Eurogamer

Capcom has just wrapped its big Tokyo Game Show presentation on all things Monster Hunter, giving us some new details on the recently announced expansion Sunbreak plus a release date and a bit more information about the much anticipated PC version of Monster Hunter Rise.

The PC port of one of the best games of the year so far - at least I thought so in our Monster Hunter Rise review - will be coming on 12th January 2022, with a demo arriving as soon as 13th October. There will be support for 4K resolution and ultrawide monitors, improved framerates and textures plus refined keyboard and mouse controls.

Read more

Last week, I said I was worried about eFootball. Now it's out, I'm afraid to say it's even worse than I expected.

eFootball is available to download now - for free - in extremely limited form. This bizarre launch for Konami's football game, which, let's remember, is two years in the making after PES took 2020 off, lets you play offline 1v1 matches against the computer and online 1v1 matches in a challenge event that expires in 10 days. And that's it.

Read more

Christopher Judge, the voice actor of Kratos, claims he was responsible for God of War Ragnarok's delay after needing time to rehabilitate from knee and back surgery.

Judge also praised developer Santa Monica Studio for its patience and support while he recovered.

Read more

With the Tokyo Game Show now in full swing, Microsoft just finished up its Xbox event with a number of announcements.

Among them was the news that Scarlet Nexus will arrive on Xbox Game Pass today.

Read more

Lucid Games, the developer of Destruction All-stars, is apparently working on a new Twisted Metal game.

That's according to a report by VGC, which claims that the UK studio has started early development on the new title.

Read more

Nintendo has issued a denial on a new 4K Nintendo Switch report.

Last night, Bloomberg (paywall) reported at least 11 companies, including Zynga, have "tools" from Nintendo to make 4K Switch games.

Read more

For years whenever I've been hunting around through books about old games and going over compilation discs, I've seen the words "Solomon's Key" and never been tempted. Intrigued, but not intrigued enough. It's an old game, right, maybe a bit puzzley? Ported a lot.

That ended yesterday. I was looking through the NES games on Switch for something to play, and there was Solomon's Key. After all this time, what is this game? Is it playable at all? A relic? Will it make me understand the lineage of another game a little better? I didn't know what to expect, but I'll tell you what actually happened: I fell in love.

Read more

Following reports earlier this week, Twitch has officially unveiled a new suite of verification-based tools intended to help combat the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of hate raiding.

Twitch's controversial raid feature was originally designed to be an easy way for streamers to share audiences by enabling them to redirect all viewers currently watching their broadcast to a target channel. Unfortunately, malicious users quickly began exploiting the feature, setting up dummy accounts and bots to flood the chats of often marginalised streamers and subject them to doxing, harassment, and attack.

Read more

Let's get some important stuff out of the way up front. While Super Monkey Ball Mania is effectively a remake of Super Monkey Ball Deluxe - itself a compilation of the brilliant first two entries in Sega's simple and often supremely satisfying series - this is not the Monkey Ball of old. With new assets, a new soundtrack and oh-so-slightly reworked physics, this remake in Unity is not the Monkey Ball that once kept me up for endless sleepless nights chasing a perfect score in Monkey Target with friends. There's something flatter, duller, not quite so magical to its visuals, never mind the fact the all-important momentum you used to manage at the bottom of the slope in Monkey Ball's most cherished mini-game, and most frequently mishandled in the entries ever since, is now replaced with a rude and not-so-subtle shove into the heavens.

There's always a risk with remakes, of course, especially remakes of games as cherished as the original Super Monkey Ball - it's remarkable how strong an emotional attachment you can have to a 20-year-old game about pushing simians in hamster balls around checkerboard courses. Maybe it's nostalgia getting the better of me, but to these tired old eyes this is a remake that looks demonstrably inferior to the originals; I miss that distinctive chunk of the Sega Naomi era, or details like how the polished sheen of shimmering bonus level floors doesn't quite have that sparkle.

Read more

Sony has announced October's PlayStation Plus games, confirming a leak from the weekend.

