Just two months after the release of the PvP arena shooter Empulse, 1047 Games is halting work on the game and its predecessor, Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, saying that neither is making enough money to support their operating costs. The studio itself will remain but its "focus is changing," and its next game "may look very different from what people expect."

The original Splitgate: Arena Warfare was something of a phenom when it debuted in 2019, which was a blessing and a curse: The crossplay beta test was a mess because the game was so popular, and its final release was delayed so 1047 could revamp its server infrastructure. The money flowed in and 1047 co-founder and CEO Ian Proulx mused about being the next Riot Games, but the wheels came off with Splitgate 2; its follow-up, Empulse, showed early promise but failed to cause much of a stir, and just a month after that game's release, the company laid off a number of employees.

And now work on both games has ended entirely. "The reality is that neither game is generating enough revenue to support the ongoing cost of dedicated servers," 1047 said in a Steam update. "We have continued covering those costs because we wanted to give both games every opportunity to grow, but we have reached the point where that is no longer sustainable."

The good news for fans of Empulse and Splitgate: Arena Reloaded is that, like the original Splitgate before them, both games are being given peer-to-peer support: Dedicated servers and matchmaking will end on September 3, "but players will still be able to host matches, find games, and play with friends forever." Empulse will also get a final new map, and a price reduction.

1047 said in a separate post that it will continue to operate, although there's a distinct curtain falling vibe to its "What's Next" message.

"To everyone who worked on Splitgate, Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, and Empulse, including those no longer at 1047: thank you. You put years of your lives into them, and we are grateful for what you helped build," the studio wrote.

"And to everyone who played, gave us feedback, made videos, argued about balance changes, discovered ridiculous movement tech, or brought friends into a lobby: thank you for being part of this with us.

"Thank you for the last 10 years. See you in the server browser."

One of video gaming's great strengths is letting players step into worlds that previously only existed in words or on canvas or celluloid. Lush fantasy kingdoms, sprawling sci-fi universes, and of course surrealist dreamscapes where people have music printed on their butts.

Admittedly, that last one is a relatively recent addition to gaming's ever-expanding map of the human imagination. It comes courtesy of Hieronymus, an in-development FPS based on the works of late-medieval Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.

Revealed at the Future Games Show during Gamescom, Hieronymus lets players explore 3D adaptations of Bosch's most famous works, such as his best-known triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. It sees you play as a woman named Helena van Aken as she attempts to unravel the mystery of her family's association with otherworldly powers, all while accompanied by none other than Faust himself. Or at least, the real-life alchemist who inspired the folk legend.

The trailer shows the player wandering through marshlands dotted with bulbous structures and mermaid knights, evading giant beasts as they stomp around the map, and watching some poor fellow get munched by a giant humanoid creature with a parrot's head.

Aesthetically, Hieronymus is instantly enticing. But how will Hieronymus actually play? Well, according to the game's Steam page, you'll be able to battle enemies with period-accurate weapons like a crossbow and an arquebus, employ alchemy to create projectiles that can stun creatures and influence their behaviour, and even catch and tame some of the weird critters that you'll find stumbling around.

Watching Hieronymus in action, my gut reaction is that visually it looks splendid, but mechanically it seems to need some work. The movement looks plodding and sluggish, while combat and interactions look quite slow and floaty and not especially engaging. Which is not to say I expect a game based on the works of Hieronymus Bosch to play like Doom Eternal, although now that I've thought about it, I really want to play an id Software/Hieronymus Bosch mashup.

I'm also curious to see how developer Hurdy-Gurdy Games deals with the fact that artworks like The Garden of Earthly Delights have a quite spectacular number of butts in them—which is something that Steam seems increasingly censorious about.

At the very least, I would expect the developers to replicate the butt which has musical notation printed on it—located in the panel of Earthly Delights that depicts hell. This particular rear end went viral several years ago after a tumblr blogger spotted the music inked across the cheeks of one of Bosch's tortured souls, then transcribed and recorded it for your listening pleasure.

Yet with or without the butt-music from hell, Hieronymus still looks like an intriguing prospect. A release date hasn't been announced yet, but I wouldn't expect to play it until next year at the earliest.

A massive cache of internal builds from Valve has reportedly leaked online, including beta builds of several classic Valve titles and possible weapons from Half-Life 2's cancelled third episode.

The leak, which began circulating on Saturday and comes from an unknown source, includes 12 terabytes of data currently being sifted through by data miners. The files are dated from a ten-year period between 2003 and 2013, and include builds and assets of many Valve projects across that timespan.

Thus far, data from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Left 4 Dead, and Portal 2 have all been claimed to feature in the leak. This reportedly includes the complete Portal 2 beta from 2009, a much sought-after artifact for Portal 2 fans.

The 2009 beta has a somewhat different story from the final game. It still takes place in the ruins of Aperture Science, but sees you guided through the initial test-chambers by pre-recordings of GLaDOS rather than Wheatley, and features other personality cores much more prominently. Curiously, a team of beta researchers and enthusiasts recently released a Portal 2 mod that attempts to recreate the beta build as accurately as possible, a project that took four years to realise.

In addition, Valve-focussed YouTuber and enthusiast Gabe Follower reports that the files include the Weaponizer, an unfinished weapon that has been previously linked to Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Information about the Weaponizer appeared in a separate leak that occurred in 2011, inside a directory labelled "ep3", while a gun that resembles the Weaponizer was shown in footage of Episode 3 that appeared in Valve's 20^th anniversary documentary on Half-Life 2 (via Gamerant).

Also apparently included are files (but apparently not a working build) of Valve's cancelled puzzle game F-STOP, a precursor to Portal 2 that was in-development for around a year before Valve canned the project. Also known as 'Aperture Camera' F-STOP featured a mechanic similar to the one seen in 2023 puzzler Viewfinder, in which the player takes photographs of the environment which can then be applied as 3D objects in the game world.

While it's not clear where the leak originated from, it has been linked to Valve's Steam2 content-server infrastructure, which was replaced by SteamPipe in March 2013, which would explain why the latest files from the archive are from that year.

I have contacted Valve for comment on the leak and will update this story with any response.

Activision has employed many different tactics in its unending battle against cheating in Call of Duty, from suing cheat makers for millions of dollars to employing complex technical solutions to ban cheaters as quickly as possible. In its latest gambit, Activision served cease-and-desist papers to one especially infamous Call of Duty cheat maker, filmed the entire exchange, and posted it online.

On Friday, a video appeared on the official Call of Duty X account (via Kotaku) showing a legal representative arriving at the home of Elocarry—a cheat maker who creates exploits for games like Rust and Apex Legends alongside Call of Duty—walking up to his front door and serving him a cease and desist order.

Now, if you're expecting some Dog the Bounty Hunter level of reality TV drama, expect to be disappointed. The whole exchange between Elocarry and the legal representative is brief and civil—pretty much "Hello. Here are your papers. Goodbye." The most interesting part occurs when the representative explains the papers are cease-and-desist orders, and Elocarry asks "What's that?", after which the representative suggests Elocarry call the relevant attorney's office.

Clearly though, the objective here is to serve a broader warning to Call of Duty cheaters. That not only will the publisher come after you legally, that it will also do so publicly and for the whole world to see. In a follow-up post, Activision says that it served 80 such cease-and-desist letters in its fight against cheat makers, disrupting 375 reseller operations and shutting down 30 vendors entirely.

Regarding Elocarry specifically, the cease-and-desist order appears to have had an effect. Further down the thread, the Call of Duty X account posted a screenshot from Elocarry's discord which states he has "temporarily paused sales" of Call of Duty cheats as he "review[s] a matter internally".

Activision also took the opportunity to discuss how these anti-cheat efforts are being carried forward into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. In another post in the thread, Activision stated that during last weekend's beta test "infection rates were lower, hardware bans were harder to evade and our time to action improved." Sadly, Activision didn't go into much more detail than this. But the publisher certainly seems keen to let players know how seriously it is taking cheating.

Modern Warfare 4's second beta weekend is currently ongoing, and unlike the first beta weekend is open to all players. Alongside the standard multiplayer test, players can also try a mission from the campaign and drop into Warzone for a bout of battle royale. PC Gamer's Morgan Park got hands-on with Modern Warfare 4 earlier in the year, coming away impressed by the level of detail on show, but unconvinced by its maps.

We see games getting delayed all the time, but today's delay is particularly notable because this particular game was first supposed to come out in, ooh, let me check... Yep. All the way back in 2015.

Squadron 42, the long-awaited, celebrity-packed episodic singleplayer component of Star Citizen has been delayed once again. And why? This time, according to game director Chris Roberts, it's to avoid the media hubbub around another oft-delayed game: GTA 6.

"At CitizenCon 2024 we announced we would ship in 2026. Our plan was to release in Q4 around IAE," Roberts said in a post on the RSI website.

"But much like the rest of the industry there is no way I want to launch my spiritual successor to Wing Commander, a game that has had twelve years of blood, sweat and tears invested into it (we started Squadron 42 development in 2014 as 2013 was opening studios, hiring people and getting the Hangar module out for Star Citizen) launching into the attention buzz saw of GTA 6.

"While GTA 6 isn’t launching on PC this November, pretty much all outlets and most content creators will be all over it, not leaving a lot of room for other coverage," Roberts said.

"We have taken a look at the release windows at the start of 2027, and decided that Q2 provides a better time for Squadron 42 to release."

Look, I dunno. Roberts isn't wrong: there will be absolutely tons of attention on GTA 6—there already is, if you haven't noticed—but not everyone plays GTA 6 and not everyone wants to watch videos or streams or read about it. There's no game so big it swallows absolutely everyone's attention for months, not even a new GTA game.

We've seen a lot of games getting out of the way of Rockstar's path, but pushing the release that far into 2027 suggests CIG just wants more time. And judging from the state of the recent disastrous Star Citizen livestream, it may need more time.

"I know a lot of you will be disappointed to not be playing Squadron 42 at the end of this year," Roberts said, "but it is the best thing for the project as it is truly something special and so needs to the opportunity to have the focus of the wider gaming world."

One of the quiet tragedies of Valve's game library is a standalone Ravenholm game that never came to fruition—it was being worked on by Arkane Studios in the late 2000s, and it would've probably been pretty damn good if Valve had the moolah to make it. Over a decade later, an entire hour of footage would drop online, with reports stating that around 10 levels had been fleshed out prior.

Now, almost 20 years later, Arkane's founder Raphaël Colantonio has managed to find his zen with the heartbreak, speaking with Press Box PR in an interview earlier this month (thanks, GamesRadar+).

"It took us a decade to move on from the pain of the Ravenholm project because we were incredibly excited about doing that game and we put in a lot of creative energy into it and eventually when the decision was made to cut it, we did not understand it as it happened," said Colantonio. "We were young and we were just refusing to see the reality of the situation, and the reality was much simpler than the way it looked to us."

Colantonio, who left Arkane in 2017 but was instrumental on one of its all-time greats, Dishonored, says that "it all came down to the economics behind Half Life 2 and how the DLCs were selling. They had a business ratio between how much they could spend and how they could make it to be worth it to them, because it takes the attention of the entire structure on their side."

With time to reflect, Colantonio views Arkane's involvement as more of an experiment in retrospect—especially given that a Ravenholm game had already been in development between 2005 and 2007: "They thought, you know, why not try these guys? We seemed pretty effective and eventually, like the two other attempts that they had looked at, we went somewhere with it, and it was cool. What we had was really, really cool.

"But it still needed more time, and too much time to finish … There was a business call at some point where it was decided that it didn’t really make sense. It was very painful for us but it made sense, we grew up and got a little bit more mature about it."

It's not all bad, though. It got them in touch with Viktor Antonov, a concept artist whose work was instrumental in forming the aesthetic of both Half Life and Dishonored. Antonov sadly died in 2025: "Eventually he joined us to create Dishonoured and we did not betray the Valve mentality. We learned a lot from them, actually. It’s just that we probably snuck in some of our own Arkane stuff in there as well."

Honestly, while I'm glad Colantonio's found peace, I can't help but feel a touch melancholy. The same Arkane that couldn't ship a game, but got a second chance with Dishonored in the 2010s, is now cleaved in two, with Arkane Austin closed entirely by Microsoft, and a thin film of French law protecting Arkane Lyon. Not that the earlier videogame industry was a cakewalk, Ravenholm's ill fate proves that, but still. It was a different time.

The Metro series has its roots in war-scarred post-apocalyptia, as such, it grapples with a lot of themes: The indescribable cost of nuclear war, the grim, complicated grey at the heart of humanity, and the cost of human life in a world no longer built to support it.

Which, to those developers who founded the studio in Ukraine and have been under similar duress as their contemporaries at GSC, has become all too real of a prospect. The studio even tragically lost one of its animators, Andrii 'Nizrok' Korzinkin, who fought and died in Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Speaking to Eurogamer's Dom Peppiatt in an interview concerning the studio's latest game Metro 2039, executive producer Jon Bloch tells the site: "The previous games were about preventing war; the themes and the morals and all that supported this idea that revolved around 'how do we as humans stop the cycle that we keep finding ourselves in'.

"And when Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that brought war to our doorstep. Now, our team has been living in a state of war for the last four and a half years. And that changes things. Significantly."

This manifests for 4A Games as a major shift in how it thinks about morality. Namely, this idea that a post-apocalyptic world has to deal with shades of grey—the 'everyone is the hero of their own story' idea that comes from an imagined world where resources are scarce and everyone's starving.

But faced with the evils of the real world, that's shifted: "in a situation like this, as the story explores what authoritarian regimes do, and what happens when one takes over, and what happens as they grow and take more and more power… there is nothing good about that. There is only evil involved in that.

"And so the grey morality of the past needs to be more defined now. It needs to be more specific and clear. And so our approach needed to change and, therefore, the story needed to change … Now that war is here, we need to talk about the consequences of it. We're not building this based off of literal real-world events, but Metro has always been political and it continues to be that in the lessons and the morals that the game tries to teach."

Co-creative director Pawel Ulmer concurs, telling the site: "we have this chance to show people what can actually happen if the world would stop working on preventing war. And ironically, we're making [a game] in a world which is already dead! But our world - the real world—still has a chance."

"Metro was always about the cult of war, the propaganda, people dying, and the cost of others' ambitions. It didn't become politicalised; it always has been. But what's become uncomfortable is that the franchise's very nature is getting too close to reality."

It's perhaps easy to dismiss the role that any art—not just videogames—has to play in the bluntly horrifying existential circumstances the modern day finds itself in. But given Russia itself tried to spark a boycott of Stalker 2, a game that nonetheless grew so popular it throttled Ukraine's internet for hours, it's clear that these studios continuing to put their experience into art is vital.

Isn't it always the way? You spend so long yearning to leave home, to strike out and make a go of it all by yourself, but the second you step foot out the door you start missing it. All of it. The camaraderie and the rows, the shared meals and the constant, privacy-smothering proximity, and—of course—the mutated beasts from the overland, intent on your complete and utter destruction.

This is how I imagine it went for 4A Games when it came time to make Metro 2039, the fourth mainline game in the Metro series. Artyom is gone—he took a train off into Russia's carcass in Exodus, but Moscow and its metro endure, and 4A has returned to them for 2039.

In Artyom's absence, you play someone new: The Stranger, a gruff and—in contrast to the previous three Metros—chatty protagonist who's on a quest to find and kill Hunter, the former legendary Ranger hero and (it seems) current overlord of almost the entire metro.

Things have gone to pot since Artyom went interrailing. The metro's many fractious stations have largely been brought under one banner, but it is a fascist banner, ruled over by Hunter with an iron fist. Someone should probably put an end to that.

Up top

I've spent roughly an hour in The Stranger's shoes in a sliver of Metro 2039, and I'll say this: it really is a pleasure to be back in the metro. Even streaming the game (a necessity for the demo), it looks lovely, and retains all the thunking physicality that makes the setting distinct and memorable. We are still whipping out a contraption and repeatedly whirring it to make our torch shine brighter, gang. We are back.

But just because we are back in Moscow does not mean we are leaving the innovations of Exodus behind. The bulk of the demo I played consisted not of linear tunnels with the odd secret squirrelled away—as was the case in Last Light and 2033—but an open and above-ground area that invited you to explore and pick through it at your leisure. Or, well, kind of at your leisure. At the leisure of your gas mask filters and your access to resources to craft new ones.

This is a positive development. Metro is a series of small details, and poking into its crannies to find them has always been one of my favourite parts (that and pointing at the screen and telling people when I've been to one of the depicted stations in real life—at which they are always incredibly impressed). Nosing around the area I uncovered modded-up new guns, slices of story, blueprints for new weapon parts, resources and general goodies, locked doors guarding rooms of treasure that I had to suss out the codes for, and multiple angles to tackle my objectives.

