Have you ever played 'comp stomp?' When I want to arrange an RTS playdate with a mix of casual and hardcore friends with wide gaps in skill level, it's the only way to play without someone (or perhaps everyone except the guy who can time his build order) getting smoked. Load into a map against a bunch of AI opponents, form an alliance with your buds, and proceed to mercilessly gang up on the bots. There's just one problem with comp stomp: it usually sucks.

It can be fun to mow down crummy AI here and there, but it's the equivalent of getting a bunch of people together for a baseball game and then deciding, well, let's actually go to the batting cages instead and all practice our swing next to each other. RTS bots tend to either try and fail to mimic a decent human player or cheat out the wazoo, and if there's no real contest, no threat big or clever enough to push me into genuine improvisation and panic, I'm hardly playing an RTS at all.

Enter Dawn of War 2's The Last Stand, a decidedly Warhammer 40,000 answer to comp stomp. It might be an apocalyptic hell-future where everyone in the universe hates each other, but when you're down to a single measly commander unit and surrounded on all sides by waves of souped-up aliens, there's no time to be choosy about allies.

It's RTS by way of Killing Floor: take cover, work together, kill 'em all. If everyone on your team dies, it's over.

The Last Stand retains the chill vibes of comp stomp because of its cooperative setup, but it's hard enough that everyone in a lobby has to rely on one another. The first few waves are breezy, small packs of jobber orks and tyranids, but soon the game starts chucking much heftier units at you: artillery, infantry with grenades and rockets, and anti-everything monsters and bosses. The sort of stuff you can't kill with just one unit.

With enough kiting and clever use of whatever active abilities you've brought with you, getting through all 20 waves is a doable, lengthy challenge. But the game does not make it easy, and that's the best part—rather than ape strategies a real player might use, The Last Stand opts for the blunt force approach. The game tries to crush you in an avalanche of hopeless odds, with one wave going so far as to pit you against exact copies of your own characters, retaining the ability to revive each other and use whatever gear you've collected against you.

It's careful to extend a hand both to novices, who can get a feel for the game without having to worry about juggling several squads or managing the macro aspect that just becomes noise in a rushed PvP match, and to experts, for whom it becomes a de facto arcade mode. Score multipliers stack up based on how long you all go without dying, how many control points you're able to hold at once, and how quickly you best each wave. At first it’s a struggle just to see the end, and as you improve, it becomes a race to get there as efficiently as possible.

Where some casual RTS modes try to relieve the tension by making it certain you and your friends will win, Dawn of War 2 does it by making it likely you and your friends will lose, at least until you’ve taken your licks. That sort of punishment is exactly what I come to Warhammer adaptations to drink deep of; it’s the grim darkness of the far future! I don’t want the privilege of an even fight, I want to be beset on all sides, drowning in horrors, sustained by lonely rage at the futility of every spent magazine. It doesn't seem like I'm alone.

When I queue up for standard games in Dawn of War 2 these days, I tend to get bored of waiting before I find a single match. But with The Last Stand? I'm rarely left waiting for long, and you can still find people discussing the mode online these days, 15 years after Dawn of War 2's final expansion came out.

The same is true of other co-op modes in the genre, like Starcraft 2's excellent two-player missions. But I think The Last Stand has a unique quality that makes it worth going back to even if you don't play RTS at all: it mutates the genre’s DNA so much that it actually just cracks the code on a PvE MOBA, and because it's (almost) the only one, it takes the genre crown by default.

To MO-BE, or not to MO-BE

In this mode, nearly all the conventions of standard RTS play are stripped away. You only control a single hero unit, and you cycle between a few simple abilities restrained by resource costs and cooldowns. Sound familiar?

Dawn of War 2's standard PvP modes had already (controversially, at the time) done away with base-building and labyrinthine research trees to focus on lean, tactical scraps. Last Stand just takes that distillation to its natural conclusion.

You might think of this as cynical trend-chasing now that the traditional RTS is an aging carcass and MOBAs remain a big deal, but The Last Stand first debuted in October 2009—the same month League of Legends released. If anything, the mode was sort of forward-thinking for its time.

It's the perfect time for it to have come out, I reckon, because it has a lot of MOBA-esque ideas without feeling too similar to League or Dota. It feels like the result of alike influences rather than an impulse to ride the wave. As you play, you unlock wargear: weapons, accessories, and armor, each of which grants you new abilities and fundamentally alters your playstyle. Two space marine captains at the same level might play completely differently, with one toting a supportive healing aura and ranged bolter and the other tackling every witch in sight with lightning claws and heavy armor.

Even today, when there are so many great Warhammer-themed games all competing for your attention, it has a larger-than-average smorgasbord of playable xenos from the tabletop. Dawn of War 2: Retribution's base roster of factions each lend a single hero: the orkish mekboy can be anything from an oppressive rocket-wielding tankbuster to an explosive, randomly teleporting imp, while the chaos sorcerer can possess enemies (yes, even a clone of himself!) or simply melt them with hellfire. The playstyles range from gimmicky as all hell, like that teleporting mekboy, to straightforward and suitable for learning the game, like the imperial guard hero who can call in a retinue of AI-controlled soldiers.

After Retribution's release, The Last Stand was furnished with a faction selection even beyond that of the core game: the Necron overlord and (my favorite) the Tau battlesuit are a mite overpowered, but as a fanboy of the greater good who still wishes Fire Warrior was a decent game, I think I'm owed that. These factions are rarely playable in Warhammer videogames, most of which stick you in a familiar human body or its genetically super-enhanced astartes counterpart, and getting to draft your own uneasy alliance in this mode is a treat for fans of the tabletop game and its lore.

I think it says something about the hunger people have for a mode like this that it still attracts a chatty, if extremely small, group all these years later when so many alternatives exist. Darktide and Space Marine 2 might have bigger, more lavish horde-blasting modes for shooter fans, but there’s just something so very Warhammer about watching all the carnage unfurl from a bird’s eye view, anxiously wondering whether to dive behind cover or charge into melee.

It’s a smooth shot of what I dig about both MOBAs and Relic's more tactics-oriented strategy games, like standard Dawn of War 2 and Company of Heroes, while remaining accessible to newcomers as it straddles two genres notorious for their complexity. Because you're struggling against enemies you often can't solo and there's no economy to manage, no one can outscale their teammates so hard the challenge is trivialized. And there’s just enough build variety that every player gets to make their personalized mark shaving seconds off each wave.

Like plenty of dweebs addled by plastic glue fumes, I am looking forward to the release of Dawn of War 4 later this year, but it is more accurate to say I am specifically waiting to see its reprisal of Last Stand. While I'm glad DoW 4 looks to give diehard fans of the first game what they've been missing for the last two decades, the sequel more or less converted me to its RPG-inspired 'ding gratz lol' way of thinking, and I'm more keen to see an evolution of its best ideas than I am a base-building blast from the past. I got countless hours out of this mode in DoW 2 despite its spartan setup for progression and nearly no baked-in replayability aside from the score attack aspect—the waves are always the same, and there are only two maps.

I'm hoping DoW 4 can remix things just enough to keep it fresher for longer, without compromising the purity nor the brutality that make The Last Stand so special.

Back in 2006, Relic's World War 2 strategy game Company of Heroes picked up the entire RTS genre and shook it. At the PC Gaming Show just now, Relic announced Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition, and I couldn't be more excited about another opportunity to hop into the trenches.

I felt a giddy thrill come over me as I watched the trailer and saw the little GIs hopping out of the boat and storming up the beach for D-Day. For me, Company of Heroes is the best World War 2 strategy game, and this remake looks like it's going to be a diligent upgrade that preserves everything that made the original so special.

Company of Heroes helped redefine the RTS genre with a more tactical approach, popularising mechanics like cover and reinforcements in a genre that often felt like it was about drawing a box around all your dudes and right-clicking the enemy base. Or maybe that was just me.

Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition will include the original game alongside the Opposing Fronts and Tales of Valor expansions, plus a modernised UI, quality-of-life improvements and new enemy AI that Relic promises will provide a tougher challenge. Under the hood, the game is also making the jump to a 64-bit platform, helping it play more nicely with modern hardware while remaining compatible with the past two decades of community-made mods.

The announcement has me excited because it reminded me of all the hours I spent playing Company of Heroes at university, where I was an utter gremlin to almost everyone I played with. One friend stopped playing with me forever after I surrounded his entire base with barbed wire and tank traps before stationing snipers and anti-tank guns around the perimeter and declaring that I had demilitarised him. Reflecting on it years later, I probably would have quit in a huff too. Sorry, Nigel.

In a lot of ways, Company of Heroes practically encouraged this sort of behaviour. Who can forget the Fallschirmjäger Squad ability, which lets you spawn elite infantry from almost any building on the map at any time? The only real counter was to level every building before I could use it, which wasn't exactly practical when you were also trying to stop my forces from kicking your teeth in. Check it out on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Has your mini collection ever been too disparate to flesh out a fully-blooded army, and just thought: "What if all of these guys could get along?" That's the vibe that Tabletop Tavern, a roguelike RTS that has a demo out ahead of its release next week, aims to do.

Tabletop Tavern is a pretty straightforward game on the surface of it. Instead of defending cities on a worldmap, you advance through a linear branching path of battles towards a final boss—along the way, you flesh out your army into an appropriate deathball to take on the final skirmish of the act.

What really sets this thing apart is the roguelike goofiness that would misbalance a regular RTS substantially. While the hero you choose at the start is important, giving you specific bonuses (for example, Ser Edric Valeward likes having rare units and charge units) you can also recruit foes from the enemies you defeat.

This meant that my first playthrough wound up with my ghostly cavalry units rubbing shoulders with treants that I'd grabbed from the final town—and a good thing, too, I barely scraped past that battle, with my treants being the last green men standing.

You can also add items to your roster—giving powerful bonus effects to augment your armies. Despite Ser Valeward being into Charge units, I mostly ran ranged units thanks to some strong items I picked up during my marauding.

Speaking of, Tabletop Tavern's equivalent of rest sites are interesting. When you come across a settlement, you can either simply rest there, allowing you to regain some of your unit's health—or you can sack it, forcing you into a tough battle that might reap some better rewards.

The only critique I have for Tabletop Tavern is that it's a little informationally-dense, and it doesn't do too great a job of explaining how the game works—simply throwing several walls of tutorial text at you off the bat.

That might not matter, though, given the type of game this is clearly marketed towards—RTS battle fans who would rather muck around than deal with the stresses of a whole campaign. The lower stakes of a roguelike also had me messing around quite a bit more than I would otherwise—if I optimised poorly? I'd just go for the next run.

The theming is also deeply charming—you're essentially just wargaming in a mediaeval tavern, and at any time you can pan the camera up and see your low-poly opponent grumbling at your dastardly tactics (little did they know, I didn't have any). Tabletop Tavern charges into Steam come June 11.

Six years ago, in October 2020, Blizzard announced the end of new content updates for StarCraft 2, its storied real-time strategy game, although it promised to continue supporting the game with tweaks and balance patches "as needed." It's followed through on that commitment over the years since, and today (technically yesterday, but I didn't notice it then) brings as a new one, and it's kind of a banger.

The focus of this update is on "extending the early and mid-game experience, allowing players to remain competitive on one to three bases for longer periods," Blizzard said. "We’ve introduced changes to make non-warped Gateway play a more viable path, while also increasing overall strategic diversity across all three races."

The top-line change is a reduction in starting workers from 12 to eight, which fans in the StarCraft 2 subreddit seem generally supportive of, because it provides for more varied builds and, as redditor GoGoGoRL put it, because "shaking stuff up in this stage of the game in general is a breath of fresh air."

"The idea is to force harsher compromises in builds, in that you can't get counters for everything online as quickly," redditor Appletank added, explaining how the change fits with Blizzard's strategy of extending StarCraft 2's mid-game. "This increases [the] need to scout, increase time spent in the 80-150 supply range before everyone maxes out, makes supply slightly less free with expanding, makes it slightly less punishing to be a bit later on expanding as your main base minerals aren't half gone by eight minutes."

Redditor RedErin was a bit more succinct: "With 12 worker starts you have to get a third base ASAP or you're dead."

There are a handful of other economic tweaks, gameplay changes to zerg, protoss, and human forces, and a surprisingly beefy list of bug fixes and quality of life updates—all told, a more impactful update than you might expect given that StarCraft 2 is now 16 years old and, at least in terms of new content development, effectively abandoned. StarCraft 2 players are already kicking around ideas on how the patch will change strategies.

Comment from r/starcraft2

starcraft 2 changed warpgate after like 10 years whattt

— @hatmasteryt.bsky.social (@hatmasteryt.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-29T18:41:09.643Z

The StarCraft 2 5.0.16 patch is live now on the public test realm—depending on how that goes, it's possible some of these changes will be reworked. The full patch notes as they currently stand are below.

Economy

• Starting workers reduced from 12 to 8.
• Default Large Mineral patch resource count reduced from 1,800 to 1,600.
• Default Small Mineral patch resource count increased from 900 to 1,200.
• Total Default Minerals per base increased from 10,800 to 11,200.
• Default Vespene Geysers' resource count increased from 2,250 to 2,500.
• Total Default Gas per base increased from 4,500 to 5,000.
• Rich Vespene Gas Geyser harvest return value decreased from 8 to 6.

Zerg

• Hatchery, Lair and Hive
  • Supplies provided reduced from 6 to 4.
• Creep
  • Spread/Recede rate slowed from 0.45 to 0.55.
• Spore Crawler
  • Damage against Biological increased from 20 (+10 Biological) to 20 (+15 Biological).
• Carapace Upgrades
  • Level 1 cost decreased from 150/150 to 100/100.
  • Level 2 cost decreased from 200/200 to 150/150.
  • Level 3 cost decreased from 250/250 to 200/200.
• Infestor
  • Microbial Shroud range increased from 9 to 12.
  • Microbial Shroud can now be cast without requiring an upgrade from the Infestation Pit.
  • Neural Parasite on builder SCVs will only expire at structure completion.
  • Now has an auto-attack weapon.
• Viper
  • Abduct now considers Sieged Tanks a valid target.
• Overlord
  • Speed without Pneumatized Carapace decreased from 0.9 to 0.7.
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.
• Overseer
  • Changelings automatically inherit the current order queue of the casting Overseer.
  • Changelings’ deaths are contagious to other nearby Changelings.
• Mutalisk
  • Mutalisk Glaives now prioritize targets.
  • Arc slop increased to 180.

Terran

• Command Center
  • Supplies provided reduced from 15 to 13.
• Ghost
  • Supply increased from 2 to 3.
  • Health reduced from 125 to 100.
  • Attack damage changed from 10 + 10 vs Light to 20.
  • Attack range increased from 6 to 7.
  • Steady Targeting:
    • Damage increased from 130 + 40 vs Psionic to 170.
    • Energy cost increased from 50 to 75.
    • No longer cancels upon taking damage.
• Medivac
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.
  • Subgroup Priority:
    • Priority order updated from (Raven, Ghost, Battlecruiser, Marine, Marauder, SiegeTank) to (Ghost, Marine+Marauder, Raven, Battlecruiser, Siegetank).

Protoss

• Nexus
  • Supplies provided reduced from 15 to 13.
• Warpgate
  • Warpgate Research moved to the Gateway from the Cybernetics Core.
  • Warpgate Research speeds up Gateway unit production time by 35%.
  • 'Transform to Warpgate' cost increased from 0/(0) to 50/(50).
  • Warp-in Time is no longer determined by 'slow power fields'.
  • Warp-in Time decreased to 3s (from 3.6s and 11.4s).
  • Warpgate Cooldown Values:
    • Zealot: from 20 to 22.
    • Adept: from 20 to 22.
    • Stalker: from 23 to 22.
    • Sentry: from 23 to 22.
    • High Templar: from 32 to 35.
    • Dark Templar: from 32 to 35.
• Gateway
  • Pre-Warpgate Production Time Values:
    • Zealot: from 27 to 28.
    • Adept: from 30 to 28.
    • Stalker: from 27 to 28.
    • Sentry: from 23 to 24.
    • High Templar: from 32 to 40.
    • Dark Templar: from 32 to 40.
  • Post-Warpgate Production Time Values:
    • Zealot: 18.
    • Adept: 18.
    • Stalker: 18.
    • Sentry: 16.
    • High Templar: 26.
    • Dark Templar: 26.
• Sentry
  • Hallucinations automatically inherit the current order queue of the casting Sentry.
• High Templar
  • Psi Storm total damage reduced from 110 to 100.
• Disruptor
  • Now has a 'phantom attack' weapon.
• Warp Prism
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.

