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Silent Hill 2, like the rest of the series, features no shortage of tragic characters. In these games, even an antagonist can have a background that garners sympathy, but it might not be enough to absolve them of their actions. It does, however, create a world that's morally gray, and the way that it mirrors the human experience adds to the horror and unsettling elements that make this franchise so memorable. At times, a character can end up feeling too relatable in that nightmare of a universe. View the full article

After a summer of nerfs, review-bombings, and self-inflicted harm, Helldivers 2 is back on the up. It buffed dozens of weapons and strategems as part of its 'buff everything' update, and later released a patch that made Automatons "less frustrating." It was a show of support from the dev team, who, after a stellar start, made a series of near-fatal missteps. View the full article

Want to inspect your weapons in ****** Ops 6? There are moments in every battle where you won't have much to do. Whether that's because you've already ******* everyone in a heated encounter, or you were the first person to get taken out in combat, these moments occur more often than you might think. During this time, you might want to take a moment to appreciate your fancy guns by inspecting your weapons. You've put in all the hard work to earn those ****** Ops 6 camos, and now it's time to reap the benefits in the FPS game. Not only should your opponents see your ******* skins, but using the Call of Duty ****** Ops 6 inspect ******* feature, you too can bask in the glory of your shiny camos. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best ****** Ops 6 Tanto .22 loadout Best ****** Ops 6 C9 loadout How to pull out your ****** in ****** Ops 6 View the full article

If you're playing Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred, there's a very high chance you've picked up the new Spiritborn class. Not only is it fresh and shiny, making it more appealing than the options we've had for the past year of the base RPG, but it also boasts the strongest builds in Season 6 right now. As we near the midseason update, Blizzard stalwart and Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson asks whether some of its more broken aspects should be brought back in line, or if everyone is enjoying themselves too much to stop. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best cross platform games 2024 Diablo 4 Halloween event features free cosmetics and a shrine shakeup Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred hotfix cuts down your resource grinding, again View the full article

It's been a pretty depressing year for the games industry, with more layoffs and cutbacks than anyone can remotely justify, as corporate bigwigs still take home huge compensation packages, or waltz into golden parachutes. As much as they can, developers are trying to ****** back against this tide of misery, but it's a tough task, as the developers at not quite Disco Elysium sucessor studio Summer Eternal know all too well. Read more View the full article

Valve continue expanding their upcoming game Deadlock, the online third-person MOBA shooter. The latest update is quite a big one too. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 will see the return of the popular Zombies game mode. The return to the round-based format looks to improve upon the poorly received change to the open-world Outbreak game mode in the latest iterations of the series. Other changes in ****** Ops 6 include a Guided Mode for the intricate Easter egg questlines, new Zombies characters, brand-new Wonder Weapons, and a return to the GobbleGum upgrade system. A much anticipated new feature is the brand-new Perk-A-Cola called Melee Macchiato. View the full article

A casual city-building sim, Romopolis, is currently free for for PC gamers to grab from the Microsoft Store for a limited time. Occasionally, games are given away for no cost on the Microsoft Store, though perhaps not as frequently as other platforms. And when there is a game to claim at no cost, its not often widely advertised. View the full article

Long-running online FPS games require a lot of tweaking, whether it's balancing how weapons handle in Counter-Strike 2, fixing matchmaking issues in Payday 3, or adjusting rewards in the likes of Call of Duty and Hunt Showdown 1896. Some of these, naturally, are ******* than others. But after 17 years, one particularly bothersome little problem has persisted in Team Fortress 2 - until now. Thanks to the latest TF2 update, Valve has finally corrected an issue that, although superficial, has been bugging players since 2007. Deadlock might be on the way, and, hopefully, Half-Life 3 could still happen, but the Team Fortress 2 Scout has thankfully just been put right. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Team Fortress 2 Halloween update adds seven new community maps Team Fortress 2's 'Save TF2' petition has been delivered to Valve HQ Team Fortress 2 fans beware, new 'version' of Valve petition is a scam View the full article