It's packed with mutants, of course, who you are encouraged to take on with a degree of stealth. I recommend not doing this at least once, if only to experience the feeling of seemingly the entire map turning and looking at you with murder in its eyes the second you let a non-silenced gunshot crack out. I then recommend, ah, doing it from there on out, as they are still pretty annoying to fight, constantly darting about the map and out of your reticule.

When I was not getting distracted by troves of materials hidden behind locked doors, the first actual objective Metro 2039 gave me was to pick my way through a building of bandits, to access the tunnels beneath it. My first time, I did this the way I usually do anything: without thinking about it even a little.

I promptly ate it. My one-man assault, armed with a silenced pistol, a pneumatic rifle, a shotgun, and an SMG (no bullets) could not quite measure up to the task of storming the fortress in front of me. I figured I would take a break. My gas mask filter supply was high—I could afford to nose around the neighbouring buildings to see if there was anything of use.

There was. For one thing, there were ways into the building that were not 'literally the front door,' which is probably handy for infiltration. But much more useful was the wrecked apartment complex to the base's right. As it turned out, this had been the outpost of a stalker who had been keeping an eye on the bandits in the base I was trying to get into. The stalker was dead, but his scoped Kalashnikov remained propped up on the balcony. The bandits' headlamps bobbed about the building until they didn't, winking out one by one as I put the AK to its purpose. This was very satisfying.

Down low

Once you're back in the tunnels, what you find is fairly familiar Metro. You're at one end of a tunnel and you'd like to be at the other. Between you and it stand many armed men of an irascible disposition. You can start blasting, if you like, or stalk through, taking out sentries with throwing knives and putting out lights with a silenced weapon (your watch will glow blue when you are visible, as in previous games).

My experience assaulting the bandit base fresh in my memory, I opted for stealth. Now, I'll admit it: it's been a while since I last touched a Metro game, and it's possible my memories of the series' stealth are coloured by the bastard of a time I once had trying to get through Metro 2033's Frontline mission without ever being spotted, but 2039's stealth felt more forgiving than I remember. I was able to sneak through and clear practically every room of enemies with just my throwing knives and some gumption, never getting seen once.

And when it's not men, it's mutants. Nosalises and whatnot (mostly whatnot) inhabit everywhere that the metro's human inhabitants haven't squeezed into, and will menace you as you attempt to navigate through cramped spaces and wreckage. This is, for the most part, entirely fine—a little action to break up the haunted spelunking, but the game is enthusiastic about springing boss fights on you. These aren't too hard, but I cop to muttering a quiet 'Really, again?' when the game dropped a big hulkin' brute on me to fight after picking up a blueprint.

Stranger, danger

I muttered a little louder when The Stranger, having defeated that big hulkin' brute, dropped his post-battle one-liner: "I guess someone stronger than you finally showed up." I had a good time with Metro 2039 and am very eager to play the full game, but I suspect I will be doing that in Ukrainian.

The Stranger is comically gruff. Much like Skif in Stalker 2, his English voice acting scans more as an action-hero parody than post-nuclear survivor, to the point that I found myself sometimes missing dear, mostly-mute Artyom.

But that's not much of a complaint, is it? And since it's my biggest gripe coming out of Metro 2039's demo, I'm firmly in the 'interest piqued' camp for 4A's return to Moscow. It's a joy to be back cursing at my ramshackle weapons and burning enormous spider webs with my lighter again.

The latest trailer for Metro 2039 tried to get a scare out of me with its radiation-sickened bugs and monsters jumping at the screen, but the spookiest thing about it is how gosh darn good it looks.

I'm not talking specifically about the gameplay, which this trailer does show more of—gun customization, mask wiping, stealth kills, the Metro hits—but the graphics. 4A has always been one for graphical showpieces (Metro Exodus was an early adopter of full ray tracing), but Metro 2039 is a significant step up in the realm of photoreal.

It's got that high-frequency detail and soft lighting that, at times, makes outdoor spaces look like straight-up photographs. Which begs the question: will a normal person's computer be able to run this thing?

That question wouldn't usually be top of mind, except, well, we're deep into a hardware crisis that shows no signs of stopping. Powerful PC hardware is almost impossible to reasonably obtain, a sad reality that has some of us embracing the great Tech Pause.

Metro 2039's flexibility will come down to how much worse you're allowed to make it look, and there is some good news here: It's a console game, ya'll. That means somehow, 4A will have it running on an Xbox Series S, the low benchmark for modern consoles. Does that mean mid-range PC owners will be happy with how it performs? Less likely: Anything less than a locked 60 fps is a hard sell for a shooter these days.

But I offer another ray of hope: 4A uses a proprietary engine helmed by experienced engineers, so it could be a smoother ride than we've come to expect from realistic-looking Unreal 5 joints.

Metro 2039 has no release date yet, but if you can pop over to Germany, 4A has a playable demo at Gamescom this week.

You ever get the feeling that a game is about to make a big splash, but nobody you know is talking about it yet? That's where I've been with Wardogs, the 100-player milsim FPS that I haven't stopped thinking about for weeks. Wardogs has steadily built buzz over the past year, recently eclipsing a million wishlists.

Developer Bulkhead held a closed beta this past weekend for those who pre-ordered the $40 early access release, which reached over 100,000 peak Steam players on Sunday—more simultaneous players than Squad, Hell Let Loose, or Arma has ever seen on PC. In a beta debrief video published today, game director Howard Philpott said nearly 500,000 total players tried Wardogs.

"The reaction from the FPS community has been insane," Philpott said, "with nearly half a million unique players showing up to play the closed beta the same week as Call of Duty's beta and Battlefield 6's massive update."

I don't share these figures to stoke obsessive number comparisons between very different flavors of shooter, but to point out how different it is for an FPS as crunchy and complex as Wardogs to already have an audience this large.

I reckon it speaks to a shift in tastes that's been in progress since PUBG and Escape From Tarkov came around. Wardogs is neither a battle royale nor an extraction shooter, but the popularity of those genres has set the groundwork for its shared qualities to be instantly accepted—milsim stuff like realistic ballistics, large maps, and restrictive inventory isn't as niche as it once was.

It also helps that Wardogs makes a good impression with its economy hook. Players have a persistent wallet of in-game money used for buying guns, unlocking gear, tipping pilots, and bribing medics to save your life. Money is earned by doing anything useful: killing enemies, reviving teammates, capturing objectives, or giving someone a ride. It's a fun, freeform system for encouraging teamplay through selfish desires (cash money).

Wardogs enters early access on September 10.

I like thinking as much as the next guy. It can be really fun to play a videogame that challenges your mental prowess, as it encourages you to weigh up every strategic shred of dialogue or split-second decision. But, counter to this, I also really like not thinking in videogames, and just riding the wave of adrenaline, muscle memory, and bloodlust.

Usually, when I want to scratch this itch I play something like Ultrakill, but now I can add another game to the rotation: Gunstoppable. And let me tell you, it lives up to the name.

It's an action roguelike in which you grapple, slide, and wall run around various maps killing whatever poor robot falls into your path. You're ultimately doing this to save your family and take down the evil billionaire ruling class, one of which is the CEO who made you into the killing machine you are today.

Ok, so the story isn't going to win any Pulitzers, but that's fine because the action is where it's at. You can dual wield weapons, whether that be automatic rifles, knives, or rocket launchers, and as you progress through the levels you also get the chance to upgrade said weapons from a pool of randomly selected bonuses.

Some are pretty basic, like Adrenaline Shot which grants you double attack speed after taking damage, or Rocket Recoil which upgrades any attack so it launches you back when you fire a gun (and also adds force per stack). But there are other more niche upgrades like building into your grapple hook with Supply Hook, which restores ammo.

On my first run, however, I decided to build into power (obviously) but also sliding, because running is such a cliche way to move when you can infinitely slide on your knees and look like a badass.

So with this in mind, I spent the rest of the run sliding around across the floor. Not only am I a harder target to hit, but I also got a perk which meant if I did get hit while sliding I'd take less damage, I built into that and soon became an unstoppable sliding force, who also had a couple of guns.

But no combat is complete without sick enemies to go up against, and luckily Gunstoppable has that too. I've only played a few runs so far, I've got past Fluffy the Crab, who is not fluffy but is giant and can launch baby exploding spiders into your face, kind of like face huggers without the hugging.

Then there's the narcissistic nepo baby Jonny Jetpack who, apart from being a pretty decent fight, instantly captured my heart as he's voiced by none other than Gianni Matragrano—who also voices Gabriel in Ultrakill, enough said.

With all of this in mind, Gunstoppable has easily made its way into my game rotation. Its action is a little more forgiving than Ultrakill, but to be fair I still haven't made my way through the Tower, (although I am so close!), so it's not too easy either. But it nails the adrenaline-rush action that I love from games like this, so if you're in the market for a new action roguelike, I implore you, check Gunstoppable out.

The beta for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 kicked off in earnest this weekend, with Infinity Ward commencing public testing of what we all hope is a return to form after the disappointment of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. And changes are already being made, with the developers releasing a new patch that makes a couple of mechanical tweaks while also adding a new map and mode.

We'll deal with the latter additions first. The new map is called Cachette, and it is truly a new map, making its debut in Modern Warfare 4. It's a compact, 6v6 affair set on the outskirts of a French rail terminal, where some military types have made an armoury out of an old mechanics garage and an abandoned wine warehouse.

The new mode, meanwhile, is called Inflation, and it is a cash grab in the most literal sense. Eliminating enemies during a match gives you cash, while players with the most cash become marked as high-value targets. If you get the better of a high-value target, you get to steal their cash and, presumably, become an HVT yourself. I always think Call of Duty shines brightest when it adds a little bit of structure to its inherently frenetic nature, and this sounds like the right balance of the two.

As for those mechanical adjustments, footstep volume has been reduced after players complained it was too loud. On top of that, Infinity Ward concurs with players that "time-to-till [TTK] isn't quite right yet" and as such has "turned down the lethality of some of our guns." Oh, and map voting has been introduced, with Infinity Ward stating that the system needed four maps to work effectively—which it now has with the addition of Cachette.

Infinity Ward says it will continue working on the beta throughout its runtime, so further patches may be waiting in the wings. The early access beta ends on August 25, with a second, open beta arriving on August 28. Alongside the multiplayer modes and playable campaign mission made available this weekend, the open beta will also let players get hands-on with the latest iteration of Warzone. If you want to know how to access the beta yourself, you find all the info you need here.

You might have caught it in the news: Sony infuriated absolutely everyone recently with a single blog post (usually it's me who does that) announcing that, come the big year 2028, PlayStation owners can wave goodbye to physical media. It's the information superhighway or the, ah, highway from here on out—your games will be digital or they will be nothing at all.

The tide of anger at Sony was such that it was only temporarily diverted when Xbox CEO Asha Sharma spent a Monday marching from studio to studio with a chainsaw and a can-do attitude.

I suppose Sony's antics are old-hat to you and me. We are PC people; we have been de facto digital-only for over a decade at this point (almost two for me, to be honest: I made my Steam account in 2009). The last time I built a PC with a disc drive was back in 2015, and I didn't use it for anything but moving around photos.

Nevertheless, Sony's war on the physical realm got me thinking: what was the first big-box PC game I remember handling, back when I was a speck of a boy at a hulking Fujitsu desktop? Was it good? Was it an all-time classic, rightly embodied in unconquerable materiality?

Tunnel vision

No. It was Tunnel B1, a 1996 first-person shooter that asks 'What if a hovercraft had machine guns?' and which no one but me remembers. It's an odd thing—despite its year of release, it feels like a transitional fossil between dime-guzzling arcade shooters and something more modern, more narrative, more id-inflected.

It is a messy beast of a game that does not really have all that much going on, which I imagine is why its Wikipedia article cites contemporary GamePro reviewers Scary Larry and Dr Zombie as feeling pretty ho-hum about it. We should go back to being called things like Scary Larry. I'm just called Josh. It's terrible.

I was mesmerised by Tunnel B1 as a kid. I don't know how my household came to possess it or why, but I remember finding it parked in my dad's CD collection. Amid a stack of Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers albums, there it was: a weird gold-ish box with a very startled guy in a gas mask on the front, making direct eye contact with me.

I remember turning it over in my hands, fascinated by the screenshots. What wonders were contained within? What could it be about? The box suggested speed, danger, maybe a hint of terror—the wide-eyed gas-mask guy was sure worried about something.

Long before I had put the disc in the drive (or made my dad put the disc in the drive—I couldn't reach it), I had an entire world of Tunnel B1 mapped out in my head. This was, doubtless, the greatest game ever made. It had action and drama, enormous guns and vehicles whose treads turned the whole world to mulch beneath them. I would emerge a different person from playing it, my life delineated into pre-B1 and post-B1 eras.

You can replicate the experience for yourself, if you like, thanks to the wonderful archive over at Big Box Collection (though my copy was not "Komplett in Deutsch").

I am focusing so much on the tactile and aesthetic experience of ol' B1 because my memory of actually playing it is, well, hazy. Far hazier than my memory of the fantasies I built up around it. So hazy, in fact, that I repurchased it on Steam (for £0.89, which I will absolutely be expensing).

The troubling news is that there's a reason my memories are muddy—Tunnel B1 is not the remarkable, life-altering game my six-year-old brain imagined. You race down a series of circuitous highways in your hoverthing, blasting enemy turrets and vehicles with your guns that you can upgrade by racing over pick-ups. Some levels are timed, in an attempt by the game's designers to sort of gesture vaguely at tension. It's all based heavily around attaining a spot on a scoreboard in that charming, videogames-of-old sort of way.

The levels are all essentially the same sickly green highway, challenging you on occasion to ram a button to open a door, and your weapons are limp and unspectacular—your machine guns sound like someone is crinkling tin foil in an adjacent room, your rockets spurt directionlessly from your nozzle. This is not Doom or Quake; the gunplay is geriatric.

Sometimes you will zoom over a new weapon or pick-up, and the estranged wife of Microsoft Sam will chime in to tell you what it was in a dazed, bored sort of way. "More. Energy" she says on a health pickup, maybe as a statement, maybe as a request.

The best part is that you really do move fast. Your hovercraft has two modes: stationary and practically out of control. You are more pinball than pilot, bouncing off walls and obstacles and Czech hedgehogs as you proceed in the vague direction of something that is very probably your goal.

In other words, it's not something I should remember. I played a lot of games as a kid, many of them bad, and all of them except Tunnel B1 appeared on our family computer courtesy of a family friend who knew how to do piracy in the mid-to-late '90s: digital distribution in an early skunkworks form. Those games—the bad ones? I've forgotten them all, but goddammit I remember Tunnel B1 like I was running my thumbs over its corners five seconds ago.

You see where I'm going with this. I might've made my peace with being a 21st century digital boy in my current PC videogame-playing career, but that doesn't mean I haven't lost anything, and it doesn't mean we don't all lose something when the entire concept of physical media goes away. And, yes, Sony says that—over in console land—it will keep selling codes in boxes at retailers, but we can all see the road they're headed down here, right?

I don't think it's pure boomer nostalgia to say that there was something a little magical about the videogame box, a physical vessel into which your child mind could pour all its energy, warping the actual game within into something far grander and stranger than it could ever be in practice.

Those kinds of fantasies, pawing over game boxes my parents could not afford to buy me in shopping centres and second-hand stores, were a really vital part of me falling in love with videogames growing up. Can kids today feel the same way about a Steam page, an App Store download?

Well, maybe. I'm not one of them, and I might just be an old man waxing nostalgic for a world that—like all worlds—only existed for a brief moment in time. But I think something does get lost when you leave behind the material world, if only my moonstruck boyhood fantasies of whatever was in the box of Tunnel B1.

It takes a brave soul to ask the question "What if Doom was an incredibly slow-moving tactical shooter?" In fact, it's not a question I ever thought I'd want an answer to—we aren't exactly short of grim-faced, hyper-lethal first-person shooters these days. But the most recent footage of Blackout has convinced me that tactical Doom might be a good idea, if only because its dark and dangerous demo looks so darned terrifying.

Blackout is a work-in-progress mod built for Doom source ports Zandronum and UZDoom, currently available in playable alpha. Created by modder PKmX, it's designed to provide "tactical military simulation-based gameplay that focuses on slow methodical clearing", according to a breakdown posted on the ZDoom forums, with players expected to "hide behind covers and execute proper breaching techniques to maximise chances of survival."

The mod makes several radical changes to Doom's basic playstyle. Movement is much slower, while your character is significantly more fragile. Weapons are based on real-life firearms that feature ADS and reloading, with damage and recoil that reflects their calibre, fire-rate, and so forth.

The enemies you face remain classic Doom monsters, but PKmX says their behaviours have been "tweaked to suit tactical gameplay". Attacks are deadlier but take longer to charge, and they can both suppress you and be suppressed by you. There's also a stealth and awareness system where gunfire draws monsters to your location, while remaining quiet may enable you to sneak past enemies unseen.

