Of the thousands of demos on offer during the current Next Fest, I've far and away been most fond of About Fishing, The Water Museum's downright Lynchian "fishing mystery game" of surrealist, psychological angling that's eerie, absurd, and endearing in equal measure. My tackle box has a conspiracy board inside it, the town church has a prison ward in the basement, and I can commune with caught fish to retrieve submerged clues from waterways.

It's magnificent, and it is entirely, precisely my shit. But despite it being the traditional goal of Next Fest participants, About Fishing developer The Water Museum doesn't seem particularly concerned about whether I wishlist the game or not.

In a Steam news post that coincided with the start of Next Fest earlier this week, Water Museum developer Kevin said it's a great time for players to try the About Fishing demo. But then he made an unconventional ask:

"After you're done—you don't have to wishlist it," Kevin said. "Just promise me you'll find another demo that looks interesting and give it a go. There are some genuinely great creators in this fest who deserve the attention. Take your time with it."

Kevin continues to suggest we then turn off the computer, go outside, and maybe enjoy a nice tree. (Having gone on a lovely walk this morning, I can personally confirm the efficacy of the looking-at-tree meta.)

Considering that wishlisting is conventionally understood as one of the most valuable things a potential customer can do ahead of a Steam launch, The Water Museum's declaration that we should actually just find another cool game is a surprising act of developer solidarity. It probably helps, however, that About Fishing has already secured an audience of eager players: On June 11, The Water Museum announced via a Steam post that About Fishing had lured 100,000 users into wishlisting.

Get it? Lured. Like in fishing.

While The Water Museum might be too pure to tell you to wishlist its game, I urge you to try it for yourself if you think you'd enjoy seeing its unsettlingly detailed textures stretched over entirely too few polygons, doing Wanted-style bullet curving on your fishing hook mid-cast to execute hyper-precise angling, or being told by your ethereal grandfather that "the fish around here might've been the last witnesses to a murder."

If not, then check out one of the 4,400 other demos. As Kevin said, there are plenty of playtests worth your attention.

About Fishing is set to launch sometime later this year.

Basketball was one sport I loved playing as a kid—not only to compete or spectate, but just for fun. I was not good at it. So I stopped playing, partially because I hated feeling like my teammates were stuck with me. When I got benched, that bummed me out. But when I got put in, the responsibility to not let my friends down made my heart race, even if it supposedly didn't matter if we won. Now I realize I shouldn't have been so hard on myself.

NBA The Run saddled me with the same existential questions I had back in those days. It's a 3-on-3 throwback to arcadey classics like NBA Jam, Street, and my personal favorite, the one where you can play as a horse. These games trade the simmy mechanical depth of more buttoned-up ball 'em ups for easily executed moon jump dunks, gaudy tricks, turbo buttons, and commentary from guys yelling stuff like "Boom shaka-laka!" It’s basketball as only videogames could envision it.

In other words, if classic 2K was Ball Turismo, NBA Street was Midnight Dunk Club. Much chiller, just as killer. But just imagine if Midnight Club had no arcade modes, no offline play of note, and instead shot you right into competitive online races without so much as a tutorial. As much as I'm having fun with it, that's the rough start you get with The Run, which released on Steam last week.

I soured on that setup while playing the default mode, squads. Instead of one player controlling an entire trio, six players each control a different character on the court. The playable cast includes a mix of real pro players, each of whom are outfitted with different stats and some personalized animations, as well as unlockable "street legends" with wackier playstyles, like the 7'7 El Gigante.

This format works great when you're on the same couch as your teammates, or in a game like last year's Rematch where clearly defined roles nudge each player toward what they should be doing. In 3-on-3 basketball though, it's a mess of point-hungry buffoons rushing at the ball, shooting Hail Marys from half-court with every possession, and sprinting around aimlessly.

Squads might be great fun with a premade squad or in rare moments where you click with strangers, but an uncoordinated team is comically nonfunctional. I found myself longing for voice chat or a ping system, which just felt wrong. Shouldn’t digital street ball be an escape from the two-bit esports I endure in games like Overwatch?

That said, the core action still hooked me. It's not as pure as Jam or as expressive as the trick-centric Street, opting for a nice balance between the two: dunks, blocks, and steals are simple button presses, but you can swerve around defenders with stamina-guzzling ankle breakers and shove other players as you please (street rules—it’s legal!). Go for a dunk without the ball to give your teammate an opportunity for an alley-oop, and you can even pass using the backboard or an opponent's face with an off-the-heezay.

It’s all narrated by Bobbito Garcia (AKA DJ Cucumber Slice), who you might remember as the ultra-charismatic announcer from NBA Street Vol. 2. He furnishes the game with a fun-forward sensibility befitting its stylized look.

But because The Run gives you the tools to play stylishly without much fuss and celebrates you for doing it, the emphasis on matchmade online tournaments—the only way to play outside of private lobbies—feels at odds with everything on-screen.

The flair is there, but the competitive context emphasizes performance and mastery over expressive plays and all-in-good-fun antics. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it made me wonder why it’s a street ball game and not a deeper simulation with a more involved metagame to explore. In real life, street ball is a rejection of stuffy structure, but The Run adds it right back. And taken as an esport, this will get old fast… there’s a reason goaltending and shoves are illegal in "real" basketball.

It does have one trick up its sleeve to keep things fresh, and it’s my favorite part of the game: the changing win conditions. Every match has different rules around points which cleverly upend go-to playstyles. In one game, every shot that wasn’t a three-pointer was only worth a single point. Funnily enough, this made dunks a lot easier to pull off, since defenders kept gravitating toward the 3-point line. In another match, dunks were worth three points, turning the game delightfully aggressive.

Still, I found myself wishing for even wackier gimmicks and tricks to toy with, but The Run's team format emphasizes playing to win. Sure, I can pass to a teammate in hopes they'll see my alley-oop and send it back to me in time, but nothing feels as reliable as rushing in for a dunk or pump faking to bait out a block and secure a 3-pointer. The game's "in the zone" meter tries to reward you for flashy maneuvers, but games are often over before it can make a real impact, and at least one of the random rulesets removes it from play entirely.

At that point, why risk losing the ball just to do something cool? A question like that feels counter to the spirit of The Run's predecessors, but in a game that's throwing rank points at you after every match and tracking your win rate percentage, it feels unavoidable.

This is less of a problem in the game's solos mode, which I'm liking a lot more than squads. It's a 1v1 where both players control their entire team, swapping between them with passes. Not only does this mean you don't have to rely on silent randos, but you can also choose a spread of pros that cover each other's weaknesses. I can keep a tall center like Victor Wembanyama in the paint, confidently block an opponent's shot, and dish the ball to Jaylen Brown for a reliable swish. All of a sudden, I'm actually playing basketball! And if I want to go for off-the-heezays and alley-oops, my successes and failures are mine alone.

Once you focus on the fundamental balling (which may take some losing at first as, again, the game has no tutorial at all), The Run reveals itself to be a revival worthy of its inspirations, for the most part. That said, I still wish it had a singleplayer campaign like NBA Street Vol. 2's Be a Legend mode, or at least something along the lines of NBA Hangtime's create-a-player, which let you create custom ballers and boost their stats with each win in offline matches. Instead, there's nothing meaty for a solo player, and the online modes don't lend themselves to casual enjoyment.

The unfortunate result is that there's not really a way to unwind while playing The Run, which feels absurd to say about a game which strips away basketball's depth so it can focus on the cool, flashy stuff. It's a bit of frantic fun, but the games it’s taking after and the riffs that arose in their absence, like the Jam-inspired fantasy Supergiant RPG Pyre, have proven that arcade basketball can be bigger and better.

I've pretty much lapsed in my Wordle devotion. Once a fanatic who would crawl through broken glass to make sure I kept my daily streak alive, I now only remember to play Wordle maybe a few times a month.

Hey, it happens. Five empty boxes can only remain appealing for so long.

So I'm always on the lookout for a new daily fix, a game like Wordle that isn't actually Wordle, and I'm happy to say I've found my latest morning go-to game. It's not about words at all, unless you count a couple four-letter words like GOLF and PUTT.

My new daily game is called putt.day, and it's a new hole of minigolf each and every day. You already know how to play, probably: click and drag behind the ball (or press and drag if you're on mobile). The further you drag, the harder your shot will be. Drag anywhere else on the screen to look around, zoom in and out using the mouse wheel (or by pinching on mobile) and try to get your ball to the hole in as few shots as possible.

I'm terrible at it, and seemingly most of the PC Gamer staff is too, but the important thing is we've found something new to do with a couple minutes of our time every morning. You can share scores, Wordle-like, on social media or in chats, and you can replay a hole if you want to beat your own score.

There's no sign-in, though it'll keep track of your streaks and scores as long as you don't clear your browser data. There's also an archive of past holes that goes back about two months if a single hole per day isn't enough for you.

Putt.day is made by ell.dev, using public domain minigolf models created by Kenney. Give it a try! I got 20 in today's course, which is a par 12 (I told you I was terrible) but I'm sure you can do better.

The NFL has an extremely ugly history with concussions. I won't rehash it all here, but in broad strokes, the American football organization spent years denying a link between head injuries sustained by players and the devastating long-term effects, was eventually sued by more than 4,500 players for negligence and fraudulent concealment, and settled the suit for nearly a billion dollars in 2013.

The Madden football series, for their part, included concussions in the games for a few years (in part due to John Madden's insistence), though a less-specific description of "head injury" replaced the term in Madden 13.

It's obvious the NFL and the Madden games want to distance themselves from the word "concussion," but now a mod called Modden 26, created by a non-profit foundation dedicated to increasing awareness of sports-related brain injuries, is bringing concussions back into the game—along with their effects.

While using the mod for Madden NFL 26, if your player sustains a head injury in the game, you'll begin experiencing some of the commonly reported effects of a concussion, which could be headaches (the screen will throb with a reddish color), shortness of breath (you'll hear the player's ragged breathing), tinnitus (a ringing sound), light sensitivity, nausea, dizziness, and other symptoms, which you'll see and hear manifested onscreen while you play.

The mod is meant to be an educational tool, because pro football players aren't the only ones who need to be worried about concussions. According to the American Medical Society, "It is estimated that as many as 3.8 million concussions occur in the USA per year during competitive sports and recreational activities; however, as many as 50% of the concussions may go unreported."

If a pro athlete is hurt during a football game he'll be immediately surrounded by medical experts who will (hopefully) pull them from the game if they suspect they're concussed, but for teens and kids playing football at school or in the neighborhood, it's helpful to know the warning signs themselves—especially since young athletes are so often told to brush it off and get back into the game.

The mod was created by The Derek Sheely Foundation: Derek was a 22-year-old college student who suffered a head injury during football practice and died soon after. His parents believe Derek was already suffering from an earlier concussion at the time of his fatal injury—his death was preventable, in other words, and the Foundation now works to educate others in an effort to prevent similar tragedies. You can download the Modden 26 mod here.

If you haven't played demon-killing skate 'em up Skate Story, you're missing out—it was one of our favorite games of last year, confidently answering the question, 'What would a skating game be like if I was a demon made out of glass and pain?' It's a great time to get it, too, as it just landed on GOG with a 20% discount bringing it down to $16.

You could just pirate it, though. That's not me offering you that option—I'm a well-behaved golden boy who gets good grades and would never advocate for the five-finger discount—but Skate Story creator Sam Eng shared news of the sale yesterday on X by saying, "If it's still too expensive just pirate it honestly." Gotta respect the candor.

"Push through hell and discover The Devil’s greatest weakness: humility, perseverance, and a disgustingly sweet backside tailslide," reads the game's description. In his review, PC Gamer news writer Lincoln Carpenter said it's "a stylish lunicidal skater with peerless vibes and devilishly sleek flip tricks." It's as though the game was engineered such that people would have to use as many cool words as possible when discussing it.

It was turning heads all the way back when it debuted in 2020—a year that I'm pretty sure was a few decades ago—so it's good to see the game will be available to even more people now. It is also on Steam if you prefer, though the sale only applies for the GOG version. It seems like it's mostly important to the creator that you find some way to play it if you're so inclined: "I hope it'll resonate," Eng posted on X yesterday.

AI is coming to take my job, so I'd better start looking for a new one. Luckily, there are a ton of job simulators on Steam, and I'm going to play as many as I can until I find my next career. This week's job: PBA Pro Bowling 2026, a bowling sim about bowling.

As a new bowler on the amateur circuit, my first day isn't going well. I'm trying to learn how to hook the ball—to roll it in a curving pattern so it hits the pins at an angle—and it turns out there's quite a lot to it. You even have to consider the oil patterns on the alley and how they affect the ball. I didn't know there was oil in bowling, let alone patterns of it.

Much as I respect PBA Pro Bowling 2026's surprisingly deep physics simulation—I'm a little impatient. I've rolled the ball like five times and have yet to make a strike. All I want to do is fling a ball and hit pins and hear that glorious clattering sound, one of the best sounds in all of sports.

What if I just, I don't know… roll the ball straight? No hooking it, just aim down the middle. Has anyone in bowling history ever even tried it? Probably not! I try it and make a strike. I try it again and make another strike. Frowning a bit, I roll the ball in a completely straight line again. Third strike.

I'm also throwing it as hard as I can, which seems to help: the more the pins get bonked around by physics, the more other pins they'll knock down. It's working, so I decide to stick with it. I'll be the bowler who just rolls the ball straight. I'm going to disrupt bowling.

I immediately feel my legend growing. My brash newcomer who doesn't play by the rules, and who I named Bo W. Lurr because I'm a really good writer, is routinely throwing strikes and then celebrating as if routinely throwing strikes isn't exactly what he's supposed to be doing.

I try to imagine acting like that at my real job, where every time I finished writing something I made my editors watch me do the stanky leg. I don't think it would fly.

Is there a weakness to my throw fast and straight technique? Admittedly, yes. As anyone who has ever been bowling or watched bowling or possesses a rudimentary grasp of knocking things over, if you roll the ball straight down the middle and hit the pins head-on, you'll be highly vulnerable to splits. There's the dreaded 7-10 split but plenty of other nightmares such as—hold on, I'm quickly Googling—the "Greek Church," the "Big Four," and other combinations where you have a couple pins on both sides of the lane with a big gap down the middle.

But still, my method is working: I win my inaugural game with five strikes and a score of 191. And only one nasty split.

I begin working my way through local bowling events with my straight line style. There's a league night, which sounds fun except I'm not even allowed to come up with my own league name (we're playing against the Roll Models, a high level pun.) There's also candlepin bowling and duckpin bowling, but they involve little tiny balls so the physics of the collisions aren't particularly satisfying.

As I rack up experience and defeat opponents I'm given money to spend in the pro shop. I buy a shirt that has a straight line on it. See what I'm doing there? I'm building my brand.

I even develop an advanced version of my straight line approach I call—hold onto your hats for this one—the diagonal line. Since hitting the pins head on comes with a risk of splits, I start hitting them from an angle.

I'm not hooking the ball, I'm just rolling from the far corner of the lane and aiming for just off-center. And it's working! I'm racking up more and more strikes and my cavorting after each becomes, impossibly, even more obnoxious.

You think that's bad? There's an air guitar celebration I refuse to show you because even though Bo W. Lurr has no dignity, I do.

I also need to admit: helping my career take off is the fact that these generic amateur bowlers are pretty terrible at bowling. I'm not complaining because soon I've trounced enough no-names that two huge things happen.

First, I can afford to buy sunglasses from the bowling store, which ratchets up my obnoxiousness to heights I didn't think was possible. Second, and almost as importantly, I can now compete for the regional qualifiers, putting me one tier away from bowling against actual bowlers in bowling.

A lot of bowling follows. Special events. Bracket tournaments. Literal dozens of dollars earned that makes it possible for me to buy one new pair of pants. And at the moment I need it most, I bowl my all-time high of 236 with 9 strikes against a fake guy named Larry Ronseik who looks like a generic version of me. I've done it. I've won the central region qualifier. I've made it to the Pro Tour.

First stop: a head-to-head match against a simulation of an actual pro bowler, Andrew Anderson. I'm suddenly worried my straight line bowling technique has just been an illusion and this guy is gonna mop the oily lanes with my stupid magenta beard. But I put Anderson down easily, scoring 235 to his… 123.

I hate to admit it, but I can't enjoy the victory because that doesn't seem right. I've bowled 123 in real life, as a real person who isn't good at bowling. A pro bowler with a 123? I have a quick dip into the game settings and my suspicions are confirmed. I've been bowling on "Rookie" difficulty this whole time. My groundbreaking bowling technique of never hooking the ball may, just may, be a huge crock of shit.

I turn up the difficulty to "Pro," take a deep, dismayed breath, and face-off against Anderson again. I get absolutely wrecked. I can only manage three strikes, I wind up in a nasty spare situation with a 1-4-5-7 split, and manage to miss all of the damn pins—one of my three open frames in the game. It's brutal and humbling.

Just out of curiosity, I redo the qualifying bracket just to see if I even remotely deserve to be a pro bowler. My first time through I came in first in every round. This time, under pro conditions, I place sixth overall—which honestly isn't terrible in a tournament of 32 pretend bowlers. Still, you need to place third to qualify, and I didn't. It's back to the duckpins for Bo W. Lurr.

Performance evaluation

Last year Games Workshop announced there would be a new edition of Blood Bowl, the tabletop game of frenzied fantasy football ferocity. Cyanide Studio's digital adaptation, Blood Bowl 3, is getting updated too. Only instead of a patch, it's a whole new ball game.

"This new adaptation will be free for all players who already own Blood Bowl 3," Cyanide says, "who will keep their accounts along with all the content they have purchased or unlocked in-game."

Rebranded as Warhammer Blood Bowl, it'll include two new teams—the undead Tomb Kings and knightly Bretonnians—making for a total of 26 teams at launch. Everything from Blood Bowl 3 will carry over. "There will be no step back in terms of content or features," Cyanide says.

Another new addition will be Rumble mode, in which two teams of seven players (rather than the usual 11) take to a narrower pitch for a 30-minute match, promising a faster and more focused way to play. Rumble mode will be available ahead of launch as a free demo on Steam from March 18 to March 25. The demo will let us choose one of five pre-designed team rosters—Dark Elves, Lizardmen, Necromantic Horrors, Khorne, or the Old World Alliance—and try out both a PvP and PvE version of Rumble play.

