I've spent the last week playing Beast of Reincarnation and I've really enjoyed it, though I am not, admittedly, a huge lover of parry-centric action. And Beast of Reincarnation has loads of parrying. You can't not parry in Beast of Reincarnation, but there are ways to make the combat far less reliant on precise parries and dodges.

Protagonist Emma starts with a crossbow and when I realised this I wrote it off as a throwaway accoutrement that you can't really rely on, kinda like the rifles in Bloodborne, or the companion drone in Stellar Blade. But no. Focusing on the crossbow and the long bow—which you get about an hour into the game—is basically the game's easy mode, without resorting to the game's actual easy mode (which exists, by the way).

Because if you focus on upgrading projectiles they'll end up chewing through health bars at a stunning rate. While some bosses—especially those with two forms—will last longer than your ammo supply will, projectiles are a sure fire way to absolutely shred their health pool from a safe distance without taking too many close range risks in a game where two hits can kill.

Spoilers follow, but this is me against the first major boss in New Game +. The video isn't really meant to demonstrate how easy it is, but more to show what crossbow violence looks like when you invest in it. This boss has a second phase, but luckily I hadn't used a single one of my arrows yet.

(Yes, enemies can still close the distance on you if you're not careful. No, investing in projectiles will not completely eliminate the need for parrying and dodging.)

It's a lot of fun to float suspended in mid air, thanks to Emma's entanglement gauge, while raining down hell on the vast majority of enemies incapable of touching you. Arrows and bolts replenish at every checkpoint campsite, and since these are very, very common (perhaps too common) you can pretty much mainline projectiles from about a third into the game.

The best direction on Emma's skill tree to start with is the bottom left, where Tracking Shot is the first option. This, as you'd expect, makes your ranged arrows track enemies. Further on you can increase the chance of shots not consuming arrows or bolts by up to 15% percent, which dovetails nicely with a later skill that gives a 50% chance of replenishing up to 10% ammo for ranged weapons for every enemy killed.

Another skill, Magic Bullet, will have each tracking shot loop back around and hit an enemy again once its first made contact. Add to this Scatter-Shot, which splits every ranged projectile into three spreading shots, and you can probably imagine the potential for some intense audio-visual fire works here. Whenever I was popping off bolts the area felt like a News Years dancehall.

But for Scatter-Shot and the also awesome Entangled Shot—which makes every ranged attack "slightly" restore your world-pausing entanglement gauge—you'll also need to invest heavily in Emma's Hair skills as well. Overall, my focus on Emma's projectiles meant that I didn't invest a whole lot in the mutt Koo during my first playthrough, but there's always New Game + for that.

The skill tree isn't the only avenue to upgrade projectiles. At workbenches and campsites you can upgrade each ranged weapon to at least +11, in my experience, which takes in upgrades to reload speed and damage. Every individual arrow and bolt can be upgraded too. For example, I've upgraded acid arrows to +2, which increased its damage and the amount I have in my quiver. I put the vast majority of my amber into upgrading projectiles, which probably would have seemed silly to me in most other action games but not here.

Overall, I was surprised by how viable a projectile playthrough of Beast of Reincarnation is. Now, to focus on the dog...

Beast of Reincarnation is a sci-fi action RPG whose parry-happy woman protagonist is on a mission to save an apocalypse-blighted humanity. On paper it sounds like Stellar Blade, and in practice, it feels a bit like Stellar Blade. It's open but linear, and ruthlessly focused on speed and dexterity. And yet, while Beast of Reincarnation may draw from the same pool of inspiration—think Sekiro, Final Fantasy, Nier—the net result is cosmically at odds with Shift Up's outing.

Emma is a young woman stricken by the Blight. It's the very same phenomenon that has transformed 41st century Japan into a wasteland of verdant ruins. She entirely lacks emotion thanks to her malady, nor can she remember her life before the illness. To make matters worse, she's an outcast among survivors by dint of her condition. But in exchange she has inherited some gnarly Blight powers, namely the ability to generate aggressive, tentacle-like flora.

The Blight is an infection spread by the titular beast of reincarnation, whose wrath is renewed every hundred years. Though an outcast, Emma and her similarly Blight-infected dog companion Koo are tasked with taking the fight to this mysterious deity-like beast. So off they go, chaperoned by a small crew in a giant military biped which serves as home base.

The flagrantly unoriginal premise seems to promise a bombastic, relentlessly loud spectacle. But entirely to its credit, Beast of Reincarnation is an unusually quiet and patient thing. If Stellar Blade is psytrance with the bass jacked right up, Beast of Reincarnation is psytrance with the percussion removed entirely. I mean, it's essentially a precision-oriented action game, and it can often be very tense, but the whole project is suffused with an elegiac doom. This is a richly atmospheric, melancholy videogame. It took me by surprise.

Parry On

But let's assess it as an action game first. Emma is a dab hand with a sword, but an even dabber hand at parrying with it. Like Stellar Blade, Beast of Reincarnation is a parry dance and there's just no getting around it, though if you feel vindicated by the sudden popularity of the "parryslop" pejorative, there are ways to loosen things up.

One way is with projectiles. Emma has a bow and a crossbow, and if you invest in them via Beast of Reincarnation's typically convoluted skill trees, you can make them monstrously powerful. Both can be equipped with three elemental varieties, and ammunition is automatically replenished at bonfires campsites. If I aim my bows mid-air the world slows to a crawl but Emma doesn't, an effect which depletes the "entanglement gauge" I can also manually trigger to slow down time on foot, or to use my special attacks.

But the most effective way to fill a depleted entanglement gauge is to pull off perfect parries or dodges with an ever-increasing array of swords, none of which feel different but carry certain passive benefits. Parrying and dodging is also the most effective way to make sure canine Koo's powers stay viable in combat. While the mutt will happily fight without my input, I can trigger their special attacks via a turn-based combat style menu. Smooth application of these specials will also marginally heal Emma.

I think this will be wildly variable between players, but since Emma and Koo share a pool of skill points I ended up investing far more heavily in the former than the latter. I found myself almost forgetting to use the dog's special attacks (I was too busy raining down explosive bolts from the sky) though they were always marginally useful: especially for that sliver of health, because most enemies will kill you in two or three hits.

(Not that I'm ragging on the dog: Koo's a lovely hunk of fluff.)

Beast of Reincarnation's skill trees do offer the possibility of contrasting playthroughs. Rather than focus on projectiles I can upgrade Emma's hair, which is one of the game's neatest tricks. Emma can use her sylvan expandable ponytail to gain a huge elevation boost or create bridges to otherwise inaccessible platforms. Better still, she can use her locks to eff her enemies' shit up in ways ranging practical through to "for no better reason than it looks cool".

Green Out

I liked the combat, for the most part. If you're a parry tragic but enjoyed the slightly more forgiving windows of Stellar Blade versus Sekiro, that's basically where Beast of Reincarnation sits on the spectrum. There's a gratifying freneticism to more prickly encounters that really highlights the emotional decompression afforded by the dog’s light turn-based trappings.

But while the fighting feels good in the hands the encounter design is often extraordinarily dull. Beast of Reincarnation takes place across a series of discrete maps of varying openness, and it often feels like enemies are just plonked thoughtlessly onto the map. There are usually too few of them at once to really ratchet the tension, especially if I stealthily eliminate some in advance. It usually took the presence of at least one hulking heavy to give the scraps any zest, but then, there's very little at stake when I die: campsites serve as checkpoints where I can save, craft and level up, but they are almost comically abundant, and anyway, no items are lost upon death.

Where combat sings is during major encounters with bosses or mini-bosses. What otherwise simmers boils over into something spectacularly spicy. It's an overused analogy, but when all of Emma's abilities interlock—her bows, her magical hair, her swordplay—Beast of Reincarnation feels truly balletic. It’s just a shame it only ever reaches that point during big cinematic scraps.

The game's prizing of fluidity is somewhat undermined by the overly rugged art style, whose lush and tangled regrowth is full of geometry that may or may not be solid. It can put a real dampener on exploration. The graphics can be egregiously busy too, often resembling a general green mucky murkiness that makes it hard to take in the true scale of the world. This extremely green overgrown wasteland remains an extremely green overgrown wasteland for the vast majority of the game, and while it can sometimes be gorgeous it wends rather too closely to the tech-jungle look of Avatar or Horizon Zero Dawn, which is starting to feel overplayed.

It also runs pretty poorly on my gaming laptop, with frequent dips below 60fps with settings on medium and FSR 3 toggled on. My PC is just below the recommended specs, but even on low it occasionally trembled. (A performance patch rolled out just an hour before this review went live, but I haven't had the chance to test it.)

Of course it's not perfect, but I admire Beast of Reincarnation. The fact that it comes from Pokémon studio Game Freak is both bizarre and, in other ways, makes perfect sense. This is a prestige double-A outing, which is basically what all Pokémon games are if you remove that timeworn brand.

But what even is double-A? Is it just "mid-range budget"? Or is it a vibe? Because if it's just the latter, Beast of Reincarnation is decidedly not that. The characterisation and voice acting—I played in Japanese, but English dubs are available from the main menu—is among the best I've seen in a big action game for years. Emma's robotic impassivity could have been performed as blandly stoic, or doll-like and naive, but instead registers as oddly, hauntingly absent.

And like I said, there's a maturity and patience to the presentation that feels more filmic than even the Hollywood-aping fare that Sony doles out (or used to). Game Freak loves its long, slow, lingering shots. It loves a strangely resonant silence. No one quips. There are no quirky asides or overbearing teaching moments. Characters speak elliptically, or else with an unguarded sincerity just a touch removed from JRPG mawkishness. It is severely committed to its bereft, enveloping ambience, and feels like it was made by a team blissfully unaware of Star Wars or the MCU.

Do not be misled: Beast of Reincarnation is tonally further away from the hypersexualised Stellar Blade than, I dunno, Pac-Man, despite feeling like an answer to its popularity. I knew the Pokémon studio's first blockbuster action RPG would be imperfect, but I also didn't expect it to be so fun and distinctive.

Modder Elevna on the Nier Replicant Nexus has made my day with the full release of Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139…, a project that replaces the young protagonist of the cult classic's 2022 remaster with his grizzled, older counterpart from the 2010 original.

Let's back up: In Yoko Taro's vision for Nier, the titular protagonist (whose name you're allowed to change for some reason) was a waifish anime twink who kinda looks like Raiden from Metal Gear. This was during peak Xbox 360, the piss filter era, so Square Enix executives wanted a hero with a little more Unreal Engine 3 beefy masculinity to appeal to the west.

The compromise: Japan got two versions of Nier. Replicant on the PS3 boasted Yoko Taro's preferred "Brother" Nier, so named because he's siblings with fellow main character Yonah. The Xbox 360's Nier Gestalt featured "Father" Nier, who was aged up to his 40s, put on a powerlifting program, and made to be Yonah's dad. In the west, we basically only got Nier Gestalt no matter the console version.

Fast forward to 2022, and Nier gets a remaster because everybody took another look after the explosive success of Nier Automata and realized the original was always good⁠—I liked Nier before it was cool, and I'm not bitter about all those 6/10s it got. The cheekily named Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… brought Brother Nier to the west for the first time, giving us oldheads something to get excited about (aside from finally having a PC version).

Here's the thing, though: Yoko Taro, I love you and your eccentric auteur purity, but just this once, the shadowy cabal of risk-averse, art-hating, shareholder-worshipping executives was right. Father Nier is the man. Grizzled dads protecting their kids in the post apocalypse is played out, sure, but Father Nier is one of the high water marks of the form⁠—not the least because he's kind of an asshole who sucks and makes everything worse.

