This Week in Gaming (Week 30)

[TheLostSwede]

After a slow week of new releases, we're in for an extremely packed week this coming week, as we have no less than two AAA titles and several other big releases. The first AAA title this coming week is a sequel from Gearbox with the second AAA title having been out on the PlayStation consoles for quite some time, but it's been given some new sparkly features on PC. We also have a space game that we know some of you have been looking forward to, as well as a time travel game and a few other little gems.

Remnant II / This Week's First AAA Title / Tuesday 25 July
Remnant II is the sequel to the best-selling game Remnant: From the Ashes that pits survivors of humanity against new deadly creatures and god-like bosses across terrifying worlds. Play solo or co-op with two other friends to explore the depths of the unknown to stop an evil from destroying reality itself. To succeed, players will need to rely on their own skills and those of their team to overcome the toughest challenges and to stave off humanity's extinction.





Space Cats Tactics / Monday 24 July
Fight nerve-wracking spaceship battles in this turn-based tactical space opera RPG! Manage your crew of feline warriors to adapt to every strategic situation and dive into a thrilling space opera story where your choices will determine your path.



Crimson Tactics: The Rise of The White Banner / Tuesday 25 July
Crimson Tactics: The Rise of The White Banner brings you an epic adventure in the form of a turn-based tactical RPG. Set in a medieval high fantasy world, witness a massive political disruption through the lives of different characters and fight for the fate of Wendalle.



Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart / This Week's Second AAA Title / Wednesday 26 July
The intergalactic adventurers are back with a bang in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart! Go dimension-hopping with Ratchet and Clank as they venture onto a PC near you for the very first time. Help them take on an evil emperor from another reality as you jump between action-packed worlds and beyond. With their own universe next in the firing line, dust off the dynamic pair's outrageous weaponry and stop a dimensional collapse in its tracks!



Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival / Wednesday 26 July
Time travel through history to become God. Ride dinosaurs, forge tools, sail dunes, build a colony, siege castles, automate and fly, mine underground, launch to the moon, build a dyson sphere! An insane, unforgettable and revolutionary survival crafting base building open world adventure.



The Expanse: A Telltale Series / This Week's AA Title / Thursday 27 July
Experience the exciting universe of The Expanse like never before in Telltale's latest adventure, The Expanse: A Telltale Series. Follow Cara Gee, who reprises her role as Camina Drummer, and explore the dangerous and uncharted edges of The Belt aboard the The Artemis. From scavenging wrecked ships in a zero-g environment, to surviving a mutiny, to combating fearsome pirates, you make the difficult choices and reveal Camina Drummer's resolve in this latest Telltale adventure.



Mega City Police / Friday 28 July
Retrowave Skill-Based Action Roguelike about tough cops fighting crime and keeping peace the old-fashioned way. Choose your cop and dive into hardcore action against enemies and bosses using a huge arsenal and special abilities that will define your playstyle. The law will make crime bleed.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Dristun]

Ratchet and Clank almost looks like a big budget CGI cartoon alive as a videogame, definitely playing it. Always up for some good old action-platformer!

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

Ratchet and Clank almost looks like a budget CGI cartoon alive as a videogame, definitely playing it. Always up for some good old action-platformer!

If you're into that kind of game and haven't played it yet, Kena: Bridge of Spirits might be up your alley too.

 

[TheLostSwede]

As for Remnant II, it might be worth holding off and waiting for the patches...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1683054228472733696

 

[Dristun]

If you're into that kind of game and haven't played it yet, Kena: Bridge of Spirits might be up your alley too.

thanks, I'll check it out

 

[dgianstefani]

Tried Remnant II, didn't have any RT effects to enable, only DLAA, still, maxed out settings 1440p the framerate wasn't great, I lowered shadows to high (motion blur etc. off) but still lowish framerates. Playable though. I got to the end of the first mission then got bored though, so uninstalled it. I wasn't using a frame rate monitor, just observations.

At least the game has 99%+ GPU usage the whole time so it's not being CPU limited, it's just whatever it's doing graphics wise doesn't look anywhere near good enough to run like it does.

"Designed for upscaling" sounds like laziness. Upscaling can be great for playing at 4K without performance hitching, or when using DLAA such as in my case, or even for people with older cards who want to play newer games. But it's not an excuse to be lazy with performance, neither is it an excuse to release a game that looks like a 2018 game, but performs like a new Crysis.

