While it's natural to question if Overwatch's pivot to mid-game power ups is a direct response to Marvel Rivals' team-up abilities that can similarly elevate heroes, Overwatch 2 lead gameplay designer Alec Dawson told a roundtable of press at Blizzard's Irvine campus this week that perks were in the works long before Rivals was the new hero shooter hotness. That said, the motivation ultimately came from a growing feeling that Overwatch was at risk of stagnating.

"One of the things we all agreed on was that Overwatch needed to evolve and needed to have more choice," Dawson said.

When Season 15 introduces hero perks on February 18, heroes will earn XP throughout the match and level up twice, picking between two perks at levels 2 and 3. The goal, as Dawson tells it, is to identify the creative ways players are already using heroes and designing perks that serve that fantasy.

"People have always asked for Lifeweaver to be more of a damage dealer. How do we look at that and then give that to you in a way that makes sense for Lifeweaver?" he said. "Another [hero] that's representative of that is Sombra. One of her major perks lets her heal allies with her hack. People have talked about 'support Sombra' for a long time. How can we give a little taste of that?"

Perks didn't start out so adventurous. Dawson talked about early versions of perks that were more conservative than their current iteration and said it took a lot of time and playtesting to learn to stop holding back.

"There was one Tracer perk where, when she recalls, she would get back one blink charge. The one we're shipping with is when she recalls, she gets back all of her blink charges."

That desire to be less protective and "less precious," as game director Aaron Keller put it in a presentation to press, about what an Overwatch match can be has become a guiding principle for Dawn's team.

"There's a little bit of letting go of the fine balance that we've been chasing and see how it all plays out to some degree," Dawson said. "We should be a little scared of what we're putting out there, in terms of how it might affect the game. Within reason, of course.

"I think perks are that. It's gonna be a lot for players to learn and we're going to be monitoring how that happens over time, but also giving it room to breathe."

When asked if the overnight introduction of 168 buffs across 42 heroes means Blizzard is embracing a degree of balancing chaos, Dawson copped to Overwatch's reputation for overcaution and fuddy-duddy balance patches.

"We think players do crave slightly more complexity than we've been giving them for a while," he said. "When we look at some of our balance patches, they've been a lot of tuning and recycling. We want to step out of that and make sure that when we make balancing decisions, they are really felt. I think perks give us a nice turning vector for that."

Multiple Blizzard devs mentioned how excited they are that perks will give the team "new knobs to turn" for future balancing passes. Dawson also mentioned that perks will change seasonally, whether that means balance adjustments, ditching underperforming perks, or through two planned yearly "perk drops" to keep the system fresh—a similar approach to Marvel Rivals' rotating team-up bonuses.

"I do think the team overall wants to make sure that we don't forget Overwatch is supposed to be fun," Dawson said. "We're supposed to have a little bit of wackiness, but also let these heroes play in the ways that our players want to play them."

Overwatch 2 Season 15, starting February 18, will bring hero perks to both Quickplay and Competitive. Stadium, Overwatch's new third-person mode with its own upgrade story unrelated to perks, is coming in Season 16 alongside new hero Freja.

Just two weeks after launching on Steam, "multiplayer extraction survival horror" shooter Level Zero: Extraction has reached the end of the road. In a message posted to Steam, community manager Antishyr said the game has "underperformed compared to our expectations," and thus "it's no longer feasible for our relatively small teams to sustain the game from a financial standpoint."

"As the project's community manager, on behalf of [developer] DogHowl and [publisher] tinyBuild, I'm informing you that Level Zero: Extraction has reached the state that will, most probably, be its final form for the time being," Antishyr wrote. "The final patch for the game was released on January 30th, 2025.

"Level Zero: Extraction is an ambitious debut title from Doghowl. Our desire was to create a game unlike any other by combining the extraction shooter and asymmetrical horror genres. Although we ended up seeing that those are not easy to blend, we're grateful we had the chance to try and gain so much invaluable experience."

Level Zero: Extraction actually began life in 2022 as Level Zero, an asymmetric survival game in which a team of scientists struggle to repair their facility and get the hell out, all while trying not to be brutally butchered by a xenomorph-ish alien monster. But after a couple years of silence, it was "re-announced" as Level Zero: Extraction, a more conventional-looking extraction shooter that cast players as gun-toting mercs rather than pencil-neck geeks.

I wondered at the time about the wisdom of trying to muscle into the crowded extraction shooter genre, but art director Alex Golenishchev said it was "an organic evolution of the concept," and that the combination of genres "empower each other, and ... offers a unique experience" that other extraction and horror games do not.

Sadly, it did not work out. Level Zero: Extraction had a peak concurrent player count of just over 2,600 following its early access debut in August 2024, but that quickly fell off to sub-100 numbers by mid-October. The 1.0 release in January didn't turn things around, achieving a peak concurrent player count of just 98 immediately after launch. At this moment, there are 20 people playing.

Level Zero: Extraction servers will remain online, so the game will continue to be playable, and wipes will continue to happen on the first Thursday of every month but there will be no further weekend events, and of course no new maps, weapons, cosmetics, game modes, or any other features. As for Doghowl, it's now working on a new multiplayer game, this one a co-op experience: "We really hope that the invaluable experience gained with Level Zero: Extraction will help our emerging studio in future efforts," the studio said.

Except it's not called System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition anymore, apparently. It's just unveiled itself as System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, which is a pretty nice way of spinning the six years since it was announced all the way back in 2019. When life gives you lemons, make the lemonade look like it was your plan all along.

Not only that, but Nightdive has finally announced a date… on which it will reveal the release date. Those rapscallions. We'll get to hear when the game will make landfall on March 20, during the Future Game Show Spring Showcase at GDC 2025. (The Future Game Show is run by, well, Future, which also owns PC Gamer).

Of course, given that System Shock 2 was a 1999 game, this year will actually mark its 26th anniversary, but that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely, so it's either stick with 25th Anniversary Remaster or wait another four years until it can come out as the 30th Anniversary Edition. I prefer this option.

Aside from the date for its release date, Nightdive doesn't have much more info for us just yet on its dolled-up SS2, save that the March 20 announcement will be accompanied, naturally, by a new trailer.

Nevertheless, I am excited. Every fragment of info the studio has dropped about the remaster makes it look like it's taking very special care with it, preserving its brilliant System Shock-iness while making it run spick-and-span on modern, high-res machines.

Counterswapping is a pretty contentious subject in Overwatch. The actual definition is when players repeatedly switch their hero to one that counters someone specific on the other team, but a lot of players have watered this down and take it to mean anytime someone is playing a hero that counters something that they are playing, even if it's just a coincidence and not intentional.

Despite the fact that countering enemy players is just part and parcel of what it takes to win in a hero shooter—it would be kind of pointless just to lie down and die instead of swapping to another character that is better suited for the match—I can understand why, at its worst, counterswapping is annoying.

Because every perk is unique to each hero, they won't carry over if you switch mid-game. So, every time you pick a new character, you'll have to start back at level one. Even if perks unlock slightly faster for new picks, players are hoping that this disadvantage will work as a disincentive for those who spend too much time counterswapping.

"Yep, probably a good thing, though the level of catchup mechanic is important," one player says. "And that initial meetup likely is still not so bad to stop first fight swaps, but it's a step forward. Remove some ult charge retention, and we're getting somewhere." While other players point out that this could specifically help with counterswapping tanks.

Tanks in 5v5 Overwatch tend to have the hardest time when it comes to counterswapping, because they are often the lynchpin of a team, there's only one of them, and they have some very obvious counters. For example, if I went Hog, the enemy tank should probably go Mauga, then I would go D.Va, then they'd go Sigma, then I'd go Doomfist, then they'd go Zarya, then I'd go Reinhardt, then they'd go Ramattra, and then I'd be back to Hog and the cycle begins anew.

It's incredibly convoluted, and realistically, no one should be changing that much each fight, but as the only disincentive before was restricting ult charge, it was a possible strategy. It still is, even with perks, but now there's one more reason not to, and that may be enough for players just to switch things up a couple of times and then leave it at that.

Blizzard has made previous changes to try to dissuade players from counterswapping as well. Season 13 introduced a small update to the scoreboard, which meant if you switched hero mid-fight, players on the enemy team can't see who you've picked for 15 seconds. "This change adds more friction to counterswapping, especially in the extreme case where two players on opposite teams are both sitting in spawn with the scoreboard open and rapidly switch their heroes in response to each other's choices," a developer commented.

While this update was a small help, it didn't completely eradicate counterswapping from Overwatch 2, and it's pretty likely that this perk feature won't either. Swapping is just part of the game—it's why there are counters, there are so many heroes, and you can switch heroes mid-fight. So next time you get someone yelling about CounterWatch in your chat, just remind them that you wouldn't do it if it weren't a massive strategic part of the game.

"Welcome Freja, the newest addition to the Overwatch 2 roster," a Blizzard blog post says. "A former search and rescue operative turned bounty hunter, Freja brings a new dynamic to the game with her explosive crossbow and unique abilities. You can expect a challenging and rewarding experience, as she requires precision and a steady aim to master."

Freja's Revdraw Crossbow lets you unload a flurry of rapid-fire bolts in quick succession and also aims one high-speed explosive bold that deals immediate and secondary damage to hit targets. Both are useful in their own right during a match. The first attack will likely be helpful when trying to deal as much damage as possible into a crowd of enemy players, sniff out invisible Sombra players, or just try to whittle down a tank's health. The second attack is more precise and will likely be helpful when it comes to dealing the final blow or attacking supports sheltered in the backline.

This DPS hero is also fairly mobile. Freja has a Quick Dash ability, which allows her to move in any direction while also simultaneously reloading an explosive bolt attack. You can also use the Updraft ability, which seems to make use of a powerful gust of wind to launch yourself high into the sky. Tricks like this are always helpful when it comes to map traversal, avoiding incoming attacks, or just trying to find a good vantage point where you can pick off heroes on the enemy team.

The final powerful ability that Freja holds is her ultimate, Bola Shot. This shoots out an explosive Bola Shot, wrapping enemies up and pulling in the rest of their teammates. It may not be very lethal on its own, but this is the kind of ultimate that'll prove very useful in combos. It's always dangerous anytime you can pull a bunch of enemy players into one spot—we've seen it with Zarya's ultimate or Orisa's old gravitational energy orb. These tend to be followed by ultimates with a small area of effect but which also deal a high amount of damage, like Hanzo's ultimate.

You'll be able to try her kit out for yourself later on in Season 15 during a free trial weekend, but the specifics of when that'll happen will be announced at a later date.

There's also another hero, codenamed Aqua, who is being teased right now. "Aqua is a Chinese hero, wielding water-based abilities that can manipulate the battlefield with an innovative playstyle," the blog post says. We won't see more of this character until Season 18. But for now, learning about Freja and how to best use her kit is more than enough to get on with.

I hope I'm not the only one who saw Blizzard's reveal of Stadium, Overwatch 2's big new round-based mode played in third-person, and thought "Get this nonsense outta here." The FOV shift struck me as a change you'd come up with to make something seem more different than it actually is. Overwatch is a first-person shooter, damn it—the ideal POV for digital shooting! What is this, Marvel Rivals?

Then I played some Stadium at Blizzard HQ yesterday. Overwatch 2 surely doesn't need a third-person mode, but it does feel surprisingly good. I played some Soldier 76, Mercy, and DVa, and it's safe to say not every hero's behind-the-back camera works equally. Soldier 76 moved as naturally as his Marvel Rivals clone, The Punisher, and the higher FOV helped with my decision-making with Mercy. One time as Mercy, the third-person camera even saved my life because I could see a Reaper teleporting behind me.

D.Va felt a bit clunky—her mech is so big that it takes up a lot of the screen (a problem Blizzard never planned for in 2016), and you can't even see her guns firing because of where they're placed. There are some kinks to work out (or not work out, and hope people don't mind), but honestly, after an adjustment period, I wasn't thinking about the camera change. I was just playing Overwatch 2—a supercharged version of Overwatch 2 that's far less predictable and kinda broken (in a fun way, so far).

Before we go any further, it's worth going over exactly what Overwatch 2 Stadium is and what it definitely is not, because I played it and still found it confusing next to all the other changes announced today.

Stadium is...
✅A third "primary" mode in Overwatch 2 next to Quickplay and Competitive
✅Played in third-person by default, but first-person will be an option
✅A best of 7 round-based format with randomized, shortened objective modes
✅Overwatch with a MOBA-like item store: Farm currency, buy upgrades, try not to snowball the other team

Stadium is not...
❌The mode with perks: The new hero perks coming to Quickplay and Competitive are a separate system to Stadium's item store. I said it's confusing!
❌"A Counter-Strike mode": It's round-based and has a buy menu, but Stadium is still unmistakably Overwatch with extra stuff.
❌Ready yet: Perks are coming out with Season 15 on February 18, but Stadium won't be ready until Season 16 in April.

My first round of Stadium started with an in-game store sporting tons of icons, concepts, and stats that haven't existed in nine years of Overwatch. Stadium's cheapest upgrades modify stats usually exclusive to the domain of MOBA sickos: Attack speed, ability power, cooldown reduction, weapon power. During the excruciatingly long 80-90 second buy phase, my eyes widened as I juiced Soldier 76's Pulse Rifle to shoot faster, evolving its steady hum into the roar of a minigun. Blizzard later told us it extended the buy phase for our preview event so we could take our time picking powers, which is good to hear—by our second match, we didn't need more than 20 seconds to choose some starter gear.

I'm impressed by the variety of items in the store. There's enough going on that the game defaults to a "Starter Builds" tab for your first few matches, offering two complete builds centered around different playstyles. In my D.Va match, I went all-in on her Defense Matrix and rockets, choosing a power at level 1 that turned DVa's one defensive ability into a factory that produces more offense: "Fire one rocket for every 50 damage absorbed by DVa's Defense Matrix." That one paired well with a later power that increased her rocket explosion radius by 500%. I'll never forget the dumbfounded looks of Reaper and Soldier 76 as they dumped everything they had into the matrix and ate a bunch of mega rockets to the face.

Shopping spree

A lot of the store (the official name is the Armory) is straightforward upgrades to base stats. The main attractions are each hero's 12 unique powers that significantly boost or modify an ability. DVa's rocket factory is one power, as is a Solider 76 power I picked up that briefly activates his ultimate every time his secondary attack deals damage. Everyone picks a free power on rounds 1, 3, 5, and 7 if the match goes that long. You can't buy powers or swap them out once you've picked one, which is probably to ensure snowballing doesn't get out of hand.

In my best match, and the one that ultimately won me over on Stadium, I followed one of the Mercy starter builds and picked up two really cool abilities: One that grants lifesteal to heroes Mercy boosts with her blue beam, and another that chains her beam to the last two heroes she's healed for a few seconds. I've understood how to play Mercy for nine years, and with just two modifiers that whole script was tossed out the window. Now I had to tactically manage my beam targets to prioritize the best healing chain, and with lifesteal, her blue beam can provide enough healing that I hardly ever had to switch to yellow.

Hopefully all of that makes sense—the point is Stadium powers are all about breaking Overwatch wide open, which is fun, a little scary, and not without issues. For one, you're locked into the hero you choose at the start, MOBA-style. There's no pick-and-ban phase, so there's no way to react to the enemy's hero choices. This led to one really bad matchup between our DVa and their Zarya—a one-sided matchup for Zarya that led us to a 0-3 mercy rule defeat. Blizzard later told press that this specific matchup has been tweaked in a more updated build, but didn't get into how.

I think the idea is that you'll always be able to "build" your way out of a bad matchup, but that sounds a lot easier said than done when one of DVa's primary abilities is entirely useless against Zarya's beam gun.

That no hero swap thing gets to the heart of something inherently awkward about Stadium: So much original design work has gone into developing all these cool abilities and strategic economy, but it's all still wrapped around the vanilla Overwatch experience. Jumping between five to seven different maps and modes over one match was a lot. My longest match was around 30 minutes, but it felt longer because of all the starting and stopping. A shorter buy phase would make a difference.

Stadium is larger than an experiment, but its introduction couldn't feel more opposite than when Blizzard declared 5v5 was the future of Overwatch and we'd just have to get used to it. This version of the Overwatch team, with years of failed experiments behind it, is much more relaxed about the whole thing. If people love Stadium, it'll put more resources into it.

Stadium is immediately fun, but I have no idea if it'll be in my regular rotation a year from now. Either way, I'm just happy that Blizzard is finally taking big swings with Overwatch 2. Better late than never. I plan on booting it up for the first time in almost a year when Season 15 drops on February 18.

But the biggest news is a release date: Borderlands 4 is out September 23, 2025. That's a Tuesday, if you're curious. Multiple failed attempts to get into Borderlands 3 and that strange Tiny Tina game have shooed me away from the series, but I'm seeing lots to like in the sliding, double jump, and grapple hook—is Borderlands a movement shooter now? Ok, I'm leaning in.

