Latest Articles

Kingmakers has too much going on to easily summarise, but I'll try. Really, though, you should just click below and watch the trailer, which will surprise and delight you with its twists and scope in a way my words will not.

Gigantic, the free-to-play team brawler from a former StarCraft and Guild Wars designer, which launched (fully) in 2017 and closed the following year, is returning as Gigantic: Rampage Edition. It's no longer free-to-play, but a "premium and definitive release" of the original, and it's due on April 9th.

Temtem was a brief mega-hit when it launched in Early Access back in 2020, as a Pokémon-like that was both online and on PC. Now it's getting its own "survivor-like bullet heaven" spin-off called Temtem: Swarm.

In 2023, more than 500 games earned more than $3 million (around £2.3 million) in gross revenue via Steam, according to Valve. The stat was shared as part of their annual summary, a breakdown of the platform's past year in terms of new features and performance.

I always love it when stuff I've legitimately bought appears on sale, and that's the case today with this XPG Caster DDR5 kit that's 10% off on Amazon UK today. That brings this 32GB dual-channel DDR5-6000 CL40 kit to £64, a great price for this spec - especially for an RGB-enabled model.

Welcome to Steam Deck Academy, where we take the microfibre cloth of understanding and wipe away the smudgy touchscreen fingerprints of handheld gaming ignorance. Here, eager students – that’s you, I’m assuming – can feast their minds on all the Steam Deck guides, explainers, and investigations that we’ve produced, as well as further instructive pieces to come.

Mechanical keyboards can be pretty cheap these days, but I've not never seen one on sale for as little as £4.99 - especially not for a full-size RGB model available for a brand I've actually heard of before! That is indeed the case at GAME though, who are selling the Trust Gaming GXT 865 Asta for £4.99 plus another £4.99 in shipping - that's £20 less than this keyboard normally costs!

Nose around Helldivers 2's Galactic War map and you might notice that there's a lot of empty space. Around half the celestial sphere is given over to the dominions of the Automatons and Terminids, leaving ample room for another enemy faction to be inserted via free update or paid DLC. What could that next faction be? Surely it can't be any worse than a horde of giant bugs or a legion of robots. Surely it can't be, say, a highly advanced elder species of teleporting illusionists equipped with lightning guns and cloaking devices. Oh dear.

Playing Pacific Drive reminds me of an army recruitment advert shown on British TV about 20 years ago. A group of soldiers are travelling along a road at night in a Land Rover, when suddenly they spot the enemy ahead. The front seat passenger starts barking orders at the driver: “Get off the road! Kill the lights! Through the trees!”. You sense the panic as the camera, inside the vehicle, jolts with the suspension on the rough ground, and the driver fights the steering wheel to stay in control. It’s a scene you reenact quite frequently in Ironwood’s survival game with roguelike trimmings. Well, except, instead of a Land Rover you’re behind the wheel of a rusty station wagon, and instead of military opposition, you’re scarpering from paranormal phenomena.

Inflexion's fantasy survival sim Nightingale releases into Steam early access today. Our pre-launch impressions? Well, the procedurally generated landscapes are engrossing, a blend of British fairytale influences with many a hushed forest, spidery swamp and tempting ruin. We're also pretty keen as a team on the game's Realm cards system, which lets you shape those fairytale worlds both before and after you portal into them. But we were less enthralled by HUD and user interface elements such as the crafting menus and hotbar, which we found ornate and circuitous to the point of confusing.

Speaking to me after our co-op hands-on - in which guides writer Kiera made friends with a tree monster only for somebody to shoot it - Inflexion's CEO Aaryn Flynn explained a bit about how the game will evolve during its early access period, which Inflexion estimate will last 9-12 months. Thankfully, it sounds like fine-tuning the UI is a priority, though Flynn is "cautious" about committing to a full-blown roadmap.

Every year, there are a couple of game soundtracks I become properly obsessed with. In 2022, I more or less had the music of Tunic and Citizen Sleeper on repeat whenever I left the house. In 2021, it was Chicory. In 2020, it was Coffee Talk and Signs Of The Sojourner, and in 2019, it was all Mutazione, all the time. 2023 was a pretty great year for game music as well, as we not only got Alan Wake 2's exquisite musical set-piece that's honestly just been getting better and more insane as time's gone on, frankly, but also the toe-tappingly brilliant soundtrack of Cobalt Core, which has somehow risen even higher on my forever playlist after revisiting it for this month's RPS Game Club.

