We’ve covered the Dell Black Friday in July deals a few times in recent days, and they’re still coming. In fact, there are now so many offers that we’ve got a whole list of them here.
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I spent a good chunk of my weekend combing through GPU deals like these. I don't really need a new graphics card, but seeing prices drop by almost half gets my curiosity going. It’s not even just the big names like the RTX 5090 or the Radeon RX 7900 XT, even refurbished cards look tempting when they’re going for hundreds less. I know some folks hesitate with renewed products, but I’ve had solid luck so far. Last year, I grabbed a renewed RTX 4070 super and it’s been running steady since. I guess it’s that mix of curiosity and trying not to miss out that keeps me scrolling through these lists. Here's the best deals I can find for your latest rig upgrade:
Just when you thought Prime Day was over, we’ve mentioned it again and triggered all those flashbacks.
I recently ripped out my Steam Deck’s SSD and enthusiastically slapped in a WD Black SN770M 2TB mini SSD, and it's easily the smartest thing I’ve done with it that didn’t involve tinkering around in desktop mode.
Tales Of The Shire: A The Lord Of The Rings Game is finally coming out this month, offering terrifyingly cosy Hobbitiness to us bumbling Bilbos. Its system requirements have just dropped, and they're pretty reasonable.
In fact, its needs are so modest and homely that I'm wondering whether you might be able to run it on a Hobbit, provided you could find one in real life and staple some Nvidia - or AMD- branded plastic into the surface of its flesh. It's ok, I'm sure Gandalf has a magic stapler that doesn't produce excruciating pain if you fire it directly into a person.
Fresh Helldivers 2 patch alert. This one's patch 01.003.200, and it brings the latest in pointy flag tip technology, in addition to another round of weapon balancing. You'll need that flag stabbiness too, as the latest Galactic War twist has seen the Automatons try to wrestle control of Super Earth's space station.
Yep, stop trying to rename a city 'Gun' for five minutes, some stuff's going down in HD2 that you need to be clued in on, even if its just so you can run around the room cheering at how much more effective your Flame Sentry'll now be.
One of the best things about my job is that I get to fly around the world and go to events, and while I’m off to Warframe’s TennoCon this week (and very excited about it) there’s always a bit of a panic about what to pack to keep oneself sane on a long flight.
As part of their mass layoffs earlier this month, Microsoft cancelled an MMORPG that was in the works at The Elder Scrolls Online developers ZeniMax Online Studios. Now, the union that represents a number of devs left in limbo by that game's canning have issued an update about the process of fighting for their futures.
ZOS' MMO, codenamed Project Blackbird, wasn't the only game Microsoft pulled the plug on as they let go of around 9k people. Rare's Everwild and The Initiative's Perfect Dark reboot were also wiped out, with the latter studio being shuttered to boot.
The first thing that happened to me in the demo for The Little Tomb: The Maholova Club And The Search For A Dead Body was a stuffed horse on a spring telling me it knew when and how I'd die. Many such horses. You play as Kofun, a boy shaped like a keyhole tomb who is also sort of an actual keyhole tomb but also a boy who wants to fulfill his destiny as a keyhole tomb, namely by finding a dead body to bury inside of himself. He lives in a park with his mate Haniwa, who is a Haniwa. Haniwa's secret is that he's very good at calligraphy. Here's some visual orientation in case you're not caught up yet.
Dell’s Black Friday in July sale has knocked the price of an Alienware 16 laptop down to $1,099.99, and while it’s not the perfect machine, it’s a decent price for a reasonably affordable mid-range gaming setup.
You might remember Where Winds Meet as the open world Wuxia RPG that mixes scenes of exquisite calligraphy with scenes of hooligan sword masters subjecting blameless bears to sonic bombardment, paralysing whole gangs of chimney sweeps with chained Blink attacks, and getting chased by angry geese.
If you don't, you can watch the below trailer or read Ed Thorn's (RPS in peace) preview from 2023, in which he commented "I'm both excited to see more and a tad worried it could end up being a disjointed, overstretched mash". Then you can consider signing up to the game's next playtest, which runs from July 25th to July 30th.
I'm writing up Astro Prospector for a couple of reasons: firstly, it reminds me of two childhood favourites, Atari's Asteroids and the less-known Crystal Quest for the Macintosh. And secondly, there's something appealingly perverse about a bullet hell of all gametypes that is always simulating the player nodding off at the keyboard.
