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.

Plants vs. Zombies review - PC Gamer issue #200 (UK, May 2009)

This was on the tip of everyone's tongues, PopCap just gave it a name. The name they wanted to give it was Lawn of the Dead, but apparently there were issues with that.

You have a lawn. Soon, the dead will attempt to cross it and eat—as the game puts it in dripping green capitals—"YOUR BRAINS!" To stop them, you collect blobs of sunlight generated by your Sunflowers, and spend them by placing plants that shoot, block, trap, freeze, eat or explode the zombie hordes.

It's genuinely one of the most exciting games I've played this year. It takes a few onslaughts to accept its oddities: zombies won't navigate around plants in their way, those plants can only shoot directly forwards, and you can't place many different types at first. If someone had, rashly, told you that it's PopCap's take on tower defence games, you might be tasting the familiar tang of disappointment.

Forget it. Plants vs. Zombies belongs to no genre I know, and it's casual only in the sense that it's easy to understand. There's nothing casual about the 30 goddamn hours I've spent, effectively, gardening. PopCap supplied me (and presumably other reviewers) with a guide to what to see if you only play it for an hour. I can promise them now that even the laziest, most wretched hack in this industry won't need it.

The key is that scant toolbelt of seeds you can sow: it grows. In fact, you get a new plant type to play with at the end of every level for about seven hours—the total running time of the 'Adventure' mode. Soon the seeds available outnumber the maximum you can take on a level - initially seven. So long before you've unlocked all 48, the decision of which ones to take with you becomes agonising. If you take both the Wall-Nut and the Tall-Nut for defence, you won't have space to take the Split Pea to shoot backwards at any burrowing zombies that might get past your Magnet Shrooms. It's a tough goddamn call.

It helps that you get to peer over your garden fence before a level starts, to see which zombie types are incoming. For a while, the most advanced is a zombie who has had the debatable wit to place a bucket on his head for protection. But soon you're flooded with more formidable—equally adorable—configurations of ambulatory stiff.

Thriller zombies in red leather jackets, strutting their considerable stuff to summon backup dancer zombies. Floating zombies suspended by helium balloons, miner zombies who tunnel beneath your garden and eat their way back out, crazy zombies who blow themselves up, zombies on bungee ropes, zombies in bobsleds, zombies riding zombie dolphins.

There are counter-plants for each, but the more effective ones only counter one or two types. You tend to learn the hard way which zombies absolutely have to be crushed the second they show up, and which will generally succumb to raw firepower despite their special abilities. Since the mix on each level is different, PvZ never lets you settle into a comfortable build order for your garden, or preferred set of plants.

The drip-feed of new toys is what keeps the Adventure exciting, but very quietly, another side to PvZ is building in the background. Sets of levels are punctuated with silly little minigames, and mysterious options appear on the main menu. By the time you finish the Adventure, the obscene wealth of other things to do already outweighs it for entertainment value.

These minigames, challenges, shops and pet projects are all tied together by an economy: some zombies drop money when they die, all minigames give cash rewards, and your Zen Garden generates a steady stream of income. Your profit from all of these can be spent at Crazy Dave's car boot sale. Some extremely expensive but extremely tantalising plant upgrades give a powerful impetus to play any and all modes that make you money.

A few of the extra ways to play deserve special mention: Beghouled is a pitch-perfect mash-up in which you play Bejeweled with your plants even as the zombies try to chomp through them, adding strategy to which types you choose to match.

Last Stand lets you take as long as you want to design the perfect garden with an enormous budget, but leaves you helpless to watch once the zombies pour in. My favourite is I, Zombie: a delicious reversal in which you have to choose which zombie types to purchase to strategically decimate a preset garden.

I love Bejeweled and Peggle, but I stop playing those games when I tire momentarily of their singular mechanic, or get irritated by their random elements. I stop playing Plants vs. Zombies when someone makes me. It has neither of those limitations, and more substance, invention, humour and depth than either game.

It's not a hardcore strategy game, nor is it a hard strategy game, but it is a strategy game. And a strategy game by PopCap turns out to be a frighteningly compelling thing.

My deep-down reaction when I first heard about Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era was, "What're ya doin'?" Does anybody really want a hex-based strategy game these days, particularly one whose glory days ended 20 years ago? Well, as it turns out, the answer is a resounding "yes," as publisher Hooded Horse announced that the game sold more than 250,000 copies in its first day of early access.

That's a big number, but it's not the only impressive stat: 91% of the more than 3,500 user reviews on Steam are positive, adding up to a "very positive" overall rating, and it hit a peak concurrent player count of nearly 52,000 on Steam. Those are Helldivers 2 numbers, baby. HoMM:OE is also riding high on Steam's top-selling games chart.

Over 250,000 copies sold in less than 24 hours. 91% positive reviews on Steam.Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era has had an incredible launch. We're so thrilled that players are loving this game as much as we've loved publishing it. 💛Congratulations to the @unfrozenofficial.bsky.social team!

— @hoodedhorse.bsky.social (@hoodedhorse.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-01T21:22:35.434Z

"We are still over the moon and cannot thank you enough for believing in us and our project!" Hooded Horse and developer Unfrozen wrote in a Steam update. "This is a childhood dream come true for the whole team and we promise to use this opportunity you've given us to the best of our abilities!"

From a more practical perspective, the strong start means the game has already recouped its development costs, a vital achievement for an early access game with more development ahead of it.

I should probably clarify that I didn't expect Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era to be a bad game, and it's clearly quite the opposite. PC Gamer strategy pro Fraser Brown declared when it launched that HoMM:OE "isn't a reimagining or a divisive reinterpretation, it's just a brilliant strategy game," adding that even though it's only just kicked off in early access, "it's already great."

What I clearly underestimated was the level of demand for a game that's so entirely unabashed about embracing a very different, long-ago era of gaming. That's on me, but this is one instance where I'm actually quite happy to be wrong. If you remain unconvinced, you can check it out for yourself, for free, courtesy of a demo available on Steam.

Unfrozen and Hooded Horse also dropped the first patch for Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era today, a small one addressing some of the issues that came up at launch. The full patch notes are below.

• Bug fixes
  • Fixed an issue where hotkeys would fail to save or reset correctly.
  • Fixed the display of Credits in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
  • Fixed data loading issues for the leaderboard and profile in some versions.
  • Temporarily disabled detection of unsupported peripherals (such as gamepads, steering wheels, pedals) to prevent conflicts with keyboard and mouse controls. An option to enable these devices will return as an experimental feature in a future update.
• Network
  • Optimized analytics and data saving for online games launched from the lobby.
  • Fixed a rare server error occuring in the lobby.
• Balance
• Zookeper
  • Fixed template rules that could cause launch errors or crash during gameplay.
• Symmetry
  • Fixed elevation issues that caused incorrect placement of Hell Light Arena.
  • Fixed template rules that could cause launch errors or crash during gameplay.
• Arcade
  • Added Dragon Utopias to the central area.
  • Reduced the number of Pandora’s Boxes containig creatures in the central area.
  • Adjusted the value of Dragon Utopias and Legendary Artifacts.
  • Reduced the number of points of interest with multiple rewards.
  • Increased the number of points of interest with single reward.
• Sprint
  • Removed Pandora’s Boxes that grant experience.
  • Increased the number of artifacts.
  • Reduced the number of Pandora’s Boxes containing creatures in the penultimate (6th) area.
  • Added Dragon Utopias to the penultimate (6th) area.
  • Adjusted the distribution of reward values across areas 4—7.
• Localization
  • Fixed minor typos in the Russian localization.
  • Removed an extra colon from main menu button in the Spanish localization.
  • Fixed a typo in the bug report interface in the Polish localization.
  • Fixed the description of Self‑Reconstruction ability for the Lich Dragon across all languages.
  • Fixed font size issues on the clock in Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
  • Fixed spacing issues in the Ukrainian localization.
  • Fixed several missing symbols in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

If someone told me two years back that Creative Assembly was actually going to make Total War: Warhammer 40k, I wouldn't have believed them. It's not that the studio isn't a natural fit after all its work on Total War: Warhammer, it's more that the universe of 40k is both absurdly massive and ill-defined—a big challenge to overcome for any would-be grand strategy game.

You've got the broad strokes of Holy Terra and the Segmentums that the galaxy is carved into, but 40k's universe is a haphazard amalgamation of games, Black Library books, and codices, not all of which are necessarily considered canon. It's like trying to create a strategy game that encompasses the entire Star Wars' galaxy.

Despite being a lifelong Total War and 40k fan, I must admit that I've been worried as to whether Creative Assembly can adequately recreate the setting's scale, but the recent Show and Tell livestream has gone a long way to soothing my worries.

Though the 40k section was relatively slim alongside reveals for Total War: Warhammer's Lord of the End Times expansion and upcoming legendary tiger lord, Bhashiva, we did get to see a full planet and a variety of battle maps, all of which point to one thing—Total War: Warhammer 40k is going to be huge.

