Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has been using several weeks to post blogs, lore, and design previews of its update due in February, but none of them provided a release date beyond… well, February. As of the MMORPG’s most recent post, we now have a release window of sometime next week as it goes through internal testing, […]

Crafters and gatherers of Pax Dei, your sun is about to rise and cast its warm rays all over your collective face. That’s because Mainframe Industries has officially confirmed that its next patch, which is a number of crafting updates, is due to arrive on Friday, February 20th. This patch will introduce the master crafting system that […]

The moment I first saw Witchspire was a thing, I knew the exact people in my life for whom the title alone was an alluring promise. I’m not exaggerating with that; there are people who mean the world to me who are here precisely for big witch hats, witch cottages, and everything that goes along with endless […]

Unless you’re on Instagram, you may have missed the news that Equinox Homecoming has launched a demo on Steam – we sure had, anyhow, before a reader tipped us off and we found the announcement buried on Reels, rather than on Steam itself or other social media. Perhaps by the time this post is live […]

The informational hits keep on coming for Elder Scrolls Online’s big ol’ March content patch, and while most of the attention has been centered on its seasons and monetization reshuffling, there’s a variety of things also landing in Update 49, namely a refresh of the Dragonknight class. The tweaks to the Dragonknight primarily focus on […]

BitCraft, our winner for Best MMO Crafting of 2025, is focusing on communication among players in its first patch of this year, as the crafting-centric sandbox MMORPG has added support for several languages and added hyperlinking functionality, just in case you’re the sort of person who can’t help but communicate your in-game material desires through […]

By now, World of Warcraft fans are used to the multi-stage format that Blizzard employs to roll out its expansions. It’s never a one-and-done affair, is it? There’s the prepatch, the launch, and post-launch content and season unlocks. This time around, however, the studio added an extra stage in early December with the debut of […]

RPS Advent Calendar voting remains an esoteric and mercurial process, even to those of us who practice in it. If two games get the same amount of votes, which goes higher in the list? Did Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor technically release in 2025 or 2024? These are questions most of us dare not ask, and those that do often vanish mysteriously overnight. Until January 3rd or so, when they come back from holiday.

One thing’s for sure: I had a bunch of games that no-one else voted for. Don’t be sad, games. I still like you.

Read more

Are you ready for some hopefully less braindead on-foot enemies in Elite: Dangerous? Then it’s time to test your FPS mettle in any number of combat zones or settlements today because the newest update to the sandbox has brought on some updated behaviors for Odyssey enemies. Ideally, anyway; time and player trials will tell whether […]

War Thunder is looking towards the future. Or at least what it’s doing next month and somewhere down the line after that, anyway, as Gaijin Entertainment has outlined what players can expect in the December update and answered several burning questions from among its playerbase. The update due sometime in December does appear to be […]

Once again, Fellowship is tinkering with existing content, but the adjustments in question are being done in service to the December 11th patch that’s bringing Eternal queue. That’s the ability to queue for Eternal difficulty delves, not a suggestion that players will queue eternally. Even if it might feel that way for DPS players right […]

The hammering out of dents and refinement of the experience in airship survivalbox Lost Skies continues yet again this week, as Bossa Studios has put forth another major stability patch that it says has finally crushed some pretty resilient bugs for multiplayer and airships, both of which we contend are pretty important to this game’s […]

The popular gaming platform said the tool was designed to stop children from chatting with older users they didn’t know.

2003’s Manhunt is a brutal, gritty title that occupies a strange place in Rockstar’s catalog as something that should be considered the company’s best work, yet it remains overshadowed by their own mega-hit franchises. This bleak, uncompromising meditation on the nature of voyeurism questioned the player’s participation in horrific bloodshed, and has since become something of a cult title — and PIGFACE is certainly one of its descendants.

Set in a post-industrial wasteland, PIGFACE places players in the role of a woman with a bomb in her head. Faceless handlers have assigned her to murder members of a drug-dealing gang across a handful of locations, and what little characterization the game offers has those same handlers shocked by how little pushback they receive from their living weapon – almost as if she’s as much down for all the murder as the people playing the game. The gameplay is as basic as the graphics – this looks like a Quake-era experience and feels like gritty, vicious shooters of that time, back when most titles were developed by a handful of people and when it was easier to smuggle bizarre and extreme content into even major titles.

After choosing a mission, the player picks their loadout from a decent arsenal – but in a twist that feels strange for an FPS (and may have been inherited from Manhunt) the player can only bring a single ranged weapon. This creates a bit of awkwardness, as the player is asked to decide on a playstyle before they have a sense of what the level is like, and pre-mission the briefings are not particularly voluminous. So, there’s often nothing to do but guess whether a sniper rifle or a shotgun is better for any given area, and if that doesn’t pan out, they can hope to snag a more appropriate weapon off of a dead body somewhere along the way.

The strange part is that for a game seemingly built around experimentation and taking chances, the developers punish players harshly for mistakes. Any time they fail a mission, a steep financial penalty is incurred. While guns only have to be bought once and ammo is free, healing syringes cost money, ensuring that if a player fails a particularly difficult level more than a couple of times, they’ll be forced to try again with even fewer resources, and consequently, less chance of success.

Enemy AI is also a little on the spare side at this point. I’m sure it’s a difficult to balance and all of the enemies can be best described as drug-addled wastrels, but they were remarkably unobservant and unresponsive whenever violence kicked off — enemies will watch a guard’s head get blown off with a sniper rifle, shrug, and then get right back to their patrol seconds later. Setting off explosives or blasting away with a machine gun might attract reinforcements, or it might not – enemies were largely unpredictable in an ‘is the AI broken and not responding to triggers?‘ kind of way.

Still, there’s plenty to be optimistic about here. The violence is every bit as brutal and upsetting as one would hope given PIGFACE’s obvious inspiration. There are huge blood spatters with every shot, and enemies scramble around and scream as they’re injured, making the whole thing feel doubly unpleasant.

This unpleasantness also permeates every bit of the world. Every room is full of trash and dirty needles. The player is asked to shut down drug factories, and all they find are a few drums and jars crudely linked together with hoses and tape. This game is about the absolute lowest-tier of criminal being executed by an assassin who lives in a dingy one-room apartment next to a set of elevated train tracks. It’s a celebration of the grindhouse aesthetic and seemingly pointless violence – although as the story gets developed in later updates, that might well change.

PIGFACE is in a rough Early Access state at the moment, with inconsistent enemies and no real narrative to speak of. I don’t expect the graphics to get any better – the low-end look is the point — and it’s a clear throwback to a rougher, more brutal past. Anyone lamenting that we never got a Manhunt 3 will find a lot to love here.

Assuming gameplay is rebalanced and more levels are added – I beat all five in just under an hour – this is extremely promising. Hopefully the devs manage to turn it into a more complete experience, as games this heartlessly brutal are few and far between.

Or maybe this kind of game being rare is a good thing? I’ll let history be the judge.

The post PIGFACE Preview appeared first on Gamecritics.com.