Armored Warfare is a free-to-play tank fighter game, and with its next update will come a new map: Coastal Threat.

As the trailer says, it takes place in a former tourist hotspot that’s happened upon some “harder times”. You’d expect to see things like boarded up shops, but instead the tanks will get to rumble through an urban centre – including a beach and a charred forest. That means that there will be a lot of close-range combat as well as some strategic placement of artillery to control an enemy’s advance from far away.

The new map is a PvP one and 1200×1200 metres in size, meaning plenty of room to rumble around and do battle

Also coming in the new update (0.13) will be a new dealer and a refined matchmaking system. There’s also been changes to the reward system for PvE matches, meaning that there will be more opportunities presented to players.

Armored Warfare’s update 0.13 is due for release on February 11.

Unsung Story was Kickstarter backed about two years ago, in February 2014. It came from Playdek and was a turn-based tactics game that promised a blend of RPG and strategy elements. The campaign raised $600k and a further $60,000 past that with a due date of July 2015.

Like many games recently it had that date pushed back, and that was fine. The last update was in October of last year showing off a simple combat system. Now they’ve given a new update and it’s not good news – active development on the game has ceased as a small internal team tries to keep the studio together through taking on small jobs. They won’t say the game’s cancelled, but it doesn’t sound good.

The news comes from an update post that lets people know that the company lost a load of members back in October, and so a serious rethink of the direction they were headed was in order. Their current plans are thus:

“We now have one internal team capable of working on a single project, and for the financial strength of the company we need to focus on a few products in the near term that have the ability to get to a retail release before Unsung Story is able to. While this is a difficult choice to make, it is one we need to do for the ongoing financial health of the company.”

Which means they’re taking on jobs from other developers and publishers to bring in the money. As for Unsung Story, they’re trying to work out what to do next with it:

“For Unsung Story, we will explore options for outside development help, and will look to see if we are able to bring on an outside team that can assist us in furthering development. While we aren’t assured this will come to fruition, we do want to make sure that we are exploring any options at hand that can make progress on the game.”

Again, doesn’t sound good. Needless to say, the backers aren’t going to be too happy with this development.

We’re always being told that piracy is killing the media we view, from television to films to video games. Now it seems that one piracy group has decided to call the video game industry’s bluff on that.

Chinese group 3DM were in the news last month talking about how it’s getting harder to crack video game anti-piracy software and have pledged that for a year they will not crack any single-player game starting February 8th, just to see what sort of an effect it has on legitimate sales of the game. Instead they will focus their efforts on localising games for their local market.

“We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year, 3DM will not crack any single-player games. We’ll take a look at the situation in a year’s time to see if genuine sales have grown.” a representative of the group said on the group’s blog on TorrentFreak.

Piracy debates have raged for years, and just gotten worse since the advent of the Internet and its growth. There’s certainly been arguments on both sides of the debate so it will be interesting to see if this does have any effect on sales.

Mark February 8th 2017 down in your calendars, that’s about when you can expect to see 3DM’s results made public.

In terms of games, one of the genres I seem to have a particular love for is the rogue-like. Runs through levels worth of creatures, dispatching them and grabbing loot is right up my street. With that in mind, how does indie Dungeon Souls compare to others I’ve tried?

Dungeon Souls is set within a titular dungeon and has a range of different Hero characters to play as, with their own set of strengths and weaknesses and stats. A number of them are available to play right from the start, with the others all as unlockables for completing certain tasks. Whatever your preferred style of play, you enter each level on top of the deactivated portal to the next floor, and you must seek out and activate the ‘marks’ on the level to turn on the portal. Loot comes in the form of gold/gems; potions; keys to the silver and gold chests and most importantly – the upgrade items. These items give you stat boosts, special abilities or add on something that will just make your time in the dungeon seem a lot less of a hassle. They can be found in the chests, in Shops you can find in the levels and mostly especially in the giant Boss chest you get for defeating the area boss after 3 levels of that area have been completed. They can also be upgraded themselves if you so happen to find a second spawn of the same item you have already and pick it up.

Play-wise the game is responsible and flows well, with your character gaining experience that allows you to use skill points to level up a stat each level, and there will be times when you’ll be able to stop and apply these level ups, as well as to heal if you’ve got health potions or an upgrade item that allows for healing. However, monsters do respawn so you can’t stay still too long lest you get taken by surprise. You also need to get a move on once you’ve activated all marks on a level because after a short amount of time the Redeemer creature will spawn, and he will drain your HP dry. The only way to escape is to take the portal to the next level.

The game does have a few different level difficulties and playing as the same character multiple times will contribute towards an experience tally that will let your character rank up, applying passive bonuses to their stats from the start of the run. You’re also able to purchase passive buffs before you do a run to help out more.

The game is currently in Early Access so there are a few things still not implemented, like multiplayer, and the game is still being updated. This means that you can expect things to still change and for even more content to be added. This could include new playable heroes, new mobs, new loot or anything else. The game itself right now is pretty stable though, and I only managed to encounter one crash which occurred when so much was going on that the game said “Nope!” and fell over.

I’d rate this game pretty highly over all. I had an awful lot of fun with it when streaming and continue to do so. It is one of the nicest rogue-likes I’ve played, and with the price set at £6.99 for the UK and $9.99 for the US I’d say it’s worth the money. When Dungeon Souls gets a proper release, developer Mike Studios have said they’ve thought about bumping the price up a little bit so I’d advice you to get in now if you’re into good indie rogue-likes.

9/10

In one of the slightly funnier stories heard today, it seems that one CS: GO player decided to take the matter of hackers into their own hands like some virtual vigilante. By releasing a bunch of false multihacks over the course of two weeks, they’ve managed to get around 3,000 cheating players banned.

The multihacks extended the in-game viewing angles as well as supplying a constant stream of ammo and health for the players who applied them. However, they also did some behind the scenes stuff that to the anti-cheat system made them completely obvious that something fishy was happening.

“The first two releases had a “timer” in them which meant the features that instantly VAC banned them would only be activated after a certain time (e.g. 10 PM on the day after the release),” writes Redditor AndroidL, who is behind the honeytrap hacks. “the final hack (with over 3.5k downloads) just instantly VAC bans them as soon as they open the hack and join a game.”

The hacks recieved over 26,000 views and around 5,500 downloads in all, resulting in the 3,000 account ban. In case you’re wondering what that looks like, there’s a nice chart available as well as an Imgur album with some responses from those caught out (including an ex-staff member!):

No matter what you think of AndroidL’s actions, you’ve got to admit it’s just a little bit funny. I’m hoping that Valve won’t throw the book at them, or if they do not too hard. After all, the cheaters got hit because they broke the rules and tried to game the system.