one else).
The update also adds many of the features that are in iOS 14.5: the ability to track AirTags using the Find My app, new emoji and Siri voices, and support for the Xbox Series X / S and PlayStation 5 DualSense controllers. You can visit Apple’s site to see the entire list of updates and features.
(Pocket-lint) – MotoGP sits at the very apex of the motorbike-racing formulae, yet its officially licensed games have somehow never quite crossed over to a mainstream audience. The cognoscenti are aware, however, that developer Milestone – which has been crafting MotoGP games since 2007 – really knows its stuff.
For a number of reasons – not least the fact that making a motorsport game in the middle of a pandemic, when visiting circuits to scan them is somewhere between tricky and impossible, is a logistical nightmare – MotoGP 21 doesn’t offer much by way of surprises.
It’s the first MotoGP game to include the long-lap penalty, its management element has been expanded somewhat, and its tyre-wear model has been tweaked to offer even more realism. So is the 2021 edition worth the ride?
Preaching to the converted
But that there’s no major new feature isn’t vastly problematic, since Milestone’s MotoGP games have been consistently solid for a number of years, and MotoGP 21 continues that trend.
As we’ve come to expect from officially licensed motorsport games, it’s big, comprehensive and technically accomplished, and provides a meaty facsimile of the whole real-life MotoGP circus, encompassing the lower formulae, Moto2 and Moto3, and letting you indulge your team-management fantasies to an extent, as well as to showcase your bike-riding skills.
One reason why MotoGP games haven’t been huge hits among a mainstream gaming audience in the past instantly becomes obvious when you fire MotoGP 21 up: its target audience is clearly hardcore MotoGP fans and the sort of bike enthusiasts who might participate in track days.
It does have a tutorial, you can turn on driver aids, and there’s a rewind button for erasing painful wipeouts. But that tutorial is distinctly cursory when it comes to explaining the fundamentals of bike-riding, and much more detailed regarding esoterica like bike-setup.
Koch Media
MotoGP 21, then, preaches mainly to the converted, and those who are new to bike-racing games are likely to find it a tad intimidating, although it is easy enough to set things up so as to ease yourself in gently.
Carving out a career
In Career mode, once you have virtually created yourself as a MotoGP racer, you can choose whether to start in Moto3, Moto2 or the full-blown MotoGP. From then on, there’s a familiar calendar-based structure, so you can opt to participate in as many or as few testing and practice sessions and so on as you want.
Koch Media
If team management is your thing, you can start your own junior team after a season, and you can mess around with chasing the most lucrative contracts and swapping to the best teams.
But if you find all those aspects peripheral and just want to dive into the racing, MotoGP 21 delivers brilliantly. You can leave the Career mode to launch quick races in all the formulae, but if you don’t know the circuits, you’ll struggle in the races. So, it makes sense to participate in the Career mode’s free practice sessions in order to learn the circuits, before qualifying and the actual races.
If your bike-racing skills aren’t quite at a ninja level, it also makes sense to start off in Moto3: its less powerful bikes are much more forgiving and, in particular, easier to stop going into the corners – those used to four-wheel racing games will have to adopt an unfamiliar slow-in, fast-out style, and learn how to blend the throttle. Being the last of the late-brakers is a recipe for disaster.
Koch Media
MotoGP 21’s bike-feel is exemplary – the full-blown MotoGP beasts are a real handful, but once you develop confidence in the front-end of your bike, you can really flow round the circuits. Tyre wear is also very noticeable – as it is in the real-world MotoGP – and you must setup your bike carefully for the races, playing off tyre longevity against top-end power. You don’t necessarily have to fiddle around with bike settings yourself: you can tell your virtual engineers what you want, and they will make changes accordingly.