Nier shows a world well past its sell-by date, and while both Brother and Father Nier are men possessed by ungovernable rage, Papa Nier cuts it with this sense of mournful weariness that just ties a nice bow on the tragedy of it all. It's mostly sold by a career-best performance from prolific voice actor Jamieson Price, who I only just realized was also part of one of my favorite dialogue exchanges in any RPG.

There were rumblings Square Enix might do an official Father Nier DLC, but it never panned out. Cue Elevna's Gestalt mod, which offers a full, luxury Papa Nier experience in 2026. The original model is back and touched up, great, but Elevna also dug all of the audio files for Price's voiceover out of the original and ported them here, making the mod essential.

That would have been enough for me, but Elevna's attention to detail is truly impressive. Nier's alternate skins have also gotten Papa versions, and ver.1.22…'s bonus chapter now has repurposed voice lines from Price to smooth things over⁠—rewatching the chapter's cutscenes, Nier mostly makes small comments and combat barks that can easily be fudged. Elevna even ported back in relevant dialogue from other characters referencing Nier's age.

My favorite small detail: Nier's OG DLC (now just part of the game) features a dream arena where you fight as the other version of Nier⁠—Brother back in 2010, Papa in Replicant. Elevna's Gestalt mod swaps Brother Nier back in for the dream fights.

Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139… is a perfect mod by my reckoning, acting on a supremely niche demand (my supremely niche demand) at an almost absurd level of craft and care. It makes me happy. It's how I'll do my next replay.

ShiftUP CEO Kim Hyung Tae hasn't exactly been lowkey with his pro-AI stance over the years, but he and his company have now made it clearer than ever with one of the most god-awful videos I've ever had the displeasure of witnessing from a company with enough money to do better.

Stellar Blade: Blood Rain—the sequel to 2024's Stellar Blade, which I thought was just fine—is due to come out later this year. And what better way to market it than with a terrible AI-generated music video where Evie's skin-tight suit has a belly button and fingernails, and parts of her outfit phase in and out of existence all while she smiles at the camera in a deeply unsettling manner.

As if that wasn't bad enough, it's all to accompany a song that is also AI-generated. Shrill computerised bleeps masquerade as Evie "singing" high notes during the chorus—which eventually melt into an ear-splitting cacophony of robotic words—and a musical composition that barely understands the fundamentals of what makes music good in the first place.

It is a song so utterly devoid of soul, and also of anything that feels even remotely related to Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and its universe. It actively undermines the game, its theme, and any visual identity it's attempting to present in favour of something that looks shit, sounds shit, and completely discredits any goodwill ShiftUp may have had.

And it makes me worry about the way a hobby I have spent so many years loving is going. For all of the videogame soundtracks that have made me cry, or pumped up, or irrevocably happy. Because they were crafted by a human who understood exactly what they had to do to make me feel those things. Humans who also feel the things they were trying to make me feel through their music.

Videogames are a form of art, and art needs a human touch. Parading around a song that feels so utterly lifeless, that doesn't tell me what Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is actually about? It's frustrating, but especially coming from ShiftUp—a company that is certainly not short of money thanks to the revenue it makes from gacha game Nikke: Goddess of Victory. One which consistently finds itself estimated in the top 10 to 20 gacha earners alongside giants like Hoyoverse.

It can do better. It does do better! Nikke is home to some of my all-time favourite videogame bangers. It literally has a long-time rhythm game composer on its team who is responsible for a good chunk of Nikke's discography. I cannot understand why anyone would think that some of the worst AI-generated music I've heard in a hot sec is the better option.

I'm not entirely sure what effect ShiftUp was hoping to have with this video, but it has completely turned me off trying Blood Rain entirely. I was actually rather looking forward to seeing how the team could expand upon the Stellar Blade universe—I thought the first game's narrative was surprisingly underbaked considering the company's chops for storytelling in Nikke, and I was hoping to see more good stuff in Blood Rain.

And big companies normalising this behaviour only paves the way for more to follow suit. It threatens to open the floodgates, to no longer relegate this kind of garbage to those AI YouTube playlists made with some terrible 80s-themed thumbnail while everything looks and sounds diabolically crusty and deep-fried. It has the very real possibility to continue showing up in our games in a big way, while still demanding the same kind of money we were paying to have a human involved in its creation.

That sort of domino effect is how we have the very real possibility of ending up with reams of samey, soulless games that feel like the very antithesis of why this hobby exists in the first place. And that's why it's so important to call this garbage out for what it is the moment we lay eyes on it, to let companies like ShiftUp know that this ain't it, and we don't want it.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 just closed out its second year of post-release support with a one-two punch of updates. Patch 14, aka The Confrontation Update, adds a new enemy and significantly expands the game's PvP options. Since Confrontation's release, a separate update has added Steam Workshop support to Saber Interactive's hugely successful shooter.

Let's start with the Confrontation update, which, as the name, suggests is heavily focussed on Space Marine 2's PvP mode, Eternal War. Patch 14 adds two new PvP arenas, a medium-sized map called Sanctum, and Facility, which Saber describes as "one of the most compact PvP maps" available in the game. Alongside these maps, the patch adds weekly PvP rewards, meaning you can earn cosmetics and other in-game rewards by playing matches and completing challenges.

If you're more interested in the cooperative side of Space Marine 2, then the update introduces a new enemy for players to fight—the Scarab Occult Terminator Sorcerer. The Sorcerer is a tough miniboss opponent that will appear throughout the game's Operations mode, and furnished with a wide array of abilities. He's able to create copies of himself, teleport around the battlefield, and attack the player with a powerful laser beam. This video gives a good overview of the Sorcerer's moveset. It seems like he'll provide a stern test for even the most grizzled Ultramarine.

As for the Steam Workshop support, obviously it's early days for Space Marine 2 mods. But there are a few player-made extras that are worth checking out. The main one is the Astartes Overhaul, which has been available on NexusMods for a while. The mod rebalances Operations while adding new weapons and customisation options. It introduces three new classes to play as—Terminator, Chaplain, and Apothecary, as well as four new weapons including an Assault Bolter and an Artifex Bolt Rifle that comes with optional incendiary bolts.

Most of the other currently available mods are addons for the Astartes Overhaul. These range from adding some extra execution animations to letting you play with six or even nine-man squads. There are a few non-Astartes mods however Health on Executions makes Space Marine 2's grisly finishers even more like Doom's glory-kill system, while Rogue Trader Tyranids reworks the game's insectoid menace to more closely resemble their 1985 models.

While this wraps up Space Marine's second year of updates, Saber Interactive has confirmed that it will continue supporting the game for at least another year. The developer hasn't specified what new stuff will be coming to the sequel in the next twelve months, but a detailed roadmap will be revealed on the game's second anniversary in September.

First reported by GamesRadar, former Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida is apparently just like us: He loves Bloodborne, and he doesn't get why Sony and FromSoftware haven't done anything with it since its November, 2015 expansion, The Old Hunters.

Yoshida's remarks were part of his keynote address at Japan's CEDEC Industry event. Yoshida structured the talk around impactful, memorable games he encountered over the course of his almost 40-year career with Sony⁠—this included his first hands-on experience with Demon's Souls, and Sony missing out on the chance to publish Dark Souls.

"This game has a lot of fans all over the world, and it still doesn't have a PS5 version," Yoshida said regarding Bloodborne. "PlayStation's first-party team is releasing a ton of remasters, so why don't they release this one? There's no PC release.

"I am often asked why these haven't been released, but it's a complete mystery. Maybe they'll come out in the future. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll make a special edition. Maybe they won't. As a huge fan, I hope it will come out."

There's certainly a degree of "buddy, wasn't that your job?" energy to a former Sony executive lamenting Sony's lack of action, but it makes more sense considering the timeline and Yoshida's portfolio before his 2025 retirement. He switched to being head of PlayStation Indies in 2019, just four years after Bloodborne's release and before the start of the PS5 generation.

I'm a simple man, and all I've ever wanted is Bloodborne as it was, but playable at arbitrary resolutions and framerates on PC. The notion of a remaster never appealed to me, but that doesn't even appear to be on the table anymore after Sony had its go-to remaster studio, Bluepoint, devote its resources to a God of War Multiplayer game before shutting it down. Even more mystifying has been the lack of a 60fps or 4K patch for, at this point, PS4 Pro, PS5, or PS5 Pro.

And at this point, I don't think the discless, PC-scorning, maximum customer value-chasing Sony of 2026 could produce a version of Bloodborne superior to PS4 emulation. You need a hearty rig⁠—Steam Deck is unfortunately out⁠—but Bloodborne emulation looks like it's in a shockingly strong place. I just need to set aside the time and startup energy to dump my old Blu-ray copy one of these days.

Baldur's Gate 3 proved that the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, with some tweaks, make a brilliant framework for a videogame RPG. And yet Wizards of the Coast seems intent on making games that don't use that framework. Last year the publisher announced Invoke, one of its internal videogame studios, was making Warlock, a third-person action adventure that seems like an attempt at making their own God of War.

Warlock may well turn out to be a decent game, it's just odd that while I'm sure Wizards of the Coast will find a studio it trusts to make Baldur's Gate 4 eventually, it's not interested in making another game like it only without the words "Baldur's Gate" in the name in the meantime.

We still don't know much about Warlock, but WotC did use its D&D keynote at Gen Con to reveal that Maggie Robertson, who portrayed Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village and Orin the Red in Baldur's Gate 3, will be playing the protagonist's patron. Like every warlock, you'll get your powers from a pact with a supernatural benefactor, in this case the witch Tasha of Tasha's Hideous Laughter fame. When she's not cooking up level-1 control spells she's an archfey with her own domain, which I guess is what gives her the ability to hand out eldritch blasts.

Warlock also features Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica, who was the voice of EDI in the Mass Effect series, Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat X, and Sarah Kerrigan in StarCraft 2, as its protagonist. And that's basically all we know about Warlock so far. Its first actual gameplay footage will debut at Gamescom, which runs from August 26–30 in Cologne.

One of the greatest tragedies in Sony's live-service culls was the cancellation of The Last of Us Factions, the standalone sequel to the surprisingly great multiplayer mode from the original PS3 game. While Sony is still sending live-service games over the top despite the 180 in philosophy, this beloved multiplayer component is officially dead in the dirt. Well, as far as Naughty Dog and Sony are concerned.

Modder Speclizer thinks otherwise, as they've been working on a multiplayer mode for The Last of Us Part 2 on PC since the start of the year, which is planned to launch in September 2026. Just yesterday, the modder revealed that his project has "hit quite a big milestone." The mod can now handle proper 4v4 matches, where it was previously limited to 1v1s.

Speclizer regularly shows off what they've been working on via X. For example, it now also has a functioning leaderboard, and recently added the Seraphite Forest map to complement the Houses map previously shown off.

A major focus now is "exploring the methods of animation sync" to replicate the incredibly smooth, dynamic animations used in Naughty Dog's projects. As far as I understand it, in The Last of Us Part 2, only the player character has access to the full suite of animations—NPCs have different movements, which the modder realised when initially jerryrigging multiplayer functionality.

The mod creator also runs a YouTube series showing the fascinating behind-the-scenes in adding a fully-fledged multiplayer mode to a famously cinematic singleplayer game.

It's a very impressive mod, truth be told. You'd think a mod like this would be crude, but it's currently got a proper main menu with map selection and gear loadouts, a matchmaking system, and, of course, it's actually playable and looks exactly like what you'd expect from a multiplayer mode using the sequel's bones. I'd say it looks on track for September, and I'll be counting down the days.