Warhammer Blood Bowl also promises "updated rosters, new competitions, new tutorials, and an evolving competitive ecosystem culminating each year in a World Championship." It's scheduled for release in spring of this year.

I'd have bet money that the Harlem Globetrotters were founded in the 1960s or maybe the '70s, but nope: today I learned the madcap basketball exhibition team has been around for a solid century, formed in 1926 as The Savoy Big Five (and in Chicago, not New York).

To celebrate 100 years of baffling basketball trickery, the Globetrotters have unveiled a new game: Super Basketball Classics, a retro-style basketball game filled with trick plays and slam dunks. Here's the teaser:

"From playground rivalries to cheat-code-style moves, Super Basketball Classics Featuring the World-Famous Harlem Globetrotters reimagines basketball as both competitive arcade action and pure spectacle," says developer Acclaim.

"Whether players are running a full season, challenging friends head-to-head, or dazzling the crowd with over-the-top Globetrotter performances, every match is designed to feel like a show."

Unfortunately, the teaser shows more of the real Globetrotters in action than it does actual gameplay, but the screenshots and gifs on the Steam page are promising: the throwback looks remind me of classic 16-bit games like NBA Jam, and Acclaim promises the game is filled with "over-the-top moves, alley-oops, half-court bombs, and dunk animations that feel straight out of a Globetrotters performance."

That's an easy layup for me: I never saw the Harlem Globetrotter's live but when I was growing up they always seemed to be on TV, torturing the poor Washington Generals with their trick plays—and I'd jump at the chance to step into their shoes and do a bit of fancy footwork myself.

Just five months after the early access release of the Skate reboot, Electronic Arts is "transforming" development studio Full Circle so it can "better support Skate's long-term future and focus the team on the things that matter most to you." And yes, let there be no doubt, that means layoffs.

"These shifts mean making changes to our team structure, and some roles will be impacted," a message attributed to Full Circle states in the euphemistic style preferred by game studio executives.

"The teammates affected are talented colleagues and friends who helped build the foundation of Skate. Their creativity and dedication are deeply ingrained in what players experience today. This decision is not a reflection of their impact and we’re committed to supporting them through this transition."

The free-to-play, multiplayer Skate isn't putting up huge numbers on Steam, where it's been averaging a few thousand concurrent players since the beginning of 2026. That doesn't tell the whole story—Skate is also available on consoles and mobile devices—but it is a dramatic dropoff from its first few weeks of release, when it hit a peak concurrent player count of nearly 135,000.

Despite that, and the layoffs, Full Circle said work on Skate will continue: "We look forward to working with you as we move faster, listen more closely, and deliver consistently for all of you. Our commitment to Skate, and to the millions of players who believe in it, remains strong."

In its most recent development update on Steam, posted on February 20, Full Circle laid out its plan for Skate season 3, which includes changes to how it will handle updates in the future. Upcoming features shared in future roadmaps will be defined as either "in development," or "on the radar," the latter being "ideas we're exploring" that have no fixed timeline or even firm commitment that they'll make it into the game.

"We’re doing this to be clear about where things stand—and about how we work," the studio wrote. "The further out something is on the roadmap, the more room it has to shift, or sometimes, be shelved altogether. But we’d rather show you what we’re thinking, even while it’s shifting, than wait until everything is locked. That’s how we want to approach Early Access with you."

Managing expectations for a game that's in early access, where the future is always fluid, doesn't sound unreasonable, but it definitely lands differently in light of today's cuts. The number of people put out of work by the Full Circle layoffs has not been disclosed. I've reached out to EA for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

Denshattack! is brave enough to ask, 'What if you could do a kickflip as a train?' Now, it's unclear whether anyone was actually asking this question, but it sure is brave enough to ask it. Anyway, we can finally find out the answer to that via its Steam Next Fest demo, which is 'You'd crash about as much as you'd expect but it's sick as hell.'

The pitch is this: Most of humanity's huddling under super-safe eco domes after the climate crisis ravaged the earth. All except for you, a train driver delivering ramen who finds out that there's a new punk movement building—a movement entirely based on doing totally tubular, OSHA-violating stunts.

As for how it plays, it's a blend between the 3D Sonic games (the good ones), Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and EA's Skate. Despite being quite literally on rails, Denshattack! has more than enough variety to keep you going even in its first couple of levels.

You can swap tracks, jump, and slam down to avoid deadly track obstacles. You can drift-turn around corners to build up speed, you can honk your horn to scare off bats or signal gates to open, and you can perform tricks with your right stick (you should be playing this on a controller) with movements a la Skate.

That's just what the demo levels give to you. Dip into the trick park, and you'll see that Denshattack! also has rail-grinding, wall-riding, tunnels, manuals—and yes, multi-track drifting—into the mix. What this produces is a surprisingly freeform movement system, with tons of tracks to flip between that fly at you with alarming speed.

Denshattack! has a lot in common with speedrunning games, in that a lot of getting good at a level involves memorising the layout. And while the obstacles can come at you a bit fast, crashing your train doesn't set you that far back, allowing you to get familiarity with whichever bit of the circuit you're having issues with.

As far as vibes go, it's all looking very Jet Set Radio, and that's a compliment—colourful, cel-shaded punk absurdity, adorable character designs, and a zany attitude which, at one point, saw me joyriding a Ferris wheel into an active volcano. If the full game keeps up this level of creativity, it's sure to be a riot. You can play the Denshattack! demo for free on Steam.

Mark Frost's The Greatest Game Ever Played tells the story of golf's most legendary amateur, Francis Ouimet, whose victory in the 1913 U.S. Open stands as one of the most notorious upsets in the sport's history.

Legendary as it might be, that game was probably boring, that book is probably boring, and the Disney movie based on it is also probably boring. Let me be clear: I do not care about anything unless there's lasers in it.

Thankfully, Super Battle Golf just arrived to save the sport from its own mundanity with lasers and rockets aplenty. Its unique approach to golf, where players race across the fairway to sink the ball as fast as possible while sabotaging their buds in multiplayer, is turning heads: developer Brimstone announced in a Steam community blog post that it sold 100,000 copies in just 48 hours.

The post reads, "WOW. OK. THANK YOU!!! That is just so absolutely amazing and I am filled with so much joy. Reviews are sitting at 97% Overwhelmingly Positive, and we've been reading every review, forum post, message board taking in all your amazing messages and feedback!"

It's certainly an impressive turnaround given that, as the post states, the game was thrown together in just "4.5 months." I'm not quite sure if it counts as friendslop given that it's competitive rather than cooperative—maybe partyslop or tourneyslop is more accurate—but its combination of inexpensive thrills and inebriation-friendly multiplayer make me think it's striking the same chord with people.

Super Battle Golf seems to be just another example of how videogame golf, like minigolf, improves upon the venerable, ecologically deleterious, and often exclusive sport by breaking down the barrier to entry and distorting its rules as if through a funhouse mirror. If you'd like to hit the links yourself, the game is available on Steam.

Skate's free-to-play resurrection hasn't had a smooth ride in early access. While it attracted millions of players at launch, it slumped to an early "Mixed" rating on Steam, and the following months of trudging through microtransaction muck and technical troubles haven't done much to improve player sentiment.

This week, EA seems determined to test how much more room to fall its player reception still has, revealing plans for Skate's Season 3 content rollout that includes a new map area that requires payment for unrestricted access—something that, before launch, Skate's developers explicitly said they wouldn't pursue.

In a Season 3 preview blog post, EA revealed a reworked Isle of Grom: an upgraded version of Skate's tutorial zone "expanded with a ton of new spots to skate and explore," like "hillbombs, massive gaps, cool transitions, and some Skate 2 and 3-inspired spillway action."

Sounds nice! Until you scroll down a little bit further to see the details for who can access the Isle of Grom and when.

Initially, the Isle of Grom will only be available from March 10 to April 14 for players who've purchased the Skate Pass, which costs 1,000 San Van Bucks (which costs roughly $10). Then, the Isle of Grom will have an "open access" period from April 14 to May 5, in which "all players can skate Isle of Grom during a special multi-week event."

Finally, after May 5, the Isle of Grom will once again require Skate Pass Premium—but players will also have the option to rent access to the new area with in-game currency by paying 500 earnable Rip Chips (we have strayed perilously beyond the light of divinity) for a 24-hour Isle of Grom Water Taxi day pass.

Even if I think we can all understand the logic of asking players to pay for a new region in a free-to-play game, it becomes a lot less palatable when access to it is presented with a conditional, three-stage flowchart while the game is already submerged inches-deep in microtransaction slurry. But what makes Skate's rollout of a new map area locked behind a paywall feel particularly foul is the fact that, in a July 2022 video published before launch, Skate's developers said there would be "no map areas locked behind a paywall" as a "hard ground rule."

On X, the official Skate account has been attempting to implement damage control by responding to players who are understandably frustrated by the game doing the thing it specifically said it wouldn't.

"Launching in Early Access meant we were going to work on the game in public while players played," the Skate account replied with near-palpable exhaustion to a frustrated player. "We want to build this game to last, and it means we will need to make changes as we go sometimes. It also allows us to make improvements like updating our characters, lighting, adding tricks and other things we've changed since September. This change was made to ensure this game sticks around for the long haul."

Elsewhere, the Skate account said that "sometimes plans have to change. That's part of the deal when you're building in public. We're here, we're listening, and we're going to keep shaping Skate together."

Nothing reassures me about the future of skateboarding like pacifying corporate pseudo-acknowledgment. If you want to join in shaping Skate together, EA has published an updated development roadmap for Season 3 and beyond. You can get tattoos soon. So, you know. Pretty cool.

Nutmeg is one of those games that, if you're in the target demographic, sells itself on the title screen. Pure Roy of the Rovers and Panini vibes, with a flaming football streaking across the middle to put an exclamation point on "Nutmeg!" I am a man in his mid-forties who's followed football since I was a kid in the late '80s, had the sticker albums and replica kits, and played obsessively until a few years ago. In other words, I am very much the target audience for Nutmeg.

This is not only a love letter to the '80s/'90s era of English football when the old First Division was becoming the Premier League, but to everything that accrued around it. At times, perhaps, too much so. To give an example that works: you view your squad, backroom staff, transfer targets, and various other information via flipping the pages of a sticker album.

Less great is that there are no likenesses for the stickers that go in this book, with players represented by silhouettes in various poses. Nutmeg treads an odd line here and, funnily enough, parts of it add to the '90s nostalgia for things like International Superstar Soccer's likenesses of players, which were always close enough to be obvious but somehow not actionable. So Nutmeg uses real player names, for the most part, and real club names too: but then every so often you don't play Everton, you play the "Mersey Blues."

We'll get back to the era this is trying to evoke soon enough but: how does it work? This is at its heart a deckbuilding game of chance, split between strengthening your team cards and then, in matches, deploying strategy cards for advantages in a given situation. Games play out from left-to-right with each situation unfolding over on average four to six card deals.

In each of these, there's a brief description of what's happening on the pitch between two player cards (eg "forward clash" or "loose ball"), then three possible outcomes are shown, each with a % chance of success. This is where you can start bringing in the cards to bump-up your chances, the most basic ones just upping the number while others have more sneaky use-cases: and there are obvious restrictions on them, so for example you can't use a defensive "clearance" card when your striker is bearing down on the opposition goal.

When I said in the headline that Nutmeg at its best was like football Balatro, I don't mean it uses cards in the same way or has anything like that level of complexity to it. But what it does have is that delicious sense that even minor choices are important. Learning to save your cards for the duels you really need to win is one thing: chaining from back-to-front and scoring an unlikely goal when you're away from home and under the cosh is another thing entirely.

Each match has what feels like around ten situations for you to manage, some more some less, and between each individual action the match clock skips forwards. You can make two substitutions, and tweak between three basic formations (4-4-2, 4-3-3, 5-3-2, aka the good old days), and three basic instructions: press, keep the shape, or park the bus.

Managing your squad and playing the core game is what Nutmeg is amazing at. The cards could do without the little crafting minigame (where you upgrade them before matches) and with a little more craziness. There are some fun and obvious references like an 80%+ attacking chance card called "Hand of God" that comes with a high chance of being caught and carded...

But this game is specifically evoking those early Premier League years, and let's not forget that this is the era where Eric Cantona kung-fu kicked a Crystal Palace fan (and was right to do so) before returning after a lengthy ban to tell the assembled press that "when the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines are going to be thrown in the sea."

Some bonkers stuff went on in those days. Leyton Orient's manager John Sitton fired one player after a match then offered two more out for a fight in the middle of a TV documentary about the club, delivering the immortal lines: "You can pair up if you like. And you can fucking pick someone else to help you. And you can bring your fucking dinner. Because by the time I’m finished with you, you'll fucking need it!”

I really have often wondered about whether, upon regaining consciousness after a beating, I would be glad to see a chicken tikka masala nearby.

Do I not like that

Nutmeg has some naughtiness to it, which is unfortunately confined to its Teletext-aping news service, but none of that craziness that '80s/'90s football had. A far bigger problem, as so often, is all the fuss surrounding the good stuff.

The game leans into the retro manager vibe by making your hub a desk, on and around which are an old PC, a phone, the tactics board, stadium blueprints, the TV, a games console, a stereo, the sticker book, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Yes that does sound like a lot of things. It is.

Nutmeg's problem is that the concept is bang-on (retro football manager deck-builder with the names you remember) but it hasn't stripped away enough. For such a simple game the subsidiary systems don't feel like they need to be there: I'm not interested in managing what merch the club shop stocks. I don't want to hire the club accountant. I don't want to manage the stadium, or phone the bank manager, or even set training routines.

This game demands all of those things, and admittedly in a mostly light-touch way. But the whole reason I'd be interested in something like this is that I want the football manager match day fantasy: I don't want the granular simulation of a Football Manager, even diet Football Manager.

Nutmeg should be Roy of the Rovers stuff. I want to sign some awesome players, whack a team together, and manage the matches. Yes some sort of enveloping meta-structure around that would be cool, but what Nutmeg has now is just a bunch of cruft that takes me away from what the game's good at.

Then the real crime: the UI is very clunky, even if serviceable. This game asks you to switch in and out of different menus all the time but it's not as slick an experience as it should be, with giant blue-and-purple arrows somehow combined with at times unclear signalling. This is obviously an early build so I wouldn't want to be too harsh, but this isn't a pleasant game to navigate.

I played through Nutmeg's challenge mode as Blackburn, aiming to win promotion to the first division in the early '90s. The team you start with isn't great, but very quickly interesting transfer prospects pop up: some young buck called Alan Shearer is going for a song, this Tim Sherwood looks alright, and who's that David Batty fella?

Yes, you essentially start building Blackburn's Premier League winning side from the ground up. Nutmeg's structured around one month increments, each of which contain five matches, but you delegate four of these to your coaching staff and choose one fixture as the "broadcast" game. The broadcast matches increase the boosts you get from good results (fan sentiment, gate receipts) and vice-versa, so it's important to pick carefully: if you're away to a very good Ipswich team, maybe let the coaches take the hit on that one, and focus all your efforts on hammering Oxford at home.

It took me roughly two hours to play through the season, which started badly before a bunch of incredible signings righted the ship. I don't recall Rivaldo and Alessandro del Piero queuing up to join Blackburn in the early '90s, but with some juicy contracts they were soon putting Grimsby to the sword.

There's a nice balance to be struck here between the fixtures and what kind of cards you take in. I rocked up to Newcastle away with a ludicrous forward line and a load of attacking cards, but then barely saw any of the ball and didn't have the defensive boosts to shut down opposition attacks: scoring from your only counter-attack is nice, but when you've already shipped three it is cold consolation.

There are incongruities between what's happening in the match and the commentary all the time. Your stout centre-back Colin Hendry might decide to go for the classic tactic of hoofing it as far as possible, but the voiceline says something like "this slow pressure is really wearing them [the opposition] down." Such things are to be expected in pre-release versions, of course, but if the audio commentary can't maintain some kind of consistent link with what's actually happening in the match, then you start wondering why it's there at all.

I really enjoyed most of managing Blackburn, mainly the games, the transfers, and the odd press conference. I found most of the rest of what Nutmeg's doing extraneous, and even irritating at times. When it comes to the structure around the matches something like the stadium upgrade minigame is simple enough to work, and retain my interest, but I just can't be bothered with choosing between selling scarves or badges on matchdays.

You knew this was coming: Nutmeg is a game of two halves. There's a great game bubbling under here that feels like it really vibes with the era it's going for, and catches a little of the magic of football in the late '80s/early '90s. The cards could perhaps be a little more characterful and out-there at times, and I'm not enormously sure what the crafting adds, but in the matches Nutmeg can really deliver.

Almost everything outside of that feels like a distraction, even though I'll emphasise the management side is (as these things go) very light. It's a difficult balance to hit: you do want to feel like you're managing a club somehow, but also you just want to get on with the matches. One might think Nutmeg delivers on paper but, as the great Brian Clough once said: "We had a good team on paper. Unfortunately, the game was played on grass."

The skating game revival of the last few years has been an unexpected, but welcome surprise. Vicarious Visions' remaster of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 heralded a new wave of aspiring skate sims, ranging from the ultra-authentic Session: Skate Sim to the abstract brilliance of Skate Story, with EA's online playground Skate landing somewhere between the two.

Now, another challenger has, er, entered the half-pipe (I apologise to all skaters). Skate Style is a new game about risking shredded knees for the thrill of mild propulsion that leans closer to the Session end of the authenticity scale. Developer Zellah Games bills it as a "next-gen skateboarding game" focussed on realism and physics-powered tricks.

What separates Skate Style from other games of its ilk is its extensive customisation. Not only can you customise the look of your skater and board, but Skate Style also comes bundled with an in-game animation editor. This allows players to adjust numerous variables like body movement, foot placement, and timing. This combines with a physics-based trick system where your character's feet can actually catch the board.

As for where you'll be skating, Zellah Games highlights two maps based on real-world locations. The first is Barcelona's Museum of Contemporary Art (known as MACBA), where you can take advantage of its modern concrete exterior, as well as surrounding squares and hidden alleys. The second is Prague's Stalin Plaza, which the developers describe as a "legendary flatground spot". The trailer also shows off a dedicated skate park, presumably where you can hone your skills before jetting off to Skate Styles' European locales.

