Steam

Dark and Darker is a bit of a Schroedinger's video game, isn't it? Seemingly fleeting back and forth between a state of being available for ***** and being outright delisted. Back in March, the multiplayer extraction game was delisted from the Epic Games Store, with developer Ironmace saying at the time that the "decision appears to be based on claims made by opposing parties in an ongoing legal dispute." Read more View the full article

Everyone has their favorite Final Fantasy game. For me it's FF7 Rebirth, with FF14 coming in at a very, very close second. The beauty of the series is that, despite oftentimes being wildly different in terms of style, there's no 'bad' games. Some naturally stand a little taller than the others, however, and Final Fantasy Tactics is one of them, and Square Enix is bringing it back with a brand new remaster, set to release on Steam. It's even going to launch with some new additions, arguably making it the definitive version of the game. There's just one problem, though: the War of the Lions extras won't be included. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The Final Fantasy Tactics remaster is real, and it's coming to PC View the full article

Today marks not one, but two huge moments for Minecraft. Firstly, the newest update, Chase the Skies, is here, offering more ways to traverse your worlds with relative ease. Secondly, and in my eyes more importantly, is the arrival of Vibrant Visuals. Starting now, your servers can look better than they ever have in Minecraft, with an array of graphical enhancements that don't impede on the visual style, a decade after launch. If you've been waiting for the perfect excuse to jump back in, this is it. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: 15 best Minecraft tower designs in 1.21.6 The 25 best Minecraft shaders for 1.21.6 The best Minecraft house ideas for 1.21.6 View the full article

Finding the best Rainbow Six Siege X settings is tricky, especially compared to other competitive shooters with much more basic graphical settings on offer. It can get overwhelming pretty quickly, but following our guide will help take the stress out of getting your in-game frame rate maximized. The Rainbow Six Siege X system requirements are a step up from the original release, but that was to be expected. You still won't need the best gaming PC in order to run Rainbow Six Siege X, but if you're targeting high frame rates or resolutions like 4K, then it couldn't hurt to explore some upgrades. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Get Dune Awakening free and sense the desert with this new Razer gaming gear Best gaming mouse pad 2025: hard, soft, and RGB mats tested The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti price just dropped below MSRP in the *** View the full article

Hades 2's third major patch, The Unseen Update, is out nowView the full article

Fortnite has revealed that the Grammy-winning musical artist Bruno Mars will be headlining Season 9 of the popular game mode Fortnite Festival, which is scheduled to begin on June 18. Fortnite is currently wrapping up its major collaboration with hit artist Sabrina Carpenter, who headlined Season 8 of Fortnite Festival. View the full article

Microsoft has announced a multi-year agreement with AMD to create chips for its future devices, which it says will not be tied “to a single store or device”. The news was shared in a brief video published on Tuesday, in which Xbox president Sarah Bond pledged to deliver “deeper visual quality, immersive gameplay, and AI-powered experiences”. In what could be interpreted as another sign of its shift in focus away from game consoles, however, Bond said Microsoft’s gaming arm is “working closely with the Windows team, to ensure that Windows is the number one platform for gaming”. Read More... View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

The humble party game genre has connected people throughout gaming generations. And while nobody really considers it whenever a new one hits the fray, the results are usually an enjoyable time. That’s true for Lego Party, the mini brick’s seemingly successful attempt to Lego-fy Mario Party so that fans of the tiny constructables can get together in a group of four and proceed to ruin their friendship over minigames. If you’ve played Mario Party you know exactly what to expect for Lego Party. A group of four players will drop onto a boardgame-like table and roll numbers to advance the requisite number of spots. Some spots will have special prizes, some will hide traps that will steal your hard-earned Stars, or in this case, a golden Lego Brick. After every player rolls their turn, they’ll all drop in to compete in one of 60 Lego-themed minigames. And to Lego Party’s credit, the minigames is where this effort can differentiate itself from Mario Party. There are some standard-fare activities, like a game where players jump over a swinging octopus tentacle until the last player is left standing, to some very off-kilter ones. One I tried is a Bennett Foddy-style unicycle racing game where players must use the joysticks to balance atop a very fiddly unicycle and inch their way towards the finish line. We only played about eight minigames total, so I’m very excited to see what else Lego Party has in store. Another Lego innovation is how Lego Party leans into the creative aspect of the toy bricks. While the overworld maps are themed after fun concepts like “Pirates,” they can also be modified if certain conditions are met within the game. Landing on a specific spot will let players create unique elements to add to the map like a pirate ship that wasn’t there when the game began. Visually, Lego Party has the crisp, colorful aesthetic Lego games have come to be known for, though the party game aesthetic means that these Legos lean towards more whacky designs than something I’d consider charming. That is to say, these Legos are all about being zany and loud, which is perfect for the genre. Playing with three other players (my two IGN colleagues and a developer), we found ourselves immediately sucked into its playful orbit. The goal is to collect as many Gold Bricks by the end of the game. Winning minigames on their own will only award you Lego bits that you can turn into ways to score Gold Bricks, such as movement modifiers that will help you land on the spot where a Gold Brick has spawned. There’re also traps you can purchase (don’t worry, it’s not in a microtransaction way) to potentially steal Gold Bricks from other players, and unique spots on the board that will initiate a special 2v2 game where the winning team will both get Gold Bricks as a reward. These 2v2 rounds include special minigames where, for example, both players each control one half of a car and must coordinate their controls to drive to the designated goal. While we did complete a small game ourselves, we only saw a fraction of what Lego Party has to offer. If the rest of the games are anywhere near as fun as the handful that we played, I can see Lego Party having the kind of addictive appeal Mario Party has had – which is especially good news for PlayStation and Xbox players that don’t have access to Mario Party. Matt Kim is IGN's Senior Features Editor. View the full article