Is it the standalone Last of Us Factions that Naughty Dog was working on? No, probably not, but Sony killed it and this is the next best thing.

Two weeks ago I came to you with news that Thief: The Dark Project (and its expanded version, Thief Gold) were getting a sort of pseudo-remaster courtesy of GOG, ahead of its official Nightdive remaster coming this winter. My sentiment at the time could be summed up as: hey, this is cool.

Well, I've now played a chunk of GOG's dolled-up Thief, and my sentiment can now be summed up as: hey, this is cool.

No, really. I've spent a bit of my workday going through Thief's opening Bafford's Manor mission, and I'm genuinely impressed by how well a technically un-remastered version of Thief holds up in the big '26.

It's not radical—you'll have to wait for Nightdive's effort for your proper bells and whistles—but it is remarkable. There's a lot to be said for having a version of Thief you can just boot up and play, in modern resolutions on modern systems, and with startlingly well-integrated controller support, of all things.

It's the gamepad stuff that most blows my hair back. Now, let's be clear, the role GOG plays in this is mostly that of curator and collator: gathering up fan mods, securing the relevant permissions, and bundling them up. But it made good choices with Thief—the inclusion of Peter Wright's Gamepad Mod turns the venerable classic into a game I could comfortably play on my TV.

It's no hacky add-in, Thief really feels seamless on an Xbox One controller, right down to the new radial menus that pop up to let you select your equipment, artfully slowing down the game to enable you to make your choice.

It's not just the gamepad, of course. Making NewDark—a fan patch for the game that's all but mandatory these days—part of the game's default installation is an obviously good move, letting the game run at modern widescreen resolutions out of the box like it was made for them in the first place. It all lets Thief's age get out of the way of your enjoyment of it, and solves the vital issue of 'I want to play this old game but can't be bothered faffing about with mods and fan patches'. Someone else has faffed for you.

Wrap it all up with GOG's other fixes and, well, it's the kind of treatment I wish all the classics could get—the easy inclusion of all the myriad essential fan-patches that accrue around old games, saving you from having to venture out and install them yourself. I mean, hey, I'd rather everything got the super-polished Nightdive treatment, but until we live in that world, this does just fine.

I've said it before and, in all likelihood, will say it again several more times: one of the best things about PC gaming is that modders can come in long after a game has been set aside by its developers, and proceed to clean up all the nagging bugs and imperfections that continue to linger.

Take, for example, MGSHDFix, which sprang into existence not longer after the initial launch of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 to spruce up MGS2 and 3 (plus MG1 and 2) ports that were, at the time, lackluster. Konami's done a lot of work on the games since then, and they're in a good state, but there's always work to be done. That's why MGSHDFix 4.0.0 released over the weekend.

It's a doozy. "With MGSHDFix 4.0.0, MGS2 is effectively restored back to its original pre-HD Collection state," writes author Afevis. "All of MGS2's graphical effects that Bluepoint left unimplemented (there was a ton of things that were literally left marked as 'BLUEPOINT TO-DO' still in the source code that are still untouched to today), have been fully restored (either through the game's own rendering system, or in some cases, through modern custom D3D11 recreations.)"

While Bluepoint's 2011 HD-ifications of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3—which are what the Master Collection versions are based on—are generally well-regarded, that doesn't mean there weren't some regressions from the original games. MGSHDFix de-regresses them. For instance, both games' depth of field rendering now actually works, and scales properly with modern resolutions.

MGS2 got most of the game-specific love here—a meaty list of PS2-era effects that were missing from the Bluepoint versions have been restored, like certain water effects, cutscene filters, motion trails, crossfade camera transitions, bloodstains on guards and more. It's a lot of stuff that you might not notice is missing, but which is certainly nice to have. And in games that have the kind of strong directorial vision that MGS does, it's sure nice to feel like you're getting the visual experience the original designers intended.

Anyway, if you want to check it out, you're best off downloading the 4.0.1 hotfix version that released yesterday. A little bad news if you run the mod using Luxtorpeda on Linux, like I do: Luxtorpeda is still pulling the 3.1.0 version of the mod at the time of writing, but I don't doubt that'll be fixed sharpish.

The era when it seemed like every second game was about zombies and the one where I played a lot of Flash games because they were free had a lot of overlap. Which is why I have fond memories of the hours I lost playing games like The Last Stand and Rebuild 2. I've just had a flashback to that time thanks to Yet Another Zombie Defense HD, which has had its price temporarily dropped by 100%.

It's a twin-stick shooter where you spend the nights shooting zombies and the days building defenses, erecting barricades and saving up to buy a turret and then realizing you also need to buy a gun to mount on top of that turret. There's local and online multiplayer, a bunch of weapons and traps to unlock and modes to play, and it sure does have the look and feel of an indie game from a bygone age—even if it was only released in 2017.

It's got a Steam Workshop too, where you can download skins to make your survivor look like Hatsune Miku, Garfield, Deadpool, or Shrek. Never change, Steam Workshop.

Yet Another Zombie Defense is available for free to promote the upcoming release of Yet Another Zombie Survivors, which is a bullet heaven game with the same aesthetic and an escalating horde that builds to giant werewolves, mummies, and other B-movie baddies. It's currently available in early access, and is scheduled to hit 1.0 on August 20.

I'm not big on the survivors-like genre, but I do like to turn my brain off and headshot zombies, which is why I was happy to snag Yet Another Zombie Defense on Steam where it's currently free until July 30.

We're still in the dark with regards to a GTA 6 PC release date, but the neon-filtered pre-order screen for Rockstar's next blockbuster on my PS5 looks too good to be true. I've racked up thousands of hours in GTA Online on PC over the last decade, but in the space between its arrival on desktop in 2015 and its launch on the PlayStation 3 two years prior (a statement that now reads like a typo), I must have clocked hours into the hundreds.

As detailed by PC Gamer's own Rory Norris last month, developer Rockstar insists at this late stage on describing GTA 6 as a "single-player experience"—but there's simply no way an evolution of the game's multiplayer offshoot isn't in the immediate offing, right?

Whatever form that takes, I fully expect to once more use its console iteration as a test bed for my inevitable platform switch when the time comes. But the overarching question at this point is: what guise will GTA Online 2.0 take upon arrival? And, perhaps more to the point, what do we even want that to look like?

Clear as mud

Without sounding too much like an old bastard, I suspect age will play an integral role here. I was 27 when GTA Online landed in late 2013, and I first migrated to Los Santos from the boundless plains of Minecraft. Now 40 years old, my desire to build and refine my own worlds has waned quite significantly, therefore I view Project Rome—the codename widely associated with Rockstar's reported push towards user-generated content and tools for the next era of GTA Online—through a lens of relative indifference.

I still think UGC is very cool—watching my kids grow and raze their own creations in Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox is a joy; as is engaging with other people's projects in games like Dreams. But, and I can only speak for myself here, I no longer believe I'm the primary target demographic for out-of-the-box creator-led experiences.

Which is, of course, totally fine. I'll still enjoy this parallel of GTA Online Part Two in the same way I thrive in Grand Theft Auto 5's roleplaying scene, despite having not once built an asset or script of my own in these spaces. Rockstar's acquisition of Cfx.re, coupled with the omnipresent Project Rome chatter in forums, suggests the studio is thinking beyond the traditional single/multiplayer split towards something much broader in Vice City, and the enduring success and appeal of FiveM has shown that millions of players are happy to spend countless hours in Los Santos without ever touching Rockstar's intended gameplay loop.

GTA 6 will never be, say, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but GTA Online 2.0 will almost certainly need to evolve in order to meet the expectations of modern players—not just in terms of what other games are doing right now, but also by virtue of GTA Online's growth beyond recognition over the last 13 years.

To the latter end, GTA Online remains the same high-stakes murder playground it has always been, but over time it has also inadvertently become, quite simply, a cool place to hang out. From its machinima scene to its stunting community, its Dr Dre update to its After Hours nightclub circuit, its nefarious business activities to its still booming roleplay spectrum and its many, many more subcultural identities, GTA Online has become as much of a platform as it has a tangent of a popular single-player video game.

I suspect that distinction is an important one as we enter the next chapter, but in any event, given that Rockstar has barely shown us what GTA 6 looks like in motion⁠—far less anything on the nuts and bolts of Online 2.0⁠—I cannot help but wonder. Can Rockstar support creativity without breaking the essence of what has allowed Grand Theft Auto to endure for the last 30 years?

More questions than answers

With a more user-generated focus comes a series of questions. Who in GTA Online 2.0 moderates that content? Who profits? Who owns maps? Can creators monetise? Do servers stay independent? How much freedom is too much? What about GTA Online as it applies to GTA 5? Will there be a tangible link between the two worlds? Or will Rockstar put the original GTA:O out to pasture, similar to Blizzard's handling of Overwatch 2 and its forerunner? Answers on the back of a faux Miami postcard, I guess.

What may be more important here isn't how Rockstar views GTA Online 2.0, but how it views itself on the cusp of a new and almost certainly redefining era. If GTA Online as it exists today has become a platform, then it's very possible Rockstar sees itself through a similar lens. Epic has Unreal Engine, for example; it has Fortnite and it has the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN).

Roblox, on the other hand, has Roblox Studio. Valve has Workshop. Build a Rocket Boy, despite Mindseye's well-documented troubles, still has big plans for Everywhere as a UGC-driven prospect. And Rockstar between times has purchased FiveM.

Should GTA Online 2.0 in turn become more like Fornite, then? Should it introduce a formalised creator economy and revenue sharing, a Discover tab that helps surface community creations, branded collaborations, and live events? I don't know, is the short answer. I've long felt a large-scale Grand Theft Auto-flavoured Coachella-style endeavour would be fantastic—akin to Fortnite's Travis Scott event of 2020—especially given the fact Rockstar has a host of world-class DJs at its disposal by way of its Circo Loco Record imprint.

Heists on a far grander scale would be much-welcomed too, continuing the steady evolution of the series-signature set-piece from GTA 4 through 5 and now 6, incorporating more players by way of bigger servers. And then some degree of seamless roleplay integration is something I'm certain would absolutely fly on PC, standing on the am-dram shoulders of everything that's come before in Los Santos and Blaine County.

These are but a few things I personally would love to see, but with so much of the basics still unknown, it is, unfortunately, impossible to think too hard on big picture stuff. The next iteration of GTA Online enters a very different world from its predecessor, and with so many well-established live-service platforms already in operation, Rockstar finds itself in relatively unfamiliar territory and under a degree of unfamiliar pressure.

Without blowing smoke up the developer's backside, though, if anyone can pull off such a feat, it's surely them. The fact that Rockstar has shown us absolutely nothing to this end concerns me ever-so-slightly—but I guess the arrival of the series' first single-player venture in close to a decade-and-a-half will serve as a pretty good distraction from what may or may not lie ahead. And that grace period between GTA 6's imminent console launch and its long-awaited arrival on PC gives Rockstar plenty of time to sort itself out with an eye on our platform of choice.

From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer #321 (UK, Sep. 2018). The review appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation.

It’s a damn crime that no game ripped off Red Faction: Guerrilla’s Geo-mod destruction feature. You take a hammer and you use it to smash out a panel of a wall and break through a pillar. Smash out a few more walls and maybe the building creaks. A few more whacks of the hammer later and the whole thing comes down, perhaps with you inside. And hey, maybe it knocks through another building on the way down. It’s still amazing to watch.