Bug Fixes & Quality of Life Updates

• Fixed an issue where Carrier Interceptors owned due to a player casting Neural Parasite would not inherit the opponent's upgrades.
• Fixed an issue where EMP visuals did not provide clear visual indication of effect radius/affected units.
• Fixed an issue where Motherships would warp in adjacent to the Nexus rather than overtop.
• Fixed an issue where Guardian Shield visuals would persist even after loaded into a transport.
• Fixed an issue where melee units targeting builder SCVs would lose their attack order when the SCV moved through the structure.
• Fixed an issue where SCVs could not have build orders queued sequentially onto structures already being constructed by another SCV.
• Fixed an issue where Guardian Shield visuals would not update player color post-initialization.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge could knock back immobile targets during Recall.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge lacked a placement model and AOE effect radius cursor indicator.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge would be thrown in front of a target unit rather than at the targeted cast point.
• Fixed an issue where some units' spells would not trigger Protoss shield-damage graphics (Purification Nova, Corrosive Bile, KD8 Charge).
• Fixed an issue where units with burrow move would lose their current orders when told to burrow.
• Fixed an issue where 'Zerg Rocks' were lacking polish. (Now uses correct wireframe, has a Zerg building armour icon, and uses animation state to communicate health level).
• Fixed an issue where a variation of large diagonal rocks still did not receive an attack command if certain portions of the rock were within vision but not others.
• Fixed an issue where attack commands with Adept Shades in the selection behaved erratically (Example: finishing a shade caused the attack target to be lost if the command was not issued by smart command/right click, units could unexpectedly move command etc.)
• Fixed an issue where the Nexus had no indication Nexus Recall nor Energy Recharge abilities' cooldowns were global. Command card now displays charge counters and minimap displays all Nexus range radius.
• Fixed an issue where the Nexus Energy Recharge ability range radius actor would display permanently rather than when the ability was being targeted.
• Fixed an issue where Lurker Attack Spike sounds could be heard through the Fog of War.
• Fixed an issue where Lurker eggs lacked polish during creation/destruction. Eggs now take less time to appear due to faster birth animation and play a death cry to communicate when destroyed early.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism would not display an unload visual model indicator.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism would not display a load range radius actor when the ability was being targeted.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism movement was highly variant/ sluggish if ordered to queue pickup orders or pick up units slightly out of immediate range.
• Fixed an issue where Banelings in splash range of enemy units but killed by enemy units would not spawn an audio cue indicating splash damage had been dealt.
• Fixed an issue where non-disguised Changelings would not play their full birth animation.
• Fixed an issue where commanding Oracles to build Stasis Wards in areas inside their range could result in slower execution than being commanded to build outside their range.
• Fixed an issue where Oracles would teleport short distances if told to build a Stasis Ward while overlapping with other air units (such as other friendly oracles).
• Fixed an issue where Stasis Wards lacked a distinct audio cue for their death.
• Fixed an issue where players attempting to attack a Stasis Ward could easily accidentally move command underneath it instead.
• Fixed an issue where Colossus could not be created/unloaded in space an air unit already was (this mostly affects the predictability of colossus drop positioning due to collision with the warp prism).
• Fixed an issue where Voidray Prismatic Alignment lacked a termination audio cue.
• Fixed an issue where Immortal Barrier lacked a termination audio cue.
• Fixed an issue where beam attack visuals would not terminate if targets were picked up by transports or teleported away (Sentry, Void Ray).
• Fixed an issue where the Sentry's beam attack visuals were misleading due to being significantly delayed during creation and termination. They should now feel much more responsive to control.
• Fixed an issue where the Cyclone basic weapon was unable to damage friendly cloaked/buried units.
• Fixed an issue where the High Templar's basic weapon's visuals and sounds were not proportionate in size/volume to its impact.
• Fixed an issue where Vespene Geysers did not update their model to tolerate shaders if players' shader graphics settings changed mid-match, allowing for re-enabling of the higher graphics option.
• Fixed an issue where Phoenix would not face their channeled Graviton target.
• Fixed an issue where killing a Viper prior to its Abduct tongue connecting with a target would not cancel the abduct.
• Fixed an issue where Nexus would still play Blinding Cloud visuals (despite no longer having Photon Overcharge).
• Fixed an issue where Planetaries lacked or had misleading visual and audio indicators (splash damage impact visuals, sound).
• Fixed an issue where Archons lacked several visual and audio indicators (birth sound, splash damage impact visuals, movement sound, attack physics).
• Fixed an issue where Disruptor Purification Nova cooldown/firing status was difficult to discern. Ability status should now be much more obvious due to increased colour states.
• Fixed an issue where friendly Disruptor Purification Nova range radius actors were displayed permanently, even if the unit was on cooldown, causing unnecessary clutter as unit count increased.
• Fixed an issue where Swarm Host range radius actors were displayed permanently, even if the unit was on cooldown, causing unnecessary clutter as unit count increased.
• Fixed an issue where Swarm Hosts lacked an equipment (weapon) display indicator for the Locust.
• Fixed an issue where Microbial Shroud's appearance happened gradually and unnoticeably due to lacking a sufficient impact model for the cloud.
• Fixed an issue where Hellbat walk animation speed was faster than expected.
• Fixed an issue where casting Generate Creep would only affect a subselection of Overlords or Transport Overlords rather than both variations.
• Fixed an issue where Creep Tumors lacked placement and placeholder models when spreading themselves.
• Fixed an issue where it could be difficult to distinguish if a research structure was active (Twilight Council, Fleet Beacon, Armory, Evolution Chamber).
• Improved an issue where injecting Queens 'shuffle'. Allowed re-issuing inject during ongoing cast so orders are not offloaded to others queen. Long-range orders are invalid if another queen is nearby the target hatchery.
• Improved an issue where units with their primary attack order on a changeling would lose their order if the Changeling subsequently disguised itself.
• Improved an issue where gather orders were clunky for workers. Workers adjacent and move commanding to a geyser now update their command to a gather order if a refinement structure gets built.
• Xel'naga towers can now be selected through the Fog of War. Xel'naga Towers now show their vision range radius when selected.
• Active Creep Tumors will now take selection precedence over Inactive Tumors.
• Active Creep Tumors in a control group at the time of exhausting their charge will now transfer control group membership to the spread tumor.
• Critters and destructible neutral objects have been standardized to share similar targeting/selection/collision values. They will no longer collide with/block player structures or units.
• Larva/Eggs will no longer collide with/block player structures or units.
• Locusts that were previously uncommandable during their swoop animation are now also unselectable (if already selected they will stay selected).
• Neural Parasite will now add the target unit to the current selection if the selection only contains one infestor.
• Protoss structures now generate additional 'damaged' graphical models.
• As larva increases, they will now spread further upwards around the sides of the hatchery. Larva will still start from the bottom of the hatchery.
• Music selection for spectator players has been adjusted to feature a greater pool of suitable tracks for spectating. Duplicate entries have also been removed.
• Slightly polished Oracles' Revelation and Build animation transitions.
• High Templar and Ravagers are now less likely to aggro towards faraway targets.
• Adjusted Warp Prism and Raven visual fly height to minimize clipping inside other models and reduced Warp Prism shadow size on low graphics to minimize shadow-casting on unloaded units.
• Commands to unsiege Warp Prisms will now be issued to all Warp Prisms in the selection.
• Healing Shrine visuals/sounds have received a minor polish pass.
• The Warp Prism will now attempt to immediately siege when instructed rather than prioritizing deceleration.
• Mapmaker support tools now include proper Worker-Only-Path indicators, No-Resource footprints, air unit height modifier doodads, and variable rock reduction units.
• Mule Repair is now set to auto-cast by default (Mules with a harvest order still do not attempt to repair units).

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 review - PC Gamer issue #197 (UK, February 2009)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation. By Tom Francis

Here's something I never thought I'd hear myself say playing a strategy game: "I think we brought the right classes, we just shouldn't have aggroed that second mob. Thaddeus makes a decent main tank now that Spiff is specced for range, we just need to find some better armour."

Dawn of War is now a roleplaying game. It's a strategy game too, but it feels as if RPG is the dominant—if beardy and dice-juggling—gene.

This is an extraordinary shift, bemusing in some ways, exciting in others. Real-time strategy has stuck so closely to the template laid out by Dune 2 and Warcraft—that endemic absurdities plague the entire genre. Who the hell builds a city on a battlefield? Why, how and from whom am I buying upgrades?

Dawn of War developers Relic like to say that Space Marines don't chop wood. They'd already subverted the conceit of harvesting on a battlefield in the first Dawn of War, and partially avoided the unlikelihood of base-building in the World War 2 strategy of Company of Heroes. Now they've found the courage to do away with both mechanics entirely. In Dawn of War 2, you have no resources, no base and at most 11 men.

The 'classes' I mention above are really squads—there are six in the game, but you can only take four on each mission. Those missions are no longer skirmish matches against equal forces, but mini quests to slay bosses, working your way through 'mobs' of enemies. Squads earn experience, and you choose what attributes to spend their points on when they level up—which is how commander Spiff was 'specced for range'. Loot—from 'better armour' for Thaddeus to new grenade types—is dropped by every boss and awarded for every mission.

This is heresy. This is madness. This is what happens when strategy game developers play too much World of Warcraft while they're working on the sequel. And this is, strangely, really good fun.

I don't miss building a base from scratch every half an hour, or managing my requisition and power economies. What I do miss from Dawn of War is the broader choice of units. You only get to play as the Space Marines in Dawn of War 2's campaign, and even then six squads is a slim slice of what that army had to offer in the first game. I'm happy to choose just four at once, but doing so from such a stingy menu feels like no choice at all.

Dawn of War 2 focuses instead on squeezing every crimson drop of murderous fun from those six squads. By limiting your remit to such a tiny band of men, it can ask you to direct their every move with thought and precision. And when you do, the game rewards you by giving their attacks spectacular force.

All your units are tougher than they have any right to be, but the one-man 'squad' that is your commander—you—is a human tank. Send him wading into oceans of hostiles and watch him cut his way out with a buzzing chainsword and a shower of blood. Thaddeus, meanwhile, leads a three-man squad of jumpjet assault troops—human artillery. They land with the force of a howitzer, and before the prone can even stand they're being ripped to ribbons.

Avitus is the tactical backbone of your strike force, and the personifcation of one of Company of Heroes' most satisfying mechanics: emplaced weapons. He leads a three-man heavy bolter team who need a second to set up their guns, and a specific direction to point them. That means drawing your enemies into their fire rather than advancing directly, but their damage output is obscene enough to justify that rigmarole every time.

Tarkus leads a four-man squad of standard marines, useful and durable but rather unexciting. Cyrus's Scout squad are the opposite: fascinating but incredibly weak. He's a stealth unit, but initially there isn't a lot he can do once he's snuck into position. Levelled up and handed a sniper rifle, though, he becomes a superb assassin and munitions-delivery device.

The sixth unit I won't spoil, since he's not unlocked until towards the end of the game and it's a great moment. Whichever you pick, you'll have ten or more special abilities between your four squads, and it's vital to direct them individually and manually. If you don't use hotkeys already, believe me: you will.

There's an urgent need for swift and accurate micromanagement, which means this certainly isn't the dumbing down some will inevitably call it.

It's more of an action game, sure, but one that's intensely tactical in a way DoW never was for the average player. Select all >Right Click is never viable, and that's DoW 2's biggest change and greatest strength.

Personally, my preferred tactic was to lead with my Scouts, stealthed, until they were behind the nearest enemy force. I set up Avitus in the best cover just out of range, and place my commander in front of him as a bodyguard. Then: action.

Thaddeus slams down into the biggest cluster of troops, knocking them flying, and falls back before they can get up. Soon they're blundering after him in a neat column, right into Avitus's line of fire. As the bolter fire pelts their ranks, my commander charges directly down their line, splitting them like a chisel.

Immediately, Cyrus de-cloaks to snipe their commander, so far back in the direction they've just run from that no one can reach him before he cloaks again. My commander, now deep in their lines, engages any ranged units to stop them firing, leaving Thaddeus's men free to advance unassailed once they've finished mopping up the forward troops—and Cyrus safe to grenade any occupied buildings.

The first time you orchestrate a perfect combined arms assault, the satisfaction is enormous. I don't think I ever pulled off an attack with this level of cohesion in the original Dawn of War. I'm sure you can, and pro players do, but Dawn of War 2 exaggerates these mechanics and relationships until they're clear to the average player, and gives you hundreds of manageably sized mobs to practice them on.

The 250th time you orchestrate a perfect combined arms assault, the satisfaction is starting to wear thin. That's not an exaggeration—I fought around five mobs per mission, and I finished the campaign on Day 48. You play one, sometimes two missions each day, so 250 is guessing low.

It's an enormous campaign, the opposite extreme of the original game's brief and jarringly anti-climactic one. But there aren't 50 missions. In fact, there are only about ten, of 15 minutes each. It's just that two of those—kill the boss and defend the shrine—are repeated to the point of insanity. To the point where you start to wonder if you did anything wrong in a previous life.

The idea is that you have a choice of missions spread across three planets. Some are plot critical and marked as such, others just get you a reward. But once you've done all the plot ones available, they just run out. You're left to do the seemingly random ones, often on the exact same map, until a new plot mission crops up.

Missiony positions

The depressingly similar quests come in three flavours

It'd be fine if the missions were varied, but Relic seem to think that 'Fight your way through a series of mobs and kill the Tyranid' is different enough from 'Fight your way through a series of mobs and kill the Tyranid who can burrow.'

Sometimes it's on a different map, but they're all pretty similar. Sometimes it's against a different foe, but once you've done fighting an Eldar mob, an Ork mob and a Tyranid mob, you've fought them all. The differences between the bosses aren't tactically interesting, because the boss fights themselves are oversimplified wars of attrition. And often, even the boss itself is the same.

What's presumably supposed to provide the real sense of progress is the roleplaying game element—choosing how to level up your squads and equipping newly found loot.

This works for a time—some of the abilities you can unlock are incredibly potent, and I excitedly worked my way towards them. Similarly, a few new items found in the field or offered as mission rewards spectacularly outclassed the equipment I had at the time, so there was a little buzz from earning those.

Soon, though, you're struck by how little impact these things are having on the way you play.

I'm not sure I ever noticed my commander's chainsword doing more damage, whether it was a few dozen points or hundreds. Almost every new weapon worth using is just a better version of the one you already have, so your tactics remain the same. The few exotic ones—plasma guns, flamers and missile launchers—do so little damage compared to their conventional counterparts that you'll switch them back out for the boring old bolter.

The same goes for attribute points: the only workable choice is the dull one. When Avitus levels up, you put his points in ranged damage. When Cyrus does, they go into Will to keep him in stealth juice. With Thaddeus and your commander, it's mêlée damage or health. I tried the alternatives for the sake of experimentation, but they just end up feeble.

There are exceptions to both these disappointments. Tarkus and the extra unit you get later in the game are better suited to customisation. Finding a teleporter or jump pack for your Commander is a big deal. And the perk that lets Cyrus use abilities while stealthed opens a lot of doors. But all these things come into play very late in the game, after the bulk of the repetition, so it's a little too little much too late.

The climax of the campaign—that's your cue to skip this paragraph if you want to avoid a mild, non-specific spoiler—comprises the game's best missions. They're the only moments where the scale and spectacle of Dawn of War 2 escalates. They lead towards what would have been an inspired, brutal and brilliantly dark ending, but the game inexplicably chickens out of that at the last minute. I don't have anything more to say about that—except, I hope the readers skipping this paragraph just glimpse the word 'chickens'—but for safety reasons this paragraph needed to end on a non-spoiler sentence.

There's one word in this review's opening paragraph I've skipped over: 'we'. I was playing Dawn of War 2's campaign co-operatively at the time, which is absolutely the best way. The missions are identical, but you and your friend pick just two squads each. Good always-on voice comms courtesy of Games for Windows Live facilitates co-ordination, but you will occasionally grenade each other or wander into an artillery strike. The advantage is that each squad is effectively getting twice the attention and brainpower it normally would, so your force as a whole is reacting faster and fighting more efficiently.

You do need to be able to keep playing with the same partner, though. You're both using the host player's squads, so it's no fun for the guest if he's never going to see his guys again once the mission's over. The host needs to let him level up those characters and play with them for a good chunk of time.

That's not the extent of multiplayer by a long shot. Because in skirmish mode—against other players or AI—Dawn of War 2 is a completely different game.

Taken Apart

Suddenly bases are back. Suddenly resources are back. Suddenly the four-unit limit is gone, the simplicity is gone, and all four races are playable. Weirdly, the only two modes of play are one-on-one, or three-on-three. About the only simple thing about it is that there are only five maps, and of those, only three work in three-v-three.

It is, for your first few games, utter chaos. There are three hero units to choose from for each faction, four resources, nine upgrades for your hero, a three-tiered tech tree of ten or so units, four global abilities, turrets to place, two other players to coordinate with and your much larger army still requires as much micromanagement as your four squads in singleplayer. And before you know what you're doing, it's over—matches only last about 15 minutes. Relic said they wanted to make multiplayer Dawn of War more accessible—I have no idea how this was supposed to relate to that.

It's wholly enjoyable madness, though. Here at last you get to amass proper armies, choose any units, and play as the ravenously-anticipated Tyranids. They're a truly horrible bunch—seas of bony mouths flooding your enemies, while delicate but deadly towers of spines pick the strongest targets to pounce on or eviscerate. Their mechanics are obtuse and fascinating, which only makes me more desperate for a Tyranid campaign, one where individual units mean something. Multiplayer is too fast-paced to get attached to your squads or care much about upgrading them.

There's definitely virtue to a multiplayer strategy game that's over in a coffee break, but it doesn't mix well with the enormous complexity here. Even once I'd learnt to play effectively, I never felt like I had a good overview of what was going on.

You've got too much to focus on to keep tabs on your allies, so the match can turn around in a minute without you knowing why. Neither victory nor defeat feels entirely yours, so you're just less invested throughout.

DoW 2 ends up feeling like a boxset of cool new ideas for strategy games. An action-RPG that's incredibly satisfying but sorely lacks variety; a great long-term co-op game about tightly coordinating two teams; and a hectic, spectacular lunchbreak skirmish game. But I'm left wishing they'd concentrated on one of them, because no single part of this is better than the original game.

Relic started with a classic game and have made a merely great one out of it. In that sense, their attempt to overhaul strategy has failed. But I like what they tried. I think they were right to scrap bases, to forget about resources, and right to focus the game on skirmish tactics rather than economies or larger-scale strategy.

They just stopped short of giving us real choice of units or weapons, meaningfully different missions and a campaign for the most exciting race.

We don't give marks for effort, so the game they've ended up with is all that matters. It's a great and truly new one, just not varied or exciting enough to live up to this particular name.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Demigod review - PC Gamer issue #201 (UK, June 2009)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation. By Graham Smith

Demigod is gloriously bombastic, the introductory cutscene intoning the slight backstory in its best, booming Christopher Lee voice. One of the gods has been destroyed after leaking company secrets. As one of eight monstrous, magical demigods, you’re fighting for promotion to the suddenly vacant position of Totalgod.

The story needs no greater depth than this because there’s no campaign. You simply battle in individual skirmishes or larger tournaments against bots and other people, the various demigods separated inconsequentially into two teams for the event: the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness.

Demi war

On their surface, these fights resemble traditional RTS, albeit focused upon one unit. Succinctly, you point and click to tell your demigod where to go and what to hit.

Battle takes place across eight maps, each small and symmetrical, covered with capturable flags and enormous Grecian statues. It’s an appropriately decadent stage for battles between hulking immortals and the AI minions at their feet. One map is surrounded by beautiful waterfalls, another takes place atop the coiled body of a two-headed snake, gripped in the hands of a screaming statue that floats in space.

These battles start small, but by the end levels are obscured by giants, demons and blubberous priests, all casting magic, throwing boulders and wreaking havoc. Beneath this lies a core of action roleplaying, where instead of building a base you’re growing your character by gaining experience, choosing skills and purchasing armour and magical items that provide buffs. In other words, your demigod is your base.

Except for your base, which I’ll come back to in a minute.

The demigod-as-base idea is best exemplified in the game’s most iconic character: the Rook. The largest of Demigod’s semi-deities, the Rook is an anthropomorphic castle imbued with all the wist and sorrow of one of the massive creatures from Shadow of the Colossus or something out of a Miyazaki film. He looks enormously cool, and he’s the first demigod I played. Either by design or by coincidence, this proved a good call, as he’s the easiest to grasp in a game that suffers from having no tutorial and no hint system. Despite this lack of knowledge, by the end of my first skirmish I’d levelled up my Rook to the point where his left shoulder was full of archers, his right shoulder was a kind of automatically firing Tesla coil, while a central tower balanced a trebuchet.

