In its recent history, Xbox has accomplished few esteemed deeds worth commemorating. Even as it attempts to pivot into a new era under new CEO Asha Sharma, it's still suffering from the fallout of a persistent strategic malaise, having achieved little more in the current decade than acquiring a sizable chunk of the games industry just to lay it off, spinning up a games subscription service that served as a division-wide money pit, and briefly insisting that everything is an Xbox before realizing that gave everyone a reason not to own an Xbox.

Now, as its new leadership seems poised for another round of sweeping layoffs and studio closures, Microsoft's gaming division has released a set of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 ads—spotted by Resetera user CloseTalker—that distill its years of dysfunction into one embarrassing disclaimer: "NOT ON XBOX GAME PASS THIS YEAR."

According to the Meta ad library, the ads in question started running across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads on June 27. In a vacuum, the business decision clarified in their series-standard tactical coolguy font is a defensible one: In April, Xbox announced that Call of Duty games would no longer appear on Game Pass at launch after reporting emerged in October that the service had generated an estimated $300 million loss in sales of Black Ops 6.

Presumably, that's because giving people an option to pay for a month of Game Pass instead of your best-selling series means you sell a lot fewer copies of your best-selling series. Especially once customers lose patience with the service's prior habit of maddening pricing tiers, increasing subscription costs, and arcane restrictions.

It's no surprise, then, that dropping CoD from Game Pass and lowering its pricing demands has led to improved revenue growth for the service. But while delaying new CoD entries' addition to Game Pass libraries until a year after launch should help sales figures, the fact that ads must now disclaim YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS ONE NORMAL-STYLE instead of 137 NEW WEAPON ATTACHMENTS or whatever feels like a surrender, brought about by pathologically confused brand messaging that hasn't improved under the new regime. We used to have FAQs for these kinds of things.

But hey, at least we're clear on how many of the letters in "Xbox" should be capitalized in official communications.

In a new episode of Nightdive's Deep Dive podcast, host Locke Vincent, producer Daniel Grayshon, and studio head Stephen Kick got into some of the more granular details of Thief: The Dark Project Remastered, including that they brought on an original Looking Glass artist, Daniel Thron, to help revamp Thief's cutscenes.

"We have one of the original artists back who did work on the original game," said Grayshon. "When you look at the cutscenes [in the 1998 release], they're in a very low resolution, have a limited frame rate. But now, we have the original artist back, and he's really helping us nail down that look.

"It looks the same, but 4K⁠—so much better. The animation is smoother. I don't think there would be anybody⁠—and I'm making a bold prediction saying this⁠—I don't think anybody would be unhappy with what we're doing."

I reached out to Vincent via email, and he confirmed that Grayshon was specifically referring to former Looking Glass developer Daniel Thron. In addition to directing, animating, and producing art for Thief's cutscenes, Thron was one of three primary artists credited on Thief alongside Robb Waters and lead artist Mark Lizotte.

Thron also voiced a number of characters throughout the game⁠. Devs pulling double duty on VO was a thrifty practice of Looking Glass' that I've always found charming, Thron in particular did great work, and it also lead to iconic performances by writer/designer Terri Brosius (Viktoria, Shodan).

So it sounds like the cutscenes are in good hands. Thief has a deliciously '90s intro movie and full cutscenes at a few key story beats, all in this very distinctive, 2D-animated style⁠. I've never seen anything else quite like it.

In addition to fully animated cutscenes, there are Thief's essential mission briefings narrated by Garrett himself, the inimitable Stephen Russell. The parchment illustration motion graphics of these sequences could also use some love from Thron and the team.

The cutscenes and briefings all helped contribute to Thief's one of a kind atmosphere, but have been stuck at primeval resolutions since 1998. Thief itself ran at 480p, but one cutscene upscaling mod on the Thief Nexus cites the cutscenes as running all the way down at 320x240 and 15 fps.

I'm elated to hear of Thron's involvement, but I was never really worried about the cutscenes in the first place. Nightdive already showed its command of the Dark Engine and Looking Glass' visual style in the System Shock 2 remaster.

What's more, that remaster did a phenomenal job of recreating Shock 2's own pre-rendered cutscenes⁠ in a "the same, but better" manner, as Grayshon put it. Retired Nightdive VP Larry Kuperman informed me that this was also done without the use of AI upscaling.

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered might be my most anticipated game of the coming months: It currently has a release window of "this winter," which I'm hoping lands more toward the "this December" end of things rather than "next February."

It's been established that Doom can run on produce, but porting wizardry doesn't start and end with blasting cacodemons on increasingly ludicrous hardware setups. It's sometimes the simple things that stick out most, like this web browser port of Half-Life 2. Not as silly as potatoes, but impressive all the same.

It's got some kinks—my frames are a mite inconsistent and certain animations seem to be broken—but it is, in fact, Half-Life 2 in the browser. You can play the game as normal, use console commands, and send your working hours down the drain with a spot of entertainment slightly more sophisticated than the average Flash game.

The project has garnered lots of attention thanks to a post on X from Gabe Follower, which states it was "created by Slqnt and 98006 in just three months." A follow-up post shared that the project was based on a similar browser port of the original Portal, just in case you don't have enough browser-based Valve gaming in your life yet. Maybe try and get through these while waiting to respawn in Deadlock.

Fans seem happy that the game is playable in a new, novel setting. A reply on X from ripplesworld reads, "Shit gonna go triple platinum in middle schools nationwide." The less-convinced HivoltageCS replied, "I don’t think the children are playing half-life anymore, bro."

Either way, it's neat to see a big Source engine FPS running in a tab on my browser. Maybe Half-Life 2 can be the next thing programmers get running on potatoes, earbuds, pregnancy tests, and whatever else is lying around in a given programmer's house. I assume that's how they pick this stuff.

When Operation Flashpoint launched in June 2001, it was one of the most ambitious games I'd ever played. One of the earliest military simulators, for me it was significant for being an open world game before the concept of open world games really existed.

Operation Flashpoint's intensely simulated combined-arms warfare took place across massive, freely explorable islands, all at a time when most other first-person shooters had barely crawled out of their corridors. You could drive tanks, fly helicopters, or command entire squads of soldiers. You could even lie down. It was janky. It was ugly. It was harder than a steel-plated honey badger. But it was also light years ahead of its time.

Now, Operation Flashpoint is 25 years old. It's no longer called Operation Flashpoint of course, as that license is lying dead in a ditch somewhere near the Codemasters office. Nonetheless, beneath its new title, ArmA: Cold War Assault remains the same game it ever was, and developer Bohemia Interactive has a bunch of plans to celebrate.

For starters, Cold War Assault is getting a remastered edition, with a rebuilt version of the original Poseidon engine bringing features like widescreen support and improved compatibility for modern machines. The full version of this hasn't been released yet, but there is a demo that offers a "self-contained slice" of the full game. This apparently doubles as a "sanctioned asset pack" that fans are "free to study, modify and build new Arma content from."

To that end, Bohemia has also released the full engine source code over on GitHub. Bohemia notes that "the code has been modernized to C++20, built with CMake and Clang, with cross-platform support for Windows x64 and Linux x64." Bohemia says the license does not extend to the ArmA or Operation Flashpoint trademarks and their logos, so any fork of the engine should clearly define itself as separate from those brands. But otherwise, modders and programmers are free to utilise the code as they wish.

I'm keen to see what the full Remaster looks like. While I've enjoyed all the ArmA games up to this point, there's something about that original Cold War setting that just fits perfectly with the type of game ArmA is, and I don't think Bohemia has ever bettered it, at least thematically. Players have, of course, had the opportunity to revisit some of Cold War Assault's locations in ArmA Reforger, which recreates islands like Everon in the developer's new engine. ArmA Reforger is also designed as a testbed for ArmA 4, which is supposed to release sometime in 2027.

Steam is an elephant, and we are all trying to describe it blindfolded. To bring order to this economic chaos, I have curated a list of must-play games—indies, cult hits, no brainer classics, all ones I like personally—that are $5 or cheaper in the 2026 Summer Sale.

Five bucks is my threshold for "not a big deal," and unless the economy is even worse than I thought, it's likely yours too. If you got everything on this list together, it would be about $100 total, which is none too shabby for 31 games.

RPG

Divinity: Original Sin

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: Larian
• Released: 2014
• PCG Review: 87%

The start of modern Larian. I'm more bullish about its comedic tone and lighter story than a lot of other RPG fans, but no one can deny that it's still got genre-leading turn-based combat, even as the studio has only improved on its own work.

Divinity 2

• Sale Price: $2.99
• Developer: Larian
• Released: 2009
• PCG Review: I know we did I just can't find it

No, not Divinity: Original Sin 2. Despite some of the worst self-inflicted SEO out there, Divinity 2 is well-worth revisiting to this day. It's a relic of a different time, when Larian was following BioWare's lead rather than setting its own pace, resulting in something that visually calls to mind Dragon Age: Origins, but plays more like, I dunno, Jade Empire? That attempt at console-ization does make it a bit more approachable than Larian's other pre-Original Sin work these days.

Divine Divinity

• Sale Price: $0.89
• Developer: Larian
• Released: 2002
• PCG Review: 84%

Notable as perhaps the purest expression of Larian's vision for RPGs before the first Original Sin, Divine Divinity arrived at the tail end of the CRPG's late '90s golden age. Even at this early stage, you can still enjoy the studio's unique sensibility, and it's an important text for anyone with an interest in the history of RPGs.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

• Sale Price: $3.59
• Developer: Owlcat
• Released: 2018
• PCG Review: 69%

A deranged, cruel, and irresistible RPG. Wrath of the Righteous and Rogue Trader are perhaps better introductions to Owlcat's work, but Kingmaker still got its hooks into me. I'm not a huge fan of this one's DLC, and honestly recommend skipping it unless you really gotta optimize your builds, so there's no sleight of hand to that $3.59 number.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

• Sale Price: $4.99
• Developer: Owlcat
• Released: 2021
• PCG Review: 76%

One of my favorite games of the 2020s, a vexing RPG with one of the deepest class systems I've ever seen, as well as some truly aggravating encounters. Still somehow a gentler and easier to grasp entry point than Kingmaker, by my reckoning. Unlike Kingmaker, I highly recommend the DLCs, even if it brings us over $5. Please don't tell anyone.

Dragon Age: Origins

• Sale Price: $2.99
• Developer: BioWare
• Released: 2009
• PCG Review: 94%

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened at all.

Dragon Age 2

• Sale Price: $2.99
• Developer: BioWare
• Released: 2011
• PCG Review: 94% (and proud of it, baby)

Copy and paste environments, annoying enemies, a truncated development, and the best script BioWare's ever done. The studio was always better at characters than plot, so trading the hero's journey for something that felt more like three seasons of a TV show was a masterstroke. We may never see its like again.

Dragon Age Inquisition

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: BioWare
• Released: 2014
• PCG Review: 87%

Does anyone else remember the multiplayer for this game? Did I hallucinate that? It was actually pretty brilliant: Repeatable co-op wave survival stuff that felt a lot like Left 4 Dead. It was smothered in its crib by the most deranged monetization I have ever seen anywhere, ever. Paying for gear and classes in a full-price retail game, the hubris is staggering.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

• Sale Price: $3.89
• Developer: Troika
• Released: 2001
• PCG Review: 90%

A crusty game par excellence, a "realheads know" RPG that has never gotten the love it truly deserves. At its most basic level: 2D Fallout with worse combat but even deeper elements of simulation and reactivity, all set in a Forgotten Realms fantasy world going through its industrial revolution. Don't forget Drog Black Tooth's Unofficial Patch.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition

• Sale Price: $4.79
• Developer: BioWare
• Released: 2007 (original) 2021 (remaster)
• PCG Review: Various

Firmly in the "no duh" bucket of games to get, but no matter how many times I see it on sale, the Mass Effect trilogy for five bucks feels special to me. If you are unfamiliar with Mass Effect: Think Bush-era Star Trek, but Kirk is a spec ops commando operator who doesn't play by the rules. Turn off the part of your brain that makes it difficult to talk to strangers about politics and just enjoy yourself.

Disco Elysium

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: ZA/UM
• Released: 2019
• PCG Review: 92%

Still one of the GOATs, and no amount of post-launch creative turmoil can change that. It has been the #1 or #2 game on our Top 100 list every year since it came out, and I think that says a lot.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 - The Sith Lords

• Sale Price: $3.49
• Developer: Obsidian
• Released: 2005
• PCG Review: 87%

Still the best Star Wars story ever told as far as I'm concerned, and if you don't trust me, why not hear out former PC Gamer editor Richard Cobbett instead? Be sure to grab the Sith Lords Restored Content Mod from the Steam Workshop. I'm currently replaying KotOR 2 myself on Steam Deck—I recommend grabbing Gravy's public controller profile to help with some camera wonkiness. I can also vouch for user revonvenom's cutscene crash fix outlined on Reddit.

First Person Shooter (and more!)

Max Payne

• Sale Price: $3.49
• Developer: Remedy
• Released: 2001
• PCG Review: They gotta make these easier to look up, man. It was probably pretty high.

An unassailable classic of a shooter. Max Paynes 2 and 3 improved the storytelling and shooting, but there is a one-of-a-kind atmosphere to be found in the first game's snowy bloodbath.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

• Sale Price: $2.49
• Developer: Remedy
• Released: 2003
• PCG Review: Please email me if you know.

Looking back, this feels like a turning point, when Remedy started getting quirky. One can observe the aspirations of a surreal shared world that we're now seeing come to fruition with the Control-Alan Wake continuum. The level set in the abandoned theme park of a Twin Peaks/Twilight Zone pastiche is an all-timer, and feels like it rhymes with the killer amusement park level in Alan Wake 2.

FEAR

• Sale Price: $1.99
• Developer: Monolith
• Released: 2005
• PCG Review: It's out there, somewhere

One of the original GOATs of bullet time, alongside Max Payne. It's funny: The thing I remember most from coverage at the time was how terrifying it was supposed to be. These days, fans seem to roll their eyes at Alma and stay for the tacticool shootouts. The sheer amounts of lore introduced by later games certainly didn't help.

Cruelty Squad

• Sale Price: $1.99
• Developer: Consumer Softproducts
• Released: 2021
• PCG Review: 93%

A game that still feels like the future of FPSes, five years on. It's abrasive, complex, and singular, despite tons of indie shooters cribbing off its notes in the intervening years. Thief or Hitman-style "real place" level design, but with zippy, movement-heavy shooting and some of the best level secrets and hidden stuff of any game.

Deus Ex: Invisible War

• Sale Price: $1.74
• Developer: Ion Storm
• Released: 2004
• PCG Review: 92%

A game doomed by circumstance: Virtually everything that made Invisible War feel inferior to Deus Ex was a result of console compromise design on behalf of the then-cutting edge Xbox. It's still an entertaining immersive sim nonetheless, as well as a work of sci fi storytelling that feels fresh and prescient to this day. All the love to the Eidos Montreal games, but Deus Ex and Invisible War are simply smarter works of science fiction.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

• Sale Price: $2.49
• Developer: Arkane
• Released: 2006
• PCG Review: 88%

Still the best kick in gaming, an all-time piece of melee combat design at the heart of one of the most slapstick games ever made. Dark Messiah's booby trap and bottomless pit-laden arenas still make it one of the GOATs of physics as gameplay. Even Arkane itself has never managed to fully recapture this aspect of Dark Messiah in its excellent later work.

Chop Goblins

• Sale Price: $1.99
• Developer: David Szymanski
• Released: 2022
• PCG Review: N/A

A snack of an FPS that still managed to steal my heart. It's the only boomer shooter David Szymanski has made since the much-beloved Dusk, and it has a similarly impish, pitch-black sense of humor. Chop Goblins' levels are few, but substantial, with tons of secrets and side paths. This is a great game to get with a friend too, thanks to its time trial-centric replayability and global leaderboard.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

• Sale Price: $1.64
• Developer: Headfirst Productions
• Released: 2006
• PCG Review: I know we did.

One of the jankiest commercial products ever made with Valve's Source Engine, a game I and many others can't help but love despite its many, many flaws. The more horror and adventure-focused early areas alone are worth at least two bucks, before it all devolves into mediocre shooting.

Arx Fatalis

• Sale Price: $1.64
• Developer: Arkane
• Released: 2002
• PCG Review: 85%

Where it all began for Arkane. Arx Fatalis is a prickly, complicated game that rewards patience. The one of a kind atmosphere and attention to detail in its underground society make it an all-time videogame locale for me, with the trappings of "normal" medieval fantasy life desperately masking the harsh reality of an existence deep below the surface. This is all that remains of a world whose sun went dark just outside living memory.

Star Wars: Dark Forces 3 - Jedi Knight 2—Jedi Outcast

• Sale Price: $3.49
• Developer: Raven Software
• Released: 2002
• PCG Review: 91%

The fourth game in the Dark Forces series of FPSes and the second game in the Jedi Knight series of hybrid FPS/lightsaber combat games. Jedi Knight proved a strong foundation, but Raven produced a style of FPS-inflected lightsaber combat that's never been replicated, and only recently, arguably been matched by Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor.

Star Wars: Dark Forces 4 - Jedi Knight 3—Jedi Outcast 2; Jedi Academy

• Sale Price: $3.49
• Developer: Raven Software
• Released: 2003
• PCG Review: 70%

Jedi Outcast's even better sequel. About the only thing that took a dip was the storytelling, and even then, Outcast was hardly Shakespeare. Otherwise? You get your lightsaber from the get-go, and while Outcast's levels could be hit-or miss visually and from a design perspective, every stage of Academy is a heater with some Star Wars juice. My favorites are probably the early train mission, Darth Vader's castle, and the late game Jedi tomb complex.

Uncategorized esoterica

Blasphemous

• Sale Price: $2.49
• Developer: The Game Kitchen
• Released: 2019
• PCG Review: 70%

Bloodborne, but it's a 2D platformer trading Cthulhu for Catholicism. The Game Bakers took inspiration from early modern Spain to produce something truly captivating and unique in Blasphemous' visuals and story.

Card Shark

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: Nerial
• Released: 2022
• PCG Review: 86%

The original "deckbuilder" was actually getting caught cheating at lansquenet during the ancien régime then killed in a duel. Aside from a wonderful setting that's underrepresented in games, Card Shark boasts a swashbuckling story and unique core mechanic: Actually cheating at cards with complicated controller combos.

Norco

• Sale Price: $4.94
• Developer: Geography of Robots
• Released: 2022
• PCG Review: 94%

An utterly haunting point and click adventure set in a cyberpunk Louisiana even closer to climate oblivion than the one in real life. Beautifully written, memorable, and boasting some of the most gorgeous images anyone's ever made in pixel art.

Iron Lung

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: David Szymanski
• Released: 2022
• PCG Review: N/A

The movie the game.

Hypnospace Outlaw

• Sale Price: $4.99
• Developer: Tendershoot, Michael Lasch, ThatWhichIs Media
• Released: 2019
• PCG Review: 81%

Explore the internet I wish we had, a surreal, psychedelic expanse of GeoCities-esque webpages where something strange is afoot. Hypnospace remains one of the best "desktop simulation" games, even as others have attempted their own spin on the concept.

Halls of Torment

• Sale Price: $4.99
• Developer: Chasing Carrots
• Released: 2024
• PCG Review: 90%

Still my favorite Vampire Survivors-style game, which dresses the familiar format in the clothes of classic Diablo. I hit a wall of all the objectives and questlines I felt like completing a long time ago, but I still keep this one on my Steam Deck to noodle around in whenever I get that itch.

FlyKnight

• Sale Price: $4.79
• Developer: Wabbaboy
• Released: 2025
• PCG Review: N/A

Tons of indie devs are turning their hands to homages of FromSoftware's foundational King's Field series, but I've always loved how focused FlyKnight is. I beat it in about six hours, but it still sticks with me. Already a steal at six bucks, a 20% discount has made it relevant to this list of recommendations on an arguable technicality.

Divinity: Dragon Commander

• Sale Price: $3.99
• Developer: Larian
• Released: 2013
• PCG Review: 85%

I'm not much of an RTS guy, but this one lets you hop on the back of a dragon and intervene in the fights, which I've always thought was sick. I wish more strategy games would let me do this, just go Dynasty Warriors mode on a line of Napoleonic Musketeers in Total War or something.

Back in 2025, Starbreeze turned its venerable heist-shooter Payday 2 over to a new studio, Sidetrack Games, so it could focus exclusively on trying to salvage the still-struggling Payday 3. Today we got our first look at the fruits of those efforts, and it's big news—not for Payday 3, to be clear, but for Payday 2, which is getting a major overhaul to its game engine.

The engine update will see Payday 2 ported to a 64-bit architecture, which should eliminate out-of-memory crashes that have persisted over the years, and upgraded to DirectX 11 rendering—that won't make the game look any better but it will use significantly less VRAM and thus run better on lower-end hardware. The install size has also been reduced by more than half, from 86GB to 32GB.

The downside to all of this will sound familiar: As Leon from Sidetrack Games says in the video, "Sadly, it's inevitable that some mods will break." He encouraged mod makers to "repair what can be repaired" during the beta test for the engine upgrade, and promised that "we will be there to help out with new file formats where we can."

And yes, there will be a beta test for those who want to check out the engine overhaul before it's fully cooked: It's set to start on June 30 and run until the end of July, and will be open to everyone who wants in. Details on that—including how to get in, I would assume—will be posted on the 30^th.

