Gaming in city Sandbox. Reviews, Walkthroughs, News

After teasing a 3D sequel when Prison Architect received its final update last May, developers Double Eleven and publishers Paradox Interactive have announced that, yep, Prison Architect 2 is indeed a thing that is happening - and in 3D, no less. Prisons will now have multiple floors to police, as well as a whole new inmate behaviour system to navigate along the way that will feed into gang warfare, escapes and other budding management problems. It's coming out surprisingly soon, too, with its reveal trailer dating it for March 26th.

Myth of Empires will be officially relaunched on February 21st. Developer Angela Game and Imperium Interactive Entertainment announced the multiplayer strategic sandbox’ launch date, along with a new trailer, and a Steam playtest later this month.

The Quinfall team continues to push its closed beta, which is supposed to open on January 30th. The team had confirmed the beta and said there would be no delays, but then quietly changed the date on Steam to “coming soon” amid lots of criticism and skepticism.

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It’s notable to see a smaller game given the time to grow into something special. When Empyrean’s House Flipper arrived in 2018, it felt less like a house flipping game than a bare-bones cleaning sim. While big updates and DLC added more and more to do over the years, it was an experience broken into chunks. By contrast, House Flipper 2, which arrived earlier in December, is a fully cohesive game straight out of the box.

In , there are multiple missing Bessie the Beaver collectibles that players must find to get all the trophies in the game. These little guys can be a little hard to spot, but once players get used to spotting them, the rest should be easier to see. Finding them all will result in players earning the Full House achievement.

With all the unique LEGO Fortnite creations, are we really surprised that one player already discovered how to create a catapult?

With astress test planned for early 2024, and Early Access in February, the Nightingale team is reflecting on recent changes and happenings in its latest devblog.

2023 has been a weird year. We've seen multiple MMORPG expansions come down to us, despite not really having one from one of the major hitters in the genre, while we've also seen excellent games release across the industry as a whole. It was a banner year especially for RPGs, with games like Final Fantasy XVI, Sea of Stars and, of course, Baldur's Gate 3 launching to much critical acclaim.

Myth of Empires is headed for a relaunch in February. The sandbox war game will relaunch on Steam, followed by a console release.

Valve has revealed the shortlists for this year's Steam Awards.

I haven’t been keeping up with player reaction to the latest Twar and Twarhammer games, but it seems players are none too pleased with Creative Assembly right now. In a rather dramatic open letter, the company's vice president Roger Collum has acknowledged that Total War: Warhammer 3’s Shadows of Change add-on and the recent historical strategy outing Total War: Pharaoh did not ship in a desirable state, with complaints ranging from wobbly execution to overpricing. The studio will try to make things right by offering partial refunds to Pharaoh owners and giving away DLC on top of the usual updates.

Creative Assembly has apologised for «missteps» it made with the Total War series and is offering partial refunds of Total War: Pharaoh on Steam.

NVIDIA just announced the latest round of additions to the GeForce NOW cloud library for the current week. The list of 13 PC games is led by Microsoft's Forza Horizon 4 & 5 and Minecraft Dungeons.

Those that participated in The Big Bang Live event on December 2 got their first official tease at a huge crossover between LEGO and Fortnite. Before you can see what the unique crafting adventure that is LEGO Fortnite has to offer, you must create a world.

No Man's Sky developer Hello Games announced its next big project, Light No Fire, at The Game Awards 2023. While the independent Guildford-based studio stretched its legs with the cute little puzzle game The Last Campfire, this new game is perhaps even more ambitious than No Man's Sky in some respects.

Epic Games and LEGO partnered to create a new Fortnite cooperative crafting mode called. Downloadable through the Fortnite launcher, LEGO promises to offer a secure environment for kids to express their creativity.

The Day Of The Devs showcases are always some of the brightest spots in the biannual trailer'thon gauntlets, and this year's inaugural edition for The Game Awards is no exception. There were 20 fresh-faced indie games highlighted in tonight's 90-odd-minute stream, and cor, there are some right old gems in here, too, with brand-new game announcements from the devs behind Genesis Noir, Kind Words and Tangle Tower to name just a few. We also got more in-depth looks at some of this year's most intriguing indie games that previously only had an enigmatic teaser snippets attached to them. So come and join us below, where you'll find a digest of all 20 announcements from this evening's showcase, as well as the stream in full if you'd prefer to watch it all as it happened.

