Crusader Kings 3 will finally let us play as the pope in the By God Alone expansion, launching on September 30. The power! The pageantry! The blood boys! Wait, what?

OK, so history has given us a lot of weird pope stories. One of them relates to the declining health of Pope Innocent VIII. As the story goes, in 1492 three boys were hired to bring the pope back to health with their blood. All of their blood. It went badly. All three boys died, of course, and so did the pope.

This was long before physicians understood the circulatory system, or even knew it existed, and some versions of the tale have Innocent VIII literally drinking from the lads. It's apocryphal. Obvious nonsense, and likely propaganda. But the story has gone from a tall tale full of inconsistencies to the first example of blood transfusion. It's not true, but it is compelling.

One of the reasons for that is the modern trend of wealthy psychopaths hiring blood boys to claw back their youth. The idea that the rich and powerful, the Silicon Valley execs, are literally feeding on us.

As The Guardian put it in 2024, "What history can teach us is that finding a miracle cure for ageing has long been one of humankind’s most cherished dreams. And wealthy, white men have often been at the forefront of this quest—despite the dubiousness of the effectiveness or safety of anti-ageing treatments."

Now, Paradox games can get pretty weird. You can, for instance, eat the pope. And with the By God Alone expansion allowing you to play as the pope, you could theoretically turn him into a cannibal. Justice at last. But blood boys? Nope, that's not on the cards.

A trio of Paradox devs were asked, and while they did have to check—implying that it's not outside the realm of possibility—this is not a feature in By God Alone. But there's a practical reason. "Innocent VIII is at/past the end of the CK3 timeline, so they wouldn't be appropriate anyway," Paradox says.

"Inappropriate due to realism," joked Paradox PR manager Jesse Henning, who had to ask the devs this absurd question on my behalf, "not due to atrocity."

Maybe Europa Universalis 5 will add the feature.

More papal weirdos

Endless Legend 2 is finally leaving early access, and if you've not lost a multitude of days to this elaborate 4X, well, what are you doing with your life? Anyway! Now is the time to rectify this terrible mistake.

There are a lot of reasons for Endless Legend 2 to be on your radar. There's the elaborate, story-driven campaign where you'll juggle your faction's personal quests on top of the big, overarching story; the new city-building mechanics, which allow you to build settlements and then connect them to other cities, making megacities that span multiple provinces; and tidefalls, where the ocean retreats and reveals new realms underneath, maintaining the brilliant exploration phase throughout the entire game.

For me, though, the main hook continues to be developer Amplitude's talent for designing brilliant asymmetrical factions. Faction design is really what separates Amplitude from its contemporaries and predecessors. It's been leading the pack in this regard for a while, to the point where even Firaxis started borrowing ideas for Civ 7. Though that didn't quite work out for the Civilization studio. But for Amplitude's games, it's what makes them truly sing.

With Endless Legend 2, however, things are a bit different. Where the first game gave us a bunch of brand new factions that didn't really play like anything else, Endless Legend 2 gives us a mix of old and new factions. Thankfully, Amplitude hasn't lost its touch—even the returning factions feel novel and bespoke.

Endless Legend 2 takes its asymmetry very seriously. This is not a case of getting a few unique units or buildings. The differences between the factions are fundamental. In many ways, they are playing very different games as they try to dominate the wet, wet world of Saiadha.

Take the Kin of Sheredyn. This lot are kinda like militant paladins, and they're very much worth considering if you love to turtle up, hiding from the planet's many dangers behind indomitable walls. The more fortified you get, the more toys you have at your disposal, as well as economic bonuses. They've also got magical powers. Really this is what remains of their tech, as a former space-faring people, but there's a fantastical bent to them.

While the Kin chill behind their walls, the Sandshapers are unrelenting expansionists. And this doesn't just mean building lots of cities. It means completely changing the world to suit them. They are fuelled by sand. But this damp world is devoid of sand. Thus, the Sandshapers must terraform the planet and then feed on these new deserts. It is a completely different way to play the game compared to all the other factions, and I confess I've not quite got the hang of them yet.

But I love that! In most 4X games, you can kinda just wing it no matter who you pick. In Endless Legend 2, you need to throw out the rule book and start leafing through a brand new one whenever you take another faction for a spin.

This goes a long way to making the seemingly small faction roster of six feel a lot meatier. But that number doesn't quite paint the full picture. With Endless Legend 2, Amplitude has introduced the concept of rogue factions—new race variants that put a fancy spin on the existing ones. So far, there are two of them. One for the Kin, and another for the all-consuming Necrophage hivemind.

The rogue factions are a great example of Amplitude finding novel ways to make interesting choices even when there's an overlap. So while the Order of Zelevas shares a lot with the Kin, especially its militant focus, it actually plays very differently. It's expansionist for one. Where the Kin benefit from focusing on the capital, making it as fortified as possible, the Order strike out and get rewards for controlling more territory. It even has different mechanics for unit recruitment, where soldiers are exclusively purchased instantly for dust, Endless Legend 2's main currency.

With a greater need for dust, the Order must become an economic powerhouse as well as a military one. In turn, this means you'll be building your cities in new ways, following a different strategy compared to a Kin player.

All of these differences are just the starting point. The choices you then make in regards to research, unit upgrades, city development, diplomacy and what minor factions to assimilate turns each of these predefined factions into something that's uniquely yours. And none of this would matter without a compelling campaign. When you throw these weirdos together in a constantly shifting world, that's when Endless Legend 2 starts to become something truly special.

Endless Legend 2 leaves early access on September 22, and you can grab it now on Steam.

There has been no drought of good 4X games over the past decade. Part of that has been the steady work of Amplitude, whose Endless series has become a stalwart part of the strategy scene. Endless Legend 2 further cements Amplitude's legacy as a great 4X developer, delivering the studio's trademark creativity and standout visual design in a modernized package.

The original Endless Legend was a shot in the arm for a 4X genre that had gotten pretty stale. If you'd asked me in the years afterward if I wanted more Endless Legend, I'd have said yes. In the years since, many of its innovations—and those from sibling series Endless Space—have become standards in the genre. You might expect that to have dulled some of the charm. 12 years later, though, I still want more Endless Legend.

Sciences fantastical

I wanted more Endless Legend because there's never enough good science fantasy. Not the Star Wars kind, though that's fun too, but the kind where it's sword and sorcery with a technological flavor. Where it's mostly monsters and wizards. Bows, not blasters.

So I'm glad that we're back to Endless Legend's worlds of crashed starship survivors building robotic golems and battling with titanium swords and wielding magic that might just be nanotechnology. The setting and its weird people are just as good as the first time, though a bit more scientific-feeling. No dragons, for example, or elf stand-ins—instead we've got evolved desert lizards, coral robots, and sand spirit genies. It's another rich world that lets its developers break the rules of the genre in interesting and creative ways.

The new world of Saiadha is familiar in one important way: Like Auriga of Endless Legend, Saiadha is dying. This time though it's because the Endless, an ancient race, sealed something away beneath Saiadha when they terraformed it from a planet of desert dunes into one of storm-wracked seas and isolated islands. Now that something is coming back, which means the oceans are draining away into the planet's core.

Every few dozen turns a monsoon comes, shrouding the world in storms, and at the end of that monsoon season comes Tidefall: The shoreline recedes, unveiling sunken landscapes and ancient technologies that are now ripe for your faction to colonize and exploit—a perfect setup for a genre about expanding and building.

Aesthetics fantastical

Endless Legend 2 continues the tradition of the first game in another way with one of the most pleasing, coherent aesthetics in the entire strategy game space. The painterly color choices across terrain and units, both matte and gloss, make different areas of the world and the new biomes that emerge from the ocean very distinct.

Endless Legend 2 also makes very good use of texture on terrain to convey types of earth, sand, grass, stone, or even a field of vast living circuitry. My major critique is that the lighting is quite flat—it really only changes during monsoons—and something more dynamic or directional might have helped highlight the models and environments. Better to have simple lighting than effects that muddy the visual environment, though.

While it's still a best-in-genre user interface, interacting with Endless Legend 2 doesn't feel as aesthetically pleasing and crisp as the first game. The redesigned resource displays, menus bar, and action wheels are good, but the use of symbols on the map for cities and armies rather than clear, obvious text labels conveys less information while making the player do more work to understand what they're looking at. I had issues distinguishing the symbols for cities, armies, and resource locations until I learned where each was located. A temporary annoyance, but bad friction nonetheless.

The highlight for many will be yet another standout soundtrack from Arnaud Roy. Ethereal at times—subdued and ambient—it makes extensive use of a crystal organ. What most impressed me was how it changes as you go, avoiding repetitive loops and adapting dynamically to the screen you're on or what's happening in a battle round. Opening a diplomacy screen, for example, seems to dull out or soften the bass parts so you can hear the faction leader characters speak clearly.

Play fantastical

What may disappoint some about Endless Legend 2 is that many of the first game's signature innovations have become routine. Ideas like changing or terraforming the map, or your cities expanding over large regions, have been adopted by many others in the genre. The signature Amplitude resource system is present in full and simple to understand: Incomes for cities—FIDSI for Food, Industry, Dust, Science, and Influence—with tradeable luxury resource stockpiles for upgrades and everything else. Some might be bored of it, but it works really well, and I don't think you should mess with a good system.

What is still superb is how Amplitude wants every faction to break the rules in some way, repeating only a few tricks from Endless Legend or Endless Space. Particularly fresh is how Saiadha's receding oceans play into the genre tropes of a 4X.

The genre is at its best during two phases—the initial exploration and expansion, and the secondary squabble and race over who will control resources and which factions will actually fight with each other for them. Endless Legend's system of neutral territories is perfect for this, as you can stake claims by building camps, but must be wary of attack from enemies or marauding minor factions who can burn those down without declaring an official war.

The worst part of most 4X is when the map stagnates, empires get huge, and you engage in a grind toward whatever finish line you're aiming for. In Endless Legend 2, every time the seas recede and new land appears, the shorelines change—previously isolated territories may connect to each other, precious deposits or strategic resources may appear, and new dungeons for your heroes to delve or undiscovered minor factions may show up. Tidefall means your previously safe border may become vulnerable, or that your worst city is now part of a rich new frontier. In short, it throws you back into the most exciting and interesting parts of the 4X genre multiple times throughout a typical length game.

Tactics fantastical

The changing map also means your armies are in constant motion. You always want them moving from place to place, scouting out new territory, gathering curiosities, and either fighting or doing quests for neutral minor factions. At the same time you need them to guard your borders against potential aggressors, or against the terrible Doomwraiths that come each monsoon season, and you want them in position for the next tidefall. Where your military units and scouts are just map decoration in some 4X games, in Endless Legend 2 they're hooked into every part of the game loop in a way that feels like part of the exploration and wonder of a good fantasy story.

For all that, the tactical combat is perhaps less rich than I'd like it to be. The positioning elements of the turn-based fights are as good as ever, especially because of how it happens across the natural game map. You carefully position your armies to attack enemies from favorable terrain. As a faction like the Tahuks, who rely on ranged combat and want to exploit chokepoints, or the Sandshapers, who want to fight on desert terrain whenever possible, controlling space by positioning is still very good.

What leads to it feeling less rich is that it's very tightly wound—damage numbers are such that fights are nearly equal exchanges unless you outnumber the enemy 2:1, and scraping out an advantage often feels like exploiting the system by stacking buffs or abusing the terrain.

That said, 4X games are rarely well-tuned, but I found that the difficulty settings in Endless Legend 2 actually worked very well on their defaults. Higher settings actually delivered greater difficulty in consistent, measured steps, and the highest difficulties were so rough that you could end up in wholly unwinnable starts at times, which paradoxically I'd count as a real success.

That success, however, is still achieved by inflating the AI factions' abilities with bonus resources rather than making them better at playing the game. So sometimes the only way to win those tight tactical combats against a stream of armies you could never out-produce was by abusing the heck out of a system.

Weirdos fantastical

The factions are the highlight of this game, as with any Endless game, because of how asymmetrical they are. Each of them breaks or ignores some fundamental game mechanic.

Whether it's the Children of Sheredyn who'd rather build a fortress than a public plaza, or the Sandshapers, living mineral constructs who can't farm and must scrape together rare resources and terraform the world back into desert in order to gather the minerals they need to produce new population. There are even two "rogue" variants of factions that invert their primary playstyle—the defensive Sheredyn become an aggressive expansionist legion, the devouring Necrophage become an enslaving swarm of cyborgs.