Composed by Aaron Cherof, Cobalt Core's music alternates between high-energy battle tracks and calmer, more relaxed ambience. It's so dang good, and an absolutely perfect backdrop for sliding in and out of oncoming missile fire in its roguelike spaceship fights. So come along and jam to some of its best tracks with me below as I pick out some of my musical highlights.

A colossal new update for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader launched last night, hitting the grimdark space-aristocrat RPG with so many changes that the patch notes are almost 17,000 words long. Fitting for a game that our Rogue Trader review called "engrossing, obscure and absolutely exhausting". It adds loads of new voiced lines, fixes everything from wonky abilities to broken quests, reworks balance, improves performance, and so much more. Enough is changed that developers Owlcat are giving everyone in your party a free respec to adjust to what the game has become.

Last Epoch, a Diablo-like action-RPG from Eleventh Hour Games that's been in early access since 2019, finally arrives tomorrow as a full release. And to celebrate, there's a colossal 1.0 update that could take you an hour to read in its entirety. To spare you the time commitment, its highlights include new Acolyte and Rogue masteries, new Item Factions, a full offline mode, controller support, and plenty of visual tweaks.

The latest Assassin's Creed Mirage update is giving me flashbacks to that inglorious period in game design when every other action game had an insta-fail stealth segment to wind people up between cover-based shoot-outs and, I don't know, three-part glyph puzzles or what-have-you. Out today for PC at 12pm UTC, 1pm GMT, 7am ET and 4am PT, the 1.07 patch adds Full Synchronization Challenge, a permadeath mode (originally teased last year) that not only permakills you when you're slain by enemies, but also deletes your save file when you commit crimes such as slaughtering civilians, or going outside of "authorised map locations".

Xenonauts 2 received its biggest update yet last night, adding a bunch of new things to the early access X-COM-like that will be sure to please your rude Chief Science Officer Gaius Baltar James Callis whatever his name is SMUG FACE. Alongside a brand-new Cruiser UFO to pilfer for new technology to help fight back against your alien invaders, the Milestone 3 update also brings new story missions, weapons and vehicles, extending the campaign's play time from 180 in-game days all the way up to 260.

My experience with Warhams isn't flat zero - I had some minifigs when I was a teenager and played a few of the Dawn Of War video games - but I haven't actively checked in on it for a while. I know enough to make "[x] for the [x] throne!" jokes, basically. My experience with cleaning-stuff-sim PowerWash Simulator is extensive, though, and I was excited when the crossover with Warhammer 40K was teased a while back. Last night we got a full trailer and release date of Frebruary 27th - next week! - and I'm now earnestly very excited. The trailer is both very funny and shows off massive things to clean. Win win, innit.

It’s been eight years since Street Fighter V hit PC. As you might recall, the fighting game landed with the poise of someone shattering both kneecaps on impact, as complaints about a small roster of characters and barebones story mode - to be filled in later with DLC - were made more egregious by a number of technical issues, including bugs and online issues caused by its wobbly servers.

Despite plenty of rumours, we still don’t know when Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree will arrive - it could be later this month, this year or maybe beyond even that. While we’re waiting on the official expansion, though, modders have beaten FromSoftware to offering a substantial new experience to those who’ve cleared every corner of the Lands Between.

Sega’s upcoming reboot of ‘90s arcade classic Crazy Taxi will be a “triple-A” game, according to the head of one of the Japanese studios working on the driving game’s return.

New arcade shoot 'em up Nidus first caught my eye with its psychedelic bug blast on Screenshot Saturday Monday. Three months later, it has now launched, and for a mere £6 we can all fill our eyes with so many colourful insects. You'd have to pay at least £57 for that sort of fun down the pet shop.

I’ve been completely hooked on Helldivers 2 since diving into its exceptional Starship Troopers-y bug-blastathon last week, and I’m far from alone - so many people are playing the co-op shooter that developers Arrowhead capped the game’s servers at 450,000 simultaneous players over the weekend to try and alleviate connection and login problems caused by its enormous popularity.

There's a particular boss encounter in Balatro that always feels like it's cheating a bit. In this mesmerising poker roguelike, each stage is made up of three blinds - small, big and boss - with the blind essentially being a high score you have to hit by playing different kinds of poker hands - your traditional flushes, straights, pairs and so on. Each hand has its own number of chips and multiplier bonuses associated with it, and Balatro's whole deal is about shuffling closer to victory by making the most of the cards you're dealt. While some blinds are tiny, stretching to just 300 or 450 early on in a run, they quickly start ramping up into the tens of thousands as each successfully defeated boss blind ups the ante and the accompanying stakes. Reach an ante of eight, and bingo, you've won a run of Balatro.

