A new narrative sci-fi adventure RPG called Sky of Tides will release later this year, having players explore a world called Numen where a looming war threatens to upend protagonist Rin’s life. It’s an atmospheric, isometric viewpoint world that seems to rely on both the tropes of classic isometric RPGs and the language of branching visual novels.

To me, though, Sky of Tides looks a bit like a visual novel got real high on Disco Elysium. Which is pretty welcome—I’m interested in seeing if the gameplay formula pioneered by Disco Elysium carries something interesting forward when divorced from its wildly original setting.

You’ll play as Rin D’Lorah, the daughter of a missing researcher who discovers a conspiracy. She’ll then go on an adventure to find her father and meet…

Just six months after laying off more than half its staff and pausing work on its current project, Armello and Solium Infernum developer League of Geeks has announced that the studio is going into “hibernation” for the foreseeable future, and may not return.

League of Geeks said in December 2023 that a confluence of factors including “rapidly rising operation costs, a weakening [Australian dollar], poor early access sales, and the unprecedented withdrawal of funding opportunities across the industry” had forced it to lay off more than 50% of its employees. The launch of the turn-based grand strategy game Solium Infernum, which came out in February 2024, was not impacted, but plans for a full release of League of Geeks’ next game, Jumplight Odyssey, were put on hold “indefinitely.”…

Ready Player One is a story about desperate people seeking escape from a collapsing society within the confines of a predatory digital world run by ultra-rich oligarchs who will do anything, including committing mass murder, in order to protect their positions of wealth and power. And now a company called Futureverse is teaming up with Warner Bros Discovery and author Ernest Cline to bring that particular Torment Nexus to life with the creation of the Readyverse, which aims to “to bring the promise of the open metaverse depicted in Cline’s Ready Player One novel and the blockbuster film adaptation into a tangible reality.”

“The future has arrived even more quickly than I imagined,” Cline said. “With Readyverse Studios, we have the opportunity to leverage the revolutionary te…

To celebrate its 25th birthday, Valve updated Half-Life and gave it away for free. At the same time, it released an hour-long documentary in which the original developers talked about making the influential FPS. In the documentary, Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell explained why game delays are OK, but also took some time to explain the theory of fun Valve came up with while developing the original Half-Life.

“We knew it was an ad hoc definition,” Newell said, “and it was the degrees to which the game recognizes and responded to the players’ choices and actions, right? In behavioral science, you would say we were explicitly talking about what were reinforcers and what the reinforcement schedules were. Right? At that point in time, that was a useful way of making design decisions.”Read more

While the outlines of Helldivers 2’s Galactic War are fairly clear, and the major orders give players a through-line to follow in the unfolding narrative, much of the game’s world-building is left to hints and lore snippets that players piece-together themselves. Some of this is quite serious and consequential stuff, such as whether the Automatons may be trying to communicate, or the Illuminate are behind Super Earth in the first place.

Other elements of the world… well, let’s just cut to the chase. Pretty much every hero of liberty has the hots for the unknown female pilot of Eagle-1, no doubt helped by the fact that she delivers 500KG payloads to any xeno-infested planetary surface on demand. This gets a little too in-depth at times, such as a line of text a…

One of the more unique and interesting deckbuilders to emerge in the last few years was Hellcard, a battler that put up to three characters against hordes of enemies coming from every direction—with nasty elites and bosses liberally sprinkled in for flavor. Developer Thing Trunk have now released the full game, with Hellcard exiting early access on February 1st.

Hellcard focuses on turn-based card combat of your party—up to three heroes in both singleplayer and co-op—against a horde of monsters. The two sides alternate between teams, with the heroes attempting to defeat enemies tactically based on their declared action for the next round.  Every playthrough is procedurally generated, in roguelite fashion. I’ve played several of these cooperative deckbuilders…

If it weren’t for fans, the little turbines of cool freshness that they are, the life of your gaming PC would be tragically short. Thankfully, if you walk around the Computex show floor, plenty of hardware manufacturers know what the clued-in, cool people want: to be blown away by fans. 

I’ve compiled a list of some of the best coolers and case fans the team spotted in Computex. 

The ones that stole the show were Lian Li’s UniFan TL LCD Series of premium case fans. RGB is old news: The new hotness is circular LCD displays that can play GIFs. The floor demo also had GIFs of Pac-Man ghosts ghosting around and even a short clip of a fighting game moving through each fan.

You can also display still images, so if you want your ugly mug on there, there’s no stoppin…

Helldivers 2 has proudly announced it’ll be asking the bravest question a game has ever asked—”yes, the flamethrower’s cool, but what if we added more flamethrowers?”