Best PS5 games 2021: Amazing PlayStation 5 titles to pick up
By Max Freeman-Mills
·
Online play
Online, MotoGP 21 feels impressively solid in technical terms, although it can be difficult to tell pre-release, when servers are sparsely populated. But the online side of the game definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted: it tries to match riders with similar skill levels, but you’re still likely to be pitting yourself against gamers with expensive rigs rather than just a console and a gamepad. Inevitably, brutal racing results. Offline, you can crank up the AI to reflect that, but its default level is fairly forgiving: your rivals will be quick, but at least they won’t take you out with abandon.
Koch Media
Visually, MotoGP 21 is very good, but not exactly jaw-dropping. We played it on the Xbox Series X, and it didn’t feel like a game which was designed for the latest generation of consoles, then crunched down for the previous generation – understandably, given that new-gen consoles are still in short supply. Ironically, MotoGP 21 is at its visual best when you crash, and it switches perspective to a harrowingly realistic crash-cam.
Verdict
For hardcore, committed MotoGP fans, MotoGP 21 is absolutely spot-on: it doesn’t offer any major surprises or innovations, but it does let gamers fulfil their bike-racing fantasies in the most realistic manner imaginable. It’s technically solid, nice and flexible, and decent-looking.
Our main caveat would be that those who haven’t played a MotoGP game before might find it intimidatingly hard at first, although if you start off in Moto3 before working your way up the formulae, you should find that it constitutes a decent gateway towards becoming a seasoned virtual bike-racer.
Overall, though, MotoGP 21’s quality is on a par with the prestige of its official licence, which is pretty much all you could ask for.
Despite Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous and bug-filled December 10th launch, the title was “the largest game in CD Projekt Red’s history,” the studio said on Thursday (PDF). The game sold 13.7 million copies in 2020, according to CD Projekt Red.
We already had a pretty good idea that Cyberpunk 2077 has been a major financial success for the studio. On December 9th, one day before the game’s launch, CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077 had accrued 8 million preorders. One day after the game’s release, CD Projekt Red said digital preorders had recouped all of the game’s development and marketing costs. And the studio said that the game had sold more than 13 million copies as of December 20th in a memo shared on December 22nd.
Cyberpunk 2077 drove massive sales even though its launch was a huge mess. The game had bugs and issues on many platforms and ran particularly poorly on older consoles, forcing CD Projekt Red to quickly release numerous hotfixes. The game’s performance and fan outcry were so bad that Sony yanked the game from the PlayStation Store just one week after launch, and months later, it still hasn’t returned.
CD Projekt Red also said on Thursday that its hit RPG The Witcher 3 sold more than 30 million copies, making 2020 “the second best year in [the game’s] history with regard to the number of copies sold.” In addition, the studio committed to releasing PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S-optimized versions of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 in the second half of 2021.
AMD this week made select capabilities of its FidelityFX package available to Microsoft Xbox Series X|S developers. For Xbox Series X|S, AMD makes available FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Variable Shading, and ray-traced shadow Denoiser technologies, which are already supported by numerous PC games.
AMD’s FidelityFX is a collection of technologies that can greatly enhance visual quality of games or improve their performance without noticeable degradation of image quality. AMD has introduced eight FidelityFX technologies.
AMD’s Luminance Preserving Mapper for HDR-supporting FreeSync Premium Pro monitors
Single Pass Downsampler (SPD)
Parallel Sort (optimized version of the radix sort algorithm)
So far, game developers have implemented support for CAS, CACAO, and SPD on PCs, but eventually AMD expects developers to adopt more technologies from the package. One of the most anticipated FidelityFX technologies is AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), a rival for Nvidia’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). Unfortunately, this technology is currently not supported either on PC or Xbox X|S.
Making ingredients from the FidelityFX package available on Microsoft’s latest game consoles has a lot of rationale for AMD. Firstly, the consoles come in two configurations and it is easier for developers to make sure everything works on them as they do not have to test over a dozen of different RDNA/RDNA2-based graphics cards that are used by gamers. This is barely important for those 40 games that already support CAS (as well as CACAO and SPD) on Windows PCs, but for those titles that yet have to support CAS, variable shading, and ray-traced shadow denoiser supporting them on consoles first makes quite a lot of sense.
