Weekly Update 2026-07-12
Get a little lava on the tires
Game Releases and Updates
Blade and Sorcery Khar-Tib update – another new ‘country’ added to the base game, with just as many new pieces of armor, weapons, and gimmicks as ever. Khar-Tib’s theme is a cross between bronze age khopeshes and Morrowind bonemold, the new map apparently has a fully interactive ballista, there’s a semi-auto hand crossbow, grenades, all kinds of stuff that, well, I’ve mostly seen in mods already, but should work better having been implemented and bugfixed by the devs themselves.
Not that I’ve had a chance to see for myself, frankly – I started another new run with a mod that let me begin with Khar-Tib armor and the double-sided axe of theirs, but I haven’t seen anything else newly added so far. I’m not complaining too much, though, because I’ve had plenty of fun just using gravity magic to perform my favorite style of execution.
Fugaz release – from the developer of Monster Sanctuary-esque monster battling platformer Paplion, Fugaz is a puzzle game that appears to be a short and relatively simple sampler of ‘recontextualization.’ You get a flute, then learn some songs that you can rattle out to cause certain effects, plus solve other puzzles tangentially related to blowing four notes in some order.
I tried the demo out, which, because the full game hinges a lot on revelations and exploration, is actually a totally isolated custom-made chunk of similar gameplay rather than being some portion of the real deal. And it was alright – reminded me of the sort of puzzle game that would be near the top of its class during the days of Flash development. I liked it enough that I’m playing through the full game now, despite me technically having this niche filled with EMUUROM already.
Well, look, I’m stuck on EMUUROM right now, alright?
Angels Fall First 1.0 – [in Total Annihilation intro voice] WHAT BEGAN AS A MOD FOR UNREAL TOURNAMENT ESCALATED INTO okay you get the idea, I’m gonna stop doing it. Angels Fall First has been in Early Access for a decade, and has kind of sort of been in development since about a decade earlier, and you know what they say about games that have been in development longer than some of its players have been alive? They say wow, that’s been in development for a while.
Well, it’s totally out now, and the wait may have been worth it, if you ever spent your evenings raging out at Battlefield 2 matches and your morning classes dreaming about Battlefield 2 but also in space and you can fly one of the fighters from Battlestar Galactica and it’s like Command and Conquer Renegade and you can board an enemy capital ship and shoot people and plant charges on the reactor and teabag a guy and escape and fly away as it explodes and drive a tank. And you can make your gun shoot acid bullets and…
It’s a wildly ambitious swing for an online shooter, which makes the fact that it runs on UE3 and, to be honest, absolutely looks and feels like a barely upscaled retouch of a game from 2004... understandable. Maps can be ground offensives dominated by infantry and armor, sheer space skirmishes where light craft dogfight as destroyers pummel each other with rocket barrages and beam cannons, or combined operations, with the space combat layer allowing players on each team to spawn or board large neutral structures to fight over capture points or obliterate objectives.
Whether that sounds incredible to you or not, I thought it was neat, so more on it in the next section.
The State of Games Played
I picked up Angels Fall First after seeing it slated for 1.0 release, investigating it, and deciding its bold claims were worth testing. Now, the game only properly came out last night, so most of my playing was technically pre-release, and solo, so let me just say that, yes, this game will probably never have a totally full server browser no matter where you live or what hours you keep – it’s the sort of insanely niche and extremely dated experience that has just enough people keeping the flame alive to occasionally make plans for a game night in the Discord or whatever.1 So it’s to the game’s credit [and probably also the fact that it began its life as a UT mod] that it has pretty good bots. You can set yourself up a match with just yourself or a couple friends vs an AI team that, though frequently confused when you run at them guns blazing, do at least push objectives and attempt to play, moreso than some ‘real’ players in a lot of similar games I’ve played. And that’s what I mostly did this week waiting for release.
The infantry side leans a bit more Halo than most other shooters of its era, with pretty substantial regenerating shields guarding your non-regenerating actual health pool, and TTK is extremely high in general. But it’s also probably the component with the most customization options – you get to pick your suit and your guns, and everything, from your helmet to your grenades, has multiple slots where you can plug in particular bonuses, elemental effects, and so on, each sucking up some of the three requisition limit bars you slightly expand by leveling up your profile. You can save custom loadouts, ditch your sidearm or grenades entirely so you can carry a bigass minigun, and even add secondary charges to your explosives.
When you get to choose a vehicle [either by jumping into a fighter in your capital ship’s hangar or being offered a chance to respawn in one based on performance] you have almost as many options for customization there too, and it gets pretty overwhelming, especially when being unfamiliar with the game’s particulars means you spend more time in menus than you do surviving the actual battle. One thing I really liked was your ability to go commandeer your faction’s flagship during space conquest matches and just steer it right into the fray, risking your main respawn point for a little more firepower, like a player-driven version of the Behemoth ‘rebalance’ mechanic they tried in Battlefield 1.
