MMORPG

Worms Rumble reimagines the turn-based classic as a real-time arena shooter. It’s arcadey and colourful and extremely brisk. I would love to tell you that this is the definitive Worms Battle Royale, but so far Last Worm Standing is actually my least favourite of the three modes on offer. Nonetheless I guess that’s the pitch.

It’s 32 players blasting each other to pieces in surprisingly expansive 2D environments with lots of architectural complexity to balance the fact that there are so many people packed in there together. There are shopping malls and underground stations with working trains. There are vents and elevators and secret areas, which are covered to the player until you head inside yourself – which could mean a nasty surprise. You spawn with one of a handful of weapons but there are plenty of others scattered around. This is Worms so there are rifles and shotguns, but … Read the rest

The cubes are probably my favourite thing about Immortals Fenyx Rising. The floating cubes. Huge cubes, taller than me, scattered nursery toys of the Gods. You whack them to start them up and then they glow and hover above the ground. In this state you can pull them about and even throw them. You can stack them and use them for all kinds of platforming puzzles. Clever stuff, inevitably. What I love though – and I think I do love the cubes a bit – is their playfulness. Prod them and they drift a little. Lob them at a target and they spin away afterwards with a sort of Space Odyssey laziness. Once I was standing on a cube and I got another one stuck underneath it, which meant the cube I was standing on started to tilt and threatened to throw me off. Immortals is always a lively game, … Read the rest

After staying seemingly closed off for many years, 2020 is looking like the year Chinese games break out onto the global market. There’s first-person shooter/slasher Bright Memory, which not only left early access earlier this year but is also being developed into a full-length game, while early footage of next-gen action game Black Myth: Wukong was enough to generate buzz around the world. The biggest success however belongs to Genshin Impact, already the biggest global launch for a Chinese game ever, with over $100 million revenue reported within two weeks of release. If these are signs of a trend, then Chinese developers are in for a bright new dawn of premium-quality games.

But when I think of Chinese games, I’m never just thinking of games made from China. As a Chinese person myself, I’m thinking of all the other cultural traditions and sensibilities that carry across a whole ethnic diaspora. … Read the rest