Now with wings

While the Rook is immediately appealing, the other demigod designs don’t make a similarly immediate connection. The game is all about the demigods, and it’s their distinct attributes that make the game a delight, rather than the game modes. But you may have to play each at length for those beautiful- on-the-inside attributes to become clear. In early matches I dismissed Regulus, an angelic sniper designed for ranged combat, as too weak to be useful. Then I realised that his skills, enhanced through levelling and judicious item purchases, make him great for protecting control points with mines and felling fleeing enemies with a single shot. Plus, tell him to walk somewhere and he’ll occasionally say, “This would be faster with wings,” and then you get a skill that lets him grow wings.

All of the demigods have at least one thing that falls into this category: an idea that is silly, or extreme, but ultimately cool in a 12-year-old high-five comic book kind of way. Both the Rook and Regulus are Assassins, one of Demigod’s two classes, and do most of their fighting themselves. Their two remaining classmates are Untamed Beast, a roaring, lizard-tailed creature with the ability to spread the plague, and Torch Bearer, who can use ice magic to slow and debuff enemies and with the click of a button “relive his fiery death.” That is, burst into flame and use fire magic to damage them directly. While burning, he repeatedly screams, and switching back to ice magic afterward is described as “ending his suffering.” Again, cool.

Yeti gain

The other class of demigods are the Generals, who while still possessing considerable personal strength rely on summoned minions to aid them, making the game slightly more like a traditional RTS. Oak is your best entry point, possessing enough strength to withstand melee fights while also able to reap the souls of his enemy’s fallen minions. Once you’re comfortable commanding troops, you can move on to trying the Queen of Thorns, a buxom lady floating above a plant held aloft on the backs of beetles; Sedna, who rides atop a giant cat and summons yetis to her cause; and the vampiric, pointy-eared Lord Erebus, who can reap souls, but also turn into a painful mist.

Using the Generals, there are moments when swarming enemies with minions is hugely satisfying, and times when it simply becomes confusing as to whether my guys are still alive amongst the ruckus of laser blasts and area of effect spells. It’s all colourful and beautiful, but it’s not always informative.

The distinctive demigods, and the different tactics required in the four game types (see ‘Four Holy Wars’), make it interesting to see which character combinations prove most useful. Conquest and Fortress require direct assaults on defensive turrets, for example. Sadly, this can cause matches to quickly become attritional, the inevitable winner clear long before the finish, and fights against turrets fixed in place by a level designer are a lot less fun than fighting giant monsters.

Those turrets, though fixed, can be upgraded via the Citadel at the centre of your other, more traditional base. Trekking back here from the frontlines is tedious, but there are big rewards to upgrading.

None more obvious than the changes you can make to your minion reinforcements, who spawn from portals bracketing each map.

These aren’t controllable by anyone, even Generals, but flow through the map on a fixed path to clash against the enemy’s minions. It’s by these creatures’ progress that you can tell the status of a battle. Upgrading at the citadel leads to new, larger creatures joining your side: first clerics, later the excellently named catapultasaurii, and lastly concrete- stick wielding giants bigger than some of the demigods.

Not like this

You accrue in-game money as you go, and if you’re not interested in spending it to benefit your team, you can instead benefit yourself by purchasing artefacts and items. This is why I refer to my Rook as my Rook.

On my second night of play I found myself online, reading forums and advice on character builds. I thought the roleplaying elements would be a nice way of getting RPG fans to play an RTS. It never occurred to me that the opposite was also true.

I’ve played and loved roleplaying games before, but not like this. Not where I actually paid attention to the numbers operating beneath it all.

Demigod is a Trojan horse filled with statistics. The Mage Slayer provides a 40% chance on hit to stun the target for 0.2 seconds? Man! I am all over that. That will totally benefit my Rook against faster opponents.

Demigod has about a dozen small but obvious flaws right now – most easily fixable, some bewildering.

These include some iffy pathfinding and the oddity of the game world being shrouded by grey sludge upon death. But the one that really matters is that its netcode is very patchy indeed. Joining a game via automatic matchmaking, the server browser, or even a friends list, is a perilous process where a single player with connection issues can prevent everyone else from playing the game. I expect this will be quickly fixed, which is why I didn’t mention it upfront, but at the time of writing, this multiplayer game, with its online matches and scoreboards, is frequently only playable against the computer. That’s a travesty.

Yet I’ve had nothing but fun while playing, both against the PC and when it’s worked online. Demigod’s blending of traditional strategy with RPG stats-based tactics leads to something that at least feels new, but it’s the unabashedly cartoony voices and over-the-top abilities that make the game fun.

Back in 2010, we gave the WW2 RTS Ruse an enviable 84% review score, applauding developer Eugen Systems for "doing something novel with one of strategy gaming's hoariest themes." Just five years later, it was gone—removed from Steam by publisher Ubisoft due to expiring license rights.

Now, in a surprise twist, it's back: More than 10 years after that takedown, Eugen Systems has relaunched Ruse on Steam with all previously released DLC attached, plus various technical updates and full Steam Deck support.

"While we developed and launched Ruse in 2010, the game didn’t officially belong to us," Eugen wrote in the re-launch announcement. "Sidelined due to distribution constraints, we could do nothing in the subsequent years to help the players who contacted us for assistance or tried to obtain the game. Recently, we received the opportunity to return Ruse to our catalog. This allowed us to re-release this pillar of the RTS genre, with some added extras!"

I don't see any specifics on those promised technical updates, aside from the verified Steam Deck support, and to be clear this isn't a remaster: The re-released Ruse is still a 2010 RTS. But, to repeat what we said earlier (that is, 16 years ago), it's a very good 2010 RTS.

The price—$30/£26.49/€30—has sparked a trickle of complaints from people who don't think a game of that vintage should cost so much, but more importantly, user reviews since the re-release are "overwhelmingly positive": 197 positive, compared to just two negative. It's not a huge number, but you have to like that ratio.

You don't see review charts like this every day:

Also note, speaking of price, that if you own Ruse already, the updates and DLC are yours for free—because again, this isn't a remaster or anything, it's just back on sale. Old saves and replays won't be accessible in the re-released version to prevent crashes, but they're still there too: If you want to use them, use the "Compatibility Branch" available in the Ruse Steam properties.

How this all came about is unclear at this point, although Eugen Systems is now listed as both the developer and publisher, meaning Ubisoft is completely out of the picture: Given Ubi's financial woes and restructuring, it doesn't feel like too much of a leap to assume that Eugen Systems was able to score the rights at a pretty good price. But hey, whatever: The important thing is, Ruse is back on Steam, and that's very cool indeed.

RTS games generally aren't my thing, mostly because I'm not very good at them. But I loved the original Homeworld: Enemy AI was too easily exploited (although for me, that's a feature, not a bug) but the setting and presentation were magnificent—more than enough to make it one of the most unforgettable games I've ever played.

I'm not the only one who thinks so: PC Gamer's Fraser Brown, who very much is a strategy guy, said a few years ago that even after decades, Homeworld is still his "dream RTS." That's a pretty powerful recommendation.

For those of you who haven't played it, this is your lucky day: The Homeworld Remastered Collection, with remastered and "classic" editions of that great sci-fi epic and its perfectly fine follow-up, is available for just $8 as part of the new 2K Tactics and Tycoons Humble Bundle. Astute online shoppers may point out that the Homeworld Remastered Collection can be had for just $3.49 on Steam right now—that's 90% off of the regular price—and that is true.

But wait! There's more! (You didn't think I'd point you toward a bad deal, did you?)

The 2K bundle also includes the outstanding prequel RTS Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, which Rob Zacny—another serious strategy guy—said is "a terrific RTS" in his 90% review, and "also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic." Deserts of Kharak is also 90% off on Steam right now, dropping it to just a fiver—so you're already saving money with the Humble Bundle.

But wait! There's more!

I'm really just here for the Homeworld, but there's a bunch of other good stuff on tap too, if you're into the RTS scene. You'll also get:

• Railroad Tycoon 2 Platinum
• Army Men
• Army Men 2
• Army Men: Toys in Space
• Army Men: RTS
• Shattered Union
• Freedom Force
• Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich

These games are quite dated but generally well regarded (with the possible exception, I am informed, of the Army Men games), particularly Railroad Tycoon and Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, and one of the nice things about RTS games, and strategy games in general, is that they don't rely on cutting-edge visuals to succeed. In fact, I look at this screen from Railroad Tycoon 2, released in 1998, and aspect ratio aside I think it looks pretty sweet.

Of course, Homeworld is just flat-out sexy.

So anyway, if you want just Homeworld Remastered, or Deserts of Kharak, Steam is probably the way to go. But if you want both (and why wouldn't you?), then get the bundle—you'll get a bunch of other good games along with them, and you'll save 50 cents, too! (Hey, every little bit counts these days.) The 2K Tactics and Tycoons Humble Bundle is available until April 24.

Stormgate, the StarCraft-like RTS that launched into early access in 2024 and hit 1.0 a year later, is ending support for online play at the end of April because Hathora, which provides server functionality for the game, has been purchased by an AI company. There's a chance that online play could be restored at some point in the future, but for now developer Frost Giant Studios says it will patch Stormgate so it can be played offline.

Hathora announced in March that it had been acquired by Fireworks AI, and that its support for games like Stormgate would end on May 5. A partnership with GameFabric "to provide a clear migration path and hands-on support through the transition" was announced at the same time, but Stormgate apparently isn't going to make that move.

One possible reason is that Stormgate isn't seeing much action these days. We were quite taken by the game in its pre-release days, and there appeared to be a tremendous amount of support among long-suffering RTS fans too. A Kickstarter campaign drew nearly $2.8 million from backers—that's on top of the $35 million in private funding Frost Giant had already secured from investors—and a subsequent investment opportunity raised another $1.2 million.

But the early access release stumbled, and the 1.0 release in 2025 didn't turn things around, probably at least in part because some of the game's core features, including the terrain editor and co-op mode, were still in development. User reviews on Steam are mixed, with less than 50% of them positive, and concurrent player numbers haven't exceeded double digits since December 2025; the peak concurrent player count for the past 24 hours was just 28. For a free-to-play game, that's not sustainable.

So, the end of online support, as announced on the Stormgate Discord:

Frost Giant said it hopes to restore online play at some point in the future, but that will require "finding a partner to support ongoing operations." Given that Stormgate likely isn't making much money these days, I have to imagine its options on that front are pretty limited.

The one bright spot amidst all of this is that promised offline patch: Online modes will no longer be available, which isn't great for a game in which multiplayer figures so prominently, but Stormgate does offer a campaign and other solo modes, and those will remain. These days, that seems to be about the best you can ask for.

Earlier this year, Dawn of War 4 developer King Art Games showed off its combat director, which synchronizes melee animations to go a step beyond the already impressive sync-kills that were a trademark of the original Dawn of War. As senior game designer Elliott Verbiest explained on the latest episode of Deep Strike, an interview series on Warhammer TV, they're worth slowing down the game to watch.

"We had a few closed alpha playtests," Verbiest said, "and one of the key points of feedback that we got and that really showed that we have something special here was, 'Hey, could you maybe balance the combat to take a little bit longer? Because we really want to see all these sync-kills and all the sync-melee combat that you guys have got going on.' People found it so spectacular that they wanted to keep seeing more of it."

It's something you don't get in a tabletop game—no matter how much effort you put into painting your space marines you'll always have to imagine what it looks like when a unit of orks swarms your dreadnought.

On the subject of translating between the table and the screen, Verbiest pointed out that some things are better not given a one-to-one adaptation—like the necron faction's resurrection orb, a device that lets them bring dead troops back to life. Well, what passes for life when you're an unliving robot. "When you are playing in singleplayer for example resurrection orb feels amazing," Verbiest said. "Your units have been defeated, here's something that brings them all back. Doesn't sound super great in a multiplayer setting."

Rather than letting necrons have an artifact that functioned as a big undo button for death, they added a necron building called the resurrection gallery. Once you've built one you can select a particular unit type, and if one of those dies it gets to come back—though not immediately. It gets across the same idea, that necrons don't always stay dead, without being annoying to play against.

"We've conveyed it now in a way that also offers other players a form of counterplay," as Verbiest put it. "You can destroy the structures, it takes time for the necron units to come back, so there is a window in which you can do things in that meantime. Those are the kind of things we've considered in order to still bring across that core fantasy, and especially for the campaigns we go all out for that kind of stuff."

Another example of that comes in the Dark Angels campaign, which will let you play as their primarch, Lion El'Jonson. It's a big climactic moment for that storyline, giving you access to a figure right out of myth and legend, but one you won't be able to play in multiplayer. Because how would you balance that?

Dawn of War 4 is targeting a 2026 release, and you can follow its development on Steam.

There's something in the water in PC gaming right now. Specifically, ships. Lots of ships. Earlier this month, Facepunch Studios weighed anchor on Rust's massive naval update, adding player-made boats and a vast offshore region for survivors to explore. Now, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is getting in on the seafaring action, with its latest update careening Microsoft's refurbished vessel to scrape the barnacles off the hull of its naval mechanics.

The elegantly named update 169123 is a typically hefty patch from developer Forgotten Empires, addressing a wide range of bugs and balance issues. But the most significant change is the addition of the Hulk-line, a new main ship type designed to counter fire ships.

There are three tiers of ship in this line, namely Hulk, War Hulk, and Carrack. All three are fast, durable vessels equipped with grappling hooks for close-range combat. Their high speed and armour means they can effectively withstand the heat belched out from fire ships, though they are vulnerable to long range attacks from ships like galleys.

These aren't the only ships added by the update either. Also new to the game is the Catapult Galleon, which replaces the cannon galleon for several civilisations. It functions in the same way, but has a shorter firing range and higher durability.

These additions arrive alongside an overhaul to naval systems that bring "significant changes across the board". This makes balance changes to all of the RTS' ships, such as reducing damage dealt by demolition ships, and adjusting fire ships so they only deal melee damage instead of both melee and piercing damage.

Even fishing vessels have been tweaked, making them more fragile and slower to gather fish, but adding the ability to gather gold from whales, a new aquatic resource. I'm guessing Forgotten Empires glosses over exactly how you extract gold from a whale, unless those aquatic mammals are just really into free-to-play games.

More broadly, the update adds cross platform voice chat, plus accessibility options like text-to-speech and speech-to-chat. There's a big flag update that adds regional garrison flags and waypoint/gather point flags that are specific to each civ, though I doubt this will stop players disingenuously asking "do you have a flag?"

Finally, there's a rework to the Inca civilisation, which adds a new unit called champi warriors, removes access to eagle warriors, and also removes several buildings like lumber camps, mining camps, and mills.

These changes tie into the launch of the Definitive Edition's latest DLC, The Last Chieftains, which bulks out the game's roster for medieval South America. It introduces three new factions, the Mapuche, the Muisca, and the Tupi, each of which comes with its own campaign. Each faction also has unique units like the Mapuche's bolas rider and the Muisca's guecha warrior, a specialist javelineer who heals other guecha warriors when they die.

Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition's consistent popularity has proved there's a big audience for classic RTS action, even as the broader genre struggles to break new ground. Hence, it's a little surprising to see other grizzled strategy veterans polishing their blades for one last stab at glory. One such example is last year's Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition, which further fortified ye-olde castle-building sim with a shiny visual overhaul and new campaigns.

It proved a successful makeover, with the Definitive Edition garnering itself a 'Very Positive' rating on Steam. Now, Firefly's stalwart RTS is getting additional reinforcements in its Winter Update, bringing a bunch of vital supplies to the game.

The headline feature is Steam Workshop support, which itself is supported by a new player tool—The Castle and CPU Lord editor. While not the most elegant name, it's an accurate description, the tool allowing players to create custom castles to besiege and CPU lords to pit their strategic wits against.

Joining this is another tool that lets players create custom trails—strings of skirmish missions that sit alongside the main campaigns. Alongside building whole new trails, the tool also lets players edit existing trails, tweaking the lord and castle configurations of any included missions to your liking.

If you're more interested in playing than creating, the Winter update adds ten new maps for you to build and fight on. These range from a map split into four sections by water channels, necessitating long range siege fighting before you risk a ground assault, and a coastal free-build map that lets you construct your fortifications on cracked flatlands or rugged cliffsides.

The winter update also introduces a 10-mission co-op trail, in which you and a buddy must square off against the Caravan of the Camels. Frankly, that seems like a bit of an unfair fight to me. Two crusader armies against a bunch of dromedaries? I can only assume those camels spit bullets.

Other new features include a spectator mode, an 'extreme' difficulty for trails, CPU castle editing in multiplayer and skirmish, and the usual array of bug-fixes, balance tweaks, and scenario adjustments. You can currently get Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition and all its wintry accoutrements for a 30% discount, bringing the price down to $14 (£11.89). That discount ends on Monday.

One of the reasons Dawn of War is still the best RTS is its sync-kill system. You'll be panning across the battlefield watching a disco storm of lasers go off, and in the middle of that inferno see two individual soldiers in a co-ordinated fight to the death right out of a movie. They'll finish with a dramatic impalement, or execution-style shots to the face. Big guys pick up little guys and crush them to death. Little guys climb big guys, plant grenades, then leap off. There's a huge variety of detailed animations for the many possible match-ups.

Dawn of War 4 will apparently expand on that with what developer King Art is calling its "combat director." As animation director Thomas Derksen recently told IGN, "Most people know the sync-kill system from all the way back from Dawn of War 1, but what we did is we tried to expand on that and instead have synced combat really. Every action that you see in the game really has a counterpart, so you see guys fighting it out between themselves. I don't think really any RTS has done anything like this in the past."

You can see an example of that at the 3.23 mark. A work-in-progress animation depicts orks swarming a dreadnought, which picks up one of them and throws it away, then stomps to clear some ground. Finally a couple of orks succeed in clambering up the dreadnought's arm and begin to hack away with axes.

Derksen goes on to explain that combatants are given power levels, and while some combat animations are unique to individuals, others can be shared between match-ups of the right power level. "There's a range of actions that only a terminator can use against other terminators for example," he says. "Some of them we will be able to combine with say a dreadnought or a deff dread or something, but gretchins then have their own unique action sets where they would match up against all the smaller ones."