I think Skate Style has a chance of catching some attention, given how some of last year's skating games didn't quite live up to their promise. PCG's Kara Phillips thought EA's Skate felt like it was made by men in suits, and that Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 was inhibited by the decision to implement time limits for every level.

The exception here is Skate Story, which thoroughly impressed Lincoln Carpenter in how it pays off its premise of a more narrative-driven skating experience. "It culminates in a stunning closing sequence that's on an altogether different tier of audiovisual and presentational ambition," he wrote in his Skate Story review. "In my last hour skateboarding became a cosmic force with such biblical-scale intensity that the game as I knew it up until that point started to buckle around it."

There's no word on a release date for Skate Style yet, but you can try the game yourself through its recently released demo.

Once again it's time for my annual—except for the year I forgot—tradition of simulating the Super Bowl here at PC Gamer! I've now done it six times using various American football-related PC games and have a record of 3-3 for predicting the winner, a 50% accuracy rate. Meaning I could have skipped all those hours of simulations and thousands of words written and just flipped a coin instead.

Although my Super Bowl simulations in the past have included highly technical simulators like Super Slam Dunk Touchdown and Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football, I've never used the high-water mark of American football simulators: Madden.

That all changes today, because I'm using John Madden Football. From 1988. Which, interestingly enough, was developed in part by Bethesda! Who then spent years suing Electronic Arts over it. There's gonna be a movie about it this year.

To access this nearly 40-year-old videogame, I went over to Classic Reload where I can play it in a browser surrounded by not one, not two, but three of those big green "Download" buttons that we all have a healthy suspicion of by now. One of those buttons is occasionally covered by a banner ad for a Mazda CX-50 SUV, which adds a little more immersion: this is the Super Bowl, after all, and there are gonna be a lot of car ads.

In 1988, John Madden Football didn't have any NFL or NFLPA licenses, so there's no real team or player names, though plenty are transparently based on real players like "Terry B" and "Mean Green" and, quite unfortunately, "Juice." Yes, it's the '80s. The Juice is, unfortunately, still Loose.

Using the red team as the Patriots and the blue team as the Seahawks, I set Madden's AI to play itself, sit back, and listen to the abrupt blasts of scratchy sound effects as tiny men on my screen fight over a football the size of a beanbag chair, accompanied by baffling onscreen text like "COMPLETE FUMBLE PASS JOHNNY TO FEERS 31 YARDS RECOVERED BY ASSASSIN" while learning about the Mazda CX-50 from this banner ad. For example, Mazda's current slogan is "More To Move You." Huh!

For a while it seems like the best way to counter Madden's football AI is with identical Madden football AI, because neither team manages much of anything for most of the first quarter. Most passes are incomplete and most runs are just a few yards. The Patriots do eventually put a drive together but have to settle for a field goal by GROZU, who after some Googling, was probably based on kicker Lou Groza. You owe him royalties, EA! Oh, Lou Groza has been dead for more than a quarter of a century. Never mind.

The Pats put another drive together but the digital representation of current Patriots quarterback Drake Maye, who was born 14 years after this videogame was made, throws three consecutive incomplete passes into the end zone and has to settle for another field goal. Then, after doing essentially nothing for the past 10 minutes, the Seahawks have a great idea: try playing football! They run back the kickoff for 57 yards and finish up with the game's first touchdown. 7-6, Seahawks!

In the second quarter more weird player names are revealed, some lazy like "Brown" and "Johnny," some fun like "Ray Gun" and "Crazylegs" and "Sweetness," some daringly litigious like "Buttcuss," a not-so-thinly veiled stand-in for Dick Butkus. Meanwhile, the Patriots continue to falter in the red zone, resulting in their third field goal. The Seahawks follow up with another, and as the Bad Bunny halftime show gets underway, the score is Patriots 9, Seahawks 10, and the Mazda CX-50 surprisingly reasonable at $29,990.

Finally, the Patriots remember how passing works, and midway through the 3rd quarter Maye hurls a 36-yard beaut to Crazylegs. The Seahawks counter with a field goal, then put together a drive in the last few seconds of the third and Sam Darnold's avatar ("Terry B") throws a touchdown pass to make the score 16-20, Seahawks. Good game so far!

I missed a bit of the 4th quarter because I was on the phone with my local Mazda dealer, but I'm back in time to see the Patriots score another touchdown on a 1-yard run as the lead switches hands for the sixth time. The Seahawks come storming right back with a TD of their own, making the score Patriots 23, Seahawks 27 with just over a minute left on the clock.

I know it sounds weird to say this about a pixelated game from 38 years ago, but I'm genuinely on the edge of my seat about the end of this game!

Speaking of seats, I'm also thinking about those comfortable seats in the Mazda CX-50, which is designed with nature in mind and you at heart. Mazda Intelligent Drive Select (Mi-Drive) allows you to choose different drive modes to best suit your driving situation. Combined with i-Activ AWD® and powerful engine options, it provides Mazda signature driving dynamics for nearly any terrain or road you’re on!

I feel like the Seahawks have this locked up: a field goal won't save the Patriots. But the kickoff is returned with a stellar 63-yard runback! The Pats have it on the 31 yard line with 46 seconds to go. Maye throws a bullet to whoever Feers is and makes it to within 2 yards, first down. And just like real football in the midst of incredible drama, everyone starts using their time outs, dragging the game on five times as long as it needs to be.

It's a hand-off for a three yard loss. 14 seconds left. Another hand-off. Fumbled! It's fumbled at the 8 yard line and recovered by… the Patriots! Whew. The game almost ended right there but the Pats still have three seconds to go 8 yards. Another hand-off… but it's a fake! Maye drops way, way back and hurls it…

Touchdown! Touchdown with the clock expired! The extra point is good! The Patriots win! The Mazda CX-50 earns Car & Driver's Editor's Choice for 2026! Wow! I'm not even being sarcastic, that was a fantastic end to a great game.

My prediction for Super Bowl LX: Patriots 30 - Seahawks 27!

Football is the world's most-watched and popular sport, and outside of the World Cup the pinnacle is the English Premier League. Right now we're coming to the end of the mid-season transfer window, where clubs have the opportunity to buy and sell players, and amidst the incessant speculation one of the league's top managers felt the need to remind the football media that the beautiful game is not, in fact, a videogame.

The moment arrived during a press conference featuring Tottenham Hotspur manager Thomas Frank, a Danish coach whose witty asides are not quite papering over the fact that the club is having a terrible season. Frank took over in June last year from Ange Postecoglou, a garrulously amusing Australian who committed the cardinal sin of winning something with Spurs and was promptly sacked.

Nevertheless the North London club remain one of the biggest around, and one of the players it's been heavily linked to over this transfer window was Antoine Semenyo. Semenyo instead chose to join Manchester City for £62.5m and, while Tottenham have made other signings, Frank was asked to address losing out on one of the club's main targets.

"It was clear, there is no doubt, that the club wanted to sign Semenyo," said Frank. "They did everything and I think that is a clear signal that [club owners] the Lewis family is very committed. That's the quality of players we are looking for to improve the squad."

Frank went on to say he didn't want to become "obsessed with a short-term fix" because there could be a "big summer ahead" for Spurs, before digressing on the complexity of the transfer market, which is when we get to Sports Interactive's Football Manager series.

"The fans just want the best for the club, just like I, the owners, the staff, the players. Everyone wants the best for the club," said Frank.

"But the transfer window is not Football Manager, unfortunately. It is not. It would be a lot easier, but also a little bit more boring. We would not have as many good stories to talk about."

Devastating news for armchair Guardiolas everywhere. I don't want to put words in his mouth here, but it's likely that Frank's also thinking about the whole social media ecosystem that now exists around transfers, whereby clubs are linked with around a dozen players for every one they sign, and managers are peppered with questions about every rumour going.

In Football Manager, and I'm simplifying here but not by much, you put in an offer on a player, wait a day or two for a response, and if the offer is accepted begin negotiating a contract with a player, then wait another few days for a yes or no. Obviously in real life there's much more human complexity to it, such as whether a player wants to uproot their life and family to move to a new city or country. Or, as is likely the case with Semenyo, whether they think they'll have a better chance of trophies elsewhere.

Frank remains under pressure at Tottenham, with the club 14th in the Premier League, though it has qualified for the last 16 of the Champion's League. The team has been unlucky at points, and conceded some sickeners: exactly the kind of thing that, if football really was like Football Manager, would've had Frank going for more than a few cheeky reloads.

I never have been (and never will be) interested in golf. I think it's a boring sport for boring people. I am, however, interested in golf that's been messed around with. That includes things like minigolf and crazy golf (is there much of a delineation there? Answers on a postcard please). But there are also video games that use the fundamentals of golf to create something more interesting, like Cursed to Golf, Dungeon Golf, and What the Golf?

Naturally, therefore, I was immediately drawn to Super Battle Golf, a multiplayer party game that lets you go full Falling Down on your clubmates.

Designed for 1-8 players, Super Battle Golf sees you and your pals teeing off simultaneously, aiming to complete the course first by any means necessary. While you can theoretically try to win the game fairly, cheating is built into the experience.

You can aim your shots directly at other players to knock them over, for example. Or you can run them down in a golf cart, shoot them with a gun, or blast them with a rocket launcher. You can even assume control of an orbital laser and blast them into the rough from halfway across the map (shouting "Fore!" just to rub it in).

Super Battle Golf lets you fight for fairway supremacy across 27 different courses. These include all the familiar obstacles you'd expect on a golf course, like sand traps, water hazards, and board executives, plus a few more novel additions like landmines. Super Battle Golf also offers extensive characters customisation options, including letting you swap out your nine iron for a chicken leg, a stop sign, or a giant, off-brand Chupa-chup.

Super Battle Golf is out pretty soon, launching on February 19. There's a trailer you can check out. Publisher Oro Interactive hasn't revealed how much the game will cost yet. But given it's the kind of chaotic multiplayer experience that's highly in vogue at present, I reckon it could do well if it follows the Peak pricing model.

Granted, players tastes lean more toward cooperative than competitive multiplayer games right now, but Super Battle Golf looks light and silly enough to tempt even the most competition-averse player for a round of nine holes.

WWE 2K24 is about to get the Gunther treatment, which is to say that 2K Games is going to mercilessly choke it out: As noted by Delisted Games, the Steam page for the rasslin' game that was released less than two years ago—on March 8, 2024—says it will be removed from sale on February 1, 2026, and will lose all online functionality on March 31. Offline modes will continue to function as normal.

That might seem like an awfully short window of existence for a major, mainstream videogame, but believe it or not the server shutdown date is actually an extension: WWE 2K24's online features were originally set to be killed on January 5. It's also a fairly standard period of full functionality for 2K's WWE games. WWE 2K23 servers took a piledriver in January 2025, 2K22 servers ate an RKO in '24, and four pre-2K21 games were put through tables at the same time in 2022.

Players can take some comfort in the fact that offline modes will continue to work as usual, so this isn't a Crew-like situation where the game will be rendered completely unplayable. It still sucks, though, because it's such an obvious, naked effort to push players to shell out for annual releases: If you're having fun playing online with your friends, you're going to have to keep paying for it.

And look, I know, it costs money to keep servers up and running, and at some point a game's player numbers just don't justify that ongoing expense. WWE 2K24 certainly seems to be at that point, with just 188 people playing on Steam right now—not exactly a vital and thriving audience. But that, I think, inevitably leads to another question: With all due respect to WWE fans who are happy to pay for a new game every year, but do we really need a new WWE game every year?

The answer, for now at least, is clearly "yes." And don't expect the pace of release-and-retirement to ease up anytime soon: 2K has already slated the end of service for the 2K25 edition for March 2027.

I submit that there's no greater feeling in videogames than finally figuring out how to enjoy a series that once eluded you. Liking games is a skill that you can get better at, and my big skill check of 2025 was learning to love Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4.

A copy of the latest Tony Hawk remake fell into my lap because, well, few others at PC Gamer were interested. THPS was once among the biggest series of the late '90s and early aughts, but their legacy doesn't carry as much weight in PC gaming. Nor does it for me: The sole Tony Hawk I owned back in the day was THUG 2, the 2004 successor series to Pro Skater that let you get off the board and run around (which is what I ended up doing most of the time).

No, instead I was an annoying Skate fan who preferred to kickflip with the right stick and insisted Tony Hawk was too arcadey or unrealistic. How's it feel to be a mega wrong dummy, teen Morgan?

Allow me to catch up: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is divine. It might be the perfect sports game and also the perfect driving game. You're a dude standing on plywood, but you're also an acrobatic vehicle of wicked speeds who can jump, grind, slide, and turn on a dime.

From the outside I assumed THPS was a mindless score-chaser, but that's because I was too dumb to notice it's also a scavenger hunt, a racing game, and a platformer all in one. It's casual fun that slowly bleeds into a raw hunt for efficiency. And it does so while showing just as much reverence for the hobby as the grounded Skate games I obsessed over in the late 2000s.

Sure, THPS physics are exaggerated and one level involves demolishing a Los Angeles highway people are actively driving on, but the goal never wavers from the pursuit of geographic mastery through two minute sessions—the pure gratification of rolling into a foreign place and unlocking its secrets through improbable flip tricks and sickass grinds.

One nice thing about jumping straight into the 3 + 4 remake having not played much of the 1 + 2 remake from 2020 is experiencing this series at the height of Neversoft's powers. Every elevated curb, every high drop, every camouflaged line is so thoughtfully considered and nestled into the scenery.

It would've been easier to make X Games-style skate parks with wooden ramps and imported rails, but 3 + 4's playgrounds—recreated by Iron Galaxy with a loving brush—are seamlessly carved into city streets, a college campus, an airport, and literal Alcatraz Island. There isn't a single map in the package I dislike, though I never returned to the "competition" maps that trade goals for simpler score chasing.

I know this particular remake chafed fans of the original THPS 4 by tossing out its open world structure and screwing with old maps. I hear you and your complaints are valid: It is weird that Iron Galaxy opted for forced timers on maps that didn't have them before and got rid of interactable NPCs altogether in THPS 4. The explanations for the changes were kinda weak, and in the end it was probably a call made to speed up development, but now I want to pick up a copy of the original THPS 4 to see what I'm missing.

That said, the reworked levels play very well, and I particularly love the new maps Iron Galaxy added to the package. Waterpark is so colorful and dynamic and dense that I assumed it was a Neversoft original before my friend set me straight, and the (minor spoiler) pinball machine level unlocked at the end of the THPS 4 career is a delightfully absurd coda.

Considering the arrival of the Skate reboot and the standout indie Skate Story, 2025 turned into an unexpectedly triumphant year for virtual skating. Yet, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4's controversial alterations led to it getting largely ignored back in July.

That's a shame, because it carried forward the excellent work Vicarious Visions started with the 1 + 2 remake in 2020—excellent animations, a great updated soundtrack, and modernized graphics that are more concerned with performance and vibes than realism. It's what Pro Skater would play and look like in 2025 if Activision had never abandoned the series.

If you're grumpy about the changes, I won't try to change your mind. But if you're like me and missed out on the Tony Hawk fun back in the day, this is an excellent on ramp.

Electronic Arts' all-conquering EA Sports FC, the game formerly known as FIFA, can now with certainty be called a successful re-branding exercise. EA Sports FC has become a ubiquitous sight at all levels of matches, with it being near-impossible to watch a Premier League game in particular without having the logo tattooed on your eyes by the end. The latest entry in the series has already sold over 10 million copies.

So pity poor FIFA. World football's governing body was left in the lurch by EA (for which it only has itself to blame) and until recently has proven itself utterly clueless about what to do next. FIFA president Gianni Infantino can insist that only a game with the FIFA name will be "the best" but so far, outside of a tie-up with the Football Manager series, everything it's tried to do in games has been risible—the Roblox World Cup game that didn't feature any actual football being an especial low point.

FIFA and Netflix have now announced that a new FIFA "football simulation game" will release to coincide with next year's World Cup. The game is being developed by Delphi Interactive, which is oddly enough working with IO Interactive on the upcoming 007: First Light but is otherwise yet to release a videogame.

There are only the vaguest of details, no screens of the game, and what we do know… well, it's not exactly promising. Netflix subscribers will be able to play the new FIFA for free via the Netflix app on Android and iOS devices (uh oh), as well as via compatible television sets. There's no mention of a browser option as of yet, though Netflix's dedicated games page (which is linked in the FIFA announcement) suggests this will be an option.

The game will, per the press release, allow players to "experience the emotion and drama of the tournament in its purest, most joyful form—in a format that’s fast to learn, thrilling to master, and built for anyone to jump in." It will feature both solo play and multiplayer.

Here's one sentence that absolutely no football fan wants to hear, courtesy of Alain Tascan, president of games at Netflix: "We want to bring football back to its roots with something everyone can play with just the touch of a button."

"Our reimagined game truly marks the beginning of a new era of digital football," said Infantino, a man whose words have all the solidity of wind. "It will be available for free to Netflix members and is a great historic step for FIFA."

Infantino says the game aims to "reach billions of football fans of all ages everywhere in the world and will be redefining the pure notion of simulation games."

Oookay. Casper Daugaard, CEO of Delphi Interactive, said on LinkedIn that "I am honored to announce Delphi Interactive has been trusted by FIFA to develop and publish the return of its iconic franchise back to simulation gaming. Ours will be the most fun, approachable, and global football game ever created."

Well, we'll see about that. More details are incoming in 2026, and it will at the very least be interesting to see what Delphi Interactive can do with such a potentially enormous audience, and the dream tie-in with the World Cup. I'm not sure that EA Sports FC enjoyers will be rushing to pick up what sounds like a one-button F2P game built for mobile first… but maybe millions of others will. If nothing else, at least we'll get the spectacle of Infantino making some childish digs at EA when it launches.

It's one of my life's greatest shames that I do not and cannot skate.

There's a simple reason: I never trusted I could do it without exploding my whole skeleton. Nevertheless I behold the skateboard with a kind of talismanic reverence. It's an implement that grants a different relationship with our earthly geometry. Skating is an almost occultic discipline, its practitioners defying worldly convention to dabble in transcendent matters of slope, rotation, and bodily contortion.

