Built with the awesome power of GZDoom, the upcoming shooter Selaco is really looking to be something quite special and I absolutely need to play this.

"Selaco is a brand new original shooter running on GZDoom, featuring thrilling action set pieces, destructibility, smart AI and a fleshed out story taking place within an immersive game world. It draws inspiration heavily from F.E.A.R. in terms of action set pieces, while mixing traditional retro-FPS elements from QUAKE and DOOM, along with some more modern features. Together with professional artists who work in the industry, several having worked on successful throwback FPS games in the past, Selaco is a fully fleshed out world full of character, action, and mystery."

The new teaser is short but it sure does make up for that with pure insanity, showing off their fancy Ridiculous' Particle Effects setting. Check it out:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Game Features:

• A lengthy story-driven campaign

Selaco is a story-driven experience, and we don't say that lightly. A dedicated writer has been brought on board to assist with creating an engaging and believable sci-fi story and world.

• Intense Action set pieces

Turn the entire world into confetti with the destructive power of your weapons. Every single bullet will react properly with any materials or objects you hit. Our artists have created many different variations for each (voxel)object to ensure that the aftermath of each encounter is palpable. That once lavish office space now nothing but a pile of rubble with broken paintings, smashed tables, screen, chairs, smoke, and chunks of debris.

• Custom AI

With our FEAR influence, writing proper AI was a goal from the get go. The enemy is fully aware of each other's presence and work together to take you down. They will keep their distance if you apply constant pressure on them, will rush you if you hide or run out of bullets, toss grenades if you use the same cover for too long, and much more. Hundreds of custom lines have been written and acted out, providing hints to the player about their current plans and tactics.

• Full soundtrack

Selaco is accompanied by a full length original soundtrack composed by an experienced musician who has worked on many games in the past.

• Professional voice-acting.

To help immerse players in the story and atmosphere of Selaco, professional voice actors have been brought on board. Dawn will be voiced by the incredibly talented Melissa Medina, with other casting choices revealed at a later date.

It's quite some time away from release yet but don't let that stop you heading over to Steam and hitting that wishlist button.

You can also support the developer on Patreon .

Not long at all after putting up a special Beta for testing, The Indie Stone have now set the massive Build 41 overhaul for the Zombie survival game Project Zomboid up as the official new version.

The absolute biggest upgrade the game has ever seen and it's quite magnificent.

Project Zomboid has come such a long way. I remember back in 2011 where the developer had an unfortunate incident where their development hardware (along with the source code) was stolen that resulted in some big delays and lots of stress. It's taken a long time to get to this stage but it was firmly worth it and Build 41 is very impressive.

Watch video on YouTube.com

"This build marks a huge step for us, the graphics, gameplay, audio and netcode being significantly remastered and radically improved, Build 41 feels more a sequel than a patch update. As well as a huge map update, new mechanics and systems, its by far our biggest update yet."

Some highlights of what's new includes:

• Massive animation and character overhaul, more immersive animations and smoother gameplay and combat, highly customizable character that shows clothing and equipment in the world. Visibly ripped and damaged clothing. Visible Backpacks and Bags.
• In-game map system to allow the player to chart their exploration and find their way around the huge map.
• New animations and new movement systems. Sneaking, sprinting, jogging, racking, reloading, climbing, fence-jumping, collapsing and much much more.
• New multiplayer built from the ground up for smooth, immersive and low latency player and zombie movement.
• New combat, new weapons, new difficulty balance.
• New tutorial teaching you the very basics of the new movement and combat.
• New character creation – many, many different new clothing options both on spawn and discoverable in the world as loot or on zombies.
• New city to explore, the gargantuan Louisville, as well as many improvements across the entire map, including new buildings, decoration, and curved roads for easier driving.
• New zombie behaviour: feasting on recent corpses, lolling against walls, falling over fences etc.
• Blood and dirt system that progressively bloodies bodies and clothing of survivors and zombies
• New injury system – movement and combat visibly hampered when injured. Lacerations now possible, an injury state that lies between bites and scratches.
• Improved gunplay: green/red target outline while aiming, increased gun loot spawn.

There's absolutely tons more.