I found most of the dialogue, events and writing quite tedious though, admittedly I only played the first level.

 

[Sithaer]

If you're into that kind of game and haven't played it yet, Kena: Bridge of Spirits might be up your alley too.

Kena is a lovely game, I can also only suggest it. 'Thats one game I will for sure play again at some point, maybe go for a NG+ run'

To me Ratchet&Clank kinda gives Guardians of the Galaxy vibes with the crazy nonsense fun type of gameplay/characters and thats a game I had a lot of fun with so this one I'm also interested in.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Everyone forgets that Jak and Daxter was the original formula... basically it is the same design logic with different chars. The game was not bad, very enjoyable, I had pain to collect all those damn rings, I remember seeking some missed ones for few hours without any clues...

 

[Sithaer]

Everyone forgets that Jak and Daxter was the original formula... basically it is the same design logic with different chars. The game was not bad, very enjoyable, I had pain to collect all those damn rings, I remember seeking some missed ones for few hours without any clues...

Personally I'm not familiar with any of those since I've never owned a console, actually I'm only aware of this Ratchet&Clank game cause it was ported to PC. 'hopefully it won't be an issue that I don't know anything about the serie'

 

[mechtech]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1683054228472733696

Think I will buy it just because no ray tracing

Edit - I guess W1zz better start testing GPU encode/decode, driver overhead, other workloads and drop gaming performance from reviews

 

[trsttte]

As for Remnant II, it might be worth holding off and waiting for the patches...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1683054228472733696

And there it is, upscaling tech being used as a crutch to solve bad performance and/or optimization

 

[Deleted member 185088]

If you're into that kind of game and haven't played it yet, Kena: Bridge of Spirits might be up your alley too.

Yeah I liked that game, kinda of reminds me of Kameo (another game Microsoft abandoned).

 

[Readlight]

I think Ratchet is mechanics instrument.

 

[Deleted member 229121]

Ratchet and Clank just looks like a good time, haven't played since pry PS3, looking forward to it.

As for Remnant II, it might be worth holding off and waiting for the patches...

Spoiler: port details

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1683054228472733696

Well at least they're being up front about it I guess

 

[evernessince]

As for Remnant II, it might be worth holding off and waiting for the patches...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1683054228472733696

Not a good trend for the industry. 1080p gamers in particular are going to get shafted as the quality hit at that resolution is noticeable on all upscalers.

 

[Chomiq]

As for Remnant II, it might be worth holding off and waiting for the patches...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1683054228472733696

At least it looks OK, JA3 looks like potato and somehow it makes 3080 Ti sweat at UWQHD with 100+ fps and DLSS quality.

 

[thestryker6]

At 3440x1440 high preset, no upscaling, motion blur off Remnant 2 runs about 50 FPS on my system DLSS balanced with the same settings is around 90 FPS (I opted to cap at half refresh so 72). The 536.67 nvidia drivers alone raised performance around 20% over the ones I'd had installed already as the CPU was being utilized better. It certainly seems like there's some optimization needed to be done and I'm not sure if it's the fact that they switched to UE5 later in development or just more development time needed in general. The game at least looks good and runs consistently while wrecking hardware.

 

[SN2716057]

Mega City Police aka American Police sim (/s) looks like old skool fun.
And I'll mos def check out The expanse cause I like the idea (and Cara Gee), I just hope it isn't too bare (the game).
Ratchet & Clank looks great too but it's PS only? So I must wait..if it ever comes to PC. edit: it's on steam and on my wish list

ps: The Grand Emprise trailer showed a lot but it felt odd. So either it's a HUGE AF game or too good to be true.
pps: Cats in space

 

[TheLostSwede]

pps: Cats in space

I was going to include this first...
I figured one pixelated retro game was enough and there wasn't much else out of interest on Friday.

Super Catboy on Steam

Super Catboy is an action-packed platformer created in a high-bit pixel art style, combining the best elements of the golden 16-bit platformer era of the 90s with some ‘pawsome’ new mechanics! And let’s not forget; there’s plenty of CAT CONTENT!

store.steampowered.com

Ratchet & Clank looks great too but it's PS only? So I must wait..if it ever comes to PC.

