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There's a trend among certain restaurants where diners sit in the dark, trusting the waiting staff and their remaining senses to enjoy the food placed in front of them. It's a way of heightening taste and removing sight from the equation, and that's exactly what new multiplayer FPS Blindfire is doing with its penumbral setting. What's more, it's already out for you to play in early access. Read the rest of the story... View the full article

With grappling hooks, wallrunning, parachuting, and more parkour than you can shake a modified machete at, Dying Light 2 boasts some of the best videogame movement and traversal mechanics around. Throw in hordes of zombies that you can turn to a pulp in countless different ways, and you've got yourself a memorable experience. Well, as part of a big Halloween ***** over on the Epic Games Store, you can now bag yourself one of the most underrated zombie games for 60% off, and there are plenty of other revered spooky titles with big discounts too. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Dying Light 2 dev hints at mysterious, totally unannounced new game The best parkour games on PC 2024 New Dying Light 2 update transforms it into a roguelike, playable now View the full article

Excellent news. PlayStation Publishing, Insomniac Games and Nixxes Software are bringing Marvel's Spider-Man 2 over to Steam on January 30, 2025. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Another biweekly release of the Windows compatibility layer Wine is out now! Wine 9.20 brings the usual assortment of new features and bug fixes. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 developer Treyarch Studios has confirmed it will be bringing back Last Stand, a controversial perk that hasn't been seen in Call of Duty's multiplayer since the days of 2009's Modern Warfare 2. While the perk's return has disappointed Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 fans, the divisive feature is no longer a perk and has instead been adjusted into a field upgrade with a brand-new name: Morphine Injector. View the full article

A trend of gambling-inspired games has surfaced in the wake of poker-like deckbuilding roguelike Balatro. The recipe? Take a standard game of chance you might find in any casino and mash an uncountable number of bells and whistles and gizmos and weirdnesses into it, then slather it in a "one more turn" roguelike dressing, and make it as tactile and punchy as humanly possible. The ongoing Steam Next Fest has no shortage of these gambley gimmickers, but here's one demo that stood out. Ballionaire is a colourful pachinko-inspired roguelike, but you choose where the wacky widgets will go. Read more View the full article

Cyberpunk 2077 features a dense and complex world full of secrets and lore. It has a ton of story to build on, given that it comes from an existing TTRPG with whole books of established characters and events. Overall, the game does a good job of laying out these details in a way that makes players care about them, as any good open-world game will, tying in the story of Night City with the story of the game's protagonist. But there's one well-done aspect of worldbuilding in this game that many players miss out on. View the full article

The Batman: Arkham series is one of the best superhero franchises in gaming, but what order should these games be played in? Superhero games and Batman games have existed for decades, but the quality of them has always varied. While there were plenty of good superhero games in the early 2000s like Spider-Man 2, Batman always struggled. Even the Batman Begins video game was rough despite being based on a universally acclaimed film. It's hard to imagine a bad Batman game after seeing how Rocksteady perfected the formula for such a thing in 2009. View the full article

Hero shooters are the current hotness, so it was only a matter of time before someone finally made a competent attempt at doing it in Virtual Reality. ********* developer MyDearest looks to switch up the 3v3 Hero shooter genre by adding some Smash Bros elements, but does this deliver a unique enough experience to sell […] Source View the full article

The company did not elaborate on whether there are any carryover features from the original PS4 release, though. View the full article

It's not just battles and dungeon-crawling — you have to represent yourself to the people, too. View the full article

World of Warcraft just shared a short video showcasing the dungeons coming to Classic Timewalking. Featuring four iconic dungeons, two of which are separated into two wings each, World of Warcraft fans can challenge these six retro instances during the upcoming 20th anniversary event, and again in future Timewalking events when Classic comes up in the rotation. View the full article

One of the most terrifying sections of Silent Hill 2 just got even more scary thanks to the changes made in the remake. Bloober Team, the developers of the 2024 remake of the classic survival horror game, included a lot of design and quality changes from the original SH2 that make for a more immersive and chilling experience. One area, in particular, stands out with these tweaks and can surprise new and veteran players with one of the scariest sections that leaves a lasting impression. View the full article

RTS Tactical Warfare has already made first contact with the public thanks to an earlier playtest, but with its release right around the corner and Steam Next Fest currently running, you can get your hands on a demo of this souped-up Command and Conquer style RTS game right now. If you've ever been one to grab a big ball of medium tanks, sending them to plow through your opponent's base while cackling to yourself, then this may be the title for you. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Command and Conquer has a spiritual sequel in new RTS you can play now View the full article

