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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

What's the one extra bit of spice OG Oblivion's main story needed to take it to the next level? An invincible terminator relentlessly hunting you and Sean Bean across Cyrodiil in an effort to massacre you both before you can save the world, you say? Read more View the full article

A massive new update has just been released for Helldivers 2 today, May 13, bringing new Illuminate enemies and the long-awaited addition of weapon customization. This is likely what the Helldivers 2 developers were cooking when new content slowed in recent weeks, and this latest saga in the Second Galactic War sees Super Earth itself on the verge of being overrun. View the full article

Popular crime game Schedule 1, which is currently in early access on Steam, continues to face issues with fan-made mods, as even more creations have been discovered to be malicious. Schedule 1quickly found success after its release earlier this year, but its newfound fame has resulted in a plethora of different mods being infected with malware. After their removal from the popular modding site NexusMods, even more mods have now been taken down. View the full article

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre video game will be receiving no more extra content or support, because its developer believes the game is now complete. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released in August 2023 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One and PC, and is an asymmetrical online multiplayer game where four ‘victims’ have to escape three members of the Sawyer family from the notorious 1974 horror film. In a press statement, Gun Interactive said that it considered the game “fully realised” and that it’s now focusing fully on other projects. Read More... View the full article

Stellaris's recent 4.0 update, which launched alongside the (pretty unpopular) BioGenesis expansion on May 5, finally introduced the concept of babies. Their lack of inclusion previously made plenty of sense, of course. Babies are useless. Especially when it comes to giant space empires. But they are here now, which means a fun new bug has reared its head... Read more.View the full article

A Funky Kong mod is sure to followView the full article