There's less extremity than in Endless Legend in places—no faction can move its cities, for example—but there's still wild stuff in here that would be seen as unacceptable in other games. The friendly Aspects, a symbiosis of living corals and robotics, can spend their copious influence to force treaties like peace or trade on other factions. The Necrophage can only have one city, their hive, and are always justified in declaring war on others. (They're hungry, OK?)

There's just not another 4X where you can play as religious fanatic lizards who use a solar mirror laser to turn the world to glass. I appreciate that.

When I got to play a sliver of Company of Heroes 3's dynamic Italian campaign for the first time, it was hard not to be impressed. The team had taken all the best parts of Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault, expanded it, and then added all sorts of novel new ideas. It felt like I was playing Total War: World War 2.

A year later, once I'd been given unfettered access to the campaign for my review, I was less impressed. Player feedback had inspired Relic to remove one of the new features I dug the most—controllable detatchments—but there was a larger, more fundamental problem: the dynamic campaign wasn't dynamic. The fascists largely sat back and let me liberate Italy.

The RTS battles remained incredible, and the second more traditional campaign was excellent, leading to me giving it a score of 82% in my Company of Heroes 3 review, calling it a "failed experiment but a great game". Broadly, though, the player reception was not great, and user reviews on Steam continue to sit at Mixed.

"We set out to build the biggest Company of Heroes game ever," Relic CEO Justin Dowdeswell tells us. "More factions at launch. Two full campaigns playable at launch. I think it was an ambitious goal we set, and that showed up in some of the issues of launch around the level of polish and some of the bugs that the players were encountering. We didn't quite land it."

The Italian campaign was conceived early in the game's development, but actually getting it to work was a "stumbling block" that never quite got resolved, Dowdeswell says. "Yeah, we bit off more than we could chew. The idea was great. The spirit of it was good. The team was energised. It was just more than we could get done in time. And it wasn't nearly as polished as it needed to be at launch."

Relic thought, or at least hoped, that everything would fall into place eventually. "For so many of us in the industry, things come together kind of late in the project," Dowdeswell says. "So when it's not there and you still have time, there's this belief: well, we'll get there, we always do. And this one, we didn't."

When that didn't happen, Relic had to deal with the fallout. "It's disappointing for sure," Dowdeswell says. "It's so much work. A big team spent years and years making that game, and to see it not land well with players, it hurts.

"Obviously we spent serious amounts of time in postmortem discussions: where did we go wrong? What can we do to fix it? And just taking the time to be really thoughtful about what the top issues were that we needed to address, and when we could get them addressed by. So that was really the focus. I think we got over the initial shock quickly, and then it was just heads down. Let's work on these problems and find ways to turn it around, basically, knowing we want to do that quickly."

But was there a way this could have been avoided? At the time, Relic thought it was doing things right: bringing in content creators, modders, competitive players and other members of the community to chat to the studio and, eventually, play the game during development.

"So I think that was good," Dowdeswell says. "But by the time we got to the place where we actually were ready to start sharing software, some of those decisions were so far back that it was too late to reverse them or change them, and it was also too late to really course correct by the time we knew the game had to come out."

This was all years ago, but to Relic's credit it hasn't given up on Company of Heroes 3. On its second anniversary, Company of Heroes 3 2.0 arrived with lots of free improvements and additions, on top of premium DLC. And earlier this year Relic launched Final Stand, a standalone wave-based roguelite. Unfortunately, like the base game, it's sitting at Mixed on Steam. Later this year, we're also getting the 3.0 update, which will include additions to both games.

Perhaps more exciting is the prospect of the original Company of Heroes returning in the form of a remaster, Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition, with enhanced textures and lighting, quality-of-life improvements and a 64-bit upgrade. It's due in 2027.

Following its split with Sega, Relic is now independent, but it remains dedicated to Company of Heroes. And while the latest iteration may have not quite panned out, I remain convinced that nobody does WW2 RTS battles quite like this lot.

Total War fans are eating good recently. Lovers of fantasy have the Lords of the End Times DLC for Total War: Warhammer inbound, historical fans have Medieval 3 on the distant horizon, and even enjoyers of grim dark sci-fi have Total War: Warhammer 40k likely dropping next year. Well, it gets even better.

Today, Creative Assembly announced that Total War: Shogun 2 is getting a remaster on October 13. Widely considered to be one of the best Total War games (especially its Fall of Samurai expansion) Shogun 2 originally came out in 2011, so it's starting to show its age a little bit.

Total War: Shogun 2 - Complete Edition includes all three campaigns (Shogun 2, Rise of the Samurai, Fall of the Samurai) alongside every faction DLC which was sold piecemeal, but also a range of other improvements, including:

• Full Japanese and Chinese voice and text localisation
• Improved visuals, lighting and shadows
• 1440p and 4K UI scaling
• Modernised controls
• More than 50 newly playable factions
• Integrated Mod.io support
• 64-bit upgrade
• Ultrawide monitor support
• Colourblind accessibility options

While I don't actually think Shogun 2 has aged as poorly as some other Total War games due to its simple visual style, its controls definitely have, so that's one thing I'm personally very excited for. There are also apparently "over 50 newly playable minor factions" in this version.

It's hard to say whether this just means all of the factions who were previously unplayable across all three campaigns, or whether it's including the factions that were sold as DLC before. Still, it's going to be a lot of content.

Those who own Shogun 2 already will receive legacy DLC from the original game at no extra cost, which I'm assuming means all of the campaigns and paid factions. Owners will also get a "75% time-limited loyalty discount" on the new edition, so not free, but all Shogun 2 players will be getting something either way.

I've got to say, I'm pretty hyped though. Shogun 2, especially Fall of the Samurai, is one of my most played Total War games. What'll be even more fun is the potential for a multiplayer revival—Shogun 2 has a feature where other players could drop into your campaign to battle against you as an enemy army, so maybe years later it'll actually have enough players to function again, not to mention the popular Avatar Conquest mode.

The main thing preventing me from playing Star Wars Zero Company in its iron man "beskar" mode is cowardice, but the second thing preventing me from doing that has been the state of the game at launch. I've had it crash on me a few times, and the thought of my one and only run being lost because of a mid-save crash is enough to keep me playing with iron man off—even if Zero Company is much easier than XCOM and actually losing seems unlikely.

Fortunately, a 1.1 patch is here, and the first patch note is "Fixed various crash issues." Following that, "Fixed an issue where Beskar saves were temporarily deleted" and "Fixed a crash issue for Beskar mode."

There's also a fix for "an issue where shots can be missed, even when the chance to hit is 100%." I've been assuming that ZCOM was rounding up the numbers and actually I'd been missing 97% chance shots the several times I completely whiffed a point-blank sure thing in my playthrough, so it'll be nice to actually land those attacks instead.

The other main bug I experienced was overwatch not triggering even when enemies jog through multiple targeting cones on their turn. That doesn't seem to have been addressed, although several other bugs involving overwatch triggering against units outside the targeting cone or behind solid objects have. Maybe I'll wait one more patch before turning on the beskar mode then.

Bit Reactor, the studio that created Zero Company, reportedly furloughed most of its staff shortly before launch, and has been operating with a skeleton crew since then. Which explains why it's taken two weeks for some fairly fundamental issues to be addressed. Here's hoping some of those staff can get brought back on to help speed up the rate patches come out.

Despite more than a year of updates and at least one massive overhaul, Civilization 7 remains as stubbornly divisive as ever. May's enormous Test of Time update brought significant mechanical reworks and a fresh influx of players to Firaxis' latest entry in the 4X series. But with Steam reviews still sitting at 'Mixed', with 51% positive, it ultimately did little to shift player opinion.

This is partly because numerous aspects of Civ 7 are still rudimentary compared to previous games, including the ability to wage nuclear war. While Firaxis' latest allows players to drop atom bombs on their enemies via World War 2 bombers, its final, modern age ends in 1950, meaning many advanced technologies, including nuclear submarines and ICBMs, are not featured in the game.

Fortunately, this is going to change. Alongside the release of update 1.5.0—which adds features like improved resource generation and an Earth map where your faction starts at their historically-accurate location—Firaxis outlined its update plans for Civ 7 over the next year. This includes another free update that will finally drag the game into the age of the A-bomb.

The update is called Arc of Tomorrow, and Firaxis says that it will be "even bigger in scope" than May's Test of Time patch. Introducing a fourth Act to Civ 7 that extends the game's timeline from 1950 to 2050, Arc of Tomorrow will bring a host of new features and play opportunities to the experience.

This includes "expanded nuclear gameplay" that introduces new units and what Firaxis describes as a "fun twist" on mutually assured destruction, plus atomic-era diplomacy options that will let players call for nuclear disarmament or escalate warhead production and send the doomsday clock spinning toward midnight.

Alongside nuclear weapons, the update will also extend Civ 7 into modernity in other ways. Firaxis says it will add the ability to transform settlements into City States, then use these to engage in proxy-wars to avoid battling empires directly, essentially letting you engage in Cold War-style conflicts. It also introduces the ability to manufacture advanced resources like enriched uranium, and a system called "Great Works of Film", where film crews can scour the globe for ideal filming locations, presumably for cultural benefits.

Like Test of Time, Arc of Tomorrow will be free for all Civ 7 players. Unlike Test of Time, Arc of Tomorrow will likely be released alongside Civ 7's first major expansion—Earthrise. As the name suggests, this will focus on humanity's exploration of the stars.

Interestingly, your stellar endeavours will run throughout the game rather than being squashed into an end-game Space Age, with players able to chart the night sky in the age of antiquity and even name celestial bodies. As technology advances, you'll be able to launch your first orbital missions in the modern age, before establishing your own space agency to venture out into the solar system.

Firaxis says that both the Earthrise expansion and the Arc of Tomorrow update will be released sometime in 2027, and that the announced features are still in development and subject to change. In the meantime, if you're on the fence about Civilization 7 (and you certainly wouldn't be alone) the base game is currently free to play until September 10, so now would be a good time to see whether its structure works for you. If you're taken with it, then the full game is 50% off until September 17, down from $70 (£60) to $35 (£30).

The Labor Day weekend is upon us (in Canada and the US, anyway, and we'll be sure to spare a thought for our UK colleagues who will be working on Monday) and holy cow, it is about time. If you find yourself in need of something to do, here's a thought: Play Civilization 7, because it's free to play on Steam until September 10.

Civ 7's had kind of a rough go of things since it launched in early 2025. It made some big changes to the formula that didn't go over well with a significant portion of the fan base, the UI was almost universally unpopular, and performance was dodgy.

Firaxis has been banging away on it ever since, to mixed results: A major update released in May brought a big bump in player numbers on Steam, but the reactions expressed via Steam reviews were almost literally split down the middle. Civ 7's Steam rating remains "mixed," with only 48% positive user reviews, while concurrent player numbers on the platform are still running neck-and-neck with the 16-year-old Civilization 5.

Civ 5 is much beloved but I imagine Firaxis and Take-Two would like to see people move on.

Ah, but here's the counterpoint: It's free. Just go around to Steam and click the "Play Game" button, and after some requisite amount of downloading, you're playing Civ 7 without spending a penny. It's hard to go wrong, really.

If the past year-and-a-half of updates have got Civilization 7 to a point where you think to yourself, 'Yes, I would like to play this game all the time,' you can also pick up the standard and deluxe editions for half price until September 17: That's $35/£30/€35 for the former, and $50/£45/€50 for the latter.

The Civ 7 development team (a small part of it, anyway) will also be discussing what comes next during a livestream from PAX on September 5—you can catch that on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook.

One of the significant differences between most historical Total Wars and the Warhammer games is that the factions aren't comparable with nations. In Total War: Warhammer 40,000, the Space Marines and Astra Militarum, for instance, are effectively two branches of the same military.

So when I was playing Total War 40k at Gamescom as the Ultramarines, I noticed that my settlement garrison was full of just ordinary soldiers—members of the Planetary Defense Force. These units only served to defend the settlement, like a normal Total War garrison, but they weren't the same units that I could recruit as a Space Marine faction.

"The way that the Imperium works together is going to be very important," Dave Petry, battle product owner, told me. "And working as a Space Marine with local planetary forces and governors to be able to get the support that you need in order to be able to be that tip of the spear, we want that to be the case."

How the Imperium works, and your relationship to it, is still a work in progress, but Petry added that Creative Assembly has been playing around with concepts like "gaining support to be able to bring along units with you to fight your battles". So we might be able to bring in some meat shields from the PDF, or units from the Astra Militarum, to fight alongside our Space Marines.

I already saw a hint of this in the demo I played. In both the medium and massive-sized battles, my Space Marines arrived to find the Astra Militarum already fighting orks. I wasn't able to control them—they were just an allied force—but hopefully this is just a taste of something meatier.