It's not often you see a really cheap laptop with an actually decent gaming spec, but this gaming laptop deal on Best Buy is a genuine bargain. For just $599.99, this MSI Thin 15 machine not only gives you an Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU, but you also get an eight-core Intel CPU and 16GB RAM, with this offer saving you $300 on the already-reasonable price of $899.99. You wouldn't usually expect to get the best gaming laptop specs on a machine at this price, but the gear in this cut-price MSI machine is surprisingly capable for $599.99. When it comes to gaming, the main draw is that Nvidia GPU, with this budget rig coming equipped with a GeForce RTX 4050, which is based on Nvidia's latest Ada Lovelace architecture and supports all the latest features, including Nvidia DLSS 3, complete with frame generation to boost frame rates. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Grab Stalker 2 for free, thanks to MSI OLED gaming monitor sales are booming, and these are the ones to buy Grab Metaphor ReFantazio for free, thanks to MSI View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

My favourite top-down arena shooter rogue-lite, Brotato, has a free update and big new DLC out now with Brotato: Abyssal Terrors. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

The creators of "beautifully designed yet imprecise platforming adventure" Tales Of Kenzera: Zau are working on an Afrofuturist gothic-horror RPG with isometric visuals and a body-sharing dual character premise. Currently known as Project Uso - the Swahili word for 'face', 'appearance' or 'surface' - it'll take place in the same world as Kenzera, and will take inspiration from Surgent Studio founder Abubakar Salim's experiences of parenthood. Providing, that is, the developers can find enough money to make it. Read more View the full article

Look up major events in 2011 and there's some world-changing stuff... and some not so world-changing stuff. Shadows Of The Damned's Xbox 360/PS3 release may slip into either camp, depending on whether you liked it back in the day or not. It's a third-person action adventure where two famous video game folks joined forces: No More Heroes' Suda51 and Resident Evil's Shinji Mikami. And to my knowledge, it's considered a bit of a cult classic. So, having played Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered after never experiencing the original, do I think it's any good? If you were a fan of the OG, there's no doubt you'll like it. If you're coming in as a newbie, I think it's refreshing in the sense it's a trim throwback with some interesting ideas and middling-to-good **********. But its whole schtick isn't only a product of its time - it's actually downright yucky. Read more View the full article

Valve has finally fixed a problem with Team Fortress 2 that’s been in the game since it launched 17 years ago. Ever since the influential hero shooter came out on October 10, 2007, the Scout’s pants on the blue side were the wrong ******. Now, among patch notes for a recently released Team Fortress 2 update, Valve ******* the big news: Scout’s pants are now fixed. Here’s the rather innocuous line from the patch notes: Fixed BLU Scout using the incorrect team ****** pants In typical Valve fashion, it made the change without explanation or fanfare. No explanation for why it’s taken 17 years to change the ****** of Scout’s pants, and no reason for why it’s done so only now. Ever mysterious, Valve is. It’s fair to say the reaction from the Team Fortress 2 community has been a mix of shock and excitement. “They changed a character design 17 years later! What!” X/Twitter user @heavyfortres asked. THEY MADE BLU SCOUT’S PANTS BLUE THEY CHANGED A CHARACTER DESIGN 17 YEARS LATER WHAT [Hidden Content] — heavy team fortres 2 (@heavyfortres) October 24, 2024 “Honestly I can't believe they did it,” redditor KyleTheWalrus added. “BLU Scout had gray pants and blue belt loops for 17 years, and he has several cosmetics that require the gray pants ****** to work correctly. “If they fixed anything, I was sure they would just make the belt loops gray because it's easier. But those crazy bastards took the hard route. “Now we wait another 17 years for the rest of Scout's pants cosmetics to become the correct shade of blue. Hooray!” Valve’s relationship with the Team Fortress 2 community has certainly had its ups and downs over the years. The game’s had an awful **** problem for some time, and exacerbated players often call for Valve to do more to clamp down. They’ve also asked for more support and content for Team Fortress 2 from Valve, which, some say, is more focused on its other, more popular games. Team Fortress 2 ******** incredibly popular, though, and is among one of Steam’s most played games ahead of the likes of Warframe, Overwatch 2, and Destiny 2. Last month, Team Fortress 2 players got creative in the ****** against the shooter's rampant **** problem by turning a 340,000 signature strong petition into an actual book and delivering it to Valve headquarters. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article

