If you've checked in on Worms creator Andy Davidson sometime in these past few years, you'll know he's been hard at work on Worms: The Director's Cut 1.5, an unofficial but nonetheless Team 17-approved expansion pack for the original strategy-party mashup's Amiga-exclusive sequel. The goods have finally arrived: you can download the whole thing for free now.

It's got over 40 custom levels, 50 new sample packs for your Worms' voices, new teams and terrain types, and so on. It's a collaboration with fan creators and the likes of legendary indie developer Jeff Minter, who was honored via a Llamasoft-themed level in-game. In an interview with Daryl Baxter, Davidson called the expansion a chance to "celebrate the Amiga."

"The expansion pack is a chance for people to enjoy the full package of DC, with all it could do. Rather than closing a chapter, I hope it gives the game a new lease on life," he told Baxter, saying work is underway on a site players can use to share custom levels. "It would be nice for a wider audience to get a chance to play DC. It’s the version of Worms I’m most proud of, as I feel it’s when the gameplay and humour really clicked."

Notably, Director's Cut never made it to modern platforms, but Davidson said in a post on X that the expansion will play nice with emulators if you don't have old hardware lying around. While working with such an old version of Worms—which as you may know, spawned countless sequels and spinoffs all the way through 2025's Apple Arcade-exclusive Worms Across Worlds—was a chance for Davidson to revisit his favorite take on the series, it was also a challenge.

As he told Baxter, "Going back to the original code did prove much more difficult than I imagined. There was a lot I just didn’t remember three decades on, and scrolling through the code I did wonder how I managed it all in the first place!"

Endless Legend 2 seriously impressed me when it launched in early access last year. And now it's poised to escape its development shackles and appear fully formed, as the 1.0 launch now has a release date.

On September 17, you'll be able to begin your conquest of Saiadha in earnest. And if you dipped in during the early access phase, you can expect to be greeted by quite a few new features.

The final major faction will be making its first appearance on that same day. The Sandshapers are the oldest civilisation on the planet and aim to terraform the rather damp marble into a lovely, dry desert.

They'll be joined by a bunch of starfish, though I assume they prefer to be referred to as the Mangrove of Harmony. This is a new minor faction with its own hero, questline and recruitable units and pops. It was also designed in conjunction with the community, so if you hate starfish, you know who to blame.

Finally, there's a new spin on major factions in the form of rogue factions—splinter groups with their own bespoke quests, stories and mechanics.

At launch, we'll get two of them: a conquest-loving twist on the Kin of Sheredyn known as the Order of Zelevas, and a Necrophage offshoot known as The Severed Claw, which can enslave other factions.

Last year I called it "an incredible 4X" even in its unfinished state. The foundations of greatness were already apparent, though I didn't quite vibe with the combat—as much as it was a clear improvement over the disappointing brawls of Humankind. After a year of tinkering, I'm eager to see how much Amplitude has improved on it.

So make some room on your calendar for alien weirdos and planet-spanning quests. That gives you a couple of months to figure out what faction to play first.

Nobody could have foreseen this.

Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, Ubisoft's NFT tactics game, will be shutting down in October, as announced on its website and its official Discord. If you need a refresher—I did, despite having previously written about the game—Ubisoft launched Champions Tactics in 2024, long after most of the tech-adjacent industries had relented on trying to push quarter-baked Web3 feature pitches and shifted their attentions instead to the emerging AI boom.

As hard as it is to believe, Champions Tactics was one of two NFT games that Ubisoft launched in 2024, despite previous fumbled rollouts of "pay-to-earn" features that prompted the VP of its Strategic Innovations Lab to insist in January 2022 that we simply "don't get" the value of NFTs. Surprisingly, that didn't stifle the backlash much, driving Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot to assure us all in September 2022 that the publisher was only "researching" further Web3 integration and would pursue it "when we have something that gives you a real benefit."

Well, we can see now how that turned out.

"Today, we’re sharing an important update regarding the future of Champions Tactics. After careful consideration, we have made the decision to sunset the game," Ubisoft said in its announcement of the upcoming closure. "The Champions Tactics servers will officially shut down on October 30. Until then, the game will remain fully playable, and our goal is to ensure that players can continue to enjoy the experience during these final months."

Champions Tactics had already shed its NFT features earlier this year, announcing in May that it would "progressively transition away from blockchain functionality" due to "upcoming changes to the blockchain infrastructure supporting the game’s Web3 features." In the following days, Ubisoft removed the ability to mint and sell its NFT characters—some of which had been listed on the Champions Tactics marketplace for over $63,000 shortly after launch.

It's unclear how many of those characters had ever been sold, or for how much—and once the Web 3 features were removed, each player's supposedly non-fungible characters were converted into thoroughly fungible ones. You know, like the ones that are in a videogame.

But don't worry, its heavily invested users didn't walk away with nothing. On May 21, Ubisoft announced that "players who reached Divine rank at least once during the last three seasons" will be eligible to receive free stuff in Might & Magic Fates—a digital TCG it launched in February that lets players earn and trade cards "through an external marketplace powered by Immutable's technology that will enable and secure these exchanges" and oh my god they're still doing this?

Before now, Champions Tactics hadn't occupied much of the public consciousness. It had previously only entered the news cycle when a matchmaking bug forced all its ranked players to spend their first weekend with the game continually connecting—and immediately losing—the same baffled, unkillable guy.

Looking at the Discord, it's hard to tell how upset the remaining Champions Tactics players are; mostly they've been arguing about whether or not the game was a scam. I think the results speak for themselves.

A couple of months back I was playing Bhashiva for the first time in Total War: Warhammer 3, having a wild time mauling enemy armies with my tiger horde. But then I fought a siege battle. Not only had siege pathfinding somehow gotten even worse with the update, but despite having spent over 3,000 hours in this series, I was seeing a new gate bug, effectively bricking my unit by perma-freezing them in a destroyed gateway.

Total War: Warhammer's sieges have always been the buggiest component of the games. Hell, the infamous "gate bug", where an enemy unit opens it, splitting your unit in-half, has followed the series through all three games at this point. Siege pathfinding is also notoriously poor. I basically never direct more than one unit through a gate at a time, because I know they'll inexplicably decide to climb the walls instead if I do.

And good luck getting those units off the wall. You'll likely instruct them to fight an enemy below, and return two minutes later to see they haven't moved a muscle. I've even seen heroes and lords fall through walls and out of existence while climbing them, which as you'd expect, is pretty detrimental to the war effort. Thank god that bug doesn't seem to exist anymore.

All of which is to say, I've grown accustomed to Total War: Warhammer's buggy sieges over the years, and I still love the series in spite of them, but goddamn am I excited to play a game without gates, or at least with gates so gigantic no unit is ever going to get trapped inside them. Though we haven't seen any of Total War: Warhammer 40k's sieges yet, I'm inclined to think that there probably aren't siege battles, at least not in the more traditional sense we've come to expect from Total War: Warhammer.

Warhammer 40k's sieges are usually of a monumental scale, with giant hive or fortress gates and bastion walls barring the way. There are even entire Space Marine legions who specialise in siegecraft, such as the Imperial Fists and the Iron Warriors, who focus on defense and offense, respectively.

However, once those walls are breached it's more street-to-street urban conflict, relying on positioning, cover, and chokepoints. We already got to see the importance of those elements in the first Alpha Strike livestream, but in a setting with no traditional siege towers, ladder escalades, and where sapping is somewhat redundant, I could see siege maps not having walls at all, and honestly, I wouldn't mind that.

Walls have become a bit of a crutch for Total War's sieges. You feel an obligation to defend them, but the truth is, overreliance often makes for boring battles. The most fun and tactically diverse parts of a siege are when you're in the streets, chokepointing, protecting command points, and cleverly cutting off the tide of enemies slowly filling your settlement. In fact, the only thing I personally enjoy about walls is occupying them with my missile units to turn fire against defenders.

If Total War: Warhammer 40k does have walls, it will make for some of the most punishing sieges in the series, considering the vital importance of cover when most units are range-focused. With airstrikes and orbital lances at our disposal, it would also be relatively easy to breach them (unless they're super tanky). More than likely, the lion's share of the fighting will take place in the streets and districts beyond the walls, which is what makes me suspect Creative Assembly might do away with them entirely.

Either way, it's unlikely that any of Total War: Warhammer's siege bugs will find their way into 40k, especially when the game is using the brand new War Core engine. Will there be new game-breaking bugs to contend with instead? Of course there will. At least, though, we can likely bid farewell to some of the siege niggles that have impacted battles for over a decade.

Jedi are a key ingredient in most Star Wars adventures, but a little bit of a Jedi also goes a long way. Put too many Jedi in your Star War and you end up with an Attack of the Clones or a post-New Game Enhancements Star Wars: Galaxies—the magic and mysticism of those berobed space wizards drowned in a sea of lightsabers.

With its upcoming tactics game Star Wars Zero Company, developer Bit Reactor appears to understand this well. According to a recent AMA hosted by the studio, there will only be one Jedi Operator in the entire game. What's more, if you act cavalier with them, you may end up with none whatsoever.

As Bit Reactor has noted previously, permadeath is a major feature of Zero Company, with the main players in your adventure able to shuffle off this mortal coil at any point. For most classes, you will be able to recruit other Operators to fill in those class roles. But in the era when Zero Company is set, Jedi are supposed to be exceedingly rare.

So what does this mean for Zero Company's Jedi Padawan operator, Tel-Rea? Can players recruit other Jedi operators if she dies? This question was posed to BitReactor by SammyBoii in the Zero Company's discord server, to which lead designer James Brawley responded: "Tel-Rea is the only Jedi Padawan class Operator in Star Wars Zero Company—be careful that nothing happens to her!"

It's worth noting here that although permadeath is a big part of Zero Company, it isn't mandatory. Some difficulty levels will allow you to turn it off. Even if you do play with permadeath on, Zero Company's authored characters are "woven in the critical path of the story" for their respective introductions. Once you're into the full swing of the game, however, "they're very vulnerable, and it's up to you to keep them alive and make sure they're part of the team."

Taking permadeath to its logical extreme wasn't a decision Bit Reactor arrived at easily. Narrative lead Aaron Contreras previously told PC Gamer that "there were some fights" among the team about letting the whims of the game limit the impact those authored characters could have in the story. But Contreras added that he ultimately lost this argument, and that "it was good that I did." With Zero Company releasing next month, we'll soon discover for ourselves whether Bit Reactor was right or not.

Ahead of a showing at Comic-Con in San Diego, StarWars.com has revealed the main cast of Star Wars Zero Company, the squad tactics game by ex-Firaxis XCOM vets. The topline for big Star Wars freaks: Dee Bradley Baker and Matt Lanter will be reprising their long-running roles as clone troopers and Anakin Skywalker respectively.

Baker always reminded me of the actors in Elder Scrolls games (like the inimitable Wes Johnson) in the way he elevated the high-volume job of voicing every clone trooper for like, a decade.

It's something you could see becoming rote or workmanlike, but across multiple shows (most notably Dave Filoni's The Clone Wars), Baker put some zip into named clones and one-line mooks alike. His main role in Zero Company will be Trick, one of the game's RPG-like story companions.

Lanter similarly defined Anakin Skywalker in the animated Filoni-verse. When I got to try Zero Company hands-on back in February, I clocked Baker as Trick immediately. The Summer Game Fest reveal that Anakin Skywalker will appear in Zero Company had me wondering if the Chosen One would get a similar treatment.

Elsewhere in the cast, Vic Michaelis of the popular Dropout universe of improv shows is voicing Runa Blask. Ignoring the "Zendaya is Meechee" of all these very Star Wars names for a sec, Runa was one of my favorite characters from my hands-on time: She's an advisor at your base and an insufferable, rude, former Separatist agent who sucks. She rules.

Alex McKenna (Sadie Adler in Red Dead 2), Judy Alice Lee (Melinoë in Hades 2), and D.C. Douglas (Albert Wesker in Resident Evil, Legion in Mass Effect) caught my eye as notable performers from other videogames.

That strong cast is important, because Zero Company is trying to blend some lavish, cinematic storytelling in with its hardcore tactical gameplay. From my hands-on experience, it's looking like a winning combination. We'll know for sure when Zero Company releases on August 27⁠ for a blessed and anachronistic $50 price tag. Until then, you can wishlist it on Steam.

As the closed beta for Total War: Warhammer 40k grows ever closer, we're getting to see a lot more gameplay. The first reveal was at our very own PC Gaming Show, and then a couple of weeks back, courtesy of BiliBili, we got to see a kind of battle report overview of the same encounter with narration.

In the latest Alpha Strike livestream, Creative Assembly showed off that same battle, but ran it three times through from the player's perspective. We got to witness the Astra Militarum trying to defend a river crossing against the Orks, and learned a lot more about ranged combat, cover, reserves, army abilities, and other juicy details.

You can watch the full stream above, but here are some of the things that stood out to me as someone who's been following Total War: 40k's reveals closely:

• Units have a lot more stats since they're made up of multiple entities with different weapons, making them effective against specific units. For example, a unit could have a commissar, a vox operator, and regular soldiers, all with different stats and loadouts
• Heroes will have bodyguards you can customise instead of running them as individuals as in Total War: Warhammer
• Units can now strafe, firing as they move slowly in a specific direction, such as a tank backing away from infantry, though accuracy will be impacted
• You have airstrikes and army abilities, but for the Astra Militarum, these Regimental Orders only impact those close to command units and voxcasters (as in the tabletop)
• The balance of power bar now visualises and represents reinforcements off the field
• Line of fire is now individual to entities in a unit, so they can fire independently at different units at once depending on what they see
• All projectiles are simulated, units have unlimited ammo, you can suppress enemy units, and some units (like Baneblades) now have sweeping fire to maximise ranged damage
• There's a new Sentry Mode that lets you mark enemy units to prioritise before they come into range, plus there's now a visual indicator of line of sight when targeting a unit
• There are grenades and unit abilities—psykers were mentioned for the first time
• There is a unit morale system and units will visually represent the damage they've taken
• You can choose to deploy reserves or hold them and reinforce later in the battle, such as with drop pods or thunderhawks for the Space Marines
• It was mentioned previously, but blood is in the game for free (no blood DLC)

It was a massive info drop, but my key takeaway is that positioning is going to be king in Total War: Warhammer 40k and that using cover, line of sight, and scenery will make or break battles. Unit loadouts will also be very important in terms of matchups and performing effectively in combat, similar to Total War: Warhammer.

Honestly, the new engine is looking really good, too, and all the changes to projectiles and line of sight are very exciting. It was also mentioned that this is a two month old build, but it sounds like we'll be getting more of these livestreams on specific features in the run up to the beta, so hopefully we'll see more of the Space Marines and Eldar in combat, too.

As someone who frequently finds themselves embroiled in gargantuan, branching RPGs and spends far too much time in live service romps, I really appreciate a game I don't need to dedicate my life to—a nice palate cleanser that's one and done. And it looks like Star Wars Zero Company falls into that category.

In a recent Discord Q&A, developer Bit Reactor tackled the subject of game length, and while I certainly wouldn't call it short, it does sound pretty manageable. "Depending on your difficulty level and experience with the strategy genre, we estimate about 30-40 hours for the average player to complete the main story campaign," said lead producer Caydence Funk.

We also know it's going to be a linear deal, with no branching paths or romances between operatives. So there are not a whole lot of reasons to dive back in once you've already concluded your Clone Wars misadventure.

There's no New Game+ mode, either, though Funk notes that "players will unlock certain customisation options on subsequent playthroughs". I doubt I'll feel compelled to play again just for some extra customisation options, and honestly without an NG+ mode I feel like Bit Reactor should just give us everything in one playthrough.

At this point, the only thing that would encourage me to play through it multiple times is modding, but nope, there won't be any official mod support.

Aside from the lack of mod support, this isn't miles away from XCOM 2, which was also technically a linear game, though there were plenty of tactical choices you could make, especially in the War of the Chosen expansion with its different factions.

It's probably good news for folks who bounced off Midnight Suns, which was full of platonic relationships for you to develop and a mountain of optional diversions. Personally, I loved all that nonsense, but I'm looking forward to a new tactical romp that doesn't swallow up my life.

Zero Company is a little over a month away, launching on August 27, ending a pretty dry period with few notable releases, aside from a couple of remakes. I am ready for some clone fun.

From the archives: This feature was originally published in PC Gamer #305 (UK, June 2017). It appears below as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation.

No gaming genre can generate stories quite like the colony sim. Almost entirely unique to PC gaming, colony sims task players with building and sustaining a habitat for a group of AI characters, which could be anything from dwarfs to demons.

Although the player controls how the colony is shaped, constructing rooms or buildings and filling them with useful objects, they do not control the inhabitants directly. Instead, the colonists interact with their surroundings and other NPCs via AI systems that simulate their needs and desires.

Through these desires and the player’s ability (or inability) to meet them, colony sims produce incredible, incidental plotlines; tales of dwarves who delve too greedily and too deep, unleashing hordes of monsters into their fortress, of bitter rivalries between demonic creatures that tear apart the plans of an evil dungeon master, of prisoners who explode into riot because the warden forgot to build a shower block.

It’s the autonomous personalities of these AI individuals which separate colony sims from other populace-focused strategy games such as management sims and city-builders.

“You watch more named non-player creatures interacting with each other over a longer period of time in a colony sim,” says Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, “And you’re watching them more carefully than you generally watch, say, scheduled NPCs in an RPG. It gives you a chance to really get to know the characters, and how they respond to situations both you and the game world throw at them.”