Petry also teased what sounds like a reputation system. "Collaborating among the Imperium is something we really want to be able to do, and managing your reputation in the Imperium as a Space Marine is also something that's very important. Like not doing things that look too much like building an empire or becoming too powerful." So you'll need to keep the Imperium happy and avoid being accused of heresy.

Creative Assembly wants to "fill the galaxy out," says Petry, so we can expect to see other elements of the Imperium appearing. I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for some Adeptus Mechanicus fun in the near future. And the studio has already been teasing other Space Marine chapters, like my beloved Space Wolves, as well as xenos threats like Genestealer cults.

The good news is that you won't need to buy three games to see it all this time. Unlike Total War: Warhammer, Total War 40k is going to be a sandbox that Creative Assembly keeps adding to, rather than a series of separate games.

Hard experience has taught me that I am not, in my heart, a Rainbow Six Siege guy. In fact, I'm not really a Rainbow Six guy. The series' hardcore-ish squad-based first-person gameplay just never jibed with me going all the way back to 1998, when a five-year-old Josh got shot to death by eco-terrorists in about 0.3 seconds and promptly decided to play something else.

So colour me surprised that my brief, hands-off Gamescom demo with Rainbow Six Tactics not only blew my hair back, it quickly became one of my most-anticipated games of the show, and precisely because of the ways it blends together familiar XCOM-ish tactics gameplay with, well, a whole buncha Siege stuff.

United colours

Here's the pitch: a bunch of characters you last saw executing people in Siege have signed up for a new Rainbow organisation, under the command of Paul Bishop from Rainbow Six Vegas. Bishop is a bipedal breeze block who you, notionally, play as, but you only 'play' him in the way you play the commander in XCOM, from what I've seen. For the most part, you're either touching up Rainbow's base or giving orders in the field.

'In the field' was where we found ourselves at the demo's start. The Rainbow gang have infiltrated an industrial dock. Their aim is to make their way across it and into a warehouse at the other side.

This bit? All very XCOM (or, indeed, Mario + Rabbids, which several R6 Tactics devs worked on). You're moving your fellas about a field, setting up overwatch zones, and using their special abilities to take down foes. For instance, one of the characters in our demo squad was Montagne, who more-or-less functioned as a piece of moveable cover—the semi-circle area from which he could painlessly take attacks marked on the ground around his feet.

Also on our roster: Siege's sniper Glaz, who in Tactics can shoot in a great long line that can take out multiple enemies, if you rack 'em up. The game has no fog of war in its outside areas, making the guy with a gun that shoots really far something of a force of nature.

So far, so much a perfectly cromulent Rainbow-Six-flavoured take on XCOM-style tactics, but it's when the gang got to the warehouse that R6 Tactics began to show its hand. Our demoer did not just pile up her troops around the building's entryways and go—which is what I've done for years in all games remotely like this.

Instead, it all got very Siege. First up, the team deployed drones—the same little wheeled drones you've deployed in countless Siege matches as the attacker—to scope out the warehouse interior and pinpoint enemies. Unlike the outside world, interior spaces very much do have fog of war, and properly reconnoitering them looks, well, pretty important. It's a neat wrinkle in a familiar loop, and turns XCOM-style scouting (the process by which you send one fast trooper dashing off to see what's up before having them dash back) into a more fleshed-out phase of the operation.

It's rather important you do it properly, because the next thing we saw was R6 Tactics' Breach mode. Rather than kicking the doors of the warehouse in, our demoer plotted out every member of the team's moves and attacks ahead of time, using the interior map established by her earlier drone reconnaissance. Once it was all plotted out, she hit go, and everyone moved simultaneously, the squad taking up their assigned positions and shooting several people in the face along the way, in ways that probably aren't in-keeping with official military rules of engagement.

Some more Siege: plenty of the roughhousing had impacts on the warehouse itself. Shots and explosions destroyed parts of the level they passed through, with one in particular from Glaz seeming to pass through a flimsy wall and out the other side, into the waiting skull of someone who assuredly deserved it. This is, I'm not afraid to say it, cool as hell, and a smart transplant of one of Siege's most interesting features into a new arena that's nonetheless wholly suited for it.

And then? Well, the Scooby gang found a man with a beard and some plot and had to lead him to safety—out of the warehouse and into a waiting boat. This was mostly a replay, mechanically, of the demo's opening, with the added complexity of spending accrued 'Order Points' to buff the team.

These are small-but-handy things—more damage, increased movement—that could be pivotal to the flow of battle if used right, and the rub is that your enemies get them too. As you faff about with beard-man, trying to get him and your squad to the boat, a turn-counter ticks down in the lower reaches of the screen, indicating when your foes will next get to buff themselves. It's not a major thing, but it's smart: another sign that the people making Rainbow Six Tactics have put proper thought into the overall flow of gameplay.

It might have been a relatively quick glimpse, and I still have a lot of questions (like what the HQ half of the game is like), but as a starving XCOM fan I was absolutely intrigued by what I saw of R6 Tactics. Between this and Star Wars Zero Company, I feel like I'm eating better than I have done in years.

With Total War: Warhammer, Creative Assembly designed a trio of games, each with their own bespoke campaigns, but the core of the series quickly became the mode now known as Immortal Empires—every single faction and lord in one massive sandbox. And that's been a big inspiration for Total War: Warhammer 40,000.

At Gamescom 2026, battle product owner Dave Petry told me that the plan was to make the initial release of Total War 40k the "bedrock" upon which Creative Assembly will continue to build, rather than splitting it up into a trilogy.

"We're going to have major releases," he told me, "we're going to update this game with some significant stuff in varying sizes, but we're looking at what Total War is and looking at things like Immortal Empires. Like the true experience is the sandbox. That's what we want to build, and that's what we want to continue building on, and bringing that into one place so that there are so many different ways that players could enter and still get to experience the whole thing without being siphoned off and only getting to experience a part of it.

"We just felt that was super super important, and it also puts us in a position to build better together, and to work on the same thing in the same space with the same problems, and just keep making it better together with everyone. So yeah, it felt like the right thing to do, and it's just such a huge galaxy to fill. So it made sense to treat this as sort of like that bedrock to start building a new future."

Creative Assembly has already been teasing what might be added to the sandbox after launch, too.

Initially, we'll have four customisable factions: Space Marines, Astra Militarum, Aeldari and Ork. Compared to fantasy Warhammer, that's a pretty tiny number, but we can expect other Space Marine chapters to come down the line. Space Wolves are already confirmed, which is all I really needed to hear. But Genestealer cults are also on the table, and of course Chaos is always waiting in the wings.

Total War 40k is due in 2027, and from the hour I played at Gamescom, it's shaping up to be something pretty special.

With Afterworld, Paradox Development Studio is giving the post-apocalypse the Stellaris treatment, turning the end times into a ludicrously elaborate sandbox where you can live out all sorts of apocalyptic fantasies—whether you want to create a freewheeling band of road warriors or a new American empire.

I went to Sweden to play an alpha build of this ambitious behemoth last month, and I've been able to keep playing at home since then. But this is a Paradox game, so I still feel like I'm barely scraping its dusty, radioactive surface.

Here's a bit of what I've been getting up to, across multiple playthroughs:

• I made a band of alcoholic mutant cannibals, stole some bikes, and conquered Florida.
• I embraced the religion of the highway, creating a tribe of zealous petrol heads spreading their beliefs across the wasteland.
• I teamed up with an ancient immortal to help rebuild America, betrayed him, and tore the continent apart with our brutal civil war.
• I created a docile empire of slaves by making everyone addicted to drugs.
• I became a cheese magnate.

Even in this alpha build, with its single origin and only one major threat, there's plenty to do—enough to give this would-be conqueror a bit of a headache, frankly. OK, before I get too far ahead of myself, here's the setup.

Leaving the vault

You are a band of survivors in the North American wasteland. Like Stellaris, you'll have a variety of starting options—your band's origins—but in this build there's only the Shelterborn. Think Fallout's vault dwellers. This gives you a bespoke starting scenario, where your vault is about to go kaboom and you've got to find a new place to live on the surface.

Unlike Stellaris, however, these origins let you give some input. In the Shelterborn origin, for instance, you get to decide how your survivors handled food riots, and if they want to rebuild America or dominate what remains. Your choices determine the character of your band and their starting resources.

From there you'll build and upgrade settlements, join up with other bands, explore ruins, create laws and belief systems, and butt heads with powerful dominions—sprawling empires ruled by immortals who were born before the collapse of civilisation. Dominions are a bit like Stellaris's fallen and awakened empires, in that they are established and immensely powerful right at the start of the game.

Afterworld's alpha purposefully puts you right in the path of its sole dominion, ruled by Citizen Farouk. He's just a responsible patriot who wants to rebuild America. He's even going to hold an election to pick the 'president of presidents'. Sure, he's going to make sure it's him, but you can trust him. Definitely. 100%.

Refusing to join Farouk always leads to war. At first he just sends other bands who have joined him to do his dirty work, but eventually he gets sick of the disrespect and sends in the big guns. Huge, mechanised armies that you'll have no hope of fighting off until the endgame. Joining him doesn't mean you'll have to be loyal, though.

I refused to pay his tithes, rejected all of his requests, and slowly built up my own power base. It wasn't until I became pretty powerful myself and stood against him in the election that Farouk truly woke up, kicking off an apocalyptic civil war that I've so far not been able to win. This isn't just because Farouk's armies are massive and much better equipped—it's also because I really hate fighting wars in Afterworld.

The UI and map just aren't up to the challenge of making these big fights easy to parse yet, and the Whac-A-Mole problem that appears in a lot of Paradox games is so much more pronounced here. War just feels too much like a grind. That said, most conflicts I became embroiled in ended swiftly. It's incredibly easy to just steamroll foes if you've got some bikes and guns.

Fighting is further complicated by Afterworld's multitude of manufacturing and supply chains. It's an evolution of the Hearts of Iron 4 model and is actually the one part of Afterworld's warfare that I like. Every single weapon and vehicle that you use must be either built or found, and then you also need to keep manufacturing fuel and bullets, which require both resources and buildings.

End times economics

In this way, Afterworld evokes logistics-heavy city builders and survival games, and it makes creating and maintaining a well-armed force feel like a real achievement—one that you're rewarded for, as all this equipment will make it incredibly easy for you to expand if you have conquest in mind.

Even if you're not set on a path of domination, however, the resource economy will still be central to all of your playthroughs. Resource scarcity is one of the main drivers behind exploration and conflict, and so many of the decisions I made came down to a need for more fuel or batteries or simply food and water.

But this isn't a survival game, and Paradox has been a bit more generous due to this fact. If you don't have enough food or water, it isn't the end for your tribe. It just stunts population growth and harms the health of each individual band in your tribe, which makes them more dissatisfied with the way things are being run.

Finding the resources you need, either through theft or exploration or settling a region that naturally produces them, is only half of the puzzle. You'll need other resources to build ways to extract those resources or manufacture them into something more useful, and then you need to consider what bands are running the show.

While you start off with a single band, you'll end up juggling a lot more of them in your tribe, and every single one of them is treated as a separate entity with their own characters, beliefs and skills. You can choose where they sit in the tribe's hierarchy, and give them territory to govern. If you've got a band with a green thumb, then, you'll want to put them in charge of your tribe's bread basket.

Once a band is under your control, you are in charge of its progression, and I found myself compelled to create a list of things I needed and then pick bands to take care of those things, always choosing the option that enhanced their ability to do so whenever they levelled up.

It's a level of population management that I haven't encountered in other Paradox games before, and I appreciate the level of fine control it offers. It also works well for this zoomed in setting. You're not trying to conquer the world or a galaxy—you've just got North America to worry about. So this granularity feels manageable.

Another significant difference compared to most of Paradox's games is Afterworld's pace. You can finish a game in a weekend. Within a couple of hours, you can go from being a one-band tribe scrounging around for food and water to a burgeoning empire. And the randomness of exploration means that your tribe's warriors could be decked out in plasma guns and accompanied by mechs while you're still figuring out the game's basics.

Snowballing

You can definitely become too strong too quickly, so there's some balancing required, but I hope Paradox maintains some of the random leaps in power. It feels true to the post-apocalyptic genre. A band of nobodies discovering some pre-fall tech that catapults them into the limelight is a fun trope, and given the shorter length of a playthrough, the randomness and surprises feel crucial.

Paradox says it's aiming to make Afterworld its most accessible grand strategy game, but at this point it's hard to see. This is largely down to the build being alpha. The UI is still in flux and is missing a lot of the informative tooltips that bless other Paradox games, and it's not yet intuitive. Afterworld lets you do so much, but finding out how to do anything requires a lot of effort.

