The first snow has fallen in this part of the world (which is a mini-miracle here in the UK - usually we have to wait until an anomalously cold week in April). Things are feeling festive, and now that the lovely powder has turned into glossy frozen deathtrap puddles, it basically means we’re stuck in our homes this weekend. Ah well, nothing for it than to do an online grocery shop, duly forget about all the cooking we were planning with it, get a couple of takeaways, and get on with some weekend gaming.
Looks like the DualShockers team is brightening up their festive period with an unusually vibrant assortment of games (with a healthy splattering of toilet humour thrown in).
But what about you? What areyouplaying this weekend?
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Kyle Knight - News Editor
I decided to get first dibs on this week’s ‘What’s Everyone Playing?’ because you’re all probably going to seea lotofHigh On Lifeon this list, so I’m here to grab your attention before you get sick of it. The Game Awards have officially been and gone, but Robert did make a valiant effort to stop them as some of thebest games of the year were yet to be released. One of these is High On Life, which was finally released earlier this week for Xbox and PC (on Game Pass, no less).
I’m a huge Rick and Morty fan, it’s my comfort show. So when I heard that High On Life was from the mind of Justin Roiland, picking it up was a no-brainer. I played roughly an hour on release day, and although the shooting felt a little clunky, I wasn’t particularly expecting Call of Duty-esque combat[ed: just had to slip CoD in there somehow, didn’t you?]. High On Life looks fun, quirky, and comical, so I can’t wait to jump in properly this weekend.
Jeff Brooks - Evergreen Editor
Since The Game Awards last week and the announcement ofVampire Survivorscoming to mobile for free, I decided it was finally time to check it out. I’d heard so many good things about it, after all. I’m not generally much for mobile gaming, aside from my recent obsession withMarvel Snap, but I gave it a whirl. And now I’m utterly obsessed with it!
The game is deceptively simple – mostly navigating through the endless hordes of enemies as your character auto-attacks with a variety of fantastic abilities – but the game offers a unique power fantasy that I can’t get enough of. Games can easily last up to 30 minutes with the right upgrades, but being able to pause at any point makes it easy to put down if need be, and since moving around the battlefield is the only control, playing on my phone couldn’t be easier. Even though every run only ends with you dying, the ‘just one more game’ feeling is incredibly strong with this title.
Elijah Beahm - Features Editor & Unapologetic Saati Main
So, I finally upgraded to a laptop with a 144hz display. Despite rarely seeing much difference between 30 and 60 FPS, I will admit - it feels nice to playPaladinswith liquid smooth performance. While I don’t expect to be pushing most games this hard, it’s actually improved my response times, so I can frustrate even more squishy support characters with a headshot from Saati’s magnum.
Beyond that, my aim for this weekend is to dig further into theSaints Rowreboot, and to finally giveUnreal Tournament 3’s campaign mode a whirl. What with the latter finally going completely free as Epic’s mass delisting occurs (hopefully with Unreal: Gold coming back as well), I figure it’s about time to see what happened with Unreal’s last single-player effort. Will it feature terrible writing? Yes. Will it be hilariously terrible? Nowthatis the question!
Matthew Schomer — News Editor
Like Jeff, I’ve also recently jumped on the Vampire Survivors bandwagon, and I can’t believe a free-to-play pixilated mobile game can be so addictive. But you don’t want to read about that twice in one article, and my fresh gaming joys are still being loaded into Santa’s sleigh, so it looks like I’m taking the cheap route and going back to the well. I was about to jump back intoNo Man’s Skyin late summer and enjoy the added difficulty sliders, which allow me to keep combat relatively interesting while spending less time slogging through resource harvesting, but then I got a job at a really cool gaming website, and it kind of fell by the wayside until now.
I’m really appreciating the accelerated start, though. Plus, what better way is there to shake off the cold-weather blues than to hop into your procedurally named fighter craft, hit the pulse drive, and rocket away from an ice planet to your home base on a tropical oceanic paradise with occasional superheated monsoons? Blankets and cocoa come to mind, but No Man’s Sky is a close second.
I am truly besotted withMarvel’s Midnight Suns. It’s a game I picked it up when I realised I hadn’t played many of this year’s numerous triple-A releases (and I had a game-of-the-year list to write) and I instantly took to it. I’ve had the game for under a week, and I’ve already logged over fifty hours. Whether I’m wreaking havoc on Hydra forces in tactical battler missions or breaking up the action by having a pool party with my best buds Magik and Ghost Rider, I’m always having a good time. I’ll have more to say in the future but for now, I’m loving it.
If I’m taking a break from Midnight Suns, do I dare to pick up old schoolRuneScape? The YouTube algorithm has inundated me with high-quality OSRS content, and I’m close to being hooked back in. How long can it take to get level 99 woodcutting anyway?
It’s GOTY crunch time, so no more pissing around (unless you count juggling several new games at once and trying to give them any level of critical attention as pissing around, which I do).High on Life, Signalis, and now possiblyBlacktail(due toElijah’s irresistibly glowing review) are the key games in question. Thus far, I’m loving High on Life’s ludicrously detailed world; everyone goes on about the humour which, yes, is hit-or-miss, but so far I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time watching whole five-minute in-world TV shows, chatting to ass-faced aliens, and looking at made up movie posters. Signalis is fun so far, and I don’t even know what a ‘Blacktail’ is yet, but I mean to find out.
Then I’ve got to check outHunt: Showdown’s new event, which periodically sets the whole bayou on fire, and will continue looking for signs of ray-tracing inThe Witcher 3Next-Gen Edition,because I just don’t see it.
Damien Lykins — Editorial Final Boss
I have to admit, I haven’t looked back at the Lands Between since it plunged my social life into non-existence for a couple of solid months upon release. But withits big GOTY winand thecompletely coincidentalcontent drop preceding it, I’m game to check out those shiny new PVP arenas. I’m most certainly behind the times in terms of viable builds, but a dedicated PVP area that is presumably free of three-man insta-gank squads intrigues me, and not necessarily for competition’s sake. I’m not going to be so disingenuous as to suggest FromSoftware’s ever had its PVP down to a fine science — Souls PVP is unbalanced, hectic, and more of a mood influencer than it is a well-tuned competitive system, and I love it for that.
What has really always fascinated me concerning that lovely, tangled mess is the depth of PVP etiquette in Souls games. The game’s layer of systems includes PVP, sure, but the players build a culture around it that’s surprisingly organic, nuanced, and something of an unspoken “code of honor,” if you don’t mind me sounding like a hoity-toity turd in describing it as such. I want to check in and see what sorts of emergent behavior are springing from this new wrinkle.
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