October's PlayStation 5 game is Black Matter's 50v50 WW2 shooter Hell Let Loose, which launches straight into PlayStation Plus (it's also out on Xbox Series X and S and PC). Our Chris Tapsell previewed the PC version in July.

Read more

Lone Echo 2, the sequel to Ready at Dawn's acclaimed 2017 zero-gravity VR adventure will - following a last-minute delay in August - finally release for Oculus devices on 12th October.

Lone Echo 2, which looks set to deliver another about of moody sci-fi adventure built around zero-gravity traversal and puzzling, catapults its two protagonists - Captain Olivia Rhodes and player-controlled android Echo One (also known as Jack) - 400 years into the future following the events of the previous game, this time focussing on an abandoned space station that supposedly holds the key to returning home.

Read more

Toy Soldiers HD, a revival of the Xbox Live Arcade classic, will finally arrive on 21st October for Nintendo Switch, Steam, PlayStation and Xbox.

That date has been pushed back a couple of times now, but today was made "absolutely" final after a couple of last-minute bogies were identified.

Read more

Horror game Scorn is now due out at some point in 2022.

Confirmation comes from a note to press from new publisher Kepler Interactive, which is co-founded by Scorn developer Ebb Software.

Read more

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain has returned to PC via GOG.

Silicon Knights' action adventure launched on PSone in 1996 before coming out on PC a year later. It's the first game in the Legacy of Kain series, which went on to include the seminal Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Soul Reaver 2 and Blood Omen 2.

Read more

Firesprite, the large Liverpool-based team bought by PlayStation earlier this month, has expanded further with the acquisition of Fabrik Games.

Fabrik will now become part of Firesprite, and boost its overall headcount up to 265.

Read more

The revived GamesMaster will be hosted by videoGaiden veteran Robert "Rab" Florence, aided by esports presenter Frankie Ward and comedian Ty Logan.

All three will, of course, also be joined by the floating head of a GamesMaster - although their identity remains under wraps.

Read more

Marvel has described Insomniac's upcoming Spider-Man 2 as a "darker" follow-up to the original game.

Speaking on the latest This Week In Marvel podcast, the comics maker's creative vice president Bill Rosemann briefly discussed Insomniac's current slate of projects.

Read more

Amazon will offer New World players free server transfers in the next two weeks, with lengthy queue times blighting the MMO's hugely popular launch.

New World launched yesterday and peaked at 707,230 concurrent players - the fifth-highest concurrents figure ever seen on Valve's platform. At one point it was the most popular game on Steam, ahead of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Read more

He burns his belongings.

It's hard to imagine what has happened for a man to think there are no options left other than to take a box of his stuff - a box of cherished memories, I think, although we're never formally told - and shove it into a bonfire. It's harder still to imagine how it must feel to keep doing it, over and over and over again. Does it get easier, do you think? After the second time - the tenth time, the fiftieth time, the hundredth time - does it stop hurting? Do you stop feeling it? Or does every box stuffed into the flames make your heart ache just that little bit more?

Read more

Night School Studio, the developer behind acclaimed narrative adventure Oxenfree and its highly anticipated sequel, has been acquired by Netflix.

Night School has gained a reputation for creating engaging, sharply written adventures with a strong focus on narrative across the four games it's launched since its founding in 2014. After 2016's critically lauded Oxenfree, the developer released a well-received Mr. Robot tie-in, 1.51exfiltrati0n, followed by pub-crawl-through-hell adventure Afterparty and the Apple-exclusive space escapade Next Stop Nowhere. Notably, given the acquisition news, the studio was also reported to have been developing an unannounced Stranger Things project in conjunction with Telltale Games at one time, before the latter company's collapse.

Read more

Microsoft says it will soon allow third-party storefront apps, including those of Amazon and Epic Games, to be discoverable via is Windows store.

"Just like any other app," Microsoft writes in a post announcing the new measures, "third-party storefront apps will have a product detail page that can be found via search or by browsing - so that users can easily find and install it with the same confidence as any other app in the Microsoft Store on Windows."

Read more

Netflix's fledging foray into video gaming continues today as the streaming service launches three new games for subscribers in select European territories.

