Plague Inc: Evolved just got the biggest expansion it's ever seen with Plague Inc: The Cure. You can play it free right now too, as there's no cost until 'COVID-19 is under control'.

Really great stuff from Ndemic Creations who worked together with global health organisations including the WHO, CEPI and GOARN. The idea here is to simulate how the world reacts to fight off a deadly disease so it's very much the opposite of what you do in the normal Plague Inc: Evolved. You can read more behind the scenes work on the CEPI website page for the game. It tries to keep to real science often, although there's often plenty that has to be simplified due to such a real thing being vastly complex.

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Features:

• Hunt the Disease: Dispatch research teams around the world to find patient zero, track the spread of the outbreak and support local responses.
• Control the Outbreak: Implement measures such as contact tracing, lockdowns and border closures to limit the spread of the outbreak, whilst getting people to wash their hands and preparing hospitals to prevent them getting overwhelmed.
• Support the Economy: People won’t comply with poorly designed quarantine measures; use furlough schemes and other policies to drive community support and consensus.
• Develop a Vaccine: Research, manufacture and distribute a vaccine to stop the disease. Work carefully and promote global cooperation to accelerate development.

Grab it on Steam now as a free DLC . Plague Inc: Evolved is also 60% off on Steam to help more people have a go until February 4.

Starting off as nothing but a tiny little cell in a massive world, Thrive is a free and open source evolution sim backed up by the power of science.

Quite early on in development still overall, it is however very playable already and you can have a little fun exploring and eating away at various resources to evolve your creature. It's like a much more detailed version of EA's Spore (in the early game stage). Now powered by Godot Engine , their progress on it seems to be speeding up.

Thrive 0.5.3 is up now and it brings with it numerous improvements to the flow of things like key rebinds, translation support, a process panel to show running processes in your cell, big improvements to the save game system, you can pan the camera in the editor now, music fade improvements, tips on the loading screen, plus lots of bug fixes to make it a lot smoother.

Check out their latest release trailer:

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Work is already well underway for the next version, which will have a fancy new binding agents feature which wasn't quite ready for this version. Once that's ready, the next release will go up with that and whatever else they've done. They're also working on thermoplasts, 3D stages and absolutely loads more that sounds exciting for an evolution sim.

You can follow it on the official site and GitHub . It's free and open source. They also take donations to their Patreon , where if they manage to hit an additional £100 per month one of their team will be able to actually work dedicated part-time on it which would be great to see hit.

Ready to cure the world? Ndemic Creations have released another small bit of info for Plague Inc: The Cure, the upcoming expansion to the excellent Plague Inc: Evolved. We already knew it was coming and that it would be free for all players until they deem COVID-19 to be "under control". Now we know that it will be here in "early" 2021, and their new Steam page is up with some extra details so you can follow it along and wishlist it ready.

Here's the details from the new Steam page:

• Hunt the Disease: Dispatch research teams around the world to find patient zero, track the spread of the outbreak and support local responses.
• Control the Outbreak: Implement measures such as contact tracing, lockdowns and border closures to limit the spread of the outbreak, whilst getting people to wash their hands and preparing hospitals to prevent them getting overwhelmed.
• Support the Economy: People won’t comply with poorly designed quarantine measures; use furlough schemes and other policies to drive community support and consensus.
• Develop a Vaccine: Research, manufacture and distribute a vaccine to stop the disease. Work carefully and promote global cooperation to accelerate development.

I imagine the gameplay mechanics from the base game lend themselves quite well to the opposite side, so I'm really keen to see all the dedicated tweaks they're doing for it since they've been working together with health experts from various organisations including the WHO, CEPI and GOARN and they say that "Plague Inc: The Cure is an engaging and timely simulation of a global disease response".

You can buy the full game of Plague Inc: Evolved on Humble Store and Steam .

A little repair and reconstruction while doing a space walk? That's now a thing in the latest free expansion to the spaceship building simulation game Kerbal Space Program.

With lots of other smaller features that were added in this update, the EVA Construction Mode and new textures are the biggest highlights. EVA Construction Mode especially, because it can change how you play the game entirely when mixed with the new inventory system that allows your kerbals to store and carry around objects of their own. Some Reassembly Required also boosts the customization possible with a bunch of new lights to stick on your craft, plus some deployable lights too.

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When it comes to the texture overhaul they mentioned it's ongoing work with the Joolian satellite system of Bop, Vall and Tylo seeing major texture upgrades which make quite a big difference. The full changelog, as expected of a major upgrade, is pretty long and interesting full of smaller new details and quite a lot of bug fixes too.

Buy a copy of Kerbal Space Program from Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Do we have any regular players here? Let us know what you think of all the changes in the comments.

Want to test out another Linux game that uses the Vulkan API? Prepare to lose a lot of your free time with Transport Fever 2 as they've just enabled it.

Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment have been working to try and improve the overall performance of the game, on top of adding in macOS support too. The latest Beta is now available which adds in: Vulkan support with a switch available in the UI for OpenGL and Vulkan, there's a new cable-stayed bridge type, a library fix for Linux and more.

It's still quite early and there's plenty of issues but they're continuing to upgrade the foundation, and their game engine to support further updates to Transport Fever 2. You can find more info on the dedicated Steam Group they setup especially to gather feedback on the testing.

Considering how nicely reviewed it is by users, you can't really go wrong picking it up. Overall on Steam for example it has a Very Positive user rating and the more recent reviews even give it a higher Overwhelmingly Positive rating so it seems Urban Games have done well. See the likes of Vulkan in it is quite exciting too.