This is our best look at Borderlands 4 gameplay yet. Gearbox also had a trailer during The Game Awards in December, but that one was more focused on characters and humor, aspects of Borderlands I can't say I've ever thought highly of. Maybe Borderlands 4 will be a turning point. Back in September, narrative director Sam Winkler said:

"We want to make sure the player and the vault hunters are the central characters of our story. We want to make sure the world is reactive, that the world is grounded. That while we keep our humor that brings a lot of people coming back to our franchise, we want to make sure that it's situational, that it emerges naturally."

Hopefully Borderlands 4's humor emerges more naturally than in the Borderlands film, a critical and commercial flop that did not turn out to be the big cross-media "moment" for Borderlands Gearbox was hoping for.

Well, now it is. In a 34-minute Overwatch 2 "Spotlight" video that premiered today, Blizzard laid out the next year of Overwatch, which includes the biggest shakeups and additions the FPS has seen since Blizzard slapped a '2' on it. It's safe to say this is a bigger deal than 5v5 ever was.

During the first few seasons of 2025, Overwatch 2 is getting:

• Perks: Passive and active upgrades for every hero unlocked during Quickplay and Competitive matches.
• Stadium: Overwatch's third primary mode separate from Quickplay and Competitive. A third-person (by default) round-based mode where players purchase upgrades and craft builds between rounds. (We'll have more on Stadium in a separate article soon)
• 6v6 competitive queue: 6v6 will have its own competitive open queue in Season 15
• A new hero: Freja, a Danish bounty hunter with an explosive crossbow
• Loot boxes: They're back as weekly rewards and battle pass rewards, but we're not sure you can buy them.
• Hero bans in Competitive

From that list, only perks and the 6v6 competitive queue are arriving in Season 15: Honor and Glory, on February 18. Stadium, Freja, loot boxes, and hero bans won't arrive until sometime in Season 16.

Each hero has two pairs of perks earned throughout a match. Heroes begin at level one and gain XP through kills, damage, and playing the objective. At level two, you choose between one of two "minor" perks, which Blizzard describes as "a little boost to warm you up." Level three gives the choice of two "major" perks, which can be anything from a significant damage buff to an entirely new ability. All 42 have four unique perks, meaning longtime players will need to get familiar with 168 new variables that didn't exist a week ago. After skimming a complete list of hero perks, I'm surprised by how strong they sound. A few examples:

Orisa

• Level 2: Primary fire critical hits refund heat OR Fortify briefly grants an additional 100 overhealth when activated
• Level 3: Hold left-click to charge Energy Javelin, increasing its speed and knockback. Pierces enemies at full power. OR Convert Javelin Spin to instead launch a barrier

Zenyatta

• Level 2: Snap Kick's knockback is increased by 30% OR Activate and hold double jump to hover for up to three seconds
• Level 3: Secondary fire charges 20% faster and can store one extra Orb of Destruction OR Zenyatta heals Orb of Harmony targets for 20% of his damage dealt to Orb of Discord targets.

Genji

• Level 2: Swift Strike resets double jump OR Dragonbalde swings gain 30% lifesteal
• Level 3: Swift Strike deals 25 additional damage over time when used shortly after an elimination OR Regenerate 25 health per second while deflect is active

As a lapsed Overwatch player, I'm still in mild shock. These changes are big enough that just one of them would be the centerpiece of a regular balance patch. This is Blizzard upending its nine-year-old shooter overnight—the gall!

If you have hundreds of hours clocked in a hero, it's easy to imagine how differently they'll play after February 18. Genji mains can get more aggressive with their deflects, Zenyatta sharpshooters are rewarded with more healing, and Orisa can spec toward her old barrier role.

I got a bit of hands-on time with perks at a Blizzard HQ press event yesterday and came away nervously excited. In one game, I had a Symmetra with four turrets and an upgrade that boosted her laser's range the longer it fired. As Mercy, I upgraded her blue beam to boost two allies at once and increased her Guardian Angel range by 30%. It's way too early to say how this major change to Overwatch will be received—all I know is this is the most interested I've been in the game since the unfulfilled vision of Overwatch 2.

"Season 15 also features the return of loot boxes," a press release says. "You will be able to earn a variety of cosmetics when collecting loot boxes. They will be available from weekly and event rewards." You'll also be able to earn one loot box via the free battle pass and an additional two in the Premium battle pass.

Loot boxes were initially removed during the launch of Overwatch 2. As the game moved to free-to-play, Blizzard seemed more comfortable making money via the in-game shop and battle pass purchases instead of loot boxes. Loot boxes were also quite controversial thanks to their association with gambling and regulation efforts from government bodies.

With those issues in mind, Overwatch 2's new loot boxes will be more transparent and predictable than before: "In addition to the below drop rates, to ensure you always have a chance to receive some truly great items, we are guaranteeing that a Rare or better item will drop in every single box, with an Epic item within five consecutive boxes and a Legendary item within twenty consecutive boxes."

Regular loot boxes have a 5.10% chance to include a Legendary item, a 21.93% chance of having an Epic, a 96.26% chance of having a Rare, and a 97.97% chance of having a Common in one of the four slots. While legendary loot boxes have a 100% chance of having one Legendary item, a 21.93% chance for an Epic, a 96.26% chance for a Rare, and a 97.97% for a Common.

I never personally had an issue with loot boxes. While I understand the need to police features that resemble gambling in a game that has young players, I didn't think it was a bad way to earn cosmetics, especially as you could get them for leveling up or completing challenges. Throughout the course of Overwatch, I earned every single skin without having to pay a dime. That feat is impossible to replicate in Overwatch 2—whether you're purchasing skins from the shop or buying the premium battle pass, there aren't a lot of free rewards on offer to players. So this change is one that my wallet is especially happy to see.

Overwatch 2 Season 15 starts on February 18.

Unlocking Derealize, and thus earning Barrow-Dyad, can be pretty involved—especially if you don't know where to go. Here then, I'll lay out all the steps you have to follow to unlock the mission, as well as a few tips to bear in mind when you run it.

Finding the Taken Blight

There's no quest marker to follow just yet—this is the bit that Bungie left players to find for themselves. To start the quest that will eventually unlock the Derealize exotic mission, you need to head to Heresy's new Nether activity. Once you've landed on the Dreadnaught, you're looking for a Taken blight.

For me this was the most annoying step of the entire thing—there should be a blight in each area, but sometimes it just wouldn't appear where it was supposed to spawn. In the end, the one that spawned for me was in the Hall of Souls, in the room facing the central plinth—the one you load into when launching the King's Fall raid.

Based on what other players have said, there's also one in the Mausoleum, along the right-side wall when you turn around from the spawn position. And in the Trenchway, near where the Taken wizard event triggers to the left of spawn. This latter one seemed very inconsistent for me. In the end, I just reloaded the activity until I landed in the Hall of Souls.

Once you've found the Blight, jump into it. You'll spawn into a new room with an energy barrier down the middle.

Step onto the plate on the floor, and face the direction of the symbol that appears on the barrier. In the bottom-left corner of the screen, your message feed will tell you a direction. For me, the barrier displayed an eye symbol and the message read "Something whispers to the right…"

Keep looking at the symbol and move off the plate in the direction you're given—in my case strafing right. This teleported me to the other side of the barrier, where a collectible sits on a pedestal. Grab the collectible—a Taken Osseous Fragment—and return to orbit.

Taken Osseous Fragments

Head to Eris's apartment in The Last City, and over to the Shaping Slab. This will give you a new quest, The Taken Path. Your first step is to unlock and equip the Scotopic Rune in the Shaping Slab's Runic Enhancement menu. This costs Sigil Shards and requires you to be at Nether Enhancement Level 2 to equip—meaning you may need to farm some Nether completions if you aren't yet able to fulfil the criteria.

Once the Scotopic Rune is equipped, it's time to collect more Taken Osseous Fragments. The quest first directs you to Sorrow's Harbor on the Moon.

• Head to the K1 Lost Sector, which will be suspiciously empty of enemies.
• Find the Taken dome about halfway through the Lost Sector, and shoot the small blight above it.
• Inside the dome was the same plate puzzle as before. Step on and face the symbol, and then step off in the direction you're given.
• Taken will now spawn. Kill them to reveal a new fragment.

The next step of the quest takes place in the Cosmodrome's Forgotten Shore.

• Enter the Veles Labyrinth Lost Sector—again, it's quiet in there.
• Walk through the cavernous maze until you arrive at another dome, and shoot the blight above it.
• This time you'll need to move through a sequence of portal plates—once again always stepping on the plate, looking at the symbol nearby, and stepping off in the direction you're given.
• Surprise! Another bunch of Taken have spawned. Kill them off—you'll need to work backwards through the Lost Sector and through the maze section again—and you'll reveal another Taken Osseous Fragment.

The Three Curses

It's back to the Shaping Slab now, where you'll be given three new quests: Curse of Endurance, Curse of Urgency and Curse of Revenge.

For each one, you'll need to travel to a specific location or activity, and pick up a Taken artifact. When you grab the artifact, a timer will start counting down—but it can be refreshed with every enemy you kill with the artifact. Eventually you'll need to dunk the artifact in the marked location—usually after the associated activity's completion.

Here's the rundown of each specific quest:

• Curse of Endurance: Head back to Sorrow's Harbor and you'll see a waypoint leading to the artifact near the entrance to the Scarlet Keep. Simply kill the enemies that spawn, and dunk the artifact at the marker given. This one completed for me automatically because a bunch of Guardians were already doing it when I loaded in.
• Curse of Urgency: This one's in the Hallowed Grove Lost Sector, near the Sludge landing zone in the EDZ. Here you'll grab the artifact, run through the Lost Sector and destroy a Taken barrier at the end using the artifact's super ability. The dunk spot is behind the barrier.
• Curse of Revenge: You'll find this one in Nightmare Hunt: Pride on the Moon, which takes you through Skolas's ship—the location of Destiny 1's first secret exotic mission. You'll find the artifact in the boss room, and you'll be able to dunk it once Nightmare Skolas is killed.

The Thrall Statues

To finish off the three curse quests, you need yet more Taken Osseous Fragments. This new set can be acquired through the Thrall statues you can now find in each zone in the Nether. When you interact with a statue it spawns a miniboss nearby. Kill the boss and the fragment will spawn back on the statue.

Here's the location of the three statues I found:

• The Mausoleum: Jump down into the eldritch pit at the back of the room—where you fight the zone's boss. In the upper section, before you walk down the ramp to the boss arena, head to the left side—the statue is there.
• Trenchway: This one is near the event where you fight the two shielded Subjugators—on the left-hand side of the stairs if you look at the area from the platforms opposite. It can be hard to spot as it's shrouded in shadow.
• Hall of Souls: Look to your right from the spawn point and you should see it pretty easily.

Do this three times—either as part of a full Nether run, or just reloading back into the Nether—and you'll finally be done.

Now, in your director, in The Last City, you'll see the prompt to launch the new Derealize mission.

Derealize

You can see Esoterickk's runthrough of the mission above. It's reasonably simple as a combat challenge—there's no timer or revive limit here, and unlike in the Nether you do regenerate health normally. It's an easy one to complete solo, but there is one puzzle that can take some work to figure out.

Derealize Hive symbol puzzle: After the first boss encounter, you'll be trapped in a space similar to the portal room that kicked off the whole quest. To escape this, you'll need to again do the plate-based teleportation puzzle that's been required throughout The Taken Path. This time there's a twist.

When you step on the plate, a 10-second timer will start. When the timer hits zero, you'll be automatically teleported to a new room for 10 seconds. You'll travel between four rooms like this, before being returned to the start.

Above the plate, this time you'll find a code of four symbols. The trick here is to only step off the plate in the corresponding direction if its symbol matches the next one in the code—reading it from left to right. If it matches, step off in that direction. If it doesn't, simply wait on the plate until the timer counts down and you're automatically teleported to the next room.

From what I can tell the code remains the same for everyone:

• First symbol: In the first room, step right.
• Second symbol: In the third room, step forwards.
• Third symbol: In the second room (after one full cycle), step backwards
• Fourth symbol: In the fourth room (after one full cycle), step left.

You'll know if you've done something right, because the code will remove any symbol you've correctly activated. If you mess up, it will instead reset and display the full code. If this happens, just wait. After you're teleported through all four rooms, you'll be taken back to the start to try again.

Beyond that, you're really just repeating mechanics that you learned in the prelude to the quest itself—the main other thing to watch out for is the sealed green barrier during the mission's main jumping puzzle. You'll need to destroy three purple crystals to lower it.

Eventually you'll end up at the boss room, where you'll finally unlock Barrow-Dyad. Then, when you defeat the boss, you'll be given a new quest to unlock the catalysts that are available to craft.

In a statement posted on X, Crytek cited "complex, unfavourable market dynamics" as the reason behind the reductions, which will affect roughly 60 of the around 400 employees within the studio's development teams and shared services. "This has not been an easy decision to make, as we deeply appreciate the hard work of our talented teams."

Crytek goes on to say that "after putting the development of the next Crysis game on hold in Q3 2024, we have been trying to shift developers over to Hunt: Showdown 1896". Yet while Crytek's nineteenth-century extraction shooter is "still growing, Crytek cannot continue as before and remain financially sustainable." The studio also stresses there are "ongoing efforts" to reduce running costs, but says that layoffs are nonetheless "inevitable".

The news that Crysis 4 is on hold may come as a shock to fans, especially given the decision was apparently made some time ago. However, Crytek has said little about the project since it was announced way back in January 2022. The reveal was accompanied by a teaser trailer (viewable below) but no footage of the game itself was shown at the time. The fact the game is merely on hold, rather than cancelled outright, means there's some hope we'll see it eventually. But given Crytek is shifting developers over to Hunt: Showdown, it seems unlikely we'll be seeing a new Crysis anytime soon.

Regarding the future of the studio as a whole, Crytek says it is "fully committed" to the operation of Hunt: Showdown 1896, and will "continue to expand" the extraction shooter as it has done since launch. Hunt enjoyed its highest-ever player count following its 1896 update, which Crytek described as a "new era" for the shooter. But recent brand crossovers with the likes of Ghost Face from Scream have raised concerns about the ongoing identity of the game.

Personally, I'm gutted that Crysis 4 is in limbo. I'm a big fan of the series overall, but especially that almighty first game and its ridiculous technical wizardry. Last year I sat down with Crysis' director Cevat Yerli to get the inside story of the game's creation, and he told me all manner of wild development anecdotes, like being invited to an actual nanotech conference because of the game's website, and how the studio created a blushing system specifically for its NPCs.

Moreover, although I cannot claim to be a business mega-brain, I have a sneaking suspicion that a new Crysis would be absolutely huge right about now. The original is one of the most fundamentally PC games ever made, combining dazzling environments with rich, flexible systems and a real desire to put the action in your hands. It's a combination the gaming community has demonstrated a real desire for lately, with both Stalker 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 proving big hits, even if they're not always the most streamlined or user-friendly experiences.

It's enough to make you want to reach for a mop and bucket, honestly. The thing is a game of Killing Floor 3 is never just a handful of kills. Killing Floor has a rich legacy as a horde shooter and developer Tripwire Interactive has gone hard on the horde part, practically drowning you in enemies at all times. There's usually a swarm of Zeds pushing at you from every angle, clogging up your field of view and forcing you to fight on the enemies' terms rather than your own. The game is at its best when you're on the back foot, low on ammo and hoofing it between enclosed corridors and debris-strewn courtyards.

Killing Floor 3's core premise hasn't changed much since the original game made its debut as an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod in 2005. You're part of an elite paramilitary group desperately trying to survive against hordes of Zeds—not zombies but brand name mutant monsters from the Umbrella Corporation-esque bioweapons corporation Horzine—or die trying. You'll do this wave by wave, with just enough time between scraps to hustle to a trader and top off your ammo or armour or buy a shiny new gun.

Over time, these Zeds have evolved and so has Killing Floor. Killing Floor 3 takes inspiration from hero shooters like Overwatch or Marvel Rivals, making the individual classes of the previous games into specific characters with their own skills. Practically, this means that the classes have their own unique grenade, a selection of weapons they do more damage with, and an incredibly powerful "ultimate" ability. Mr Foster is no longer a skin you can select, but a character that means you'll be playing as the Commando.

Across Reddit and Steam forums, this looks like it's been a contentious change, but after playing for a couple of hours it doesn't feel that different from Killing Floor 2's perk system. It's more efficient to use assault rifles if you're the Commando, sure, but you don't have to. The biggest change? That's that all-powerful gadget that functions like an ultimate, giving you an incredibly effective emergency button you can hit roughly once every round and a half or so. The commando gets a little drone that pops up over your shoulder and fires acid rounds at hordes you target and it's a total game changer. But that's not my favourite. The Engineer has little shoulder-mounted sound cannons which you can fire manually, pulverising enemies in front of you until they are little more than paste.

Progression for these characters is much faster, too. I played for around three hours during a closed beta weekend and got a handful of levels for the Engineer, Commando and Ninja—this game's replacement for my beloved Berserker—that allowed me to choose a few different traits. This means each time you play, at least those first few sessions, you're going to feel like you're making progress. This was my biggest annoyance with Killing Floor and Killing Floor 2, where after a few hours you never really got anywhere.