Back in July, Netflix confirmed it was "in the early stages" of expanding into games and that it would initially focus on mobile titles. The first fruits of its labours emerged in August, when it added a tiny handful of mobile games to its entertainment library - Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3 - as part of an early Poland-exclusive test.

Read more

Square Enix has shared its full presentation schedule for this year's Tokyo Game Show, confirming fresh looks at a range of upcoming games, including Final Fantasy Origin, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Forspoken. Also planned: jazz live painting.

The complete schedule spans three days - running from Friday, 1st October, to Sunday, 3rd October - and kicks off with a big one-hour showcase at 7pm JST (that's 11am in the UK) before shifting the focus to individuals titles. You can also expect a handful of special events, including a live concert and the aforementioned jazz live painting, along the way.

Read more

Discovery and realisation are the two great thrills of Outer Wilds, so let me dust off an old reviewer's cliche and say that if you loved that game you should stop reading and play Echoes of the Eye without further ado. Nothing I can write will be as compelling as unravelling this first and only expansion for yourself.

Indeed, writing takes a backseat in Echoes of the Eye - as, rather unexpectedly, does spaceflight. Where Eurogamer's best of 2019 saw you chasing clues from gravity well to gravity well, hurrying to make sense of a pocket solar system before the sun explodes and resets the game's 22 minute timeloop, Echoes takes place almost entirely on one, mesmerising new world with its own, self-sealed mode of traversal. It's the erstwhile home of an alien race whose language you don't know, and whose torrid past you must accordingly glean from images that are equal parts Kodak Moment and found footage eeriness. Fortunately, your ship computer still does a solid job of paraphrasing key findings and mind-mapping them for consideration, bolstered by a menu tweak that lets you organise leads by planet.

Read more

Microsoft has announced October's Xbox Games with Gold lineup.

On Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S, Mad Fellows' 2017 rhythm action rail shooter Aaero is available to download from 1st to 31st October.

Read more

Battlefield 2042 will host its delayed open beta test next week on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

Everyone will be able to play from 8th to 9th October, with early access starting from the 6th for pre-order customers or EA Play members.

Read more

A new trailer for Pokémon Legends: Arceus has shown one of the game's boss fights - and it's against a brand new Pokémon species. Or should that be old Pokémon species?

Legends: Arceus, a prequel to the main Pokémon game series, will debut Kleavor, a previously-unseen evolution for original Kanto creature Scyther. It's a Bug/Rock type, with axes for arms and a face a bit like an angry rock chicken.

Read more

If you've been reading this site for a while, you probably remember Ellie Gibson. Ellie was our funniest writer and most, er, unpredictable interviewer until she left to spend more time with her family (and her comedy career).

Now part of the parenting comedy duo Scummy Mummies, Ellie is also the world's most middle-aged Twitch streamer. Today - right now in fact - she's streaming for 12 hours in support of two charities close to her heart: the Borne Charity, which funds life-saving research into the causes and prevention of premature birth, and Women's Aid. Ellie and her comedy partner Helen Thorn will also be running the London Marathon in support of those charities this year.

Read more

Splitgate now has mantling.

The popular Halo-meets-Portal first-person shooter got a big update overnight that added the new mantling feature. This is designed as a jetpack boost, so there is no first-person animation that interferes with aim/gunplay, developer 1047 Games explained. You can turn it off in settings.

Read more

The cross generation transition is proving to be more extended than some may have initially imagined - so where does that leave an established franchise like Call of Duty? With Vanguard, Sledgehammer Games needs to wow owners with the new generation of consoles while ensuring that the new series entry still passes muster on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It's a tricky proposition because the developers can't institute the kind of 30fps/60fps split between the console generations seen in Halo Infinite (though 60fps did make it to One X in the latest test flight), and fundamentally there needs to be parity to a certain degree in the visual feature set - simply to ensure a level playing field online. Resolution, 120Hz support and minor visual flourishes appear to be the dividing line between consoles old and new.

