Month: January 2019

Free games are always good, and PlayStation Plus members can try an extra one for a limited time soon. This weekend the PS4 shooter Firewall Zero Hour is free for anyone with an active PS Plus subscription, though you’ll also need a PSVR headset to play.

Firewall Zero Hour launched in August 2018 to a positive reception. The tactical shooter is multiplayer-based, pitting squads of four against each other. It ordinarily costs US $40 / £25 / AU $40, so to be able to play it for free is quite the deal. The offer is valid from January 18-20.

January’s free PS Plus games are also live now. PS4 owners can pick up Steep, an extreme sports game from Ubisoft that lets you ski, snowboard, and glide in a wing suit to go from a mountain’s snowy peaks to its powdery base. The other PS4 game for January is Portal Knights, which takes the building component of Minecraft and constructs around it an RPG that encourages crafting and exploration.

The PS3 freebies are Zone of the Enders HD Collection, which contains remastered versions of two PS2 mech combat games, and the music/rhythm game Amplitude. PS Vita owners can grab Fallen Legion: Flames of the Rebellion (also playable on PS4) and Super Mutant Alien Assault.

PS Plus members should note that, starting in March 2019, Sony will no longer give away free PS3 and PS Vita games for PS Plus members. If you subscribe to PS Plus primarily for those free titles, you’ll want to turn off your subscription’s auto-renewal option or cancel it then.

Pioneer, the sci-fi project teased within Watch Dogs 2, has seemingly been canceled. A trailer for the space exploration game was found in a Watch Dogs 2 mission that had you infiltrate Ubisoft’s real-life San Francisco office. However, ex-Ubisoft game director Alex Hutchison has now cast doubt on the project’s status.

“RIP Pioneer,” he stated on Twitter, including a link to the game’s trailer. When followers asked if this meant the project was dead, he simply responded with crying emojis. Ubisoft has declined to comment, but then the game was never officially announced in the first place. It was seemingly due to be revealed at E3 2017, before needing to be “retooled,” according to Kotaku’s sources in November 2016.

Hutchison is now working on Journey to the Savage Planet at new studio Typhoon. He previously worked on Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed III at Ubisoft and Spore while with EA.

There’s no sign, meanwhile, of a third Watch Dogs game, which has been heavily rumored to be set in London. The next major Ubisoft title to launch will be February’s Far Cry: New Dawn.

If you’ve been keeping up with the weekly Fortnite challenges, you may notice that Week 7’s set has one particular challenge that you’ll have done recently. The challenge in question involves visiting seven Expedition Outposts, which is something you had to do for Week 4 back in early January. For those who’ve completed Week 4’s challenge, this should be a cinch, but if you need a helping hand, we’re here for you.

Expedition Outposts can be spotted on the map as little red dots. In the game world they exist as small red bunkers with a globe icon surrounded by arrows on them. For the most part, they’re surrounded by X-4 Stormwing planes, which are pretty easy to spot from high up, so look out for those if you need markers. To make things easier, we’ve got a list of bunker locations below, as well as a map to show your their exact locations.

Week 4’s bunker challenge tasked players with eliminating enemies in the bunker areas. However, for Week 7’s variant, all you’ve got to do is find them and hang out in the area for a second. When you do so, you’ll see your progress towards completing the challenge advance. The easiest way to get it done is to hop out of the Battle Bus and land on a bunker, leave the game, and repeat until you’re done.

Expedition Outpost Locations

• Southeast of Lazy Links (F3)
• Northeast of Pleasant Park (D3)
• Southwest of Pleasant Park (C4)
• West of Dusty Divot (F5)
• West of Lonely Lodge (I5)
• West of Paradise Palms
• South of Shifty Shafts (D8)

Once you’re done with this challenge and you’ve pocketed the Battle Stars, it’s on the others. We’ve got a full list of Fortnite Season 7, Week 7 challenges, which shouldn’t be too difficult to complete. Don’t forget that Fortnite’s 7.20 update brought back glider redeploy, so you can make good use of that to get challenges done, provided you manage to get a hold of the new item that enables it. Since one of the challenges also requires you to score damage, keep an eye out for the new gun: the Scoped Revolver. That’ll be handy in dishing out big damage from a safe distance.