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For now, the pressing question is the same as it ever was: What does this mean for Payday 3? Payday 2 continues to fly high on Steam while its supposed successor lags far behind with a small fraction of players.

And while shunting Payday 2 off to Sidekick was ostensibly meant to enable Starbreeze to "focus on Payday as a whole and Payday 3 in particular," all we've really seen since then from the newer game are crossovers with PUBG and Roblox, and the launch of peer-to-peer support—which is always good, yes, but also makes me wonder if Starbreeze is weighing whether those dedicated servers it's maintaining are really worth it. As we said when the Payday game in Roblox went live, Starbreeze hasn't declared Payday 3 dead yet, but it sure does seem to be paying a lot of attention to other things.

EA's had a hard time juggling Battlefield 6 since launch. It was a record-breaking release for the series, but it quickly dropped off amid frustrations over map design, gunplay, and its seasonal structure.

Six months later, the team was hit with layoffs. Since then, we've been living in the 'we've heard your feedback' era, with Battlefield Studios promising seven new maps in 2026, including the remakes of your old favourites. While the playerbase seemingly hasn't recovered (at least looking at Steam concurrents), the community has perked up.

And the developers have just announced one of the biggest changes yet: overhauls to gunplay coming in update 1.3.3 on Tuesday, June 30. It's looking to address all of the complaints we've had with Battlefield 6 since launch. "Growing a game like this means more than just adding content: it’s about revisiting your initial vision and having honest conversations about how it should change," the blog reads.

Firstly, all of your weapons will feel different. Random bullet deviation is officially out (well, "significantly" reduced), and more predictable recoil patterns unique to each gun are being introduced instead. Guns will also have a greater spread while holding the trigger down to encourage burst and tap firing, and bullet velocity is being decreased.

It's exactly what I wanted back at launch, and should make each weapon much more distinct, especially at range—right now, lots of them kinda blur together, or there's one weapon that's the obvious choice.

My favourite change is the introduction of limb damage to the series at long last. Limb and lower torso shots will deal less damage, generally increasing the shots to kill in most firefights. However, headshot multipliers are going to be increased to compensate. So, you'll be more rewarded for hitting enemies in their centre of mass, and especially in the head.

Of course, this will be more felt at longer ranges, demanding more precision while close-range time-to-kill remains almost unchanged.

"Our TTK benchmark in close-quarters runs between 200 and 300 milliseconds for automatic primary weapons, similar to the TTK in Battlefield 3 and 4, but with some room for outliers. This is key to allowing players to have a chance when they're outnumbered," the developers explain.

Snipers in particular are getting significant changes to make them more distinguishable. The one-hit 'sweet spot' range for most snipers overlapped and was far too generous, so they're being tinkered with.

These new overhauls come as part of the developer's new 'Battlefield Combat' series of behind-the-scenes blogs aimed at improving the core pillars. This, of course, starts with the gunplay tweaks I've outlined above, but the developers mention that future updates will tackle vehicle play, gadgets, and more. It sounds like more ground-level changes are in the works.

After a year of struggling to pull in players, the PvPvE game Wildgate is calling it quits. Game director Dustin Browder said in a Steam update posted today that despite the best efforts of developer Moonshot Games, "Wildgate hasn’t found a large enough audience to sustain ongoing development," and so it's ending further updates.

"Wildgate is not going away," Browder wrote. "Wildgate will continue to receive occasional updates like bug fixes, balance updates, and small events, activations or rewards that generally repurpose existing content. And new players will still be able to buy the game on all platforms

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(Steam, EGS, Xbox, and PS)—and we plan on participating in as many sales and discounts as we can."

Despite landing with unmistakable finality, Browder appeared to leave the door open for a comeback, writing that the new patch coming in July will be the game's "last big patch for a while." The update also aims to ensure "you can keep playing," with changes including additional information on game modes, additional player-controlled options for custom modes, new sprays and items in the in-game store, and a range of balance changes and bug fixes.

It's not clear how the end of Wildgate development will impact Moonshot Games. Browder said "a small core team will keep an eye on servers," but "community management and player support for the game will be reduced," and the Wildgate Discord will be turned over to members of the community. That doesn't sound good for the future of Moonshot, but a spokesperson told PC Gamer that layoffs are not planned.

"All of us at Moonshot put a lot of love into Wildgate as well as the community that has formed around it," the rep said. "The core Wildgate team will continue to spend some time reviewing issues and supporting the game long-term.

"No layoffs are planned. Members of the Moonshot team are transitioning from Wildgate to work on new projects. We're not ready to talk about them yet, but we're excited to share with players when the time is right."

It's an unfortunate but not really surprising outcome for yet another multiplayer shooter trying and failing to find space in an overcrowded genre. Wildgate showed early promise but couldn't quite stick the landing: "It's one of the most creative shooters I've played in a while, but at times I think the entire concept is better on paper than it is as a game," Tyler Colp wrote in his 60% review.

"At its best, Wildgate can create an entire story arc as your team rises in power, overcomes unforeseen obstacles, and eventually beats the odds. At its worst, Wildgate gives you 30-minute slogs where nobody is quite sure what to do until another more coordinated team dismantles your ship before you can even react."

And while Wildgate was pretty well received by players on Steam, where it holds a "mostly positive" user rating, the audience tailed away quickly after launch, and despite multiple subsequent updates including PvE-focused modes and the launch of a free trial version, it never came back. Hopefully the studio will have better luck with its next endeavour.

I know my Doom, and its many derivatives. I've been covering it for years. It has almost never left my PC in over three decades, so I do not say this lightly. End of Starchild—a completely free, standalone game from prolific musician and indie dev Em Essex—might be the single coolest thing built on Doom's venerable, time-tested foundations.

Play it.

If that's not enough to convince you to download a whole 36 megabytes of game, then how about this; End Of Starchild (standalone sequel to 2021's Time Tripper, which you should also play) is Doom refined and polarized into a finely tuned, ultra-stylish bullet hell arcade game. It's a brisk six levels of blasting through ornate eldritch environments at ludicrous speeds (even faster than Doomguy's 60mph sprint), weaving through blankets of shmup-styled neon bullets thrown your way by an all-new cast of enemies. They each drop single-use consumable sub-weapons, adding an improvisational edge to the action.

Every map feels truly distinct, with a distinct aesthetic, pacing and rhythm, from dancing between ambushes in the wings of a surprisingly cozy cult library complex to a psychedelic neon arena rave accompanied by chaotic battle-chatter. It's bookended by gorgeous animated title cards for each level ("Her Warm Words In Winter" is a hell of a name for a Doom map), and after each sortie you return to your protagonist's inner-city apartment, which gradually fills up with unlockable decor and unsettling yet poetic letters in your mailbox.

The weapons are familiar, for the most part, but punchier than their OG counterparts. The shotgun (singular) hits like a truck. The machine gun deals more damage if you keep the fire button held down. Rockets hit almost instantly and explode in a skull-shaped cloud inspired by some classic shmups.

Each enemy feels like an arcade reinterpretation of a classic Doom archetype, often firing a mixture of pink (directly aimed) or blue (radial/random) bullets to be navigated. A few concepts feel entirely new for Doom, like a cosmic wizard who warps around evasively every time he takes damage, while opening lingering portals to Saturn's rings to pelt you with micro-meteorites.

If that sounds unnecessarily cool, End of Starchild carries that vibe through the whole game. Even the save system is stylish. Instead of quicksaving freely, you can create checkpoints at kiosks run by a gravelly voiced gremlin of a shopkeeper, who'll remember your progress if you trade in a little blood (health), sweat (your score) or tears (resolve, the game's equivalent to armor) for a second chance. There's character to every action, no matter how small—difficulty selection is handled through the elevator panel in your character's apartment building.

And if you're good, you might be done in three hours or less. But that's the first layer.

Sure, the levels are designed to be replayed. The Hard mode gives all enemies new, distinctly more evil behaviors (the Cacodemon equivalents become Pain Elemental hybrids), and there's a shmup-inspired ranking system that subtly cranks up the difficulty if you're scoring especially well, or dials it down if you're dying repeatedly. But that's just the surface.

The second layer is a nonlinear scavenger hunt. End of Starchild is also an almost Yume Nikki-like oneiric exploration game. How much is real and how much is allegory is up to interpretation, but once you've cleared out the worst of the enemies in a level you can scour the maps for secrets and really get to grips with the quirky air-dashing mechanics to explore off the main path. Not to spoil too much, but don't forget to rest your weary head, and seek to remember when you've the option to.

Most important are areas of fragmented memory that your protagonist (a purple-haired, horned, non-binary demon-slayer named Elph) is having trouble reconciling, and which have permanent, unsettling effects on the rest of the game. Hidden threads and riddles to solve abound, leading towards a new, bombastic finale that is absolutely worth the effort to find. Honestly every major secret feels individually significant, as if you're pulling back the veil on something that doesn't want to be looked at directly.

That alone will add another several hours of exploration, puzzling and combat to End of Starchild. But there's a third layer.

Sonata.

Sonata is a whole second game. Specifically, a NES-styled JRPG. And yes, this is all still somehow running in the GZDoom engine, albeit a slightly customized version.

Sonata feels like an 8-bit echo of the game it's nestled within. Low on directly delivered story but with throbbing masses of ominous flavor text, unsettling enemy designs and tough, unusual combat that plays a little bit like a more claustrophobic version of Mega Man Battle Network, both you and your enemy attacking in real-time on a shared 3x3 grid.

Sonata, too, is a warren of secrets (including a brutal optional super-boss), made all the more tense by having no save system. Knowledge and experience can get you back up to speed after a death, but panicking and dying to a boss can cost you a lot of time and progress, which is why health potions (and the item that lets you increase your chance of escaping fights) are good investments for your early-game gold. It's a whole new unsettling facet to the game that slowly evolves and reveals itself as you explore the 3D worlds above.

To plumb every depth of End of Starchild and see all of its endings (so far as I'm aware) took me around 15 hours, and has landed the game on my 2026 GOTY shortlist. While small in scope (there are much bigger Doom campaigns out there), the layered design gives it the same texture as my 2023 top pick Void Stranger. A game where it feels like every time you think you've seen the bottom of the well, a false wall shifts open to reveal yet darker depths.

Even if you don't do Doom, I cannot recommend this one enough. Just don't be afraid to dial it down to Easy mode or use the Accessibility options. This one's tough.

Final PSA: Some overzealous virus scanners are insistent that the game contains a trojan. After extensive testing across multiple heuristics, this is almost certainly a false positive.

The 30^th anniversary of Quake recently passed by—June 22, 2026 was the day—and of course there were acknowledgements, salutes, and celebrations a-plenty, as you'd expect for such a groundbreaking, influential, and enduring game. But it also got a couple of the driving forces behind it reflecting on those days rather more deeply, and as sometimes happens when youthful memories come to the surface, they got pretty deep into their feelings.

Quake co-designer Sandy Petersen, who joined id Software in 1993, got the ball rolling, writing bluntly on X that "Quake ruined id Software." He said Quake "is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design," and credited everyone on the development team for doing "a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right." But, he added, the workload was intense, "and I think it broke us spiritually."

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Petersen then ran through a list of everyone who left id "within a couple years of finishing Quake," including John Romero, Shawn Green, Dave Taylor, Mike Abrash, American McGee, and of course Petersen himself. All of them went on to have long and fruitful careers in game development, "so plainly we didn't depart because of some kind of talent issue," Petersen wrote. "We were all highly competent, just a little burnt out after the labor of Quake."

"Id Software was never the same after," Petersen wrote. "In my opinion (only an opinion), the only other truly great game that id produced was Quake 3, and it was not at the level of the pre-Quake games."

Despite clearly being a bit melancholy about the whole thing, Petersen said Quake was "absolutely" worth the cost it extracted from id: "Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world." But, he added, "man alive it seems like the company could have had its act together better and kept that dream team."

Sandy Petersen is pretty famous for having his recollections repeatedly (but respectfully) knifed by John Romero, but in this instance his reminiscences were met with agreement, mostly, from the other John of the original id Software squad: Carmack.

In response to Petersen's missive, Carmack said Quake was "overly ambitious technically," and that the studio "could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times."

"I pushed everyone too hard," Carmack wrote. "I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.

"On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better."

Carmack said he doesn't think having elevated expectations for Quake level designers was a mistake (and credited Romero with setting that bar high right from the studio's early days), but acknowledged that "we should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier." But, he continued, "there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t."

And then, simply and directly, he apologized: "Sorry, Sandy."

The dissolution of id Software under somewhat acrimonious circumstances has been well documented over the subsequent years: American McGee, for instance, was reportedly fired by Carmack for sub-par performance on Quake, although Petersen later suggested that McGee was actually done dirty by another employee. Petersen also pointed a finger at Carmack's "intensity" in particular in a separate post, writing that Carmack "decided we all needed to be in the same big room together. He’d read about this way of “focusing” the team and it did. But we also had nowhere we could decompress or hide out."

It didn't take long for the other other John—Romero—to enter the convo with his own thoughts on the matter, which aren't too far removed from Carmack's: He echoed the in-hindsight belief that they should have stuck with a Doom++ game while ironing out the fully-3D Quake engine, and that everyone at id was "pushing ourselves past what was reasonable because that was how id had always worked." He also gave particular credit to McGee for being "really good" at building Quake levels, a notably pointed comment given how McGee's time at id ended.

"There are a hundred things we could have done differently, but we did the best we could do at the time with what we knew. Having a media circus around us certainly didn’t help," Romero wrote. "id still goes on, and so does Wolf, Doom, and Quake. Maybe that was what we came together to do. That is more than enough for any game dev, any team, any lifetime really."

Taken altogether, it's a really interesting conversation about one of the most storied game studios in history. But I love a happy ending, and so what really lands for me is how it all wraps up: With an understanding that everyone was younger then, the world was a different place, and as Romero put it, we did the best we could. Following Carmack's apology, Petersen said he didn't blame him for how it all worked out and told Romero he "did an incredible job" on Quake, and Romero thanked Petersen for getting them talking: "It really was a hell of a game."

Destiny 2 has reached the end of the line: The final update is live, TWIDs are over, and we're all left wondering how the one-time king of live service shooters has come to such ignominious ruin. Even Destiny's competitors are baffled by Sony's decision to pull the plug, although some say Sony's not the real villain here at all. If there is a villain, besides Bungie management—which I think we can all agree has been pretty consistently not great—one thing's for sure: It's not Destiny players.

That bit of reassurance came from Bungie communications lead Dylan Gafner, better known to players as dmg04, in response to a Destiny 2 streamer who wondered whether they'd "done enough to try and help the situation," and if there was somehow more they could do.

"'Could I do more?'" Gafner replied rhetorically (via GamesRadar). "You all have done more for this game and our studio than could ever be imagined, and no words can accurately depict how lucky we are to have shared these worlds with you.

"Don't blame yourselves or think you could have / should have done more. This is just the way it goes sometimes."

It's fair to say that Bungie has sometimes had a bit of a rocky relationship with some of the more rabid Destiny 2 player base. Bungie whiffed on Destiny 2 in many and various ways over the years—here's us explaining "why Destiny 2 players got so angry," in 2017—but the backlash from some in the community could be beyond the pale.

In 2022, Gafner wrote on Reddit that persistent abuse and threats against Bungie employees had resulted in "reduced communications as the team plans future protections/strategies to help avoid these sorts of things," which eventually led to the creation of the anonymized Destiny 2 Team social media account. In 2023, after winning a $500,000 legal action against a particularly abusive player, Bungie warned that Destiny 2 developers were still being harassed by members of the community simply because they worked at the studio.

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But, as with so many things in life, the worst of the noise came from a small number of players—the vast majority, while sometimes unhappy with one aspect of Destiny 2 or another, focused their frustrations through a lens of respect, appreciation, and love. Despite the rough patches, that's clearly what's settled in with Gafner.

"No matter the future, we will always have these memories," Gafner concluded. "Thank you. For everything."

I love the look of Marathon, and I like shooters in general. But extraction shooters? Not so much. I'm not very good at them, for one thing, and the constant pressure to get out with your loot before the timer hits zero is a huge drag. So when Bungie said it was looking at PvE modes for Marathon, you bet my ears perked up.

The experimental Sponsored Survival mode introduced earlier this month sounded potentially interesting but not quite what I was after. But the new, full-on PvE Vault Breaker mode revealed today? Yeah, that might be it.

Vault Breaker enables players to venture into Marathon's raid map, Cryo Archive, solo, in duos or trios, to take on a series of increasingly challenging vaults. The mode will have its own unique progression mechanic that enables players to increase in power across multiple matches, until they reach the final vault "and the mysterious entity within."

The new mode will require a special "Sponsored Kit"—one of Marathon's free loadouts—to access, presumably to maintain some semblance of gameplay balance. The bigger twist, though, is that Vault Breaker eschews one of the most fundamental aspects of extraction shooters: Any gear or items you find in the mode will be left behind when you leave. The only thing you'll take with you Vault Data, a new currency that can be used to upgrade your Vault Breaker Sponsored Kit, or to purchase gear that can be used in other modes.

Bungie said eliminating gear extraction will let players "experience Cryo Archive without flooding the economy with low-risk, high-power Cryo loot," which seems reasonable to me. But it's drawn something of a mixed reaction among the PC Gamer crew. Notorious Destiny freak Tim Clark called it a huge mistake, declaring that "not keeping the stuff you find is anathema to me," while FPS guy Morgan Park saw it in a very different light, saying it "sounds like a fun way to learn the map" without getting your ass shot off by people who already know it inside and out. Lincoln Carpenter, ever the voice of reason, said it "seems fine."

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For myself, I'm actually pretty excited. This is where I finally start paying Marathon: I have even less interest in the loot grind than I do in not having my ass shot off by people who already know the game inside and out, so a mode that effectively does away with both, but still affords me the opportunity to experience the setting and action, is exactly what I've been waiting for. But for players who've already learned Cryo Archive inside and out over the last three months, a warmup mode with no stakes or other players might be useful, but probably not what they're ultimately after.

Vault Breaker will be rolled out as part of Marathon's mid-season, which gets underway on July 21. The mid-season will also see the first iteration of the Cradle Evolution system, giving players who have maxed out their Cradle upgrades an opportunity to reset to zero in exchange for an additional maximum energy point and unique cosmetics, as well as "various other quality-of-life, tuning, and other changes, including the addition of player profile stats."

If you were thinking Destiny 2's ending couldn't get any more depressing, you're wrong. Unfortunately. In a reaction to my pondering of what Destiny 3 should even be (if ever made, of course), a streamer by the name of Chrizmo demanded something that's been brought up a few times over the years: a dating sim.

Ex-community manager Liana Ruppert replied, explaining that, "Fun fact, the team actually made one," backing up a casual confirmation from a few years ago. The issue, which seems to be recurring at this point, is that "leadership was very 'Hard No' that nobody wanted romance or silliness." Boo.

Ruppert describes this long-lost idea as being "very Dream Daddy-inspired," leaving me to picture a very tongue-in-cheek roster of romances like Crow, Mara, and Empress Caiatl. Hell, imagine getting seduced by Xur, Mithrax, or even the Witness. YouTuber 'A Wild Deathstroke' actually made a fan concept video in 2022:

Former senior narrative designer Robert Brookes elaborated, saying that the project was dreamed up during a week-long game jam, where the team was given free rein to pitch and make fun prototypes. Alas, "it was never a full-fledged project," Brookes explains, but the team did lobby to make it so every year.

"Myself and two other narrative team members (who both CAME from romance game design) had an entire pitch deck for one complete with costs and real hard metrics on returns."

Not to kick a dog while it's down, but that's not all we missed out on. Former Bungie director Christopher Barrett revealed that there was "also a fighting game, a Destiny-inspired heavy metal concert, a dialogue conversation system, and other random stuff" made in game jams.

Obviously, these were generally rough concepts made to spark some creative thinking, but it's hard not to imagine how these could've looked in-game. I think a Valentine's event involving a dating sim would've been silly, non-canon fun. It's not been confirmed, but I wouldn't be surprised if something like the iconic Sparrow Racing League spawned from experiments like this.

While it's a shame these ideas never came to any kind of tangible reality for players, it's always interesting to hear more about the behind-the-scenes of Bungie. Even more so, given the reports over the years of struggles between developers and leadership, with the added pressure of lots of red on its financial books.

The best Darktide Skitarii build for my money is all about the powerful Chordclaw ability. While the Servo Skulls are certainly fun and provide a lot of utility, such as rezzing allies or solving puzzles, if you're a melee-enjoyer like me, Chordclaw's skewering hand is too good to pass up, and can brutalize both bosses and tanky enemies.

I'll explain the build in depth below, but it's essentially about crit-ing lots for added bonuses like regaining ability energy, and then using Chordclaw lots to murder enemies and gain further bonuses. It's pretty straightforward, so here's how to set it all up.

The best Darktide Skitarii build

After experimenting with the Skitarii, the best build I found revolves around the powerful Chordclaw ability and using crits to electrocute enemies and gain capacitance (your ability resource). Chordclaw fires out a stabbing arm, a guaranteed rending crit which, buffed with its sub-talents, Probing Strikes and Slice and Dice, hits three times, applies bleed, and gains extra damage for each successive hit.

This is further enhanced with Electro-Strike Conduit, which makes melee crits apply electrocution (including the Chordclaw). Flux Conduit Build-Up will provide capacitance as you crit to regain Chordclaw charges (which includes Chordclaw uses), plus when you do Chordclaw, Moebian Conductor, Voltaic Restoration, and Enhanced Capacitance Protocols will buff your overall damage, replenish toughness, and regain all stacks for Flensing Protocols.