It's clearly a lot of effort, but the pay-off is a sense of connection with the little dudes down there you don't get in games with more abstract combat. Watching from your godlike perspective as two units take turns to repeat attacks while health bars shrink by predictable amounts is nothing compared to seeing your Force Commander duel a bloodthirster.

Fostering a feeling of ownership with your troops is what Dawn of War is all about, and I'm glad it seems like King Art understands that. As Derksen says, talking about his experience with the original game, "The first thing that I saw and that they did different than most other RTS was, I had a squad of guys there and I could equip them with a range of weapons, I could upgrade them, I could add a sergeant and everything, right? It just felt like I cared so much more about these guys on the battlefield there fighting it out."

Dawn of War 4 had a couple of closed alpha tests last year, has a Steam page you can keep an eye on for updates, and is targeting a 2026 release. I'll be making the wait go faster by watching old sync-kill compilations on YouTube.

I've been utterly obsessed with Warhammer 40,000 lore videos recently. You may not think learning about the 19 extra organs Space Marines have would help lull me to sleep, but it does. I'm jumping on the Warhammer bandwagon at a great time, because the recently announced Total War: Warhammer 40,000 just hit an impressive milestone; it has over one million wishlists on Steam.

Creative Assembly announced its existence during The Game Awards in December. Getting over one million wishlists in barely a month is no small feat, and the Total War team shared a message on Steam stating it's "unbelievably excited" to share more with us all soon.

So far, we've only had one trailer for Total War: Warhammer 40k. It was introduced by David Harbour of Thunderbolts* fame (and West End Girl infamy), and it's an absolute delight to behold. We get a glimpse at gorgeous cinematics of elite Space Marine squads fighting against ork hordes, both with giant war machines onside to level the battlefield.

We also see some pre-alpha gameplay, showing the devastating weaponry that can be fired from orbit to help defeat the bigger enemies. The giant death beam reminds me of the WMDs in Tom Clancy's EndWar.

We'll get to fight both planetside and amongst the stars in a galaxy-spanning war that will hopefully live up to the vast scale of the 40k universe.

The game has excited the tabletop sickos among our ranks at PC Gamer, so much so that they even made their own wishlist for the Emperor that includes all the features they want. Hopefully he can take a break from psychically warring with the Chaos Gods and give it a once over.

What we do know is that the ancient alien race, the aeldari, will be a playable faction, as will the human legions of the Astra Militarum. I can't wait to take the former rulers of the stars for a spin—I'm sure they have some horrifying and devastatingly effective tricks up their sleeves. Do they even have sleeves? I haven't gotten that far in the lore videos yet.

I'm no RTS expert, but I'm nonetheless ride or die for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. I've poured what must be hundreds of hours into campaign and skirmish modes across the game's four versions, gleefully gunning down gue'la for the greater good and deep striking dreadnoughts where they are least welcome. Granted, there's no record of my wartime victories, as the Steam versions of these games (and the CD-ROM versions of my youth) never had acheivements—until now.

That only holds for the recently released definitive edition, which as Sean Martin said in his impressions is a "sparing" but superlative version of the classic RTS series, but the GOG version has the achievements as well. You can find the full list on a Steam News Hub blog post from Thursday, and they're about what you'd expect.

There are achievements for winning a skirmish and multiplayer match as every faction, seeing each ending across the various story campaigns, and more flavorful ones like killing 666 space marines while playing as chaos marines. There's also an accolade for deploying each of the games' relic units—big monsters like the Greater Knarloc and the Bloodthirster—which was always a hype moment in-game, even if matches didn't always go on long enough to facilitate it.

None of them should prove particularly elusive, provided you can find enough opponents online to get all the multiplayer achievements. There's also "The Grim Darkness of the Far Future," where you're meant to kill 40,000 enemy units… hopefully you'll be fighting lots of imperial guardsmen.

The new achievements won't account for prior progress, as the blog post notes: "With a 20-year-old game as our starting point, we did not have much in the way of existing stat tracking to use, so we had to add that in this latest patch to support achievements." That being said, you only have to finish a campaign to get credit; if you have one beaten, you should be able to replay just the final mission and cross it off your list.

I'm not much of a completionist, but I will take any excuse to revisit some of the greatest strategy games ever made. If you see me in multiplayer, feel free to let me win! I'm just here for the achievement, after all.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 might be a hell of a lot sillier than even the original Red Alert, but it still holds up all these years later. If you never hopped off the classic RTS train, I have horrible news for your productivity at work: there's an impressive fanmade browser version of Red Alert 2, easily squeezed between Slack and Google Sheets tabs.

Called Chrono Divide, it released in pre-alpha in October 2020, and has continually received updates through this year. While you might expect it to be a solo novelty, it's actually got its own leaderboard, boasts cross-platform play with Android and iPhone users, and even has limited mod support. It's all being maintained by solo developer usestrict, who goes by El Presidente on the project Discord.

As the fan game's website notes, "the project initially started out as an experiment and was meant to prove that it was possible to have a fully working, cross-platform RTS game running in a web browser. Now, with a playable version already available, the end-goal is reaching feature parity with the original vanilla 'Red Alert 2' engine."

After importing my Red Alert 2 files and futzing around with it for a minute, it certainly seems like an impressive recreation. It's a little janky and the solo AI is a work-in-progress, but it's a way to play ranked Red Alert 2 on the toilet, which is better than anything I've built in the last five years. The leaderboard reveals quite an active community: player Milk is dominating the playing field with 105 wins and an 85.4% win rate.

I'm more of a campaign guy, so for me, this is ultimately a novelty until more singleplayer functionality is added—still, it's an utterly cool sight and decently popular, if the Discord server with over 17,000 members is any indication. It's free to try, but the developer accepts donations on the Chrono Divide website.

And now if you'll excuse me, I've got to rewatch that perfect opening.

Dinolords is one of those ideas that sells itself the second you hear about it, a colourful blend of RTS and ARPG that sees medieval knights and marauding Vikings take to battle on the backs of roaring, stomping, terrible lizards. I've been eager to try it ever since it was announced, and the first real opportunity to do so is rapidly approaching. At the end of this month developer Northplay is running a closed alpha playtest, and you can sign up to test its tyrannosaurs right now.

In a Steam post, Northplay explained the closed alpha will comprise a "small slice" of Dinolords, though to my eye it looks like a sizeable slab of stegosaur steak. The closed alpha will let players get hands-on with a three-part tutorial, after which they'll be able to explore four distinct maps, two different game modes, and a "'campaign' setup with cross-level progression." That's enough to give Fred Flintstone indigestion.

All of this will let players experiment with Dinolords' core systems, which includes typical RTS mechanics like basebuilding and unit control, as well as the more ARPG-inspired combat. The playtest will apparently focus on the game's Viking faction, though you'll naturally be able to control an array of dinosaurs too.

Lucky lizard wrangler Robin Valentine managed to grab half an hour with Dinolords at this year's Gamescom. He came away convinced it'll prove to be more than a one trick pachycephalosaur, describing it as "mechanically a much more creative and interesting game than you're likely expecting."

A crucial part of this is how your perspective on battles is locked to your titular dinolord, meaning you're always at the centre of the action, as Robin explained: "Jumping onto a velociraptor steed lets me speed between different settlements and battlefronts. Then I'm hunting for nests in the forest so I can steal the giant eggs and use them to recruit new dino species. As I set up my base, I'm enchanted to see that the lumber mill sends out a specially trained triceratops to uproot the trees and carry them back for sawing into logs." Sounds rad, honestly.

If you're interested in participating in the closed alpha, you can request access to the playtest via the Dinolords Steam page. Northplay stresses that not everyone who asks to join will necessarily be invited, and that when the playtest commences, the studio will be "letting in players in batches starting at the end of October."

Every Dawn of War game has been a bold stylistic departure from the last, so it's nice that Dawn of War 4 is looking like a buffet table stocked with all the best ideas from the series' history. A new interview dropped at today's PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, giving the inside scoop of how it all plays out on the battlefield.

"In the end we said, 'no, let's really go with Dawn of War 1, that's our guiding star,'" says creative director Jan Theysen; that's the game that influenced this sequel the most.

Everyone on the team said what they loved most about that first game was the "sync kills." Essentially, when enemy units faced off against each other, they'd actually fight and you'd see individual soldiers being defeated after being hit, rather than just randomly dropping dead.

"We wanted to double down and push forward on sync kills," explains Elliott Verbiest, senior game designer. "So not only just having synchronized animations between units killing each other, but also synchronized melee combat through our combat director system."

But, as with any sequel, the challenge is "you're not trying to recreate the old game, you try to recreate the feeling people had," says Theysen.

So, base-building and large-scale armies are back, as well as factions like the Blood Ravens and the Orcs.

If you wanted this kind of scale before, you needed the aid of mods or to play Dawn of War 3. But even without the towering mechs, there is a generous number of squads and buildings on screen in some of these firefights, which should put to bed any concerns the action will be stripped down.

With four campaigns playable in co-op, the return of Last Stand, and three varieties of skirmish, there should be plenty to tear into when Dawn of War 4 finally gets a release date one of these days. In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

If you lent a keen eye to the Mars Tactics trailer which dropped at today's PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, you might have spotted the ability to establish universal basic income right next to a button which wheels out a Martian Guillotine, or even the option to declare neoliberalism and "bend the knee to Earth's institutions." Come for the tactics, stay for the ethical and logistical burden of leading a revolution!

That's if you care to revolt at all, of course. Mars Tactics centers a conflict between striking workers and corporate enforcers on the Red Planet, and whether you want to brownnose the shareholders or blow them up with a rocket is up to you.

I'm interested in any game that offers an XCOM-like blend of turn-based tactics and squad management, but Mars Tactics' cheeky tone and larger metaprogression are what stand out to me most in the new trailer.

There are those governance policies I mentioned earlier, which seem to let you fine-tune an ideology reflected through your playstyle, as well as a research tree, and gun mods. I'm curious to see how deep the well goes; a scrappy resistance leveraging prison breaks and guerilla tactics against a heavily armed and entrenched corporate master presents a juicy sort of asymmetry. My heart tells me to side with the exploited underdog, but my lizard brain likes the look of those sleek business mechs.

We also get a peek at base building, which is one of the more unique aspects of the game I'm eager to know more about. Solo modes in tactics games can sometimes feel more like a series of puzzles than a player-driven campaign—not to say that's a bad thing, I hope I didn't hurt Into the Breach's feelings—but I'm hoping that in this case, I have the agency to hem and haw about which policies I can't afford to not be heartless about.

Mars Tactics is set to come out May 2026 and is available to wishlist on Steam.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Tempest Rising finally broke the RTS curse when it arrived earlier this year, delivering a thrilling remix of Command & Conquer's classic strategy action, while also remembering to add proper singleplayer campaigns alongside its competitive multiplayer.

If I had one complaint, though, it would be that keeping up with the pace of its singleplayer could be difficult sometimes. While I generally approved of Tempest Rising's balance between tension and fun, my reaction times aren't what they used to be during C&C's heyday, and having a little more time to think wouldn't have gone amiss in some of its scenarios.

Fortunately, this will no longer be a problem as of next week. Tempest Rising's next update will bring several of the community's most hotly requested features. Among these is an active pause feature and a game speed adjustment tool designed specifically for the singleplayer campaign, letting you tweak the pace of the action to your liking, or freeze the game entirely while issuing orders to your units.

Adjustable singleplayer speed isn't the community's most requested feature, however. That, apparently, is larger-scale multiplayer matches. Currently, Tempest Rising supports 1v1 and 2v2 scenarios. But the next update will introduce 3v3 matches too, supporting both multiplayer and single-player skirmish.

For these larger bouts, the update will add a new multiplayer map set in Kyoto with four and six player variants, while two existing multiplayer maps have been adjusted to accommodate 3v3 battles. Other improvements include a "full" spectator mode that expands upon the basic functionality added in June, a balance pass for the campaign missions (which should further help with pacing), and, curiously, a 'no bot' sandbox mode:

"We've heard from both new and experienced players that they'd like to load into a map without any opponents," developer Slipgate Ironworks says to explain this last feature. "In this next update, we're adding a 'No Bot' sandbox functionality to Skirmish mode so players can more easily experiment with units, buildings, and factions."

The update will roll off the assembly line on September 9. Sadly, there's still no word on when Tempest Rising's third faction will be made playable in the game, which is a shame as I think it's what the RTS needs to elevate itself from being a quality C&C successor to a classic in its own right.

I always enjoy it when someone with great power decides to use it for great mischief, rather than great responsibility. As is the case of the hacker that wreaked havoc in Nexon's online RTS, Blue Archive, late last week.

As spotted by Automaton, said hacker tapped into the game's systems to, and I am being fully serious, copy-paste the same anime girl over and over. Kurosaki Koyuki is a student players can obtain—a hacker prodigy with a mischievous streak. This event has been dubbed the "Koyuki apocalypse".

As shared by Jambo971 on X above, the hacker replaced recruitment banners with Koyuki, spawned a bunch of Koyukis in the game's cafes, and did this to the game's information page, replacing its title with "Nihahaha" (her laugh) and, you guessed it, more Koyukis.

This prompted Nexon to pull Blue Archive offline for six entire hours, per this official notice, which reads: "We sincerely apologize for the concern caused by the abnormal display of certain content on August 31 (Sun). The investigation into the situation has reached its final stage, and we would like to share the details of the incident along with the measures taken, prevention plans, and compensation."

The post goes on to explain that "The Blue Archive client checks environment settings from the CDN (Content Delivery Network) when launched. These settings are created and managed separately from the game, but records of external access were confirmed … Some settings were altered, redirecting to 45.94.31.77 (Netherlands), which caused the issue.

"Symptoms included abnormal banners, the appearance of Koyuki/Miku"—oh, yeah, Hatsune Miku also showed up later—"in Cafe content, and specific YouTube content being displayed. A thorough internal investigation confirmed no other irregularities beyond these."

In fact, Nexon's keen to emphasise that the hacker didn't do anything nefarious, and couldn't even if they wanted to: "We confirm that players’ accounts, game data, and payment information were not affected, as they are operated in a separate database and always revalidated by the game server."

Nexon will be compensating players for the six-hour maintenance with the following live-service doohickeys: A 10-Recruitment Ticket, 500 AP, 150 Tactical Challenge coins, 3,000 Expert Permits, 300,000 Credit Points, and seven Lesson, Bounty, and Scrimmage Tickets.

I mean, listen—in a professional capacity, I do not think you should hack (online) videogames. It's against the law. It can get you in trouble. However, a quiet little part of my mischievous soul finds this whole debacle, and ones like it, extremely funny; no serious data was lost, which helps. There is a tiny little Koyuki in all our hearts, and she is saying nihaha.

It's a little odd that Age of Empires is one of the liveliest RTS series of the 2020s. Perhaps that speaks to the sorry state of the genre in general. But a genuinely great fourth game from Relic and several well-judged remasters have undeniably helped the series defy the tide of history. In any case, if you haven't been paying attention to AoE's surprisingly strong twilight years, you've got a fleeting chance to catch up on the cheap, as the entire series is on sale until next week.

All four Age of Empires games are on varying discounts for the next few days, while the series' overhauled spinoff Age of Mythology: Retold has also had its price chopped down. Unsurprisingly, the remastered original comes in at the (joint) lowest price, down 75% to just $5 (£3.74). Frankly, I found Age of Empires: Definitive Edition a bit too timeworn when I played it on launch. It looks lovely, but I don't think its design has aged anywhere near as well as its slightly younger sequel.

On that subject, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has the best deal pound-for-pound. Although not the cheapest game in the deal, at 65% off it's still very affordable, down to $12.24 (£7.24). For that, you get an enormous amount of game, with 42 civilizations to play as and 229 campaign missions to march through, as well as all the multiplayer gubbins on top.

Meanwhile, Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition is 75% off at $5 (£3.74). I must admit I've never played AoE 3, mainly because it arrived to a bit of a shrug on release. But its reputation seems to have improved over the years, so it may be worth a look at that price. I have played Age of Empires 4: Anniversary Edition, though, and thought Relic did a great job reviving the series. $16 (£12) is more than a fair price for it, though I still reckon AoE 2 is the game to shoot for if you're playing the series for the first time.

If you prefer your history with a bit of sugar on top (and by "sugar", I mean living gods smashing up the joint) then Age of Mythology: Retold is the RTS to pick up. As with all myths, Retold has changed with time, but Phil Iwaniuk found these differences to his liking in his Age of Mythology: Retold review.

"Retold is brave enough to play with the balance and the stat values of its source material, and that makes for some knotty, tactically fascinating skirmishes," he wrote earlier this year. Retold is half price at $15 (£11.24), which seems very reasonable for this heavily reworked affair.

You can get all four AoE games, plus Mythology Retold and couple of DLC packs, in the Age of Empires 25^th anniversary collection for $53 (£40), which apparently is 64% cheaper than usual. The sale runs until Monday.

We described Crossfire: Legion as "a promising, if somewhat sparse tactical RPG" when it appeared in the 2022 PC Gaming Show, shortly after its early access launch in May of that year. It went into full release in December 2022, but never managed to gain any real traction with players, and now, a year and a half after its last update, it's going away for good.

"It is with the deepest regret to inform you that we will be officially ending active development and support for Crossfire: Legion," the team said in an announcement on Steam.

"As part of this process, Crossfire: Legion will be delisted from the Steam Store on Aug 18th, at 18:00 PDT and will no longer be available for new purchases. However, players who already own the game will retain full access through their Steam Library."

It's not a surprising outcome—it's been a year since Crossfire: Legion surpassed a single-digit concurrent player count on Steam—but disappointing nonetheless. The Crossfire FPS the game is based on isn't well known in the West but it's a big deal in China and South Korea, which I imagine publisher Smilegate would give it a running start. Legion was also developed by Blackbird Interactive, the studio behind the outstanding RTS games Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak and Homeworld 3. The pieces all seemed to be there, but the players simply were not.

The good news is that the delisting doesn't mean the end of the game. If you own it, you'll be able to continue as always, although developers warned that the lack of updates and support means "multiplayer functionality may degrade over time or become unavailable in the future."

If you're curious what you've missed out on, a Crossfire: Legion demo remains available on Steam. If you're suitably impressed but don't feel like springing the full $20 for it, you can pick up a Steam key for $4.49 from Fanatical.

Throwback RTS Tempest Rising is one of my favourite games from this year, a spectacular and thrilling tribute to Westwood's tragically absent Command and Conquer series. I thought its twin campaigns were pretty much perfect when I reviewed it a couple of months back, which is possibly why its first major update focuses mainly on multiplayer.

