I liked Still Wakes the Deep so much I gave it a four-star review, but with a change of focus it could have been so much more.

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Considering E3 is dead, an awful lot of it happened over the weekend. There were hours and hours of showcases including Xbox, Summer Game Fest, Wholesome Direct, and more. But who's got time to go through all that? Jim Trinca, that's who, because it's his job. And here's his definitive list of all the best reveals and featured games from this year's I Can't Believe It's Not E3. Other opinions are available.

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Remember the PS VR2? No? Well, there’s a reason for it to be on your radar now with Skydance's Behemoth slated for a fall 2024 release. And if you weren’t at all sure of Skydance Games’ upcoming endeavor, Eurogamer’s Ian Higton has tried it out and appears to have been pretty thrilled by the whole experience.

The PS VR2’s catalog isn’t the most impressive thing ever. There are plenty of solid VR games out there that are compatible with it; there’s even a VR port of Resident Evil Village, as well as Horizon Call of the Mountain and Gran Turismo 7. But Skydance’s Behemoth (which will also release on PC VR), looks to shake things up a bit.

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Welcome to Wishlisted, a showcase of our favourite demos from Steam Next Fest: June 2024. Check the video above or watch on YouTube.

Finding the Best NextFest Demos is all about the joy of discovery, but with so many Steam Next Fest demos getting released in such a short amount of time, it can be bewildering. So we’ve decided to show you our ten Best Steam Next Fest games which we think deserve your attention. These are all upcoming Steam Next Fest games that we’re genuinely excited for, and that we think should play nicely on PC handhelds too!

This is just the start of our Next Fest coverage. This week we'll be previewing loads of upcoming demos across the entire network - right here on VG247, of course, but also over on our sister sites Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun. Bookmark our Wishlisted Steam Fest hub to stay in the loop. And this is well before Next Fest actually starts, so you, dear reader, get to bask for a solid fortnight celebrating all the wonderful new games that are just around the corner. Enjoy!

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One-hundred episodes. 100 weeks of The Best Games Ever podcast. I can scarcely believe it. On a personal note, it's been wonderful to host this stupid, daft, funny, sometimes even informative show about games past and present, with its mad politics and meta-games, running gags, plot twists, special guests, and so on.

Tom asked me to host it on a freelance basis at first, and it was working with the brilliant VG247 team on this ad-hoc basis that convinced me to snap up the opportunity when he later invited me to put throw my hat in to replace the brilliant Dorrani Williams as VG247's Video Person. We're definitely not the biggest gaming podcast in the world, or England, or Basingstoke, but we are as far as I'm concerned one of the best.

Onto business, then. For the 100th episode we decided to come up with 100 episode topics and blow them all on one huge quiz round, with individual buzzers and everything. Inviting some favourite guests to return (Owen, Richie, and Burns) with the promise that, yes, however many points you score in this mammoth episode they will be added to your overall total for the series. If you want to know who came out on top, you'll have to wait for part two next week.

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They were supposed to keep people safe from the horrors of nuclear war and the ensuing, er, fallout, but Vault Tec had other plans.

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Prey featured portals before Portal, so watch as Eurogamer's Ian Higton steps aboard to revisit it in VR.

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Ever since Bethesda took a certain little-known isometric RPG for neckbeards and turned it into a huge mainstream phenomenon (thank you Bethesda), the Fallout brand has done Big Business. And so it has been roped into numerous cross-promotional schemes over the years, lending its iconic branding to all sorts of pointless adornments you can get for other games.

And also a pretty nifty Minecraft world, packed full of homages to key locations from the series, like a sort of blocky Fallout theme park. Hey, until they build Megaton at Universal Studios, that’s probably the closest you’ll get to such a thing. You’ll have to bring your own devilled eggs.

Check the video above for a nifty rundown of forgotten brand crossovers featuring Vault Boy, Codsworth, and Red Rocket showing up in other games, thanks to friend of VG247 Ian Higton off of Eurogamer!

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I have mixed feelings about the early access model. It’s a great way for studios to get projects off the ground, a much needed part of the funding mix in an age of ballooning budgets and perilously long development cycles. But as a consumer, you’re essentially paying to be a play tester. So while I’m glad it exists as one of the ways to get games made in the first place, I find it deeply unattractive as a proposition.

There are times, though, such as in the case of recent early access triumph Baldur's Gate 3, where it works beautifully for players as well as creators. Given that No Rest for the Wicked is similarly ambitious in scope, potentially offering vast and endless replayability following a 1.0 release, is it worth diving into sooner rather than later?

And what is it, exactly? A Soulslike? A Diablo clone? A Rogue-lite? For the video above I sat down with site contributor Sherif Saed, who’s been putting the game through its paces for some weeks, to find out exactly what the craic is.

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There's now a premium, extended version of this podcast that you can get as a VG247 paid subscriber - check out our Support Us page for more info. Doing so helps ensure that we can keep making the show! But don't worry if that's not for you, the main show will always be free.

You can’t say anything these days! Is what silly people say, a lot. You can actually say whatever you like. You can say, for example, and with confidence, that there are certain things you could get away with in gaming thirty years ago that simply wouldn’t fly now. Like… racing games with only one track. Platformers with a length of 20mins if you’re good at them. Games with terrible representation of anyone who isn’t a straight white male.

Attitudes and expectations change with time – sometimes it’s progress, sometimes it’s regression. But whatever the reason, it does lead to a lot of otherwise good games being cast into the shame cupboard of history. Games which would be a tough sell or borderline offensive now, but play great.

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Check out the video above for an in-depth appraisal of this very unique adventure, in which we ask the question: is it still possible for games to surprise us?

The high-tech world of game development has long had a fruitful creative partnership with the low-tech world of clay people being poked around all day in order to simulate movement. In the world of film, too, stop motion animation always seems to endure, despite the fact that it must be one of the hardest and most arduous ways of get moving images onto screens. There’s something gorgeously, lovably tactile about it which can’t quite be mimicked, and so it is seen as worth the extraordinary effort.

Harold Halibut is a deft blend of that hand-built aesthetic with modern video game animation that absolutely hits a sweet spot between the two, capturing the imperfect, organic essence of human-made art and imbuing it with life via motion capture and skilled cinematography. The result is something quite unlike anything I’ve played before, and a great marriage of art style and storytelling. The setting is a rattly old spaceship, submerged for centuries under an alien ocean, host to a remnant of human civilisation that is making the best of a bad situation. Of course it’s gnarled, and a bit wobbly, and tinged with a sense that none of the bulkheads quite fit together as well as they should.

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TV shows are alarmingly short these days. Long gone is the era of 26 episode seasons. Nowadays, you're lucky to get ten episodes per year of your favourite show. With Fallout, the absolute television event of the year, we've had to make do with just eight installments. Sure, that means there's very little fat or filler in there, but damnit, we just want to spend more time in the wasteland with those particular characters. Because, let's be frank, the TV show is great. Even the director of the original game thinks so.

Well, enter Zoe from our sister publication Eurogamer with this handy video guide for building Lucy MacLean, Maximus, and The Ghoul as your Fallout 4 protagonist, and just in time for the long-awaited current gen update coming next week. Sure, you'll have to fill in some of the gaps with your imagination, but that's what role playing is all about. This guide is for the vanilla game and doesn't utilise any mods, so console players are welcome to get stuck in.

So check out the video above. Anything to take the sting out of the long wait for season 2, right?

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Picture this. You're mythic raiding in World of Warcraft, and it's all on the line. Your DPS is good and your ability rotation is damn near perfect. This is the run. Your hard work is about to be rewarded with the post-boss logs showing you're a top tier player - one of the best, perhaps? Just then, your tank trips over the stack of pizza boxes near his desk and plummets to the ground, his $500 VR helmet slamming into the floorboards and concaving his face as his brain shoots out the back of his head. Unable to press Shield Wall, he dies and the raid wipes. You are left distraught as the healers are lectured on their poor performance.

This is just one of the many possibilities now at our fingertips with the release of a VR mod for World of Warcraft. Created by a gaggle of creators and posted for free on Github, the mod allows you to put yourself in the body of your undergeared Blood Elf mage and take off in a glorious adventure around Azeroth. See the wonder of the Stormwind tram yourself for the first time, farm Siege of Orgrimmar every week for 7 months for the mount and feel tears get trapped inside your tech goggles. Truly, this is an experience WoW has desperately needed.

Jokes aside, it does look like a decent bit of fun if you've got the hardware available, and as Eurogamer's Ian Higton showcased in their own video (which you can watch above) it seems to actually work reasonably well. Don't get the wrong idea - bringing this to progression raiding or M+ is deeply sinful behavior, but for a casual romp around your favourite zones? Why not! It's your sub, after all.

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Warning: the video above contains loads of spoilers for Fallout on Amazon Prime Video, in case that wasn’t already clear.

The Fallout TV show is finally with us, and it’s been a roaring success by any metric. The reviews are glowing (including our very own), a second season is all but confirmed, and people are flocking back to the games having been reminded just how much they love the world of this bleak, beautiful, borderline deranged post-apocalyptic universe.

Still, it wasn’t perfect: though the consensus is strongly favourable, not everyone is completely enamoured with the show. More than a few viewers are concerned about the effect it has had on the continuity of the games, and some are even convinced that it has effectively deleted the beloved Fallout: New Vegas from the canon entirely. Which is patently untrue, but Reddit’s gonna Reddit.

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Dragon's Dogma 2 is an early but solid contender for GOTY – we said that might be the case during preview, and we’re certain of it now. It’s a game of uncompromised vision, and where the original looked at the likes of Fable and Oblivion and asked “what does Capcom’s version of that look like?”, the sequel responds: “why don’t we make Capcom’s version of Dragon’s Dogma instead?”.

The original game is full of compromises. Content cut short for time or RAM. An entire planned beast race that never made it in. Only two inhabited settlements, one of them a tiny tutorial village. And squeezed onto creaking hardware that could barely run it. Well, the more things change, etc. To anyone with an interest in the original game and its development, it’s clear that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a labour of love, and a hugely successful do-over for an idea that didn’t quite materialise on the first attempt.

Which is why, as explained in the video above, I’m not convinced by the circulating idea that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is some kind of cynical money-grab. Yes, the microtransactions are stupid, pointless, and opportunistic. But if they’re a dealbreaker, that’s a whole lot of baby getting thrown out with the bath water.