The new patch also heralded the arrival of a mysterious icy orb, which is floating above Polar Peak. While it’s unclear what exactly it is, does, or will do, it’s likely tied into a big event coming to the game soon. It could be part of Season 8, which means you should try and finish up remaining challenges from Season 7 before it’s too late. You can use our comprehensive Fortnite Season 7 challenge guide for help with the trickier challenges from previous weeks.

We’re now in week seven of Fortnite‘s seventh season. There’s a new collection of challenges now available, so if you’re planning on unlocking everything the Battle Pass has to offer you’ll need to grind them out. Complete the challenges, earn the Battle Stars, level up the Battle Pass, and unlock the cosmetics–you know how it goes.

As always, challenges are separated into two categories. The first is a free set available to anyone that has the game. The second set, however, is exclusive to those that have spent V-Bucks to unlock the premium version.

In the free category, players will need to visit seven Expedition Outposts that are scattered across the island, use a Rift or Rift-To-Go in three different matches, and then score three pistol kills. If you’ve got the paid Battle Pass, you can get yourself a few more Battle Stars. To do so, you’ll need to complete a multi-stage challenge that begins with you landing at Salty Springs. Once you’ve done that, the next stage will reveal itself–there are a total of five stages. You’ll also need to search seven treasure chests at either Loot Lake or Frosty Flights and destroy one X-4 Stormwing while it’s in flight. The final challenge is another multi-parter which begins by asking you to do 200 points of damage in a single match.

Take a look below for a full breakdown of all the Fortnite Season 7, Week 7 challenges.

Week 7 Challenges

Free

• Visit all Expedition Outposts (7) — 5 Battle Stars
• Use a Rift or Rift-To-Go in different matches (3) — 5 Battle Star
• Pistol Eliminations (3) — 10 Battle Stars

Battle Pass

• Stage 1: Land at Salty Springs (1) — 1 Battle Star
• Search Chests at Loot Lake or Frosty Flights (7) — 5 Battle Star
• Destroy flying X-4 Stormwing (1) — 10 Battle Stars
• Stage 1: Damage opponents in a single match (200) — 3 Battle Stars

Things are getting weird in Fortnite once again. Kevin the Cube might be a distant memory at this point, but for those that miss having a giant, mysterious entity floating in the air, there’s something new to get excited about.

On January 16, as part of the 7.20 update, an icy orb appeared above Polar Peak. If it ends up being anything like dearly departed Kevin, it will lead to a world event. Interestingly, group of eggs also showed up beneath the castle, and a bunker has been found near Happy Hamlet–it was previously blocked by an iceberg.

The orb’s frosty nature fits with the winter theme for the season. At the start of Season 7 an icy chill swept through the island, giving certain areas a snowy makeover. It could be that the orb either expands the impact of this cold spell, or completely undoes it, changing the state of the island as setup for Season 8. The eggs and bunker are likely to play a part in what happens on the island next, but as of yet what that is remains unclear.

Fortnite’s 7.20 update also brought back glider redeploy and introduced a new gun: the Scoped Revolver. You’ve still got a few more weeks to complete remaining challenges from Season 7, and you can use the tips in our complete Season 7 challenges guide to get it all done before the new season kicks off.

When Metro Exodus was first revealed at E3 2017, it overwhelmingly appeared to be an open-world game. Publisher Deep Silver later clarified Exodus would be a “sandbox survival experience,” with players exploring large, non-linear levels throughout the game. So not quite open-world, but something approaching it, then. If a four-hour preview build is anything to go by, Developer 4A Games has fulfilled that promise, but it remains to be seen if the move turns out to be a positive one for the hitherto underappreciated series.

In theory, marrying Metro’s survival gameplay with an open(ish) world is a great idea. Exploring a wide environment, scavenging for resources, and, well, struggling to survive sounds exactly like Far Cry 2, aka The Best Shooter Ever Made (don’t @ me). However, in practice, it has so far turned Metro from a flawed but focused survival experience into a flabby and frustrating sub-standard shooter.