Combined with the lack of tutorial or any real onboarding, it's impossible to say if Afterworld is going to be accessible or not. Though there is one feature that I think is moving things in the right direction, and that's the tech tree.

Instead of seeing the whole tree laid out before you, or getting a random selection of techs to choose from as you do in Stellaris, the tree is revealed through exploration. If your tribe encounters a river, you'll learn about irrigation, unlocking the appropriate idea in the tree. If you meet another tribe and they've established a religion, then you'll discover the organised religion idea.

The system also benefits from the map's procedural generation. While the terrain and geography are immutable, you'll encounter different tribes, resources and dangers when you start a new run. So you'll always be able to find that river and unlock irrigation, but other experiences will be random. Just because you've discovered something, however, it doesn't mean you can start researching it.

I wanted to turn mutated trees into steel, for instance, and had discovered the forestry tech tree, but I couldn't start researching the technology without passing a law regarding the exploitation of our forests—which I couldn't do because the council was largely opposed to switching from hunting to logging. Bribes, promises and threats couldn't net me enough support. But then came a rebellion, some upheaval and some new blood at the top of the political hierarchy, and the new folk liked my ideas a lot more.

Not being able to do stuff because of council opposition was frustrating, but I do love the law system. It's another example of Afterworld doing exciting things at a granular level. If you want your tribe to be clearheaded, for instance, you can ban all intoxicants—or you can ban them for everyone but your slaves, so you can keep them docile. Yes, you can be a real prick in Afterworld.

Embracing a belief system allows you to further define your tribe, and while Afterworld stops short of letting you design a custom religion from scratch, levelling up your belief allows you to select a variety of perks that add new facets to your tribe. Beliefs can also create a lot of welcome friction. Your tribe might include various faiths, which don't always get on, and the faith you've embraced might occasionally be at odds with your laws and goals.

Also, yes, you can worship carburetors or books or whatever ancient relics you'll find in the wasteland, or they can be given to bands to increase their standing within the tribe. Some of them even have a practical use beyond using them to exploit the faithful.

Afterworld boasts some of Paradox's most interesting systems, and it's left me genuinely excited to watch it develop. But I don't think the team has quite found the fun yet. It's fascinating and ambitious and often feels like an entirely different approach to grand strategy, but I've spent most of my time with it just troubleshooting and getting lost—in ways that are more frustrating than satisfying.

But even as I've been playing, Paradox has been tweaking. With the feedback the studio has been getting from press and content creators—some of them putting over 100 hours into it already—the devs have a lot to work with now. So there's reason for some optimism. And, importantly, there's already so much good stuff in here.

When Total War: Warhammer first debuted, I was much more into the wargame setting's sci-fi counterpart. This would be cool if Space Marines were in it, I remember thinking, somehow unaware that Total War: Warhammer would end up being one of the best strategy games on PC. Not that my theory was wrong: Space Marines are finally in Total War, and it is, in fact, cool. Just ask the folks who picked this year's Gamescom award winners: it won best PC game.

It's the third award Sega took home this year, along with best audio for Alien: Isolation 2 and best lineup for its whole gaggle of games. It's easy to see why, particularly in the case of Total War 40K—PC Gamer's Fraser Brown said it took a mere hour of playtime to cement the game as the highlight of his year. "It's immediately obvious how special Total War 40k is—I don't think a tutorial has ever made me giddy before," he wrote.

According to Gamescom's website, the winners are chosen "by both an expert jury of gaming professionals and the community." In other words, it was a favorite among both professional nerds and the pro bono sort.

If it wasn’t clear before why people have been so vocally insistent that this game should happen ever since Total War first embraced fantasy, it should be now: there are many ways to adapt Warhammer 40,000's galaxy-spanning eternal war in videogame form, but Total War's combination of scale and gruesome, exacting detail seems a particularly good fit.

Warhammer thrives on extremes, and a game where I can watch a single ultramarine hack an ork to bits up close then immediately zoom out to see an enormous whirlwind of violence in wide shot is an exciting prospect indeed. As for whether that'll pan out into a good game once it finally releases, we'll have to wait and see.

Star Wars Zero Company is enough like XCOM that everyone's been calling it ZCOM, but there are some ways it isn't quite XCOM enough for me. For starters, the radial menu you use to select each character's actions, a controller-friendly system that flings all your abilities out in a circle around the active character like a medieval jailer's ring of keys.

The first time I panned over to find an enemy I wanted to attack and then had to pan back to the character I'd selected to pick an attack off their radial menu I found myself wishing for a more traditional way to play. And look at that, there it is in the options menu. Go to the Gameplay section, scroll down to Ability Selection Style at the bottom of the General area, and bump it from Radial over to Linear.

That puts moving and shooting and overwatching and etcetera onto a numbered row of boxes down the bottom of the screen where God intended, getting them out of the way when you're trying to line up the perfect angle to punch someone into a wall from. There's also a Hybrid option if you're indecisive and feeling a bit "¿Por qué no los dos?"

I'm still in the early hours of Star Wars Zero Company, but playing with a mouse and keyboard, Linear Ability Selection just feels better. Between this and the fact you can bother a gonk droid, maybe it is a 90% masterpiece like Ted says.

Creative Assembly dropped a whole bunch of new information about Total War: Warhammer 40,000 at Gamescom this week, and yeah, this all sounds amazing. But what is it actually like to play?

I got an extended look at a preview build yesterday, where I was able to spend an hour exploring a slice of the tutorial, a little bit of the campaign, and finally a huge late-game battle, and oh boy. Folks, it's incredible. Total War: Warhammer 40,000 was, hands down, the coolest thing I saw at Gamescom.

Even in the tutorial battle, which starts you off with only a few Ultramarine units, it's immediately obvious how special Total War 40k is—I don't think a tutorial has ever made me giddy before.

Yes, the massive-scale scraps are one of Total War 40k's big hooks, but the smaller battles are actually great at showing off what sets this game apart from its predecessors. My tiny army of Intercessors—just some basic dudes—ended up feeling as powerful and versatile as a standard, full-featured Total War army.

As the green tide of orks charged towards my position, I stuck my lads behind some cover and opened fire. But they weren't just firing their basic bolt rifles. Units have multiple wargear options, so my small Ultramarine army made up for what it lacked in numbers with the diversity of its arsenal.

Grenades were getting tossed out, for instance, or launched from grenade launchers, leaving big holes in the ork horde. The devastation left behind was stunning. When a few eager orks managed to make it to my fortified position, it became a melee scrum, with my Intercessors proving that they can rack up the kills even when they aren't shooting.

And that's just the tip of the bloody iceberg. The variety of weapons represents the greater range of tactical decisions you'll need to make, depending on who your enemy is. Against orks, for instance, autos can be handy, letting you mow them down when they come into close range—which is where orks naturally like to be. But if you're fighting the aeldari, you'll benefit from long-range weapons, like the stalker bolt rifle.

Every unit still has a primary function, but this system just nudges them slightly beyond that function, giving them a few more options. So an Intercessor unit might not be the best choice for taking on some light vehicles, but with their grenade launchers they are more than capable of standing their ground and melting metal.

When another group of orks appeared, I decided to call in reinforcements. Assault Intercessors. I aimed their drop pods right at the green mess, so when they landed they took out plenty of extremely surprised orks. Then they just started hacking at them with chainswords, covering their armour in ork blood. In a matter of seconds, the orks were routed.

In the brief campaign slice, I got to create my own Space Marine chapter, decked out in red and gold, which I named the Blood Drinkers. [It has since been pointed out that this is the name and colours of as real successor chapter, that I created quite by accident.] The build didn't contain the full range of customisation options that Creative Assembly is planning—and we can expect even more after launch—but there were still plenty of colour and emblem options.

I didn't get to see much settlement development or management in this portion, as it's not ready for prime time yet, but I was still impressed with just how striking the campaign map looked, with its rotatable 3D planets and, when you zoom out, an entire solar system waiting to be played with. Creative Assembly's artists are firing on all cylinders. These are grimy, imposing worlds that look hostile to all life, but they're simultaneously gorgeous. And busy, too, full of geographical flourishes, gargantuan hive cities, miasma-filled forests, shipwrecks and wandering armies.

The campaign slice ended in a medium-sized fight, which I handled quickly because I knew I was running out of time and I desperately wanted to jump into the late-game brawl. I was not disappointed.

I was playing as the Ultramarines once more, arriving just in time to see the desperate soldiers of the Astra Militarum about to get overrun. While the Space Marines and Astra Militarum are separate playable factions, they are both part of the Imperium of Man, and thus work together. In the campaign, for instance, my settlement was protected by an Astra Militarum garrison.

Anyway! My buddies were in trouble, and the ork army seemed endless. I had some Predator tanks and Dreadnoughts at my disposal, but I was still fielding a tiny force—the rest of my units were up in space, waiting to be called down when needed. In another Total War, I might have been worried. But Total War 40k is eager to give you all sorts of tactical tricks to keep your warriors alive.

The cover system truly is a revelation. This isn't the first Total War to feature cover—that would be Empire—but this time it benefits significantly from an inherent dynamism. As buildings and walls get toppled, your cover disappears, but as the battle progresses you'll encounter new places for your troops to hunker down—a massive crater that just appeared, for example.

A greater focus on defense could have turned Total War 40k into a slightly plodding game, or made it static, even, with entrenched units taking potshots at each other. But the dynamism means that the battlefield is constantly changing shape, so you need to adapt on the fly throughout a fight. It was surprising to see just how much of the battlefield ended up being used. This is easily the most kinetic Total War has ever been.

You'll also have to consider how to beat cover. Positioning has always been critical to Total War's battles, but that truth is so much more pronounced here, when you've got opponents just chilling behind walls or in buildings. Thankfully you're spoiled for choice—you could drop some reinforcements behind them or on top of them; sacrifice some lower tier units as a distraction, while you send some Terminators in to flank the enemy; or you could just go all out, bombing the position or sending a war machine through the wall.

When Creative Assembly first introduced Total War: Warhammer, there were several game-changing features, but Total War 40k is next level. The Total War fundamentals have been preserved, of course, and I found that my familiarity with the series meant that, even with all the changes and focus on ranged combat, I was still in my element, but not a minute went by without me witnessing something or doing something that I've never experienced in a Total War before.

As someone whose dining table often hosts giant battles, I'm primed to love this stuff. I let out an audible whoop when I called in my beefcake Terminators, and watched orks getting completely squished as they walked into beautiful powerfists. Even if 40k isn't really something you've engaged with before, however, you're going to have a blast.

After the demo ended, one thing felt clear to me: I'd just played the future of strategy games. There were just so many "holy shit" moments. I may have only played for an hour, but I got a day's worth of fun out of it. My predilection for cynicism has been stomped by hefty Space Marine boots.

It's unclear whether you can respec Hawks when you first start out in Star Wars Zero Company, but the good news is you can, and it's an entirely free process. You can change class, but also refund every Focus Point you've spent in its dedicated tree to start levelling another. Here's how it's done.

How to respec in Star Wars Zero Company

You can change your class once you reach Cycle 3, which is very early in the game. All you need to do is:

1. Interact with the Personnel console by the map table
2. Cycle right to the Focus Tree tab
3. Select Change Specialization in the bottom right
4. Pick whichever class you want

There's no cost to changing class and it will also refund all of your Focus Points, letting you respec entirely. The only thing this doesn't refund (if you're respec-ing a story character) is the Focus Points you've put into your talent at the top.

When you unlock recruitable operators a little later on, you'll also be able to change their talents in this same menu, letting you customise anyone you hire entirely. This means it's better to grab operators because you like the look of their character more than it is to recruit them based on their talent and specialization, which you can change at will.

While I do have some best class recommendations early on, it's well worth experimenting and playing around with different specializations. You can even change them on the initial story characters you work with like Trick and Kabb Uppercut, so team composition is always variable.

Picking the best talents in Star Wars Zero Company is something you'll start pondering when you unlock recruitable operators in the game. Each of these will have both a class and a talent, but the good news is that you can respec both in the change specialization menu once you've recruited them.

This means it's usually a better idea to recruit a character you like the look of, versus one with a talent you can tweak anyway. Some of these talents have a very clear and strong synergy with Zero Company's specializations, so I'll run through all available talents and talent levels below, plus give my top picks for each class.

All talents in Zero Company

There are ten talents available to recruitable operators in Star Wars Zero Company. These are:

The Bigger They Are…

This Operator's ranged and melee attacks deal +2 damage to elite and boss enemies.

• Level 1: +3 damage
• Level 2: +4 damage
• Level 3: +6 damage

Anticipation

This operator gains 1 stack of evasion (next attack is evaded). Once per turn.