Flensing Protocols is vital here—this key node and its sub-talents give you eight stacks of +2.5% damage and toughness damage reduction, and +1.5% crit chance and melee attack speed. These are reduced when you get hit by enemies, but you regain them all whenever you use Chordclaw.

Lastly, the Integrated Refraction Emitter gives you a three-charge shield which you can use in tricky spots to avoid ranged damage and electrocute enemies in an AoE for more damage against them, thanks to talents like Weakness Analysis Doctrine and Retribution Conduit. It sounds complex, but the fundamentals are crit lots, use Chordclaw lots, profit.

Best Skitarii weapons and relics

These are the weapons, blessings, and perks I recommend using for the Skitarii:

• Melee weapon: Paired Transonic Blades
  • Blessing 1: Shred (+4% bonus critical hit chance on chained hit. Stacks five times)
  • Blessing 2: Perfect Strike (Critical hits ignore hit mass armour bonus from armour. +10% melee critical hit damage)
  • Perks: Melee crit chance, melee crit damage

While the Arc Maul is a very strong weapon to start with, I recommend hopping to the Paired Transonic Blades when you unlock them. These Mechanicus swords have two different attack patterns that you switch via the special weapon action: a series of horizontal slashes for hordes, and downward strikes and stabs for single entities, so make sure to swap between them if you suddenly spot a Mauler or Crusher amidst the crowd.

Considering this build is all about hitting crits (electrocuting enemies for bonus damage and gaining capacitance), I recommend taking Shred and Perfect Strike, the classic Zealot combo which buffs crit chance, crit damage, and makes crits ignore armour mass for more cleave. If you feel like you're still not crit-ing enough, swap Perfect Strike for Riposte—if you play anything like me, you're dodging constantly, so this crit chance buff on dodge is easy to maintain. Perk-wise, I suggest crit chance and crit damage to buff it further.

• Ranged weapon: Galvanic Rifle
  • Blessing 1: Deadly Accurate (+60% critical weak spot damage)
  • Blessing 2: Headhunter (+20% critical chance on weak spot hit until your next critical hit. Stacks five times)
  • Perks: Ranged crit damage, +% damage to carapace armoured enemies

The Galvanic Rifle is a very satisfying weapon and I mainly use it as a means to quickly snipe troublesome specialists or enemies in the midst of combat. With that in mind, I chose Deadly Accurate and Headhunter. These will ensure that your headshots are more likely to crit and that they hit incredibly hard, letting you quickly deal with dangerous foes.

For perks, I recommend you buff your ranged crit damage and (considering you've already got plenty of crit chance via Headhunter) your damage to carapace armoured enemies, who will be the trickiest to kill with ranged attacks.

• Curio bonuses: Toughness, max health, sprint efficacy

Lastly, for curio bonuses I suggest the usual combination of toughness, max health, and sprint efficacy. It never hurts to have a little corruption resistance and an extra wound either, but neither is strictly necessary, I don't think.

Best Skitarii talent and keystone levelling path

This is my recommended levelling order for the Skitarii, but it's worth noting that you can grab most of these at any point thanks to its radial skill tree, as I do in the video above. So, if you're struggling with survivability, pick the talents in here that buff toughness, or if you need extra damage, focus the ones that buff that instead.

Skitarii build playstyle

As mentioned, this build is all about using crits to electrocute enemies and regen capacitance for your powerful Chordclaw ability, which will also provide benefits on use. You've also got the Integrated Refraction Emitter shield to keep you alive under heavy fire or when you need to revive an ally. Here are some other tips for playing this build:

1. Regularly use Chordclaw for tough foes and bosses

Chordclaw murders most enemies and brutalises bosses. Landing three strikes will kill a Crusher from full health in Heresy—I genuinely cannot imagine the havoc a team of four Skitarii with this ability will wreak. Chordclaw also provides extra benefits thanks to this build (including regen-ing Chordclaw because of its guaranteed crit hits), so use it often, especially as it will replenish all your Flensing Protocol stacks if you've been hit by enemies.

2. Snipe annoying specialists with your Galvanic Rifle

The Galvanic Rifle is a great weapon for headshotting foes at long range, and if you're following this build it's essentially set up as a headshot crit machine. Use it for snipers, flamers, poxbursters, hounds, bombers, gunners, ragers, and just about anything else you can safely kill at range with a quick cranial plink.

3. Switch Paired Transonic Blade modes for different foes

It took me a while to get used to this, but make sure to use your special weapon action to swap your Transonic Blades into single-entity mode. I'm pretty sure it changes the weapon's profile, because it suddenly becomes significantly better at piercing armour for Maulers and Crushers. You can also switch modes mid-combat and I'm pretty sure this move counts as a block, too.

4. Use the Integrated Refraction Emitter in tricky spots

Though it costs grenade uses, the Integrated Refraction Emitter is absurdly strong against ranged enemies. You can use it to complete objectives or revive allies under fire, and allies can even shelter behind you since it's an AoE shield. Thanks to its Kinetic Repulsion sub-talent, it also reduces health damage you take in melee and electrocutes enemies around you on use (for increased damage), making it handy for any tough spots you find yourself in.

During the 250+ hours I've spent eviscerating Darktide's hordes of poxwalkers and nurglefied hive inhabitants, few classes have gripped me as much as the Zealot. Is it the sweet purr of the chainsword as I grind off a Mauler's face? Is it that rush as I slide into melee range with a squad of traitor guardsmen and de-limb them as they feebly try to bayonet me? Whatever it is, it never gets old. I'm as surprised as anyone, then, that Darktide's new Skitarii class might have finally converted me to praising the Omnissiah full time.

I've always had a fondness for the cogboys in red, but Fatshark has really excelled itself with this cyborg warrior. First off, it's bloody huge. It's not clear in the trailers, but the smallest Skitarri is the size of the tallest Darktide human, making its tallest variant more like playing an Ogryn without the chunkiness. And I have to say, I take great pleasure in looming over enemies, ominously burbling binharic cant as I bat them aside with my Arc Maul.

The Skitarii's voice is one of my favorite components. During character creation, you can choose a Forge World (including the Moebian 'Branx' created for Darktide), and what bits and bobs you want welded onto your robot man, including Voxcaster Tuning. Here, you pick one of four voices as usual, but you can mess around with it to create a unique variant just for you. It's a nice way of avoiding those awkward matching teammates, especially when we all know it's going to be nothing but full Skitarii teams for the next month.

Skill-wise, Skitarii come in a few different flavours. If you're an Arbites who loves micro-ing your pooch, you'll be eyeing up the trio of Servo Skulls you can bring. I didn't find them particularly strong damage-wise, but they offer lots of utility, allowing you to rez allies at range, deploy a flamethrower to chokepoint corridors, or you can even have them solve the Data Interrogation minigames—a pretty tempting prospect, right?

But as a melee-loving Zealot, I settled for the Chordclaw, which lets you skewer enemies with an extendable stabby hand. I love how wacky it looks, as if you've opened a jack-in-the-box hidden in your trench coat, but instead of a boxing glove, it fires out a giant clawed appendage. It's essentially an "I want this to die" button, letting you end anything big and bad on demand, plus its guaranteed crit, application of bleed and electrify, plus three potential hits, means it chunks through bosses.

I coupled this with the Integrated Refraction Emitter, a shield that consumes grenade charges to make you immune to ranged damage. It also electrocutes enemies around you periodically, making it the perfect ability when you come face-to-face with a bristling wall of guns. One of the advantages of the Skitarii's radial skill tree (versus previous classes' descending ones), is that there's a lot more freedom.

Skitarii can automatically acquire and shoot targets with Advanced Combat Doctrines, or emit electrifying explosions with the Voltaic Emitter. Electrifying enemies and gaining buffs against said enemies is a big part of the Skitarii class, as is the 'charge' mechanic. Your ability has up to three charges, which you gain via acquiring capacitance, and you'll unlock buffs in the skill tree based on how low or high your charge count is. It's not perfect, but it's by far the most unique skill tree I've seen Fatshark attempt in Darktide, which gives me a lot of faith in terms of future class design.

For implements of murder and mayhem, the real standouts for me were the Arc Maul, Galvanic Rifle, and Paired Transonic Blades. As a Zealot and Arbites player I am sick to high heaven of mauls, but the Arc one is rather nifty. When you activate its special action, you charge it with Arc, a new electricity type that hops between enemies (available via the Arc Rifle and Arc Grenades also). The only downside is that this period doesn't last very long and you have to wait for it to charge up again.

The Galvanic Rifle and Paired Transonic Blades are both masterworks of *chef kiss* weapon feel. As Fatshark noted in the preview I attended, the rifle is essentially an M1 Garand, the videogame classic, and it feels so satisfying to fire and reload, cracking off arc bullets into enemies before slotting in a new clip with a delicious metallic click. I sometimes animation cancel the reload just so I can enjoy it again.

Though usually reserved for Sicarian Ruststalkers, the powers that be also allowed Fatshark to give the Skitarii a Transonic sword and dagger combo, which (sorry Hive Scum mains) makes the dual shivs feel like garbage. This blender has two settings—a series of horizontal slashes for groups, and downward strikes and stabs for chunky single-entities. Having two entirely different movesets for one weapon feels super versatile, especially when you can weave the switch into the rhythm of melee combat.

I really hope the Skitarii is just a taste of what we can come to expect from future Darktide classes. It's certainly better than the Hive Scum, and for me, just about edges out the Arbites (a class I love) with its sheer uniqueness. It'll be a fair while before murderbot-ing my way through Tertium grows stale I think.

What weapon comes to mind when you think of a Skitarii in Warhammer 40k? A Shock Maul? An Arc Rifle? Or even the cool Transonic Blades that the Sicarian Ruststalkers use? For me, and a lot of others, it's their iconic longarm, the Galvanic Rifle. Visually, it resembles a flintlock with a glowing blue cylinder mounted on its undercarriage, a cool combination of old and new. But it's never been entirely clear how it reloads—does it take a clip? Or is it a revolver rifle?

Well, when creating the Skitarii class for Warhammer 40k: Darktide, it's a problem the developer Fatshark had to tackle:

"It took us a while to figure out how they actually work and Games Workshop didn't know either," says lead designer, Victor Magnuson, during the preview session I attended. "They've never looked at them in this type of detail before either, so it's something we worked together with them to figure out, how this would actually work in this type of fidelity."

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So what weapon was chosen to help model the Galvanic Rifle? It allowed us, says Magnuson, "to pay homage to a gaming classic, the M1 Garand, which is a weapon I really love using in other games". If you don't remember the M1 Garand, you probably haven't played much Call of Duty or many WW2 shooters. Part of what makes this rifle so iconic gaming wise is its *feel*, especially the signature "ping" when you run dry and have to slot in bullets to reload.

"We came up with this idea where there's a clip of actual bullets that you put in," explains Magnuson. "And then the coil thing on the bottom is where the galvanic charge comes from. This is the type of weapon we've really wanted to do in Darktide for a long time. I'm so happy with how it's ended up, it's super satisfying to use."

As someone who's been playing the Skitarii class this last week and has almost exclusively used the Galvanic Rifle as my ranged weapon, I've got to agree—it feels really good. Fatshark also did a wonderful job with the Transonic Blades, usually reserved for Sicarian Ruststalkers, but here it was allowed to create a sword and dagger combo for the Skitarii, too.

If you want to play Darktide's new Skitarii class, it's out now on Steam.

Destiny 2 is slowly closing its doors—its servers aren't shutting down, but Bungie has emphasised that it won't be getting any more content, bar a massive quality of life patch that has left it in a relatively good, but inert and unchanging state.

One might, if they were being cynical and cutthroat, think this is cause for celebration—particularly if they were in charge of the competition, as Warframe is. Not so, says community director and live ops lead Megan Everett in a conversation with Eurogamer.

"Truthfully, it's heartbreaking. It's earth-shattering. I never thought I'd ever see the day where I'd read an article from Bungie about Destiny 2 essentially shutting down.

"I'm speaking personally, but I know people would echo it as well. No one is celebrating the fact that this has happened to Destiny, and its players and that story. I know that people have obviously compared us in terms of being 'direct competitors' and stuff like that. But I think a game is healthy when you have competitors."

As someone in the MMO space, it's honestly true—World of Warcraft got its act together (at least, when compared to the catastrophe of Shadowlands) when a mass exodus of fans drifted to Final Fantasy 14. Conversely, with FF14's stagnation, it's starting to adopt a lot of the measures WoW and other MMOs did with Evercold, shaking things up.

My point being, healthy competition tends to drive games to be better than one another—and stop me if this is going off the reservation—but I think we can all broadly agree that we like it when videogames are good.

Everett also says it's a shame that Destiny 2's been shown support much too late: "I think what's unfortunate and sad is they announced this was happening, and suddenly people are showing all this support for them. They've been getting a lot of negativity for all this time, and it's like, where was all this love!

"Overall, I hate to see that happen to them. I have close friends who play Destiny over Warframe, and ain't mad about it. We have friends over there, to see this happen to them is devastating to the industry. No one saw Destiny going away"

Sand: Raiders of Sophie launched into early access today after a number of last-minute delays, so I finally got the chance to try out the first-person base-building extraction shooter.

My first thought after about two hours of play? It's like Sea of Thieves but on land, and if your vehicle gets destroyed you've gotta build a new one: you can't just wait a few seconds and respawn with a pristine new ride.

The walking bases, called tramplers, are the star of the game. Before you embark on a mission—you're in outer space, orbiting a desert planet on some sort of Victorian-era gaslamp space station, by the way—you need to prep yourself and your trampler. You can build one yourself by snapping together modules (I haven't played too much with this feature yet) or use a preexisting model.

Take a couple handheld weapons like a pistol, shotgun, or rifle, fill your pockets with ammo, then bring a crate containing heavy guns for your trampler, like 40mm and 80mm cannons.

Once you deploy to the planet, you need to run around your customizable walking base getting it ready for action: mount the guns in a few places on the exterior and load them up with ammo. Manually fire up the huge engine, then run to the steering emplacement and start throwing giant levers like you're Kenneth Branagh driving his spider-mech in Wild Wild West. Your big, noisy, smoke-spewling behemoth will begin slowly stomping across the dunes.

Even the smallest mechs are big enough that getting around on them takes time, having to clamber up ladders and dash through the different compartments to reach the guns, engine, steering, and storage areas. I've only played Sand solo, and there's definitely that same ultra-busy Sea of Thieves feel to it. I've got to pilot this huge mech, adjust how fast I'm going, and check the map, all while scanning the horizon for lootable locations and enemy tramplers (by spying ominous clouds of black smoke instead of distant sails).

I also have to leave my mobile base all the time, scurry nervously across the sand on foot when I want to do some looting, terrified the whole time that another mech is gonna stride up and start blowing mine to pieces. That's a very Sea of Thieves-like feeling.

When the shit goes down, I've gotta leave the wheel to man the turrets, some of which are located well on the other side of the vehicle. It's a mad rush to reload guns and aim turrets and repair damage and make sure the mech, which is still walking so it doesn't become a stationary target, isn't about to crash into something like a big rock or rusted ship. It's glorious chaos, especially for one person.

The sound design in Sand is excellent, too: the trampler makes fantastic mech noises, gears groaning and cables jangling as it lurches across the landscape. The mounted guns are deafening, really making you feel like you're firing a huge, deadly weapon. And you can hear battles taking place from well across the map, letting you know other players are somewhere in the neighborhood.

The PvE part comes in with ghoul-like NPCs who guard some lootable locations: I only ran into a few of them and they're not the most dynamic enemies, basically running toward me and shooting me on sight. More devastating are the automatons who (I think) come blasting down to the planet from orbit and begin stamping around after you. I ran into a trio of them, and while they're not as big as player-built tramplers, they still sock a punch with their artillery and take a decent amount of damage to bring down.

Like Sea of Thieves, Sand is harrowing and tense and it's definitely not a game meant for solo players: there's just a little too much to handle if you're playing on your own. There's one thoughtful feature, though: if you are playing Sand solo, you can join a server that is solos-only, so at least you won't get mobbed by larger crews. Even Sea of Thieves doesn't do that.

Once you've done some looting and stored your stuff in the cargo hold of your trampler, you can drive your trampler to an extraction point, where most of the combat takes place. You have to disembark and climb a tall tower to kick off the extraction sequence, wherein a ship takes a few minutes to come down from orbit to collect you. That's the cue for everyone in the area to stomp your way and try to blow you to hell first.

I've done three voyages so far, though two ended early due to launch-day server issues. My second mission was a fun one: my trampler got blown up by computer-controller walkers that swarmed me, and since I didn't die, I was able to run to an extraction point where another player was about to lift off. I stowed aboard his trampler, thinking it might let me sneakily extract along with him, but once he took off I simply died.

In my last mission, I looted some old ships I found in the desert, shot a few ghouls, bombarded a player attempting to extract (but failed to stop him), then extracted myself while a different player stomped over and took some cannon shots at me. Pretty fun, and I'm interested in crewing up with some friends and playing it more once the server issues have been resolved.

One of the most popular games on Roblox right now is a multiplayer FPS with zero idle mechanics or brainrots. It's called TTK, and as of this writing, it's been played over 7 million times.

TTK is the newest game from Sable Digital, a duo of Roblox devs who go by PoptartNoahh and CanyonJack. The first version of the game was published in April, but it blew up in a big way last week after clips of its realistic deathmatches went viral.

The version of TTK that everyone is playing right now is a free-for-all deathmatch with basic Call of Duty-like loadouts, but this is apparently just a vertical slice made for testing purposes. Future versions of TTK will focus on "co-op PVE squad AI mechanics" with "story-based doorkicker scenarios/missions" as well as team-based modes. The explosive popularity has caught the pair of devs by surprise, who say the Roblox algorithm "found us too early."

It's an impressive accomplishment for two people. Sable is upfront about its main inspirations here—everything about TTK's slow movement, floaty aiming, high-lethality, and immersive mechanics like magazine checking is meant to evoke bodycam shooters and SWAT games like Ready Or Not. They've done a great job of emulating the feel of Void Interactive's hit co-op FPS in Roblox, a platform that doesn't spit out decent shooters every day.

For a Roblox game, it's quite good. It looks great for something that'll run on a phone, and the absence of Roblox's default block guys is always appreciated. Guns are loud and dangerous, sound is directional enough to hear someone coming around a corner, and its handful of maps (while basic) already offer more interesting layouts than last year's Black Ops 7.

That said, TTK's popularity seems to be more about the Roblox of it all. While there have been viral shooters that borrow heavily from established FPSes in Roblox for years now, there are clearly many folks only now learning that the platform is capable of more than idle clickers, horror walking sims, and 'obbys' (obstacle platformers).

To me, the most notable aspect of TTK is that it's not trying to mercilessly extract money from 6-year-olds. The only way to spend money on it for now is a 400 Robux supporter pack that grants some profile effects—essentially a tip jar. It was nice to spend 30 minutes on this platform without stepping on a pressure pad that triggers a $20 purchase screen. I wonder if TTK will actually stay this chill—perhaps the only reason it's not heavily monetized is because Sable didn't expect all the attention.

Either way, if you've played the games that Sable is pulling from here, there's no rush to go play TTK yourself. It's fine, it's free, but it's also about as good as a number of Steam shooters that release regularly. This one just happens to be in Roblox.

Picture a huge metal beast lumbering through the sand dunes. As it lifts its mechanical legs and places its heavy metal feet down, you probably wouldn't be surprised if it stumbled, lurched, or even got stuck here and there for a bit.

That's what's been happening with Sand: Raiders of Sophie, a PvPvE extraction shooter where you build and pilot giant walking mechanical bases, stomp around in the desert on an alien planet, and battle both other players and their own walking bases. It's taken quite a few missteps on the long, sandy path to launch.

The first delay was last year, when plans for an early access launch in April 2025 were scrapped. Following that, the game pivoted into being a full release upon launch, which was planned for March 2026—but in the final few days of March it became clear that wasn't happening either, and the revised release was then targeted for June 10.

On June 9, the day before that new launch date, not only was the release moved again (to today, June 22), but the game shifted back to being an early access release again. Talk about walking in circles.

But here we are on June 22, and Sand: Raiders of Sophie is finally out in early access! That doesn't mean there weren't still a few more little stumbles at the starting line: as eager fans in the official Discord witnessed today, "a couple of wires got crossed that we need Valves help us uncross," the development team said, which delayed today's launch "an hour or two."

Three hours after that announcement, a 10-minute countdown appeared—which then expired and was replaced by a second countdown, this one for 20 minutes. Gosh.

But then! Before the second countdown could fully run out, Sand finally launched on Steam. It's really out this time! Fer honest!

How is it? Well, I bought it myself (it's 21% off for the next two weeks) but I've been busy writing this story while it's downloading. I'll jump in shortly and let you know if Sand was worth the wait.

Now that Destiny 2's massive final update is here, it's more or less set in stone forever. Destiny is calcified—no more FOMO, no need to re-grind gear, and the end of a seasonal treadmill.

That should make me sad, and it does, more so because it's over rather than that it's easing off the gas. I've always loved playing it, so seasonal updates were a good excuse to keep looting and shooting. But there's no avoiding that, at times, playing Destiny was a chore of Bungie's own design.

