Ion Maiden is an old-school shooter made in the same Build engine as Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior. On the heels of its reveal, publisher 3D Realms and developer Voidpoint launched Ion Maiden on Steam Early Access today. Starring Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison, the protagonist of 2016’s Bombshell, Ion Maiden is a proudly retro FPS. 3D Realms promises “huge, multi-path levels filled with those famous colorful keycards and plenty of secrets and Easter eggs to discover.” Ion Maiden will not feature

Abandon Ship, which hit Early Access last week, brings us an evil cult, a summoned kraken, and a managerial high seas adventure that will, possibly, be great. The world of Abandon Ship is a web of maps, framed squares of sea which are connected by gates. Opening a gate requires completing certain number of encounters which are discovered by zipping your little ship around and uncovering icons hidden by the fog of war. Abandon Ship is less economical with space and time than FTL was. I’m excited

In The Blackout Club, some teenagers have been waking up in different parts of their hometown, covered in dirt or with blood under their fingernails, and no memory of what led them there. “The Blackout Club contacts you using a series of emojis that is essentially a code to prevent detection by the adults in town, and you can translate those into text. The team is making The Blackout Club for co-op partly because horror is a social activity—watching scary films or playing scary games with other

H1Z1 is launching out of Early Access today and features a new team-based, cars-only mode called Auto Royale. I was told the price of H1Z1 will not change as it departs Early Access: it’ll still be $20. The battle royale game started off as a popular mode for Sony Online Entertainment’s free-to-play multiplayer survival game, H1Z1. After SOE became Daybreak Game Company, H1Z1 split into two different games: H1Z1: Just Survive (the survival game) and H1Z1: King of the Kill (battle royale). Along

H1Z1 is launching out of Early Access today and features a new team-based, cars-only mode called Auto Royale. I was told the price of H1Z1 will not change as it departs Early Access: it’ll still be $20. The battle royale game started off as a popular mode for Sony Online Entertainment’s free-to-play multiplayer survival game, H1Z1. After SOE became Daybreak Game Company, H1Z1 split into two different games: H1Z1: Just Survive (the survival game) and H1Z1: King of the Kill (battle royale). Along

Whether your fighting flush or guarding your pennies, Humble’s latest gathering of games has something to suit your budget. Well, that’s assuming you like beat ’em ups. If you don’t, you’re as screwed as me playing any beat ’em up in the history of beat ’em ups. Step up to the bundle’s ‘pay more than average’ weight division—$5.59 at the time of writing (£4.02 or thereabouts)—and face-off with Street Fighter X Tekken and Arcana Heart 3 LOVE MAX!!!!! Graduate to the bundle’s main card by paying $

I’ve never built a full PC from scratch, but I feel like a right engineering genius every time I open a PC up and stick in some extra memory or a new graphics card. If you want to get that feeling without having to shell out for some expensive tech, or face all the dust that’s been collecting since the last time you opened the case, then you might want to take a look at PC Building Simulator, a game that pretty much introduces itself. We invited developer The Irregular Corporation to show off, a

Battle Princess Madelyn is Causal Bit Games’ debut project, a modern throwback to Ghosts ‘n Ghouls-era platformers that accrued three times its Kickstarter ask last April. As director and CEO, Christopher Obritsch shoulders most of the work. His boss, however, is his seven-year-old daughter Maddi. Which is partly why Battle Princess Madelyn is filled with fantastical boss characters—not least giant crabs and trees and spiders and boars, all of which feature in the following boss montage:SHOW ME

Haemimont Games’ imminent Surviving Mars will give me a chance to prepare for it beforehand—you know, should NASA run out of astronauts and have to resort to sending unfit games journalists out on its galactic expeditions. You’ve already seen Evan Lahti play Surviving Mars for 13 of our Earth minutes, but ahead of its release on March 15, developer Haemimont Games joined us at the PC Gamer Weekender to offer a little more detail about its open-ended city-building strategy game. Hopefully this wi

The battle royale mode for Fortnite is getting jetpacks soon, which is great news because jetpacks improve everything. But does Fortnite actually need jetpacks? The game already lets you take flight, though only the most skilled (or lucky) will ever manage to do so. During a recent livestream, Fortnite streamer BullNizzle managed to board a collaborator’s airborne rocket and, while boarded, quick scope a nearby foe. But then, according to the Storm Shield One stats page, he has won 476 games, wi