Secondly, at around 4.5 million consoles sold to date, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X|S have a larger installed base that AMD’s entire RDNA2 lineup, so game developers are more inclined to use the collection of FidelityFX technologies (well, three of them at this point) for the new consoles rather than for the latest graphics cards. Of course, it would make even more sense for AMD to get its FidelityFX to the latest Xbox Series X|S and to PlayStation 5 (i.e., to over 11.5 million systems) to popularize the package, but right now the collection seems to be a more PC centric.
Earlier AMD said that it was going to support arguably the most anticipated FidelityFX Super Resolution technology available on all RDNA/RDNA2 platforms, which includes PCs running AMD’s Radeon RX 5000 and Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X|S, and Sony’s PlayStation 5. Meanwhile, the company has not disclosed when it plans to roll out its FSR.
If you have tons of Dogecoins lying around, you can use them to put together your next PC or upgrade. Newegg has announced via a press release today that the retailer now accepts Dogecoin as a payment method.
Newegg has always been a retailer that embraces cryptocurrencies. The company was one of the first to accept Bitcoin back in 2014 and now, the online retailer has added Dogecoin to the list. Using Dogecoin on Newegg is as easy as selecting your BitPay wallet at checkout and then choosing the Dogecoin option.
“The excitement and momentum around cryptocurrency are undeniable, and the recent surge in Dogecoin value underscores the need to make it easier for customers to make purchases with this popular cryptocurrency,” said Andrew Choi, Sr. Brand Manager of Newegg. “We’re committed to making it easy for our customers to shop however works best for them, and that means letting them complete transactions with the payment method that suits them best. To that end, we’re happy to give Dogecoin fans an easy way to shop online for tech.”
In comparison to Bitcoin, Dogecoin is easier to mine. However, the reward is also lower. While a Bitcoin is worth over $56,000, Dogecoin is currently sitting at $0.39. Just a week ago, the meme-inspired cryptocurrency was worth $0.09 so that’s a whopping 355% increase. According to data from CoinMarketCap, Dogecoin’s current market cap is over $50 billion, which is even bigger than Ford Motor Co. and just a few million behind Twitter.
You can pick up some good stuff if you’ve been stashing Dogecoins. The GeForce RTX 3090, when in stock, starts at $1,499 at Newegg, which is equivalent to around 4,470 Dogecoins with today’s rate. Or if you’re into consoles, the PlayStation 5 sells for just $2,099.99 or 6,255 Dogecoins.
Sony has announced that it’ll be keeping its PS3 and PlayStation Vita digital storefront open “for the foreseeable future.” The PSP’s store will still be shut down on July 2nd, 2021, as originally planned.
“Upon further reflection, however, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here. So today I’m happy to say that we will be keeping the PlayStation Store operational for PS3 and PS Vita devices. PSP commerce functionality will retire on July 2, 2021 as planned,” Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan announced in a blog post.
Sony had originally announced that the digital storefronts for its legacy consoles would be shut down at the end of March, making it impossible for customers to purchase digital copies of games for those systems. Sony says that the move to discontinue to the storefronts was “born out of a number of factors, including commerce support challenges for older devices” along with a desire to focus more on newer products (like the PlayStation 5).
Following the announcement, though — and the backlash from PS3 and PS Vita owners upset that they would no longer be able to buy new games — it seems that Sony has relented and will be keeping those stores open indefinitely.
Those lucky enough to have got their hands on a PlayStation 5 despite the recent shortages can look forward to another large download in the near future, as Sony gears up for the release of the console’s first major update tomorrow, as announced on the PlayStation Blog.
(Image credit: Sony)
With the first PS5 update you’ll now be able to store PS5 games on external storage, but you won’t be able to play them from there. Copying games from a USB SSD sure beats deleting them and re-downloading, or reinstalling from a ‘disk’ (whatever one of those is) if you’re short of space on the internal SSD, but it’s not a perfect solution.
