August 21 - 27 | Gamers With Jobs

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IMAGE(https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/files/pictures/pictures/picture-13445.jpg) Felix “Mech Up” Threepaper

Welcome folks, and happy “112th Anniversary of the theft of the Mona Lisa” week!

On 21 August, 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia—an artist and worker at the Louvre—shoved the Mona Lisa under his workers’ smock and walked out with it. It remained missing for 3 years. All sorts of people were implicated during the Louvre’s investigation, even Pablo Picasso. As with most art heists, the jig was up when the thief tried to sell the painting. Peruggia was an Italian patriot who thought the Mona Lisa belonged to Italy. He tried to sell it to the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, who told the Louvre about it, but not until after he had displayed the painting at the Uffizi for 2 weeks. The theft of the Mona Lisa catapulted it into public consciousness, helping to make it the famous painting it is today. You may all celebrate by playing a game where you don’t really miss an item until you lose it.

It’s ramping up again, folks. AAA and indie bangers lurk around every corner. We are on the downhill slide now. I’m trying to only have eyes for the imminent console release of BG3, but the release schedule won’t let up. Plenty of this week’s games would make worthy additions to the Pile.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is FromSoft’s return to their 3rd-person mech-fighting series, whose last instalment was on PS3/Xbox. These games had their own reputation for difficulty, due more to tortuous controls than Souls-like precision combat. Fires of Rubicon streamlines the controls, so it’s no more complex than other 3rd-person shooters like Returnal. The lead developer is the guy who led the dev team on Sekiro. There’s a lot of dashing during combat, but you can fly, so the dashing goes vertically as well as sideways. The aim of the game is to earn money from missions to buy more gear for your mech, so that you can take advantage of all the different loadout options and the tactical variety they afford. Combat looks frenetic and the sense of scale is huge: you think your mech looks big in the hangar, then you jump into a mission and take on bosses that you originally thought were the horizon.

Immortals of Aveum is a spellcasting FPS, reminiscent of Hexen, but using the new Unreal Engine 5, so the graphics and spell effects look super shiny. The protagonist is straight out of videogames circa 2007: a novice named “Jak” who is always wisecracking and has a sarcastic rebuke for everybody. Despite the skippable dialogue, the spell-flinging combat looks good: each of the 3 types of magic provides your basic FPS building blocks (rifle, minigun, shotgun) but branches out from there with further spells, and you can mix it up to find killer combos.

Blasphemous 2 is a sequel to the popular 2017 Castlevanioid. It’s a typical “more” sequel, giving more of what people liked about the first game, and less of the croft. So there’s more spells, weapons, platforming, and gross-out religious-themed art. Each weapon also has a traversal feature to help you explore the levels and get to their secrets. There’s less backtracking and repetition, although the enemy variety within each level is still pretty slight.

Fort Solis is a 3rd person sci-fi thriller set on an abandoned base on Mars. It’s going for the “whole game is one shot” effect seen in God of War. The focus is on narrative and puzzling rather than combat and jump scares. You don’t get any weapons, just a multi-tool to hack doors and store all the journal entries you’ll find. When there is action, it is resolved through context-specific buttons, which looks inspired by games like Heavy Rain and Quantic Dream. It has high production values and a stellar voice cast, including Roger Clark, Troy Baker, and Julia Brown.

WrestleQuest is a turn-based RPG where your party members are pro wrestlers. There’s an extra layer of conceit that these are all just action figures, so it’s kind of like imagining a battle royale with all your toys. Maybe their arms get ripped off, but you can just stick them back on again later. Beyond that, there’s some homage to actual wrestling legends of the 1980s. There’s a lot going on—only crazy indie studios attempt to mix so many elements like this.

Immortals of Aveum looks interesting, but in a “wait-for-sale” kinda way. I didn’t really do Armored Core VI: Fires of the Rubicon justice with the bare-bones description above, but it is the GOTW. It looks like the most accessible Armored Core game yet, which is the perfect entry point for me. A lot of people have been waiting for FromSoft to stop messing around with Souls games and get back to this series. Hopefully they will not be disappointed.

Here's the list, in release-date AND alphabetical order!