With the threat of a Power cap increase or power-creep removed, you're now free to do whatever you want, whenever you want. You don't need to race through quests to be 'raid ready', or complete seasonal tasks and grind specific god rolls before they vanish into oblivion. And honestly, it's bliss.

Ironically, this is basically how Destiny used to be. The first game was built around major expansions, which would see the player count naturally rise and fall in accordance. And this is how Destiny 2 began as well. However, at some point, we all became fed up with the idea that we'd run out of new things to do and play something else for a little while.

Enter the live service-ification of Destiny, giving rise to unceasing seasonal updates and yearly expansions to keep the good times flowing. As fun as this era was, it's clear that it was practically impossible to sustain for Bungie. Live service games are expensive, and Bungie was one of the very few attempting it from a predominantly PvE angle, where content tends to be very one-and-done compared to infinitely queueing multiplayer matches in Call of Duty, for example. Plus, forcing every story arc to fit a weekly cadence like a TV show wasn't ideal either.

It didn't work for Bungie, and I'd argue it didn't really work for us, either. From my observations, the community is oddly happier with the game in its current state, in spite of it being the end. Of course, people are enjoying the new content, but mostly, I think we're enjoying being able to play Destiny without the pressure. It's nice, isn't it?

Plus, I'm older now and have less time to dedicate to one, let alone multiple live service games. It's an existential threat to a game like Destiny, where the most die-hard fans who picked up the first game in their 20s would be in their late 30s or 40s by the earliest time Destiny 3 could arrive. I figure Bungie will have a hard time getting everyone on board for a return to the seasonal treadmill, or convincing a new generation away from their already-established live service mainstays.

So, in the theoretical situation where we eventually get a Destiny 3, my big question would be what form it would take.

Maybe an MMO-like subscription model would better support a sequel designed from the ground up to be the live service MMO Destiny 2 aspired to be. But perhaps not, since there are very few MMOs left standing these days, and maintaining this would be an expensive venture. And that 'from the ground up' bit is an important note, as Destiny 2's dated infrastructure has constantly shot Bungie in the foot, most obviously in the form of the Destiny Content Vault that removed a whole chunk of game.

Maybe Bungie opts for smaller/spinoff games to more economically tell stories in the same universe, akin to Halo 3 ODST and Halo Reach. I miss the days of focused shooter campaigns and some tacked-on multiplayer, and I love Destiny's world, so I'm not opposed to this at all. However, it would feel like a bit of a gut-punch, downsizing one of the biggest franchises in gaming.

Despite the inherent risk, I'd argue it's best we return to a full-fledged expansion schedule and sequels, and come to peace with the fact that it's alright to put a game down once you've had enough to return when something's piqued your interest. More time to develop large expansions, more time for game-changing sequels. That's effectively how Borderlands works.

Whatever the approach, it's clear that change is required. Destiny 2 died for a multitude of reasons, but new-player onboarding, removing content, and the maligned Portal system are among the largest. These issues can't return. But hopefully the universe of Destiny can.

Season 2 of Marathon kicked off earlier this month, and thus far it's been a season of ups and downs. Things started badly, with Bungie's traditional launch woes undermining its free-to-play week. But new features like the Night-time Dire Marsh map and its Sponsored Survival quickly proved hits popular with the community.

A few weeks in, however, new problems have emerged. Basically, progression in Marathon has become too easy, which is ironic considering the game's formidable reputation. Where you felt lucky to extract with anything of value in Season 1, Season 2 players have apparently been hoovering up so much loot that their vaults are overflowing with goodies, throwing the game's economy into disarray.

Earlier this week, Bungie published a Steam post explaining what had gone wrong, and what might be causing it. "Out of the gate in Season 2, progression and access to power moved much faster than the previous season," the developer wrote. "For reference, the average wealth in week two of Season 2 is similar to what we saw in weeks 11 and 12 of Season 1. And while we did want to increase progression speeds, we didn't land at a place that's healthy for the game."

Oops. As for what's causing this issue, the answer appears to be a combination of factors. For starters, there were several contributing bugs that Bungie says it's now fixed, such as "guaranteed gold drops in places that shouldn't have them". The rush of Sponsored Kits at the start of the season also gave progression a boost, as did a combined issue with "Sponsored Survival grind" and a valuable chest in the Complex Control area, with players milking Marathon's mostly PvE mode for all it was worth.

The primary factor remains somewhat elusive, however. According to Bungie, there's an issue making higher rarity loot proliferate through the game. But the team doesn't know exactly what's causing this. "This isn't something we've seen in our internal playtests, and we're still unravelling the source." Curious.

While it investigates this, Bungie has made some other "tweaks" targeting progression, such as turning off boosted containers and nerfs to Cradle XP rates. But these are temporary measures, which Bungie plans to "reverse later in the season when we have other solutions in place." Hopefully the team will figure out the root cause of the problem soon, though I'm sure there are some players who don't mind having a slightly easier time of it on Tau Ceti IV, at least in the short term.

From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer (UK) #279.

Crysis 2 gets a lot wrong. Its AI is criminally stupid. Its story is a convoluted mess. Its characters are hackneyed archetypes. Worst of all, its narrower environments and more limited nanosuit restrict the potential for emergent play, which was the essence of the original game. As far as sequels go, many of Crytek's design decisions for Crysis 2 are utterly baffling.

Yet for all its mistakes, Crysis 2 gets one thing right: destruction. From its low-key beginning to its apocalyptic final act, this grim fairytale of New York is a master-class in disaster fiction. If you embrace this theme of obliteration rather than fighting it, Crysis 2 is at times even more enjoyable than the original.

The game puts you in the boots of US marine and personality vacuum Alcatraz. Within five minutes he’s seen half his platoon massacred by the alien menace known as the Ceph, been shot half to pieces himself, and been given the task of saving New York by Prophet, the nanosuited squad leader from Crysis 1.

Crytek recognised that the most interesting aspect of the first game was the nanosuit, and so built Crysis 2's story almost entirely around it. The nanosuit is the game's real hero, synthesising a cure for the alien virus as the story progresses.

Alcatraz is merely a bag of leaky meat who provides the suit with locomotive abilities to get from objective to objective. Our FPS protagonists are often defined by their suits and little else (Half-Life and Halo are two notable examples) so why not give the suit some of the credit for once?

It's a fun idea, but Crysis 2 fails to walk its talk. During play it actually reduces the suit's functionality from that of the first game. It decreases the number of active abilities from four to two, armour mode and cloak, while speed and strength become passive abilities with little impact on how you play.

There are no walls to punch through, and chucking objects and enemies about is fiddly and unsatisfying. You can Power Kick cars and certain objects, which feels good. But having played the game three times, I’ve never once used this successfully in combat.

Cloaking, meanwhile, is almost too effective, letting you waltz past enemies as they forget about you the moment line of sight is broken. It's always tempting to exploit Crysis 2's artificial idiocy, but I’d strongly advise against it, simply because a pure stealth approach isn’t the way to get the most out of the game.

Instead, use Cloak to navigate your way to the nearest mounted machine gun. Tear it off its mounts. Then activate armour mode, identify a target, and let rip. Feel the kick of the HMG judder up your mouse arm as it spits bullets the size of table knives, listen to the stomp of your feet as the nanosuit’s hardened shell collides with the tarmac. Marvel as CELL troopers and Ceph alike crumble in the face of your merciless onslaught.

This is what Crysis 2 is really about: glorious devastation, using your cloak to place yourself in a position of supremacy, and then ripping through the enemy ranks before they have time to blink. It simply takes a while to make this fact obvious.

Yet there are glimmers of a love for breaking things in the first few hours. Early on a beleaguered alien spacecraft smashes into a skyscraper, tearing a huge hole in its upper floors. A couple of levels later, a whole section of the FDR highway collapses before your eyes, leaving a thick cloud of dust that you can use to quietly pick off mercenaries investigating the cause. Yet these are merely scripted vignettes interspersed between long stretches of small-arms combat, as you evade and engage groups of CELL mercenaries on your mission to meet up with a hacker known as Gould.

It's only when you regroup with the marines, around a third of the way through the game, that Crysis 2 kicks into its highest gear. The familiar grid-like streets of Manhattan are transformed into canyon-like gouges in the earth, as the city is slowly torn apart by the alien's root-like virus dispersal pipelines. Your arsenal become more powerful and your enemies larger and more numerous.

Additionally, your role in the game turns much more defensive, as you assist the army with the evacuation of the city. A standoff against a thunderous assault by the Ceph concludes with you bringing down one of their mighty gunships, while the best level in the game —'Unsafe Haven'—sees you fighting through the Ceph battle-lines in order to prime and detonate demolition charges on a multi-storey building, bringing it crashing down across the Ceph’s artillery trajectory.

It's this gradual escalation that makes Crysis 2 so satisfying for me. The city's destruction becomes an inversely-proportional progression tracker. As the fight becomes more and more desperate, the city becomes less and less recognisable. It's reminiscent of Half-Life 2's 'AntiCitizen One' and 'Follow Freeman' chapters, but drawn out over a longer period. Also, rather than being on the assault, you're on the back foot, simply trying to buy time as you attempt to get the city's populace to safety. Crysis 2 excels at making the Ceph feel like a genuine threat, always capable of matching and exceeding Alcatraz’s own superhuman capabilities.

Unfortunately, while the mid-to-late section is excellent, the final mission is a massive anticlimax. Once again it lets you breeze past most of the enemies, and the ending is a big dollop of nonsense that leaves you mystified and disappointed.

Although I like the slower start, and admire it for not frontloading its action, that failure to build to a satisfying climax damages the game considerably.

In the end, Crysis 2's limitation on emergent play proved to be an error in judgement, one that Crytek tried (and failed) to rectify in the undercooked Crysis 3. But there are still moments of greatness in there. Crysis 2 gets a lot wrong, but we shouldn’t let that obscure the things it got right.

When PC Gamer senior editor Wes Fenlon wrote about Luna Abyss last month, he said it left him "already hoping for more of its kind." Sadly, it doesn't look like that will happen—the entire team that made it has just been laid off.

The news came in the form of a LinkedIn post from Kwalee Labs CEO Hollie Emery posted June 16. "The entire team has been made redundant; a decision that was completely outside of our control," Emery said.

"As a result, the entire team is available for work as of today … Thanks for your endless support, and whilst we’re sad it ended like this—I have no doubt that our team will go on to make amazing things." The nine affected developers are listed on the LinkedIn post, and Emery encouraged potential employers (or anyone in contact with potential employers) to reach out directly and share the post.

While Luna Abyss was celebrated critically, it appears that didn't translate to good sales. According to SteamDB, the game has a concurrent player count of just 43 as I write this, and at its peak only ever reached 317. The bullet hell has always been niche, but Luna Abyss further tested that with a cutting-edge genre fusion. Still, the game released less than a month before all this on May 21—its chance to draw folks in was cut absurdly short.

If you're unfamiliar with the game, it merges the bullet hell with the FPS for a unique combination of autoaim-infused blasting and pattern dodging. In his impressions, Wes said it "is proof the bullet hell FPS should be a thing … the bullet hell is more than 30 years old, but all Luna Abyss had to do to make it feel fresh was put it in first-person, robbing you of the peripheral vision Returnal is kind enough to offer."

It's a somber reminder that even making a great game won't protect you from the innumerable sorts of turmoil killing jobs in the videogame industry, even as it, from a bird's eye view, rakes in cash like never before.

FLAG STOLEN. FLAG DROPPED. FLAG STOLEN. FLAG DROPPED.

So sang the anthem of capture the flag, a cornerstone mode of the multiplayer FPS that has persisted for over three decades. The mode is almost as old as the genre itself, but it was first popularized by the Threewave CTF mod for Quake by Dave "Zoid" Kirsch. It was impossible to be an FPS fan of the '90s or '00s without a version of these words burning a permanent hole in your brain. Though the frequent updates from the announcer could be tedious, hearing them now elicits nothing but joy.

Two teams. Two flags. Two bases on opposite ends of a map. It's a dynamic game of close shaves, stalwart defenses, and upsets. There is no image more powerful in multiplayer gaming than a flag dropped mere feet from its destination—proof of a late hero who braved enemy lines and almost made it home.

I try not to throw around "perfect" lightly, but CTF really earns the superlative. Every FPS mode falls somewhere on a spectrum of casual and competitive. Way over on the casual end is team deathmatch, a timeless classic that I also consider perfect. On the other end is bomb mode—the apex of sweaty, tactical, and endlessly repeatable objective play.

CTF is special because it does both, and it does them extremely well. At times, heisting the enemy flag is a gripping team effort that rewards coordination, stealth, map knowledge, and pure skill. Other times, the objective blurs into the background of a lobby that's more interested in blowing each other up.

It's normal and natural for not everyone among a lobby to be locked in on the objective, and CTF is happy to accommodate. There are other great objective modes that work with minimal participation—king of the hill and Battlefield's conquest come to mind—but they tend to work because the goal is as simple as standing in certain spots for a while. You can participate in conquest by accident, but playing CTF takes intention. It's a playstyle all its own, and in fact, the best flag carriers can harness a disorganized lobby. All it takes is a small splinter group, or even just one fearless individual, to sneak into a base and get out with the flag before anyone notices.

It's a format that's only as sweaty as the people playing it—it's poker night, it's pickup basketball. It's social, it's competitive, but only so serious. Doesn't that embody what the FPS genre used to do so well? Before matchmaking made strangers of us all, the multiplayer FPS was a place. Servers were hangout spots with friends, regulars, and established house rules.

Where did CTF go?

CTF was the perfect pastime. So it's a shame that the mode has become a rarity. Look around at the popular shooters of today and you won't find many flags, but it's understandable why: CTF was born from the arena shooter, a genre that's been effectively dead for a long time. The mode's waning presence coincided with the rise of multiplayer service games built around single modes with purpose-built maps. Hero shooters, extraction shooters, and battle royales don't offer the variety that was once expected of a Quake, Tribes, or Halo.

Similarly, Counter-Strike 2 and Rainbow Six Siege are so hyper-focused on bomb that alternate modes tend to die on the vine or not exist in the first place. Even Call of Duty, an enduring bastion of mode variety, doesn't always make room for CTF. The last time it appeared at all was as a late-season arrival in Modern Warfare 3 (2023). The last time it was included as a core launch mode was 2017.

You could build a whole game around CTF, but you won't get much love for trying to bring back a classic, as the developers of Last Flag and Highguard learned just this year. And it's been like this for a long time now. Tribes: Ascend, whose CTF mode stood out for its speed and difficulty, got its last update in 2016.

No, I reckon CTF needs to be one great option among many to truly thrive, and there just aren't many folks making shooters like that anymore. The one popular FPS where CTF is still prominent is Team Fortress 2, which swaps flags for intelligence briefcases. I think every day I've ever played TF2 has involved at least one embattled round of 2Fort—a legendary venue for CTF whose discreet tunnels and swiss-cheese interior were built with the mode in mind.

But when I think of CTF, I think of Halo. You can still play it through the Master Chief Collection or Halo Infinite as a core Arena mode, and I suggest you do, because I don't believe there has ever been a more successful marriage of game and mode. It's large, spacious maps make flag runs intense, and the measured movement speed of players means you usually have plenty of time to react to a stolen flag before it scores. I don't know if Halo was the first game to do this, but I also think it was genius to make the flag carrier have to actually carry the flag. Not only are teams encouraged to guard the vulnerable carrier, but the flag itself becomes a deadly and memorable last-ditch melee weapon.

Halo accommodates CTF at every scale and permutation. You can be a stealthy infiltrator who picks up active camo and disappears the flag along with it. You can barge in and Terminator your way into a possession. But the inclusion of vehicles is when Halo really shines. You'll never feel closer to total randos in a shooter than you will after joining a three-person Warthog crew, raiding the enemy base, and burning rubber with your buddy white-knuckling the flag in the passenger seat.

But hey, I'm turning 30 this year, so of course my ideal version came from the mid-2000s. For other perspectives, I suggest reading this fun r/gaming Reddit post in which dozens of people just start naming CTF games they dug. The thread has 98 comments, yet just 12 upvotes, which feels appropriate for our underappreciated mode. CTF doesn't enjoy the spotlight anymore, but for many, it never got better.

Destiny 2's final content update threw so much into the shooter that something was bound to break, and break it did. An upcoming patch will fix a "near infinite damage" bug introduced by the Monument of Triumph update, but the developers at Bungie have decided to drag their feet on the fix to let more players have a taste of godlike power.

"While we're planning a fix (next week likely), we think this is a bit fun," the Destiny 2 team said on X. "Go ahead. Get out there, beat up on Atheon. Destroy some bosses. Do your thing."

The bug, which Rory describes how to exploit here, allows players to stack multiples of the same seasonal Artifact perks, achieving unreasonable damage output.

Bungie is disabling Artifacts in PvP modes for now so that players aren't falling victim to what the studio is calling "The Artifactening," but the game's bosses aren't so lucky.

"Do some crazy stuff," Bungie concluded. "Send us your videos. Have some fun. Be Brave."

The Monument of Triumph update brought back another way to cheese bosses, too: Punting them into the abyss.

The beloved technique is being deployed in The Pantheon, in which players fight a series of raid bosses back-to-back. As our friends at GamesRadar spotted, player Esoterickk has demonstrated how to send The Pantheon's version of Morgeth sailing over the edge of the arena for an uncontested victory.

"It wouldn't be a Destiny release if you couldn't bump a boss off a ledge," Bungie comms manager dmg04 said on X.

It's finally over, we're free. Overwatch players no longer have to live in fear, cowering from the skies in anticipation of what is essentially an AH-64 Apache appearing overhead and gunning us all down, because Jetpack Cat has been nerfed yet again.

This comes as part of Overwatch season 3's patch notes, where Jetpack Cat has undergone some decent changes, including a reduction in the shield minor perk, a speed decrease, and crucially, a fuel regeneration penalty while carrying a target, which has been increased from 2x to 3x slower.

The latter is big news for anyone who's fallen victim to Jetpack Cat's ability to carry allies into enemy backlines. What started as a goofy joke graduated to a viable strat as Jetpack Cat and Bastion quickly became meta. Jetpack Cat is one of the most mobile characters in Overwatch, so she's pretty hard to hit as is, but add a flying Bastion in the mix, which can switch to turret mode and mow down any poor soul that can't duck for cover, and then you have a server admin-level threat.

"While Jetpack Cat's win rate and play rates remain low, Lifeline is highly effective at higher ranks when continuously carrying certain heroes," the patch notes explain. "Increasing the fuel regeneration penalty while carrying a target and reducing the strength of Transport Shielding weakens this strategy, while weapon improvements increase effectiveness outside of Lifeline."

If you're still not convinced of the sheer power of Lifeline then just look at the recent Overwatch World Cup, where teams were forced to either ban Jetpack Cat or play into the Cat and Bastion meta—it was pure chaos.

This isn't to say Jetpack Cat has just been left in the dirt, though, as she has got a couple of buffs. Damage and healing from Biotic Pawjectiles has been increased from 4 to 4.5 per pellet and the Headbutt major perk has had its damage increased from 30 to 50.

I'm not opposed to making Jetpack Cat stronger in these areas; so far my biggest issue with her has been her ridiculous mobility and the Lifeline ability, both of which have been addressed to some extent. Although, I'll still probably ban her in competitive matches—I don't want any of that smoke.

Destiny 2's live service ambitions have come to an end with its final update last week. And with it, Bungie added everything and the kitchen sink, from new catalysts for every Exotic weapon to broken perk combinations. With no new endgame to grind or necessarily protect the sanctity of balance, Bungie's set us free with some of the most broken—and fun—tools we've ever had.

Despite that, I don't think Bungie ever expected returning to the infamous 'Craftening' levels of bonkers builds. For those who weren't around then, this was a bug with the crafting system where you could pinch the perks of one gun onto another, including Exotics.

More specifically, players have found a new bug where you can have multiple of the same seasonal artifact mods active at the same time. It's really easy to do but, as always, so obscure that I'm baffled it was ever discovered:

1. Queue for a competitive or Trials of Osiris match, which disables your artifact.
2. Once it disables your artifact, inspect it and equip whatever mods you like.
3. Leave the queue, and it'll stay broken.

You'll notice you can now equip max-level perks in any slot, including multiple of the same one. This has led to some game-breaking combinations that let you absolutely rinse bosses in a matter of seconds.

For example, Kindling Flame can stack, giving you an ignition on any hits against unscorched enemies. You can use seven Pack Tactics mods and Warlock's Mataiodoxia Exotic to have a ravenous Threadling army. Or how about seven Thunderous Retort mods and max Super stat to turn Titan's Thundercrash into a nuclear bomb.

There is a bug that lets you equip multiple of the same artifact perk from r/destiny2

Despite living in the 'do what you want' era of Destiny, I've no doubt this bug will still be squashed very quickly simply due to how broken it is. Still, it feels so right that a bug like this would crop up at the end of the game's lifecycle. Poetic, really. Some things never change.

If you've got some raids or dungeons you're yet to clear, now would be a good time to blitz through them. In fact, you can even solo some encounters using some of the builds mentioned above.

Destiny 2's sun is setting, and it's perhaps fitting that one of the oldest traditions of the franchise—that is, pushing bosses to their doom—is happening once again. Except this time, they're becoming porcupines holding void light footballs which smacks bosses so hard they fall to their deaths.

The method, as explained here by YouTuber InSaNeGaMeR300, involves combining a crossbow with high Persistence (to make the bolts stick for longer) and the Sentinel Titan's Ward of Dawn ability.