Titled the "Rally and Recon" update, the patch substantially expands and refines player-on-player warfare. Its biggest additions are a ranked mode for 2v2 play complete with leaderboards, and the ability to queue for 2v2 matches either solo or with your friends. It also adds the "much requested" ability to adjust population cap for multiplayer matches, letting you play with anywhere between 100 and 500 li'l guys.

Among these are a couple of slightly smaller additions, such as a proper lobby chat system so you don't have to sit in textual silence while waiting for a match, and a "basic" spectator mode which developer Slipgate Ironworks defines as "V1", suggesting that it'll be improved over time.

Outside of these broader features, the update extends the online battlefield with six new maps. Four of these are designed for 2v2 play, with the remaining two are built around 1v1 warfare. All maps are repurposed affairs rather than being entirely new, but on the plus side, one of them is called "Emptied Hopes" which sounds like the name of a spaceship in Halo.

All of this arrives alongside an extensive rebalance for existing units. Slipgate provides a detailed breakdown of how each unit is affected in the patch notes, but the gist is to establish "a more formal Early/Mid/Late pacing for tech progression."

This affects each faction differently. For the GFD, it means a nerf to the intel-generating spy drones support power, but a buff for the hunter tank. The Tempest Dynasty, meanwhile, get slower resource harvesting, but more effective second-tier units, such as the missile-spewing Porcupine truck.

It's great that the multiplayer mode is getting such thorough attention. But I mainly want to know what's going on with the game's third playable faction. Slipgate stated it'd be coming sometime after launch, but haven't said much about it since. It is a much weirder faction than the other two, so it isn't surprising you could only fight against them in the campaign on launch. But I hope it gets folded into the main game soon, if only to give it something that isn't directly borrowed from the C&C games of yore.

HBO's first Game of Thrones series didn't feature nearly enough dragon scenes, if you ask me. My favorite mythical beasties mostly showed up for a passing greeting or to die within seconds, but it sounds like that's a problem PlaySide's upcoming RTS, Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, could remedy.

"The dragons have been a big focus for us," game director Ryan McMahon told me during a Summer Game Fest interview. "We've actually got a bit of an R&D team specifically for dragons. People that are dedicated to just making the dragons."

Even as someone who read and watched it all, I'm still impressed by how thorough and intense fans get in Game of Thrones lore debates. The PlaySide team finds themselves in many of those same debates, which are complicated by unreliable character sources and differences between the books and shows.

There's one question in particular they've spent ages debating: What happens when a dragon dies? While they don't speculate on what counts as definitive canon, the team does internally discuss whether or not some dragon details will be brought into the game.

McMahon didn't seem fully committed to implementing any one theory just yet, but clearly wants War for Westeros to investigate those details and how it affects the environment. A PlaySide spokesperson even chimed in, explaining the questions that came up as the team investigated the precedents set by the books and show.

"The implication is that when a dragon crashes into the ground, it explodes like a nuclear bomb," said PlaySide's spokesperson, referencing interpretations of some scenes in House of the Dragon. "The back and forth about what actually happens when a dragon isn't alive is absolutely fascinating."

"You know, in House of the Dragon, you see dragons die a lot and some sort of explosion. There are things about why they would explode in death," said McMahon, referencing their fire breath and different death scenes throughout the series. "That has been an interesting debate. Does it [the explosion] happen all the time? Or does it happen at all?"

I can see how that matters when we're talking strategy on the battlefield and whether or not some draconic traits should make it into the game. Should I strategically take my own dragon out over an enemy unit so the explosion catches them all? Or do they just sort of crash and roll into the ground? Does it depend on what they hit, like a barrel of explosives? If I get to determine how some iconic Game of Thrones battles play out, then the flying Targaryen beasts will star in them all.

The original HBO series had its fair share of impressive dragon talent, too, but CGI ain't free, so they were often relegated to offscreen adventures and distant roaring. Naturally, House of the Dragon has given them a little more airtime, but don't count on War for Westeros including anything from the prequel, at least not yet.

When I asked if we'd see more characters from the books or HBO's House of the Dragon, McMahon clarified War for Westeros "is just for the Game of Thrones IP" since the newer series is a separate license. Though he added, "That doesn't mean that's what we're going to do forever."

Correction: A partially misheard quote has been corrected. The developer has emphasized that its discussions about dragons in the game and show are not definitive; we've updated this article to better reflect that position.

I never watched the Game of Thrones series on HBO because, frankly, I get my fill of political awfulness from the real world in which I live. But even without being immersed in the scene, I was surprised how quickly everyone stopped talking about it: It was like the last season rolled and everyone immediately decided to pretend the whole thing had never happened.

There's something of a comeback happening on the videogame front, though. The action RPG Game of Thrones: Kingsroad launched on Steam in March, and tonight at the Summer Game Fest we got our first look at Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, a new RTS being developed by PlaySide Studios.

As you might expect from the title and the fact that it's an RTS, players will take command of the armies of House Stark, House Lannister, House Targaryen, or the Night King, and go to war for control of the Iron Throne in either a singleplayer campaign or "free-for-all multiplayer."

From the press blast:

Engaging in epic real-time strategy battles, forging strategic alliances, and weaving deceit against rival forces will be key. Each faction offers deeply asymmetric strategies, with signature heroes, armies, and mechanics forged from the brutal legacy of Westeros. Players can deploy infantry, cavalry, siege engines, giants, and dragons to break enemy lines as they work to outplay and outmaneuver rivals with inspiring hero abilities and the ruthless instincts of a true war commander.

And a handful of screens:

It'll be very interesting to see how War for Westeros fares when it arrives. It may be a very good RTS and you can never have too many of those, but I wonder how much the Game of Thrones license really brings to the table, and whether it will attract many gamers who wouldn't otherwise be interested in a "classic" fantasy RTS in the first place. Do we really still care that much about Jon Snow and the gang?

We'll find out next year: Game of Thrones: War for Westeros is currently slated to launch sometime in 2026 and available to wishlist now on Steam.

Larian is a certifiable CRPG rockstar right now, having taken the once-niche genre to chart-topping blockbuster status with home runs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the superlative Baldur's Gate 3. A lot of people, myself included, started gnawing the bars of their enclosure last year in anticipation of Baldur's Gate 4, an idea Larian mulled over before moving on from the series completely.

And so, tantalizing mystery takes the reins. What could possibly follow the first game to score the videogame equivalent of an EGOT? An easy prediction is Divinity: Original Sin 3, but here's my thought: Baldur's Gate 3 is Divinity: Original Sin 3 in all but name. Larian has taken the CRPG crown twice over and rocketed to space with it. I declare that the only suitable follow-up to a game like BG3 is a similarly seismic revelation—a niche genre must be reared up from the earth and reborn with new panache.

Yes, I'm talking about character action-RTS hybrids like Brutal Legend and the visionary Sacrifice. Yes, I'm talking about a sequel to Divinity: Dragon Commander.

No, you can't force me to shut up about Dragon Commander, and I have an allowance of around 800 words to wax poetic about this bizarre little treasure.

Where dragons dwell

Dragon Commander was always a stopgap for Larian—it released after Divinity: Original Sin's Kickstarter campaign had ended and the studio was about to enter its fourth year developing the RPG—and once the team realized Original Sin was going to take the extra resources, Dragon Commander was, as Swen Vincke put it, "murdered." Not canned, but rushed out the door.

Despite the early release, the game did well for itself critically and made up for its lack of polish with a premise so fresh it's still novel today. You play as a dragon strapped with a jetpack and charged with rebuilding a shattered empire. In play, this manifests in thirds. You need to seize territory on a shifting game board, quash enemy armies in action-RTS battles, and keep various fantasy civilizations happy with policy decisions.

The game is visibly stretched thin trying to do all this at once. The RTS battles are visceral when blasting apart foes in dragon form, but tactically toothless compared to full-on strategy games. Like a Silver League game of Starcraft, whoever makes the most stuff fastest usually wins, and your units can comfortably be clumped into a deathball for the majority of fights. Terrain presents no fuss and economy boils to one all-purpose resource. I'm a complete RTS luddite—I like MOBAs because I only have to micro one unit—and even I found Dragon Commander's battles too dumb to pass as dumb fun.

And yet despite all that, the game is still good! Dragon Commander's worthy of a revisit because the messy RTS action is bolstered and given context by the oldest metagame of them all: cutthroat politics.

Wag the trogg

The lynchpin holding Dragon Commander together is its RPG aspect, which manifests in a few ways. Between battles, a council of advisors try to sway you to their side on various hot topics. Should the free press remain free? Should public schools include religious studies in their curriculum? Are your imp advisors allowed to tear apart a sacred historical site so they can test a weapon of mass destruction?

The noble answers might seem obvious, but it's all about which advisors you're willing to piss off—and who's offering what in return.

For instance, the undead advisor represents a plainly corrupt theocratic power called the Church of the Seven. They want to institute indulgences, win your support for a state-sponsored inquisition, and grant complete political immunity to their priests. They suck! But playing into their hand gives a bonus to luck, making auto-resolved battles a cinch. If you vote against the undead too much, you won't have much support among them, and you'll have to defend their lands with far fewer units.

It's easy to get lost in an RTS or grand strategy game as a parade of stat blocks and spreadsheets, but Dragon Commander is eager to remind you that every soldier on the front lines has a life back home; it's your job to make it a life they'll fight for.

You've also got your betrothed to think about. Early on in the game you'll choose a first lady from one of the game's fantasy societies; feel free to marry for love, but it won't keep you safe from the politics for long.

If you marry the elven Lohannah, you'll win a huge base of elf supporters; but elves traditionally don't eat meat, which might be buzzkill at dwarven banquets. The undead princess Ophelia is terminally ill, and you'll have to find her a solution amid experiment-eager imps and snake oil salesmen eyeing on the royal treasury. Your decisions carry mechanical weight, but it's all tied up in characters you grow to care about. It never reaches for the devastating emotional hits of something like Papers, Please, but it manages to press some of those same buttons in a lighter, sillier setting.

The game's handle on politics is admittedly shallow and its battles are rudimentary, but in those gripping moments where the different elements play off each other—uphill battles spent defending villas that despise your rule, conversations spent wondering how many citizens you're willing to sacrifice to a demon in exchange for power—it feels like the best parts of a bunch of unrelated fantasy epics all ladled into a Michelin star stew.

Larian's later games might be tighter, cleaner, and sure, better. But Dragon Commander has an enterprising, irresponsibly ambitious spirit that's just begging for a second look.

Base-building RTS Tempest Rising released on Steam yesterday, a full week before it was supposed to, and the publisher doesn't see a good way out of it, so the game just has a new release date now: April 17 instead of April 24.

"While the team worked quickly to address the issue, the most seamless solution ended up being to release the game to everyone," reads an update on Steam.

The mistake had something to do with a seven-day early unlock period that was meant to start yesterday. Only those who pre-purchased the Deluxe Edition were supposed to be granted access, while others would have to wait for the full launch. Instead, Tempest Rising just fully released.

The error put developer Slipgate Ironworks and publishers 3D Realms and Knights Peak in a bit of a pickle. Anyone who pre-ordered the special edition specifically for advanced access has lost the bragging rights and theoretical extra hours of gameplay they paid for, but as the studio ultimately decided, rescinding access for owners of the regular edition would not be a good move.

After all, they seem to be liking the game, which currently sits at a Very Positive user rating on Steam. We liked it a lot, too, awarding Tempest Rising an 85% in our review.

The developer is now "working on new exclusive in-game content" for Deluxe Edition owners to make up them losing their early unlock reward.

Well, technically losing it. Tempest Rising did unlock early, it's just that it unlocked early for everyone and not just Deluxe Edition owners.

It's a pretty minor game launch accident all things considered, but it does draw attention to the silliness of advanced access bonuses.

Players who pre-purchased the Deluxe Edition are now in the awkward position of having lost something that it would look awfully petty to complain about: the privilege not to have Standard Edition owners enjoying the game alongside them. But they did lose something they paid for, and they aren't the ones who invented early unlock bonuses, so hopefully they like whatever they end up getting instead.

Anyway, for the rest of us, Tempest Rising is out now on Steam, and it's good, so we certainly aren't complaining about the early launch.

A new report in Asia Today (spotted by IGN) says that four different Korean publishers are pitching StarCraft games to Blizzard, in the latest attempt to bring back the iconic RTS franchise.

Ah yes, the good old RTS. StarCraft rumours come around fairly regularly but rarely do they centre on anything as absurd as a Starcraft 3 following up two of the greatest RTS games ever made: nope, what seems to get Blizzard excited these days is anything but.

The four Korean companies competing to pitch for the StarCraft license are NCSoft, Nexon, Netmarble, and Krafton. NCSoft, known for Lineage and Guild Wars among other MMOs, is claimed to have been pitching a StarCraft RPG, which presumably would be an MMO.

Nexon has pitched a "unique" take on the universe. Krafton, which owns PUBG as well as more recently being in the headlines for Inzoi, is going for something "based on its own development capabilities," according to a machine translation of Asia Today's report. And Netmarble? It's going for a mobile game, so Blizzard's probably going to go with that pitch (I jest of course).

Pitches are pitches and, even if anything comes of these, it will be many years before we see any kind of actual game out of this. But I'd say there are two notable aspects to this development.

The first is that StarCraft originally became a phenomenon in South Korea, with the much-improved Brood War turbocharging one of the most exciting esports scenes in history, and Starcraft 2 keeping that legacy alive. The game is arguably better-known and more beloved in South Korea than anywhere else in the world, and I don't think it's a coincidence that this pitching process involves four giant Korean companies.

The second point is simply that Blizzard's listening, and may even have invited such pitches. The Asia Today report says it has confirmed that "some of these game companies have gone all the way to Blizzard’s headquarters in California to hold presentations in order to secure a competitive edge."

Well. Last year brought the news that, while Blizzard has at least one StarCraft project under development in-house, it's the studio's third attempt at making a shooter in that universe (following the cancelled projects Ghost and Ares). "If it's not cancelled," said author Jason Schreier at the time. "I mean, this is Blizzard after all. Yes, that is a project that, as far as I knew, was in development. At least, as of the time that I wrote this book [...] this felt like such an interesting and useful nugget to include because it really just shows you that Blizzard cannot quit StarCraft shooters."

If you sense that the wind might be changing for StarCraft, you're not alone, but let's not get our hopes up. Recent years have brought nice things like StarCraft: Remastered and a crossover with Hearthstone, as well as a new tabletop miniatures game announced last week, though nary a hint of the number three (feels familiar). All new StarCraft stuff is welcome, and perhaps one of Blizzard's suitors will make a great game. But make no mistake: I love StarCraft because it's an amazing real-time strategy game and, if that isn't in some way part of its future DNA, I'm not sure that love will last.

Age of Mythology has had a long, strong history as the weirdest and most cult-like of the Age RTS series. Last year we got the release of Age of Mythology: Retold, which updated and revamped it for modern audiences. The community who still love and support the game have received it pretty well, with thousands online every day to play the enriched version of their favorite RTS. It recently got a big expansion, Immortal Pillars, adding a pantheon of Chinese gods and a Chinese faction alongside the Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, and Atlanteans of the base game.

In making a fresh expansion, senior director of production Earnest Yuen and the team at World's Edge realized that they'd have to abandon some elements of the Chinese faction in Age of Mythology's first remaster, the 2014 Extended Edition.

"To be open, we deliberately chose not to closely adhere to the original. We have all played the original expansion of course, so we understand what was good about it and what can be improved," Yuen said. "Even folks who did work on the original felt that we should rework the expansion with the experiences the team have gained now."

It's a little surprising for an expansion on a decades-old game, but not too much so. When I spoke with Yuen and the World's Edge developers at the start of 2024 as Age of Mythology Retold was revealed, they showed themselves to be huge fans of the game. They told me at the time they wanted to go "way beyond what we normally do for definitive editions" in order to build an epic as older players remembered it, rather than as it was in 2002. "We want to build the game in your head," he said.

The same held true for Immortal Pillars: they wanted to make the expansion you imagined for Age of Mythology, not the expansion that actually existed a decade ago. They didn't explicitly say it, but to me it was clear that Immortal Pillars either had to be up to 2025 standards or it shouldn't exist at all.

Good gods

"One of our key goals early on was to unleash our creative team to be free to 100% completely reimagine and rebuild the pantheon from the ground up, showcasing what a modern take of a Chinese pantheon would look like in 2025," said Yuen. "We wanted to reimagine the Chinese pantheon based on authentic Chinese mythology, which includes collaborating with experts and partners in China to create this expansion. Chinese mythology stories run incredibly deep, and we had a hard time picking which gods would make the final cut."

Some of those choices were informed by how players engage with Age of Mythology Retold. The team at World's Edge does their best to monitor social metrics—how people are talking about the game—and the hard data they get from people playing matches. That's part of what told them that a lot of AoM players really enjoyed skirmish and singleplayer game types against the AI, which lead to the development of the PvE Arena of the Gods mode released last year. That meant that a priority of design for the Chinese pantheon had to fit with the flashy "look at these cool battles" draw of that mode.

"It has so many incredible-looking Myth units which really makes any big battles look epic. I mean, we now have even more flying dragons and new flying tigers," said Yuen, adding that Immortal Pillars also includes a singleplayer campaign.

Not all design was informed by the need to look good, though. I asked Yuen how the team approached adding new gameplay types—there are a lot of cool ideas from the last two decades of strategy games that just aren't present in the core of AoM.

"Of course you have the completely new and awesome ideas like Taotie that eats other units to grow larger and increase attack stats. I especially like that unit design because not only does it introduce a new way to play, but the idea also aligns perfectly with the original Chinese mythology of Taotie representing 'gluttony,'" said Yuen. "I also love the hero Nezha, who leaves behind a trail of fire everywhere he goes.

"The way the Chinese gain favor is entirely different from any other pantheons, as they have to constantly expand their empire to cover more 'favored land,' and the barracks allow you to add defensive tower expansions on the buildings. These and other new features offer us new strategic options to think about building placements in the battlefield."

Yuen and the team clearly just really love this game. They're thrilled watching players come up with new and innovative ways to use the factions and powers they've implemented.

"The players have often created new ways to play the game or use various units and god powers in ways we don’t initially expect. Yes, sometimes it does keep our game balance team busy, but most often it just makes the game fun to watch and play. When the game first came out, I learned a lot from the best players out there and used those tools against other people in our team, especially with the new Norse god Freyr. I’m looking forward to doing the same with the Chinese Patheon!"

