Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The new Call Of Duty: Warzone map is flipping enormous. Larger even than the colossal locales of PUBG, Verdansk is home to many hundreds of unique buildings, thousands of loot drops, and up to 150 players at once. Our Call Of Duty: Warzone map guide will offer you an extremely detailed look at Verdansk and all its locations, even going so far as to rank the very best loot locations across the map.

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Today has brought the launch of Ori And The Will Of The Wisps, the follow-up to Ori’s lovely 2015 journey through the Blind Forest. The cute lil’ fella is off on another metroidvania-y platforming adventure, bashing baddies, gaining new movement abilities, and generally cooing at the pretty scenery. And it’s a cracker, so I’m told. Lovely to the eyes and a delight to the fingertips, I’m told. Good boss battles, I’m told. By our review. Our glowing review, posted yesterday.

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There’s a lot to be frightened by in Hunt: Showdown. Bee ladies, dying horses, a scuttering spider-beast. Slavering hounds, alarms made of clattering hanging bones, zombies. Ducks. It’s like this whole bayou hates you.

But the swamp and its horrible denizens aren’t Hunt: Showdown’s antagonists. The real source of tension is other players. Every detail of this shooter’s design is about engineering a sense of threat from the fact that running around this grimdank hellhole are other people who are aiming to end your bog holiday early. (more…)

What is the half-life of Half-Life? I would have long ago described Valve’s first-person shooter as my favourite game, but revisiting it last month in preparation for Half-Life: Alyx made clear how many parts of its design have aged.

Enter Black Mesa, a fan-made remake of the original Half-Life, inside Half-Life 2’s Source engine. Over 8 years since we first reviewed its earliest release, the project is now complete. It is a triumph on many levels, and in terms of scale and polish, the most impressive fan game ever made. But it remains, underneath, Half-Life – with all that that entails.

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When Google Stadia was first announced at GDC last year, id boss Marty Stratton promised that Doom Eternal would run at “true 4K” when it launched on the search giant’s cloud streaming service. However, according to id’s updated specs for the game, this is no longer going to be the case. Instead, the Stadia version of Doom Eternal will now run at 1800p when played on a 4K display (that’s 3200×1800), with some sneaky up-sampling pushing it the rest of the way to proper 4K (3840×2160). The news will no doubt come as a blow for die-hard Stadia fans, but when you take a closer look at id’s official 4K PC requirements for Doom Eternal, it’s actually not entirely surprising.

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As rumours predicted, E3 has officially been cancelled. Like all the other events cancelled recently, it’s down to health concerns over the Covid-19 coronavirus. The highest-profile marketing event of the games industry calendar is binned.

“After careful consultation with our member companies regarding the health and safety of everyone in our industry – our fans, our employees, our exhibitors, and our longtime E3 partners – we have made the difficult decision to cancel E3 2020,” the Entertainment Software Association said today. They do say they’re considering an online show for all the big announcements, though I’m sure we’d still hear them all if not.

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Buy Stations are scattered throughout the enormous world of Call Of Duty: Warzone. And it’s a good thing too, because these Stations are unbelievably powerful repositories of goodness. Our Call Of Duty: Warzone Buy Stations guide will walk you through everything you can buy, where you can find these stations, and the best ways of earning enough Cash to use them.

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The Epic Games Store has added a feature that’s been on many users’ wishlists: wishlists. You can now add games you wish to acquire to a list. Epic’s wishlist feature is at present literally a list of wishes, not performing helpful functions like telling you when a wishlisted game comes out or gets a discount. Hey, baby steps.

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The last patch Apex Legends received was a big ‘un, introducing lots of new Apex content hidden away amongst our game files. Not all of it is in use yet, of course, it’s just tantalisingly hanging out back there, waiting for a new update to activate it… Or, waiting for a sneaky data miner to take a peek. And peek they have, for those files are hiding loads of unannounced skins, a potential new event, and these giant alien dog creatures who originally hail from Titanfall.

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With yesterday’s news that Sony will release Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC this summer came a hint that this might be only the first of their PlayStation exclusives coming our way. It sounds like they’re moving slowly and cautiously yet do expect to bring more. While this has seemed increasingly likely in recent years, it’s still surprising to me. What a great thing. Sony own a number of world-class development studios and I’d be thrilled to see more of their games on PC. But I’ll not get over-excited just yet. Just in case.

