You can count me among the idiots who would happily play a new Dark Souls game every year until the sun finally explodes, so I’m watching Code Vein with interest. In case you hadn’t heard, Code Vein is Bandai Namco’s forthcoming action RPG which – let’s be perfectly frank – basically just looks like anime Dark Souls. The gameplay video below is a brief look at the combat, taking place in two different environments. The first is more heavily reminiscent of PS4-exclusive Nioh, to be honest, but th

Summer Games Done Quick has officially kicked off, just in time to spend the first half of your working week surreptitiously watching people play video games in a tiny browser window. The seasonal speedrunning event is a fundraising drive for Doctors Without Borders, but it’s also a good oppportunity to watch virtuosic gamers slay world records. While the schedule is by no means limited to just PC games (Nintendo is typically prominent), there are some good games scheduled. It runs until next Su

I’m not going to lie to you; you’re building a system that pumps water through connections that you have assembled yourself. In the fours years since I first discovered the joys of custom water cooling, I’ve had just one leak and it was entirely my own fault. This brings me to the most important rule of water cooling: take your time and double check everything. If you follow these very simple rules water cooling can be a very fun and safe hobby. Finally, if you’re still too concerned and decide

If you’re at a loose end this afternoon, why not explore a big chunk of the world via fun new browser game Wikipedia: The Text Adventure. It converts Wikipedia into, well, a text adventure, complete with environmental descriptions and images drawn from Jimmy Wales’ ambitious human-history database. Each location even includes the corresponding Wikipedia image, which has been squashed down and jettisoned of extraneous colours, so that it looks convincingly 8-bit-ish. In each location, you can EXA

Cast your mind back to 2016, and you might remember a little adventure game named The Lion’s Song, which released the second of its four chapters at around Christmas time. I appear to have missed the launch of episode 3, but here’s news that the fourth and final chapter of The Lion’s Song will release in a couple of weeks, on July 13. ‘Closure’ will wrap up the series in the traditional pre-war manner: with a nice old-fashioned, ruddy mysterious train journey. train journey that connects the sto

Dragon Ball FighterZ stole the spotlight at E3 for me, and the over-the-top anime fighting game is appearing at another big event next month. Evo announced that it will be playable at the tournament, and organizer Joey “Mr. Wizard” Cuellar revealed that the build of Dragon Ball FighterZ present at Evo will, at the very least, feature the recently revealed Future Trunks. But FighterZ won’t be the only game playable at Evo. April Fools Day 2017 brought us a lot of jokes, but it was also the day Ar

Hearthstone players will soon be able to purchase every set that’s been released for the game. As of now, only packs from the current and last sets are available to buy. In the main Standard format, you’re only allowed to make decks using cards from the previous two calendar years. If you’d like to see what Wild is all about, you can check out the first big Blizzard-sponsored tournament right now. We’re into Day 1 of the Wild Open, which is all about the quarterfinals—the semis and finals happen

People seem to be enjoying roguelike-ish, Metroidvania-esque platformer Dead Cells, and if you count yourself among their number, perhaps because you got a whopping saving on the game a few days ago, you might be pleased to hear that it’s just received a new update that adds a brand new, mysterious biome, and more. The ‘Hello Darkness’ update whacks in that new biome, of which developer Motion Twin is being enigmatically, mysteriously cagey: “Some say it will get you nowhere but six feet under…

Thanks to Beyond Skyrim – Bruma, a massive Skyrim mod that releases today, you can now revisit Bruma and its surroundings some 200 years later, to a time when returning dragons are one of the main talking points. As Chris mentioned last month, Beyond Skyrim – Bruma is the first part of the Beyond Skyrim – Cyrodiil project, which aims to recreate all of Oblivion’s Cyrodiil inside Skyrim, while moving the time period forward so that it’s contemporaneous with the fifth Elder Scrolls. Version 1.0 of

Earlier this week I wrote a feature outlining the nagging worries I have about Destiny 2’s design, a game I am otherwise almost uncomfortably excited about playing. According to an E3 interview game director Luke Smith gave to Mashable, all the gear in the game—i.e. “There aren’t random rolls on weapons anymore,” Smith said. “Better Devils is a Crucible hand cannon [in Destiny 2], and what it has on it is what it has on it. Check out this exchange between Smith and Datto, a prominent Destiny You