Once Human, a new post-apocalyptic multiplayer open-world survival game from Starry Studio and NetEase, will open a beta test tomorrow.  The teams describe their game as «a New Weird Sandbox Survival Game», and now's your chance to see what they mean.

The Play Store seemed to be missing out on decent colony sims until today! Little Village is an indie pixel farming game inspired by RimWorld. This quaint little adventure lets you turn the wilderness into a habitable community for all kinds of zany villagers.

Flock, the next game from the developers behind Hohokum, now has a free demo available on Steam.

Spare a thought for any game attempting to compete with GTA 6 today. It can't be easy when big hitters like that inevitably suck all the air out the room, but bless the folks at Hollow Ponds for poking their heads above the 4K flamingo parapet anyway by releasing a lovely new demo for their upcoming critter collect 'em up Flock today. I've just been giving it a go over lunch, and it is truly a very relaxing way to decompress after a morning of poring over GTA gubbins.

Dieselpunk-inspired city builder and strategy game New Cycle will launch in Early Access for PC via Steam on January 18, 2024, publisher Daedalic Entertainment and developer Core Engage announced.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is getting a bunch of new content soon, both paid and free. Where the former is concerned, developer Frontier Developments has announced the Cretaceous Predator Pack, which will launch on November 30 and bring four new Cretaceous carnivores to the game in the Gigantoraptor, the Utahraptor, the Concavenator, and the Tarbosaurus.

I was just pondering writing something about Subnautica, inspired by revelations that there’s a new Subnautica project on the boil, and along comes the decidedly Subnautica-esque Honeycomb: The World Beyond with a trailer. Developed by Polish team Frozen Way, whose other projects include, erm, Hairdresser Simulator, it casts you as Hennessy, a human xenobiologist who is starting afresh on the alien planet of Sota7.

Earlier this month, Agnitio Capital founder Shum Singh hosted a panel at the Montreal International Games Summit to discuss the state of mergers and acquisitions in the games industry, and opened the presentation talking about how the pandemic boom fueled incredible M&A activity a couple years ago and gave everyone a story of some founder they knew who sold a studio for an unexpectedly generous valuation.

If your life has been upsetting devoid of underwater terror since polishing off Subnautica: Below Zero, a glimmer of nautical promise is on the (distant) horizon, with publisher Krafton confirming the next instalment in the ocean survival series is anticipateed to arrive in the first half of 2025.

It appears the next Subnautica game is diving deep sometime in early 2025. It’s been roughly two years since fans dove into the chilly waters of the series, and it feels like it’s nearly time to strap back into that diving suit once more. And then get eaten by a Reaper Leviathan.

Cities: Skylines 2 came out last month, and while a sequel to a mega-poplar citybuilder should have been cause for concrete celebration, the reviews were sadly mixed. Most of the criticism was directed at the game’s performance woes (not teeth-related, apparently) and bugs (which are always a problem in cities, no?) In an effort to iron out the game’s technical problems and implement the mod editor, Paradox and developers Colossal Order have now delayed post-launch content included in the Expansion Pass.

Cities: Skylines 2 developer Colossal Order has delayed the release of scheduled content within the game's expansion pass, while it continues to improve the main game's performance.

At the time of Star Fleet II: Krellan Commander's release, I was still learning to spell and wrestling with the whole "going to the toilet independently" business, but if I'd had access to an MS-DOS PC between potty-training sessions, I dare say I'd have tried my hand at being an intergalactic warlord. Originally published in 1989 by Interstel Corporation and distributed by a little-known company called Electronic Arts, it's an absurdly in-depth and fiddly-looking space sim in which you fly around a randomly generated cosmos in your horrible Klingon-adjacent battlecruiser, blowing up or commandeering other ships, bombarding or invading planets, and generally speaking being a nuisance.

If it's indies you want, you're in luck (as long as you're specifically wanting them on Switch); Nintendo has aired another instalment of its Indie World showcase, this time bringing news of a canceled Shantae revival, plague-themed turn-based tactics, a launch date for developer Inkle's gorgeous hiking adventure A Highland Song, news of Outer Wilds' long-awaited Switch release, and more. If you're looking to catch up on the excitement, or simply need a reminder, you'll find a full breakdown of everything featured during the show below.