• Level 1: Two per turn
• Level 2: Three per turn
• Level 3: You can use it on an ally instead

Cold-Blooded

Applies 1 stack of vicious (next attack is a crit) to this operator. Once per combat.

• Level 1: Two per combat
• Level 2: Three per combat
• Level 3: Applies two stacks of vicious

Taunt

Taunts the selected enemy. Once per turn.

• Level 1: Reduces target's damage by 2
• Level 2: Reduces target's damage by 4
• Level 3: Reduces target's damage by 6

A Life of Labor

This operator gains a bonus +5 health and +1 defense.

• Level 1: +5 health, +1 defense, +2 melee damage
• Level 2: +5 health, +1 defense, +2 melee damage, +2 critical hit damage
• Level 3: +7 health, +2 defense, +4 melee damage, +4 critical hit damage

Thievery

Earn an additional +150 credits when this operator completes a combat mission. Does not stack.

• Level 1: +200
• Level 2: +250
• Level 3: +300

Sabotage

Trigger an explosive object on the battlefield to detonate, immediately affecting any units nearby. Once per combat.

• Level 1: Two per combat
• Level 2: Three per combat
• Level 3: Unlimited uses

Espionage

Earn an additional +5 intel rewards when this operator completes a combat mission. Does not stack.

• Level 1: +7
• Level 2: +9
• Level 3: +12

Grit

Applies 1 stack of invulnerable (prevents all damage from next attack) to the operator. Equipping this ability also increases health by +2. Once per turn.

• Level 1: +4 health
• Level 2: +8 health
• Level 3: +12 health, two stacks of invulnerable

Fortitude

Increases defense by +2 while this operator is injured.

• Level 1: +3 defense
• Level 2: +4 defense
• Level 3: +6 defense, operator ignores chance-to-hit penalty from injury

Best talents for each class in Zero Company

Now we've gone through all the talents, here are the best ones to pick for each specialization in the game.

Personally, I think the top-tier talents for any class are Life of Labor, Anticipation, and Grit. The former grants an all-round stat boost that's useful to pretty much every class, while the latter two give you ways to straight-up avoid damage. Anticipation, in particular, lets you dodge three attacks per turn at its highest level, which is somewhat cracked.

There are some obvious synergies between talents and classes, though. For example, the Heavy—a class all about taking hits—benefits from Taunt, Anticipation, or Grit, because it gives them a way to mitigate the damage more. Single-target focused Sharpshooters also benefit from Cold-Blooded, since you can combine the guaranteed crit with their guaranteed hit ability, or The Bigger They Are… to make them better at picking off elites.

And for more support-based classes like Medic or Scout, you can give them a way to avoid damage when out reviving someone with Anticipation, or make them support your wallet, too, by having them farm credits or intel with Thievery and Espionage respectively. I like giving Scout the Sabotage talent, which is incredibly situational, but feels very thematic, like they planted explosives before combat began.

Picking the best starting class in Star Wars Zero Company is a little challenging when you haven't played any of the game yet. But don't worry: you can change your class specialization once you hit Cycle 3, which is very early on. After that point, you can also change the specialization and talents for hired operators too.

The only thing you can't tweak is named character talents, like Hawk's Fearless Leader. Below I'll offer my recommendation for the best starting specialization in Star Wars Zero Company, plus some options if you don't want to double-up classes with any of the named characters you initially team-up with.

Star Wars Zero Company best starting class

The best starting class in Star Wars Zero Company is the Scoundrel. This specialization has a great kit focused around making enemies vulnerable (for guaranteed critical hits), penetrating their defenses, and increased assist damage. This ties in perfectly to Hawk's Fearless Leader talent, which increases assist damage for the whole squad when they're present. Assists are free attacks that also generate advantage, so they're very strong.

While you can respec any character specialization when you reach Cycle 3, the first three companions you'll get are a Scoundrel (Kabb), a Soldier (Trick), and an Assault (Jae). Having two Scoundrels in a party isn't a bad thing considering Hawks will buff everyone's assists, and more assists are always good, but if you don't want to double up or change pre-existing character specializations, you could also take:

• Gunslinger
• Medic
• Heavy
• Scout
• Sharpshooter

I personally wouldn't recommend Medic or Scout. Medic is plain overkill early in the game when most combat encounters aren't that tricky (depending on your difficulty), and Scout is a class entirely about farming advantage, something you won't need to worry about much either in the game's initial missions.

Of the Gunslinger, Sharpshooter, and Heavy, I'd definitely recommend the former. Gunslinger is a strong early pick because of its ability to hit and finish off multiple enemies (getting you more advantage), plus its general buffs to ranged attacks. By comparison, Sharpshooter is more single-target focused, which can feel a bit limiting when you're not facing bosses or elite enemies, and the Heavy has more of a passive playstyle around taking hits and retaliating. This specialization works much better on an operator with the Taunt or Anticipation talent, allowing them to avoid or tank the damage better.

As you'll realise when you unlock operator recruitment, many of the best talents for recruitable operators are far more synergistic with specific classes than Hawk's Fearless Leader. Either way, don't be afraid to change specialisations often—it'll refund all of your Focus Points (apart from those in your character talent) so there's really no drawback to experimenting with party compositions.

The Total War: Warhammer 40k Gamescom demo is underway, with lots of players getting their hands on the upcoming grimdark strategy game for the first time. Total War's content creators have been giving their impressions, but Creative Assembly also snuck in a new Alpha Strike livestream, and this is one of the biggest information drops we've gotten yet.

The stream finally reveals the campaign structure for Total War: Warhammer 40k, explaining that each solar system we fight through will comprise a campaign, as we battle across multiple regions on each planet. Once a campaign is done, we'll zoom out to the wider Crusade Theatre, where we can start a new campaign in another system, carrying through our characters and retinues. Apparently, there are about ten systems per theatre, culminating in a final battle on Armageddon.

It's not necessary to complete every campaign in a theatre, but it's already reportedly bigger than anything Creative Assembly has made before, including Immortal Empires. There were lots of other little information tidbits, too, including:

• Heroes will have 'followers' they can equip to change the unit composition of their bodyguard. Imagine something like the Imperial General's retinue in Dawn of War.
• All unit weapon loadouts are fully customisable.
• There are planetary governors who you'll have to appease to unlock certain diplomatic actions and support.
• Space Marines can co-opt Planetary Defense Armies from the Imperial Guard to follow them as backup.
• The Imperial Guard have a variety of structures they can build on planets (similar to forts or watchtowers in Medieval 2 and Rome Total War), including artillery batteries and deathstrike missile launchers.

One of the best and most loreful additions, though, is that you can place 'dead' Space Marine characters inside Dreadnoughts (1:20:41 in the stream).

"It wouldn't be Space Marines if you couldn't take the mushed-up, almost corpse of a Space Marine, stuff it in a big metal tin can, and send it back into battle as a Dreadnought," says Will, Campaign Designer on Total War: Warhammer 40k. "There will be a little mechanic where even if your character has died, they might continue to serve the Emperor in a slightly chonkier form.

"Dreadnoughts and Land Raiders as well, we're treating them more like characters. Like these are super rare, super powerful ancient creations that are really valuable."

For those unfamiliar with Dreadnoughts, they're effectively what happens if you attach an array of deadly weapons to a life support sarcophagus and give it legs. Most mortally wounded Space Marines who are interred in them gradually lose their minds as they turn to mush over the long centuries, repeatedly roused from slumber to face each new battle, or provide wisdom and ancient memories to the younger brothers of the chapter.

Still, knowing that one of my Space Marine heroes who I've battled with since my first campaign can stave off permadeath by hopping into a Dreadnought is a great feature. After all, it sounds like we're going to grow very invested in our small, yet elite, self-created Space Marine retinue as we fight across the many campaigns of the Crusade Theatre.

After lying fallow for over a decade, Heroes of Might and Magic is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. Earlier this year, Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era launched into early access and will hit 1.0 in 2027. And now it's going to be joined by an old friend with a new look. The series' golden child, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, is back. Again.

HoMM 3 Remake is actually the third version of the third game in the series, which was remastered back in 2015. At a glance, however, you could be forgiven for assuming that it's a brand new entry, as it boasts a new art style along with a few more tweaks. But this is still absolutely HoMM 3.

I took it for a spin over a couple of hours ahead of its Gamescom reveal, playing the simple campaign prologue and the Arrogance scenario—a popular map first introduced in HoMM 3: The Shadow of Death. It's a compact, well-paced adventure that I remember being a good place to start when you wanted to delve into multiplayer (or if you just wanted a fun comp stomp).

This remains true in the remake. It's a four-player deal, and each starting position is close to a second town of the same faction, rapidly expanding your ability to recruit big unit stacks and making it easier to support multiple heroes early on. With entrances to the underworld close by, and nearby shipyards letting you cross the tiny ocean, it gives you the full HoMM 3 experience extremely quickly.

I confess, however, that I did embarrass myself a little bit. It's been a while since I've played HoMM 3, but I've been playing Olden Era in early access, so I expected to crush the AI. Unfortunately, I spent too much time just mucking around and fiddling with my army composition, so by the end I'd been outpaced by my computer opponents. I'm still convinced I could have clawed my way back, but we'll never know.

So this is largely the game you'll remember, but with some convenient quality-of-life improvements. Of particular note is the ability to see movement ranges for enemy troops, letting you identify which of your units might be at risk on the enemy turn—something that exists in the later HoMMs, but not HoMM 3 or its 2015 HD remaster.

If you don't remember because you never played the original, here's the skinny: you command heroes and their armies as they scoot off on grand adventures, hassling monsters, conquering towns and gobbling up resources. Inside those conquered towns, you can construct a plethora of buildings—most of which can be upgraded—allowing you to recruit more units and heroes, as well as unlocking new spells.

Each day lets your heroes travel a specific distance, and as time moves inexorably forward, your recruitment pool and treasury will expand, allowing you to field larger armies and more heroes. You'll eventually have hordes of dragons, giants, angels and demons ready to smite your foes in grid-based battles.

The hallmark of the series—and 3 in particular—is how easy it is to get to grips with, which belies its impressive depth. There's an accessible lightness to the proceedings, accentuated by a frequently whimsical tone, that eases you into a level of complexity that would otherwise be daunting. There are so many layers to juggle—economic management, big-picture strategy, tactical combat, RPG systems, and then the literal layers, as you try to conquer both the overground and underground regions.

HoMM 3 was exceptional in 1999, and age has not tarnished it.

The most obvious change in the remake is the art style, and this is something I'm a bit more ambivalent about. It's vividly colourful, fantastical fare, with units that are considerably more detailed than its predecessor's. The combat animations are cracking, too, making each attack more dramatic and weighty. The quality is there, then, but I fear the soul might be lacking.

OG HoMM 3 simply had a bit more character, with big, bold monster designs. It veered towards the cartoonish, certainly, but these goofy-looking units had a lot of rizz. The remake may have smoothed out the edges too much, aiming for fidelity over personality. And this is more obvious because we have another modern HoMM with which we can compare it.

HoMM: Olden Era's mere existence makes this remake pretty unusual. Olden Era is a completely new entry in the series, but it's obviously a spiritual successor to HoMM 3, both mechanically and aesthetically. It feels like a natural evolution. So it does feel bizarre to see it now sharing the limelight with a remake. There's just a heck of a lot of overlap.

Still, after waiting over a decade for more HoMM, I'm not going to turn my nose up at two coming along at the same time. HoMM 3 Remake launches next year, and Olden Era should be leaving early access then, so tactics nerds will have plenty to keep them occupied.

"But why?" That's the question I kept asking myself as I played through a few skirmishes of Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, an RTS based on HBO's TV show. It's a competent, workmanlike creation that nonetheless fails to capture any of what made the show and the books that inspired it such a phenomenon.

It just feels so ill-timed, too. It's not due out until 2027, but Game of Thrones concluded in 2019, with a final season that even GoT defenders such as myself had to acknowledge was a bit of a dud. These days, HBO is busy with its prequels: the plodding but still entertaining House of the Dragon, and the delightful, brisk A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Instead of giving us something new, or even current, War for Westeros returns us to the fight for the Iron Throne. You can command a tiny Kit Harrington, listen to narration from Charles Dance, or enjoy a rendition of The Rains of Castamere while you build another mine. These touchpoints are too recent to engender feelings of nostalgia, but not recent enough that they elicit much excitement.

Now, don't get me wrong. GoT provided us with some of the greatest battles to ever grace our TVs. Even as the story went off the rails, the muddy brawls were a sight to behold. There's plenty for an RTS to take advantage of—but this style of RTS fails to play to the strengths of the source material.