The upcoming premium Warbond, dubbed “Freedom’s Flame” features two new primary weapons, a new secondary weapon, a booster, two armour sets (with a new passive), a title, paint for your mech, hellpod and pelican, fresh capes and—most importantly—the ability to finally chest-bump your mates.

Here’s the full run down of the new kit when it comes to toasting bugs:

• The SG-451 Cookout, a pump-action shotty that fires “a burst of incendiary phosphorus pellets.”
• The FLAM-66 Torcher, a primary weapon that’s also a flamethrower—a type previously relegated to support we…
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Cyberpunk 2077’s biggest update ever is now live—and that’s saying something if you look back on some of the mega patches CD Projekt Red’s dropped for the game over the last two years. Instead of an endless list of bugfixes, the 2.0 patch is almost all deep, meaningful changes and additions to Cyberpunk’s core systems, including a long-awaited revamp of the police system, a do-over for skills and progression, and a wholly new approach to loot. 

We’ve known those changes were coming for ages, and we’ve been playing with them for the past week. Based on our time with 2.0, the police AI is a big improvement and cyberware is way cooler now. But today’s patch notes offer some new detail on exactly what’s been changed, including some smaller features that CD Projekt Red hasn’…

“It doesn’t get much worse for a multiplayer launch”, Fraser Brown wrote on the release of Helldivers 2, mentioning issues like “broken matchmaking, frequent crashes, and a kernel-level anti-cheat system that everyone hates.” The developers at Arrowhead have been working to rectify the issues, and according to an update from CEO Johan Pilestedt, three hotfixes deployed during a recent period of server maintenance have dealt with at least some of the problems.

But not all. As Pilestedt explains, “our services as well as our partner services have a rate limiter that denies connections beyond a volume per minute to prevent the entire system from failing.” As PlayStation’s biggest PC launch, Helldivers 2 hit that limit hard, which was responsible for multiple problems. That limit has …

While Google’s AI assistant Bard is currently available in 180 countries across the globe, the European Union and Canada still aren’t invited to the AI party. Almost two months after Google launched its friendly AI chatbot, Bard, the company is still withholding access to certain regions, but there’s no official statement on the matter.

The best guess is that Google may not see eye-to-eye with certain incoming regulations, not to mention that up against current GDPR rules, its processes may already be a little bit illegal.

The EU’s incoming AI Act is currently making its way through European Parliament in a bid to push current and would-be AI developers into making their products more transparent, and safer for the general public. Having spoken to some experts on th…

Persona 5 meets Street Fighter meets Genshin Impact. That’s one helluva mix—if miHoYo can get the balance right. More importantly, the game will need to run smoothly on our gaming PCs before all that. That shouldn’t be any issue, however, as the Zenless Zone Zero system requirements are going to be zero bother for most.

Set for full release on July 4, and available to preload today, Zenless Zone Zero should run perfectly fine on the majority of gaming PCs today.

The minimum system requirements are, quite frankly, absurdly low for a game in 2024. I’d guess that’s due to this game’s simultaneous mobile release—it’s set to launch on PC, PS5, iOS and Android. You’ll only need a 7th Gen or above Intel Core i5, 8 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. That’s a ten-ye…

Getty Images has begun legal proceedings against the creator of AI art tool Stable Diffusion. Filed this week in London’s High Court, Getty Images’ action claims that “Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright,” and used these images for its own commercial gain.

Getty Images and image library rights holders like it are set to be some of the most affected by AI image generation, and while some have embraced the technology, such as Shutterstock, others have largely rejected AI art. Getty Images falls into the latter category. Getty Images banned the upload and sale of AI images in September 2022, in a bid to keep itself safe from legal challenges.

Getty’s CEO, Craig Peters, had previously said that there are concerns for AI-created …

Blizzard’s reveal of Hearthstone’s Mercenaries mode in September 2021 was, as we put it not too delicately, “a masterclass in how not to announce a game.” Despite that inauspicious beginning, it actually turned out to have real potential: Hearthstone streamer and podcaster Ben “RidiculousHat” Goodman said that after a few days with it, “I feel the pull of the couch and just one more run.”

Unfortunately, it looks like his longer-term concerns about competition and economics were prophetic. Blizzard announced today that Mercenaries is getting one more big update in patch 25.4, after which there will be no further new content released.

The patch will add six new Mercenaries to the mode, described by Blizzard as “some of our most interesting Mercs yet,” which will push the total…

While others started with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Tekken, my childhood fighting game obsession was 1993’s Eternal Champions. That series didn’t quite have the same longevity, as it turned out, but today I am vindicated: They’re making an Eternal Champions movie.