Lots of features already included too:

• Free play with countless configuration possibilities
• Three campaigns across three continents with over 20 hours of playing time
• Editors for creating maps and editing saved games
• Three landscape types: moderate, dry, and tropical
• Realistically modelled vehicles from Europe, America and Asia
• A total of over 200 vehicles: trains, buses, streetcars, trucks, aircraft and ships
• Modular train stations, bus and truck stations, airports and harbors
• Realistic transport simulation including one-way streets and light signals
• Editable and paintable terrain with realistic effects
• Intuitive construction tools for building railroads and more
• + plenty more and modding support

You can buy it on Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Hive Time, the sweet beehive building and management sim from Cheeseness hits the one year mark, celebrates with a new upgrade and a fresh little trailer. Disclosure : the developer has contributed to GOL in the past.

It might not be scientifically accurate but it sure is charming. We've seen all sorts of building and management sims from people to ants and bees too definitely need their time in the spotlight. One of the most important creatures to keep our environment alive, you gotta love the bees.

After being out for a whole year now, Cheeseness has upgraded the game with community features like chat integration for livestreams. Players watching can vote on various game features, and vote on gifts to help or hinder players. Some active chat participants may even get select to be a special bee - how lovely. For everyone else there's also new content like events, new hats, a bunch of new effects, new game options to tweak how you play for your own fun, optimisations and a lot more.

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If you missed it, Cheese also did something of a deep dive into how the release went and their thoughts on releasing a pay what you want game. See a brief round-up of some points included in our previous article .

You can buy Hive Time as a Pay What You Want game from itch.io .

Uncharted Depths is the name of the latest upgrade to Barotrauma, a sci-fi exploration sim that puts you and friends (or random people / AI) inside a submarine in the depths of Jupiter's moon Europa.

What I love to call an underwater suffering sim, as it's a pretty good description of what to expect from it. Inspired by FTL, RimWorld, Space Station 13 and others it's a sci-fi game full of silly ragdoll characters and plenty of horrifying sea creatures that want to eat you and your submarine. It's like a much darker and more in-depth version of We Need To Go Deeper.

The Uncharted Depths is out now adding in a huge overhaul to the environment with remade textures, branching level paths, more varied levels, new small explorable caves, destructible floating ice chunks, new environmental hazards like falling Ice Spires and more. That alone sounds awesome but there's a whole lot more including new missions, a big upgrade to the AI bot system to help you when you're alone, expanded modding support, tons of bug fixes and more.

Check out their new trailer:

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While it's quite a difficult game to get going, it's one full of laughs and a few jump scares here and there when you're not expecting a monster to come visit your submarine. Between trying not to crash, dealing with alien sea creatures and putting out all those fires - it's can be a lot of fun with the right people.

Barotrauma is available to buy on Humble Store or Steam .

Klei are back with their great space colony sim with the Oxygen Not Included - Spaced Out! expansion now available in Early Access with Linux support. Easily one of my favourite games from 2019, and now you're telling me it's even bigger? I didn't need much of a push to get back into Oxygen Not Included as Klei had already crafted a fantastic game.

Spaced Out is a big one, adding in some pretty huge new features! What to expect from Spaced Out? Here's a quick overview of what Klei say is already available:

• New Multi-World Gameplay! The Starmap and space program have been completely redesigned to allow you to span your Duplicant civilization across multiple planetoids, each with their own resources to contribute.
• Brand New Starting World! The Swamp start, along with its supporting biomes, provides a new, different mixture of resources to exploit as you nurture your fledgling colony.
• Mid-Game Rocketry! The rocket mechanics have been completely redesigned to make rocketry part of your colony's core infrastructure, rather than just an end-game goal.
  • Rocket tech is easier to research and is more integrated with the rest of the tech tree.
  • The surface of the starting planetoid is a lot less hostile, and new early-game tech is being added to ease the transition into space.
• Multi-Colony UI Improvements! The Diagnostics side panel and redesigned Resources screen have been expanded to manage your attention across planetoids.

A lot more is planned too, since it's Early Access and not quite finished. Klei mentioned how they've now got a solid foundation so it's ready for players to buy, test and hopefully enjoy it but they're going to push it further. Their ideas coming to the DLC include a Radiation / Nuclear System, Late-Game Planetoids and Rocketry, Rare Resources and Global Sustainability and eventually modding support for it hooked up properly again as it's disabled for it while it's not finished.

Check out the new trailer:

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As for how long to expect it to be in Early Access? That's not clear. Klei said they don't want to rush it, so they will develop this DLC just like they did with the base game - out in the open in Early Access, pulling in plenty of feedback. Once they get together the initial feedback they will be sorting out a more official roadmap of what's to come. The price is likely to go up as more features go live too.

You can buy Oxygen Not Included on Steam . The Spaced Out DLC is here .

After being out for two years, Texel Raptor have now added online multiplayer to the theme park builder Parkitect. Not exactly a small feature for such a game, and it's a free update for everyone too.

You can team up with 7 people so there's a max of 8 players total, all working on the same park where you get to see exactly what everyone is doing. This is true for sandbox park and campaign scenarios too, and most mods should be compatible with multiplayer too. DLCs are supported too but people will need to own the DLC to play with you.

See the trailer for the update below:

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Update highlights:

• added co-op multiplayer mode! Now you can build parks with up to 7 other people together
• added a new background music track
• improved decoration score calculation speed
• fixed fences not sticking to terrain when terraforming
• fixed a case where decoration could be seen through the terrain
• fixed a bug where guest money setting would not be stored properly when editing a scenario

The only downside is that right now the multiplayer is not cross-platform between Linux, macOS and Windows but they did make it clear they're going to continue working towards that goal.

You can pick up Parkitect from Humble Store , GOG and Steam .