Guerrilla does this one thing really well. It’s an otherwise uninspired open world game, with okay driving, unimpressive shooting and a boring story. Hell, Mars doesn’t even look that nice, because it’s Mars. But knocking down buildings in an open world is more than enough to carry this game.

You’ll crash a jeep through a base. You’ll detonate mines and blow up a bridge, which will then collapse on top of an enemy settlement. You’ll melt the beams of a tower and watch it fall over. This destruction felt great in 2009, and it still feels good now.

In this Re-Mars-tered edition, which is free for owners of the Steam version, THQ Nordic touts reworked textures among other improvements, along with better shadows, lighting, a shader and postprocessing rework, and native 4K support.

For a freebie, it seems pretty good after four hours or so. I can’t say I notice vast visual improvements, but environmental textures like rocks and the ground look a little sharper. The lighting is nice, too, but it’s not a vast upgrade.

To anyone picking this up for the first time, I recommend focusing on the campaign. That’s where the biggest destructive opportunities are, like a huge bridge and a massive tower, which take meticulous use of the object-melting nano rifle and rocket launcher to bring down.

You’ll wait a while to unlock all the really good toys, but the singleplayer will give you plenty to blow up along the way, as well as a dull story about miners rebelling against an army that’s a bit like a boring version of Firefly. The big destructive opportunities in this campaign need to be seen, though—I still talk about them with friends years later.

I’m not in the mood for finishing the campaign these days after doing it twice before, but that’s where the game’s Wrecking Crew mode comes in. It’s basically a score attack that gives you a quick dose of the game’s destructive physics in a variety of settings.

You pick a loadout, set the parameters, like time limits and how easily the buildings fall, then knock them down as quickly as possible. It makes a great pass-the-pad party game, and there’s a challenge mode with leaderboards, too.

No imitators

It’s weird that no one else made a game like Guerrilla after its release. Destruction features have shown up in everything from Battlefield to Minecraft to Just Cause, but Volition’s game still offers something that no other game does. It’s the idea of blowing each building up like it’s a puzzle, efficiently using your arsenal so it collapses in the most satisfying way possible.

It might’ve been Red Faction’s sparse Mars setting that made Guerrilla work in the first place. It’s noticeable that all the best buildings are far away from one another, and it probably wouldn’t have been possible for Volition to replicate the Geo-mod system in the vast cities of Saints Row. But that is the type of open world game I’ve always wanted to play, where you can manipulate the environment.

We’re instead in an age of open world games packed with busywork and towers to climb. I like those, too, but Guerrilla shows open worlds and destructible buildings are a perfect match.

Even old THQ didn’t seem to know why Guerrilla was good. Volition followed this up with Armageddon in 2011, a bad sequel that took us away from big open setpieces to the tedious, more linear underground. Still, if THQ Nordic is bringing Darksiders back for another shot, perhaps Red Faction will get its chance again, too. I just wish its influence, and its collapsing buildings, had carried a little further.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, a game with a title that feels like it ought to have a colon or an em dash somewhere in there, is finally here and it's selling like whatever the nautical equivalent of hotcakes is. Hardtack, I guess. Not only did it sell 2 million copies in a single day, a recent financial report includes Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot saying "Two weeks in, the title has already exceeded the annual expectations we had."

"The strong launch of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced in early July by Vantage Studios is an encouraging proof point," he said. "The game is the highest-rated Assassin's Creed title since the original Black Flag, and we are very pleased with the praise it received from players … I would like to warmly thank the teams whose talent and dedication brought it to life."

Guillemot's thanks come at an interesting time, given that nearly a third of Ubisoft Barcelona was laid off just weeks ago, triggering a labor strike. This was part of a larger wave of layoffs which affected hundreds of workers. As it has done with a variety of Ubisoft games, Ubisoft Barcelona supported the development of Black Flag Resynced and "did all the underwater levels" as tech and gameplay animator Manel Cota posted on X back then.

Regardless, the ludicrous sales Black Flag Resynced is enjoying seem like a signal that the original game's reputation is strong enough to carry this remake through potential turnoffs for prospective players, such as the day one DLC, simplified swordfights, and in-game shop. In his review, PC Gamer's Morgan Park called the game "a well-made, but inessential remake that loses more than it gains."

If you've been hitting the high seas yourself, check out our guide on how to see all the new stuff—if not, the original is there and as good as ever.

I still remember the long ritual of installing World of Warcraft to my parents' laptop as a young'un, mystified by the sheer number of discs it took to squeeze the game onto a hard drive.

The more discs a game took to install, the better it must be, I figured—child me would be aghast at the contemporary world, where game boxes come with mere codes inside and PlayStation is killing off disc production. That last factoid has triggered commentary all over the industry and beyond, with everyone from Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot and French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon weighing in.

Speaking to IGN, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser gave his own commentary on the physical vs. digital debate with a multifaceted answer. "I don't know that I care. If people want that, I think companies should provide it," he said.

"But I don't know that I personally care. And I also think the ability to update games, as critical as people are of digital releases, the ability to update and fix problems in games has been really useful for the quality of games." Notably, both physical and downloadable patches existed before digital distribution became the rule. Magazines like the superlative PC Gamer would even help distribute them!

Grand Theft Auto writer Jeffrey Crawford "Lazlow" Jones, who was with Houser for the interview, weighed in as well. "I mean, we all have that sort of feeling of when you get that copy and you put the disc on the console, but I also have to say, I really like being at the airport and going, 'oh cool, I can download some quick games to my Steam Deck for this 12-hour flight."

Jones went on to talk about how tangibility still has its perks even as a creator: "[It's] just really fulfilling to have a physical thing you can say, 'Look, we made a thing.'" Houser followed up, "I love physical media. I think everyone does, you know." It's worth noting that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be both a digital-only game and console-exclusive at launch.

One aspect of Helldivers 2 I've repeatedly lamented is how many of its new toys are locked away inside Warbonds, with too few new weapons, equipment and stratagems unlockable through regular play. Hence, it's worth giving Arrowhead credit when they do let you unlock a new toy through spending requisition slips and nothing else. Such is the case with the M-103 Supply FRV, which will become available for all Helldivers to unlock in October.

The Supply FRV is one of three variants of Helldivers 2's offroad truck. The vanilla FRV is equipped with a mounted machinegun, while the Incinerator FRV swaps that out for a flamethrower. The Supply FRV comes equipped with both an automated turret and a supply rack at the rear of the vehicle, good for eight full restocks of Helldiver ammo and equipment.

The Supply FRV was originally made available as a stratagem to players who participated in June's "Census Thunder" campaign, which saw players battling hordes of Illuminate 'Voteless' spewing from voids opening up across the galaxy. Now though, Arrowhead has decided to roll the vehicle out to all Helldivers 2 players—albeit with a significant delay. In a Steam post, Arrowhead said that players who earned the FRV in June had "enabled the rest of your comrades in arms to access this equipment in October," adding that "a rising tide of firepower lifts all divers".

The Supply FRV is the first stratagem reward to derive from Arrowhead's new galactic campaign system, which replaced the previous system of running objectives in June. Introduced to give players a better chance of taking part in the shooter's collective objectives, galactic campaigns are part of a much broader overhaul that Arrowhead committed to earlier this year, following growing player dissatisfaction with the live-service shooter.

The second galactic campaign—Lightning Intercept—is currently underway, with players attempting to destroy an Automaton orbital platform. We don't know what the next campaign will be, but Arrowhead has said that a Warhammer 40,000 themed Warbond will be revealed on July 30, one of the few video game crossovers that I'm actually intrigued by.

The late '90s was a wildly exciting time in the internet's history, one that witnessed a Cambrian explosion in websites as users crawled out of BBS forums and began forming dedicated webpages of their own. PC gaming coverage was no different. There were entire websites dedicated to covering individual games, not least the Planet network operated by GameSpy. If there was a PC game that you were looking forward to, chances are there was a website somewhere out there waiting to cover it.

Today, most of those websites are long dead, the victims of over-ambition, the brutal realities of the modern internet, or good old fashioned link rot. But holed up on some dusty server in the internet's Outer Rim, one crazy old hermit clings on to the past.

A New Hope

The Massassi Temple is a community website dedicated to Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, which has been running consistently since it was launched in early 1998. The site was created by Brian E. Lozier, who is also the site's current owner and administrator.

Lozier became a fan of PC gaming playing first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. But Lozier's newfound hobby was quickly interrupted when he joined the United States Air Force, working at what he describes as a "secure facility" as a computer operator.

If this sounds thrillingly clandestine, Lozier stresses it was anything but. "It was really boring," he points out. "We were just having to wait for stuff to happen and then respond to it. Most of the people who did that job with me watched cable TV for hours."

It was around this time that Lozier discovered Star Wars: Dark Forces, which, as a huge Star Wars fan, reignited his desire to play PC games. "I had to buy a new computer just to play it," he says. As it turned out, Dark Forces wasn't quite the dream game he'd hoped for. But when Dark Forces 2 came out two years later, that was another matter.

"I thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and I started watching or reading other websites," he says. "There was a site called jediknight.net and they were saying 'Hey, there's people working on the level editor so you can make your own maps for this thing.' I was blown away."

Lozier began making Jedi Knight maps in his spare time. But he found learning how to use the level editor difficult. "The way the levels are constructed was really different than anything my mind could think of." Hence, he decided to write some tutorials to lessen the growing pains of other wannabe Jedi Knight modders. Since he needed somewhere to host the tutorials, he decided to build his own website.

This also proved more of a challenge than Lozier anticipated. "I had to learn programming, and I had told myself earlier in my life that I was never going to be a programmer," he explains. "[But] then it turns out I wanted to make something … so I learned it out of books."

The secure facility Lozier worked in understandably did not allow people to bring in external computers. So Lozier would write the code for The Massassi Temple on pencil and paper during work downtime, then take it home and test it on his computer. Between designing the site and writing the tutorials he planned to host on the site, the process took a couple of months. "Right now it looks really close to what it did back in 1998."

The Force Awakens

The Massassi Temple launched in 1998, with Lozier announcing the site on jediknight.net. The news spread across other sites like Blues News, Voodoo Extreme, and Telefragged, which also indirectly hosted the site at one point.

It wasn't long before people started showing up, keen to benefit from Lozier's tutorials. "Our most popular section in the early days, especially, was the message boards, where people would go in and ask questions. 'How do I do this? How do I make this type of feature in my level? How do I use the programming language?'"

Initially, Lozier would respond to every inquiry personally, while also posting the latest Jedi Knight-related news. But the site quickly grew to the point where its community became self-perpetuating. "Within a couple of months, there were more people answering the questions that I had no idea how to answer," he says. "It felt really good to see people getting use out of it and being inspired."

But the site's popularity was only beginning. Over the next couple of years, the number of visitors grew, and grew. "In the late '90s and early 2000s, the site was getting millions and millions of visitors," Lozier says. "We were running ads, we were making multiple thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue."

Much of this cash went on operating costs. The server alone, which had a cutting-edge 300-megahertz processor, cost $1,000 per month to lease. "It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time that was the state of the art, because none of the shared hosting could keep up with us, right? We would just bog down their servers."

By the time Lozier left The Air Force, The Massassi Temple was bringing in more money than his military salary. Lozier realised a career might be in the making. "I left the Air Force thinking 'Hey, I can do this.'"

Fallen Order

With The Massassi Temple operating smoothly, Lozier began setting up websites about other games that were tangentially related to Jedi Knight. "The team who made Jedi Knight split apart, and some of them started their own game company called Nihilistic Software. They made a Vampire: The Masquerade game that we were all excited about."

