Phantom Doctrine, CreativeForge Games’ strategic turn-based espionage thriller that feels a wee bit like XCOM, has a release date. As head of The Cabal, an undercover cohort fighting against a global conspiracy, you’ll direct your base from the underground. But don’t listen to me paraphrasing a press release, listen to Jody whose hands-on impressions of an early build are a delight. Jody even illustrates the above with a gif:Elsewhere, Jody explores Phantom Doctrine’s likeness to games like SpyP

You’ve rallied a couple of pals in Blighttown, you’re on your way to fight Quelaag, you’ve reached the crest of her domain’s entrance. And while I can’t say for absolute certain my invader was a hacker, I’m pleased to see Bandai Namco actively working to reduce cheaters with Dark Souls Remastered’s latest patch. “Improved the security against cheating during online multiplayer,” reads one bullet point in update 1.03’s patch notes. A section of Dark Souls Remastered Steam players have aired their

You can pick up rat and chaos-slaying co-op game Warhammer: Vermintide 2 at a very reasonable price today. “Vermintide 2 succeeds on the merits of its stellar combat and level design,” he said. I played a bunch of it over the weekend, which offered double XP for my trouble. In all honesty, given how much I play games like Vermintide 2, and how little repeating levels many times over appeals to me, it actually felt like the right pace for unlocks and progression. Some online stores give us a smal

Furthering its recent anti-cheat drive, developer PUBG Corp says it’s “prioritising” anti-cheat measures among other things. As noted in this Steam Community update for PUBG’s PC #17.1 update, anti-cheat measures are among the devs’ main concerns—alongside performance and bugs. “We greatly appreciate this feedback and we know that all of it comes from a place of support and love for PUBG. Right now we’re developing new plans to resolve various problems facing PUBG, prioritizing server performanc

Battle royale game The Culling 2 has arrived on Steam, just six months after work on developer Xaviant’s original BR game, The Culling, was halted. Today, I jumped into my first match of the Culling 2 and hung around the in-game lobby, waiting for other players to join. A few minutes later, the match began, and roughly 15 seconds after that I was declared the winner. As it’s rare that I ever win anything, let alone a battle royale game, I’m still going to wear my badge of victory proudly. Follow

As far as GTA 5 mods go, Warfare is pretty straightforward: it turns Los Santos into a militarised urban hellscape, where teams of 20 fight… just because. It does look pretty good though, and once you’ve installed it there’s a fair bit of flexibility involved. You can pit your two teams (yourself and 39 NPCs, in case it isn’t clear) against one another in a variety of pre-set Los Santos environments, or else create an arena yourself. Created by zanzou, the skirmishes involve tanks, choppers an

One of the high points of this year’s marathon was the Destiny Community Podcast’s segment, which raised over $100,000. Here’s the moment where the stream hit its $100,000 goal (you can watch the full stream here ):I reached out to Pope Bear to hear his thoughts on the stream’s runaway finish. “I knew that the Destiny community was going to step up in a huge way but that last 20 mins was an absolute blur. If you hit 10k, you’ll get a final patch note for today.Don’t do it for the patch note – do

It’s been a little over a year since Dead Cells, “the old school Castlevania gone roguelike” as Shaun described it, debuted on Steam Early Access. “We’re super stoked to see people play Dead Cells 1.0,” the devs said. “However, the journey doesn’t end there as we’re still working on Dead Cells to bring you new content, as promised before, and are dedicated to improve mod support.” Shaun took Dead Cells for a spin shortly after it hit Early Access last year, and even at that stage he found it imp

Fear the Wolves is a mashup of Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl and battle royale from Vostok Games, developer of Survarium. On day one of its closed beta, with a Steam Early Access release just a week away, it’s in very, veryf rough shape. On your way to the finale, however, I’d advise running, not driving:The start of a round of Fear the Wolves is what I guess we can now call standard battle royale. That’s exactly the type of landscape you’ll find in Fear the Wolves. With Fear the Wolves entering

Dark Souls Remastered is, as you might guess, an updated version of the 2011 action-RPG, with support for 4K resolutions running at 60 fps. But if that’s not quite enough of a visual upgrade for you, the “Evie’s Ultra HD Dark Souls Remastered Retex” mod that recently appeared on Nexus Mods might be worth looking at. Based on the Firelink Shrine UE4 Remake that was released in March by the same creator, the mod is a work-in-progress redo of all visible textures in Dark Souls Remastered. It covers