See, Ward of Dawn creates a protective dome of void light which you can pick up and reposition—turns out, when you do that, any crossbow bolts you've stuck into the central orb will travel with you while you carry it under your arm like a football. Hit an enemy with the Ward of Dawn while you're all porcupine'd up, and they'll go flying.

The game just assumes you beat the bosses in question fair and square, which means players have been using it to farm the Pantheon raid gauntlet, which returned in Destiny 2's final update.

It's something of a full-circle moment, as back in the Destiny 1 days, players would push the Vault of Glass boss, Templar, into the void with pulse grenades.

I'm not sure Bungie'll simply let this stand even if D2 is in its end-of-life era—or perhaps specifically because it's in its end-of-life era. Simply allowing players to yeet some of the game's hardest bosses for fat loot is funny, but also probably not what the developer envisions as the sunset of its game. Even if it is appropriate.

Until then, Sentinels can enjoy their free boss kills and potential god rolls—and, as one of our very own Destiny 2 players Sean Martin calls it, one of Destiny 2's paradoxically best updates yet, full of long-requested quality of life features. And deadly porcupine sportsballs, as it turns out.

Last year's explosion of 'friendslop' games inspired by Peak's phenomenal success may be a recession indicator, but I'm still here for it: I love seeing indie developers focusing on small, cheap, creative games built around the idea of hanging with the pals. But the game industry's tendency to pile onto a promising trend does mean that if you go looking for a new co-op game on Steam, the selection is likely to be dominated by what's been most successful in the last couple years. Lo-fi 3D games riffing on Peak; survival crafting; roguelike mechanics slapped onto anything from gambling to cowboys to Dark Souls.

I've got nothing against those games, but they don't get me gassed up the way finding a purer—and if I'm being totally honest, more old-fashioned—form of Discord hangout game does: the linear, 7/10 co-op first-person shooter.

That was exactly the description that crossed my mind when I played Turok: Origins at Summer Game Fest last week. It may sound like damning with faint praise, but I truly mean it as a compliment.

The prequel to the dino-shooting '90s FPS is a three-player co-op game that lets you switch between first- and third-person at will; I played two missions and shot a whole bunch of both dinosaurs and aliens, frequently popping off abilities that launched volleys of magic missiles or beam attacks at them instead of bullets. It wasn't until we fought the boss of the second mission that I figured out how the health system worked, because up to that point I'd mostly been mashing buttons, watching shit explode, and chatting with one of the game's developers over a headset mic that was trying valiantly to filter out a whole lot of background noise.

There's something reassuring in the confidence of a game that knows exactly what it is and executes on what it promises with workmanlike precision. Call it the opposite of eurojank, where you admire the ambition of a game reaching for more than it can really deliver on. Turok: Origins, at least from the bit I played, isn't attempting to tell a nuanced story (though there is one) or deliver the most amazing-feeling FPS guns you've ever used (though they feel pretty good!). It's also, crucially, not built around the lure of keeping you playing forever with procedurally generated guns or a roguelite progression system.

I think it might be my perfect Discord hangout game.

I should probably be clear about what exactly I mean by "Discord hangout game." The definition will naturally vary depending on the size of your Discord group, of course, and how much time you have to play games. To me, there are a few key characteristics:

• Co-op support for 3-5 players
• Story should be minimal, but it can still be valuable for creating structure and giving co-op sessions a sense of accomplishment
• A Discord hangout game should be playable while only half paying attention the majority of the time
• You should only have to really lock in 10-20% of the time; the rest of the play session should allow for idle chit chat
• One player being less engaged than the rest of the group, or more engaged than the rest of the group, will not spoil the experience for everyone

All of these factors are important, but I think the last one especially is. Overcooked, for example, is not a very good hangout game because one player can easily ruin the whole vibe by either taking it too seriously or not doing their part.

As PC Gamer's Morgan Park pointed out to me when we were discussing our shared love of co-op shooters, one of many reasons "friendslop" feels like a poor descriptor for games like Peak is that they're actually fairly demanding of the player. You can goof off in Peak and have fun without taking it seriously, but to succeed you do need to be pretty engaged. The climbing stamina system demands patience, caution and good timing; one or two falls and you're almost certainly dead. Peak's use of proximity voice chat is a fantastic design touch, but further pushes it out of casual hangout game territory for me. It's hard to chat with a friend about what they made for dinner or what's going on with their job when you wander out of earshot and have to break off the conversation.

This isn't a criticism of those types of games—it just means they're at their best with a degree of attention I don't think is always ideal for a casual Wednesday night Discord hangout when we're all kinda tired but want to play a game together. Similarly, I find roguelites and survival games often aren't the best fit for a small Discord server that has a busy-adults-with-many-important-things-to-do vibe: the promise of infinite possibility and hundreds of hours of game is often not that appealing.

A game like Turok, on the other hand, with set missions, just enough story to give each one a bit of flavor, and a class system where we can each specialize in a role and unlock more gear as we go? The promise that we can replay levels on harder difficulties with our souped-up gear if we want, but we could also just finish the game and be satisfied instead of just kinda trailing off when someone gets busy for a few days?

In a different context, I might have more gripes about Turok: Origins—that its moving or shooting could use a bit more friction, that objectives like "enter this arena and blow up these five glowing plants" aren't exactly the most engaging. But while playing it I was mostly having a good time, because nothing in the game got in the way of having a fun chat while the shooting lit up the "bad guys go boom" bit of my lizard brain.

It's flashy. It moves fast. A few times I threw down a shield to help my teammates; most of the time we were each just running around blastin'. You can do some cool finishing moves on the dinosaurs that are guaranteed to elicit some hooting and also hollering in the chat.

I don't particularly like the phrase "turn your brain off" as it's often applied to the dumbest big-budget games or Hollywood blockbusters, because the best examples of either form manage to be engaging or novel in some way that puts them a cut above the average. I haven't played enough of Turok: Origins to say exactly how it will land, but playing it made me appreciate the art required of making a game that demands precisely enough from its players. I mean, just imagine trying to hold a conversation while playing Doom Eternal. Ridiculous!

But between Space Marine 2's class-based mission system and what I've played at Turok: Origins, I think Saber Interactive has found a very welcome niche in making shooters that know when to make you focus on surviving for the next 30 seconds, and are otherwise content to let you blab about your latest sourdough success. I'm blessed that both a legendary line of dinosaur hunters and King Arthur have my back.

Overwatch's next hero might carry twin pistols and has a quick dash, but she's no Tracer. Tomorrow, when Shion makes her debut, Overwatch will have a hero who fights like a Devil May Cry character.

In fact, the character action game series was so much of an inspiration that Blizzard originally gave Shion a Devil May Cry-esque style rank meter to measure your moves.

"We did have a style meter," lead hero producer Kenny Hudson said in a recent group interview with PC Gamer. "We had this little style meter UI in the beginning and it would start at D or E and then move its way up to S, depending on how [many abilities] you could link together."

Hudson said it "would've been cool," but it was too stressful to manage in combat. The team also had troubles figuring out how to reward you for earning an S rank. "At one point we had it so she has super speed or she has double the run speed of other heroes in the game," Hudson explained. "That was kind of wild, and we felt that the bike [was] going to be enough of a challenge."

Even without the style ranks, Shion still has some Devil May Cry DNA in her kit. The motorcycle he mentioned isn't just for racing around the map. Shion can take off with it into the air, hang for a beat, and then kick it towards enemies. Some characters have rocket launchers or grenades; Shion has an explosive bike—a core part of her design that everything else was built around.

The rest of Shion's abilities are made to be used interchangeably so you can combo them together based on what you need in the moment: Each pistol shoots a three-round burst before she swaps to the other, they can both be unloaded in an X pattern for a huge chunk of damage, and she can use her dash to move in or out of the fray.

I can already see several ways you can optimize Shion's abilities for the different heroes you'll face in a match, like forgoing the accuracy you gain from charging up her pistol volley when fighting a bulky tank hero. This flexibility extends to her ultimate ability, which gives her three charges of an AoE barrage that she can use in place or after a short dash. In the brief demo Hudson gave us, it looks like Shion will be particularly good at pouncing on weak targets before they can react, but will struggle to survive anyone prepared for her arrival.

That also might mean Shion's about to become the most banned hero in ranked. Erratic movement abilities can be as much of a pain as a hero with auto-aim. Hudson said a problem in early playtests was that it was nearly impossible to take her out while she was riding the bike because her hitbox became smaller than intended. That's fixed now, but I still expect it's going to take some practice to stop her before you've been turned into roadkill.

Shion will Akira slide into the hero roster tomorrow when Overwatch season 3 begins.

Why bring guns when you can throw motorbikes? Overwatch's Season 3 plans to answer that important question with the new hero Shion. She brings both, so guns and weaponised motorbikes must fill different, invaluable niches, I suppose.

Below, I'll explain when Overwatch Season 3: Into the Tiger's Den releases in your time zone, as well as what you can expect from the new season. Of course, that includes a rundown of Shion's abilities and perks, which are seriously cool.

When does Overwatch Season 3 start?

Overwatch Season 3 begins on Tuesday, June 16, 2026, at 12 am PT / 3 pm ET / 7 pm GMT, and runs until mid-August. You'll be able to preload this update on PC and console (now including Switch 2) to save you time.

This coincides with the end of the current season, so you've still got a little time left to finish your battle pass.

Here's everything arriving in Season 3:

• DPS hero Shion
• Neon Junction (Hybrid) map, set in Tokyo
• Anima Strike event
• Summer Games event returns
• Stadium hero reworks and tweaks for every character, "with about half the cast getting minor reworks."
• Illari mythic skin
• Hanzo mythic weapon
• Yaosobi collab skins for Kiriko, Hanzo, and Genji
• Hero ban updates

As always, there will also be a new battle pass and store bundles, and another mythic skin coming in the mid-season update.

Overwatch Shion abilities and perks

Releasing alongside Season 3 (there are no hero trials anymore) is Shion, the newest hitscan DPS to join the roster, and the leader of the Hashimoto. She's similar to Tracer in that she dual-wields semi-automatic pistols and has a dash, but she's also got a motorbike. And it's as outlandish as it sounds, letting you drive around and then launch your ride at enemies.

I predict she'll be a very strong flanker due to having two mobility tools and an execute in her base kit, which is something Anran, another recent flanker, has been lacking. You'll have to wait and see where Shion lands on our Overwatch tier list once she's settled in.

Here are Shion's abilities:

And here are Shion's perks:

Minor:

• Rapid Reload: Evade reloads nine ammo.
• X Machina: Execution does 20% more damage to enemies below half health.

Major:

• Refuel: Joyride instantly restores 50 health and regenerates 20 health per second while active.
• Faces of Death: Gain all other Damage subrole passives (Recon, Specialist, and Sharpshooter).

The elephant in the room is the Faces of Death perk, which has the potential to be incredibly broken. But chances are, you don't remember all the subroles off the top of your head, so here they are:

• Recon: Detect enemies below half health through walls after damaging them.
• Specialist: Eliminating an enemy briefly increases your reload speed.
• Sharpshooter: Critical hits reduce your movement ability cooldowns.

These come in addition to her default Flanker passive. The end result is a DPS that will be blazingly quick, so long as you're hitting headshots and scoring kills. With two mobility skills and an execute, that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

I'll probably be picking X Machina as the minor perk to gank low-health enemies before they inevitably get healed up, and Faces of Death as the major perk to become supercharged. However, I'm interested in testing Refuel. Depending on how quickly you can get on your bike and fling it at the enemy, that burst of healing could be very handy.

When Bungie announced the final update for Destiny 2, I felt relieved. It surprised me as well. As someone who's spent the past six years (and over 3,000 hours) battling humanity's enemies across the solar system, you'd think that news of my favorite MMO's end would fill me with sadness. But no, just a bittersweet sense of relief as I considered we were finally moving on (as we should've after The Final Shape's year) to whatever the future may hold.

Whether Destiny 3 gets made or not, I genuinely think this is the best thing that could've happened. For fans of the series, it gives us time to reassess our relationship with the games and remember what made them special in the first place, something that definitely felt impossible for me while I was still strapped into endless Portal power climb and the ever grinding gears of the live service machine.

And this is what makes Destiny 2's final update, ironically, a good place to start. It adds numerous quality of life features we've been requesting for years, loot refreshes, exotic reworks, and even attempts to revitalise stale old destinations with the new Distortions activity. The narrative conclusion might be lackluster, but 71 pages of patch notes stand testament to just how much this final update has added to the game.

It's a patch about revitalising and reliving what it was, versus what it became in its final year or so.

What exactly does the new update bring, then? 17,000 words of changes detail the exact tweaks being made, but to summarize briefly:

• Sparrow Racing returns from Destiny 1
• A new Pantheon raid boss gauntlet brings back vaulted bosses
• Restored destination director and simplified Portal
• Lots of new guns, perk, and loot refreshes
• The ability to upgrade gear tier for weapons (making the tier system mostly redundant, thank god)
• Catalysts for all exotic weapons that didn't have them
• Reworked anti-champion mods so they're linked to weapon frames and the ability to choose between seven artifacts (seasonal buff sets)
• New aspects, grenades, and abilities
• More attunement options so you can target farm easily
• 300 more vault space slots and eight more loadout slots

Even Gambit got some love. As Destiny players do, our clan has had numerous QoL complaints over the years, one of the foremost being the inability to link seasonal artifact perks to loadouts—but Bungie even tweaked that. It's such a strange situation to suddenly have all of these amazing quality of life additions only for it to coincide with the end.

Couldn't it have been this way all along? *sigh* well, at least if you're starting now you can benefit from all of these lovely inclusions. And to clarify, Destiny 2 is still a very good game. I think the reason why anyone on the outside noticed players frequently getting so frustrated with it during its lifespan is frankly (despite Bungie's bungling) because there's no other game quite like it—sure, you can go play something else, but there are few other places you can go for a true Destiny-like experience.

Even though I fell off shortly after the release of Renegades and Edge of Fate's dire Portal grind, I wouldn't trade my 3,000 hours in Destiny 2 for any other game. When it's good, it's really good, especially its raids, dungeons, and high-level activities. There's a reason I've gilded the Conqueror title seven times, because in pure PvE buildcrafting and gameplay terms, Destiny 2 is still at the top of its game.

Obviously, there's an elephant in the room, though—what about the Red War? What about the original Destiny 2 campaign that sets the narrative foundation for every expansion after? I would've liked to replay the campaigns, and it would've gone a long way to repairing relations with players who are still smarting about that content vaulting years after the fact.

Sadly, though, Bungie wasn't able to bring it back out of the vault for whatever reason, presumably because it would fundamentally break the newer version of the game, which I think Destiny players are well aware is held together by string and duct tape. It did, however, finally create a collection bundle where you can grab all of the available expansions in a straightforward way. It's massively discounted right now, and I assume will be for a while yet.

The final update announcement actually made me more excited to play the game than I have been in a long time—finally, I thought, I can enjoy Destiny separate from the live service structure that came to dominate it, sometimes to its detriment. No more escalating power gains or pointless grinds, and all with the backdrop of the current QoL changes like tons of loadout slots so I don't have to think about Guardian Rank, and wide-ranging attunement so I can farm more easily for what I want.

It's like Bungie has unlocked Destiny 2 with this update, and it'll be the most liberating iteration of the game's new player experience ever. And for those of us who've done almost everything, there are new exotics to grab, new builds to make, and time still to tackle those challenges you've always pondered, like ticking off solo dungeons or trying the Pantheon.

It's a bittersweet time for any Destiny fan, as Destiny 2 is now in stasis after its final update. Hell, even This Week In Destiny, my weekly ritual for over a decade now, is coming to an end. All good things must finish, I guess.

Many have placed blame on Sony for pulling the plug on Bungie's genre-defining looter shooter following its $3.6 billion acquisition of the studio in 2022. Also controversial is its decision to back Marathon in its place. One former employee has pushed back on the notion that Sony is the only culprit, however.

"This fight was pre-Sony," said ex-community manager Liana Ruppert on social media. "Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition. If it wasn’t acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition."

Even from the outside, it was clear that Bungie was in a pickle long before it was acquired by Sony. The acclaimed studio had split from Activision in 2019 to self-publish the MMO-lite. With shakeups to content delivery, microtransactions, and pricing over the years, and a declining playerbase, alongside layoffs at the studio, it wasn't too surprising to see the company hunting for a new partner to keep the ship afloat.

And that's apparently how we ended up with Sony ponying up $3.6 billion to make Bungie its own, a deal that hasn't necessarily worked out for the best. Just last month, Sony recorded a $766 million impairment loss against Bungie for the 2025 financial year, a painful one-two punch of Destiny 2 and Marathon failing to meet its expectations. Despite the acquisition, the numbers still aren't adding up.

On the bright side, Destiny 2's final update has bolstered its player count for the time being, and a fan petition asking Sony to greenlight Destiny 3 is taking off—even though it's screaming into the void. Maybe it's not too late for the 'Destiny Infinity' idea that was pitched to save the series.

Destiny 2's Monuments of Triumph is here, the final update for the game and potentially the last Destiny anything. Even This Week In Destiny, my weekly ritual for over a decade now, is coming to an end. To that end, Bungie has crammed in as much of a conclusion as possible, given we're actually at the start of a brand-new saga.

After the conclusion of the decade-long Light and Darkness saga in The Final Shape, Bungie kicked off the Fate saga, beginning with The Edge of Fate. It's all about the mysterious god-like entities affiliated with the planets of the Sol system who have been pulling the strings this entire time. They control time, setting up key events like dominoes.

Say what you will about The Edge of Fate, but its story was the most fascinating aspect. New character Lodi (one of the best in the series, no less), a pre-Golden Age guy working at Destiny's version of the Federal Bureau of Control, was ripped out of the space age and brought to space in the far future. Turns out he was a co-worker of Ikora's, though Guardians don't tend to remember their past.

Unfortunately, this promising new saga was cut short, ending just as it was ramping up. And the new secret cutscenes in Monuments of Triumph are a bittersweet teaser of what was to come, and an obituary for a universe we might never get to explore again.

There's a bunch of great dialogue and story developments between its new quests, but I want to focus on its two vital hidden cutscenes. Obviously, spoilers ahead for 'the end of Destiny', so to speak.

Me and you, Big Blue

The first cutscene sees our commander-in-chief for a decade reflecting on the journey and the weight he's had to carry. It tugs at the heartstrings of any long-time Destiny fan, not least because of the passing of his previous voice actor, Lance Reddick. Rightfully, Zavala's ready to hang up the hat, with no Ghost and only one life left. Zavala's story fittingly ends with him retiring and passing the baton to Ikora, the last vanguard of the old Vanguard.

And then your Ghost drops one of the most on-the-nose, poignant lines: "Nothing ever stays the same, does it? What do you think is in our future?" You know what, Ghost? I don't know, but I hope it's a continuation of this world.

What's most impressive about this cutscene is the directing, which is a shocking step up from just about anything we've seen in the series. I adore the transition between scenes using Zavala's shoulder pad.

Cinematic director John Ebenger explained that the team "pulled out some new tricks for the transitions between in-engine and pre-rendered and tried to put in the work to make this one special in a short time frame."

A meeting in the Dark Forest

This cutscene is the most important one for the future of the saga, and the one that hurts the most. Lodi's in the Dark Forest, possessed and contorted by an unknown being and speaking cryptic gibberish. He speaks of "A showdown at the end of time, between champions of Dark and Light," and that's why the egotistical Nine have been courting us this whole time.

This entity is presumably the Winnower, an extradimensional god, lover of the 'flower game', and the Darkness equivalent of the Traveler so to speak, directly interacting with us for the first time. And it's told you to take a breather and enjoy some slaughter for the time being. In other words, the story ends here, but with just enough of a thread to pick back up on should Bungie ever get the opportunity.

That's one hell of a cliffhanger, and only makes the realisation that a showdown with the Winnower is unlikely feel like a punch to the face.

I suppose that was the plan with this update, really? Pull out all the stops, set up a new story in the most intriguing way possible, but also try to tie as neat a bow as possible just in case. You win, Bungie. I'm sad, I'm angry, and now I want Destiny 3 even more.

A big new chunk of the upcoming Halo: CE remake dropped online yesterday, and everyone is being normal about it. I actually mean that for the most part—there's a lot of excitement around the Unreal Engine 5-powered do-over, which will serve as a test run for Microsoft's next phase of Halo.

For some, including myself, Halo: Campaign Evolved (a funny title that says upfront they're only recreating one half of the game) comes across as superfluous. The original holds up tremendously well today and is readily available through the Master Chief Collection, so its remake will have to dramatically improve on that game to make a real mark. I wouldn't want that task.

I'm going into Campaign Evolved with an open mind—expecting different, but not necessarily better. Halo Studios' official playthrough of mission five, Assault on the Control Room, is so far confirming that impression. I watched the 28-minute video in full and then played the original mission through the MCC to refresh my memory. What follows are some notable differences and observations:

Cortana is more helpful, and waypoints are everywhere

"These lights seem to be responding to our proximity and guiding us to the exit," a new Cortana voice line says as Chief enters the first of many hexagonal control rooms. It could be a little confusing to find your way around these rooms in the originals, but l always found the flashing white arrows on the ground pointing forward to be sufficient visual guidance. Now, Cortana barks that tip into your ear so you can't possibly miss it.