But this also makes colony sims tough to develop. Since the release of Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper, which set the template for colony sims through the colourful and often fractious personalities of its demonic creatures, only a handful of similar games have been made. In recent years, however, the genre has witnessed an exciting resurgence, thanks to the dedication of a few tiny development studios.

Dwarf Fortress is the flagship in this resurgence. Created by Bay12 Games, Dwarf Fortress is an immense, 20-year development project currently halfway to completion. Its simple premise is that you build and maintain a colony of dwarfs, but the ultimate aim is to generate and simulate unique fantasy worlds in their totality. This includes everything from the terrain to the history, right down to what clothes individual characters wear.

The sheer scale of Bay 12’s project is mind-boggling. The aforementioned features are merely entry-level stuff for Dwarf Fortress’s preposterously granular simulation.

More recent additions include procedurally generated poetry, the result of a cascade of new features that typifies the rabbit-hole that is colony sim development. “If I recollect,” says Adams, “we were working on taverns at the time and we were dedicated to allowing the dwarves to play the instruments that had been in the fort. This led to procedural instruments, which led to procedural music, which led to procedural lyric descriptions, which led to procedural poetic forms and also dance forms.”

Such detail increases the range of unique events that can happen to the dwarfs in any given fortress. But it’s also important that the player is not ignored as a part of the game. Indeed, one of the immediate challenges in designing a colony sim is determining how much control the player should have over the colony and its inhabitants.

“It’s important at some point to have a conception of what the player ‘is’. For us, it’s the ‘official will of the fort,’” says Adams. “So you’d ideally be able to give orders and decide on other fortress-level activities, while the dwarves are in control of their own lives, and can even decide to disobey orders in extreme cases.”

Dwarf Fortress’s dedication to simulating every angle of fantasy colony life has made it legendary within the industry. But it is an extreme game in all senses, and this applies to its flaws. It is famously difficult to get to grips with, thanks to an archaic presentation and user interface, while its commitment to random numbers means your experience with it can vary wildly.

Rimming the changes

Not all colony sims are so uncompromising, however. Ludeon studios’ sci-fi colony sim RimWorld is a natural evolution of Dwarf Fortress’s design.

But not only is it more accessible, with a straightforward user interface and a modern art style, it also flips Dwarf Fortress’s design philosophy on its head. Rather than using procedural generation as a basis for its storytelling, it uses storytelling as a basis for its generation.

“RimWorld is designed at every level to generate story,” I’m told by Tynan Sylvester, founder of Ludeon studios and lead developer on RimWorld. “That’s always been the central pillar of the design, to the point that I deliberately decide every design conflict between ‘game’ and ‘story generator’ directions in favour of the latter.”

This concept is embodied by RimWorld’s AI Storyteller. Inspired by Left 4 Dead’s infamous AI director, this is an overarching AI system designed to maintain the pace of the game. The system comprises two principle components. “Story watchers” monitor the game state along specific parameters, such as player wealth or dangers encountered.

Then “incident generators” take those statistics and respond to them by triggering events in the game. These could be positive, like a much-needed cargo drop, or negative, like a disease epidemic.

“She [the AI storyteller] attempts to match a rising and falling pacing curve, and not to over-brutally murder struggling players,” Sylvester explains. “Though she also is not pandering or cloying. A struggling colony can still be hit by pretty brutal raids or disasters, because in extreme challenge lies the greatest drama.”

Although it helps to mediate the player experience, the AI storyteller adds another layer of complexity to the colony’s simulation, which already has potentially dozens of AI agents moving through it, all with their own goals, needs, emotions, and ambitions.

Add all the different rooms you can build, items you can craft, trading systems, weather systems, environmental hazards and hostile aliens also included in the game, and you’ve got one huge pile of overlapping, interlinking, and potentially conflicting systems.

This is another of the major challenges of colony sim design—structuring the development.

Knowing when to add features and game mechanics, and when to stop adding features and game mechanics, is crucial. “I think the characteristic design danger in this genre is drowning in your own complexity,” says Sylvester. “It’s very easy to just end up submerging players in complexity and micromanagement.

"My approach here is to treat player learning and player attention as precious, limited resources and ‘spend’ them accordingly. If any mechanic would require any amount of player learning or player attention, I try very hard to redesign it so it can be optional, or set things up so it only applies in some situations, or so it can be introduced gradually.”

Inner space

Considering the player’s experience of your colony sim is vital in other ways too. One of the toughest challenges when designing these games is not creating a system that produces interesting events, but ensuring it communicates those events effectively to the player. This is a problem that has been agonised over by Simon Roth, the creator of the colony sim Maia.

Maia traces its origins more to Dungeon Keeper than Dwarf Fortress, but has a similar commitment to simulating its alien world at an extremely granular level—particularly with its human colonists. In Maia, everything can affect a colonists’ mood, not just hunger, thirst or fatigue, but whether they’ve spent enough time around other people, and even the lighting of the room they’re in.

In total, Maia’s colonists have around 50 needs that can affect their mood, but communicating all this information to the player in a way that’s both clear and unobtrusive isn’t easy. “Presenting more information to the player has been the biggest difficulty in the game,” says Roth. “The thing is with the AI it’s so incredibly complex now, although the code is well laid out.”

Machine Studios has tried to solve this problem by giving the player both direct and indirect information about the colonist’s mental states. Unlike Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, Maia’s 3D engine means Roth and the team can use detailed animations to communicate colonist emotions.

Ironically, this only works for obvious emotions and needs, such as hunger, anger, fatigue, etc. For subtler problems, the team needed a more direct solution. So they enabled the colonists to send the player emails.

“The emails were not such a big thing,” says Roth. “But since we realised we needed to present more depth to the player, the colonists can send emails. They can send these long procedural things.”

Alongside straightforward statements about their physical and mental state, in an unusual move, the colonists can also present the player with direct choices about how to deal with certain scenarios in the colony.

“If they’ve got a skill for a thing and they spot a potential problem in the base, they can suggest doing something to the player, and the player can either give them a yes or no answer”, Roth says. “It shows the AI are more self-aware than you realised.”

Although almost 30 years old, the colony sim genre has barely been explored. This recent smattering of games has pushed the envelope enormously in the last few years. But the great irony of colony sims is the more detail you include in the game, the harder it is to ensure that detail will be appreciated by the player.

Hence they need to be thought of like any storytelling medium. Ultimately, it’s not about how many words your story contains, it’s about how entertaining they are to read.

It's dangerous to get too excited about a new RTS. Just look at what happened to Stormgate. So I've been cautious with ZeroSpace. It's an RTS built in the classic mould—think StarCraft 2—featuring proper basebuilding and potent hero units. So far, pretty familiar. But there's more.

ZeroSpace also boasts an RPG campaign with dialogue trees and loyalty missions, evoking the likes of Mass Effect—albeit without those enviable production values. And then there's the Galactic War, inspired by Helldivers 2's dynamic conflict. My interest was piqued. Cautiously.

Let's start with the good stuff. The campaign is shaping up nicely, though the early access build is limited to a handful of missions that form the first act. While the setup is a generic 'humanity needs this rare resource that's protected by horrible aliens', ZeroSpace quickly establishes plenty of friction between your crew and sets up a complex political situation where it definitely seems like you shouldn't trust your superiors.

The writing and performances are workmanlike, but my feelings towards the cast so far are at best neutral. Still, there's definitely something here, and with a bit of polish the more cinematic, RPG-inspired side of ZeroSpace could really shine. At the moment, though, it's a bit underbaked.

Between missions you can take a break and enjoy a blether with your crew and level up some of your colleagues, who back you up during missions. It's obviously channelling Mass Effect, right down to the alien designs, but I never really felt like I was playing an RPG. That said, we're playing an alpha build, and it's a solid foundation.

This is also where you can spend resources on upgrading troops and buildings, and there's a lot of potential here and some fun synergies—like expanding the range of your basic troops' jetpacks, while also buffing their damage once they land, effectively letting you build Warhammer 40k-style assault marines.

The campaign missions call to mind StarCraft 2 in terms of the variety of objectives and integration of story beats, but it's significantly more streamlined. The micromanagement of troops and your economy is pretty effortless, letting you get into the action rapidly, and then stay there. I dig it, though the reduction in complexity might not sit well with everyone.

One thing I'm a really big fan of is the ability to draw a battle line when you've selected some units—it's a quick, straightforward way to get your troops in an effective position or formation, and a smart evolution of the cover system pioneered by Relic all those years ago.

Unfortunately, the UI is ugly and at best functional, and it can be tricky to get a read on a given battle. When you've got units that are twice the size of your buildings, tiny soldiers running between them, and swarms of alien enemies filling the screen, you need a lot more clarity than what ZeroSpace offers.

And while Homeworld artist and Relic co-founder Aaron Kambeitz has been spearheading an art overhaul, I don't think it's quite there yet. Aesthetically, it's a mix of Mass Effect and StarCraft 2, but on a budget, with only the ship and vehicle design approaching anything noteworthy.

Alongside the start of the campaign, ZeroSpace's early access build offers quite a few ways to get your kicks: comp-stomps, co-op survival matches, 1v1 and 2v2 PvP brawls, and the option to create custom games. While ZeroSpace often feels very early access, the variety of modes is commendable, and that's before we even get to the Galactic War.

The Galactic War is ZeroSpace's big multiplayer hook, taking Helldivers 2's dynamic campaigns and making them competitive. It's an extremely cool concept, especially if you don't care about competitive ladders but still want something to fight for. Each season will see you hop between worlds and battles as you try to swallow up the galaxy for your chosen faction, earning rewards along the way.

Unfortunately these rewards are just titles and portraits, which I doubt most people will really get excited about. Helldivers 2-style cosmetics would make me much more eager to die for the cause. Yes, I'm a very mercenary lad. Rewards aside, though, I think the system has a lot to offer an RTS and I'm looking forward to watching it evolve.

There's just one problem: streamers.

What you might not realise when you pick your faction in the Galactic War is that you're actually picking a streamer. Winter, Neo and uThermal each lead a faction, which might mean more to you than it does me—a man who has never watched a stream the whole way through and who refuses to watch YouTube videos unless they feature cute dogs.

We, the unwashed masses, are merely cannon fodder, fighting to earn our "chosen" streamer the title of Galactic Emperor. What are their policies? Where do they stand on devolution, nationalisation and renewable energy? Will they fix the NHS? Who knows?

Look, I get it, streamers can be a potent arm of a videogame's marketing department, potentially bringing their audience to whatever game they're advertising. But what am I getting out of it? Exclusive portraits and titles feel like a lacklustre reward compared to being crowned the ruler of the galaxy. Even if it's a ceremonial role, I'd like a crown too.

Then there's the ZeroSpace: First Contact Invitational, a tournament that will see 12 streamers and RTS pros duking it out over a $13,000 prize pool. An RTS kicking off with an invitational is not unusual, but it's a massive turn off when a game begins its life by trying to enrich streamers instead of normal players.

The real issue with all this is that it speaks to the misapprehension that a surprising number of RTS developers labour under—that competitive multiplayer is king. In reality, most RTS players stick to the campaigns and comp-stomp skirmishes.

Competitive multiplayer can give an RTS an incredibly long tail, as we've seen with StarCraft and its sequel, but this early elevation of streamers that most of ZeroSpace's potential audience will have never heard of kinda bums me out.

I've just been burned too many times by the assumption that streamers and competitive multiplayer are the most crucial components of an RTS, when that's just not the case.

To be fair to ZeroSpace, it's clearly giving a lot of love to its singleplayer elements, as well as co-op and comp stomps: This doesn't actually feel like a game that's prioritising competitive multiplayer over the campaign. Still, it's unfortunate that developers Starlance Studios and Ironward are dedicating time and effort to getting the streamers on their side, when there are so many better things it could be doing.

I hope these will end up just being minor niggles once it hits 1.0, dwarfed by the quality of its campaign and the liveliness of the Galactic War. At the time of writing it's just managed to pull itself out of a Mixed rating on Steam, and the bulk of complaints seem to be that this early access game is still a work in progress. That said, I still recommend waiting for this one. It's got a lot of promise, but there's plenty of work to be done.

Steam's new Games Made in Sweden sale is out here reminding me just how many great titles we owe to our Scandinavian cousins. Vermintide, Darktide, Payday, Valheim, Amnesia, Satisfactory—the list goes on and on. Currently, a lot of these games have decent discounts, such as Vermintide 2 (one of our games of the year for 2018) for only $3 / £2.34. For my money, it's still the best Warhammer Fantasy action game around, even eight years on.

But what really caught my eye in the sale was three of my favorite microstrategy games, each an absolute banger in its own right: Bad North, Kingdom Two Crowns, and Battle of Polytopia. You can grab all three for under £10 or just over $10. Here are the deals plus a bit about each game:

Bad North ($2.99 / £2.55)

Wonderfully simple yet surprisingly tough, Bad North is all about defending beautiful diorama-esque islands from a huge viking invasion nipping at your heels. Each turn you hop to a new island defence, gathering soldiers, upgrading units, and unlocking abilities in an ever-escalating game of tag.

It's such an elegant formula I was certain it was inspired by hnefatafl (or viking chess) since it contains a similar concept of fending off encircling enemies, but when I interviewed Oskar Stålberg, he assured me it isn't. Stålberg's equally brilliant island-building game, Townscaper, is also on sale, should you prefer something a little more chill.

Kingdom Two Crowns ($3.99 / £3.35)

Kingdom Two Crowns is a vibe. Not just one of my favorite microstrategy games, but one of my favorite games, period. Buoyed by a brilliantly chill soundtrack from Amos Roddy and some of the most gorgeous pixel art you will see in a game, the Kingdom series, for me, is the best iteration of the "build a town, get attacked at night" formula.

You ride across your sidescrolling kingdom on a menagerie of steeds, upgrading your defences, uplifting your population, and uncovering each island's mysteries through trial and error. It also has split-screen or online co-op. Perhaps my favorite mechanic is the coin purse—you can tap to drop coins to pay for upgrades, but you can only hold so many and they'll spill out when it overflows.

The game also lets you pick a number of different settings, including vikings, ancient Greece and feudal Japan.

The Battle of Polytopia ($4.49 / £3.41)

Last, but not least, The Battle of Polytopia is a no-nonsense 4x done fast. It's honestly quite cathartic if, like me, you're the kind of player who rarely gets time to finish his 4x campaigns, or peters out before the end. In Polytopia, you can face off against other players in a quick 30ish minute game instead of pouring days into your standard 4x playthrough.

It's got a surprising amount of depth, too, with 16 different civilizations, three game modes, and even diplomacy mechanics. Definitely one to grab if you're growing tired of endless playthrough bloat.

There are tons of other great games available in the Games Made in Sweden sale (though sadly not Arc Raiders), but still, thanks for all the good times Sweden!

Last month at the PC Gaming Show we got to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at Total War: Warhammer 40,000 including glimpses of a battle between the Astra Militarum and orks. The video above, revealed at BiliBili World, is a more detailed look at the same battle in the Armageddon Theatre campaign, and looks sick as hell.

Though I'm not convinced my PC will be able to run it. Seeing the framerate drop when the explosions go off and limbs start flying through the air has me looking at my wallet in concern.

While the spectacle looks neat, once again the part I'm most interested in is the cover system. A couple of minutes into that video, you can see the player send infantry into barricades and it looks like they dynamically split into smaller squads to suit the cover available, and to take advantage of cover provided on the upper storey of a ruined building.

Then the ogryns come along and stomp through a bunch of it. Like the sentinel walkers in an earlier part of the footage, the hefty lads trash barricades they pass through while the regular infantry are animated vaulting over them. Looks like we'll have to be careful to maneuver around any protection we want to preserve for the sake of keeping the little guys alive.

Though maybe that's not in character. As the narrator says watching a barrage rain destruction on one and all, "These men did their duty." The average Imperial Guardsmen has an estimated life expectancy of 15 hours in combat, and once you've done your duty tying down enemies with jump-packs long enough for the artillery to load, well, both you and your cover are expendable.

When the excellent Command & Conquer successor Tempest Rising released last year, it featured three factions battling for supremacy across a war-torn future Earth. But only two of those factions—the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty—were playable with their own singleplayer campaigns. The third faction, the mysterious Veti, were wholly computer controlled.

Developer Slipgate Ironworks has always said the Veti would be made playable at some point. Indeed, it has been testing the faction's multiplayer integration for some time. But the question of whether the Veti would receive any singleplayer missions has remained unanswered, until now. It turns out the Veti will be getting their own campaign, but you will have to pay extra to play it, as it's arriving in the form of an expansion.

The Veti's Wrath sees you play as Tempest Rising's third faction across 11 new campaign missions—the same size as the campaigns for both the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty. Slipgate doesn't provide many specifics about how the campaign will pan out, but it does say that the early campaign missions "will serve as a tutorial for the faction" in a similar vein to the campaigns featured in the base game.

The Veti are very different from the other two factions, an ancient race that has slumbered beneath the Earth for centuries, boasting a distinctly Ancient Egyptian aesthetic. This carries through to how they play too. Conversion and sacrifice are two major themes of the Veti's playstyle, with the faction able to raise dead enemy soldiers as "enlightened", which can then be spent as a resource to upgrade structures and provide other benefits.

While the full release won't be happening until later this year, you can also play a snippet of the campaign right now via the Tempest Rising demo. This includes the first two Veti missions, plus the first two missions for both the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty. It's also worth noting that, while you'll have to pay to play the Veti in singleplayer, they will be available as a multiplayer faction in the base game at no extra cost.

