Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Moonbreaker is an early access turn-based tabletop game by the Subnautica devs, and before you ask, no there isn't a Blue Eyes White Basking Shark piece that inhales everything on the board. There are, however, plenty of sci-fi people who wield spears and guns and do battle by spending a currency called Cinder, if that's your jam.

Whether you're new to tabletop strategy or already like bashing miniatures together, the game makes for a perfectly enjoyable time. I just don't know whether it goes beyond "perfectly enjoyable" into "thrilling", though, and that may be down to its lack of, well, lots of things. Give it time and it may just evolve into a game of serious depth but right now it's a bit too miniature to recommend wholeheartedly.

Read more

The devs creating historical combat sim Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord have revealed that your little medieval murderblokes will soon be able to officially carry banners into battle at last. TaleWorlds Entertainment shared details of what’s coming to the game before it releases on October 25th, along with a look at what to expect after. That includes the possibility of DLC further down the road.

Read more

Somewhere at the edges of the galaxy in No Man's Sky lies a large, verdant planet with an abandoned, but functioning, starter ship on it. I left it there in 2016 after discovering a larger ship out in the wilds, but it's a decision that still haunts me to this very day. You see, I was so taken with my new set of wings that I failed to notice it didn't have a functioning hyperdrive attached, which is needed to punch through the atmosphere to visit another solar system. It also turned out that this particular planet didn't have any of the necessary resources to craft a new one either, leaving my only form of escape back in my tiny little starter ship – which, of course, was now nowhere to be seen. I spent hours looking for that little ship, but the planet was so vast that I never saw it again.

Upcoming aerial survival game Forever Skies doesn't have lots of large planets to lose your only means of transportation in, thankfully. In its Steam Next Fest demo at least, the only things I was able to land my makeshift aircraft on were tiny, rusty platforms perched atop decaying skyscrapers on an Earth ruined by disease and an ecological apocalypse. But that fear of getting stranded somewhere I shouldn't be has never left me, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a teensy bit scared of jumping down from my ship and finding I wasn't able to get back up to it again.

Read more

The Steam store page for top-down roguelite sequel Streets Of Rogue 2 has gone live, and has some screenshots and a wee GIF of the game in action. This time, the immersive sim shenanigans are going open-world. The Steam page also provides some inkling of what else is coming when the game launches in 2023. Did I mention it’s coming out in 2023?

Read more

Agent 47 is still going freelance, but not this year. IO Interactive have pushed Hitman 3’s planned free Freelancer mode back again, this time to January 26th. The delay was announced along with the reveal of a closed technical test for Freelancer starting early next month. And here I was, thinking that Ian Hitman never missed a target.

Read more

Last month, Rachel and I made the long pilgrammage to Seattle in order to attend PAX West 2022. While we were there we ran around the show floor with a bag full of loose camera equipment, stopping frequently to enthuse about cool video games we'd discovered or to interview someone interesting. At the time, all of these videos were only accessible to our premium supporters. However, as 30 days have passed since we originally shared them, we're now making them free for everyone to enjoy. Surprise!

From an interview with the voice cast of Team Fortress 2 to a comprehensive tour of the show floor, there's something for everyone in this bundle of audio-visual delights. Scroll down to see what we got up to, and remember, if you like what you see please do consider funding content like this via our supporters programme. It truly means an awful lot.

Read more

Overwatch 2 launched earlier this evening, prompting the traditional New Blizzard Game Experience of thousands of players waiting in long queues to play. According to president of Blizzard Entertainment Mike Ybarra, however, today's launch issues are being made worse by a "mass DDoS attack" on their servers.

Read more

A lot of former PlayStation exclusives have been ported to PC over the past two years, and Sony seem to see the benefit of doing more. Hermen Hulst, head of PlayStation Studios, says that "Further investments in areas that will strengthen the expansion on to PC, on to mobile and into live services, that's definitely a possibility for us."