So do keep the reviews, comments, and discourse going, Age fans. It's clear they're important to the World's Edge team. "Players may not know this but on top of looking for complaints, the positive comments have routinely been a huge source of encouragement for our team to keep making the game as good as we can," Yuen said.

"Thank you, Myth fans. We love you."

Earth vs Mars is a new RTS in development at Relic, but unlike the studio's big Company of Heroes and Dawn of War games, this one is a "smaller indie-style" game being made under its Relic Labs label, which aims to "explore new sub-genres, experiment, get our creative juices going, and release games more frequently."

The new game is a campy take on a familiar scenario: The Martians, having had enough of our nonsense, invade Earth with an overwhelming force of flying saucers, hover-tanks, and other such staples of classic sci-fi. Humanity's only hope is the "Splice-O-Tron," a technology that enables humanity's leaders to combine "volunteers" with terrestrial animals to create supersoldiers that will fight alongside conventional military forces. But it may not be just human-animal hybrids on the table: The Steam page cites intriguing units like the airborne "cheetah-fly" and the "deadly squirrel-cow infantry." I'm not really an RTS guy, but I definitely want to know more about that.

But Mars, not being slouches in the technology department, will deploy their own weirdo mutants as the campaign progresses, evolving their own army alongside yours. Earth vs Mars will feature a singleplayer campaign with more than 30 missions, along with online multiplayer, a versus mode, and a map editor enabling players to create their own custom maps and scenarios.

The Earth vs Mars reveal comes just a week after Relic announced a new "bold course for the future," built on three key pillars: Continued support and updates for its existing games; "re-imaging" its older games in the form of re-releases, remasters, or "brand-new franchise experiences that capture the spirit of the originals while appealing to a new generation of players"; and "smaller scope" games with an indie bent, which Relic said "will allow the studio to explore new genres and gameplay experiences and continue fostering a culture of experimentation and artistic expression."

That announcement came in the wake of a rough couple of years for Relic, which has laid off more than 150 employees since mid-2023 and in March 2024 was sold by previous owner Sega. Relic said in May of that year that it was "returning to its roots as an independent creative studio," but it also confirmed that its new majority owner was investment firm Emona Capital LLC, which struck me as a bit counter-intuitive to the concept of independence.

In any event, Earth vs Mars is clearly Relic's first big step forward as it looks to regain its footing, and while it's still an RTS—the genre the studio is known for—it does look to be a simpler, more scaled-back experience than Relic's previous games. A release date hasn't been announced but Earth vs Mars is expected to be out this summer, and it will only be available for PC at launch: Relic said it may come to other platforms in the future, "based on the game's reception."

In February 2024, World's Edge announced new DLC for Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition that was slated to be out at the end of 2024. In October of that year, however, the DLC was delayed to an unspecified "future date," and today the studio announced that "after serious consideration," it's been cancelled entirely.

"We apologize that we haven’t provided any updates to you since our announcement of the DLC," the studio wrote on Steam. "While considering the inclusions for last year’s [New Year, New Age] show, we wanted to ensure that Age 3: DE players felt part of the franchise celebration as we know you have huge passion and love for the game. However, pushing to ensure that the game was included meant we announced content before it had been built, and we now feel that announcement was premature.

"We know that this is a huge disappointment, and many of you were excited for more content. We were able to put out a patch for the game towards the end of last year but understand that it was not the size and scope you were hoping for."

Details of the DLC were never revealed, but production director Earnest Yuen said when the announcement was made that it would feature two new civilizations "that have been highly requested by the community." He wasn't cleared to name them, but he did offer a tiny hint:

(Those are the flags of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark, by the way.)

The last expansion for Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition, Knights of the Mediterranean, was released in May 2022, and with this promised new DLC cancelled it sounds like the game will be effectively settling into maintenance mode: World's Edge didn't say there will be no more DLC ever, but it did say it "will continue to maintain servers, rotate civs through the free trial version, and provide Customer Support for any issues you may encounter whilst playing." Given that Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition is now five years old, I'd say it's a good bet that this is where the studio puts a pin in it.

There are a surprising number of RTS romps knocking about these days, but few of them have managed to leave a mark. Pessimism has overtaken me, but there are some exceptions. Tempest Rising—Slipgate Ironwork's sci-fi throwback—is one of them. If you've ever dreamed of a reality where EA didn't completely wreck Westwood's Tiberium saga, this one's for you.

Last summer's demo convinced me that it's on the right track. There really hasn't been a Command & Conquer successor so primed to carry on Westwood's legacy before. A couple of missions, though, don't tell the whole story.

Multiplayer might not be at the heart of real-time strategy (despite the number of developers who have been mistakenly convinced that it is), but it's still a vital component. Certainly it's one of the reasons why StarCraft 2 managed to sit at the top of the pile for so many years. The good news, then, is that Tempest Rising's latest demo is showcasing its multiplayer chops.

Between now and February 3, you'll be able to duke it out with human players across a trio of maps: The Alps (2v2), Oasis (1v1) and Altitude (1v1). If you're more into comp stomps, though, you'll also be able to take the skirmish mode for a spin, too, flinging troops, drones and tanks at AI foes. All to the beat of a heavy, industrial, tinnitus-inducing soundtrack that features bangers from none other than Frank Klepacki himself.

The full game, meanwhile, will also include custom matches and ranked matchmaking, alongside the skirmishes and twin campaigns. It's not too far off, either. Tempest Rising is launching on Steam on April 24, or a week earlier if you shell out a few quid more for the deluxe version.

Dave Pottinger has programming credits on all three Age of Empires games, was director of technology on Age of Mythology, and was lead designer on Halo Wars. He probably knows what he's talking about when it comes to the RTS genre. Speaking to Videogamer to promote his new studio Last Keep's upcoming RTS, Project Citadel, Pottinger pointed out the genre hasn't done a lot of evolving in the last two decades.

"It hasn't changed much," he said. "You know, you're still playing the same game we're playing 20 years ago and looking at some of these new games—Stormgate and others like that—and they're still really largely based on that formula. It works, it's an old, golden set of rules, because they were good back then and they're still good now, and it’s nice to see that stuff still works but at the same time I want to do something new, we want to do something new."

As for why the RTS is so indebted to its past, he mentioned that back in his Age of Empires days there was a fear that players would push back against attempts to experiment. "There were some times on the Age franchise where we flew a little too close to the sun," he said. "We had to pull back and take some very innovative things out of the game—I'm talking particularly about formation-based combat in Age of Empires 3. Hell, we demoed that at E3, and took that out of the game because we were afraid it was going to alienate too many of the existing Age fans."

I'm the guy who fruitlessly votes for Dawn of War: Dark Crusade in the PC Gamer Top 100 every year, so I'd agree the RTS enjoyed its peak a good long while ago. Pottinger isn't just talking the talk, however, and Project Citadel (as it's currently codenamed) is aiming to shake things up. It'll be a space-based roguelike with procedural maps, and sounds a bit like a cross between Planetary Annihilation and FTL. "Battle your way through Voltari space on a mission to free the sector from their rule" says the description on its Steam page. "It won't be easy, but you have a secret weapon to aid you in your voyage—a secret relic that allows your mothership and crew to regenerate at the edge of Voltari space—again and again as you uncover the story’s twists and turns."

Other tweaks to the formula include a "Turn-based overmap" and "Fast-paced action with skill-shot special abilities". I dunno if permadeath and procedural generation is what it'll take to get me excited in a new RTS, but it's definitely a niche in need of a change. For once I agree with our cynic-in-residence Fraser Brown, who summed up recent attempts at revivals by writing that real-time strategy almost came back from the brink of death and then fell flat on its face.

Project Citadel is on its way to a release in early access, where the campaign will be fully playable. "Through Early Access," the developer says on its Steam page, "we plan to expand the number of playable factions, variety of units, and add related content in stages. We also plan to iterate on balance, gameplay rules and expand content based upon community feedback."

How bad could cutting into a pipe filled with highly pressurized corrosive goo be? A question I have asked myself many times in just the first few hours of playing Creeper World IXE (pronounced "icks"), the latest in a long-running oddball indie strategy series. The answer, somehow, is always "very bad". And yet I continue to do it. Partly because I'm an idiot, and partly because the results are always oddly spectacular, especially when every single pixel of the world is physically modelled.

If you're new to the Creeper World series by micro-indie outfit Knuckle Cracker, they're a turtler's wet dream, emphasis on the wet. Slow-and-steady defensive strategy games where your enemy isn't some invading army or swarming bugs, but a spreading ocean of deadly blue goo (the titular Creeper) that will just keep flowing and dissolving all the things you hold dear until you can push back the tide (usually using explosives) and plug the interdimensional hole it's leaking out of. Something I've always found weirdly satisfying, and given that we're up to the sixth game, I'm not the only one.

While each game in the series experiments in strange new directions (Creeper World 4 is the only one in the series that's 3D), there's always elements of traditional, intuitive RTS gameplay here, including resource gathering and base-building. Creeper World has always been a solo experience: you versus a force of nature that needs to be mopped up rather than fought. As such, success is solely ranked by completion speed. You can take things slow and steady, but bold strategies get you a higher place on the online leaderboards, and there's randomly generated and user-made missions on top of those provided.

Sandbox strategy

Creeper World IXE is the sixth in the series (if we're counting space combat spinoff Particle Fleet), and returns to the side-on ant-farm perspective of Creeper World 2, but blends in a hefty helping of Falling Sand style particle simulation—the kind most recently seen in roguelike alchemical chaos simulator Noita. It makes for a very granular, unusual battlefield where your terrain-editing ships are every bit as important as the ones with big lasers, giving the missions a more puzzle-like feel than other games in the series.

Everything from your fleet of spaceships (which don't so much fly as disintegrate and rebuild themselves) to the terrain and the Creeper itself is physically modeled on a per-pixel basis, and each element interacts in interesting ways. Water turns non-interactable lava into excavatable rock. Acid and Pixelium form a Creeper-suppressing physical barrier, and there's a little in-game cheat sheet showing you the other useful alchemical mixtures you can exploit. Gases rise and liquids build in pressure against stone walls, just waiting for you to pop the cork and scramble to cut through the tide to reach the leaky source inside.

As with its predecessors, there's a satisfying rhythm to each mission here. Your mothership (which is able to dig, shoot, tank and act as a construction and resource-hoarding platform) is the first unit down, but you'll quickly deploy the rest of your fleet and rush to intercept any incoming Creeper tides and build force-barriers to contain liquid flows. From there it's an order-of-operations problem as you figure out which areas need your immediate attention and what parts of the cave systems can be left for a while. Messing around too long can result in unwinnable (or at least very difficult) situations, but you're free to pause, slow or accelerate time. In real-time, missions can often take upwards of half an hour, although that time just flies by, given the chance. The high-energy synthwave soundtrack doesn't hurt either.

Too greedily, too deep

Perhaps a little too fast, even. Creeper World IXE also has a lot of ideas and funky units introduced over the course of its relatively short 20-mission campaign, the most distinctive being a power-armored hero unit that you can control directly, platformer-style, shooting, transporting materials and blasting open paths through areas that your ships might not be able to reach. They're very interesting, but new units and ideas are introduced at such a rate that they don't really feel like they have room to breathe. This will become less of a problem over time as the community produces more levels (which you can access directly in-game), but you might feel a little rushed through the main story.

Rushed feels like the word of the day. If there's one thing holding Creeper World IXE back, it's the interface. It's not bad and works reasonably well once you adjust to it, but for some reason it defies standard RTS controls. There are no useful hotkeys for selecting or grouping units, and modifiers like Control and Shift are needed to do things as simple as drag-selecting ships. Likewise, digging, building shield tiles and clearing build orders feel a bit fiddlier than they should be. From what I've played, it would have made more sense (at least to my sludge-filled brain) to have separate unit command and terrain building modes that you switch between with a single toggle key.

The UI visuals are also an odd choice, reminding me of shareware-era programmer art, and a significant step down from the clean but classy layouts in Particle Fleet and Creeper World 4. While I dig the Amiga-esque aesthetics of the pixel world and ships, the buttons, boxes and menus feel less retro and more primitive. Especially when a lot of Amiga games had absolutely gorgeous interfaces. The tutorial videos in-game also hammer through ideas at a comical rate, and automatically move forward instead of pausing and repeating the one thing you're trying to look up details on.

It's a frustrating set of issues. Nothing that can't be fixed or worked past once you're over the initial learning curve, but it makes a rough first impression for newcomers to the series. All that being said, this is still a smart and creative evolution of the series, with a lot of fun new ideas that I hope to see the community properly explore, like the action-style power suit unit and zero-gravity levels. But it's hard to shake the feeling that this one was pushed out the door a little prematurely. Still, an interesting new direction for a continually evolving series. Creeper World IXE is out now on Steam for $17.99/£15.07, with a 10% launch discount running until December 26th.

Any game with the noble ambition of reviving 90s-style real-time strategy is going to have our attention here at PCG, especially when it comes from the great minds behind Command and Conquer. Industrial Annihilation, a follow-up to Planetary Annihilation and spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, landed on Steam Early Access the other day after accomplishing its Kickstarter funding goals earlier this year, but its first few days on Steam have been a bit faltering.

Industrial Annihilation has recovered from a 'Mostly Negative' rating up to a 'Mixed' one, with player counts peaking around 350 on launch according to SteamCharts (despite the game having nearly 6000 backers). Industrial Annihilation offers an interesting twist on the old-school RTS formula, whereby you build up a vast factory of conveyor belts, supply lines and the like in order to create nuke-like weapons. You then need to defend your factory from enemy armies, while sending out your own mechanised forces to scupper their nuclear ambitions, with the whole thing ending in a big ol' nukefest. 

Early sentiment in the community is that the game feels too threadbare (which could be a case of mismanaged expectations around what 'Early Access' means). "It's so bare bones that it's basically an asset show without a game," said one player on the game's Steam forums. Others have been willing to look past the game's current scarcity and inevitable EA bugginess to see the potential of its 'Factorio meets C&C' concept, while saying that it has a long way to go.

It's worth remembering that Planetary Annihilation, made by the same team under a different studio name, also had a rocky journey before landing on a pretty solid final product. Planetary Annihilation was one of the early Kickstarter superhits back in 2012, raising over $2,000,000. When it finally came out, it… wasn't great, so the studio released the Titans expansion the following year that sought to right the wrongs of the base game, as well as adding a bunch of new content. 

Founding Kickstarter backers were gifted Titans for free, but other owners of the base game—some of whom paid $90, which granted them access to the alpha build—weren't too happy that they had to pay for the upgrade (albeit at a steep discount), feeling that the base game fell so far short of expectations that it should've been a free upgrade for all existing owners.

When all was said and done, Planetary Annihilation: Titans wound up being pretty good, with a 'Very Positive' score on Steam, so here's hoping that the studio has learned from previous experience, and Industrial Annihilation grows into a game that does its RTS lineage proud.

In Utter Darkness is a mission in StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty that you're destined to lose. The protoss are making a last stand against zerg forces: The goal isn't victory, but to protect the construction of an archive that might aid some future species in their own war against the zerg. Hold the line, kill enough zerg, and you win—even though, y'know, you lose. But what if you could beat back destiny—what if you didn't lose?

YouTuber Davey Gunface set himself to the impossible task, and 14 years after StarCraft 2 launched, he's managed to pull it off. He didn't win, strictly speaking, because there is no win condition, but he didn't lose, either. By employing very high-level StarCraft 2 strategies, and taking advantage of some weaknesses in the enemy AI, he was able to lock the zerg into an effective stalemate.

Davey's breakdown of his strategy is the kind of deep magic that will make sense to committed StarCraft 2 veterans and absolutely no one else, but it turns on a few key points. The arrival of the final wave of protoss reinforcements includes Artanis, enabling what Davey calls the "Archon Bidet," essentially a variation of the Archon Toilet, which I discovered today is actually a well-known protoss tactic that allows for large numbers of enemies to be wiped out very quickly.

"There's a reason I'm calling it the Achon Bidet, and not just the Archon Toilet," Davey says. "Because here's the thing: Artanis has 500 energy compared to the base mothership's 200, so instead of being able to cast only two abilities at max energy, Chad-tanis over here can cast up to five in rapid succession."

This is important because of another mothership ability, Mass Recall, which Davey was able to use to pack a few ground units into a specific small crevice. Not enough to make a real difference, except—he's going even deeper here—when combined with Vortex and Artanis' much greater energy cap, which enabled him to squeeze about 24 Templars into the space, which then morphed into Archons, who can tear through waves of enemy air attacks with ease.

Even in that crevice, the protoss forces can still be attacked by some zerg units, meaning they would eventually be wiped out but for the next step in the strategy: "Abuse the AI." In most StarCraft 2 missions, according to Davey, losing all your structures means game over no matter how many forces you have deployed. But because In Utter Darkness is a glorious last stand, all your structures and units have to be wiped out in order to lose. But because the AI recognizes it can't reach the Archons in the crevice after destroying his main base and tracking down and killing Zeratul, the zerg forces just stop, "stun locked for the rest of eternity," as Davey put it.

The final nail in the zerg coffin is the result of a limitation in StarCraft 2 itself. To prevent lag, the game will at a certain point stop spawning new units until existing units are killed. But because everything on the map is effectively inactive, nothing happens. "After you hold off for long enough and you set up everything correctly, the protoss just live," Davey says. "Forever."

And if simple existence until the heat death of the universe isn't good enough, there's even a way to keep killing zerg until there's nothing left but unarmed Overseers, who "fly away to hang out outside the map, which results in literally hundreds of them just vibing in the middle of nowhere, out of bounds." Supply block eventually kicks in, preventing any more units of any kind of spawning, and with absolutely nothing left that can threaten them, the protoss do indeed win, even though they will never see a checkmark in the W column.

Of course, this outcome has repercussions that go beyond just the survival of the protoss: The demonstration of protoss power means Kerrigan isn't really needed to ensure the survival of the universe, and since nobody has to deal with that headache, the trickle-down effect is that the trilogy never happens. "StarCraft 2 ends here with me and the boys menacingly hovering over this dumb rock for all eternity," Davey says. "And I'm kind of all right with that."

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Zooming in on tiny things and imagining what life is like for them: it never gets old. Like 2016 platformer Unravel and Obsidian survival game Grounded, new RTS Empire of the Ants plops us into the world of macro photography. It does a great job of showing us the world from an ant's perspective, where pebbles are boulders and a beetle is an elephant, but you've really got to love that feeling for it to work, because as an RTS campaign, it's not great.