GoT's gargantuan pitched battles call to mind the epic scale of Total War—it's no surprise that there are several GoT Total War mods. War for Westeros, meanwhile, has been fashioned in the mould of Age of Empires, or its fantasy cousin, The Battle for Middle-earth 2.

You plonk down buildings that generate resources, which you can spend at other buildings that spit out troops or let you research upgrades, and then you send your army to capture territory or boldly torch your opponent's HQ. You can build fortifications and siege engines, but most of your conflicts will be between generic soldiers, sometimes led by heroes drawn from the show's roster of important folk.

It's fine, I guess. There are certainly worse GoT games—most of them on mobile. But War for Westeros is so straightforward and plain that I probably would have had more fun with something uniquely awful. A bawdy brothel management game with Littlefinger, perhaps?

Where Age of Empires had a multitude of bespoke civilisations to play around with, and The Battle for Middle-earth 2 was full of exotic fare like giants and goblins and horrible spiders, War for Westeros is simply full of dudes. Squads of spearmen, squads of swordsmen, slightly smaller squads of elite Night's Watch warriors.

The full game will feature four factions, but I was only given access to arguably the dullest: the Starks and Lannisters. No dragon-loving Targaryens or hordes of the undead for me. Of the two, the Starks are the most conventional, though they can field direwolves, as well as troops drawn from the Night's Watch and the Free Folk. The Lannisters, meanwhile, are more economy-focused, featuring quirks like a debt mechanic that allows you to quickly fund expansion.

So there's some asymmetry, but that's par for the course. And at least where the Starks and Lannisters are concerned, the asymmetry is broad rather than exciting. It's hard to get pumped about one faction needing to spend a wee bit more gold to recruit their slightly better swordsmen.

OK, maybe I'm being unfair. There are more substantial differences than that. Like being able to recruit both Stark heroes' fluffy pets, which bumps the available heroes up to four (with a fifth locked in the preview build). That's double the Lannisters' roster. There are some more unique units, faction-specific upgrades and special mechanics—but they all fell a bit flat for me. It's all just very, very dry.

The nature of this type of RTS means that it's never going to give you memorable fights like the Battle of the Bastards or titanic Total War-style clashes, but after a few upgrades you can field some pretty meaty armies and get some big, messy scrums going. The rather plain aesthetic does mean that they aren't always the easiest to read, however, or particularly engaging to watch. That said, I am a fan of the physicality of the cavalry charges, which send any infantry units that get in the way flying.

The big problem is the lack of an obvious hook. This is an extremely conventional RTS, and while the genre isn't especially healthy at the moment, there are still plenty of alternatives. If you're in the market for something fairly traditional, Age of Empires 4, Age of Mythology: Retold or Tempest Rising have a lot more going for them.

The GoT skin is simply not enough to carry it, and there was little that felt uniquely GoT about the skirmishes I played. Perhaps the campaign will inject some much-needed flavour into the proceedings? The more exotic Targaryen and Night King factions might spice things up a bit, too. But so far, it's just very safe and predictable.

The Star Wars Zero Company release times are almost here, letting us step into the shoes of Hawks and their band of misfit operators as they try to eke out a living during the Clone Wars. As noted in our Zero Company review, it's "a new all-timer Star Wars game" that will appeal to both tactics fans and those desperate for more of the universe. Here's when you can play it.

Star Wars Zero Company release times for each region

The Zero Company release date for most territories will be August 27, though due to timezones, that'll push into August 28 for a few. Here are the release times for each region:

• West Coast US: 8 am PDT
• East Coast US: 11 am EDT
• UK: 4 pm BST
• Europe: 5 pm CEST
• Australia: 1 am AEDT (August 28)
• New Zealand: 3 am NZDT (August 28)

If you're unsure whether you can run the game, you can check its requirements on the Steam page.

Can you preload Star Wars Zero Company?

Yes, you can preload Zero Company as of *checks watch* right now. The game size is reportedly 34GB, which is refreshingly tiny in our current climate of frequently 100GB games, so even if you start preloading late, you should still get to play on launch, internet connection depending, obviously.

It's kinda weird that it took somebody this long to make a Star Wars squad tactics game, but studio Bit Reactor has, for all intents and purposes, knocked it outta da park. Star Wars Zero Company is a superbly executed⁠—if familiar⁠—tactics game, but it's also a new all-timer Star Wars story: I'm talking Rogue One, Knights of the Old Republic, TIE Fighter-tier.

Melt away everything else, and it's got a Terminator skeleton of pure XCOM, the trendsetting tactics series many of Bit Reactor's senior developers cut their teeth on. But the studio struck out from there into more uncharted territory: lavish production values, zoomed-in action game-style exploration, and some truly knockout set pieces and story beats.

Crucially, none of it came at the cost of challenge or crunchy complexity. It feels like Bit Reactor has pitched a big tent where tactics sickos, RPG storytelling fans, and Joe Sixpack cinematic console game-enjoyers can truly find something to love, not just tolerate.

Zero to hero

Zero Company takes place in the twilight of the High Republic, and sees you inhabiting a Commander Shepard-y point of view character, Hawks. Hawks is a disgraced former Republic officer and, at least in my save file, a Zabrak (Darth Maul guy) who delivers every line in a charmingly incongruous cowboy drawl. While Hawks has a largely set character, their gender, appearance, and dress are highly customizable, including your choice of combat class and Bit Reactor's admirable embrace of Star Wars' cantina-going humanoid aliens. I felt a sense of ownership of my Hawks the same way I do with Geralt of Rivia.

The entire cast shares a similar easy charisma, both in your home base crew and recruitable story-centric operators⁠—it's a winning, "family of friends" ensemble straight out of the BioWare playbook. There are a lot of comfortable Star Wars archetypes among them⁠—ponderous-but-loveable alien bruiser, uptight princess, and laconic bounty hunter, to name a few⁠—but, like the comfort zone combat mechanics, they're executed extremely well and belie surprisingly affecting twists.

There is some serious "Aerith dies in Final Fantasy 7" stuff in Zero Company's back half that knocked my socks off, and Bit Reactor went to such great lengths establishing a narrative status quo, the moments that upended it felt like I was getting smacked in the chest.

Even when the story's cruising at a relatively calm clip, your lovable crew can be at each others' throats. The cast has the sense of friction and conflict I'm always looking for in an ensemble, and the ex-Separatist characters are some of my favorites. Former bean counter and Zero Company operations lead Runa is abrasive, smarmy, and unpleasant in the best way, while Umbaran bubble boy Luco hates your guts, as well as those of your clone buddy, Trick.

Zero Company is basically Star Wars A-Team: You're mercs with hearts of gold who do private war stuff for the highest bidder, but in, like, a cool, fun, and ethical way. Galactic Republic Intelligence drops a fat contract in your lap to investigate a kooky cult (it's always a cult), leaving Hawks and crew to turn-based battle their way into saving the galaxy.

You gear up and manage your operation from the Den, a small but well-realized home base in an asteroid-bound smuggler city. From the galaxy map, you can choose to execute from a selection of text-based, noncombat espionage operations reminiscent of the War Table stuff in Dragon Age: Inquisition, while each "Cycle" (read: day) at the Den is capped off with a full-fat combat mission that moves time⁠—and, when appropriate, the story⁠—forward.

You explore the Den with full on, action game-style driving third-person controls, and this is one of Zero Company's neatest tricks. Every environment is as tactile and richly detailed as something in Jedi: Fallen Order, and major story missions even feature exploratory interstitials between the fights. But, as soon as combat starts, Zero Company seamlessly zooms out to a classic, tactical view.

The exploration gameplay is almost painfully simple⁠—interact with points of interest for small bonuses, otherwise you're mostly walking down corridors⁠—but I found it had a really outsized effect in this tactics game context. Even as a first attempt, it adds this revelatory immersive quality, while Bit Reactor managed a level of presentation and wow-factor that I'd love to see in other tactics games and CRPGs.

Squad wipe

You're limited to four squadmates on a mission, and can embark on a variety of odd jobs between main quest blowouts: Hostage rescue, steal the thing, blow the thing up, and the surprisingly rare "kill all the guys." Even on side missions, there's an impish, trolling quality to Zero Company's design that I always love to see.

Enemies will spawn just far enough away that you'll struggle to reach them on a first turn, but they'll have no problem counterattacking after you've committed. Reinforcements often spawn right in your path to an exfiltration, and it seems only enemy snipers have access to the really good rifles that can pinpoint strike you from across the map.

Zero Company's difficulty feels very well-judged to me: I felt pressured enough on Normal, but not overwhelmed. My guys would get downed here and there, but I only had to take a second try on one fight in my playthrough.

I'm a huge sucker for gimmick battles in a turn-based game⁠—the Iron Throne in Baldur's Gate 3, for example, or the flaming oil tower from Divinity: Original Sin 2⁠—and Zero Company's main campaign missions are consistently full of "oh shit" challenges that had me grinning. One of my favorites had me and my squad trooping out in explore mode down a suspiciously deserted catwalk with the MacGuffin of the day at the far end.

Once we grabbed the thing and the trap was sprung, enemies started filling in the path to the exit, and droid bombers began strafing the bridge in a turn-by-turn expanding killzone that pressured me to stay moving even as bad guy reinforcements blocked my path.

In other missions, things could get really weird: One memorable main story level gifted me a one-time, functionally invincible super-unit to clear a path as I had my normal guys follow along and complete objectives⁠—it felt like a reverse-escort mission in this delightfully surprising way. Another jaw-dropper, season finale of a mission hit me with what I can only describe as "Spec Ops: The Line type-shit," a simple-but-devastating mechanical twist that perfectly complimented the narrative one.

Buildy boys

I was surprised at how much RPG buildcrafting there is in Zero Company. We're not quite at Rogue Trader levels of spreadsheet psychosis, but there are some fun synergies to exploit. A little ways in, Zero Company introduces multiclassing, and then we're really off to the races.

My jam has been the Gunslinger: They get stronger the more attacks they make in a round, and also get a quickdraw ability that refunds its action point cost on a kill. Crowds of one-shot, dopey battle droids came to resemble juicy Thanksgiving turkeys to my quickdraw-addled mind, powering me up for DPS attacks on beefier foes.

Astromech droids are support gods in Zero Company, and I almost never went out without one. They can't make direct attacks, but they can refresh squadmates' AP and get bonus slots and uses for utility items like grenades. They're support-casters that feel like College of Lore Bards in Baldur's Gate or the Officer class in Rogue Trader.

In addition to Zero Company's main cast, you can hire generic mercenaries more in line with the anonymous, proc-gen squads of XCOM. I mostly stuck with the canon crew, but I was pleasantly surprised at how seamlessly the custom operators slot into the Den. They draw from a selection of "personalities," each with their own voice actor, and they can be found chilling around the Den like Mother Base soldiers in Metal Gear Solid 5. They even have relevant commentary on the story as it unfolds, and will converse with each other as well as the story squaddies.

Hanging over all of them is the threat of permadeath. I didn't experience its consequences directly in my playthrough, but even the threat of it lends each fight higher stakes⁠. I can't help but admire the chutzpah of hanging permanently missable story content on such a lovable, fragile cast. These systemic risks are also supported by the story in a really clever way: Some characters leave the stage in shocking, permanent fashion. It all contributes to a narrative that feels tragic and grown up in a similar way to Rogue One.

Complete package

Zero Company has been a treat from beginning to end, and I've found little to complain about. There's small stuff, some patchable, and some less so⁠; EA has indicated there will be a day one patch I did not have access to in the review period. My biggest issue: I'm a pretty anti-waypoint guy these days, and Zero Company's exploration segments are so linear, the ever-present Skyrim quest marker felt like it was leading me around by the nose⁠—I'm shocked there isn't already a toggle in the options.

I experienced two hard crashes in my playthrough, as well as one severe graphical glitch that required me to reload a save. Smaller issues popped up here and there: minor graphics hiccups, flickering UI elements, a long hang time while the game would try to resolve an enemy turn, but nothing I found particularly odious. I am sorry to say that Zero Company is not a Steam Deck candidate, and it's hard to see how Bit Reactor could make it fit that box. Bottoming out settings and maxing FSR resulted in a soupy, unparsable, 15-20fps mess for me.

Minor issues aside, Star Wars Zero Company is one of the best games of 2026 and a new all-timer Star Wars videogame. While I don't see it having the modding/sandbox "forever game" gravity of XCOM 2, it is excellent, substantial, and highly replayable. I've found it to be a mic drop of a debut from Bit Reactor, a sense that's only compounded by its crowd-pleasingly anachronistic price tag of $50.