The boss blind I keep coming a cropper with, though, is The Flint. This sucker not only halves a hand's chip score, but it also cuts its multiplier in two as well, and I've yet to figure out exactly how to defeat it. Sometimes it appears with a blind of just 600, but other times it's been an enormous 22,000. In fairness, all bosses have little tricks like this. Some will debuff certain card suites, making them useless in your overall score count. Others may only let you play one hand type the entire match, while the cheeky Tooth will deduct you $1 for every card used. But Balatro isn't simply about beating the odds with smart and intelligent card plays. It's about bending, twisting and abusing those odds to your will - also through smart and intelligent card plays. Cheating isn't just encouraged in Balatro. It's damn near mandatory, and it's all thanks to the brilliantly conceived joker cards that give the game its Latin-based name.

As time-travelling fantasy APRG Last Epoch gears up for its 1.0 release this week, developers Eleventh Hour Games have revealed the final crop of character classes that will be arriving in the game on February 21st. Technically, they're the final pair of the 15 mastery classes that you'll be able to unlock after working through one of Last Epoch's five base classes, but listen, I don't even need to look at the other 14 masteries to know what I'm going to be aiming for come release. The Falconer specialisation of Last Epoch's Rogue class just sounds too good to pass up.

Ore-poaching co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic was updated today, primarily to address a series of longstanding technical issues but also to encourage you to get sozzled and turn into a filing cabinet. The patch adds a new Hidden Dwarf Double IPA bevvy to the space rig hub's bar, and duly necking it will initiate a prop hunt minigame among your squad of dwarven miners.

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by handcrafted art, intense fighting game violence, cosy management, and heaps more attractive and interesting indie games. Check these out!

Helldivers 2 is turning out to be an absolute laugh riot of a co-op shooter; it may even have the potential to rival Deep Rock Galactic on good vibes and teammate deaths as accidental comedy masterstrokes. Even ongoing server connectivity issues haven’t done much to spoil the sense of fun, which incidentally, can also be shared on the Steam Deck.

Indeed, following a quick Proton update on Valve’s part, its previously SteamOS-incompatible anti-cheat will no longer put the kibosh on you dropping into Helldivers 2 via your Deck. I’ve been testing on both an original 512GB model and the newer Steam Deck OLED, and as long as you don’t mind dropping the quality settings, it can usually run tidily above 30fps.

Modern art puzzler Please, Touch The Artwork was a bit of a surprise hit when it came out in 2022. It not only poked fun at the reverential distance enforced on us by stuffy old art galleries, but it also invited us to recreate abstract modern masterworks by clicking, tracing and generally getting up close and personal with them with our big, colourful in-game fingers. Now, solo developer Thomas Waterzooi is back with Please, Touch The Artwork 2, which takes us on a slightly different journey through the art world as a hidden object point and click game. It's out today, is completely free, and was made to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the death of the Belgian expressionist and surrealist painter James Ensor.

As time goes by, it really does seem like there's a Soulslike for every occasion: Lies Of P for those who prefer their fairy tales more on the messed up side, Steelrising for those who like France and robots, Lords Of The Fallen for those who like spectral moths and lanterns. Well, another joins the fray in Enotria: The Last Song, an Italian-inspired Soulslike with the loveliest setting I've seen in a while.

Cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer have highlighed a heartwarming story of lost media becoming found again. A mod for Matthew Perry career high and/or nuclear apocalypse RPG sidequest Fallout: New Vegas, which was thought lost since some time around 2016, has been found by chance on someone's hard drive. The content of this mod, you ask? It adds a companion who looks like redoubtable nu-metal pioneer Fred Durst. I was trying to come up with a pun to do with "nookie" or that modders will "keep rollin'", but I respect you too much for that (also it's Monday and I'm very tired - give me something to break, am I right?).

Among the things I like bestest about Inflexion's alt-Victorian fantasy survival game Nightingale is its Realm cards mechanic, whereby you generate and modify worlds by playing Major and Minor cards. Major cards are used at portals to conjure up a particular biome or world type and set the difficulty, including an approximate choice of resident NPC factions, local fauna and resources. Minor cards are played within worlds to mess with their workings. You can lower the gravity for optimal umbrella gliding conditions, alter the weather or summon a Blood Moon (sorry, Zelda) that reduces your max health.