I’d forgive you if you’ve never heard of this particular Sega Megadrive (or Genesis) classic—to catch you up, it was basically a fighting game where characters from all throughout time came together to beat the stuffing out of each other. You could play a caveman against a 1920s mobster, or a bounty hunter from the future against a ninja from the ’90s. It was very much aping Mortal Kombat, outside of that twist—it had its own equivalent of fatalities, for example—but its weird roster and fun bac…

Blizzard is about to take a sledgehammer to the way Overwatch 2 is played. The change will take effect when season 9 launches later this month.

For the first time in the hero shooter’s history, every tank and DPS hero will heal themselves, loosening their reliance on support in a match. Through a new passive ability, tanks and DPS will gradually regain their health outside of active combat. It will be a “tuned-down version of the support self-healing passive,” game director Aaron Keller wrote in a blog post today. In addition to this, more changes to reduce “damage spikes in combat” will be detailed in another blog post closer to the season’s launch.

If I had to describe the current state of Overwatch 2’s balance in one word it would be turbulent. The most recent se…

Helldivers 2 just had its first balance update. While mechs are still en-route, this payload is certainly nothing to sniff at—especially since it’s still adding one major feature to the game: True to the game’s Starship Troopers inspiration, meteors are now a major concern for the hardworking patriots of Super Earth. I’m sure nothing bad will happen to Buenos Aires, though.

“Many planets now have additional environmental challenges that will appear at random while you are deployed, from fire tornadoes to meteor showers and many more,” the patch notes state. Helldivers 2 actually already had fire tornadoes in the planet of Hellmire—but as far as I can tell they were just background dressing. Until now, that is.

Eradicate missions—which were previously used a…

In June, poncle announced that the reverse bullet hell Vampire Survivors will finally be getting a couch co-op mode in August. Today we got a closer look at how it will work, along with the surprise announcement of new Steam-specific features that are actually live today.

Co-op play in Vampire Survivors is quite straightforward overall: It’s the same as the singleplayer mode, but with more people. Naturally, some concessions have to be made to accommodate the crowd, and they were spelled out today on the Xbox News Wire. Each player in co-op mode must choose a different character—”Having 4 Poes, O’Soles or Sigmas on screen would simply make the universe implode,” poncle senior marketing manager Geo Morgan explained—and while weapons can be chosen at will, the numb…

Kerbal Space Program is a game where you assemble cool things out of neat parts and then eventually break them on accident. The Lego hobby is about literally the same thing. Understandably, there’s more than a bit of crossover.

A new proposal on Lego’s Ideas fan design site has achieved the 10,000 supporter goal needed to be considered by Lego, and creator Sam67c has assembled an absolutely lovely collection of bricks and parts to make just about any early game craft that players of Kerbal Space Program would be familiar with. There’s even a trailer showing the set off.

Just look at that. The perfectly stacked piles of rocket parts are immediately familiar from my time playing Kerbal. The rocket cockpit modules in both one- and two-kerbal sizes to the batteries, probe comput…

It’s been no secret that shipments of gaming PCs and GPUs have been on a downward slide these past few years. On the other hand, high refresh rate gaming monitors have bucked that trend and sold like hot cakes on a frosty morning. However, market analysts International Data Corporation (IDC) are forecasting some significant changes once this year is over, with the growth in performance GPU shipments outstripping mainstream chips and gaming PCs.

The report from IDC paints a somewhat underwhelming picture for 2024, with shipments of normal gaming monitors falling roughly 4% compared to last year and total gaming PC shipments only increasing by a few percent. Premium gaming monitors (i.e. those with fresh rates greater than 165 Hz) are expected to improve by more than 20%, so …

Hades 2 released into early access earlier this month—and it’s been doing gangbusters, unsurprisingly. Supergiant has a sterling reputation behind it, with so much industry heft to every step it takes that other indie devs have already leapt out of the way of the game’s early access, considered a quasi-‘shadow drop’. 

I’ve apparently already sunk close to 30 hours into this thing (I just checked the stats now, and I’m left wondering when exactly that happened). I’ve beat Chronos up enough to wonder how many lessons I have to teach an old man, and I’m pretty content with what I’ve seen so far. Supergiant, however, seems to feel it can improve the game’s baseline mechanics before it really gets cooking on new content.

“Our first patch should be coming later this mon…

Baldur’s Gate 3‘s second act has a couple of very important decisions—so much so I wrote a whole dang guide on how to thread its particular narrative needle. Before I get stuck into it, spoilers for the game’s second act, in case the headline didn’t clue you in.