Thankfully, though, Creative Assembly is clearly putting a lot of work into the fundamentals, into replayability, particularly in terms of the game's planets and battle maps. Each system will consist of a handful of planets of varying biomes and civilization types (An arid hive-world, say) that you fight across the surface of, rotating 360 degrees around them. I was expecting each planet to be the equivalent of a couple of provinces in Total War: Warhammer, but conquering one looks more like a mini-campaign in itself.

This is going to mean fighting a lot more battles, but the maps look well set up for it. Not only are they absolutely massive—one of them had a giant crashed ship at its center—but the ones they showed off look super dense as well, with lots of buildings and scenery to work around, plus more flavorful touches, like anti-air fire in the background and aircraft swooping by.

We already knew that the maps were going to have destructible elements, such as buildings and forests, but with so many structures per map, it's really going to change the way we fight battles and chokepoint enemy armies. Not to mention the confirmation that we can collapse buildings on top of units.

Each map has different versions depending on the planet's biome, and more deployment options than previous Total Wars. You can fight maps north-to-south or east-to-west, and also attack or defend more entrenched positions in assault or defence battles. Presumably these will tie into the cover zones they revealed which units can shelter in, including what looked like a squad of Imperial Guardsmen occupying a building almost Company of Heroes style, standing on the upper floors.

We don't know much about what Total War: Warhammer 40k's map looks like beyond the system level, but what I've seen reassures me that Creative Assembly is addressing the practical realities of a 40k Total War campaign, working to provide the replayability we're going to need to fight our way across the expanse of the stars without it growing stale.

As for the even bigger stuff, we'll have to wait until June when we're slated to see more of the game.

The Total War Show & Tell included info on the historical games and destructible terrain in Total War: Warhammer 40,000, but a sizable chunk of its midsection was there to get us up to date on all things Total War: Warhammer 3. Including, right off the bat, game director Rich Aldridge saying to expect a patch "addressing some issues players have seen around idling AI and clustering around settlements. That will be coming very soon."

After that the focus was on upcoming update 8.1, and the previously revealed legendary lord Bhashiva, the White Tiger. Among other abilities, she'll have a teleport called Heaven's Gate that lets her bounce around the battlefield, explosively attacking everyone around her wherever she ends up. The other addition for Cathay was one we hadn't seen before, a free DLC hero called Taoyan the Merciless. Cathay's getting an overall rework at the same time, with a redone tech tree, unit buffs, and the like.

The big news was the reveal of a legendary lord who'll be joining Nagash as part of the Lords of the End Times DLC: Graf Boris Todbringer, who'll be in charge of the Ulrican faction based in Middenheim. Apparently, he'll be a touch more aggressive than the existing Imperial lords.

"Boris is much more about taking on anyone and everyone that's in the Empire right now," says associate design director Sean Macdonald. "And anyone that's even thinking about getting the Empire, he's taking the fight to them. No more defensiveness. He's embodying the god Ulric, the god of war, winter, and wolves, and he's bringing that war with him to all the foes of the Empire. He's got his claws out."

In battles you'll have the choice between Todbringer's regular campaign voice actor and YouTuber Angory Tom from the Yogscast. He's memorably cosplayed as "Toddy" in the past, and is exactly as over the top as you'd want a man who wears a castle for a hat to be.

Two new units for the Ulricans were shown, the Knights Panther and the Teutogen Guard. The latter are bodyguards for the high priest who is basically Ulric's pope, Ar-Ulric Emil Valgeir. Heavy hints were dropped that we can expect to see Ar-Ulric as well, presumably as a legendary hero, and two more units suggested in silhouette. They sure look like Hunting Hounds and the Celestial Hurricanum from tabletop Warhammer to me.

Looking ahead to the update 9.1, the siege update, we're finally getting rid of ass ladders. Sure, Creative Assembly say they're "removing pocket ladders as the default setting," but you and I both know the ladders siege attackers currently summon from nowhere are coming out of their butts. After the update, ladders will default to being tower things besieging units bring into battle with them, though if you really love ass ladders they'll remain in the menu as an option.

The Total War: Warhammer 3 section of the showcase ended with a promise that we should expect more in May, with more news about free additions specifically coming in June.

One of the things on our wishlist for Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is a cover system, and the Total War: Show & Tell makes it clear that we're going to get our wish. And also, if we don't like that cover, we'll be able to blow it up.

"You've got all of these tactical options and then strategic elements that can come out of it," battle product owner Dave Petry says during a map flyover. "One of the really big and exciting things that we're doing here is that destruction is going to come into play. That forest, if you don't like it, you don't have to keep it. If you find that pesky forest is getting in your way and you can't see around it then you can get rid of that thing. Or you can use it to hide in."

The developer roundtable four months ago mentioned there would be destructible buildings, but it's nice to have it clearly stated that we can just delete other stuff off the map if it's in the way.

"Being completely clear, not absolutely everything is destructible, right?" Petry clarifies. "We've kept it to areas where it really works and it makes sense and it feels like it can add to that depth." As the camera pans over a hive-city warzone with plenty of steep angles and gothic architecture, he says, "We are dealing with a universe which is full of really powerful but flat-firing weapons, so cover becomes incredibly, incredibly important."

One way to blow up that cover will be with orbital bombardments, and the showcase takes a few minutes to spin around a hive world as seen from space. It looks like something right out of the last stage of Spore, only covered in toxic gas and cities so big they cover entire countries. It's 40K as heck, and does assuage some of my concerns.

Sure, the Astra Militarum troopers we see are lined up like Napoleonic regiments, but they're the faction where that's probably most apt. Total War: Warhammer 40,000 still has a release date of "to be announced" on Steam, so there's plenty of time for stuff to change too.

1999 was an exceptional year for PC gaming. One of the all-time greatest, really. Age of Empires 2, Alpha Centauri, Freespace 2, Homeworld, System Shock 2, Planescape: Torment, Unreal Tournament, Dungeon Keeper 2, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun—we were eating well.

This was also the year of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which has long been considered the pinnacle of the strategy series—hence the questionable HD remaster in 2015—as well as a genre all-timer. Nearly 30 years later, it's still the gold standard. But Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is coming for it.

New age

Olden Era out in early access today, featuring the first act of the campaign, but plenty more besides, and it feels like it was plucked out of the timestream by a benevolent cosmic deity, giving strategy freaks of a certain vintage everything they could ask for.

This is not a remake—it features new factions amid the familiar ones, a brand-new campaign, systems both updated and completely new, and an art style that serves as a nod to HoMM3 without being beholden to it. This is a new game, but it's undeniably been made for those of us who played and loved HoMM3—as well as those who would have, had they been born.

Playing it over these last few days has been as comfortable as sinking into the sofa with a lovely, cosy blanket draped over me. Comfort and contentment. I might dabble in some Stardew Valley or Pokopia, but this is really my kind of cosy game. Yes, the vibes-based not-quite-genre of cosy gaming usually doesn't include things built on conflict and war, but Olden Era evokes many of the same feelings that cosy games tend to engender in their adherents.

The colourful, inviting maps; the overwhelming sense of nostalgia; the sincerity of the writing and light world building; even the clarity of its structure—they all contribute to this reassuring feeling of cosiness. Even with an apocalyptic threat bearing down on the world, this is whimsical fantasy at its core, but whimsy tempered by clear rules and achievable objectives. You get to experience the joy of knowing what to do every day. The real fantasy.

OK, a quick primer if you skipped the series and never dipped into adjacent games like Age of Wonders and King's Bounty. Olden Era is a turn-based strategy game divided into two phases: exploration and combat. Your hero traipses around a variety of vibrant fantasy realms with their army in tow, grabbing gold and resources, taking over buildings and bumping into foes—both the static kind, usually guarding some kind of treasure or useful building, as well as other roaming heroes.

Brawls take place on a hex grid, letting you command your units when it's their turn, which depends on their initiative and speed characteristics. Fairies, knights, dragons, banshees, horrible little frog-men—all the fantasy stalwarts are here. Your hero doesn't actually fight in the scrum, though, instead hanging back at the edge of the hexy board, where they can occasionally fire off an attack or cast a spell from their burgeoning magical tome.

So you ride around looting and fighting. Simple! But that's always been HoMM's greatest trick: making you think it's straightforward, until you dig a bit deeper, and then realise you're still digging hours later, uncovering all this obsession-forming depth.

The not-entirely-linear campaign is a great place to start as you ease yourself into your new obsession. Olden Era is usually a race, sometimes a marathon, often a sprint, but the game initially makes you the only hero on the map. This allows you to get to grips with things before its more intense, competitive nature is revealed. Eventually you'll be managing multiple heroes, and thus multiple armies, as you try to beat your opponents to unit-spawning buildings and bountiful treasure.

Being early access, though, means there are still wrinkles needing to be ironed out. In one mission, for instance, time simply stopped working.