If you're an RTS fan and missed out on Tempest Rising when it launched last year, I'd strongly recommend you give it a whirl. As I explained in my Tempest Rising Review. It's a genuinely great riff on the classic C&C formula, and one of the few RTS games of recent years that really understands the importance of a strong single-player offering. It's also 30% off this weekend, meaning you can grab it for $27 (£21). That discount ends tomorrow.

Paradox Interactive, that studio that publishes all those grand strategy games with oodles of DLC, announced via a forum thread and a post on X earlier this week that inactive Paradox accounts will be "cleaned up" come March of next year. In other words, those accounts will be deleted if they don't show some sign of life in the intervening months.

The posts clarify that an inactive account is one that hasn't logged in since Sep. 2025, and Paradox staff forum account Elmaze said the "maintenance event" is happening because getting rid of excess accounts in the database "helps us maintain performance, reduce clutter, and keep our systems healthy for active players." And to be clear, logging in via a game launcher counts—you don't have to log into the Paradox website or anything.

That means the upcoming housecleaning likely only concerns a tiny number of people anyway—if you're any kind of active Paradox player, you'll be fine. Local save files and owned games will be unaffected either way since they aren't managed by the account. The main thing Paradox accounts are used for is multiplayer, and if you aren't attached to your old info or forum badges, you can always just make a new one.

There is one fringe scenario where this might mean you lose access to a game you own: if your Paradox account is attached to an unclaimed game code, and you never received an email for it or somehow lost it. But in a forum post, Elmaze said that can be resolved through Paradox's regular support channels.

Suffice it to say, this should really only worry you in a very narrow set of situations. And if you happen to fall within the above criteria, you have eight months to log in once. And if you don't, why not take the excuse to start a new Crusader Kings save? It's about to get playable popes, you know.

Endgame events are a big deal for Total War players. Most of us remember the Mongols and Timurids invading in Medieval 2—both the sense of anticipation as we prepared for their arrival, and the monumental battles that took place as we tried to survive their onslaught. They're just one of the many features that make Total War campaigns so special.

The original Total War: Warhammer did it pretty well, too, teasing Archaon's arrival and the Chaos invasion before having all the Warriors of Chaos lords unite in a sweeping tide of destruction that ravaged its way through Kislev and the Empire. Still, it never felt complete while we lacked daemons and much of the expanded Chaos roster, and truth be told, it was never all that much of a threat to the world at large.

Then Total War: Warhammer 2 arrived with its Great Vortex campaign and Total War: Warhammer 3 with its spin on venturing into the Realms of Chaos. Somewhere along the way, the iconic endgame, Archaon's invasion, fell by the wayside, and we got new scenarios revolving around everyone but Chaos, even including order factions like the Dwarfs and Wood Elves.

When playing as more evil-aligned races nowadays, such as the Dark Elves, I'll often find myself allying with Chaos and Archaon to fight against endgame scenarios, which is a strange position to be in. That said, Immortal Empires endgame scenarios always felt rather bland. Despite their wide variety, they're mainly different flavors of grinding away at endless doomstacks.

That's why I'm excited for Archaon's new Chaos invasion endgame, arriving alongside the Lords of the End Times expansion. As revealed in the recent Total War livestream, as well as a rework for the Vampire Counts and our first look at the Glottkin, Archaon's invasion will now be a genuine threat to the entire world.

Thanks to a super high ward save, the Everchosen will be functionally immortal until you weaken his Chaos host by defeating his armies or taking over the invasion fortresses dotted across the world. At the same time, any settlements razed by Chaos will remain so until he's defeated. The new Lords of the End Times devastation mechanic will also come into play, transforming entire regions into blasted hellscapes as a majority of their settlements are despoiled.

It sounds significantly more strategic than simply bashing your head against an endless tide of doomstacks, a kind of damage control last stand as you try to mitigate how much of the world is destroyed, while simultaneously working to weaken Archaon for that decisive final confrontation and killing blow.

What's even more exciting is that you can actually play as this endgame, too. As mentioned in the stream, when you complete Archaon's short victory conditions, you'll get the option to start this endgame crisis. You'll no longer be able to occupy territory, and when you destroy enough regions in a province it'll become devastated, adding to your overall power level.

Archaon will also be able to confederate every Chaos faction Norsca-style, by defeating their leader in combat, so not just the Warriors of Chaos, but every daemon faction as well. Add to that some visual updates for Archon himself, plus the Wrathmongers and Skullreapers End Times units being added to the Warriors of Chaos Warband system.

All in all, it's shaping up to be the endgame crisis that both Archaon and Chaos have always deserved, but fell short of in the original game. Now we have a significantly more fleshed out Chaos roster, as well as the daemon factions, I'm excited for all of those resources to be chucked into a proper Chaos crisis for us to try and survive.

We don't know when exactly Lords of the End Times expansion launches yet, but it's currently expected later this year.

Creative Assembly's recent What's Next livestream dropped a few bombshells about the upcoming 9.0 update and the Lords of the End Times DLC. It's good news for anyone who loves vampires and Chaos, and for anyone who has ever found themselves underwhelmed by the conclusion to an Immortal Empires campaign.

First things first, it was mentioned that the long-awaited siege rework will be part of the 9.1 patch, and so wasn't part of this latest discussion. Neither was any info about Neferata, who is currently being worked on. And patch 8.1 is still coming too, which we'll hear more about next week.

What was included was the reveal of new endgames themed around the End Times. Where previously an Immortal Empires campaign could build to an endgame crisis, these "do not satisfy what we wanted them to do" according to associate design director Sean Macdonald. Each one basically just spawned extra armies. Now, most of those crises are being shifted to the midgame where they'll serve to power-up factions, with End Times events as the dramatic conclusion to a campaign.

There are three of them in the works. One is an altered version of the existing Vermintide crisis, one is based on Nagash (a legendary lord who will be part of the Lords of the End Times DLC), and the one CA focused on during the livestream features Archaon, the best boy of Chaos. Whichever one you get will be introduced with a cinematic and a note explaining the campaign mechanics.

Archaon, for instance, has a huge ward save that makes him basically undefeatable until you weaken him by taking out his lieutenants. While you're doing that, he can devastate provinces after razing enough regions in them, meaning even if you take them back you won't be able to rebuild there until he's defeated. Archaon's also able to confederate with any other Chaos faction, not just the Warriors of Chaos he could previously. To help you fight back, once Archaon's invasion begins other forces will be more likely to ally against him, making for a climactic dust-up.

If you're playing a campaign as Archaon, you'll have the option of continuing as you were or becoming the endgame crisis yourself, gaining the ability to devastate provinces, each of which increases how powerful you are, and eventually leads to your victory.

On that subject, victory conditions are due for a rework in update 9.0 as well. Each legendary lord will get their own unique victory conditions, a checklist of objectives that might include ranking up thematically appropriate units, confederating with specific friendlies, constructing their most famous landmarks, and so on.

The Vampire Counts rework is good news for me, an undead player from way back, and anyone else who has been holding off on a replay until the bloodsuckers got some love. They've been basically untouched since The Grim and the Grave DLC came out 10 years ago, which is wild given how significantly some of the other factions have been freshened up in the meantime.

The rework includes changes to how recruitment works, so Raise Dead will let you replace lost troops based on how many people died in a battle, each corpse in a province becoming a potential unit for you. Vampires, meanwhile, will be more powerful but more difficult to find. You'll have to discover a lair in a settlement and then either capture it or send an agent there, after which you'll be able to customize the vampire you get, spending resources to choose their bloodline and so on. Also, Vlad and Isabella von Carstein can both become legendary lords if you play a campaign where one starts as a hero. Which is nice.

For a finale, CA revealed another legendary lord coming with the Lord of the End Times DLC. In addition to Nagash and Boris Todbringer (and Neferata, who will presumably be the traditional "free-LC" released alongside the expansion), the Glottkin are joining the Warriors of Chaos. The brothers Glot are a trio of heavily mutated siblings marked by Nurgle, with the monstrous Ghurk so large he serves as a mount for his brothers Otto and Ethrac. Though a part of the Warriors of Chaos faction, the Glottkin will have access to Nurgle's daemons, as well as new units like the Putrid Blightkings, Basilisk, and Chaos Siege Giant.

That leaves one more Lord of the End Times still to be announced. I'm pretty sure it's going to be Thanquol, the Skaven Grey Seer infamous for failing upwards after being defeated every time he shows up in a Gotrek and Felix book, and going through rat-ogre sidekicks at a rate of knots. If it's not Thanquol, someone's going to have to check in on the guy who's been ratposting for over 200 days in anticipation.

All eyes may currently be fixed upon Total War: Warhammer 40,000, Creative Assembly's ferociously ambitious foray into the 40k universe. But it's worth remembering that the more traditional side of Total War is looking pretty exciting too, as CA is returning to one of Total War's best settings in Medieval 3.

Medieval 3 is much earlier in development than ol' Total Warty K, but the CA has been surprisingly open with the community about its development thus far, regularly showing the game off in preproduction livestreams. Now, it's also fielding opinion on which factions should be playable in Medieval 3, asking fans to complete a survey about which nations, dynasties, and city-states they want to control the destinies of.

This comes courtesy of Creative Assembly's most recent Medieval 3 blog, which delves into the developer's faction-based decision-making process. According to creative director Leif Walter, three factors go into deciding whether a faction should be in the game. These are how well known the faction is, how unique its starting situation is and how distinctive its "potential mechanics" could be.

Naturally, there are some factions which Creative Assembly considers "locked in" by default. These are England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Sultanate of Rum. Where CA wants player input is on the smaller factions of the Middle Ages. How keen are you to play as Italian city states like Venice or Milan, for example? Or Kingdoms of Scandinavia? Or Muslim nations like the Almohad Caliphate or the Fatimid Empire?

Creative Assembly lists all the factions it is considering making playable in the article. There are some potential factions that CA rules out, such as the Russian Principalities, the Mongol Empire, and the Papal States. Apparently, the latter is particularly desired among Total War fans, but Walter says that Creative Assembly "discussed internally that this playstyle would be so unique and special that it would reduce focus of development too much."

Of course, the faction I'm most interested in playing as from the list is Scotland. Partly because that's where I live, but also, I think you could make an interesting mechanic out of the Scottish clan system, which developed through the medieval period. Dealing with new clans emerging, trying to stop them from infighting and stealing cattle from each other in order to deal with larger threats (mostly the English), seems like it'd be a fun and distinctive challenge.

Whichever factions end up in Medieval 3, however, you can bet that I'll be playing it whenever it launches. But I'm happy to wait, not least because Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is on the horizon. CA's sci-fi strategy got a fresh showing at this month's PC Gaming Show and, judging by what CA has revealed so far, is shaping up to be a dream 40k experience.

Amid Star Wars Zero Company's gameplay and release date reveal at the 2026 Summer Game Fest, it somehow slipped by me that the squad tactics game from XCOM veterans also got an official price tag: $50. What year is it, 2005? Not only is this what Firaxis charged for XCOM: Enemy Unknown in 2012, it's less than the beloved XCOM 2's launch price of $60 a decade ago.

I got to try Zero Company hands-on earlier this year, and it is one of my top upcoming games: Zero Company pairs the crunchy permadeath squad tactics you'd expect from its pedigree with scandalously lavish production values. Its cutscenes feel more in line with CD Projekt, boasting intricate animations and a large voice cast.

I'm also jazzed about one of Zero Company's big mechanical innovations: Exploration between fights and back at your home based is zoomed in like a third person action game, transitioning seamlessly to the overhead god view when fighting starts.

I wouldn't have batted an eye at Bit Reactor charging 60 bucks for it, and the studio easily could have justified the increasingly standard $70 price tag. Galactic Racer, another upcoming Star Wars game I'm pretty hyped for, is going the $60 route, and I can't blame its devs or publisher in the slightest.

We'll see how Zero Company stands up at launch, but even as a work in progress, it felt like GOTY material. Seeing EA and Bit Reactor ask such a reasonable price for it even as a major franchise licensee has me even more excited. Contrast with Rockstar asking us to pony up $80, even $100 for GTA6 with nary a gameplay trailer in sight, and Zero Company feels like a breath of fresh air.

It's a savvy business move: Whatever the costs of triple-A development, it's still effectively competing with $20 and even $10 indies for people's time and attention. This is a way to stand out, add value, and stave off the perpetual threat of a flop launch. We'll have the full verdict on Zero Company soon: It's set to release August 27, and you can wishlist it on Steam.

Long before Heroes of Might & Magic enjoyed a triumphant return to form with Olden Era, we had King's Bounty: The Legend, a strategy-RPG in the classic HoMM mold only with a single gigantic world map rather than discrete levels, and some quirky ideas about courtly marriage. Infamously, this was the game where you could marry a frog or a zombie.

The most recent sequel toned down the whimsy and ended up being much blander for it. Fortunately, you can skip that and go back to where it began with a newly freshened up King's Bounty: The Legend for modern PCs. Now it fully supports widescreen resolutions without those uggo black bars down the side of the screen. The maximum zoom-out distance has been doubled and the UI's been given a readability pass.

It's also got a bunch of modern Steam features like achievements, trading cards, and a points shop. There's a dedicated Steam Workshop too, though at the moment the only mod is one that undoes one of the aforementioned readability changes and restores the Original Fonts.

Katauri plans to bring these updates to King's Bounty: Armored Princess next. Right now the series is also on sale, so you can get King's Bounty: The Legend for 85% off on Steam, and the fan-favorite follow-up King's Bounty: Crossworlds is also 85% off.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Every long-running series benefits from an occasional change of genre. Yakuza dabbling in RPG-style combat works well. Dragon Quest going Dynasty Warriors for a bit is nothing but refreshing. Sonic racing about in a car makes a fun change of pace. Now it's R-Type's turn, the legendary arcade shmup series putting on a strategy hat and stuffing its UI with statistics and material costs.

On the PSP, where the two Tactics games exclusively appeared in the late 2010s, this unexpected shift in style easily stood out thanks to the handheld's relative lack of sci-fi strategy competition. In contrast 2026's PC gamers are utterly spoiled for choice: XCOM, Battletech, Xenonauts 2, and plenty more only a few clicks away—if they're not already installed. What does this release have to offer the kind of person already up to their eyeballs in metal death machines and alien menaces?

A lot.

Specifically, giant monsters with specific weak points waiting at the end of tight passageways. Force units—those glowing orange blobs that can attach to either end of compatible ships—reimagined as versatile mobile enhancements for compatible ships, able to offer a slew of different shot types or even head off independently and ram enemies so hard they're pushed a hex backwards. One stage is dominated by a giant space cannon, and it's on me to lure my enemies into its line of fire without decimating my own forces in the same blast. Weak walls can be shot to pieces, creating new routes and offensive opportunities.

The graphics responsible for showing me these wonders have been rebuilt from scratch, making another run through the original look as fresh as a phallic alien bursting straight out of someone's chest. Neon-coloured energy particles light up smooth metal surfaces, broken structures cast complex shadows on easily missed background scenery, organic horrors glisten in the starlight, and minor spaceships are so detailed it's possible to catch sight of tiny seats inside beautifully rendered cockpits.

Tactics' shmup heritage leaves an indelible mark on every aspect of the game, every feature directly drawing from a design template and visual language most strategy games never touch.

This unusual approach never overshadows the newfound tactical side of the game, which has more than enough depth to satisfy even the most spreadsheet-adoring strategy head. Ships now have fuel and ammo reserves to consider, the threat of being left defenceless and unable to move very real. A range of support craft prevent these new features from becoming a simple case of saving the big guns for the tougher enemies, with mid-flight resupplies and repairs an essential part of the flow of battle, temporarily retreating back to the safety of a mobile transport a sensible way to spend a turn, and slight detours to liberate a strategically placed facility (giving damaged units somewhere else to recover as I press on) well worth my time.

Terrain plays a much bigger role than expected in a game where almost everything can fly and many levels are set in the vast expanse of space. The side-scrolling nature of it all, mimicking the games it's based on, gives this tactical game an uneasy momentum: I have to push forwards, even though I know that's where all the danger is. Vertical drops are deliberately awkward to navigate. Sometimes I'm not facing the right way and there's little I can do about it because shmup law states I face one direction and that's the end of it.

Small maps and cramped spaces create a cautious, claustrophobic mood, forcing me to decide who's going to go first through a narrow tunnel and take the brunt of whatever might be lurking in the dark, or pick an unfavourable position that leaves a ship as open to friendly fire as it does the enemy's because it's the last spot available. Gaseous substances, ice blocks, and asteroid fields can slow ships down or need clearing out first, and at times I even have to consider the direction a waterfall flows in, rising upwards more difficult while I'm flying underneath them. Sometimes whole planets get in the way.

Even when I'm well prepared and on high alert, that sense of vulnerability never quite goes away. A nasty battleship-shaped surprise is always just around the corner, and the game isn't afraid of seizing any opportunity it can get to destroy one of my precious ships, or of letting me thoughtlessly stumble upon a screen-sized nightmare with more mouths than eyes.

The unforgiving nature of combat is constantly reflected in the brief commander's logs between each mission, campaigns painted not as brave expeditions undertaken by confident, well-supported armadas, but desperate fights to survive. In the first game I'm far from the best Earth has to offer, nothing more than the leader of a small scraped-together group wondering what the heck their superiors are up to and not receiving any meaningful answers.

In the sequel the peace I fought so hard for has soured into all-out civil war. The storytelling here takes a different tone to the sober political machinations in the likes of Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics; there's a pervasive melancholy to it that still feels unique, as if I'm constantly marching towards my own funeral rather than on the cusp of a noble last stand.