The HD rerelease of Heroes of Might & Magic 3 from 2015 used to be the only way to get the strategy classic on Steam, leaving many players frustrated since it lacked the expansions and the random map generator. Ask fans of the series, and they'd tell you to get the original version from GOG instead.

So it should be an easy win for Ubisoft that the series' current owner finally decided to put the original version, complete with its expansions Armageddon's Blade and The Shadow of Death, on Steam at last. Its current user review rating of 80% negative suggests otherwise.

Fork out $10 for it and you'll find an install that's only 23.49 KB big, which gives a "dummy executable" error message when you try to launch it. Because Heroes of Might & Magic 3 on Steam does not come with Heroes of Might & Magic 3. Somebody forgot to include the actual game files with the game.

I'm sure this will be fixed soon, perhaps when France wakes up, but in the meantime the complete edition on GOG is still the best version and it's currently on sale for half-price. Here's hoping the upcoming remake has a smoother launch, you know, like one where they actually remember to include the game.

Humankind 2 was announced today at Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase, and I have to admit that I was among those who raised an eyebrow at the announcement trailer and wondered: Is this AI generated? A number of commenters speculated that it was. (For instance, under this X post.)

Nope, says the studio.

"The Humankind 2 live-action announcement trailer was filmed at Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia using real actors, practical sets, and custom-made props created specifically for the production," developer Amplitude Studios told PC Gamer over email. "We will be sharing behind-the-scenes images from the shoot soon."

PC Gamer has seen a few of those photos, and they do indeed show actors on a sound stage with partial sets and a typical blue backdrop for compositing.

In my and the internet's defense, the trailer does have something of an AI look to it. From the fisheye perspective of recently-birthed infants, we're stared at uncannily by a prehistoric woman, a hollering Viking aboard a longship, an American settler in a wagon, and other new parents from throughout space and time.

In the backgrounds: a giant tornado, bandits on horseback, a nuclear explosion, outer space. The studio hasn't commented on how those special effects were created, but they may well just be old fashioned CGI. I've asked for clarification on that point, as the studio didn't say explicitly that zero generative AI was used.

As for the game, the first Humankind was decent—Fraser described it as "a solid 4X that could use a bit more personality" in his review—and the sequel will introduce "new progression systems, innovative features, enhanced visuals, a modernized UI, and gameplay improvements," according to Amplitude.

Humankind 2 will release on PC in 2027, and there's a Steam page with more information live now.

Paradox Development Studio is taking a break from conquering history and space, setting its sights instead on post-apocalyptic North America. Afterworld will see you take control of a tribe of survivors as you explore and conquer the ruins of the fallen continent. Which you might already know, after yesterday's leak. But now it's official!

Afterworld was just revealed during Gamescom's Opening Night Live, with a trailer that's evocative of both Fallout and Mad Max. Paradox has naturally put its own spin on things, however, with features like the Ancients, immortal leaders who existed before the collapse of civilisation, and who are now fighting to rule what's left using forgotten technology. They might cause some problems for you.

Like Stellaris, you'll be able to pick your tribe's origins, including a Fallout-inspired start that sees you leaving the safety of your bunker to begin a new life in the wasteland. There's a survival bent to the proceedings, with your tribe needing to scrounge up the bare necessities like food and water before it can start thriving. Unlike previous PDX games, you really are starting from scratch.

Eventually you'll be able to rebuild civilisation or create something completely new, founding new religions, establishing laws, and taking advantage of pre-Fall technology, like that big ol' spider robot from the trailer. With convoys you'll be able to set up trading routes and supply lines to keep your new civilisation ticking, and if things get too rough you can leave your home behind and migrate to a new land, or just become nomads or raiders.

Afterworld seems to be shaping up to be Paradox's most exploration-heavy grand strategy game—even when compared to Stellaris. Take the ideas tree, for instance. This is essentially your tech tree, and it's based entirely on what your tribe experiences.

Instead of seeing the whole tree laid out in front of you, or getting a random selection of techs to choose from, the tree is revealed through exploration. If your tribe encounters a river, you'll learn about irrigation, unlocking the appropriate idea in the tree. If you meet another tribe and they've established a religion, then you'll discover the organised religion idea.

This is also where the procedural generation can shake things up. While the terrain and geography are immutable, you'll encounter different tribes, resources and dangers when you start a new run. So you'll always be able to find that river and unlock irrigation, but other experiences will be random.

Afterworld's development is being led by Dan Lind, formerly game director on Hearts of Iron 4. But there seems to be plenty of concepts drawn from Paradox's other grand strategy games as well. I've mentioned Stellaris a couple of times already, but it looks like there's plenty of Crusader Kings DNA in here too. Even though you're running a tribe rather than inhabiting an individual ruler, it still seems like there are some RPG nods.

"Afterworld is Paradox’s first non-historical setting in a decade, and I can’t wait to see what stories our players will tell with it,” says Lind. "This is the first world we’ve gotten to build from scratch in a long time, and the first one we've had the pleasure of destroying before the game starts. The old world is still out there in fragments, waiting to be found. What comes after it is entirely up to the players."

I know a lot of PDX fans were hoping for a Stellaris-like fantasy game for the developer's next outing, but we've already got so many fantasy-themed 4X games—the post-apocalypse strikes me as a more novel GSG setting.

A couple of weeks ago I got to go hands-on with Afterworld, so keep an eye out for my preview soon.

Ubisoft has identified the peanut butter and jelly in its pantry, and believes they would make a mean sandwich.

Announced at today's Gamescom Opening Night Live show, Rainbow Six Tactics is an XCOM-style tactics game led by the folks behind another turn-based tactical adaptation, the Mario + Rabbids series. It's the first singleplayer Rainbow Six in 19 years and features characters from both Rainbow Six Siege and the Vegas series.

Though, Siege is really the source text: R6 Tactics' story centers around the rebuilding of Rainbow after the events of Siege Year 10 (a story that has been told mostly through seasonal lore videos), and its playable cast includes 15 operators hand-picked from the competitive FPS. A briefing shown to press ahead of ONL included Ash, Montagne, Glaz, Doc, Nook, Smoke, and Sledge. The roster is a mix of attackers and defenders from Siege, but the Tactics missions I saw were all centered on attacking fortified terrorists.

The briefing also made it clear that R6 Tactics will have no in-game store or live-service aspects—it's just a game you buy and play. Players will operate Rainbow from headquarters and deploy operators on counter-terrorism missions. Screenshots suggest there will be an element of operator development and base building similar to the XCOM series.

It'll also have "dozens of hand-crafted maps from around the world," not procedurally generated ones—though there will be some randomized elements like enemy and objective locations. Every mission begins with a realtime recon phase, in which drones are deployed to covertly learn the lay of the land just like in Siege. Then comes the entry phase: Players choose entry points for operators, lay down breaching charges on walls, and execute a simultaneous infiltration. From there, the action seemingly goes turn-based: The briefing mentions that XCOM-staple mechanics like cover, overwatch, and sightlines are crucial.

Operators will seemingly have unique abilities—I noticed that Glaz can take long-range shots from across the map with his sniper rifle, acing two lined-up enemies with a single shot. Nook's ability seems to help her freely move between sightlines, and it's a safe guess that Sledge can break open walls whenever he wants.

The Vegas connection, if you were wondering, comes with the campaign's main character (and new leader of Rainbow): Paul Bishop, the protagonist of both Rainbow Six Vegas games. The story is told through cutscenes between missions, and should be a gold mine for the Siege loreheads.

Rainbow Six Tactics is out in 2027.

Since the full reveal of Total War: Warhammer's new Lords of the End Times expansion, the content is coming in thick and fast. Last week, Creative Assembly showed off Neferata, the incoming Free-LC lord, alongside the extremely fun-looking rework for the Vampire Counts. This week we're getting more information about the new end game crises.

The latest livestream went deep on Archaon's new Chaos Invasion endgame, Nagash's Great Ritual of Nagash, and the Skaven's Vermintide. We got to a rundown of each crisis, saw differently devastated world regions and special devastated battle maps, and even got an introduction to new End Times units.

Most notable for me, though, was the news that The Vermintide endgame features a rat counter that shows how many Skaven you still have left to kill. "You can see an estimated number of rats" says Mitch Heastie, Lead Game Designer on Total War: Warhammer, during the livestream. "It is based on the actual numbers, like roughly."

The counter on the stream (at 40:37) reads 165,000 RATS, who make up 60 Skaven armies you'll have to defeat. The Vermintide end game does sound fun, though. You'll have to destroy Skaven Under-Cities before they blow up your settlements with Doomspheres and quickly recapture territory, as the rat men will keep spawning armies otherwise. There are also new buildings to help deal with the menace, and it sounds like there's a narrative component, as each defeated army helps you uncover the Skaven's insidious plot.

By comparison, Nagash's end game is more focused on the climactic final battle. As the Black Pyramid slowly travels to Nagashizzar, you'll have to mitigate the Lord of Undeath's conquests and weaken him as much as possible for that final confrontation. And of course, there's Archaon's reworked Chaos Invasion, where you'll have to defeat his armies and fortresses to weaken his ward save before he destroys too much of the world. Otherwise he'll be functionally immortal. Easy enough.

I've got to say, all of these updates alongside the Lords of the End Times content have me very excited to play on September 24. With the news that anyone who buys one of the expansion lords gets access to Immortal Empires, it's also going to be one of the best times to start playing Total War: Warhammer as well.

As we head into big gaming week™ there are lots of studios with secret projects whirring behind the scenes, waiting to be announced at Gamescom or Opening Night Live. We now know that Paradox is one of said studios, thanks to its own forum filters.

"Paradox Forum website seems to accidentally list the unannounced game's name in the Unreleased Game filters," one eagle-eyed detective pointed out (via DualShockers) on Reddit. In the accompanying screenshot you can see the keyword Afterworld appear beneath Unreleased Games and Prison Architect 2.

Paradox has also been hinting at something appearing at Gamescom: "What is happening across the Paradox Universe?", a social media post reads. "Find out more on Aug 25th." And players seem to think Afterworld is set to be the big reveal.

Since then, online sleuths have been digging deeper. The Redditor who spotted the game name on the forums finally struck gold on Discord, finding the unreleased server, which had the following description: "Lead a tribe of survivors, rediscover ancient technology, manage wasteland settlements and wage wars of conquest and political struggle in Afterworld, an original post-apocalyptic survival grand strategy game." Sadly, the sleuthing stopped there: "Edit: rip they kicked me :(".

On the Paradox forums, there's a mix of speculation, a few reservations, and some disappointment that it's not the fantasy grand strategy game that a lot of folk were expecting. "To be honest: I would have liked a more fantasy based setting," one comment reads. "But ultimately the quality of a game is decided by mechanics and not by the setting."

Another forum member expressed concerns that it could go down the Fallout route, by treating "civilisation as a sort of 'one and done' endeavour and have the survivors forever picking at the corpse of the old world instead of ever making meaningful progress in building a new one."

It's worth reiterating that this is all based on one brief description, accompanied by some art, so it's a bit early to draw any conclusions. We'll likely find out more in the coming days, with Gamescom officially kicking off on Tuesday night with ONL.

Yesterday we finally got to see a full reveal for everything arriving in Total War: Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times expansion and it's a whole heap of content. We've got Nagash and his undead legions, a fully-fleshed out Boris Todbringer and Middenland, plus the Glottkin's putrid hordes, and the greatest of Grey Seers, Thanquol and his giant rat-ogre, Boneripper.

But nestled among the reveals was also the announcement that when Lords of the End Times launches on September 24, you'll no longer need any Total War: Warhammer games to play the huge trilogy-spanning Immortal Empires campaign, which is the best bit of the series. From the official DLC summary:

"In a series first, purchasing any of the [Lords of the End Times] content grants access to the colossal Immortal Empires campaign with no need to own any of the Total War: Warhammer games, making it a great entry point for new players."

The entry conditions for Immortal Empires—the grand campaign which compiles content from all three instalments— have softened over the years. You used to have to own all three Total War: Warhammer games, then it was just Total War: Warhammer 3, and from September, it'll just be any individual Lords of the End Times character, meaning you'll be able to unlock Immortal Empires for about $9 (£7.49) in perpetuity.

In fact, when the Lords of the End Times lords go on sale, it'll potentially get even cheaper. Content-wise, the base version of Immortal Empires amounts to 14 different factions, and 24 legendary lords, and that's not including all the Free-LC lords and heroes added over the years, plus entire free factions like Bretonnia, who also have multiple playable characters.

Alas, while expansion factions and lords are present in Immortal Empires, as it was previously, you'll still have to purchase individual DLC to play those—I recommend waiting for a sale and selectively picking up any extra races you're interested in trying after you've played the game for a bit.