Read more

Electronic Arts' next Need For Speed game will be revealed this coming Thursday, October 6th. The official Need For Speed Twitter account shared the news that the reveal trailer would land at 8am PT/4pm BST/5pm CEST.

Read more

Card game Magic: The Gathering introduced sets which cross over with other worlds last year under the name Universes Beyond. Wizards Of The Coast announced during an investor call today that future crossovers would include Final Fantasy and Assassin's Creed - although not until 2024.

Read more

In an update for investors, CD Projekt Red today outlined their "long-term product outlook." It contains some projects we already knew about, such as next year's Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty, but also many that we did not. That includes a new trilogy of The Witcher RPGs, a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, and a brand new IP being developed by CD Projekt Red, plus two further games in The Witcher universe being created by third-party studios.

Read more

Put a screenshot of Overwatch 2 next to a screenshot of Overwatch 1, and you'd be hard-pressed to spot any difference. Both display a vast chaotic ballet, in which two teams composed of some of the most well-realised characters in hero shooters wage war until one team emerges triumphant. Just like its predecessor, Overwatch 2 is one of the most delicately crafted sensory onslaughts I've experienced in a game.

Guiding my old favourite heroes through venerable maps like King's Row and Route 66, it's like I never left. In many ways, it feels like I've simply been given a reason to play Overwatch 1 again. Is that enough for a sequel? Is it enough to justify the incredibly confusing, lengthy, and oft-botched process of trying to make Overwatch feel relevant again? I'm not certain it is. But perhaps it should be.

Read more

Is it possible to play a PC game from a safe place behind your sofa? If so, then the new trailer for Motive’s Dead Space might have just made me consider shifting my seating position when the sci-fi horror remake arrives in January. You can decide for yourself after watching the trailer below. Go on, join Team Sofa.

Read more

Gothic horror strikes again in Magic: The Gathering Arena in 2023, when the Shadows Over Innistrad Remastered set rears up from its grave in the first half of the year. The remaster of 2016’s return to the plane of werewolves, vampires and zombies was revealed by Wizards Of The Coast today during a stream that kicked off Magic: The Gathering’s 30th anniversary celebrations.

Read more

Upcoming real-time strategy threequel Company Of Heroes 3 has been delayed to February 23rd, 2023, Sega and devs Relic Entertainment have announced. The game had been due to launch next month on November 17th, but Relic say they need extra time for "bug fixing, balancing, and polishing". This is all just tweaking time, apparently, as Relic have finished development of the game’s features.

Read more

I love Steam Next Fest season, because you can go from "Oh this is from those devs who did that thing? Huh. Hadn't heard of this," to "holy video game, Batman, this is the absolute business" in the space of a free demo. This is what I experienced with Flat Eye, a story-heavy management sim where you're in charge of a super-advanced gas station, where you harvest personal data from the port-a-loos, and feed the biological matter from those same toilets into your high-tech vending machine. Mmmmm. Flat Eye, the Next Fest demo for which you can download and play right now, is from Night Call devs Monkey Moon. I liked Night Call fine, but I really love the Flat Eye demo.

Read more

Free to play fantasy MMO RPG Lost Ark has shared a sneak peek at the new classes and raids coming to the game up until the end of the year. Following on from September introducing Lost Ark’s very own Iron Man in the form of the Machinist advanced class, expect two more classes to arrive between now and the start of 2023, taking the roster to 21. October is all about raids though, and this month sees the arrival of the limited-time Mystic Abyss raid.

Read more

Believe it or not, this month marks 25 years since Fallout brought its take on post-apocalyptic survival role-playing to PC. Bethesda are making Fallout 76 free to play for a week, starting today, to mark the occasion. There’s a bunch of other things happening during the rest of October to celebrate the Wasteland too, ranging from events in Fallout 76 to long overdue updates to Fallout Shelter.