Even the terrain descriptions make venturing into dangerous territory feel uneasy, simple labels like "Bydo Corpse?" and "Incubation Facility?" reinforcing the idea that my group's completely out of their depth to the point of not being entirely sure what they're looking at, never mind why they're fighting them.

R-Type Tactics doesn't just stand up to modern PC strategy games, it deserves to proudly stand amongst them. This is a polished PC release—mouse compatible and already working beautifully on Steam Deck (officially "Unknown", however)—that feels like it's finally found the right home. What format could be a better fit for a game full of lengthy battles that expect players to weigh up accuracy percentages, range, charge states, fuel consumption, and consider potential counterattacks?

There's never been so many missions to work through either: Well over 100 of them, split across three unlockable campaigns. The second set, brilliantly subtitled Operation Bitter Chocolate, have never been available in English before now, and the additional post-Chocolate "Cosmos" missions are completely brand new.

Here's hoping PC gamers embrace its unusual charms and send this strange spinoff into orbit.

Stellaris is one of those games I've never played, but I'm delightfully confounded by it from afar, as occasionally one of my friends will send me a message about how her robotic gestalt consciousness is doing. And here I was thinking this was about annexing provinces, or whatever! If you'd like to be confounded up close, now seems like an ideal time—the game is free to play this weekend on Steam.

That's good through June 22, but you'll have a bit longer—until next Thursday, June 25—to decide if you'd like to buy it at a discount. Until then, the game is 70% off, bringing it to $15 for the base version or $18 for the "anniversary edition," which packs in the Galactic Paragons, Aquatics, and Leviathans DLCs.

If you want everything, that's on sale too, for the cool sum of just under $148. Hey, it's still a Paradox game. If you want to dip into that lifestyle before fully taking the plunge, you can subscribe to the game for $10 a month to get access to all the DLC instead, but there's no discount on that.

If you can look past the associated shedload of DLC, Stellaris is quite the game. PC Gamer EIC Phil Savage scored it a respectable 70% when he reviewed it back in 2016, saying its superlative early game revealed its potential as an "instant strategy classic." It's only refined things since with each new overhaul, and as Leana Hafer said in a recent story for PC Gamer, "1.0 and 4.3 are almost hard to recognize as the same game." Game director Stephen Muray joked back then that Stellaris is "the Spaceship of Theseus."

As for the new expansion, Nomads? Senior guide writer Sean Martin wrote in his impressions that it could "use some work," but its additions of Mongolian throat singing and nomadic factions are welcome indeed.

I've always loved starting a new Stellaris campaign. There's a special magic for me surrounding those initial years, as you explore the systems surrounding your home planet, discover anomalies, and just generally see the shape of the galaxy around you. Maybe your fleets run into a mysterious alien species, an abandoned mega structure, or a black hole that starts whispering to you.

For me, it's the most exciting time, before the sheer scale of the game overwhelms your ability to really focus on any individual solar system. I've always struggled with that aspect of Stellaris, balancing my desire to explore the universe with the demands of claiming territory and planets, chokepointing swathes of the galaxy against the equally hungry factions out there in the black on all sides.

So I've long wondered what it'd be like to play as a faction with no territory. Stellaris' Nomads expansion is pretty successful in that regard, giving you an Arkship for your spacefaring race (though sadly with just one visual variant), and a bunch of extremely fun origins to choose from. I picked and played through The Sacred Path, which saw my race of Arthropoid pilgrims tracking down sacred sites across the galaxy. But the Forever Cruise, which sees you pick a crew and a passenger race, also sounds very good.

You start off fixing your Arkship, but once that's done, you can go pretty much anywhere. Arkships are essentially a colony, shipyard, and battle fleet rolled into one, and they can ignore closed borders, meaning you carry what you need with you to explore. The main drawback with nomadic factions, I found, is the Waystation. Rather than holding territory, nomadic races build outposts that can harvest and stockpile resources.

When they're full, though, they need to be picked up by a logistics ship and delivered to your Arkship. So, theoretically, you can go wherever you want, but you'll make it increasingly difficult for your ships to ferry resources to you. There is an alternative, and that's harvesting resources with your Arkship directly from planets. The price is that planetary mining stations produce 75% fewer resources for a while, and the faction who owns the system really doesn't like it, so you'll want to pick unclaimed systems that don't have Waystations in them.

Yes, this does become increasingly difficult as the galaxy gets painted. The best way to survive as nomads seems to be to befriend a faction and agree a Wayline treaty with them so you can build inside their territory. Factions offer contracts to nomadic races, including remote research, transporting sightseers, or scanning systems, all of which are an incredibly easy way to acquire influence so you can construct more Waylines or form treaties.

Your nomadic faction also has a new resource combining Energy Credits and Minerals which is called Operational Reserves, but honestly, I'm really not sure why this was created because it's confusing as hell. Your reserve level (low, medium, high) confers various benefits or detriments to your Arkships. You can also choose the speed at which you consume your reserves to add further bonuses, but it doesn't really give you a proper breakdown so it's often hard to keep balanced.

For the most part, though, I had a lot of fun piloting my Arkship across the galaxy and slowly upgrading it into an unstoppable juggernaut, but the phrase "We're running out of sky" couldn't help but come to mind. As spheres of influence expand, it feels like you're almost obligated to befriend and support a faction, especially as completing contracts is so lucrative.

I do, however, really like the post-Nomads Stellaris galaxy. It's fun running into other nomadic factions and there are some great extra additions, too, whether it's new OST like Manduul Haan by Batzorig Vaanchig (which has a lovely bit of Mongolian throat singing you can listen to further up), or events like the Champion's Forge Live.

This TV station Arkship broadcasts a special free-for-all you can enter your fleets into, giving you a chance to square off against the rest of the galaxy to potentially win the grand prize, though sadly I didn't make the cut. Still, its additions like this that make Stellaris's galaxy so fun, and Nomads definitely contributes to that, even if playing as a nomadic faction isn't 100% what it should be right now.

It's a hard life, being an orc—you wake up, you smash puny creatures, you go to bed. But your warlord's mad at you. Why? Because you got a little too in the zone and broke all the things you were there to steal. That's a big problem, especially if you're trying to do things like agriculture or society—in the interest of smashing, obviously.

Don't Kill Them All makes this the main thrust—or club, whatever floats your boat. It's a delightfully clever little strategy game wherein you're having to conduct an easily-ragebaited band of marauding orcs so as not to raze everything that moves.

It does this by looping everything into a central mechanic: rage. Your orcs can't die, but they CAN lose their temper—either by taking damage, or by witnessing the destruction of the resources you came to claim, which your enemies can also collaterally tear asunder. If all of your orcs crash out, your expedition's over and you lose all the resources you came for.

So you do need to do a bit of smashing, but it's calculated smashing. You'll be maneuvering your warband to avoid logs and rocks on the tile-based combat grid—or just shoving enemies out of the way so their attacks don't spoil your, well, spoils. If you've ever played Into the Breach, it's a lot like the collateral damage aspects of that game—just with pure resource-hoarding self-interest rather than the horrible loss of human life.

But where this system really shines is in how it interacts with your attacks. Orcs can theoretically smash as much as possible, but each subsequent usage of an ability (or the first use of an ability, in some cases) ramps up your rage. This means there's always a devil's bargain available to close off a combat.

The downside being, rage doesn't go away between encounters. You need to balance the knife's edge between gaining rage and pushing further on your expeditions—which themselves cost time, XCOM-style. Time you'll need for building your base, crafting bonus equipment, or calming your orcs down with a nice mud bath or some herbal tea.

It's already an extremely promising demo, and it helps that the general art style's really charming—marrying with the strong theme of "orc really gotta figure out resource management" well. Which is why the current low playercount (in the double digits) is kinda shocking to me, given how solid the core concept is. Orc heartily recommend hidden gem, orc think it gonna be good.

I am 41 years old tomorrow, and for most of my life I've had a game of Civilization in rotation. The first Civ arrived in 1991, popularising the nascent 4X genre and quickly becoming a PC gaming icon. But Civ could have looked very different. Instead of a slow, deliberate turn-based game, it was almost Age of Empires.

Back in 2017, I interviewed every Civilization lead designer for a magazine feature, The complete history of Civilization, which was later published on the site. Until recently, each game had a different lead, starting with Sid Meier and the OG Civ. This tradition continued until Civ 7.

Civ was born out of Meier and Bruce Shelley's desire to push the boat out after the success of Railroad Tycoon. Instead of running a company, how about running a nation, and eventually the world?

"We were young, and we had no fear," Meier told me.

But Meier started to worry that their ambitions were too grand. He needed to find a way to make this imposing challenge more accessible for would-be world conquerors. One of the accessibility solutions was ditching the popular hex-based map model for simple squares.

"One of the reasons we used squares for mapping was we thought hexes were too geeky. We went with squares to make things accessible," Meier said.

That would continue until Civilization 5, which arrived in 2010.

An even more impactful accessibility decision led to Civ becoming turn-based. But that came after prototyping other options, namely making it an RTS. While testing it, though, Meier realised that the RTS model wouldn't give players the space to get to grips with the game's complexity.

"Development is a journey in itself," said Meier, "and it could have easily gone in different directions. There were a number of things we considered that we didn’t end up doing. Real-time is one of them. I think it’s great to look at Age of Empires, for example, because that’s how the game would have probably progressed if we’d continued down that route."

In the end, we got both versions of Civilization. Six years after Civ launched, Age of Empires appeared, with Bruce Shelly serving as game director. Beyond being real-time, one key difference was that AoE wasn't interested in charting all of human history—it was focused on the ancient world.

An RTS with Civ's scope wouldn't appear until 2003. That game was the exceptional Rise of Nations, from another Civ veteran, Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri's Brian Reynolds.

So while Meier ended up going down a different route for Civ, it still spawned Age of Empires and Rise of Nations. We got to have our cake and eat it too.

I'm a big fan of management sims, and I think Frontier's Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster series are some of the best modern examples you can play. Not the best—that award goes to last year's brilliant Two Point Museum, though there's a good chance the recently announced Planet Zoo 2 could steal the crown back from Two Point Studios.

One of the reasons Two Point Museum is so great is that it gives players a new institution to manage, something less familiar than a theme park or hospital that gives Two Point Studios room to explore new ideas. It seems Frontier is looking toward pastures new too, as it has just spilled the beans on a new management sim unrelated to zoos or rollercoasters.

"We've started work on a brand-new Planet Game franchise, which has all the familiarity you love, but a completely new setting for us than Planet Coaster or Planet Zoo, one which still combines our love for creativity, management and meaningful simulation," wrote Frontier's head of player engagement Richard Stephenson in a Discord post shared on Reddit (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun). "We'll have more to share as we continue to work on things, so watch this space."

Naturally, Planet fans are going wild with speculation about what this new game might be. In the responses to the Reddit post, the most popular suggestions include Planet Resort, in which you manage a chain of hotels, Planet Festival, in which you manage concerts, and Planet City—a city-building sim in the vein of SimCity and Cities: Skylines.

As for which is most plausible, clues might be found in nine new trademarks filed by Frontier on Monday. Planet City isn't mentioned, but both Planet Resort and Planet Festival are. Also listed are Planet Farm, Planet Vacation, Planet Dinosaur, Planet Prehistoric, Planet Fantasy, Planet Mythical Creatures, and Planet Dragon.

Some of these have likely been filed to ward off competition. I don't see Frontier making a Planet Dinosaur game when it is already making the Jurassic World Evolution series. Others, like Planet Farm, seem too similar to Planet Zoo, given Stephenson refers to this new game as a "completely new setting for us". That "for us" bit is intriguing too, suggesting that the setting may have been seen in management sims elsewhere.

Of these options, I think Planet Resort is the most likely, as it’s the closest to Coaster and Zoo in theme. I think Planet Fantasy is a cooler idea to be honest, but a game with dragons and knights and such seems like it'd have too much friction for a Frontier-style management game. Whatever Planet we end up managing, I doubt we'll see it much before 2028, given Planet Zoo 2 releases later this year, and there were two years separating that and Planet Coaster 2.

As you've probably heard multiple times by now, Marathon is a thoroughly excellent game. Bungie brings all its FPS experience to bear on the inexplicably popular extraction shooter genre, delivering a game that lures you in with its unique aesthetic and then socks you in the jaw with nuanced class-based combat. It has fantastic shooting, an intriguing story and, as you delve deeper into the game, some outstanding map designs.

In short, I like Marathon a lot. But I would trade it instantly for another game about grouchy dwarves blowing up zombies with Molotov cocktails.

I am, of course, referring to Myth, Bungie's series of low-fantasy strategy games developed between the original Marathon trilogy and Halo: Combat Evolved. It's a curious island in Bungie's FPS-focussed history, one you'd be forgiven for not having visited or even knowing about in the terrifyingly futuristic year of 2026.

Halo is something of a false floor in Bungie's past anyway, tending to obscure everything its success was built upon. But it doesn't help that you can't buy the Myth games online anywhere, while getting them to run on modern machines requires you to jump through a bunch of hoops.

This is particularly wild when you consider what a big deal the Myth games were when they arrived, a shot in the arm for a genre that had quickly become bogged down in Command & Conquer clones. The irony here is that Bungie had not initially intended to get into strategy game development.

Following Marathon Infinity, released in 1996, Bungie had planned to develop another FPS, this one in true 3D. But at some point, Bungie's Jason Jones decided the project was too similar to Quake, and responded by pivoting to a completely different genre.

Myth's design was a direct response to the trajectory of strategy games post-C&C, streamlining the base-building, army-rushing loop of C&C and its brethren into pure, tactical squad management.

Thrusting players into a grisly low-fantasy world terrorised by hordes of undead, Myth sees players assume control of small forces of warriors, archers and dwarven artillerymen (plus a few other units later in the game). Each mission assigns you specific objectives, like defending a bridge or escorting a village leader through the wilderness. Inevitably, the wretched minions of the Fallen Lords will attack your party, usually in numbers greater than your own.

This means you need to use your wits to emerge triumphant. And more than most strategy games of this era, Myth really is a game about wits. Barring scripted reinforcements, the units you start a mission with are what you get to complete it, so you really need to maximise enemy casualties by minimising your own.

You'll want to position your archers so they can thin out advancing enemies before they clash with your melee units like warriors and berserkers, and you'll want those melee units in the right formation so that they can slice through enemy health bars as quickly as possible. Most of all, though, you'll want your dwarves to bomb the un-living shit out of enemies before they have a chance to set a rotting finger on your other units.

It would be unfair to say that Myth's greatness resides wholly in its Molotov-chucking dwarves. But they are what first grabs your attention, the special sauce that gives Myth a different flavour from other strategy games of the time. As I've mentioned about three times at this point, these growling, grouchy warriors attack enemies by lobbing Molotov cocktails at them. But these incendiary bottles act more like grenades in Myth. Rather than setting enemies aflame, they blow them apart in a spectacular shower of blood and limbs.

The effect was massively ahead of its time, made possible by Myth's ridiculously advanced physics engine. All those zombie giblets bounce and roll in a way that wouldn't become standard in games for several more years. The result is an interaction that simply never gets tiring, as elementally satisfying as blasting an imp with the shotgun in Doom.

Myth's dwarves comfortably reside among gaming's greatest strategy units. Yet while they seem ridiculously powerful, they're not overpowered. Or rather, they are overpowered, but in such a way that counterintuitively balances the whole game.

See, while dwarves can take out huge clusters of enemies, they can also take out huge clusters of your own units. And Bungie is very good at building scenarios in a way that makes this a frequent possibility, pulling and stretching your forces so that one poorly timed throw could obliterate your entire front line. Molotovs also occasionally fizzle out due to rain or just bad luck, and since dwarves are all but useless in melee combat, you need to keep them protected.

The downside of Myth's design is that things can go very wrong very quickly, and you can easily put yourself in a situation where completing a mission becomes impossible. Indeed, the original Myth was criticised for its harsh difficulty upon its release. But there is something very appealing about the puzzle-like nature of its mission designs today, and bringing your forces through a mission unscathed is tremendously satisfying if you can pull it off.

Despite gaming being inundated with fantasy games over the last 30 years, there still isn't another one really like Myth (apart from its two sequels, of course). Which makes it more of a shame that you can't buy them, anywhere. While Myth and its sequel were developed by Bungie, the rights are held by Take Two Interactive and I suppose fantasy strategy games are a low priority when you have Grand Theft Auto 6 in your stable (though I'd love to see a Myth reboot developed by Firaxis).

There are ways to play Myth today, however, and in pretty robust form too. If you have a copy or ISO for Myth 2: Soulblighter, you can download the excellent Twice Born Edition, a thorough fan remaster of the 1998 sequel that makes Bungie's RTS run beautifully on modern machines. There's also a separate remake of the first game's campaign available for Twice Born, as well as a full port of The Fallen Lords that reverts the changes made for Myth 2 into their original form. All of them are great ways to experience this weird tangent in Bungie's history, and enjoy two of the most distinctive fantasy strategy games ever made.

You ever play a game that just activates your brain in all the right ways? I remember it happening a few times in my life—the first time I played Morrowind on a friend's PC and experienced a lifelong RPG addiction occurring in real-time. Just hearing that menu theme makes me want to run outside and start smacking mud crabs. The most memorable occasion, though, was playing Rome: Total War for the first time as a kid.

I immediately knew that this genre was made for me, and turns out I was right; over 6,000 hours and many years (and games) later, Total War remains my favorite. After 25 years, its longevity as a series feels almost unprecedented, especially as most of the games still use a very similar formula—the classic balance between real-time battles and overworld campaign management.