In motion, Blackout reminds me a lot of Stalker, with relatively slow movement but highly reactive (and vicious) gunplay. Surprisingly though, this isn't the inspiration that PKmX cites. Apparently, Blackout draws significantly from Crysis, right down to featuring an energy suit inspired by Crytek's nanosuit. Not only does this feature a damage-absorbing energy shield and an "adrenaline system" that provides a speed boost when near death, but it also includes a cloaking device which temporarily makes the player "almost undetectable" by enemies.

I think this goes a long way to explain why Blackout looks as good as it does. While Blackout is clearly a more methodical shooter than Doom, the emphasis remains on action and combat rather than the strategy and resource management layer of other tactical shooters. Indeed, a commenter on PKmX's video asks whether the game will feature magazine management, to which the modder responds "one of the goals of this mod is to avoid becoming an inventory simulator."

If you fancy giving Blackout a go yourself, you can download it via the Doomworld forums. PkmX also recommends several other mods to enhance the experience, including a palette mod to make levels darker, which certainly seems to fit with Blackout's tone.

It's a bountiful weekend for the military FPS: two highly-anticipated military shooters are holding betas for those with a pre-order, and they couldn't be more different. One is, predictably, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, but the other is a new kid on the block: Wardogs, a 100-player milsim that recently surpassed one million wishlists.

The pair are currently the top two sellers on Steam overall. Call of Duty is number one—no surprise—but to see Wardogs, a totally new game from a relatively unknown studio, going toe-to-toe with Activision is surprising. Though its instant popularity won't surprise those who've been following the game: Wardogs has built up a ton of organic buzz throughout 2026 through closed playtest word-of-mouth. I played an alpha build a few weeks back, and honestly, it's something special.

Wardogs beta details

• 17:00 UTC August 21 to 02:00 August 24
• Pre-order access guaranteed
• Steam playtest requests open
• Refundable

Modern Warfare 4 beta details

• Pre-order beta (weekend 1): August 21 to August 25 10 AM PT
• Open beta (weekend 2): August 28 10:00 AM PT to September 1 10 AM PT

Modern Warfare 4, on the other hand, is more of a good thing. This is Infinity Ward's first at-bat since 2022, and I could tell from my first match this morning that the best Call of Duty developers are back. These games really excel at bottling up the aesthetics of reality—meticulous reload animations, ear-piercing thwips, the rattle of empty round casings—into an arcadey format that anyone can pick up. This year's beta also includes a campaign mission, which is fun.

Wardogs seeks to simulate a lot of that reality, too: Time-to-kill is short, headshots are extremely lethal, and reloading sometimes means loading individual bullets into magazines. Maps are gigantic, kilometers-wide regions that require dedicated player pilots to taxi soldiers to warzones. But Wardogs is also an outlier among milsims like Squad, Escape From Tarkov, and Arma for its arcadey concessions aimed at accessibility, like a killcam. Developer Bulkhead is building an on-ramp for folks who play mainstream shooters or battle royales to try something more complex. If you like Battlefield, Wardogs isn't a huge leap.

I'll be trying both this weekend, but if I could only play one, it'd be Wardogs. It's a $40 pre-order to get in, but the devs are encouraging folks to refund it if they don't like the beta. Unfortunately, nobody's been able to play enough to decide for themselves yet—Bulkhead is working through crippling server issues caused by higher-than-expected turnout (over 87,000 people as of writing). I guess I can level up my M4 in Modern Warfare while I wait.

I grew up in a golden age of FPS games. With the likes of Modern Warfare 2, F.E.A.R., Halo: Reach, and Black Ops 2 all releasing back when I had no responsibilities and all the time in the world; I didn't know how good I had it.

Looking back on it now, it's clear to see that we had it so good because, well, excellence breeds excellence. There was no shortage of inspiration for devs to pull on back in the 2000's and early 2010's.

In fact, Halo: Reach's designer Niles Sankey has confirmed this by dropping by to tell fans just how much other releases of the era inspired Reach. "Modern Warfare 1 and 2 were huge influences on Halo Reach's campaign," Sankey says in a social media post. "The tonal execution in those games was (and still is) absolutely brilliant."

That's not to say that Halo at the time had absolutely nothing going for it. "We knew that Halo did some things better (AI combat, vehicles, etc)," Sankey says. "But we also knew the MW games were beating us in other departments."

One area which the Modern Warfare games had Halo beat was in inter-character relationships and, crucially, its ability to tell a gritty and rather depressing story. "Many of the moments in Reach were inspired by the brilliant work of Infinity Ward," Sankey continues. "Including the Nobel team squad interactions, and 'Objective Survive' was spiritually inspired by the Nuke sequence (in Modern Warfare 2). We just tried to push it one step further."

Reach's final Lone Wolf mission and Current Objective: Survive still haunts me. At the time I'd only just gotten over Loose Ends, and now my poor naive young self was faced with another previously implausible situation. I'd never considered the possibility of the character I'd play in a game, someone who was so clearly meant to be the hero, not making it out alive. I was all too familiar with important characters I liked kicking the bucket, but Reach's final objective did, and still does, hit different.

You can't regularly queue up for combat until October, but a series of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 betas are a chance to try one upcoming campaign mission and several multiplayer maps before launch. Trying to decipher what happens when and how to register is super convoluted, so here's an info drop on the MW4 beta dates and what you'll need to get started.

Call of Duty MW4 beta dates

You've got two options for jumping into the MW4 beta: If you pre-order the game you can participate in the first round (early access beta), or you can wait and play for free in the second (open beta).

Call of Duty MW4 beta codes and registration

Some players need a MW4 beta code to participate in the early access weekend starting on August 21, but it all depends on how you've pre-ordered. The second period on August 28 doesn't require a purchase; it's open to anyone on Steam, Battle.net, or consoles.

The MW4 open beta weekend on August 28 does not require a pre-order or beta code to participate. Anyone can download the open beta build on any platform.

MW4 beta modes, maps, and more

The maps and modes available in both beta weekends

Most maps and modes are available in both MW4 betas, but features like Combat Outpost aren't available until the second weekend. A couple of maps are also limited to just one weekend, so I've put together those key differences in a table for reference

MW4 beta rewards

MW4 beta pre-loading

Overwatch season 4 introduced a rank reset and you know what that means, it's every cat, hog, and retired sniper for themselves as players desperately try to claw back to where they finished last season. As if that isn't stressful enough, we've also got a new rank on our hands.

Slotted between ranks Platinum and Diamond you can now find Emerald, the answer to the growing skill disparity between Plat and Diamond players. "As we've shown in the past, the majority of our players are in Gold and Platinum," the patch notes read. "So adding a new rank closer to the middle of the skill curve gives many players a better sense of rank identity, a new goal to achieve, and increases fidelity in assessing skill for many players."

Season 4 is full of really smart changes, and this new rank is one of them. I completely agree that there needed to be a buffer between Plat and Diamond, as high plat and low diamond increasingly became a frantic free-for-all with players who had vastly different skills far too frequently grouped together. But the tradeoff seems to be that all this chaos is now neatly packed into Emerald.

I only played in a few Emerald games when I was placing all my roles, as I soon pushed past into Diamond and above, and all I can say is: thank god. Because I wouldn't have wanted to spend any more time there.

The games felt frantic, with players on both sides oscillating between making smart plays and really basic mistakes—I could never predict which way a team fight was going to go. Now, this makes sense when you think about the kind of players meant to be in Emerald: better than average but perhaps not quite equipped for the kind of teamwork and restraint you find in higher elos. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating. If I had a nickel for every unnecessary flank, panic ult, or repeated stagger I saw in those games, I wouldn't have to write about them anymore.

Then there's the people.

This could just be my bad luck, but I saw a noticeable drop off in toxicity once I cleared Emerald. Now, this isn't everyone in a game, but there'd often be one person who just complained and whined the whole time, blaming everyone for their misfortunes instead of looking in the mirror.

I get that sometimes you can play the best game of your life and still not win, because at the end of the day Overwatch is a team game. If your team isn't up to it, there's only so far you can carry them, and that can be annoying. But also, the only person you have control over is yourself, and knowing that is half the battle in Overwatch.

Let's say you have a tank who is constantly in the enemy backline despite not having a dive team, for example. It's definitely frustrating, especially when they have no clue about any line of sight angles, but you gotta work with what you have. So if I have a tank like that, you best believe I'm switching to dive, and more often than not changing to better fit the team around you instead of just whining will lead to a win.

It seems simple, but I was surprised to see how few people were willing to make that change, compromise, or admit that perhaps they're just not as good at a particular hero than they think they are.

Emerald has certainly made a name for itself in just a short time since its addition. Hopefully, the rank will mellow out as the season goes on, a rank reset always ushers in at least a little disorder, but that doesn't mean I don't feel bad for the players who are stuck in Emerald. From my experience, and from what I've heard from friends, it's a pretty dicey place to be right now, so god speed to anyone still in those mines. But rest assured, it's only up (or down) from there.

Here follows a transcript of every conversation I have had with another human being about Stalker 2 since I scored it 83% in our Stalker 2 review, back in 2024:

SOME GUY: I'm kind of curious about Stalker 2, but I'm wary. I've heard that game is really buggy.
JOSH: It's gotten a lot better since the review period! GSC has put out a lot of patches and ironed out loads of the kinks. And even back when it was ultra-buggy, I still really liked it.
SG: Hm, but it's a little janky, right? Isn't there some big update that's in the pipe?
JOSH: Well, it's Stalker. Jank is part of its beautiful, simulation-y package. But yes, GSC is working on literally overhauling the game's entire Unreal Engine 5 implementation in its 2.0 update.
SG: So I should wait for that?
JOSH: You don't have to! The game is good!
SG: I'm going to wait for that.

And so, I remain the only person in human history who has ever actually played Stalker 2.

But good news: the Stalker 2 2.0 update that everyone I know has been waiting for—including at least one person I know who paid full price for the game at launch—is out tomorrow, alongside the new Cost of Hope expansion, and I'm forced to admit that, damn, maybe you were right to wait.

I should note that, though I've dipped in a few times, I've not seriously played Stalker 2 since a few months after it first released. Many of the changes I'm noticing could well be a product of previous patches rather than the 2.0 update.

But one thing is indisputable: Stalker 2, as of 2.0, runs better and smoother than it has done throughout its entire history. Compared to the thing I first played during its ramshackle, chaotic review period, it might as well be an entirely different game.

I booted into a pre-2.0 version of the game to check and, roaming around Garbage, I still ran into little performance stutters and hitches. It wasn't unbearable, but it was noticeable. In 2.0 it's silky smooth. There are still times, running around out in the open world on Epic graphics settings, that I will encounter just a hint of slowdown, but it really is a stark difference compared to, well, the various forms of Stalker 2 we've gotten before.

It looks rather nice, too. The Zone's never been ugly in Stalker 2—even when it was peopled with those distended flesh sculptures—but it's prettier than ever now. In particular, interior areas with contrast between light and shadow (of which there are many in the Zone) pop more than they did before.

It's good, is what I'm saying, and I get the impression it's the version of Stalker 2 that GSC would have liked to put out two years ago, if it had its druthers. You can officially stop waiting. Go play Stalker 2.

Quake mappers are absolutely killing it in celebration of Quake's 30^th birthday. The Quake community has been running map jams of varying themes all year. In the last few months there have been two 'Quickie' speedmapping jams, a 1024 Jam where contributors had to build maps of 1024 units cubed, and a Limits Jam, with the fun restriction that submitted maps had to use the same technical and design limitations as the original Quake campaign.

Now, the Quake community has brought another bloodstained birthday present to Quake's afterparty with Q30 Deathmatch Jam. Organised by Quake mappers Annihilazor & Infiniti, the map-pack adds 22 new arenas designed specifically to be played with regular old Quake.

The maps run the gamut of Quake's interdimensional settings, ranging from gothic castles through sci-fi kill-zones to an industrial brown sewer called The Filth Pit. Numerous notable designers from the fan community have taken part, including a collaborative map called Overflow by Mazu and Makkon. The latter was one of the organisers of the excellent Quake Brutalist Jam 3, while the former designed that Jam's showstopper map—a five hour long mini-campaign with its own internal story.

If you want to give the maps a whirl yourself, Q30 Deathmatch Jam is designed to work with numerous modern Quake sourceports, including Ironwail, Netquake or Nightdive's Kex port as seen in the Quake Remaster. In each case you can play it as a standalone mod by dropping the folder straight into your Quake directory and using the in-game console to call it up. If you want to play online via Netquake or QuakeWorld servers however, you'll need to copy the map, loc files, and skybox data into the relevant folders of your competitive multiplayer install.

None of this is to mention all the other Quake-related events that have happened this year. As mentioned, January had barely begun when the community released Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a massive mod themed around concrete megastructures which was essentially a new FPS in all but name.

Then, at QuakeCon id Software launched a brand new episode for Quake, developed in collaboration with Machine Games to celebrate the shooter's 30^th anniversary. While Microsoft's brutal layoffs cast a pall over the proceedings, Dawn of the Machine is nonetheless a fantastic collection of maps, and a worthy successor to Machine Games' Dimension of the Machine from 2021.

When I first played Half-Life at the tender age of 11, I found it a terrifying experience. Admittedly, I was scared of pretty much everything at 11. Wasps, heights, loud noises, football (or more specifically, everyone finding out how bad I was at football). I was an anxious child all around. Hence, playing an interactive disaster movie filled with weird aliens was an intense experience and lashings of violence was an intense experience.

Now I'm rapidly approaching 40, the idea of Half-Life being in any way scary seems ridiculous, especially when you compare it to modern horror games and actual real-life terrors like tax returns. But there is one part of Half-Life that still frightens me, and it appears right at the start of the game. Midway through the introductory tram ride, five words and a number appear on the screen:

SUBJECT: Gordon Freeman. Male, Age 27.

Every time I see this caption, it seems wrong, like it must be a typo. Surely Gordon Freeman is older than 27. I mean look at this man. That’s a fella in his mid-thirties at the youngest.

To be clear, this isn't a notion I've developed recently. I've always believed this. I must have seen the caption countless times, but it never really sank in, because I was busy watching all the scenery and cool scripted sequences that you get during that tram ride.

Basically, Freeman's youthfulness weirds me out. It also led me to wonder: how old are all the other '90s FPS protagonists? Is DoomGuy actually DoomBoy? Is B.J. Blazkowicz short for 'Baby Junior Blazkowicz?'. Is Duke Nukem even allowed to enter a strip club?

Riddled with doubt, I decided to try to find out the age of as many '90s shooter heroes as I could. The answers proved pretty surprising, and in some cases, instructive about game design.

B.J Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein 3-D)

Let's start with an easy one. William Joseph Blazkowicz has surprisingly extensive lore for a video game character created in the eighties. According to the Wolfenstein Wiki, Blazkowicz was born on August 11, 1911. Canonically, the events of Wolfenstein 3-D take place in 1943, meaning that Blazkowicz is 32-33 when he takes down MechaHitler.

The Wiki also states that B.J. is canonically the grandfather of Commander Keen and an ancestor of DoomGuy, which is a fun bit of trivia.

Kyle Katarn (Star Wars: Dark Forces)

I'm gonna skip Doom and Duke for the moment and deal with another straightforward case. Kyle Katarn is the protagonist of Star Wars: Dark Forces and Star Wars: Jedi Knight—Dark Forces 2. (And also Jedi Outcast and, in a secondary role, Jedi Academy, but those are noughties games). Because Katarn is a Star Wars character, and because Star Wars fans are, shall we say, fastidious, it's straightforward enough to find out Katarn's age.

According to Wookiepedia, Katarn was born in 23 BBY (That's before the Battle of Yavin—the concluding act of the OG Star Wars—for non-Star Wars heads). Before Rogue One changed the canon, Katarn was the original thief of the Death Star plans which occurred in the same year as the Battle of Yavin. That makes him 23 at the outset of Dark Forces. He was 28 in Jedi Knight, and 35 in Jedi Outcast. Each of these facts is like a needle being pushed into my ageing body.

Cate Archer (The Operative: No One Lives Forever)

Strictly speaking, No One Lives Forever is a noughties shooter, releasing in 2000. But spiritually it is 100% a nineties FPS, and for that reason I'm going to include it.

Like Katarn, finding out Archer's age is easy enough, as Monolith gave her a detailed backstory. The NOLF Fandom Wiki says she was born in 1942. The events of the original NOLF take place in 1967, making her 25 when she becomes a superspy for UNITY. Like James Bond, Archer is apparently also natively Scottish, born in Glasgow.

Prisoner 426 (Unreal)

Another easy one, albeit for different reasons. Unreal's nameless protagonist is also an ageless protagonist. Since Unreal's player character can be customised both in character model and gender, Epic never specified an age for them either. In short, Prisoner 426 is as old as you want them to be (so for me, 57).

Caleb (Blood, Blood 2: The Chosen)

The age of Blood's revenant protagonist is somewhat dependent on perspective. According to the Blood wiki, Caleb was born in 1847 (in Texas, apparently). Since the events of Blood take place in 1928, this would make him a sprightly 81 years old by chronology.