When it was first announced that Remedy, the developer behind seminal single-player epics like Alan Wake and Control, was working on a multiplayer shooter, I was equal parts confused and excited. This is a studio with a knack for creating inimitable worlds, so revisiting one in a less expected way seemed like an intriguing experiment worth checking out. Now, after 15 hours of blasting through FBC: Firebreak’s striking levels, upgrading my loadout, and fighting off a plethora of infected monsters, I feel about as confused and excited as I did at its initial announcement. This is an imaginative jaunt that struggles to make its mark in a fiercely competitive genre, but it’s one that’s at least left me with plenty of war stories to share. FBC takes place six years after the events of Control, and invites you back to the wonderfully strange architecture of The Oldest House under wildly different circumstances. Instead of saving the day as the reluctant director Jesse Faden, you and up to two friends control a trio of wildly underprepared first responders attending to oddball emergencies that would make even the most battle-hardened OSHA officer wince. If a sentient sticky note infestation is turning the workers into monsters, or radioactive leeches have infested a quarry and need to be thrown into a furnace on wheels that resembles Team Fortress 2’s Payload, it’s you and your team that receive the call. It’s a hard job, but someone's gotta do it! You thought that was it? Think again. On top of completing the task at hand, you’ll face off against the hordes of Control’s interdimensional antagonist, The Hiss, which seems to have taken up permanent residence in The Oldest House. And, on top of that, once you’ve finished your Jobsite shift, your team will also have to trek back to the elevator you arrived in and survive until it reaches your station. It seems like a lot to handle on paper, and it would be if played solo. But, with the help of two other players, these surreal tasks begin to feel like just another day at the multiplayer office – that is, if your office also includes menacing floating helmets, safe rooms and molten furnaces. When playing as a full team, which feels like the optimal setup for FBC, each player gets to wield their own ‘Crisis Kit’, which mimics the class systems found in other cooperative shooters. There are three available, with each Kit offering a unique skill that can expedite key tasks during a job. In the sticky note-laden Jobsite, Paper Chase, using the globule-hurling Splash Kit will let you douse the yellow notes to make them more vulnerable, while someone with the Fix Kit can run around bashing the soggy slips with their trusty wrench whenever they’re not using it to fix light boxes which illuminate contaminated areas. With all that going on, the Jump Kit operator can then keep Hiss agents at bay by using their secondary fire rocket jump to fly around the map. This meant that as I dipped between roles while figuring out my favourite Kit, I always felt like a key player in my team’s success. The starting weapons are a decent intro to FBC’s approachable but limited combat. That’s also due in part to the fact that gunplay is mirrored across all three kits. When you start your campaign, you’ll have a choice of two weapons: a Submachine Gun and a Double-Barrel Shotgun. Both provide more than enough firepower to take down basic enemies in close-quarter duels and offer a decent introduction to FBC’s approachable but limited combat. As you get into more complex levels, you’ll naturally start to unlock increasingly powerful choices like Machine Guns, Pump Action Shotguns, or my personal favourite, the humble Revolver. The rinse and repeat process of taking out hordes of possessed office workers can feel dull at times. Fortunately, FBC’s relentless array of flashy particle effects and vibrant lighting features ensures there’s at least something striking to look at as you work through its objectives. There aren’t too many constraints on the composition of your cohort, as you always have alternative means to completing Kit-specific tasks. That wrench might make repairs a simple button press, but they turn into a surprisingly stressful rhythm game without it, where you tap Q and E (or L1 and R1) in sequence without making errors to progress a meter. Like much of FBC, what seems straightforward is not, and the surprise here is that if you make errors while button-mashing, you take additional damage. This process starts out cute, but grows quickly tiresome in emergencies, and eventually my team negotiated our roles to include all three kits – nothing makes you miss your Splash Kit operator more than burning to death while trying to extinguish a fire they could have ousted in seconds. As of right now, there are five total Jobsites, with each site being split into three Clearance Levels that can be completed all at once or in segments. The visual identity of each mission is wildly different and wholly unique, and beyond what I’ve mentioned already, there’s also chubby pink foam-filled turbine halls and dimly lit office spaces consumed by frost anomalies. Unfortunately as