Skate Story takes that to an extreme. If Dante Alighieri had known that skateboarding could be a weapon of metaphysical rebellion against hell and reality itself, his Inferno would also have followed a "demon made of glass and pain" who's entered into a contract with the Devil to eat the moon in exchange for their soul.

Skate Story is one of the best-sounding and most stylish games I've played in recent memory. It's an esoteric art installation and interactive concept album navigated via powerslide and axle grind: a mesmerizing ode to the miserable occupants of an uncannily familiar underworld. It's grungy; it's grimy; it's almost certainly intolerable if the word "postmodern" sets you on edge. But my god does it make landing a clean heelflip feel very, very good.

Thus, the skateboard

Skate Story's melding of lo-fi assets and post-processing mastery is a flex in and of itself. The Skater is a literal mass of polygons in skate shoes, but their glass pane skin is beautiful to watch in motion as it refracts and reflects light while I grind Hell's curbs. Skating has immaculate animation and visual feedback: Simulated camera shake made for a delicious impact whenever I landed a trick after gaining big air.

Those flourishes only sing because the skating itself is tightly crafted. You prime tricks with button combinations before you pop into the air, so rather than cramming as many tricks as possible into the available airtime, building score is an art of timing and tempo.

It's been more than five years since Skate Story's announcement, and I could feel how much of that time was invested in capturing the weight and momentum of The Skater and their board. As additional techniques like spins and reverts were introduced, I loved how skating clean lines became a moving meditation of managing speed, orientation, and combo accumulation.

The skating is a satisfying ritual—but it's also a means of metaphysical combat. Throughout Skate Story, I confronted demons, celestial objects, and Hell's own existential fabric, transmuting the score from my skate combos into damage. In these sequences Skate Story becomes an even more vibrant spectacle: Hell's skate spots bloom into kaleidoscopes of demonic psychedelia. Time slows as I stomp ollies to punctuate trick combos in eruptions of glittering demonlight, as though reality itself is warped by the combined force of my righteous kickflips. I regularly kept boss encounters going longer than necessary, just to keep watching the show.

I was initially frustrated with Skate Story's score mechanics until I internalized I wasn't playing Tony Hawk. It took awhile to realize I wouldn't completely lose my combo points if I lagged too long between tricks; it starts gradually bleeding away instead, but performing another trick staunched the flow and let me pick my combo back up.

When I was afraid of not dealing enough damage before boss timers expired, I was frantically alternating between tricks in a futile effort to baby my combo timer. Once I understood I was free to skate more calmly, I stopped constantly shattering my skater's body and my lines became a lot cleaner—and more satisfying.

Those boss sequences wouldn't hit nearly as hard without Skate Story's soundtrack. Blood Cultures, the experimental band that contributed most of the game's music, is a perfect pairing for Sam Eng's vision of Hell, alternating between pounding, synthetic menace, hushed, aching melodies, and—when The Skater's allowed to go off—manic, liberatory crescendos. During intense moments Skate Story's environmental lighting and post-processing synchronize with the thundering instrumentals of the soundtrack like Blood Cultures was possessing the game itself.

The Devil's Geometry

As you might guess from all the glass demonry and moon eating, Skate Story has a unique vibe. It casually coasts between oppressively infernal imagery, cosmic portent, and surreal irony. There are obsidian slabs carved with instructions for performing ollies. At one point, I entered a sentient trash bag to discover a maze of skatable tunnels, because physical space in the underworld obeys "the Devil's Geometry." Souls are money and I can earn more by disspelling pools of the moon's accursed light with a few flip tricks.

It's not always coherent. Playing Skate Story is a bit like absorbing the demonic imagery of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, where the effect of seeing a tormented soul playing a flute with his butt is more important than understanding why it's happening.

That said, Sam Eng's idea of Hell is a very different image than the one conjured by the Italian writers and Dutch painters of the Renaissance. Rather than a fiery pit, Skate Story's underworld is a warped, chimeric New York. It's a metropolis of dripping concrete and sleep paralysis architecture, where structures are textured with melting oilslick jpegs of what might've once been more pleasant buildings.

Existential malice and bureaucratic absurdity share a block with the thoroughly mundane. Hell has bodegas and 24-hour laundromats. The Department of Death is 40 seconds of skating away from a local cafe. A gift shop where I can buy skate decks and stickers—my personal favorite is a wok-wielding shrimp with the text "GET BUSY FRYING OR GET BUSY DYING"—is on the same street as "The Meanings Factory," which is "powered by state of the art ennui technology."

Rhythm and pulse

The underworld's torments are familiar, too, if a bit more permanent. Eternal damnation in Skate Story doesn't involve much pitchfork prodding or being flayed alive forever. Instead, Hell is going hungry. Hell is exhaustion. Hell is not having a place to sleep. It's being unable to stop inventorying your regrets and tallying your wasted time, and hoping you'll get fired so you can at least stop working your terrible job.

It didn't feel accidental that Hell's miseries echo many of those being endured around us. And yet, living in Hell can be surprisingly chill. Despite the crimson ribs sprouting from the pavement and the occasional metal beam enclosure labeled "CAGE OF SORROW" in perfunctory sans serif font, Skate Story's dreamscapes—while small—are meditative backdrops that I loved combing for potential lines to skate. It's the same paradox in the underworld as it is above: Woe and contentment can share a close proximity. Skate Story's gravest sin is that there's no way to revisit earlier skate spots without starting a new game—something I hope gets addressed in post-launch updates.

What I wished I could appreciate more is how deeply Skate Story feels like a game about New York. I'm a native of New York the state but not New York the city; Skate Story is speaking a familiar language with familiar sounds, but in a dialect I don't fully understand. From Languishin Square to Hellsea to Godhook, I could sense how it's saturated with a particular kind of minor key nostalgia accessible to anyone who's felt the pleasant melancholy of walking home from work in a nighttime rain.

But it's colored with such a local specificity that I couldn't help but envy those who better know the source. I've got plenty of experience being depressed elsewhere, but I haven't been depressed in New York.

Skate Story's writing, meanwhile, has a character all its own. Its narration is a longform poem recounting The Skater's quest with an indulgence that occasionally veers into grammar agnosticism. Words bleed back and forth across the boundaries between noun, verb, and adjective as if they're following the same Devil's Geometry as the underworld's uncanny skateways. Moonlight growls the ground. Skull demons insist they'll catch vibes in half with a pair of shears.

It's half-nonsense that in other contexts I'd think was in need of an editor. But against the backdrop of the absurdity, irony, and general unfathomability of Hell, it tends to work. And when it doesn't land, it's not long before a line like "The skateboard vibrated with a divine frequency" appears on screen to unfurrow my brow.

Set it on fire

Throughout the whole game, the skating really only stumbled when the linear sections leading into setpieces were too optimistic about my ability to perform sharp turns or dodge unexpected obstacles at over 30 mph. Wiping out just as things accelerated into full spectacle had a way of slamming the brakes at the worst possible moment. But those were ultimately brief hiccups.

Skate Story had already won me over in its opening chapters, but it culminates in a stunning closing sequence that's on an altogether different tier of audiovisual and presentational ambition. In my last hour skateboarding became a cosmic force with such biblical-scale intensity that the game as I knew it up until that point started to buckle around it.

It's experimental. It's funny. There's a frog. I'd be doing a disservice by describing it with anything but the most general terms, but I'll be replaying the ending of Skate Story in my head for months, even if the impact was slightly dulled by my inability to avoid shattering myself at high speeds.

At the end, Skate Story's message—that we should believe something better is possible, even if it threatens to break us—isn't new. But in a world that detests you for being in it, what else is there to do but reject it? We all skate down here.

It's been nearly two months since skate dropped in Early Access, and it hasn't exactly been the seamless skating experience a lot of us expected. Between bugs turning your character into a lump of voxels and making any tricks impossible, to progression issues that stunt your growth as San Vansterdam's greatest skater, it's safe to say that skate has plenty of creases that the developers are desperately trying to iron out.

However, to thank the millions of people who have been jumping in, the team shared in a blog post that each player can expect a decent number of rewards. This includes 2000 Tix to unlock rewards in the battle pass and 500 SVBs to spend on whatever cosmetics you fancy for your character and board in the in-game store. The only catch is that the Tix needs to be used on the battle pass before the end of Season 1, which concludes in the first week of December.

In a way though, these gifts feel less like a thank you and more like an apology for the shoddy state of the game and the number of issues that players have experienced since it launched. In the Dev Update announcing the rewards, the team highlighted a number of problems they're aware players are facing, such as softlock and progression issues, and errors when the daily tasks reset. While these have been looked at, there isn't a green light suggesting either has been remedied. Instead, the post stated that "there still may be a few slip ups."

The post continues: "We're tweaking and fixing the game - some of it on the fly, and some of it as part of longer-term improvements. But things will continue to change and improve. We all want skate to be great, and working with you, our community, to fine-tune the player experience during Early Access is the way we get there."

The same fine-tuning applies to cosmetics and the battle pass, especially with Season 2 being right around the corner. This means a number of changes will apply to the new season, including earning more SVB, branded and licensed items being readily available to unlock via the pass, and the current tiers being tweaked to make it less of a grind to complete each season, which certainly is a plus.

How to improve Football Manager. It’s a question both Sports Interactive and players like me have asked on an (almost) yearly basis for the last 20 years. So the answers should, by rights, be forthcoming and straightforward. It’s a series that eats up vast, greedy swathes of your time, and in the hundreds of hours you spend with it each year, you become as familiar with its foibles as one might with a spouse. And yet the more time I spend with Football Manager 26, the most significant update to the old Collyer brothers’ formula for years, the more I’m stumped about what the right answer is to that question.

Is it a matter of making it a more technically impressive affair? Sports Interactive evidently think so. The London-based studio took a lot of heat for cancelling FM 25’s release last year in order to switch engines and deliver a more technically substantial update than has been customary. You’ve got to admire a developer who does that.

The result? Simply put, matches look more like real football. Now running in Unity, but most importantly with a deeper fidelity and variety of player animations in the match engine, FM 26 shows you details that weren’t there before. Alright, it doesn’t rival the Matrix Awakens demo for jaw-on-the-floor graphical heft, but it actually makes your job easier. Previously I might have looked at the player profile screen to decide which of my Roma left-backs made it into my starting XI, scanning for numbers approaching 20. Now it’s clear by actually watching Angelino and Tsimikas on the ball: the former is pacey and creative, full of deft touches and stepovers. The latter is functional and less adventurous in possession.

The newfound match engine fidelity definitely serves a gameplay need, then. My manager’s eye can better observe how well a team holds its shape out of possession, watch impact subs skin their markers with their fresher legs, and note when my centrebacks are pulled out of position. But the gamer in me just likes watching the cool goals go in. The spectacular moments feel dialled up in this revamped match engine, and that’s just as important.

Match fit

It’s funny how much more the extra detail has bonded me to my players, and how it’s told a distinct and compelling story in certain games. When it caught my star winger Matias Soule rolling around feigning injury, I felt disappointed in him. The way wonderkid Niccolo Pisilli repaid my faith in him by hammering in an absolute worldy from the edge of the box in a Europa League match against someone really normal like Midtjylland. These things bring out emotion. This is a good thing.

Showing you more of the match yields some big gameplay rewards in FM 26. The thing is, I’m not sure that same philosophy extends to the rest of the game. Among some more straightforwardly positive additions to this game, like 14 playable leagues from the women' s game and the men’s Premier League license, is a UI update, and it makes my brain hurt.

The intention of this redesign is to show you more information on each screen. SI probably thinks the benefits of this are twofold: less clicking between menus, and an at-a-glance overview of just how deep FM 26’s simulation goes, in order to create a real sense that there’s a living, breathing world of football beneath the numbers.

In practice, it’s like someone breaking into the home you’ve lived in for the last 15 years, rearranging everything and leaving incredibly detailed notes on all the cupboard doors about where all your stuff is now. If that seems unkind, it’s only because the UI was already overwhelming before, and this game seems to have doubled down on it while simultaneously disorienting me.

I’ve spent so much time scanning through extraneous information for the one stat I’m looking for, not because it’s not present in a particular menu, but because 9,000 other things are too. This Roma job’s not easy and the Italian press don’t tread lightly when you get a bad result away to Como. My patience for playing ‘guess where the menu you used to be able to navigate to lives now’ is wearing thin.

Look, it’s not a disaster. It’s functional enough and over time you do learn its ways. There’s even a bookmark system which lets you pin your most-used menus to the ‘portal’ page, a redesigned hub menu intended to work like your career save’s homepage. Ironically though, that bookmark section is sharing that portal’s real estate with such an absurd number of other elements that it’s easy to miss, and the icons are so small that it feels fiddlier to use them than to navigate to your intended menus the old school way.

Big data

And that makes me wonder whether the way to improve Football Manager might actually be to show the player less information, not more. There’s a passionate group, not insignificant in size, who’d tell you that the whole series peaked at Championship Manager 01/02. No match engine at all, far less detail, far fewer interaction types. Just a big database of players, an inbox, and some fairly basic tactics options. That might sound like rampant Luddism, but having played it back-to-back with FM 26, I think there’s something to the argument.

The joy to be found in this series, a genre unto itself really, is the way a world tends to build up around you the more you play. You start to develop imagined relationships with players, with rival managers, with the press. Stories start to form about plucky kids from the youth setup whom you gave a chance in the first team, dream transfer targets you court for years but never quite have the funds to secure, cup finals you lost on penalties and vow to one day win. But all of that happens only when enough time passes. And in modern FM, time simply passes too slowly.

In the first eight hours of my Roma save, I’d played four league games and a Europa League fixture. Some of that’s on me for spending so much time scouring the transfer market for young Brazilian left-sided wingers, but the game has to take the lion’s share of the blame for moving along at such a glacial pace between fixtures. No matter how many tasks you delegate to your backroom staff, no matter how many news event types you unsubscribe to, there always seems to be something insignificant popping up to stop the passage of time.

This is a philosophical problem, not a technical one. Sports Interactive would say it caters for those after a more classic FM experience with the ‘Touch’ editions of its newer games, but even they’re too laden with system-bloat to give the zippy career pace of earlier Champ Man titles.

Excel-lent

And yet here I am, still playing the damn thing, and still having loads of fun. Confound it. Before it was addictive because you had plans for the next season that you wanted to see out before bedtime. Now it’s simply that you want to make it to the next fixture. Frustrating as it is, that withholding way of FM 26’s does keep you engaged.

If you’re prepared to just go with it, FM 26’s depth of simulation is as impressive as the series has ever been. There are small reinforcements like searching for transfer deals via TransferRoom (basically Craigslist for footballers), and a tactics reworking that draws a clear line of delineation between how you set your team up in and out of possession, and they both work well to give you more granular control over two of the most important and satisfying components: buying and selling players, and making those players do what you tell them to on the pitch.

At present, it’s perhaps slightly too easy to exploit tactics that see your wingbacks wandering into the box rather than crossing at distance, but considering the magnitude of this year’s overhaul there don’t seem to be any glaring glitches or cheese tactics. It’s well-balanced, and the ability to set strikingly different shapes and player roles in and out of possession gives tactics creation a breath of fresh air.

But really, the strengths of FM 26 are the same strengths that the series has always relied on. The vast and detailed database of players and staff, and the way it simulates not just your poxy little club, but the entire rest of the world. You find yourself checking Ligue 1 results, knowing you will never ever take a job there. You eagerly await the World Cup so that you can watch the matches. That’s the marker of FM’s quality. You quite quickly come to believe that its simulated world of football is real, and worth poring over in forensic detail.

It is, if you’ll forgive an unforgivably tired cliche, a game of two halves. The revamped match day experience really was worth the wait, and shows you details that not only make you a pleased fan but a better informed manager too. Off the pitch, though, it continues to overload you with information and refuses to let time pass with any rapidity. The sum total is captivating, just like always, but often frustrating and exhausting too.

A whole lot is riding on Football Manager 26 which, after the late cancellation of FM 25, has to deliver a major leap forward for the beloved management sim. The early signs are positive, with showcases of the new-look match engine, overhauled tactics, a reimagined UI and the debut of the women's game all going down well with fans.

One other reason to get excited is Sports Interactive's deal with the English Premier League, arguably the greatest club league in the world, and now it has announced another biggie: a multi-year deal with FIFA, football's world governing body, that gives FM 26 and its successors the license to multiple international competitions, most notably FIFA World Cup 26.

The World Cup is obviously as big as sport gets, and next year's competition will be held across Canada, Mexico, and the USA. Qualification for the tournament remains ongoing, but last week saw a rampant and swashbuckling Scotland guarantee themselves a play off spot at the minimum, with automatic qualification still a possibility. England apparently squeaked through too.

Point being that this deal means that FM 26 will include the FIFA World Cup 26, alongside the official kits of all 48 qualifying teams, as well as the tournament branding and broadcast graphics. So should Scotland qualify, for example, next summer I'll be able to give Steve Clarke his marching orders and maybe get us through the group stage for the first time ever. Then I can just ignore whatever's actually happening on the telly.

SI adds that "this licence coincides with the inclusion of a playable, revamped International Management module in FM26, FM26 Console and FM26 Touch in a Content Update next year in advance of the World Cup."

As well as the World Cup, this deal will bring the FIFA Women's World Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup to Football Manager. The Club World Cup is an interesting one: it's only been around for 25 years and has never been taken particularly seriously, but FIFA is attempting to make it a major part of the calendar.

While this is great news for SI and FM 26, it's frankly even better news for FIFA. Ever since EA unceremoniously dumped the license and went its own way with EA Sports FC, the world governing body has struggled to move on. The licensed games it has managed to produce have been for the most part embarrassing: the tie-in for the 2022 World Cup was some Roblox nonsense with bowling. If nothing else, an association with a game of genuine quality might put a little lustre back on those four letters.

This week, the first season pass arrived for the recently-reborn Skate in an update that—as a quick glance at the Skate subreddit will tell you—isn't being received very well, with players complaining that a spattering of superficial challenge additions are being used to justify a pile of new microtransactions.

The most reviled among Skate's new monetization vectors is the Isaac Clarke bundle, which offers players the opportunity to roll around San Vansterdam as a cardboard-and-duct-tape knockoff of the Dead Space protagonist for the price of 3350 San Van Bucks, which shakes out to around $35 USD.