Steam helpfully tells me I've played 63 hours of Killing Floor and 41 hours of Killing Floor 2 and I never felt like I'd made any meaningful progression. I didn't make any in a couple of hours with Killing Floor 3 either, but I can see a bright future where I'm actually rewarded for the time I'm pouring into the game.

Combat flows well, both solo and in multiplayer. A lot of this is the upgrades to the Zeds I mentioned earlier. From the lowliest Clot to the terrifying Scrakes, they've all been given some upgrades. Often, this just plays into the science fiction body horror theme of the thing, and they've had plates of armour welded on just about everywhere. Every enemy has one new trick though: the Scrake's chainsaw is now also capable of firing out a grapple hook to bring you right into chainsawing range, while the spiderlike Crawlers can now crawl over walls and ceilings to get to you, something that feels like a tiny change until they drop in behind you, blocking off your escape routes.

Bigger enemies will now blast clean through walls, tearing doors off their hinges as they step forwards to mess you up, and combat is faster across the board, and now I find myself pinballing through chokepoints, trying to thin a herd of enemies and avoid getting pinned down.

Gunplay feels fluid with this higher pace, too. Assault rifles bark and skip around at range, meaning you'll be looking to close the distance yourself, dancing in and out of the crowd so you can do the most damage. You can see this more with the Ninja's armoury, many of which are melee. This means a good Ninja player will actually have to hop in and out of combat, leathering a few monsters and then dodging back as it gets messy. Later you get a bow, which rewards precise shooting and careful ammo management. This adds a whole new dimension to things because, frankly, while ammo is often at a premium, Killing Floor 3 is not an easy game to conserve your shots in.

Despite all of the changes, everything still feels charmingly old school. In an interview with our own Tyler Wilde, Tripwire studio creative director Bryan Wynia explained that one of the biggest things the team learnt from a lengthy prototyping phase on Killing Floor 3 was that "classic wave based combat is the lifeblood of Killing Floor."

They also learnt that its players don't just see it as a co-op game.

"One of the things that we gathered data on from KF and KF2 that's now part of KF3 that I think helps make us a little different from other wave-based shooters is that our playerbase is almost 51 percent likes to play with a friend and 49 percent likes to play alone," said Wynia. "So, dynamic balancing is really important for us. If it's just me playing at a specific difficulty setting it's balanced for that. If there's six players, we have it balanced for that too. Prototyping let us find the lifeblood, the DNA, of Killing Floor, and really emphasise those biggest parts."

Which explains how Killing Floor 3 always made me feel like my back was against a wall whether I was playing alone or when I teamed up with PCG's Evan Lahti to mess up some Zeds as a pair. I vastly prefer the game as a multiplayer experience, both because I like the extra chaos, but because Killing Floor 3 is a game that's full of "what the f**k was that" moments, and sometimes it's good to have someone else there to talk through what you just saw.

This taste has given me enough to be excited for the main event, when the game releases on March 25, 2025 and I can get my buddies involved. I'm intending to be knee-deep in Zeds as soon as possible.

Ubisoft's return to Steam has continued slowly but surely since September 2024, when the company finally decided that enough was enough and it was time to start selling games where people actually want to buy them. That means day-one releases on Steam, which is a big deal in its own right, but Ubisoft has been going an extra step by adding Steam achievements to its older games on the storefront. That's nice, although it doesn't really interest me personally—or at least it didn't until today, because today Ubisoft brought that love to what is possibly its greatest videogame ever.

I am of course talking about Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, the "'80s vision of the future" starring Rex "Power" Colt, whose mission in the futuristic world of 2007 is to kill everything, get the girl, and save the world. "Experience every cliché of a VHS era vision of a nuclear future, where cyborgs, blood dragons, mutants, and Michael Biehn collide," the Steam page promises, and let me tell you as someone who grew up in the era of Terminator, Aliens, and Navy Seals, it works: It's dumber than hell and an absolute blast.

Blood Dragon is, at its core, a Far Cry game, but it strips out a lot of the extraneous nonsense in favor of a focus on blasting and cheesy one-liners. Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme didn't worry about the niceties of a coherent story, so why should you? Naturally the experience is most effective if you have an appreciation for '80s action flicks, and the jokes can sometimes wear a bit thin, but even without that context it's exactly the sort of top-tier silly fun you'd expect from a game about a guy who's got "the robo-balls to destroy evil."

(That's a Rex Colt guarantee, by the way.)

So there's a lot to recommend about Blood Dragon (the soundtrack is great too), and now there's Steam achievements on top of everything else. The achievements aren't quite as on-point as I would've made them—I'm sure Ubisoft could've easily filled the list with great movie quotes—but they're fun in their own right. A few notable examples:

• Nice Like Jesus
• Murder Nature
• What Are You Reading For?
• Running Man
• Derp
• The Drug of the Nation

If you've already unlocked Blood Dragon achievements in Ubisoft Connect, they'll automatically transfer over when you launch the game on Steam. And look, I admit, slamming achievements on a 12-year-old shooter isn't the biggest deal ever, but it's Blood Dragon! I will never not take the opportunity to wave my hands around and talk about Blood Dragon, the only Ubisoft game I've ever really loved—and one that, even now, I sometimes find hard to believe was actually allowed to be made.

Now, a mere nine years since its release, The Queenbreaker has become one of the premier DPS weapons in the game. Currently, all linear fusion rifles benefit from an artifact mod (ie temporary) called Particle Deconstruction, which partially refills the magazine and deals additional damage on sustained hits. But the reason The Queenbreaker is eating so voraciously is thanks to two things. Firstly, its core exotic perk got a complete rework. Per the patch notes, the alternate firing modes now work as follows:

• Marksman Sights fires a single-shot bolt that chains to nearby targets and blinds them on hit.
• Combat Sights fires a three-round burst that decreases charge time even further on sustained damage.

Marksman is a monster for clearing trash mobs, thanks to the chain AoE damage, but it's the Combat mode that is baking bosses. Combined with Particle Deconstruction, it makes Queenbreaker a damage monster, as you can see from the testing below from DPS guru TheAegisRelic.

The second reason is that The Queenbreaker also received an exotic catalyst. These are special upgrades which enhance the core functionality of exotic weapons, and have to be acquired by specific (sometimes complex) paths. In The Queenbreaker's case, the catalyst grants the Rewind Rounds perks, which reads "When this weapon's magazine is empty, it refills from reserves based on the number of hits." The upshot being you barely need to reload during a typical damage phase, thereby maintaining higher DPS.

How to get The Queenbreaker exotic catalyst

The Queenbreaker catalyst is found as a random drop from completed matches in the Gambit, Vanguard or Crucible playlists, meaning you're at the mercy of RNG. And given that those games can take 10-15 minutes each, it can be a frustrating slog. But there is a painless way to snag it sooner. Click on Destinations, go into the Crucible node and select a Private Match. Now, in the Game Options, change the settings to:

Game Type: Collision
Match Time Limit: 5:00
Match Score Limit: 5

The map doesn't matter, and crucially you don't need any other players. Launch the activity and on spawn just run over to the nearest zone, cap it, and the game will end. You won't receive any other rewards, but The Queensbreaker catalyst does have a chance of dropping. It took my clanmate and I about six games each to get it—much quicker than grinding a playlist normally. Now all you need to do is get 400 kills with the weapon (Altars of Sorrow on the Moon or a Shuro-Chi checkpoint are great for this) and you'll be able to upgrade The Queenbreaker to its final form.

One final tip: If you're facing a mobile boss with a small crit spot, such as the final encounter in the new Sundered Doctrine dungeon, gently persuade a teammate who doesn't have The Queenbreaker to run the Divinity trace rifle. It'll make hitting those headshots a breeze and you'll soon be chonking damage bars like a demon.

Budega can be heard shouting his head off in the background of this interview clip, and the beginnings of the altercation were streamed live (choice commentary line: "who says esports is boring?"). The incident occurred in the third and final map, with the match level, after DarkZero was awarded a free round due a rule violation from Budega. When DarkZero closed out the match, Budega started shouting and got in the face of various opposition players, and appears to barge into the back of DarkZero player Nathan ‘Nafe’ Sharp, with officials intervening.

Budega was removed from the venue almost immediately, swiftly followed by Vivas. Budega confirmed after the incident he had been warned twice (in posts that have subsequently been deleted, but are easily found), and went into self-justification mode. "A member of BLAST’s staff is making false accusations about me, saying that I physically intimidated him," says Budega, who can be seen on the livestream getting physically close to other competitors, gesticulating wildly and remonstrating. "That’s a lie and the fact that someone has the courage to lie about that makes me sick."

That's a tough claim to make stick when you've been caught on camera. Nevertheless he continues, "I shouted things amid the heat of the moment that could have been avoided like, 'Whoever made that decision should be fired', but I never touched anyone and my conscience is clean, I still have chances for my 'ban' to be reverted."

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this feels unlikely. No doubt Budega felt hard done by, but the clips show this is playground level behaviour at a professional event: If you can't take a loss with a bit of grace, maybe you're in the wrong career. This is not Budega's first brush with Ubisoft: He was suspended for 12 months in 2022 for breaking the rules.

"Disappointed and shocked by what transpired during and after the match today," said M80 founder and CEO Marco Mereu. "Completely unacceptable. Sorry to the players, fans, Ubisoft staff and Dark Zero for what took place. Completely ashamed of how M80 was represented today. Really no words."

M80 continues to compete in the event's lower bracket. One of its players, Leonardo ‘kyno’ Figueiredo, assured fans that the team are "hungrier than ever" and now have a fire in their nether regions (might want to get that checked).

The Invitational is the biggest event on the Siege calendar, with the 20 best teams in the world playing in Boston for a fetching Sledgehammer trophy and the lion's share of a $3 million prize pool. Ubisoft's official Rainbow Six account says "an active investigation into [Budega and Vivas'] conduct is underway", and has gone back to posting (rather good) clips from the tournament.

But EA has a plan. "The trajectory of the business of that franchise has not been headed in the direction that we have wanted for some time," said Wilson (thanks, GIBiz). "We continue to test and develop more and great content for that community. And I would say we have seen some progress in that, but probably not as much as we would have liked."

In the last earnings call before this one, Wilson himself claimed there were no plans for an Apex 2.0 and pushed back against the idea. Now? It is very much on the cards.

"We do believe there will be a time where we need to do a more meaningful update of Apex as a broad game experience, and the team is diligently working on that. You should imagine we probably wouldn't drop that on top of a Battlefield launch. And so from a timing standpoint, our thinking right now is that that would exist post-Battlefield."

What EA is calling "the biggest Battlefield ever made" is scheduled to release before April 2026, which to be fair is sooner than many of us were expecting. So you could read between the lines and think Wilson's talking about 2027 or winter 2026 at the very earliest here. As he puts it, EA thinks about Apex in terms of in decades rather than years.

"On a longer-term horizon, these franchises that exist at this level and have this much fan love don't come often," said Wilson. "What I think we've demonstrated as a company is an ability to build franchises that last 10, 20, 30 years."

Then, he says the magic words:

"Our expectation is that Apex will also be one of those franchises, and that some time on the horizon, there will be an even bigger, more meaningful update to that broader game experience—an Apex 2.0 if you will. This will not be the final incarnation of Apex."

Quite a turnaround from the last earnings call, then, but I suppose when you're disappointing shareholders you also need to promise them that there will be jam tomorrow. And Apex matters to EA because live service games now account for 74% of the company's business: $5.449 billion of the $7.347 billion it made in 2024 came from "live services and other."

That's also bad news for fans of what EA's CFO calls "blockbuster storytelling," with Dragon Age: Tthe Veilguard's underperformance a major area of focus. That game was reportedly in early production when the decision was made to strip out the live service components, and the lesson EA seems to have taken from this is that, erm, it should have kept those in:

"In order to break beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category," said Wilson. "Dragon Age had a high quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played; however, it did not resonate with a broad-enough audience in this highly competitive market."

Cruelty Squad is undoubtedly one of the weirdest indie breakthroughs of this decade, a wilfully obtuse and unpleasant immersive sim in which you play a corporate assassin in a lo-fi 3D world painted with vomit. But we dug its counter-cultural (and counter-mechanical) approach and, following its success, the developer has since been working on a new game called Psycho Patrol R, which has just dropped a new trailer in advance of its early access launch in a few weeks' time.

Psycho Patrol R is spiritually aligned with, but fictionally distinct from Cruelty Squad, with developer Consumer Softproducts describing it as a "policing and punishing simulator" set in a decaying state called Pan-Europa. In fact, I'm just gonna drop in the full blurb in below, because it's basically nightmare dystopian flash fiction that really got me stoked to jump in.

You play as an officer of the European Federal Police, a V-Stalker pilot of Psycho Patrol, a special unit tasked with counter-psychohazard operations and neural meltdown prevention using cutting edge criminological frameworks. The battleground of the 21st century is the human brain, the base unit of the hyperconjoined egregore Terra. The soul of the planet is on the verge of collapse. Your chances are 0.001%.

I mean, who wouldn't want to play that?

Pyscho Patrol R likewise appears to play similarly to Cruelty Squad, providing an open-ended blend of stealth and first-person shooting. The world is seamless this time around, rather than being split into missions, and you'll be able to approach its objectives however you like, with the developers stating that "every quest is a side quest".

The biggest difference, though, is how you can switch between on-foot combat and piloting a big mech, which the new trailer dedicates a big chunk of its time to portraying. You might think a mech designed by the creator of Cruelty Squad would handle like a forklift on an ice-rink, but it looks surprisingly smooth and responsive. Indeed, the combat in general seems slightly more refined than Cruelty Squad, which I'll admit I'm relieved by. I liked Cruelty Squad's ideas, but I found it just too unwieldy to stick with. The textures still look like they were taken from a pub car park, however, so don't expect it to be in any way a conventional FPS experience.

Psycho Patrol R launches in Steam early access on March 31. It's landing in a big year for first-person shooters, with Killing Floor 3 arriving a few days before Psycho Patrol R, Doom: The Dark Ages set to rip and tear a big hole in your gaming time in May, and the likes of Atomfall, Borderlands 4, and Splitgate 2 all set to launch this year. Yet even among this packed crowd, I doubt Psycho Patrol R will have much trouble standing out.

"Mercy’s rapid Resurrect isn’t the only thing to get hyped for in Overwatch Classic: Moth Meta," Overwatch's official X account says. This new version of Overwatch Classic will be playable from February 4 to February 18 and has the old 6v6 open queue format, so it's exactly the same as it was when this meta was first introduced.

This was the meta that saw Mercy transform into a rapid resurrecting machine. She had rez on cooldown and could instantly bring someone back from the dead, even being able to rez two people within her 20-second ultimate; there was no chance to stop her and no way to counter her.

This also meant that pretty much every game had a Mercy in it, and if your team didn't, you were at a serious disadvantage. I've never really mained Mercy, but I had to throw that aside during this meta just for the sake of winning and not being shouted at by everyone else on my team. Needless to say, I do not have any fond memories of it. But there are some people who are overjoyed to see the Mercy Moth Meta return. "MERCY MY BABY UR BACK," one player says. But Mercy isn't the only hero getting changes in the return to Moth Meta. Both Doomfist and Orisa will also get a couple of retro changes.

Doomfist is back to being a DPS hero, and Orisa gets her Shield Generator and gravitational energy orb back. These aren't as significant as Mercy's changes, but they'll still be a ton of fun to try out again. Despite Doomfist transferring over to tank, he's never really lost some of his DPS features that saw him able to dive backlines, wreak havoc, and then dip out when things got too tough. When it came to Orisa's energy orb, I used to have so much fun using it to drag enemies off the map, so it'll be nice to return to my old ways once more.

Overwatch Classic is all about reliving the glory days. But the more I play this mode, the more I realise that old Overwatch wasn't as great as I remember it being and that it's actually in a pretty good state right now with the 5v5 format. The Moth Meta is only back for a couple of weeks, and while I may poke my head in for a couple of days, I won't stick around to witness the depressing mayhem that will inevitably develop in this classic flashback, thanks to an overpowered hero that can make your hard-earned kills completely redundant and who's as easy to catch and kill as, well, a moth.

Different companies define their fiscal years differently. EA is currently in its 2025 fiscal year, but that ends this March, after which the 2026 fiscal year begins. So, where EA is concerned, the 2026 financial year starts this April. Yeah, it's baffling, but that's how they do it, and it means that the next Battlefield will be out sometime between this April and the start of April 2026, if everything goes to plan.

Things could change, of course: Answering a question during the call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that if the FY2026 release window turns out not to be ideal—say, because of a big competing game—the timing could change. I also doubt that EA plans to release the new Battlefield this calendar year, even though it's within its release window. Sometime early next year seems most likely.

Still, I'm mildly surprised it's coming so soon: EA keeps talking up how big this new Battlefield will be, and it was only last year that DICE said it was fully moving on from Battlefield 2042 to focus entirely on the new game.

On Monday, EA announced Battlefield Labs, a new playtesting program that will inform development of this as-yet-unnamed Battlefield game. We also saw a brief snippet of gameplay: It looks a lot like Battlefield 3, which aligns with our expectations. After the dire initial reception of Battlefield 2042, EA said explicitly that the next one will emulate Battlefield 3 and 4.