Elsewhere, there are some changes to social features and personalization options. The popup Game Base menu that covers parties and chat has been improved, you can hide titles you’re ashamed to own in your game library, and trophies are now handled better with (finally!) the ability to see a quick summary of your trophy stats. The PlayStation smartphone app is also getting some love, with added abilities including console storage management and notifications of when your friends are online.
While there’s quite a lot baked in to this update, it’s more notable for what it doesn’t contain: there’s still no way to expand the internal storage of the monolith, and Sony maintains it’s still ‘working on this feature’. For those of us used to whacking an M2 drive into any spare slot and it working first time, this seems like an unnecessarily drawn-out process, especially as Microsoft’s partnership with Seagate has seen expandable storage modules for the Xbox Series consoles become readily available.
Sony is reportedly working on another remake of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us — first released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3, followed by a PlayStation 4 remaster in 2014. The latest version of the game is intended for the PlayStation 5 and would reportedly feature the gameplay and graphical improvements introduced in 2020’s The Last of Us Part II,Bloomberg reports.
Bloomberg reports the remake’s status is part of a broader reorganization at Sony’s first-party development studios, which are struggling with the conflicting goals of the company’s desire for larger, blockbuster-scale projects from its major studios and the smaller, less lucrative passion projects from its smaller teams.
The Last of Us remake is one such project. The remake was originally started by Sony’s Visual Arts Service Group, an internal team that largely provided support work for art, animation, and development to Sony’s other studios on bigger projects like Spider-Man or the Uncharted games. But the Visual Arts Service Group aspired to work on its own games, and it figured that lower-cost remakes of popular Sony franchises would be a good place to start — leading to rumors last year of a “secret” new Sony studio in San Diego.
But Sony reportedly largely ignored those efforts. It tentatively approved the Visual Arts Service Group’s remake project but refused to give the team an expanded budget for the remake. The project was then moved back to series creator Naughty Dog, where it’s apparently still in development — with the Visual Arts Service Group assisting, as usual.
It’s worth noting that all these projects are still apparently fairly early on, so there’s plenty of time for Sony’s plans here to change regarding if, when, or how these games actually are released.
Bloomberg’s report notes similar issues with Sony’s Bend Studio, the developer of Days Gone. The Bend team reportedly tried to pitch a sequel to the open-world zombie game but was rejected — instead being tasked with helping Naughty Dog on a multiplayer project and a new Uncharted game. Bend’s leadership was apparently so concerned about being fully absorbed into Naughty Dog’s team that it asked to be removed from those projects; it’s now reportedly working on a new game of its own.
Deathloop has been delayed again, with Arkane’s timed PS5 console exclusive moving from its previous May 21st release date to a fall release on September 14th. The news marks the second big delay for Deathloop, which was originally supposed to be out in the 2020 holiday season alongside the then-newly released PS5.
As with the earlier delay, Arkane’s Lyon studio is once again citing COVID-19-related delays, with an increased difficulty in development as it works to ensure “the health and safety of everyone at Arkane.”
Deathloop is the latest title from Arkane’s Lyon studio, best known for the Dishonored franchise and the rebooted Prey from 2017. Players assume the role of Colt, an assassin stuck in a time loop who must fight his way out by assassinating his eight targets using a variety of weapons and mystical powers — all while being hunted by a rival assassin, Julianna (who can be controlled by other players over the internet).
As a next-gen exclusive title, Deathloop is only set to be released on the PlayStation 5 (for a one-year exclusivity period) and PC — despite the fact that publisher Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft. Xbox studio head Phil Spencer told Bloomberg back in September that it’ll still be holding to that timed exclusivity for both Deathloop and GhostWire: Tokyo. Thatmeans, with the current delay, Xbox owners will be waiting even longer before they’re able to head to Blackreef.
(Pocket-lint) – If you were to pick out a gaming genre that’s hard to break into right now, online looter-shooters would be high up on the list. High-profile attempts like Anthem have shown how difficult it can be to upset the hierarchy.
