PC, Xbox; Bethesda Softworks Bethesda’s gigantic space RPG’s first major expansion only highlights the game’s fundamental limitations The first story expansion for Bethesda’s big, bold, rickety space RPG arrives after a year’s worth of incremental updates that have already ironed out the game’s most egregious flaws. Those quest-breaking bugs have been squished, there are now vehicles to make planet-side travel less of a chore, city maps are at least partly useful these days, and there’s now a 60fps mode for those playing on Xbox Series X. But Starfield’s fundamental problems remain – turgid, rubbery NPCs; the baffling profusion of loading screens – but just as the Phantom Liberty expansion finessed Cyberpunk 2077 in its entirety, Shattered Space arrives poised to improve upon what came before. It appears that Bethesda has acknowledged that travelling across space by selecting planets from menus and watching a cutscene was a bit rubbish, because Shattered Space mostly takes place on a single map, much like Skyrim or Fallout. This new, self-contained narrative concerns House Va’ruun, Starfield’s slightly tiresome cult of space-serpent-worshipping zealots. The player is whooshed towards the secretive society’s homeworld after it has suffered a cataclysm, heralded as the civilisation’s potential saviour – which, naturally, means everyone has plenty of chores for you to do, busy as they are standing around staring at walls or genuflecting in courtyards. Starfield: Shattered Space is out now; £29.99 on Xbox, £25.99 on PC Continue reading...

PC, PS4/5 (version tested), Switch and Xbox One/Series X While there are no spectacular advances on last year’s game, new refinements provide a vivid glimpse of what it’s like to be a genius on the field It’s been a year since EA, having abandoned its Fifa licence, brought us EA Sports FC, the most awkwardly named sports game franchise since Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona. Sales were apparently 5% down after the switch to the catchy new moniker, but profits were up thanks to the cash-raking power of Ultimate Team, EA’s controversial, financially voracious take on a Panini sticker album. Now we’re on to the follow-up and with Konami’s eFootball still underperforming and no new Fifa title on the immediate horizon, it’s another open goal for team EA Sports. Fortunately for us, the developer is not taking its dominance for granted: there are genuinely intriguing new features here. Last year it was all about the advanced HyperMotion2 animation tech, this year it’s FC IQ, which looks to enhance the strategic side of the game by giving you intricate control over team and player mentalities. Here, you can tweak your build-up style and defensive approach, then go in and change the priorities of each individual player. Want Saka to play in an aggressively attacking rather than balanced role at Arsenal? You can make that change. Then, when you start a match his AI will be yelling at him to make forward runs at the expense of providing defensive support. It’s a fun option for Claudio Ranieri types, but a bit much if you’re just after a kickabout. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox series SX; Devolver Meta spin on arts-and-crafty games has you helping an eccentric trio able to access the world outside their story to battle the evil Humgrump There is a whole sub-genre of video games that use arts and crafts as the basis for their aesthetic, landscapes and storytelling: LittleBigPlanet, Chicory, the Paper Mario series, Yoshi’s Woolly World and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, to name but a handful. The Plucky Squire takes things one step further, and then things get very meta. About two-thirds of this game takes place in a gorgeous children’s picture book with a hand-illustrated feel, wherein the player helps the titular Squire and his two friends – an apprentice witch with an affinity for painting, and a mountainside rock’n’roll troll with a knack for rhythm – face up against the chaos raining down from the evil Humgrump. But despite these twee beginnings, it gets pretty postmodern pretty quickly. The remaining third of the gameplay takes place on the child’s desk around the book. The Squire has the power to jump out of the 2D world of his story into reality. Here he can turn pages, tilt the book itself and smuggle objects from the chaotic, messy desk into the story to help him. Continue reading...

Set in the year between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws follows Kay, an ambitious street thief as she plots a giant heist. We meet the gang behind the gang About 10 minutes into the latest preview build of Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s forthcoming open-world adventure, lead character Kay Vess enters Mirogana: a densely populated, worn-down city on the desolate moon of Toshara. Around us is a mix of sandstone hovels and metallic sci-fi buildings, crammed with flickering computer panels, neon signs and holographic adverts. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, R2 droids glide past twittering to themselves. Nearby is a cantina, its shady clientele visible through the smoky doorway, and just to the side is a dimly lit gambling parlour. As you explore, robotic voices read out imperial propaganda over public address systems and stormtroopers patrol the streets, checking IDs. At least as far as this lifelong Star Wars fan is concerned, these moments perfectly capture the aesthetics and atmosphere of the original trilogy. Like A New Hope itself, it’s a promising beginning. Continue reading...