In Empire of the Ants you're 103,683rd, a warrior-caste red wood ant who fights for their confederation of ant colonies against the much larger world's wonders and horrors. It's a wonderfully whimsical world—drawn from a series of French novels—and although the game mechanics aren't anything special, and the campaign missions are a letdown more often than not, there is an undeniable delight in exploring its tiny world. This is a game about beauty and enjoyable scenery above all else.

The art almost aggressively leaps at you, with as photorealistic a set of greenery and logs and other tiny things as Unreal Engine 5 can muster. The many insects and arachnids and other creatures have believable texture to their exoskeletons that varies between species and type. I was especially enamored by the huge ferns, grasses, and flowers your ant can climb all around on. The surfaces aren't always as detailed as insect carapace, but the way your ant's legs twist to clutch at the stem as you climb or spread out on smoother surfaces is just kind of detail you hope for from a game about zooming in on details. It's simply a very fun, and pretty, game to move about in.

The huge artifacts of the larger human world are also delightful. A rugged old soccer ball features quite early on and looks realistic with its worn stitching and fraying panels and slick slug-trail from a circling, curious creature. These human objects are accompanied by ant-scale descriptions wondering what they might be: We can't eat the soccer ball, says one, it's not real leather. Avoid a glass jar in the summer, says another, as it gets very hot.

That does make the places that lack similar detail very obvious: You can build little wood walls for your nests, for example, but you just clip right through them when walking. Lack of attention to certain mechanical details is painful in your average mission, because much of Empire of the Ants isn't actually RTS missions—it's platforming around these worlds as a little ant. And that's fun when you're traversing and sightseeing, but most of those platformer segments boil down to timed scavenger hunts that have you rushing about and fighting with the awful UI for smelling pheromones more than enjoying the scenery.

The antgony of defeat

As a whimsical ant exploration simulator, Empire of the Ants does pretty well, but it's in theory a third-person RTS first and foremost. That part of it is lacking quite sorely. Running around and directing your ants to take new nests—the fixed-in-place capture points that also serve as your only base building—is often too simple. The battles are largely deterministic, where you can see from the start which side would win and which will lose because of the Warrior-Worker-Spitter unit triad forming a Rock-Paper-Scissors counter system. The only wrench in those gears is that sometimes you can use pheromone abilities from your otherwise non-combatant ant leader to do stuff like boost your units' movement or cause an enemy to flee. It's very simple stuff that doesn't inspire an interesting range of tactical scenarios.

That becomes painfully obvious in multiplayer, where the battles devolve pretty quickly into who's quicker on the draw to take resources and leverage them—I didn't have any interesting or surprising tactical interactions. There's little to nothing to recommend this as a committed multiplayer game over other, more strategically-varied games that'll feel fresh longer.

In the later campaign missions, it's often frustrating to tab through the long list of ant legions and allied creatures like beetles and wasps you command—and tabbing through the list is indeed the only precise way to select units other than facing and clicking them directly… which can be hard when a half-dozen enemy and friendly unit icons overlap. The UI for base upgrades can also frustrate: it's projected on the ground and can get covered by friendly ants.

The two halves of Empire of the Ants, exploration and tactics, are both mediocre and at war with each other. It is possible to blend puzzle-platforming and small-scale tactics—typified by the excellent Pikmin series—but Empire of the Ants strictly separates the two types of play. Campaign missions are always either exploration or strategic scenarios, and the exploration is only sometimes mysterious or surprising enough to justify itself. A Pikmin-style game blends the two gameplay types into a fluid whole, with larger levels or regions that reward exploration with strategic bonuses. Here, I feel like I'm hopping between a passionate environmental tech demo and a mediocre third-person RTS in stutters and stops, but those environments are at least enough to recommend it, with big caveats, to lovers of insects and other tiny things.

We didn't get too excited when Blizzard unveiled Warcraft Rumble in 2023: It was the company's first new RTS in years, which made it kind of a big deal given that Blizzard made its bones on legendary RTS games like Warcraft and StarCraft, but it was a mobile game, and so we were left out of the fun. Until now, that is.

As part of today's celebration of the 30^th anniversary of Warcraft—and boy, am I feeling old right now—Blizzard announced that Warcraft Rumble is on the way to PC, with a beta test set to begin on December 10.

It's not an entirely surprising move. Diablo Immortal, the mobile take on Diablo that caused such a stink when it was announced in 2018, did the same thing, coming to PC in 2022. And while mobile ports are sometimes not great, Warcraft Rumble looks not terrible: PC Gamer's Fraser Brown said it doesn't stand up to Blizzard's classics, but acknowledged that "as mobile games go, it's not a bad one," with both a PvE campaign and support for online PvP skirmishes.

Warcraft Rumble will be available on PC via Battle.net, and like its mobile counterpart will be free to play. If you don't want to wait for December, you can take a shot at the mobile version on Android and iOS devices.

Blizzard isn't just releasing remastered versions of its first two real-time strategy games today: it's also bringing back the Battle Chest, a bundle containing both games that was a stroke of marketing genius back in the mid '90s.

Before there was The Orange Box, there was the Battle Chest. Before we had convenient digital stores like Steam and Battle.net where we could buy games with a couple clicks, we had to go to a physical store and hope they had the big bulky boxes full of disks or discs that we wanted. There was only so much shelf space to go around, which meant new games would often push out the old—only the bestsellers got to hold onto that hard-won and vital visibility. So Blizzard, circa 1996, figured out how to gosh darn guarantee that it would never have to surrender its shelf space by making a box so big it stood out from everything else in the gaming aisle—and then making it such a good deal no one could pass up buying it.

Blizzard's first Battle Chest bundled together Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2, and Warcraft 2 expansion Beyond the Dark Portal. I suspect the original Warcraft wasn't selling much at that point when it was up against the likes of Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer: Red Alert, so Blizzard had basically nothing to lose by tossing it in as a bonus. The strategy definitely worked on me: I already owned Warcraft 2, but I bought the Battle Chest to get Beyond the Dark Portal and experience the story of the first game that I'd only read about in Warcraft 2's manual. Besides, how cool was that giant box??

Clearly the Battle Chest was a huge success, because Blizzard repeated it multiple times. The StarCraft Battle Chest bundled in the Brood War expansion and a couple strategy guides; the Diablo Battle Chest combined the first game with Diablo 2 and its expansion; even Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft got Battle Chests in the 2000s as sales moved increasingly online. It's been almost 10 years since Blizzard's last Battle Chest for StarCraft 2, but Warcraft's 30th anniversary was apparently justification enough for the studio to bring back The Old Ways.

Or, well, at least an old name. The Warcraft Battle Chest out today sadly isn't a box you can place on your shelf; it's just a digital bundle available on the Battle.net store. But it does still scratch that same "what a value!" reaction as the very first one did. It includes not just Warcraft 1 and 2 Remastered, but also Warcraft 3: Reforged (and the expansions, of course), and it's available today for $39.99.

We knew a Warcraft 2 remaster was coming, but Blizzard's still managed to pull off a surprise during its celebration of Warcraft's 30th anniversary. Not only is it remastering its mega hit RTS, but it's also remastering the original—and both are available today.

"These remasters have brand new, hand-drawn visuals that capture the original art style from each game, and you'll be able to swap between the original graphics and the remastered versions in real time," said Warcraft manager Brad Chan.

We'll have to spend some quality time with these remasters to get a real sense of how well the new artwork compares to the old pixels, but from a quick look in the trailer above I'd say they look great—the animations may be quite simple, but the clean cartoony drawings are a dead ringer for Warcraft 2's art as I remember it, just HD-ified.

Warcraft 1 is getting some much-needed changes to make it more palatable to the modern player: 16:9 resolution support, for starters, as well as control options that became standard in the years after its release. You can now right-click to move units instead of relying on hotkeys and also draw a box to select multiple units without having to hold down Ctrl.

Both Warcraft 1 and 2 have also received "various UI and UX improvements such as tooltips and health bars, mission select screens, and increased unit selection." If you remember the original versions of these games, you'll recall that they were pretty limited in how many units you could select at once, and you had to look at the unit icons in the sidebar to see how much health they had. Bringing that information into the playfield will be a very nice improvement.

The feature of the remasters that Chan seemed most excited to announce in today's 30th anniversary livestream was just for Warcraft 2, but it is a damn good one. "Warcraft 2 will still have multiplayer functionality and all legacy custom maps will still be fully compatible and playable," he said.

The remasters are available now by themselves—Warcraft 1 is $9.99 and Warcraft 2 is $14.99—as well as in a new Battle Chest alongside Warcraft 3: Reforged, which got its own major 2.0 update today, meant to address some of the community's longstanding criticisms of the disappointing remaster.

First released in 2021, Overreign is a mod that converts Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition into a first-person experience. Though it's been around for a while it launched in quite a buggy state, but creator Spriteblood kept plugging away and now it's looking much more stable: it came to my attention thanks to a video from YouTuber T90Official, who specialises in AoE2 content, and ably demonstrates just what first-person PvP looks like in a 1999 RTS.

It's one of those mods that somehow works in exactly the way you imagine, with the 2D spritework proving a surprisingly great fit for the new perspective. It works across the game's skirmish mode and lets you assume control of a single unit, from which perspective the AoE2 world is unmistakably familiar but also very very odd: as the buildings go up, it's like watching giant inflatables rise.

"I stopped developing this game in late 2022, everything since then were only some bugfixes and little changes to keep it playable and compatible with the fast-evolving Aoe2 DE," says Spriteblood. "I am amazed that until today there are still people who find and try this. On average, 2-3 games are played per day, which is very nice for a standalone-mod that launched 5 years ago. Thank you all who played it."

There appears to be something funky going on with the mod's pages at moddb, though I was able to download it earlier, and be warned that this thing can be pretty intensive on your hardware. "The mod is great but extremely RAM-heavy," says Yuri Kot. "In late game (with many units) it eats up my 32GB for breakfast and freezes every couple of minutes."

PCG's Morgan Park pointed out that this all reminds him of Age of Doom, a brilliant-slash-bizarre mod that uses the Age of Empires 2 engine to make Doom into a third person isometric RTS shooter. The two certainly make for good companions and, just like Doom, Age of Empires 2 is having quite the afterlife: over a quarter of century since it released, the game is still getting official DLC.

When I noticed that Phil Spencer was wearing a StarCraft T-shirt during Xbox's Tokyo Game Show presentation, for the briefest moment I got excited. I am a naive child. StarCraft 2 is now more than 14 years old, and Blizzard has been largely ignoring its RTS legacy—let's try to forget about Warcraft 3: Reforged—for a long time. Could that be about to change, I wondered? No. Apparently not. 

The T-shirt tease was the setup to a terrible punchline: StarCraft 2 and StarCraft: Remastered are coming to PC Game Pass. So I guess that's nice for the RTS fans who somehow overlooked two of the genre's most important games. For the rest of us? Well, it's a bummer.

To be clear, though, these are absolutely amazing games and they belong in your library. The original StarCraft and StarCraft 2 multiplayer are already free, but StarCraft: Remastered is a worthy update, while the StarCraft 2 campaigns are among the genre's best, and they're still absolutely worth experiencing if you missed out. 

But by god do we need something new. Before Blizzard got into the live service racket (with the occasional questionable dip into mobile gaming), it was one of the driving forces behind the RTS Golden Age, alongside Westwood Studios. The competition between these titans defined an era of gaming and effectively established the model for the RTS genre. 

The genre's heyday is long behind us now, of course, and while there's been a resurgence of RTS games, we're still waiting on the kind of major successes that can propel the genre forward. The Blizzard of today is not the Blizzard that gave us Warcraft and StarCraft, but it does have the resources and ability to attract talent that could give us another genre-defining RTS. If, you know, it tried.

All that said, these games are a welcome addition to PC Game Pass and you should absolutely give them a download when they appear on November 5.  

In amidst all the mechs, anime, Phil Spencer speaking Japanese, and whatever the hell Slitterhead was, Xbox's Tokyo Game Show presentation also showed off a few tantalising seconds of a new expansion for Age of Mythology: Retold—its Age of Empires: Definitive Edition-ification of the god-battling RTS from 2002.

It's called Immortal Pillars, and from the brief glimpse we got, this is the one that brings the Chinese civilisation back to the game. When Age of Mythology: Retold was announced, some players were curious why it wasn't coming with the Chinese civ that joined the original game in its 2016 Tale of the Dragon expansion. The reason, more likely than not, was that no one liked that expansion very much, and the devs on Retold wanted to rework it before bundling it into their re-do.

Well, I guess that reworking has already come some way. In the trailer, we get snippets of Chinese soldiers stomping about, junks floating in the water, and various creatures from Chinese mythology that I—as some guy from the UK's East Midlands—do not quite feel confident identifying.

It looks cool, though of course the proof will be in the pudding. When will that pudding arrive? Xbox doesn't want you to know just yet, inviting you to wishlist the pudding over on its Steam page, where it has a release date of "Coming soon". The pudding is the expansion, by the way. Sorry if I got you excited about actual pudding. None is forthcoming.

I've got a good feeling about this one, despite the brief look. Our Age of Mythology: Retold review was pretty positive on the game, scoring it 75% and praising the visual overhaul for the difference it makes even with the old game's now-creaky mechanics. The fact that the devs have seen fit to rework the original, unloved expansion into something that hopefully succeeds a bit better suggests to me their hearts are in the right place. But we'll have to wait for that pudding before I can make a declarative statement either way.

Every so often you're browsing Steam's upcoming releases, and a game's name makes you do one of those cartoon spit-takes. Say hello to Marines Vs God, in development from no less than the Marines Vs God Team. It is an eight-person PvP game where seven players bellow "ooh-ra" and rush forwards with third-person guns a-blazing, while the other controls a giant disembodied hand in a top-down view and does everything they can to screw over the tiny humanoid team.

"Put your soul at stake and experience the power of natural selection in an epic battle with God," booms the Steam store description, making clear that this is not one for the creationists among us. Each mission sees the four marines dropped on a planet cursed with a bomb that eventually explodes and "leads to doom of the God", which makes you wonder why the deity's hindering rather than helping things, then have to complete objectives as the God player casts spells.

These are chosen from a deckbuilding-style list of 100 Godly abilities, and there are some rather poetic and vague descriptions of what to expect:

• Anthem of extinction to damage all units
• Unleash psi storm destruction
• Use illusion of deceit
• Depth power to call creature of the night in broad daylight
• Summon reactive poisonous dragon
• Spawn fake supplies to trick marines
• Lethal horror effect
• Spawn society breaker boss
• Evolve into a new clandestine life form
• Drop atomic bomb

Just nuking the marines seems like it would do the job, and yes you're maybe wondering why the big man doesn't just snap his Holy fingers and blink them out of existence, but God works in mysterious ways. The God player chooses up to seven abilities per match and as well as this can choose their preferred God. Here's where the wheels come off a little: Okay, Zeus is definitely a god. I'm not so sure about "Necromancer, Demonologist, Gin, King of Robots, Matriarch, Juggernaut", nevermind the TikTok star Anar Dreams. If it all sounds a little familiar, particularly Zeus taking on a platoon of marines, that's because Arma 3's Zeus mode offered similar asymmetrical mayhem a decade ago, though in a much simmier sandbox.

In Marines Vs God the marines can also choose to betray the corps and work alongside their truculent deity. The game's modes allow for one god against multiple marines, but also for one god and a marine to team up against a marine group (with several abilities designed to confuse the marine team that presumably sync well with this setup).

Marines Vs God is due out in 2025, with a playable demo featuring one map launching soon. This could go either way: the scope doesn't seem outrageous, and the game was announced with a trailer showing plenty of in-game footage from both perspectives. The whole setup is appealing enough to me, but when you see a dinky 'lil marine blasting away at some giant polygonal sky face, and then can watch the incoming fire from the latter perspective, this looks like it will be a good laugh at the very least. It also really seems to have it in for gods, exhorting players to make them "remember they were all once human too." Again I'm not sure on the scripture here but, when god's going down anyway, maybe it doesn't matter anymore.

Age of Mythology: Retold, in case you're unfamiliar, is a sort-of remake of the classic 2002 strategy game that—as per our Age of Mythology: Retold review, which gave it a solid 75, "walks the tightrope of updating the bits that feel clunky by today’s standards without killing the sense of nostalgia."

But there's a fly stuck to those rose-tinted glasses. As players have observed, the game has exactly one DLC to its name (bar a soundtrack) the Legacy Deity Portrait Pack. It's currently on sale for $6 (£5) and, as the name suggests, lets players use the portraits from the 2002 original release.

It's also bundled in with the premium edition—along with advanced access, which is why both the base game and the DLC are available for reviews right now. What we have here is a unique situation where, perhaps for the first time, a DLC has received a "Very Negative" Steam reviews before the game it's attached to has even arrived.

It's not exactly undeserved, either. I'm not strictly against cosmetic DLCs (though I do think they still subtract something from a game), but your buck's just not banging, here. $6 for some old jpegs that were made in 2002 is objectively nonsense for something a modder could achieve in an afternoon. As a side-bonus for the premium version? Sure, harmless. Worth it on its own? Not on your immortal life.

The reviews themselves sum things up pretty well: "WORSE THAN HORSE ARMOUR DLC" writes one incensed player, presumably in the throes of vivid flashbacks to Bethesda's progenial graft. Another player, who bought the advanced access version of the game, adds: "I got it for free, but so should everyone else. They are 20 year old images, and the players that would be interested in the old images are the same players that have supported the series for the past 20 years."

I'm not coming to the defence of the DLC in isolation here, but in the interest of fairness I feel obligated to point out that the premium version (which includes these things) seems objectively fine. For $20 extra you got seven days of advanced access as an early buyer, a new god to play with, and two upcoming expansions that are fresh to the game—which is a reasonable price point on the face of it.

As far as its base game reviews go, Age of Mythology: Retold also seems to be pleasing long-term fans. At the time of writing, it's sat at a 92% positive user review score, with roughly 3,670 advanced access players giving it the thumbs up. Not too shabby. I'm reminded of a larger-scale fiasco that happened with Dragon's Dogma 2—where the game was actually a riot, but some poorly managed DLC packaging gave it a battering on Steam. Optics are, as always, vital.

Four years ago, I looked at the once mighty RTS—the genre that had, throughout the '90s and early '00s, so dominated my free time—and questioned whether it could ever come back from the brink of death. Only a small number of developers seemed to remember it existed, and 2010's StarCraft 2 remained its last great success story. "The genre needs a spark," I said, "but lately we've just been blowing on dying embers." Two years later, I'd done a 180. 