Not that you actually need to look for arrows on the ground when Campaign Evolved has added HUD waypoints that are visible at all times. This is one of several ways that Halo Studios' is applying a modern hand-holdy lens to Combat Evolved.

So bright, so very bright

This was already clear from the Silent Cartographer playthrough from last year, but Halo Studios isn't just making higher definition sand and snow—it's fundamentally changing Halo's visual identity in many situations.

That's definitely the case as Master Chief emerges onto the bridge above the snowy valley. As you can see in the comparison above, it's really bright out here! So bright that the weather doesn't appear all that "inclement," as Cortana notes. It looks nice in a vacuum, but I think the OG's dreary palette feels more intentional. When Unreal Engine 5 is involved, the sun always seems to become a main character.

The sprint of it all

As we already knew, this remake makes sprint a default power of Master Chief. My record on this debate is consistent: Halo plays better without sprinting, and it's strange to add such a consequential movement change to levels that were originally designed (and balanced!) around a slower, consistent pace.

Take that first open valley Chief arrives in after riding the elevator down: In the original, you're meant to cross a wide gap while vulnerable to a Wraith lobbing plasma mortars down the valley. If you don't get in the Warthog, or it gets randomly blown up, or you can't snag a Ghost, you're stuck having this tense faceoff with a tank whose mortars travel almost quicker than you can pivot. With sprint, I highly doubt Chief will be in much danger at all.

It's nice that they're including a "no sprint" skull modifier for the folks who want a classic moveset, but I'm here to tell you it's "classic" for a reason. It's not like Bungie forgot to make Chief quicker all those years ago—Halo's methodical pace made it distinct. It placed a premium on ranged combat, forcing you to get creative with grenades and flanks in moments when the magnum was unavailable. I could embrace this change if I heard a convincing argument that moving quicker makes Halo better, but instead, the reasoning always seems to come back to sprint being 'expected' of a 2026 FPS. That's dumb.

Lock-on rockets make banshees a non-issue

Banshees could be real jerks in this mission (especially on Heroic or Legendary) back in the day, but I doubt they'll pose the same threat with the SPNKR having lock-on capabilities in this remake, as it does in subsequent games.

Health is gone

I forgot this was happening. The remake ditches Chief's non-regenerating health bar (and med kits as a result), which seems like an out-of-pocket change, unless the goal is to make Halo 1 less distinguishable from the games that came after it. Is that what remakes are for?

Guns are super accurate now

Theoretically, the inclusion of sprint would make close-to-mid-range guns like the assault rifle more useful, but perhaps that doesn't matter when everything appears to have laser beam accuracy from the hip. The AR, plasma rifle, Needler, and plasma pistols in this video have a tighter spread than the original, which would place them roughly in line with Halo Infinite's rendition of those weapons. Not a great sign, as Infinite's sandbox has always had a problem with so many guns being viable from so many distances that it hardly matters which one you choose.

The Wraith and Scorpion shoot and move much faster

Another change in line with Infinite and other 343-era Halos. The Scorpion and Wraith, the heaviest vehicles on the battlefield, now steer and aim on a dime. Their cannons also cycle much faster, which stacks the odds in Chief's favor in at least one showdown in this mission. On Heroic in the original version, Hunters are one of the only real dangers for Chief in a Scorpion. They can often take two shots to kill, and time between tank shells is long enough for them to get off one or two Fuel Rod barrages. Not anymore: the tank's new fire rate makes quick work of these apex predators.

What have they done to the sniper rifle…

I really like the new model for the sniper rifle in the remake, but its new sound? "Downgrade" is a loaded word, but it's appropriate here. Sound on.

Halo CE sniper rifle: A godly announcement. A thunderclap. A warning that comes too late.

Halo remake sniper rifle: blam-o

You can't get Sgt. Johnson killed anymore

Here's a change that makes a lot of sense with 25 years of hindsight. Originally, Sgt Johnson is one of the marines fighting for his life in the valley with the Scorpion tank. His sniper rifle makes him an excellent wingman on the tank's shoulder, but uh, he can also die like any other marine. The remake fills in this plot hole by taking him out of the encounter.

You can swap guns with marines

Since I've been complaining about features from latter Halo games that make CE less interesting, I'll mention one I'm glad to see in the remake: swapping weapons with marines. This was a thing from Halo 2 on, and it always felt like a cool way for Master Chief to throw his rank around—"I want your sniper rifle, here take this pistol."

But real heads know that the best use of this feature is actually to give marines all of the power weapons, since they have unlimited ammo and decent accuracy. The person on the sticks of this demo does exactly that when the tank section comes around, and it's super effective.

Destiny 2 is ending—for all intents and purposes, in fact, it already has, with the launch earlier this week of its final update, Monument of Triumph. More than one Destiny fan at PC Gamer has described the moment as bittersweet—it's not only Destiny 2's last live service update, it's also one of its best—and in a smaller way, this is too: Maybe it's no surprise, but the clockwork-like This Week in Destiny updates will soon be over.

The launch of the Monument of Triumph update went remarkably smoothly, given both its massive scale and Bungie's long history of, well, not always having great luck with big updates. In today's TWID, the Destiny 2 team said it's "keeping a close eye on what needs some extra tweaks," and that an "incremental patch" aimed at tackling those issues is slated to go live next Tuesday.

And then, the sadness. "As a reminder from our Monument of Triumph announcement article, we will be continuing TWIDs for a few weeks following launch to keep you informed of game news," the team wrote. "Once we're through our launch window, our weekly blog entries will be entering a form of hibernation as well.

"This won't be the end of communications from us by any means; we'll still be keeping in touch with you and sharing community highlights through our website, social media channels, Discord, and other outlets."

It's kind of a melancholy moment even for me. I haven't touched Destiny 2 for years and even when I was playing regularly, I didn't care enough to keep up with TWIDs—known at the time as This Week at Bungie updates. I was happy enough to just jump around and shoot things and occasionally annoy my teammates by firing my super at the wrong time.

But my boss, editorial director Tim Clark, is a man who once ignored multiple tornado warnings so he could finish a Destiny 2 raid, and you better believe that every Thursday he'd have a quick scan through the TWAB and then I'd get a message in the PC Gamer Slack chat asking if I was covering TWAB, telling me what to cover in TWAB, and reminding me that if I enjoyed my ongoing employment I'd best keep the sass to a minimum—occasionally, all in a single sentence.

I did not keep the sass to a minimum, for the record, and while I haven't touched a TWAB (or a TWID) in ages, I have fond memories of working with Tim on them. Which isn't to say that I'll miss doing that, strictly speaking—trying to parse some of that stuff could be a genuine headache—but on this point at least, I will join with my colleagues in saying that, yeah, it's a bittersweet moment.

I had forgotten about Quake Champions, the free-to-play take on Quake 3 Arena that first arrived on Steam in 2017. But it's still around, it's still got, well, a handful of players, and today it got a surprisingly beefy update to mark the 30th anniversary of Quake, including a free battle pass for everyone.

The battle pass is the most obvious hook here: Befitting the big birthday of id Software's OG 3D shooter, the season 30 battle pass includes a number of cosmetic rewards from 1996 and QuakeCons gone by, plus previously exclusive skins and the new Disintegrator rocket launcher and Goroth's Earth Magic podium.

Functionally, though, I think the update is the bigger deal. Despite its age and relatively small player numbers—it typically peaks at a few hundred concurrent players on Steam these days—the patch makes some significant changes, including an overhaul to the network code aimed at reducing packet loss and lag compensation, and improving projectile predictions. The amount of lag compensation will now vary based on your ping, problems with hit validation for high-ping players have been fixed, and the 160 ms ping limit required to connect to games has been removed completely.

A range of other fixes, optimizations, and tweaks have been made across the board, and a new "Random Champion Select" option has been added that lets players play as locked champions—when randomly selected—in practice, quick play, and ranked modes.

Universal weapon shaders have been added, characters and maps have been tweaked up in a range of ways, Quake 30th anniversary banners have been added everywhere—this is a sizable update by any measure, and particularly so for a shooter we included in our list of "eight 'dead games' that are still very much alive" two years ago.

That hasn't gone unnoticed by players on Reddit. "I don't know how [Quake Champions developer] syncerror convinced them to let him keep updating this game for so long but I'm grateful for his efforts," redditor Fob0bqAd34 wrote. "When we got that battlepass some months back (or maybe it was last summer?) with a ton of the old weapon skins in one pass I thought that was going to be it. Hopefully he gets to keep quietly ticking away in the Sharma era as well."

The patch notes for the Quake Champions 30th anniversary update are below.

• Game Client Updates
  • Fixed the collision bug that pushed players out of the map, through the map geometry collision layer
  • Fixed being able to damage a respawning player by attacking their death location with a gauntlet
  • Raw Mouse Input fixes & optimizations • NVIDIA Reflex fixes & latency markers added
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the damage summation markers code
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the special movement input code
  • Fixed Heavy Machinegun shader not applying when attempting to customize its shader prior to selecting any other weapons in Customization
  • Fixed the wrong champion medals being awarded after meeting the qualifications for a medal and then changing champions
  • Fixed an issue where you could see a static player doll in the map when a spectator enters Freefly cam mode
  • Fixed spectators not being able to exit Freefly cam mode after entering it
  • Fixed a crash in the camera manager when switching to a player that is currently dead
  • Added caching optimizations to improve performance when referencing user setting values
  • Reduced RAM size requirements for Texture Quality levels
  • Quality Settings will no longer be lowered for hardware that is too new to appear in our internal CPU & GPU databases
  • Removed the fullscreen UI popup that would occur after a match when reaching Level 2, announcing that a new mode (Slipgate) has been unlocked
  • Fixed several cases of game crashes
• Threaded Input
• This option is enabled by default as it has tested to improve performance under most conditions – however, this option is not recommended for Linux users and may not be ideal for mice using polling rates of 4Khz or greater.
  • Added Threaded Input setting - Enables moving the input to a dedicated thread that runs at above normal priority. This has some benefit regardless of input mode but greatly reduces Raw Mouse Input latency
• Sound UpdatesBroken Persistent Sounds
  • Fixed sounds that would remain persistent in the world after they should have ended
• Pain Sounds
  • Fixed missing pain sounds
  • Fixed the incorrect pain sound playing when exactly 25 or 50 hp
  • Restored pain sounds between 75 and 100 hp
  • Added Acid & Fire panic sounds when a damage-over-time effect has been applied
• Death Sounds
  • Death Sound radius extended to 35m to match other character sounds
• Weapon Sounds
  • The volume of the RUTHLESS water railgun shot sound was reduced
• Item Updates
  • Power-ups dropped from dead players will now have a minimum duration of 3 seconds remaining • Dropped Power-ups no longer pop up vertically before dropping
  • Dropped items now fall at the normal rate of gravity
  • Fixed in-game Lore drops, in addition to being able to unlock a readable lore item, it grants an in-game bonus to those who discover them
  • Fixed dropped items (weapons, powerups, flags, etc.) from being able to land on a player’s head and remain floating in the air
• Bot AI Updates
  • Fixed Doom Slayer Bots so that they can now use their Berserk ability
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer run backwards during Bull Rush
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer accidentally cancel their abilities early
  • Fixed Strogg Bots so that they can now use their Drone Strike ability
• Armor Feedback
• To provide players better feedback regarding how their combat encounter is going, we have integrated the armor hit beep system from Quake 4 and expanded upon it further. This new feedback will provide unique hit beeps when dealing damage to an opponent with armor, as well as provide visual feedback when that armor has depleted.
• Armor Hit Beeps
  • You will now hear a unique hit beep when you hit an opponent who has armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BEEP STYLE - includes OFF, Q4 and QC options Armor Break FX
  • You will now see special fx when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • HUD Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK FX Armor Break Sound
  • You will now hear a special sound effect when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK SOUND - includes OFF, POWER DOWN, ENERGY RELEASE, SHIELD PUNCH, and METAL TINK options
• Additional Hit Beep Options
  • Added HITBEEP styles – includes:
    • Mid-Tone (popularized in Quake 3)
    • High-Tone (from Quake 4)
    • Damage-Based (from Quake Live)
    • Additive Damage (introduced in QC)
• Teamplay FeaturesTeammate Death POIs
• Teammate Death POIs have been added to assist in teamplay. These not just help you know when a teammate has fallen but can act as a sign of danger. Whether you choose to rush into that combat zone for revenge or heed its warning to find a new path is up to you.
  • Show a Point of Interest markers at the position a teammate dies
  • HUD Settings: Added TEAMMATE DEATH POI
• Drop Commands
  • Now available in team modes are the Drop Weapon and Drop Power-Up commands. Each command will drop the item if available and trigger a message in team chat
  • Drop Weapon will drop the weapon with the current ammo count if you own below the weapon’s starting ammo amount
• Say Commands
  • Added 6 Say Commands: Yes, No, Hi, Bye, Thanks, Sorry.
  • Available in all game modes, issuing these commands will print a chat message and generate a local in-world VO message that everyone can hear
• Show Vanity Customizations Toggle
  • Enabled by default, this new setting allows you to toggle off the in-game armor shaders, vanity items, vanity weapons (including their custom fx and sounds), and weapon shaders. This can be toggled on the fly in a match. You will still see all vanity in the Match Lobby and the Pre and Post Match Podium scenes to show off your style, but during gameplay all vanity will be removed
• Weapon Zoom Toggle
  • Activating the toggle will keep the weapon zoomed in until you either untoggle or change weapons
  • CONTROLS Settings: Added ZOOM TOGGLE
• Hidden Weapon Position
  • New Hidden option sets the weapon and hands to be invisible and centered
  • Added a Gauntlet icon to the ammo HUD, so that the gauntlet weapon selection is always visible
• Weapon, Ammo, & Knockback Updates
  • Starting Weapons now upgrade instantly without weapon switch downtime
  • Weapon Pickups will now always add the starting ammo count to your current ammo count
  • Knockback is now applied immediately instead of queuing and applied in delayed batches
  • Knockback cap adjusted from 120 to 132, resolving the rocket jump penalty accrued in the prior update
• Champion Specific Weapon Loadouts
  • Weapons are now equipped per Champion in Customization
  • Added an optional Equip on All Champions button
• Random Champion Select
• The Random Champion, selected in the Champion Roster, will make a random selection from all champions. This option allows players to play locked champions (albeit random) on Practice, Quick Play, and Ranked
  • In Duel, it selects one champion at random that will be used for the entirety of the match
  • In Sac Tourney, CTF Tourney, and TDM Tourney, selects a champion during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the team
  • In Duel Rounds, makes a random selection during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the squad
  • In all other modes, it picks a Mystery Champion that cycles at random with each respawn, with ability cooldown retained
• Universal Weapon Shaders
• All weapons that currently have shader support now support 23 universal shaders, which have been made available for free to all players, instead of needing to own different sets of basic weapon shaders for every individual vanity weapon
• Basic weapon shaders
  • Red, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Lime, Green, Teal, Blue, Purple, White, Grey, Charcoal, and Black Basic Shaders Camo weapon shaders
  • Grasslands, Forest, and Snow Camo Shaders Patterned weapon shaders
  • Blue and Brown Patterned Shaders Mastery weapon shaders
  • Ithagnal, Cthalha, Goroth, Volkerh, and Master Shaders
• UI Player HUD Updates
  • Buff & Debuff player info HUD (such as Quad, Protection) shows a remaining duration number when duration is 5 seconds & below (and shows decimal durations when duration is 3 seconds & below)
• Pre & Post Game
  • Fixed the Drag/Move Player hit detection of the bottom right pillar in the Custom Game 4v4 Lobby
  • Fixed a the Add-Bot [+] UI elements appearing on top of the Settings UI when passing Party-Leadership to a player actively in the Settings menu
  • Added new tips to the map loading screens
  • Fixed the persistent menu blur bug when leaving the Battle Report after a match
• Champion Updates All Champions
  • Changing champion mid-game no longer resets the ability cooldown
• Anarki
  • Disabled weapon switch during ability usage, while still allowing you to queue the switch, which will execute after the Injection completes
  • Fixed the Anarki hoverboard sounds' Teammate Volume support
• Athena
  • Grappling Hook: Fixes & updates to pull speed acceleration
• BJ Blazkowicz
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Increased Walk Speed from 160 to 280 ups (for silent walking)
  • Fixed BJ Blazkowicz’s SUMMERTIME outfit attachments when combined with the GOLDEN CROWN
• Clutch
  • Starting armor reduced from 100 to 75
• Barrier
  • Barrier: Breakable shield, increased duration that degrades as it receives damage, with a maximum of 200 dmg received before breaking
  • Barrier: Both duration and damage soak share the same energy pool. For example, while the shield can withstand a maximum of 200 dmg before breaking, if half of its duration expires before taking damage only 100 dmg is needed to burn through the shield’s remaining energy
  • Barrier: Shield sound now alters pitch as duration depletes
  • Barrier: Fixed incorrect movement settings during ability usage, including move speed 300 instead of 320 and max speed of 750 instead of 600
  • Mining Laser: Duration is now 3 seconds, instead of the remaining time from Shield duration
• Dodge
  • No Dodge Passive while the Shield is active • Spawns with 1 of 3 dashes available
  • Reduced stamina regen from 0.33 to 0.3
  • Improved the responsiveness & accuracy of the Dodge Stamina UI
  • Added a 10ms delay between executing dodges to address small issues when rapidly executing dodges
  • Updated the Air-Dodge passive title & description to Dodge Jump, to fully encompass both Air-Dodge and Ground-Dodge mechanics
• Death Knight
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Fixed the "bayonet" bug that would leave the sword extended outward while holding a weapon
  • Fixed Death Knight’s Humiliation vanity not staying equipped
• Flame Strike
  • Fixed the splash damage from the fireball projectiles, they will now always add the flame dot
• Charring Passive
  • Fire Dot - Increased from 6 dmg x 5 sec (30 dmg max) to 9 dmg x 5 sec (45 dmg max)
• Doom Slayer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
• Berserk
  • Improved enemy visibility in Berserk, making them appear solid white (with an enemy outline colored arrow)
  • Duration reduced from 5 to 3 sec (to reduce the distance he can run away when using berserk passively)
  • Duration restored in full when he lands a punch, resetting the remaining berserk time to 3 seconds (to encourage offensive usage)
  • Added a sound effect when a punch lands, to help it feel more visceral and for punches to feel like they are making contact
  • Added magnetism, trails, and new pickup sounds for blood punch bubbles
  • Fixed a bug with the weapon drop and hand raise that resulted in being stuck without fists or a weapon during or after ability usage
  • Blood Punch sound added when earning a kill with Berserk
• Eisen
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Max Extra AP reduced from 175 to 150 ap
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved Eisen armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 sec
• Sentry Turret
  • Added Damage Summation audio support for hitbeeps from turrets
  • Added Overhead Health Bars for both friendly and enemy turrets; health bars on enemy turrets are visible when the turret is either below full health or when it has obtained any armor upgrades
  • Decreased the turret’s max health from 120 to 100 hp
  • Increased the turret’s starting health from 120 to 125 hp
  • Starting Armor 0 ap, Max Armor 50 ap, Max Extra Armor 75 ap. Armor is granted via the updated Repair passive
  • Improved Turret armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 secs
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 100 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Reduced activation delay from 2.0 to 1.5 sec
  • Added an a health and armor info status indicator above the ability info to show when you have an active turret deployed and how healthy it is • Fixed turrets from eternally bouncing on jumppads
  • Throwing a turret into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the turret and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the turret was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
• Repair Passive
  • Removed the armor regen passive, in favor of a new Turret Repair passive
  • Eisen can now deny Light Armor pickups when at max armor by standing near the pickup for 2.5 sec. Any armor Eisen picks up will also be applied towards the deployed turret to "upgrade" the turret's stack
• Salvage Passive
  • Shards will now grant 5%, Light Armors 10%, and Heavy Armors 10% cooldown reduction
• Galena
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved the fitting of the QPL SEASON 3 BELT with Galena’s ACOLYTE Outfit
• Unholy Totem
  • Hitbeeps will now play when damaging enemy totems
  • Damage Numbers will now appear when damaging enemy totems
  • Added Overhead Health Bars, Enemy Arrows, and Owner Names for friendly totems
  • Added Overhead Enemy Arrows for enemy totems, when targeted Owner Names, and when damaged Hit Beeps and Health Bars
  • Totems now receive Quad Damage, Protection, and Spawn Protection FX to show when they will deal or can receive more damage
  • Added fire SFX to totems when 3 totems are deployed
  • Totems you own will now appear solid through walls, to differentiate them from totems belonging to a teammate Galena
  • Friendly totems will now appear yellow through walls when 3 overcharged totems are deployed
  • Enemy totems will now have a visible SFX ring around them that is visible in any lighting quality setting
  • Starting Health increased from 60 to 75, Max health increased from 60 to 75
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 75 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Throwing a totem into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the totem and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the totem was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
  • Fixed applying the Super Shotgun's close range bonus damage towards totems; damage was capped at 80 dmg with the Super Shotgun but you can now deal 120 dmg
  • Slightly increased the totem's weapon collision mesh, so that close range shotgun pellets don't miss when expected to hit
• Keel
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Grenade Swarm
  • Fixed grenades sometimes explode 3 times instead of once
• Reinforced Passive
  • Improved self-damage reduction from 60 to 67%
  • Improved splash damage reduction from 20 to 33%
• Stockpile Passive
  • Improved ammo box cooldown reduction from 10 to 20%
• Nyx
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 750 to 1000 ups
• Ranger
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Ranger Gladiator outfit renamed to BRAWLER to avoid having two armor sets with the same name (Strogg's GLADIATOR, which is based off of the Q2/Q4 Strogg Gladiator enemy). BP art for new reward added
• Dire Orb
  • Velocity reduced from 1000 ups to 900 ups
  • Shoot Delay after throwing increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • Shoot Delay after teleporting increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • The orb now has 75 pts of health and can be destroyed when shot, triggering the orb to explode. The explosion can be triggered by anyone: Ranger, teammates, or enemies
  • The orb’s damage output is now based on it’s time in flight, gaining damage over time & distance
• Scalebearer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
  • Fixed an IK animation crash in the Scalebearer’s animation set when trying to reach a target position during weapon-aiming that was unreachable
• Bull Rush
  • Fixed the Scalebearer sensitivity bug, where sometimes the default rotation limits are not restored
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bull Rush sometimes passing through the enemy target with a collision (especially at high ping)
• Slash
  • No changes.
• Sorlag
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Strogg
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Will no longer drop Stroyent when he commits suicide
  • Fixed Golden Crown power-up shaders • Fixed Golden Crown crash behaviors that would occur when cloaking & decloaking
• Drone Strike
  • Drone: Fixed Peeker’s camera view angles from updating if its Strogg owner's body enters a teleporter domain
  • Fixed Peeker’s drone flight sounds persisting after death
• Visor
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap Piercing Sight
  • Piercing Sight now exposes the enemy’s health and armor information
  • Increased the volume of Visor’s third-person ability VO and reduced how much the occlusion muffles its volume
• Game Mode UpdatesLobbies/Queues
  • In a ranked match, when a player disconnects from the lobby/match, the leaver still gets the existing forfeit loss, but now loses SR. The remaining opponent now also gets a forfeit win persisted to their profile
  • Added Unholy Trinity TDM to the Bot Practice queue
  • Added support for disabling the Score Limit, by setting Score Limit 0 in Custom Game
• Matches
  • Fixed the max warmup time bug, which would allow warmup to go on forever, instead of being capped to 120 sec
  • Fixed the Auto-Abort system, to properly end matches when no enemies remain in game
  • Anti-Griefing system will now exit the current match and send you back to the main menu, instead of closing the game application
• Duel
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized
• 2v2 TDM
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized. Instagib • IG Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Sacrifice
  • Active Abilities are now canceled on Soul Pickup, just like we do in CTF during flag pickups • Added an Announcer VO countdown from 10 to 1 as the point reaches 90-99% captured
• Clan Arena
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Slipgate
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Unholy Trinity
  • UHT Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Spectating
  • Fixed spectators having a delay changing the spectator player, when the followed player dies and has entered the death HUD UI
• Map UpdatesAll Maps
  • Quake 30th Anniversary Banners added
• Blood Covenant
  • Removed an unused out-of-bounds jumppad
• Blood Run
  • Added a teleporter from the Tri-bolt mid-level to the Super Nailgun / Power-Up room
  • Fixed a hole in the wall mesh near a statue
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bounds breakable urn, placing it back into the map
• Church of Azathoth
  • Fixed missing game mode flags for items in the disabled obelisk area
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bound breakable urn
  • Removed the out of bounds jumppad
• Citadel
  • Removed out of bounds fireplace reference inside the central jumppad Deep Embrace
  • Recreated ocean mesh from scratch for performance optimizations
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Insomnia
  • Fixed holes in the window frame mesh near HMG
• Ruins of Sarnath
  • Swapped the SG spawn and SG player-spawn locations (so that you don't have to turn around to pick up the Super Shotgun)
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Tower of Koth
  • The smaller version of Tower of Koth will now be used in DM, TDM, IG, i9, and UHT
  • The larger version of Tower of Koth has now added the support beam above the central mid-level teleporter that was introduced in the smaller version of Tower of Koth