much as the chaos is exciting at first, it’s not long before you run out of new zones to take in and enemy variants to fight – which right now includes little beyond tanks, grunts, and aerial attackers. In this way, FBC can feel a little bare. That said, the inclusion of tweakable Corruption and Difficulty levels ensures that what’s here has reasonable replayability nonetheless. Take the level Hot Fix, for example: your main job in it is to sort out malfunctioning heat fans by zapping and whacking them with the Jump and Fix Kits while someone uses the Splash Kit to keep you both from igniting – easy, right? Well, once you push the Corruption slider to the max, you’ll need to complete that task with random level modifiers popping in, like a Globe that lowers the zone’s gravity or an evil flying Stapler that wildly increases enemy health. Now your team isn’t just avoiding being burned to a crisp; you also need to make perfect shots and watch your footing, too. The addition of these Corrupted Items frequently provided a fresh challenge and delivered some unbelievably frustrating and hilarious multiplayer moments. In retrospect, I wish I’d clipped the audio of my friends screaming, “Where’s the stapler, I’ve got to kill the stapler now!” It doesn’t have the Easter Egg-ridden worldbuilding that always intrigued me in Remedy's games. If you find yourself in trouble when under attack, each zone is equipped with healing decontamination showers and ammunition bays where you can restock and take a beat. Though true to FBC’s chaotic modus operandi, these essential zones can falter and break, which then requires either a kits or that button pressing minigame to get them back online. The bays also move around as you revisit levels, meaning you won’t be able to rely on your memory to find safety, either. While I can appreciate that this kind of mayhem might not appeal to everyone, I found the unpredictability to be quite moreish, especially when the confusion led to flash arguments in our Discord chat. Thankfully, if – or, more likely, when – it all goes up in flames, depending on what difficulty setting you choose, you’ll have a series of lives to use before it’s actually game over. Perhaps what’s most disappointing, however, is that while FBC is a Remedy game, it doesn’t feature the same Easter Egg-ridden worldbuilding that always intrigued me about the studio’s other games. You won’t find Alan Wake cowering in a cell or a stray note about Mr. Door – at least, not in my experience so far. That’s not to say there isn’t anything curious to gawk at, and there are hints of the tonal brilliance of the Remedy Connected Universe in the sarcastic posters and redacted notes littered around these maps, as well as the sporadic lore dumps delivered via voice over when you’re waiting in the lobby. But when I went looking for more serious depth beyond the tasks at hand, I came back disappointed. It might be the nature of the genre, but it was still a bummer when I realised investigating the nooks and crannies would never reward me with any lore or secrets, and would instead just leave me open to getting swarmed by bad guys. Beyond moment-to-moment healing and ammo drops, you can turn the tables more permanently by investing in FBC’s approachable perk and gear upgrade trees. As you attack the primary goal for each Jobsite and explore shelters, you’ll find Lost Assets and Research Samples, which act as upgrade currencies. And, thanks to a post-launch patch (v1.2), Lost Assets are now more visible and have a lot more purchasing power than when I started playing. I started to feel more adept in FBC once I got into a rhythm of splitting my cash between practical upgrades in the Requisition tree and passive perk upgrades in the Research tree. As a shoot first and ask questions later kind of player, FBC allowed me to specialise with upgraded weaponry and meaningful perks to match, such as the ammo-hoovering Shop Vacuum that allowed me to stock up fast as I darted between zones. What’s more, a Perk will become “Resonant” when upgraded to its maximum level, which means it applies to the other players in your party when they’re in proximity to you, allowing your once-fragile group to share the benefits of an experienced party member and overwhelm Hiss forces. Still, despite these smart ideas, FBC doesn’t ultimately have a wide enough variety of upgrades to work towards in the long term, making it feel like a dubious investment. The heart of what’s here is promising, it just lacks the scope to make a big enough impact, which is a huge shame. FBC also relies so heavily on team dynamics and coordination that it can alienate people who are matchmaking with strangers or riding solo. During my playtime, I consistently queued up with friends with whom I’ve already established a rapport, which meant that not only could we yap about what upgrades to choose and build our arsenal together, we could also laugh and poke fun when things inevitably went wrong. Without that kind of solid social backing, FBC’s stressful, sometimes unclear objectives become frustrating kick-off points rather than communal goals. View the full article