It's been applied to ancient Rome, the Dark Ages, medieval times, the Boshin War, and even trickier myth-shrouded periods like China's Three Kingdoms and the Trojan War. The only thing Creative Assembly could do to make Total War more addictive in my book was combine it with my favorite fictional settings, Warhammer, which it proceeded to do back in 2016. The 3,000 hours I've since sunk in those games stands as testament to how bloody good they are.

Welp, Total War: Warhammer 40k is next in line, and as for so many, it's a setting that's near and dear to my heart. In the PC Gaming Show last weekend we got to see 40k gameplay for the very first time, as well as a closed beta announcement for later this year, and honestly, it's looking really good.

When Creative Assembly first revealed the game, I was a bit unsure, both in terms of the somewhat arcadey looking visual style of the battles, and my uncertainty surrounding how it could possibly flesh out such a vast and canonically fragmented setting. Live blogs and new info since then have gone a long way to assuaging these doubts.

The map reveal showed us that Creative Assembly has crafted a planet creation system that will flesh out the universe, while the maps have gigantic scale, plenty of variation, and even destructible scenery that opens up new tactical avenues. And now, the new gameplay reveal has me convinced Total War: Warhammer 40k is going to be quite special.

Here are some things that stood out to me:

• We're taking a road trip to Armageddon: The previous tease of Yarrick and Ghazghkull, his long-time nemesis, has been cemented, and CA confirmed that we're fighting our way to Armageddon. This isn't unusual considering the new edition of 40k is all about Armageddon, but I suspect the campaigns will culminate in either defending the planet against a gigantic waaagh (as Yarrick) or assaulting the planet with said waaagh as Ghazghkull.
• The Space Marines and the Eldar have a different opposing campaign: The Astra Militarum and the Orks are similar tactically, so it makes sense they'd be diametrically opposed in the conflict for Armageddon. What are the Space Marines and Eldar doing, though? As stated in the video: "The end goal, at least for the Orks and the Imperium, is Armageddon." Considering their smaller elite numbers, it's likely we'll get a different objective that the Space Marines and Eldar are fighting for.
• Cover is king: We already knew from the map reveal, but we actually got to see units of Astra Militarum being lined up along ruined buildings while protecting a river crossing against Orks. We also got to see a very fancy animation of troops scaling cover as they traversed the battlefield.
• Lots of new units: We got to see loads of units that we hadn't previously, such as a Baneblade, Leman Russ tanks, Sentinels, Ogryns, a Commissar. And for the Orks? Meganobz, Deff Dreads, and we even got a lovely close-up of a Stompa at one point.
• Bombardments are big: The scale of the battlefields already looks pretty huge, but the bombardment abilities seem especially big. At one point, we see a giant explosion (at least as big as a warpstone nuke in Total War: Warhammer) send greenskins flying into the air. Later, we get to a valkyrie fly past and unleash a rocket barrage.

For me, it looks so much better than it did during the initial reveal and a lot further on than I'd expected it to be. Originally I estimated we wouldn't see the game until early 2028, but between this gameplay, the map reveals of the planets and planet-making system, and the beta happening this year, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the game releases next year. If you're interested in checking it out, don't forget to sign up to the beta later this year.

10 years after Misfits Attic released the highly acclaimed real-time tactics roguelite Duskers, we're finally getting a sequel. And this time the developer is promising to expand upon the first game "by adding purpose."

In the first Duskers, players were set the task of piloting drones into derelict and abandoned spaceships in order to find the means to survive and try and figure out how the universe came to be what is essentially a giant graveyard. Our own Christopher Livingston gave it an impressive 86% in PCG's Duskers Review: "When the shit hits the airlock, when your careful plans fall apart and you’re forced to think quickly, when a successful mission becomes a harrowing, scrambling nightmare, Duskers really shines."

Duskers 2.0 has the same premise, but with more "purpose" as mentioned above. It turns out that players had been asking for this, and the answer Misfits Attic came up with was to place survivors hibernating in cryopods inside each run. So now there's an opportunity to not only save all these people you find as you progress, but also create a new home for them by assigning survivors to different colonies and in doing so potentially secure humanity's future.

"Players will scavenge resources, not for them to survive, but for others to thrive," Misfits says. "Sacrificing everything to rescue survivors that will never know them." The developer goes on to compare the role you'll play to Cooper from Interstellar, or Theo Faron from Children of Men.

You'll be able to find out what all that really means for yourself when Duskers 2.0 goes into early access towards the end of 2027, with the full release scheduled for sometime early 2028. But that's quite far into the future, so for now you'll have to settle for the latest trailer shown in today's PC Gaming Show. Hopefully that's enough.

The trailer is a mixture of mock UI and in-game footage, alongside a voiceover which utters remembrances about the necessary and unselfish sacrifice the player must make to save the survivors and humanity itself. It certainly seems like the stakes have been raised for this sequel; with a new emotive twist on the original game's premise. Let's just hope you manage to find and save all these people lost out there in the dark, cold, vacuum of space. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

At the 2026 Summer Game Fest, we got a new trailer for Star Wars: Zero Company, the Star Wars squad tactics game from the XCOM veterans at new studio Bit Reactor. The trailer revealed that Zero Company will launch on August 27, and Anakin Skywalker himself will feature in the story.

This new trailer had a similar balance of gameplay to cinematics as Zero Company's reveal last year, with an emphasis on juicy Star Wars aesthetics and fan service. Nothing wrong with that—Bit Reactor has a great handle on Star Wars art.

One new thing I clocked from the trailer is a wider degree of options for custom characters than I had gleaned at my hands on with the game in February: The trailer included custom-built clone troopers alongside the alien mercenaries we already knew were coming.

The trailer ends with, what else, a surprise cameo from Star Wars' #1 problematic fav, the infamous youngling-hater, Anakin Skywalker. It's unclear as yet how much of a presence Skywalker will have in the game overall, but hey, always nice to see the guy.

I had the opportunity to try Zero Company for myself at Bit Reactor HQ in February, and it immediately shot to the top of my personal most wanted list. As you can see from the trailer, it is basically Star Wars XCOM, but it's not just Star Wars XCOM.

Zero Company has a large number of RPG elements, like Mass Effect-style story squad mates with loyalty missions, conversations, and the like, alongside some punishing permadeath. It also has a commitment to cinematic storytelling that really has to be seen firsthand, with console-style cinematic exploration in-between crunchy tactics battles.

Based on my hands-on, Zero Company is well-positioned to hit that August 27 release date. You can wishlist Star Wars Zero Company on Steam.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era's strategy of building on the series' peak—the 1999 classic HoMM 3—has paid off. In a single day it broke even, shifting 250,000 copies. And in less than a month it managed to climb up to 1 million.

That's a heck of an achievement for the new game in a series that largely seemed to have been forgotten by owner Ubisoft—HoMM 5 came out in 2006, and since then it's been left alone. And nobody can tell me otherwise.

It's definitely earned its popularity. As I said in my Olden Era early access impressions, it's not some wild reinvention, it's simply riffing on the best version of HoMM, giving the vets what they've always wanted: a return to the good old days of HoMM 3. But at the same time, this isn't a remaster or remake—there are new ideas here, with big changes introduced to the magic system and the addition of some fancy new modes.

Speaking of new modes, there are more coming. To celebrate the 1 million sales milestone, Unfrozen and publisher Hooded Horse have shown off a roadmap detailing what's to come as the game makes its way through early access.

There's some good stuff coming this year, like teamplay and observer modes, along with replays, class reworks and a hero skill rebalance, but the meaty parts will be coming closer to the end of early access and beyond. That's when we'll get things like a thieves guild, underground terrain and, perhaps not that surprisingly, a roguelike mode.

This new PvE mode is still a bit of a mystery, unfortunately, with Unfrozen promising "more information later". But it's an exciting prospect all the same. The only issue with Olden Era hewing so close to HoMM 3 is that the veterans have done it all before. But the last time we got a good HoMM, roguelikes weren't really a thing (yes I know Rogue came out in 1980).

So I'm genuinely excited to see this very '90s game get a very '26 mode.

The good news is that if you can't wait for it to hit 1.0, the early access version is already brilliant—and pretty full-featured too. The campaign only has a single act at the moment, and higher-tier magic and monsters are yet to come, but none of that has stopped it from feeling like a return to greatness for the series.

Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus was an evocative turn-based tactics game, accentuating the spookiness of 40K and the hypocrisy of its heroes through both writing and mechanics. You sent your tech-priests into tombs to recover lost knowledge and high-powered weaponry, with lesser cyborgs in front to soak up attacks from the necrons who lived in those tombs. There was no cover system. The necrons attacked whoever was closest, so you'd shove a skirmish screen of robotic zombies and work-experience kids out front, your overpowered tech-priests with power axes and plasma guns waiting safely behind.

As well as doing away with cover mechanics, Mechanicus introduced a cognition system where you'd earn points by learning things—studying monoliths, examining enemies, letting your servitors take hits to better understand the enemy's guns—then spend those points to activate more powerful abilities. If you got the balance right you could steamroll missions, powering up gloriously busted combos.

But it only let you play as the tech-priests. Mechanicus 2 has two campaigns, and after the prologue introduces the two factions, it lets you play as either the Adeptus Mechanicus or the necrons. Getting to see things from the necron side stops them from being faceless robots—you get to know these dynastic intrigue-loving immortals at their most noble and their most petty. If you're into necrons, if you collect an army of them in tabletop 40K for instance, you might want to play Mechanicus 2 just to see them get a turn in the spotlight.

It's tougher to recommend for anyone else. Not because Mechanicus 2 is bad—it's actually pretty good when it hits its stride—but because you could be playing the first game and having a better time.

Unfortunately, a lot of what made the original so special has been done away with. There's cover now for starters, and the choose-your-own-adventure tomb exploration has been replaced with linear sections where your leader gets to make some token strategic decisions that adjust the balance of the next skirmish while just sort of taking a long walk across a map.

Might & Mechanicus

The big change is the way it treats your leaders. Where the tech-priests used to be customizable and could be assigned different classes, then multiclassed to really break the system, Mechanicus 2 gives both the tech-priests and necrons five named leaders with their own upgrade trees—but kind of rudimentary ones. The guy who plays like a tank will always be best at tanking no matter how you spec him.

Instead of being able to bring several of them on each mission, you can only take one and they're essential. If your leader dies that's it—restart the skirmish or load a savegame. It reminds me of Heroes of Might & Magic 4, which might be a deep cut to reference but too late, I've done it now. In every other HoMM game the general stood off the side of the battlefield casting spells or shouting encouragement like a dad at the junior softball league. In HoMM 4 your generals could get stuck in, marching onto the battlefield where they were no longer perfectly safe and could fight and die like everyone else.

It completely changed the tactics, and made protecting that one guy the only thing that mattered. Mechanicus 2 is the same, which gets particularly rough once you encounter enemies who have jetpacks or can teleport. Rather than targeting your frontline they'll deep-strike right next to your leader and take them out in no time flat. It warps the way you play, making every skirmish about making sure you clump more attractive targets together to draw out the assassins and then you just repeat that across every fight.

That's true in both campaigns, and makes them feel less distinct than I was hoping. While tech-priests in Mechanicus 2 earn cognition points by using troops the most strategic way—rangers get a point for shooting someone at long-range, for instance—and that does work differently to the necrons ramping up their dominion level by causing damage, in both cases you're just running protection for a named leader while earning points to activate their cool power. Like Voltron waiting till the end of the episode to bring out the big sword.

Scrap code

I hit a bug where the subtitles for the necrons showed Adeptus Mechanicus dialogue, though the audio remained correct, and the performance isn't great either. It's worth turning down the volumetric fog if you want a decent framerate, though it's a turn-based game so I didn't mind the fact it often ran at just over 30 fps. Not worth bothering with on Steam Deck, though.

The atmosphere is lacking compared to the original as well. While you can turn off voice-acting in the options to get the tech-priests to talk in an approximation of the first game's dialogue, a kind of Modem Simlish, the music doesn't hit as hard. I still listen to the original Mechanicus soundtrack whenever I need an industrial monk rave-up, which is more often than you might think, but Mechanicus 2 sounds more muted. It's closer to ambient menu music, and I didn't hear a single pipe-organ drop.

Mechanicus 2 has the novelty of playing as necrons going for it, which normally only happens in 40K games that contain basically every faction like Gladius or Dawn of War. And when I stopped trying to get as immersed in the vibe as I was in the original and just plugged away at it without paying much attention, treating it almost like a second-screen activity, I had a pretty good time in a "heavily modded XCOM" kind of way. But that's a step-down from the OG, which was both absorbing and innovative in ways Mechanicus 2 is not.

Brian Blessed is a national treasure. From attempting to climb Mount Everest multiple times without oxygen, to being the oldest man to trek to the Magnetic North Pole on foot, to that episode of Have I Got News For You where he eroded Ian Hislop's will to live, the man is a veritable force of nature. He also happened to voice Gotrek Gurnisson, the most famous dwarf slayer in Warhammer Fantasy.

It's a role he played in two separate audio productions, Realmslayer and Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World, both of which recount the undying dwarf's adventures in Age of Sigmar after The End Times. He also reprised the role in Total War: Warhammer, where he was added as a free character alongside his erstwhile companion and "rememberer", Felix Jaeger.

Brian Blessed's association with Creative Assembly actually started much earlier, in an extremely fun video for Total War: Rome 2 (which you can watch below) in which he gets very excited about firing a catapulta. Jumping into Total War: Warhammer 2 as Gotrek, though, came a lot later. He wasn't the only celebrity cameo either, as we also got Iwan Rheon as sadistic Druchii beastmaster, Rakarth (presumably a reference to Ramsey Bolton and his dogs), and Dylan Sprouse as Alith Anar.

Now, I've read all of the Gotrek and Felix novels and they amount to some of the best in Warhammer Fantasy, but last weekend I finally took the leap into his Age of Sigmar stories (Black Library actually gave Realmslayer away for free last month) and I wasn't disappointed.

I don't usually enjoy full cast audio productions versus standard audiobook narration, but Realmslayer's production values are really high, it has a great script, and Brian Blessed is perfect for the role of Gotrek. Turns out that it was pretty demanding, though, as he explains in the post-Realmslayer audio interview:

"I played King Lear a year and a half ago and I would say that this is six and a half times harder," says Blessed. "He is an enormous, powerful personality that dominates everything. He virtually takes on the universe. He's like a strange, giant dwarf knight errant."

If you're in any doubt as to the power Blessed puts into Gotrek, you can listen to a short snippet below from Realmslayer—now imagine him doing this for five and a half hours.

"I'd say it's the most demanding part I've ever come across, he's like ten King Lears and it requires immense voice, and immense control of your diaphragm, and power, and infinite variety. You don't just shout all the time. There is immense subtlety in his primitive character. He's adorable, but you underestimate him at your peril."

I'm not sure I've ever heard Gotrek described as adorable—he literally bites someone's nose off in Realmslayer—but I guess there is a certain hulking… cuddliness to him? As Black Library narrator extraordinaire, Jonathan Keeble (who also happens to voice Maliketh in Elden Ring) puts it:

"When a character is described as being larger than life and a force of nature, you need someone to fill those boots, and Brian's straight from central casting for that."

If you've never had a chance to listen, Realmslayer is a fantastic audio production and one I definitely recommend, especially if you managed to grab it free last month, and you enjoy Blessed's performance in Total War: Warhammer. It could also work as a stepping stone into the novels, though obviously starting at the very beginning with Trollslayer is best.

Of the other free books Black Library gave away last month, I also really enjoyed Darkoath, which provides a pretty unique story from the perspective of a Chaos-worshipping marauder tribe, and was actually written by Chris Thursten, who used to write for PC Gamer many years back.

We live in complex geopolitical times. I think. I'll be honest, I've not been paying attention. But it's recently become known to me that a little strip of water called the Strait of Hormuz has—like a wavepool they had to shut down due to a urine crisis—shut up shop.

This has caused a great deal of consternation.

In news that was presumably impossible to know in advance of all this, loads of everyone's favourite stuff came through that Strait: crude oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and more.

America has done its best to calm the situation—first by creating it from whole cloth and then, when the Strait was unforeseeably closed in response, by threatening to do even more bombing, while doing more bombing.

Somehow, the crisis remains ongoing. But I am prepared. I was born for this. The good Lord and a Swedish man named Johan have given me the tools to solve this problem just as they gave me the tools to solve last year's tariff situation. It's my patriotic duty to strap in, fire up Paradox's Europa Universalis 5, and wargame my way to a solution to this crisis. This will be easy.

This is not easy

A thing not many people notice about Europa Universalis 5 is that it starts in the 14th century, which is not the century we currently inhabit. This meant my first task when I launched the game was to engineer a scenario that roughly approximated the conditions surrounding the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, just without drones, nuclear weapons, the mass use of gunpowder, industrial capitalism, Iran, Israel, oil, or the United States of America.

Apart from that, though, it would be basically the same.

My first inclination was to recreate the relative balance of power of our current crisis. Iran vs the USA is not an especially balanced fight in the 21st century, and I felt it was important to recreate that dynamic in EU5. Subbing in for modern-day Iran would be Ormuz, the scrappy little nation whose borders span either side of the now-iconic Strait. It was close enough, though it was technically part of the Ilkhanate—the gaggle of lands under some form of post-Genghis Mongol dominion. We'll say that's a stand-in for… the Comintern? Is modern Iran in the Comintern? Let's assume yes.

For the USA? I needed the closest thing 1337 AD had to a globe-striding colossus—an entity that could project power anywhere in the world and whose economic and diplomatic might was unignorable. Amusingly, this turned out to be Yuan-dynasty China.