BF2042 was released not long after it was revealed, with just a couple obligatory beta sessions in between. After players ripped into it at launch, DICE went into 'we hear your feedback' mode and made substantial changes over the next couple years. I was an outlier in that I liked BF2042 from the start, but it did get a lot better over time by many accounts.

Despite the less-than-ideal launch of BF2042, EA committed heavily to the series after it came out. The publisher put Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella—formerly of Call of Duty dev Infinity Ward—in charge of the franchise, and has multiple studios working on it: DICE, as usual, plus Criterion, Motive, and Ripple Effect. The latter is the studio that made the cool Battlefield Portal server hosting feature in BF2042, and it's working on a "new experience" that hasn't been detailed.

"We've invested more in this Battlefield than any Battlefield before," said Wilson. "We have four studios. We've had a meaningful amount of time. We're looking for this to be the biggest Battlefield we've ever made."

This time, they're getting players in for testing much earlier—sign ups for Battlefield Labs are open now.

"There is some trepidation amongst the core community as to what this Battlefield will be," Wilson said in response to a question about the reception of Battlefield Labs. "Battlefield is this incredible franchise, at unbelievable scale, with destruction and vehicles and all kinds of things, and is much loved in the community. The last two iterations of Battlefield have not resonated as strongly and have been found wanting by meaningful parts of the community globally. And so we do appreciate and understand that there is some trepidation there, and this development team, the biggest development team we've ever had, is committed to working very closely with our players to ensure that they understand what we're doing, that they feed into the tuning and balancing at scale of this game."

EA is hurting a little right now—both Dragon Age: The Veilguard and EA Sports FC failed to meet the publisher's projections over the past three months—so there's perhaps a little extra pressure on Battlefield to be a big deal, and to avoid significant delays.

As with the launch of every new Destiny 2 season, players who log in today and look at the new season pass will be greeted with a countdown timer showing how long they've still got to earn their seasonal rewards. At time of writing, the current season pass says that the Heresy episode ends in just 160 days and 22 hours, leaving us with an end date of July 15, 2025.

Heresy's five month runtime will make it one of the longest stretches between Destiny 2 content drops to date, beaten only by Season of the Lost's 181 days and Season of the Wish's 189. It's worth noting that Season of the Lost and Season of the Wish ran long due to delays: both were the last seasons before the launches of yearly expansions whose release dates Bungie had pushed back. When Destiny 2 seasons stretch, it's typically because Bungie's working on getting a big release out the door.

Heresy's July end date, meanwhile, lands within the Summer 2025 release window that Bungie's latest Destiny 2 content roadmap had sketched out for the upcoming Codename: Apollo expansion. July 15 is also a Tuesday; Destiny expansions always drop on Tuesdays. It's not an official release date, of course, but the numbers line up well enough to serve as a rough estimate until Bungie gives us specifics.

Apollo will mark the beginning of Codename: Frontiers, Bungie's working title for Destiny 2's next major, multi-expansion narrative arc after The Final Shape closed out the decade-spanning Light and Darkness saga. So far, details about Apollo are sparse, but Bungie's called it a "nonlinear character-driven adventure," where the story "takes place over dozens of threads you’ll explore and discover" in the order you prefer. It also, based on early concept art released by Bungie, seems like it'll involve a big, crashed spaceship. Everyone loves a big, crashed spaceship.

How Destiny will look five months from now, however, is an open question. Heresy arrives in a moment where player counts on Steam have been hitting historic lows amidst frustrations with Destiny 2's new act-based episode structure and a sense of narrative stagnation. But if I know Destiny players, nothing sparks their interest like a giant, haunted spaceship full of guns. Hopefully Heresy can move the needle.

And hey, you can dress your Titan up like a stormtrooper now, if you're into that.

One thing it won't have a lot of however, is voiced dialogue. As part of the January 30 This Week in Destiny blog post on the Bungie website, the community team tempered expectations around voice lines amidst the continuing SAG-AFTRA strike.

"With this being our final epilogue entry for the Light and Darkness Saga, our teams have been taking great care to deliver delightful narrative beats and story content for players to enjoy," the blog post read. "Due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, you may notice certain voice lines being silent in-game. However, we have enabled subtitles by default for this release to ensure players do not miss any narrative content." It's unclear exactly which characters will be voiceless right now, though we do know based on last week's livestream that Sloane is one of them.

Bungie says that activities affected by the missing voice lines will display a warning, and points folk to the multitude of closed captioning customisation options present in the game that can be tweaked to each player's liking. There's no word on whether Bungie'll go back and patch the voice lines in post if things come to a resolution, nor did it offer any further comments on the strike.

Destiny 2 isn't the only game feeling the impact right now, mind. The SAG-AFTRA strike has been in full swing since July last year, with videogame voice actors wanting better protection against the rising use of AI, including "fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the AI use of their faces, voices, and bodies." In October, the union reported that 120 games from 49 different companies had signed the agreement, though an updated figure hasn't been provided since.

Other games we've seen hit by the action include League of Legends, with Riot delaying the English voiceover, a decision which came with some scathing criticisms from some voice actors. Hideo Kojima also revealed that his upcoming projects OD and Physint have run into a few hiccups thanks to the strike, though Death Stranding 2 is in the clear. Activision, meanwhile, went the recast route after a handful of actors were replaced and their credits removed in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

The next Battlefield doesn't have an official name, date, or even a proper trailer yet, but EA wants folks to play it and start giving feedback. The series' new playtesting initiative is called Battlefield Labs, and its first participants will play a pre-alpha version of the next Battlefield in the coming weeks and months—signups are live now.

The Battlefield Labs reveal video ends with a nice surprise: 10 seconds of pre-alpha gameplay for the next Battlefield. This is a look at what Labs participants will be playing, a build that EA described to PC Gamer as a test of "the core pillars of Battlefield: core combat, destruction, vehicles, weapons" in familiar modes like Breakthrough and Rush, as well as "new concepts."

We can only glean so much from 10 seconds of soldiers running down a city street, but it sure looks a lot like Battlefield 3—dusty maps, modern soldier garb, and not a single specialist in sight. The video is consistent with Battlefield boss Vince Zampella's recent proclamation that the next Battlefield would emulate Battelfields 3 and 4 as the "pinnacle of the series."

That destruction looks pretty nice too. There's a physical, crumbly quality to the RPG explosion that would represent a step up for DICE if it ends up looking that good. The current leaders in impressive destruction tech in a multiplayer setting is undeniably the ex-DICE veterans making The Finals.

EA is also introducing a new brand, Battlefield Studios, representing the four studios working on the series: DICE, EA Motive, Criterion, and Ripple Effect. The mega-publisher is taking a very Call of Duty-like approach to future Battlefield development, with each studio focusing on different modes or support functions—DICE is completely focused on multiplayer and core systems, Criterion is leading the singleplayer campaign, Motive is contributing multiplayer maps and singleplayer missions, and Ripple Effect is making an unspecified "new experience" (taking bets on this one, my money's on some sort of battle royale or persistent open world mode).

Unlike Call of Duty, EA's studios aren't exclusively relegated to Battlefield support status. EA clarified to PC Gamer that Criterion will continue to work on the Need for Speed franchise and that Motive will continue its work on an Iron Man game.

As promising as a back-to-basics Battlefield sounds, this is a lot more pomp and circumstance than an announcement of playtests really calls for. It's clear EA wants us to get very excited about the future of Battlefield, but if you ask me, the best thing for a series with a damaged reputation is to show, not tell. Unfortunately, the Battlefield Labs playstests won't be for show: similar to EA's Skate playstests, participants will be under strict NDA.

While I'm stuck on weekend news duty, PC Gamer's FPS-likers have been having a gay old time with the new goodies, fragging out like it's a 2002 LAN party amid the terminal decline of 2025. Among the new weapons, the katana feels so right it's shocking there wasn't one in the initial release of the game. I'll be curious to see how the AP mine changes up STRAFTAT's slapstick mines-only maps, while the failed '80s/'90s experimental "future guns" represented by the H&K CAWS and G11 were practically made for games like STRAFTAT⁠—they certainly didn't get much play with the Bundeswehr.

As for the maps, "ReeperBahn," "Patio," and "Highwall" all have the names that most pique my FPS sicko interest, but I'll have to reserve judgement until I have time to check them out myself. I was also tickled by the addition of a lone new cosmetic suit⁠—usually you expect FPS updates to be all cosmetics and maybe a map or two if you're lucky.

But STRAFTAT is a different kind of FPS, a free 1v1 arena shooter with a $5 DLC that doubles the size of the game. Fraternal developer duo The Lemaitre Bros told us they just made the 1v1 FPS they were dying to play, and I'm extremely grateful they did. You can check out STRAFTAT for yourself for free on Steam with no strings attached, but you'll probably be back for the DLC just like we were.

Sniper Elite: Resistance is no different, and my frustration has only grown after playing it. Dare we ask for more than shooting Nazis again, in the same ways, after 10 years? Each game has added new side modes or expanded progression, but tinkering around the edges has only diluted the series’ core focus with each new release. After Resistance, it’s time developer Rebellion looked to its older assassination brother Hitman to radically reform its flagship series.

Sniper Elite is rooted in its depiction of the many fronts of World War 2 conflicts, from the barren deserts of Northern Africa to the rural villages of France. Despite offering up new theatres of war with almost every game, the mission designs and setups are almost universally dull. Each game almost always tasks players with moving through a location to find some intel or kill a specific target. You might have an extra objective along the way, like destroying a train in a station, but few campaign missions take advantage of the unique opportunities sniping offers or put you in inventive scenarios or situations.

This leads to every game feeling virtually identical, and if you asked me to name a mission from Sniper Elite that was memorable, I couldn’t give you an answer. Sure, the sniping's still great. But that's not enough in 2025! This is a problem virtually every other singleplayer, level-based shooter has figured out by now, from Call of Duty to Hitman.

The former has at least one or two missions in every game that take place in a location I haven’t seen before in a shooter. Hitman, especially with the recent World of Assassination Trilogy, gives players the flexibility to approach assassinations or objectives in a multitude of ways. Each mission is a complex moving simulation to analyze, unravel, and exploit. Sniper Elite mostly consists of meandering through buildings and streets, picking off enemies one by one until you reach your goal.

While I’m not looking for Sniper Elite to directly copy the action-packed setpieces of Call of Duty or the exotic locations on offer in Hitman, I do believe there is room to inject Sniper Elite’s core experience with more unique mission design, inspired by Hitman’s move towards a more reactive, player-driven philosophy.

Small tweaks, like having to discover who your target is through obtaining clues from dialogue and interrogations organically, rather than following objective markers, would be a strong start. But more importantly, Hitman's purpose built levels are full of situations far more interesting than "another warzone." Having to assassinate someone from the top of a hill in the midst of a wedding or a family birthday party, where the stakes are higher and you have to avoid killing civilians, forms the foundation for creating a more memorable shooter. IO Interactive's focus on making its levels reactive means your decisions affect how NPCs and other characters behave, forcing you to adjust your strategy on the spot. In Sniper Elite right now, its a cat-and-mouse game of waiting until the enemies stop looking for you in a bush or building.

Imagine Sniper Elite missions where hurricanes or sandstorms sweep in during the middle of it, affecting your visibility and shot accuracy, forcing you to change your approach on the fly. The basic mission structure is just begging for more Hitman-style reactivity: For example, the more intel or information you find on Nazi plans in a level, the more it could amplify the enemy reinforcements in the next mission as they realise their information has been stolen over the course of the campaign.

This could make the game harder to stealth your way through in return for knowing the location of key loot, weapons, or gear that could give you the upper hand. Going a step further, you can add civilians into the mix who may provide you with information or details of Nazi movements.

I may be spitballing untenable design ideas here, but Sniper Elite’s premise is just such a good fit for intricate, complex gameplay mechanics. The series is feeling closer to extinction the longer it refuses to evolve. Hitman felt like it was going the way of the dodo before becoming a stealth trilogy masterpiece. Necessity breeds innovation, and Resistance really feels like that point for Sniper Elite.

I'd gladly trade away some of Sniper Elite's side modes for missions that are complex and interesting enough to compel me to replay them like Hitman levels. Right now, the only incentives you have to actually replay missions, use the new weapons you get and start at different entrances in the level are to complete some meaningless challenges or obtain some collectibles.

On top of its campaign, Resistance has a returning PvP multiplayer mode, a wave-based Survival mode, Elden Ring-like player invasions, and a new Propaganda mode that is effectively Call of Duty-like Spec Ops missions with a time limit.

Propaganda mode is especially bewildering because it takes a chunk of a campaign mission map, sticks a bunch of enemies in it, and asks you to kill all of them before a timer hits zero. It is completely antithetical to the core methodical sniping the series is built off of. None of these modes stand out - they feel like bolted-on multiplayer modes from the 2000s that were forgotten about after a week or two.

Sniper Elite isn’t going to attract new audiences with thin side activities or yet another set of missions that look the same as the last set.. While it doesn’t have to have the flexibility and player creativity Hitman offers, Sniper Elite needs some kind of unique selling point in 2025. Right now it doesn’t have one.

If channeling Hitman isn't the way, maybe it's heightening the intense survival experience of sniping instead. Give players a limited number of bullets, so they can only kill a handful of people each mission. Weather, like rain, could dramatically affect visibility, forcing you to clean your scope in exchange for masking shots more, allowing you to get closer to your target.

Sniper Elite's only real competition, Sniper Ghost Warrior, seems to have been slowly abandoned as CI Games saw success with Lords of the Fallen. This means Sniper Elite is the big player left in this space, and if the series wants to thrive, it needs to adapt beyond its base form that it has recycled for so many years now. If it doesn’t, someone else will come along and snipe the trophy right out of its hands.

I hope you've got your mop ready, because Killing Floor 3 has officially announced its release date. Tripwire Interactive's zombie-blasting sequel will slop wetly on your PC in two month's time: The studio revealed the game's release date on its X channel, simply stating 'The battle begins on March 25'.

You might be able to get hands-on with Killing Floor 3 sooner than that, however, as Tripwire simultaneously announced dates for a closed beta test. This beta will start on Thursday, February 20, and run through the weekend until February 24. You can sign up for the beta test on the Killing Floor 3 website here. At the time of writing, the site still says the dates for the closed beta are "TBD". But don't be confused, it's happening in Feb.

Tripwire released a brief new trailer to accompany the two announcements, which you can view above. It doesn't show a vast amount that's new, although I did sit up slightly at the forearm-mounted grenade launcher that appears 17 seconds in, since the only way to improve a grenade launcher is to physically attach it to your person. It also gives an unpleasantly close look at some of its zeds, the highlight being the walking hotdog filled with teeth that assaults the player at the end.

We've kept a close eye on Killing Floor 3 since it was revealed back in 2023. Jake got hands-on with the sequel last year, where game director Bryan Wynia revealed Killing Floor 3 would be less frantic than previous entries, but with a wider variety of enemy shapes and sizes to make combat more tactically challenging. The third game also brings back its fireball-hurling mecha zombies (now with added jetpacks) and even more advanced gore tech that lets players "dismember any limb in any order" and enables zombies heads to "open up" like a flower.

Between this and Doom: The Dark Ages, 2025 sure is lining up to be a gib-fest. Id Software's shooter launches two months later than Killing Floor 3, but likewise innovates in the field of virtual murder. Whereas glory kills previously locked the Doom Slayer into grisly first-person animations, now they're completely decoupled from enemies, meaning you can finish them off at any angle and disengage at any time.

More recently, Gearbox's senior project producer Anthony Nicholson told GamesRadar that while "Borderlands 4 does have some open-world-like features" including "seamless travel between zones" that doesn't mean we should expect, I dunno, Ubisoft towers or whatever tedious nonsense open world games are full of nowadays. He clarified that, "we did not set out with the intent to create an 'open world game' in the traditional use of that term."

What it will have are side missions and events to discover, and new ways to get around, including a hover bike and a grappling hook. Based on what little we've seen of Borderlands 4 so far it seems to be set on a single planet, and possibly its moon. The world of Kairos, Nicholson says, isn't like Pandora because it's "a world where the outlook is bleak, the stakes are real, and the characters treat them as such" though it does still have room for "the zaniness, oddity, and mayhem that makes a Borderlands game a Borderlands game."

I wouldn't put it past them to sneak in a joke at the expense of the Borderlands movie. In a time when videogame adaptations have often been annoyingly high-quality and respectful, the Borderlands movie was brave enough to hark back to the era when they were almost universally absolute catshit.

Keep scrolling for an overview of what's out on PC in February 2025, and for a more zoomed-out view of what's coming out on PC this year, check out our full list of 2025's new PC games.

February's big PC release dates

February gaming events

• The Six Invitational Rainbow Six Siege tournament runs February 3-16.
• D.I.C.E. Summit , an industry event in Las Vegas, is happening February 11-13—we'll be on location for coverage.
• PGL Cluj Napoca is a CS2 tournament running February 14-23.
• Steam Next Fest, where a gazillion game demos flood Steam, starts on February 24.

