Latest Articles (Page 887)

It's Friday, which means the weekend, which means a few extra hours to be wrung of all their gaming worth (unless you have other plans, but that's totally okay too). However, should you find yourself inexplicably game-less as all that additional play time stretches ahead of you like an endless road 'neath a moonlight sky, you might like to know that Torchlight is currently free on the Epic Games Store, while Age of Wonders 3 is free on Steam.

Gears 5 is a smoke-free game. In fact, going forward, smoking is banned across the Gears of War universe.

Blizzard has revealed "the next evolution" of cheat detection in its hero shooter Overwatch.

Strategy game Age of Wonders 3 is currently free to download and keep forever from Steam.

Epic's drive to make a success of its PC game store has annoyed plenty of Steam lovers - but it's boom time for the developers whose games are snapped up as exclusives.

I love how games dress your powers up to make them sound really exciting, I always have, but the game which really got me thinking about it recently was Slay the Spire. I have a big crush on it right now - I don't know why it took me so long to get around to playing it.

If you had a particularly lazy weekend, you may have slept on Saturday's Fortnite AMA: a thread by Epic which sought to answer the community's questions about the game's future. Highlights include hints about season eight items, along with some interesting mechanics Epic is considering for future seasons. Oh, and some frankly devastating news about everyone's favourite vehicle.

Ubisoft has done a big frowny face at Assassin's Creed Odyssey players who've been cheekily - if cunningly - building levels in the recently added Story Creator mode to rapidly farm XP.

It's been six years since the PS4 first launched, and as we near the end of this console generation, people are... well, just about learning how to use it. After one PS4 shortcut earned itself nearly 30k upvotes on Reddit, other PS4 owners have been sharing dozens of tips on how to better navigate the console's UI - and quite frankly, I had no idea most of these existed, and now I'm feeling pretty dumb. I guess nobody reads the console manual or update notes.

Sometimes, there's no better thrill than that of being lost. It's why I love those moments at the start of a big open world adventure when you set your first feet out in the wilds and see how far they stretch. After about a dozen hours with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, there's much that same sensation, only this time it's a giddiness that comes when you see how far its systems spread, how deep it runs and how bloody much of it there is. It's apt that much of Three Houses takes place within the classrooms and courtyards of an academy; running around its labyrinth corridors and getting up to speed with everything that makes this particular Fire Emblem tick feels as dizzying and exciting as the first day at a new school.

Expect to see fatalities in the upcoming Mortal Kombat movie.

Skulls of the Shogun has arrived on Nintendo Switch via the Bone-A-Fide edition. This is a tactics battler that has always reminded me of Advance Wars, despite the fact that it deals with circles rather than squares, radial movement boundaries rather than grids. Still, it's all about getting a handful of different units spread across a compact battlefield, getting the resources flowing and then sticking it to your enemy. Focusing on a group of undead Samurai, the whole thing is astonishingly pretty too: resource tiles are rice fields, cavalry units ride skeleton horses and the world is stylised with thick black lines and lovely grainy, spotty sixties-cartoon textures.

Splatoon 2 may be sailing off into the sunset, but Nintendo isn't letting it's final ever Splatfest event go without some extra promotion.

Square Enix will debut new details and hold "the first public gameplay reveal" for its upcoming Marvel's Avengers game at San Diego Comic-Con on 18th July - but you won't be able to see it unless you're there.

We've finally got Call of Duty: Modern Warfare gameplay - and it looks like the game is more grounded than previous entries in the series.

To date, Microsoft has largely been content focussing on Minecraft Earth impressive augmented reality elements. Now though, as part of the upcoming mobile title's closed beta reveal, we've finally been given a taste of its Pokémon-Go-esque location-based gameplay.

A wizard, a knight and an archer go into a dungeon. It sounds like the basis for a joke - okay, not a particularly brilliant joke. But in Total Party Kill it's basically the punchline to one. It also sounds like the basis for an RPG. Again: not quite. Total Party Kill is a puzzle game for smartphones and PC that looks like an RPG. You control a three-person RPG party off on an adventure, and you clear each room by sacrificing party members in clever ways.

There may still be a few months to go until the release of Monster Hunter World's snow-themed Iceborne expansion, but that hasn't stemmed the flow of information spewing out from Capcom's enthusiastic maw. And we now have a whole bunch of new details to ponder over, courtesy of Iceborne's latest trailer and developer diary.

Developer InXile's long-awaited Director's Cut mega-update for The Bard's Tale 4 has finally received a release date: it arrives on 27th August, and the game, in its freshly refined guise, will be making its way to PS4, Xbox One, Mac, and Linux on the same day.

Back in May, news emerged that British metal band Iron Maiden had taken umbrage with developer Voidpoint's promising retro FPS Ion Maiden. Claiming the studio was attempting "to trade off... Iron Maiden's notoriety", a $2m lawsuit was filed, and, as a result, publisher 3D Realms has opted to give Ion Maiden a brand-new name: Ion Fury.

Supermassive Games has announced two new multiplayer modes for Man of Medan, the first horror game from its Dark Pictures Anthology.

As the beast folds away its wings and plunges itself into the water, I begin to cry. I've been tracking it for a while now, cutting Kay's narrow boat through the water, but each time I get close it turns its eyes to mine and beats its wings to move away from me. Abandoning the boat - leaping over the silent arms that reach out for Kay from the murky depths - she scrambles across the rooftops, terracotta tiles tinkling in her wake. But it's too late. I know I'm too late. The beast has already disappeared.

Abbey Games, the studio behind Reus and excellent turn-based adventure Renowned Explorers, has launched its promising strategy god game Godhood into early access on PC.

Developer Lemonbomb Entertainment has announced that Stranded Sails, its tropical (and piratical!) single-player "open world farming game", will launch on PC, Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 this October.

Journey, the delightful and serene game from That Game Company has finally made its way over to PC, available exclusively on the Epic Games Store - and in theory at least, the transition to this platform should allow for the definitive experience; a game freed from its technical constraints on console and allowed to scale on the hardware of today - and tomorrow. I'd say that the potential is there for this game to deliver that experience, but we're a patch or two away from perfection.

Nintendo has ruled out the release of another new Switch model this year, following yesterday's announcement of the Nintendo Switch Lite.

One of the most disquieting things about lobster - a creature that urinates through its face, I have been told, and is therefore at a pretty rarified level of disquiet already - is that beneath the shell they seem to be all lobster. Maybe you have watched lobster being poached in butter on a cookery show. The claw is removed. The shell of the claw is cracked open. And inside, a perfect padded claw-shape of lobster, a novelty lobster claw cushion of meat. And nothing else! How do these things work? How do they get about and skitter around the seafloor? How can they even master the effort required to urinate through their own faces (I have only been told this, I might be wrong) when they're just meat wandering around inside a shell?

Has it really been eleven whole years since Codemasters' Race Driver: Grid? Well, I've just checked Wikipedia and I can confirm that yes, it very much has - and, oh my, so very, very much has happened since then.

The Division 2 is about to get a little bit meatier, courtesy of the game's first free episode, titled DC Outskirts: Expeditions, which comes to PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on 23rd July.

Another batch of NES titles is heading to Nintendo's Switch Online service next week, on 17th July, and the whole library is getting a new rewind feature on the same day.