THREE TO PLAY
PSN games you might have missed
Every month, loads of games come to the PS Store – so many that you’d be hard pressed to play them all. Each month we take a look at some that didn’t quite make the cut, and this time my attention is drawn to boats, robots, and rowdy pensioners with a thirst for vengeance.
What’s more dangerous than sailing the seas in the era of pirates? Why, sailing the unpredictable procedurally generated waters, of course. In King Of Seas, your high seas swashbuckling adventure is your own as you stumble upon lost islands and chart the oceans through fog. The offspring of the titular King, you join up with pirates to find out the truth behind his assassination and clear your own name. Most of the game takes place with a top-down perspective, including cannon-blasting ship battles. You need to upgrade your ship to stay safe, adapt to new enemy naval routes, and choose wisely which ships you engage in battle and which ones you avoid in order to fund your expeditions.
From the sea to the stars!
The Colonists also has you dealing with some unpredictable situations, except here you’re helping cute little robots setting out on their own on a far-off planet with the desire of becoming human. To succeed, you must help them automate their ways to an idyllic life, ratcheting up complexity to create a satisfying, almost hypnotic existence for the adorable machines. It’s up to you to decide how they research and evolve their technology, and to direct them to harvest, refine, and build new structures. Originally released on PC, the new control scheme makes things pleasingly easy to get to grips with on PlayStation (and you can adorn them with new hats).
If that all sounds like too much work, why not just throw life the finger? Just Die
Already is a comedically dark sandbox game from the developer of Goat Simulator, in which you play an older person ready to live life with reckless abandon, a little like the senior members of Team PLAY. Its humour is a bit crass – a mixture of urinating wildly and your arms falling off and spurting blood – but its dystopian setting, in which the old are left to their own devices, hits close to home, and there’s a justifiable anger there. In some ways it’s a bit more over-the-top than the animal antics of its predecessor, which makes it a bit less silly and a bit more Jackass.