It's a big day for Xbox Game Pass, as the subscription service is getting three new games, including day-one releases for FBC: Firebreak and Lost in Random: The Eternal Die. June has already been a stacked month for the platform, thanks to a massive lineup of incoming games and day-one availability for 11 Bit Studio's hotly anticipated The Alters. The Xbox Game Pass hot streak keeps going today, especially for Ultimate subscribers. View the full article

In a post-Andor world, it seems weird to be feeling bad for Star Wars' Galactic Empire (you know, the folks that did the Ghorman massacre). But when it comes to the Star Wars Legion tabletop wargame, Vader and chums have been a pitiable bunch in recent months, with the Imperials getting trounced at most tables. Well, no longer - Atomic Mass Games has just released a surprise points update that's got the pals of Palpatine rubbing their hands with evil glee. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: This space shipwreck terrain is perfect for Star Wars Legion games on Jakku Star Wars Legion's lead designers delve into the Galactic Empire starter set Star Wars Legion fan turns his vast Lego minifig collection into playable armies View the full article

Have you been playing Stellar Blade? If not, you may be some kind of statistical outlier, as Shift Up recently came out and announced that the game had sold over 1 million copies on PC in its first three days alone... Read more.View the full article

Fishing, I think, is the truest of all video game power fantasies. Action hero combat, romance wish fulfilment, god like abilities, all of that sort of thing pales in comparison to the act of fishing in a game. Just you, your rod, and a whole load of open water. I love to fish in video games, despite not being someone that has a strong desire to 100% genres like collectathons, I do love getting as many fish as I can, and I love a twist on the format. Enter Out Fishing, a mysterious sounding horror fishing game. Read more View the full article

Last month saw Quake inducted into the World Videogame Hall of Fame, and it's about time: as PCG's Andy Chalk observed "you've had Halo in there since 2017, and not Quake? What? What are we even doing here?" That's Quake fans for you... Read more.View the full article

Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero publishers HoYoverse are suing a player for $150,000 over a pre-release stream of a new Honkai: Star Rail character. Read more View the full article

Thank goodness for the fansView the full article

The idea to have Mifune came from the game's director trying to visualize "what it is about samurai that makes them actually cool"View the full article

The voice actors behind Genshin Impact's male and female Travelers have announced they will reprise their roles in later updates. Several Genshin Impact characters have been silent in the English-dubbed version for quite some time, mainly because of the SAG-AFTRA strike. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

From the outside, Alpha Response resembles several other FPS games. Since it comes from Minh Le, the legendary Counter-Strike creator, Valve, and Rust developer better known as 'Gooseman,' it naturally whispers CS 1.0. You play as the police, which is likely to draw comparisons to SWAT 4 and Ready or Not, and it's also fully PvE and each mission involves a heist or a shootout in the street, which might make you think of Payday. But Alpha Response, in reality, is nothing like any of these games. It's fast, it's fun, it's a sensory spectacle, and it's totally unique - it's better than any other shooter on Steam this year. Read the rest of the story... View the full article

Dating everything takes a very long timeView the full article

Square Enix will share more on June 20View the full article

The Magic: The Gathering card Nether Traitor is in the midst of a spike that doesn't yet seem to have reached its peak. Previously, Time Spiral copies of the card were valued at around $7.80 according to price checkers like MTG Goldfish, but since then they're gone up by 68% to a more substantial $13.10. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: MTG Final Fantasy release date, card spoilers, and latest news MTG card that supercharges top Final Fantasy commander spikes in price by 140% Forget Commander, Clive is the core of my new MTG Final Fantasy standard deck View the full article

Microsoft recently announced that six games will leave the popular Xbox Game Pass subscription service on June 30. As usual, Xbox Game Pass subscribers who are interested in these titles and do not have time to finish them can purchase them with a 20% discount before they leave the service. View the full article

She had a good run, but it’s almost curtain call for the short and sweet Sabrina Carpenter, the current leading ... Read more View the full article

Atlyss dodges a bullet which wasn't really there to begin withView the full article