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There's now a premium, extended version of this podcast that you can get as a VG247 paid subscriber - check out our Support Us page for more info. Doing so helps ensure that we can keep making the show! But don't worry if that's not for you, the main show will always be free.

Inspired by the (frankly excellent) Fallout TV show, this week on VG247's Best Games Ever podcast I've tasked my colleagues with finding the best game where a family member ditches you. With the prerequisite understanding that none of them are allowed to pick Fallout 3, the quintessential "dad's buggered off" simulator.

As it turns out, being forsaken by a family member is a fairly common scenario in video games, especially if you widen the concept of family out to any sort of fraternity or gang. Which didn't stop racer-obsessed Mark trying to crowbar in a Burnout game, of all things. Or Tom from bringing up the usual guff. To find out which specific guff, you'll have to watch or listen to this, which is presumably what you're doing here in the first place, which means I've essentially wasted the last five minutes of my life typing this out. Thanks for that. Thanks. I could have spent that doing something nice, like cradling my laughing child, or eating crisps, or any number of things that we do while the reaper waits.

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Inspired by the recent free drop of current viral sensation Content Warning – a co-op survival “shooter” about making spooky FauxTube videos with three of your mates – this week’s Best Games Ever podcast is all about freebies that we’d happily pay for.

It’s a happy coincidence that this topic coincides with the launch of our extended podcast: a paid version of the show which includes an extra segment where you get to heart the host’s pick, and its subsequent demolishing by the rest of the panel. To paraphrase one recent YouTube commenter, “so this is the idiot whose opinions you plan to monetise?”. Well, yes, but the point is that they get kicked around like a sheep’s bladder, so I’m actually nobly offering myself up as the waste organ in question. For more information on how to become a paid VG247 subscriber, which comes with other benefits such as silky-smooth ad-free browsing, check out our Support Us page.

Anyway, some rules for this episode are: we’re talking about actual free games. Not free-to-play games that aren’t actually free once you factor in the entire economic model. So free as in beer, not free as in The NHS. Also, stealing doesn’t count, Connor.

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Horizon Forbidden West just arrived on PC, along with its Burning Shores expansion. Forbidden West is only the latest PlayStation 5 first-party title to make the jump to PC, but this is a special release, thanks to its implementation of leading Nvidia tech.

DLSS is the big news here, particularly DLSS 3’s frame generation technology, which brings a new dimension to the discussion of framerate and resolution. Jim tested the game using an Nvidia RTX 4070 Super - an upper-midrange GPU. As part of the RTX 40 Series line-up, of course, the 4070 Super gets full access to the latest DLSS advancements.

Even without using upscaling, Forbidden West has a well-optimised PC port that you can run without compromising on framerate or resolution. But you can do even better, and that’s where DLSS can really push it into territory that’s years ahead of PS5. As you can see in the video, Jim ran the game natively, using DLSS upscaling, and later with frame generation. When you see the game maxed out and running as smooth as it does, it honestly feels like cheating.

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There's a lot to love about Dragon's Dogma 2, obviously. The game is a cut above a lot of other games we've seen come out in recent months (yeah I'm including Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth too), and we reckon it's due to some truly unique quirks and charming little features you can find sprinkled all over Capcom's latest action RPG. You want an example? For my money, you've got to love the live action cooking scenes.

That's why I was pleasantly surprised when the good folks over at Eurogamer ranked each of the cooking cutscenes in order of worst to best, which you can watch in the video above! Not only is it packed full of meat puns (as you'd expect), but it'll also help you get a troublesome achievement / trophy if you follow it along yourself.

Obviously the rotten meat goes at the bottom but you may be surprised which ranks near the top. This reminds me of a university story. Did you know one of my old flat mates once ate undercooked sausages in front of four people, and pretended they were cooked? We were making fun of him not being able to cook sausages properly, and instead of admiting he couldn't even over-cook food, he forced his way through three raw sausages to prove a point. He was later ill, obviously. He didn't even get a trophy for it - he flunked out of third year I think. £25,000 down and no trophy...

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Yeah, get a load of that headline, art people. With your paintbrushes, your easels, and your pointless degrees. We, a group of people with equally expensive degrees that might honestly be a tiny bit more useless have made some art using Dragon's Dogma 2's very nice character creator.

Obviously there's more to DD2 than just trying to recreate your nan, or your cat, or your favorite member of the Bee Gees, but quite frankly, you can get lost in just picking your nose all on its own. So, that's what we've gone and done.

Jim and his friend, er, let me look this up, Owen O'Donnell of The Infinite Review, teamed up to take a look at some of the characters us at VG247 and a couple of other people who either are or have been associated with Gamer Network at some point in time have created in Dragon's Dogma 2. Every character showcased and analysed in the kind of depth you can only expect from a man who actively grimaces whenever he has to reveal his own pick on our podcast - despite the fact he's in control of it - and one of that man's mates was definitely created in Dragon's Dogma 2.

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Big Western style open-world RPGs from beloved Japanese studios who tend to be known for other things (inhale) are like buses: there's none for ages, and then two come along at once! See also: Clinton-era disaster movies about Earth getting clobbered by an asteroid. See also: Clinton-era disaster movies about America getting clobbered by volcanoes. See also: those ones about the White House (former home of Bill Clinton) getting clobbered by some guys with guns. I dunno. You don't read this anyway.

Listen. It's just an excuse for everyone to shout at me. Listen at your own inconvenience here.

Stay tuned for a new episode of The Best Games Ever Show every Friday. Subscribe right here on VG247, or wherever you get your podcasts:

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Final Fantasy 16: The Rising Tide - the game's second DLC - takes place before the ending of the main game. Square Enix has revealed that fans will be able to play the DLC from April 18, bought on its own or as part of the existing Expansion Pass. Either way, you'll need to also own the original game.

"An unmarked letter arrives at the hideaway containing a most curious request: the Dominant of Leviathan, the long-lost Eikon of Water, needs rescue," Square Enix says. "To heed this call, Clive and his companions must journey to Mysidia - a hidden land under a blue sky - where they will uncover the tragic history of a forgotten people."

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You might be aware that things are changing here at Gamer Network. As well as a certain looming sale that became public knowledge a few weeks back, we're also shuffling things around to unify our video teams from across all the brands, making a sort of videography supergroup that encompasses everyone from Dicebreaker to Eurogamer.

That may not really be important to you folks, but it means I get to work more often with our friends across the network, which includes showing up for Eurogamer's Dragon's Dogma 2 livestream with Ian Higton, whose work I've long been a fan of.

On Thursday, we teamed up to take a look at the opening hours of Dragon's Dogma 2, including pawn creation, early side quests, and making that precarious initial journey to the capital city. Having already started my own playthrough about a week earlier, it was fascinating to see just how much of the early-game content I'd missed, and how much I'd stumbled upon that Ian hadn't. There are many forks in the road in Dragon's Dogma 2, as ever.

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Dragon's Dogma 2 and Rise of the Ronin are both “western style” open world games from acclaimed, beloved Japanese studios who don’t usually do this sort of thing. On paper, they have a lot of similarities: deep combat systems, vast landscapes to explore, visuals that push current gen consoles to the limit, and an intrinsic love of cats. In practice, despite their obvious crossover appeal, they’re wildly different beasts.

So, which should you buy? Well, if you haven’t got a PS5, the question is moot on account of Rise of the Ronin being a PlayStation exclusive. But assuming you’ve got a PS5, which should you buy? Our expert reviewers Alex Donaldson and Sherif Saed have joined me in the comparison video above to help you decide for yourself. Contains loads of gameplay footage. Like and subscribe etc.

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Marvel Games has a new video game due in 2025, and it's Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. If you ask us it's looking pretty great, at least going on this story trailer.

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra is an original story featuring a number of Marvel greats, including Captain America and Black Panther. The game, in development at Skydance New Media, is being headed by industry great Amy Hennig.

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Please enjoy this week's Best Games Ever Podcast, your Tuesday lunchtime pick-me-up panel show where a bunch of regular guests try to convince me, the host, that their Gaming Opinion is the best one. This week I'm asking the question: what's the best game that's an unofficial adaption of a movie or TV show?

I already know what you're thinking, but no: not a single person put forward Deadly Premonition as an unofficial adaptation of Twin Peaks. Or Alan Wake as an unofficial adaptation of Twin Peaks. Or Life is Strange (Twin Peaks). Or Silent Hill (Twin Peaks). Or, er, Link's Awakening? Nope, no, that's enough Reddit for today.

It’s clear from Helldivers 2’s marketing that the game is directly inspired by Blair-era Dutch arthouse anti-war movie Starship Troopers. It’s also clear from playing it that Warhammer 40,000 and the future war bits of Terminator have made their mark on the project, and with its sprawling, player led, strictly PVE campaign engendering a keen sense of community among players, it’s rather like a wholesome war-themed social club for 90s teenagers. As a Nearly 40 it feels laser-targeted at my exact levels of pop culture cutoff, shooting skill, and associated decrepitness.

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Check out the video above, in which dolls are smashed with hammers, and one of us is Injured For Real!

A while back, THQ Nordic made the questionable decision of inviting myself, Jim, and Connor to a real life haunted house experience inspired by the upcoming Alone in the Dark reboot. This haunted house - a particularly fancy, albeit rundown mansion on the Thames - was definitely an experience that we won't be forgetting anytime soon, mainly because we ended up accidentally breaking a few things we shouldn't have ever been allowed near.

While taking on the role of urban explorers, we were sent into this derelict mansion to acquire a family heirloom of great value, but we ended up finding a lot more than we bargained for. From half-eaten tins of sweetcorn and the 'shame room' to monsters that resemble stink-bugs and talking dolls. We learnt a lot about what it means to be a bit of a Ghostbuster that night, as well as whether or not we think Genshin Impact or World of Warcraft players have better personal hygiene.

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It's been long and arduous road to something resembling a worthy adaptation of Frank "dirty" Herbert's sand-based epic Dune, but with the recent release of Denis Villeneuve's Dune 2, we can safely call that one done. I just hope we get enough sequels for the films to start covering such nonsense as half-worm emperors and chair dogs.

Aside from the various video game adaptations of Dune - from classic RTS games to modern upcoming survival games - there have been plenty of games that effectively use the desolation and devastation of desert sand. Who can forget the arresting third act of Uncharted 3, or the Tatooine section of KOTOR, or the grand majesty of Assassin's Creed Origins, with its ambitious recreation of sun-drenched North Africa?