Lost on Mars, the second of three expansions slated to come to Far Cry 5, will be out on July 17, Ubisoft announced today. The expansion will also bring new Mars-themed assets to the Far Cry Arcade, which all players will have access to. This expansion strikes me as more blatantly Blood Dragon-esque than the first Far Cry 5 DLC, Hours of Darkness, perhaps because it’s so much more otherworldly and goofy than the core game. Far Cry 5: Lost on Mars will be available for $10, or as part of the $30

We’ll be sorting through everything once Prime Day hits to highlight the best PC gaming deals we can find. Are there any early Amazon Prime Day deals? Here’s what we’ve found so far:Save 20% off select Amazon Warehouse dealsPrime Members can currently enjoy exclusive discounts in the Amazon Warehouse section of the UK site. This sale ends at 11:59 on Monday July 16th, just before Amazon Prime Day kicks off in full. Amazon Echo Show $129.99 (Prime exclusive)Not exactly the most exciting in terms

Stardew Valley has an enormous variety of crops ranging from cranberries to kale to starfruit. But ‘Smellyhippie_’s’ Cannabis Mod adds six more—and I bet you could guess them just from their username alone. With decriminalization of marijuana becoming common across the States and Canada, it only makes sense that the citizens of Stardew Valley would want the freedom to smoke up as well. Smellyhippie_’s Cannabis Mod adds six crops to Stardew to plant and cultivate, 40 new items, and 37 crafting re

In the meantime, here’s 10 Fortnite pro players you need to pay attention to, in no particular order. In March they plunged headfirst into competitive Fortnite by picking up KingRichard, one of the most promising Fortnite pro players and streamers. Ninja isn’t a Fortnite pro player on paper, but if he wanted to, he could easily become one, and it shows with his impressive performance in Friday Fortnite every week. When he’s not destroying other pros and streamers in tournaments, he’s often found

Anthem executive producer Mark Darrah talked to us about BioWare’s upcoming Destiny-like last month at E3. More recently, he’s continued to answer questions about the game on Twitter, snapping off short answers to quick inquires across a wide range of Anthem-related topics. What GPU was the Anthem E3 demo running on? A lot of it is understandably vague, but there are some usefully specific (or at least interesting) answers in there too. Each class of Javelin has “some form of damage mitigation,”

Yesterday, Kotaku reported that popular Twitch streamer Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, the “shooter wunderkind” we profiled in May, had spent some time playing Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds with a hacker. He rode in a flying car, for instance, and scored at least one kill thanks to being told where an opposing player was hiding. It wasn’t a great idea. It seemed like a great idea. But it wasn’t a great idea.

If you’re looking to build a budget PC, you can get a head start by heading over to Newegg and checking out the Rosewill Orbit-Z1 case. It’s on sale for $59.99 (down from its $99.99 list price) and comes with a Rosewill Fusion C30 keyboard and mouse combo. None of these are top-tier parts by any stretch, but if you’re looking to keep costs low, this is nice starter pack for your build. It’s a mid-tower enclosure with a side window, two RGB fans, and an RGB strip pre-installed. Some online stores

To help make that happen, Samsung has begun mass producing its fifth generation of 3D V-NAND flash memory chips with faster data transfer rates than the previous generation. That’s up from 64 layers in the previous generation. Samsung also reduced the operating voltage from 1.8V to 1.2V to make up for the increased power consumption that the faster interface speed introduces. It also begs the question of how much faster V-NAND matters for moderns PCs. For certain datacenter workloads, faster sto

The majority of gaming mice are ergonomically tailored for right-handed gamers, leaving left-handed users to look for the rare exception, or an ambidextrous rodent. Cooler Master’s new CM310 falls into the latter category, though there’s a caveat. Cooler Master’s “ambidextrous” billing refers to the CM310’s symmetric shape, which the company claims makes it an effective rodent “whether you’re normal or southpaw.” It’s also “specially engineered” for both palm and claw grip styles (Cooler Master

Blizzard has just announced that Hearthstone’s next expansion will be The Boomsday Project, and it’s due to launch on August 7. Headlined by none other than Dr. Boom—aka Dr. 7, and isn’t that fitting given the release date—The Boomsday Project will add 135 new cards, including nine Legendary spells, a host of new Mech minions, and the new keywords Omega and Magnetic. What do those Legendary spells look like? On top of Legendary spells, The Boomsday Project will also add a new spell type: Project