It took a crew of more than 100 talented modders and another hundred voice actors nearly five years to make Fallout: London. Just as they planned to release it, Bethesda came out with a "next-gen upgrade" of the mod's base game, Fallout 4, forcing the team to scramble and ultimately find a way to downgrade the game. When they finally released London, they then dealt with game-stopping bugs and quality issues that their small QA team could not have caught. It's been a long, maybe even post-apocalyptic road for these modders. A few updates later, Fallout: London is in much better shape. I've been able to put about 12 hours into it, and that, in itself, is essentially my review: it is worth that kind of time and more. If you can still enjoy Fallout 4, of course. Any Fallout fan waits a long time between official releases, so it can be tempting to go easy on any new offering, however *****-and-bailing-wire it may seem. But Fallout: London is a game in its own right, with a distinct look, vision, and stories to tell. You can find evidence of its unofficial mod-ness if you look around, but you're better off doing the Fallout thing: wandering, wondering, fighting, and occasionally talking to some messed-up weirdo. Read full article Comments View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

If you've been playing EA Sports FC 25 and the Silent Hill 2 Remake over the past couple of months, an indie game looks like it could be right up your alley. It's called ***** FA 98 and it's a "horror arcade soccer simulator" that's just launched a Kickstarter. Read more View the full article

****** Ops 6’s Zombies mode is packed full of Easter eggs, as you’d expect from a Treyarch game, and the bank vault is one the biggest on the Liberty Falls map. You can’t ****** the code with guesswork, but we’ll tell you how to get the loot inside. Opening the bank vault in ****** Ops 6‘s Liberty Falls map requires you to find three numbers in various POIs on the map. These numbers change each game, although the locations where you find them remain the same. View the full article

The AK47 in Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 is great in the right hands. This is what most players look at as a reliable ******* across the series. It's widely regarded as one of the best ******** Rifles in the game, capable of decimating enemies with its high damage output. The only problem is that it is terrible at long range, and the recoil is pretty bad. However, with the right loadout, the AK47 gets closer to overcoming these issues. View the full article

Stardew Valley fans on console have been waiting for months to finally gain access to the game's biggest patch, and ConcernedApe wants everyone to know that everything is still on track. The 1.6 Update managed to impress everyone when it launched on PC, but those on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Mobile have been left out in the cold. Now that November is around the corner, ConcernedApe has made it clear that the wait is almost over, and there's an extra surprise in it for those on PC. View the full article

****** Ops 6 isn’t just about the frantic run-and-**** action—there are plenty of puzzles to solve during the campaign. If you’ve been wandering around the Safehouse looking for solutions, we’re here to help. There are seven puzzles to solve in the Safehouse in the ****** Ops 6 campaign, which range in difficulty. Some are much easier to complete than others, although you must mostly follow them in a specific order. View the full article

World of Warcraft’s 20th Anniversary event is in full swing, running from Oct. 23 to Jan. 6, 2025. It’s a celebration of all things WoW, and one of the main highlights is the new scenario called The Codex of Chromie. Here’s a breakdown of how to start The Codex of Chromie, including where to get the weekly quest and how to finish the encounter in one piece. If you’re hoping to pick up every reward from the 20th Anniversary event, it’s worth adding this to your weekly rotation. View the full article