More games releasing in February

• February 3: Spirit Swap — "action-puzzle meets narrative game" (Steam)
• February 4: Blood Bar Tycoon — run a vampire bar (Steam)
• February 5: Rift of the NecroDancer — rhythm combat (Steam)
• February 6: Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator — EMT sim (Steam)
• February 6: Keep Driving — road trip RPG (Steam)
• February 6: Sworn — Arthurian roguelike (Steam)
• February 7: Slender Threads — paranormal point and click (Steam)
• February 7: A Game About Digging A Hole — what the title says (Steam)
• February 12: Legacy: Steel & Sorcery — fantasy extraction (Steam)
• February 12: Urban Myth Dissolution Center — occult mysteries (Steam)
• February 13: Dawnfolk — minimalist city builder (Steam)
• February 14: Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak 2 (Steam)
• February 14: Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered — classic collection (Steam)
• February 18: Lost Records: Bloom and Rage — Life is Strange devs' latest (Steam)
• February 20: Era One — strategy in space (Steam)
• February 20: Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii — pirate Yakuza... in Hawaii (Steam)
• February 21: Die in the Dungeon — or try not to? (Steam)
• February TBD: Midnight Murder Club — past my bedtime sorry (Steam)
• February TBD: Tiny Pasture — desktop pets are back, baby (Steam)

It was a pretty comprehensive package, but Nightdive and Bethesda have continued to tinker away with it in the months since. This culminated in a new update that arrived earlier this week, which makes numerous smaller fixes and quality-of-life changes, but mainly adds support for multiplayer mods.

Playing multiplayer mods through Doom + Doom 2 is a little more elaborate than playing modded single-player Doom. For starters, the accompanying Steam post notes the mods in question "must be authored with Vanilla DOOM, DeHackEd, MBF21 or BOOM to be compatible" and that the host must activate the mod before entering the online menu. Players will likewise need to subscribe to the same mod before joining the match, which the blog recommends doing using "room codes". While it may sound complicated, it's a fairly standard requirement for playing multiplayer mods through a base game, and certainly more straightforward than playing modded Doom multiplayer via other means, which required players to install Zandronum or GZDoom (the latter of which didn't have great support for multiplayer mods) and then install compatible mods.

You can read the full patch notes here. 2025 is a big year for the first-person shooter's angry green grandaddy. The latest entry in the series, Doom: The Dark Ages, got its first in-depth presentation earlier this week, with id Software revealing a heavier, more grounded combat system than the airborne acrobatics of Doom Eternal. The new game also unlocks glory kills from fixed animations, allowing players to brutalise demons "from any angle, in and out as you see fit," according to game director Hugo Martin. Most importantly of all, we got a firm release date, and frankly, May 15 can't come soon enough.

Alongside multiplayer mod support, the update tweaks the collection in various ways. For singleplayer, it resolves an issue whereby "some red doors did not display as red on the automap," which explains why I struggled so much to find red doors when running through the campaigns last year. Conventional multiplayer, meanwhile, adds a spectator mode for players waiting to respawn during co-op mission play. Finally, the update adds several features for both mod players and creators, shoring up the mod downloader so it can "process more than the first 100 subscribed mods" and enhancing mod compatibility for the aforementioned authoring tools.

Butcher's Creek should have been named Kill Streak. I mean, what else would you name a game about a man on a naked axe-murder rampage through a cult compound? Released just a few days ago, it's the sort of short, low-fi and pointedly horrible experience that its lone developer David Szymanski (Dusk, Iron Lung, Squirrel Stapler) is increasingly known for. Filthy, rusty, rough-edged horror adventures of movie length or less. Just long enough to get under your skin and have you turning them over in your head for a while.

Playing a bit like a budget-priced and condensed (but every bit as grimy) riff on Condemned: Criminal Origins, Butcher's Creek is a game that revels in slasher horror violence. Playing as a wandering uber-killer investigating reports of an Appalachian murder-cult, you're here to brutalize all in your path while collecting snuff videotapes (used to save the game) and enthusiastically building up your collection of polaroid murder photos, which, concerningly, also restores your health. You are not the good guy here. There are no good guys. A good guy would have prioritized getting dressed before going on a rampage.

See, shortly after getting tutorialized on the basics of CQC (including kicking people and whacking them around the head with a rusty pipe or any other solid piece of metal that comes to hand), the protagonist of Butcher's Creek is captured and stripped naked, and that's how you'll stay for the rest of the game, bare feet swinging into view every time you want to punt a burlap-masked assailant.

This adds the interesting Die Hard-esque twist of making broken glass on the ground a threat to your health, and encourages players to move carefully and with eyes fully peeled. It's all too easy to miss something dangerous, thanks to the game's intentionally low-fi VHS aesthetic, murky tunnels and paranoia-inducing soundscape, punctuated by the occasional enemy screaming profanity at you or (puzzlingly and amusingly) calling you a penis. They don't pick Appalachian murder-cultists for their eloquence, it seems.

Not to spoil too much more, there's a few smart nods to Szymanski's other works in Butcher's Creek. Is there some kind of contiguous and grimy horror-verse being built up here, or just shared themes? Is it just fan-service for those following his work? Does it even matter, when this game's focus is so squarely on being mad, red and nude offline? Butcher's Creek is out now on Steam for £7.22/$8.49, with a 15% launch discount.

Beyond Citadel is FPS outsider art. Developed by solo Japanese dev Doekuramori, it's the sequel to 2020's The Citadel and feels like someone coming at a familiar genre with a truly fresh perspective. With similar understanding of the fundamentals (the developer has cited Bungie's classic Marathon series as a key influence), but with clear mechanical obsessions and roots in extreme, transgressive anime art. While there are toggles to reduce the violence and the technical gun-handling elements, just be aware that those are part of the intended experience.

But for those wanting something raw, intense and a bit unsettling, there's nothing else like it. The thrill of chewing through armies of enemies while having to juggle blood oxygen levels and whether the magazine you just quick-dropped on the ground mid-fight broke, then wading through a field of shattered bones and unraveled intestines is a one-of-a-kind ride. You might just need to be a little sicko to enjoy it fully.

Neon genesis

Beyond Citadel's setting is an interesting one. Mankind is almost extinct. Primarily wiped out by an invading force of 'demons' that started punishing the sinful by turning them into pillars of salt. Then further wiped out by all of mankind's cyborg soldiers being mind-controlled. It's grim stuff, made more dreamlike through its almost Wolfenstein-esque blocky architecture, stark palette of greys and blues with red highlights, and the fact that most of its maps are semi-abstract structures floating in an endless void. This game has a vibe going on, elevated further by a moody and well-chosen soundtrack and a drip-feed of lore and dialogue with often uncomfortable implications.

There's a lot going on mechanically here too. By default, weapons have pseudo-realistic handling rules, with separate buttons to cock your weapons and eject magazines to store them in your (mercifully auto-restocking) backpack before you can even think of reloading. Weapons have their own ballistic properties, armor penetration and bullet drop, and the maps and enemies are varied enough to force you to use your entire (massive) arsenal.

While early levels feel like claustrophobic Wolfenstein-style tunnel crawls, some later stages are open battlefields with enormous sight-lines, and enemy fire can come from any direction, and in many forms, thanks to a good range of human soldiers, robot units and an assortment of demonic monsters keeping the roster of targets fresh. And in a few levels, you get to really tear things up using mechs, tanks and a VTOL gunship. There is little limit to your capacity for violence.

As you progress through the campaign (a lengthy eight episodes, each with around six levels and a boss), you gradually unlock more abilities, like air-dashing and ledge-mantling that greatly increase mobility, and alternate weapons to fill each of the slots, so navigating those big spaces becomes a joy rather than a chore. While things strain a bit in the final stretches as the game hits the limits of its systems (the final episode introduces a whole new set of platforming-centric movement mechanics, and some late game enemies are very tanky), this is a game that has sights to show you. If you can stomach its depths.

The way of all flesh

I really cannot emphasise enough that Beyond Citadel is a game horny for violence. Yes, the protagonist wears little more than a helmet, tactical sports bra and a single strategically placed leather strap. Yes, you can find pin-up art of her in secret areas. And yes, you can see both her chest, legs and crotch if you crouch and look down in-game. And yet that's secondary to the violence. Or at least inescapably tied to it. Even outside of combat, you sometimes find statues of her body, headless and split open like anatomical models, internal organs lovingly rendered in stone, throat and veins open to peer into.

In combat, the violence you visit upon your enemies is both clinical and laviscious. Wounded enemies will slump to their knees, panting heavily, eyes rolled back and tongues hanging out, waiting for you to finish the job. Skulls split open, limbs are sent flying. They can return the favour as well—if you die, you remain in first person until you respawn (your character uses expendable clone bodies as extra lives) to witness what happens to your own corpse as they pile more bullets into you. It is very explicit. This game is preoccupied with flesh, both in the good-touch sense, and the 'we are all made of fragile meat' sense, and I don't think it draws much distinction between the two extremes.

Even Beyond Citadel's healing system seems more aware of the human body than most games. While you can't suffer locational damage, you restock your health in an emergency with (instantly activated) blood packs which leave you woozy, your aim swaying. A hit of oxygen will clear that up, while eating food stabilises both, albeit slower and allows for both to naturally regenerate faster. This is a game that, whether enthralled or repulsed by its aesthetic and thematic excesses, will give you something to think about in those quiet moments between the brutal hyperviolence. The fact that it's able to balance twitchy, high-agility retro FPS combat with tactical detail and still leave room for ero-guro adjacent art is an impressive feat.

Beyond Citadel is a meaty (in every sense) game I greatly enjoyed, and will probably be chewing through in New Game Plus for a while. If my praise has left you more curious than repulsed, you might want to give it a look for yourself. Just don't say you weren't warned. Do not expect any punches pulled. Beyond Citadel is out now on Steam for £12.79/$14.99. Although for story's sake (and it is an interesting one, minus a rough-edged translation), you might want to check out the original game first.

To unlock each of the time trials in Propaganda mode, you will need to find propaganda posters in seven of the nine levels in the campaign. These aren’t easy to spot as they blend in with other posters on buildings and in the environment (although when you get close enough, they do shimmer).

I’ve put together this list of all the Sniper Elite: Resistance Propaganda poster locations, with map images of where to find them while you're completing the campaign.

Dead Drop propaganda poster location

The Dead Drop Propaganda Poster is the easiest to find. As soon as you begin the level, head through the main sewer entrance in front of the town. When you climb up the ladder, head through the gate ahead to find it on your right.

Sonderzüge Sabotage propaganda poster location

In the initial street area of this mission, before you cross the bridge to the northern side of the level, you can find a small alley by two buildings on the riverfront. On the outside of one of those buildings, in the alley, you can find the poster.

Collision Course propaganda poster location

On the far eastern side of the map, you can find a tunnel leading underneath the hillside. Above it are some buildings. Head down to the tunnel entrance along the railway track to find the poster at the very boundary of the level.

It is best to get to this by going all the way around the north of the map to avoid the tank on the railway track.

Devil’s Cauldron propaganda poster location

At the start of the mission, you have several roads and paths you can take north. Head to the westernmost one, and slightly north, to find a church just off to the left of the main road. On the outside of the church, you can find the poster next to a small statue.

Assault on Fort Rouge propaganda poster location

Along the western border of the level, you can find an alley off of one of the main roads that is in the southwest corner. The poster is down here, on the wall.

Lock, Stock and Barrels propaganda poster location

From the start of the mission, head along the southern edge of the map towards the east. Kill the handful of Nazis by the houses along the water. Eventually you will reach a small footbridge by another house. Cross it and head to the right, around the outside of the building.

Right in the corner, next to the water you can find the poster.

End of The Line propaganda poster location

Towards the start of the level, you can follow the train tracks north, and you will see a ladder leading up to an overlook on the central building in front of you. At the top of this ladder is the poster.

"In 2025, Overwatch 2 is going to be packed with groundbreaking changes to the PvP experience that will be unlike anything you’ve seen before," a blog post says. "But it’s going to take more than a blog or a developer update to let you know what we have coming this year."

Blizzard is planning to host a livestream event on February 12 on its YouTube and Twitch channels: Overwatch 2 Spotlight. In this, it'll show off some new heroes, maps, and more content that'll be released over the rest of the year. If you tune into the stream, you'll also be able to pick up the Lucio Cyber DJ Legendary Skin as an exclusive drop, but you'll also have to watch an hour of the creators' streams before you can claim this prize.

Overwatch 2 players are already trying to theorise what this could mean, and despite Blizzard's teasing that these new features are "unlike anything you've seen before," some people still think that this could mean that 6v6 will finally make an official comeback. "I bet it'll be 6v6—my fingers are crossed," one player says. "It was the best Overwatch since [the sequel] came out, and I actually had a good time."

Last year, Blizzard announced that Overwatch 2 would be getting some 6v6 tests. Overwatch 2's game director Aaron Keller even said that depending on the results of the tests, 6v6 could become a viable option in Overwatch 2's future:

"We would reflect carefully on the learnings from whatever test we run and explore how to best give players what's being asked for," Keller says. "Whether that’s a world of 5v5, 6v6 or even both, is for future us to figure out." So it's possible that 6v6 has a shot, especially as Blizzard announced that the limited-time tests were so popular it decided to extend them so players could enjoy it for longer.

While I wouldn't say an announcement concerning 6v6 is out of the question for the livestream, I think—and would prefer—us to get something in the ballpark of a talent system. Way back when Blizzard was promising a whole host of new traits and features for Overwatch 2's release, one of the new concepts included skill trees and hero traits as well as new role passives.

One of the presentations at Blizzcon 2021 even showed off a new system that would let players evolve hero abilities through a skill tree into new diverse traits. "The talent system is really deep and rich," Keller said during Blizzcon 2021. "Every single hero has different trees. You may open up [Soldier] 76's tree, and as you're leveling and picking new talents, you're starting to feel your hero change."

While this idea would later be scrapped alongside the promise of PvE, we did get a taste of what it would've been like via last year's Junkenstein event. This offered players a new game mode that introduced the skill trees for a select number of heroes. It was a ton of fun, and I loved how you could customise hero abilities to suit different fights and team styles. I would love to see it incorporated into Overwatch 2 more seriously, even if that's only through a recurring Arcade mode.

Whatever these big changes turn out to be, I really hope that they are as significant as Blizzard has hinted at them being. Overwatch 2 needs to adapt and evolve if it's to compete against some of the big new releases like Marvel Rivals, which has managed to pull a ton of players, including my friends and I, away from Overwatch 2.

But I honestly think that Blizzard is ready to hold its own against some of the newer additions to the hero shooter genre. I got sent a survey to complete recently, and while it did kind of feel like a clingy ex asking me where it all went wrong, it also seemed like Blizzard was serious about taking the responses on board and using them to get a better feeling of community sentiment.

So, while I know better than to get my hopes up too high about the upcoming livestream, I am going to go into it with a little bit of hope that Overwatch 2 is kicking things up a gear, and won't just go out lying down.

One day, after 36.2 hours of playing the early beta version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, b00lin opened his Steam profile to find a ban message. At first, he thought that it could've been a result of encountering a couple of bugs in the beta. But after appealing the decision, Activision held fast: "We've confirmed with our security team that your account has been permanently banned for using unauthorised software and manipulation of game data. As you were the account holder at the time of the infraction, your ban will not be overturned."

This short message from Activision Support was the start of a long and arduous process of using the legal system to get his account unbanned and receive a refund for his initial purchase of Modern Warfare 2—all of this would take two years.

Before taking the matter to court, b00lin tried going through Activision one last time. He used Activision's ticket system, attempted to phone Activision support, and even tried contacting someone who works at Activision through Linkedin, but nothing seemed to work.

"When appealing these bans, I would often ask if there was any proof of the 'unauthorised software' used," b00lin says. "The answer I always received was that they are unable to [provide examples] due to it being a security risk and could expose how the anti-cheat works."

Protecting anticheat software is a must, especially when it comes to competitive games where players stand to gain the most from cheating. Within a week of Activision announcing its new kernel-level anticheat, Ricochet, back in 2021, the Anti-Cheat Police Department (a group of players dedicated to rooting out cheaters) announced that the driver had already leaked amongst cheat developers. When something like this happens, Call of Duty games and Warzone are usually swamped with cheaters for weeks afterward until Activision can make the necessary changes to root them out.

While keeping security secrets and information about Ricochet in-house is clearly important, b00lin does point out that he wasn't exactly asking for top-secret information. "Knowing the information such as the name of the software, IP address that was used, and how the software manipulated game data would all be known to a cheat developer," b00lin says. "Not even this harmless information [was] provided. How can I prove that I didn't cheat when no information has been provided? Was it Logitech G Hub? iCUE? OBS? To date, I still don't know what caused the false ban."

The last stop before taking the matter to court was an attempt to settle the matter by signing an NDA and using an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), which would involve an independent third party helping both parties involved come to a "mutually acceptable outcome." But that was shot down by Activision.