Each mission is divided into days, weeks and months, you see. Every day lets you travel a specific distance (the number can be increased by skills, spells and shrine buffs), and at the end of the day you'll get gold and resources based on the buildings in your property portfolio. Certain points of interest that give you buffs or rewards will also reset after a week, and you'll be able to revisit recruitment buildings to get new units. So when time breaks, none of this happens. Reloading an autosave fixed this bug for me, so the mission was salvageable.

Mission accomplished

The odd bug or design quirk aside, I'm pleased to report that I encountered few speed bumps in my many races, leaving me free to focus on the important stuff: winning wars. That's easier said than done, though. Even in some of the more forgiving early campaign missions, you can find yourself in a seemingly unwinnable situation if you make a few missteps.

Enemy hero AI is extremely competent, quick and just the right amount of aggressive—it will gleefully give chase to try and murder you, but it can also get distracted by other priorities, giving you a bit of breathing room. It does mean you need to put thought into your plans for each day, though, even when you're not playing against a human opponent.

At first, you'll probably just be rushing towards the fantasy of commanding a big army. And they can get very big. While you're limited to only seven units, how many troops you've got in each stack is up to you. You can also split stacks into multiple units, sacrificing might for battlefield control. But big armies need big economies, and that's what might trip you up.

Don't worry, you don't need to pay for your army's upkeep, but to get the high-tier units, and to reinforce units that have taken a beating, you need plenty of cash. You also need specific resources to construct the buildings that generate them. And eventually you'll want to upgrade these units, which as always requires yet more cash.

See, while you can find buildings on your adventures that generate units for you to purchase every week, to get more control over your roster you'll need to invest in your cities—which are also where you can construct marketplaces, mage guilds, fortifications and economy buildings.

Some financial planning is required, then. Say you want to field some griffins. First of all, you'll need to either be a member of the Temple faction, or in control of one of their cities. Then you'll need to build a rookery, which costs 3,250 gold, five wood and five iron. This will immediately let you recruit a small number of griffins—seven, to be exact—for 1,785 gold.

A week later, you'll be able to recruit another seven griffins. If you want a larger pool to recruit from, you'll need some upgrades. The second fortification building project will bump the number up to 10 a week. To get that, you'll need to spend 2,500 gold and five iron on the first fortification project, and then 2,500 gold and 10 iron on the second.

There are plenty of ways to get passive and active income, but you've also got enemy heroes with all the same demands on their economies, and they'll be eager to take your cities and captured buildings away from you. So you'll need defenses to protect your stuff, and extra heroes so you can quickly reclaim anything that was stolen from you, which will also allow you to more quickly hoover up resources and treasure scattered across the map.

A bad week, heck, even a bad day, can be a real setback, giving your opponent everything they need to put you in the ground for good. But being smart about your priorities and not overextending will help you avoid these gloomy times.

X marks the spot

Olden Era is not a 4X game, technically, but it's pretty close. It's no surprise that Age of Wonders, which was originally inspired by HoMM, proved to be such a comfortable fit for the genre when it fully embraced the 4X pillars in Age of Wonders 3. If you're expecting something similar with Olden Era, though, you might be disappointed. There's no population management, diplomacy is simply a secondary skill that allows you to recruit neutral units, and there are no opportunities to develop a bespoke society.

Despite my love of Age of Wonders 4 in particular, and 4X games more broadly, I'm not missing these features here. Olden Era is a more focused experience, but one secretly hides an abyss where you can lose yourself in the nitty gritty, as you try to turn your realm into the most efficient, warmongering machine possible.

This can be done by fine-tuning your economy, making sensible picks when you level up and equip your hero, figuring out the best unit synergies and getting stuck into the law system. Each faction has two law trees full of boons, split into faction and army buffs. These can reduce recruitment costs, net you regular shipments of resources or increase the strength of specific units. It's through these laws that you can also increase the recruitment pool, so you'll get additional griffins to recruit every week.

There are so many ways to build and develop your armies, heroes and realms, even within the same faction, and while Olden Era rarely tries to limit you, the fact that it's a race encourages you to specialise more, to pick a specific strategy and focus on that. This even goes for your unit roster, as there are morale costs to fielding units from different factions, and high morale means units are more likely to act twice in a turn. But there are strategies that get around this, or negate its impact. You've always got options. This flexibility doesn't mean you should try to do everything; it just means you have the option to pivot when things fall apart.

When it's all laid out, Olden Era could seem daunting to the uninitiated, but the way it encourages this focus, and the way it's broken up into days where you might only be able to do a couple of things, actually makes the difficulty gradient pretty gentle. The magic system, though, could benefit from a bit more clarity.

Olden Era's magic system is great in practical terms, but not especially intuitive, and it works a bit differently from previous games in the series. You can construct mage guilds in your cities, and each unlocks a bunch of random spells—seven for the first tier, with each higher tier of building unlocking fewer but more powerful spells. Heroes then need to visit the city where the guild is located to receive the random spells that specific guild unlocked. Every hero can learn any of the lower tier spells, but they need proficiency in specific magic schools to cast the more powerful ones.

Every spell that's been unlocked, in every city, is collected in the Magic Observatory. Here you can upgrade spells using the resources you've collected, but you can also unlock new spells, as long as you have the appropriate guild constructed, at a limit of one per day.

Then you've got neutral magic, and each neutral spell has to be unlocked manually by spending a special resource, insight, which you can only get by generating enough astrology points, which you'll get from your cities. Even after you've unlocked them, your heroes will need to be at the appropriate level to actually learn them.

You'll have to go through a lot of steps and a lot of menus, then, but it's worth it. Magic in Olden Era is game-changing. At the higher tiers, you'll get access to apocalyptically powerful spells like Armageddon, which has a meagre base attack of 100, but adds 10 times the hero's spell power, and then hits every unit on the battlefield, including your own. Might be best to save that one for when you've got a lot of magic resistance.

Practical magic

Neutral spells aren't as flashy as the stuff you'll cast in combat, but they give you a lot of utility—flight, extra movement points, town portals. They're incredibly powerful, even if you won't be using them in a fight.

Dimension Door, for instance, allows you to teleport your hero to a location within eight squares. It's less powerful and cheesy than it was in previous games, though. In HoMM3 you could teleport to areas you wouldn't normally be able to access quickly because of geographical obstacles or monsters. This is still possible, but with more restrictions, as Olden Era's maps have borders protected by guardians that must be defeated before you can cross over, even if you have mobility spells. I miss the cheese, but I suspect it'll go down well with the PvPers.

Developer Unfrozen clearly knows its audience, because while Olden Era is still in development, it has all the features HoMM veterans could ask for. There are already five game modes, including the campaign, so you can dive right into a classic match, or shake things up with the single hero mode, and if you're more interested in simply trouncing an opponent in a duel, then you can pick the arena mode.

Olden Era utilises proc-gen maps, but lovers of hand-crafted adventures will be well taken care of as well. The campaign maps are hand-made, and once you're done with the first available act, you can dip into scenarios, featuring bespoke stories and objectives in more hand-crafted missions.

Even better, Olden Era has launched with a beefy map editor containing pretty much everything one would need to start tinkering away—despite the caveat from Unfrozen that it's "still in development and will be significantly improved". I've not created anything usable yet, but I am tinkering away on the monstrosity above. It's very on-brand.

When it comes to early access, I often find it hard to recommend anyone shell out for an unfinished game, especially when we have no idea what the future holds. It could get better. But it could get worse. You lose nothing by waiting. This will be true if you wait for Olden Era to hit 1.0. That said, it's already great. It's not a reinvention or a divisive reinterpretation: this is just classic HoMM, a bit modernised, a few tweaks here and there, but otherwise what you'd expect, and more importantly, what you'd actually want.

For much of its early access development, Shapez 2 was an interesting alternative to the tentpole automation sims like Factorio and Satisfactory. A more streamlined affair that dispensed with many of the supplementary systems seen in those aforementioned games, Shapez 2 adopted a more puzzle-centric approach to assembly-line construction.

That's still very much the case. But with Shapez 2's recent departure from Steam early access, developer tobspr games has also aligned the game more closely to those factory building titans. This isn't just a 'game is finished' release," writes tobspr. "With this update, we're introducing a huge amount of new content and improvements on top, for new and existing players."

Chiefly, the 1.0 patch adds a new mode that focuses less on solving specific puzzles, and more on building the massive, multipurpose factories that make this genre so dangerously compulsive. Manufacture mode mixes things up so that instead of shovelling shapes into the game's central, ravenous vortex, you need to supply specific shapes to trade stations scattered across the void. These stations will then output a new shape, which you can use to supply a different trade station.

In this manner, Manufacture mode gives you the ever-increasing complexity of construction that is at the heart of factory sims. As explained in a separate dev blog, tobspr intended for such a mode to be the default mode of Shapez 2. But they felt that going straight into building massive factories could be "overwhelming for new players" and decided to make it an optional game mode that sits alongside the more puzzle-centric structure. Nonetheless, it gives experienced players a whole new way to play Shapez 2, which makes sense given they will have already seen much of the game's existing experience.