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I get that if the last instalment in your long running game series came out a whole six(!) years ago, you need to remind new potential consumers that it exists. Especially if it runs on a games-as-a-service sort of a model. Enter, then, a new ad campaign? Branding? Thought experiment? for the Sims (and, more specifically, The Sims 4) called Play With Life.

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The Gulag is one of the most fascinating selling points of Call Of Duty: Warzone, the new Modern Warfare Battle Royale mode. Learn how the Gulag works, and how you can use it to respawn and head back into the fight with our Call Of Duty: Warzone Gulag guide. Stick to the end and we’ll also offer up some top-tier tips on winning fights in the Gulag.

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Grecian roguelike Hades has taken one more step towards leaving early access hell. The Nighty Night update came out last night, unleashing some new spikey gloves, a trip to a library, and a tiny, evil, rat. There’s loads more besides, but that new weapon, the Twin Fists of Malphon, is the highlight. I am looking forward to punching small malevolent rodents.

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With more and more events being cancelled over recent weeks due to concerns about the Covid-19 coronavirus, it’s seemed nigh inevitable that June’s E3 would be binned. The organisers have so far said they were keeping an eye on the situation while moving ahead buuut now several outlets are reporting they’ve heard that E3 is scrapped. Rumour says this will be announced at 9:30am Pacific (4:30 UK time) today. Should the rumours be wrong and this not happen today, ah c’mon the ESA are just kicking the can down the road.

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Castlestorm was Angry Birds re-imagined as tower defence, with a dash of Worms and a WoW-lite aesthetic, and it was extremely good! If it was released today, however, I’d probably ignore it. Because, even though it isn’t even a mobile game, it’s got a massive case of rubbish mobile game energy. It’s all exaggerated, cartoony fantasy characters, bright colours, and humour of the kind that got stale around the time Clash Of Clans spent its second billion on marketing. But in 2013, the tsunami of identikit mediocrity was still just a (free to play!) bulge on the horizon, and so I picked it up, thinking it looked like fun. It was.

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After dabbling with a battle royale mode in last year’s Call Of Duty, Activision have finally caught up with 2017’s hottest trend and today launched a free-to-play new battle royale. Call Of Duty: Warzone is its name, and shooting lots of people until one team stand triumphant is its game. I’d thought myself done with trying new battle royale games but the idea of one with the slickness of CoD is tempting me. Tired as it may be after years of annual sequels, CoD at its core does a whole lot right so I’m curious about this.

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A new season has started in Destiny 2 today, bringing a new existential threat to the human race and new weapons to beat it back. This time, baddies riled that we broke their star-destroying superweapon are retaliating by straight-up crashing the miles-long spaceship into Earth. Rude. So here we are in Season Of The Worthy, powering up the defences of an ancient AI named Rasputin and nabbing new guns of our own. Ye olde supersweaty PvP mode Trials Of Osiris is returning too. As is the way, some parts of the season are free to all players but some require buying a pass.

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If you’re looking to start strong with the newly released Call Of Duty Warzone Battle Royale, you’ve come to the right place. Below are our top tips for surviving and dishing out death all across Verdansk, covering all aspects of this high-octane, massive new Battle Royale. From Cash to Vehicles, from Gas to Armor Plates, we’ve got everything you need to know to start winning matches in Warzone.

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The long-awaited Call Of Duty Warzone has finally arrived, people. We’ve heard rumours for months of the upcoming Modern Warfare Battle Royale and all its shiny new features, from 150-player matches to contracts and the infamous Gulag… but for those who are out of the loop, our COD Warzone guide will walk you through how you can start playing this free-to-play BR right now, and give you a primer on everything you can expect in this brand new FPS experience.

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Murder By Numbers, which would seem to be tailor-made for a few of the RPS staff, is a murder mystery visual novel, where you gather clues by completing picross puzzles (also known as nonograms or griddlers).

Aided by a small, cute robot called SCOUT, who consists almost entirely of a flying CRT monitor screen with a face, actress Honor Mizrahi falls into detecting when the producer of her own murder mystery TV show is killed on-set. Honor had played the bumbling detective on the show, which was called Murder Miss Terri, and which looks great. In fact, Murder By Numbers has the dubious honour of being the only game where I want to watch both a TV adaptation of the game itself, and a version of the fake TV show nested in it. The game even has an absolutely slammin’ theme song prepared for this eventuality.