But which sandy game is the best one, according to our lovely panel? If Alex Donaldson was in this episode, he'd have picked Fifty Cent: Blood on the Sand, but he isn't. To find out what was actually pitched, listen to The Best Games Ever Podcast!

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Final Fantasy is an anthology series of sorts: narratively speaking, the majority of FF games are standalone experiences with a unique set of locations and characters. There are a handful of recurring elements and themes, but for the most part, each new Final Fantasy saga starts from scratch in a brand new world. And that’s a huge part of the charm.

In this video, our resident JRPG obsessive Alex Donaldson argues that Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is one of the best Final Fantasy games ever released precisely because it’s building on a strong foundation: 2020’s Remake, certainly, with its incredible combat system and jaw-dropping production design, but also the 1997 original which it so deftly reimagines, and its plethora of spin-offs.

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If you're anything like me, nothing makes you lose interest in a game quicker than the words "always online". Or "free-to-play". Or "connected experience", or whatever other marketing terms they've come up with for "live service grindfest that sucks". Sometimes they don't even tell you upfront that it's a GAAS title, leaving it up to the prospective audience to divine this information from visual cues in gameplay trailers like... three distinct types of in-game currency, numbers popping out of enemies heads, and the whole thing having that unmistakable whiff of a project that no involved creative could ever muster real enthusiasm for. The core of a good idea spoiled by shareholder demands. Etc.

It wouldn't be so bad if every single effing game didn't seem to ship with live service elements nowadays. But still, sometimes a s**t sandwich comes with sprinkles, and people can enjoy any old muck if they have to. Which brings us to the topic of today's Best Games Ever Podcast: what's the best live service game you begrudgingly like? Could it be Destiny 2, the series that many hold responsible for this genre? Could it be Genshin Impact, the poster-child for F2P games that are Good Actually? Or could it be Diablo 4, which leverages a beloved ARPG brand to lure people into its miasma of micro (and macro) transactions?

To find out, you'll have to watch or listen to this podcast, and you can do either via the methods listed handily below these messages:

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The Best Games Ever podcast is a game show where three regular panellists have to find the best game in a weirdly specific category such as "Best game with a named horse", or "Best game with a terrible British accent". They have to pitch their pick to our host, Jim, who then decides the winner. But there's a lot of office politics, backstabbing, and meta-gaming going on which makes this mild-mannered panel game fraught with real danger.

Physical game releases have been in danger of disappearing for a long time, what with Steam all but killing the PC optical drive, a cheaper discless PS5, and the rumoured incoming Xbox Series refresh which will do away with bluray even on the premium model. They're not likely to die off entirely: there will always be holdouts in the die-hard enthusiast sector, there are still people releasing Mega Drive carts now in 2024.

But there will come a time when, for all intents and purposes, the era of major game releases on disc will come to an end. It makes sense for publishers. It makes sense for the environment. It makes sense for people trying to live in a small flat (hello). But it will be a shame when it finally succumbs to the inevitable, because there's nothing quite like the tactile appeal of holding a new game box. Reading the manual on the bus home. Slipping it in amongst its new shelf siblings in the correct alphabetical order, its colourful spine adding to the cacophony of Cool Logos that adorn your living space. Digital libraries try to simulate this, but they just don't scratch that particular itch.

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This week The Shiitake Show asks: what's the point of Xbox? That's not us being sarcastic or snide. It's a question that everyone in the industry, not least Microsoft themselves, needs to find an answer to. A conflicted, convoluted vision for the platform has left it struggling for an identity at the dawn of a future it is trying to forge for us all, one where the console itself no longer matters. And yet, Xbox still needs us to buy Xboxes. It's a tricky position to be in, compounded by the perception that Xbox doesn't have any compelling exclusives. Watch below.

That’s not to say the Series X and S aren’t fine machines. They absolutely are – yes, even the “underpowered” and much maligned Series S, which I’ve been a big advocate for in the past and will continue to be because, in a nutshell, it’s the most bang-per-buck deal in gaming. A lot of people pointed to the Baldur’s Gate 3 fiasco as a big indicator that the Series S was Bad Actually. As things stand right now, the plucky machine is by a considerable margin the cheapest place to play Baldur’s Gate 3. And Cyberpunk 2077. And Starfield. And every existing or future current-gen only game, excluding PS5 exclusives and the odd rarity that never makes it off PC. For a box that costs half as much as a decent low-mid range GPU, that’s incredible.

But if you already have a halfway decent GPU sitting inside a halfway decent PC, you simply don’t need an Xbox. Not even the cheap one, such is the business model of Xbox Everywhere. PC Game Pass essentially delivers the entire Xbox experience as a handy little Windows app. Hell, you don’t even need a proper PC: if you own a Steam Deck and have ten minutes of free time, you can get Game Pass running via Xcloud, and very nicely too. Microsoft provides an official guide for the procedure. It even includes bespoke artwork.

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The Best Games Ever podcast is a game show where three regular panellists have to find the best game in a weirdly specific category such as "Best game with a named horse", or "Best game with a terrible British accent". They have to pitch their pick to our host, Jim, who then decides the winner. But there's a lot of office politics, backstabbing, and meta-gaming going on which makes this mild-mannered panel game fraught with real danger.

This week, inspired by the recent release (finally) of £70 quadruple-A experience Skull & Bones, we're asking: what's the best Pirate Game that isn't Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag? We're asking like that because of two things:

1) Black Flag is arguably the best pirate game of all time. Well, it's either Black Flag or Sid Meier's Pirates!, and the latter isn't connected to a recent game launch, so.

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Curious about Rise of the Ronin, but not into souls-likes? Well, VG247 contributor Sherif is here to assure you that if you skipped Team Ninja's games in the past because of their reputation for uncompromising difficulty, Rise of the Ronin might just be your ticket in. Check out our video here:

Look, let’s face it, even if you’re into souls-likes you might be getting sick of them at this point. And for people like me (cowards) they've always been frankly too much bother. But, like all things with aspirations for long-term survival, the souls genre is changing. Elden Ring ushered in a new era of open-worldiness for FromSoft's signature style, and it seems that Team Ninja have taken that ball and ran with it, even cribbing elements from other, decidedly not-soulsy games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, The Witcher 3, and even Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

This naturally lends itself to being less punishing. Now that you’re no longer funnelled toward boss encounters, you can take your time. Maybe come back when you’ve got a bigger gun (there’s guns in this).

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Sometimes it's just really baffling why certain games are popular. And you wonder to yourself if it's just because you're broken in some way. What malfunction or defect from birth would lead someone to, say, think Horizon Zero Dawn is a load of cobblers?

We're here to assure you that it's fine, actually, to just not get Mass Effect. To look on in bewilderment as your colleagues all obsess over Death Stranding. To be left cold by everyone's incessant overtures about Breath of the Wild. Some things just aren't for you! And that's ok! The healthy way to deal with it is to accept that you're just, in some small way, better or smarter or more discerning than everyone else.

But which of our distinguished panel has picked the best game that everyone except them loves? To find out, watch this. Watch this!

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What's the best game that has no business being brought up on a podcast that's all about the Best Games Ever? If you can get your head around that, you're already way ahead of our regular panel.

Some of the worst games ever made are also the most interesting. Take Night Trap, for example: it's arguably one of the most important games in the history of the medium. Questions were asked about it in congressional hearings: it was, despite narrative overtures to the contrary, a peeping-tom simulator where you, the player, spied on a house full of teenage girls having a sleepover via a bank of (extremely rubbish quality) video feeds. Your objective was ostensibly to save the girls from vampires, or something, but it doesn't matter, because few people actually played Night Trap and even fewer would admit it.

What's interesting about it is that it caused such a moral panic in the US that it led directly to video games having their own age ratings systems, which is an important thing in the evolution of the medium, because now it's an accepted fact that the video game audience isn't solely comprised of impressionable children. Which means we get mature, grown-up games like The Last of Us, which is about headshotting zombies and chucking bricks.

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By our counting, this is episode 84 of the Best Games Ever Podcast. That's a lot, and probably isn't accurate. We hope you like listening as much as we like making the show. And with that little bit of friendly chat, it's time to announce that in a few weeks we're going to launch an extended version of the show that you'll have to pay for. "Oh, no," you say. "Not them too!" you add, as you clutch your wallet and let out a single sob. One tear slowly wipes its way down your cheek.

Right, listen. This is a new segment. We're not taking anything away from people who just don't want to pay. Each week Jim will name the game he would have picked if he was allowed to pick a game, and the rest of us will tell him why that is a bad choice (most likely).

The good news is that for this week (and next) we're giving this new section away completely free of charge. What a bargain! The bad news is that after that it'll cost you about £30 a year or £3 a month. So when you think about it, it's not even bad news, given how cheap it is. And we stress, we're not taking anything away - the core show remains as it was.

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So much STUFF game out in 2023 - we had The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a new Baldur's Gate 3, a Skyrim sequel which introduced such innovations to the series as Guns and Boring. I'm talking about Starfield. And you knew that, but I have to spell it out in the body text because a certain tech giant has taken wordplay, nuance, and creativity out onto the back porch and shot them all in the head as a sacrifice to the god of Endless Growth. Which doesn't exist. The god, or the concept. Heh! We even got a sequel to Dead Island (it was called Dead Island 2).

Some of the very best games frankly of all time came out last year. Outrageously, though, many of them came and went with minimal fanfare, because within DAYS of their release, the news and hype cycle was onto the next thing. Whether that was yet another huge, record-breaking franchise entry or a team getting laid off after having made one. Yes, for the games industry, last year ruled and sucked in equal measure. It truly was the best of times and the worst of times.

Anyway, the point is, there were so many amazing games coming out last year that you've forgotten most of them. And of those games you forgot, which is the best? Let's find out by asking our panel, Rebecca Jones, Connor Makar, and Alex Donaldson. They're experts, honest. They like video games for a living.

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With Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Ubisoft has deftly proved two things that many capital-G Gamers are vocally skeptical about. Firstly, that Ubisoft itself is a powerhouse of creative talent, and not just a bloatware shop. Yes, the publisher has become synonymous with “long”, “bland”, “formulaic”, and other disdainful adjectives. Its flagship Assassin’s Creed franchise, itself arguably a spin–off of Prince of Persia, has seen the games grown to frankly unmanageable proportions, boasting multiple hundreds of hours of gameplay padded out by excessive icon janitoring and copy/pasted environments. However, it seems as though Ubi is serious about righting the ship, and ditching the stifling mandate of content for content’s sake. The Lost Crown is only as long as it needs to be, and is an extremely lovingly designed game to boot.