As for that existing experience, Shapez excels in tickling that part of the brain that loves to set things up and watch them run: looping conveyor belts shuttling LEGO-like studs in hypnotic formation. The lack of survival mechanics or hostiles to defend your factory on means you can focus purely on the construction side of things, refining your factory designs to their cleanest, most efficient forms.

In addition to manufacture mode, the 1.0 version adds some extra challenges to classic mode, as well as visual improvements and two new shapes to manufacture—X and Y. A pedant might argue those are letters rather than shapes, but I suppose there are only so many ways you can draw a triangle or an oblong.

The update also reworks the tutorial, adds achievements, and introduces modding support. If you're intrigued by Shapez 2 but are yet to pick it up, tobspr's factory sim is currently on a 20% launch discount. That means you can currently grab it for $24 (£20). The discount ends on May 7.

While still very much at the 'early' stage of early access, Menace is by all accounts an excellent take on turn-based tactics. Wannabe space mercenary Jonathan Bolding was effusive in his praise of its approach to the genre when he deployed into its sci-fi universe in March. "I can't stress enough how much fun Menace's core strategy play is, even with a few early access quibbles," he wrote. "The basic rules simplify the kind of ultra-crunchy stuff you find in dense wargames into a faster-playing game without sacrificing any cool simulation."

Such player quibbles are also the focus of Menace's first major early access update. Released earlier this week, Menace's 'Redacted' update goes significantly further than the bugs and balance patches the game has received so far, reshaping several core features and mechanics in big ways.

This starts with the complete removal of one of Menace's most disliked features—the promotion tax. "This not so popular mechanic made sense from a game design perspective, but was very frustrating to engage with," developer Overhype Studios writes, explaining that this added cost made promoting units feel like a punishment, while unexpected promotions could throw off your planned loadout. "To compensate, we increased the squaddie supply costs across all ranges, but reduced the squad's base supply costs."

With the removal of one system comes the expansion (sort of) of another. Alongside being able to cut through fences, all units can now remove wrecked vehicles from the landscape, improving their ability to reshape the battlefield. You may not use this much at the moment, but Overhype says it will help "especially in confined areas like the new urban maps, which will become more prominent with a new operation we are working on." Intriguing!

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Overhype has reworked Menace's faction of creepy-looking cyborgs, the Constructs. "The constructs are the main faction of our game, but were severely lacking in uniqueness, variety and style," the developer explains. "We reorganised them a bit, overhauled their stats, and gave them new skills."

The changes here are numerous, but here are the highlights. Drones, the cannon fodder of the Construct faction, are now easier to kill but appear in larger groups. Soldiers can no longer use rocket attacks, meaning they can be countered with heavy vehicles. Meanwhile, "Guncrawler" units now have a rocket launcher, making them one of the faction's bigger threats. Finally, the update introduces a new high-tier unit for the faction, which Overhype describes as an "especially powerful support unit that will rattle things up a bit."

The redacted update is out now. 2026 is shaping up to be a decent year for tactics games. Alongside the early access launch of Menace, Star Wars: Zero Company is also due to release this year. We got our first proper look at the game back in March, and it's shaping up to be as much inspired by Mass Effect as it is X-COM.

Ubisoft has revealed that city-building sequel Anno 117: Pax Romana will get its first DLC later this month. Prophecies of Ash will add the largest island featured in the series yet, one that happens to be loomed over by a massive volcano. Because why bother building a Roman city without the risk of a natural disaster that will echo across millennia?

Cinis is the name of the volcanic island, acting as an expansion to the Latium province rather than a whole new map. The trailer for the Prophecies of Ash suggests that Cinis will be a bountiful place to build, with plentiful river slots and mining nodes for your citizens to exploit. The DLC also introduces a new resource to the game—Obsidian—which brings new items to fashion like carved idols and boardgames, alongside the production chains required to make them.

Naturally, building a city in the shadow of a volcano comes with its own hazards. The trailer doesn't explain exactly what these will be, though it shows footage of giant rocks blasting out from the volcano and landing on buildings in the city. A press release from Ubisoft mentions that volcano-based mechanics will include eruptions, volcanic winters and a "bloom phase". I'm guessing the latter two affect the productivity of your agricultural buildings, with the former hindering food production while the latter sends it into overdrive.

Finally, Prophecies of Ash lets players construct a temple to Vulcan. This boosts mine productivity and your city's fire safety, which seems like it's going to be particularly important given the environment in which you're building.

Prophecies of Ash launches on April 23. It'll be interesting to see how it affects Anno 117's somewhat muddled reputation. The game has a 'Mixed' rating on Steam, partly due to Ubisoft Mainz' controversial inclusion of AI art in the game (which has since been removed), but also because there's a sense the game was released in an incomplete state, with the third act of the campaign's story having been cut.

None of this stopped Anno 117 having the most successful launch for the series ever. We liked it well enough too, with Phil Iwaniuk awarding it a score of 80 in our Anno 117: Pax Romana Review: "Anno 117 finds a reason for being with its setting and characterisation, giving you new resources and supply chains using a ready-made and polished interface," he wrote back in November. "I’ve been surprised to find that’s exactly the pace to keep me compelled towards this chocolate-box depiction of Rome."

Everybody in the Europa Universalis community has spent the last four months worked up about the (admittedly hilarious) glitches that have plagued EU5 since its release, but the real problem with the game is much deeper.

I'm an EU4 veteran with 1,700 hours and a world conquest under my belt, and I can attest that EU5 has left me in a state of anger and confusion. Halfway through my first 93-hour campaign as Castile, I realized I loved this new entry. But by the time I was done, I decided I didn't want to play it again.

Worst of all, I went back to my beloved EU4 only to discover that EU5 has ruined its predecessor for me forever. Each of these games has something the other lacks, and Paradox has yet to provide the perfect synthesis.

I don't say that lightly, because it's not a stretch to say that Europa Universalis 4 changed the course of my life. I had a few weeks of EU4 YouTube fame back in 2016 for making a meme video about a one-province map mod. More importantly, I wrote about EU4 in my admissions essay for grad school (and got in!), where I wrote another paper about the game's (mis)representations of humanity's dynamic past, and later presented it at an academic conference.

Then EU5 came out. My two-month-long Iberian joyride showed me that the game has the groundwork to be the most immersive, all-encompassing historical grand strategy game in the genre; but the lack of differentiation between its factions—Spain plays just like Hungary, who play almost exactly like the Ottomans—is a discordant note that ruins the symphony for me.

Breaking the map-painting curse

Europa Universalis 5 is actually complicated, whereas I have long contended that—as much as I love it—EU4 is a relatively simple game (map painting) disguised with false complexity.

I ended my 93-hour EU5 Castile campaign with an empire—if you could even call it that—barely extending beyond Iberia. In EU4, this would be such a sad conclusion that I would be afraid to even mention it at one of the dinner parties, soirees, salons, or hootenannies at which I often find myself talking about Europa Universalis.

But in EU5, every broken, buggy moment in 500 years of Castilian state management sucked me in deeper. And there are a lot of bugs: Every four in-game years for the last ~150 years of my campaign, all thirty of my Spanish colonies revolted one-by-one and then immediately accepted peace, over and over again.

I caught myself many times just watching the virtual months roll by without even giving much input, purely for the joy of seeing the systems interact: saving up thousands of ducats and mass-building roads just to see my control go up, slowly centralizing my personal unions with Portugal and Hungary, watching the trade ships cross the Strait of Gibraltar en route to the Ocean Sea.

But the game spat me out on the other end with some newfound conclusions: all of EU5's beautiful groundwork isn't enough on its own. EU4 rode a ten-year high of flavor additions that made each country a hoot; EU5 comes with almost none of this flavor baked in. I'm not the only veteran EU4 warrior (we can't call ourselves that?) complaining that every playthrough feels the same. One astute Steam reviewer notes that, while Europa Universalis is supposed to be a historical sandbox, too much sand is a bad thing: it's "coarse and it gets everywhere".

I finished that run on February 15, and I have not touched the game since. I've even stopped reading r/EU5 like it's the newspaper. I have no idea when I'll go back, and I don't feel the drive to.

Even before its deluge of addons, EU4 was notably superior in this regard at launch thanks to how it handled geography: A run as Ashikaga on the Japanese archipelago will feel like a very different game from land-locked Bohemia caught between a kaleidoscope of acquisitive Eastern European powers.

But in Europa Universalis 5, imperial expansion isn't really the game. Like I mentioned above, I campaigned as the strongest imperial power of the 16th century—a run that, in EU4, would have likely ended in control of half the world—but I ended only with Iberia, a bit of Morocco, and a chunk of Caesar's obstreperous Gaul. At least one commenter on my colonial revolt video expressed surprise that I managed just to defeat France.

No, EU5 is as much a Victoria-style economy sim as anything else, and much of the player's focus is, by necessity, turned inward. Rebellions are far more frequent and harder to control, your economy demands more micromanagement, and I probably spent a quarter of my total playtime nannying the forty exploration missions I had running at any given time.