The stage was set: China vs Ormuz in the battle of the (14th) century. I fired up a new game and hopped into the Emperor's embroidered shoes.

Problem one: This is the point at which I make you, the reader, aware that I do not have a great deal of time in EU5. In EU4? I've got hundreds of hours, and it's one of my favourite strategy games ever made, but a lot of EU5's systems are still opaque and unfamiliar to me.

Problem two: China and Ormuz are, like, really far apart.

These two problems merged into a single polycrisis. On day one in power, I fulfilled my campaign promise and declared war on Ormuz. The effect of this was nothing. I'm not even sure the letter arrived. All that changed was that, on the world map, Ormuz was now bordered by an angry shade of red, but the simple fact that our countries were so distant meant it was all a drôle de guerre: a paper war, a war in theory rather than practise.

It did also occur to me at this point that, China being so far away from Ormuz, the latter wouldn't really have cause to blockade the Strait. That's its own Strait. It lives there.

The long paddle

These were all secondary issues compared to the vast barrage of domestic notifications that began to crowd the imperial iPhone lock screen. My heir was unmarried. The estates were unhappy. The peasants were dying in droves but still had the capacity to be angry about it. A lot of stuff about the imperial bureaucracy and the Mandate of Heaven that really flew over my head. Where's the food? Who's growing the food? Why is no one growing the food? Humans need the food to live, your majesty. The markets will be upset about this situation concerning the food.

The run was already a wash but I thought I could treat it as a practice session. I dispatched the entire Chinese army—which at this time consisted of 500 men, for reasons I was too distracted to investigate—onto the entire Chinese navy, which was five boats. Off I sent them to Ormuz.

After what felt like several actual, real-life months of travel (it takes a really long time to get around India; why aren't we making a strait to sort that out?) my men arrived at party central. Or, well, what remained of them did. No food, you see. Several of them died on the trip over.

Why dilly-dally, I thought? I debarked them right at the enemy's doorstep: Hormuz itself—the province and capital—and set them to sieging.

Nothing happened. Despite the immense might of the Chinese military, my 342 remaining men were, it turns out, inadequate to the task of besieging my enemy's capital. In addition, for reasons I still don't really understand, the ships that brought them over all began sinking, seemingly of their own will. Probably a Mandate of Heaven issue.

Take two

Enough monkeying around. I'd learnt my lesson. I needed to pick a USA stand-in that was nearer the action, less riven by major internal crises, and that would give Ormuz reason to actually, ah, blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

You might question the extent to which a country matching this description really functions as a substitute for the 21st-century USA, but I am not taking questions.

I settled on Injuids, one of Ormuz's neighbours that actually sits a little further into the Persian Gulf than Ormuz itself does. Its small size made it less difficult to manage and its location meant Ormuz might actually have some cause to blockade the Strait.

I also knew I needed to exercise a stronger hand in setting the scene. Ormuz's navy at the beginning of a true EU5 game consists of two fishing boats and some sort of pleasure barge. If these were the means by which modern Iran were blockading the Strait of Hormuz then I—literally me, videogame man Joshua Wolens—could probably get over there and sort it out.

So I cheated them in a honking great navy: 50 heavy frigates and 50,000 sailors (this many sailors in one place is known colloquially as a Shenmue) to staff them. I declared war and, just to make sure the skittles were set up just the way I intended them, I quickly swapped into Ormuz's shoes and gave their new navy the task of blockading my ports.

Everything was in place. How would the war play out? We were now in the realm of simulation: the solution to my situation that I found here would be the one I sent to the White House. I needed to be operating at peak efficiency, poised to counter whatever dastardly move Ormuz sent my way.

Ormuz sent three men my way.

I'm not entirely sure what occurred here. Admittedly, my attack on Ormuz came entirely out of the blue (I considered this appropriate). I suppose its land forces, which I had not cheated up, were not quite prepared for it. So the response they mustered to my assault was three men, who just, sort of, hung out in the mountains, getting hungry.

Meanwhile, my own land armies—around 2,500 men summoned from my national levies—were merrily trampling through Ormuz's capital. These were not 342 hungry Chinese soldiers conveyed by death-seeking yachts. These were strong, fit and ready soldiers, punishing Ormuz for having the temerity to do whatever it did.

But I wasn't solving the problem. It didn't matter what I did to Ormuz's towns and cities, the fact remained that it had 50 heavy frigates floating happily in the Strait, forbidding me from passage.

I considered, briefly, that perhaps the solution was to never have begun this war at all. Maybe this conflict was the height of foolishness. Maybe I should sue for peace.

I then rightly disregarded this part of my brain as a communist.

I didn't want to cheat myself a solution. You can't pull up the cheat menu in real life. I had to make do with the resources I had at hand.

There once was a country who swallowed a fly

It came to me.

Right next to Ormuz is Makran, another minor state whose chief export is vibes and whose main business is hanging out. I couldn't cheat myself a solution, but what if I were to somehow get another power—one with a mighty navy—to intervene in my conflict? Real-life diplomats accomplish this by posting at their allies on social media websites they own, but I was limited to 14th-century technology: the debug console.

I quickly swapped over to Makran and cheated it a navy. Ormuz has 50 heavy frigates? Meet the beautiful Makran 100. If I could woo Makran to my side and get it to intervene in the conflict, I could have the Strait cleared in a single business day.

I tried everything. Which is to say, I waited for my diplomacy points to recharge several times before sending Makran nice compliments, but the country remained inexplicably unwilling to pull me out of my hole. No matter what I did, no matter how much I grovelled, wheedled or cajoled, Makran had no interest in helping me.

I gave into temptation. I switched over to Ormuz and declared war on Makran. Then I switched back to Injuids and did it again.

The plot was perfect: using a single, tiny Injuid boat, I lured Makran's great hulking fleet deeper into the gulf. There was no chance the nation would pick a fight with Ormuz's navy—the one currently blockading my port—by itself. It'd win, sure, but it was ultimately pointless. A poor source of war score and strategically unnecessary. I had to bait them into it myself.

It worked. My fishing boat was translated to glory, but the Ormuzi and Makrani fleets collided head-on. The view from my ports must have been spectacular: a great conflagration on the water as the two greatest navies the world had ever known smashed into each other. I was a hero, I was a legend, I was a military genius. My enemy was defeating my enemy, the Ormuzi navy would soon be a thing of the past, and so too would their hateful blockade of the Strait.

When day broke, the Ormuzi were in ruins. Their blockade was broken. In their place stood north of 60 Makrani heavy frigates.

Ah. Yes. I'm beginning to see the problem here.

It was a pretty stacked year for Warhammer Skulls. Instead of the usual plethora of mobile game ads, we got tonnes of good stuff: a new Skaven game called Deathmaster, the long-requested Skitarii class for Darktide, a release date and a beta for Rogue Trader's Trazyn DLC and Dark Heresy, plus a new Chaosgate sequel announcement.

That's not even mentioning the games that were also released yesterday, like Mechanicus 2 and the Bhashiva character pack DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3. Most interesting for me, though, was a relatively brief new trailer for Total War: Warhammer 40k, perhaps one of my most anticipated games ever.

In the trailer, a gruff-voiced character, revealed to be "old man" Commissar Yarrick by the end, talks about, what is presumably, the fourth war for Armageddon and defeating his long-standing ork megaboss rival, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka. It left me with a lot of questions, but there's one thing I'm feeling pretty certain on, both Yarrick and Ghazghkull will be playable characters in Total War: Warhammer 40k for their respective races.

Since the early reveal of the generic Space Marine commander, I've long-wondered as to the position of named characters in Total War: Warhammer 40k and how any of them were going to slot in. But when you think about it, having a generic Space Marine leader in a faction that's supposed to be highly customisable (letting us design our own chapter) makes sense, whereas that doesn't matter as much with either the Astra Militarum, the orks, or the Eldar.

With the new edition of Warhammer 40k focusing itself around the planet of Armageddon, which Yarrick and Ghazghkull have fought over for the past three wars, it makes sense that they would both feature. Especially when you consider Games Workshop's tendency of working with developers to tie Warhammer videogames into what's currently happening in the universe.

In case you're not familiar with either character, Yarrick is essentially an Imperial hero, an aged commissar who's famous for, among other things, defending Hades Hive against Ghazghkull during the second war for Armageddon.

Yarrick faced an ork warboss called Ugulhard, losing an arm, but as if killing Ugulhard wasn't enough, he proceeded to chop off the ork's giant power klaw and attach it to himself. It's hard to overstate how difficult it would be for a lone unaugmented human to kill an ork warboss—few other humans have earned such respect and infamy among the orks. He even speaks orkish.

By comparison, Ghazghkull is the most influential warboss and prophet among all the orks, amassing and martialling gigantic waaaghs (effectively huge ork warhosts) with his strategic smarts and craftiness.

My real question is: in a planet-hopping, system-conquering game like Total War: Warhammer 40k, how are we going to have a significant conflict on a single planet? I guess Armaggeddon could feature in a similar way to The Lost God campaign for Total War: Warhammer 3, which acts as a standalone introduction, prologue, and tutorial for the game.

We could also see a wider conflict in which Yarrick and Ghazghkull are hunting each other across the stars, which would also make sense considering their rivalry. Either way, this is a development I wasn't expecting, but I'm glad it seems like we're going to get actual named characters in Total War: Warhammer 40k versus the generic faction leaders and commanders we've seen so far.

The annual Warhammer Skulls event happened earlier today and it spawned a lot of announcements. Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Deathmaster is a 2D brawler starring a wretched skaven, XCOM-like Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters is getting a sequel, and—the announcement in most want of further context—Darktide is getting a cog boy.

And that's not even all. A demo for Boltgun 2 dropped and apparently it's sick (in a good way). You'd be forgiven for feeling a bit flummoxed by all the Warhammer happenings, which is why one of the most important announcements has gone somewhat unremarked upon.

Warhammer 40,000 Gladius - Relics of War is currently free-to-keep if you redeem it on Steam quick smart. I don't know how long the offer lasts, but Epic Games Store, for example, isn't giving it away willy-nilly so I don't think it's a permanent thing. Normally "free game" is a big deal.

Gladius is a 4X strategy game released in 2018. Upon release, PC Gamer's Tom Senior wasn't too impressed by it, awarding it 61 / 100. "A plodding and predictable 4X strategy game that's relaxing in its own way, but rarely challenging," he wrote. Still, other outlets rated it fairly highly: IGN wasn't wowed by it but reckoned there was "a lot of action-saturated, tactically-driven fun to be had". And our official Warhammer ranker wants to add that it was substantially improved after launch thanks to some patches and DLC.

Unwowed, unimpressed, sickened… what matters is that Gladius is currently free and you can make up your own mind risk-free. It's the only 4X Warhammer game, so for that fact alone it's worth a shot.

Way back in 1998, Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate was a turn-based tactics game that pitted Ultramarines against the forces of Chaos. The series was revived in 2022 with Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, this time setting up the psychic space marines of the Grey Knights against Chaos. Where the original was heavily inspired by the '90s X-COM, the sequel was based more on the hyphenless remakes, specifically XCOM 2. And as someone who played XCOM and thought "this would rule even harder if it was Warhammer" that's all I wanted.

Except what I also wanted was a bit more enemy variety. After the tutorial, Daemonhunters focused entirely on servants of the one Chaos god, the flyblown plague lord Nurgle. So the just-announced sequel that promises we'll be turn-based tacticsing our way "across the war-torn worlds of the Tyrian expanse against seven distinctive enemy factions" is exactly what I was hoping for.

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Deathwatch was revealed during the Warhammer Skulls event with a trailer that shows not only new enemies, but also new protagonists. The Deathwatch marines are alien-hunting specialists drawn from existing chapters, who paint their armor black to show their new allegiance (just like Titus in the opening of Space Marine 2). They also act as part of the Inquisition, and it looks like we'll be able to round out our squad with Inquisitorial agents and more vehicles—a Leman Russ tank, a Scout Sentinel walker, and a Redemptor Dreadnought.

"Rising to power as Interrogator Bastian Rath," the press release says, "players are thrust into command amid a conspiracy threatening the stability of the Tyrian expanse. Across scorched planets, commanders will decide the fate of the sector and the Imperium's future within it as they uncover the truth left behind in the wake of Inquisitor Rykov."

As for those seven factions, only a handful show up in the trailer. Orks, t'au, and genestealers are all represented, and a mutalith vortex beast sneaks in at the end—a servant of the Chaos god Tzeentch that carries a literal Chaos gate on its back, justifying the name of the game right there. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Thousand Sons, space marines who follow Tzeentch, show up as well.

Though it doesn't have a release date yet, you can follow Chaos Gate – Deathwatch on Steam and the Epic Games Store for updates. Other big news from the Warhammer Skulls showcase include a release date and DLC roadmap for Dawn of War 4, Darktide getting a Skitarii class, the reveal of a platformer where you can play a ratman, and the release of tiger warrior DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3.

Bad news, gang: war is dawning. Four. Uh, I mean there were a bunch of Dawn of War 4-related announcements at Warhammer Skulls, including the game's release date. The game will hit on September 17 this year, unless you forked out for the whizzbang Commander Edition, in which case you get it three days earlier on September 14.

Oh, what's the Commander Edition, you ask? Wouldn't you know it—they announced that at Warhammer Skulls too. There's the humdrum standard edition, which gets you the base game and the hoi-polloi release date, and the Commander Edition, which marks you as a member of the videogame preorder aristocracy, gets advanced access, and comes with some extra DLC gubbins when they release post-launch: a story prologue, a campaign expansion, and a new faction (those last two are one package).

That prologue is more properly called the Blood Ravens Story Prologue, and is described in the pre-announce press bumf as "a Blood Ravens strike force returns to their ancestral homeworld of Aurelia. Guided by a legendary commander, their mission sets in motion events that will shape the fate of the Chapter. Fight through pivotal battles ignited by ancient relics."

The expansion reads as a little meatier, at least to me. It will add an as-yet unnamed new faction for you to do war with and a new post-main-campaign campaign. You'll also get new playable commanders and expanded stuff for the game's Crusade Mode.

Crusade Mode will make its appearance in autumn, and "a series of free updates will introduce new modes, map packs, and the Mission Editor—allowing players to create, play, and share their own battles."

There are no actual announced prices for either of those just yet—but I feel confident saying the hoity-toity edition will be dearer—but both are 10% off during their preorder periods, as videogames tend to be.

This week marks the culmination of Civilization 7's yearlong attempt at a post-launch redemption arc, as Firaxis has released its Test of Time update, a free patch the studio has called an expansion-sized overhaul. Alongside the much-requested option to play as the same civilization between age transitions, Test of Time reworks victory conditions, adds systems for optional objectives with bonus rewards, and more.

Clearly, Civ fans have been waiting for a ripe opportunity to give the controversial sequel a second shot: At time of writing, there are more Steam users playing Civ 7 than there have been in over a year. But as early reactions remain as mixed as ever, it's unclear whether Test of Time will repair Civ 7's reputation.

Steam's Most Played chart says there are currently almost 16,200 users playing Civ 7. Not only is that its highest player count in over a year—according to SteamDB, the last time Civ 7 attracted more than 16,000 concurrent players was April 13, 2025—it's also roughly double the peak concurrent tallies it's managed during the last week.

Those new and returning players have also brought an uptick in Steam reviews. Before the Test of Time launch, Civ 7 hadn't received more than 20 Steam reviews in a day during the last month. Between yesterday's patch drop and now, players have left 172 new or revised reviews.

Unfortunately, across all languages, those responses have been almost evenly split, with positive reviews having a slight 52% majority. Favorable reviewers say they appreciate Test of Time's changes, with one user writing that the game finally "feels like a 1.0 release rather than a beta." Another says the update's changes "show the team is dedicated towards giving the community what they would like."

Others say Test of Time's changes—while they are improvements—aren't enough. One critical reviewer says Civ 7 still "just isn't very engaging," adding that gameplay systems remain "heavily stripped down" compared to prior entries. Even after the update, UI issues are a persistent complaint in negative reviews, as players say the game still struggles to present useful information when it's most needed. 2K's DLC pricing, like the Right to Rule Collection demanding $30 for four civs and two leaders, is a common callout, too.

Users on the Civ subreddit are sharing the same range of opinions. Some are calling it so "transformed" that Civ 7 is "like a brand new game." Others say they "still feel put off." Some say they've already switched their Steam review to positive; others are holding off until they see even more improvements.

As ever, consensus about the course of history is slow to form. But if you've been giving Civ 7 some time to work through its initial growing pains, now's a great time for a revisit to form a more final opinion.

I've been waiting 20 years for this. All the way back in 2006 a supplement for the Warhammer TTRPG called Tome of Corruption quietly slipped in an illustration of a tiger-headed warrior preparing to attack an elephant in the jungle. The idea there were beastmen with the heads of tigers somewhere in the Warhammer World's nation of Ind was hinted at in a few books, but that was the first illustration I'd seen of one, and the first suggestion they were a legit thing and not just one of the many exaggerated rumors about distant lands Warhammer books are stuffed with.

Two whole decades later, I'm playing an army of tiger warriors in Total War: Warhammer 3 and they rule. I'm as surprised as anyone that a whole new species got plonked into Warhammer this late in the day, though perhaps the most surprising thing is that they come in the form of a DLC that's only five dollars.

The value for money of Warhammer 3's DLC has been a point of contention for a while now. Creative Assembly tried splitting up lord packs so that instead of buying multiple legendary lords bundled together you could just pick one you want, though at $9 a pop, players still quibbled. So, while Bhashiva the White Tiger is a legendary lord, she's packaged in a new format called a "character pack" that only costs $5 and doesn't include new Regiments of Renown or as many bells and whistles as other DLC. To save you skipping to the end, I think it's worth the money.