As such, Lozier set up Planet Vampire in association with GameSpy, alongside several other Planet sites. He also launched websites dedicated to Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, which was built with the same engine as Jedi Knight, and a Serious Sam site for which he created level editor tutorials. "That did really well actually. In Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, I was so surprised—I beat the game, and it was rolling the credits, and my name was on there."

Best of all, Lozier's association with GameSpy meant he got to see the games industry in action. "When I was working on Planet Vampire and some other Planet sites, IGN and GameSpy sent a bunch of us to E3 multiple times in a row," he says. "I got to meet John Romero, I got to meet people working on the later Quake and Doom games … it was just amazing."

But even as Lozier's website empire blossomed, the cracks were beginning to show. Several of the games Lozier had established websites for flopped, which meant the websites did too. "Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption, we were so excited about it, but then once the game came out it didn't get very good reviews and people had a hard time playing it," he says. The Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine site also struggled. "At the last minute we found out [LucasArts] weren't going to allow mods."

Then, in early 2000, the dotcom bubble burst, and the shockwave ripped through Lozier's collection of websites. "All the money that was flowing around disappeared," he says. "We saw CPMs drop to tiny pennies, fractions of a cent, where you had to get hundreds of millions of hits to make any decent money."

One by one, the sites Lozier built began to shut down, and he realised the floor was collapsing beneath him. "I was like 'OK, I'm not gonna make money with this. I need to feed my family," he says. Lozier handed control of the site over to someone else, got a job as a software developer, and left The Massassi Temple to its fate. "That was one of the times where I let it go."

Return of the Jedi

Yet where every other site Lozier created died, The Massassi Temple kept on going. Lozier believes this is down to the dedication of its community. "The site wouldn't exist without all the people that visit and that are on our Discord and that are sharing and working on stuff."

And over the years, The Massassi Temple has built up a vast array of additional Jedi Knight adventures. This includes hundreds of mods and more than a thousand multiplayer maps. Some of these are wildly ambitious, including JK Gunrunners, a total conversion mod that transforms Jedi Knight into a modern day roleplaying game, featuring vehicles and racing. "We did level contests over the years where people would submit maps to include in the big multiplayer pack," Lozier says.

Alongside the maps and mods it hosts, The Massassi Temple is also a key nexus for ongoing Jedi Knight support. Many of the developers involved with OpenJKDF2—an open source reimplementation for Jedi Knight—hang out in The Massassi Temple's Discord channel. The site's tendrils have also reached out into broader game development. "We've got a couple people who are active AAA game developers in our Discord," Lozier says, while David Wehle, developer of The First Tree and the upcoming horror game We Harvest Shadows, cut his teeth making mods for Jedi Knight.

Thanks to its community, Jedi Knight is chugging along nicely. Nonetheless, Lozier says the community would be happy to see something bring this aged FPS back into the limelight, such as a Nightdive-style remaster similar to what the studio did with Star Wars: Dark Forces. "I think we would all really appreciate an updated version, especially if it supports all the old mods that still exist," he says. "I hope they make an easier way to play multiplayer. That would be the absolute best thing to keep the community alive and keep the game alive for longer."

Survivor

Lozier has stepped away from The Massassi Temple several times over the years. But he has never fully been able to let it go, intervening on several occasions when the site looked likely to shut down. The last time he took the site over was "seven or eight" years ago. "I'm sort of stubborn, and I have a hard time letting go," he says.

Today, The Massassi Temple is but a small corner of the internet. "Traffic is lower and lower every year now," Lozier says. As such, he has begun to think about what happens if the site should shut down, and how to preserve both the site and its contents for the future.

The site's code is already available open source on GitHub, so the next stage is to preserve the community's creations. "I want to have a permanent archive of all the levels, maps, and mods that people have made over the years that are hosted by us," he concludes. "It's no skin off my back, like the community made the site … the main content that everybody cares about was not made by me."

Lozier has no regrets about how things panned out with his website career. "I taught myself programming as a hobby in this dark room in the Air Force to make this website, and I've been a software engineer since then as my full-time job." That said, he does wonder whether something was lost in the post-dotcom era of the internet, where traffic has been increasingly funnelled toward a small handful of megasites:

"Back then, if you wanted to know about snowboarding, you went to a snowboarding website. If you wanted to go to message boards about a videogame, you searched up the videogame and went to the websites," he says. "Nowadays, the entire internet has transferred to these big corporations. A lot of the Jedi Knight community and snowboarding communities are now on Reddit or Facebook or whatever, so you don't have an individual identity for your Jedi Knight playing versus your snowboarding."

Then again, he thinks the dotcom crash was, in the long run, a good thing for The Massassi Temple specifically. "It was a hobby that turned into something commercial, and we lost something there, because I was focussed on more sites, getting more impressions, showing more ads, making more money," he says. "When the dotcom bubble burst, and all those ad dollars dried up, it transitioned almost immediately back into a hobby, and that's a net positive for the community, because I don't have to worry if I don't update it for a year, it's still there. It's still alive.

As a series, Grand Theft Auto has spent decades cycling between the same three locations, with each variation of Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas being more detailed than the last. But players haven't been able to explore all three locations at once since the release of the original.

Until now. A modder has done what Grand Theft Auto hasn't since 1997, creating a mod that lets players travel instantaneously between the settings of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. And it's all thanks to that most underutilised of game technologies—portals.

Veteran Grand Theft Auto tinkerer DryxioGTA posted a video of the mod—which is still in development and doesn't seem to have a proper name yet—on YouTube (via GamesRadar) The clip shows the player travelling between three brightly coloured portals located in San Andreas' Grove Street. Walking through each portal transports the player instantly to the relevant game and location, switching to the appropriate player character in the process.

DryxioGTA provided some technical details in the video's comments. He confirmed that all three games are running "inside the same process, sharing one Direct 3D device" and that "each portal is a live GPU texture" with the relevant game "actually running behind it, it's not a video or a captured window". DryxioGTA also says that the three worlds maintain their own saves, missions, and settings, and that they continue to run the world state, including traffic and physics, in real time.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the mod is that the portals don't just let the player travel between cities, they also allow for interactions between those cities. DryxioGTA demonstrates this by shooting through a portal, gunning down several civilians. This causes peds in his current world to attack him and triggers a wanted rating.

It's seriously impressive work, and the GTA fans responding in the video's comments are clearly bowled over. "The fact that you can shoot the peds and other objects through the portals is just beyond unimaginably insane," writes li_B4shar_il, while ross3695_basedhax observes that "We got inter-GTA portals before GTA 6."

In fairness, it's not that long before Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar's hugely anticipated sequel is due to land in November, and that fact alone has already had a substantial impact on gaming. Every other developer is scurrying to get out of the way of Rockstar's behemoth, resulting in the next three months being crowded with dozens of highly anticipated launches.

Despite a poor reception, weak sales, and losing publisher IO Interactive, developer Build a Rocket Boy hasn't given up on its open world shooter MindsEye. Which might be commendable, were it not for the multiple rounds of layoffs, the wild conspiracy theories emanating from its executives, and allegations from former workers that spy tech was covertly installed on their machines.

But whatever's going on in and around the studio, MindsEye itself is still receiving updates. And the most recent update adds quite a lot of stuff, though whether it's stuff everybody wants is another matter.

Described as "one of the biggest yet" by BARB in a Steam post, Update 8 brings a major new component to MindsEye—multiplayer. Specifically, it adds a team-based mode called "grenade football", in which players apparently "swap their boots for launchers and bring the firepower to the pitch."

Contrary to what this implies, grenade football participants do not in fact wear the launchers on their feet (though that would arguably make for a more interesting spectacle). Instead, grenade football is basically Rocket League without the cars, with players in red or blue jumpsuits running around a pitch blasting a giant ball at each other's nets.

There's a video of grenade football in action below. Like so much else about MindsEye (certainly post-launch MindsEye) it looks very basic and rough around the edges. The ball, which is far too large to actually fit in the launchers, just kind of disappears into them when a player collects it, so reading where the ball is and who currently possesses it is tricky.

There's also the question of who you're going to play Grenade Football with. At the time of writing, MindsEye had attracted a peak of 36 concurrent players in the previous 24 hours. Which I suppose is enough to get a game or two of Grenade Football going—just. But if you are interested in checking it out, I'd recommend doing so promptly.

In short, I don't think the developers of Rematch have much to worry about. But that isn't everything the update adds. Alongside the addition of multiplayer, the update also introduces some extra racing circuits, a raft of social features to help players interact across the game, and further improvements to the singleplayer.

These are what I'm most intrigued by. The update reworks numerous elements of the vanilla game. Improvements include better enemy physics when being hit by explosions, difficulty adjustments to various missions, a general overhaul to AI pathing and behaviour, improved vehicle handling, and animation transitions between moving, combat, and interactions.

I couldn't care less about all the clearly doomed multiplayer and metaverse stuff BARB seems hellbent on adding. But I would like it if the basic campaign was half-decent to play. Aside from Grand Theft Auto 6 looming over the horizon, there aren't many games of this ilk being made anymore.

Hence, while the launch version of MindsEye was undeniably terrible, I've no objection to seeing it improved. There are some questions over how BARB is attempting to improve MindsEye, however. Earlier this month, former MindsEye developers protested at a fan event being held at the studio in the wake of yet more layoffs and the secret surveillance scandal, as the Independent Workers of Great Britain Union claimed that BARB was "handing over work, both paid and unpaid, from the BARB workforce to the BARB fanbase, during a game sector job crisis."

Bad news for anyone looking forward to playing the new Tomb Raider game Catalyst next year: It's not going to be out until the year after that.

Word of the delay came from Amazon Gaming chief Jeffrey Gattis during an interview with The Game Business. Talking about Amazon's game investment strategy, Gattis said the company is into pretty much everything, "from what we call game night games, which are those phone-as-a-controller games, which I think of as single-A games that are in the single millions of dollars to develop, all the way up to triple-A."

Then, to provide an example of how Amazon remains committed to big-time, he dropped the news: "We've announced the two Tomb Raider titles—Atlantis comes February 12^th of next year and then we'll follow on in 2028 with the next one."

Tomb Raider: Catalyst hadn't locked in a hard release date, but when it was announced at The Game Awards in 2025 it was set for launch in 2027.

It's possible that Gattis merely got his years or games mixed up: I still occasionally do the 'what year is it?' Jumanji meme in real life when my wandering mind is suddenly snapped back to reality by someone asking if I've finished filling out the form.

But this strikes me as unlikely, for two reasons. One, saying "2028" specifically is very different from rolling with "next year" when you're not completely sure what year it is right now.

Two, and more to the point, Tomb Raider: Catalyst developer Crystal Dynamics appears to be in a bit of disarray. In March, the studio conducted its fourth round of layoffs in 12 months, and studio leadership—not just at CD, but anywhere that's taken a big hit—may say that cutting to the bone isn't going to impact ongoing projects, but at some point that's probably just not so, as presumably those laid off people served a function that they're not around to handle anymore. Even if you're only talking about the psychological toll that constant layoffs take on those who remain, that's going to have an impact.

To be sure, I've reached out to Amazon to ask if the 2028 target as expressed by Gattis is correct, and will update if I receive a reply. Until then, though, I'd suggest making other plans to occupy your gaming time in '27.