It’s a game about a hard-punching knight—the Fight Knight, as you may have guessed—who embarks upon a quest to ascend “the Tower” armed with nothing but his clenched, armored fists. “Fight Knight is a mix between a first person dungeon crawler and a high speed action game. Players spend their time ascending a massive Tower, learning the story of Fight Knight and getting to know friend and foe alike,” the Kickstarter pitch says. “Along the way they’ll solve puzzles, collect artifacts and help Fig

This article was originally published during the 2016 Steam Summer Sale, and has been refreshed for 2017. Steam sales: the wonderful, terrible times when PC gamers around the world struggle to keep their wallets safe from the allure of discounted games. Every Steam sale brings with it hundreds of great games on sale for absurdly cheap prices, but even among those deals there are standouts: those deals that simply seem too good to be true. After picking out some of our favorite games from the mos

We reported yesterday on a rumor that planned story DLC for Mass Effect: Andromeda had been canceled because of the tepid response to the game and the changes that have taken place at BioWare as a result. Until today, that is, when Kotaku reported that the hoax actually got it right: According to three sources “familiar with BioWare’s plans,” Andromeda will not get any single-player DLC. It’s disappointing, but the really frustrating thing for Mass Effect fans right now is that BioWare and EA st

As a bonus, enemy remains appear as chunks of pink torso that make the game look like a big gross buffet. Nevertheless, I’m happy for the Chiliad Mystery crew for the dedication they’ve shown in cracking this case over several years. Monsters, that’s whoIt’s been quite a week for my specialist subject of semi-competitive card games. Meanwhile, in a high beamed from the future, I’m off to Shanghai next week to watch Hearthstone’s Spring Championship. I hope it’s clear this isn’t my high of the we

But what if you could take all the modern innovations of a game like Path of Exile and bring them to Diablo 2? Created by GreenDude, Path of Diablo is one of the most popular and active D2 custom servers. The mod adds some awesome quality of life features to Diablo 2 like an expanded inventory and Path of Exile’s loot filters. Drawing inspiration from Path of Exiles’ robust skill system, Path of Diablo introduces tons of tweaks to every class. One other major addition is a complete reworking of

Pity Skyrim’s humble courier. He’s charged with tracking you down in an incredibly dangerous fantasy world to deliver notes, letters, and quest instructions. Thankfully, celebrated Skyrim modder Arthmoor has stepped in with an equal dose of mod skills and empathy, and the Provincial Courier Service mod is the result, giving our favorite letter-carrier a proper home and base of operations. Okay, it’s not a palace, just a humble abode, but we can all agree the fellow deserves it. You’ll find the c

Blizzard has announced the newest playable character coming soon to Heroes of the Storm: StarCraft’s Alexi Stukov, a Terran vice admiral who was killed, reanimated, and infested by the Zerg. In Heroes of the Storm, Stukov is a Support hero that can heal allies and slow and silence enemies. His Q ability infests an allied hero with a Healing Pathogen that heals over time and can spread to nearby teammates, subsequently healing them as well. Massive Shove has no maximum range, meaning that enemies

H1Z1: King of the Kill’s latest update introduces a bunch of tweaks, changes, and additions to Daybreak’s battle royale shooter. Most notably for those who enjoy playing with friends, team scoring has arrived, which will display alongside individual performances at the end of the match. A new skirmish mode has been added, which takes place at night and is restricted to the Pleasant Valley area only. Team scoringMatch end screens have been completely reconfigured to show individual and team perfo

The LawBreakers open beta kicked off earlier today, meaning that anyone with a capable PC, an internet connection, and a bit of free time can take Cliff Bleszinski’s new team-based, gravity-optional FPS for a spin. The beta will include a new map called Vertigo, “a high-altitude reconnaissance outpost with near suborbital elevation” set in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and a new CTF-style mode called Uplink. There’s also a new Weapon Stickers customization feature in the beta, complete with a spe

Here’s an unexpected twist: Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Oculus VR and the creator of the Oculus Rift, recently pledged $2000 per month to the Patreon for the CrossVR project that’s developing Revive—the software that enables the use of Oculus-exclusive software of the HTC Vive headset. Revive first came to our attention in April 2016 as a “proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR.” It wasn’t perfect, as you’d expect from that sort of early-development software, but