The highsPhil Savage: Rez-urrectedOnce upon a time, Rez was not available on PC. I’m going to dig into why Rez is good (for the most part) in my review next week. Most importantly, it’s a cool bit of games history that now, finally, is available on PC. Tom Senior: International loveThis year’s Dota 2 International tournament concludes tomorrow. Joe Donnelly: Mixed bagThis week was a good one so far as Highs are concerned, so I’m going to overindulge and list more than one.

The first, and last, that we’d heard about the Second World War RTS Sudden Strike 4 came in August of last year, when publisher Kalypso Media announced that it was in the works and targeted for a release in the second quarter of 2017. That didn’t quite work out, but it didn’t miss by much—it’s out now. Sudden Strike 4 is a “fully-fledged series entry and not a remake or reboot,” with three campaigns featuring the Allied, German, and Soviet forces. More than 100 different units are available, and

For Tameem Antoniades, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice’s titular theme of sacrifice hits close to home. Antoniades tells me that he was simply fascinated with the subject in the same way he was fascinated with Hellblade’s Norse aesthetic. But it wasn’t until Antoniades began researching psychosis that he realized what a massive undertaking Hellblade would be. During development of Hellblade, Antoniades and several of the team would interview psychosis patients about their experiences. But with so m

The League of Legends champion Lucian, as described in his official profile, “wields relic weapons imbued with ancient power and stands a stalwart guardian against the undead. Lucian walks alone on a grim mission: to purge the spirits of those ensnared in undeath, his eternal beloved among them.” He also seems to have an affinity for sports, especially soccer, if his Striker Lucian skin is anything to go by. But that skin has landed LoL developer Riot Games in a spot of trouble, as former pro so

Raid: World War 2 was announced earlier this year as a four-player co-op FPS about a team of renegade misfits who go behind the lines in Nazi Germany to conduct daring raids and steal Nazi gold. Details were a little thin at the time, but publisher Starbreeze announced earlier this week that it will be out on September 26, and that the voice of British intelligence officer Control will be provided by none other than John “Don’t Mention the War” Cleese. “The goal in Raid: World War 2 is simple—sa

Everything I’ve heard about LawBreakers, the new online FPS from Cliff Bleszinski’s Boss Key Productions, indicates that it’s very good. The reaction among players on Steam is very positive, too. That’s not a great start, but in a wide-ranging interview with Eurogamer, Bleszinski said he’s not worried. Interestingly, he said that the LawBreakers public alpha was a mistake, because it didn’t properly represent the “full vision” of what he wanted to achieve. It probably comes from a lack of being

But Hellblade isn’t a movie, and in a game, permadeath can be an effective narrative tool. It is a beautifully executed bit of narrative design, game systems and story working in tandem. Dying for a good causeLost in all of this is the purpose of Hellblade’s permadeath as a design choice. Game design is no exception. Hellblade’s permadeath, no matter how it works, should be celebrated for this, not pushed back against without considering its purpose.

Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos was released in 2002, which for those of you who don’t have a calendar handy was roughly 15 years ago. Yet it was just this week that Blizzard announced that it is finally getting its very own public test realm, which Classic Games senior producer Pete Stilwell said will initially be used to test “new Map Pools for 1’s, 2’s, 3’s, 4’s and Free-for-All.” The core game has also been updated with a number of “general improvements and gameplay objectives,” listed below:Bala

Ubisoft put the brakes on the second year of Rainbow Six Siege back in May so it could spend a few months on Operation Health, an effort to fix and upgrade the game to better position it for the long-term future. Poland’s GROM unit, you will recall, was squeezed out of Siege Year Two in order to make room for Operation Health, but individual GROM operators were promised for release as part of seasons three and four. The new map will apparently be set in a theme park: Ubisoft hasn’t said anything

We have plenty of recommendations for racing chairs (and regular chairs), but if you’re looking for something cheap, Rakuten is selling a high-back executive racing model for just $52 (after coupon code 294152339) with free shipping. That is about as cheap as it gets for a racing chair. At that price we don’t expect the quality or comfort to rival that of our top pick, the Vertagear SL5000. According to the product description, the seat measures 19.5 (L) x 20 (W) inches, and the back measures 20

Side panel windows are common among cases, though more recently case makers have been pushing tempered glass. The upgrade normally costs a premium, though BitFenix is bucking the trend with its affordably priced Nova TG. The Nova TG is a mid-tower chassis with a large side tempered glass panel that measures 4mm thick. The Nova TG supports CPU coolers up to 160mm in height and graphics cards up to 280mm long. BitFenix is offering the Nova TG in black or white for $60 (£50).