Silent Hill 2 remake players have discovered that there's an older build of the game available that dates back months before the release of the game. Those who own the game on disc for the PlayStation 5 can potentially access this version of the Silent Hill 2 remake. View the full article

Marvels Spider-Man 2 is coming to PC, with a confirmed release date of January 30, 2025. Last year, Insomniac continued its open-world superhero saga with Marvels Spider-Man 2, which featured both Peter Parker and Miles Morales as playable characters in a darker plot that saw the introduction of classic villains like Venom and Kraven the Hunter. Spider-Man 2 was met with widespread critical acclaim and commercial success at launch, with many praising it for refining the gameplay that made Marvels Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales smash hits for PlayStation. View the full article

A Minecraft player has created a terrifying base inspired by Pokemon's Unown and the ruins they typically reside in. Many Minecraft fans have shared impressive builds over the years, but this Pokemon one may be among the more unsettling. View the full article

Leakers have now revealed Fortnite's upcoming Fishpool skin as well as its back bling, which is making its first-ever appearance. Fortnite has released thousands of skins over the years. When it first surfaced, skins would come out in the Item Shop every now and then, but that progressively changed as Fortnite's popularity increased. While before the shop featured little more than a handful of cosmetic items, there are now dozens of pages in the Item Shop, and every day gamers get to choose from a selection of countless skins and other items. View the full article

Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2 has been one of the biggest (pleasant) surprises of the year. While there was always a lot of ****** that the co-op slayer sequel would deliver on the quality, what I didn't expect was just how many people would get hooked by it. It's also a visually-impressive game, and now you can make it even more stunning as Saber Interactive has stealthily released a massive new 4K texture pack. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The best Space Marine 2 mods 2024 Space Marine 2's next free update adds in its "most terrifying" ****** yet Space Marine 2 Twitch drops and how to claim View the full article

With New York Comic **** in full swing, there's almost certainly a plethora of Spider-Man news to come our way throughout the weekend. Well, Insomniac Games took the lead-off role and announced that Spider-Man 2 is indeed coming to PC -- and sooner than you might think. View the full article

I have a tendency in games like Civilization 7 to turtle. I get a few cities on the go and then sit behind walls, building and researching while stubbornly refusing to actually recruit an army. This means that as the game progresses into the middle eras, I can't expand anymore and if someone wants to take me down they usually can. New leader Ashoka looks like he might be able to help players like me, especially thanks to a secondary DLC persona he has to offer. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: New Civilization 7 leader is a nightmare if you want a Domination victory Civilization 7 system requirements Civilization 7 release date, trailers, gameplay, and latest news View the full article

Game Rant can exclusively share the first official trailer for My Hero Academia: Battlegrounds. Aside from showcasing its action-packed gameplay, the video also offers some developer commentary on how this Roblox experience came to be. View the full article

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero features an engaging narrative in the "Into a Third Future" arc, which offers players multiple endings and expands on the series' rich lore. Players will navigate through critical decisions to discover there are three distinct outcomes based on their choices. Each path will reveal different character arcs and themes. This approach of a dynamic storyline enhances the game's replayability and engages players by making them consider the consequences of their actions throughout the game. These varied endings and their implications ultimately add depth to the overall experience. View the full article

Bandai Namco and Dimps have announced that Goku (Mini) from Dragon Ball Daima will be added to the roster of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 in the upcoming second chapter of the game's Future Saga DLC expansion. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is still getting support to this day, as Dimps and Bandai Namco have been periodically adding new content to the game, with both paid and free updates. Some of the most recent content added to Xenoverse 2 over the years include Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero versions of Videl and Gohan, along with Gohan's ****** transformation from the same film for customizable characters. View the full article