While Bhashiva's individual campaign mechanics aren't unique—the insignias she can award to units resemble orc scrap upgrades, for instance—the combination of mechanics does end up feeling different. The currency to pay for those insignias is earned by completing missions for your neighbour, the Iron Dragon, and that relationship adds a distinct flavor.

Bhashiva's a mercenary general whose people are refugees from Ind, given a new home in the Mountains of Mourn by one of Cathay's draconic rulers, Zhao Ming. Every five turns he offers three tasks you can choose to tackle or ignore, which sometimes reward you with new units or magic items, but always pay iron favor. As well as buying insignias, that's the currency you use for hiring additional units from the Cathay roster, and for increasing the total number of armies you can have.

So yeah, there are limits on both your units and armies, though I never found them too painful. Tiger warriors aren't restricted in the same way as the regular Cathayan troops you've got access to, and I wanted as many tigers as I could get, mainly using Cathayan crossbow units and a grand cannon or two to plug gaps. Plus, I quickly amassed a fortune in iron favor. Even when you're not working on those tasks Zhao Ming staples to the office notice board, fighting his enemies and taking their settlements pays a steady amount.

Bhashiva's other big campaign mechanic is the Tiger Court, where you dedicate relics to three philosophical pillars in return for buffs to tiger warrior units. The Way of the Thousand Gods represents the religion of Ind, and includes defensive enhancements to physical resistance and melee defence. The Prophecy of the White Tiger is about dedication to Bhashiva's lineage, white tigers who return when danger looms, and has a sweet ability that means tiger warrior reinforcements show up to any battles that aren't sieges. The Teachings of Kamau venerate a legendary tiger warrior hero who sounds like their equivalent of Sigmar, and I prioritized that one for the sake of increasing my armor-piercing damage.

Relics pop up in pre-set settlements across the map, some of which can be earned by reaching them with trade caravans, which work just like the caravans the other Cathay factions use, though narratively you're guarding them as mercenaries rather than acting as merchants yourselves.

The relics and Zhao Ming's jobs provide more structure to Bhashiva's campaign than I'm used to on the Immortal Empires map. (You can't play her on the Realm of Chaos map, which is fine since I'm pretty sick of it anyway.) You start at war with some of the Ogre Kingdoms and have more to the south, while Grimgor's orcs are immediately to the north and Chaos Dwarfs to the east.

Each has a relic or two in their settlements, but none of Zhao Ming's first batch of quests gave me a reason to target the Chaos Dwarfs, while one quest promised a payout if I spent 10 turns whaling on the orcs. Also, the tiger warriors don't have a lot of armor penetration until you dedicate some relics to the Teachings of Kamau, and I didn't fancy taking on the tiny Chaos tinheads until I'd done something about that.

I ended up allying with the ogre tyrant Greasus Goldtooth, since he was already friendly with my boss Zhao Ming, who surprisingly kept offering me missions to defeat Goldtooth and take his settlements. While I slaughtered Grimgor's orcs with pleasant ease and then took the fight to the Chaos Dwarfs, Zhao Ming was constantly needling me to fight ogres. Ignoring those tasks made completing the 10 of them I needed to finish a long campaign harder than expected—sometimes those goals ask you to take a settlement or defeat a foe on the other side of the map, or select a target that quickly gets taken by an ally, rendering them moot. I spent a bunch of turns pursuing other objectives while waiting for a task I could accomplish to show up.

The real sticking point turned out to be relics. While I earned a few with caravans, I also lost several caravans due to all the enemies I made along the trade routes. I'd carefully angle them away from the Chaos Dwarfs I was at war with only to have a horde of daemons or one of my other foes take them out. Conquest is the way to go, though I did encounter an annoying bug where one settlement with the green relic icon above it didn't pay out when I finally took it over.

The campaign would have gone quicker if I'd known to prioritize relics right from the off, and maybe not stayed friends with the ogres, but it didn't drag. Though I always autoresolve insignificant late-game battles, when I fought the ones that mattered I had a great time with my army of ferocious Tony the Tiger lookalikes. The base dual-axe tiger warriors are fast and hard-hitting enough that I didn't feel the lack of cavalry, the iron claw warriors who fight with guandos are both a strong general upgrade and useful anti-large specialists, and the stalkers who throw discs as precursor weapons when they charge (like the Lizardmen skinks do with javelins) can serve as vanguard-deployment flankers.

On the battlefield the tiger warriors are enjoyably savage, though I learned the hard way not to throw Bhashiva at problems on her own and expect her to tank them all. Tigers together strong. Off the battlefield I'm less enthusiastic that Bhashiva's entire personality is based around honor and dedication to Zhao Ming, when a more rough-edged relationship with the slightly mental dragon man—who you can't declare war on or confederate—would be interesting. I don't own a cat, but the idea of them as blandly loyal servants rather than hand-scratching little maniacs seems like missing a trick.

After waiting 20 years to have more than a picture in an RPG book to go on, I'm still stoked with what we got. Having cleared out the Chaos Dwarfs, I ended up in a protracted war with Clan Rictus, and sending my cats after the rats felt like a much more thematic match-up. Now that I think about it, the bird-headed Tzeentch is Bhashiva's ancestral enemy too, so maybe there's more cat to them than I thought.

The Bhashiva character pack will be available on May 21 during the Warhammer Skulls event. An update at the same time will add a free legendary hero called Taoyan the Merciless, who is recruitable by any Cathay army.

Civilization 7's latest update arrives on Monday. Firaxis revealed the bulk of the update's additions earlier this month, including the "most-requested addition" of letting players guide a single Civ across the entirety of its campaign. But Firaxis kept one last surprise in reserve, having just revealed that the update will add military wunderkind Alexander the Great to the base game for free.

As you'd probably expect from one of the ancient world's most renowned generals, Alexander's playstyle is all about making war, receiving a natural +2 combat strength bonus for land military units. More specifically, though, Alexander's all about making a name for himself. Not only are towns that are converted into cities renamed after Alexander, but building a wonder in cities outside your capital also conveys a host of bonuses to his Civ.

For starters, Alexander gets +2 Dominion for every city with a wonder outside your capitals, while those same cities also gain 10% production and culture bonus. Finally, unique military units get a further +1 combat strength for each non-capital wonder too. In other words, monuments to Alexander's might also convey further might upon him.

Alexander's introduction also brings a new unique hoplite unit and a new wonder, the oracle. All of this comes bundled alongside the broader additions featured in the update, which includes an overhauled victory system that removes legacy paths and focussed on making more interesting choices, and a "triumphs" system of optional objectives that convey extra bonuses when completed.

It's undoubtedly a significant patch, with Firaxis keenly pushing its "game-changing" qualities. Whether it will be enough to shift the game's stubbornly 'Mixed' rating on Steam remains to be seen, however. Civ 7's Steam reviews have been split right down the middle for months, and the complaints causing that split aren't limited to its controversial age transition system. They also relate to things like UX and underdeveloped secondary mechanics that all contributed to a sense that Civ 7 left the oven too early.

Yet while Civ 7 may be divisive, it has been a commercial success for Firaxis. 2K CEO Strauss Zelnick said that the game has been "a profitable enterprise", even if he conceded that they got the Age system "wrong".

For a game series that revels in realizing the obscure and ephemeral pieces of the Warhammer Fantasy setting as in-game units, Total War: Warhammer has left the interests of one specific player segment unfulfilled: the furries.

As countless intersecting player subcultures are no doubt celebrating, that changes next week when giant tiger people become playable in Total War: Warhammer 3. Creative Assembly has announced that the Bhashiva and the Tiger Warriors character pack launches on May 21.

The Tiger Warriors are a bit of rarely-seen Warhammer Fantasy flavor that players have been hoping to see in gameplay since Grand Cathay—itself something that had largely existed in Warhammer's periphery before its Total War incarnation—was first announced as a playable faction in 2021. The reason is self-evident: It's cool to see a big tiger man hit somebody with an axe.

Sadly, their presence in Warhammer 3 until now has consisted of a settlement named "Village of the Tigermen" in the Broken Lands of Tian Li province. But once the Bhashiva character pack drops next week, players can field Tiger Warrior armies of their own, including the titular White Tiger of Shang-Yang herself as a legendary lord.

A mercenary sworn into the service of Zhao Ming, Bhashiva will be able to field a spellcasting tigerman hero unit and a trio of Tiger Warrior infantry types. She'll also be able to complete missions to earn Zhao Ming's favor, allowing her to access the more conventional troops of Grand Cathay.

Creative Assembly first announced the upcoming inclusion of the Tiger Warriors in February, and describes their playstyle as "a force built around agility, stalking, and sudden ambushes." As someone who prefers a thoroughly dwarven strategy of covering a mass of infantry in enough armor that they can simply march unbothered into the middle of enemy armies, that's a departure from my usual tactical playbook—but again, giant tiger guys hitting things with axes. It argues for itself.

The Bhashiva and the Tiger Warriors character pack will be $5 when it launches on Steam on May 21.

The annual Warhammer Skulls event has mutated over the years, going from a week of discounts and freebies involving Warhammer-themed videogames to a showcase of upcoming additions to that growing library of ultraviolence. This year's edition will be no different, but we're also getting a whole game earlier than expected, with turn-based tactics-em-up Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus 2 being released during the Skulls event on May 21.

We're pretty hyped for this one. Robin Valentine played the demo and called it a tantalising slice of what could be the next great Warhammer strategy game. It'll have a revamped Cognition system, with every unit having its own way of collecting the Cognition points you need to activate abilities and do cool stuff, and will also feature the debut of 40K's space dwarf faction, the Leagues of Votann (or squats if you're an old Warhammer tragic like me).

The Warhammer Skulls showcase will also include news about Darktide (a new class reveal maybe?), Space Marine 2, Dawn of War 4, Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy, Warhammer Survivors, Boltgun 2, Battlesector, and Total War: Warhammer 3. As hungry as everyone is for updates on Total War: Warhammer 40,000, the folks at Creative Assembly recently said we'll hear more about that by the end of June, so don't expect much movement on that front.

Warhammer Skulls will be broadcast on YouTube and Twitch on Thursday, May 21, at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm BST. The showcase will be hosted by Alanah Pearce, who is voicing Nyra Veyrath, the playable Celestian of the Sisters of Battle in Boltgun 2. Mechanicus 2 will be available on Steam and Epic.

Reinstall: Tim Edwards plays Sid Meier's Railroads! and tracks his progress - PC Gamer #201 (UK, July 2009)

I didn't realise I enjoyed business. But business is competition. Competition is a game. And games, I think we can all agree, are awesome. That's why I've fallen in love with the railroads.

Sid Meier's Railroads! in this case. Sid Meier of Civilization, and Gettysburg, and Golf fame—to name but a few. Sid is widely recognised as one of the truly great designers, someone who has a reputation for cutting through to the core of what makes games interesting. Someone who can craft game mechanics from market forces and direct AI to produce human-like behaviour. Someone who can find the fun and humour in often quite dark subject matter. Civilization is a videogame all the family can enjoy. It's also about genocide, racism, religious hatred and slavery. Go Sid.

That lightness of touch is everywhere in Railroads!. I think this is a game that was cruelly ignored upon release. It stands upon uneasy ground. It is neither a game about the micromanagement of railroad tracks and train-routes, a game of signals and junctions, nor is it a hard-nosed business simulation. You will not be setting ticket prices, nor will you be balancing freight costs. Instead, it lies somewhere in the middle. A game about train sets and toys and the raw competition of commerce. I think it is, in fact, a competitive real-time boardgame, one that deserves to be played with friends.

Fare enough?

So: in Railroads!, you link towns and industries with the goods and passengers they need by painting tracks across a bright and airy landscape. There are around ten scenarios, each set in distinct and exciting periods for rail technology, and each can be played to completion in about a couple of hours. You can play alone, but to experience what the game is really about, you'll want to add at least a couple of AI competitors, or try it in multiplayer.

Given that the game didn't sell particularly well, and it used a hideous GameSpy server browser, you're better off hooking up over an office network and/or LAN party. Yes. You read that correctly. I'm advocating running a Railroads! LAN party.

When you start playing, you're looking to get a war chest by carrying passengers to and from the major cities. The money is good, but not massive. Pick a shortish route, and you'll save on the maintenance and running costs. Once you've made your first $100K, you'll face a decision. Extend, secure, or invest?

Financial engineering

This is where Railroads! begins to get dirty. Extending your railroad means putting lines down between more cities and industries, taking control of their goods and taking a stake in their production. It's no coincidence that dropping a depot on a lumbermill or factory is called 'annexing' in Railroads!—it's a hostile act. You're saying to your opponents "this is my territory. Keep off."

Your second option is to secure your position. You can do that in two ways: the first is to use your float to buy up the industries you're planning to exploit – then you'll get an income not just from transporting their goods, but for every item sold. Raw materials don't make you much cash. Transporting iron ore is for suckers. Transporting nitrates (goat shit, essentially) from a farm is for losers. What you should be doing is moving the finished products: the bombs and missiles produced from refined materials. Buying up that weapons factory in Leicester can secure your position throughout the mid-game. Monopolies are fun.

But it's not a simple case of throwing cash onto the table and reaping the rewards. You can't just buy your factory. When you make an offer, the factory is put up for auction, and at that point, all the AI players or human players can put in bids. And they will, just to screw you.

If you want and need that factory, you're going to have to pay for it – often through the nose. Other players want a cut of the proceeds, or they just want to drive the purchase price higher and higher. You can bankrupt players like this. Or you can make them vulnerable to hostile takeover.

You could call it investing, or you could call it 'being a cock'.

The final method of attack is to start buying shares, either in yourself or your competitors. You can buy share options in 10% increments, the cost of which is determined by the value of the company in question, their assets and profits. Gather a greater than 50% aggregate stake in a company, and you'll take them over completely, either adding their railroad to your own network, or selling the entire company off. You're the Borg, but with the cybernetic killing machines replaced by fat controllers.

It's horrifying to realise that a rival has a 30% stake in your company. It is even more horrifying to realise that to raise the capital to complete a major project or network upgrade, you'll have to sell some of your own shares.

Rolling stock

That's where the genius of Railroads! appears—in the interaction between these three systems. Need money? Sell shares. That's a risk. Want to take a controlling interest? Hoard cash and hope the value of your rivals doesn't outpace your savings. Want to bankrupt an opponent? Make a play to buy the industries at the heart of their network. If you win the auction, you'll be in the black. If you lose, they'll double their operating profits, but they may have to sell stocks to raise the cash.

In singleplayer, the Railroads! AI does an extraordinary job of exploiting these interactions—triggering auctions you can't afford to drive you to sell stock, or annexing your most important industries. In multiplayer, it's a constant battle between friendly fuckwittery and outright humiliation.

This remains an imperfect game, however. Irritating routing bugs have been present since launch: you'll sometimes find trains can't find their way through a junction. And it remains slightit's in desperate need of an easy-to-use level editor and new scenarios. But it's a worthwhile and worthy game to test your business acumen. There are few games like it: few games in which you can honestly end a session with "I do actually own yo' asses. Now fetch me tea."

I'm a big fan of Two Point Museum, the latest and greatest of Two Point Studios' revival of the Bullfrog-style management sim. But I am also a fan of how the developer has approached the release of its DLCs. You can pay for expansions like Zooseum and Fantasy Finds to get a big chunk of extra stuff to build, but you also get a portion of the DLC for free with each of the game's updates.

Such is the case with Two Point Museum's latest add-on, Arty Facts. As the name implies, this expansion lets you add an art gallery to your institution. The pack adds 27 new art exhibits for your guests to gaze meaningfully at, but it also adds a new "art studio" room where your experts can create paintings of their own. According to the expansion's launch trailer, the art studio facilitates "millions of potential outcomes", thus providing an "endless" stream of custom art.

I was curious about how this system works, particularly whether it used any generative AI given it's filtering into games everywhere these days, often without clear disclosure. So I posed the question to Sega, which publishes the Two Point games. Sega got back to me pretty quickly with a thorough rundown of how the art studio works, the upshot of which is there is "no generative AI involved".

To summarise, there are three types of art the new in-game studio can produce, namely paintings, portraits, and sculptures. Each of these artworks is randomly generated from a catalogue of relevant assets, such as 3D models in the case of sculptures, or pre-made character icons in the case of portraits.

But the way each artwork type is generated is slightly different. Paintings, for example, have four layers that are each randomly generated, as are the colour palettes of the painting, and the size of both the canvas and the frame. Portraits, meanwhile, have various filters that help define the variation of the images. As for sculptures, players can actually choose between three different materials—clay, marble and bronze—with randomised variations in colour in each.

All told, Sega says the system can produce more than 250 million combinations, far more than you're ever realistically likely to see. That's a lot of extra customisation in a game that already offers a broad array of options, which is pretty neat.

As for the other exhibits, they aren't just limited to paintings and sculptures. You can also create five interactive art displays. This includes performance art exhibits such as mime acts and Shakespearean pastiches, giving Two Point Studios' world class animators yet more room to flex their muscles.

You can put all your curation skills to the test in a new Museum location, Undee Docks, a fittingly urban space to showcase all those emerging artists. There's also new gift shop items, new themed café foods, and a fresh expedition map to explore, which sees your experts get metaphysical as they traverse a living sketchbook.