The second thing Ubisoft has proved is that it is possible to cater adequately to hardcore players who relish a challenge, and the rest of us mere mortals who are time poor, possibly arthritic, and extremely not in the market for having content blocked off by skill filters.

Check the video below to get an idea of how Prince of Persia is catering to all kinds of player, no matter their ability:

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What is our GOTY? Well, because the question is so subjective, we don't really like to just pick one. What we prefer to do instead is have one for each of our staff, so we can celebrate more of the year's most deserving games over the holiday season. And in a banner year for GOTY candidates such as this, even just whittling it down to a list of eight proved to be an agonising process.

Other websites call this "cheating", but to paraphrase Tim Blake Nelson in Syriana, cheating is how we win. So deal with it, "other websites".

First off it's our resident horror connoisseur Kelsey Raynor with an ode to Alan Wake 2, a game she liked instantly as an existing fan of Remedy's work, and which she grew to love as a uniquely modern horror experience that pushes boundaries on technical and artistic levels. It even managed to warp reality itself, in a thematically fitting twist. Bloody hell, no wonder it won big at this year's Game Awards.

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Here's your very first look at GTA 6 in the debut GTA 6 trailer, the next entry in the GTA franchise from Rockstar, coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2025.

The GTA 6 trailer showcasing the setting and some of the characters you'll encounter in the game, including a main character named Lucia.

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It was bound to happen, really. Following Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar's open world tour de force which was equal parts Grand Theft Horsey and Sad Man Dies Slowly Of Tuberculosis, we sort of expected Grand Theft Auto to skew a little more grown up for its next outing. And from the looks of the trailer, it looks like that expectation has held up:

That's not to say the trailer is devoid of humour. Far from it. GTA 6 is clearly sending up America's culture of excess, celebrity, and vapid obsession with fame as it always has done. But the unhinged side of GTA seem like more of a backdrop here than the main event. The main story, apparently concerning a Bonnie and Clyde partnership of lovers who go around robbing places, is presented in the trailer as having some nuance and depth. An understated performance from the protagonists, and even some tenderness between them.

That's kind of a big deal, because GTA doesn't really do tenderness. None of the couples in GTA actually like each other. Friends and business partners are always one mission away from screwing each other over. People cheat on each other as a matter of course. Because, traditionally, every GTA character is basically a cartoon. Not a real person in any meaningful sense: a caricature of a typically selfish, decadent westerner, criminal or otherwise. Even Niko Bellic, GTA 4's tragic lead whose entire story is about failing to live the American Dream, is an unapologetic murderer. And that's fine, GTA is GTA.

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We finally have our first proper glimpse of GTA 6, Rockstar's next magnum opus, and it looks to be a huge sprawling epic set in a new version of Vice City that's far grander and more intricately detailed than we've ever seen before. Considering the last time we visited it was the PS2 era, Atomic Kitten were still in the charts, and half the people who work on this website were still in nappies, it's a pretty mindblowing upgrade.

That's what, three generations since the GTA: Vice City? And what's perhaps more striking than the scope and scale of the city is the quality of the character models. The photorealistic skin and hair, the dazzlingly lifelike animation: things have definitely come a long way since the original 3D rendition of Florida's jewel in the mud. Obviously. It's been over twenty years. But Rockstar wasn't exactly known for its character work back then. Cars and buildings? They had that nailed. Urban cityscapes? Completed it. Faces that don't look like potatoes? We'll get back to you. Separated fingers? Uh, look mate, take it or leave it yeah.

So it's astonishing to see how far GTA 6 has leapt ahead of almost everything else we've seen, not just in technical terms, but in terms of artistry. Seeing this footage removes any doubt as to why it's been so long since the last big GTA release: the amount of blood and sweat (and money) being leathered into this game is obscene.

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LEGO is coming to Fortnite, and in a big way. A brand new LEGO experience can be found in Fortnite from December 7, giving Fortnite fans new and old something different to play.

Early info suggests LEGO Fortnite is a survival game of some sort, but we'll need to wait until December 7 to get our hands on the game.

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In this overview trailer you'll find out what's new in World of Warcraft Classic's Season of Discover. The update includes new level caps, new quests, new monsters, and PvP activities. Plus there's new end-game content and new role-defining abilities.

Season of Discovery is out now for WoW Classic.

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Video game comedy is as old as the medium itself. There were text adventures running on mainframes over forty years ago that were packed with gags, and even sophisticated meta humour about fantasy tropes. Ask any Old Git to name a genuinely funny video game and they’ll probably cite Monkey Island, maybe Conker’s Bad Fur Day, or perhaps The Stanley Parable if they’re a connoisseur. There are countless others. Half of them involve Tim Schafer in some capacity.

The vast majority of gags in video games are delivered in a way that is borrowed from other mediums. That is to say, you either read them or hear them spoken aloud. Jokes are often delivered in parallel with gameplay, but seldom as an expression of the medium’s fundamentals. Lethal Company may be one of the most pure expressions of comedy in gaming that has ever been conceived. It has excellent comic timing and a capacity for ambulatory based humour that compares to the likes of Rowan Atkinson or John Cleese.

And make no mistake: it’s designed to be funny in some very specific and crafty ways that go way beyond the emergent fun time laughs that can arise from any kind of multiplayer session with friends. Check out our latest video series above, in which we fail repeatedly to meet our sales quota, but are too busy laughing at the various comic misadventures, silly walks, and absurdist situations (all this effort for a brass bell? Seriously?) to really be all that cut up about our shocking lack of progress.

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Season OG of Fortnite continues, but don't worry fans of Season 9 and X: previous ways to play Fortnite that will return in the v27.11 Nov 23 hotfix.

Fortnite Battle Royale is a completely free 100-player PvP shooter than has taken over the world. There's one huge map and the last player standing wins.

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Teardown has been in early access since we were still taking covid seriously, and has enjoyed a lively development period with constant updates and a very active community on Steam. This is great for console players, because it has now launched on PS5 and Xbox Series with all the refinements, quality of life options, and mission content that the PC now enjoys. Check the video below to see how it runs on PlayStation in 60fps performance mode: quality and 120fps modes are available, and all of them have raytracing enabled by default (it's a special voxel type of raytracing that is baked into the game's custom engine, and it looks incredible).

There's even a selection of curated mods available, with more apparently on the way, so console players aren’t completely shut out of what is arguably the PC’s best advantage. Mod Pack #1 is a free DLC on the PlayStation and Xbox stores which includes popular add-ons such as a dog companion, a space station, a GTA-inspired Californian beach house, and even a super-powered vacuum cleaner: essential in a game that generates more scattered debris than the Luftwaffe.

There's a healthy selection of premium DLC on the way too, with the currently available Time Campers campaign and several others planned, all included with a £24.99 season pass.

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Multiple Game Awards nominee Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece of horror and interactive storytelling. It’s arguably the medium at its peak: a confluence of technology, talent, and ambition that could only have happened this gen, and given how long we’ve waited since the first game, something that could well have not happened at all.

So what makes Alan Wake 2 special? Well, there’s dozens of things it does well, but here’s five things that we think it does better than any other horror game, and that make it quintessentially Remedy:

If you’re too busy to watch the video above, here’s a quick summary of Kelsey’s notes:

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The Zelda games are a patchwork of influences from the wider world of fantasy. Its most obvious inspiration is Studio Ghibli, particularly Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke. And there's more than a little Peter Pan in there too.

Given that The Legend of Zelda is already heavily inspired by film, does it even have anything to meaningfully contribute to that medium? It's not a million miles away from the Uncharted issue: Uncharted is, essentially, Indiana Jones in game form. It wears that influence on its sleeve, and it works beautifully as a leaping off point for the games. But when Uncharted becomes a movie, it's basically just an Indiana Jones clone. And a second-rate one at that.

So, can Zelda make the transition to the big screen without becoming a pale shadow of other, better fantasy films? Or is it possible that director Wes Ball and producers Avi Arad and Shigeru Miyamoto can make something truly great? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Bristol is unlikely to be the focus of a gaming news story. Not unless they do another Wallace & Gromit game, or something. So imagine our surprise when the news hit last week that Honkai: Star Rail, the turn based gacha mega-hit from the same stable as the unstoppable Genshin Impact, was doing a promotional meal deal with… Miss Millie’s. A fried chicken chain that barely exists outside of the city. Of the handful of franchises it has outside of the South West, only two are participating in the promotion.

So, if you’re lucky enough to live in Bristol, Wellington (near Taunton), Eastbourne, or Southampton, you can head over to Millie’s and order two “Astral Express Megabite Meals” to qualify for two holographic tickets that grant special in-game items, plus a special promotional standee that’s about six inches high and features the game’s chief characters, Dan Heng and March 7th, loitering in a generic fast food shop and eating some Assorted Grub. We’re assuming they have to keep it vague because this same material has to work in Miss Millies, Dominos in France, and even Wendy’s in Japan.

Yes, Dominos and Wendy’s, those fast food giants whose reach and market penetration make them a fitting match for one of the biggest F2P games of all time. It’s extra baffling, then, that Miss Millies has managed to nab this promotion in the UK. An institution in Bristol, but probably less well known than Chicken Cottage generally.

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Like many of you probably are, I’m still surprised that Final Fantasy 7 Remake ever saw the light of day, given how it seemed like it had been in development hell since Square showed that old demo of the original Midgar intro running on PS3 spec hardware. 1000 lifetimes ago in video game terms. I’m even more surprised, frankly, that we’re seeing Part II, Rebirth, within a decade of the first instalment.

It’s not actually that surprising though, as Alex notes in his preview and in the video above. Rebirth doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Rather, it builds on the solid foundation set up by Remake, which arrived at the end of the PS4’s life and proved to be one of the most impressive looking games on the machine. Assets have been reused and retooled, character models are pretty much the same level of quality.

The game’s systems and mechanics, too, have been iterated rather than rebuilt from scratch: even the new Synergy attacks are something that already appeared, albeit in a more basic form, in FF7 Remake Intergrade on the PS5.

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We all know why you're here - you wanna see some gruesome fatalities in the new Mortal Kombat game. It's okay - we're all friends here. With Mortal Kombat 1's release, we've got a huge number of new MK1 fatalities to check out. That being said, a lot of them are locked away behind character levels this time around, meaning in order to see them all you'll need to grind out a bunch of matches.

