Mycoag

A hidden gem snuck out onto Steam late last month in the form of an unprepossessing deckbuilder, Aces & Adventures, that while it might sound like nothing special has the higher production values and interesting design of a much bigger game. At its core it’s a clever little thing, a deckbuilder that has the card-adding-talent-accruing gameplay everything since Slay the Spire specializes in, but couples that with a combat system based on drawing and playing poker hands to attack and defend.

I think it’s quite clever, and the poker-based elements aren’t obtrusive if you don’t know poker too well. In truth, they just provide a nice resolution engine to play around with. That plays out over 13 narrative campaigns, each of which is fully voice acted with nice narration and character flavor. There’s also a full-on roguelike default mode after that, which procedurally generates runs to play. A session of play takes about 10-20 minutes, perfect for a quick round or an hourslong-binge.

The game has five separate characters, each with their own neat playstyle, and four difficulty modes in those 13 campaigns for a total of… 52 levels to play. Which is a lot of work to go …

Manor Lords sure took off, huh? Coming out of the gate swinging, the city sim quickly achieved, in the publisher’s words, success “well beyond what we could have hoped”—and the wins just keep coming for simulated life among the peasantry. 

As shared by publisher Hooded Horse on Twitter, Manor Lords has now hit over 2,000,000 copies sold since its release back in April. The game’s solo dev also chimed in to express their gratitude, adding in a quote tweet: “Insane! Thank you for playing”.

While it’s certainly no Palworld by volume, it has to be appreciated that the city builder—especially a mediaeval city-builder about peasants rolling wagons full of cabbages about—is finding such deep-rooted success. It really does feel as if this is the year of left-field indie games thriving while big-name companies stumble over their own feet. Or, as PC Gamer’s Tyler Wilde put it last week, “avoidable mistakes they immediately back down from”.

Out of sheer, unadulterated curiosity, I decided to do a google and figure out what the population of the largest city was back in ye olden days of mediaeval England (if you feel put out by this by an American, I…

Homeworld 3 was originally scheduled for a 2022 release, which got pushed to 2023, and then pushed again into 2024. All up that’s a substantial delay, but it has offered ample time to catch up on earlier instalments, at least. Now’s an especially good time to do that, because the Homeworld Remastered Collection has just hit the Epic Games Store, and to dramatically sweeten the deal it’s free-to-keep for a limited time.

The Homeworld Remastered Collection includes spit-polished versions of the first two Homeworld games, in addition to the original untouched versions. There’s also access to the Homeworld Remastered multiplayer beta, and yes, it has crossplay with the Steam version. If you add it to your Epic Games library before August 2, you’ll get it free, and keep it forever.

On its release in 2015, our reviewer described Homeworld Remastered as “a worthy upgrade to one of the best strategy games ever”. In addition to being a great strategy game, it’s also an emotionally charged space opera with a real sense of intergalactic existential dread about it. The aforementioned review noted that the “campaign stands today as the most effective use of t…

Hearthstone’s next expansion, Perils in Paradise, won’t have a new game board, and what might seem like a minor miss to you or I has quickly snowballed into doom-and-gloom predictions about the future of the game among quite a number of fans.

Game boards are exactly what they sound like: Different backgrounds on which Hearthstone is played. The game currently has 36 boards, though some of these are only available in the WIld mode, and aside from some cosmetic interactivity—on the Naxxramas board, for instance, clicking the spider eggs will make a squishy noise and eventually release some spiders—they have no impact on gameplay.

Nonetheless, the absence of a new board in Perils in Paradise is clearly being felt. The missing board itself isn’t really the issue, though, but rather what it’s perceived to reflect about the state of the game, exacerbated by the fact the audience has some real trust issues with Blizzard, as was notably seen with the quest XP debacle in April. 

Hearthstone is of course 10 years old now, and perhaps no longer the apple of Blizzard’s eye—or at least its accountants—leading some to worry that the game is slowl…

We’ve been following SSD prices closely over the past few weeks, months, years even… during which there have been some really bad times, some good times, and some middling times. We’re in the middling times now—some NVMe SSDs can be found for decent prices today, though you’ll need to spend more than you would have last year to get the same thing. The 4th of July sales haven’t really done much to change that, either.

I’ve been looking around to see if there’s anything around worth shouting about for PC gamers, and the frank answer is, no, not massively.

SSDs have been floating a little above where they were this time last year—a likely symptom of lower production levels to mediate slow demand. This WD Black SN850X is a good example. It’s one of our favorite SSDs today for PCIe 4.0 storage needs. 

Over on Amazon, the SN850X is down from $190 to $150—a 21% saving. Except that’s not much of a discount at all. This drive has been sitting at $150 or thereabouts since… 2023. It was July last year when this drive dropped down to $90—right around Prime Day.

Another from WD, the SN770, is down to $78 for 1TB of decently q…

Marvel Rivals, the new Overwatch-style third-person hero shooter, has a killer theme song that I heard several times while waiting to log in as its closed beta was hammered by legions of other players trying to do the same. After about an hour, however, the servers seem to have stabilized and I managed to get in and play a match.

The servers went online a few hours ago and it seems like they weren’t quite prepared for the number of players who want to team fight as classic Marvel heroes, like Spider-Man, Loki, and Storm. Several players reported being stuck on the title screen on the Steam forums, and some say they were disconnected when they finally entered a match.

On Twitch, Marvel Rivals has already climbed into the top 10 most viewed games with a little over 68K active viewers, putting it above Fortnite’s 59K. Most streamers are in and playing now, but for a while there only the first 20 or so made it past the main menu. Even FPS streamer Shroud, who has gathered over 16K viewers for his sponsored stream, was kicked out of a match and forced to relaunch the game in the first hour the beta was up.

The server troubles could be a sign that developer NetEase G…