I fulfilled a childhood ambition over the past week: I finally got the notoriously elusive Big Boss rating at the end of Metal Gear Solid 1, a feat I've simultaneously been drawn toward and terrified by ever since I first played the game on my PS1 in 1998. How did I do it? Stick-to-itiveness, gumption, and raw skill.

Also, cheating. I played the much easier Japanese version of the game and exploited a couple of speedrunning skips in order to hasten my progress. Hey, it counts.

Anyway, my challenge to you, reader, is to accomplish the same thing in the ongoing free-to-play period for Metal Gear Solid 1 on Steam, which expires Monday, July 27 at 10 am EDT / 1 pm PDT / 6 pm BST. You should probably do it the non-cheating way. It was cool when I did it, but for you? A bad look. I don't make the rules.

If you'd like to know why a three-year-old re-release of a 28-year-old game is currently running a free-to-play trial thing, I have two answers for you. The first: the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 2—which finally frees Metal Gear Solid 4 from its PS3 prison—is due out on August 27, and this is a way to gin up some MGS hype. The second: Konami is a baffling company that operates according to no law but its own.

If you shied away from Vol 1 of the MGS Master Collection for the state it was in at release, I have good news: it is much better now. All three MGS games in the collection have received significant patches since its lackluster opening day, and MGS1 in particular now looks and feels a lot better, thanks to the ability to switch on higher-resolution rendering and actually functional analogue controls.

And if you still want to sand down the remaining rough edges, I recommend the MGSM2Fix mod, (which can be easily installed via Luxtorpeda if you're playing on Steam Deck or desktop Linux).

Amazon really confounded us all last month when, following the successful launch of 007 First Light, Amazon Gaming general manager Jeff Gattis mused that sequels would be "done by MGM and, theoretically, by Amazon Game Studios." Given that so many people—barring one uncontroversial and universally beloved PC Gamer writer—rather liked IOI's Bond game, it was incomprehensible to suggest yanking it away from the studio.

Well, I guess Amazon itself has realised what a boneheaded move that would be, because in a recent chat with GI.biz, Gattis clarified that—insofar as the developer of the next 007 game is concerned—nothing is set in stone. "We did not confirm anything about who's publishing or developing the next Bond sequel… we haven't even discussed it really yet. The game's awesome. That's great. I think it's realistic to think that there would be a sequel."

Then he states the obvious: "Given the success of this one, I think you probably want IOI developing it." Taken in tandem with an earlier comment, that "Technically, Amazon does own the rights to the game, but we're going to do what's right by the game, we're not trying to bring everything into Amazon," it does at least sound like the megacorp knows it would be a bad idea to suddenly bring Bond games in-house, though it looks like Amazon will at least be publishing any new games in the series.

Still, don't get too comfortable. Gattis did add that "anything's possible" when asked about the notion of Amazon buying IOI, but noted that there are "no conversations about that right now."

Given the bumpy ride IOI had as a subsidiary of Square Enix, I can't imagine it's overeager to jump into bed with a new owner. Then again, Amazon has Amazon money. Never say never, and don't go wishing for an IO-developed 007 Second Light on any monkey's paws you have lying around.

About once a week I head on over Steam to peek at the most wishlisted games because I want to know: what are PC gamers looking forward to most? Are there any highly anticipated games on the brink of release? And is anything new blowing up

This week I definitely spotted something new: Dear Passengers, a co-op game about running "the world's worst airline" with your friends, is now seated comfortably at number 12 on Steam's top wishlists. That's impressive because the chaotic friendslop game was only announced a week ago. Here's the trailer if you missed it:

"You and your friends are the crew," says developer Flexus. "Your job is to deliver passengers and cargo to their destination. Preferably in one piece. While one of you pilots the plane, the others keep the cabin together, serve the passengers, and deal with whatever goes wrong before it gets much worse."

And things definitely look like they get worse. Turbulence, bad weather, bird strikes, and dangerous cargo can lead to all sorts of disasters while in flight, and of course there's no greater threat than your friends who might open the doors at altitude and get everyone sucked out of the plane.

It looks like chaotic fun, and the internet agrees: Dear Passengers was added to 700,000 wishlists in just 36 hours after the trailer premiered on July 14, and has more than doubled that since, collecting over 1,500,000 wishlists a couple of days ago.

It's not an entirely smooth takeoff to Mount Wishlist, however: in the same week, the Kyiv-based studio also received some backlash over its edgelord humor—players in the trailer are named "Epst.J" and "PDaddy," not-so-subtle references to the notorious sex traffickers, and one passenger on the plane appears to be modeled after Donald Trump. (He is thrown out of the plane by Epstein.)

"All characters are fictional, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental," a developer posted in the game's official Discord. "Flexus Games strongly condemns the actions of Jeffrey Epstein, as well as any crimes and individuals involved in breaking the law."

More backlash came following a job advertisement posted by Flexus on its website looking for a "2D Artist skilled in bringing game ideas to life and adept at using generative AI for concept creation"—which led to speculation that Dear Passengers uses AI-generated assets despite the game's Steam page displaying no AI disclosure.

The developers had a response to that, too: "No AI was used in the creation of Dear Passengers," Flexus said on Steam. "That was an old job posting related to marketing assets for some of our mobile projects. It has nothing to do with Dear Passengers. This game was created without generative AI."

The job posting has now been revised to state "Looking for a 2D Artist skilled in bringing game ideas to life."

That's a whole lotta stuff to happen in just one week, huh? We'll see how the rest of the year goes: Dear Passengers is set to release sometime in 2026.

It's taken centuries of human advancement, but soulslikes and demanding third-person action games have finally reached a level of cultural proliferation where we as a society can ask the all important question: What if the dinosaurs could have simply parried the meteor?

That's the tantalizing possibility suggested by Dinoblade, a probably paleontologically accurate soulslike launching on Steam later this week that portrays dinosaurs just as the fossil record tells us they lived: As big lizards getting into sick as hell swordfights by swinging around weapons they're holding in their teeth.

"Step into the role of a young Spinosaurus, wielding a colossal Great Sword forged from ancient power," says developer Team Spino in Dinoblade's store description. "Confront rival dinosaurs, some armed with brutal weapons of their own, all in a desperate fight to prevent a looming extinction."

The latest Dinoblade trailer is like a highlight reel of all the coolest things we would have daydreamed about as dinosaur-obsessed youths before society taught us how to be ashamed of imagination: There are tyrannosaurs with battleaxes. There are tyrannosaurs with halberds. There are tyrannosaurs biting down onto ankylosaurs to use them as weapons. Meanwhile, the spinosaurus player character is unleashing some of the wildest combat animations anyone has ever caused a spinosaur animation rig to perform.

And, as alluded to earlier, the trailer ends with that heroic spinosaurus seemingly preparing to enter a boss battle with the very meteor that wiped out all of dinosaur-kind.

Unfortunately, dinosaurs didn't know about i-frames. But that might change! And I'm clearly not the only one eager to see how it might: Earlier this month, Team Spino announced that Dinoblade has amassed over 500,000 wishlists on Steam. And frankly, I'd be concerned for us all if it hadn't.

Dinoblade launches on Steam on July 23, but there's a demo available now if you can't bring yourself to wait.

In a depressingly predictable turn of events, the reveal God of War Laufey came under fire from certain corners of the Internet, as it centres around a female protagonist rather than mad lad turned sad dad Kratos.

Much of this negative reaction has centred around Laufey's actor Deborah Ann Woll, who also played Laufey in the 2018 reboot. But Woll, who also plays Karen Page in Marvel's Daredevil and its reboot Daredevil: Born Again, isn't fazed by the impotent rage of misogynistic online trolls:

Woll was asked about the backlash to the game's reveal by TikTok influencer quinnphobic at Florida Supercon (via Eurogamer) who recorded the actor's response for TikTok:

"Genuinely, I thought I was going to be much more affected by it, but one, I'm not on social media, so that helps, and two, I don't know, I feel totally unbothered," Woll replied. "Because I just know it's great. It's okay if it's not your cup of tea, but in no universe is it bad."

I'll admit to being surprised by Sony Santa Monica's direction for the next God of War, since Kratos has been at the centre of it since the very beginning. But having watched the lengthy reveal trailer/game demo, you can hardly say it isn't in the spirit of the franchise. The idea of carving my way through the afterlife with a big wobbly cube companion seems rad, and if anything, Laufey is truer to the series' original design philosophy than the more recent reboots, returning to a more traditional combat system

I felt like the Norse setting had run its course by the end of God of War: Ragnarök, and some new blood was needed for the series to continue. Besides, Sony Santa Monica has said that Kratos will return in future games anyway. So why be mad? Of course, we know why some people are mad, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the game.

What I will be mad at, however, is if God of War Laufey doesn't come to PC. Both God of War and Ragnarök saw a delayed PC release after Sony discovered that launching its PlayStation exclusives on Steam et al is like printing money. But in May, Sony said it is retreating from the PC as a platform as it recommits to PlayStation exclusives being, well, exclusive.

This would suggest that Laufey will be stuck on PS5 (or possibly PS6 by the time it launches). Personally, though, I don't see this decision lasting all that long. PC is just too big a platform to ignore nowadays, and games like Laufey are so expensive to make that they need as wide a distribution as possible to succeed.

I still remember cursing aloud when I was first sent to prison in GTA 5 roleplay.

You see, unlike in regular Grand Theft Auto—story mode or Online—getting arrested in RP has consequences. Sure, you face the same trigger-happy cops when you fall foul of the law, where you're pursued until either dead or in cuffs, and are then hit with the same 'Wasted' or 'Busted' mandates depending on the outcome of the chase. Assuming the latter transpires, however, you don't simply receive a fine and a reset wanted star meter—in the majority of GTA RP servers, you instead respawn in the Bolingbroke penitentiary.

The magnitude of your crime determines the length of your stay as you pace around the recreation ground doing everything you can to avoid contact with anyone else, lest you find yourself punching lumps out of one another and extending your stay. Now, XmanStudios has introduced the whole ordeal to GTA 5 singleplayer by way of their mod, Jailbreak.

"Jailbreak is a GTA 5 script that adds a prison sentence system to singleplayer," reads the mod's description. "If the player dies or gets arrested while wanted, they are transported to Bolingbroke Penitentiary and must serve a sentence based on the wanted level they had at the time.

"The current version includes prison bus transport, prison processing, prisoner outfits, sentence timers, cell entrance and exit markers, lockdown triggers, guard reactions, baton-based cell returns, and basic escape behaviour. During normal prison time, guards and prisoners roam around the prison. If the player causes trouble, enters restricted areas, or tries to escape, the prison can enter lockdown and guards will respond."

Through all of that, players can expect visible cell entrance and exit markers, a prison lockdown system, restricted area lockdown triggers and a brutally violent so-called 'baton-based return-to-cell system' which leaves very little to the imagination. Updates in recent weeks include basic jailbreaking features, such as Shawshank Redemption-style digging, bed dummies and stealth mechanics that only kick into gear after lights out.

A quick glance at the mod page's comments reveals the warm reception Jailbreak has received so far (a few weeks on from launch and it's cracked 3,000 downloads), however there is one that immediately caught my eye. Crazyboy4881 says: "GTA 6 NEEDS THIS." And, given the prominence of prison in the scant snatches we've seen so far of the next Grand Theft Auto adventure, I really couldn't agree more.

hen I played 007: First Light earlier this year, one element of it stood out to me as unusual—and that is the arc relating to Bond's fellow 00 trainees, Cressida Bright and Lennox Monroe. IO Interactive puts a huge amount of work into building these characters, successfully selling you on the inherently bizarre concept of James Bond having flatmates.