That’s just what developer People Can Fly is trying to do with Outriders. And to its credit there’s clearly a solid foundation here. It’s built a looter-shooter that feels punchy and rewarding, with an endgame that has promising depth as it stands.
A survival story
Outrider’s framing story is refreshingly straightforward and intelligible. Escaping from a dying earth, your colony ship reaches its destination, a lush new planet called Enoch. However, all isn’t well and, after a scouting expedition on the surface goes awry, you wake up to find that decades have passed.
Enoch hasn’t been the welcoming paradise that was promised, and is instead home to a bizarre anomaly that’s altering the planet and its animals to fight back against the invasion of humans. The world you wake up to is war-torn and fractured, with factions battling over resources and a scarce few mutants gifted extraodinary powers by the anomaly, yourself included.
Best upcoming Xbox One games to look forward to this year
Best upcoming PS5 games: The top PlayStation titles to anticipate
It’s hokey stuff at times, but anyone who’s tried to understand just what on earth is going on in the Destiny universe will appreciate that simplicity can be a good thing.
People Can Fly previously made the raucous shooter Bulletstorm, so some of that game’s brash humour can be traced through to Outriders – but it sadly doesn’t always land. Your player character is, straightforwardly, a bit of a misanthrope. That attitude can make for pithy lines, but it can also mean a baffling lack of empathy and/or sympathy for non-playable characters (NPCs) that you’re supposed to care about.
People Can Fly
With acres of extra lore added into your codex at all times, there’s plenty of world-building to dig into here if you like, but keeping things simple in broader story terms is a welcome choice, in short. That said, Outriders could do without so many interrupting cut-scenes, given the hitch in loading that these seem to entail at present.
Class warfare
The core of the Outriders value proposition, though, isn’t really in how it delivers its side quests. It’s in how it feels to play, and this is an area where you can feel People Can Fly’s experience shining through.
Given the studio also worked on Gears of War Judgement, it’s no surprise that this is a third-person cover shooter that feels polished and fluid. After the game’s prologue, which you can later skip to create new characters quickly, you choose one of four classes.
People Can Fly
Pyromancers have flaming abilities that mark enemies for death; Technomancers can create turrets and heal allies; Devastators can tank loads of damage and hold areas more easily; and our personal favourite, Tricksters, can zip around the battlefield slicing and dicing foes.
There’s no swapping between classes other than by changing characters entirely, but running more than one character is very straightforward and well worth trying. This will help you get to grips with which you most enjoy, and each path offers up multiple skills to choose from to tweak your loadout.
Then you’ve got the actual guns, which are multitudinous and offer increasingly enjoyable modifiers as you progress. Things start off grounded but pretty soon you’ll be freezing enemies with bullets, or shooting an SMG that has explosive rounds, or any number of other variables.
These can be relatively easily mixed-and-matched using the in-depth crafting system, too, letting you find your favourite mods and keep them in your arsenal. One miss at the moment is the lack of transmogrification, a big word that basically means letting you keep exotic weapon skins while changing what they do, but it’s reasonable to hope that might come with time.
For now, guns and powers come together to make for a cover shooter than can also be plenty mobile and reactive, and kinetic when you find a power-set that agrees with you. That said, if you’re playing alone, we’d recommend you opt for the Trickster for your first character. Some of the other paths are a little harder to manage early on without backup keeping you healthy.
People Can Fly
There are periodically large bosses to contend with, which do a decent job of offering a different sort of battle, at scale, even if they can tend to be slightly bullet-spongey in practise. These fights still give a climactic feel to key moments.
It’s also up to you to decide what level of difficulty you want to set your game world at, with rewards corresponding to how far you can push yourself. This is another smart choice that lets you easily strap in for a more chilled session if you want to kick back with some friends, or make it tough as nails if you’re in it for top-tier loot.
Playing in solo mode is plenty fun and fairly well-balanced, but the game is really aimed at trios, where three players can pick loadouts that complement each other and dominate the chest-high cover battlefields that most fights take place in. Played like this, Outriders can be frantic good fun.