I'm not really a Call of Duty player for the most part. Sure, I've played the hits like anyone who enjoys a good shooter, and have fond memories of the first, second, and third, plus the Modern Warfare games and the original Black Ops, but besides those, modern CoD has mostly alienated me. Or at least it did until 2022 when I found myself putting hundreds of hours into a new Warzone mode: DMZ.

To this day, I genuinely think DMZ is one of the most underrated extraction shooters around, plus one of the best things modern Call of Duty has ever produced. It's not necessarily for the hardcore crowd, but for those who prefer more PvE-centric play. Back before DMZ, I felt alienated by the genre. I personally love extraction shooters like Hunt: Showdown—it's a fantastic concept, but for me its world and setting (which I wanted to explore) were hampered by the fact I'd get sniped whenever I attempted to do that.

I love PvP, but more as an interlude, as a tasty little morsel of encounter that occurs between exploration and PvE. And this is one of the reasons DMZ was so good. The giant city-wide map of Al Mazrah, flush with locked buildings to explore, loot rooms to raid, vehicles, events, and even boss-type enemies felt so liberating. Sometimes you'd encounter other players, sometimes you wouldn't, but when you did, its team-based mechanics made these encounters all the better.

Not just proximity chat, but the ability to gamble on betraying your team to join another, or even recruit other teams you'd just wiped, giving you a better chance at clearing harder areas. And to clarify, I'm not talking about an unofficial alliance Marathon-style, you could literally join other teams to tackle harder content. Stuff like the Koschei Complex—an entire indoor mode with loot vaults and bosses you could only matchmake for in Al Mazrah itself.

Building 21 was a fantastic concept, too, channeling many of the same ideas as Marathon's Cryo Archive years before. To enter this hardcore mode, you required a special keycard loot item you could only find in Al Mazrah, which would give you a single run when the mode was periodically active. This was a great way to incentivise players to bring their best gear, especially as the building was filled with puzzles, dangerous enemies, valuable loot, and bosses like the grenade launcher-wielding Velikan.

Defeating him was the only way to get this extremely powerful gun in DMZ and my proudest moment in the mode might be when I managed to kill him and snatch it. All of this is to say, DMZ was filled with really smart ideas, and for me, it was my Arc Raiders before Arc Raiders.

Sure, it wasn't perfect, and sometimes a match would devolve into teams of six riding around ganking everyone in sight. DMZ has also progressively gotten more sweaty since its release (as shooters generally do), but especially after Activision stopped supporting the mode in 2023. That's why I'm excited for a fresh start. As you've probably seen, DMZ 2.0 is set to arrive with Modern Warfare 4, and not as a beta like the previous iteration, but a fully-fledged mode.

You can watch the reveal trailer above, plus a developer deep dive on the COD Podcast where they discuss DMZ 2.0's development, but it sounds pretty great. There's a new stealth system, dynamic weather, the option to bring vehicles into the mode, but the biggest green flag for me is that they're talking about accessibility and accommodating all the different player experiences they observed in the original DMZ.

There are also new deployment options that allow you to matchmake with people who want to do similar stuff, avoiding that classic DMZ experience of one player running off in a completely different direction. The story missions also sound much cooler. No more picking up three bandages and exfiling—one of the missions they describe involves robbing a casino vault.

Perhaps my favorite addition is the "star system", an almost GTA-style escalation as you're discovered and continue to loudly kill enemies. The higher your stars, the more enemies will be drawn to you, including "deathstalkers" and "hunt squads" neither of which sound particularly friendly. In general, though, it sounds like DMZ 2.0 will be much more reactive towards your team's playstyle.

When I first watched the trailer, I was a little nervous that Infinity Ward was pushing the experience purely towards PvP, but from what I've read and what's been said by the developer, it genuinely seems like it's building on what makes the original DMZ such a fantastic extraction shooter. Essentially upgrading every part of the experience as it becomes a fully-fledged mode versus its beta predecessor.

Either way, if you're an Arc Raiders player who loves its PvE-focused elements, but maybe want to try your hand at a little more PvP, I think DMZ 2.0 is set to be pretty special. Especially if it manages to retain DNA of the original when it releases in October.

Strange as it is, Destiny 2's massive final update is here, marking the end of an era. But Bungie's gone out with a bang here, not least because it's added 26 new catalysts and updated nine old ones. No Exotic weapons have been left behind, and that's a fitting way to leave things.

Below, I'll outline all the new catalysts and how to get them, as well as what's been changed on existing catalyst-havers. I'll warn you now, it's a bit of a grind, but it's not like there's anything else on the horizon anyhow.

All 26 new catalysts in Destiny 2

There are 26 new catalysts added to Exotic weapons that didn't already have one, meaning every golden-tier gun now has an upgrade. While the catalysts for raid and dungeon-exclusive Exotics remain in their respective activities, so far it seems as though any Exotics available from random drops, quests, or the Exotic Archive have their catalysts in the general loot pool. In other words, you can grind ritual activities and complete Exotic Orders in the hopes that you get what you want.

Most of these new and updated catalysts are pretty strong upgrades, though I've certainly got my favourites. I think Riskrunner is one of the biggest winners here, now having Chain Reaction explosions added to its catalyst on top of already incredible add-clearing potential. I'm also partial to the Last Word, and its new catalyst makes it a gunslinger's dream in both PvE and PvP.

Here's what each new catalyst provides and where you can get it:

Updated catalysts

Bungie has also expanded a number of Exotic weapons' catalysts so they're a little more interesting—these upgrades were previously just stat bonuses, now they've got a perk, too—and buffed some others.

The new Distortions quest in Destiny 2 introduces you to the event of the same name, which Bungie hopes will revitalise destination-based play a little more now that the game has received its final update. There is a range of really good new weapons available in this event, so it's well worth the time if you find something you want to farm, especially with the inclusion of attunement for pretty much all activities.

You first get this quest from Lodi in the Tower, so here's what you need to do from then onwards to complete it, and how to play a Distortions event.

How to complete the Distortions quest in Destiny 2

After you visit Ikora and Lodi in the Tower, you'll get the Distortions quest. Lodi tells you that The Nine are still wreaking havoc on reality in a bid to escape the solar system, though none of that really matters now, but this is the intro to the new Distortions event.

Your first step is to head to whatever destination is currently Distorted—you can tell this by the red circle around it. Once there:

1. Complete a public event and then wait around after it—you'll see a red glowing pillar begin to build and a new event countdown will start.
2. Complete the Distortion event (both succeeding or failing counts). It's basically a wave defense, but between killing enemies, you have to destroy three glowing red corruptions hidden around the arena by shooting them.
3. Now you need to gather Strange Matter. You can do this by opening chests, gathering destination material nodes, and completing public events, so explore the destination grabbing what you can until you hit the amount.

When done, the Strange Matter will transform into a Strange Signal you now have to follow.

How to follow the Strange Signal in Destiny 2

Your final step is following a Strange Signal. This marker will appear on the map as a circle, so select it to activate the nav marker on it and follow the markers to get there. You'll find a tough Distorted enemy at the location you need to beat—doing so will unlock a chest just next to them that you can open to get one of the event weapons, usually of a high tier.

If you head into your inventory, select attunement, and then Distortions attunement, you can see all of the potential weapons that will drop. They each have the extremely fun Carrion Munitions origin trait, which spawns explosive insectoid robots that chase enemies when you defeat a powerful combatant.

You can find info about each of these weapons' perk pools either in their respective entry in collections, or by using light.gg. This will help you decide which to attune to when completing Distortions and Strange Signals.

Destiny 2's Monuments of Triumph final update is here, giving you tons of challenges to complete, new catalysts to collect, and even a new Exotic mission for the Cull's Shadow. One such challenge is the very enthusiastically named GOOOAAAALLL!!!, which requires you to kick a ball into the hidden net.

You'll fall into one of two camps when you see this. You either don't know where the soccer pitch is in the Tower, or you've played ball in the hangar many times. Either way, you won't be looking in the right place to complete this challenge.

How to score a goal in the hidden net in Destiny 2

First, you need to head to the Tower Hangar (take a left from where you spawn into the Tower and follow the path). Here you'll find a soccer ball in front of Saint-14 in the centre of the room. You need to bump into this ball to 'kick' it to the hidden net, which is actually inside the old Future War Cult faction room—it's not the usual glowing green barriers at the edge of the hangar.

As I demonstrate in the video above, from where the soccer ball spawns:

1. Push the ball across the hangar towards the red staircase towards the entrance.
2. Go up the first, smaller set of red stairs—avoid bumping the ball all the way up, or over the railings.
3. Continue up the white stairs on your right, leading into the old Future War Cult room, the big windowed space overlooking the hangar.
4. Push the ball through the green light barrier at the entrance (that's the net) to score a goal.

Completing this challenge will give you ten Legendary Marks, which is a unique currency used at the Monument of Guardian Tenets in the Tower. You can spend them on various rewards, like armour sets, Sparrows, ships, Ghosts, and engrams. You'll want to complete the other Monuments of Triumph challenges in the Journey page to earn more Legendary Marks and, hopefully, unlock everything.

It's the day of Destiny 2's final live service update, and players have swarmed into the shooter to celebrate the game and make their demands for Destiny 3 known.

With a peak of over 164,000 Steam concurrents so far today (via SteamDB), Destiny 2 is more active right now than it has been since Episode: Echoes launched in June 2024.

The biggest peak between then and now came with the launch of the Edge of Fate expansion in July 2025, which reached 108,000 Steam concurrents. That number quickly dissipated, and in April of this year, the shooter didn't break 13,000.

While not as bad as the news that Destiny 2 content updates are over, The Edge of Fate was a real low point for the game. One of our resident Destiny 2 diehards, Phil Savage, wrote in his 54% Edge of Fate review that Destiny 2 had become "worse to play in almost every way."

We didn't know at the time that the expansion was the beginning of the end, but we did wonder. "I have never known a Destiny 2 expansion with as many problems as Edge of Fate, and I'm worried the game may not survive them," Tim Clark wrote.

Ironically, the news of Destiny 2's demise has injected the scene with new energy. Bungie clearly threw everything it could at today's final update, which is called Monument of Triumph and came with an appropriately monumental list of patch notes.

And just as it takes its final live service breath before entering maintenance mode, Destiny 2 has become today's top seller on Steam thanks to the whole game going on sale for $26/£22. Kind of makes you wonder if they should say "psych!" and announce another expansion, doesn't it?

Plenty of fans would certainly like more Destiny. A petition asking Sony and Bungie to greenlight Destiny 3 has gathered over 370,000 signatures.

Welp, once again Sand: Raiders of Sophie—the hotly anticipated PvPvE extraction shooter where you build and pilot big stompy mechanical bases across an alien planet—has been delayed.

And this time, the delay was announced a mere one day before it was supposed to launch. Yikes.

Just yesterday the global launch times and regional pricing for Sand: Raiders of Sophie were posted in the game's Discord, seeming to indicate that the launch was a go. But this morning, another announcement said the game would be delayed until June 22—and when it does launch, it'll now be an early access game instead of a full release. Yikes, again.

This isn't the first time Sand has been delayed: for months, the release date was listed on Steam as "March 2026," until in the final week of March the developer finally admitted the game wasn't quite ready. And here we are again.

"It’s been a crazy few days, with SAND featuring at Summer Games Fest and the Server Slam exceeding our expectations on the number of players," publisher TinyBuild said on Steam. "We’ve welcomed tens of thousands of new smugglers into the world of SAND and it’s shown us just how special what we have on our hands really is."

Noting extensive feedback (both positive and negative) from players on balancing and features, "It’s clear we need to more closely involve the community in our development, and so we’ve decided to release into Early Access to work towards the best possible version of SAND: Raiders of Sophie," the publisher said.

"What’s also clear is we can’t reliably serve enough players with our current server structure," the announcement continued, hence the delay until the new release date: June 22.

"We will also do a sanity check playtest around June 15, next week. In a way the server slam achieved its goal: the servers definitely got slammed, and we gathered invaluable information on why," TinyBuild said in the official Sand Discord.

"Over half of you experienced connectivity issues which were revealed at the higher online population. The good news is we have a plan to stabilize the servers. We just need a bit more time."

Overwatch's soft reboot earlier this year has kicked off more story development than I can keep up with. There are several new short stories, comics, and even webcomics that are building up to something big. And it looks like they're going to be necessary for figuring out what is going on with its newest hero, too.

The trailer for Overwatch 52nd hero, Shion, doesn't actually tell us much about her that we didn't already vaguely know from some of the hints in the past few months. She's one of the leaders of the Hashimoto clan—Overwatch's near-future version of the yakuza—and dual wields pistols.

People have already been debating if she's a robot (an Omnic in Overwatch parlance) or a human based on the early info, and the trailer refuses to give a clear answer. At first, it looks like Shion wears a demon mask like many of the other Hashimoto members, but when she starts talking through speakers in her neck it almost seems like it's not a mask at all and that she is indeed a robot.

This isn't helped by the fact that she tells Sojourn that she "fights well for a human," which is the kind of thing an Omnic would say. But Sojourn says she was thinking the same thing and now I don't know what to believe.

Right now, all we know is that she's the clan's "most terrifying elder" and that she's going to be a villain in the next season. Her dialogue with other heroes or a new comic will likely explain her whole deal.

For now, we'll have to wait until she is playable in season 3 starting on June 16 to find out more. It's not super clear what kind of hero she'll be. She has those pistols and an electrified knife of some sort that she stabs Sojourn with. Maybe Blizzard is about to drop a damage hero who can stun you in close-range and then turn you into swiss cheese.

Halo Combat Evolved, the start of the legendary FPS franchise, may have already been remastered (albeit in 2011), but now it's time for a full-blown remake. Enter, Halo: Campaign Evolved. It's the original story you know and love but with fancy graphics, "refined controls", and three bonus prologue missions—it's not just a retread.

Xbox hasn't presented a clear plan for Halo beyond this remake (though we know a brand-new game is coming), so it'll have to do for now. I've compiled everything you need to know about this remake, so you'll be ready to take the fight to the Covenant once again.

When is the Halo: Campaign Evolved release date?

The Halo: Campaign Evolved release date is Tuesday, July 28, 2026, which was confirmed during a new trailer for the game at the latest Xbox Games Showcase. However, you can also pre-order the Premium or Collector’s Edition to get five days of early access beginning Thursday, July 23, 2026.

It will, of course, release on PC and Xbox Series X|S consoles, but it'll also be available on PS5. This makes it the first Halo game to ever be released on PlayStation—weird times.

What's changed in Halo: Campaign Evolved?

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a full remake of the original game, but what does that mean exactly? Here's everything that we know of so far that makes it different from the original and its 2011 anniversary remaster:

Halo: Campaign Evolved trailers

The Halo 1 remaster was first revealed with a trailer and gameplay demo of perhaps the most iconic mission in the game, The Silent Cartographer, back in October 2025. Apart from reticence towards it being in Unreal Engine 5 and an oddly specific dislike of the assault rifle having 32 bullets, I'd say it went down pretty well. I mean, it's Halo: Combat Evolved again.

Seven months later, at the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, we were treated to a cinematic story trailer, which will feel very familiar to fans of the series. The Master Chief crash-lands on the ringworld and fights off Covenant aliens with the help of his AI companion Cortana.

The Operation Meteorite trailer we got is much more interesting, showcasing brand-new content arriving in the remake. As I mentioned earlier, it's a short prologue to the events of the main story, where we see Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson fight through some lush environments and Covenant ships. It's new, but it also looks very classic, and hopefully seamlessly slots into place.

After nine years, eight expansions and a mountain of updates—many good, plenty questionable—Destiny 2's final ever patch releases today. The Monument of Triumph is the final hoorah; the last big release before the studio walks away from the game forever.

The future is uncertain for the series. Destiny 2 itself will remain playable for the foreseeable future, but there's no hint of a Destiny 3 on the horizon. Bungie claims it will "begin work incubating" its next games, but anything that comes out of that process will be years away from announcement, let alone release. For now, then, this is where the series ends.

Bungie at least seems to be pulling out all the stops to leave Destiny 2 in a better place than it has been since the maligned The Edge of Fate expansion. The Monument of Triumph update brings new features, weapons and buildcrafting options, along with a whole host of quality of life changes. We'll be updating this liveblog throughout the day with commentary and reactions as the community logs to celebrate, mourn and pay tribute to most singular live service game ever made.

When does Monument of Triumph release?

[#Destiny2Game] Upcoming Maintenance: Update 9.7.0 ⚠️ Impact: Destiny 2, API, Websites TIMELINE 📅 June 9, 5–11 AM PDT (-7 UTC)🛠 Downtime Start & End: 5:30–10 AM🔓 Pre-Load: 9 AM🚀 New Update and Login Available: 10 AMFull Schedule: bung.ie/d2serverInstall Size Info: bung.ie/motsupport

— @bungieserverstatus.bungie.net (@bungieserverstatus.bungie.net.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T16:48:18.238Z

Destiny 2 is about to go down for pre-patch maintenance. Per Bungie's support team, here's when you'll be able to get back in:

• Pre-load begins: 10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT, 6 pm BST
• Monument of Triumph is live: 11 am PDT, 2 pm EDT, 7 pm BST

That's assuming no delays or server queues, at least.

On Steam, we're looking at a 28.4 GB patch, which is appropriately chunky given everything we're expecting from the update.

Ikora's last message

Over the last few weeks, many people who worked on Destiny 2 across the years have been sharing their feelings about the game and its impending end. Here's Mara Junot, voice actor for Ikora Rey, with an apropos goodbye.