With that in mind, if you've still got a taste for some bloody murder, we've created a video montage of all the Mortal Kombat 1 fatalities you unlock straight away. Each character gets one from the get-go, so there should be enough to whet your appetite! For a few minutes of gory glory, watch the video embedded above!

If you've not jumped into Mortal Kombat in some time, you can see me on occasion fumble a few of the inputs. Thankfully, easy fatality tokens are available to players, albeit in limited supply. For what it's worth, they aren't particularly difficult to pull off, granted you've got a good idea of the various ranges required for each one and take your time on the directional inputs.

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I was asked to unbox the Lies of P Deluxe Edition on the basis that I'm a puppet and so was Pinocchio, which I found crass, given that Pinocchio was one of the stringy ones and I am one of the ones with a hand up the backside. However I reluctantly agreed despite this in order to spend more time with my horrid son Vespasian (no relation).

What I found within was a copy of the game (useful for playing the game) and some other things. An art book was one of the things. It has concept art from before they started properly making the game. When people make games they often draw them first just to pretend, like when you used to draw a girlfriend.

The art is good, it's properly coloured in and everything (mostly within the lines). There is also some codes for "digital content" such as in-game items and the Sound Track, which I am not bothered about because I only like Fleetwood Mac and that one song by Alphaville. I do not like Foxy Lady by Jimi Hendrix so don't ask, as I am sick of those kinds of crass assumptions etc.

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It’s the $7.5bn dollar question: is Starfield good enough to make people buy an Xbox? It’s a platform that’s been frustratingly lacking in killer apps, but we’re starting to see the tide turn on that front, and Bethesda’s latest opus is a key title in Xbox’s line-up going forward. In the video below James and I discuss whether it’s good enough to warrant owning a Series S or Series X console:

Starfield didn’t start life as an Xbox exclusive: it became one as a result of Microsoft’s highly publicised acquisition of Bethesda Softworks back in September 2020. Or March 2021, depending on whether or not you consider announcing the intent to buy something and actually buying it the same thing.

This put some noses out of joint, because a lot of people love Bethesda games, and a high percentage of them are PlayStation users. All of a sudden, folks who were quite content to not own an Xbox now found themselves facing the terrifying prospect of having to buy one in order to continue enjoying Bethesda’s specific brand of petty theft simulators. Some insisted that this was Microsoft’s plan all along: incentivising people to buy their then upcoming Series X/S consoles. Others dismissed this as an outlandish conspiracy theory, and were convinced until very recently that Starfield, Fallout 5, and The Elder Scrolls VI would definitely still show up on PlayStation (these people remain easy marks for the wallet inspector).

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When a game comes out that’s set in a place you live, the most natural compulsion is to head for your house to see if they’ve put it in. Unless you live in Manhattan, Downtown LA, or Central London, you probably haven’t enjoyed this phenomenon outside of Flight Simulator (which has everyone’s house in it). But we all live in a certain spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which just happens to be where Starfield takes place. Yes, you can visit the SOL system. And yes, going one better than Elite: Dangerous, you can land on Earth.

But you should probably steel yourself first. Or have a very stiff drink. Because it’s not the Earth you recognise: see the video below. Stop reading here unless you’re liable to get raging about spoilers.

See, in Starfield, an unfathomably thorough ecological disaster has turned the Earth from the ocean-drenched cradle of life we all know and mostly love (nobody likes Birmingham) into a barren ball of sand. There are vague indentations of where the land masses and oceans used to be, but aside from that, there’s nothing left of the planet or the vast human civilization that once called it home. As the in-game lore explains, it was this very disaster that gave humanity the impetus to colonise the stars in the first place:

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With a significant portion of the Xbox user base rocking the cheap & cheerful Series S instead of its more powerful stablemate, it’s reasonable to assume that a big chunk of Starfield’s audience (perhaps even a majority, we have no idea how the numbers shake out) will be playing this current-gen showcase on a hairdryer. A piece of kit that costs less than a budget smartphone. One would rightly expect it to be compromised on Microsoft’s controversially underpowered machine, but one should also expect it to run at an acceptable standard, because it’s a product that’s being sold to people for money.

Well, both of those expectations are correct. Our guides editor James has sunk dozens of hours into Bethesda’s latest opus on Series S, and happily reports that “it’s fine”. Perfectly playable. There are some frame drops in the big cities, and the image quality isn’t always the sharpest, but as it stands the Series S runs Starfield at a perfectly acceptable level, with no major caveats, only some reasonable image quality concessions and a bit of choppiness here and there. Check out the video above that was 100% captured on Series S, featuring space flight gameplay, general mooching about in New Atlantis (the game’s largest settlement), and some planetary exploration, so you can see for yourself how it holds up.

Series X owners will of course have a more premium experience (check in on our sister publication Digital Foundry for a proper in-depth analysis), but we expect, for obvious reasons, that the definitive place to play will be on a nice, fast PC. Not only will PC be the only platform without that 30fps cap, but it will, if previous Bethesda games are anything to go by, be host to a prolific modding community that will spend the next ten to fifteen years producing everything from graphical enhancements, to additional quests, items, and, er, body parts. Xbox will very likely also have mod support, but as with previous games it probably won’t be quite as fully featured.

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The quality of Baldur's Gate 3 performances, and the technology and expertees used to render them so beautifully on screen, is one of the best things about it. And that’s high praise considering that there’s one hell of a lot to love about the best RPG of the decade so far. We make the case for this extraordinary work, and why it’s so crucial to recreating the D&D experience, in the video below.

It’s particularly impressive because of the game’s sheer size. You could argue that there is better performance capture work elsewhere, for example in The Last of Us Part II, where millions of dollars per pixel is spent on producing photorealism in very controlled environments, most successfully in cutscenes. And it’s incredible work, no doubt. But Baldur’s Gate 3 is much wider in scope, and leaves much more up to the player in terms of where and when dialogues can be triggered, even taking into account permutations like the height of the player character (which, in a game with loads of different races, can vary wildly). So, while it isn’t as photorealistic or quite as granular as TLOU’s motion captured performances, it has a lot less control over where the player looks and a lot fewer places to hide.

So, for my money it’s an incredible achievement, and a real step forward in what games of this size and scope can achieve. But a lot of that is down to the fact that BG3 is not a game that has come from the AAA studio system, as Sherif points out in his latest op-ed. The game’s development was funded partly via a long stint in early access, on the back of Larian Studios having built up enormous trust and goodwill amongst CRPG fans by simply making a lot of very good games over the years.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a runaway success on PC that has taken a lot of people – including its creators – by surprise. For the record, I always had faith that this game would be Larian’s “Witcher 3 moment” – when an acclaimed but niche studio finally goes stratospheric with a release that becomes the watercooler game of its day. It’s been a long time coming: Larian are masters of their craft. But we don’t yet know how the PS5 version will compare to its PC brethren, in terms of visual fidelity or its gameplay experience.

Except we can make a few educated guesses in terms of how the PS5 version will shake out, because this isn’t anyone’s first rodeo when it comes to console ports of best-on-PC games. We know how BG3 will control on the PS5’s DualSense controller because it’s natively supported in the PC version: with the correct on-screen prompts and everything. And, we know roughly how the PS5 compares to equivalent PC hardware in terms of performance. Granted, 1:1 comparisons are impossible here because PCs and consoles are different beasts, designed to do different things. But in the video below we predict that the PS5 version will look similar to the PC version running at medium settings with some kind of resolution scaling - possibly AMD’s FSR 1.0, which is currently available as an option on PC.

Though we can’t know for sure how it’ll look until PS5 code comes in, we can answer the other part of the equation – how does it play? – pretty confidently, barring some sort of disaster where the game’s performance affects how it feels to control (not likely - see below). The controller support is excellent. Larian have done a fine job of arranging the myriad options available to traditional keyboard & mouse users onto a gamepad interface without the experience feeling lesser or compromised. The system revolves around all the important menus being mapped to triggers and bumpers – including an extensive and infinitely customisable in-combat radial menu where you’ll be spending most of your time agonising over your next move.

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Diablo 4 is here, courtesy of one of gaming's worst employers for fridge security, among other things. Allegedly. Despite being the product of a toxic work culture, it’s pretty darn good, with a lot of quality that the Diablo fan will appreciate. But is it the best in the series? Is the story any good? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, has the leap to an open world MMO format led the game to lose some of its charm? Connor and Sherif discuss all this and more in their one-on-one chat on Diablo 4, after sinking dozens of hours into the game’s pre-release review beta. During that time, they’ve explored the four corners of the open world map, messed around with multiple classes, completed the main story, and more.

First things first, Diablo 4 is a joy to play. It’s juicier and bloodier than previous games, with that same solid game feel that has made the Diablo series an ARPG classic through its life. Whether you’re swinging a massive maul around as a Barbarian or setting enemies alight with the Sorcerer, you’ll have a great time.

As for the story, it’s pretty good! While Sherif and Connor disagree on just how good the Diablo 4 narrative is, it has some seriously good moments that got us incredibly excited at some points, and very very sad every now and again. Lorath was a special highlight and practically carries scenes on his back.

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We know what you're wondering, does The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have permadeath? Since you're a strong, popular, hardcore gamer who is only cool with investing dozens of hours into a game if a stray arrow or sudden real-world distraction can force you to throw all that time away. You may have thought The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom isn't for you, but thanks to some under-the-table bribes and dumpster diving behind Nintendo HQ, we've found evidence that may surpise you...

This hot scoop comes via an alternate cut of a recent Tears of the Kingdom ad that went live yesterday. In it, a depressed man in an obviously loveless marriage finds brief joy in playing Tears of the Kingdom on the bus with the sound blasting through the speakers, or at home while his lonely wife texts old flames in the neighbouring bedroom. You can watch it yourself below.

There we have it. Indisputable proof of permadeath in Tears of the Kingdom. I mean, not really, but every game has permadeath if you manually delete your saves after every demise. Still, kinda wild brave of them to slap that much gore in an otherwise bloodless series but y'know what maybe it's about time Zelda grew up with its fans who now should have jobs and mortgages like real people (husks).

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There are two kinds of people in the world: people who understood that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s weapon degradation was a necessary component of a game built around experimentation, and other people who like to moan about things. Still, look, some of you out there really bounced off having to keep a few backup swords, and being unable to form any kind of attachment to a Good Weapon because nothing in that game had any permanence.