The geography-based strategic delights of EU4 no longer mean much in EU5, because this is not a conqueror's game as much as it is an administrator's. I found much less emphasis on planning a 50-year campaign to dominate the western Mediterranean and rein in the Italian city-states, much more on balancing the books at home to make sure all of my numbers kept creeping up excruciatingly slowly.

Depth without flavor

EU5 is also missing national ideas and mission trees, both of which could grant a journeyman strategician some truly colorful opportunities to control half of Europe without ever going to war, or generate Prussian Space Marines capable of 17th-century Thermopylae stands. Nor does EU5 even have generic idea groups to choose from, so a player can at least inject some basic novelty into a second game. EU5 not only lacks the decade of flavor that trickled into its predecessor via its famously well loved DLC scheme—it also lacks a clear path forward to reproduce that flavor.

There are very few unique mechanics—even my beloved Holy Roman Empire, a true pandemonium (in the original meaning of the word), feels two-dimensional. In any other context, a singleplayer game sustaining 93 hours of playtime would be a true achievement. But as a follow-up to a 1,700-hour game-of-the-decade candidate, I am bereft.

EU4's flavor solutions were controversial, and I'm not saying that its successor needs to have a railroaded storyline. But I pray to the PDX pantheon that they give us something to choose—an idea group, a mission branch, anything—that will make a game as Delhi feel fundamentally different from one as Spain.

That is what I hope Paradox fixes, even more than the bugs.

I fell in love with EU4 because, despite its own shallowness, its tapestry of national colors was a pleasure to look at, finishing missions and idea groups triggered all the right brain chemicals, and I usually felt like I was doing something. Europa Universalis 5 has the framework for an infinitely tactile historical simulation, but it lacks some je ne sais quoi, some feeling of higher purpose; and that's a more fundamental design flaw that can't just be fixed with some light polish or an overpriced fairly priced DLC.

I'll be honest with you right up front: I loved the Firaxis XCOM games, but I never played the '90s originals. I know, I know. For years, people told me how good they were, and how the newer ones lost some of the magic. And while I may have bounced off of the first Xenonauts, Xenonauts 2 has finally revealed the truth to me. You guys were right all along. This rules.

There's something almost indescribably awesome about that moment in an alien invasion scenario where your scrappy little fighter shoots down a UFO for the first time and everyone cheers. It's like when the cavalry arrives at first light on the third day. We're up against a vastly superior foe, but with this small victory, it feels like maybe we can win this. Maybe there's hope.

Don't pop the champagne just yet, though. This is when Xenonauts 2 likes to take you down a peg, like the time it completely instagibbed my star sniper from halfway across the map even though she was in cover and wearing the most advanced armor my research teams have developed.

The quickload button has never looked so tempting. But what the underlying design understands so well is that the victories never taste as sweet if they're not built on the graves of fallen heroes. Hope can only come shining through when the clouds are dark.

The bones of Xenonauts 2 don't differ much from any other XCOM or X-hyphen-COM or X-COM-like you might have played. You're in charge of a secretive organization of scientists, engineers, and soldiers trying to stop an invasion by technologically advanced aliens—building and defending secret bases, dissecting captured foes, learning to use their technology, and stopping the six major regions of Earth from devolving into panic.

Doomsday

I completely failed to do that about 180 days into my first campaign and had to start over. This is a very difficult game, both tactically and strategically. I did not take to most of its systems intuitively at first. But that forced me to take a step back and think. It forced me to learn and adapt. And I really ended up enjoying that process after getting over the initial frustration. Contemplating what I could have done differently over a pile of dead soldiers is how I eventually won.

Xenonauts 2 is chock full of skill expression. Mastering the 'time units' you use to move, fire, and even rotate the vision cones of your soldiers, and learning how to deal with each of its deadly alien variants—dozens of them—can give you an edge on a tactical level. But that's not enough on its own.

Securing supporters and eliminating infiltrators on the strategic map is a whole minigame that requires you to prioritize reducing panic, gaining more funding, or controlling an entire region to get a unique bonus, like increased passive experience gain. The prices of different supporters change over time, so you can't really rely on a set build order.

Despite this, I was able to stay a step ahead of the aliens almost the entire time by reacting to juicy opportunities intelligently. But this interstellar menace doesn't go down without a brutal fight, and the lessons that contributed towards my victory were hard-won.

The one area where I felt really shot down by the difficulty curve, literally, was knowing which techs are must-haves by certain points in the escalation of the invasion. If you haven't got tier 2 or tier 3 fighter jets by the time the nastier UFOs start showing up, that's basically a game over that might take months to painstakingly play out.

It's not especially enjoyable to have my entire air force grounded, desperately trying to catch up as I watch the xenos have the run of the place.

Scramble fighters

I did love the real-time air combat when the fight was winnable, though. Especially early on, using the throttle controls and roll maneuvers at exactly the right moments allowed me to win some really lopsided dogfights, sometimes without taking a scratch.

Different UFOs require different approaches depending on their capabilities, which creates some really compelling fights when they get mixed and matched. It's one more little area where skill can come into play and add up to a big advantage.

The tactical battles are the star of the show, though. I started with eight and went all the way up to 12 squadmates, taking them to a variety of urban and rural environments reflecting everything from a North African market to a polar storage facility. The depth of the combat is remarkable, too, forcing me to carefully consider the smallest moves.

Room clearing feels tense and authentic, costing time units to kick the door down and look both ways. The safest way to play is to stick together, moving from cover to cover, crouching down every turn and leaving enough time units for reaction shots. But exciting timed missions shook me out of this routine, where I had to take some big risks that had me standing up and pumping my fists when they paid off.

The story is less remarkable. There are a couple twists regarding the aliens, but nothing too crazy if you've read a lot of sci-fi. But it gets the job done, maintaining tension, setting a good narrative pace, and mixing in moments of triumph with eerie periods where you're left guessing about what the aliens will do next.

It's in the moments in between where Xenonauts 2 shows off. The emergent stories, which have burned themselves into my brain—like the corporal I sent onto the UFO bridge to scout, mainly as a sacrifice, who dodged six plasma shots somehow and ended up sticking with me as a colonel all the way to the end. A random number generator that can one-shot a badass can also spare a rookie, and that's where the magic happens.

Squad customization is another rewarding journey, where I teched up from realistic ARs to lasers, gauss rifles, and eventually plasma. I loved seeing my squadmates progress visually from kevlar vests to basically space marines by the end, with powered armor and auto-med injectors that, nevertheless, still didn't keep them from getting annihilated by an unlucky roll now and then. The tension never goes away entirely.

This is coupled with saveable loadouts and certain items like grenades being unlimited once you research them, which maintains some resource management without it getting too tedious or fiddly. It can, however, start to get cumbersome toward the end to kit everyone out. The same goes for the more complex combat turns.

10 soldiers in the midgame feels like a really good number. Once I got the dropship upgrade to bring 12, that felt like too many. And base defense missions, which can have even more than that, were the only ones I really dreaded. They're a micromanagement nightmare with the number of friends and foes present, and they can't be auto-resolved.

Good hunting

Most of the enemies should be pretty familiar if you've played any version of X-COM, but many of their special abilities can be countered in clever ways, waiting for you to discover.

There are these floating egg tank creatures that are impervious to damage in a frontal arc, and they can easily one-shot multiple fully kitted-out soldiers in a single turn. Naturally, they were initially the last enemy I'd want to face in a mission. But there's a catch: they always turn to face the last thing they heard. When I realized I could solo them by throwing a grenade behind them to make them turn around, then unload into their backside with a machine gun, I actually yelled in triumph.

There's no dedicated overwatch ability, but units will take reaction shots if they end their turn with enough time units left. Unfortunately, they're not particularly smart about this and will autofire straight through a teammate to try to hit an alien that pops out.

This is frustrating to begin with, but in the long term, it increases the opportunity for skill expression in a way where setting up a door breach becomes almost like composing a song. Positioning everyone just right, keeping track of how many reaction shots they could take, and setting up contingencies for worst-case scenarios (they happen more often than you might think!) is incredibly satisfying when everything goes according to plan.

Maybe I fell so hard for Xenonauts 2 because I had never sipped X-COM Original Flavor before. But if so, that only speaks to how this uncompromising, dangerous, and detailed sort of tactics puzzle remains today, even without the nostalgia. The way it builds and releases tension across missions and campaign chapters is magnificent. And when the stakes are so high and the price of failure so steep, victory feels earned and tastes so much sweeter.

Climbing games are having something of a moment: Fare like White Knuckle, Peak, and Cairn have all made big splashes (so to speak) and I maintain that Jusant is one of the most sadly overlooked games to come along in recent years. And now we've got Ascenders: Beyond the Peak joining that mix, with its own take on the cliffside life—but it's a whole lot different than the others.

Ascenders might be most aptly described as, what if Darkest Dungeon was a climbing sim? Thematically, that is. You're not climbing solo, for one thing, but as the leader of a team—and as the leader, that means you'll occasionally have to make some tough calls. Like, for instance, who's going to die.