"Real-time strategy is back from the brink of death," I proclaimed prematurely. So naive. So filled with hope. But with good reason. Homeworld 3, Company of Heroes 3, Tempest Rising, Stormgate, Dune: Spice Wars, The Great War: Western Front—so many exciting games on the horizon, in all sorts of different configurations. It was dizzying. And this list just scraped the surface. I'd never been happier to be proven wrong. 

And now I've never been more disappointed to be proven right. This has not been a comeback. The RTS might not be dead yet, but it's still in rough shape. 

Reality check 

Company of Heroes 3 landed with a thud. The missions were spectacular—a triumph of smart tactical systems and stunning cinematic flair—but the much-touted dynamic campaign was rubbish. I loved it despite its flaws, but over a year later it's been unable to shift its Mixed rating on Steam. Relic continues to support it and there's still life in the multiplayer, but its 11-year-old predecessor has more people playing it. Between this and Dawn of War, 3 seems to be a cursed number for Relic. 

At least it's in a better state than Homeworld 3. The fully 3D space battles and striking aesthetic meant I still had a good time with it, but this long, long-awaited sequel had none of the original games' storytelling chops, its roguelike Wargames mode was an absolute dud and the multiplayer is already dead. And while I still found plenty to like about it—while acknowledging that it cannot compare to its incredible predecessors—most players absolutely did not, garnering it a Mostly Negative Steam rating. 

There's perhaps some hope for Stormgate, which is still in development. It ain't looking too hot right now, though, following its lacklustre early access launch. Honestly, I don't think early access is the right move for an RTS, especially one so focused on multiplayer, which needs polish and balance that you just can't get when it's still cooking. Frost Giant has also made the mistake of forgetting that, despite StarCraft—one of its primary inspirations, along with Warcraft 3—being an esports sensation, real-time strategy has always attracted more singleplayer fans. A good campaign is critical, and a couple of iffy missions aren't gonna cut it. 

The long list of recent RTS launches largely sways between all right to good, but we've been missing a major success—a buoy to keep the genre afloat. The Great War was a valiant attempt to untangle World War I, but it was just too conservative. Dune: Spice Wars was pretty well received and had some novel ideas in its hybridisation of the 4X and RTS genres, but it's not an especially memorable example of either of them. We also got Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, a game with too many colons that failed to leave a mark, and Men of War 2, a perfectly serviceable if uneven alternative to Company of Heroes 3. 

Crucially, none of these games really inspire return trips. The best RTS games keep calling you back to replay their best missions, engage in a good old fashioned comp stomp or brawl with pals. With this lot, the compulsion just isn't there.

I do still have high hopes for C&C-inspired Tempest Rising, which I called a "dream RTS for Command & Conquer vets" after I became obsessed with the demo. After playing only two missions, I was snared. But that's all the demo provided, and it's faced significant delays and no longer has a release date.

There's been one bright spot. Sneaking in just this month we got Sins of a Solar Empire 2, a genuinely great RTS that maintains everything that was so exceptional about its predecessor while spitting out fresh novelties like its headline feature: dynamic maps that shift according to their celestial mechanics. It reviewed well, players are happy, and there's a solid multiplayer community, but I suspect that its lack of campaign might hold it back from growing into the kind of genre-supporting behemoth that the most influential Golden Age RTS games became.   

Really, though, there needs to be more than one game giving the genre the breath of life. The genre's '90s heyday was driven by the competition between Blizzard and Westwood. With each new game, they tried to one-up each other, developing new systems and tricks while pushing tech, storytelling and UI design forward. And all around them were imitators and innovators. Total Annihilation experimented with scale, Age of Empires took notes from Civilization, Homeworld gave us unshackled 3D space combat. Within a decade we witnessed an unbelievable amount of growth and iteration. 

Something old, something new 

Perhaps distance has made it easier for us to create a narrative out of the Golden Age, but the genre did feel more cohesive back then. You can see this clear line of progression from things like Dune 2 to Warcraft 3. Now things are a bit more chaotic, with developers desperately trying to find a hook, a unique angle to draw players in, something that says "Look, the RTS is back and cool again and doing interesting things". There has been some genuine innovation, but not enough to propel the RTS forward. And all these games feel like they're being designed in a vacuum. When they are inspired, it's by the old classics, so we no longer have this environment where contemporaries elevate each other. 

My concern now is that there have been so few successes that we're just heading straight back into an RTS Dark Age, where the risk just doesn't seem worth it. The arguments against them are already being made. Tastes have changed. The genre has been lying fallow for too long and people just aren't that into it anymore. Our expectations are so much greater than they once were. But I don't think this stands up to scrutiny.

2019's Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, for instance, was extremely well received, and five years on is considerably more popular than any of the modern games that have come out since. This is a 25-year-old game with an HD upgrade and some new campaigns, and it's kicking everyone's arse. Though not quite as enduringly popular, 2020's Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection also garnered a great deal of praise at launch, and it has as many, if not more, players than the new kids. Next week, Age of Mythology: Retold will be out, and we'll see if the trend continues. These classics were not just great games for their time; they remain great. 

What this does imply, though, is that while the audience is still there, it's an old one. These remakes and remasters have done well because RTS veterans want to relive the good old days. It's also why there's a lot of anticipation for Tempest Rising. A lot of folks on the cusp of middle age and beyond really miss Command & Conquer. What we don't have is something building a new audience—something to attract PC gamers who joined the hobby after the RTS downturn. 

And I don't think that's going to change. Sure, we'll probably get to dine on some quality fare occasionally, and the genre will be able to coast on nostalgia for a while longer, but I fear that's as good as it's going to get. I find it incredibly hard to imagine us ever getting back to the point where multiple real-time romps end up in GOTY lists, rubbing shoulders with all those RPGs, shooters and open world games. And that's pretty depressing.

Four years ago, I wondered if the RTS could come back from the brink of death. And now I'm pretty sure I have my answer.

How the mighty are fallen. In a bygone era, Tiberium harvesters and chariot archer rushes were a mainstay on my monitors, and my keyboards bore careworn lines where the 'build archery range' shortcut keys lay. It was a time of plenty, but modern real-time strategy games are far rarer, and that means the stakes always feel high when one arrives. Particularly one that starts with Age of...

Enter Age of Mythology: Retold—not a 100% faithful translation of Ensemble’s 2002 original but, as the name indicates, a modern interpretation which walks the tightrope of updating the bits that feel clunky by today’s standards without killing the sense of nostalgia. It’s a particularly tricky kind of alchemy, and although there are some tonal mis-steps *cough* voice acting *cough* it largely succeeds in knowing when to stick and when to twist.

That’s despite a list of developers so long that it makes the average Call Of Duty seem like a mad auteur’s passion project. World's Edge, Forgotten Empires, Tantalus Media, CaptureAge, and Virtuos Games have all lent their talents to this one, and maybe it’s unfair for me to be surprised that it feels so cohesive. This is modern game development after all, the pipeline that never sleeps.

Age of Mythology is more or less Age of Empires set in mythical eras, where powerful hero units and mythological beasts fight alongside conventional military archers and spearmen. Friendlier and slower-paced than Starcraft’s ruthlessly aggressive take on RTS, but built around the usual rock-paper-scissors game of unit strengths and weaknesses. Victory is wrought by finding the right army composition and using your limited resources—food, wood, gold and favor—to materialise it.

A UI and visual overhaul occupies the headline billing since it’s the most noticeable element, and it feels in touch with the original game without being overly married to it. The arrangement of your units, resources and build options is logical and clean. Hero units glimmer with a distinctive aura, and the ancient environs hit your eye with impressive detail. One of the many reasons I’ll never rank particularly highly online in this game is that I get distracted by the lovely oceans and spend seconds at a time just… watching them.

Onto more meaningful nuts-and-bolts changes: I’ve chalked up many Ls in RTS skirmishes past and present due to over-adventurous units taking mad hikes across the map, but with the new ‘attack move’ command in Retold comes a lifeline. Micromanagement’s still important for arranging your unit types so that they hit the battle in the right order, but ‘attack move’ tells everyonne to engage with all enemies they meet along the way to your waypoint. That meant no suicidal dashes towards buildings for my campaign armies while ignoring the infantry units pelting them in close proximity. Outside of combat units can still be caught going for an unsanctioned wander off into nothingness, but Retold feels like a big upgrade on the original’s often baffling pathfinding where it matters most. 

The best thing about combat in this game is finding the sweet spot between human and mythical units, and knowing when to send super-tough heroes into battle with them. It took me a few skirmishes to find that mix for Nords, whose reworking now involves more ranged units but still play very differently to their enemies (pro tip: their military units also handle building construction). 

With apologies to all historical shipwrights, I found great success in naval combat by spamming ships to distract my enemies and keep the pressure off my base. That meant destroying their docks was an important step towards resigning them to the history books. With all ship types available from the Classical age, the aquatic version of rock-paper-scissors is just as tactical as the terra firma equivalent that you’re managing with your archers and infantry.

God powers are no longer one-shot, game-changing cataclysms, but now operate on cooldown timers and can be deployed more than once per round. I can’t decide whether that feels more or less strategic—the gravity of deciding when to use a powerful one-shot in the original game is offset by the depth of timing one just right in Retold so that you’ll get it at a useful moment later. The powers break down into AoE damage-dealing abilities, with some enjoyable twists like Aphrodite’s curse, which turns enemy units into pigs, and resource buffs. 

God powers aren’t exclusively about raining death down on your foes with satisfying AoE icons, though. Take wonders, for example. Where before you could construct certain wonders that would win you a round if you defended them for long enough, now they simply provide you with constant passive buffs that hasten your victory. That feels like a less stressful route to the win, but not necessarily a simpler one since you still need to carefully consider how to spend those resources. 

The sell here, after sitting with all of Retold's changes to a 22-year-old game, is that the slower pace and the combination of historic and mythological units makes for a relaxing, therapeutic RTS session. The Greeks, Egyptians, Norse and Atlanteans play differently enough to take some pleasure from mastery of each, and although it’s an odd business decision that the Chinese—added as DLC after the original’s release—haven't been bundled in, they are at least being added in Retold’s first DLC. 

There have been concerns over the character portraits in Retold, and speculation that the devs used AI to generate them—an accusation that the devs squarely denied, stating clearly that they’re drawn by human artists. The problem to my eye isn’t who drew them, it’s that they lack charm. People get understandably attached to characterful touches in classic games when so much of the presentation was of limited fidelity, so the bar’s high when you’re updating them. It’s a minor misstep that they lack some personality, nothing more. 

The same’s probably true of the voice acting. It’s probably just a minor issue. Probably. After all, cutscenes are not the game. They’re the bits that bookend it. But the performances are a rogue’s gallery of slightly off accents, and that does detract from the drama and immersion. I found myself feeling harsher towards this one point as I got deeper through the campaigns, but we should all probably remember that bad cutscene performances are basically mandatory in real-time strategy. The great Tim Curry taught us that.

Retold is brave enough to play with the balance and the stat values of its source material, and that makes for some knotty, tactically fascinating skirmishes. Watching Hittites flanked by Minotaurs lay siege to the walls of Troy has been a genre highlight for me. It could have been braver about the stylistic bits, the way gods and heroes are characterised visually and in motion. But given real-time strategy’s tenuous spot in the current PC gaming pantheon, Retold is an important, if qualified, win.

As with so many online games lately, it's easy to wind up confused about the official Stormgate launch time. Frost Giant's free-to-play RTS has been technically playable for about two weeks but hasn't actually launched yet. Its Steam page may say it launched in July, but the actual release date is on August 13.

Stormgate has done that thing where developers co-opt the phrase "early access" to refer to a period of time where players who pre-order the game get to play early—starting back on July 30 in this case. To add further semantic confusion, Stormgate is in fact launching in Steam Early Access, the thing we're all used to calling "early access." And even though it offered a preorder package for $25, don't forget that Stormgate is indeed a free-to-play game. Despite all that unnecessary confusion over what words mean, Stormgate is about to launch, for real and for free.

When is the Stormgate launch time for early access?

Stormgate launches in early access on Tuesday, August 13 at 10 am Pacific according to its official Discord server. You can check what that equates to in your local timezone, but here's how that breaks down around the world:

• 10 am PDT (Los Angeles)
• 1 pm EDT (New York)
• 2 pm BRT (São Paulo)
• 6 pm BST (London)
• 7 pm CEST (Berlin)
• 3 am, August 14 AEST (Sydney)
• 5 am, August 14 NZST (Auckland)

Stormgate is launching in early access with competitive 1v1 matches, the beginning of its campaign, and 3-player co-op versus AI. It's planning to remain in early access for at least a year to add 3v3 matches, more heroes, a map editor, and other features detailed in its Stormgate roadmap.

Fraser Brown got to play Stormgate with a pro in June and had a good time getting back into an RTS, saying "for the first time in a while, I'm excited to dip my toes into the competitive side of real-time strategy again."

As for players who've already been playing its early-early access, the Steam user review rating is still aggregating to "mixed" but Frost Giant is confident that won't last. "Mixed reviews are to be expected at this stage," said Frost Giant CEO Tim Morten. "There are so many amazing games that get polished into gems after mixed initial responses. We firmly believe that we’re building something special, and we have big plans for Stormgate’s future."

Stormgate was unveiled in 2022 and it's come a long way since then: It was the biggest videogame Kickstarter of 2023, earning $2 million on top of $35 million already raised through an initial funding round, and even managed to attract some celebrity voice acting from Simu Liu and Chris Metzen. It also made a big impression on online editor and PC Gamer strategysmith Fraser Brown, who declared that "for the first time in a while, I'm excited to dip my toes into the competitive side of real-time strategy again."

The early access launch for Kickstarter backers hasn't gone smoothly, however. Since its debut on July 30, Stormgate has earned a "mixed" rating on Steam across just over 2,000 user reviews: Common complaints include an incomplete story and unremarkable unit interactions, sub-par enemy AI in PvE modes, the lack of manual saving and loading, and over-aggressive monetization.

That's far from a catastrophe, especially given that it's an early access release and expected to stay in that state for at least a year, and doubly especially because the full early access launch, which will see Stormgate go free to play, doesn't happen until August 13. For now, access is limited to Kickstarter backers and anyone who purchases an "early access pack."

Developer Frost Giant Studios emphasized those points in an update released a few days after Stormgate's early-early access launch, saying there's still "a long road ahead" before the 1.0 release is ready. It also addressed some of the current complaints about the game, foremost among them that a new in-game hero, not included with any of the Kickstarter bundles, was available for separate purchase on launch day: To ensure that early backers of Stormgate "feel rewarded" for supporting the game, the next paid hero to be released will be given to everyone who purchased the "UItimate Founder's Pack" tier or higher on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, as well as to everyone who purchases the Ultimate Early Access pack on Steam.

Frost Giant said it's taking action on "critical feedback" about the state of the game itself, including complaints about character models in cutscenes, inconsistent audio levels, and the "stylized art direction." In-game features including customizable hotkeys, a pause function for the campaign, and a save system that will work independently of the current checkpoint save system, are also on the way.

In a bit of a departure from this sort of thing, the studio also addressed comments about Frost Giant's "possible financial outcomes," apparently sparked by a Reddit analysis predicting that Frost Giant will be facing financial trouble by early 2025. 

"Those projections were wildly inaccurate," the studio wrote. "Like any business, Frost Giant needs to make products that people decide to purchase in order to succeed. We're trying very hard to do that, and we're grateful to be well-funded relative to most start-ups, including many who never get to see their game in players’ hands."

The reaction to Stormgate up to this point puts a spotlight on the risks of early access releases. Early access games are explicitly not complete: To varying degrees, they're essentially beta versions you have to pay for. And that's where the risk comes from: When you hand someone a beta build and tell them it's for testing, bugs and bullshit are expected; but when you charge for a product, "early access" or not, expectations are naturally elevated—so what might have been a "we'll see how this goes at launch" ends up an ugly Reddit thread about the various ways a game has failed.

"Early access has meant different things to different studios; it’s still a relatively new way to develop and publish games," Frost Giant CEO and production director Tim Morten told PC Gamer. "Some players came into our early access preview expecting a near-final product and not a work-in-progress. 

"To us, early access means this is a knowingly unfinished work. We see early access as an active development phase where we will introduce new systems, new game modes, and our editor. We have a lot of content we plan to add to the game before we will feel like it’s '1.0.' That also encompasses less immediately visible aspects like audio, localization, performance optimization, and so on."

Morten said expectations for Stormgate may have been further inflated because of comparisons to StarCraft 2. Frost Giant was founded by a core of former Blizzard developers, and the game is widely seen as the long-overdue proper successor to that great RTS. There are clear similarities between them in terms of core gameplay, but Frost Giant simply doesn't have access to Blizzard-tier resources at this point.

"[StarCraft 2] benefited from more than a decade of development time, support from Blizzard’s world-class cinematics team, all the social features of Battle.net, and so on," Morten said. "As a smaller and more modestly-funded team, our cutscenes (which are the focus of much of the critical feedback) fall short of Blizzard’s Pixar-like quality. They will improve over time, but this is one area where an independent studio will always be at a disadvantage."

Some of the negative feedback received so far was anticipated by developers, while other critiques have been "thought-provoking." But Morten said that all of it has been valuable to Frost Giant because it helps set priorities for the future.

"We’re making adjustments to our production schedule based on player feedback," he explained. "That’s actually one of the major benefits of early access: getting feedback that positively improves what we deliver for our eventual 1.0. We’re moving up some work that was slated for later in development, such as more detailed character models for our in-engine cutscenes. We’re taking this opportunity to reprioritize a variety of work."

As for the predictions of financial doom and gloom, Morten was blunt, describing the analyses he's seen as "deeply flawed." And while superficially those messages could be interpreted as gamers rooting for the studio to fail, he sees it differently: "I believe the underlying message is that these players want Frost Giant to stay in business. That’s a sentiment I can get behind, even when their attempts at financial analysis miss the mark."

Frost Giant plans to release Stormgate's next big content update, which will include "some meaningful response" to player feedback as well as new content, in the second half of September, with comparable updates expected to follow at least every two months thereafter. Ahead of that, a balance patch is expected to roll out ahead of the full early access release on August 13, and another smaller patch aimed at fixing bugs and other issues the team can tackle quickly is coming "shortly."

"Mixed reviews are to be expected at this stage," Morten said. "There are so many amazing games that get polished into gems after mixed initial responses. We firmly believe that we’re building something special, and we have big plans for Stormgate’s future. 

"As Stormgate continues to improve and progress towards 1.0, I hope and expect that many players will come around. Stormgate is very much a passion project for us, and the entire team at Frost Giant is committed to making it great."