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Amazon aren’t the only ones getting in on the deals action today, as Dell have just fired their own deals gun to signal the start of their three-day UK sale. There are big savings to be had on all sorts of XPS, Inspiron and Alienware gaming laptops, desktops and gaming monitors, and your ever faithful deals herald has scoured the lot of them to bring you the best of the best – including a rather tasty £237 off their Inspiron G7 15 laptop, which has an Nvidia RTX 2070 graphics chip and Intel Core i7-9750H processor inside it.

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Back in the before times, before the fires and the disease came, you could feed bread to ducks without being cancelled by the bird police. Just grab a sliced pan of wholewheat Warburtons and hurl it into a lake, then watch as every duck, swan and anaemic-looking goose in the postcode descended upon it in a feathery gale, quacking and honking and feasting in a sordid maelstrom of avian debauchery. Now, say the bird police, it is only appropriate to feed fresh organic frozen peas to the ducks, otherwise their insides will turn to slime and their beaks will go soft and drop off.

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It’s been two months since rumours started flying about Horizon: Zero Dawn coming to PC, and now, out of absolutely nowhere, it’s been confirmed. Horizon is a (soon-to-be former) PlayStation exclusive where you get to hunt giant robot dinosaurs, and it’s making its way to PC this very summer.

Oh Nate will be pleased.

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Two new doorkickers arrive in Rainbow Six Siege today with the start of Year 5 and Operation Void Edge. Iana can deploy a remote-controlled holographic duplicate of herself, while Oryx eschews fancy technology to just run around real fast to bowling over opponents and bashing through walls with his burly body. The update also brings a reworked version of the map Oregon, balance changes, and bug fixes. See some of all this in the trailer below.

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The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection will deliver its overhauled versions of the original Command & Conquer and Red Alert (plus expansions) on June 5th, Electronic Arts announced today. Westwood’s cheery ‘n’ cheesy real-time strategy games from the 90s come with fancying-up including redrawn high-resolution artwork, support for mahoosive monitors, a revamped interface, remastered sound, and a new multiplayer backend. And yes, absolutely, they’ve touched up those wonderful FMV cutscenes. Have a peek at all this in the new trailer below.

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I cannot believe that that damn song from the Netflix Witcher series only took 10 minutes to write. When Toss A Coin To Your Witcher was thrust upon us by Jaskier just before Christmas, I was not prepared for how catchy the damn thing would be. And neither were the Netflix show’s creators, apparently, as the idea for the song came to co-executive producer Jenny Klein while she was thinking about Geralt in the car.

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The unendingly changeable roster of PUBG guns and weapons takes a staggering amount of time to truly master. Each individual gun brings to the table a unique set of stats, spray patterns, behaviours, and other quirks.

Our PUBG guns & weapons guide seeks to level out this learning curve just a little, by providing you with all the most up to date stats and opinions on each weapon. So whether you’re new to the game and still struggling to tell an UMP from a Bizon, or you’re a more experienced player who just wants to check up a few updated stats, we’ve got what you need.

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Frontier Developments today announced that they’ve landed a license to make several years of Formula One management games, with the first launching for the 2022 season. They’re the studio behind the gentle management of Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster [pictured above -obvs ed.] as well as the spacemurders of Elite: Dangerous, and isn’t F1 really just about pleasing crowds with colourful beetles built of space-age technology? The exact shape of these games is a mystery for now, as Frontier were announcing the license not any particular game. But it’s a management game so, y’know, managing teams and that.

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GDC may be cancelled for now, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft from releasing all the talks they had planned for the event. On March 17th and 18th they’ll be streaming all the sessions they had ready for the Game Developers Conference over on Mixer, meaning those who wouldn’t have made it their in the first place will be able to listen in, too.

The developer-focused sessions include a bunch of talks on accessibility in games (like Gears 5), some info on Project xCloud, and there’s even a talk from Rare about Sea Of Thieves (which, naturally, I’m unreasonably excited about).

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SSD deals hunters have been spoiled for choice in recent weeks, with savings to be had on everything from 1TB SSDs to half-price NVMe drives. Today is no different, as Amazon UK have got the excellent 500GB WD Black SN750 (the non-heatsink version this time) for £77 right now, which is only around £7 more expensive than it was over Black Friday. The 1TB model is also 36% off if you’re after something larger, and there are lots of good savings to be had on WD’s portable SSD drives as well. So come on in and see what’s what.