I only ever post games that are available on PC. This is the PC release of the game, the screenshots are even watermarked to highlight that they're grabbed on a PC.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

What an.. interesting week, let's breakdown some:

• Remnant 2: I don't get why the hoopla about this is, ¿was the 1 such a big deal?, i got the 1 free on epic, and it wasn't a good game at all(even considering that when it goes free in epic it's quite mature and patched). I played it with friends and we all ended up abandoning it quite fast, it was tedious and bad. The maps are huge for no reason meaning you waste minutes running in the empty map, plus the maps can be quite a maze. In fact one of the worst issues is that you run.. and run... and run... a complete time waster, even the home base is a maze where you'll waste minutes running and running, in fact we even got lost on the base several times looking for a specific npc or salesman or having to run from one end of the base to the other. To make matters worse considering what you guys posted this one seems to be a shit console port, "designed with upscaling", F U i'm not going to even deign to "acquire" this game by alternative free means, my PC will NEVER touch any of that scaling nonsense.
• ratchet and clank: never played the 1st one, never cared, still don't care, another console port....
• Space Cats Tactics: This one seems... ¿interesting?, kind of like FTL according to a friend, but his one has chonker cats, might try the demo on steam. No coop really puts this one low on my list, i'm sick tired of games not having coop.
• Crimson Tactics: The Rise of The White Banner: Turn based chibi-3rd person (¿what do you call this type of game?) like this are not really my cup o tea, but one one thing that REALLY blacklists this for me is how even on the FIRST promo screencap they reuse the SAME CHARACTER PORTRAIT for several NPCs(look at the NPC recruitment window), wtf is that, no no no that's not how you make a game, that's fuggen dev lazyness and corner cutting, nope.
• Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival: errr seems like they tried to cram everything and the kitchen sink in this, not even scam shitizen has dared to try to cram so much stuff , not really into survival games but a couple friends are, like SN2716057 said, seems "too good to be true".
• The Expanse: A Telltale Series: Never played a "telltale" game before, have been following this one with some interest as a fan of the scifi series(not on its tenure at scamazon), but dunno... will wait and see maybe when it's free on epic. ¿Specially as this seems to be one that will have several game releases/episodes?, no idea how previous telltale games worked. Kudos for them using a main character from the series which really constraints how freeform you can take the game story direction in, i wonder how they skirted around the game not impacting the canon of the story.

 

[MarsM4N]

Good week. Got already Remnant II, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart & The Expanse: A Telltale Series (another EPIC Store exclusive, ughh!) on my wish/watch list. But I guess the safest bet would be Mega City Police as it's a game not much can go wrong. Not in a hurry as I buy most SP games years after release on heavy discount, so I just lean back and see how the STEAM reviews pan out.

What an.. interesting week, let's breakdown some:

• Remnant 2: I don't get why the hoopla about this is, ¿was the 1 such a big deal?

Remnant: From the Ashes (2019) is still very popular, on average 2.699 players for the last 30 days. Would go for this one and wait for the new one to mature. Game is still a little pricey even on keyshops. Got it in the Humble Choice June 2023 bundle, so that was a dam good deal, lol.

What an.. interesting week, let's breakdown some:

• The Expanse: A Telltale Series: Never played a "telltale" game before, have been following this one with some interest as a fan of the scifi series(not on its tenure at scamazon), but dunno... will wait and see maybe when it's free on epic. ¿Specially as this seems to be one that will have several game releases/episodes?, no idea how previous telltale games worked. Kudos for them using a main character from the series which really constraints how freeform you can take the game story direction in, i wonder how they skirted around the game not impacting the canon of the story.

Telltale Games are basically like a interactive comic/movie where where choices matter decisions influence where the story is going. Has also some replayability since different decisions lead to different events and endings. Nothing challenging, but pretty entertaining, plus more immersive like watching a movie.

Ratchet & Clank looks great too but it's PS only? So I must wait..if it ever comes to PC.

Nope, it's already on STEAM.

 

[SN2716057]

I was going to include this first...
I figured one pixelated retro game was enough and there wasn't much else out of interest on Friday.

Super Catboy on Steam

Super Catboy is an action-packed platformer created in a high-bit pixel art style, combining the best elements of the golden 16-bit platformer era of the 90s with some ‘pawsome’ new mechanics! And let’s not forget; there’s plenty of CAT CONTENT!

store.steampowered.com

I only ever post games that are available on PC. This is the PC release of the game, the screenshots are even watermarked to highlight that they're grabbed on a PC.

And another wish listed!

Edit: nevermind, the demo ran at 2fps