Real ones know that the only XCOM spin off worth its salt is Hasbro’s 1999 play-by-mail banger First Alien Invasion, although that didn’t stop System Shock 2 studio Irrational from getting to work on an FPS set in the strategy series’ universe after being acquired by 2K in 2006. If your sentiments are anything like I remember a lot of the internet feeling at the time, you may get nightmarish flashbacks to the trailer below, first shown at E3 2010. The project was eventually canceled and adapted into 2013’s The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, but Irrational co-founder and current Wild Bastards studio Blue Manchu founder Jon Chey has shed some light on the FPS’s development, and it sounds like it was once a far more ambitious project. Kaiju ambitious. Read more View the full article

As players are rushing into Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6, some of the more skilled players are figuring out the ins and outs of the game's omni-movement and gameplay settings. Through this day-one experimentation, they've discovered that a single setting is having a substantial impact on your aim. Yes, your aim too! Read more View the full article

Of all the games made so far in Unreal Engine 5, the one I've had the most fun with is RoboCop: Rogue City, an unapologetically old-fashioned FPS that delivers some of the most intense, graphic combat seen in video games to date. This is combat that our reviewer of the game described as 'straight up *******' and that caused him to totally lose it when he went to punch a baddie for the first time and RoboCop's fist flew out 'with the force of a particle accelerator, instantly atomizing their skull.'.. Read more.View the full article