Amazon Prime Day might be over, but some of the best Ryzen CPU deals are still live right now. There’s still time to snag big discounts. We're seeing up to 39% off, which is rare for these processors. No Prime membership? No problem. Amazon’s free 30-day Prime trial still applies, so there’s really no excuse to miss these while they’re hot.
Gun.
There are a lot of them in Helldivers 2, it being a shooter and all. HD2 players aren't happy for it to end there though.
They've been asked for their input in renaming the single city on Super Earth they've so far succeeded in rebuilding since all of that Illuminate invasion business, and they're voting for Gun.
Armchair History Interactive would like to you know that their upcoming strategy game Master Of Command is full of smart, unforgiving systems. I know that because they emailed RPS saying that our "strategy features often spotlight smart, unforgiving systems".
I imagine several other outlets also received this exact email but this didn't stop me thinking "you know what - they're right! I am strategy-clever and tactics-tough! And what better way to show that than by covering this game, completely of my own volition and with no outside influence from cleverly worded PR emails playing on my sense of strategy-knower's pride. That'll show those fatcats down at the community historical strategy club treasury committee. Who's "making too many explosiony noises during this serious reenactment of the Somme" now, eh?
Truthfully though, I probably would have covered this without the email. It looks suitably grand, and I really dig the idea of a strategy where the management isn't about empires, but the personal journey of your army on campaign. Plus, you get to play uniform dress-up. Here's a trailer.
Deep beneath the smog of a plausibly denied planetoid, there lurks a space hulk full of dessicated hand monsters, shorn dreadlocks and long-emptied Pulse Rifles. The vessel mostly lies silent, but every so often, an ancient server deep within the core crackles awake, beaming an ominous signal far out into the void, and the chitinous corridors come alive with flamethrowers and squelchy stabbing noises and oh, so much screaming. Also, the coveted chirping of Steam achievements.
"Fine" is a funny word. It can mean something is sublimely crafted, but it can also be used in a withering sense. It's fine. This is fine. But there's another, calm and casual sense in which you can say something is fine. Like when a friend handing you some tea apologises because they "only have semi-skimmed milk". S'fine. Or when they say "nah, let's go to a different pub". Sure, fine! You're just happy to hang out. Kaizen: A Factory Story is a fine game. It is a puzzler that makes me feel OK about not finding the perfect solution.
Great stealth games are basically forever games. Whether or not they're boosted with regular live service jabs like a Hitman, it always feels like it's worth returning to a Dishonored, or a Metal Gear, or a Desperados 3. Always ways to finesse or experiment or utterly style on encounters you've slipped your way through dozens of times before. If you love stealth, you've likely got a library full of such games you've been meaning to get back to at some point. If you don't, you've likely been put off somewhere along the line by the sort of tired and punishing design tropes Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is full of. Naturally, I don't think it's worth your time either way.
A battle between three former Subnautica 2 developers and their publishers at Krafton intensified over the weekend, after an internal document appeared online showing how the scope of the survival game has reduced during development. The source of this document remains unknown. In fact, quite a lot of facts about the document remain unknown. Nevertheless, Krafton have since leapt at the chance to confirm its authenticity.
One of the European Parliament's vice presidents has voiced his support for the Stop Killing Games campaign, and said he's signed the group's petition to the European Commission to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable by shutting down their servers.
The petition surpassed a million signatures recently, though there are concerns that some of the signatories are fake. It has received some pushback from bodies representing game publishers, so it's no surprise the organisers have welcomed an endorsement from Nicolae Ștefănuță.
Morning all! The working week once again looms above us like a bulldozer driven by raucous and somehow loveable sheepdogs in top hats and cufflinks. Quickly now, lob a few new PC game releases under the caterpillar treads to slow its passage. It's not clear where those sheepdogs are going, but your and my wellbeing are clearly of secondary importance.
It's time. Elden Ring Nightreign's gotten a randomiser mod, just in case the base game isn't quite maxing out your unexpected chaos-per-run meter at this point, despite its revamped bosses.
While FromSoft's roguelike-ish twist on the established souls formula already switches things up in a manner that's a bit like a randomiser mod makeover of one of the series' traditional entries, modder thefifthmatt has still found ways to tinker with it.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is out August 14th, with a 30% discount off the $30 label price for owners of the Anniversary Edition. That discount applies to both Steam and GOG, and will be available for the "foreseeable future" (Fateweaver noises). Other currencies aren't listed.