Yet just as you warm to these characters, they vanish from the story, and after MI6's failed operation to eliminate the rogue 009 in Slovakia, Bond primarily teams up with his mentor, Greenway.

All of this is well portrayed. But the cadence of it nonetheless struck me as odd while playing. It turns out there might be a reason for this. IO Interactive initially intended for First Light to be less squarely focused on Bond, while his pals would have played a much bigger role in the story.

Speaking to Eurogamer, First Light's lead writer Michael Vogt explained how the game's first act came together. "During the training sequence, we make a false promise," Vogt said. "Basically, we're saying 'This is going to be an ensemble piece, all the 00s working together, as they do in Slovakia'.

"And then we pull the rug out from under you when most of them die, and serendipitously, [Bond's], the last man standing. He could have died in that explosion but he doesn't, and so he emerges as the top agent. But in my very first pitch I think we were actually toying with the idea of making it an ensemble piece, that you had the different agents working together."

Logically, this makes sense. You're not going to put a newly trained agent out in the field on their own until you're certain they can handle it, which given Bond's roguish tendencies would probably take a while. But IO ultimately cut the ensemble concept short to kickstart Bond's character development.

"The story beat that it serves is of course that it goes from all fun and games for him—he's a young kid, he's on an adventure, and he's out globetrotting and playing secret agent—but after that explosion, he wakes up to the harsh reality. When M says that [00] life expectancy is very short, it's like 'Oh, right''. He gets it, and he matures from that, of course, and also from the guilt—maybe the survivor's guilt—of being the one who made it."

Vogt can't recall when exactly this change was made, but it would explain why Cressida and Monroe feel so much like companions who are going to accompany Bond through the entire game. For at least a part of the game's development, that was the plan.

Making money in GTA Online has basically always been a game of whack-a-mole, with players finding the latest and greatest trick, and Rockstar promptly shutting the loophole down. With Grand Theft Auto 6 on the horizon, Rockstar has decided to nerf heists, which were one of the most popular ways to make a good buck in Los Santos.

The latest update added the Kortz Center heist where you're tasked with stealing an art collection. The first hurdle is that it costs at least $16.2 million to get a mansion and art studio upgrade you need to unlock it, and it only pays out a measly $2 million per completion for all your hard work—lower than most existing, easier-to-access heists. If you don't already have a mansion at least, it's not worth the investment.

Compare this to the Doomsday Heist, which can be started by purchasing the cheapest facility, worth $1.2 million, and then a low $25,000 setup fee for Act 1, which previously paid out $975,000. By the time you'd beaten the Acts 2 and 3, you'd be raking in the money.

Alongside this, Rockstar has nerfed multiple other heists' payouts and introduced a weekly bonus to compensate, which I assume is to encourage players to engage with a more diverse array of activities. For example, completing the Kortz Center will only reward you with a bafflingly low $400,000 on your second run of the week. The Diamond Casino's maximum $3.3 million reward has been cut to $2.3 million, and it now goes as low as $1.4 million.

Sure, if you're completing each of the heists every week to earn the first-time bonuses, then it's technically a buff, but most players don't have the resources to do this given the high setup fees. And if you're doing every heist every week, then chances are you're not a casual player anyhow.

Unsurprisingly, these sweeping nerfs haven't gone over well with the community. "Prices go up, paychecks go down. I thought a game would let us escape the world a bit," one player wrote on Reddit. And it's true, all the sought-after vehicles cost a couple of million bucks each, steadily increasing over the past few years, and since Rockstar capped most vehicle resales at $500,000 earlier this year to combat duplication exploits, it's tough to recoup any cash. The new Grotti Veleno GT costs $3 million alone. Buying property is similarly pricey. While payouts have, in practice, been slashed for most players, flashy new rides and facilities are as expensive as ever.

"Wtf are they doing?" another player said. "This will not encourage people to do these heists more. It does the opposite."

Likewise, "If people want to grind the same heist, let them, why discourage it?," said yet another frustrated player. "If it's to make players change up what content they do, maybe change the unpopular heists. Weekly bonus is cool but not enough to make up for the nerfs. Definitely feel like nerfs just to try and push as many players as possible towards GTA 6."

And they make a good point. We still don't know what Rockstar has planned for GTA Online when GTA 6 arrives. Is it to be replaced by a brand-new, completely separate online mode for the long-awaited sequel? Is the current GTA 5 online mode simply going to continue like it is now? Will it be updated for the new era in a similar fashion to Call of Duty's battle royale mode, Warzone? If it's the latter, perhaps these economy tweaks are to set the stage for what's to come. Only Rockstar knows, and it's rarely one to tell.

Aaand relax.

Having fought the first three bosses, slain a familiar parade of public domain monsters, and enjoyed many a crack of Castlevania's new whip, I can confirm that Evil Empire hasn't followed up The Rogue Prince of Persia with its first bad game. If you've been longing for this series to confidently get back to its Symphony of the Night-era glory days, you're in luck. Frankly, I'm happy just to see Castlevania finally back from the dead.

"It was completely crazy," says Emmanuel Nouaille, creative director at Evil Empire, when I ask how it feels to make a new Castlevania game. "It was a blast of course. Just a dream come true." Tsutomu Taniguchi, the game's producer at Konami also assures us that he's happy to be making the first new Castlevania after 12 years of coffin rest.

"But at the same time, I feel a lot of pressure," he says. "It's a happy pressure." Tanighuchi's translator urges us to look at his smiling face so we know he's telling the truth.

Putting on a brave face? No, there's plenty to smile about here. Belmont's Curse introduces Rose Belmont, daughter of Trevor 'star-of-ancient-Vania-games' Belmont. Let's hope Rose hasn't read her game's subtitle, eh? Father and daughter arrive in the ruins of Paris, which has been overtaken by the forces of darkness, naturally. Trevor goes off to make his own investigations while Rose starts exploring Paris and smacking monsters around, occasionally taking a break to cryptically refer to her unnamed mother.

Intriguing…

A dull, tedious part of me will always want my 2D Vanias to be pixel art affairs, but I'll begrudgingly concede Belmont's Curse is a looker. Backgrounds pack so much detail into its far-too-on-fire take on Paris that often it's borderline 2.5D. Castlevania has also never felt smoother to play, and certainly never this welcoming. You start off with three health potions, and can even stack more on top of that. Floor slide and wall jump platforming techniques are available right from the start instead of being stingy unlocks. Enemies drop health-restoring food infrequently, but not as ridiculously rarely as in the earliest games, where you could easily forget they contained a food system at all.

Blasphemy? Possibly, but from the first boss onwards, Belmont's Curse grows a fine set of fangs.

Kid Dracula?

As in '80s and early '90s Castlevania bosses hit suddenly and hard, punishing even the most minor mistakes by snapping your health bar over their knee. Fights outside these behemoth bouts scale up quickly, too: Belmont's Curse loves needling cowards by having threats constantly pursue you across the screen. Fail to deal with some flying gargoyles and they'll stalk you right into your next battle with a big flame shooting horror, multiple harpies, and bats so irritating they must have flapped right out of Pokémon's caves.

For the first time since Order of Ecclesia way back in 2008, a year so distant it might predate Dracula, the series is finally a proper metroidvania again. Given that Evil Empire has never made one and is known for roguelikes, surely the studio must have considered giving Castlevania a similar spin? "It's the first Castlevania we've released in quite some time, so we really did want to give homage to the 2D action exploration games," explains Taniguchi. He stresses that Konami still gave Evil Empire plenty of autonomy, but it looks like everyone aligned on making a metroidvania pretty swiftly.

"We had a lot of discussions at the beginning as to what makes Castlevania special," says Nouaille. "We have a lot of different gameplay styles in the history of Castlevania." But the team decided it had to be what Konami officially calls a "2D action-exploration game" early on. "We didn't talk a lot at the beginning about doing another style of gameplay."

Belmont's curse hits all the metroidvania staples with gusto. Weird hooks in the walls and other progress blockers have you covering the map screen in reminders to make a return trip. There's a vast amount of secrets to discover, with a pleasing frequency of surprisingly smashable walls. Best of all, it rewards you for taking the time to examine its map screen properly, connecting routes in your head and then whipping and swinging your way to the treasures they're hiding.

There's no waypoints or guide arrows here (now that would be blasphemy). Instead, ghosts tell morbid stories that offer clues as to where you should go next. One spirit tells us a tragic yarn about seeing someone dragged under the roots of a cursed tree. Aha, so there's a route beneath those roots! Score! Oh, and, er, sorry for your loss. It's nice to know that if we're completely stuck we can scroll through these hints, even if some are a little patronising. It's not a good idea to look Medusa in the eyes, you say? Hope you didn't notice how hard I just rolled mine…

Old rope

Only Indiana Jones rivals this series for most iconic whip, and Evil Empire has probably given us its best incarnation yet. This whip lets you swing over gaps and yank yourself towards enemies, the latter obviously being something of a mixed blessing. "The whip is not just a tool for traversal," explains Nouaille. "It's used for both combat and traversal. We focused on having something simple to use with a lot of responsive aspects. We like to create a movement like a dance." The idea was to give the player a whip that they actually "use like wings."

Staying airborne as long as possible by whipping from enemy to enemy is like playing the Spider-Man: Vampire Hunter game I never knew I wanted. Swinging off enemies gets steadily more vital in the increasingly cruel platforming sections, too, pairing beautifully with another power that can morph certain platforms and walls in and out of existence.

Leap-whip-whip-morph-whip-morph-slice-leap is incoherent gibberish to you now, but trust me; that's exactly what'll be playing through your head just a few powers in.

The game constantly chucks new weapons at you. I thought I was committed to the fast swipes of the basic sword, until I cheated on it with the lovely chuckable spear. Each weapon and spell has criteria you can fulfill to upgrade it, too. At the most basic this is simply a case of killing enough enemies, but more interesting challenges stand in the way of the bigger unlocks.

These pair nicely with unlockable talismans that offer boons, like more damage delivered when you're airborne, gently pushing you into trying different playstyles. Evil Empire can't simply smash up your toys each run like it could in Dead Cells and Rogue Prince. But it's great to see the team still knows how to encourage you to experiment regardless.

My only issue so far is that, in the nearly two decades since Order of Ecclesia, metroidvanias have been through about five renaissances. The whip is a fine weapon, but it doesn't challenge Nine Sols' revelatory talisman-slapping or even Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown's sublime swordplay (at least, not yet). Getting turned to stone by Medusa's flying heads raises a smile of recognition, but I instantly know to waggle the analogue stick to break free.

Should an epic battle against the forces of darkness feel this much like slipping into a favourite pair of comfy slippers?

At least one of the bosses being Joan of Arc is new, and certainly a novel way to try to butter up a British games journalist.

After three hours of play, Belmont's Curse is a very good metroidvania, and full of potential to be an outstanding one. If it's 'merely' a greatest hits collection then that'll only be a mild disappointment. But I'd be delighted if Evil Empire has some more tricks up its sleeve and whackier weapons worthy of Dead Cells' almighty arsenal. I've got everything crossed for something as sublimely silly as Aria of Sorrow's soul-sucking vacuum cleaner.

If Belmont's Curse can deliver on that, then never mind Dracula; this could well be the entry that finally dethrones the almighty Symphony of the Night.

A man who was found liable for multiple high-profile hacks including a major leak of Grand Theft Auto 6 footage in 2022 has reportedly been released from the secure hospital where he'd been held since 2023, and is now in prison awaiting a retrial.