Note: This review specifically covers the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6. For our thoughts on the other modes, see our multiplayer review in progress – and for Zombies, stand by! A spy thriller worthy of the name, Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6's campaign is a hugely welcome reinvigoration of the long-running first-person shooter series. It looks back at what has historically made the best CoD single-player modes so great and throws its own exciting and novel ideas into the mix, to fantastic effect. Telling one of the most engaging stories the series has ever seen, ****** Ops 6’s enticing variety and impressive scale provide a stellar return to form. Ever since the 2003 original, CoD campaigns have been heavily influenced by military action movies – starting in a logical place with classic WW2 cinema like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan before moving on to more contemporary influences, in particular the panoramic yet still claustrophobic camerawork of Ridley Scott's ****** Hawk Down. But the lens shifted focus away from theatres of full-scale war and onto spy thrillers in the mold of the Mission: Impossible and Bourne series, beginning with 2010’s ****** Ops and evolving into a refined, enthralling form with ****** Ops 6. It’s in this distinctive direction that the returning Adler and Woods team up with a new team of skilled operators, this time in 1991, to combat an emerging new threat called The Pantheon, amid rumors of the creation of a potentially history-changing bioweapon. Sure, 2020's Cold War had its fair share of espionage action, but the majority of ****** Ops 6's missions don't take place on the flashes and bangs of the frontline, but in the shadows that lie deep behind it. Two missions in particular showcase this brilliantly: the infiltration of a political gala in Most Wanted, and the casino heist of High Rollers. The former presents three different options for how you want to go about completing your objective - I had a great time tinkering with a silent auction, but other paths are available that will test your spy skills - and while your choice has no lasting impact on the story, it does add an element of replayability to otherwise linear levels. The heist, by contrast, has you swapping between multiple members of your blacklisted team, spread across lavish slot machine-filled surroundings and the dank underground waterways beneath. You don't get to swap freely, but the slick character baton-passes add another dash of cinematic flair. There's an enjoyable amount of flexibility to how you can approach missions. There's an enjoyable amount of flexibility to how you can approach other missions as well. Stealth is often encouraged, but going loud is almost always an option (with insta-fail stealth thankfully only rearing its ugly head on one or two occasions). Keeping to the shadows or hidden underwater made me feel like a silent *********, but when I let that slip I had to swiftly switch to a more combative style. Gunplay, crucially, delivers in both areas, with suppressed headshots satisfyingly pinging brains out of heads in one trigger pull and rattling SMGs and punchy shotguns feeling great when manically dashing in and out of cover thanks to the exciting new “omnimovement” system. This completely revamped movement mechanic allows you to sprint in any direction, as well as leap into the air sideways while ******* to pull off your best ****-***-esque stunts. There's a great sense of improvisation as well. Weapons need to be constantly discarded and replaced with whatever **** is within grasp due to ammo sometimes being kept cleverly sparse. That also applies to the more DIY methods of dispatching enemies that are available, such as grabbing knives from chopping boards to then send them flying into skulls. Again, it evokes that espionage action movie feel, letting me briefly cosplay as John David Washington brutalising his way through a restaurant kitchen in Tenet. The variety of its levels and top-tier presentation makes sure that it's never once dull, but this is a feat of stamina as well: By the historical standards of Call of Duty campaigns ****** Ops 6 is one of the longest, clocking in at just around eight hours for me (roughly twice the length of Modern Warfare 3’s dud of a mission chain). It’s no Baldur’s Gate 3, certainly, but that’s a respectable runtime for a shooter campaign. By the historical standards of Call of Duty campaigns ****** Ops 6 is one of the longest. I do wish, though, that Call of Duty had more tricks up its sleeve by now when it comes to adding difficulty and differences to ****** encounters. Even now, after so many games, it’s still resorting to simply chucking a juggernaut or two your way to unload full magazines into when it wants to ramp up the stakes, but this time these challenges are occasionally solved via more interesting means thanks to a range of spy gadgets handed out at regular intervals. A throwing ****** that can home in on targets adds a welcome dose of Batman energy to proceedings, and the trusty explosive remote control RC-XD cars make a fun return. Naturally, if all goes wrong, you can always rely on the more rustic C4 option to ***** up anything you need it to. When downtime is had between outings, the writing hits a fun sweet spot between cliché and self-awareness and is supported by a cast that fully buys into their roles. Bruce Thomas in particular is in great form as the brazenly enigmatic Russell Adler, and Y’lan Noel and Karen David make a great first impression as Marshall and Sevati, respectively. The latter has a lot of fun in her chameleon-like role as a master-of-disguise *********, with new personas taken on from mission to mission. You'll spend more time with them when you return to the safe house, where you can learn more about your teammates' backstories, solve puzzles, and purchase valuable upgrades using cash found on missions. These perks range from standard stuff like explosive damage negation to ones that are more traditionally found in multiplayer modes, such as Last Stand, which gives you a temporary health and speed boost when close to ******. It's a further example of the increased flexibility in game design and the way that developer Raven Software is encouraging you to adopt your own playstyle. Your sizeable Bulgarian manor is also home to dormant KGB secrets, which I had a great time uncovering. While none of the puzzles are too brain-testing – usually amounting