A huge part of Cities: Skylines appeal lay in its modding community, which expanded on the citybuilder's robust foundations with new maps, assets and more for years post-release. Cities: Skylines 2 is still waiting on its own official mod support, but Paradox have offered a new update on progress, saying that the editor is "a couple of months" from being in a releasable state, with no concrete timeline as yet.

MMORPG’s and Metaverse can go hand in hand, and in a recent announcement from Avalon Corp, a new contender has emerged with a vision to redefine the genre:AVALON. This ambitious project, unveiled by a fully remote, global team of industry veterans, promises to empower players with unparalleled creative freedom and player-centric experiences.

It’s been a long time coming, but Teardown is finally making its way to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X tomorrow, November 15. And who better to help us get excited than the great Owen Wilson? Wowwwwww…right?

Official modding tools for Cities: Skylines 2 will take at least a couple of months to be ready for an initial release, developer Colossal Order has said.

The open world co-op survival game I liked most was Wurm Online, in which every action was performed via a right-click menu and we needed a town meeting to discuss who would spend the hours necessary to flatten a small patch of land.

Cities: Skylines 2 studio Colossal Order has pledged not to release paid DLC for its city building sequel until its heavily criticised performance issues have been «fixed to our standards».

Cities: Skylines 2 devs Colossal Order have said that the game known as the Builder of Cities and Destroyer of Framerates (at least, known as of me typing this) won’t get any paid expansions while they’re still getting its performance up to scratch.

Baldur's Gate 3 will be released on Xbox on 6th December, 2023.

Players can preorder World of Warcraft: The War Within now and earn in-game rewards like the Algarian Stormrider mount, Traders Tender, Stormrider's Attire, and more! Preorder World of Warcraft: The War Within Prices range from $49.99 USD to $89.99 USD. Players can earn tons of in-game rewards depending on the edition they purchase — there's a package for everyone.

When purchasing the Epic Edition of The War Within expansion, you will receive access to the beta testing of the expansion, plus be able to play the expansion three days in advance. This early access will be limited as many endgame features won't be available then but will allow players to level up early. Click here to Pre-Order The War Within

World of Warcraft®: The War Within™ has just been announced!  Prepare to descend beneath the surface of Azeroth to explore subterranean worlds full of hidden wonders, earn the trust of the new Earthen allied race, and face an ancient evil lurking in the darkness.

Simulation games can be some of the most rewarding games to excel at, but they’ve never quite found a natural home on consoles like they have on PCs over the years. That isn’t to say that attempts haven’t been made over the decades, but results have been mixed with ports that weren’t fully-optimized for console gaming hardware and in some cases, that’s led to games being worse to play on modern hardware than even older hardware. Games like Planet Coaster ring that bell because with a newer and theoretical console-optimized experience, it still never felt natural on a controller. Meanwhile, the original Theme Park on the Sega Genesis felt pretty natural with its controls reworked and a very similar premise.

Ledger is launching the second season of its gamified educational platform in The Sandbox virtual world with the aim of expanding crypto knowledge in the metaverse.

In a quest to expand metaverse gaming, Animoca Brands has announced the acquisition of Web3 streaming platform Azarus.

The overarching theme of this year’s GamesBeat Next conference is “Playing the Edge” — in other words, the technologies, innovations and initiatives sitting at the edge of the gaming industry that have potential to become industry game-changers. User-generated content is one of the areas with the most promise, says Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer at GamesBeat. He spoke with Nicola Sebastiani, chief content officer at The Sandbox, during a special preview session for the conference, about how developers can power brands and creators with immersive experiences and tools.

Worldshards is an independent life simulation sandbox MMORPG from Lowkick Studio. The team recently appeared at Gamescom Asia with a new build of the game, ahead of a planned closed beta set for Q4 2023.

Experienced groups often attempt to spice up new campaigns with innovative storytelling techniques, and adding one or more wildcard characters is a great tool for DMs. If a DM has run prior games for the same group of players, even the most skilled storyteller can become predictable. Players may anticipate plot twists and themes well in advance, due to familiarity. While the players themselves always bring surprises to a campaign, true wildcard NPCs can ensure that every participant is engaged and excited for where the campaign might go. For groups ready for an advanced approach to tabletop RPGs, a wildcard is an ideal addition.

I’m ready to see a lot of gaming people again and so GamesBeat Next is coming just in time for me. Things are different this time so I thought I’d fill you in.

The winners of the 2023 US GamesIndustry.biz Best Places To Work Awards have been revealed.