You can currently buy Total War: Warhammer 3 for $9 in the 10th anniversary sale, but with this change in September, it'll actually be better content value to buy Nagash, Thanquol, Todbringer, or the Glottkin for the same price. You won't get the Realms of Chaos campaign, which is missable to be honest, but you'll get Immortal Empires, which contains its campaign map, plus one of the new DLC lords.

The same goes for Total War: Warhammer 1 and 2. The second game's Great Vortex campaign is a fun time, but its entire map is included in Immortal Empires. I've spent many hundreds of hours in every instalment in this series, but even I'll admit there's basically no point going back to individual games now Immortal Empires exists and collates all content.

And with its endgame rework plus all the new stuff, Lords of the End Times' release will be a great time to jump into Total War: Warhammer if you've been eyeing it for a while yet never made the leap.

As the prophesied hour approaches, we now know when the End Times descend on Total War: Warhammer 3. Today, in a reveal that arrived alongside a new cinematic trailer, Creative Assembly announced that its anticipated Lords of the End Times DLC will launch for TWW3 on September 24.

And in case you weren't familiar with how the End Times turns out for the Warhammer world, that's only good news if you're some sort of undead, or demon-thing, or rat-guy. However, given how prominently the new trailer features Grey Seer Thanquol, a skaven whose schemes are infamous for causing as much carnage—or more—for his fellow rat men than their intended targets, maybe everything will go fine in your personal campaign.

Provided he doesn't, you know, successfully blow up the moon with a big warpstone gun. Fingers crossed, I suppose.

To go along with the release date drop and cinematic, Creative Assembly also published a Lords of the End Times DLC overview, providing a summary look at the new gameplay that'll accompany its four new Legendary Lords.

For example, campaign playthroughs as Nagash, Supreme Lord of the Undead will involve gathering his Mortarch lieutenants and his legendary lost Books to finally ascend to godhood and reshape the world into a sort of global skeleton zone. As one-eyed coolguy Boris Todbringer, players will channel Middenland's battle fervor into empowering its Great Temple of Ulric, earning army bonuses in the process.

If you instead choose the Glottkin, the Rot-father's favorite special boys, you'll sow Gardens of Nurgle as you lay waste to the world, providing beneficial plagues and demonic Nurgle units from its festering depths. And as Thanquol, you will—as previously mentioned—scheme.

While Creative Assembly says those won't "always go according to plan," Thanquol will "see his grand and destructive plans realized" if you're able to manage the collateral damage caused by your plotting. How hard can it be?

The studio also promises substantial free game updates coinciding with the Lords of the End Times launch, including gameplay overhauls for Vampire Counts and Archaon, new end game scenarios, and reworked victory conditions for every legendary lord.

And, "in a series first," Creative Assembly says purchasing any Lords of the End Times DLC—either as a bundle or individually—will provide access to the massive Immortal Empires campaign mode, even if you don't actually own any of the Total War: Warhammer games. It's the most generous the end of days has ever been.

It's been a bit since I've fired up a new Total War: Warhammer campaign, but the End Times sound like the perfect time to ease back into some grand strategy. Lords of the End Times launches on Steam on September 24.

Bad news: Dawn of War 4 is no longer a mere month away. King Art Games' first take on the RTS series was due on September 17, but it looks like the war needs a bit more time to cook. It's been pushed back until December 3.

If you shell out for the Commander Edition, you'll be able to sneak in a bit earlier, though, with the three-day early access unlock letting you dive in on November 30.

"As we approached the final stages of development, we saw an opportunity to further enhance Dawn of War 4 and deliver the quality of experience we’ve always envisioned," said creative director Jan Theysen. "The additional time will allow us to continue optimising performance, resolving bugs, and applying further polish to ensure players have the best possible experience from day one."

Dawn of War 4's launch will be followed up by free updates with new maps, the return of Crusade mode, more commanders and a mission editor. Two story expansions are also in the works.

There are a lot of big games coming out between now and the end of the year, but this is one of the new releases I'm most excited about. The first two Dawn of War games are among the best RTSs of the 3D era, and King Art's work on Iron Harvest has left me confident that it can rise to the challenge of bringing the series back to its glory days.

Back in 2025, I got to play a skirmish, controlling the Blood Ravens in a big ol' scrap against the orks. And while King Art has made some tweaks to the formula, its closest relative is undeniably the OG Dawn of War. It was an absolute blast—one which ended in an orbital strike that took out the final ork base, while my beefy Dreadnoughts smashed any greenskins trying to escape their grim fate.

I've been craving more time with the game ever since, but I guess I'll need to wait a few months longer.

Star Wars Zero Company is giving the people what they want. And that is: more XCOM. The turn-based shootouts, perishable soldiers and those beautiful moments where you survive by the skin of your teeth because of judicious use of overwatch—it all unapologetically calls to mind the two games that have defined the modern tactics genre. It's what we've been waiting for.

I've played through 18 cycles of a preview build, and there were moments where it felt like I was checking out a Star Wars-themed XCOM 2 mod, but with huge production values. It is, at times, incredibly familiar. Which isn't surprising, of course. Developer Bit Reactor was founded by Greg Foertsch, former Firaxis art director, and a bunch of Firaxis veterans followed him to this new venture.

Risky business

But inviting comparisons with XCOM, especially XCOM 2, is risky. Look at what happened to XCOM: Chimera Squad. It was a genuinely compelling twist on XCOM 2, but the ways in which it wasn't quite as good as its predecessor were massively amplified by its association. After dabbling in Zero Company's early game, I can't help but wonder if this is happening again. It is very XCOM, but it isn't XCOM.

When it works, oh boy it works. In one mission, my squad was surrounded and outnumbered. My troops were in good positions, though, so I thought I'd be able to chip away at the enemy numbers. And then a series of shots with 80-90% chances to hit missed. All of them.

I was screaming at the RNG gods. Why would they do me dirty like this? After the enemy turn, every member of my squad had taken a battering. But it wasn't over. I had tricks up my sleeve, most notably some abilities that gave my squad extra action points and free shots. My next turn was going to be my time to shine.

Once I was in control again, I activated a backup ability, so when my clone buddy Trick fired at a Separatist, one of his comrades followed it up with a free attack of their own. Some deft repositioning also allowed one of my crew to get behind the enemy frontline, so he didn't have to worry about shooting goons hiding behind cover. But then I had a better idea in the form of a cover-destroying, bone-crushing grenade. Things were looking up.

My leader ability also meant I could dole out an extra action point to someone—which I gifted to the beefiest member of the crew, who then charged at a Separatist and beat him to death.

I'd prepared for the next enemy turn, too, by holding back one member of my squad in the previous turn. Instead of attacking, I taunted a big group of enemies and activated his retaliation ability—this meant that four enemies would exclusively target him, and every time they shot at him, he'd immediately shoot back.

By the time enemy reinforcements arrived, we'd cleaned up. They walked through a door into the combat arena, only to be greeted by three overwatch cones. Zero Company eschews XCOM's omni-directional overwatch, which feels restrictive, but appropriately tactical. Anyway, the Separatists were goners.

Damn did it feel good. I got that XCOM 2 buzz, but there were also some Zero Company-specific tricks in there too—particularly the flexibility and even greater emphasis on teamwork. That this is so present even in the early game, when the bag of tricks is at its emptiest, is reassuring.

The astromech droid class is a prime example of Zero Company's slightly different approach. These little droids aren't frontline glory hounds, instead filling a support role. It's another way to get extra AP, or revel in some squad-wide buffs, and their self-heals mean that, while they are vulnerable, they don't need to be constantly protected.

This class is made all the more interesting because Zero Company, like XCOM, makes each one of your crew matter, because you're only ever going to be fielding a handful of troops. So that astromech might be a lifesaver, but can you afford to go into a fight one gun down?

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm is tempered by all the times the fights feel like a lesser example of the XCOM 2 model. One where fog of war, patrolling units and surprise attacks are replaced by regular enemy reinforcements spawning in clearly defined areas, which has a devastating impact on the tension that's normally inherent in tactics games, and especially XCOM.

I confess I'm also getting pretty bored of the combat arenas, which tend to be small, mostly open spaces littered with crates. Zero Company has an entire galaxy to play with, but while there's a variety of tilesets with some cosmetic differences, most of the locations have already started to blend together.

This issue is exacerbated by the range of foes—people with guns, and droids with guns. There's the odd exception, and I know more exotic enemy types appear later on with greater frequency, but it still feels comparatively conservative for a galaxy where space wizards exist.

Then there are the problems with clarity and precision—which Zero Company is a bit lacking in. I've made far too many positioning mistakes because of this, and I've been disappointed to discover that Bit Reactor is clearly expecting us to use a gamepad. Zero Company is just unpleasant to play with a mouse and keyboard. In a tactics game, this is wild.

Midnight Snack

While the battles feel comfortably XCOM-adjacent, a lot of the most novel and forward facing elements draw from Midnight Suns, which Foertsch was working on at Firaxis before he left to set up Bit Reactor. The more concentrated theme of camaraderie, the pre-battle conversations with your squad inside a base you can freely explore—on top of some pre-mission exploration in the combat levels themselves—and the mid-fight team-ups all evoke Firaxis's heroic tactics game.

Some of these elements have a mechanical payoff, like the bonuses individual members of your squad receive from working together. But even the arguably fluffier parts, like the aforementioned conversations, or those brief moments where you get to explore an area prior to a fight, walking around as if you're in a third-person action game, make a significant impact.

The cinematic presentation and subtle nods to RPGs elevate the workmanlike tactical gameplay, ensuring that the whole feels richer. Zero Company has character and panache—of the kind you don't often see in a tactics game.

In most cases, though, it doesn't go as hard as Midnight Suns. The Den is so much smaller than the Abbey, the conversations are brief and the team-up mechanics—though extremely handy—are restrained.

There is one place where it goes harder, however, combining both XCOM and Midnight Suns in a way that makes the stakes feel so much higher. While Marvel's heroes could not be killed, any member of your squad, even the full-fledged bespoke characters, can die. We cared about our very mortal XCOM squads despite their lack of identity, filling in the gaps ourselves. But we don't need to do that here, and the risk of losing a member of the team feels so much more pronounced.

If permadeath isn't your bag, though, you can simply turn it off.

I've been a bit more down on Zero Company than I expected, but 18 cycles only lets you explore the tip of the iceberg, and I still think there's a lot to like here. Squad management and progression is really strong, for instance, and I've already had plenty of fun mucking around with builds, using different combinations of classes and weapons to create potent killers.

At the moment I'm really digging my pistol-wielding gunslinger. Pistols are pretty weak, but you can fire them more often. To take advantage of this and shore up the weapon's weaknesses, I've turned him into a crit hit monster—basically a sniper with a pistol. He's a bit soft, though, and I've been having just as much of a lark building indomitable tanks who soak up damage and dish it back out again to devastating effect.

So I've been having a pretty good time, then. Just not as much as I expected. And a big part of that is probably because I was expecting Zero Company to push the blockbuster tactics game forward a bit more. XCOM 2 is a decade old but has yet to be shoved off its throne—and to do that will require a boldness that I've not really seen here. Little of it feels like evolution, and in some cases it feels like a step back—albeit an enjoyable one all the same.

Hopefully it takes bigger swings later in the campaign. Otherwise, I think it might leave me pining for XCOM and Midnight Suns again.

Slitherine's turn-based 40K strategy game Battlesector launched with a campaign where you could play as the none-more-goth Blood Angels against the bio-horror tyranids. That was followed by DLC adding other playable factions for multiplayer and other modes, leaving players hungry for more singleplayer story campaigns.

With the Deeds of the Fallen DLC earlier this year we finally got our wish—a 12-mission narrative campaign where we got to play as the nuns with guns of the Sisters of Battle, up against the green tide of the orks. It won't be the last, as Slitherine has revealed in an updated roadmap.

Following a free update in October, presumably with more of the balancing patches and quality-of-life updates Battlesector has received since launch, the new narrative DLC is penciled in for "Q4 2026". It's followed by another free update in Q1 of 2027, and then another new faction DLC in Q2.

I've got my fingers crossed for an Astra Militarum campaign, but I'm just happy to see Battlesector continuing to receive new additions. It's been well-supported since launch, with entire new modes Daemonic Incursion, Planetary Supremacy, and the roguelite Crusade mode—which just hit version 1.0—added via updates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody could have foreseen this.

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

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

Well, we can see now how that turned out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rimming the changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inner space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's just one problem: streamers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad North ($2.99 / £2.55)

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

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

Kingdom Two Crowns ($3.99 / £3.35)

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

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

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

The Battle of Polytopia ($4.49 / £3.41)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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