You wouldn't believe how close I was to forgetting to poll everyone today for Playing This Weekend. In fairness, no one reminded me or sent me their paragraphs. What, so it's my responsibility to remind everyone to remind me? F'gawdsake.
Anyway, right on time as usual, here are the games we're clicking on this weekend!
Bestest best roguelite city builder Against The Storm is getting invaded by bats. Not the kind that swoop and screech and dive around your car in New Games Journalism articles that lean a bit too obviously on Hunter S. Thompson - bless our hearts, we've all done it - but the kind who labour at the forge and rejoice when their colleagues crumble and may even drive other workers out in order to make themselves feel better.
On the whole, I think I prefer the Fear and Loathing variety. Anyway, here's the trailer for Against the Storm's second DLC expansion, Nightwatchers, which will release on PC via Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store on July 31st.
Big piratey thing Sea of Thieves will be getting custom servers as part of a paid subscription service in "early 2026", developers Rare have announced during a first-ever community direct for the game. That's far from all of the studio's plans, with wider shakeups also in the pipeline.
This outlining of plans to make sure the good ship SOT is not only seaworthy, but can successfully broadside the many other vessels competing for its players' attention comes with some depressing and un-piratey context. It follows Rare being one of the studios affected by Microsoft's mass layoffs earlier this month, with Everwild being among the number of in-development games cancelled as part of the cuts.
Having taken a Dilophosaurus to their Dennis Nedry-esque plans for AI-generated scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution 3, Frontier are back to talking about a more wholesome form of generation - dinosaur sex. The game's latest trailer is a brief glimpse at the new breeding features, which allow you "to synthesise male and female variants, each with visible dimorphism" and have them do the ole horizontal tango "to shape the traits and markings of future generations." Please close the curtains before clicking play.
Capcom are fine-tuning the live service of livestock-murdering game Monster Hunter Wilds by making the Arch-tempered monster hunts a permanent fixture, rather than time-limited seasonal content quests. It's a bid to address the FOMO element that has dragged the game down to an Overwhelmingly Negative Steam user review consensus, though there are other things to blame for that, such as dodgy performance.
As a faction, the strength of Total War: Warhammer 3's Bretonnia lies in their knightly calvary. The peasant infantry is basically just there to squishily hold the enemy in place for charges. However, I'm feeling revolutionary today, so we're staging a serf uprising. Let's see how long we last. Pretty simple rules here, then. No knights. No horses. Conquer the entirety of Bretonnia. Defeat every horse I see in one-on-one combat.
We were in a bad way. Rats to the south. Goblins to the east. A dwindling stockpile of gold reserves. Worst of all, the lady of the lake herself had shunned us, stripping us of her blessing for no other reason than the cheeky bit of cowardly retreating we'd done from Masif Orcal. No appreciation for self-preservation tactics, that one.
Morsels is a game best enjoyed by poison tasters. A roguelike pixelart shooter from Furcula and Annapurna Interactive, its world is a relentlessly aberrant waste dump in which it often feels like the only sure way to differentiate objects is to pop them in your mouth, and hope they don't rupture, ignite or wriggle down your throat.
Video game science has yet to devise and normalise control devices that are operated with your tongue, despite notable efforts, so during my hands-on, I'm forced to fall back on my untrustworthy eyeballs. It's an adventure. Developer Toby Dixon has to step in frequently to point out that some of the game's oozing anomalies are there to empower me, not harm me. It helps that we meet at the end of Summer Game Fest and are both exhausted. It also helps that Dixon doesn't seem entirely certain what some of the creatures are himself.
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Amazon’s throwing out some serious gaming headset deals for Prime Day 2025, but today is the last chance to grab one. If you’ve been meaning to upgrade your audio setup, this is your sign. Discounts are hitting as high as 45% on top-tier brands like Corsair, Logitech, Razer, and SteelSeries. Even if you’re not a Prime member, you can still snag the best prices by jumping on Amazon’s free 30-day Prime trial. No strings, just faster shipping and early access to lightning deals while it lasts.
Subnautica 2 publishers Krafton have accused three recently ousted leads of "abandoning" their duties on the game, suggesting that this is to blame for it being delayed. That statement was almost immediately followed by one of the former Unknown Worlds bosses, co-founder Charlie Cleveland, writing in a Reddit post that a lawsuit's been filed by the trio against the company.