If that price alone didn't feel contemptuous enough for you, the bundle's got all the usual grimy monetization trappings: It's a limited time offering. It's got stickers and emotes crammed in to rationalize the price. And it costs just enough SVB to force you to buy more premium currency than you need if the bundle's all you're interested in.

That all felt grimy enough to me already, especially when players have noted that Skate 3 had an Isaac Clarke skin that only cost the amount of time it took to enter a cheat code—and that one wasn't cardboard. But it became particularly egregious when I fired up Skate myself and ran into repeated crashes for 40 minutes before I could check the in-game store.

After making my character—I was starting a new account—the initial load into the tutorial took an unsettling amount of time. After a solid two minutes of watching the kickflipping load screen graphic, I was finally dropped into the world, where I proved myself worthy of an initial skateboard with some basic movement and climbing.

The Issac Clarke skin was FREE in Skate 3 and looked better. from r/SkateEA

I approached the glowing purple circle to trigger the cutscene where I'd be granted my fated implement for inevitable grinds and flips… and then the game locked up for forty seconds and crashed out with a memory error.

I relaunched. Another lengthy tutorial load. Another run through the basic movement lesson. Another attempt to claim my god-given right to skate, and another crash for my efforts. I tried validating installed files through Steam; crashed. I tried deleting EA anti-cheat files so they could be redownloaded on game startup, a fix I'd used elsewhere; still crashed.

The solution I found after browsing the many threads from users experiencing similar issues was—inexplicably—disabling crossplay. If you're wondering why that would produce memory errors during cutscene transitions, your guess is as good as mine.

Monetization is the devil's bargain we suffer in exchange for free-to-play games; all of us understand that. But I think we can all agree that if you're going to use your game as a trough for cosmetic slurry, you should at least wait until it's deep enough into early access that its default settings don't leave the game unplayable.

Then again, if EA's going to be looking down the barrel of $20 billion in leveraged buyout debt, we probably shouldn't expect anything else.

The new Skate game has been a bit of a weird one—EA's first free-to-play foray with the series, one that currently sits at a 66% 'Mixed' rating on Steam. No Steam Deck compatibility thanks to Easy Anti-Cheat and a subpar open world seem to be the biggest culprits, according to the 33,000 user reviews. 'Fun but bland' is certainly the vibe I'm getting.

Yet, despite all that, the game has managed to reel in over 15 million players in the three weeks since its release.

Part of that will, of course, be down to the price tag—or lack thereof. But also, it seems that folk are simply hungry for another good-ass skating game. While Skate's launch day was fairly low-key with around 30,000 concurrent users according to SteamDB, that skyrocketed by an extra 100,000 over its first weekend to hit an all-time peak of 134,901 players. It's tapered out in the weeks since, but is still bringing in a pretty respectable 50,000 to 80,000 players each day.

That'll be sure to continue as the game launches its first season today—introducing new skateable areas, cosmetics, as well as additional tasks and challenges. There's also a handful of quality-of-life improvements—general upgrades in stability, "enhanced skater creation and customisation," as well as work on "core gameplay responsiveness and balance," according to a blog post on the game's Steam page.

It'll be interesting to see how many of these fixes address the most pressing issues players are having. Some of the negative reviews on Steam are pretty damning, after all. "This game kinda feels like buying a skateboard from Walmart," one wrote. "Like yeah, it looks the part, but the soul's missing., It technically works, but the quality's off, the vibe's watered down, and you can tell it wasn't built by people who live it."

Even your good ol' thumbs-up reviews seem to come with a heap of caveats. "Soulless and corporate but the skating feels good," one positive review wrote. "Hopefully this grows into a more engaging experience." Another wrote: "Barely passable just because the main mechanics are there and they're as fun as ever, but man does this game feel very lackluster compared to Skate 2 and Skate 3 when it comes down to just how much is there left to do."

In early 2022 EA announced what many had expected for a while: it was ending its licensing deal with FIFA, the world football governing body, and re-branding its incredibly successful FIFA series as EA Sports FC. At the time EA was at least gracious towards its former partner, but FIFA wasn't in any mood to play nice.

"I can assure you that the only authentic, real game that has the FIFA name will be the best one available for gamers and football fans," thundered FIFA president Gianni Infantino at the time. "The FIFA name is the only global, original title. FIFA 23, FIFA 24, FIFA 25 and FIFA 26, and so on—the constant is the FIFA name and it will remain forever and remain THE BEST."

As proof that it was taking the breakup well, that year FIFA's tie-in game for the World Cup was some Roblox nonsense featuring… bowling.

I always thought the most logical next step for FIFA would be partnering with Konami's eFootball, which remains the most likely competitor to EA Sports FC (even if it's currently in the doldrums). But an actual football game featuring actual 11-a-side matches with actual clubs and players? That's far too straightforward for FIFA, which has now announced its next game is called FIFA Heroes and stars a bunch of animal mascots.

Always a good sign when an announcement features absolutely no game footage. The press release says this is "an arcade fast 5-a-side football title with fantasy flair set across the globe" and, uh-oh, it sounds like they'll be trying to do a Fortnite with the player characters: look forward to "your favourite fictional characters from iconic TV shows and films."

Speaking as a football fan, no-one gives a toss about the FIFA mascots (unless it's Wolfie beating up the Bristol City Pigs). You want to play as Ronaldo, Mbappe, Bellingham, and so on: I'm mystified as to why FIFA would go for cartoon mascots when the sport has so many icons, contemporary and historical, ready to go.

But perhaps I'm being a little harsh. This is clearly not intended as a competitor to EA Sports FC, and the way the press release talks about the mascots having "super abilities and special moves" just makes me think of the Mario Strikers series (which is variable but boasts some great entries). Get ready for some buzzwords:

"With FIFA Heroes, fans can create a multiverse team: mixing their treasured fictional heroes, favourite players, and our own mascots," says Christian Volk, director of gaming and esports at FIFA. "We're offering the love of football to a new generation, while rekindling the nostalgia and fun for families and older players who’ve grown up with FIFA. FIFA Heroes fits seamlessly into our digital football portfolio under the FIFAe umbrella, adding another strong pillar to our fast-growing gaming ecosystem."

Whatever the hell that means. FIFA Heroes will also feature a tie-in to next year's World Cup, and does promise "football legends" down the line, so we'll see how that shakes out.

"With FIFA Heroes, we set out to capture what actually makes football so compelling: speed, drama, and rivalry," says Kyle Joyce, director of publisher Solace. "Football has a unique way of bringing people together, and this game is our way of putting that love of the sport into play.”

Sadly, our man Gianni Infantino does not provide a quote on FIFA Heroes, though I'm sure he remains bullish. The good news for PC players? FIFA Heroes is currently only announced for console and mobile. Sad for us to miss out on "THE BEST" of course: but maybe it's for the best.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is true of many long-running franchises, but nowhere is it more obvious than in EA FC. EA Sports FC 26, though, feels like a game finally willing to back up its yearly price tag. It doesn’t rip everything up, but a series of smart changes and a few long-overdue tweaks make this the most confident, rewarding entry the series has had in years.

It's been a complicated couple of years for the sports game formally known as FIFA. EA Sports has been making football games since 1993's FIFA International Soccer, but FIFA and EA had a falling out in 2023 which led to EA striking out on its own with EA Sports FC 24. It was a strong entry, but felt incremental. EA Sports FC 24 felt like a FIFA game, rather than a significant step forwards.

Fast forward a couple of years and EA Sports FC still feels like a FIFA game. If that irks you, you can stop reading now, it's okay; FC 26 is a football game for better or worse and there's a good chance you'll already know whether you want to buy it. If you hate football, nothing here is going to convince you. Yet, FC 26 knows what players want and delivers it with style. The pacing is sharper, new and subtly improved animations give matches a real sense of weight, and the subtle tweaks across Career and Ultimate Team mean there’s a lot here to pull eager fans back in. FC 26's improvements still feel incremental, though, and the loss of the 3v3 Volta mode stings, but it's competently made—not quite a reinvention of the wheel, it's just polishing the hubcaps.

The most noticeable shift for the game is that there are two different types of football now. Competitive, which is the standard FIFA/EA FC style full of right-stick trick flicking and sweaty goals, and Authentic mode, which is slower and a bit more thoughtful.

Switching the dial to Authentic reshapes the game with a few new features that are specifically called out: more life-like defending from AI teammates, re-tuned pacing of skill moves, authentic player reactions to in-game situations, increased influence of physics on ball movement, and realistic impact of fatigue on performance. In play, the key thing to take away is that when you're kicking about in Authentic mode the game slows right down and you have to think a bit smarter to get the win. There's less sprinting, a bit more of a focus on positioning and occasionally players will just make an error, looking a bit wobbly.

Competitive Environment

I'm pretty average at EA Sports FC and I was pretty average at FIFA before that, but in Competitive mode scoring against the AI is as easy as running it toward the goal, flicking the right stick to roll the ball gently to the side and then tapping it past the keeper.

In Authentic, it can often be a more realistic scoreline, scoring a goal or two, and I actually thought the six minute matches that have long been the default for EA's football games were a little too short, with three minutes for each half barely leaving me with enough time for a proper attack. As a result, most matches would end in mere 1-0 and 2-0 scores instead of the 10-0 drubbings I was handing out in the game's competitive mode.

The matches I've played with Authentic are pulse pounding—it feels like a truly revolutionary step from a series that, if I'm honest, hasn't done too much in the way of innovation over the last few years. This is closer pace-wise to the old Pro Evolution Soccer games, and it makes an attacking build-up so rewarding it feels like the best way to play against the AI.

The catch is that Authentic can only be played in the single player matches like Kick Off and the career modes. Ultimate Team and the other online offerings can only be played with the Competitive preset. This sucks for Ultimate Team's club battles, because you can only play it in Competitive. I like the slower. sim-y pace of Authentic, and it's a shame that after offering it up to players EA are hiding it away.

Regardless, these two different presets exist side by side and it seems like EA has finally come up with a way to relentlessly poke and prod the competitive side of the game for the hardcore players while preserving a more chill experience for those that just want to play the career modes. We'll see how it goes. In the time since I started reviewing the game a patch has dropped changing the way defenders react and tweaking how players move with the ball.

These patches will continue throughout the year, so the EA FC 26 that you can play online in six months is going to be entirely different to the one you can play now. If the plan is for Authentic to feel like the same experience throughout these changes, it's easy to see how it could capture the imagination of fans that are left cold by the festival of Ultimate Team.

Competitive mode is similar enough to previous games that it doesn't feel worth examining to the same degree. However, I do want to call out that the AI of both your team and their opponents is significantly smarter. When defending, the squad holds its tactical shape a lot better; when pushing forwards, there was always an attacker ready for my pass as I moved up; and goalkeepers collect balls efficiently. In both styles of play, movement feels fluid and responsive with the ball stuck to your feet until you clatter into a defender. In Competitive you can really take advantage of this, clamping down on the trigger to sprint and bypassing the enemy team with ease. Oh, and you can score from headers reliably again without having literal giants on your team. That's nearly worth the price of admission alone.

Micro management

Sadly, while the football really is tremendous, FC 26 doesn't quite stick the landing when it comes to the Manager mode. There's a lot of new content here: the live manager hub asks you to achieve some pretty lofty historical challenges to win new kits and the classic mode feels fully fleshed out, but it's very lightweight and, sorry but it's true, quite annoying to play when you're off the pitch.

Fortunately, there's some pleasing randomness here: a training injury ruled out both my goalkeeper Areola and defender Kyle Walker-Peters before a key game, leaving me to rely on my terrible back-up keeper. The only way to avoid getting battered was to ensure the ball never made it near the net and so we parked the bus to leave my amateur goaltender unbothered and in his lane. After the match he sent me an email thanking me for giving him a chance in a key cup match. I guess he hadn't noticed Areola laying face down on the field earlier that day.

But, the user interface is seriously lacking. Reading that email in the game's Manager career mode was infuriating, as you try to navigate an in-game email client with sticks and triggers instead of the mouse and keyboard sitting right in front of you. Try to play the game on your keyboard, which I'd advise heavily against, and you get to the home screen of the career not by clicking on the giant home icon but by pressing the W key.

Negotiating to buy players is also exasperating as there's just so much guesswork. Offer to buy someone and you're asked to make a random bid. If you've scouted them before, you'll know the player's worth, but try to go a little lower and the other manager will go off in a huff and you won't be able to hire him at all. Buy a player and you're scored on it, ranked from between an A to an F on how well you managed to guess at whatever algorithm the game is using to decide whether I can put Scott McTominay in a West Ham shirt this season or not.

I can forgive FC 26 a lot of these errors just because of how good it looks. From the pre-match introductions all the way to on-pitch overlays, playing FC 26 feels like you're watching a cohesive TV broadcast. Getting stuck into a season full of West Ham matches means I got to see the digitised London Stadium a whole bunch, and it feels just like the real deal.

Animations look good, celebrations look good. But there are some weird face captures: I chose to play as Graham Potter and FC 26's weird little homunculus version of the man will haunt my dreams forever—but it doesn't need to look like real life, it just captures the vibe. There's not a lot that EA FC can do as a series to meaningfully improve its graphics right now, but it looks the part and is a joy on a 4K monitor where you can notice all of the little details.

Ultimate power

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the game seems designed to funnel you towards Ultimate Team. If you're unfamiliar with Ultimate Team, it's basically the football-themed Pachinko machine that is the equivalent of the Panini sticker books of my youth—except they release new stickers every single week and you can never fill the book.

Ultimate Team is gambling, it's always been gambling, but despite the fact gamers have now agreed that we don't like loot boxes, it's always gotten a pass. It's better here than it used to be: I've gotten a few kick-ass players without spending a penny, but the spectre of pay to win—the idea that you could have a better team and potentially win more matches if you were only willing to cough up a little cash—is ever present and refuses to be exorcised. It's less grindy this year, you'll get rewards faster, but the flip side is that in an attempt to flatten the powercurve those rewards are actually a little worse, meaning if you want to have the best time possible in the shortest timeframe, it's still worth dropping some cash.

Play Ultimate Team and you should expect weird and wonderful kits and a pace of play more similar to basketball (with the same scorelines) as stamina just doesn't seem to have any impact whatsoever. It's fast and frantic and honestly pretty good fun, but it's nonsensical, with the end of each match being a welcome breather as you can take a second to recover from the relentless pressure.

There's plenty of game here, too much to fit into one review, but I tend to grimace whenever I have to do anything except play football because everything takes too long and makes you faff too much. But outside of its wonky menu UI, FC 26 feels like the strongest evolutionary step EA has taken with its big franchise in years. It's still football, but it's the beautiful game at its best. Top notch graphics, thoughtful improvements and the bold step of splitting the entire game in two to try and appease two different fanbases has made FC 26 feel like a real contender.

Rematch is kicking off its first season post-launch, which means all sorts of cosmetics, and a nice helping of pretty arenas to get "Good Job!" spammed at you in. To celebrate, Sloclap's made the game free to play for a long weekend—or until September 29—on Steam. There's also a 20% discount until the same date.

Which means new blood and a livelier matchmaking queue. And that puts me in a precarious situation, folks, because Hades 2 is also out and I'm very interested in that as well. Sometimes the games I'm torn between are very similar; this is not one of those times.

As for the nitty-gritty balance changes: The Ippy Slide (a quite frankly horsecrap option that let dribblers clown on defenders without much counterplay) is dead and buried, and SloClap's "reduced how quickly players can snap to the ball while using extra effort" so that volleys are a smidge weaker.

There's also a 3v3 ranked matchmaking mode—though I'm not entirely sure this was the play. There's no current option to queue for both 3v3s and 5v5s at the same time, meaning you're gonna be splitting your playerbase in two.

Besides, I popped in for a couple of 3v3 ranked matches, and I'm not convinced we needed this thing. Sure, there's more room for individual skill expression, but sometimes that skill expression just involves passing the ball in a triangle while you're one up, since your opponents have a mathematically un-counterable amount of defenders to stop you doing just that.

Fundamental Problem with 3v3 Ranked from r/Rematch

I can think of a couple solutions to this—making it the first to two/three goals is one, but I also reckon you could stand to make the arena a touch smaller. That might be a tall ask given how the (cool as ever) background screens work, but as it stands 3v3 feels dead in the water unless you just, like, really hate passing to people.

Still, given the game's free until Tuesday? This is a solid time to get stuck back in. Unless you're helping Melinoë exact her revenge in the underworld, in which case you'll need to clone yourself so you can play both games as much as you want to. Maybe a third clone for like, doing dishes. And a fourth one for seeing friends. Can games stop coming out for a bit, please?

To paraphrase French-Algerian thinker Albert Camus: One must imagine the coin flipper happy.

In Unfair Flips, released on Steam today by developer Heather Flowers, you have a coin and a button. The button flips the coin. To win, you have to flip ten heads in a row.

Initially, you only have a 20% chance of flipping heads. This is, as the name suggests, unfair.

It will likely take thousands of flips, and you'll have to manually click for each one. Thankfully, flipping heads rewards you with money. With that money, you can purchase upgrades, increasing the coin's value, your flip speed, your cash combo multiplier, and—crucially—increasing your chance of flipping heads.

As the game itself tells you, "this is the entire game." You flip, and then you upgrade your flips, and then you flip until you win. But Unfair Flips isn't really about flipping heads, or incrementally upgrading your odds and income, or stacking combo multipliers for a jolt of post-Balatro dopamine.

Unfair Flips is a game about negotiating the temptations of superstition.

It's a game about the human mind's instinctive drive to find meaning where there is none—to assign some special significance to when a coin does or does not land how we'd like. It's a game about developing a faint worry that you'll anger the coin if you upgrade it in the middle of a hot streak. It's a game about debating with yourself whether a coin landing tails side up a full 18 times in a row is a quirk of chance or proof of sinister intent.

It's a game about getting four heads in a row despite only having a 30% heads chance, and wondering if you're doing something right. And then laughing to yourself, because of course you can't be doing something right. There's nothing to do wrong. There's only probability.

Right?

It's possible that, despite its insistence on probability's merciless and inviolable truth, Unfair Flips is engaging in trickery—that there are invisible manipulations guiding the endless procession of Tails, Tails, Tails, Heads, Tails along a deliberately maddening contour.