Easily one of the best survival games available on Linux.

Don't own it yet? You can purchase a copy from Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Kubifaktorium isn't as well known as a number of other building sims but it's certainly an interesting one and now it has left Early Access as a finished game. Developed by a small two-person indie studio based in Sankt Augustin, Germany. This is their second game following BossConstructor in 2016.

It's got quite a mixture of genres here and doesn't seem to really fit into any alone. There's city-building a little like Settlers and plenty of automation a bit like Factorio. Not surprising, as the developers mentioned those games (amongst others) as inspiration.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Game Features:

• Build, manage and grow a thriving colony and discover new lands in Kubifaktorium. The game features different biomes to explore, plenty of resources to exploit, complex machinery to build and interesting production chains to master.
• The heart of your colony consists of loyal colonists who will mine resources, farm crops and craft tools and weapons. Each colonist has a different set of skills which will change based of the jobs he or she performs. Managing your colonists' needs and abilities is vital to ensuring your colony's efficiency.
• In the course of the campaign you explore and colonize multiple islands and encounter different biomes. Each biome features new challenges but also new resources to discover and process.
• While your colonists are awesome, their work power is limited. Fortunately, your colonists know how to craft advanced machinery like automated farms, smelters and more, which you can use to automate more and more of your production.
• As your colony grows and your production hums along, transporting the resources you need becomes a bottleneck. Kubifaktorium features a number of transportation systems like trains, conveyor belts, zeppelins and more. Automated depots and inserters are there to help you store, sort and keep track of all your goods.
• The game is designed to be mod friendly and allows players to create anything from new goods and industries to total conversions with new terrains, scenery and stories. Created mods can be published and managed via the Steam Workshop.

Available to buy with Linux support from Steam .

Valve are always tweaking something on Steam and their latest experiment is an upgrade to the Store Hubs, the areas on Steam where you can browse through all the random tags.

Now, when you click a tag on Steam (if you opt-in), there's a great big banner carousel at the top to go through some of the featured games. This shows off those titles that are new, top-sellers, discounted, recommendations from users and curators and more from their mighty algorithm. Below that you will get a list of recent and upcoming events, helping you to stay on top of everything.

The massive banners at the top do waste a bit of space IMO but they certainly do grab your attention - so I guess they're working as intended. They also, again, don't seem to respect your operating system preferences as it just shows anything.

When you scroll further down, Valve also shows off various personalised recommendations based on what you've been playing, plus items from your wishlist that might be relevant. On top of that, there's also all their new sorting and filtering options available in a list towards the bottom (which does have a platform filter).

Overall, it's far more useful that what Valve had before for tag hubs, it's looking pretty good.

The Wine team has put out a second Release Candidate for what will eventually turn into a Wine 7.0 stable release in early 2022. This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows - on Linux. Part of what makes up Steam Play Proton .

Since it's now in a code-freeze, no new features are being pulled in while they work through any bugs and regressions that appear. Wine 7.0 RC2 release notes mention 34 bugs solved including issues for: Weird Worlds: Launcher, Death to Spies: Moment of Truth, Shadow Warrior, Resident Evil 4 HD, Her Story, Borderlands GOTY Enhanced, Dark Souls: Remastered, Steel Division: Normandy 44, Final Fantasy XIV, Sonic Adventure DX and more.

Going by past releases of Wine, we're probably looking at 5-7 RC builds before Wine 7.0 is released officially.

We expect that early next year Valve will also update / rebase Proton onto the 7.x series of Wine.

The massive AI Kingdoms update for Kingdoms and Castles has finally hit Open Beta for anyone who owns it, so you can now see what the developer has been working on for quite some time.

Kingdoms and Castles is a city-building simulation game about growing a kingdom from a tiny hamlet to a sprawling city and imposing castle. It has gradually grown from quite a small and relaxed game into a much bigger city-builder / RTS hybrid, although you can still pretty much play how you want and AI Kingdoms are optional to add in.

