Latest Articles (Page 771)

F.E.A.R. was a game that gave the player military hardware with one hand, and a sense of terror with the other. As effective as the horror element remains today - including a number of admittedly cheap jump scares - what remains truly impressive 15 years after release is a side-effect. Arguably, no FPS before or since has offered the player such a powerful, transporting sense of place.

How much to read into the newly appended title of a re-release like this? In the case of Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition, a splendorous revisit of Monolith Soft's 2012 Wii RPG for Nintendo's Switch, it could mean so very much. By his own admission, creator Tetsuya Takahashi has always struggled to finish off the job with his own games, his Xenosaga series petering out halfway through its intended run, while Xenoblade Chronicles only saw it through to completion upon partner Nintendo's insistence it be done properly.

Another week, another Warhammer 40K game - but this latest does present a curious blend of genres, with Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command offering turn-based aerial combat courtesy of small Sheffield-based outfit.

May's irreversible slide into June means another batch of games for PlayStation Plus subscribers, and this month they look an awful lot like Call of Duty WW2 and Star Wars Battlefront 2.

Oscar winner Cate Blanchett will take a leading role in Eli Roth's upcoming movie adaptation of Gearbox's Borderlands series.

Welcome, freebie fans, to another instalment of Oh Look, More Free Games to Get on the Epic Store!, which, granted, isn't the snappiest of titles, but it gets the job done. And, this week, the aforementioned games temporarily discounted to zero pence in a grasp for your ongoing consumer loyalty are Borderlands: The Handsome Collection and Sludge Life.

Developer Red Hook Studios' brilliant but punishing Lovecraft-inspired strategy RPG, Darkest Dungeon, is getting a brand-new chunk of DLC next month. It's called The Butcher's Circus and, rather unexpectedly, adds PvP arena battles to the previously single-player game.

Back in April, developer Red Hook Studios announced it was working on a free PvP mode for its deliciously punishing Lovecraftian strategy RPG, Darkest Dungeon. And now, two months on, Butcher's Circus, as the new DLC is known, is available to download on Steam.

As promised, Naughty Dog's latest livestream has served up another (grisly) helping of The Last of Us Part 2 footage for players to pore over ahead of the game's June launch; there were refreshers of previously revealed mechanics, a smattering of new details, and the whole thing culminated in a sizeable slab of gameplay, showcasing stealth and extremely visceral combat.

When Outriders properly broke cover earlier this year with our first look at this looter shooter in action, there was a fair amount of talk of it looking like something pulled from 2008. The more I learn about People Can Fly's first solo outing since 2013's Gears of War: Judgment, the more I think it's not so much a slur as something to be celebrated: this is a shooter that's proudly, defiantly old-school.

Might this finally be the announcement to prod me into buying a VR headset? Possibly, as a new Star Wars VR experience has been announced, and so far it sounds pretty promising.

In a new blog post summing up the Xbox Series X's backwards compatibility features, Microsoft has hinted it may not be done adding more games to its back compat program.

I hope you're ready to witness hundreds of Captain Price clones in your Modern Warfare lobbies, as the latest trailer all but confirms Price will be the next operator available on the battle pass for season four. Oh, and that season is starting next week on 3rd June.

Like many people, I'm sure, I've found myself reaching for the wine a little more frequently than normal to pass the time during lockdown - and apparently so has the visual effects team at Valve, although perhaps not in the way you'd think.

In 2011, role-playing fans banded together to fight for the Western release of three games on Nintendo's Wii console - The Last Story, Pandora's Tower and Xenoblade. It was known as Operation Rainfall - and, astonishingly, it worked. All three games got English language releases but it was Xenoblade - renamed Xenoblade Chronicles in the West - that found the greatest success. Sequels followed for both Wii U and Switch, but now the original is back - remastered and updated for Nintendo's current-gen system. It's called the Definitive Edition, but just how much of an upgrade do you get?

The scaffolding has come down, the cranes are gone. Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Japan looks ready to open.

My favourite visitor in Animal Crossing is probably Celeste. This owl - I think she's the sister of Blathers over at the museum - loves star-gazing. She drops by on nights when you'll see shooting stars. The thing I love is that you walk out of your house and she'll just be wandering around in the trees somewhere. I know a lot of visitors do this, but Celeste seems to do it differently: she's not selling anything or after a trade. She doesn't want you to do her a favour.

Another month means another batch of piratical activities on the Sea of Thieves, and today's Lost Treasures update - a somewhat lower-key offering than usual - brings a number of quality-of-life improvements such as Tall Tales checkpoints, plus a quivering heap of new limited-time events and recurring challenges, designed to encourage regular returns.

If you've been eyeing the 16th June arrival of Wild West tactical stealth sequel Desperados 3 with mounting anticipation, there's some good news; PC players can get some rootin', tootin', and sneaky shootin' in early courtesy of a new demo - one of several, including a playable look at troubled System Shock reboot, now available on GOG.com.

Fast and Furious Crossroads is a video game about driving cars with guns on their roofs, while actors from the film franchise narrate what is going on.

The Kingdom Hearts series has garnered a bit of a reputation for having a... convoluted storyline, to say the least, so perhaps it's just as well that Disney has a TV series planned for it rather than a film - if recent reports are to be believed.

Pokémon Go's annual Go Fest extravaganza will this year take place over two days: 25th and 26th July.

Toy Soldiers, a classic from the era of Xbox Live Arcade, is getting a full sequel more than a decade later.

Minecraft is famous for its Creative mode - the option which gives an endless supply of digital Lego for you to play around with. It's the place people build replicas of their universities or the Sistine Chapel or that big tower from Lord of the Rings. But for me, Minecraft has always been about its Survival offering. There, the blocks I build with are ones I've dug out the earth myself, while having to fight off monsters and chomp down on baked potatoes in order to keep going.

We'll never get to play Ravenholm, the cancelled Half-Life spin-off once in the works at Arkane Studios, but we can at least now see a little bit of it in action for ourselves.

There's no such thing as too much cheese, in my book, so if you share this sentiment then boy do I have the Skyrim mod for you.

The Definitive Edition of Mafia 3 has lost the game's enhancements for the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X - something 2K has now said is an error.

As June prepares to fling open its door and usher in the steamy summer months, a fresh batch of Xbox Games with Gold titles are waiting in the wings for those with Live Gold subscriptions - this time including Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, Destroy All Humans on Xbox, and more.

Somewhere along the way, my copy of Gormenghast got rained on. I wonder if a roof leaked in some previous house, or a chimney made a nearby wall a bit damp. Whatever. I went for it a few minutes ago and the book's pages have the wavering crispness of the once-wet. The cover is thickened around the edges, and the first few chapters have some kind of dark speckling on them advancing from one spread to the next. Some of the print is smeary.

Developer Frogwares' well-regarded series of deduction-based Sherlock Holmes games is making a comeback next year with an origin story titled Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One.