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With Doom: The Dark Ages having officially entered early access, developer id Software is celebrating the occasion with a special developer livestream to distribute free digital goodies for fans. Anyone with a Steam account can grab the rewards, even if they haven't purchased Doom: The Dark Ages. View the full article

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game that first launched in 2023, is done releasing major updates after the May 2025 update drops. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre gives players the chance to play as Leatherface and his twisted family as well as the survivors that are attempting to escape their clutches. View the full article

GeoGuessr Steam Edition has quickly become one of the lowest-rated games in Steam history, receiving thousands of negative reviews less than a week after its May 8 release. The game was the long-awaited adaptation of the popular browser-basedGeoGuessr, in which players challenge themselves and others in a pursuit to guess real-world locations based on Google Street View coverage. View the full article

More than two years on from Microsoft's last mass round of layoffs, the company is laying off a huge amount of staff once again. As reported by CNBC, the tech giant is laying off 3% of employees across the entire company, meaning all levels, teams, and geographies. While nothing has been directly confirmed as of yet, this does include the possibility that some games studios it owns will be affected too - we'll provide an update if there is one. In a statement provided to CNBC, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company will "continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace." The spokesperson also said that one objective of the layoffs is to reduce layers of management. As always, a ridiculously heartless way to frame such a thing. Read more View the full article

If you are planning a PC build and have been waiting patiently to get ahold of one of the new Nvidia Blackwell graphics cards, here's an opportunity that's as good as you're going to get. Right now Amazon has Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Gaming graphics cards in stock starting at $899.99 shipped. Inventory is reserved for Amazon Prime members only. Also for a limited time, you'll get a free voucher for the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages game with purchase. According to Nvidia, the version you'll receive is the Premium edition that retails for $99.99. "For a limited time, get the Premium Edition of DOOM: The Dark Ages (a $99.99 value) with the purchase of a qualifying NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070 desktop system or graphics card, or laptop with a GeForce RTX™ 5090 Laptop GPU, RTX 5080 Laptop GPU, RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. Technology varies by GPU." [/url]Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU in Stock on Amazon Amazon Prime members only for some models Although the MSRP for these cards range from $899.99 to $999.99, a reference GeForce RTX 5070 Ti card is actually supposed to sell for $750. More advanced cooling designs, a more uncommon colorway, or overclocking out of the box add to the cost, but even then, admittedly, these cards are still priced higher than what Nvidia originally advertised. The reality is that even third party manufacturers like Gigabyte, MSI, Asus (and pretty much everyone else) are also taking advantage of the high demand by marking prices up from the get-go. Unfortunately, you'd be hard pressed to find another RTX 5070 Ti GPU for this price or less. RTX 5070 Ti GPUs are generally selling for over $1,000 on eBay. The RTX 5070 Ti GPU Has Excellent 4K Gaming Performance Of all the Blackwell cards released thus far, the RTX 5070 Ti offers the best bang for your buck, especially when pitted against the previous generation GPUs. It performs neck-and-neck with the RTX 4080 Super and already marginalizes the RTX 5080, which is only about 10%-15% faster but costs 33% more. This GPU is capable of high framerates in nearly all games, even at 4K resolution with ray tracing enabled. Heck, even if you plan on using this card for AI, the RTX 5070 Ti might be the better value than the RTX 50870 since both are equipped with the same 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM. Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU Review by Jacqueline Thomas "At $749, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the best 4K graphics card for most people, delivering much better value than either the RTX 5080 or 5090. Across my entire test suite, this GPU soared at 4K, coming within striking distance of much more expensive graphics cards, and that’s before taking multi frame generation into account, which will make the RTX 5070 Ti even better at hitting extremely high framerates, albeit with a hit to latency." [/url] Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