However, Caleb is murdered by his demonic master Tchernobog at some point between 1871 and 1928, so biologically he's likely significantly younger than his chronological age. Amusingly, Blood 2 takes place in 2028, which means Caleb would be 181 years old during the events of that game.

DoomGuy: (Doom)

Here's where things start to get tricky. Unlike his (alleged) ancestor B.J. Blazkowicz, DoomGuy does not have a specified age. It's generally assumed he's somewhere in his mid-thirties—mainly because the face at the bottom of the screen looks like it's seen some shit.

But I took a punt and reached out to John Romero, Doom's co-creator, and asked him whether, either publicly or privately, id Software ever determined a specific age for DoomGuy?

Romero quickly got back to me with a reply. Unfortunately, it appears id never officially pinned it down. "No, we didn’t invent Doomguy’s age, or Ranger’s," Romero wrote in response. "I think it’s assumed they are mid-to-late 20s."

If you're wondering who the hell Ranger is, well, spoilers for the next entry.

Ranger (Quake, Quake 3)

As Romero mentions above, id Software never specified an age for Quake's protagonist as they didn't with Doom. That would seem to be the end of that rabbit hole. However, Ranger also appears in 1999's Quake 3 and 2022's Quake Champions.

Quake 3 isn't all that helpful in determining Ranger's age. But Quake Champions is. According to the lore added by QC, Ranger is actually a Vietnam veteran, having served in the US military up to 1975.

According to the Quake timeline, the events of Quake are concurrent with the game's release—1996, which means 21 years elapse between Ranger's return from Vietnam and the events of Quake.

Unfortunately, the timeline doesn't specify when Ranger signed up to fight, or how old he was when he did. But the youngest he could (legally) have been to sign up was 17. The US began active combat operations in 1965, so it's unlikely that he would have served before then, and the implication seems to be that Ranger did his tour(s) of 'Nam in the early '70s. Quake Champions also includes a photograph of Ranger and his family taken in 1978, in which he looks to be in his mid-to-late twenties—though he could be older.

All of which suggests that Ranger is either a mid fortysomething or an early fiftysomething during the events of Quake, which would make him the oldest still-living protagonist on this list.

Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem 3D)

I've saved the most interesting case until last. There are a couple of ages banded about for Duke Nukem online. But most of those are for Duke Nukem Forever, and they suggest he's somewhere between 45 and 47 during the events of that game. The source for those isn't clear, however, and in any case, we really want the age Duke was during the events of Duke Nukem 3D.

To try to pin it down, I sent an email to Scott Miller, the founder of Apogee Software (later 3D Realms) the developer of Duke Nukem's 3D. He quickly responded with this:

"When I and Todd Replogle first came up with the Duke Nukem character, there were two things I decided to never reveal: what year the game took place in, and how old Duke was," Miller wrote. "I never wanted to say, for example, that the game took place in 2004, because whenever you nail down a date it often comes back to haunt you when you pass that calendar date in real life (eg. 2001: A Space Odyssey).

"So never in the Duke storyverse is a date mentioned. As for his age it was the same thinking—if we had mentioned his age in a game, would we need to keep aging him for every succeeding game? So, I just wanted to fully avoid these issues. But, in my mind, Duke was in his mid-30s".

In short, Duke is forever a man in his prime, which is only fitting for the character.

You could tell that Stalker 2 was a true sequel to 2007's survivalist FPS in that it was as broken as it was brilliant. GSC Game World succeeded in delivering the seamless open world it has spent two decades striving toward, but players' exploration of Chornobyl's exclusion zone was hindered by bugs, broken quests, and more performance issues than a drunk orchestra.

The sequel has received numerous massive patches already, but the biggest and—hopefully—best is yet to come. With the imminent arrival of the shooter's first story expansion, GSC has detailed the enormous 2.0 patch that will accompany the DLC.

Named 'Back to the Zone', the 2.0 update will bring both a visual and mechanical refresh to Stalker 2 upon its release next week, as detailed by GSC in an article on its website. The headline change is an overhaul to the Zone's lighting, which GSC says it has altered to provide more varied conditions:

"The sun still shines brightly outside, but now it plays differently across the environment on the ground—shadows and reflections included," GSC writers. Indoor lighting has also been changed to make it "more realistic", while the landscape and vegetation has apparently been reworked for a more natural look.

Arguably more significant, though, are the changes GSC has made to A-Life—the system that governs the behaviour of the mutants and rival Stalkers that prowl the Zone. Again, the focus appears to be on improving the Zone's atmosphere, making it more of an immersive space and less of a warzone.

"The Zone isn't one constant gunfight. It's a lonely place where life carries on by its own rules," GSC explains. "Every encounter or firefight is the result of stalkers and mutants simply doing stalker and mutant things."

Specific changes include giving creatures more places to be like campfires, bus stops etc, and increasing conflicts around those spots. GSC has also fixed some of the more immersion-breaking glitches experienced in the sequel, like enemies shooting through walls.

Other additions coming with the patch include a custom difficulty where you adjust parameters like combat difficulty, anomalies, and the in-game economy, new weapons and scopes, dynamic fog that you can use to your tactical advantage, and binoculars—which are pretty useful to have in a game like Stalker.

Back to the Zone will be released on August 20, launching in tandem with the expansion 'Cost of Hope'. This DLC—one of two GSC has planned—revolves around the series' authoritarian 'Duty' faction and will see players learn what secrets lie hidden in the centre of the Zone. While I'm up for further story adventures in Stalker 2, a smoother ride in the base game is easily what I'm most excited about.

Few things in gaming are more routine than a Call of Duty multiplayer beta, but this year's is actually a bit different. The Modern Warfare 4 beta kicking off on August 21 (for pre-orders only) will include the usual smattering of multiplayer modes, and in a series first, it'll also include a chunk of the campaign.

"Entrenched" is the campaign mission that'll be playable early, and Infinity Ward has published a brief teaser for it (watch above). Based on what we know about the story of Modern Warfare 4, it seems we're neck deep in North Korea's invasion of South Korea by this point.

The mission will follow a squad of South Korean marines (plus one embedded American) in an uphill offensive—we've got trenches, APCs, shotguns, and that thing where an NPC buddy has an elaborate mo-capped brawl right in front of you. In short: a Call of Duty mission, and perhaps a good one.

Warzone will also make an appearance in a beta for the first time, but not until the second weekend. That's the one that's open for all, August 28 to September 1. The new Zodiac Resurgeance map will be playable, and I imagine we'll also learn the ways in which Warzone will be absorbing Modern Warfare 4's gameplay changes.

If you're not caught up, Infinity Ward's first CoD in four years appears to be more about refinements than anything else—clever solutions to things like muzzle flash, hipfire, and movement aimed at maintaining Modern Warfare's immersive qualities while not annoying serious players. I played a bit of multiplayer back in May against other journalists and had a good time, but next week's beta is a proper test drive.

As for why Infinity Ward is double-stuffing the beta, it has not said, though one could intuit that the studio is extending an olive branch to fans disappointed by last year's pretty bad Black Ops 7, and who might not see the urgency to buy another $70 CoD weeks before GTA6 arrives.

Marcus Lehto is known to some as the "father of Master Chief," and for good reason: He was the art director on Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and its two direct sequels. The look of Halo is kind of his thing, in other words, and he has some issues with how the new Halo: Campaign Evolved looks—specifically, its halos.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a remake of Combat Evolved, all done up pretty in Unreal Engine 5. It looks pretty faithful, to the extent that I watch the trailer and I say to myself, "Yup, that's Halo."

Lehto, however, sees something else—something less. "While Forerunner tech was metal (not stone) it was also ancient, vast, alive, and a tomb to the horrors that lurked within," he wrote on X, alongside images comparing Halo rings then and now. "It had seen hundreds of millennia of conflict. Yet the [new] game shows it as shiny metal that looks like it was built a few years ago.

"The main menu ring is the most offensive thing we see every time we boot up the game. It should feel massive, dark, mysterious, sinister, but also full of wonder. This new ring looks like a shiny new toy—out of scale, no mystery, damn ugly."

In response to a now-deleted post, Lehto also brought up the toll that "war, Flood outbreaks, repairs, [and] collisions" would take on the structure. "Also, the biggest issue is just with [the] pure scale of the design. It lacks all the micro detail that should give it the epic scale it deserves. Lastly, it needs to feel like an ancient tomb."

That might seem to fly in the face of comments Lehto made in 2025, when he said "the game looks and feels genuine," and described it as "gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001." For the most part, though, Lehto seems to be having a good time, and he likes how it looks.

"Overall, I really love the upgrades—movement, cinematics, visuals—damn the lighting is brilliant," he wrote on August 4. "Do I have gripes? A few, but they are taking a back seat to the fun."

Those halos, though? Not great.

You know a developer is confident in the game it's making when it's willing to list all of the reasons you might not want to buy it. That's the thrust of the latest dev log for Wardogs, the tactical milsim FPS coming to early access in September.

Wardogs has built up a lot of buzz this year, joining Steam's top-wishlisted games and rising ever since. Now it's up for pre-order, and it's immediately become Steam's top-selling premium game. I played a handful of hours in a closed playtest this past weekend and it totally won me over—this thing might be special.

But developer Bulkhead also knows Wardogs won't be for everyone—which is, coincidentally, one of the "10 reasons NOT to buy" Wardogs, according to the studio. The whole thing is worth a watch, but here's a few of the more interesting bullet points with a relevant quote from the devs:

• Early access content: "Wardogs has a content problem… After launch into early access, we'll be focusing on bug fixes, feedback, and a new map… Players should not expect regular content drops [throughout early access]... We want to make sure your expectations are set here before your purchase."
• The price: "Right now, you can preorder Wardogs for $39.99 on Steam and get access to the beta… If the price feels too high for an early access game, please don't buy it yet. Wait until the game has more of what you want, and consider it then… If you don't enjoy the beta, just refund it."
• Player count will decline: "We expect our initial days after launch to have a lot more players than expected, but we can tell you for a fact that this is completely normal. Those players will fall away over the next coming months. Player numbers will drop off, and journalists and influencers on the fringe of the community will try to ragebait your enjoyment out of the game for social media clicks. This doesn't mean the game is dying. We're thinking longer term than a flash in the plan. Our goal is to settle into a sustainable, close-knit community. If we're pulling in 3,000 to 5,000 daily concurrent players who genuinely love the game, it'll allow new players to buy in anytime and join an active community."
• Monetization: "We will not monetize the game at any point during early access. We will never monetize in-game gold bars, they must be earned through play. We will never allow you to purchase camos, with the sole exception of an optional supporter's edition… However Bulkhead will have ongoing running costs [after 1.0], and those costs will need to be covered if base game sales no longer cover them."
• We made Battalion 1944: "As much as we wanted [our WW2 FPS Battalion 1944] to succeed, with the low player numbers of only 50 to 200 daily players, our publisher relationships broke down, the console version was held in limbo by lawyers, and we burned through our profits supporting the game. We went dark on communication, way darker than we should've gone… If you still don't trust our studio because of Battalion 1944, don't rush to buy Wardogs. We hope our actions speak louder than words."

The video is essentially a clever framing for a design manifesto, laying out what Wardogs is and isn't so that curious Steam shoppers can decide if it's their speed while also addressing common criticisms. The brevity is refreshing: I don't know I've ever seen devs preemptively confront the hobby's fixation on player counts, and the race to declare a "dead game," in official marketing.

Wardogs isn't out until September 10, but pre-ordering gets you into the beta on August 21.

I'm seated on the edge of a transport helicopter, legs dangling in the breeze, when our pilot flips on the radio to Flight of the Valkyries. "Duh duh duh duh, duh, duh duh duh duh, duh" three passengers sing in non-unison, their VOIP lagging two seconds behind the actual song. The pilot interrupts the performance with an announcement: "Jump quick once you see grass, because we're headed to the hot zone. How many of you bought a parachute?" The chopper goes silent. "Well then."

I realize this is the same pilot who taxied me to the frontline at the very beginning of the match over 40 minutes ago. He's been doing this the whole time, has zero kills, and according to his top five position on the scoreboard, has made over $35,000 of in-game currency. Bullets immediately start whizzing past the chopper as we reach the middle of the gigantic map. Our pilot descends toward an LZ with a practiced corkscrew maneuver that, from the inside, could've been mistaken for crashing.

But we land with zero casualties. I touch grass, tip the pilot $25, then get shot in the head about six seconds later. I lay there, bullet in brain, weighing my options: give up and lose the $2,600 I spent on this loadout, or wait for a revive. Were this Battlefield, I'd get impatient and respawn after the first samaritan passed me by. But in this game, money talks: I press F1 to "bribe" anyone in the vicinity. Now, whoever risks their life to save mine gets $100. Ok maybe $150. $300? Yes. At $300 someone took notice, dragged my body to safety, and brought me back.

That is Wardogs, the upcoming milsim FPS from the team behind Battalion 1944 that's entering early access in September. I entered the closed playtest held this past weekend with no expectations—I'm a fan of similar games like Squad, but haven't regularly played a milsim in years. I jumped in because Wardogs has slowly built up a lot of buzz, and five hours of playtime later, I can see why.

Wardogs is PvP only and supports 100-player servers. The main mode in the playtest is three teams (still not sure how they're dividing 100 players in three) fighting over the same circle of territory on a gigantic map. The team with the most bodies in the zone scores, but you can make your body count as two by occupying the "hot zone" within the circle—that's where the most killing happens. The format is directly inspired by a popular Arma 3 mod, Arma: King of the Hill.

Money talks

On the spectrum between "hardcore Arma stuff" and "basically Battlefield," Wardogs finds an exact middle ground. Weapons are snappy and the gunplay is approachable. At a basic level, all you really need to know to contribute is to stand in the capture zone and shoot the other teams—if you get Battlefield, Wardogs won't be a huge leap.

Peeling back another layer reveals a logistical metagame familiar to milsims: building FOBs (forward operating bases), constructing defenses, transporting supplies, and controlling strategic locations.

Where Wardogs differs most is its economy. Players earn account-level money for doing anything productive—getting kills, standing in a capture zone, healing teammates, driving folks from A to B—and you spend that cash to gear up. As mentioned, you can also throw around your cash in the form of tips and bribes.

Cash is how Wardogs (like Arma mod before it) harnesses a bit of extraction shooter juice. You fill a shopping cart with thousands of dollars in guns, helmets, vests, magazines, gadgets, and bandages, and then put that gear on the line. You have a personal stake in surviving, and the best chance of doing that is sticking near teammates.

It's a really smart incentive structure that goes beyond the Battlefield idea of simply rewarding XP for teamplay (Wardogs does that too). It also scratches the part of my brain that enjoys putting together a loadout in extraction shooters. A single life does sort of play out like a raid: you gear up, head out, then try to make more money than you lost. But cash handouts are generous enough that you don't need to obsess over your wallet: I made a profit in 9/10 lives by simply standing on the objective, healing, and getting the occasional kill. I suspect that'll change as I unlock more expensive gear and develop a finer taste in helmets.

I'm impressed by the ways Wardogs is both individualistic and team-focused, but developer Bulkhead might need to adjust the numbers throughout early access. The main thrust of the progression is unlocking more guns and vehicles. That gets expensive fast, so I can see some players adopting an overly safe playstyle to maximise their profit per match.

The weekend playtest saw the beginnings of this: My matches had a lot of teammates camping towers with scoped rifles instead of pushing toward the objective. FOB defense is important and all, but I think they just wanted to farm kills from a safe spot.

Class rules

Similarly, I don't think Wardogs' loosey-goosey class roles set teams up for success. There are no formal classes, just tools that anyone can buy like rockets, defibrillators, and hammers. A class-based game like Squad ensures that a full squad has a balance of every role, but in Wardogs, it was hard to find somebody who'd gone to the trouble of buying a crowbar to break into enemy FOBs, or who had extra bandages for teammates, or who had even unlocked a rocket launcher at all yet (I still haven't).

The flip side is that Wardogs is less prescriptive, and freeing: I'm never locked out of sniping because people with quicker load times grabbed those roles first, or boxed into the medic role nobody else wanted. This is an inherently less organized game than its closest comparisons, but that's also the appeal. There's work to be done, but Bulkhead has done a decent job of making collaboration natural through establishing an extremely clear objective, simplifying logistics, and setting low prices for the most crucial gear.

Wardogs gives a very confident first impression. It's entering a two-year early access period with a robust core mode, strong fundamentals, and a distinctive twist. It's got problems, but it's the type of shooter that's immediately attracting dedicated fans with constructive feedback—this thread is pretty spot-on. I really want to play more.

Out of game, Bulkhead is saying all the right things for a savvy studio confident in what it's making: preorders are open at $40, but Bulkhead encourages buyers to refund if they don't like the beta that begins on August 21. The studio has also committed to zero monetization throughout early access, and said skins will always be earned, not bought (with the exception of a supporter pack). It's also worth noting that Wardogs is a PC-first FPS that'll support community servers. They're really speaking my language here.

