Old-school shooter Ion Maiden delayed, adding multiplayer beta

Good news and bad news for fans of classic first-person shooters. The good news is that players who've bought the Early Access version of Ion Maiden, the retro shooter being made in the same engine as Duke Nukem 3D, will gain access to a forthcoming multiplayer beta. Developers Voidpoint are calling the multiplayer "classic" and "fast-paced" though what specific modes it will have has not been announced. That brings us to the bad news—Ion Maiden's launch has been delayed to 2019.

You can try Ion Maiden's single-player in the Early Access version, both Queen of the Hill mode and a shareware-style chunk of its campaign. Alex Wiltshire thoroughly enjoyed it, saying, "Ion Maiden's scale is ridiculous, with everything too wide and too tall, but that's totally fine because of your equally ridiculous run speed and jump height. You don't need special abilities to traverse the world, not even a sprint meter, because you can just run everywhere. Ion Maiden has the old school's vital kineticism, a sense of speed that more earthbound modern shooters has forgotten. I'm not saying that making everything fast is ideal in all cases, but when environments are this enormous zooming through them feels great."

Limited copies of a collector's edition are available, including a copy of the game on a USB shaped like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. You can get the digital version on Steam.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.