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Ori And The Will Of The Wisps delivers an affecting tale overall, but it teems with small, strange stories: a cutesy little owlet learns to glide along the pockets of air its massive, dinosaur-sized ancestors once sailed. A small man with a skull for a face tries very hard to save a tree that’s already dead. An ancient frog king fights some sort of weird brain squid, who manipulates him into swallowing a magic orb. But at its core, all these disparate tales feed into the same overarching saga, in which a teeny-tiny spirit protects the harmony of nature – not for the sake of the world itself, but for their best mate, who’s gone missing.

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Please. I’m begging you. If you’ve played Battleboard, let me know. I’m starting to think it was a shared hallucination.

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If you’d not heard of Pendula Swing, as I hadn’t, now’s an alright time to find it. The “Tolkien meets The Great Gatsby” point & click adventure game began nearly two years ago with episodic releases. Now that all seven episodes are complete, Valiant Games have wrapped them up into the Complete Journey version. You take on the role of celebrated Dwarven hero Brialynne Donu Tenúm as she explores jazz and speakeasies in pursuit of love and an axe.

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The Valve Index headset is back in stock. There, that’s the post. Seriously though, it’s been a bit of a ride the last few weeks watching the upcoming VR-only Half-Life game creep closer as Valve’s own VR headset remained out of stock. Half-Life: Alyx, is releasing later this month and it looked like the Index wouldn’t get back on the digital shelf in time. You can now order your own Valve Index set, for now at least. It’s not clear yet how many units are available and how fast the stock will run out. I’m half expecting orders to stop by the time I’m finished writing this post.

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Total War: Warhammer 2 has had its share of updates and DLCs over the last several years. Creative Assembly say that each new pack of Lords and other content make it increasingly challenging to change balance between units without upending the entire house of cards. Instead of slowly rolling out more conservative changes, Creative Assembly are going a bit more radical. They’ve invited players to take part in an experimental beta branch called the Proving Grounds where bigger, “extreme” balance changes can be vetted.

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Your gaming monitor is one of the biggest and most expensive purchases you’ll make when upgrading your PC, so it pays to get the best gaming monitor you can. With so many to choose from, though, finding the right monitor for you and your budget can be tricky. Fortunately, I’m here to help, as I’ve put together a list of all my best gaming monitor recommendations that I’ve tested right here at RPS.

You’ll find everything here, including the best gaming monitor for those on a budget, the best gaming monitors with high refresh rates, as well as my top picks for all the best 4K gaming monitors out there as well. Whatever screen size or resolution you’re looking for, I’ve got a best gaming monitor recommendations for you.

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It’s been a long time coming, but Razer’s Raptor 27 monitor is finally here – and hoo boy does it impress. When I first saw the prototype of this 27in, 2560×1440, 144Hz, FreeSync screen at CES last year, I oohed and ahhed at its striking design, metal cable tidies and fabric-wrapped display. Now, having tested the final model over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been making exactly the same noises at its lovely IPS panel. Not only is it one of the most colour-accurate 1440p monitors you can buy today, but it’s also got proper HDR support and has been fully certified by Nvidia as a G-Sync Compatible display. Is it enough to break into our best gaming monitor list, though? Here’s wot I think.

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After all the drama and hubub trying to keep things under wraps, Activision have announced a new Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare battle royale game today. It launches tomorrow and will be free to play even for those who haven’t bought Modern Warfare. The 150-player matches will take you back to familiar locations all mashed up on one big map and puts a COD twist on a few battle royale features.

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“O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!” Popeye the sailor man once famously said. A few weeks ago Graham messaged me and said we were refreshing our list of the best RPGs. “Which Diablo game should go on it?” he asked me, the Diablo liker on the editorial team. “Diablo II or Diablo III?”

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It all started so reasonably. Last July, I fancied having a bit more Minecraft in my life again, so I started a little Realms server for the RPS treehouse. Sin made a hovel. Astrid built a caravan. I bought a couple of friends in and we made a little town in a canyon. It was pleasant. But time moves on, and places change. By the time summer had rolled round into autumn, the original settlers of the server were all but vanished – Sin, indeed, had been Hounded Out.