Read more

Sci-fi gacha MMO Tower Of Fantasy is heading to Steam on October 20th, the same day as its Version 2.0 Vera update arrives. The update adds the realm of Vera, where you’ll find the Gobby desert (really) and its cyberpunk city of Mirroria. Watch the very neon and sandy trailer below.

Read more

The WD Black SN850 is one of our favourite gaming SSDs, and today it's available for just over £100 at Ebay when you use the code SPEND15 to knock 15% off the price. This a good price for one of the fastest SSDs on the market, especially given that it's a PCIe 4.0 model that comes with a heatsink - very useful for PCs and it even meets Sony's strict requirements for the PS5.

Read more

The WD SN550 is going cheap at Ebuyer's Ebay UK page right now, with a 2TB drive costing just £118.98. That's an awesome deal for what is already one of the best value PCIe 3.0 SSDs, offering sequential read speeds up to 2600MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 1800MB/s. That's about five times faster than even the fastest SATA drive in terms of peak read speeds, making this an excellent choice for handling large files such as 4K videos, disc images and so on.

To get this reduced price, you'll need to use the code SPEND15 at Ebay. This knocks £21 off the price, moving it from £140 to £119.

Read more

In case September didn't add enough new indie games to your burgeoning Steam wishlists, Valve are back today with another edition of their demo-packed Steam Next Fest, and we've been playing some of its many, many, many demos to help give you a few pointers on where to start. You can view the whole of October's Steam Next Fest right here if you'd rather just dive in headfirst, but below you'll find some hand-picked highlights we've been enjoying ahead of time - including a new Return Of The Obra Dinn-alike, a first-person skeleton shooter, an underwater citybuilders and a platformer where your gun is also an umbrella.

Read more

A couple of weeks back you may remember that I played the early access build of Gloomwood, a very good Thief-like that currently snaps shut just as you reach the best bit. The Richard Gere holding a necklace of video games. One thing that I do not dwell on in my feature, though, is that I was hamstrung not just by the early access limitations of the game. For almost all of the first playthrough I did, I thought that you could neither heal nor store items in Gloomwood. I was like "Wow, this is a really hardcore stealth sim."

You can, of course, do both of those things in Gloomwood. It's just, I am an idiot.

Read more

Since Google announced they were giving up on Stadia last week, some developers and publishers are taking steps to ensure players don’t lose their progress when the platform shuts down in January. So far, Bungie, IO Interactive and Ubisoft have issued statements to reassure Stadia users that they’re investigating ways to salvage their saves. It’s a welcome development following Google’s sudden shutdown revelation.

Read more

Fancy playing a new Legacy Of Kain game at some point in the indefinite future? Well, Crystal Dynamics are running a survey seeking opinions about where a hypothetical next instalment in the series might go. They’re also checking whether anyone would be up for remasters or remakes of earlier games, such as Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver. If you don’t enjoy the sound of a satirical co-op beat ‘em up set in the vampiric realm of Nosgoth then you might want to chime in with your thoughts.

Read more

When action RPG Flintlock: The Siege Of Dawn was revealed in March, its cinematic trailer struggled to conjure up anything more than a slight tinge of excitement. Then a gameplay reveal arrived later at Summer Geoff Fest and it immediately slid into the "Cor, this game looks a bit good doesn't it?" category of my brain. Finally, another game befitting A44, the studio behind minimalistic Ashen which Brendy quite enjoyed.

Colour me excited when I had the chance to see a half-hour presentation of the game in action at this year's Gamescom, and chat to A44's CEO Derek Holding at the same time. It was even better than I'd expected, honestly, and I've come away with the belief that it may just be one of the best Soulslikes to arrive in quite some time.

Read more

Pop culture wiki service Fandom has acquired a whole bunch of gaming and entertainment sites including media sites GameSpot and Giant Bomb, the company announced today. As part of the deal with Red Ventures, Fandom also gain Metacritic and GameFAQs, along with broader entertainment coverage through Comic Vine and TV Guide. The cost of the purchase wasn’t disclosed.