As you might imagine, that's a fraught call to make, and not just because of the obvious moral considerations. Cutting the rope lightens the load so the rest of the squad is less likely to get hauled down into the abyss, but that's not just because you've got one less climber dangling from a rope: Any supplies or resources they were carrying gets the same express trip to the bottom, which is going to cause headaches later on. There's also the psychological toll on those who remain, which will almost certainly make the continuing descent more difficult.

Of course, you can always opt to withdraw from whatever precarious perch you find yourself clinging to and maybe save a life. But your carefully planned route upward may be lost as a result, potentially risking everyone in the party, rather than just that one guy who doesn't seem to be particularly good at the whole mountain climbing thing anyway.

This would be me. Every time, all the time. It's why I only climb mountains in videogames.

Unlike the other climbing games I mentioned, which are primarily games of dexterity and timing, Ascenders is turn-based and strategy-first. The game features numerous classes of climbers, each of which brings unique tools and abilities to your party that can work together in sometimes very powerful ways. Artifacts collected during successful expeditions can be used during future climbs or to upgrade your base camp, or can be traded instead to other factions. Which factions you work with over the course of the game, which mountains you climb, and when you choose to press forward or retreat will also impact your reputation, the world state, and possible game endings.

And why, exactly, are you doing all this? Dying on tough ascents isn't all that terribly uncommon: Mount Everest is famously covered in frozen bodies of fallen climbers, some of whom end up serving as landmarks for future expeditions. But the motivation in Ascenders goes beyond the classic, "Because it's there." It comes back to those artifacts you're collecting: As the trailer hints, these mountains are "cursed with mysterious Lovecraftian threats hidden within the rock."

"Every expedition is a desperate attempt to reach the summit, understand the forces shaping the mountain, and return alive with the knowledge and artifacts you need for your next ascent," developer Ludogram said. "At all costs, your mission is to forbid them from falling into the wrong hands. Death after death, players will learn to turn the environment into a weapon, mastering each ascent through hard-earned roguelite progression."

That's a long way from the chill, magical mountaineering of Jusant, but even so I have to admit I'm intrigued—and no, not just because I want to find out if I can cut the rope on the rest of my team even if I don't have to. (Not entirely, anyway.) Ascenders is currently expected to launch into early access in Q3 2026, and will be available for PC on Steam.

Does a tactics game need a story? Does it even need to look good? Greg Foertsch, creative director on the upcoming XCOM-like Star Wars: Zero Company, certainly thinks so. The former XCOM dev dove into his thoughts on the genre in a recent conversation with PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield.

While it might seem like the biggest compliment a tactics game can get is 'you know, it's actually more of a puzzle game,' Foertsch said that's no excuse to spare players a good story.

"How do we do something that makes you feel something as a player, and not just think through a problem? That's the space where I think the genre can grow," Foertsch said. "I think that's the space where we can innovate, and that's the space where, I've forgotten the things I did before, and we're worried about making something better next. That's where Zero Company was born."

Genre diehards might be content with even the spartan visuals of the original XCOM—that is, 1994 and not 2012—but Foertsch said he wants to realize the largely untapped potential for eye-catching graphics and immersive storytelling in tactics games.

"I have an axe to grind with the genre," he said. "It's so easy for genre fans to wear it as a badge of [honor], 'Oh, the art doesn't matter, the graphics don't matter, the story doesn't matter. It's all about gameplay.

"The gameplay is what it is about. But depth doesn't cost you elegance. You can absolutely have all those other things, and not to mention this genre in particular, you should have those things. It's a single player game."

He argued that you could turn off all the upcoming Zero Company's fancy camera angles and the gameplay would still be "the same," but the extra oomph offered by snazzy production values improves the whole package. "Why do you have to compromise?" said Foertsch. I'm inclined to agree with him after playing the criminally underloved Marvel's Midnight Suns, a game Foertsch was art director on and a case study in how tactics games can have their cake and eat it too.

Foertsch maintains that it's not an either-or, and he said he's not sure why or how fans got "conditioned" to think strategy games can't graphically luxuriate a little bit or spin memorable yarns. "We should have better stories, we have more immersion, we have better visuals … we're here to tell you, you can have both, and that's what we're planning to deliver."

If you're itching to learn more about Star Wars Zero Company, you can read Ted's full preview of the game—it's chock-full of details and interview tidbits from Foertsch and others. We also have a handy explainer on the game that'll tell you everything you need to know.

Greg Foertsch, creative director on the upcoming Star Wars Zero Company, gave his take on the resurgence of crustier PC gaming genres like RTS and turn-based tactics over the last decade in a recent interview with PCG associate editor Ted Litchfield. He also explained why he thinks there was such a long fallow period for complex, simmy games in the aughts and early 2010s.

If you love grand strategy, 4X, turn-based tactics, RTS, CRPGs, and so on, there were several decades where you needed a PC to get the full lay of the land, and even then it was slim pickings for a while. You could certainly find these genres finding success on consoles here and there with games like Fire Emblem, Halo Wars, and Dragon Age: Origins, but countless classics were gated by InstallShield wizards and newbie-hostile forum lords who refused to explain what "THAC0" was.

That's less true these days—Age of Empires plays great on a controller, Baldur's Gate 3 is a cross-platform mega hit, and in defiance of all common sense, Company of Heroes is on Nintendo Switch.

"Early on in the 2000s, we got enamored with consoles," Foertsch explained. "And I think certain games didn't make the leap right⁠—the technology reasons, whatever it was, they couldn't make that conversion. A lot of tactics games you look at, they had an isometric sprite based thing. And the way they delivered the content, it never embraced the camera as a tool."

"Camera as a tool" is a line that really struck us: You can see what he's talking about with the cinematic kill cams of XCOM, which Foertsch and many of his colleagues worked on, and contrast that with the pre-rendered, 2.5D art of so many '90s tactics and strategy games. It's a classic look, but also a particularly bad fit for lower TV resolutions viewed from further away than a monitor.

Foertsch reckons it took awhile for the UX and camera tech to innovate in the right directions, but as it catches up, it's approaching the level of comfort you can expect from keyboard and mouse. "You're starting to see some of these games and genres that maybe had a difficult transition to the couch, actually being games that are that are great to play on the couch," he said. "A lot of my PC games, I'll play with controller, and some of them feel great.

"The explosion of turn-based tactics since 2012 is amazing. You'll see some things that are consistent and threads that go through them, but then you're also seeing things where people are really taking some innovative approaches and trying to really change it and question some stuff and push the genre forward. Hopefully people are just [going to say] 'a great game is a great game,' and look at it from that perspective."

He added that the more games there are solving these problems, the easier it gets to see what works and what doesn't and, in turn, innovate further. "It's great to see other people's solutions to problems that we faced, and how did they get around that? What did they do? What choices did they make? Because these games are deceptively hard⁠—they look easy⁠—but they are deceptively hard to make."

You can read Ted's full Zero Company preview here to get more insights from Bit Reactor developers and learn more about the upcoming tactics game, which is shaping up to be a hell of a lot more than just 'Star Wars plus XCOM.' After that, feed your unceasing hunger for timely information with our guide article that gives you everything you need to know about Zero Company.

There's a new Mechabellum season, which means I can get onto my tiny soapbox and beat my "PLAY MECHABELLUM" drum. Mechabellum is a 1v1 (and occasionally 2v2 or even 1v1v1v1) autobattler where you slap down giant mechs and then make them fight each other. It is probably one of the best strategy games I've ever played and yet hardly anyone has heard of it.

So, prepare to be convinced.

At a surface level, Mechabellum works because all of the mechs are blowing each other up. Your favourite mech is in here tearing it up. Do you want little Gundam-looking things with sniper rifles? They're here. Tiny spider-bots? Yup. Flying saucers? You bet.

Drop 10 hours into it, and you'll get past that and see that what makes Mechabellum genuinely good isn't just that it's a well-made strategy game. There are plenty of those. It's that it understands something a lot of modern competitive games forget: the real pleasure of strategy isn't execution, it's interaction.

Mechabellum is at its best when it feels like a conversation between two players rather than a test of memorisation. You place a line of Crawlers; your opponent responds with area damage. You pivot into heavier units; they counter with air. Each round is a small negotiation. New seasons tend to restore that conversational feel because the “correct” answers aren't fully established yet. It's less about copying a meta and more about thinking on your feet.

That idea—strategy as dialogue—is what gives the game its edge.

A lot of competitive games drift toward optimisation. Over time, they become about learning the right builds, the right timings, the right sequences. You study, you replicate, and if you execute cleanly enough, you win. Mechabellum resists that pull, or at least slows it down. Because while there are strong units and known synergies, nothing exists in isolation. Every decision is contextual, tied directly to what the other player is doing right now.

That means you're never really playing the game in a vacuum. You're playing the person across from you.