New Minecraft updates vary in importance. Sometimes, Mojang releases a Snapshot and, while it makes a few nice, little adjustments, business in the blocky world continues basically as normal. Other times, everything changes. In recent weeks, the mechanics (and recipe) behind leashes have been overhauled and there have been significant alterations for ranged combat. Now, one of the rarest and most useful items in all of Minecraft, previously confined to Nether fortresses and desert pyramids is available for crafting. Thanks to Snapshot 25w20a, you can now make your own saddles. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Minecraft 1.21.6 update release date and details Minecraft snapshots - testing new features in 25w20a Where to watch A Minecraft Movie online View the full article

We’ve been waiting a long time to learn practically anything about Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, an action-adventure game showcasing a ... Read more View the full article

"That one off hand joke really really got out of hand," admits Shams JorjaniView the full article

Gearbox head ****** Pitchford hyped up Borderlands 4 in a new Creator's Voice video from Nintendo, sharing what he thinks makes the Switch 2 version of the game so exciting. Pitchford stated that the Switch 2 port of the game actually helped with development, saying it's "astonishing" how good a fit Borderlands 4 is on the platform. Borderlands 4 was confirmed for the Nintendo Switch 2 earlier this year, with both the console and game being among some of the highest-profile releases of the year. View the full article

May 13, 2025: This piece was originally published August 18, 2016 as part of our 'most important PC games' series. We've republished it for Doom: The Dark Ages' launch. "The Citizen Kane of videogames" gets thrown around a lot in the modern 'games as art' discussion. And it's a term that can mean different things, depending on the commentator. Alex Steacy and Cameron Lauder put forward Half-Life as the Citizen Kane of videogames in their Twitch show, Talking Simulator, on the grounds that it had legitimized the medium, just as Citizen Kane had for film. Matt Kamen wrote for Empire that PS4 exclusive The Last of Us "may also prove to be gaming's Citizen Kane moment - a masterpiece that will be looked back upon favorably for decades." Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: This Doom PC controller is stunning, but only 1,000 are being made Oblivion remade as a slick and brutal Doom style boomer shooter Surprise Doom update adds brutally hard campaign built by John Romero himself View the full article

The "low effort" posts are becoming too muchView the full article

****** Mesa is an officially recognized fan remake of Half-Life, Valve's iconic first-person shooter, and it's currently on ***** for an exceptionally deep 90% discount. Crowbar Collective's remake was officially released in 2020, but is celebrating the 10th anniversary of it entering early access in 2015, and the game is now climbing Steam's purchase and player charts. View the full article

Marvel Rivals has announced that it will be celebrating the anniversary of its first Closed Alpha by releasing the Galacta's Gift event, which will also bring back the Season 0 battle pass for a limited time. NetEase Games recently released Season 2 of Marvel Rivals, which added Emma Frost to the hero shooter's ever-expanding roster. View the full article

Genshin Impact has officially unveiled Dahlia as a 4-star Hydro Sword, set to debut alongside Skirk in Version 5.7. Dahlia's journey to become a playable character in Genshin Impact has been longer than most. He was first mentioned during Rosaria's drip marketing in Version 1.3, but fans have been aware of his playable status since the initial wave of Fontaine leaks two years ago. While his design changed somewhat, it's fair to say that the community had high expectations for Dahlia as the second Mondstadt character since Version 1.5. View the full article

Gun Interactive is ending all future support for their The Texas Chain Saw Massacre game, clarifying there will be no future content ... Read more View the full article

Anyone that's played a FromSoftware Souls game knows how it tells its stories. You meet a wide range of characters, all of which mostly just talk at you in varyingly cryptic ways. There's also tiny bits of lore offered up from weapons and items too, all of which build up a messy picture. But in something like the upcoming Elden Ring Nightreign, where the main focus is gameplay that encourages you to constantly be on the move, I've been left wondering how its story will play out. As it turns out, it's quite different from the original Elden Ring. Read more View the full article