Somme starts off interesting by opting for the somewhat maligned Conquest Assault mode variation instead of the more nonlinear Conquest. The trenches in Somme are one of BF1’s best vehicles for strong memories. Somme’s trenches are some of the most developed of any Battlefield map, easily reaching past head height and narrowing the outside world to cloudy skies. I’ve collected similar experiences in other Battlefield maps, but the trenches in Somme are one of BF1’s best vehicles for strong memor

Prepare to spend a lot of Vermintide 2 on the ground until you get real good. Below, a dwarf, a knight, and James talk about the harsh welcome of Vermintide 2’s first few hours. But my initial impression of Vermintide 2 is that Recruit should be a lot easier. I want to love Vermintide 2 (and I already kind of do), but I’m apprehensive about how bloody difficult it is. Wes: I think what I’m most excited about—which I didn’t get to touch in the beta at all—is Vermintide 2’s talent system.

Not only do you need the stomach for it, but developers aren’t always the best at making evil choices feel as nuanced and satisfying as their morally righteous counterparts. That’s why we forced some of our writers into the confession booth to finally fess up about their favorite evil decisions in PC gaming. Tyranny – Hush little babyTo be fair, Tyranny is an RPG that has no real shortage of evil choices to be made—you do murder millions of people in the introduction alone, after all. I don’t th

By my calculations, that places it four years after the original Defiance game, which was actually a tie-in to the Syfy television series. “Defiance 2050 has been created with the original game’s community in mind,” producer Matt Pettit said in the announcement. Defiance 2050 marks a shift for the game that goes beyond the change from the year 2046 to 2050, and we are absolutely thrilled to hear what people think of it.” Defiance 2050 may be more of a remake than a proper sequel, but setting it

You may remember Hellscreen from an article Austin wrote last year: it’s a stylish, retro, reflex-oriented FPS with a bloody rearview mirror. And while the bloody rearview mirror is cool, I’m more drawn to the hellish sci-fi colour palette, which kinda reminds me of the latter episodes of vanilla Doom, crossed with, uh, Dark Forces. “We wanted to put Hellscreen on Kickstarter because we want to devote ourselves full time to realise its vision,” the Kickstarter page reads. “If successful, the Kic

The video is a fairly basic overview of Mechwarrior combat, which Battletech creator Jordan Weisman describes as similar in many ways to that of XCOM. “There’s all sorts of different kinds of tactical combinations between the mechs and the mechwarriors, and what their different capabilities are. Do I have, this one is going to be my long-rage scouter and then be able to fire in remotely? Am I trying to do brawlers who can really go in and use melee?” Battletech is available for preorder now on S

DeepCool has taken things a step further, however, by designing frameless RGB smart fan set that hooks into your wireless network. DeepCool’s new MF120 set comes with three fans and a controller for them to plug into to. “Its unique frameless design together with double-layer blade can generate positive air pressure and deliver maximum airflow with zero hindrance from the fan structure. The PWM fans can be active between a silent 500 rpm up-to a hefty 2200 rpm,” DeepCool explains . The fans will

If you’re looking for a computer case with a tempered glass side panel and don’t want to spend big bucks on one, take a look at the Phanteks Eclipse P400S (PH-EC416PSTG_BK). This “silent edition” carries a $90 MSRP, but can be had for $52.50 on Newegg today. Use promo code PPSALE18 at checkout to save 10 percent, and then take advantage of the $15 mail-in-rebate. In addition to using tempered glass, the case has a built-in RGB lighting controller, 3-speed fan controller, and sound proofing panel

The Colony, you see, fires “insectoid robot grenades” that track enemies and explode when they come in proximity. Normal and Prestige Nightfalls now have scoring, with points earned through kills and orb generation, and high scores displayed on each Nightfall strike’s emblem. Challenge cards will drop for Curse of Osiris owners in both the normal and Prestige Nightfall modes. Crucible, Destination, and Nightfall emblem variants that track kills in various categories can be purchased from vendors

I first saw Hyperbolic Magnetism’s Beat Saber on Twitter. Someone retweeted the 30-second video of the VR rhythm game above and I was hooked immediately. Ján Ilavský, the lead developer on Beat Saber, initially came up with the idea after he bought an HTC Vive and was dissatisfied with the rhythm games on offer. Beat Saber looks extremely promising. “In March last year, we stopped working on Beat Saber, because we didn’t know how to move forward.