Even at lower levels, you feel this immediately. There's a constant back-and-forth: a probe, a response, a feint, a correction. You try something slightly greedy; they punish it. They overcommit to a counter; you sidestep it. The board evolves not just as a system, but as a shared space shaped by both players' intentions. That's what keeps it engaging. You're not solving a puzzle—you're co-creating one.

It also makes losing feel different. When you get outplayed in Mechabellum, it's rarely because someone executed a perfect, pre-learned script. It's because they read you better. They saw what you were trying to do and answered it more effectively. That kind of loss stings, but it teaches. You can trace the moment things went wrong, the decision that tipped the balance. It invites you back in rather than pushing you away.

Another reason the game works so well is how clearly it communicates cause and effect. You place units, you watch them fight, and the outcome is legible. If something fails, you can usually see why. Maybe your frontline collapsed too quickly. Maybe your anti-air came online too late. Maybe you misread their transition entirely. There's very little hidden information, which means improvement feels fair. You're not guessing—you're learning.

That clarity feeds back into the conversational aspect. Because you understand what just happened, you can respond to it. The next round isn't a blind reset; it's a continuation of the same exchange. You adjust, they adjust, and the game becomes a chain of decisions that builds toward a conclusion. It has rhythm in a way a lot of strategy games don't. This new update has shaken up the low cost meta, adding a little robot crab that the Reddit is certain is horribly overpowered, but it's just that people haven't worked out how to play around them yet.

Crucially, Mechabellum also respects your time. Matches are tight, self-contained, and meaningful. You don't need to sink hours into a single session to feel like you've had a proper game. I often play a round while I eat lunch, another mid-afternoon when my energy starts to flag and I need something to get my brain whirring to finish off the afternoon's work. That makes it easier to engage with the deeper layers because the barrier to entry stays low. You can experiment, fail, and try again without friction.

And then you come around, again, to the spectacle, which quietly reinforces everything else. The units are readable but impactful, the battles chaotic but understandable. When your plan works, you see it unfold in real time—your counters landing, your positioning holding, your opponent's line breaking exactly where you expected it to. It's not just satisfying intellectually; it's satisfying visually but as you start to learn the game it's not just about mechs smashing each other, but about you watching the carnage to see what your next retort should be.

Put all of that together, and you get a game that feels alive. Not because it's constantly changing for the sake of it, but because every match is shaped by two people actively responding to each other. That's a harder thing to design than it looks, and Mechabellum nails it.

It's not about memorising the right answer. It's about asking better questions, round after round, until one of you runs out of replies.

We've been spoiled for city-builders and institutional managements sims in recent years, but successors to the Peter Molyneux-style god game have been considerably thinner on the ground. Molyneux himself has whipped out his giant, disembodied hand for one last grab at glory in Masters of Albion, but PCG writer Joshua Wolen's wasn't convinced by it in our recent preview.

However, there is now another project aiming to rekindle the glory days of Dungeon Keeper and Black & White, and that's Sintopia—a hybrid of management sim and god game published by Team 17. It's arriving around the same time as what is purportedly Molyneux's last game, too, having just settled on a release date for the middle of next month.

Sintopia essentially takes Black & White's concept of overseeing an idyllic settlement of miniature people, then builds a Dungeon Keeper style management sim in the basement. The premise casts you as an omnipotent being overseeing a community of "humus", watching them from above and occasionally wafting your big floating palm to help or hinder them in their lives.

But the meat of Sintopia revolves around when those humus die, and their spirits descend into Hell to be punished for their sins. In Sintopia's infernal bowels, you establish an elaborate infrastructure dedicated to processing these wayward spirits, building cruel and unusual punishment contraptions and hiring demons to extract all the precious sin from them. Once a soul has been sufficiently tortured, you then send it back into the realm of the living for reincarnation, where the whole cycle starts again.

It's a fascinating blend of two of the god game's biggest touchstones, and our initial impressions of it were promising. Elie Gould checked out an early build last year, discovering plenty of opportunities to exercise their demons within the game's devilish toolset.

"There's so much room to perfect Hell's production lines with intricate layouts," theywrote back in September. "Then there's everything that can play out in the overworld, like killing kings who don't inspired their subordinates, fighting off rogue groups, and having to deal with an end-of-the-world type scenario."

It sounds like exactly the kind of experience I've been craving from this genre. There isn't much longer to wait until we find out whether Sintopia can deliver on its promises. The game is out on April 16.

When it was announced that Baldur's Gate 3 would have turn-based combat unlike its predecessors, I reacted like the little girl with the frog from The Cabin in the Woods: "The evil has been defeated!" Our long national nightmare was over. And by "nightmare" I mean games expecting us to control an entire party of characters in realtime, with the ability to pause and issue commands tacked on like a clumsy panacea.

Not everyone sees it the same way. Even the people making games with turn-based tactical combat like Star Wars Zero Company can't be bothered disliking RTWP combat as vehemently as me. "Realtime-with-pause is not dead," lead designer James Brawley told PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield during his recent hands-on preview. "It will have its day. Someone will make something wonderful in that space, and it'll take the world by storm again."

Brawley takes a sensibly moderate position, suggesting turn-based games haven't won any kind of "final" victory. "It's like everything, these genres oscillate up and down over time. And I think part of the reason why we see a resurgence of this kind of turn-based games recently is that there's been a lot of innovations in how we pace the action and the camera work, and the immersion that goes into the game has made these games feel a little bit more approachable and easier to play."

Firaxis did a lot of good work in making turn-based combat feel dynamic, with XCOM's mobile camera and window-smashing sprints across the battlefield. A genre based on stately chess-like play suddenly felt action-packed and energetic. "Part of the reason why I think this kind of turn-based format, team turn-based format, was able to make a resurgence is because of innovations in presentation and pacing that keep it from feeling too sluggish or too menu-driven," Brawley said.

"If you rewind back to the early 2000s, a lot of older games that were in this space⁠—not exactly adjacent to what we're doing, but they co-exist with that sort of team-based format—they tended to get very slow, very sluggish. They required a lot of patience to play. They were very rewarding in some cases, but I think it was hard for a lot of people to adopt that gameplay if they were coming out from another genre, coming from realtime strategy, or even coming from classical JRPG turn-based combat."

Returning to the original Jagged Alliance recently, a turn-based mercenary romp from 1995, I definitely had the sense that everything took at least one more click than it needed to. "You just ended in a space where just things took a very, very long time to play," Brawley said, "and required a great deal of patience that you needed a very specific type of player who could really get into those games."

It took some serious rethinking about how they felt to make turn-based tactics games a mainstream proposition again, but if a genre that stereotypically nebbishy can manage it, then why not RTWP? "I wouldn't say that more realtime or realtime-with-pause-type tactical games are dead on arrival," Brawley concluded. "I mean, they'll be back. Somebody will come up with something really cool that will bring those same kinds of innovations back, bring that back into the forefront. It's only a matter of time, I think, before that happens. And I'm looking forward to that as well, because I still enjoy those types of games."

Bit Reactor's long-rumored Star Wars tactics game, Zero Company, finally got a formal reveal last year, but we still didn't know many details about this Clone Wars-era black ops story⁠—until now.

I got about 4.5 hours of hands-on time with Zero Company, plus several interviews with the dev team⁠—you can read my full write up about the game and what I think of it. In this article, I'm sticking to the facts: What's the story, what are its mechanics, what can you expect from the moment-to-moment gameplay.

When is the Star Wars Zero Company release date?

The Star Wars Zero Company release date is Thursday, August 27, 2026, finally revealed during a new trailer at the latest Summer Game Fest. That's actually sooner than I expected, which I'm pleased about.

If you pre-order the game, you can get the Crystalline Astromech cosmetic pack to make your bots look all fancy pants. EA also revealed the Deluxe Edition, which includes two cosmetic packs and five "exclusive weapon camos" (they're basically just orange).

Star Wars Zero Company trailers

So far, there are only two trailers for Zero Company. The original announcement trailer established the Clone Wars setting, the protagonist Hawks, and a quick glimpse at a few of the characters on the team as they gear up for a mission. It's very cool, and very CGI, with only a short 30-ish seconds of real gameplay at the end.

That same trailer was showcased at a lengthy panel discussion with Bit Reactor, Respawn Entertainment, and Lucasfilm Games at Star Wars Celebration 2025. So there was no new material to see but it gave us a peek behind the curtain.

The latest trailer came at Summer Game Fest 2026, which revealed its August launch and an Anakin Skywalker cameo. I'll admit I didn't actually expect Bit Reactor to pull an Anakin cameo, despite it being set during the height of the Clone Wars. There's also a lot more gameplay and cutscenes in this trailer, showing off the locales you'll visit and comrades you'll meet along the way. One of my favourite bits is where they flick through a few of the customisation options and characters in the menu, where it's clear just how much choice you'll have.

What is Star Wars Zero Company?

Zero Company is "Star Wars XCOM," but way more than that. Its combat iterates on XCOM, but its presentation is closer to something like Jedi: Fallen Order or even Mass Effect. You lead a mercenary company of former Separatist and Republic operatives during the Clone Wars, investigating a new Dark Side faction on behalf of the Republic.