Warhammer Skulls is back from the Warp, and will be landing on your computer screens very soon. Starting May 22, a festival of Warhammer-themed game news, reveals, and juicy discounts will pop up in this annual event, promising some updates on recent hits like Space Marine 2, Rogue Trader, and Darktide. Read more View the full article

Repetition is part of the process when it comes to a certain type of action roguelike. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but Yasha: Legends of the ****** Blade commits the cardinal sin of not bolstering the droll byproduct of doing the same thing over and over again with compelling meta-progression or hiding it under an interesting story delivered by characters you can’t wait to hear from. Instead, its few attempts at drama and humor miss more than hit, and its decent combat and interesting weapons are let down by room after room of weak monsters and weaker level design. The “legends” part of the title is literal, with the story of Yasha told and retold across three campaigns with different playable protagonists. Each tale remixes the roles of some key characters, almost akin to a theatre troupe that puts on multiple shows with the same small cast. Old man Gengo goes from village elder to adoptive father to benevolent king across the three stories, for example. This idea is maybe the most interesting thing about these stories, though. They are otherwise filled to the brim with some well-worn tropes, like the chosen one whose past is shrouded in mystery or the good soldier just looking to uphold the honor of their patron in the face of certain annihilation. The problem isn’t simply that they aren't super original – reused structure can still make for entertaining fiction. It's that all three are packed with just as much (or more) banal writing as they are with any compelling dialogue. Underwhelming moments of self reflection and bad attempts at humor quickly overstay their welcome in a trio of tales that try and fail to be moving and meaningful. The structure of Yasha doesn't help deliver the story very well, either. It attempts the Hades-like approach of weaving conversations between boss fights at the end of each dungeon run’s three stages, but produces neither memorable moments between the chosen characters and their enemies nor good, or even coherent, reasons to continue down the path. Finishing a run changes the chapter, and everything is done all over again with almost no changes to the structure. In between trips through the gauntlet, the village full of people you are supposedly fighting to protect features a good amount of townsfolk to talk to and not a single one with anything interesting to say. The rinse and repeat nature of it all does the already mid story no favors. For their own reasons, each hero takes off on a journey in pursuit of the dastardly Fox ******, who's been spreading his dark influence and causing chaos throughout the land. These journeys take them chopping and shooting their way through the same three locations: a crab infested beach, a forest full of demons and angry wildlife, and a frigid castle stuffed with enemy soldiers, all with loot to collect along the way. Runs themselves are largely static and predictable as stage layouts, enemy variety, and spawn patterns remain largely the same for every trip through the dungeon. Monsters may be slightly stronger and rooms are shaped differently when you reach the next chapter, but that’s about it. The rinse and repeat nature does the already mid story no favors. These areas are pretty, but aren’t very dynamic, and only the last castle region has features in it like destructible walls and floor traps that can hinder your progress outside of the monsters themselves. This does help you gain some muscle memory and learn the best way to handle challenges from run to run, but the majority of the battles felt trivial on standard difficulty. I only got consistently challenged by the last couple of bosses, who have such large health pools that you can’t kill them so aggressively fast that they don’t even have the chance to do damage to you. Though Yasha is pretty easy, it can still be fun thanks to the snappy combat and how different each of the three playable characters control compared to one another. Every fighter combines light and heavy attacks to vanquish foes while using dashes and parries (successful ones can be turned to big damage counter attacks) to stay alive. Shigure’s sword swinging is capable of a balance between aggressive and defensive strategies that rely on those counters, which feels very different from Sara’s all-in dual wielding style that’s all about overwhelming enemies with naturally empowered dash attacks or Taketora’s patient ranged strategy of creating distance and clobbering enemies from afar, while also having strong melee options to make space if needed. It’s all pretty basic, but it's crisp and crunchy. Like a good, oni-flavored potato chip. The weapon selection is plentiful at around seven options per character, of which you can take any two on a trip through the dungeon. They’re all pretty different from one another, with swords that light enemies on fire or get stronger every time you use certain types of attacks… but across characters, you’ll start to notice they don’t deviate much – for example, all three warriors have a version of that fire weapon or that one that gets stronger. And when most enemies are so easy that they don’t require much strategy to beat, there wasn’t much encouragement to experiment with the more interesting weapons anyway, like a fun looking bow that can mark enemies and make every subsequent shot home in on them. The only real randomness in Yasha comes in the various soul orb buffs you can earn for your weapons after each room of enemies that empower and alter their abilities, as well as amulets that increase your stats that you can buy from a shopkeeper or loot from enemies. The former is where almost all my brainpower was spent, trying to guess how a new ability might work in tandem with ones I already have or if it’s good enough to abandon my original plan entirely for. I spent the majority of my runs across all three warriors focusing on one specific build simply to defeat the frustrating power spike of the last boss, since many of these abilities function similarly between like weapons in each character’s arsenal. As the saying goes: if it’s broken, don’t fix it. After every run, win or lose, you can spend currency earned in battle on some passive abilities that strengthen your damage and health or give you bonuses when certain conditions are met, like bonus attack damage while at less than half HP. Whether you choose to invest in these talents or use those resources to upgrade your favorite weapons instead, I always felt significantly stronger the next time I went down the rabbit hole. None really changed the way I played significantly, but they made everything I planned to do work a bit better than last time. When finishing a character’s story, you gain the ability to add modifiers to future runs that ostensibly make it more difficult. This does add more push back to any given run far earlier and gives you access to special items that let you upgrade your weapons even further, but I ran out of steam on pushing myself to this game’s limits pretty quickly after the main campaigns were buttoned up. At around 21 hours across three characters, seeing the exact same areas and enemies so many times, I just couldn’t be bothered to take any more trips though the ****** gate. View the full article