It’s been a busy week in the gaming industry, with big game releases, a new PS5 and, after months of to-ing and fro-ing, Microsoft finally completed their acquisition of Activision Blizzard to the tune of $68.7 billion!

Bandai Namco has debuted a new developer diary series for Sand Land, the upcoming sandbox action game based on Akira Toriyama's one-volume manga. Just about everything that we've seen of the title so far has shown promise, and the new gameplay that's on display here — along with explanations of mechanics from producer Keishu Minami — has only served to enhance our enthusiasm. The video's well worth a watch if you're even slightly interested in the game.

My Time at Sandrock is sequel to the fairly popular My Time at Portia, and it's looking rather promising in its latest gameplay overview trailer. As you'd expect, the video covers a broad range of topics, explaining how the title's shaping up to be an intriguing mix of role-playing, sandbox exploration, storytelling, monster-whacking combat, and building.

House Flipper 2 is going to have a Sandbox mode, Frozen District has confirmed. The sandbox mode will give players access to the same tools the development team used to create the houses in the game, meaning players can build homes in their own style. This will be the first of many updates that will come to the game, based on player feedback.

I'll admit I passed on the original House Flipper craze because I'm not one for job sim games. But I really like to build and decorate houses, which, it turns out, House Flipper 2 is totally prepared to support. House Flipper dev Frozen District has already announced that the sequel would have a sandbox mode, but now it's been shown off in a new trailer. I'm all in this time.

Frozen District has released a new trailer and screenshots for House Flipper 2 introducing the new “Sandbox” mode experience.

House Flipper 2 is going to have a Sandbox mode, Frozen District has confirmed. The sandbox mode will give players access to the same tools the development team used to create the houses in the game, meaning players can build homes in their own style. This will be the first of many updates that will come to the game, based on player feedback.

Profane has recently announced the return of its playtests on October 18th, 2023, in their latest Discord announcement. The game's developers recently shared the exciting news on their Discord channel, revealing that the tests are set to commence in 2023. Players eager to dive into the world of Profane can now sign up to participate.

Wizard With a Gun is an upcoming Co-Op Sandbox Survival Shooter set in the wild world comprised of arcane firearms, time travel hijinks, eldritch horrors, and a whole lot of chaos.It’s a game published by Devolver Digital and Galvanic Games (best known for other games like Some Distant Memory and Gurgamoth) that many indie game fanatics have been eagerly awaiting.

Delightful destructive heist sim Teardown is getting four paid DLCs, with the first to be released on November 15th. It's called Time Campers and will transport players back in time with a caravan to tackle new heists with "old-timey tools and architecture" in the Wild West.

Presented by Blockchain Game Alliance

Today, CCP Games unveiled EVE Vanguard, its next attempt at a first-person multiplayer shooter game integrated with EVE Online. Some players may still remember Dust 514, which attempted something similar but largely failed as a PlayStation 3 exclusive. CCP didn't stop trying and came up with the so-called Project Nova, though that one didn't even make it to launch.

Insomniac Games returns to its most successful game to date with Marvel's Spider-Man 2. The hugely anticipated sequel will feature the two playable protagonists, Peter Parker and Miles Morales, taking on threats like Venom and Kraven the Hunter.

Insomniac made an interesting claim about Marvel’s Spider-Man 2  in a new interview with Inverse. As they put it, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 had sandbox elements.

It's a good time for games about breaking things. There's the great voxel city smasher Teardown, the medieval demolition simulator Besiege, spaceship salvager Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and now here's Abriss, a cool $17 «physics-destruction building game» I tried out after it exited early access on Steam last week.

Google has started rolling out Privacy Sandbox, its replacement for third-party cookies.

Gameforge has announced a deal with 01Studio to publish the Canadian developer's upcoming sandbox platform, Cubio. The deal, which is global, will bring the sandbox game creation platform, designed for all ages and skill levels, to life.

The popular fantasy sandbox MMORPG,  Albion Online, has officially entered its sixth anniversary. Developer Sandbox Interactive has chosen to commemorate the event with the return of last year’s Living Legacy event. 

Grand Theft Auto 6’s development continues to be a hot topic for gamers around the world. The upcoming entry in the storied franchise was confirmed in February 2022 and aims to “set creative benchmarks for the series, our industry, and for all entertainment” according to Take-Two Interactive’s CEO Strauss Zelnik.