Junot had the unenviable job of replacing Gina Torres as the voice of Ikora back in 2021, and did an admirable job—nailing the character's personality and mannerisms. As a Warlock main, Ikora was always my favourite of the Vanguard. Here they deliver a pitch perfect farewell, which is making me feel a lot of things.

OK, so what's actually in the Monument of Triumph update?

Here's a rundown of some of what to expect from the patch, based on what Bungie has been teasing across the past few weeks:

• A restored director, which will once again be the main way to launch the game's activities and has been refreshed to add Kepler and the Lawless Frontier
• A heavily simplified version of the Portal, which will hopefully make it easier to jump in with friends and actually earn good rewards
• Distortions, a new modifier that will rotate between the game's destinations—offering extra challenge, empowered enemies, and unique rewards on completion
• The return of Sparrow Racing League, a race mode that was available in Destiny 1, arriving in the sequel for the first time
• The return of the Pantheon raid gauntlet, this time featuring bosses from raids that were "Vaulted" (ie, removed) from the game
• New loot for all of the Portal categories
• Refreshed loot pools for all raids, dungeons and destinations, including new armour set bonuses
• The ability to upgrade weapons to higher tiers
• More attunement options to help chase specific weapon drops
• Catalysts added to all exotic weapons that didn't previously have them
• 300 more vault space slots
• 8 more loadout slots
• The ability to choose between seven artifacts
• A rework of anti-champion mods, now making them intrinsic to weapon frames
• A new aspect for each class
• A new Stasis and Strand grenade
• An across the board buff to all primary weapons
• A massive balance pass across abilities, weapons and exotic armour
• Gambit is back

There's more too, including updates to bright dust—Destiny 2's in-game currency—and reworks to a bunch of PvP activities. You can browse through a full thread of planned updates, with links out to relevant articles, over on Destiny 2's Bluesky account.

The Guardian's last message

Here's Peter Jessop, voice of the male Guardian player character, saying goodbye.

"So long my friends," he writes in the video's description. "Some of you knew, but most of you didn't when I was playing along beside you. I forgive you for Ganking me in the Crucible."

Man! These are hitting me harder than I expected. I thought I'd made piece with the end of a series I've been playing for over a decade, but I guess not.

The final patch notes are here

We're still a few hours away from the release of 9.7.0. While you wait, how about over 17,000 words worth of patch notes?

New additions, reworks and fixes abound. It's an exhaustive list, and plenty of it is genuinely exciting. This would be a bumper patch worth showing up for even if Destiny 2 was continuing. Hopefully it does enough to place the game in a good place for those of us who still plan to play across the coming months and years. (Or at least until I've finished soloing all of the dungeons.)

A musical interlude

Peter Jessop's video below not only set the tone of the moment, but it did so backed by arguably the most iconic song from Destiny 2's original soundtrack.

It's one of many stand-out tracks from the game's history, a catalogue of work from series composers Skye Lewin, Michael Salvatori and others that adds massively to the rich texture of the game's history. So many of the game's moments that stick in my mind are, in part, because of the music that backed them. The orchestral howl of the dogs in the Leviathan's pleasure garden encounter, or the electronically ethereal chimes of The Whisper exotic mission.

Here's two that have stuck with me the most over the years:

Deep Stone Lullaby is a triumph of a thing—a sad, quiet, sparse little tune that's deployed perfectly in the Deep Stone Crypt raid. It's arguably the best raid moment in the series, and it happens during a jumping puzzle of all things.

On the other end of the adrenaline scale, Shell of What Was is a recurring motif throughout the Forsaken expansion, but one that comes to the fore at the end of the Last Wish raid. It's a big triumphant finish to one of the best raids to come out of the series—a final moment of hype that punctuates the time you kill a big wish dragon.

Sometimes Destiny 2 was a very very good videogame.

What builds are you taking into Monument of Triumph?

With new aspects, ability reworks, exotic armour buffs, and seven whole artifacts full of mods to pick from, this update is looking like a buildcrafter's dream. So what builds should you actually play?

Destiny 2's build scientists have been hard at work theorycrafting based on what Bungie has revealed of the new stuff. I'm particularly enjoying Llama's series, which offers three builds for each class that make use of the new toys on offer. It should offer a nice break from Getaway Artist Prismatic Warlock.

Titan

Warlock

Hunter

Is it weird that the end of Destiny 2 has me more excited to play than ever?

It's incredibly bittersweet that my most anticipated features this patch are tainted by Bungie's past decisions

As usual when we post about Destiny 2, one of the first comments to this live blog was about the time when Bungie removed a whole bunch of stuff from the game.

I've written about it before, but the 'Destiny Content Vault' proved to be a major misstep, alienating players who were rightly upset about stuff they'd paid for being taking away, and making it impossible for new players to experience the game in its entirety.

It's telling, then, that the two Monument of Triumph features I'm most excited for are also ones that are tainted by the shadow of the DCV.

Pantheon 2.0

The returning raid gauntlet mode will, this time, feature a selection of bosses and encounters that were previously vaulted. The concept art features Calus from Leviathan, Argos from Eater of Worlds and Gahlran from Crown of Sorrows. While there's no word yet on any Scourge of the Past encounters, I'll be disappointed if I don't get to have another argument about CAP vs ACP.

I'm looking forward to the nostalgia of tackling these bosses for the first time since they were removed with Beyond Light. But that excitement is lessened by the fact that I shouldn't have to see this as a big deal. That Bungie would remove a chunk of its endgame in the first place is absurd.

And a single encounter is a poor replacement for the pacing and vibes of a full raid—the way mechanics are teased and expanded across the encounters, or the connective tissue and atmosphere of interstitial combat and jumping puzzles. It's just not the same.

Calus is a fun fight, but it's a shadow of Leviathan as a whole; it's Royal Baths and braying dogs and the wacky gameshow obstacle course that lead into the boss fight. Without Scourge's city opener and Sparrow escape, Insurrection Prime is just a Servitor stuffed into a mech suit.

Part of me had always hoped they'd come back in their entirety one day. When the studio started adding old Destiny 1 raids, I'd assumed eventually it would be the turns of the ones that D2 lost. Now we know it'll never happen. That's a bitter pill to swallow.

Distortions

I've always liked Destiny 2's destination spaces. In some respects they're a missed opportunity—all a bit too simple and small to really sell the concept of a shared world shooter. Nevertheless they're a chill space to enjoy Destiny 2 as a satisfying FPS. A perfect canvas to grind bounties and catalyst progress while listening to a podcast.

So I really like that Monument of Triumph is giving them a bit more purpose. Distortions will rotate between a number of the game's patrol zones, making them harder and adding, we're told, surprising encounters and other interesting quirks. Colour me intrigued!

I like the idea of giving these spaces a bit more structure and purpose—an actual gameplay loop that offers players a reason to revisit these otherwise neglected spots.

But again, it's another part of the game left incomplete. We're missing numerous destinations still, from Io to Mars to the Tangled Shore—big chunks of the base game and it's first expansion. I'd love a Distortion on the Tangled Shore, just because I'd love to return to the Tangled Shore.

The end of Destiny 2 is sad not just because of what could have happened in its future, with the intriguing story Bungie was cooking up as part of the Fate saga. It's also sad because we now know that the tapestry of Destiny 2's history will forever remain incomplete.

Preloading for the patch is live

I can confirm patch 9.7.0 is now rolling out on Steam, ahead of the servers going back live in just over an hour. You may need to restart Steam if you don't see the download option.

At least the community is still making tools for Destiny 2

No discussion of the game would be complete without a nod to its many third-party community tools. If there's one thing Bungie absolutely nailed for Destiny 2, it was its extensive API that allowed for some powerful options to help manage your loot.

Destiny Item Manager, D2ArmorPicker and Light.gg have all been pinned to my bookmarks bar for years now. And even now, people are still offering up new ways to sort through the game's guts.

Destiny Report lets you search through the games guns. You can filter by element, type, perks, frame, source. You can also play about with each gun's perks, checking what each does to a weapon's stat distribution.

It's not the first tool that has let you search through the database for the exact perk combo you want, but it seems significantly faster than many of the alternatives.

We're live!

This patch already has more players on Steam than for the launch of the last Destiny 2 expansion

Even with the patch going live slightly earlier than expected, the Monument of Triumph update has breached 100,000 concurrents on Steam.

In comparison, Destiny 2's Renegades expansion pulled just 71,278 concurrents on its first day on Steam.

Marathon, meanwhile, has 7,870 players right now.

...And the servers are down

This is how you know this is a proper Destiny 2 launch. I tried to load into the Tower, got a Weasel error and now I'm stuck on a loading screen.

We're so back.

Chart watchers in shambles

Did enough people just try to check Destiny 2's concurrent numbers on SteamDB that they had to throttle traffic?

It's running fine now, but my chart watching was briefly interrupted by a queue due to increased demand.

For sure plenty in the community are invested in this patch's success, to prove to Sony and Bungie that Destiny as a series is worth investing in. See also the many, many calls for a Destiny 3 announcement during the major announcement conferences over the last week.

The Traveler returns

Back where it belongs.

This patch already has more players on Steam than for the launch of The Edge of Fate

Over 150,000 people in-game on Steam now. That means we've passed The Edge of Fate's concurrent peak, which was 108,535 people on the Saturday following its release.

Destiny 2's biggest Steam launch was for Lightfall, with 316,750 players. I'd be surprised if we get there, but it's nice to see people showing up to show support.

Destiny 2 is also the top selling game on Steam right now

Not only are old players returning, but it seems that new players are showing up too.

Destiny 2 is currently the top selling game on Steam.

This is likely thanks the Destiny 2: The Collection bundle. It's the entire game: All expansions, all dungeons, even the 30th Anniversary Pack, all for $26/£22.

It's a frankly absurd deal, but more than that, it's an actually easy way to buy and experience Destiny 2. Previously, you had to read the runes and consult the tablets to figure out what each individual purchase would let you play. It was a nightmare, one actively off-putting to people who may have wanted to get into Destiny 2.

I've said it before: It's wild that it took the death of the game for this to happen.

A quick note for anyone hunting for the Old Lights emblem

For some reason, the in-game message tells you to look for the Old Lights emblem—earned for playing Destiny 2 during each of its expansion years—in the General tab of the emblems collection page.

You'll actually find it on the Account tab.

Here's how to earn the new exotic catalysts

As part of this final update, Bungie has created catalysts for the remaining 25 exotic weapons that previously didn't have one. (Catalysts being upgrades that add stat bumps and new functionality that can substantially alter the weapon's performance.) It has also created catalysts for the two new exotic weapons added in this patch: Turncoat, a void exotic hand cannon, available from the seasonal reward pass, and Fafnir, a void linear fusion rifle in the power slot, which can be purchased for Legendary Marks from the Tenet of Bravery statue in the central courtyard of the Tower. Check out their perks in the gallery below.

The catalysts for the older weapons have various acquisition methods. Common or garden exotics like Khvostov and Bastion will drop their catalysts randomnly from Vanguard, Crucible and Gambit ops activities. But the more rare raid and dungeon exotics, like Conditional Finality and Xenophage, will only be found in their respective activities. Which means dragging your best group of guardians together for one last ride, or braving the rollercoaster of LFG.

Content creator Aztecross has a video discussing what all the catalysts do, which I've also embedded. Spoiler: they're juiced. Riskrunner getting Chain Reaction and Anarchy getting buffs to trap duration and damage—as well as Impromptu Ammunition—are the stand outs for me.

Having played for a couple of hours, here's what I've learned...

This is Tim, taking over from Phil on liveblogging duties. First, a bit of a brain dump having spent some time with the game. Please bear in mind that as a veteran with 10,000+ hours in Destiny 2, this is both an exciting and very sad time for me...

• Being able to upgrade weapon tiers is a huge blessing: Previously, I would delete anything that wasn't tier 5. Now, if you find a lower tier weapon from one of the new loot pools, you can upgrade it all the way to tier 5 by spending mats and glimmer. It's expensive: the final upgrade cost me 20k glimmer, 3 Ascendant Alloy, and 1 Ascendant Shard—but hey, the game needed a resource sink. And the better news is that upgrading old craftable weapons from raid and dungeons is free. You won't get access to an extra row of perks, but Bungie has added new ones. For example, I just added a perk called Dimensional Shift to my old Corrective Measure machine gun. That's a weapon I've used since Destiny 1, and now it feels box fresh. I'm not crying, you are.
• Make sure you attune: Almost every major activity in the game now offers optional loot attunement. To access it, go to your inventory screen and click the box top left. There you'll find 12 sub-menus, covering everything from the new Distortions activity to Gambit, Crucible, Trials and even the reprised Sparrow Racing League. In each one you can select a weapon to attune to, which will then drop more regularly as a reward.
• Distortions offer a new reason to spend time on planets: Thanks to their baby soft difficulty, most players felt no reason to spend time patrolling on planets. Bungie tried to fix that by making players always underlevelled on Neomuna, but all it did was turn the enemies into bullet sponges that were a joyless slog to shoot. This patch forges a better path with its addition of Distortions. It's a map effect that rotates between planets on a timer, and sees the skies ripped open to deposit harder enemies and events. (Crucially: just hard enough.) Distortions has its own distinct loot pool, making it—for now, at least—worth spending time with, and solving the problem of most of the game's geometry going to waste. I've already snagged a sweet-looking Stasis support rifle called Decateur 02. Why didn't you do this years ago Bungie!
• Don't forget to grab your new abilities: The final patch adds new ability options across the classes, such as Void Warlock's vampiric Soul Siphon aspect and Void Hunter's Phantom Surge melee. In order to activate them, you'll need to visit Ikora Rey (my forever vanguard queen) in the tower. She'll charge you a couple of thousand gimmer and then you'll also need to meditate to unlock the ability so it can be slotted into your build. And if that seems over-engineered, then you must be new to Destiny 2. Everything was like this!
• There is an insane amount of gear in this update, and much of it is free: Clearly what has happened is that, with this being the last major update, Bungie has gathered up every single thing in development for several future seasons and then emptied the cupboards. The cynical among you will note that there are now 21 new exotic weapon skins in the Eververse MTX store, each costing 700 Silver ($9.99 / £7.99 each). You can however circumvent the cost via Bright Engram focusing, which can now be found at Tess Everis in the tower. Results are random, but you'll gradually be able to unlock everything. Overall, there is more gear to earn for free than we've ever seen before. Check out the four tenet statues in the Tower Courtyard and each one contains Ships, Ghosts, entire armor sets, rare shaders and more. All of which can be purchased, largely for affordable prices, using Legendary Marks which are earned for completing in-game triumphs. Collecting everything is going to take a while, even for a degenerate like me.
• Connection errors are very much still a thing: Well, it wouldn't be a Destiny 2 update without getting booted back to orbit by Anteater and Baboon errors I suppose. It's going to be interesting to see what level of technical support the game gets in the coming months (and years), given how it's hardly been bug-free at the best of times.

Get a free set of armor ornaments and other cosmetics from Bungie's site

As I mentioned earlier, there's a massive amount of gear to earn in the Monument of Triumph, but here's a complete set you don't need to earn at all. Instead, just redeem a bunch of codes via Bungie's site whilst logged into your profile. Here's the page. I'm not sure why this stuff isn't just in the game with the other new additions, maybe it missed some sort of cutoff. In any case, I'll take it. Speaking of which, I need to check what the mood is like over on r/DestinyFashion. I imagine they're losing their minds at the sheer amount of new outfit options.

You can get what were supposed to be this year's Halloween outfits right now

Oh boy! My trip to r/destinyfashion found the motherlode. Tucked away in the collections database are two new sets of Halloween armor ornaments for each class. Bungie usually makes one set per year available, based on a player vote, with the other arriving later down the line. Seeing as the game has no plans for future content, I don't think any of us were expecting more spooky gear, but I guess they had already been designed. I've embedded all six helmets above to give you the vibe.

In order to unlock all of the ornaments, you'll need to gamble on Bright Engram focusing via the Store. Look for the icon marked Bright Engrams in the left-hand menu. On the second tab (click to the right, see below) you are able to focus based on the slot you're missing. It's going to take a while, especially if there are a lot of other ornaments you don't have, but at least it won't cost you a dime (unlike previous offerings).

There's a secret exotic mission in the update

I'm logging back on to tell you that the community has unearthed a secret exotic mission that rewards a new kinetic fusion rifle called Cull's Shadow. The big brains over at r/raidsecrets have a guide on how to start the quest. Who knows what else lurks in the patch!

I was pleasantly surprised by the Xbox Showcase overall this year. Seeing Marcus in normal clothes was rather funny, but Gears of War E-Day looks as gnarly as ever. Clockwork Revolution is a very promising time-bending steampunk RPG, and a hit of Bioshock nostalgia. I'm already sold on Vivarium, the most charming Ghibli-esque life sim I've ever seen.

Of all the games that Xbox showed off, I'm sad that I was most disappointed by Halo. We got a fresh look at the creatively named Campaign Evolved during the showcase, and it looks fun—I like Combat Evolved. More specifically, we got a look at Operation Meteorite, three brand-new missions featuring the Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson, set a year before the main story. I'm looking forward to playing through Operation Meteorite, and I'm glad there's something actually new coming with the remake.

However, Xbox's mascot has been treading water essentially since Microsoft set up 343 Industries to shepherd it into the future after Bungie's departure. That was almost 15 years ago, by the way. Halo 4 was alright. Halo 5's campaign was terrible, but I enjoyed the (controversial) multiplayer quite a bit.

And the promised next evolution, Halo Infinite, was actually very finite it turns out, after the team announced at the end of 2025 that it would shift focus from live-service support to creating new games. That's for the better though, honestly.

In 2024, Xbox even rebranded 343 to Halo Studios, which I thought would finally put the series on track and usher in a second golden age for everyone's favourite green, gun-toting spaceman. But so far, all we've got is yet another rehash of Halo Combat Evolved.

If there's anything the Xbox Showcase was missing—apart from the awkward elephant in the room that is The Elder Scrolls 6—it was a clear plan for Halo. I'm sure Halo 7 is coming at some point, but there are a lot of questions and, personally, a lot of doubt. Perhaps it's time we moved on from the Chief, dare I say it, and told some new stories that didn't feel so tethered to a past that it can't live up to.

While Xbox is in 'the future is going backwards' era—with all-caps XBOX rebranding, a classic (albeit beautiful) transparent special edition console, and console exclusives (sometimes)—it's such a shame that Halo's stuck in the mud.

I don't know about you, but playing FPS games makes me feel old. I'm way past my prime, my twitch reflexes are shot, which in turn leads to me getting shot. How I wish I could simply stop time to reposition or line up a headshot. Maybe grab an enemy's missile and redirect it back at them. Even teleport behind them. Then I'd finally have my old edge back.

Hang on a minute. I've just watched the reveal trailer for Time Strike at the PC Gaming Show, and it has all of those things, I'm saved!

The gameplay trailer for Time Strike, developed and published by Mode 7, shows off the game's voxel aesthetic, which also helps bring me back to my younger days, where videogames were more blocky, polygons far less numerous.

It looks like the game takes place in a selection of dense, urban sandboxes, where enemies can come at you from any angle. Why are you fighting them? I don't know. This is a videogame and you've got a gun, so stop asking questions and start shooting—that's how it used to be.

What's fresh about Time Strike is the ability to pause time at will. If you're being shot at, simply stop time, turn around, and shoot your enemy first. You've also got access to a doohickey of some sort that allows you to redirect objects your opponents fire at you, like missiles. You can also use it to lob helmets at their faces or even tear down walls and ceilings on top of them.

There's even a gadget (maybe a contraption, or part of the doohickey) that allows you to teleport a short distance, and you can actually see one of the NPCs look all confused as you warp behind him and then shoot him in the back.

If you want to feel young and powerful again, you can wishlist Time Strike on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I've been playing first-person shooters for a long time, so if you show me a man wall-running while blasting an enemy, a big smile is going to creep across my face. Empulse's gameplay, shown for the first time at the PC Gaming Show, has me grinning like an idiot, then.

There's a warm, fuzzy nostalgia to Empulse that 1047 Games are no doubt hoping will attract lapsed fans of arena shooter silliness. The trailer, a solid minute of frantic gunplay that ends with a bloke lamping a mech with a sledgehammer, immediately took me back to the glory days of Xbox 360 shooters and left me wanting more.

At heart, I love tactical shooters and saying things like "enemy down" and "we're clear here", but I grew up on weird and wonderful arena shooters like Halo 3, Brink and Timeshift. Empulse's kinetic movement and high-speed combat reminds me of those days, back when I was a teenager with unlimited internet access and basically no responsibilities: the ideal conditions for keeping up with the people who play FPS games online.

That feeling comes rushing back every time the trailer shows someone sliding between a mech's legs or hip-firing an assault rifle while sprinting along a wall. Telling PC Gamer more about the game, 1047 Games promised that movement is at the heart of everything in Empulse. In addition to wallrunning forwards and backwards, you'll also be swinging with grapple hooks and even tossing paint on the ground to change the way the ground works.

Did I mention there are mechs? They spawn on the map armed to the teeth and the different teams can claim them to splatter the enemy team across the scenery. If powerful game-changing stuff spawning on the map doesn't scream classic arena shooter to you, I'd posit that you never played one.

This nostalgia even extends to the soundtrack. Joey Valence & Brae's bustamove might be a brand-new track, but it channels golden-era Beastie Boys so effectively that it put a smile on my face. It might do the same for you.

If you've been convinced, Empulse is releasing on Steam's Early Access platform on June 24, and you can play it for free at Steam Next Fest starting June 15.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.