Smooth in patches
As with many cross-generation releases, the visual side of things is a mixed bag for Outriders, which largely depends on your platform. Playing on PlayStation 5, we had nice quick load times and the whole game plays at a smooth 60fps with only very rare stutters, just as it should on Xbox Series X and S.
On older-generation consoles the game runs at 30fps, something that’s hardly new for those platforms but still feels signficantly more sluggish when you try it. However, there’s no difference in what you can do and how you do it – it’s purely a visual disparity, also reflected by lower resolutions.
People Can Fly
In art direction terms, though, Outriders posts solid results without much to write home about. Enoch might be a raw alien world but the spaces it offers up to fight in, at present, aren’t the most visually ravishing you’ve ever seen.
Its encampments and forts are straight out of Gears of War, as are the chunky oversized weapons and, while you’ll fight across different biomes, none of them are all that fresh. You’ll see ice levels, forested areas, built-up ruins and lava-strewn wastelands, and it’s all serviceable without being memorable.
That’s not helped by the fact that every arena will inevitably need to feature the age-old maze of chest-high walls to fight around, something that really hamstrings any attempt to make levels feel really naturalistic.
Enemy design is also pretty ho-hum, with a whole bunch of burly blokes in armour sets charging at you for most of the game’s span, interrupted by occasional beasties.
People Can Fly
Still, the particle effects that your powers summon up look vibrant and jazz things up, and running on next-gen hardware the game can look great in big battles, especially when you’re in the more colourful locations.
As an always-online title, though, Outriders launched with some technical issues that were disappointing to say the least. With player numbers presumably inflated by its late-notice inclusion on Xbox Game Pass, server outages have been frequent since release, although the situation is improving all the time. Launch problems are nothing new for online titles, but that doesn’t make them acceptable, especially for those who paid full price for a game they couldn’t access.
Top PS4 games 2021: Best PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro games every gamer must own
By Rik Henderson
·
Verdict
As it stands (and assuming the servers straighten out after the launch troubles), Outriders is a good bit of fun for anyone who’s into third-person shooters or light role-players.
In a time when co-op experiences are thin on the ground it offers up a lengthy campaign you can play through with a couple of friends, and there’s a bombastic, if simplistic, time to be had while doing so.
With a loot and crafting system that can potentially offer up real depth for those who want something to sink into, there’s also plenty of promise in the endgame here, even before you unlock expeditions that offer up high-tier loot for the most dedicated players.
The fact that it’s a complete package is also a tonic compared to a full live-service offering, although whether it’s enough to keep people playing much beyond the campaign will remain to be seen.
Writing by Max Freeman-Mills. Editing by Mike Lowe.
Build-A-Bear has finally revealed what its new Animal Crossing: New Horizons-themed lineup will look like with two stuffed animal versions of fan-favorite Isabelle and infamous loan shark (loan raccoon?) Tom Nook, decked out in island outfits that match the game.
Of course, because it’s 2021, you simply can’t just buy a hot item like an Animal Crossing Build-A-Bear doll — you’ll need to sign up for a PlayStation 5-style queue, which will then randomly assign you a place on line to buy the bears (are they still bears if they’re a dog and a raccoon? How does Build-A-Bear’s taxonomy system work?) today, April 6th, at 11AM EST / 8AM PST.
Right now, Build-A-Bear has only showed off those two characters, although its possible that the company will have other outfits or merchandise as part of the collection, too. (Given the wealth of adorable Animal Crossing critters in the game, there’s plenty to choose from.)
Build-A-Bear is also to be commended for making the new stuffed animals actually look like cute real-life versions of their in-game counterparts, instead of the company’s vaguely horrifying Avengers: Infinity War bears from 2018.
If you are planning on buying an Animal Crossing Build-A-Bear, you should probably stop reading this post and get on line. If it’s anything like the Animal Crossing / Sanrio collaboration, things will sell out fast.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