Wardogs is out September 10 in early access.

First spotted by Eurogamer, ExplorEverythingOnce on the Battlefield subreddit claims to have received a full refund on Battlefield 6 from Steam support after 470 hours logged, well in excess of the platform's standard refund window of two hours within two weeks.

ExplorEverythingOnce supplied a redacted screenshot of their Steam purchase history, showing a full refund of BF6's more deluxe "Phantom Edition," which they claim to have purchased on launch day. They did not supply proof of playtime or communication with Steam support, leaving an outside chance that a rapid purchase and refund was made to back up the initial post.

But Steam does have a history of offering refunds outside the usual window in extenuating circumstances. In this case, Explor's stated reason for pursuing the refund, which they claim proved persuasive to Steam support, was the surprise removal of multiple popular modes from Battlefield 6's standard quickplay queue. For Explor, the killer was the removal of Rush, their preferred gametype across those 470 hours.

A small, school marmy part of me wants to point out that you might have gotten your money's worth with a game after 470 hours. At the same time, if you make a live service game, you should prepare for live service outrage. It is, I think, a failure on Battlefield Studios' part to effectively downgrade the experience like this.

"I've been a Steam customer for 22 years and have 2500 games on my account," Explor wrote in a comment on the original post. "I have only ever requested a refund once in that entire time until today."

Battlefield Studios presented the controversial mode removal as being in the interest of queue times and healthy matchmaking, consolidating the bulk of the playerbase into a smaller number of supposedly more popular modes. It's going over like a lead balloon, though, with a wave of negative recent reviews on Steam criticizing the decision. Comments under Battlefield Studios' announcement on X and posts on the Battlefield 6 subreddit are similarly hostile.

Overwatch's next season will finally move the hero shooter more in line with the other live service games that don't purely rely on FOMO for their battle passes.

In season 4, Blizzard will "unvault" an old battle pass and make it available again. The details on how exactly the system will work are slim at the moment, but it sounds like a specific old battle pass will become available halfway through every season going forward. It will be on sale for anyone who doesn't own it or simply made available for anyone who paid for it previously, and it will be permanent from that point on.

There is one catch however: The premium currency, player titles, and Mythic-level skins that were in old battle passes won't be available in the new unvaulted versions. Overwatch used to have new heroes locked behind a tier in the old battle passes too, but I am guessing they've been replaced with a generic reward.

Blizzard says there will be more information about exactly how these will work closer to the halfway point of the season, which will be sometime next month.

Ditching some of the FOMO involved with battle passes is always a welcome change in my book. It's a little sad that it won't be every battle pass opening up at the same time. You will still need to wait for each one to show back up. However, it's a step in the right direction, especially when games like Marvel Rivals have done this for a while now.

The old battle passes will act like a linear progression of rewards that will sit alongside Overwatch's new battle pass system that is debuting with season 4. Blizzard is basically taking Fortnite's idea and giving you a way to unlock major cosmetics in whatever order you want. Instead of a linear set of battle pass tiers, they'll now be broken up into "tracks" consisting of multiple rewards. You'll also get one chance to swap out a Legendary skin you don't want with another from a curated selection.

Blizzard stressed that the new battle pass system won't make it take longer to complete in a recent blog post. The goal is to give you a way to choose skins for heroes you actually play. The only downside to this that I can see is that the premium currency to buy Mythic skins is now only unlocked at the end instead of sprinkled throughout.

Considering Overwatch is reportedly doing very well for Blizzard, it makes me wonder if this is a result of the studio loosening up on how it monetizes it. The season 4 trailer just teased the third skin collab with popular K-pop group Le Sserafim—who are also going to be at this year's BlizzCon—so I think it knows where the money's really at.

Season 4 and new mech hero D.Mon will launch on August 11.

The ongoing effort to come up with a new Payday game that people actually want to play continued today with the announcement of Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience, a UEFN game that's available exclusively in (you guessed it) Fortnite.

Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience "reimagines elements of Payday as a progressive roguelike shooter," with three separate heists—the Jewelry Store, the Bank, and the Harbor—each of them made up of multiple unique rooms "ensuring endless replayability."

"We recognize that today's audiences are discovering legendary IPs in entirely new ways," Starbreeze chief growth officer Matt Dixon said. "Integrating Payday into the Fortnite ecosystem through UEFN is a cornerstone of our strategy to engage new players and welcome them into the broader Payday platform."

That's the sort of utterance that you're only going to hear from an entertainment industry executive, but it does nonetheless get to the heart of Starbreeze's big problem. Payday 2, which launched in 2013, is still chugging along on Steam, with concurrent player counts that keep it consistently within the platform's 100 most-played games.

But Payday 3 continues to flounder, and while updates are still rolling out it's hard to shake the feeling that Starbreeze is looking elsewhere for the future of the franchise. The studio announced a Roblox spinoff game in April—actually the second, following Notoriety: A Payday Experience, which came out in 2024—as prior to that, a VR game called Payday: Aces High.

Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience is live now in Fortnite. If you want to check it out for yourself, use Island Code 8105-9005-4478.

You've been shot, and I have the hit marker to prove it.

The humble hit marker glyph is a mainstay of the FPS user interface, dutifully reporting the fate of projectiles. Hit your target and 'X' marks the spot. See nothing, and you're hitting nothing. I like the hit marker—it's an absolute form of feedback unique to shooters, and I can think of a lot of games that wouldn't feel right without it.

But it's also a crutch. The hit marker is both overused and often misused, nowadays appearing in every game with a gun as if it's always the best form of communication. The mechanic has even penetrated the singleplayer arena, which is weird, because the studio that popularized the hit marker always meant it to be a multiplayer-only concession.

There are earlier examples of a hit marker, but it was made famous by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The 'X' glyph and gratifying "thwip" sound instantly became iconic to the series, but not the campaign. In fact, the majority of Call of Duty campaigns don't use them. I'm not aware of Infinity Ward ever commenting on why it decided this back in the day, but to me, it's obvious: The hit marker was superfluous to the campaign, because you knew you'd killed a guy as soon as he dropped dead.

Looking back at that campaign today, it still looks totally readable and natural:

I don't watch that and think "this could use some hit markers," and in fact, I think they'd detract from the experience. Hit markers make a lot of sense in the context of PvP, where it's helpful for network and competitive reasons to know exactly when your bullets are landing, but they undeniably add a layer of artifice. They're kind of ugly and distracting, to the point that they become the only visual cue I'm paying attention to in the heat of a match. Compare that older CoD to the recent Black Ops 7 campaign, which features hit markers and enemy health bars, and you do give up some immersive qualities.

Intuitive feedback

As anyone who played an FPS before 2007 can attest, developers were using more creative solutions to the same problems way before Modern Warfare came along: impact animations, wound FX, blood spurts. Land a shot, and the target itself reacts, not your UI. It's intuitive feedback—the videogame equivalent of "show, don't tell" filmmaking. When games really nail it (in singleplayer or multiplayer), it's better than a hit marker.

Which is why I'm calling out two series that definitely don't need hit markers, but have deemed them the default nonetheless:

Halo: Campaign Evolved, why have you cluttered up the HUD with hit markers when Bungie designed the original game around clear, diegetic feedback? I know my shot landed because an elite's energy shield flickered, a grunt died, or a jackal shield popped! Halo Studios (formerly 343) has been injecting hit markers into the series since Halo 4, and I don't love it.

And Gears of War: E-Day, you can do better! In 2006, Gear of War's solution to hit feedback was as elegant as it was gory: shoot a locust, and buckets of blood erupt from the wound. Hit; marked. But alas, The Coalition has succumbed to trends in E-Day, and hit markers are the default for both multiplayer and the campaign (if Microsoft's direct presentation from June is any indication). They work fine in the bits of the multiplayer beta I've played, but in turn, they've toned down blood spurts and made them less useful as an alternative. Perhaps a downgrade?

The old ways are far from extinct, but I do think the shift toward hit markers has given developers permission for their FPS to skimp on intuitive feedback.

This week I fired up Left 4 Dead 2 to remind myself what the pinnacle of hit feedback looks like. Then I played some Back 4 Blood, Turtle Rock's spiritual successor to L4D that, among many changes, introduced hit markers.

Pretty big difference! Left 4 Dead 2's zombie animations, wounds, and ragdolls are still unbelievable. I love the way blood splatters on walls and zombies react to individual impacts where they're struck. It's not only impressive 17 years later, but looks cleaner than Back 4 Blood's in-your-face hit markers. Behind the flickering X's are some pretty bland, unremarkable zombies. Back 4 Blood's hordes don't run, react, or die with the same weight or realism, which is weird, because a lot of the core Left 4 Dead leadership returned to make it.

I'm always keen to read what you all think, but I'm especially interested to hear other perspectives on hit markers, so please do sound off in comments or my inbox (morgan.park@futurenet.com). Hit markers are now this omnipresent fixture of the genre, yet nobody really talks about them. They just sort of happened, then kept happening, then stuck.

Typical, isn't it? You wait ages for a surprise launch of additional Quake adventures, and then two come along at once. The original game just received an official new episode as part of the shooter's 30^th anniversary celebrations taking place at this year's QuakeCon. But now Raven Software's Quake 4 has got in on the action, as a build of the sequel's cancelled expansion has been discovered and uploaded to GitHub.

Quake 4: Awakening was being developed at Ritual Entertainment—creators of the soon to be remastered SiN and its aborted episodic sequel—but the project was canned by Activision due to underwhelming sales of the base game. The expansion was thought lost to time, until a veteran game developer chanced upon a copy on the hard drive of a second-hand PC he bought.

Said developer is Justin Marshall, a programmer who has worked on games such as The Evil Within, XCOM 2, Dead Island 2, and The Dark Pictures Anthology—and unfortunately is one of the casualties of the industry's massive swathe of layoffs. The discovery of the build appears to have had a profound impact on him.

"I came across this at a very sad point in my life, it was on a hard drive on a vintage computer I bought off Amazon," Marshall explains on the expansion's GitHub page. "Literally this essentially saved my life, I was going through a divorce and just happen[ing] to come across something like this was insane."

While there's an outside chance this is an elaborate prank, everything points to it being legit. A big clue can be found in the config files, some of which are named after then-employees at Ritual, such as legendary Duke Nukem 3D level designer Richard 'Levelord' Grey, and Michael 'RomSteady' Russell, who has discussed the Quake 4 expansion in the past. Speaking to PC Gamer last year, Russell told us that "the expansion pack was 95% done" before Activision pulled the plug.

The far bigger clue, though, is that numerous people have already got the expansion up and running. A no-commentary let's play by Youtuber pagb666 shows the expansion's first three missions, which feature new weapons like a cryo cannon, and a section where the player pilots a mech (because what self-respecting noughties FPS would be complete without a mech sequence?).

While some elements do look unfinished, like a few of the scripted sequences, it does appear that Russell's estimate of how complete the expansion was may be accurate. Marshall says he uploaded the expansion for preservation purposes, and in the hope that "the community can make something cool with it." Given its apparent state, polishing it up to release-level quality may not be beyond the realms of possibility.

At this year's QuakeCon in Gaylord, Texas, a number of id Software's OGs and founders are in attendance for a retrospective talk and reunion, and it looks like legendary programmer John Carmack took some time to refamiliarize himself with the reason for the season.

"I sat down to try the Evercade Doom port, and before I knew it, I was on level four, and realizing that I had forgotten where all the keycards were," Carmack wrote on X, "The Everything App." "It wound up taking me 15 minutes each on level four and five. Still a great game after all these years!"

It certainly sounds like Carmack's a little rusty: E1M4 and M5 have par times of 1:30 and 2:45 respectively. I'm always curious to see how developers relate to their own games, especially a Criterion classic like Doom decades down the line. Carmack's fellow John, Romero, is still very much "Knee Deep in the Dead," as it were, creating the Sigil expansions and even giving the one-of-a-kind MyHouse.wad a try on stream.

I've always been slightly shaken by Larian honcho Swen Vincke's admission that he's never revisited Ultima 7⁠—one of his favorite games and primary inspirations⁠—because he knows it wouldn't stand up to his memories from the '90s. In the same conversation, Vincke told me that he spends so much time immersed in and testing Larian's games during development, he hardly touches them after launch.

Couldn't be me: I compulsively replay all my favorites to the point that it's a problem. I have to agree with Carmack: The original Doom really has held up after all these years.

Bethesda is currently running a 40th anniversary sale on Steam until August 13, just in time for this year's QuakeCon. The sale covers the studio's entire catalogue, including the offerings of subsidiaries id and Arkane.

That's where the real heat is, if you ask me: The recently-released Doom: The Dark Ages expansion, Revelations, is on sale for 50% off, 10 bucks to a typical 20. If you've missed out on the main game as well, Dark Ages itself is 67% off, or $23.

It's been a month since Revelation's July 7 release, and it's a beast of a shooter. Former PCG guides writer Rory Norris awarded it a 90% in his review, while staff writer Morgan Park, who was more cold on Dark Ages' base game, argued that Revelations redeems the whole endeavor.

Aside from Revelations, there's bound to be something in here to strike your fancy⁠—it's hard to argue against 10 buck Skyrim, if you somehow don't already have it. I'm a huge Arkane freak, personally, so the studio's whole catalogue for $54 gets a hearty recommendation from me.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is weirdly not discounted in this sale, possibly related to its publishing and copyright situation, but it's also only $10. So taking the plunge on the bundle probably comes out in the wash versus buying things piecemeal.

The sale is an undeniably great opportunity from a customer perspective, but comes at a fraught time for Bethesda. The studio and its subsidiaries were hit hard by Microsoft's "reset" at Xbox: Layoffs at Bethesda Game Studios, Zenimax Online, and id Software, while Arkane is getting spun off with an uncertain future. It also makes me nervous to see a game as good as Revelations get a 50% off discount after just one month⁠—you'd think Bethesda would have protected its value with a more token discount if it was selling really well.

Back in 2018, Blizzard revealed something very funny about its iconic mech hero D.Va: Everything about her is a mess under the hood.

Game director Aaron Keller likened the way D.Va is programmed to a "plate of spaghetti," when speaking to Kotaku at the time. When she ditches her mech, she's actually transitioning into a separate hero as far as the game understands it, and this led to lots of weird problems and even weirder bugs.

That won't be a problem with D.mon, the newest mech hero to join Overwatch, lead hero producer Kenny Hudson explained in a recent group interview with PC Gamer. D.mon is "actually one entity," he said, even though she can be separated from her mech just like D.Va.

"Took a little bit of work, definitely doubled the animations and stuff like that," he added. "But overall, [it] makes the experience of making D.Mon a lot easier and fixing D.Mon and providing assets for D.Mon down the road a lot easier for the rest of the team."

That's good news because I think D.Mon will draw a lot of players over to the tank role when she debuts in season 4 next week. Hudson provided a brief demo of her kit built around an energy sword and shield. D.Mon is sort of like the sequel to Reinhardt, holding the frontline and boosting straight into her targets.

As the leader of MEKA Squad, a group of Korean mech pilots that includes D.Va, D.Mon is much sturdier than her Overwatch elder, who zips around the battlefield like a bee. D.Mon is anchored to the ground, but she can still dash in any direction using a limited fuel resource. Her shoulder has a mounted machine gun that can be used long-range before she's close enough to take out her shield. With the shield up, she basically becomes a slightly faster Reinhardt with a bonus charge ability to knock enemies back (or off ledges).

Her ultimate, Limit Break, will probably be the reason to play her (or ban her). She does a big whirlwind slash with the sword, tearing open a weakness on every hit so that enemies take increased damage. It also gives her a huge chunk of overhealth. Hudson said she's dangerous in team compositions that can trample over enemies fast and pairs nicely with any damage-dealing heroes who can quickly capitalize on her ult's debuff.

My favorite part about D.Mon only happens when she's been knocked out of the mech with nothing but her mech's machine gun. In addition to knocking enemies back when she calls down her mech, you get to see the arms and legs fly in and lock together like an episode of Voltron. The whole animation is slick and now has me eager to see if Blizzard will one day surprise us with more members of MEKA Squad.

D.Mon will touchdown with season 4 on August 11.

A very Quake-themed QuakeCon kicked off today, with John Romero and current id studio co-director Marty Stratton speaking on a panel celebrating the shooter's 30th anniversary. A new 19-level Quake episode was announced and released during the panel, which also featured a brief livestreamed appearance from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor.

Reznor famously composed the music for Quake, which was a very big deal at the time. If ever there was a more 1996 cultural artefact than Quake I don't know what it could be (maybe Space Jam?). Reznor's industrial tumult definitely fit the grimier, darker, browner mood of Quake, compared to the MIDI thrash metal of Doom. I remember sometimes having to mute the music because it made me feel too tense.