These are the latest twists in an ongoing saga that began with Striking Distance CEO Steve Papoutsis being parachuted in to replace Cleveland, fellow co-founder Max McGuire, and CEO Ted Gill earlier this month. That kicked off a war of words between the two sides, punctuated by a report from Bloomberg which alleged Krafton's call to delay the game was made just before a $250 million bonus was set to be paid to Unknown Worlds staff.
Former RPS sealife correspondent Nate once described the game Maneater as "an ecstatically violent simulation of being a fool's idea of a shark", which stuck with me. The Jaws Effect is a reasonably well known phenomenon coined in a paper that explores the impact the 1975 film had on Australian policy response to shark bites, although the term is now used a bit more broadly to refer to how sharks are villainised in pop culture - villainisation obviously being an absurdly human and dramatic concept to apply to a hungry or scared fish.
Jaws did actually result in an increase in shark culls, but its lasting legacy has also been argued to be more insididous. Depending on whether you're looking at stats from the UN or from conservation charities, the number of sharks killed or mutilated and harvested each year for fins and other parts ranges between about 10 and 100 million, and it's been argued this continues with relatively little pushback as compared to similar wildlife atrocities due to wide-reaching perception that ranges from apathy to vilification. A sharknado of lies, if you will.
It's time to get totally radical, dudefolks. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, the latest nostalgia-fest about avian athletes artfully acing acrobatic boardiness, drops in full today, July 11th. Though, thanks to pre-order early access meaning the game sort of released three days ago, its modding community is already off and running.
If you've spent the past few months watching old X Games reruns and thinking to yourself that all the shreddage might be better if Bob Burnqvist were an Edwardian nanny, a train chaser, or a gabagool enthusiast, I've got some good news.
Tides Of Torment, the next DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3, has been pushed back from its original Summer release window to later in the year, with September onwards sounding the likeliest from a new blog post.
And that's…honestly where the bad news ends, as far as I'm concerned. The rest of the blog is filled with some exciting and pretty respectable thoughts about future updates. Even the reason for Tides Of Torment's delay ("the short answer was no", it didn't hit the team's standards) strikes me as a good sign, since it means the DLC team at least feel they've got the breathing room to not rush out something they're not happy with. It's too nice outside for my PC to be running the kind of temps 1000 angry sea elves are going to result in, anyway.
Ah, yes: Sea Elves are confirmed now, led by Sea Lord Aislinn. Expect more details from a new video in August, by the sound of it.
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There’s a strong mix of Prime Day deals and direct offers from HP, Dell, MSI, and others, covering everything from compact gaming laptops to top-tier RTX 5090 desktops. It's the last day of Amazon Prime deals, so you can guarantee other retailers will put their prices back up after today too. Some builds are priced well below what it would cost to build yourself, and a few include extra savings with codes like LEVELUP20. If you're gaming on the go or setting up a full desktop battlestation, there’s a deal in this guide for just about everyone.
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Amazon’s dropped a ton of Prime Day deals on Steam Deck docks, but today is the last day to grab these exclusive discounts. Most of these are 20% to 45% off, with solid options for everything from budget setups to full desktop replacements. If you’re not a Prime member, Amazon’s offering a 30-day free trial so you can grab these deals without spending extra. Just sign up, check out, and cancel if you want. No pressure, just cheaper docks for today only.
Sometimes, when you're fighting aliens, you've got to whip out a gun that might explode in your own face. Them's the rules. You've got to risk it for a chocolate biscuit. Or, at least that's premise of Helldivers 2's latest warbond.
Dubbed Control Group, it'll give you access to a bunch of experimental gear Super Earth's scientists have cobbled together from captured Illuminate tech if you opt to pick it up when it drops on June 17th.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn has attracted a fair few Mass Effect comparisons for its sci-fi squad combat and romanceable companions since its announcement last month. Not least from developers Owlcat themselves, who've namechecked the "iconic" RPGs as inspirations. In a recent interview with Polygon, creative director Alexander Mishulin said he's humbled, but that Osiris Reborn also has its own approach to choice, consequence, and storytelling that's a bit different from Bioware's sci-fi trilogy and also the other one (Andromeda was actually pretty solid though).