The combat is to XCOM as Dragon Age: Origins was to Neverwinter Nights or Knights of the Old Republic: immediately familiar, but definitely an iterative upgrade. The big surprise is how you can walk around with full third-person control back at your home base and between fights on missions.

It's a seamless, immersive, and very exciting development for the genre, blurring the line between squad tactics and a full-on RPG. Selecting a mission from the galaxy map, coming home, talking to all my buddies, upgrading stuff⁠—the overall rhythm was giving Mass Effect 2, even though the fights themselves couldn't have been more different.

Who is Zero Company?

You get a custom protagonist in Zero Company, Hawks, who is also a mandatory unit in story missions. They're a disgraced Republic officer getting by in a galaxy at war, accompanied by their clone war buddy, Trick.

You can customise your Hawks' appearance and their combat specialisation at the start of the game. Then, you'll fill your squad out, either with original characters made by the developers or your own custom operators. As you send these characters on missions together or perform certain actions as a squad, their bond improves.

Zero Company itself is Star Wars A-Team, doing covert mercenary work for the highest bidder⁠—but with a heart of gold, naturally. The story introduces a number of authored squadmates who resemble BioWare companions, and that cast includes:

• Trick: Clone commando
• Kabb Uppercut: Cyborg boxer
• Cly Kullervo: Mandalorian mercenary
• Luco Bronc: Umbaran sniper
• Jae Mordant: Ousted nobility
• Tel-Rea Vokoss: Jedi padawan

There are also a number of story-centric support characters who remain at your home base, the Den. Every story squadmate is subject to the same permadeath rules as custom mercenary operatives, and the mechanical playing field is fairly even between them. Story squaddies do get special abilities unique to them that persist if respecced: Cly's Mando jetpack, Hawks' AP refresh, Jae gets a random assist ability that reminded me of Fallout's Mysterious Stranger, finishing off enemies when you need it most.

Everybody can be found and talked to at the Den: The story characters feel like BioWare companions with their conversations and side stories, while custom operators hang out like Mother Base soldiers in MGSV⁠—only you can't suplex them and have them thank you for it. The mercenaries have "personalities" that determine their combat barks and greetings.

Last but not least: There's an extensive astromech droid builder to create your own little R2D2s, and they get their own class with a focus on support abilities and grenade use.

How does character customization work in Zero Company?

Story squadmates have set appearances, but can be respecced to any class other than restricted "exotic" classes. Cly Kuervo, for example, can be respecced to the Sharpshooter class, using her signature Mandalorian jetpack to reach strategic vantage points, but no one else can be respecced to the Mandalorian Warrior class she starts with.

The base classes or "specializations" are as follows:

• Assault
• Heavy
• Sharpshooter
• Soldier
• Scoundrel
• Gunslinger
• Scout
• Medic

My favorite to play was definitely Gunslinger: They get an attack that refreshes AP on kill, letting you chain together finishing blows. Hawks and the fully customizable, XCOM-style "mercenary" characters also get their pick of Star Wars alien species:

• Devaronian
• Human
• Mirialan
• Togruta
• Twi'lek
• Zabrak

The following species are only available to custom mercenaries, not Hawks:

• Neimoidian
• Ovissian
• Rodian
• Weequay

How's the combat in Zero Company?

Zero Company's combat is immediately familiar having played XCOM. You're usually in control of a squad of four, with three AP per character per turn. There are a number of abilities to restore AP mid-turn and get extra attacks in, while movement and actions draw from the same AP pool⁠—think Fallout or Divinity instead of Baldur's Gate 3's separation of movement and attacks.

The squad has an "advantage" bar that functions like a communal ultimate meter: The Assault class gets a multishot ultimate, while the Heavy class has an AOE rocket launcher. Those take big advantage spends to use, but there are also smaller advantage abilities. Once per turn, Hawks can spend a little advantage to restore one AP to an ally. Advantage abilities, notably, to not require AP to use⁠—Trick could start a turn with a rocket attack, then still pivot into a heavy blaster salvo.

The fights I saw were early game, but still difficult and memorable in that XCOM way. A 70% chance to hit means "Oh god, I'll probably miss this," while enemy positions and unit makeup feel calculated to punish complacent strategies and make you think on your feet. Seemingly sure bets can blow up in your face, but you can also luck into amazing moments. I managed to trivialize a tough boss by setting up overwatch from multiple characters over its spawn point, thinking it was just going to be another gaggle of normal enemies. My squad chunked its health bar before it could even get its shields up.

The mission objectives I saw ran the gamut of hostage rescue, holding a control point, holding multiple control points, and "just kill everyone." There was a good variety to how the maps were shaped and the advantages enemies had over me. The control point map had the objective exposed to enemy fire in the middle of an open arena, while the hostage rescue map had three open areas strung together by two long lanes, with the spawn point at one end, the extraction zone at the other, and the VIP in the middle.

I got an inkling of some of the trickier enemies we'll run into as the campaign goes on: Commando droids from the Clone Wars show with an evil dodge buff, and dark side cultists who get stronger the more of their comrades you put down.

What does Zero Company's meta game look like?

Your home base of the Den has an unprecedented level of immersion for the genre, but you'll do similar stuff to what you got up to at XCOM HQ: Research, upgrade gear, select missions, etc. Zero Company runs in "cycles," with each cycle ending when you go on a mission and move the clock forward. Missions on the galaxy map will only be available for a limited number of cycles before they go away.

In addition to tactical missions, there are non-combat "operations" on the board. Instead of one per cycle, you can do as many operations at a time as you have the resources to fund. These intelligence-gathering objectives play out within the galaxy map UI, and remind me of the text-based, choose your own adventure bits of Pillars of Eternity or Rogue Trader. They typically feature a choice that will determine the rewards you get, as well as squad approval of your actions.

One involved getting intel at a cantina: Do you sweet talk the relevant parties, bribe them, or start a brawl? In addition to squad mate reactions and material rewards, that last option risks an injury on the character you send out. Injuries are usually accrued by getting KOed in combat, and have to be taken care of with time and money. Too many injuries, and a character dies permanently.

You have an ideologically diverse squad: Helping the Republic more than you're contractually obligated to will cheese off the Separatists in your organization, and vice versa. That built-in friction is one of the top things I'm looking for in a cast, and this has me very excited for Zero Company's prospects as an ensemble story.

Other details

Is there romance in Zero Company?

Sorry horndogs, I was told in no uncertain terms that there would not be RPG-style, player-centric romance subplots in Zero Company. There are a lot of ways it seemed like Zero Company harkens to old BioWare, but that ain't one of them.

Who's making this game?

A lot of former XCOM talent. Bit Reactor founder Greg Foertsch cited a figure of around 20 former Firaxis devs on the team in one of our interviews, and comparing the people I talked to with the credits of XCOM and Midnight Suns saw a lot of overlap. Apex Legends/Jedi series developer Respawn is publishing the game under the auspices of EA, and Fallen Order/Jedi Survivor lead writer Aaron Contreras is heading up the story on Zero Company.

R2-D2 is proof that the humble astromech droid is the unsung hero of the galaxy far, far away. During every climactic space battle, bombing run, and ill-considered marriage between dignitary and warrior monk, there was a heroic animate trashcan nearby guiding the course of history.

Star Wars wouldn't be the same without the astromech's nobility and valiant conduct—and Star Wars Zero Company lead missions designer James Brawley says he's eager to see you prove it with an all-astromech playthrough once the game launches.

"The four astromech challenge is a gauntlet I threw down in early development," Brawley said in an interview with PC Gamer. The challenge, which he now offers to the world at large, was inspired by his "fondest gaming memories" of completing the original Final Fantasy with a party of four white mages—something that "made the game phenomenally difficult in the first four to five hours," but eventually became extremely satisfying.

"I always wanted astromechs to be a playable unit in the squad. I always wanted to give them a special place as the king of support units, basically," Brawley said. "But in the back of my head, I was like, 'what if you played through the game with four astromechs?' I wanted that to be possible. Granted, it might not be a very easy thing to do."

Brawley admits that there'll have to be an asterisk on any eventual all-astromech challenge runs: On primary story missions, you'll have to bring Hawks—the player stand-in protagonist character—as an honorary droid. Otherwise, he says "a lot of missions you can run with four astromechs, and it's going to be pretty interesting."

Brawley says that, as support units, any successor D-Squad will need to rely on utility items, because "that's where all of your offensive capability is going to come from." In other words, an astromech-only mission will involve the rolling mayhem of four droids "lobbing grenades around, using flamethrowers, and using support items" to keep your wheely squad in fighting shape. For your enemies it's sure to be the most confusing combat scenario of their rapidly shortening lives.

"I think it'd be a lot of fun," Brawley said.

While I'm sure mass murderer R2-D2 would approve, I suspect it will be somewhat less fun for the astromechs themselves, considering that Zero Company does indeed feature squadmember permadeath. Their sacrifice, and whatever silly droid wailing accompanies it, won't be forgotten.