I have no way of knowing, and none of the expertise necessary to prove one way or the other. I'm content to flip with the belief that 20% is 20%.

It took me 1,832 flips.

Unfair Flips is available on Steam now. It costs $2 USD.

After the Skate series was left alone for 15 years, I was optimistic that the fourth game would breathe new life into it. However, if you also fell into this trap and you're yet to delve into its free-to-play addition,"skate.", I think you should lower your expectations now. It's certainly a skateboarding game, and it has decent bones to grow into something better, but as it currently stands in early access it feels half-baked, and could seriously improve some areas before it's held to the same standard as the series is known for.

Being on your board is fun, which is the most important gold star a game about skateboarding can really receive. It's also quite challenging to mess that part up. Cruising around street-skating, pulling off curb grinds and flip tricks is easily the best part, and is what I spent a lot of my time doing. After all, that's what this whole experience is about. There is a significant "one more run" mentality, which led to a number of hours poured into runs of tricks I'm still yet to perfect.

The runs you pick up around the map are challenging, but never become frustrating. When you first head out, these are valuable in teaching you how to make the most of each area, and if you are entirely new to the series, they help in showing you the ropes. The tricks you can pull off and how you move around on your board play entirely the same as in the previous Skate games too, so you'll easily find your footing after some warmups if you're a fan already.

But, the enjoyment of cruising around is interrupted often by the voiceover telling you where to go and what to do. Which happens a lot, and I mean a lot. The general "guidance" (although it definitely feels more like instruction: you can't go anywhere without being told about a nearby challenge) quickly becomes grating and takes away from what is actually enjoyable about the game.

What I loved so much about previous Skate games was that you were free to just roll around wherever you wanted and at your own pace. There were challenges you could complete but you didn't have to race to them, and it was the sort of game you could load up and just mindlessly play for a few hours. The newest installment lacks this freedom, and instead offers something that feels far too hand-holdy and takes away the raw fun of learning to (virtually) skateboard.

You're also expected to do a surprising amount of not-skating. At the very start of the game you're guided to a section which is essentially a tutorial for throwing yourself off tall buildings. Where Skate fanatics would expect Hall of Meat, the series' infamous game mode that shows you each bone you've broken in your body and rewarding you points for how intense your slam was, an entirely new stunt system has been introduced. It's explained that "thanks to new AI technology" each skater has been programmed to never feel any pain. Which explains why you can essentially fling yourself off skyscrapers and dive into dumpsters, broken structures, or just straight into the concrete if you need a quick way down.

I'm not super pumped about this feature and actively avoid it where I can. It feels like a huge gimmick and takes away from the actual skateboarding, and the whole novelty of having to climb a building just to throw yourself off it for some points loses any sort of charm it had in the first place incredibly quickly.

Its setting, San Vansterdam or 'San Van' as it's referred to throughout the game, doesn't feel particularly lively either. It's a city made for skaters which, sure, is great in principle. But there's so much empty space and an extreme lack of NPC's which make it feel desolate. The cars on the road are simply there for effect too, since you can't skitch them, and multiple areas require building your own parks by dropping in ramps and rails because there's not much else to do outside of the challenges.

NPC interactions were never a big part of Skate games, but they helped bring the world to life. There was nothing quite like practising a trick for hours on end only to finally get your run flawless before a pedestrian walks directly in front of your skateboard and starts shouting at you. The world isn't meant to like skateboarding, and I know San Van has been created as a safe haven for skaters everywhere, but I actually miss being a mild inconvenience to innocent bystanders, or being chased out of a shopping mall by a cop.

Other players make up the entirety of other people you see around San Van, but even then you can never really get in anyone's way. You phase through them, and the only sense of interaction you have is through emotes unlocked through loot boxes and phrases like "follow me" and "hi" which don't help create much of a community spirit. With that being said, I know additional co-op features are being added in the hopefully near future, which should make the experience a lot better.

As a result of all of this, Skate doesn't feel like it was made by passionate skateboarders. It feels more like a bunch of corporate folk brought up skating in a boardroom meeting and this is the product of that. In an attempt to appeal to a younger generation, evident by the Fortnite-esque aesthetics and the emphasis on clumsy stunts and cheesy dialogue, the game has completely detached itself from the target audience. Hopefully as it changes throughout early access it'll find itself a bit more, but for now, it's just a game in which you skate rather than being the next Skate game we were so desperate for.

If you're a gamer of a certain vintage, there's a good chance that your idea of cool looks like cel-shaded graffiti artists doing roller blading tricks in a futuristic cityscape where nothing isn't neon. Sanctified by Jet Set Radio, that visual lineage continues in the work of creators like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk developer Team Reptile, which just revealed its next entry in stunt-centric Y2K futurism.

It's called Hyperfunk, and Team Reptile says it's "2 seconds per second of evolved funkstyle." Based purely on Steam page description, the developer has achieved a 100% funkstyle increase since Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I don't know if they do Nobel prizes for that kind of thing, but I think they should consider it.

If you don't find "evolved funkstyle" a particularly informative bit of phraseology, let me put it in more digestible terms. Team Reptile says Hyperfunk is "an extreme trick and graffiti game from a bright future" where graffiti crews battle "with style and ideology of how to interpret this new world."

To do that, they need to go fast. To go fast, they need to do tricks for boostpack energy. More combo, more speed. It's simple science. And judging from the Hyperfunk teaser embedded above, it seems like properly applying that science lets you achieve a high enough combo state where your skull erupts in a pillar of transcendental light that inverts the color of the world around you in a sort of trick-fueled hyperconsciousness. I think that's good!

Unlike Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, which relied on the impressive expertise of SlopCrew modders for multiplayer gameplay, Hyperfunk will feature built in online multiplayer where you can "meet random online players in the Hyper"—that's the setting's collective metaverse, I'm led to believe—"or hang out online with your friends in the streets."

In short: Looks sick, can't wait.

Hyperfunk doesn't have a release date yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam now.

The contemporary football landscape has one thing in greater abundance than ever before: scrutiny. The sport is now covered 24 hours a day, every nugget of news sliced-and-diced across every platform there is, while things like the recent transfer deadline are the subject of countless live blogs and breathless studio coverage that often amounts to praise, criticism and will he, won't he—who knows!

Then there's the actual matches, swarmed with statistics, and the players themselves, whose performances are broken down Moneyball-style. But well before Moneyball grew notoriety, videogames had been reducing sports to their starkest numbers: and in 1992, developers Paul and Oliver Collyer released their calculating, statistic-obsessed vision of the beautiful game.

The first Championship Manager wasn't a hit, but it wasn't a flop either, and follow-up Championship Manager 93 made several improvements. The Collyer brothers founded Sports Interactive in July 1994, to develop and manage what was becoming a (relative) sales success, but the game had one core piece of magic. The design of Championship Manager—the focus on statistics, the simple-if-elegant visual style, and the authentic link to the real-world sport—was perfect for annual entries and updates. Football has seasons, rolling competitions, constant player flux, and regular iterations of Championship Manager could capture all of this change and intrigue that fans live for.

New Formation

Fast-forward over three decades and everything around football has changed almost beyond recognition, but over that time, Championship Manager kept pace with it. Re-named Football Manager in 2004 after a publisher split the series, by then, was already one of gaming's most reliable annualised sports franchises, constantly iterating but with that management fantasy always at the heart. The thing about football, of course, is that it can always surprise you.

On February 7, 2025, following two prior delays, Football Manager 2025 was cancelled. Sports Interactive offered the rather fuzzy rationale that "the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be."

Six months later and SI studio head Miles Jacobson is being a little more forthright. "If we had released FM25 in the state that it was in, it wouldn't have been good value for money and it would have damaged us forever," Jacobson recently told the BBC. "It's the most expensive decision we've ever made."

Jacobson may have offered up a mea culpa but, as popular FM content creator Clayts says, "It would be nice to have things explained in more detail, what specifically wasn’t ready, how confident they are heading into a new game etc."

FM26 will, per SI, feature a new game engine, a new UI, and improved graphics. But the pre-cancellation FM25 was also supposed to be the "biggest technical and visual advancement for a generation," so expectations are sky high.

Squeaky bum time

"Everything about the FM25 lead up was about how it was going to be a huge step forward with Unity," says Clayts, and the most highly anticipated change is to the game’s match engine. The FM franchise has a loyal and enthusiastic fanbase, but you don’t have to look far to find critics of the game’s aging approach to simulating the on-pitch action, whether that centres on what it’s actually taking account of behind-the-scenes or how it communicates the salient info to wannabe Guardiolas like myself and others, who feel a sheer exuberance in attempting to master the profundities of football’s tactical side.

Following FM25’s cancellation, fans turned coders even went as far as creating their own mods of FM24’s match engine, with adaptations to ball physics, opposition AI decision making and general lighting at the forefront of their experiments. These match engine tweaks have been, for the most part, a roaring success, with notable FM content creators filling the cancellation’s gap by promoting the best mods.

"This is impressive." says @RishiJParmer in the comments of the below Zealand video where he demonstrates the XYZ mod. "I could never change back," said @whichva.

Tiki Taka

This particular mod brought welcome alterations to players’ conduct on the pitch: one New Zealand viewer mentions a time where Pau Torres, a centre-back, scored an audacious bicycle kick as a result of applying the mod—in SI’s recent Matchday First Look for FM26, welcome minor details like these were spotted with what appeared to be Dominic Calvert-Lewin having a similar bicycle-kick effort well saved by the goalkeeper.

What matters is that on-pitch players are making decisions that make sense based on what's happening. I tend to play using the classic 2D camera angle and, like fellow managers, have reached boiling point at times watching my bewildered full-back throw the ball straight to the opposition for the third time in a game.

Other minor details include Premier League arenas like Bournemouth’s Vitality Stadium and Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, alongside noticeable changes to the nets’ visual effects in-game.

The most eye-catching reveal was, of course, the brand-new match engine graphics, which are a spectacular leap beyond FM24 and certainly seem to justify the shift to Unity.

But looks are looks. After almost two years of FM24, the game can feel predictable and repetitive, hence fans flocking to a mod that changes-up what's happening in the background. The dream for FM26? A match engine that looks this good but also captures a little more of that edge-of-the-seat essence of football in real life, where anything can happen—Garnacho’s brilliant bicycle kick vs Everton, Che Adams’ tremendous halfway-line effort vs Empoli… that’s what is missing. The mod may go too far in some respects but, if SI can deliver a match engine that captures even a tenth of this euphoric unpredictability, it will surely make the wait for FM26 worth it.

Whatever changes are coming, players are united in hoping SI will make transformative adaptations to the match engine. Although, after such a long wait, not everyone’s expectations are so lofty. "Honestly," says Clayts, "I’m just hoping for a polished game that works with everything that they originally promised for [FM] 25, perhaps one or two advancements on top of that."

The match engine may be the main focus, but there are other major footballing reasons for excitement, not least SI’s announcement of their partnership with the Premier League. Within the metaphorical metaverse that aligns gaming and sports, the Premier League—arguably the greatest football league in the world—is the licence of all licences. One so precious that only EA Sports, with their FC (formerly FIFA) series, has equal bragging rights.

The potential this particular licence holds for the football manager fantasy is massive: the drama, politics and razzmatazz of management at the sharpest end. The potential of this tie-up may not be felt to the full in FM26 but could transform aspects of how the series approaches management: being a Premier League manager in 2025 is a whole different ballgame to even 20 years ago. Another intriguing benefit of this partnership is the flexibility and endless possibilities of ‘Road to Glory’ saves for FM players, with seven separate leagues in the English football pyramid now fully licenced; The Stattos will be salivating.

Interestingly enough, one of the FM25 features that didn't work out was replacing email inboxes with WhatsApp-style messaging: Jacobson says "that system didn't work", but that doesn't mean it wouldn't work as a smaller part of something else.

Finally, the most genuinely new element of FM26: the introduction of women's football. This was due in FM25 and has been a long time coming, not least because SI built a new player database and did motion-capture from scratch.

The last decade has seen women's football achieve greater visibility than ever before and, in England at least, the huge success of the Lionesses has attracted millions of new fans—in fact, the quarter-final stage of the recent Women’s EURO saw a record-breaking number of spectators. SI wasn't always so keen on adding the women's game for commercial reasons but, then, it turns out we can probably thank the Lionesses for changing that too:

"At an event, some of the Lionesses came and told me that it would never be commercially viable unless people like us got behind it," recalls Jacobson.

The women's game will be a whole new world for Football Manager aficionados and, while I'm sure there will be grumbles from the usual suspects, surely most will, at least, be curious to see how FM26 simulates it. Different statistical priorities, a different pace, different tactics: in this aspect, at least, FM26 will offer something way beyond the usual.

Play to the last

Some community hopes may, for now, remain fantasy football. But you'd hope FM26 would indicate where the future lies with things like mid-season updates, given things like that Premier League tie-in: imagine a regular patch offering players the chance to unpick that month’s knottiest problems, whether that’s digging one of the newly-promoted sides out of a rut in their crucial, final games, or winning a Hail Mary trophy at Spurs and getting the sack.

FM26 will, in large part, be an iterative entry in an iterative series: but it faces more scrutiny, and higher expectations, than the series has had in a long time. "So much pressure on FM26 now, if it’s a disaster they’re in big trouble." said @96LeedsAlex on X, in response to @DoctorBenjy’s tweet breaking down Miles Jacobson’s recent extensive interviews.

The pressure on SI cooled upon August’s FM26 teaser video, with Football Manager fanatics raving with excitement: "This means everything," said @htomufc, amidst a stirring sea of "Yessss" replies to SI’s tweet.

Football Manager and Sports Interactive being up against it almost tempts you towards clichés about a game of two halves, and wondering whether they can do it on a cold, wet and rainy night in Stoke. That’s fine: football does, too, whilst heckling fans on social media ask the latter question of Messi almost constantly.

Beyond the cliches, Football Manager's granular vision of this vast sport has always been weirdly prescient about the way football was and is going, and in some ways has even influenced it. You don't lose that kind of talent overnight. But as we all know: you're only as good as your next result.

Around seven years ago now, I got my first taste of Clap Hanz's excellent Everybody's Golf series. I picked up the 2017 game pretty cheap, for reasons I'm not quite sure of—I've never really played or enjoyed sports games, I don't care for golf, and I'd never even heard of the series prior to this purchase.

Maybe it was the promise of anime models that looked like they'd been ripped out of a 2000s online rhythm game or sheer summer boredom, but I'm glad my silly little brain made that decision. Everybody's Golf is an excellent game, and I loved the 2017 version's open courses that I could drive a cart around with my own wee custom character. Also, you know, the actual golfing part was surprisingly good with tight physics and a steep but fairly intuitive learning curve.

It's why I was especially excited to discover that the series was going to be making its PC debut with Everybody's Golf Hot Shots. It's exclusively been a PlayStation thing since the first game released in 1997—except for the one game that made its way to mobile in Japan.

What I wasn't so excited about was the fact Clap Hanz is no longer at the helm. Hot Shots instead has been tackled by developer Hyde, behind games like Digimon Survive and Tamagotchi Plaza.

Do I think it lives up to almost 30 years of Clap Hanz spectacles? Not quite, though I have been really enjoying my time with it. I just wish everyone would shut the fuck up for more than two seconds.

The good stuff outta the way first: I kinda dig how retro-feeling Hot Shots is. Everything is freaking locked, and you have to play through the game's various modes to unlock new characters, balls, golf clubs, and caddies. Is the grind a little tedious? It can be—especially when you realise that generic abilities like using higher-quality clubs and spin power mode are unlocked on a per-character basis with loyalty levels.

But for singleplayer offerings, Hot Shots has a lot going for it. I can play through an assortment of courses in Challenge Mode and face off against characters to then go ahead and unlock them in World Tour, complete with some light visual novel cutscenes.

There's even a Mario Party-style game mode with Wacky Golf where I can chuck debuffs on my opponent while making my own shots far easier to take. I haven't spent too much time in this mode, but I can imagine getting stuck into it with a couple pals.

And while I certainly raised an eyebrow initially at the little note at the bottom of the Steam page saying Hyde was using generative AI for its trees and leaves textures, former GameXplain host (now of Good Vibes Gaming) Jon Cartwright reckons the developer has been a little overcautious with its disclaimers.

But good grief, nobody in this game knows how to let a conversation sit for more than two seconds. God forbid any air is left without someone's gums flapping on the goddamn fairway. And all of this is coming from a self-professed chronic yapper.

Hot Shots starts me off with two golfers Alie and Mizuki, and caddy Hannah. I picked Alie for my first try in Challenge Mode, with Hannah tagging along for the ride with no other options available to me.

Here's what happens approximately every other second:

• "I'm rooting for you, go get 'em Alie!"
• "You can totally count on me!"
• "Yay!"
• "You got this, girly!"
• "Go ball!"
• "Deep breaths, girly!"

It's exhausting. Things only got worse when I unlocked access to German caddy Hugh—whose voice actor I am not entirely convinced comes from Deutschland. If I have to hear "to the right, ja?" one more time, I fear I might crash out.

Do people on real golf courses chat this much? How do they get any actual golf done? How am I supposed to swing my club while dancing around yelling "yay, ball!" for the millionth time? It certainly doesn't help that each character only seems to have half a dozen voice lines to pluck from for every situation, which means I'm forced to hear the same incessant yapping multiple times even in a 9-hole outing.

It's a small peeve, I know, but one that has really grated on me in my initial hours with Hot Shots and sullied what has otherwise been a surprisingly enjoyable time. I honestly wasn't sure I'd appreciate a non-Clap Hanz take on the game after the developer has been at the helm for so long, but Hyde has done a decent enough job that I'll let it slide.

If the studio can take an axe to the voice line frequency ASAP I'll be much happier for it before some poor caddy's head ends up getting shoved down a tornado hole.

PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter said last year that Skate, the reboot of EA's long-in-the-tooth skateboarding series, would "frontside pop shuvit" into early access in 2025. This annoyed me slightly, as he knew it would, because I didn't know what a frontside pop shuvit is, or even if it was just something he made up to mess with me. Whatever the case (I never looked it up, let me preserve a little mystery in the world), he was correct: It is now 2025, and EA has announced that Skate is set to launch into early access on September 16.