Here's some highlights of what's in the current Beta:

• AI Kingdoms you can add when starting a new game
• Talk, trade, or fight with these AI kingdoms
• Hall of Diplomacy where you can make diplomats used to interact with the AI Kingdoms
• Fog of war system
• Siege Workshop which builds Catapults
• New harder 'Survive 250' game mode
• Theatre and Jousting Arena
• Transport carts
• Minimap
• Ability to set maximum workers per job category
• Lots of other various improvements

I managed to set aside some time and play through the Beta today and it's looking absolutely fantastic. Kingdoms and Castles was already a wonderful game but now it just has so much more depth to it, giving you a great many more hours of building - without making it too complicated.

For the Beta, it's currently Steam-only until it's finished and then it will be up as a normal update for other stores. If you wish to try it on Steam simply right click the game and go to Properties, hit the Beta tab and select "next-version-preview".

You can find Kingdoms and Castles on Steam , GOG and itch.io .

Only a day after we mentioned that Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance would be getting a new PC release and it's here already, along with Linux support! Your chance to relive another classic thanks to Interplay Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast.

"This revival of the original Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance puts the ‘action’ back into the action-RPG genre, plunging players into the heart of Faerûn. As well as looting and leveling, players must actively defend against and dodge attacks, evade deadly traps, and fight hordes of monsters ranging from swarming kobolds to the iconic and all-consuming Gelatinous Cube.

Featuring three customizable heroes, this epic adventure spans dozens of locations across three massive acts, through the dungeons beneath the city of Baldur’s Gate, to the peak of Burning Eye mountain, deep into the Underdark and beyond."

Watch video on YouTube.com

Feature Highlight:

• A re-release of the beloved console classic
• Three race and class combinations. Play as a dwarven fighter (Kromlech), a human archer (Vahn) or an elven sorceress (Adrianna).
• 11 vividly rendered spells, including Magic Missile, Otuluk’s Icy Sphere, and Mordenkainen’s Sword.
• More than 40 different types of monsters and boss villains.
• Over 25 active and passive skills to buff your adventurer’s ability to deal and take damage.
• Varied environments, from the sewers beneath the city of Baldur’s Gate, to the Sunset Mountains, to the Marshes of Chelimber.
• Four difficulty levels to challenge even the hardiest adventurer; "Easy", "Normal", "Hard" and "Extreme".
• Fully voice-acted by an all-star cast.
• Local co-op support!

The press release mentioned that the Steam version has been tested working nicely with Remote Play Together too, so you can team up with a friend anywhere.

Available on GOG.com and Steam with day-1 Linux support.

Netherlands based Two Tribes is an indie game developer who worked on titles like RUSH, EDGE, Toki Tori, RIVE and more just open sourced their game engine. This is the game engine that was used for the likes of RIVE and Toki Tori 2+ and it's now under the GPL2.

We, Two Tribes , have used this engine for over a decade. The engine was initially conceived as a Nintendo DS game engine when creating games such as Worms Open Warfare 2 . It has since been used on many games for Nintendo Wii, Playstation 4 and PC among others.

It offers basic 3D functionality, but the main focus for Two Tribes has always been 2D games, so this is where it really shines! Our games always strived to run at 60 frames per second while offering great layered 2D visuals.

If you've not seen it before, the trailer for RIVE is below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Always nice to see more developers opt for open sourcing their tech, as it allows their games to live on well past their original release and makes it much easier to get them working on a modern platforms and platforms that don't even exist yet. Great thing for preservation.

You can find the source code up on GitHub .

Creative Assembly continue rolling out more teaser videos of the upcoming Total War: WARHAMMER III, which will be ported to Linux by Feral Interactive.

Just recently CA put up a video finally giving us a proper look at the campaign map. Going over many different biomes you can expect to move armies through and perhaps conquer. It sure does look pretty and might have one of the best looking campaign maps of any similar strategy game. Check it out below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

It's releasing in February 2022, with Linux support continuing from porter Feral Interactive. We still don't know if their native build will offer cross-platform multiplayer, as Feral still did not reply to our email on it. There's still a few months to go yet, so perhaps they will surprise us.

As a reminder: if you do pre-order (or buy in the first week after release) you will get access to an additional free Race Pack for Total War: WARHAMMER III with the Ogre Kingdoms.

Available to pre-order on Humble Store and Steam .