"When I first encountered Wolfenstein it felt impossible," Reznor said. "Nothing was like that. It was a radical departure from what I'd known as videogames. I went out and bought a PC just to play it."

But it was Doom that sealed the deal. "Jump ahead a few years, Doom comes out, and it was like a bomb went off," he went on. "It was not only technologically advanced, but there wasn't anything like that. It felt like no adults were involved, nobody said no, it was free, and it was fantastic. In some ways I felt a parallel with what I was trying to do with music, by misshaping things and trying to express myself. I really felt a connection to it."

"[I] crossed paths with the id guys and hit it off, became friends, and I'm grateful to be invited to be part of the Quake team working on music and sound effects. And you know of all the things I've done in my career I'm extremely proud of that, and I think the game holds up today."

Reznor was hardly going to make an appearance at QuakeCon in order to distance himself from Quake and its soundtrack, but it's interesting to hear him draw parallels between Doom and his own music at the time. It's a reminder that the nowadays quaint-looking shooter seemed utterly terrifying in 1993. I remember the music in E1M3 sending shivers down my spine. The first pinkie demon encounter in that level prompted a quick shutting down of the game. Similarly terrifying: hearing the radio edit of Closer on the top 40 countdown.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Quake, a bunch of Nine Inch Nails Quake-themed gear has been released. You can get an ammo box (it really is just a $30 empty box), a t-shirt, a keychain, a hoodie, and the soundtrack has been reissued on vinyl. It's all extraordinarily expensive but you may find yourself buying it anyway.

Just a smidge over 30 years after its original release date, Quake just got a big update. MachineGames has added a new chapter to id Software's landmark 1996 successor to the Doom games, dubbed Dawn of the Machine.

The 19 new levels, which join two previous MachineGames expansions, see Quake's protagonist trapped in "a dimension of endless illusion." I'm most curious about some promised new weapon variants: "the Super Axe—unleashing lightning on successive strikes—and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle."

The update also adds a gallery of archival material from Quake's development, including a handful of playable levels that were created early in development and never finished.

The creative process on display is decidedly relatable, with level names like "Tim" "Tim10A," and "Tim14," and notes like, "Lots of tight hallways make navigation tough, and similarly there are many dead ends that were not completed, so it is not entirely clear what the idea was."

The update was revealed at QuakeCon today in a panel which included id Software co-founder John Romero, who noted with laughter that the announcement was occurring not on the 30th anniversary of Quake, which released in June of 1996, but on the 30th anniversary of the day he left id Software.

Quake famously marked the end of an era for id: Romero, American McGee, Michael Abrash, Sandy Petersen and others left the company after its development. Petersen said recently that "Quake ruined id Software."

But ruined or not, the studio carried on and released two of my favorite games, Quake 2 and 3, and everything else that came after, including the much lauded run of modern Doom games.

Id now faces a new kind of adversity following substantial layoffs imposed by Microsoft as part of its plan to "reset" the Xbox business.

"This is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month," id Software co-founder John Carmack said in reaction to the news.

Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall are all scheduled to appear at a founders reunion panel on Saturday for "a rare conversation about the company's earliest days, and the friendships, challenges, and innovations that have forever changed gaming."

Doom, one of the most influential videogames of all time, was famously distributed via the shareware model: The game's first chapter was completely free, and if you liked it, you sent id Software some money and they mailed you the remaining two episodes.

What would sometimes happen in those pre-online days, though, is that less-than-scrupulous resellers would offer the shareware version for sale, even though it was meant to be free. For $5 (or whatever, it's been a while), you could take home the hot new shooter from the guys who made Wolfenstein—and sure, you weren't getting the whole thing, but whatever. It's still Doom. Do you want to play it or not?

You might think that id Software would take issue with people making money on their work while they received nothing, but speaking at QuakeCon today, studio co-founder John Romero said the opposite was true: They were happy to see it happen.

"Please do it. Don't give us any money. Just get it out there," Romero said about people who made and sold the shareware version of Doom on floppies. "You would go to the store and you would see 10 different boxes that all had the same shareware Doom in it. I don't care. Give it to everybody, get it out there.

"We were totally happy with that. We were doing so much work just getting the game out. We knew in Taiwan that they were copying it: 100%, that was the market back then. So we contacted the biggest pirates there and went, 'Can you buy boxes from us? Really cheap. Really really cheap.' So they bought tons of boxes off of us, so it would be legitimate.

"Get it out there, make them feel good. We made money when people would actually order the rest of the game. We didn't try to make money off the shareware [version]."

Romero said id viewed it as simply a form of distribution—because again, this was years before the ubiquity of the internet, and most gamers didn't have easy access to this stuff, as we explored in our feature on how shareware transformed PC gaming forever.

Doom and other shareware games were available on BBSes, but that meant two things: You had to make a potentially lengthy (and expensive) long distance phone call if you didn't happen to live close enough to a distribution board, and worse, you had to be one of those computer nerd weirdos who actually owned a modem. Believe me, there were not many of us back then. So, dodgy as they might have been, those not-entirely-legit disk-in-a-box distributions were good for id Software and gamers alike.

That attitude also informed the studio's approach to copy protection, which is something it just didn't bother with.

"There's always been a war that's never been won with copy protection, and we didn't want to waste our time with that," Romero said. "If people are going to copy it, they're going to copy it. They might buy it some time later, but—we didn't have money for everything we were playing, so we're like, let's not copy protect it. If people want to play it, they can still figure out how to play it."

In June 2020, Bungie made what would come to be remembered as one of the most reviled PR incidents in modern videogames: It announced the content vault. To make Destiny 2's long-term development more manageable, the studio said, the launch of its Beyond Light expansion coincided with a culling of in-game content, paring away story campaigns, world regions, and activities of all stripes.

The content vault may have been defensible on technical grounds, but the sunsetting of swaths of game content, many of which players had previously paid to access, left Destiny 2 with a reputational stain that never fully washed out. But now, six years after Destiny 2's downsizing and two months after its end of live service development, its players are learning how to pull some of those lost worlds back out of the vault—not for play, but for preservation.

Over the last few days, videos have started bubbling up on X and YouTube seeming to show Destiny 2 players wandering around now-inaccessible game areas, as well as regions that were never fully implemented in the game. Those videos are the products of work being done by developer stanuwu, who's building what he calls Destiny 2 Shadowkeep Singleplayer Exploration Mode—an upcoming tool allowing users to load into and explore the environments present in the last Destiny 2 build released before the Beyond Light content vaulting.

Before you get your hopes up too high, the tool won't make old builds of Destiny 2 playable. You won't be replaying any Red War missions or old raids. Instead, it's purely for exploration and preservation, as stanuwu writes in the Github repo's readme: "No mechanics are implemented and none will be implemented." Once players load up the requisite Season of Arrivals build—something you'll have to provide for yourself—its maps will be empty of enemies, NPCs, and activities.

But it will let users freely navigate the Destiny 2 destinations that have been absent from the game for half a decade, offering additional exploration features like flight and noclip. Personally, I'm eager for a chance to return to the Echo Basin on Io, one Destiny's more alien-feeling regions that was never revisited after its vaulting in 2020. (Rest in peace, Asher Mir. At least you didn't have to see all the Star Wars stuff.)

While I'll welcome the chance to reinhabit some of my old Destiny 2 stomping grounds, stanuwu's work is more promising as a preservation tool—particularly when Bungie doesn't seem to have its own method for easily accessing all of its vaulted material. By making those spaces explorable again, it will help ensure that the full breadth of Destiny 2's environmental art and design will remain accessible, even after someone eventually pulls the live game's plug.

Stanuwu says he plans to release the tool some time in the next two weeks, and that the tool will be both free and open source once it launches.

Students of first-person shooter history will likely know that the technology Half-Life runs on—GoldSrc—is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. It's one of many, many branches of id-tech's ancient technological tree. Indeed, you'll still find tiny fragments of Quake code in Valve's modern successor to GoldSrc—Source 2.

Now, nearly three decades on from Half-Life's release, a modder has decided to put Quake back into Half-Life. Or maybe it's Half-Life back into Quake? Honestly, it's hard to tell.

The mod in question is called Libre-life, and it's a total conversion mod that aims to port Half-Life's key assets, like entities, weapons, monsters and mechanics, into Quake sourceports derived from DarkPlaces and FTEQW, with the primary target being the Zircon Engine. It's the creation of modder KleskBY, who aims to "combine support for Half-Life, Quake 1 [and] Quake 3 brush entities standard" according to Libre-life's ModDB page.

Why is Klesk doing this? Well, contrary to appearances, it has more to do with looking forward than looking back. Old game engines like GoldSrc tend to have hard-coded limitations that can affect its capability in various ways, like the maximum size of a map you can create.

The way around these limitations is to create a sourceport, like GZDoom (or its newer equivalent UZDoom) for Doom 2, or QuakeSpasm or its fork Ironwail for Quake. Such sourceports are what make mods like Brutal Doom or Arcane Dimensions possible.

Half-Life already has such a sourceport in Xash3D. However, Klesk cites several reasons for not just using Xash. The modder points out that Libre-life is intended to be more than just a straight engine port. "It can run on multiple Quake engines and could even run on Xash with enough adaptation work," Klesk writes. "There is no need for the project to be locked to a single Half-Life based engine".

Klesk also claims that Xash's Half-Life reimplementation of Half-Life is "not technically superior" and that the Quake source-ports he's focussed on provide "many capabilities that Xash does not."

Currently, Libre-Life is still in its early stages, but a fair amount of work has already been done, like reimplementing all of Half-Life 1's weapons. You can see the results of Klesk's work so far in the video above. For the most part it looks and sounds like Half-Life, though there are some obvious differences, like the higher-contrast shadows and the softer blood decals.

I was curious about Klesk's work and went to check out the demo. But it was upon doing so that I discovered Klesk has some, uh, interesting ideas about AI. In an FAQ about the demo, Klesk states unabashedly that he uses AI "a lot" and that "If you are anti-AI please just close this tab and move your focus to XashXT/FreeHL."

Which, as someone who is highly sceptical of generative AI, is what I will probably do. But it wasn't Klesk's use of AI that caused me to raise my eyebrows. It's what the modder said next:

"The Anti AI movement is just a hypocrisy and it does not provide any real solution. My opinion is that Anti-AI rhetoric is influenced by Chinese government and domestic terrorists who are competitors aiming to advance in AI development, as they never provide a solution, only complaints."

Alrighty then! It isn't clear what problem generative AI critics are supposed to be proposing a solution to. If the answer is "coding", then you can do that without generative AI and have been able to since computers were invented.

As for the Chinese government/domestic terrorist stuff, I think it's far more likely that people don't like AI because the technology is built upon plagiarised work, is terrible for the environment, is ruining the PC hardware market, and causing people to lose their minds, among other things.

Given the above statements, it seems unlikely that Klesk will change their mind on using AI for Libre-life. But it's not impossible. The recent Half-Life total conversion Diffusion, which funnily enough was built in Xash3D, used generative AI for its voices. But when criticised for this, creator Aynekko had a very different response, and replaced the AI voices with a cast of human actors to the delight of its fans.

From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #330 (UK, May 2019). You should still play Bullestorm, which is frequently 90% off on Steam.

Bulletstorm is the stupidest game ever made.

Everything about this game is stupid. Your character is stupid. Your allies are stupid. Your enemies are very stupid. The weapons are daft. The skillshot system is absurd. The script almost prides itself on how much rank idiocy it can cram into every line. Even the setting is stupid, a holiday resort built using prison labour on an alien planet so hostile that it rains gamma radiation.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Bulletstorm was developed by semi-concussed jocks during a two-year long frat party. It makes Gears of War look sensible, an impression that is probably the main reason why it sold a pitiful number of copies when it originally released in 2011. The game has such a brash and puerile exterior that it put a lot of people off playing.

That’s such a shame, because beneath the fathom-thick veneer of dumbness is one of the cleverest shooters designed this side of the millennium. Every stupid thing that Bulletstorm does has been designed with a huge amount of thought.

Take the aforementioned setting. Yes, building a luxury vacation town with a bunch of dangerous criminals on a highly irradiated planet is a terrible idea, but the result is a planet populated by hundreds of mutated psychopaths just desperate to greet your bullets with their faces.

You play Grayson Hunt, a mercenary who formerly worked as an assassin for prize interstellar scumbag General Sarrano. When Hunt realised Sarrano had been sending him to murder innocent people, he went rogue and set his sights on Sarrano himself. Bulletstorm begins as Hunt encounters Sarrano’s flagship, the Ulysses, in orbit around Planet Butlins. With his four-man crew, Hunt embarks upon a frontal assault that would form the climax of any other shooter, ending with Hunt using his own ship as a missile to punch a hole through the Ulysses, sending both vessels crashing down to the planet’s surface.

Stupid is as stupid does

One thing I’ve always admired about Bulletstorm is its sheer breakneck pace. The prologue alone gets through about four missions’ worth of content, including a flashback sequence where you use gravity boots to walk down the side of a skyscraper. By the time the game commences proper, two of Grayson’s crew are dead, while the third—Ishi—has been turned into a cyborg in an effort to save his life.

What’s even more remarkable is that Bulletstorm barely breaks its stride throughout its entire six to eight hour length. The first chapter alone has about three gargantuan set-pieces, including a level where you’re chased by a giant, motorised wheel, and another where you need to escape the nest of a Godzilla-like dinosaur. There’s a sequence where you control a robot-dinosaur and a battle across a giant dam which, naturally, bursts in the process.

Bulletstorm’s sense of scale and spectacle puts most other shooters to shame, and it’s not even the point of the game. It’s merely seasoning sprinkled into the casserole of shooting angry mutants in the most creative ways possible.

Yes, the skillshot systems was and remains Bulletstorm’s most unique feature. While you’re free to kill enemies however you like, killing them in specific ways awards you with varying numbers of points. This could be by combining a kick to the face with a spray from your assault rifle to perform a “Bullet Kick” or impaling an enemy upon some metal railings to pull off a “Voodoo Doll”.

These points can be used to buy ammo and unlock new weapons, which, alongside the ever-shifting environment, can be used to conjure even more creative kills. Like People Can Fly’s earlier game Painkiller, Bulletstorm’s weapons are delightfully eclectic. Highlights include the Flail Gun, which shoots twin explosives connected by a chain that coils around enemies before exploding, and the Driller, a ludicrous weapon that fires gigantic drill-bits at colossal speeds, impaling enemies onto any surface and spinning them around like a meaty windmill. Combine these bizarre guns with the skillshot system, and you’ve got one of the most gleefully entertaining shooters ever made. Impaling multiple enemies on one drillbit for the “Shishkebab” bonus is almost worryingly satisfying, as is kicking a flail-wrapped enemy into a man- eating plant and blowing both up in a shower of blood and chlorophyll.

Like everything else about Bulletstorm, it’s incredibly crass and incredibly silly, but it’s also a huge amount of fun. The only downside to the skillshot system is that it rewards you for set tricks, which limits the creative potential of the system (there’s no difference between kicking or sliding an enemy into spikes, for example).

Swearing up a storm

What’s interesting about Bulletstorm is that it inverts the typical way modern shooters present themselves. Most shooters try to justify their violence with a grand narrative about war and sacrifice and why all that killing is necessary and important. Bulletstorm, on the other hand, doubles down on its own gratuitousness. The script is unbelievably filthy, a cascade of swearing and toilet humour that almost completes the circle and becomes poetic.

Yet despite its crass front, Bulletstorm demonstrates more self-awareness than the majority of its peers. The game is clear on the fact that you’re not playing as a hero.

Hunt is a bad leader and a worse friend, his own arrogance and desire for revenge having cost him everything except for his life by the end of the game’s prologue. Two of his squadmates are dead, while Ish’s RoboCop-style makeover has left him in constant pain, fighting the AI system keeping him alive and taking over control of his own body.

This isn’t subtext either, its frequently pointed out by other characters in the game. Trishka, the leader of Sarrano’s special forces group, is probably the most scathing of Hunt’s critics but Grayson himself is painfully aware of his own failings. Much of his swaggering smack-talk basically amounts to overcompensation. Beneath that he’s desperate to save his last living friend, and in doing so harvest a grain of redemption from the mountain of shit he’s piled up. This is partly why the addition of Duke Nukem as a playable character in 2017’s Full Clip edition rang so hollow. Bulletstorm is ultimately only pretending to be a dumb shooter, whereas there is no pretending with Duke Nukem.

Indeed, to think of Bulletstorm as an “old-school” FPS is a mistake. It’s a thoroughly modern shooter, from the regenerating health to the aiming-down-the-sights to the fact that its characters actually have some layers. Most of the time this works, but there are a few areas where it just doesn’t come together.

No jumping allowed

Most significantly, you can’t jump. You can only mantle over certain obstacles. It’s an odd omission in a game that is essentially about performing stunts with guns, and proves somewhat limiting in play. Moreover, while the environment design of Bulletstorm is incredible – particularly its crumbling sci-fi cityscapes – the actual level design is comparatively simplistic, lots of large, straight corridors cleverly decorated to make them feel more complex.