to just memorising a series of numbers or using trial and error to unlock terminals – they successfully add even further variety to an otherwise (expectedly) ****-heavy time. It's surprisingly involved, and a fantastic improvement on an idea that began as a small abandoned garage in 2020’s Cold War, serving as a great place to plan for heists, undercover operations, and the completely unexpected. Speaking of which… I won't say too much here so as not to spoil it, but perhaps the best mission of the whole campaign riffs off of previous ****** Ops hallucinogenic episodes to create something that touches on the likes of BioShock, Prey, and Control in both its aesthetic and level design. It's hard to know which of ****** Ops 6's many great missions will ultimately be remembered most fondly, but I have a feeling it might just be the weirdest that cements its place as an all-timer. That isn't to say you're kept completely out of more traditional combat zones. The first Gulf War serves as the backdrop for ****** Ops 6's story, and you do spend a couple of missions in the ‘90s Middle East. This allows for the mission design to return to its modern military roots, but does so by innovating on the Call of Duty formula, which is best exemplified in a mid-game mission that is as ambitious in its scale as any I've ever seen from this series of campaigns. Taking place over a vast desert map, you're given the task of destroying three SCUD missile sites in any order and by any means of your choosing. Feel like driving straight through the front door in a jeep? Go for it. It may be much more advisable to pick off a few targets from afar and think about things more methodically, though. Points of interest are also dotted around the map, and those can reveal themselves to be anything from special equipment supply drops to SAS scouts who show you ****** locations. These areas are worth exploring, too, as certain side objectives are built into the larger main mission design, such as when I blew up three different ****** SAM encampments to free up the airspace and allow me to take control of a helicopter's buzzsaw of a machine **** later on. This choice and consequence system is further explored in an equally exciting later mission, too, and is one of ****** Ops 6’s true masterstrokes. A mid-game mission is as ambitious in its scale as any I've ever seen from this series. It's a fantastic use of everything Call of Duty does at its best, and a ludicrously better example of how it can borrow from its Warzone and multiplayer modes to build something truly exciting in an open space that blows last year’s feeble attempt out of the water. It frankly puts Modern Warfare 3's "open" mission design to shame, and shows the worth of granting a development team more than a handful of months to cobble together a campaign. Although enthralling to play, the fact that these missions take place during Operation Desert Storm doesn't serve the story in anywhere near as fulfilling a way, making the controversial conflict come across more like window dressing. They don't delve into, or address in a meaningful manner, any of the human issues at play that surrounded the conflict in 1991 Kuwait, Iraq, and the larger Gulf area. ****** Ops 6 tries to have its cake and eat it too; you can't “keep politics out of video games” when the game in question painstakingly recreates several real-life world leaders and the wars their governments partook in to set the stage for its ensuing fireworks. What We Said About Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Campaign Modern Warfare 3’s campaign commits the biggest sin possible for a globe-trotting action thriller: it's boring. What had the promise to be an intriguingly spun web of mystery instead ends up being a dusty cobweb you'd find at the back of your shed, clinging onto 15-year-old garden toys you once had fun with. It's a pale imitation of the past, made up of underbaked story moments that clash with attempts to introduce new open combat missions designed to encourage player freedom that instead fall flat on their face. Yes, the gunplay is still great and the graphics and sound design are top-tier, but I couldn't help but feel I was playing a shinier, less subtle version of something I've played too many times before. If this is the quality we've come to expect from Call of Duty campaigns, maybe it's for the best if a year or two is taken to reset and raise this low bar back to the heights of old. - Simon Cardy, November 3, 2023 Score: 4 Read the full Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Campaign Review [/url] Instead, this is a story that’s far more concerned with being a popcorn spy thriller than it is with examining or even reacting to its own subject matter, which in and of itself isn't a fundamental issue – but after Modern Warfare’s weak argument against chemical weapons in 2019 and Modern Warfare 3's refusal to use terrorism for anything more than cheap thrills just last year, ****** Ops 6 follows an unfortunate trend of recent CoD campaigns declining to offer an emotionally nuanced reading of the settings they take on. It's no doubt entertaining, and I’m not exactly looking for (nor expecting) a deep, forensic examination of the cultural cost of global conflicts here, but it still feels like the latest instalment in a series of missed opportunities. There is room to both entertain and say something real, as so many of the war and spy movies CoD emulates already do, and 2012's Spec Ops: The Line is often praised for (even though its conflict is fictionalised). What is delivered is a constantly engaging spy thriller story as the exiled Woods, Adler, and a string of new faces go off the record to decipher the links between the CIA, Saddam Hussein, and The Pantheon. What begins as a fairly standard cloak-and-dagger plot really comes alive in the back half, managing to weave in personal stakes and treats for long-time ****** Ops fans. The nature of its closing chapter crept up and honestly surprised me, somehow managing to balance a bombastic crescendo with genuine emotive strain. It’s as good as a Call of Duty plot has been in a long, long time. A shout-out must also go to the quality animation on display, a technical area that can sometimes be taken for granted when it comes to Call of Duty. Whether it's intricate **** reloads and the mechanical finesse of your weapons when fired during gameplay, or the sheer fidelity of the cutscenes, it truly is best-in-class work. View the full article