“Skate is not just a return, it’s a complete evolution of the franchise that’s built to last," executive producer Mike McCartney said. "Our goal with Skate is to capture the freedom, creative expression and community of skateboarding, and share it with as many people as possible. From day one, our priority has been to honor the legacy of the franchise while pushing it into a bold new future—one built in partnership with our players."

Set in the "massive open world" of San Vansterdam, with four unique neighborhoods offering their own "distinct vibe and challenges," Skate will feature competitive and co-op multiplayer, with full cross-platform and cross-progression support. "Off-board controls" will let players "roam, climb, and find epic new spots" to skate, which can be further customized with the Quick Drop feature that enables ramps, rails, benches, and other objects to be placed anywhere in the world.

It's also free, which is nice.

"From day one, we’ve aimed to create an open, welcoming space shaped by players," Skate head of creative Jeff Seamster said. "We’ve built this game alongside our community—listening, learning and evolving together. Whether you’re a seasoned skater or just dropped in, skate. is a place to express yourself, connect and grow. No gatekeepers, no barriers—just a city built for skating and a community that keeps it alive. Early Access is a huge milestone in that journey, and we’re hyped to keep growing San Vansterdam with our crew around the world."

Skate will be available for PC on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Every year since at least 1826, hundreds of questionably-hinged individuals from around the globe gather at Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire to enjoy the privilege of throwing themselves down a steep slope to chase a rolling wheel of Double Gloucester cheese. Competitors risk any number of bodily injuries, as the annually overtaxed emergency medical services of the region will tell you.

If, like me, you've been faintly, distantly jealous of those cheese-crazed tumblers and their yearly submission to gravity's bone-shattering whims in hopes of claiming praise and prize (the prize is cheese), I have great news: There's a game for that now, and it won't cost you any money. Or fractures.

Cheese Rolling launched just two days ago. In it, you play as one of up to eight hapless Britons. Said hapless Britons are perched atop a hillside. There is a cheese wheel there, and it is already rolling, and you must grab it first to win.

What follows is a physics-based tangle of flailing, flopping peasantry. You have just enough control over your character's movement to trick yourself into believing you're improving at the sacred art of cheese rolling, only to watch as you—and everyone else—reach a high enough velocity that you overshoot the cheese wheel and end up at the bottom in a frantic pile trying to be the first to writhe out of the mass.

As is becoming a standard for physics-based chaos simulators, Cheese Rolling has proximity chat. I could only find one other person online while I was playing, but that meant I could clearly hear his fading wail of "Fuck" as he narrowly missed the cheese and bounced impotently into the misted distance.

Luckily, there's a more than adequate singleplayer mode for anyone who wants to get in early and master your technique. For reasons we may never be able to explain, Cheese Rolling doesn't have much of a following yet. If you ever hoped to secure your place as a cheese-chasing legend, now's your chance.

Cheese Rolling is available now on Steam.

For years, one of the most spiritually potent images on the internet was Multi-Track Drifting: It's a pair of double-page splash panels from the doujin parody manga Densha de D, depicting with mythic intensity a singular moment of locomotive stuntcraft. During a virtual preview event, developer Undercoders said it's channeling that same spirit of train stunt spectacle for Denshattack, a game where you can do sick Tony Hawk tricks with railway engines.

Multi-Track Drifting, Undercoders said, "has been in our chat since day one. That is the game."

Revealed during today's Gamescom 2025 Opening Night Live showcase, Denshattack—its developers say—is a traditional shonen anime story. Except instead of doing traditional shonen anime stuff like fistfighting as a moral dialogue about the value of friendship, you're doing elaborate stunt routines with locomotives in a post-apocalyptic Japan where charismatic gangs engage in trick-based conflict across the railways abandoned by the hyper wealthy during their retreat to sealed arcology-cities.

You can do kickflips with an entire train and it looks cool as hell.

In the Denshattack reveal trailer you can see trains ramp off rail jumps, wallride, grind atop a rolling Ferris wheel that's broken free of its supports, and more—all while stringing together Pro Skater-style trick combos with flips, spins, and manuals. Undercoders said Denshattack's selection of levels, accessible through a map based on actual Japanese rail networks, encourage both exploration and replayability: Train-trick neophytes will have plenty to find, and seasoned experts will have plenty of room to perfect their railway combo lines.

Tantalized when Undercoders told press that players will be able to perform "unique train-based tricks" that "you can only do with a train," I asked the developer whether I'd be able to do a Christ Air with a locomotive. While the developer was unwilling to confirm or deny, I was told that "with rolling stock, you can do stuff." Make of that what you will, but I'm brave enough to dream.

Denshattack will launch sometime in 2026, but you can wishlist it on Steam now.

EA's Skate series was one of my childhood favourites—I'm not nearly as skateboard-obsessed as I used to be, but I was into the classics. THPS (there was a time when I thought Underground was peak fiction, don't judge me) and Skate 1 and 2 were a huge part of my childhood rotation.

Which is why I started out hyped for Skate 4 (or just "skate.") and have gradually become wearier and wearier as time has gone on. EA's latest blog, unfortunately dubbed The Grind, hasn't helped matters much.

When it comes to customisation, the blog mercifully promises that "there's a lot to unlock by simply playing the game and earning rewards" via "Rip Chips", the game's freemium currency earned by completing challenges.

But there'll also be a "skate.Pass"—we truly are just throwing out all punctuation rules, huh—and a seasonal structure, which EA plans to have on a rotation every three months. Details will be coming up in the next grind, but the new Skate'll have all the live service trimmings we've all come to loathe.

And, look—I can only complain so much, given the game will be free-to-play, but I can't help but feel like the corruptive touch of modern gaming has finally come to infest one of my favourite franchises. It's not like it'll be pay-to-win, or anything, it's a skateboarding game. But there was a time when cosmetics weren't inherently linked to cash, and we were better for it.

On the plus side, at least the music looks sick: "The soundtrack is big—like, 100 songs big. The team focused on emerging artists and threw in some deep cuts to help you discover music you may not have heard yet." The blog says you'll be able to "like" individual tracks to create your own custom playlist, and discover tracks in the game world, too. Neato.

As for when early access is coming? "We’re getting closer every day."

The multiplayer soccer game Rematch came out strong in June, despite missing one major feature: Crossplay was not enabled because of "unforeseen technical complexities." Two months later, it's still not there, but developer Sloclap says it'll be here soon.

Word of the upcoming crossplay functionality came in the notes of the second major patch for Rematch that's now available in Steam beta—although this patch, to be clear, does not include crossplay support. It does promise to fix a lot of other, more pressing problems, however, including "a number of major netcode-related issues" including tackles not registering and goalkeeper dive rollbacks causing goals to be scored when they shouldn't.

Honestly, I think that's a bigger deal than the missing netcode. Steam reviews are slipping—Rematch is wearing a "mixed" rating for the past 30 days, although its overall rating remains "mostly positive"—and players are growing increasingly frustrated with persistent desync issues that are causing all sorts of headaches. Crossplay is a pretty big deal but it won't mean much if everyone gives up on the game because the netcode just doesn't work right.

If you own Rematch, you should see the beta version of the game appear in your Steam library automatically—no having to switch to a beta branch in the game settings, which is nice. Do note, however, that progression in the beta build is separate from the main game. The beta build will also be missing a few features:

⚽ 4v4 Quick Match

⚽ Ranked

⚽ Store

⚽ Battle Pass

Assuming all goes well, Sloclap will roll the patch out to the live version of Rematch on Monday, August 18.

As for crossplay, that's coming in the next patch.

"Patch 3 should hopefully arrive by the end of August, and will fix some remaining known issues, and importantly introduce Crossplay to the game (at last!)," Sloclap wrote. "Some gameplay tweaks might also be introduced in Patch 3 (looking at you, Ippy Slide), but that’s still to be confirmed. More news very soon!"

The full patch notes for this Rematch patch are below:

Matches / Core Gameplay Improvements

Major Changes / Updates

• Tackle improvements
  
  • Improved network resolution and rollback on tackles
    
  • Fixed an issue where sometimes a player preparing a shot cannot be tackled
    
• Fixed achievements unlocking (should affect Post to Post, Pro, Expert): if you already meet the requirements for one of these achievements, you will need to perform one more related action to unlock the achievement.
  
• Goalkeeper improvements
  
  • Fixed an issue where the GK catch/deflect seemed to play correctly, but was subject to rollback immediately after
    
  • Fixed a similar but different issue where a goal could be validated and scored even if the goalkeeper had caught or deflected the ball, causing a rollback
    
  • Fixed an issue where the goalkeeper would sometimes play the catch animation when diving close to another player
    
  • Invulnerable goalkeepers can no longer be tackled when doing an action moving them outside of the keeper area
    
• Added procedural animations so that GKs will now visibly move their arms to catch balls
  
• Reworked Ball Touch, to prevent the ball from appearing too far away from the player in possession.
  • Ball Touch is the visual system that animates the ball when in possession. This allows ball possession to be more clear but doesn’t impact gameplay, since in possession, the ball doesn’t have a hurtbox.
    
• Fixed incorrect ball position during Ball control, where the ball warped back and forth in a weird way during certain Ball Controls.
  
• Reduced Shake cam intensity on ball steal success
  
• Fixed an issue where Defense Mode deflects could be denied/ignored by the server
  
• Fixed an issue where the Defense Mode deflect animation would cancel itself prematurely when moving
  
• Fixed static ball not being controllable
  
• Multiple animation improvements and fixes.
  
• Reduced speed of walking animation
  
• New options have been added
  
  • Options can now be reset per tab
    
  • Added magnus sensitivity setting
    
• Fixed several crashes
  
  • Fixed a crash that could occur after a replay
    
  • Fixed a crash that could occur if the player performs a ball action in Freeplay as they join an Online Match
    
• Fixed the lag at the end of a match
  
• Fixed an issue where the custom match server region was different from the one selected in the options
  
• Fixed an issue where the ball would become impossible to interact with after someone in its possession disconnects

Minor / Misc. Fixes

• Fixed multiple issues in tutorials and workshops
  
• Fixed AI not being goalkeeper in Score tutorial
  
• Fixed the goal collision volume not taking ball radius into account correctly
  
• Fixed ball attaching itself to shoot on kickoff
  
• Fixed the Shots on Target stat in the Player Profile
  
• Fixed the ball’s behaviour in the Main Menu and in Freeplay
  
• Optimized pause menu loading time
  
• Fixed some shop items being shown in the customization menu when they shouldn't
  
• Fixed some cases where players could clip through the pitch’s walls during celebrations
  
• Fixed the Cart Wheel celebration in 3v3
  
• Players no longer teleport after the stadium entrance cutscene
  
• Fixed an issue where changing the audio language options would create unwanted button in the user interface
  
• Fixed an issue where, when launching the game for the first time, the default audio language would be set to a language other than English.
  
• Fixed an uncommon issue where players could walk in the air
  
• The Customization menu now works correctly when the Shop is in maintenance
  
• Player customization will now be saved properly when joining a match while making changes to it

Menus & Interface

Additions and updates

• Customization - Added editable color feedback on the body part thumbnails
  
• Customization - Now only displays owned items
  
• Workshop - Added score objectives reminder in the HUD
  
• UI - Added missing mipmaps on various UI textures
  
• Store - Updated the price component design

Major Fixes

• End of match - Fixed the Skip feature
  
• Store - Fixed the item tiers backgrounds
  
• Store - Fixed the bundles thumbnails display
  
• Player Profile - Fixed the Exp Gauge display

Misc. Fixes

• Fixed the Button Remapping display
  
• Fixed the button prompt display in notification pop-ups
  
• Added visual feedback to identify owned Bundles in the Store
  
• Fixed the Social Panel sometimes getting stuck during the credits
  
• Fixed Rich Presence sometimes not updating properly when a friend is alone in a custom match lobby
  
• Fixed the video preview to have it loop from the start when arriving in the Store Feature tab, Bundles tab and in the Battle Pass
  
• Fixed an issue where the game would lose focus loss in the Friends List panel
  
• Fixed the descriptions of collaboration items
  
• Various UI rendering quality improvements

Art / Rendering

Additions and updates

• Improved the Player Card lighting in the Customization menu
  
• Improved the Goal Celebration cutscene lighting during the match
  
• Various Stadium & VR optimizations
  
• Added a colour control setting for eyelashes
  
• Improved Global GPU/Rendering performances
  
• Improved GPU/Rendering performances for Low/Medium settings during the Prologue

Minor / Misc. Fixes

• Fixed AR Reactions not playing properly from the Celebration to Replay transition, and from the Replay to the kickoff Countdown transition
  
• Fixed the wind animation for foliage during goal bursts
  
• Fixed displaced meshes on the main character’s hairstyle in the Prologue
  
• Fixed Radar Bounces clearing too early when the previous ball's owner shoots
  
• Added missing thumbnails for some tattoos
  
• Fixed missing animations for low resolution crowd
  
• Fixed visual artefact where character outlines would be visible through the character's hair

Audio

Major Changes / Updates

• Various user interface sound-related issues have been fixed

Minor / Misc. Fixes

• Fixed the gameflow transition sequence when going back to the Main Menu
  
• Added the BGM title in the PS5 Menu
  
• Fixed a bug where the sound of the ball trail was playing loudly during the kickoff animation
  
• Fixed an issue preventing the countdown sound effect to start while playing in the Water Stadiums, Wind Stadiums and Mountains VR

Known Issues

Matches / Core Gameplay

• Sometimes, aerial volley animations are cancelled mid air but the actions are correctly triggered
  
• The invulnerability visual feedback for the goalkeeper can sometimes be missing
  
• Ball steal priority present for standing tackle over sliding tackle
  
• Desync can be caused upon repeatedly switching between Windowed and Fullscreen mode while shooting
  
• Games end abruptly after 60mn with no indications for players
  
• Sometimes, the pre-catch animation as Goalkeeper is triggered but does not connect with the ball
  
• The ball can sometimes appear to suddenly warp/snap to another position after tackle interactions
  
• Ball desync present upon reconnecting to a session following a deflect
  
• Misplaced AI pathing during the "Tackle" portion of the prologue
  
• Ippy Slide: Catching the ball during an Extra Effort transition can make the ball appear to warp/snap to another position
  
• Player ball catch/ball control is triggered even if the ball is moved out of the control range instantly
  
• Missing ball control functionality after recovering from a tackle without moving.
  
• Title crashes during the Movement Tutorial if the Player waits too long during the second Oriented Control Step.
  
• Corrupted replay camera in Spectator mode.
  
• Players can become spectators upon multiple players getting backfilled (joining an ongoing match) into a Quick Match.
  
• Shoot priority overrides the Defense Mode Ball Control upon receiving a pass.
  
• Inconsistency between invulnerability circle UI and timer when tackling an ally as GK.
  

Menus / Interface

• The player character’s color palette can be overridden with the Equipment color while previewing Special skins.
  
• In specific situations, the ranking promotion displays incorrect information to the player.
  

Other

• Rare random crashes can be encountered on PS5.

Rematch is great—I've already sunk about 40 hours into the thing and have no intention of stopping anytime soon. Just one small problem, though: the desync issues are still rough. In any given match, there's a chance you'll make a dive towards a ball—only for the fabric of time to hiccup, subjecting you to an avalanche of vicious 'good jobs!' and a wash of unearned shame.

Sloclap's already made efforts to help in a recent patch, but they haven't quite taken root. I've had plenty of encounters with the wobbly netcode myself, and while I'd usually show you what I mean, I don't have to—just a quick jaunt over to r/Rematch sees clips up the wazoo of goalies making tekkers saves, only to have their victories cruelly ripped away from them.

Amazing update guys! Not sure why everyone is complaining from r/Rematch

Here's another, and another, and another, and another, and another. Here's one poor sod whose premade goalie uninstalled the game over repeat desync issues. "It's already difficult for anyone to be predisposed to learning GK, but if it DOESN'T WORK, then it will be even more difficult to find someone who wants to fill that role."

I'm fine to suffer this sports-based dread on occasion—my doctor recommends no more than one or two stints as goalie every match—but I can't imagine trying to get a dedicated team structure going (in a game with tremendous competitive potential) and watching as your goalie, who's trying their best, has to roll the dice every time a literal curveball comes their way.

In the latest patch notes, Sloclap has pled patience and promised there are improvements on the way: "Please remember that some major priorities like netcode or crossplay are the work of specialists in their domains (gameplay replication, server infrastructure, user interface...), and that we can't put all our resources on these topics to make them happen faster—that being said we are making very good progress on these topics, more news soon!"

I'd argue that a lot of the doom and gloom I've seen (especially on the subreddit which, and I mean no offense, can be a little negative) is premature. Per SteamDB, Rematch still has a very healthy 24-hour peak of 21,000 players—but I do think Sloclap's on a bit of a timer, here. I hope the dev team sorts it, because I'm otherwise having a ball.

Small-squad soccer game Rematch has blown up—no, really, it's huge—over the last month since it released.

Fascinatingly, developer Sloclap was also responsible for Sifu, the time-bending 2022 kung fu game. In a recent Reddit post updating Rematch's now quite large community on its development, Sloclap addressed its opinion about the relationship between the two as fighting games of a sort.

"Sifu was not just a kung-fu game, and Rematch is not just a football game—in a way it’s a samurai game. Interactions between players are swift, decisive, and can turn the tide of events in an instant. As such, for the game to feel fair, and be fun, our execution must be flawless—and we're not quite there yet," said Sloclap.

It's particularly cool to see Sloclap publicly say that they're approaching both games with the same fighting game fervor: It's about tweaking gameplay balance to build an interesting, dynamic competitive experience. That means not just the recent netcode and accessibility improvements, but also refinements to core gameplay mechanics like goalkeepers, tackles, and volleys that Sloclap says will be addressed "in a few weeks."

The statement came just a few days before this week's patch, which lets you remap your gamepad, if you play with one, and Sloclap says that it's a pretty basic version but that they'll have a fancier one in the future. They've also added a colorblind mode for menus and interface, with basic filters for the three main kinds of colorblindness and a promise to also expand that feature in the future.

Rematch's own developers didn't really even get the game's samurai soccer matchups until they started having in-house tournaments. And now that it's out, players are also coming up with new tech way faster than Sloclap thought they would.

"A few kinks aside, Rematch is pitch perfect," said reviewer Justin Wagner in the PC Gamer review of Rematch.