Of course, it's in campaign that the developers can really push the new consoles and thus far, we've not seen much in this area - and neither have we seen native next-gen app support for Warzone - so it's important to view the multiplayer beta in context. But at the basic level, we are back to a COD title based on the Infinity Ward engine that worked so well for Modern Warfare 2019 (expect more details soon on how this technology has evolved over the last couple of years).

Read more

Marvel's Avengers launches on Xbox Game Pass for PC, console and cloud this Thursday, 30th September.

Crystal Dynamics' much-maligned superhero action game launches on Microsoft's subscription program in complete form - it includes all previously released free content, including the Black Panther: War for Wakanda expansion and all the post-launch heroes and missions.

Read more

After a string of high-profile failures, Amazon has its first video game hit on its hands with New World.

The £35 fantasy MMO launched today and has already shot past the half a million concurrent players mark on Steam, making it the second most-played game on Valve's platform behind only Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. As you'd expect, the servers are struggling.

Read more

Dolby Vision for gaming is now live on Xbox Series X and S.

More than 100 HDR (high-dynamic-range) titles optimised for Xbox Series X and S are available now or coming soon in Dolby Vision, Microsoft said in a post on Xbox Wire.

Read more

Fortnite has greatly increased the XP available from completing its daily quests and character questlines, in response to fan feedback on the game's new Cube-themed season.

Completing your daily quests will now net you almost double the XP, from 51k up to 90k XP, while new and future character punchcards will award 150k XP instead of 80k XP.

Read more

The New Yorker once ran a page of jokey and imaginary short-lived comic strips. I can only remember one: A Yank in the Luftwaffe. There was the yank in his plane, halfway through a dogfight. "What?" he says, or words to that effect. "The controls are all in German! I'm gonna crash!"

I thought about the Yank in the Luftwaffe for the first time in about twenty years the other day, when loading up Nauticrawl: 20,000 Atmospheres on my iPhone, where it's just come out. Nauticrawl is, I gather, a narrative roguelike about escaping from some awful society. None of that matters, though, because what it's really about for your first few minutes is trying to do that escaping when faced with a wall of terrifying dials.

Read more

Letter from the Editor is a new monthly column from our editor - a bit like the editorial on the first page of a magazine! - that's exclusive to all Eurogamer supporters.

Welcome, and thanks so much for supporting Eurogamer! In 22 years of operation, we've never asked our readers to pay to read us before - and you are one of the first to do us the honour. So, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you. It really does mean a lot.

Read more

Hello, happy Tuesday, and do I have some lovely news for you: the Eurogamer Podcast is back! And I hope you don't mind but I am your new host (or returning host, depending on how long you've been around Eurogamer).

The Podcast is something we've been able to put time into again because of the Eurogamer subscription launch. This means it's tied slightly to subscriptions, in that new episodes will be aired exclusively for Premium supporters for two weeks before being made available to all. And it'll be a fortnightly show. Episodes will be filmed, if you like videos, or available as audio-only files. (We are finalising audio hosting for early access supporters and will have that for you soon. Once public, you'll be able to listen from all the usual podcast places. For now, you can watch the episode as a video below.)

Read more

Off Topic is a weekly column, exclusive to premium subscribers, in which the Eurogamer team make recommendations and delve into subjects that have caught their eye outside of gaming.

Want to hear my origin story? Or part of it, anyway. At university in York in the 90s, I wrote for Vision, one of the two student newspapers - the big, award-winning, sort-of-upmarket, would-be Guardian one. It had a scrappier, punchier rival called Nouse.

Read more

It's a big day! We've just opened a supporter program for Eurogamer, enabling readers - for the first time in the site's 22-year history - to pay to read the site without ads and with many other benefits, including exclusive articles.

Subscriptions come in two tiers: Standard, priced at £3.99 / $4.99 per month, and Premium, which costs £5.99 / $7.99. You can save by buying yearly subscriptions.

Read more

Disco Elysium comes out on Xbox alongside Nintendo Switch on 12th October, ZA/UM has confirmed.

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut launches on Xbox Series X and S and Xbox One on 12th October as a download, with a physical edition set for 9th November. It costs £34.99 from the Microsoft Store.

Read more