The thing is: games are built around rules, and one of the rules of BotW is that weapons have a health stat. Complaining about it is like complaining that the horsey in chess can’t just gallop to the other side of the board. Fortunately, if you’re on the wrong side of this argument, Tears of the Kingdom is trying very hard to make it not matter.

Firstly, there’s the fact that the FUSE feature has completely changed the game’s approach to combat and loot. As James says in the preview video above, your traditional weapons in Tears – rusty swords, pikes, big sticks etc – are now intended as platforms for whatever you stick on the end. You can, of course, just use a Big Stick as a Big Stick, and go around bonking people with it, but it’s going to be a much more effective bonker if you pop something on the tip, like a horn, or a big spikey ball.

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^Watch our Tron: Identity video review above!

TRON is one of the most historically significant films in Disney’s catalogue. Perhaps more than any other movie, it was massively ahead of its time: the techniques and technology developed in order to shoot it have in the many decades since its production become the norm for big-budget filmmaking. It had a huge big-budget sequel, an animated spin-off series, and a litany of video game adaptations (including the marvellous TRON 2.0, which still works as a worthy sequel to the original film). So why has this major franchise that hasn’t produced anything since the early 2010s come back with, of all things, a visual novel?

See, TRON is an odd one. The original film, which I love, is as silly as it is pivotal. The liberal use of computer-generated imagery, which looks proterozoic by today’s standards but oddly timeless as a result, combined with the process of shooting most of the film against nothing in order to transplant the actors into a world conjured out of CG and matte paintings – a film where almost every shot is a visual effect – was pretty much unheard of at the time.

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It’s a pretty good week to be a Bethesda fan, because now we have two very important dates to mark in the calendar: firstly, on June 11th, we’re getting the much promised Starfield focused direct (which was recently reported to be imminent, but I guess we’re going to have to wait until the magical E3 period for any more reveals, like usual).

Secondly, on the 6th of September, the thing will actually – probably, hopefully – release, on PC, Xbox Series consoles, and it’ll be day one on Game Pass, because Bethesda games are Microsoft first-party games now following a bout of extreme capitalism back in 2021. And it’s looking pretty wonderful, actually.

Starfield being set in an era of massive space colonisation is entirely fresh territory for the studio, and nobody could mistake Skyrim’s dragon-pocked tundra or Fallout’s shattered 50s Americana for Starfield’s NASA-core, homemade Star Trek vibe, but it is driven by the same principle that makes Bethesda’s other games so appealing, which is, as was once proudly boasted on the back of Oblivion’s box, that they allow the player to live another life in another world. Or worlds, in this case.

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What on earth happened to Suicide Squad? Alex and I discuss in the video above how Rocksteady’s long-awaited return to the Arkhamverse strays disappointingly far from the formula that made them a success story.

Of course, we didn’t expect (or necessarily want) another Arkham game. The law of diminishing returns was in full effect by the time Arkham Knight rolled around. The odd rumour bubbled up about a Superman game, or a Justice League game, in a similar vein. Quite how that would have worked isn’t clear, although it’s not hard to see how, over the best part of a decade, those initial ideas might have morphed into Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.

However we got here, though, one thing is clear: this game is about five years late to the party. Enthusiasm for superhero stuff, in general, is on a massive decline. We saw evidence of this last year with Marvel’s Midnight Suns: a fantastic game from a beloved studio which simply didn’t do the numbers. Anecdotally, from what we’ve gathered from comments etc on our own coverage, this could well be attributed to the fact that a lot of people are just so burnt out on Marvel after umpteen years of the MCU (another prominent example of the law of diminishing returns, quite literally in the case of Ant Man’s recent box office collapse).

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Dredge is one of those games that comes along that almost defies conventional description. It’s a trading and exploration sim like Elite, but with a tropical Wind Waker aesthetic, and a page-turning horror story told in the style of a visual novel. It’s all of those things, and yet, nothing you can compare it to really does it justice, because it’s really about the atmosphere.

Each component part of Dredge is highly competent in its own right: the bulk of the minute to minute gameplay is concerned with you operating as a jobbing fisherman. You fish, you earn money for ship upgrades, you fish more. Then there are special contracts and sidequests concerned with obtaining items of note from the depths, which could be a rare type of corrupted or mutated fish (more on that later), or a piece of treasure from a sunken galleon – the titular activity coming into play.

This all feeds into a fascinating main quest concerning the hunting of artefacts, which gives you cause to venture further and further from the tiny vestiges of civilisation that cling to this doomed region, to explore the outer reaches of the five island groups. The more you travel, the more exotic the plunder, and more specialised the equipment needed to harvest it.

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Tom's a bit smitten with PS VR2, but I, a Virtual Reality Sceptic, have my doubts. So Tom donned the headset in an attempt to convince me that yes, Sony's newest VR platform is the real deal, and well worth the buy-in. In fact, he says, it's the most exciting leap forward in gaming since Mario 64. But I have to wonder if this costly peripheral is more akin to the Mega Drive's 32X — an impressive add-on, but fiddly to use, and destined to have a limited library of b-tier exclusives and hasty ports. We argue about it in this video here:

There's no doubt whatsoever that PlayStation VR2 is an incredible piece of hardware: 4K resolution, eye tracking, all the haptic features of the DualSense controller, and powered by the PS5's high performance silicon. But all this, of course, doesn't come cheap: at £529.99/$549.00, it's more expensive than the PS5 required to run it. And that's just for the headset and controllers: you don't get any bundled games as standard. No cutesy AstroBot game that shows off all the spiffy new features. Not even a measly demo compilation.

This is slightly offset by the fact that VR exclusive games tend to be budget priced, but that's mostly a concession to the fact that most VR exclusive games aren't what you would call "full fat" experiences. The vast majority of the VR library (no matter which headset you choose) is comprised of short-ish tech demos, minigame compilations, and traditional games which have been adapted for VR with varying levels of success.

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The video version of this article will play up here if you can sit through the short advert first. Please watch it. I'm wearing a nice hat and everything.

I've been thinking recently, apropos of absolutely nothing, about the word “Legacy”. How it’s a particularly loaded word when it comes to authors, artists, filmmakers… any kind of creative, really. A prolific author, unlike the vast majority of us, leaves behind a body of work full of clues as to their real character: Terry Pratchett, for example, who is Britain’s best and most beloved author after Tolkien, published a bewildering 41 Discworld novels over a period of 32 years, almost exactly the latter half of his life.

If you’re currently doing some quick maths and thinking, that’s preposterous, that means he must have written more than one book a year at one point, then yeah, at the time it was a bit of a running joke. At his most prolific he was writing over 400 words per day, minimum, with an almost religious determination. Sometimes he would write significantly more. At that rate, you can knock out a novel’s worth of words in around six months. The trick is sustaining it: it’s astonishing to me, someone who writes a 1200 word script and then has to go and have a lie down for about a week, that he just wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and never stopped.

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^Stay tuned for The Thursday Nite Rant, where is week we're asking: why are all the games dying?

It seems like the live service bubble has burst, with a huge swathe of online games including shooters, brawlers, and RPGs announcing their cancellation in recent weeks. Some of them representing huge franchises in the space, too: Battlefield Mobile is being sunsetted, along with Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier.

Why is it so hard for live service games to find an audience, even if they’re already attached to a big, beloved property? Well, part of the reason is surely just that the audience has a limited amount of time. Most people don’t have enough free hours in the day to sustain more than one hobby, and so, live service games tend to live or die on how much they can monopolise your life. For a lot of people, Fortnite is their only game. For others, it’s World of Warcraft.

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^Check out our discussion of the Goldeneye remaster, with oodles of 4K footage!

There are, of course, plenty of grown-up reasons why Goldeneye 007’s ill-fated remaster – almost completed, but left abandoned some time in 2008 – will never officially see the light of day. At the time, it was the victim of a licensing stand-off that never got resolved, as it would have required the sign-off of both Microsoft and Nintendo (who were at least a decade away from forging the slightly awkward friendship they currently enjoy), but also MGM and, presumably, Electronic Arts, who had the Bond gaming licence at the time.

When word came that this ancient knot had finally been unpicked, some of us dared to dream that maybe, just maybe, this meant that the original Xbox 360 remaster project could form the basis of the new release, on Xbox at least. It stands to reason, right? Xbox still owns Rare, the source code must be filed away somewhere, and with most of the work having been done over a decade earlier (with intact multiplayer), it’s surely worth the effort to dust it off and give it the final polish it deserves.

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^Stay tuned for Jim's video essay on the genius of Vampire Survivors.

Teasing around the edge of the mob, moving in concentric circles so as to maximise the surface area of your garlic aura's damage zone. An instinctive, brushing motion. Methodically scrubbing arcane horrors from the world as you would coffee stains from tooth enamel. Since the mobile release, both rituals conducted at once, either side of bed time. The life of a Vampire Survivors Enjoyer is, in essence, spiritual.

For those of us who have experienced its euphoria, it makes absolute sense that it can hold its own in a prestigious awards ceremony against the big-hitters of the day. Winning the gongs for Game Design and the coveted Best Game crown, it has seen off competition from shoe-ins like God of War: Ragnarok and Elden Ring, as well as Playstation favourite Horizon Forbidden West, the mobile juggernaut that is Marvel Snap, and other indie darlings like Cult of the Lamb and Stray.

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^Check out our preview video of Wo Long, coming to Game Pass soon!

Wo Long Fallen Dynasty is headed to Xbox Game Pass (inc. for PC) on March 3rd, and for our money it's shaping up rather nicely.

Borrowing its lore from the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, it shares a few common elements with Dynasty Warriors, but with a vastly different, dark fantasy twist to proceedings. It's also a Souls-like, so players can expect a bleak atmosphere and punishing combat, but again with an added twist: a host of AI companions to help you on your journey.

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The Callisto Protocol, the spiritual successor to Dead Space directed by veteran studio head Glen Schofield, has left a lot of horror fans wanting. Specifically, it has left them wanting the official Dead Space remake, which will land at the end of the month, because Callisto just didn’t hit the mark: the consensus is that while it’s clearly been put together by a talented team, the frustrating, under-designed combat and the various performance issues make it a slog, and the content within – though perfectly alright – just isn’t good enough to justify wading through the bad stuff.

Which is a shame, not just for users who are desperate for another Dead Space, but for the people who put their blood, sweat, and tears into this game only to see it met with such a lukewarm response. But it’s particularly galling in light of Glen Schofield’s comments early last year regarding crunch, a concept he seems broadly in favour of, although in fairness he walked the comments back after a lot of people rightly took issue with them.