As luck would have it, 2024 turned out to be a rough year to release a co-op multiplayer game featuring a satirical fascistic military force battling hordes and hordes of monstrous, bug-like alien creatures. Ironically, of the three major games that fit this description that hit PCs and consoles this year, Starship Troopers: Extermination is the least effective at pulling off the mighty few versus the endless ****** motif. Of course, even if it doesn’t match the high bar set by Helldivers 2 and Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, you can have a decent amount of fun with its unique features, like larger teams and clever base-building sections, before the swarm becomes too monotonous. Before diving into the main multiplayer event, Starship Troopers: Extermination offers up an extremely skippable single-player campaign where you can learn the ropes without letting your team down. You play a nameless soldier in the Special Operations Group, hand picked by General Johnny Rico, portrayed by Casper Van Dien in a less-than-enthusiastic performance. There really is no plot here, as this mode serves more as a tutorial removed from the chaos of the online environment than a fully fledged story with a beginning, middle, and climactic end. I’m not a green recruit, as I put more than 15 hours into the early access version earlier this year, but I can’t imagine that a true beginner would get anything out of this experience that they couldn’t pick up in a far less boring fashion in the field. These 25 missions consist of all the normal things you would do in multiplayer but with none of the spontaneous fun of playing with other people. Also, a focused campaign should have been a prime opportunity to inject some actual satire into a game dressed up like one of the most iconic spoofs in film history, but Extermination completely misses it. This first chapter, “Answering The Call,” threatens to be the first of several in a broader campaign, but if what follows is anything like this I think I’d rather put my head between the jaws of a ***** warrior bug. Extermination brings far more firepower to the ****** against the insectoid menace than its peers. Skipping ahead of all that to where it gets good: with up to 16 players on the battlefield at a time Extermination brings far more firepower to the ****** against the insectoid menace than its peers. You’re divided into squads of up to four, but there can be a good sense of teamwork as everyone coordinates to complete objectives and hopefully extract from the scene with as many of their lives intact as possible. Extermination does a great job of making sure 16 players never feels like enough, though, as it sends endless and relentless waves of bugs to ****** against your fighting force nonstop. Dozens and dozens of bugs can be actively tearing you and your base apart on screen at a time, and even ***** bugs – the only good kind – can become lingering tactical problems as their corpses can stack up to become ramps for their friends to scale walls with. It’s a welcome, but stiff challenge, as any large ****** can turn you or your squadmates into ribbons with just one or two attacks, and even basic warriors can shred you without much more effort. It gets hectic quickly. To counter the bug threat there are six playable soldier classes to choose from, each with unique ability and equipment options that specialize their roles pretty well. For instance, though they are both heavy armored, the Guardian and Demolisher would never be confused with one another, as the former can build a personal fort on the fly to protect themselves from surrounding bugs and stabilize their unwieldy heavy guns, while the latter deals damage almost exclusively by blowing things up with grenades and rockets and relies on teammates to cover them. If you’d like to know more, it’s a huge commitment. Depending on how you look at it, the decision to make character progression mostly individual to each class is either welcome content or a major drag. Unlocking all six classes’ abilities and equipment takes some significant grinding, which means you’re back to square one when you decide to branch out and try something new – but you’re also not going to run out of rewards to earn for a long, long time. To Extermination’s credit, the starting gear package does a decent job at summarizing what each class can do, like the Engineer’s flamethrower and ability to build a limited amount of structures outside of the designated zones, or the Ranger’s quick-moving, low-cooldown dashes. But if you’d like to know more, it’s a huge commitment. Every ******* performs as you would assume it would in a futuristic military shooter, but even those that aren’t big machine guns have intense amounts of recoil to take into account. Hit markers seem unreliable as well, sometimes not showing at all when aiming down sights, so you have to be ready to do a fair amount of spraying and praying. Another design decision with some major ***** and ***** is that you can’t swap your class mid-mission, even after you get ******* and respawn. That makes your choice important, for sure, but bad team compositions occasionally lead to quagmires when, for example, a mission modifier makes bugs start spawning lots of heavily armored creatures and your team doesn’t have nearly enough options to deal with them efficiently. Unless you roll with a group of 15 of your closest friends, relying on randoms to be team players and pick wisely can be frustrating. Variety can also be an issue. Though Extermination is always quick to throw impressive waves of hundreds of bugs at you and your trooper brethren at a time, there are only nine different types of enemies among them, and half of them are the same type of bitey quadruped soldier from the movie in different sizes and colors. The remaining species are all ranged attackers: Gunners who ****** straight at troopers and bombardiers and grenadiers that arc blue and red ****** juices like siege weapons. With source material that includes such a variety of interesting critters, it's baffling that none of the weirder and more interesting ones, like the infamous brain bug or