A Reddit thread optimistically titled “How to bamboozle Lady Shar” by rokamuda (thanks, Gamesradar) lays out how exactly this comedy of errors happened. “I made short work of Nightsong, saw the cutscene of Last Light Inn dome crumbling and got all of Lady Shar’s boons … as I exited through the portal I got the cutscene of Lady Shar cursing me for not completing my mission, being marked as the enemy, and Shadowheart asking forgiveness.”

Turns out, that’s down to the Disgu…

Hitman 3 was good enough to be our pick for the best stealth game of 2021, but the variety of different purchase options was also, as we noted in our newcomer’s guide, incredibly confusing. On January 26, that will change, as IO Interactive wraps the whole thing up into one big package called Hitman: World of Assassination.

Right now the Hitman 3 page on Steam offers the following:

• Hitman 3 Standard Edition 
• Hitman 3 Deluxe Edition – Includes Hitman 3 base game and Hitman 3 Deluxe Pack.
• Hitman Trilogy – Includes Hitman 3 base game, plus Access Pass DLC for Hitman 1 and Hitman 2.
• Hitman Trilogy Premium Add-Ons Bundle – Includes Hitman 3 Access Pass: Hitman 2 Expansion, Hitman…
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There’s something intriguing about islands floating way up in the clouds, especially if you can connect them with massive chains, pull them together, and build a city on top of them. That’s the idea in Myriads: Renaissance, a turn-based strategy game that’s got everything from city building to 4X to tower defense systems. There’s a free demo you can try now, and the full game is planning a Steam release on June 1.

I had a little go of the demo, which lets you play for 60 turns. Things went great for… well, about 50 of those turns. I began by building on the small collection of sky islands that comprised my airborne kingdom: a market to serve as my city center, a farm to generate food, a sawmill in the forest for wood, and a mine on a mountainous island to produce gol…

There’s a new Terminid threat on the horizon, and Super Earth doesn’t want us to know about it. Reports from Helldivers 2 players suggest a new type of enemy has joined the frey: a bug breed possibly called the “Shrieker.” They travel in packs, attack from the skies, and look annoying as heck.

That’s all been gleaned from a video shared on the Helldivers 2 subreddit by user Projectpatdc, who appeared very surprised to suddenly be attacked by an unknown Terminid foe. On Reddit, user Litnos has also shared a sighting, adding that the “Shriekers” appeared for them as a random side objective similar to Stalkers.

In the Reddit clip, Projectpatdc is in the middle of a standard refinery mission at level 5 difficulty when the Shrieker strafing begins. A single strike deals over half…

27 inches, 170Hz refresh, a quality IPS panel and 1440p native resolution. What more do you need from a gaming monitor? In a word, nothing, especially when you can have all that for just $189.

Yup, the Acer Nitro XV272U has been given the Amazon Prime Day treatment and as someone who reviews these things for a living, I can tell you it’s an absolute steal. In fact, the only problem is that Nvidia has recently decided that 1440p GPUs start at $599 in the RTX 4070.

• We’re curating all the best Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

The $399 RTX 4060 Ti is pitched as a 1080p GPU. And with just 8GB of VRAM running over a measly 128-bit bus, that’s pretty much correct. Luckily, you can currently grab an AMD …

Helldivers 2 has been suffering from success—a whirlwind launch that’s now PlayStation’s biggest PC success led to a swarm of server issues bugs, and not the kind you can shoot dead with a beam rifle.

Regardless, ambushed developer Arrowhead seems to be taking things in stride and, as PC Gamer’s own Fraser Brown notes: it’s already in better shape. From what I’ve seen and heard, Arrowhead owes its win to Helldivers 2 being a great bit of co-op shooter fun. Also (according to the game’s director and Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt) it aims to avoid the live-service pitfalls we’ve all come to loathe.

“We really applied ourselves to not make it p2w even though items are functionally different. The only item that’s p2w is the revolver—which will win you any ‘cool gun’ …

One weird demo out of the whole Steam Next Fest has charmed me, and for reasons I rarely get charmed by: It’s delightfully janky, strange, referential, and crude. Apocalypse Party is certainly chasing the roguelike action trend, but it’s so off-beat and willing to let you craft absurd combos to slaughter fantasy zombies and monsters that I ended up charmed instead of repulsed.

There’s not really a plot here. You’re some kind of interdimensional mercenary plucked by an angelic capybara from the brink of death to rescue a fantasy kingdom by defeating three demons. There’s no coherent aesthetic though. Weapons you find are as likely to be an assault rifle or machine gun as throwing knives or lightning spear or magic, returning throwing shield. Characters are like, a Hong Kong cop, a …

When Diablo 4 season 2, or the Season of Blood, begins on October 17, everyone playing a seasonal character will have to start over from scratch.