Ultimately though, this is the only area where Bulletstorm is simpler than it appears. Beneath all the blood and cursing and toilet humour is a brilliantly imaginative shooter with a unique sci-fi setting and enough action to fill a game twice its length. Bulletstorm may be the stupidest game ever made, but boy is it clever in how it goes about that.

You can play Doom on a vape, a printer, an oscilloscope, a pregnancy test, an ATM, and inside Doom itself, but can you play it on a Commodore 64? The old 8-bit powerhouse was discontinued just a year after Doom's 1993 release, and while it was capable of small miracles for its time, it was not a natural home for first-person shooters.

Engineer and programmer Steve McCrea has worked on several Metroid games and Resident Evil 4's VR port, but his current project is inarguably more important: he's building Doom for Commodore 64.

It's a far from straightforward port, and it's technically not 3D. According to McCrea posting on X, it's based on code for The Keep, a first-person dungeon crawler he created for the Commodore VIC-20. The VIC-20 is an ancestor to the Commodore 64 with inferior specs, though it only released a year before the Commodore 64's 1982 launch. McCrea writes that his C64 Doom is "using ray casting in a tile grid".

But unlike The Keep, which was more similar to something like Wolfenstein 3D—essentially a flat, grid-locked maze—McCrea's Doom C64 has variable floor and ceiling heights and elevators. It also has opening doors and "visible weapons" (versus The Keep which didn't).

It really is impressive, especially this most recent work-in-progress video which shows variable lighting (!) and a skybox. According to McCrea he's built levels E1M1 through to E1M8, but is currently looking for help on music. Chris Hülsbeck, are you around?

Apogee Software founder Scott Miller, who published Wolfenstein 3D, is impressed. "Back when we released Wolf3D I begged Id to make a C-64 version and they said it wasn't possible. Now I'm crying."

The PC is the best way to play the new Halo: Campaign Evolved remake, as well as almost every other Halo, except for one glaring flaw: no split-screen, for some reason. Xbox and PS5 get it, but PC is locked to online co-op only.

Ten years ago, that's an omission that might've gone unnoticed by most, but the rise of living room PCs and local game streaming has made split-screen more relevant than ever on the platform. It's dumb and a little insulting that Halo Studios short-shrifted us on this one, but modders are here to help.

Enter mod "Halo Campaign Evolved Split-screen Coop" by Jpurd123 on Nexus. According to the description, this tweak (which Jpurd made with AI, for the record), activates code already existing within the PC remake that enables local split-screen. If accurate, that means the PC version of Campaign Evolved does support local play, but Halo Studios didn't turn it on.

Once hacked in, split-screen can be activated by a simple keyboard shortcut before starting a session. Comments on the mod page suggest it works pretty well as long as you follow the steps exactly as described.

Now, the caveats: This only supports two player split-screen for now, which sucks because 4-player co-op is a big feature of this remake. The mod was only tested with the Steam version of Campaign Evolved, so those playing through PC Game Pass or the Microsoft Store (which is where my copy came from) might be out of luck. Folks are also saying that split-screen only works if both players use controllers—trying to mix KBM and controllers makes the keyboard take over both screens, weirdly.

So yea, it's a finicky little mod. Given its AI makeup, who knows if it'll be improved over time, but it's a good sign that useful tweaks like this are popping up within a day of the remake's full rollout. It took a lot longer for folks to figure out split-screen solutions to the older Halos through Master Chief Collection (which also got left out of split-screen on PC).

A number of recent Linux driver patches has reportedly resulted in significant performance gains for the Steam Deck. Valve's handheld runs on the Linux-based SteamOS, and these patches can apparently improve the Steam Deck's 1% low frame rates by as much as 31%.

A fresh 'epp_boost' feature for the AMD P-State driver is largely responsible for the performance boost. David Vernet, a Linux kernel hacker at Meta, is the developer behind it. The feature implements per-core Energy Performance Preference (EPP) for AMD CPUs. As far as I know, it's not yet been reviewed by AMD's Linux kernel engineers, though Vernet explains via the Linux kernel mailing list that it was developed with gaming specifically in mind (via Phoronix).

Vernet offers a technical breakdown of the inefficiency these patches are designed to address, writing, "In active (EPP) mode the platform autonomously picks the operating point between min_perf and max_perf, biased by the EPP hint, and the kernel only rewrites the CPPC request on policy or limit changes. A workload dominated by one mostly-busy thread that takes frequent short sleeps (common in gaming workloads, for example) can fare poorly under this strategy."

He elaborates, "Each sleep decays the hardware's performance signal, causing post-wakeup bursts to start at a low operating point and inflating tail latency even though the CPU is essentially fully busy while work is available," going on to add, "A game's main or render thread typically blocks briefly on a futex or a GPU fence every frame, and the resulting frequency droop shows up directly as stale frames and inflated frame-time percentiles."

Vernet writes that the most obvious fix would have been to globally force "EPP=performance" but this would not have been power efficient—especially for handhelds like the Steam Deck. So, instead these patches introduce "an opt-in, per-core EPP boost." From there, Vernet offers a breakdown of technical precedents, his testing methodology, and how the fix works in specific detail but honestly I've barely been keeping up with all the Linux riddling to this point. For those who reckon they'll fare better than me, you can read the message archive here.

I've not had a chance to check out the patch myself, but Phoronix took a look using the Civilization VI game benchmark. Their testing apparently saw the 1%-low fps pick up by 31.8%, and frame time improve by 4.1%. That's not nothing for Valve's years old handheld, though newer AMD Ryzen systems would likely also benefit.

Mind you, that's only so long as you don't mind a spot of noodling in Linux's guts to activate the epp_boost feature after downloading the patch. To get the most out of the patch, you'll need to set 'amd_pstate.epp_boost=1'. After that, '/sys/module/amd_pstate/parameters/epp_boost' can be used to check whether the feature is active. I know I said handhelds are cooked, but I will still gladly take any performance boost offered to my wizened Steam Deck.

Tracking down all of the Halo: Campaign Evolved skull locations is a significant undertaking. While there were only ten of these in the original game, there are now 39 to find, including a bonus you get when you acquire your first three skulls. That amounts to three-per-mission, all unlocking new modifiers you activate during the campaign.

Some require you to play on higher difficulties, use other skulls to get them, or even pull off tricks like grenade jumps, so you've got your work cut out for you.

All Halo: Campaign Evolved skull locations

There are 39 skulls to find in Halo: Campaign Evolved, plus once you find three skulls, you'll automatically unlock an additional three skulls used only for the Campaign Remix mode:

• Armistice - Enemy factions never fight one another
• Adaptation - Randomizes the enemy factions present in the mission.
• Reload - Randomizes the pre-placed weapons in the mission.

There are three skulls in each mission, including the bonus ones, so I'll list each as you'll encounter it, the effect, plus the best Rally Point to use to be close to them.

Pillar of Autumn skull locations

1. Speed Limit

• Effect: Disables sprint
• Rally Point: Alpha

As soon as you exit the cryo pod, this skull is on the raised platform to your right, directly above the door. Head right into the alcove with the cryo tank, ascend the slope at the back so you can jump on top of it, then jump onto the platform and go right to find the skull.

2. Magnified

• Effect: 60-round magazines for the AR are now standard issue.
• Rally Point: Alpha

After the previous skull, continue through the mission towards the bridge until the door opens and the Elite jumpscares you. Carry on down the corridor, past the marines at the barricade, and into the room with all the weapon racks. The skull is just on top of one of them to your left.

3. Perspective

• Effect: Changes the player camera to third-person.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After the cutscene on the bridge of the Pillar of Autumn, head back inside, find the two pilots sitting at the front of the cockpit behind Captain Keyes, and drop down into the space below them to find the skull.

Halo skull locations

1. Grunt Funeral

• Effect: Grunts die in a blaze of plasma.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you emerge from the underground section with the Warthog, continue on, turn left over the river, and follow the trail to find a Forerunner structure where you have to rescue a group of marines underground. If you climb the stairs to the top level of the structure, the skull is on top of the middle section halfway up, just by where the pillar of light emerges. You'll have to jump up as far as you can then grenade jump to reach it, as shown in the video.

2. Give and Take

• Effect: Firing your weapon drains your shield, but dealing damage to enemies recharges it.
• Rally Point: Charlie

From where you emerge from underground with the Warthog, follow the river on the left until it splits, then follow it right until you reach a cave. Passing some green fireflies above you, you'll spot the skull hovering above a rock to your left.

3. Floor is Lava

• Effect: Take continuous damage whenever touching the "ground".
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you exit the underground with the Warthog, head right to the crash site with all the big rocks and Jackal snipers. Go up to the top of the grassy area near where the marine sniper is, jump right onto the other grassy rock, then drop down onto the big rock in the centre below to find the skull, as shown in the video.

Truth and Reconciliation skull locations

1. Iron

• Effect: Dying in co-op resets you to your last checkpoint, dying in solo restarts the level.
• Rally Point: Alpha

When you get to the grav lift leading up to the ship, head to the other side and look for the light on the ground illuminating a cactus and a tree by the cliff edge. Step onto the rock just to the right of the light on the ground and look down to see the skull on a lower ledge. Kill yourself to get back up.

2. Endurance Spec

• Effect: Makes UNSC vehicles indestructible.
• Rally Point: Bravo

This skull is one of the hardest to grab due to its position, so I suggest grabbing the Acrophobia skull from Silent Cartographer first. After you enter the ship and defend the room you arrive in, you'll have to let the marines into a hangar. The skull is in here on the upper level. If you go around to the far end of the walkway and look back across the hangar, you'll see a crate and a bunch of pillars you can jump between with the skull at the far end, though this is hard to reach without Acrophobia active, since that skull lets you fly briefly.

3. Foreign

• Effect: Players cannot use weapons from another faction.
• Rally Point: Bravo

A little further on, through some corridors, you'll reach a hangar where a Covenant drop ship will close its doors and fly away as you enter. Head to the far right corner of this room, where there's a locked door, and wait for the reinforcements who'll open it to enter. Head inside and grab the skull on the left. It's unclear whether this door stays open, so make sure to go there as soon as you enter the room.

Silent Cartographer skull locations

1. Bandana

• Effect: Infinite ammo and grenades (disables some achievements)
• Rally Point: Alpha

After you clear the landing zone of hostiles and circle around the island to the entrance to the Forerunner structure, you'll find a cave just to the right of it. The skull is just inside on the sand in the sunny bit at the cave's centre.

2. Acrophobia

• Effect: The Corps: Now issuing rifles AND wings… (disables some achievements)
• Rally Point: Bravo

When you're directed to the plaza area with the two Hunter enemies to open the security door, climb the sloping structure in the centre (from the right side) and ascend to the far end to find this skull.

3. Hip Fire

• Effect: All weapon zoom functionality is disabled.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you enter the main facility and defeat the two Hunters in the room, you'll head down a staircase with a hologram in the centre. Look over the edge directly below you, and you'll spot a skull down below on the right side. Drop down and grab it.

Assault on the Control Room skull locations

1. IWHBYD

• Effect: It would have been your dialogue
• Rally Point: Bravo

After you get the Scorpion tank, drive it through the valley and the tunnels until you come to the bridge across the ravine with all the turrets. Turn left at the other end, drive to the icy wall, and then jump on top of your scorpion, and use it to reach the cave halfway up its side with the skull in.

2. Angry

• Effect: Enemies fire their weapons faster and more frequently.
• Rally Point: Charlie

When you finally arrive at the entrance to the Control Center Ziggurat after the long section with the Scorpion (directly below the bridge you walked across at the start of the mission) you'll spot a strange Forerunner ravine structure with a bunch of bridge like struts placed along the top. The skull is on the third strut back towards the cliff.

3. Cowbell

• Effect: Physics mass of objects is reduced, making them more easily displaced
• Rally Point: Echo

When making your way to the control room, you'll emerge onto a bridge outside where two Banshees will be parked. Cortana will tell you to commandeer one. Walk along the bridge to about halfway, where it crosses above the Forerunner structure below, and drop down on the left side. In the channel there, you'll see the skull wedged in a pile of snow.

343 Guilty Spark skull locations

1. Fog

• Effect: Motion tracker is disabled.
• Rally Point: Alpha

Continuing on from the crashed Pelican, you'll find a crashed Covenant drop ship stuck in a tree, turn left here and climb the slope, then turn right at the top, hopping up over the rocks just past the tree and where its roots are sticking out—you'll know the right spot as you can see a weird Flood stalk growing out of the tree. You'll spot the skull on a rock to your left overlooking the fallen tree you cross to continue the mission.

2. That's Just… Wrong

• Effect: Enemies have increased awareness of the player.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After heading through the initial rooms of the Forerunner structure, you'll find a marine who's gone crazy and tries to shoot you with a magnum. Kill him and he drops the skull.

3. They Come Back

• Effect: Flood Combat Forms reanimated by Infection Forms are much more dangerous.
• Rally Point: Charlie

Towards the end of the mission, you'll eventually take an elevator up, meet some marines, and have to defend a tower door against Flood while waiting for evacuation. Instead of killing the enemies, head to the right of the big tower with the door and run until you find a fallen tree resting against a ledge. Climb the tree and jump onto the left side of the rock to find the skull.

The Library skull locations

1. Tilt

• Effect: Enhances both positive and negative damage multipliers, example: plasma does more damage against shields, but less against health.
• Rally Point: Alpha

Just after Guilty Sparks leaves, you'll go through a short tunnel and emerge the other side, where'll appear again with sentinels to help you. Turn right and jump up onto the sloping strut next to the door you came through and walk up to the top to find the skull.

2. Pop

• Effect: Shooting Flood in their weak point causes them to explode.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After you finish defending the lift with Flood dropping onto it, circle around to the left or right to arrive at the next door where Guilty Spark will be waiting. You'll have to defend the door here as he unlocks it. When facing the door, turn around, and immediately behind you'll spot a pedestal sticking out of the far wall a little way up with the skull on top. Climb the sloping strut to the side, hop across to the blocks between, and then jump to the pedestal itself.

3. Famine

• Effect: Weapons dropped by enemies contain half the ammo.
• Rally Point: Charlie

Right at the start of the fourth section, when you arrive at the bottom of the third big elevator, go straight ahead, down the stairs, and turn left before you reach the sentinel beam to find the skull in a little alcove.

Two Betrayals skull locations

1. Tough Luck

• Effect: Enemies always go berserk, constantly roll out of the way, and rarely run from a fight.
• Rally Point: Alpha

After you exit the Halo control centre and descend to the bottom level where the banshee's waiting, get inside, and use it to fly back up to the big crest structure sticking out in front of the light pillar above the control centre. Fly to the top to find the skull and time jumping out of your banshee to land on the platform.

2. Black Eye

• Effect: Your shields will only recharge when you melee enemies.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you've destroyed the first conduit, you'll emerge out into the bottom of the valley (where you've been before in Assault on the Control Room) and see three bridgelike arches ahead of you. Cross the middle one to the other side, and head right to spot the skull on a pile of snow amidst the Flood growths.

3. Mythic

• Effect: Enemies have increased health (also unlocks LASO mode).
• Rally Point: Charlie

After the previous skull, you'll later have to fly to the top of a valley onto a platform where there are some Banshees, and two doors built into the valley walls on either side. Activate the terminal on the platform and head through the door directly opposite (so the door that's on the opposite side to where the objective marker is directing you). Now you need to:

1. Kill all the enemies in the room (including energy sword Elites and a lot of fuel rod cannon grunts).
2. Activate the terminal to open the door on the far side.
3. Now defeat all the enemies in this hallway and activate the next door.
4. Defeat all the enemies in the final room to spawn the Mythic skull in the pillarlike structure at the centre.

Keyes skull locations

1. Catch

• Effect: Makes enemies throw and drop more grenades.
• Rally Point: Alpha

Without a doubt, the hardest skull to get in Halo: Campaign Evolved, partly because you need to be on Heroic difficulty for it to appear. This skull is timed and will despawn if you take more than a few minutes. From the start of the level, you need to:

1. Rush through the first section to the grav lift (use the optical camo you can pick up at the bottom of the drop to make this easier)
2. Defeat the marked enemies on the lift platform
3. Stand in the centre and face away from the direction you came
4. As soon as you start rising, hold X on controller to grab the skull

The reason this is so tricky is because of the increased difficulty, time constraint, and because the skull is right before the end of the grav lift, meaning you only have one chance to catch it as you pass by. Play on co-op if possible to increase chances of survival and catching the skull.

2. Blind

• Effect: HUD and weapons do not appear on screen.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After you board the ship, you'll enter the upper level of a bay filled with ghosts and wraiths where Cortana comments that the Flood are gathering bodies in the corners. Drop down and look for the open doorway at the far end with the passage blocked by a destroyed Wraith and some Covenant crates. Blast them out of the way with a grenade and head up the corridor to find the skull by the locked door on the left.