Court's in session

First, b00lin filed a Money Claim Online (a service that allows people to make small claims online) for the cost of the game and the fee to file the claim. Due to Activision not responding to this, b00lin automatically won, and Activision paid up. But, the developer still stood firm against lifting the ban.

"Activision paid me out but still refused to remove the suspension placed on my account," b00lin says. "Their reasoning was that the courts did not order them to do so—therefore, they wouldn’t. I am sure they wish they had done so because it ended up costing them in the long run."

So the next step saw b00lin filing a non-money claim, and after Activision passed the case off to a law firm, b00lin tried settling the case with them. In exchange for paying court fees and getting unbanned, the agreement stated he would not take this matter any further and would sign an NDA regarding the terms of the agreement. Unfortunately, this was also shut down.

By the time b00lin actually stood in front of a judge in court, he had amassed a great deal of information and examples to help his case. This included presenting his squeaky clean record in other games like CS2, in which he has over 1,000 hours, pointing out that he didn't want money, just the ban lifted, and that after this case was closed, he "wanted nothing to do with Activision." He had come prepared. So b00lin was surprised when the defendant presented their case, and it became clear that they didn't have any concrete evidence to prove that he actually cheated.

"This meant that if I didn’t commit any abuse of process within the courts, my case would be heard, and Activision would have no evidence to show what they are claiming," b00lin explains. "It would appear that Activision’s anti-cheat/security team is so strict that the people they hired to defend them were not allowed to see any 'evidence' of the 'unauthorized software or manipulation of game data'."

In the end, the judge found that b00lin should have his suspension removed on Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, and Warzone, and Activision must pay the Claimant's £711 fixed costs, thanks to all the examples that he put forward and a lack of evidence presented by the Defendant. But that's not all: "The Judge also found Activision to be the one in violation of the contract," b00lin says. "And with that, two years of phone calls, emails, and reading pages of legal jargon had finally come to an end.

"For over two years (763 days as of writing), I was wrongly accused of cheating and falsely banned from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2022. As of 08/01/2025, this has been officially lifted on all platforms."

But why?

When I first read about b00lin's two-year-long fight, all I could think about was how anyone had the time and strength to keep up with all of that. B00lin had bought every Call of Duty PC game since 2003, and he's dedicated a significant amount of time and energy to build up an in-game character, and going to court wasn't about getting the best of Activision.

"Having a Steam profile's reputation ruined after seven years of ownership is what fuelled me to keep going and not give up," b00lin says. "A ban for something I did not do on a profile I cherish and have spent thousands of hours on did not sit right."

The negative effects of the ban also seeped into other games that b00lin played: " If I ever did well in a game, someone would look at my profile to see how many hours I have and instantly see the red marker that shows 'I am a cheater.'" b00lin even shares screenshots of a CS2 match in his blog where one player accuses him of cheating to win in their match: "You wouldn't have a VAC ban if you didn't cheat."

B00lin is also part of the COD False Ban Community Discord, where players who have encountered false bans or shadow bans come together to try and help themselves and one another. "I have seen so many stories of innocent players being banned and referred to this community in court," b00lin says.

Shadow bans are probably one of the most prevalent problems in Call of Duty. It relies on player reports or on Ricochet's internal system to identify cheaters, but even if you've done nothing wrong, you can still get flagged for it if enough players report you. The consequences of being shadow-banned can include not being able to play at all, worse matchmaking, or getting placed into poor-quality lobbies with other cheaters. Whatever the punishment may be, players will have to deal with it until the security team investigates the situation, which can take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks.

Whenever Activision released an update to its efforts against cheaters, like when it revealed that 136,000 Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 accounts had been banned, there's always a sizable chunk of comments that point out how detrimental shadow bans still are for the community.

"I feel the COD False Ban Community on Discord helped because it was a community of people trying to accomplish the same goal," b00lin tells me. "Not only did it give me a bunch of anecdotes I could use to show a pattern of this behaviour, a few people in there had taken legal action, too. Speaking to one of those people in there gave me a good idea of what to expect and what I should aim to do."

This is also the same Discord that Mike Swanson is a part of. A few years back, Swanson published a blog post detailing how he had been banned without cheating despite only playing singleplayer in Modern Warfare 2. "A good chunk of the pages I submitted to the courts was this blog (with Mike’s consent)," b00lin says. "It was extremely helpful to be able to refer to someone with credentials to get my point across."

Some of the material that b00lin ended up using in courts included a research paper from the University of Birmingham, which was conducted to demonstrate how cheaters will commonly bypass Microsoft Windows kernel protections, Activision's own terms of service, and one of our articles on how innocent Call of Duty players got permabanned.

All in all, the two-year-long battle to get an account unbanned may seem like a shed load of work—that's putting it lightly—but it's not something that b00lin regrets: "After fighting this false ban for over two years, I am happy to say it is finally over. In my opinion, it was worth the effort just to see the account alert."

PC Gamer reached out to Activision for a comment about this court battle but is yet to hear anything back.

Eventually, Destiny moved on. Oryx was defeated, sequels were released, free-to-play models were adopted, publishing agreements shifted, and the Dreadnought was left in space: neglected, but perhaps not entirely abandoned. In a lengthy developer livestream that aired earlier today, Bungie detailed what's coming in next week's launch of Destiny 2's Heresy episode, which finally sends players back into the Dreadnought to face new horrors churning in its depths.

For those who haven't kept up with Destiny, the end of The Final Shape saw the Traveler, liberated from the machinations of the omnicidal Witness, release a series of echoes: globs of unfathomable space magic that have since spread throughout the solar system with a nasty habit of seeking out old foes and imbuing them with terrible power. Unfortunately, it looks like the latest one may have resurrected a certain necromancer-deity.

Oryx, Bungie delicately said in the livestream, is "back in some capacity." Considering how he once waged a millennia-long campaign of ritual brutality across the cosmos, that's not great for anyone. Luckily, with the assistance of Eris Morn and the Drifter, players will be returning to a now "peeled" Dreadnought (eugh) to snuff out the resurgent god-king by "fighting fire with fire," using repurposed Taken energy under the tutelage of a returning Commander Sloane.

The core seasonal activity in Heresy will be The Nether, a 3-person game mode where players will face a randomized series of encounters in Dreadnought patrol zones from Destiny 1 in what Bungie called "a roguelite experience." Unique to The Nether, players will have boosted defensive stats, but won't regenerate health by default. To heal, you'll have to smash open containers for health-restoring pickups, resurrection tokens, and gameplay-modifying "boons."

The Nether will also have a mode where you can opt out of matchmaking to play solo, so you can sniff out the Dreadnought's secrets without worrying about your teammates getting frustrated because you're not speedrunning the activity for optimal loot.

Bungie also said it's been listening to player feedback about seasonal storytelling and loot-chasing. Rather than taking place entirely in a single hub area you'll return to repeatedly, Heresy's story will have a "more bespoke, spread-out delivery," where players will interact with the ongoing plot and its cast of characters in missions and throughout the relevant areas in the solar system. Fewer chats with a holoprojector, by the sounds of it.

Heresy will feature a "bevy" of new armor and weapons, Bungie says, including a new Strand support frame auto rifle that can unleash Unraveling seekers as you heal your teammates. A lot of those new weapons will feature perks that will synergize with the updates Bungie's made for Arc subclasses—like aspects that provide the new Bolt Charge keyword mechanic, which discharges a bolt of lightning at a target's location after dealing enough sustained damage.

Those Arc updates should also play particularly nicely with Lodestar, a new seasonal exotic trace rifle—and Destiny's first to use primary ammo. Lodestar shoots like a pulse rifle while aiming down sights, and can be charged by dealing arc damage to jolt enemies by hipfiring with its beam.

On the PvP side, as Bungie described last week, Trials of Osiris is getting a rework. The vaunted Lighthouse no longer requires a seven-game winstreak to enter. Instead, you'll just need seven wins, generally. Doesn't matter how many losses happen along the way. Seven W's, and you get to open the special chest to earn some new, pretty armor. Now I might finally play Trials.

There's also a new dungeon on the way: Sundered Doctrine, which will launch a few days after Heresy on February 7. Following the tradition kicked off with Vesper's Host, there'll be a dungeon race where fireteams worldwide will compete to solve Sundered Doctrine's puzzles and best its bosses first.

And if that all isn't enough, you'll also be able to make your Titan look like a stormtrooper with incoming Star Wars crossover cosmetics. Comarketing, ahoy.

Destiny 2 players will have access to three new Star Wars skins with the launch of Heresy, developed in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games. For Hunters, it's the black armor of the elite, covert Death Troopers; Warlocks will get to dress up in the brilliant red of the Royal Guard; and for Titans it's the classic Stormtrooper look, complete with "an intrinsic perk that tanks your accuracy." (I suspect that last bit is a joke, however.)

Ghosts will also get a glow-up in the form of the DS-2 shell, a ghost shell modelled after the Return of the Jedi Death Star, complete with a cute little superlaser that I have to assume is entirely cosmetic.

More is on the way: Senior social media manager Andy Salisbury said during the stream that there will be "a sparrow, a ship, emotes, and a finisher" that will be available with the start of Heresy.

The Star Wars skins are a good fit for the armor-clad characters of Destiny 2, although it's interesting that all of it is inspired by the space fascist team—I guess the thing to do is acknowledge that it looks cool and not think about it much beyond that.

I do wonder if it's getting to be a bit much, though. Destiny 2 is ostensibly a serious, self-contained sci-fi universe, but over the past couple years it's done brand crossovers with Assassin's Creed, The Witcher, Mass Effect, Ghostbusters, Dungeons and Dragons, Street Fighter, and more. It's nowhere near the frenetic pace of, say, Fortnite, but I can't imagine that humming "Who you gonna call?" while slaughtering hordes of the Fallen does much for a sense of immersion.

PC Gamer's Morgan Park wrote in 2024 that every time a new shooter launches, he starts a countdown "until it becomes a clown show of brands and hideous skins," and Destiny 2 may not be new but it certainly seems to be treading that path. On the other hand, Lincoln Carpenter admitted when the D&D collaboration happened that while such crossovers "can end up feeling like I'm looking at spillover from Comic-Con when I want to be looking at Destiny," his Titan "would look rad riding an owlbear", and I suppose that's really the bottom line: It may not make a hell of a lot of sense but as long as people think it looks cool, there's money to be made.

Destiny 2: Heresy Act 1, and all the Star Wars stuff, goes live on February 4—here's our full rundown of everything you can expect.

Nazis are pretty much the definitive bad guys. They're perfect videogame fodder because you never have to feel bad about punching, shooting or exploding them. And for sad real world reasons, it's never felt more cathartic to do so—so Sniper Elite: Resistance couldn't have come along at a better time. Channelling the spirit of a classic WW2 movie, there's daring romps and blockbuster beats aplenty.

Sniper Elite: Resistance is the first spin off for the Sniper Elite series that doesn't have you fighting zombies, and it's clearly hoping to capture some of the magic of 2022's Sniper Elite 5. You play as new recruit to the series Harry Hawker, fighting arm in arm with several of the French Resistance characters from Sniper Elite 5 and romping around the countryside. It feels a lot like playing an expansion pack for Sniper Elite 5, with familiar enemy behaviours, mechanics and tools. But that's no bad thing—Sniper Elite 5 was a huge step up in quality, and Resistance feels like half a step forward again, full of excellent playgrounds for the series' trademark mix of long-range sniping and guerilla warfare.

There are just seven main missions, but they're all huge and took me about 90 minutes to play through. The French locales are varied, inviting you to crouchwalk your way through farms, chateaus, secret bases, and more. Importantly, each of the levels feels distinct, with a good mix of tight corridors, interesting geometry to stealth your way through and, of course, some perfect viewpoints for sniping.

The exploration age

Sniper Elite 5 paid homage to Hitman somewhat, and here that admiration is even more obvious from the wide open levels and greater focus on player freedom and exploration. The first run through a level is often just poking and prodding at the different systems to see what's possible, what routes you can skulk your way through the easiest, and what vantage points you prefer.

It does mean that actually achieving your goals on that first run can be tricky. In one level, I encountered a multi-storey hotel—the map told me that the objective was somewhere inside, but not where it was. I had to explore five floors before I found what I was looking for, a 30 minute search that left the place a graveyard.

Many of these objectives are bombastic affairs—sabotaging dams, blowing up trains, that sort of thing—but there are also a few kill objectives that play out like a riff on the Hitman series directly. You can always simply shoot your target in the head, but if you kill them with the specific method requested you'll unlock a brand new weapon for your troubles.

I enjoyed the extra challenge. Killing with a bullet is easy in Sniper Elite: Resistance, but doing the deed with poisoned wine or an explosive piece of coal? That's much tougher, and often involves passing up on several different tempting opportunities as you sneak around behind them setting things in motion.

Old school stealth

Violence is easy, but stealth is much more challenging, demanding patience and plenty of information gathering. A lot of recent stealth games just chuck ultramodern gadgets or magical devices into the mix to make things easier, and I've got to admit I've been spoiled by them. Here, the best gadget at your disposal is often a silenced pistol, or even just a patch of mud to go prone in.

You do still have a few tricks up your sleeve, though. I've gotten the most use out of the variety of explosives you can use to booby trap bodies and walkways, but there are also lures to distract people, and even a little helmet on a stick that will distract (and mark) enemy snipers.

But it's still pretty unforgiving. Once enemies are in "combat" mode, they pretty much stay that way until you kill them. As a result, once you're seen things often devolve into awkward skirmishes or a tornado of violence depending on the level. It's tough to disengage because of the crushing weight of enemies around you. And in addition to a numbers advantage, the troops you're fighting are pretty formidable—once they've got you in their sights, they'll fire at your last known position to keep you pinned down while others move up to flank you. Overconfidence or a bad position will quickly dump you out to a game over screen.

So, gathering information before everything goes sideways is your best hope of survival. Stalking enemies and tagging them with your binoculars allows you to track their movements for the rest of your mission, but also to find out more about them. Their equipment, sure, but it also turns out your binoculars are capable of detecting someone's darkest secrets.

One of those soldiers might have plans to flee Germany to be with their partner, while another… has a pet rock. The equipment is useful, the secrets not so much, but these asides are well written and funny, a charming bit lifted from The Heart in Dishonored (where the Heart item told you such things). I don't know why my binoculars can tell me someone's deepest fears, but I'm okay with it.

Unfortunately, movement during these stealth sequences can feel imprecise at times, particularly when it comes to scaling ladders or crawling through vents. When it goes wrong it feels less like I'm controlling an elite sniper and more like I'm veering around a warzone on roller skates. It's an occasional issue, but when you blow your cover because you got stuck on some invisible geometry or clipped into a wall, it grates.

Going ballistic

Still, when the stealth goes out the window you get to play with Sniper Elite: Resistance's remarkably detailed ballistics. Bullets will punch through wood to hit anything behind it, and pretty much everything you can shoot is fully modelled too—externally and internally.

Sniper Elite's killcam is one of the defining features of the franchise at this point. With almost every killing bullet fired, you get to see the damage done to the target via an x-ray view that shows bones breaking, muscles tearing and organs bursting. Rifle shots put on a spectacular and harrowing show, but this time you also get killcams for kills with your pistol or secondary weapon, and those are much less visually striking.

As I get older, I find watching the impact of your bullets on a human body doesn't really spark joy. I don't know if I want to see that my long-range shot took out several vertebrae, or blew someone's jaw across the nearby countryside. Call me a prude, but these killcams slow gameplay down significantly, and mostly just make me squirm.

I do still get a kick out of the detailed biology on show though. At times it feels almost educational, when a target goes down in one shot rather than three and it turns out it's because I accidentally put a round through their kidney.

You can also incapacitate enemies with limb shots and enemies will strive to save them, slowing themselves down as they hoist their injured colleague onto their back and try to get them to safety. You could use this for bait if you wanted. I often wanted.

My favourite trick, something that I loved in Metal Gear Solid 2 all the way back in 2001 and I've barely seen in games since, is that if you shoot a soldier in the arm, they'll immediately drop their main gun and switch to a sidearm. In practice this doesn't happen that often, but the first time I noticed it I let out a little squeak of joy.

Resistance's weapons start off clumsy and your character can't take many hits. Given that an alarm will often bring every enemy on the map into one big fight, the best way to progress is to wage a guerilla battle, evening the odds with each brutal firefight. I'd try to take out as many people as possible, hiding or trapping bodies ahead of the grand firefight that often accompanied me trying to do any big objective.

There's a fairly dull skill system that will make you more survivable over time, but the real empowerment comes from both learning as a player and tinkering with your weapons. I quickly fell in love with the Modelle 1935 pistol, bolting a stock, silencer and long-range scope onto it, turning it into a pocket sized rifle.

Full scale invasion

Once you're done with the campaign, extra modes offer more to do. Survival is just a horde mode where you try to protect your HQ from waves of enemies, Propaganda features small scenarios set in the maps you've already played but let you play as different characters and complete new challenges, and then there's a player vs player multiplayer mode for sniping matches.