The Precinct wants to make you feel like a real cop. It doesn't necessarily want that feeling to involve just replicating the larger-than-life car chases and shootouts of an action movie, the intensive crime scene investigation of a detective, or the mundane aspects of filing paperwork at a station desk. Instead, it aims to simulate the working life of a cop by blending all of the above into a lumpy mixture of boring and exhilarating - something that's meant, in its heightened recreation of the job's ebbs and flows of excitement, to offer a different kind of police simulation. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: I finally played The Precinct, a new sandbox crime game where you're the cop GTA 6 might be a while, but new crime game The Precinct is finally coming soon Demo for new GTA style crime game The Precinct already downloaded 100,000 times View the full article

Customizing weapons in HD2 is done by levelling up your guns through useView the full article

"Soulframe has the bones of a great action-RPG," I wrote last November. Developers Digital Extremes continue to graft flesh to those bones, plumping the world-building's marrow and cranking the sinews of the combat. The game's Preludes edition - a sort of relentlessly expanding limited-access beta - continues to be updated with new weapons, faction features, player Pacts (classes, essentially), areas, and enemies. They've also made some revisions, which include turning the Idol system into a distinct set of weapons so as to give it "a more focused purpose in your arsenal". Read more View the full article

Now Playing | Facing Indiana Jones' demons made me face my ownView the full article

Fortnite is set to once again return to the App Store of Apple’s iOS devices, after almost five years away ... Read more View the full article

Excuse me, waiter, there is a Tetris in my deckbuilding soup. As a combination of roguelike deckbuilder, tactics game, and tetramino tile-builder, Drop Duchy is an interesting mash-up when it works and a somewhat messy experiment when it doesn't. It's intriguing to see the parts of these many genres falling towards a grander strategic goal, even if they don't always click into place as neatly as expected. Read more View the full article

Xbox Game Pass subscribers can once again play Warhammer: Vermintide 2 as part of their memberships starting today. This is the seventh title to reach Microsoft's subscription service in May 2025, as well as the 52nd new Xbox Game Pass release since the turn of the year. View the full article