"I've rarely thought of a sports game as immersive, but here I can practically feel the sonic boom of the crowd, the ball rocketing past a sliding tackle, and the turf whizzing by as I kick it up," he said.

Descenders Next is a sequel of sorts to Descenders, but it's pretty different. It's still about going down hills really fast, but it's no longer about doing so on pushbikes: instead we have snowboards and mountainboards. I played a little bit last year and loved it, so I'm pretty happy to see it's just shadowdropped on Steam after a delay from its initial April release date.

Like its predecessor, Descenders Next is an early access game. The version you can play has two sports—in the form of snowboarding and mountainboarding—and four biomes. The early access period will last two years, with new sports, biomes, multiplayer modes and modding support to be added during that period, as well as all the usual cosmetic stuff that's par for the course in these games.

Studio No More Robots has also decided that today is Descenders Day, though thanks to recent reporting by PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde I feel it's important to point out that this is not an officially registered day. Nevertheless, it means players of the original Descenders are getting a new race mode, which is the kind of straightforward real-time mode the game has been conspicuously lacking since launch. That's available as a free update right now.

Oh, and Descenders Next is Steam Deck verified too. I haven't tested it myself, so I'm not sure how it'll perform, but the option is there.

"Descenders Next has a blissed-out arcade feel," I wrote in my 2024 preview, "weaving between deathly trees at high speed on my last life before the next park is nail-biting, yes, but overall I’m not too concerned because whether I reach the goal or not I’m loving every moment."

You can grab Descenders Next on Steam right now with a 10% launch discount.

Iron Galaxy, the studio that made the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 remake, says it is investigating how an amusing, some might say slightly edgy, reference to Guitar Hero and developer Neversoft ended up in the game. It also committed to removing the image in question, even though players are now asking the studio to just leave it alone.

The offending image was initially brought to light on Reddit (via VGC) by someone who clearly wasn't amused by the whole thing. "Copy of (legally distinct) Guitar Hero in the trash on waterpark," they wrote. "Goes to show IG's respect for Neversoft."

Neversoft, founded in 1994 and acquired by Activision in '99, was the developer of the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, but in the mid-2000s was shifted over to the Guitar Hero series to capitalize on its then-massive popularity. Unfortunately, it came in just as Guitar Hero was peaking: Just a few years after Guitar Hero 3, its first game in the series, Neversoft pushed out its last game, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, which did not do well. The Guitar Hero series was put on ice and Neversoft briefly became a Call of Duty support studio, before being shuttered entirely in 2014.

Here's a better look at front and back images—yes, Iron Galaxy covered the bases—courtesy of redditors The_Ghost_339 and One-Treat-5078:

So you can sort of understand why a die-hard Neversoft fan might see an image of Banjo Champion (complete with Neversoft logo) stuffed into a garbage pail as perhaps a little ungentlemanly. I think you could argue just as easily, though, that it's a contextually appropriate tip of the hat to the studio that brought THPS to life in the first place.

In any event, Iron Galaxy, in fine corporate fashion, immediately overreacted.

"We have the utmost respect for anyone who makes games, we’re investigating how that got in there in the first place," the Iron Galaxy Dev Team wrote on Reddit. "Thank you to the community for bringing this to our attention and we’ll be removing that from the environment art in the next update."

Okay, so let's just get this out of the way:

And it didn't take long for other Tony Hawk fans to chime in, asking Iron Galaxy to leave the Banjo Champion box in the game. "It's just a silly gag, no need to remove it," redditor xMau5kateer wrote. Crimsonclaw111 called the reference "a benign joke," and LackingAGoodName added, "I'd like to think anyone from Neversoft would be perfectly fine with this, it's clear there was no disrespect intended."

"Don't remove it," AlexFlame116 wrote. "It's both hilarious and a testament to the treatment that Acti gave the series. It absolutely must stay."

Redditor swine_is_tall actually worked the presence of the box into a bit of Activision metaverse lore: "Most people who bought Guitar Hero (or in this case, Banjo Hero lol) threw out the packaging, so this box being in the trash says to me that someone is rocking out in the THPS universe."

Myself, I think it's entirely harmless, passingly amusing (reminds me of a joke: Guy parks his car in a rough neighborhood one night with his expensive banjo in the back seat, comes back a few hours later to find his window smashed in and three more banjos sitting in the car), and I sincerely doubt that any former Neversoft developer is going to take it as shots fired.

I also briefly held out hope that once the heat of the moment had cooled, Iron Galaxy might decide it's not such a big deal after all, and that the box—and the memories—can stay. Alas, it is not to be: A studio rep confirmed that despite calls for the Banjo Champion box to remain, it will be removed in the next update.

The multiplayer soccer game Rematch was a surprise departure for developer Sloclap, previously best known for the martial arts actioners Absolver and Sifu. But it turned out to be really good, and a genuine hit to boot: Currently there are 37,000 people playing Rematch on Steam alone.

What's also a little surprising, Sloclap CEO Pierre Tarno said in an interview with Eurogamer, is that it's not necessarily die-hard soccer fans who are driving those numbers. "We see via data, currently the core audience of Rematch lean towards those who play online competitive games rather than those who are fans of football," Tarno told the site, using the preferred European term for the game.

That soccer-indifference extends to Rematch developers too. "Loads of people in the team don't really care about football at all," Tarno said. "But quite early on in the project, teammates who weren't super convinced by it—when we ran internal tournaments—told me, 'I get it now. I don't give a shit about football, but this really struck something in me.' The dynamics, the team play, I think those are what make it interesting for players even if they don't like or play football games."

That actually makes sense to me. The first time I saw Rematch, in a pre-announcement preview, I thought it looked like Rocket League without the cars, and putting it politely, had doubts about whether it would resonate with soccer fans.

Rematch certainly doesn't aim to perfectly recreate soccer, though, but rather to capture the feeling of soccer—teamwork, coordination, strategy, flopping—in a fast, free-flowing environment. There's enough of a soccer sheen to make it immediately attractive to fans of the sport, but it's also sufficiently videogame to be accessible to a wider audience.

Tarno does expect more sports-first fans will find their way to Rematch but said it will take time for that to happen because "the main portion of our untapped audience are players who are not as savvy about games," and so are behind the curve compared to core gamers.

"They play FIFA, but they don't read Eurogamer," Tarno said. "Maybe they play FIFA and Call of Duty! But they're just waiting for their annual release. To reach them it's about word of mouth, continuing to communicate, and keep rolling out updates."

For now, though, it's core videogamers leading the way. That's working out very well for Sloclap so far, but it's not entirely without headaches: Some gamers, it seems, are still struggling with the concept of team sports.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 is all about fast, frantic fun, but that's not to say you won't benefit from a little helping hand when it comes to pulling off more elaborate tricks, which is where game mods come in incredibly handy. If you're wondering about whether or not the cheats used in the original two games still apply, I've got some bad news. They don't. Luckily there are a number of options already in the game for you to toggle on and off so you can alter your experience to suit your skate style.

If anything, game mods are the best way to ensure you hold a trick long enough to snag a good picture in photo mode. After all, if you don't have some sort of evidence, how are other skaters going to know you pulled off such an intricate trick? Here's everything you need to know about "cheats" and game mods in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4.

All cheats and game mods in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 + 4

To access game mods, open the menu while in-game or toggle to the option tab in the main menu. Go to the Game Mods section, and you can check all the tick boxes for the things you want to change here. If you adjust certain settings while you're in a level in the career mode, you might have to exit out and restart a run before they apply. The following table lists every mod and what it does:

Every time a game you loved when you were younger gets a remake, you're bound to feel a bit concerned about whether or not it'll be any good, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 definitely struck that worry in me when it was announced.

I grew up spending a decent amount of time playing skateboarding games before finally being brave enough to stick on some kneepads and pick up the hobby for myself. So, it's no surprise that the Tony Hawk games, alongside Skate and eventually Session: Skate Sim, became part of my gaming rotation. This continued through my love of the remakes of 1 + 2, so I was hopeful that 3 + 4 would have the same mix of novelty and nostalgia with a shiny new coating.

Luckily, the remaster of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 is a fantastic recreation of the original. Each time I drop in and attempt to pull off some whacky trick I'd spent an embarrassingly long time rehearsing, I'm still met with the same satisfaction (frustration, for the most part) when I inevitably bail and have to start over. Each level feels like you're playing for the first time again, and this feeling really sticks around from Foundry all the way to Tokyo. I don't feel the same for the remake of Pro Skater 4.

Both games have individual levels with unique challenges for you to work through, but outside of that, everything is the exact same. You work with the same skaters, and you'll try to nail the same tricks, which means a lot was shared between the two to make the whole package feel so united. These more subtle changes aren't the problem.

In fact, I enjoy the seamless transition between the two games, and not having to log an entire new set of moves each time I want to skate around a different location. However, there's one feature from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 which was changed entirely, which has definitely altered the experience in a bad way.

In the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, you could roam around freely and accept missions at your own pace. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 has basically stripped this freedom and implemented the two minute timeframe to every level, which has changed a few of the goals in the THPS4 maps. Or should I say, the maps that actually made the cut. A few classics were exchanged in favour of shiny new parks and settings, but that's a different rant for a different time.

I understand that having this timeframe gives you the necessary push to complete the goals and challenges you're set, and I'm sure it's got some sort of benefit to your skills as a virtual skater. But free roaming was one of the main appeals of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. With such a restrictive time limit now, it makes the remake of THPS4 feel like a bolted-on map pack, rather than its own experience.

Some may argue that the original had too many goals, and it's nice to have a neatly packed, streamlined skating experience. But for me, that's just not true. I don't want to skitch the back of the van trying to open it, I want to meticulously skate around the zoo trying to free the elephant like the original goal asks you to, and in my own time might I add. The compromises made in order to cram Pro Skater 4 goals into the Pro Skater 3 format let the entire experience down.

Before you start, yes, I know you can extend the time up to 60 minutes. 60 minutes is more than enough time to complete every goal and have a good mosey around each and every area. Which makes it all the more baffling that the original goals have been altered to best suit the two minute format. At that point, you might as well just remove the limit altogether. I would've at least appreciated the option at the very least, and I don't doubt an army of Pro Skater 4 players will probably feel the same.

As a result of my upset with these restrictions, I found myself gunning for free skate more than the traditional levels in the end. It's nice to have the aim of goals, but sometimes you just want to cruise around and do tricks in your own time. That's all I ever want to do in skateboarding games, to be entirely honest. Sure, I still spend most of my time in one small area of a map desperately repeating the same moves over and over until I'm confident enough to migrate to a different patch. But that's half the fun.

In a way, it feels like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 has been designed around new players, rather than honoring the experiences held by old ones, and these time trials are a significant enough change to keep these fans from returning. One thing that made the remake of 1 + 2 so successful was the nostalgia factor, but with 3 + 4, it definitely feels like the novelty of that has worn off. I think I'll happily stick to my free skate and a 60 minute time limit for the time being.

If you're bored of landing grab tricks and pulling off spine transfers, unlocking every Secret Skater in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 will be your next challenge. You don't necessarily need to get all of these characters, but if you're aiming for perfection, you're bound to want to know how to get them eventually.

If you're worried about having to complete some seriously challenging tricks to unlock these hidden characters, you're in luck. You can buy most Secret Skaters from the not-so-secret Secret Shop, which you can access on the main menu. They cost a pretty penny, but save you the work of having to aim for that 100% on every level. With that said, there are still a two characters locked behind very specific challenges. Here's what you need to do to unlock the whole roster.

How to unlock every Secret Skater in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4

There are five Secret Skaters to unlock across Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4. The following table lists all of them, followed by how you can unlock them. Or, how much they cost from the Secret Shop. Be warned though, you'll have to cough up some serious bucks for the privilege of skating as these characters.

When you've unlocked or purchased a Secret Skater, they will be added to your pro roster just like everyone else, and any custom skaters you've created. Although there's no great benefit to unlocking these characters, unless you're a big fan that is, each Secret Skater comes with unique special tricks which will make for some sweet photos in photo mode at the very least.

There are two separate Secret Skaters locked behind the Digital Deluxe version of the game too, Revenant and Doom Slayer. But, since these are unique to these fancy editions, there's nothing you can do to unlock them if you haven't purchased the right version, unfortunately.

I seriously doubt you're going to be shocked by this information but, almost a full month later, Rematch players are still bent out of shape over passes. Or, rather, they're crashing out about players not passing.

Dip into the game's subreddit, and you'll see 'pass, damnit!' posts cropping up so often, you could set your watch to them. Here's a post to the tune of nearly 800 upvotes wherein one poor soul goes on a 621-word rant just—absolutely tearing into the fools in their routine ranked queue.

"Honestly, not trying to do anything with this post. I know people won't change because I made a Reddit post; this is just a rant, because, let's face it, none of the dicks this is aimed at will even give a shit, but also, fuck you guys because you fucking suck.

"I've seen so many technically good players who can pull off good dribbles, rainbow flicks, tackles, shots, and even passes (when they want to) but who also lack any sort of actual functioning brain that strings all that shit together. Most importantly, you're all just a bunch of selfish wankers who would rather spend 6 minutes blade shotting, giving away possession, and generally being the most self-absorbed pricks in the entire world."

I'll cut them off there, because it goes on like that for a while, but they're certainly not the only one. Here's a less elegantly worded rant from a different player: "FUCKING PASS IT. PASS THE BALL. MATE PASS THE FUCKING BALL. PASS IT YOU DIP SHIT. PASS IT TO ANYONE. DON'T FUCKING RAINBOW FLICK IT. PASS THE FUCKING BALL."

It's hard to tell, but I think they might be upset about something.

You've even got players coming after hairstyles—specifically, one that's a reference to Meguru Bachira from sports anime Blue Lock who, best I can tell, is ironically known for his passes. "They're like the BMW in traffic. Never pass, spam good job when someone makes an error, dribble as goalkeeper. Is this from a kid's show or something?" Writes the thread's author, to which another player replies: "They all essentially think they are 'him'."

So—is Rematch plagued by selfish ball-hogs? I mean, obviously. It's a multiplayer game. But I can't help wondering if some zen is in order here.

Don't get me wrong, having grown up on MOBAs, I've had more than my fair share of raging at teammates. But I've recently started adopting the 'you are traffic' mentality. Yes, you're gonna lose Rematch games because your teammates suck and don't pass, but if you're in ranked? Guess what, buddy. You also suck.

In recent games, I've started to religiously spam the 'we got this!' emote whenever something remotely bad happens. Did my goalie beef it? We got this. Did a wannabe Bachira hug the ball and immediately lose it? We got this. And you know what? It works. Tilt really is the mindkiller, and whether I'm quietly seething or not, hammering left on my d-pad costs nothing.

Despite being an intense team game with a ranked mode—typically a breeding ground for toxicity—I've had a blessedly chill time in Rematch. It might just be because I've been wearing out my d-pad spamming "We got this!" to keep everyone calm, but I can count the amount of actual game-ruining griefers on one hand.

I can still count some, though, and I was shocked to find out that Sloclap didn't have an in-game report function. That'll be changing soon, per a recent blog post explaining what the studio's going to do about abusive conduct.

"Over the past weeks, we have received a significant increase in reports regarding violations of our Code of Conduct, including incidents of cheating, griefing, and toxic behavior. We want to take a moment to address this openly with our community.

"We take these matters extremely seriously. Rematch is designed to be challenging, fun, and fair. Actions that undermine fair play harm the experience for everyone, and we are committed to ensuring a safe and positive environment for all players."

The dev then goes on to explain what it'll be doing to stop jerks from scoring own goals: You'll get three days in the matchmaking ban slammer for it.

For "abusive language, threats, or persistent harassment", you'll be banned from three to seven days, and for cheating? Indefinite bans, bucko. Sloclap also mentions that anyone who keeps breaking the rules could also receive an indefinite ban, as well.

While, at the moment, players can only submit reports through the game's Discord server, Sloclap promises it's "working on implementing a Player Report feature directly in the game, and through our website".

Which'll be a relief. In my experience, the more laborious a game makes its report function, the less likely I am to go narc on someone. I'm not above telling, but I'm also not likely to go out of my way just because someone called me some nasty names. I have goals to shoot and tech to practice, after all.

I've been having a blast slowly crawling out of Bronze in Rematch (I'm Silver now, so I'm kind of a big deal). I've a few gripes, mind—some of which are the developer's fault, like the wonky netcode, while others are the player's fault, like that one guy who keeps spamming 'good job!' at me because I hit the post. I know I didn't do a good job. It's okay.

The developer Sloclap, who also made Sifu and Absolver, is keen to keep the game updated in the future. In a conversation with PCG's own Evan Lahti, co-founder Pierre Tarno and lead game designer Dylan Allen talked about their plans for the future.

Much of their ideas are exciting, but covered in a mid-June blogpost: Stuff like a tournament and club system, casual game modes, and basic quality-of-life features like being able to stick with a player you really like. However, before anything else, the devs are gonna improve Rematch's sometimes-ailing stability.

"So right now, our main focus is really stability," Allen explains. "Keeping the game stable, not adding any more bugs, correcting as many bugs as possible as fast as possible, also answering everything that might affect the quality of the game."

Part of that equation includes when players find new mechanical techniques (shortened to "tech" in the fighting game community or "tekkers" in soccer), such as the 'dolphin swimming' tech that saw players flying across the pitch like graceful, flying fish. Somehow faster and yet very, very silly-looking.

That arms race has been a challenge for Sloclap: "There's a lot of stuff that we wanted to do, either in the core gameplay or in the systems that we were thinking about for the long term—and once the game is in the players hands, you see [it].

"They do some things that you weren't expecting, and the game has evolved really quickly in our player's hands. We expected it to go fast, but not nearly as fast as it is going right now. So we're really trying to keep a close eye on it."

When it comes to those additional features, especially those optional game-modes, Allen is keen to emphasise that it's all about quality:

"In all of these things, our objective is always to deliver something that's as high quality and as fun as possible. We don't want to just take the game, add a couple of modifiers and be like, 'okay, yeah, that's enough'. We really want to drive down on what would make a new game mode fun."

Personally, I'm very hyped—both for these new features, and to get to do lots of weird science on all the new ankle-breaking tech the community's cooking up.