Read more

Two-person Indian studio Oleomingus make some of the very prettiest video games, I've long thought, and now they've expanded into a new genre with their latest free game. Folds Of A Separation is a puzzle game navigating rooftop mazes in a flooded city bristling with giant clocks, taps, and such in the usual gorgeous Oleomingus way. It's a lot to get your head around, though a treat to look at while boggling.

Read more

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by automotive horror, great goop technology, flirting with Hercule Poirot, and the most beautiful little cat.

Read more

One of the founders of Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM has revealed the “involuntary” departure of three staff from the company in a blog post. Martin Luiga said that designer and founder Robert Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art director Aleksander Rostov had ceased working for ZA/UM at the end of 2021. Luiga described their departure as “bad news for the loving fans that are waiting for the Disco sequel”.

Read more

Horizon Zero Dawn developers Guerrilla Games are working on an online multiplayer instalment in the retro-futuristic, robot battling series, a new report claims. MP1st say multiple sources allege the project exists, and another suggests it could include co-op involving some form of customisation based on tribes from the Horizon series. This multiplayer version of Horizon would come to PC alongside PlayStation consoles.

Read more

Sundays are for returning from a long vacation and shaking off the holiday haze. Before you kick into gear, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

Read more

What would be the most fitting end for Shenmue's anime adaptation? To be cancelled with its story incomplete, of course. And so it is: Shenmue The Animation isn't getting a season two.

Read more

I've no idea how many Steam Decks Valve have sold, but cor: it sure seems to be a success in terms of the diversity of games people are enjoying on it.

Yesterday, the official Steam Deck Twitter account shared a list of the most played games on the handheld PC gaming machine in September. The list includes Vampire Survivors, Elden Ring, Stardew Valley, Cyberpunk 2077, Hades and No Man's Sky.

Read more

Skyrim has been released and re-released several times and is available for almost anything that plays games at this point. As of two days ago, it's even now available DRM-free from digital retailer GOG.com. The GOG release is "entirely playable offline" and includes all the Anniversary Edition content "without the need for Creation Club access."

Read more

Tomorrow, October 2nd, is the last full day during which the Overwatch 1 severs will be online. Blizzard's first-person shooter will switch off at 8am PT on the 3rd (4pm BST) ahead of the release of the free-to-play Overwatch 2 on October 4th.

How do we feel about that?

Read more

It's been a while since I could do this: pinch and a pinch for the first of the month, and no returns! You've been... Octobered. Hey, don't sweat it. You can keep that bloody nose all month to get a jump on Halloween. You're welcome, by the way.

What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

Read more

Petrol stations might not be the most natural setting for pondering life's biggest questions, but the ones in Flat Eye, the next game from the makers of detective taxi-me-do Night Call, aren't your ordinary rest stops. As well as a convenient place to relieve yourself and top up on snacks, these futuristic service stations also house cosmetic surgery bots, operation tables, teleportation booths and more - and they're all overseen by a powerful AI trying to find the best possible future for the human race. As the station's head clerk, you'll debate the ethics of eternal youth and end of life care, while also making sure your station has enough power, stocked shelves and a happy customer base. It's certainly an intriguing combo compared to other management games out there right now, so I sat down with director Laurent Victorino and writer Antony Jauneaud to find out more.

Read more

On this week's episode of the Ultimate Audio Bang, we dig deep into Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's recent multiplayer beta weekends and discuss whether Warzone needs a total revamp, how Warzone impacts the multiplayer side of things, and whether Warzone's upcoming DMZ mode may be Call Of Duty's big gambit.

Read more

A mysterious new session-based co-operative shooter has been announced by Ubisoft, codenamed Project U. There aren’t many details to go on just yet, but the game is in the early stages of development and will hold closed playtests on PC in Western Europe. If you’re of an inquiring mind, and like hanging out with mates in shooter lobbies, then all you can do for the moment is register your interest.

Read more