Season 1 characters will be kicked into the Eternal Realm, where non-seasonal characters live, with all their gold, items, and crafting materials. Any items that were in that character’s stash will transfer into a new withdraw-only chest that they can access from the Eternal Realm. The withdraw-only stash will hold your items until the end of season 2—which should be roughly three months long—before they’re permanently deleted. And any Malignant Hearts socketed into your gear or sitting in your bags will disappear in the process.

Some things will technically stay, though. Blizzard just announced that any rewards from ga…

Here’s one for those of us interested in the early days of home computing. UK based Retro Games is set to release the Atari 400 Mini, a modern take on the Atari 400 home computer, complete with a recreation of the classic Atari CX-40 joystick. And what a thing of beauty it is.

The system is a miniaturized version of the classic 8-bit Atari 400. It was released in 1979 and in many ways, was the first gaming PC. It had dedicated graphics and sound co-processors, upgradeable memory, plug-and-play peripherals and a membrane keyboard. It was regarded as being ahead of its time, but strong competition from Apple, Commodore and Tandy hampered its adoption. Additionally, its mostly closed software ecosystem led to a lack of development by third-party programmers. As a result, Atari’s 8-bi…

Day of the Devs has come a long way from its debut in 2012 as an indie games showcase hosted by Double Fine Productions and iam8bit. It’s now “a fully independent 501c3 non-profit,” which organizers say will make its fundraising efforts in support of indie developers “more transparent and public.”

The announcement of the shift to official non-profit status was accompanied by the start of Day of the Devs’ first fundraising campaign and details about its plans for 2024, including an in-person event in March in San Francisco, an online Summer Game Fest showcase, and then in winter a “Game Awards Edition” of Day of the Devs that will be both in-person and online.

“We have essentially always run things as a non-profit, but making it official—through a fiscal sponsorship par…

I didn’t have much hope for Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. Homeworld is an epic, star-spanning tale of survival and triumph amidst the blackness and mystery of interstellar space; Deserts of Kharak, on the other hand, is locked into a single dusty world by the combined forces of gravity and insufficient technological advancement. How could that possibly compare?

You can imagine my surprise, then, when Deserts of Kharak turned out to be really good: We gave it a very rare 90% score in our review, calling it “a great tactical RTS with all the gorgeous aesthetics and atmosphere of the original series.”

The point of all this buildup is that Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is now free for the week on the Epic Games Store, and it’s not one to be missed. Even if you’re not an RTS fan, …

An upcoming base-building RTS has an interesting twist: It’s zombie survival, but you can use map data imported from the real world. Infection Free Zone will let you establish and lead your titular zone in an area of your choosing. Like your hometown, for example.

Taking charge of your survivor groups, you’ll be able to form them into squads and work crews to start rebuilding civilization under your banner. At first that means a few things, like going house-to-house scavenging for supplies with your armed units while your civilians scuttle around for building materials. Later phases of the game promise to let you build walls, factories, science labs, and more.

A demo, out now, lets you play on one of a handful of real-world locales like Paris, Cambridge, and the like. The fu…

For the many flaws No Man’s Sky had at launch, I really liked the way it zeroed-in on the feeling of discovery. 

My first dozen hours of naming planets, scanning weird tentacle horses, and cataloging unremarkable rocks was a real delight, so it’s no surprise that Bethesda has something similar in the works with its epic space RPG, Starfield. We have, after all, been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, snapping Dewgong in Pokémon Snap or scanning Shadow Moses as Solid Snake. 

I am, however, a little surprised that Starfield’s version of scanning creatures doesn’t just remind me of seven-year-old No Man’s Sky, it looks almost exactly like it.

We saw a bit of Starfield’s scanning in action during last month’s Starfield D…

Things are looking desperate on the Western Front in Helldivers 2 as some players are trying to recruit soldiers to rush Mantes and stop the breakout in the Xzar sector, but their calls for aid aren’t being answered. 

Right now, the Major Orders in Helldivers 2 are directing soldiers toward Zagon Prime and Fori Prime to fight against the Terminid hordes. But as the fighting dies down on these planets, some are trying to turn attention towards Mantes, a planet in the Xzar sector that has seen constant threats from the Automaton forces—if it falls, then the rest of the sector will go with it. “The Automaton front needs reinforcements,” one recruitment poster reads. “Please redeploy to Mantes and save the Xzar sector.” 

A couple of players on Reddit have pointed…