The two levels I played were set during different parts in the story; one sees the returning playable character Artyom stranded from his teammates in a jungle environment and the other has him investigating a town of bandits in the desert. 4A Games wouldn’t say when during the campaign these levels are set, but certainly being dropped in isn’t ideal preparation for a relatively involved survival game. In these areas, the increased scope and playing field felt like it undermined the core of the Metro series’ gameplay experience. Identikit enemies filled both levels–enemies who are both plentiful and powerful, two attributes that are acceptable by themselves but aggravating when combined with a severe lack of ammunition and dissatisfying, fiddly combat that makes a giant crossbow feel like a spud gun. Difficulty is not something I dislike, but at least make it fun to overcome that difficulty; being trapped in a die-respawn-die loop because there are no spare bullets in the vicinity makes it feel unfair.

Making your map a physical item Artyom carries is a nice touch that helps keep you grounded in Metro’s desolate Russian world. However, this immersion is broken by very ‘videogamey’ problems, such as needing to press a button every time you want to climb a ladder, or being unable to hop in and drive an intact, running Jeep to my destination. The immersion feels a little half-baked, and it’s at its weakest during character interactions. Even ignoring Artyom’s insistence on never uttering a word except in loading screen diaries, any conversation between two NPCs feels forced. Problems include uneven dialogue, stilted delivery (“The general situation here is completely awesome, sir!”), and sentences simply pausing in their tracks if you move out of range and resuming from the same spot minutes later when you come back into range. Finally, in the missions I played the open-ish environments don’t seem to have added to Metro in any meaningful way: objectives still needed to be completed in a particular order, there’s still a very linear critical path and few interesting landmarks, and during the demo at least, the player has seemingly no agency over the story.

Instead, Exodus is at its best when you’re indoors. Freedom for freedom’s sake is replaced by a sense of paranoia and claustrophobia, emphasized by your watch’s blinking blue detection indicator, your atmospheric gas mask display, and the sound of your own heavy breathing–it’s just you and your senses in here. Stealth is a more realistic approach given the smaller environments and cramped spaces, meaning it’s easier to defeat enemies by hand-to-hand takedowns, thereby conserving ammunition. and preventing reinforcements from being called. Things still aren’t perfect, but at least some of the frustrations from outdoors combat are avoided and having that cache of ammo does make gun-on-gun combat feel more engaging than the more desperate times outdoors.

Here, Exodus shows promise, but given the focus on the game’s openness in its marketing material and my reservations about that change in structure, I’m a little worried about this latest entry in the Metro franchise. I loved Last Light, so I hope developer 4A Games can clear the leaves from Metro Exodus’ track in the month to go until launch.

Mortal Kombat 11 made a surprise debut at the 2018 Game Awards with a shockingly right-around-the-corner release date of April 23. While that was enough to kickstart the fighting game community buzz, the initial cinematic trailer was short on gameplay details, leaving ravenous fans hungry for more details. However, at the time, NetherRealm promised a longer in-depth look on January 17, and the date is finally here.

Today, the developer, along with publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, is set to host a grand unveiling event, which will have fans and community members in attendance. For those that aren’t able to go, the event is also being streamed. We’ll have a live feed of the event here and provide you with regular updates on all the news from the show. Pre-show interviews will begin at 1:30 PM ET / 10:30 AM PT, and then the keynote will start at 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT.

So far we know a few key details. The Steam page teased custom character variations, possibly borrowing from the latest in NetherRealm’s other fighting series. It also boasted the return of “Klassic” fighters, and a story mode that continues the saga. The trailer showed Raiden, along with two Scorpions. That could signal some sort of multi-verse or time travel implications. A beta is planned for March on PS4 and Xbox One, so we’re likely to hear more details about that as well. NetherRealm has already revealed the cover art.

Pre-ordering MK11 will net you Shao Khan as a playable character, but the roster has plenty of room. We’ve heard rumors of a Spawn cameo, and athlete and actress Ronda Rousey teased an appearance at the show, so she may be involved in some capacity.

We’re likely to hear much more very soon, but in the meantime you check out our pre-order guide for more details.