But this goes beyond an ill-advised tweet from a studio head: the issue of workers rights, or lack thereof, has reached a critical stage in the games industry as hundreds of teams around the world pursue unionisation in a bid, among other things, to end crunch culture once and for all. And as the UK entered its umpteenth month of crippling strikes by public sector workers seeking to preserve their precarious living standards, in the face of a hostile government which has a clear agenda against working people, myself, Sherif, and Connor gathered in a Zoom call to ask: in a world where hard work doesn’t even pay off any more, why should anyone crunch?

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^Stay tuned for our video comparison of The Witcher 3's new raytracing and performance modes.

The Witcher 3’s next gen update, or “current gen update” if you’re one of the extremely well-adjusted people who keeps screaming about the PS6 not being announced yet whenever someone says “next gen”, is finally here after what feels like approximately two years since its announcement (it feels like that because it is that).

It is, as you rightly suspect, a refinement of something that was already beautiful. We’re talking nips and tucks here rather than a full re-work, which is absolutely fine: anything more substantial than that risks compromising the art direction, as we’ve seen countless times before when iconic games get a graphical refresh. In fact, if you weren’t A/B comparing them as we’ve done in some select scenes for the video above, you’d be hard pressed to notice much of a difference. Essentially, there’s more detail in the image – textures are higher quality, foliage is more dense, crowd simulation has been cranked up, and the level of detail fades off much further away from the camera now.

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Synced: Off Planet — a free-to-play multiplayer Rogue Like live service Looter Shooter (bingo!) — is releasing into Open Beta on December 10. Ahead of the curtain being pulled back for the public to see, myself and Sherif were able to try out some of the PvE content in an early press event.

Back from our adventure in the next of a long line of login-bonus ridden gameplay experiences, we sat down with Welsh Actor and our very own video person Jim Trinca, who interrogated us on our time with Synced. Our main takeaway? It’s alright… A perfectly acceptable, if a tad standard, shooter that may still appeal to a core audience upon release. For our full thoughts, check out the video above.

Synced takes place in an apocalyptic world where Nanos roam an exclusion zone, following a devastating disaster that dealt the dwellers of dozens of nearby domiciles a doomed hand from a dire deck. You, a brave explorer looking to venture inside this perilous region of the world in search of loot, secrets, and exhilarating peril must take on these Nano enemies as they appear in monstrous forms.

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^Stay tuned for the Thursday Nite Rant!

Need For Speed Unbound existed for years as a ghostly whisper: a vague apparition that haunted EA’s shareholder meetings, but never quite took corporeal form. That is until October of this year when was revealed that not only did it exist, but that it was due out in just a handful of weeks, and it had a leftfield art style which combined animated graffiti and comic style art superimposed onto the series’ traditional hyper-realism.

This, to put it mildly, caused a lot of eyebrows to lift. Some of them in pairs. But thanks to EA Play (and, for most of us, its inclusion with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate), we’ve been able to dip in for a meaty ten-hour trial and confirm that the risks have paid off: Unbound is a slick open-world racer with fresh ideas that isn’t afraid to punish the player for slipping up.

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^Stay tuned after the ad for our deep-dive chat into Midnight Suns, with thirty minutes of gorgeous ultrawide footage

We’ll admit it: we thought Marvel’s Midnight Suns had 6/10 written all over it. It seemed to so confused, that we wondered for months – in private – about whether it could possibly be a good, coherent, intelligible experience with so many disparate elements going on. A Marvel XCOM game that’s also a card battler, but also a relationship simulator, but also a creepy Metroidvania style National Trust explore-em-up? And in the era of Extreme MCU Fatigue? We honestly thought it was destined to underwhelm.

Well, we’ve never been happier to be proven utterly wrong: Midnight Suns is legit. It’s by some distance the best superhero game of the year. The sheer gulf in quality between it and Gotham Knights – an oddly sort of Deep Impact to the Armageddon of superhero ensemble pieces where they all hang out in a big creepy building between missions – is, frankly, so wide that even The Hulk would struggle to leap it.

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^Stay tuned after the ads for our summary of CD Projekt RED’s livestream, and our view on why The Witcher 3 deserves a next-gen upgrade.

The fabled next-gen upgrade for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was announced all the way back when we first got our hands on the new consoles, so it’s been a long time coming. It’s no surprise that it’s taken this long though, given that the firm found itself embroiled in controversy following the release of Cyberpunk 2077, which arrived in such a shoddy state on consoles that Sony infamously pulled it from sale on PS4.

Well, months of regular updates and a DLC announcement later, the Cyberpunk 2077 redemption arc is in full swing, and it seems that CD Projekt RED are determined to win back all that goodwill that they originally earned with their most celebrated and indisputably best game.

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^Stay tuned after the ads for our retrospective on the Assassin’s Creed phenomenon, and how it changed the entire gaming landscape.

Assassin’s Creed is 15 years old this week. I can scarcely believe it. I could swear on a stack of bibles that it's a “new” series, in the same way that my kids will always be “little”, or that The Rock will always be “from the wrestling”.

And what a 15 years it’s been: in that time, gaming has absolutely exploded, transitioning full from being a sort of silly hobby for weans and saddos to a mainstream phenomenon that (yes, alright, sorry, I’m going to say the thing) makes tonnes more money (ugh, let’s just get it over with) than any other entertainment medium (sigh, sorry).

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^Stay tuned for our video essay with some lovely 4K footage.

Pentiment is a beautiful piece of historical fiction. Set in a small Bavarian town during the Protestant reformation, it leverages a historically inspired art style to tell a sweeping tale of loss, love, and everything in between.

It’s one of those games that makes having a Game Pass subscription feel like you’re cheating the system somehow. But it’s also the kind of game that really exemplifies the value of a first-party subscription service, as an engine of discovery for the user, but also as a wealth-spreading mechanism that means it’s easier for things like Pentiment to get made in the first place.

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God of War: Ragnarök brings Kratos' norse mythology era to a close, but not before spending a good 40-50 hours being one of the best Sony third-person action games to date: something that moves the genre forward in terms of artistry and tech wizardry, but also in how its characters are portrayed.

As a drama, it runs the entire tonal gamut from prestige HBO drama to Wrestlemania, being stuffed with some of the best action spectacle that the series has ever offered (which is something of an achievement, given that the entire series kicks off with Kratos leaping across a shipwrecked fleet to kill a hydra), but also plenty of quiet, reflective moments which allow the pacing to breathe.

It also provides a wonderfully unique take on the gods themselves. In this portrayal, Odin comes across like the head of a crime family, something akin to Tony Soprano or Vito Corleone: powerful, yet afraid. Jealously guarding his status, willing to make huge sacrifices to protect his wealth, but ultimately ill-equipped to resist the changing times. It stands in stark contrast to the heroic, benevolent alien version of the character we have seen in things like Marvel's MCU. But, dare I say it, it's probably much closer to the source material: the old gods were hard to please.

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^Stay tuned for Jim's explanation of Ragnarök's display settings, and how much they matter.

Is nine graphics options overkill for a console game?

It's a fair question. Last week, Santa Monica Studio published an infographic detailing the nine possible graphics modes for the much-anticipated God of War: Ragnarök. This seemed excessive to some people, especially as (so the argument goes) this is a console game, so surely all this visual optimisation stuff should be left up to the developers. Shouldn't it be, ultimately, up to them to decide how best to run their game on standardised hardware?

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^Stay tuned after the ad for some beloved TV themes being murdered by our video producer

Trombone Champ is the gift that keeps on giving. Somehow the gimmick of classic tunes being mockingly rendered in the shrieking tones of a poorly synthesised brass instrument never seems to get less funny over time. Until now, probably, because I've gone and tried to play along with some classic TV themes in the free play improv mode.

That's it. That's the write-up. Can I just leave it there Tom? What else is there to say? I can do a write up of Star Trek: The Next Generation's best musically inspired episodes if you like. Well I'm doing it anyway.

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^Stay tuned for our Marvel Snap review video!

Marvel Snap is better than it has any right to be. It certainly is too good for the likes of me: a strictly single-player person who much prefers a cosy PlayStation exclusive with exploration and narrative and not a single other human being getting involved to ruin everything. But I couldn't stay away, could I? Because you lot wouldn't stop going on about it. And now I have a permanent imprint of my toilet seat on my arse and legs. This is your fault, every single one of you.

Curse you, and it, for its delectable sound design, its beautiful animations, its ultra-compelling just-one-more-match battle and progression systems that get its hooks deep into your soul, firing every nerve in your pleasure centres along the way.

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^Stay tuned for Jim’s video op-ed on how good the Series S really is.

There’s a pernicious rumour going around that the humble Xbox Series S, the cheapest next-gen console on the market, is somehow causing other, better machines to be compromised with unnecessary framerate caps. Quite how the rumour started is a little convoluted, but I’ve explained all in the accompanying video. And, look, here’s the thing: it’s a load of rubbish.

If anything, if the Series S was responsible for reducing the overall complexity of next-gen games compared to what they could achieve were it not a factor, then the big boy machines – it stands to reason – would have plenty of headroom left over for performance boosts. But that’s not what’s happening.

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^Stay tuned for our extensive video preview with brand new footage!

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a return to the mainline series, but it brings over a lot of elements from the Pokémon Legends Arceus spin-off which came out at the start of this year, including the open-world flourishes that many compared favourably to Breath of the Wild.

Our resident jRPG and Nintendo fanatic Alex Donaldson had an extensive hands-on session with the new game and found a compelling, active world to explore full of series innovations alongside more traditional touches. Classic Pokéball catching makes a return, and so do Pokémon Centres, but these are also dotted arouind in the field in the form of outside kiosks. Modern convenience! Read his full preview here.

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^Stay tuned for our big Resi 4 Remake preview video with tonnes of 4K footage.

Resident Evil 4 Remake is real, we've played it, and it's looking chainsaw-pumpingly brilliant.

Resident horror expert Kelsey went to Capcom UK's offices for a short-but-sweet twenty minute hands on with everyone's favourite Resi game (even yours, and if you comment saying otherwise I'll just assume you're lying) and reported back to the mothership that everything is looking present and correct: the tetris inventory? Check. Typewriters? Check. Overpowering sense of dread? Obvs. Feet planted while aiming? No, but that's fine, because it's 2022 and nobody has time for that.