flying fighters, are nowhere to be found. Half of the ****** types are the same type of bitey quadruped soldier from the movie in different sizes and colors. In general, building a base is a quick and seamless process of pulling out a special ****, pointing it at any place on a specified zone on the map, selecting an object, and placing its foundation. This only claims the spot as taken, though; If you want to ****** that wall or activate that ammo supply station, you’ll need to repair it and make it real – as simple as switching modes on the build tool. It’s a little extra hassle at first, but in the likely event of its destruction, the foundation will remain so that a build section can just simply be repaired again – a clever way to let you rebuild good ideas quickly without having to lay everything out again. There’s nothing that's truly surprising about how this works, but everything you can build – like tall walls with or without ramps to reach the tops, automated or mountable **** placements, bunkers that serve as relatively safe spaces for troopers to buckle down in against heavy bombardments – serves a clear and effective purpose, and in most rounds I saw a wide variety of pieces being used in base layouts. For my money, Horde is the mode most worth playing in Extermination. Granted, aside from having so many people in play it’s not much different than any other horde mode in any other game we’ve seen since Gears of War popularized the idea: ****** waves spawn that your team must survive, in which case you'll get a break to reinforce your base in order to better survive the next, even larger wave. Here, though, the scramble between rounds is real: Resources go fast and the 45 seconds between waves is not much time to fix much of anything, so you have to choose wisely. I got used to tending my own little section of the fortifications – and hoping my teammates would do the same. The trouble is that, unless a true team leader emerges, it’s very difficult to get a real macro-level plan together on such a large team. This narrowed my overall strategic options some, but I basically always found a wall to mount a heavy **** on and held my own – and that’s a pretty reliably good time. I also had to get used to just stealing from the shared pool of building ore to build my fortifications as soon as possible, and ask for forgiveness later. That gave me some memorable moments of fighting and building alongside others, but all this disorganization made me long for someone in old-school Battlefield or PlanetSide’s commander role, where one player’s full-time job is coordinating others. The scramble between rounds is real: Resources go fast and you have to choose wisely. If you prefer a more intimate team experience, Hive Hunt is a complete change of pace from the rest of Extermination because you only have to staff one squad of four troopers to trundle through caves in search of bug eggs to ***** up. It’s a tougher mode, due in part to the lack of bodies on my side and absolutely no lack of carapaces on theirs, but also with no opportunities to build fortifications at all there's nothing to put between you and the many dangerous and strong enemies that will bombard you in these tighter spaces. You really start to miss those huge walls when tiger bugs lock you in a ****** loop because they can easily one-shot you with almost zero repercussions. Without the tactical element of base building, the steady but unremarkable gunplay really comes into the *****. My least favorite mode is ARC, which asks full teams to build and maintain a base around the eponymous device while also venturing out into the map to refineries to produce and ******* resources back to power it. Coordination is key, but of course it’s completely absent most of the time when playing with mostly random people. Base-building with limited resources means that any fortifications are first come, first built, with no quick way to communicate ideas outside of barking into voice chat and hoping everybody hears you over the rest of the chatter. With few exceptions, most of my ARC rounds end in long, losing wars of attrition, where my teammates quit one by one (without so much as a **** replacement or the ability for new players to join mid-match) and those of us sticking around are forced to cower behind walls that we must constantly repair until we either run out of respawns or the ARC gets destroyed. In comparison to ARC, the ******** and Secure (AAS) missions are similar but a night-and-day difference in how consistently enjoyable they are. The key here is that the order of operations is reversed: first you travel across the map completing smaller objectives, like securing a location or refining ore and gas, and then you hunker down into a base to survive a long series of bug waves. What needs to be done is self explanatory and requires very little coaxing until the very end, so everything flows towards the big standoff organically. Everyone on the team has no choice but to work together on the little objectives on the way, so it’s overall a much better experience than ARC. However, every mode suffers from being staged on mostly empty maps, with the only real life or personality on them being the troopers and bugs. There’s nothing to see or find that isn’t an objective waypoint marked clearly on the map. Compared to Helldivers II with all of its little points of interest, it feels barren and uninteresting when you’re not actively pulling the trigger. There’s a general lack of polish all over Extermination as well. Bugs sometimes just stand around, completely oblivious to the ****** at hand. Skills occasionally activate too many times or don’t go off at all, often leaving me to shrug my last confused shrug when attempting to drop a mine only to hold on tight to it instead as I get consumed by the mob. Performance is also a bit shaky – I had to lower the video settings to medium so that I could get a smooth and consistent frame rate on my Intel Core i9-9000 and RTX 3070 GPU, and that’s something I don’t recall feeling I had to do when I played in early access a year ago. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]