In this instance, an overclocker who goes by “TheOverclocker” chilled a Threadripper 1950X CPU with LN2 and then pushed all 16 physical cores to 5.37GHz. In theory, that means Threadripper should overclocker a bit better, though things can get tricky when working with higher core counts. Just the other day, we posted an article about an overclocker pushing a Threadripper 1950X CPU to 4.1GHz using a liquid cooler. Getting back to the LN2-cooled chip, TheOverclocker benchmarked the CPU in Cinebenc

EVGA’s latest version of its SC17 gaming laptop now rocks a GeForce GTX 1080 GPU with 8GB of GDDR5X memory and is available for purchase, provided you’re willing to spend three grand on a notebook. The SC17 debuted last year with a 17.3-inch 4K display powered by a GeForce GTX 1070 GPU underneath the hood. EVGA refreshed the SC17 by adding G-Sync support to the IPS panel a few months ago, and now it’s back with upgraded components. If this is the type of gaming laptop you’re after and you have $

Indie devs Bird in the Sky first released an early version of 3030 Deathwar Redux ten years ago. It’s since been reworked with the help of Crunchy Leaf Games, has entered Steam’s Early Access initiative, and now targets a September 13 full release. Billed as an “intergalactic indie epic” that leans on both Elite-esque space exploration and traditional adventure genre slapstick, 3030 Deathwar Redux spans a 30-starred system universe and asks players to complete a range of quests interlaced with b

Just over 12 months since launch, the game awaits its imminent Atlas Rises update—and Hello Games has now announced what we can expect. 30 hours of “new story content”, which includes the appearance of a new “mysterious interdimensional alien race” tops the list, alongside “limited” online co-op. While interaction with others is currently very limited, this is an important first step into the world of synchronous co-op in No Man’s Sky. “While interaction is very limited, VOIP (Voice over IP) all

Its debut venture is digital card game Cultist Simulator. ALEXIS KENNEDY Alexis Kennedy founded Failbetter Games in 2010, and was the mastermind of both Fallen London and survival/exploration RPG Sunless Sea. He left the company last year to pursue freelance work for Paradox, Telltale and BioWare, and, having now set up another studio named Weather Factory, his next project is digital card game Cultist Simulator. To my girlfriend’s consternation, the £5,000 reward is allowing a backer to choose

I played a section of Sonic Mania’s iconic Green Hill Zone earlier this year, but it wasn’t until watching the new Chemical Plant Zone in motion that I got properly excited. Ahead of its PC launch on August 29, Sega has now revealed Mania’s opening sequence. If you’re familiar with the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic series, that sense of nostalgia is about to go into overload. As you might have spied at this year’s PC Gamer Weekender, Sonic Mania targets the early days of Sonic which the above

As predicted, the Katowice leg of the Overwatch World Cup was the most exciting yet. Let’s take a look at some of the best plays from the Katowice qualifiers. Alas, it is South Korea, and they once again seem to be operating on a different level than everyone else. This weekend’s Overwatch World Cup qualifiersThe Overwatch World Cup’s last round of qualifiers will take place from August 11th through August 13th in Santa Monica, California, and will feature the USA, the UK, Israel, Belgium, Germa

Sometimes these issues extend beyond gaming, like when DDOS attacks that started from Minecraft server squabbles took down half the internet. But here’s a terrifying first: we’ve never heard about hackers injecting evil software into DNA to commandeer a computer. They didn’t even do that in the movie Hackers, in which two men literally yell “Hack the planet!!” It’s like getting a trojan from a scuzzy copy of a pirated game, except in this case, the trojan is your own ruined DNA code. We probably

The Arma 3 project teased in March under the mysterious name of “Orange” has been unveiled as a new DLC package called Laws of War, set for release next month. “The idea for the Laws of War package was very much inspired by our relationship with the International Committee of the Red Cross. This began with a presentation from the ICRC to the Arma 3 development team on the topic of International Humanitarian Law a few years ago,” Laws of War project lead Joris-Jan van ‘t Land said. With this DLC,