These are all fine, and a good way to eke more fun out of your time with Resistance, but the standout is Invasion, which first came into the series with Sniper Elite 5. This lets you drop into another player's campaign as an Axis sniper to stalk and hunt them. Resistance, like many stealth games, is about learning patterns and systems and exploiting them, but when you are there as the sniper hunting them, you both have to do some more creative thinking.

I've baited the hero of their own campaign into hunting me only to have them stumble into a mine next to an explosive barrel that killed them instantly. I've had a tense Enemy At The Games-style standoff that went against my opponent because after they shot and incapacitated me, they were charged by my German allies and killed as I lay on the ground trying to patch myself up. It's great fun playing a miniboss for someone else, and I can see myself revisiting this for as long as there are still games to invade.

All in all there's plenty to keep you occupied here, and despite some frustrations, there's only one major problem: new hero Harry Hawker. He's maybe my least favourite protagonist of any game from the last few years. I've always thought of Karl Fairburne, star of the main series, as a human-shaped blob of porridge, unburdened by anything remotely resembling charisma. Compared to Hawker however, Fairburne is George Clooney.

He feels like an awkward children's TV presenter, constantly chipping in to tell me that long grass is itchy but good to hide in, or suggesting I might get spotted if I go this way. I think I might hate Harry Hawker, with all his overexplaining and the way he says things repeatedly with the exact same intonation during the same level. Hawker doesn't seem to care, though, rattling through his canned lines like he's getting paid per word and describing his blood as "motion lotion" for some reason.

But ignore Hawker—I try to— and Sniper Elite: Resistance is a solid stealth game that wears its influences on its sleeve but has plenty of its own tricks. It's old fashioned, but I find it quite compelling that it's a game that knows exactly what it wants to be. Sniper Elite has felt like the heir apparent to the stealth genre for a while now, and Resistance further solidifies that, a generous helping of sneaky action that's only slightly less impressive because it's retreading the same path Sniper Elite 5 already took in 2022.

I've skipped ahead a bit here. The Terminator was teased on Call of Duty's blog as part of Black Ops 6's Season 2 update, but Arnie's crimson-eyed killing machine won't arrive through the time portal until shortly after Season 2 drops. But there's plenty coming to Black Ops 6 in Season 2 itself, including a cache of new maps, two multiplayer game modes, and a horde of updates to zombies.

Let's kick off with those map reveals. There are five arenas landing in Season 2 of Black Ops 6, four of which are entirely new, with three of these arriving at launch. These include Bounty, a 6v6 map where players battle inside the lavish penthouse suite of an Avalon crime boss, and Dealership, another 6v6 arena where you'll ruin some car salesman's day blasting speed holes in all his sleek, shiny rides. The launch map that caught my eye, though, is Lifeline, a compact Strike map set in on a luxury yacht stranded in the middle of the ocean. I love a map that squeezes players together, especially one that adds a novel conceit on top. Lifeline looks like it has both.

Following these launch maps, two further kill-boxes will unfold later in the season. This includes a remaster of Grind, a skate park map originally debuting in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. More interesting, though, is Bullet, another tight arena themed around a bullet train. As well as fighting inside the compartments, Bullet will also let players try to get the drop on opponents by climbing onto the roof. Be warned, though, this tactic apparently risks you being thrown off the train as it hurtles along at 200mph.

Outside of maps, Season 2 of Black Ops 6 brings two game modes to competitive multiplayer. First up is the brand new "Overdrive" mode. Described as a "charged-up twist on team deathmatch", Overdrive sees players competing to earn stars rather than points for kills, with different types of kills earning different numbers of stars as listed below:

• Earn 1 star for Basic Eliminations like finishing off an enemy with body shots.
• Earn 2 stars for Core Medal Eliminations like headshots and melee attacks.
• Earn 3 stars for completing Distinguished Medal Eliminations, reserved for only the most impressive takedowns.

Earning stars also nets players special abilities, like the ability to see through walls, and boosts to movements and reloading speed. Alongside Overdrive, Season 2 also brings back free-for-all favourite Gun Game, where all players start out with the same weapon and cycle through new guns as matches progress.

Beyond trad multiplayer, Black Ops 6's zombies mode gets a beefy addition. A new adventure will transport players to the Tomb a "cursed dig site" that may contain the "elusive" sentinel artifact, whatever that is. Through this adventure, players will venture progressively deeper into the tomb, starting at the exterior dig site, before venturing through catacombs and ossurarys, eventually arriving in far stranger environs that I won't spoil. I'm not a zombies guy at all, but it looks pretty neat. Alongside the Tomb, Season 2 adds a new undead enemy, the electrifying shock mimic, and a new wonder weapon called the staff of ice.

These major additions come bundled with an array of smaller updates, like new wildcards and scorestreaks for multiplayer, various balance tweaks to Warzone, and more. Then there's what's coming after Season 2 drops, which brings us back to my best robot pal. The Terminator plods mercilessly in Black Ops 6 in the form of a tracer pack operator bundle, which comes with two ultra skins; Arnie's quintessentially 80s T-800 get-up as seen in the original movie (not the biker outfit he wears in T2), and his skinless "Titanium Core" as seen in the climax of the film. They both look excellent, even if the modelling of Arnie's face falls straight down the uncanny valley. I also laughed at the blog randomly quoting Arnie's line "I'll be back". Yes Activision, that is something the Terminator says.

You can read the complete list of updates here. I haven't delved too deeply into Black Ops ' multiplayer this year. Morgan described it as "pretty bland" when he tested the beta, though Nova Smith was much more positive, praising the game's "stellar multiplayer offerings" in his review. I have played through a big chunk of the campaign, however, and it's comfortably the most interesting single-player Call of Duty has delivered for a while.

The number of Fortnite creators tripled over the year, from around 24,000 in 2023 to 70,000 in 2024. The number of islands created is 198,000 and on average 60,000 creator-made islands are played every single day, with 70% of the playerbase enjoying both Epic-made and creator-authored content.

Then the money. Epic says it paid out a total of $352M to creators in 2024, but then comes possibly the most interesting breakdown in the review. Just under 30,000 creators received payouts of $100-$999; Around 5,400 made $1,000 to $9,999; 1,728 made between $10,000 and $99,999, and then we get into the people who are really making bank.

418 Fortnite creators made between $100,000 and $300,000. 154 made between $300,000 and $1 million.

37 people made between $1 million and $3 million from Fortnite's creator program in 2024. 14 people made over $3 million but less than $10 million. Then right at the top, there are seven individuals who made over $10 million from their Fortnite creations. In a single year.

That's 58 people who've made more than $1 million from Fortnite in 2024, with many making a lot more. The fact that Fortnite is so big that Epic is now paying out roughly a third of a billion dollars to community creators in a single year is almost impossible to wrap your head around.

Other stats: Players spent 5.23 billion hours playing games made by creators, which represents "36.5% of total Fortnite playtime and continues to rise." Epic notes that these numbers are increasingly boosted by non-combat creations such as "social roleplay, party games, deathruns, and horror."

This has no doubt been helped by Fortnite's ongoing mission to get every brand ever into the game, with creators able to use these official tie-ins, which is pretty remarkable when you think about it. Assets from brands like LEGO and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can be used and Epic says this allows creators to "develop authentic commercial games using world class IP without getting lost in contracts or negotiations."

Epic lists some of the creator highlights of the year, one of which shows the above perfectly: Pizza Shop Tycoon Boss Fight used Fortnite's assets to create "an authentic and engaging Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles experience" that has proven wildly popular, and is officially licensed.

As for the future, Epic says it will be "moving Scene Graph into Beta, introducing custom items, and launching additional tools to help you build deeper, more complex games with UEFN in new and popular genres." On top of this it's committing to improving the insight tools for developers, improving the Discover experience where players explore the range of what's available, and promises a roadmap by the end of the month with more details.

Well, it's probably no wonder that Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the company has spent billions fighting Apple and Google, and fully intends to keep doing so. And even if a certain buzzword has fallen out of favour, he still thinks Fortnite is at the forefront of gaming's future:

"Some people call it the Metaverse and some people call it just games, but it is real," says Sweeney. "And you find hundreds of millions of players who are highly engaged in immersive 3D games together with their friends. And we think that if we are successful with this, then someday there will be billions of users of this kind of game. And we think we're in an awesome position to be a leading company or perhaps the leading company in that world if the shackles are removed that prevent us and all developers from actually competing on our own and becoming first class companies in the industry."

With numbers like these, it's hard to argue.

"I like to harp on the negative [comments] and see what people didn't like," said Martin. "Some people said [Doom Eternal] was too hard. I actually think it's too complex. I think that the complexity of the control scheme led to unnecessary difficulties. You really want to be fighting the demons, the bad guys, not your controls."

Which is not to say that id wants The Dark Ages to be an easier game, just one with a lower barrier to entry. Martin hopes it has a more "ergonomic" control scheme, "So that way, when we do pressure the player, they're not reaching for buttons that they aren't really familiar with."

According to Martin, the team found the ergonomic, intuitive feel it was looking for in the original two Doom games. "I think I spent more time playing classic Doom on this project than I did in any other one," Martin said.

"The original Doom, and why it's stood the test of time is [that] it's really one of the most accessible shooters, first person, single player campaigns ever made," said Martin. "That's not to say it's easy. I don't think an ergonomic control scheme or an intuitive control scheme and a combat system that streamlined means easy."

The boots on the ground, projectile-dodging throwback combat promised by The Dark Ages has my inner boomer shooter sicko vibrating. Something I'm curious about is how retro the level design in-between combat will be⁠—Martin didn't rule out exploration entirely, while the developer direct trailer mentions level secrets and shows off a cheeky medieval-style keycard⁠—but Martin made it sound like that boomer shooter, combing back through the level after you've killed everything, "where am I supposed to go now?" feeling is something that id is trying to avoid. "I think there's a lot of modern conveniences that the original Doom doesn't have around exploring a level," Martin argued, citing critically important doors hiding in wall textures as an example.

Even if Doom: The Dark Ages' levels wind up being straight shots in-between heavy metal ragnarok battlefields, it looks like there's going to be plenty to chew on here. We don't even have that long to wait either. Doom: The Dark Ages is set to grace our screens on May 15.

According to game director Hugo Martin, The Dark Ages is a return to boots on the ground, gun in hand blasting—as long as we aren't counting the bits where you'll be riding a cyberdragon or piloting a mech suit.

"In Doom Eternal, you felt like a fighter jet. In Doom: The Dark Ages, you'll be an iron tank—heavy, strong, but still fast. A grounded combat system with an emphasis on power over the acrobatics of Doom Eternal, and a balance between enemy projectiles and player movement speed that makes strafing to aim viable again, just like in the classic Doom games."

However, that "return to form" as Martin calls it isn't without new permutations to the Doom combat formula. Combat in Dark Ages will incorporate contextual mechanics like the new Saw Shield, which—in addition to being revved up and thrown for ranged eviscerations—allows the player to block, parry, and deflect a variety of enemy attacks, all with one button.

Likewise, a different input will provide access to the Doom Slayer's trio of melee weapons, which includes a flail, an electrified gauntlet, and a spiked mace—each possessing its own combos and upgrades. As a key pillar of the new melee system, Glory Kills have been overhauled to provide additional fluidity to Dark Ages combat.

Instead of locking you into fixed animations as they had in previous Dooms, Glory Kill finishers can now be performed on the fly without interrupting the flow of the fight. It's "an all-new, un-synced, completely in the player's control Glory Kill system—from any angle, in and out as you see fit," Martin said. "And it feels amazing."

In a Q&A session during an early press screening of today's showcase, Martin said "it was really important that you're able to finish off an enemy, to transition from melee strikes to guns to shield play to an execution or glory kill, and not feel like there's a break in the action." Echoing the sentiment, executive producer Marty Stratton said that "when you play, that fluidity, it plays into everything you're doing," and that "it's amazing how cohesive it all is" in moment-to-moment combat.

In motion, Dark Ages looks like it's finding an interesting middle ground between the run-and-gun gameplay of Doom 2016 and a sturdier, stubborn, head-on mode of aggression—a good match for the medieval spin on Doom's usual scifi aesthetic. It's like fighting in an advancing shield wall, except some of the warriors in the throng have scifi guns that spray mulched skull shards.

Doom: The Dark Ages launches on May 15, 2025.

Multiplayer holds a prominent place in real life Doom lore: The original game was famously banned from numerous university networks in the US almost immediately after its release because the number of people rushing to try their hands at deathmatch was overwhelming the systems. And it was great! A lot of people went to a lot of trouble hauling their PCs all over the countryside so they could spend a night exchanging gunfire and trash-talk with friends.

But it was also a very different world then, one without the countless assortment of multiplayer shooter options we can choose from today. So while it's a little surprising as a matter of principle (or perhaps just nostalgia) that Doom: The Dark Ages doesn't have any multiplayer at all, it's also understandable.

"It's campaign only," Stratton said at a recent preview event. "We made that decision really from the jump. [We] wanted to basically free ourselves to create things like the Atlan and, you know, the mech experience and the dragon experience. Those are both almost like mini games within the game.

"We know our campaigns are, to a great extent, what people come to the modern Doom games to play. So [we] decided to put all of our efforts behind that and really create the biggest and best Doom game we've ever made."

Well, it's been coming for a while. "Deathmatch doesn't belong to Doom anymore," we wrote in 2020, following the release of Doom Eternal. "If we're honest, it hasn't for a long time. It's been decades since students drilled holes in their dorm walls to run LAN cables between their machines, desperate to participate in the bloody murder that was taking over PC gaming."

id Software tried to find a new way with Doom Eternal, which eschewed classic deathmatch combat in favor of a newfangled "Battlemode" that pits the Doomslayer against two human-controlled enemies, but it never really caught on: I tried it a few times back then, and it was interesting and kinda fun, and I forgot about it almost immediately. So as much as it feels odd to a gaming oldster like me, cutting deathmatch completely is probably the right move: Pouring resources into chasing a multiplayer crowd that's already got its hands full with other things just doesn't make sense.

Doom: The Dark Ages is set to launch on May 14.

"It isn't designed to be the end of something," Martin said during a recent preview event.

Which isn't to suggest developers are looking ahead to the next step in the Doom narrative—"genuinely, sincerely, we're really just focused on this right now," he continued—but Doom: The Dark Ages isn't "a period on the end of a sentence."

That's good news for Doom fans, but shouldn't come as a great shock, and not just because the big-budget videogame business lives and dies on sequels. Doom is not what you'd call a narrative heavyweight: 'There's demons and you gotta shoot 'em' is pretty much the sum total of the story, and while id has loaded up the more recent games with lore, it's not particularly vital to the experience. I mean, this is the entirety of the game description currently on Steam:

Doom: The Dark Ages is the single-player, action FPS prequel to the critically acclaimed Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal. You are the Doom Slayer, the legendary demon-killing warrior fighting endlessly against Hell. Experience the epic cinematic origin story of the Doom Slayer's rage in 2025.

That's it, that's the whole thing—but it's also all you really need to know, right? This is Doom. You know what you're here for, and you know it's never going to really be over. The irony is that its absentminded handwaving at a plot makes the Doom games very similar in at least one way to another shooter that does lean heavily into narrative: There are always demons, there's always a man, there's always guns.

Martin himself doesn't sound like he's ready to put a period at the end of the sentence that is his decade as a director at id, either. "I like making Doom games," he said. "I wouldn't have a problem doing this for a long time."

Doom: The Dark Ages is set to come out later this year.

Since the 2016 reboot of Doom, players have been challenged to jump around arenas in a constant acrobatic showcase—always moving, often jumping, always cycling through a tool suite designed to replenish resources and keep you in the fight, constantly on the attack. In Doom Eternal this combat loop was taken to the extreme. For some this was a natural progression. For others it was all just a bit too much.

The Dark Ages, then, promises to be more grounded—not necessarily slower, but less reliant on acrobatics. In the showcase, id shouts out the original Doom games—throughout what's shown, the Doom Slayer is boots on the ground, circle-strafing to dodge projectiles with not a jump pad in sight.

The new Shield Saw is emblematic of this shift. It's a shield, letting you block, parry and deflect attacks, giving you scope to mitigate damage instead of being forced to avoid it. It's also a chainsaw that you can throw Captain America style at a pack of demons. "With your shield and the parrying capabilities, you kind of push forward into these combat encounters where you're getting mano a mano with a heavy demon—something badass," says executive producer Marty Stratton in a Q&A session with press ahead of the Developer Direct showcase. "It's launching attacks at you, you're parrying them away. It really does have this stand-and-fight, melee, use your guns as additional ways to burn him down. And then you push forward to the next one … It feels totally fresh and new."

It quickly becomes clear that the new pace represents a major shift for how the modern Doom series plays. During the Q&A, game director Hugo Martin highlights "responsive and ergonomic" controls as being one of the core pillars of The Dark Ages' design. The Shield Saw, for instance, is a contextual tool—its actions stemming "all from one input."