After release, I got in a match where I managed to vote myself in as the team commander, which gives you the ability to pull up the map, order every human member to locations, points, or even to attack particular enemies RTS-style, and deploy special localized effects like plopping a giant energy shield around a cluster of your troops under fire or temporarily revealing all enemies on the map. But I sucked at that so we still lost.
I finally began the titular Exo Rally Championship from… Exo Rally Championship. The 6-wheeled rover class is a totally different beast from the vehicles you pilot earlier, with full command of its RCS thrusters to let it spin in mid-air, add extra twist to its turns, or a little extra push on acceleration or braking. And the first planet you visit is also the last in the game – the ‘geologically active’ hellscape of Fusang. Rally is fun and games until you literally need to route a course around the rim of an erupting volcano and avoid a fire tornado on the way up.
And right after ten stages of that, rather than a break, you go back to Dhool, but with even more extreme meteor showers and paths directly through boulder-strewn fields. What an incredible game.
Between sessions of Blade and Sorcery to test out the new update, I also got around to finishing the currently available content in District Steel, which is some of the best stuff in the game so far – swimming, explosive crossbow bolts, another really good boss, and, of course, a level that takes place entirely on a speeding train.
I really hope this gets maybe one more episode with its full release soon, because it’s already plenty of content for a VR game, and one of the best feeling VR shooters in existence.
I believe I’m over halfway through The Message from Deep Space, and am at least to the point where signals are decoding to relatively simple statements rather than primarily mathematical riddles. It shouldn’t take me much longer to wrap this one up, and I’m really looking forward to what the ending reveals.
I received a game called Weird RPG 2 as a gift, and decided to take it for a spin. It’s a Chinese solo-dev who has decided to populate a very bare-bones character action game with silly gimmicks and in-jokes to flesh it out, the end result of which is equal parts endearing and exhausting. Most of the gimmicks are attached to particular equipment, so you have to find or buy them to enjoy their effect. There’s basically three sorts of gimmicks for the player – mic-activated abilities, mostly guns that float around with you and shoot every time your audio input channel reads a spike – equipment that gains or loses extra stats based on the quality of your hardware – effects that augment those or are unrelated but still silly.
The whole thing is very tongue-in-cheek, and to the developer’s credit, keeps adding gimmicks and fresh jokes to replace old ones at a decent enough pace to not totally burn you out on any one in particular. Early on, for example, you can get a pistol that fires when your mic picks up any loud enough noise, but it autoaims and does pretty light damage, so you can aggro enemies one at a time and wear them down but you can’t rely on it. You also get a pair of sneakers that summon a basketball player to elbow check enemies when you dash into them, complete with poorly edited voice clips. Later on, you’ll trade those out for the ability to temporarily transform into a monkey demon with an AK and an aimbot, and a helmet that lets you shoot lasers from your eyes while in that form as long as you constantly scream into your mic. My latest upgrade is a helmet that provides a buff if you leave the in-game music audio at 60% or higher… but also changes the track to the developer himself singing along very poorly to karaoke. And it gives you an additional buff if you sing along.
It wouldn’t really be worth much more than a couple laughs, but the core game is just passable enough that there’s actually something for the jokey systems to enhance rather than them existing in a complete void. The combat largely consists of Sekiro-inspired parryslop, with your dodge and jump underperforming compared to your timed deflects, which can drain posture bars for most melee enemies and lead into you either finishing them off automatically or having an extended period of free time to wale on them in the case of bosses. There’s a surprising variety of what I assume are asset store flip enemies, and while the animations are extremely jumpy and stiff, they are mostly readable enough for the game to stay playable. Gimmicks aside, the bosses can get kind of tough, and the fact that healing items have a long cooldown and even attempting deflects drains your stamina means that you have to pay attention even if you are turning into a monkey with an AK and summoning minibosses to help you.
I got back on track with the Convergence mod for Elden Ring, at least in the sense of returning to my starting class’s dedicated weapon types. It helps that one of them is a katana with a cool Ash of War.
I’m strong enough now that I can start to explore the DLC, which apparently contains one of the new Legacy Dungeon areas, and I think it’s where the rest of my class gear is hidden. I just don’t know where that dungeon is. I might just look up spoilers at this point – the DLC is shockingly big, and a lot of it is gonna be pretty empty, even in a mod devoted to stuffing shit in everywhere it’ll fit.
Writing
I didn’t finish the write-up for Deep Space Exploitation yet. I could have, but that would involve working on the weekend and I just didn’t feel like it.
Other
I’m pretty rapidly approaching 500 subs on this site, and trying to decide what I want to do to mark the occasion, the way I did with 50. [which was less than a year ago] I’m too tapped out for another angry rant, I’ll save my retrospectives for the end of the calendar year, I’m not particularly sociable or reflective, and I’m very lazy. Maybe I’ll just try to finish Thief 2 before it happens so I have some hope of wrapping up the series before the year ends.
Just like Command and Conquer Renegade itself, which has multiple overhaul mods still in development/being played occasionally by die-hard fans.