As mentioned, the DLC's release coincides with an update to the base game that lets you try some of the DLC's features for free. The Arty Facts taster lets you play up to the first star of Undee Docks and explore the first three POIs of the expedition map, and you get full access to the Art Studio.

Two Point Museum: Arty Facts is available for $10/£10, with a 10% discount until May 14. If you're interested in management sims and are yet to try out the base game, you absolutely should. It's the most accomplished game Two Point Studios has made, and its blend of museum construction, expedition wrangling, and general institutional management represents a small but significant step forward for the genre. And if you don't want to take my word for it, check out Mollie Taylor's similarly effusive Two Point Museum review.

There's still a part of me that thinks of 2016's Stellaris as one of the "new school" Paradox grand strategy games, even though it turned 10 years old just this week. If you were to add all of its 30+ DLCs to your Steam cart right now, it would run you upwards of $200—and that's with quite a bit of it on sale. Paradox has even announced the next batch with Season 10, bringing scenarios and nomads among other things.

When Stellaris launched, it was already clear that this DLC model, funding long lifespans and lots of transformative free patches, was working for Paradox—as 2012's Crusader Kings 2 and 2013's Europa Universalis 4 had proven. But when it began its development life, the idea that a grand strategy game could still be getting DLC for a decade hadn't become so obvious.

"It wasn't exactly clear that it was incredibly successful when I started scribbling down notes for what was to become Stellaris," said original game director and Paradox's current chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus. "But I guess sometime during development we realized that this is the model we should go with."

And it's not just how much you can shell out for new features and new spaceships that makes Stellaris notable. Across its lifespan, it's received 41 major free patches and dozens of smaller ones. The current game version right now is 4.3, and each of those bigger jumps to 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 have transformed it in ways more significant than some sequels do. 1.0 and 4.3 are almost hard to recognize as the same game.

"I joke on the forums that Stellaris the Spaceship of Theseus," quipped current game director Stephen Muray.

Much like there have been four major patches, he is the fourth person to sit in the captain's chair as game director. With Stellaris being its own stellar dynasty, I was curious what two of those captains felt were the things that kept Stellaris grounded. If it is a Spaceship of Theseus, what is the shape of the hull?

"I still think it's at its core about the joy of exploring the unknown, seeing new things play out every session or every playthrough essentially," Fåhraeus responded. "So it's a little bit different from other 4X games in that regard, in that it puts so much emphasis on exploration and the events that you experience while venturing forth into the galaxy."

"I'd say that the number of player fantasies is what Stellaris is all about," Muray added, referencing the fact that you can make anything from Star Trek's borg to Starcraft's zerg in its empire builder. "I remember back in the beginning as a player trying all these different things, and then we just keep adding more and more. People say that if you come back six months later, the game is different. We're always trying to give you new things to do."

As for what Muray sees as the triumph of his turn as game director? "My reign is mostly a shift towards more of the narrative and RPG-based content. We started with [expansions such as] Overlord and First Contact and things like that. I took the team in a little bit more of the RPG direction. Stellaris and Crusader Kings 2 were the games that I played before I joined Paradox. That's sort of the style that I have as the RPG gamer. I came here from Dungeons & Dragons Online and things like that. So the stories are sort of my thing."

While Stellaris may be approaching old age in strategy game terms, it's not exactly ancient yet. As evidence of this, I have icons on my desktop right this moment for Warcraft 3 and Age of Empires 2, which are much older games. And the latter is still getting new DLC! I asked both directors if they felt like Stellaris could have that kind of a lifespan, or if we're closer to the end than the beginning.

"I think it still has some mileage left, that's for sure," Fåhraeus said simply.

"I think that there's still a lot of stories that we can still tell and things to explore," Muray elaborated. There are some fantasies we haven't hit yet. But we'll have to be careful not to retread things that we already have."

But it's not easy to maintain such an unwieldy vessel with so many new systems introduced and shiny additions bolted onto the outside of it. Even as a grand strategy aficionado, I don't find myself going back to Stellaris as much these days simply because there's too much to keep track of now. And Paradox is well aware of this.

"It's a classic development [problem] with all of our live games," Fåhraeus admitted. "What started out as our most approachable grand strategy game with a very clean interface is no longer that, let's put it like that. I don't think there are many proper ways around that. At some point you're going to have to start thinking 'sequel' I suppose. You could also do some sort of repackaging UI cleanup pass. But this is what happens after 10 years with so many expansions."

Whether or not we might see a sequel drop out of hyperspace sometime in the not-so-distant future isn't something either game director could answer. But if you want to know what is immediately on deck for Stellaris, check out the other part of this interview where we talk about the upcoming DLC for Season 10.

Most strategy games that make it to 10 years old have already passed the event horizon of their development cycle and are being pulled apart like spaghetti by the gravity of the thousands of new games released every day. Not so for Stellaris, Paradox's spacebound grand strategy 4X. How it got to where it is and is still drawing in intrepid stellar statebuilders is a saga worthy of a Star Wars title crawl. But it's not even done yet, with the newly announced Season 10 finally bringing space nomads to the table.

Nomads, with a current release date of Q2 2026, will finally let you play a species without a homeworld. This is something that Paradox has wanted to do for a long time, but posed significant technical challenges. We got to chat with game director Stephen Muray about what's coming.

"For years, I've always wanted mobile planets," Muray said. "That was always the impossible dream. The programmers would run off screaming and crying anytime we mentioned it... So after [last year's big patch] 4.0, we had an extended period of bug fixing and things like that. And we have the thing called PDT: personal development time. Everyone can basically do what they want to, as long as it helps the project, for a day. And we had pulled all of these days together into a full week of PDT because we were too busy to actually take off a day a month.

"And the team came together and were like, 'We're going to prove to you that we can do nomads.' And I was like, 'Really? Do you really think that you can pull off a successful prototype in a week?' Now, I say that in this sort of, you know, not demeaning way. I was really hoping they'd succeed because I've really wanted to do nomads for a long time. But I had to give them that challenge of, 'I don't believe that you'll be able to do this.'

"And boy, did they step up. By the end of the week, we had an interesting prototype that didn't make people scream and cry. And they were like, yeah, this is how we're going to split the colonies and ships and planets, and integrate the ship into it. And we totally have ideas on how all of this design will work. And then, you know, the next week I was like, 'Well, OK, you've convinced me.'"

The core of your nomadic empire will be a massive vessel called an arkship that basically functions as a mobile planet. You can specialize it for either a military, civilian, or scientific focus and upgrade it in much the same way you do terrestrial worlds in Stellaris now. There are even new origins that let you play as, among other things, the galaxy's most lavish cruise ship. And you'll be interacting with your gravity-bound friends and rivals a bit differently than other empires."If you conquer new planets and that sort of thing, you'll spin them off as vassals or have the option of playing as that vassal," Muray explained. "You'll also be able to settle onto planets eventually if you desire, giving up your arkship and turning it into infrastructure on the planet. Or at the reverse, say you're losing horribly in a war. Maybe you should consider greener pastures and flee your planet-bound existence and build an arkship to get away."If you're like me, the first thing that came to mind on hearing that was Battlestar Galactica fleeing from a machine revolt—something that can already happen in Stellaris. And I wasn't alone.

"Absolutely, that was kind of what we were hoping for," Muray confirmed. "We want to be the quarians who go back home and land. You want to play as [the colonial fleet from] Battlestar Galactica. I mean Battlestar Galactica was one of the things in my initial pitch deck after I approved their prototype. We must cover this fantasy."

The other, bigger expansion in Season 10 is called Willpower, which will focus on shaping and spreading Ideologies. Stellaris has always had ethics like Materialist and Spiritualist that define the things your people strive for and how they might interact with other species. But Willpower seeks to take that a step further, even possibly pitting empires with similar ethics against each other.

"If I have a spiritualist Ideology and you have a different spiritualist Ideology, then they will bicker and fight against each other most likely," Muray explained. "You'll have to be careful that you don't lose ground to their ideology and they become the dominant one in your empire. [But] we were pretty specific that this is not the religion expansion. Spiritualist Ideologies are kind of religions, but we have Ideologies for all of the ethics, not just spiritualism. So you can have Human Rationalism as an Ideology that you'll spread. And then the aliens that you expose to this may pick up your habits and want to join it and follow some of your tenets and things like that."

Alongside all of that, Season 10 will introduce scenarios to Stellaris that use its base mechanics in ways that are quite different from the standard 4X grand strategy mode. One is a king of the hill-style PvP game meant to be playable in a shorter amount of time than a grand campaign. Another is a roguelike about guiding one ship across the galaxy.

"I've always wanted to do some sorts of constrained scenarios," Muray said. "There's a lot of stories that we want to tell that we can't because there's this whole game there. The example that I always used was a Fallen Empire rolls up to pre-FTL Earth and it's like, 'Hey, here's some knowledge data banks and stuff like that. We just lost our fleet to the Prethoryn Scourge. You just need to hold up for 10 years, 20 years and we'll be right back!' And just playing these sort of short game experiences.

"In Hearts of Iron you can play a game and be done in a night or day or whatever. Eight hours is enough to do a campaign. In Stellaris it is not. And sometimes I want a shorter play session and accomplish something and feel like, 'I did this.'"With the ability to really tweak the rules and starting parameters of a campaign, Paradox hopes modders will surprise them as well.

"The players are the ultimate source of creativity out there," Muray continued. "The entire MOBA genre was created off of one of these sorts of systems. The scenarios that we have are very constrained in different ways for whatever the playstyle is. The way this works is you can be like, 'The physics research file—it doesn't exist.' You can just blacklist that. I really want to see what [modders are] able to do with Stellaris if they can blacklist or whitelist things and systems and you know just go nuts. So I don't actually know what the scenario system is going to bring us, but I really want to find out."

Season 10 makes it seem to me like Stellaris isn't ready to slow down any time soon. But if you want to know how it got here and where it might be going in the even more distant future, check out the other part of this interview on the 10th Anniversary with Muray and Paradox's Chief Creative Officer Henrik Fåhraeus.

Paradox Interactive has rolled out its "biggest update yet" for Europa Universalis 5. This is a slightly cheeky way to phrase things, considering this is only the second major update for Paradox' latest, dizzyingly complex grand strategy. But it's also accurate. With patch notes that Paradox claims would fill 72 pages of a Google doc, the Encinades update overhauls several of the game's major systems and squashes more than 2,000 bugs.

The primary goal of Encinades (which is not to be confused with echidnas, the small, egg-laying mammal and Sonic the Hedgehog frenemy) is similar to that of Alexander the Great, namely expanding the Balkans. The update introduces more than 300 new advances and around 150 dynamic historical events, many of which revolve around Greece and the other countries in Europe's southeastern peninsula. These are designed to couple with the Fate of the Phoenix expansion pack, which focuses on Byzantium, but are free for everyone to play with.

The update also overhauls the Holy Roman Empire (which history tells us is no mean feat). As explained in the accompanying video showcase, the previous implementation of the UI for the Holy Roman Empire made it "incredibly difficult to distinguish members, policies and finances at a glance". Hence, this panel has been rebuilt into a tabbed structure, which Paradox hopes will make the information easier to digest. Though one could argue the Holy Roman Empire being incredibly unwieldy and hard to parse is the most authentic experience you can have.

More broadly, Encinades provides a significant overhaul to the game's economy, with more refined trade route logic and enhancements to the Maritime Presence mechanic, as well as a new trade orders feature. Paradox hopes these adjustments will "reflect a more historically accurate economic setup". Orthodoxy has also been reworked to make Patriarchs into proper, interactable characters, while the related laws & tenets system has been updated so that some laws are inviolate, while others can be changed.

As for those bugfixes, yeah, there's a lot. British history fans will be pleased to know that The Wars of the Roses event will now trigger properly, while Lichfield Cathedral will no longer randomly wander off to Stafford. The "Reform Society" disaster has been stopped from occurring multiple times (I mean who would want that?), while Paradox has also fixed a bug where players were not "able to liberate countries because they 'would cease to exist'", which feels like something that would spark some intense political philosophy debate.

The full changelog is available on Paradox's Forums. The update should further enhance what was already a sterling entry in Paradox's grand strategy simulations, at least according to Jonathan Bolding in his Europa Unversalis 5 review. "It's nothing less than an attempt at simulating the world for centuries with a fidelity beyond anything else in the genre," he wrote last October. "It's enough to make even the most hardened genre veterans realize they'll have to stop, take a moment, and start learning new things again."

Firaxis was brave with Civilization 7, altering the basic structure of the decades-old grand strategy series in ways that were bound to be controversial. I liked some things about Civ 7's new "Ages" system, which requires players to swap to a new civilization twice over the course of a campaign, but it hasn't been especially popular: Over a year after launch, Civ 7 is less played on Steam than either Civ 5 or Civ 6.

Despite that, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said in a recent interview with Stephen Totilo at Game File that Civilization 7 is "a profitable enterprise."

The executive admitted, however, that things could have gone better. With each new Civ game, Firaxis aims to "push the envelope" enough to justify a new purchase, Zelnick said, but the trick is doing so without alienating fans of the series, and in this instance, they "got it wrong."

It's no huge surprise to hear that mea culpa from Zelnick (except in the sense that we don't hear from him much outside of earnings calls), because Firaxis has also acknowledged the need for changes in Civ 7 by making them. A big update coming later this month will give players their "most-requested addition": the option to revert to a more classic Civ structure.

"The game is a really good game," Zelnick told Game File. "And it's certainly a profitable enterprise for us. But this is one where I think what we tried to do was a bridge too far, from the consumer's perspective."

Knowing that Midnight Suns didn't sell as well as hoped (despite also being a good game), I've been a little nervous about the future of one of my favorite studios, so it is reassuring to hear that Civ 7 hasn't been a total disaster, despite its obvious struggle to compete with its own siblings.

I don't totally hate Civ 7's age transitions myself, but I have to admit that I haven't played much of it since launch. I'll give the incoming Test of Time update a spin later this month to see if it reinvigorates my desire to kill an entire Sunday pointlessly building walls around half a continent to the dismay of my hungry citizens.

Late last year, Firaxis announced that Civ 7 would be getting the ability to play a single civilization across an entire game, addressing one of the major complaints from players who weren't thrilled with the latest entry's ambitious experimentation with the Civilization format. After promising in February that Civ's traditional playstyle would return sometime this spring in an expansion-sized update, Firaxis has confirmed we don't have much longer to wait.

In a Steam news post, Firaxis has announced that Civ 7's massive Test of Time update will arrive on May 19, bringing the ability to play a full campaign as one civilization—"by far the most-requested addition," Firaxis says—as well as other major overhauls.

"Beyond simply being Civ VII's next major update, Test of Time is by far the biggest and most fundamentally game-changing," Firaxis said. "Our intent was to synthesize over a year's worth of listening, iteration, and playtesting into a one massive, free update that exists in tandem with the many smaller-yet-meaningful updates already released since launch."

Headlining the update is, as mentioned, the addition of "time-tested Civs," providing the option to continue playing as one civ across the ages of a campaign. While you'll still be able to swap civs during age transitions, you can instead continue playing as the same civilization while adopting units and infrastructure from the current age with a new "Syncretism" mechanic.

Additionally, legacy paths are being removed in favor of an overhauled victory system, which Firaxis said has been redesigned with the intent of "making sure your win in Civ 7 is defined by successfully making interesting choices and giving you as many paths as possible to pursue greatness."

That victory rework will be supplemented by "triumphs," a slate of optional side objectives for each playstyle that will award bonuses if completed—a system Firaxis says is aimed at helping each Civ 7 game feel unique. The studio promised a pile of other additions, too, including updated map generation and a new map, UI improvements, balance changes, and a free leader for all players.

While offering the chance to stick with a single civ isn't an option I'll be upset to have, the complaints I had at Civ 7's launch weren't focused on its civ-swapping mechanics. Instead, it felt like a release that dropped half-baked when it should've been given more time in the oven. UI/UX frustrations meant the information I wanted was either totally absent or baffling to access. Some playstyles and mechanics felt like sketches gesturing at gameplay rather than fully-developed systems.

Hopefully, the last year of additional work will pay off with a Civilization that feels a bit more fully-formed. Since Test of Time is shaping up to be Civ 7's attempt at a second launch, it seems like prime time for a reappraisal.

Part of the reason criticism of Warcraft 3: Reforged was so pointed was that the remaster didn't just suck on its own terms. As Fraser Brown wrote at the time in his review, "Unfortunately, if these things are putting you off, you can't simply return to Warcraft 3 Classic and forget about them. The original has been added to the new client, so the connection problems, lack of competitive ladders and other issues are now shared between them. This might be the first time a remaster has made its predecessor worse."

While subsequent patches ameliorated some of the issues with Warcraft 3 Reforged, it still isn't perfect. For starters, plenty of custom maps don't work if you play Warcraft 3's classic version from the Reforged launcher. Which is why it's nice that, out of the blue, Blizzard has finally relented.

As the announcement says, "All players who own Warcraft 3 now have access to the original 1.29 client from the Battle.net App. To install it, click the Game Version dropdown on the bottom left corner of your Battle.net Warcraft III playscreen and select Warcraft III - Legacy TFT 1.29. Please note: The Legacy client supports offline and LAN play only."

While version 1.29 wasn't the final released update, it was the last one you could easily play over LAN, and that seems to have been a priority given that online multiplayer isn't supported. (My friends and I played it via LAN as a break from our ongoing game of Dungeon Siege, to give you a glimpse at the peak of early 2000s PC gaming.)

If you install Warcraft 3 Legacy and the cinematics aren't playing for you, find the en-USMovies folder in your install directory and rename it to just Movies. You might have to do the same for the Maps directory as well.