"The buttons that are critical to me as a player when you play Doom: The Dark Ages are buttons that I'm familiar with, that my fingers happen to be on," says Martin. "When people get stressed, they tend to squeeze the controller. That's usually when a demon is pressuring them and is close to them. Well when you squeeze the controller—mouse and keyboard is obviously separate—you're going to press down on the right thumbstick. Well that's a critical part of your arsenal: the melee. The left trigger is something that's very familiar with people, and that's where all the shield play is on. And obviously the trigger for the guns, the right trigger. These are buttons and inputs that are really familiar to people. We focused on those this time, just so you could master the control scheme faster and we can ask more of you sooner."

And look, I'll admit this has me worried. I am a 40-year-old PC gamer. I was raised in the fires of keyboard elitism—every possible action having its place, each game requiring new muscle memory to develop. I am never happier than when I get to press Q to lean left. And so a major combat tool—one that can parry, block and attack—being entirely triggered through a single button press feels like a major limitation. In the heat of the moment, as the demons are pushing in, will the game always correctly interpret what I meant to do when I press that button?

If Doom Eternal pushed the speed and acrobatics to the point of being too intense for some players, is The Dark Ages swinging too far in the other direction?

id's pretty emphatic that the game is still true to Doom's essence. When asked if the heavier focus on accessibility will take away from the Doom experience, Martin gives an emphatic "No."

"'Accessible' taken the wrong way means 'easy', says Martin. "Challenge matters in games and it's a part of engagement. But it's really about making it simplified. Every great product is simple and easy to use, and that allows the user to do more with it. I use this analogy: in the '90s they had MP3 players and they were really complex looking … everything looked like it was out of the Nebuchadnezzar from the Matrix and they were really cool. And then Steve Jobs made the iPod and it was just a box with a circle on it. But no one could say it wasn't smart and intelligent and had a tremendous amount of depth—in fact it had more depth. Because as we simplify the control schemes everything gets easier to use and I can ask more of you.

"If you have too many buttons to press then I can't really press you as the designer because you're searching for the right button to hit. But if I streamline things—and I have fewer strings on the guitar and it's a truly ergonomic control scheme that's intuitive to the player, then we can ask a lot of you. Accessibility is about streamlining the experience and making it more ergonomic and really just simplifying it for the player … You shouldn't be fighting the controls, you should be fighting the bad guys."

It's not a mentality I particularly agree with, but it's still one that could work out in The Dark Age's favour. The crucial part here is id Software nailing this idea that a more simplified control scheme can give them the scope to ask more of the player elsewhere. It's the biggest unknown for me in a showcase that, otherwise, feels like some classic Doom bombast. The look, the sound, the cacophony of the weapons all scratches a very specific itch that the series consistently nails—this time with an appropriately medieval twist. Martin compares the new arsenal of weapons to "torture devices" as a direct response to this game's theme. Shout out to the Rail Spike, finally giving Doom a way to pin enemies to walls. It all looks and sounds appropriately brutal; appropriately metal. Everything on show here screams Doom.

The levels are bigger too, incorporating more sandbox environments. id stresses that it's not an open world game and remains a linear shooter, but within the larger environments you'll be able to head off in different directions to hunt down loads of secrets and things to power up the Doom Slayer. Stratton calls the environments "a dramatic expansion for our worlds"—and there are some clear big setpiece moments thanks to the addition of a giant mech you can pilot and a dragon you can fly around on. The vibes are on point.

Even the rhythm of the action does look appealing. There's a nice heft to the parries and deflections—you can tell it's going to feel good to engage in that combat loop. The Dark Ages is also modifying glory kills, replacing the locked-in-place animations with something more natural and in-the-moment, which is a sensible choice for a game that focuses more on strafing and ground positioning.

So while I do have some doubts and concerns, they're not quite enough to dampen my excitement. id Software has proven itself already with the Doom series—the 2016 game is up there alongside some of my favourite shooters. But the idea of a three-button core combat loop does feel restrictive—it'll be crucial for id to nail the challenge elsewhere, through enemy ability design and combat density. For now, I'm remaining cautiously optimistic the gambit will pay off.

We're not doomed to fight the endless hordes of hell quite yet, but it's going to be happening a whole lot sooner than you might've expected. id Software announced during today's Xbox Developer Direct that Doom: The Dark Ages is nearly finished and just four months out from release: it's landing on May 15, 2025.

"In Doom: The Dark Ages you will feel like the superweapon in the center of a medieval war against hell," said game director Hugo Martin. "We've taken the narrative out of the codex and into the cutscenes, featuring new characters, old allies and powerful new villains."

Martin suggested that The Dark Ages will be something of a "return to form" in terms of classic '90s Doom, with seemingly an increased focus on dodging between enemy attacks while staying grounded.

"In Doom Eternal you felt like a fighter jet. In Doom: The Dark Ages, you'll be an iron tank: Heavy, strong, but still fast," Martin said. "A grounded combat system with an emphasis on power over the acrobatics of Doom Eternal, and a balance between enemy projectiles and player movement speed that makes strafing to aim viable again, just like in the classic Doom games."

Executive producer Marty Stratton also highlighted a series first: a new adjustable difficulty system aiming to make the game more accessible. You can independently adjust the parry window, damage, enemy projectile speed, and other modifiers. But the system isn't just about making the game easier: you can also speed it up and make it harder with the same modifiers.

The multi-purpose shield and new melee weapons seem like the real stars of Doom: The Dark Ages, though you'll also get to ride a dragon and pilot a giant mech. Some of these new features and capabilities feel like a significant departure from the running, gunning, and keycard hunting of classic Doom, so it's interesting to hear Martin describe the combat as a throwback in some ways. We'll be able to see how it all fits together in just a few months.

If I knew the Scorgan was coming, I'd have never left.

The decade-spanning Light and Darkness saga might have come to a close, but Destiny 2's still spinning new stories through continuing episodic updates. The current episode, Revenant, sees the return of the Scorn baron Fikrul, enlisting players to face his undead horde of Scorn as gun-toting gothic monster hunters. With the episode's final act, Bungie added a new exotic mission, where players can storm Fikrul's haunted fortress to earn the Slayer's Fang, a shotgun that shoots splintering void rounds.

That's all well and good, but the main attraction at casa de Fikrul is the Scorgan: a massive, spooky organ running on dark ether and inscrutable Eliksni machinery to make your typical Transylvanian pipe piano look like a Fisher Price plaything.

By shooting keys in specific sequences, players can trigger different effects: unlocking secret areas, kicking off hidden boss fights, and the like. Great. Destiny stuff. Very good. But as budding organists across the Destiny subreddit have been all too happy to show, the Scorgan is made for bigger, better things.

Things like the most nightmarish rendition of Coldplay's Clocks that you've ever heard in your life.

Clocks by Coldplay Scorgan Cover from r/destiny2

Revenant is an episode full of dark alchemy and arcane ritual, but that all pales in comparison to the eldritch works of Guardians transmuting recognizable songs into hellish space music. Some are as simple as uncut recordings of players pivoting in place to shoot out chilling approximations of the Halo theme. Others are painstakingly edited compositions, stitching together captured clips of Scorgan notes into one of the world's more demonic takes on Megalovania.

My personal favorite is this arrangement of the theme to Studio Ghibli's Ponyo—a charming song of childlike glee that, through the unholy workings of the Scorgan, has become a harrowing musical ordeal fit for an apocalypse. It's terrible. It's beautiful. It's an effort nobody should have undertaken but deserves all the praise I can give.

Even if I haven't hopped into Destiny 2 in weeks, I'm pleased to see it's still capable of bringing players new sources of joy. My Destiny era might be past, but I hope the Scorgan has a long, bright future.

"Instances of cheating in Call of Duty, particularly in Ranked Play across both MP and Warzone, are frustrating and severely impact the experience for our community," a Call of Duty blog post says. "We’re here to tell you what’s being done about it today and our plan for support throughout 2025."

Apart from the 136,000 ranked play account bans since the mode launched a few months ago, significant updates have also been made to detection models and cross-examination tools: "When a cheater is banned, our system will detect other accounts it had regularly partied with and raise flags for the investigation to combat boosting and other cheater behavior."

A new detection and warning system has also been put in place for malicious reporting. This is when a player reports others for no valid reason—it's likely that they lost a game and are just looking for someone to take their frustrations out on.

"It’s important to clarify that when a user spams the report button in-game multiple times against a user, or someone uses an illegal cheat tool to spam 10,000 reports, our system does not consider more than one single report from a player versus another," the blog post says. "(Despite what cheat developers are telling players when they try to sell their illegal software)."

Instead of banning accounts of players who make false reports or are cheating, some parts of the Call of Duty community believe that the punishment should be far harsher. Some players call for IP bans to ensure that the guilty party cannot just simply make another account and carry on with their antisocial behaviour. But, while this does seem like an ideal solution for cheaters, Activision has reiterated that it's impossible to safely implement and, therefore, not a viable solution.

"We have seen community questions about detection methods, like IP-based banning," the blog post says. "We do not utilize IP-based bans for anti-cheat because they tend to take action against entire groups within a range that isn’t problematic. For example, a college campus or internet café would be swept up in an IP-based ban wave when only a single machine was targeted."

Even though IP bans are unlikely in 2025, Activision has some other new ideas to combat cheaters. Season 2 will introduce "new and improved client and server-side detections and systems," a major kernel-level driver update that will improve driver security and reinforce the encryption process, and a new tampering detection system.

A brand-new system to authenticate legit players and target cheaters will be introduced in Season 3 and beyond. More information about this will be revealed closer to the launch date, but for now, Activision is keeping its cards close to its chest so it doesn't "give cheat developers a peek behind the curtain."

Like always, it seems as if the fight against cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is an uphill battle, but even still, all of these new features seem complicated and helpful enough so that it'll keep the game as fair as possible, at least for the first few months before cheaters can figure out loopholes and ways around it.

I'm a bit of a freak for shooters of the boomer or just generally indie variety, but there are getting to be so many that it takes some real zing to get me out of bed for one sight unseen. Cybrlich's art style delivered that zing for me: It reminds me of when they let Genndy Tartakovsky off the leash to do something really gnarly like the Samurai Jack reboot or Primal.

Seeing Cybrlich in action has that same really electric quality as Pizza Tower, Fallen Aces, or the upcoming Mouse: P.I. For Hire⁠—it's surprising and exciting to see a game look like this. I'm also a big fan of giant, extraneous HUDs like the '90s classics or Cruelty Squad have, and Cybrlich's delivers in spades. It's presented as a little OS window, with x-out, full screen, and minimize buttons up top, huge mechanical elements and readouts obscuring your view, and the meaty hands of our hacker-barbarian protagonist holding a weapon in one hand with a recovery item in the other.

Those healing items are, naturally, burgers and enormous blunts. It's a bit of a coin toss here: I could see Cybrlich's wacky sensibility winding up genuinely funny, or tryhard and tedious, with absolutely no middle ground. On the dark path lies 2013 le epic Reddit win the internet secondhand embarrassment, or "cringe" as the kids say (I wish they'd stop). On the more virtuous path Cybrlich could wind up more like last year's Anger Foot, which has a similar bombastic aesthetic that's delivered with some real wit and charm.

The way the hacker smokes his blunts in one pull like Tom from Tom and Jerry before blowing a big cloud of smoke in the shape of the word "doink" has me thinking that Polyhedra is on the right track, and that Cybrlich will have the cleverness, the little things that make a funny game funny and not a chore. Right now, Cybrlich does not have any kind of demo or release window, but you can follow development and support Polyhedra by wishlisting the game on Steam.

Released in 2018, Total Chaos is regarded as one of the best Doom mods ever made—a total conversion that transforms id Software's demon-blasting FPS into a grungy, low-fi horror adventure. Last year, creator Sam Prebble revealed Total Chaos is being remade into a full game, debuting its first trailer on The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. Now, Prebble has revealed that a demo for the remake is imminent, letting players get their grubby hands on the game for themselves.

Speaking to RPS, Prebble stated that a demo for Total Chaos will be available "very shortly". He doesn't specify precisely when, but explains the demo is partly in lieu of embarking upon an early access development, as he did with his previous game Turbo Overkill. Prebble further says this is because he doesn't want to be overly influenced by player feedback. "I don't want to try and go too far in one direction and change what people loved about the mod."

Alongside the demo, Prebble reveals several other details about Total Chaos, most notably that it isn't a shot-for-shot remake of the mod. Although it takes place in the same location—an offshore mining colony inspired by Japan's Hashima Island—it'll elaborate upon the spaces players have already explored. "You'll enter a level—if you played the mod before—and be like: 'Okay, I remember this space.' But the more you play through the level, the more you start to realize: 'Okay, this is different.' And then eventually you're just thrown into this completely new area that you don't know."

Indeed, Prebble originally planned for Total Chaos' island to be intricately connected, adding "I wanted the whole thing to be seamless." In the end though, he realised there wasn't much point. "In the mod, you never went back to areas you previously discovered. I felt tying the whole thing together would feel slow—you'd basically feel like you're not making much progress."

One of the more surprising revelations in the interview is that, despite creating one of the most acclaimed horror mods around, Prebble has never played some of horror gaming's most recognisable touchstones. "I've never actually played Silent Hill. At the time of developing the mod, I never played Resident Evil either."

You can read the full interview here. Regardless of Prebble's familiarity with gaming's horror canon, I am incredibly excited for Total Chaos. Turbo Overkill is my favourite retro shooter to emerge from the genre's revival, an astonishingly ambitious FPS that starts with you blasting goons in a cyberpunk city and ends with you dashing along the backs of starships in space. Prebble built the game almost entirely by himself, and has a knack for punching well above his weight. When the demo finally lands, I'll be first on the boat to its foggy island mine.

“I want[ed] to make sure Crysis does not age, that [it] is future proofed, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than today,” Yerli said. Crysis' highest graphics settings were designed with the hardware of 2010 and beyond in mind, according to Yerli, and to flick them on in 2007 was an act of hubris. “A lot of people tried to maximize Crysis immediately,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s not why we built the Ultra mode, or Very High’.”

Yerli might be underselling Crysis graphical brutality just a bit, though. In a 2020 retrospective video, Digital Foundry writers John Linneman and Alex Battaglia found a more or less permanent home in the sub-30 fps range playing Crysis on a 2007-era powerful system at High settings and with the decidedly retro resolution of 1168x665. The High setting may also have been best left to future PCs then, and depending on your budget, maybe chuck Medium and Low in there too.

But it's all in good fun: That's a big part of Crysis' legend, after all. Yerli himself seems to appreciate the continued popularity of Crysis as a memetic (sometimes still serious) measure of gaming horsepower: “It was this ambivalent kind of meme that was good and bad, but I actually enjoyed it,” he said. “Last year, Jensen [Huang] for Nvidia announced a new GPU, and they said, ‘Yes, and it can run Crysis.’”

Behind the performance woes and their resulting memes, Crysis remains a great looking game that pushed a number of innovative graphical techniques. Yerli was so focused on knocking Crysis' jungle simulation out of the park that there was a running joke among the developers that, in Crysis, "One tree has more technology built in than the entire algorithm for rendering Far Cry."

A studio research team went to Haiti to document the tropical environment for reference purposes, influencing Crytek's early adoption of dynamic lighting, as opposed to the lower-cost baked lighting of yesteryear, where every shadow is placed by an artist rather than simulated. Crytek also implemented subsurface scattering to nail the "soft, green translucency where the sun is behind [a leaf]."

"Subsurface scattering was a technology that existed already in engines, but was super slow," Yerli said. "Nobody had done it at scale." Crysis further had facial animations and rendering that could challenge Valve's legendarily lifelike Source engine faces. Yerli was particularly proud of shadows and shaders that could replicate the little nuances and details, including one to make characters blush: "We went over bonkers on this one," said Yerli.

And really, that's a good summation of the entire project of Crysis, when you get down to it. To read print-exclusive stories like our full Crysis retrospective, consider subscribing to PC Gamer's print magazine⁠—you'll also get that magical feeling of holding a physical bundle of game journalism in your hand each month.

"In the wake of devastating fires in Los Angeles impacting our friends, colleagues, and residents in Southern California, we're adding the LA Fire Relief pack to Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone," Activision wrote in a tweet on the official Call of Duty account. "100% of Activision's proceeds from purchases of the LA Fire Relief pack will be donated to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation and Direct Relief."

In another post on the main Activision Twitter account, the company announced that it will also be donating $1 million directly to the LAFD Foundation and Direct Relief. "As a company with roots deeply tied to the LA area, our hearts go out to our friends, colleagues, and residents impacted by the devastating fires," Activision wrote in the second post.

It's a great move, and I also appreciate that the skin itself actually looks pretty sick even absent a charitable context: You've got a hooded, tacticool, almost Squid Games-looking operator type wearing a mask with a sort of fingerprint swirl texture to it. The whole thing's brought together with a swirling, metallic, teal and fuchsia camo pattern over a charcoal grey base. It's maybe a little too smoke shop, streetwear, gen-Z for my taste, but still one of the cooler skins I've seen, and probably a good fit for the tastes of your average CoD-liker.

The fires have had other ripple effects in the gaming world, with numerous office closures for LA-based studios and a pause on filming the Fallout Show's second season. Activision also isn't the only studio that's given back to the city: Riot donated one of its backup generators to an impacted fire station, as well as meals from its employee cafeteria.