3. Pinata

• Effect: Punching enemies makes them drop inert grenades.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After the cutscene plays with Keyes, turn around and melee the flood growth he's in until this skull drops out on the floor in front of him.

The Maw skull locations

1. Stowed Reload

• Effect: Weapons continue to reload while stowed.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After Guilty Spark stops the countdown at the bridge, you'll continue through the ship and arrive in a cryo pod bay that looks quite similar to the one you started the game in, with four pods in the centre facing each other. The skull is in the back left corner of the room on top of a pillar. You can jump to this from the walkway.

2. Boom

• Effect: Explosion radius is increased 2x.
• Rally Point: Bravo

When you enter the engine bay, go right up the slope, continue along the platform and go right through the door, follow the path up to the next floor, then turn left through the doorway and up to the next floor. Then go straight, turn right to where the far terminal is sticking out, jump across to the lower platform, then turn left and drop down between the pillar and the wall to spot the skull. This is quite complex, so follow the video above if confused.

3. Thunderstorm

• Effect: Upgrades the rank of most enemies.
• Rally Point: Charlie

During the final Warthog escape, continue along the main track until you reach the winding tunnel with pillars. You'll pass one vent shortcut on your right, take it, and continue along the main corridor until you spot a second vent shortcut on your right. Go down this about halfway, then get out and look to your right to see the skull on the ground.

Boarding Action skull locations

1. Malfunction

• Effect: Upon respawn, a random element of your HUD no longer appears.
• Rally Point: Alpha

When you meet up with Johnson in the room with the grav lift and fight the two Hunters, after having progressed through the hangar via opposing walkways, head right down the walkway Johnson came up from and follow it. Go down the stairs, past the ship on the left and through the door, then right past the turret onto the walkway, where you'll find the skull on ground overlooking the room with the dropship you started the mission in.

2. Johnny Ammo Seed

• Effect: When reloading, you lose the ammo remaining in the discarded clip.
• Rally Point: Bravo

This skull is on the third level of platforms in the white and gold room just after you start Change of Plans. To get here, you'll have to progress into the next training room with the gold energy sword Elites, climb the stairs at the far end, follow the platform around to the opposite side of the room, head left through the tunnels, and emerge into the third floor of the previous room (where Johnson was sniping from). The skull is on the walkway (by a bunch of elites) with the purple torch just ahead of you, so carry straight on, then turn right to find it.

3. Leadhead

• Effect: Headshots no longer provide extra damage or instant kills.
• Rally Point: Delta

After you meet the Prophet and survive the ambush, you'll return to the room where you originally entered the Gene Forge. After this, you'll get an objective to reach the upper decks and will find yourself in a small room with a grav lift at its centre, fighting waves of Brutes and Elites. Once done, don't go up the lift, but head through the door on the left side of the room to spot the skull a little way in.

The Most Dangerous Game skull locations

1. Temperamental

• Effect: Allies will attack the player more quickly if the player kills a friendly.
• Rally Point: Alpha

This is one of the more complex skulls to grab as it involves breaking a golden Elite's shield three times throughout the level.

1. After you meet Williams and enter the area with the mushrooms and the Jackal snipers, shoot the golden Elite standing up on the ledge to the right until you break his shield and he runs away.
2. Continue into the next area with the Covenant Base and the Wraith, just past the Wraith at the back door is the same golden Elite. Smash his shield before he escapes—this is also where you get the second skull, so check the next entry then check back here.
3. After you free the prisoners in the cell block, you'll emerge outside, at which point Johnson will mention he's spotted a high value target and Williams will mention it's the Elite that butchered her marines. He's up and to the left as soon as you exit into the circular space. Break his shield and kill all the enemies.

Once that's done, make your way up to the central podium which the skull will have spawned in the centre of.

2. Recession

• Effect: Every shot expends twice the normal amount of ammo.
• Rally Point: Bravo

When facing the Wraith in the Covenant base area, turn around and look towards the door with the two torches on either side above. These have fuel barrels inside them you can blow up, opening the door and revealing the skull inside.

3. Ghost

• Effect: Enemies no longer flinch when taking fire.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you cross the gravity bridge and Chief mentions to Williams "not being able to choose who we are," the door will open into the next area with a couple of Elites with needle rifles ahead. The skull is directly above you on the left torch above the door. Climb around the tree to the left and hop onto the tree to get onto the cliff where the skull is.

Heavy Burden skull locations

1. Eyepatch

• Effect: All auto aim is disabled for all weapons.
• Rally Point: Alpha

After you fight the Hunters in the room with the alien plants, continue through the area until you reach a bridge across a chasm, with a smaller bridge off to the left (which two Elites will come running along). Head through the door to your left and go along the smaller bridge to the door at the far end, where you'll find the skull to your left.

2. Grunt Birthday Party

• Effect: Grunt headshots produce legendary celebrations.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After you descend from the ship's bridge to meet up with Williams, you'll pass through a bunch of rooms you've already been through before reaching a large room with some plants. As you descend a short stairs with a torch on the left, you'll spot a rock-like natural structure with the skull on top. You have to jump to this from the central platform then jump to grab it, as in the video above.

3. Efficient

• Effect: Enemies killed while the player is at full health drop more ammo.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you reactivate the power on the moving platform, continue under the bridge into the following room, where you need to jump off the platform and run over to the far left corner, and grab the skull before you die of the timeout countdown.

The week I spent in Chornobyl in Stalker 2's pre-release review period is a demented blur in my memory at this point. I remember: gunfire randomly muting itself, multiple main quests that failed to progress until I ran about two kilometres away from them, bloodsuckers that required approximately 46,000 rounds to kill, and enemy corpses becoming nightmarish, distended and levitating things.

Despite it all, I loved it. Stalker 2 had the bones of something beautiful, just as soon as GSC could get around to, you know, finishing making it.

If that time hasn't arrived, I think it's fast-approaching. On August 20, almost two years after the base game's release, Stalker 2 will get its first expansion, Cost of Hope.

This is the first of two planned story DLCs for the game, this one focusing on the Zone's Duty (who think the Zone is scary and we should shoot it), and Freedom (who think the Zone is wondrous and we should share it) factions. "Explore uncharted locations, encounter unexpected allies and enemies, discover powerful weapons, and experience a gripping new story," goes the blurb.

"Launching in line" with Cost of Hope is Stalker 2's long-awaited 2.0 update, which I might honestly be more ravenous for. In August last year, GSC announced that it would be undertaking the fairly mammoth task of completely updating the version of Unreal Engine 5 the game runs on, from 5.1 to 5.5.4. That's update 2.0's big crowning bulletpoint. Mind you, it's also bringing new features and content of its own—which will, unlike the DLC, be free to all Stalker 2 owners.

GSC says it will have more to share on both Cost of Hope and update 2.0 as we draw nearer to the August 20 release date.

I've not touched Stalker 2 since that feverish review period. I figured I'd wait for GSC to do its thing. I think it might be time to return. I loved Stalker 2 when it was practically on fire. A (more or less) working version of the game with some shinier and more stable UE5 bells and whistles? Sign me up.

New Blood's comic book golden age noir detective immersive sim shooter, Fallen Aces, just got a beefy new update: Its second episode, Shadow of Death, is playable right now, while the usually $15 game is on sale for $12 until August 8.

I'm kind of allergic to playing games in early access, so I haven't touched Fallen Aces since I fell in love with its first few levels back in 2024. Those levels were fun, the stealth tense, the combat beautifully slapstick, and the pulpy story engaging. But I mean it as a compliment when I say that the Episode 2 trailer shows a practically unrecognizable game.

It's got car chases, sprawling city environments, medieval broadswords, and I lost track of how many new guns. Shout out to the cartoony Mateba Model 6 Unica in there, a.k.a the cyberpunk detective gun. The more games that sport this beautiful Italian oddity, the better.

New Blood's entire main lineup of the 2020s has been slow to cook, but the three games have justified that time with ambitious increases of scope. Ultrakill's recent layer of Fraud looks like its most striking and unique yet, while Gloomwood's development updates with monster serums, armored pig constables, nonlethal takedowns, and Rat Mode give me a "how did we even get here" feeling like looking at my phone and seeing an Uber driver in the ocean or something. In a good way.

New Blood likes to start its games cheap and raise the price as value is added in early access, so it's long been curtains for Fallen Aces' launch price of $10. 15 bucks is hardly shabby, though, and you can take advantage of that nice compromise $12 sale for the next two weeks on Steam.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was not the series' finest hour, but one aspect of the sequel that has gone down well with players is its experiments with matchmaking. For years, players have complained about the effects of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), which is intended to level the playing field by sorting players into groups of similar skill. But some players claim that SBMM can outright flatten the experience, neutering much of the fun and unpredictability of arena shooting.

Until recently, Activision had tried to convince players of the merits of SBMM. But last year saw a change in attitude from the publisher. For Black Ops 7's multiplayer, it introduced an "open moshpit" playlist alongside its standard match allocator, wherein skill consideration was "drastically reduced in matchmaking".

It appears this option has gone down well with CoD players, as Activision has said it plans to carry low-SBMM playlists forward into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. This was revealed in a post on Call of Duty's official X account, where it explained its broader plans for multiplayer matchmaking going forward.

"Over the past year, we've continued to learn a lot about multiplayer matchmaking through player data and community feedback," the developers wrote, adding that these learnings had been "reinforced" by players' reception of the releases of Black Ops and Black Ops 2 alongside Black Ops 7. Clearly, it has concluded that open playlists are worth keeping around, as it says. "We'll continue to offer Open playlists in Black Ops 7, and we'll also include Open Playlist options in the upcoming Modern Warfare 4 beta."

On top of this, Activision is introducing a "new matchmaking system" for various modes in Black Ops 7, including Black Ops classic, quick play and party games. It says that this system is "inspired by" Black Ops and Black Ops 2, and in a follow-up post, explains it builds upon "what we've learned, with smarter team balancing, wide match variety, improvements that keep matches full, and a better experience for mixed-level parties."

It'll be interesting to see how the matchmaking changes align with Modern Warfare 4's adjustments to gunplay and general combat, with a renewed emphasis on making players "feel like they're really behind the gun". The beta kicks off on August 21, though unlike last year Game Pass subscribers will not be entitled to early beta access.

I liked Doom: The Dark Ages when it arrived last year, but I really ought to have loved it. The first two Dooms of id's modern trilogy are generationally great FPS campaigns with unmatched action, memorable guns, and late-game fights that will grind your teeth down to the gums. They successfully reestablished Doom around speed, hyper mobility, and improvisational gun swapping—ideas that id actively turned away from when it designed The Dark Ages around a shield.

The Slayer's shield was a neat multitool, allowing him to block any incoming damage, parry certain attacks, or throw it as a weapon to bisect fodder grunts. But those features came at the cost of mobility and complexity—this Doomguy could no longer jump high or dash around the battlefield, and the new solution to every enemy was to block attacks and blast it in the face with the shotgun.

Revelations, the new Dark Ages expansion that released just hours after id was decimated by layoffs, is a masterful comeback.

The expansion picks up soon after the base game: The Slayer ventures into Hell to take on the very worst it has to offer. He gets his ass kicked, then summarily punted into Purgatory. Beaten and bruised, he has to rip and tear his way out of Hell's wastebasket, and this time he can't hide behind a shield.

No really—a big bad guy literally rips it in half in the opening level. Yea, id is not being subtle in acknowledging the feedback to the base game. Revelations is about the Slayer reclaiming his apex status in the mortal realm, but it's also about id reclaiming the best aspects of Doom. Enter the Chain Spear, a new appendage for the Slayer that immediately upstages the shield on all fronts by reintroducing layers of mobility back into the series.

He can plunge the spear into enemies and geometry to yank himself towards them (similar to Eternal's meat hook), but crucially, his trajectory is controlled by camera movement. That means he can hook a guy from across an arena, aim up or left or right, and turn demons into his personal catapult. It's simple, fun, and immediately more expressive than anything I ever accomplished with the shield.

At the same time, id has added Eternal's air dashes back into the mix, which can now trigger a "perfect dodge" that charges a meter for special spear moves. Such are your two options for dealing with enemy fire: The spear can parry green attacks and dashes can evade everything else. There is no block.

The result is a harmonious combat loop that siphons some of Eternal's brilliance while maintaining The Dark Ages' weighty, defensive identity. You're still doing a lot of deflecting green energy blasts back to their senders, but you're also flinging yourself over hordes to reach the high ground, sniping airborne wraiths with powerful spear throws, and atomizing platoons of demons with a single ground pound. The spear delivers control and options that the shield couldn't.

It's understandable how id thought the shield would be addition through subtraction—a persistent complaint of Eternal was an overwhelming number of guns, mods, grenades, and melee attacks to juggle—but clipping the Slayers' wings was an overcorrection.

Doom is best when the Slayer holds all the cards, and in id fashion, you can eventually swap between the spear and shield at any time in Revelations. You're never required to use both in combat, but the shield is used for traversal puzzles that incorporate both weapons—these, too, are more involved and fun than the base game.

By the time I'd reclaimed the shield and filled out the spear's own ability tree, I did have those Eternal-like moments where the number of guns, moves, and similar-but-different melee attacks at my disposal would occasionally short-circuit my brain. I'd throw my spear when I meant to slash with it, deflect when I meant to stab, or forget for an entire level that I can ground pound. But it's a hill I eventually climbed, and on the other side was a mastery of Revelation's moveset. The Chain Spear became a natural extension of my reach—the hand with which I move the pieces of Hell's armada at my whim. Every piece clicked into place, and Revelations singlehandedly justified Doom: The Dark Ages as an idea.

Do not miss the 10-12 hour Revelations expansion—out now on Steam.

If you're looking for something to do this weekend and would prefer it comes in the form of shooting guys, then allow me to direct your attention to Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, which is holding an open beta that's set to run until Monday.

Announced in 2025, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is a more-modern follow-up to the WW2 milsim Hell Let Loose. It features the 50v50 battles of the original, expanded with the addition of air power—helicopters, naturally—across six large-scale maps. Battlefield Vietnam may be the obvious point of comparison, but as PC Gamer gunner Morgan Park pointed out, Hell Let Loose is more of a hardcore milsim. The Steam page reflects that as well, emphasizing the need for teamwork and tactics, and the game's focus on historical accuracy.

To get in on that action, just pop around to the Hell Let Loose: Vietnam on Steam and punch the "join the playtest" button. The playtest is fully cross-platform, so you can jump in on consoles if you like—instructions for that are also available on Steam, but the short version is to look for the playtest on either the Xbox or PlayStation Store, and then install it. Console-exclusive servers are also being offered, for those who don't want to get hammered by the mouse-and-keyboard set, but you'll need to have either a PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass Essential subscription to play.

There are a number of known issues with the current build of the game, including dodgy voice chat, occasional performance drops, and "infrequent crashes or stability issues" on some AMD GPUs. Players are encouraged to provide feedback via the playtest survey, and reminded that any progression, XP, and unlocks earned during the test will not carry over to the full release. That's set to happen on August 13.

The Halo remake has released for those who forked out for the advance access version, and they're not thrilled with what they've got. At time of writing, Halo: Campaign Evolved is sitting at a humdrum 68% Mixed rating in the Steam user review scores—a mere 2% off the score given to the game by our Morgan Park in PCG's Halo remake review.

Why are fans—who were sufficiently John-117-pilled to pay the advance access premium—underwhelmed? Oh, the classic reasons: bugs, server problems, utterly extraneous account linking requirements. It wouldn't be a 2026 videogame release without those, would it?

"Login failed. Cannot play the singleplayer game as servers are overloaded," reads a review from Steam user GoatMedic󠁳Echoo. "Screw your DRM. Combat was not evolved." That's pretty much the vibe when it comes to how users feel about signing into their Microsoft account to play. "Error 400 or 500 when trying to login to Microslop's online services to connect Steam account," says user LVL13_. "Typical."

On the plus side, Halo Studios is replying to complaints about login issues to let fans know they're fixed. "This login issue should now be resolved. If you're still encountering this issue, please close and restart Halo: Campaign Evolved," reads the dev comment posted in reply to various different login complaints.

It seems to be more and more common for devs and publishers to wade in and start answering negative reviews these days, which makes me feel a little bad for whoever it is that gets saddled with the responsibility.

Anyway, Halo Studios does not yet have a canned answer for the other complaints players have. Many are encountering technical issues, with one user complaining of "constant crashes, graphical shimmering effect with fast movement [and] inability to disable upscaling". "Disgusting frametime spikes and stutters," laments another. They're far from the only ones. Plenty of the negative reviews touch on performance problems at least once.

All Halo Studios can offer in reply to that is a comment that performance feedback is being passed onto the devs, which probably would not mollify me if I had paid extra money for advance access to a videogame.