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^Stay tuned after the ads for our big review chat, featuring loads of lovely footage from every version of the game.

Aside from its performance issues, which are annoying but potentially fixable and hardly a dealbreaker, Gotham Knights’ biggest sin is that it just doesn’t do anything particularly exciting. And for a game which boldly kills the Batman in the first two minutes, that’s pretty astonishing.

It’s not all bad: there are some nice ideas dotted around. Occupying The Belfry between missions gives the game a nice overall pace, allowing you to spend time with the characters in some touching, backstory filling cutscenes (though, note of caution, these bits are laser-targeted at Arrowverse fans, a group of people who would inject mediocrity like heroin were it possible). The investigation gameplay also has a few neat touches, like the micro-examination of people’s workspaces and personal tech.

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^Stay tuned after the ads for our guide to legging it through a particularly gnarly bit of Requiem's second chapter.

Look, we all know that pang of regret that comes on when you cock-up a stealth section and get spotted but finish the level anyway. There's always a lingering sense of having not done things Properly. Perhaps, if you're the sort of person who likes to get max sync in Assassin's Creed no matter what, you'll make a mental note to do better on your next playthrough. But A Plague Tale: Requiem encourages you to simply manage, however one must.

At the end of chapter two there is a sequence which ostensibly presents itself as a stealth section, complete with reeds to hide in, guards with predictable patrols, and plenty of cover to duck behind. But something happens around half way through which mixes things up in a way that the first game never quite dared: the rats cometh. Bursting up from the ground, through walls, hugging the edge of the light and filling every dark space. In this section, A Plague Tale's "The Floor Is Lava" game collides with its "Hide and Seek" game: and the results are harrowing.

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^ Stay tuned after the ads for our A Plague Tale: Requiem review chat over twenty actual minutes of gorgeous ultrawide gameplay at max settings on PC.

Marshalling all the power of next-gen GPUs to render a swarm of 300,000 rats gnashing its way through medieval France is, in and of itself, a pretty neat party trick. The fact that Asobo Studio use it merely as the basis for an arresting, gripping tale of human ingenuity in the face of unfathomable disaster is an astoundingly impressive feat: and as if that wasn't showing off enough, they've now gone and done it twice with A Plague Tale: Requiem, the bold and brilliant sequel to 2019's Innocence.

The first game earned itself comparisons to the likes of God of War and The Last of Us back when it came out, and it’s easy to see why: all of these games are, essentially, 20-hour escort quests that play out as a harrowing road trip over a dozen or so chapters. But without Sony’s money hose at hand to p**s cash at your telly as though it were a truck stop urinal, there was a sense that Plague Tale couldn’t compete. It even got saddled with a pithy nickname in “The Past of Us”, as many quipped at the preview stage.

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^Stay tuned after the ads for some smooth PC footage and review impressions.

The extremely weird, disturbingly fleshy, unsettlingly phallic, HR Giger-inspired survival horror thingy Scorn finally comes to Gamepass. But, beyond the Promethean aesthetic, what on earth is it all about?

Well... egg redistribution, and poking things in holes. And it might just be one of the most interesting experiences to hit Next Gen to date: something that so heavily and unequivocally leans into its aesthetic, no matter how unsettling things might get, that you have to admire it for its vision alone. There hasn't been a mainstream release that goes all-in on grossing out the audience like this since Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, and if anything, Scorn is even more sickening.

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^Stay tuned after the ads for plenty of QHD footage and our thoughts after playtesting the beta.

Entering the same crowded marketplace that includes behemoths like Destiny and Warframe, and the corpses of high-profile failures like Anthem, must be a daunting prospect. But Korean developers Nexon have gone and done it anyway, and the result is The First Descendant, an extremely “one of those sorts of games” effort that seems to blend elements from every single one of its genre contemporaries into a sort of gloop.

And, look, gloop isn’t necessarily a bad thing, right? Everyone likes gloop. Custard. Rice pudding. Angel delight. Dessert metaphors aside, the thing about The First Descendant is that it feels almost aggressively mid: intent, almost, on existing as a mathematical average of all these other games instead of actively trying to carve out a niche of its own.

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^Stay tuned after the ads for our Street Fighter 6 Beta impressions, and loads of pristine PS5 footage.

Fighting games are often fraught with netcode issues, matchmaking discrepancies, and general annoyances that tend to make the online experience a pale shadow of the immediacy and excitement of IRL tournaments, or just hanging around in an arcade in the nineties. This isn’t a problem unique to fighting games, of course: Zoom calls are mince compared to spending proper time with your mates. It is what it is.

Capcom however appear to have nailed many of these issues in the Street Fighter 6 closed beta, which finished on Sunday, and impressed us with its smooth, generally lag-free presentation (even managing to put in a good show over wifi), and a social space that really does feel like hanging around in an arcade, complete with actual machines to sit down at in order to challenge nearby players to bouts.

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^We've re-dubbed the Super Mario Bros. movie trailer with Charles Martinet's voice work in order to give you a taste of what might have been. Stick around after the ads to hear the surprising results.

Many fans are outraged by the fact that the original voice of Mario, Charles Martinet, will not be bringing his classic take on the character to the silver screen. Instead, he's been replaced by Hollywood superstar Chris Pratt, a move which many have dismissed as stunt casting, on the grounds that Chris Pratt isn't Italian and famously doesn't even like cured meats.

While Charles Martinet isn't a Hollywood name (ask one of your normal mates about him and expect blank stares before a suggestion that he's a footballer or something), he's far from just the "voice of Mario." He's got quite a few voices, actually.

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^Stay tuned after the ads for my full RAILGRADE review and enjoy some beautiful ultrawide footage while you’re at it.

It’s not often that video games set out to mimic small things. Photorealism tends to depict the world at a scale that humans can walk around in. But, swivelling a macro-lens onto that Unreal Engine camera and pointing it at digital miniatures produces a wonderful effect that makes RAILGRADE’s otherwise fairly standard route plan puzzling an absolute joy to get stuck into.

In short, it’s transportive. For me, it throws me right back to my childhood bedroom, where a constantly reconfigured TOMY train set enjoyed permanent residence on the floor, forever delivering assorted handfuls of lego bricks between the Ghostbusters fire station and a permanently downed Star Trek: The Next Generation shuttlecraft. Who knows why. The mind of a ten year-old is unknowable, even if you were one.

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^Stay tuned for 1080p gameplay and expanded impressions through your vidscreen: it's futuristic!

Headed up by Starward Industries, which is a super-group of devs who can list such esteemed projects as The Witcher 3, Dying Light, and Call of Juarez on their collective CV, The Invincible is an adventure game based on an acclaimed genre work by a celebrated Polish author which I haven’t read and neither have you.

That’s where its similarities with The Witcher games start and end. The Invincible is a landmark work of hard science fiction which explores the perils of space colonisation and the very nature of alien life: the forms it may take, whether we’d recognise it, and how our prejudices might affect our decision making when encountering it. The game of the same name is not a beat-for-beat adaptation of the book, but a re-telling centred around a new character named Yasna: a female protagonist who doesn’t exist in the novel, but has been created fresh for the game as a concession to the fact that it is no longer the mid-sixties.

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^ Stick around after the ads for some pristine 1440p footage and a discussion about Modern Warfare 2’s place in the modern era of shooters.

As infuriating exercises in being the severalth thing in a series but having the same title as the original go, the Modern Warfare reboot wasn’t half bad. We spent a bunch of time in the multiplayer beta for MW2 ahead of the full release at the end of this month, and found a solid (if a little muddled) Call of Duty game in there.

But we have to wonder: in a world far removed from the original Modern Warfare 2, which solidified CoD’s utter dominance of the 360 era back in 2009, what place does 2022’s MW2 multiplayer have in a crowded marketplace full of free-to-play competition? Not just from the Fortnites and APEX’s of this world, but from its own Battle Royale spin-off, Warzone, which is itself getting a sequel in Warfare 2.0, dropping next month as part of MW2’s first season.

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It’s 2022, an eye-watering 31 years since I first encountered the little blue bastard. I’m in the midst of a noisy trade show, and the latest Sonic the Hedgehog game is telling me how to open a switch gate, in a tutorial level that looks worryingly like Death Stranding – a post-apocalyptic Kojima game about delivering Amazon packages to Geoff Keighley, or something. Is this what 31 years as a sexless mascot does to a mf?

Thirty-one years.

Yet, somehow, Sonic has prevailed. Against the insurmountable odds of multiple decades passing, the console arm of SEGA that he originated as a mascot of disappearing in a puff of bad management, and (perhaps most astoundingly) a general sense that the games have been a bit bobbins since, well, 1998 if you’re being charitable or 1994 if you aren’t.

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Following our preview of Crisis Core's impending remaster, Alex and I sat down to chat about its place in the new post-remake Final Fantasy 7 universe, and whether it still holds up as a prequel in that context, over some gorgeous 4K gameplay footage.

There’s no doubt that the burgeoning media franchise that is Final Fantasy 7 has picked up a lot of new fans since the remake launched in 2020, introducing an entire generation of fresh players to a universe that has been steadily expanding since 1997 with multiple prequels and film projects making up the “Compilation of Final Fantasy VII” metaseries.

Crisis Core originally released in 2007, ten years after the original game, and is widely considered to be the best of FF7’s spin-offs, chronicling the life of a key fan-favourite character and re-examining a pivotal moment in the timeline that casts a deep shadow over the rest of the series.

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So listen reet. I went to EGX last weekend with my sidekick, Daft Connor. He only wanted to play Sonic Frontiers cos he’s daft, look out for an upcoming video preview of that along with some hands-on impressions of other stuff we looked at like Goat Simulator 3, which you’ve heard of, and Shadows of Doubt, which you haven’t.

We accosted Zoe and Ian from Eurogamer to ask them what they were playing at, and Mike Channell from Outside Xbox gave us a tantalising glimpse into the decadent lifestyle afforded him by all that YouTube cash. It was like an episode of MTV Cribs except we were stood on the balcony of an East London conference centre and the only luxuries on offer were a load of Diet Coke cans in a mini-fridge, and he didn’t let us have one.

We spoke to one of the developers of House Flipper 2 and confirmed that you don’t need to play the first one to understand what’s going on. We also confirmed shortly afterwards that security wanted us to leave the House Flipper 2 booth. But Connor flashed them his Gold Wristband and while they were reeling from the revelation that we were in gainful employment with the organisers of the event, we scarpered.

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