Arion Kurtaj, who was 18 at the time, was found by a UK court to be part of the Lapsus$ hacking group that had carried out attacks on companies including BT, Uber, Nvidia, and mostly famously, Rockstar, which suffered what we called "one of the biggest leaks in videogame history": 90 Grand Theft Auto 6 videos of varying lengths were uploaded to the GTAForums fan site, more than a year before the first official GTA 6 trailer was released.

A psychiatric assessment of Kurtaj determined that he has "acute autism," and more relevantly, that he was "highly motivated" and "continued to express the intent to return to cybercrime as soon as possible," even as he was in custody for previous such crimes. He was also more than capable of following through: The Rockstar hack was carried out while Kurtaj was under police protection at a Travelodge hotel, reportedly using only an Amazon Firestick, the television in his room, and a cell phone.

The results of that assessment meant the jury in the case was only asked to determine if Kurtaj had committed the hacks, not if he'd done so with criminal intent. After it was found that he had, Kurtaj was sentenced to a secure hospital, for life or until doctors determined that he's no longer a danger.

That determination has apparently now been made. BBC correspondent Joe Tidy, who covered the case and initial sentencing, said on Bluesky that Kurtaj is out of the hospital and "in a normal prison awaiting retrial," currently scheduled for November—ironically, the same month that Grand Theft Auto 6 will finally launch on consoles.

How Kurtaj can be tried now for crimes committed while his mental state was such that he required multiple years of institutionalization isn't clear to me. In response to a similar query on LinkedIn, Tidy said that he is pursuing that line of inquiry as well, but added that police aren't currently saying anything about it: Just getting them to confirm that Kurtaj is out of hospital "was like getting blood out of a stone," he wrote.

Getting lost in history in Assassin's Creed Origins

By Andy Kelly

In Assassin’s Creed we usually visit civilisations at their peak, whether it’s Renaissance Italy or London at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Ubisoft could have done this for Origins too, taking us to the golden age of Ancient Egypt. But instead we visit this period of history in its twilight years. The pharaonic line is coming to an end and the Greeks have dramatically transformed the landscape, culture and religious practices of this part of the world.

This makes for a fascinating architectural contrast. In the largest cities you see statues of Egyptian gods crumbling and forgotten, outnumbered by pristine, polished marble statues of Greek legends. And even monuments, like the pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx, are already falling apart. There’s a tragedy to seeing this grand civilisation fade away as foreign invaders erect gleaming temples and acropolises across the desert.

It might be the best open world Ubisoft has ever created. While riding through the barren Green Mountains region on horseback, idly exploring with no specific goal in mind, I crested a hill and saw a sprawling Roman city resting in a misty valley below. It stopped me in my tracks. The scale is breathtaking, making even the vast cities of previous Assassin’s Creed games seem small in comparison.

Size isn’t everything when it comes to open worlds, of course. Just look at something like Just Cause, which is enormous but consists of little more than large swathes of dull, featureless countryside and a few unconvincing cities. Origins keeps things interesting by splitting its world up into distinct regions, from the oasis town of Siwa and the rocky canyons of the Black Desert, to the ruin-littered sands of Giza and the cultural epicentre that is Alexandria.

Crocodile tears

Faiyum is one of the prettiest and most interesting locations in the game. Founded to worship Sobek, who takes the form of a crocodile, this city is built around a network of canals and dominated by a beautiful, ornate temple dedicated to the god.

Inside, the priests worship a giant crocodile adorned with gold and jewels who they believe is the embodiment of Sobek, and one quest involves hero Bayek trying to find out why the sacred creature has mysteriously started weeping blood.

It took me a hefty 27 hours to finish Origins and there are still areas on the map cloaked in black, indicating that I haven’t travelled there yet. It’s obscenely huge, although the length is artificially extended somewhat by forcing you to reach a certain level before attempting the next story quest.

Exploring Egypt isn’t as thrilling as sailing the Caribbean in Black Flag, which remains my favourite entry in the series. But it’s a much richer, more convincing world overall, and a precious chance to step into history and experience it firsthand.

One of the largest and best changes in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is the new combat system. It's still faithful to the original's lethality, but it's no longer just about standing still waiting to counter an attack.

But you know what I don't love? The confusing removal of hidden blade combat and the ability to pick up enemy weapons. It's dual cutlasses all the way, matey, which gets old pretty fast. In fact, it's been a pretty big point of contention for fans of the original game ever since the remake was revealed.

Black Flag Resynced game director Richard Knight has spoken on the topic in a new interview with YouTuber JorRaptor, revealing why these mechanics were cut and if they're ever coming back.

Firstly, don't stop asking for it: "We can't make any promises [but] we're listening to the community," Knight explains. "We're interested in what people want the most," he adds, and I'd say that these missing features are surely high up the list.

As for the second bit, their absence came down to prioritising resources, Knight says. "During development, if you looked at Edward—he's so powerful right now and has so many tools—and so we prioritised core combat because we needed to nail that."

"Something like throwing weapons, while it's cool, it's just like 'he already has ten ways to kill somebody'. So, given the cost to reinvent the feature and rebuild it from the ground up with today's characters, rigs, and animations, there's a lot more that goes into it. It was just lower priority for us."

Core combat is, obviously, the most critical part of Edward's kit—I love the kick, sweep, and easier access to the rope dart—but these were iconic features of the original Black Flag. It means you can't steal a musket and do a cool, running takedown with it, for example, or pick up an axe and start swinging.

But there's hope yet that Ubisoft will figure out how to add them to Resynced post-launch. I suppose that's one of the benefits of Ubisoft cramming an expanded cash shop and weekly challenges into the remake: more incentive to expand on the base game and keep us all sailing the high seas.

My train spins through the air after launching off a skyscraper-high vertical ramp, swiftly twisting onto another bolt-upright bit of track, my view smothered with speed lines, Japanese onomatopoeia, and sparks as enthusiastic allies yell encouragement. A gorgeous vista stretches out below me, Japan's countryside filled with cherry blossom trees and bright blue water.

In these brief and highly curated moments Denshattack appears to be an exciting combination of Jet Set Radio's cel shaded style and Tony Hawk's tricks and challenges, with an added dash of Taito's arcade classic Densha de Go for good measure. It's an impression that sadly soon goes off the rails, any interaction longer than a social media clip's worth of action revealing a fully loaded freight train's worth of issues.

I may technically be controlling a train, but bar a token nod to not derailing on curves the metal box I'm in charge of never behaves anything like one, even if I temporarily set the acrobatics aside. There's no inertia, no weight pulling me back on steep slopes, no assistance from gravity on the way down a ramp, no careful adjusting of a virtual mascon to smoothly slow down for a corner or push for flat-out bursts of energy on a long straight.

It could be anything. A person. A dirt bike. Shadow the Hedgehog. Tracks themselves are broken into tiny chunks and discarded as often as the game's whims deem necessary, replaced with anything from half pipes to trampolines and ferris wheels.

I never expected Denshattack to play anything like a serious sim, but I did hope the train aspect of the game might involve more than letting me pick and decorate a few train-like shapes, especially as the (Japanese) word is literally in the title.

Ignoring the game's self-chosen focal point entirely and pretending it's purely a futuristic trick-based score attack experience does little to improve things. There's an inescapable feeling while I play that it would be happier if I didn't get in the way. Personal creativity is constantly pushed to the side, unwelcome in spite of all the combo multipliers and flips I can do. Every stage wants to tell a story at all times, to be a wild string of events where pure-hearted people shout nice supportive things as structures crumble and wacky scenarios pop up around them: A giant mech. A laser-spewing kaiju. A kabuki play. There are even playable Rock Band and Ikaruga homages to work through.

I'm rarely trusted to make my own fun. There's always some weird quirk to work around (at the most basic, optional rainbow tracks that are completely invisible, and therefore, unable to be spotted and planned for, until a gauge fills up). I can't strategise or create combos on my own terms.

Or guarantee I'll react in time to whatever "fun" eye-catching stunt is coming up either. The game may haphazardly offer icons warning of upcoming dangers, but when a red "!" can mean anything from "obstacle on the line" to "a giant shadow monster is about to rise out of the sea" and I've got half a second at most to react, they're of little practical use. Occasional poor colour choices only exacerbate these issues, long strings of orange lanterns hanging right beside orange grind rails, lines of yellow lights near yellow track, green air currents set against a sea green background. I'm constantly fighting the stages themselves. Failure does little beyond setting me a short way back so I can try again, the rote repetition only leading to increasing irritation instead of a meaningful opportunity to learn.

I either do what I'm told when I'm told to do it or… Denshattack has no "or," too much of the game playing like a string of QTE-like gimmicks. Me being in complete control is never the game's priority.

Attempting to make do and master what is in here is routinely thwarted by the game's wobbly sense of internal consistency, my capabilities and even plain old physics only intermittently available. My ability to race at odd angles and perform Titanfall 2-like wall runs flickers on and off like a faulty lightbulb—that bit of track, that vertical surface—and attempts to think outside the box and perform these stunts outside specific moments is brought to a crashing halt, Denshattack tut-tutting about my balance and deciding any contact with smooth perpendicular walls is a punishable offence. The water's surface must never be touched except in the occasional stages where I'm allowed to ride underneath it for extended periods of time. Crashing into things is an instant fail unless the game decides that actually crashing is OK for this bit or this particular object.

It doesn't feel fair, and the lack of clarity makes it difficult to improve my own skills when what is and isn't allowed varies so drastically from one section of a stage to the next.

Denshattack doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. For a game with such strong anti-corporation/environmentalist themes—freeing Nara's famous deer is a stage-long event—it's a little odd to see so many optional challenges involve some variation of "scare the animals by honking the train's horn." Trains are surprisingly irrelevant to a story full of them. Tricking struggles to rise beyond the level of a simple distraction: Abilities gained throughout the story don't broaden my toolset or scoring capabilities, and retrying an earlier track completely disables any later abilities gained. Tricks are just a way to survive the latest set of scripted setpieces.

It isn't clear and consistent enough for serious score attack play, yet it's also far too fussy to allow the raw absurdity of moments like controlling a shark or countering giant baseballs with aerial tricks to sweep me up in a wave of comedic positivity. This train has gotten lost somewhere between two diverging tracks.

Exciting news: it is officially Garrett summer. Just recently, Nightdive announced it's been cooking a Thief remaster at the PC Gaming Show, bringing modern resolutions, controller support, and myriad other modcons to the venerable 1998 stealth game. But if that's not enough for you—or you just believe the sacred brooks no improvement—the original game is getting some love too: GOG is inducting Thief Gold into its Preservation Program.

The Preservation Program is GOG's name for its expanding roster of games that the storefront is committed to keeping running from here until the heat death of the universe (or a catastrophe of similar scale, like the store going under). From Windows 11 to Windows 8,000, GOG is pledging to sell you a copy of Thief that you can simply boot and play on modern systems, with GOG offering technical support in the event it doesn't work.

GOG's pushing the boat out on this one a little. Where some games that get folded into the Preservation Program get little more than a kick of the tyres and a statement of ongoing support, Thief is getting some extra goodies as part of its induction. GOG's adding "German, French, and Polish localizations, updated graphics and audio defaults, improved UI scaling, optimized controls, and the latest NewDark 1.27 engine update". GOG's also bundling in the game's original, pre-Gold version, The Dark Project, should you want to play that.

Even more dramatically—if, like me, you are old and haggard and like playing videogames on your television—is the addition of gamepad support. "We’ve integrated the Gamepad Mod into the game and paired it with the GOG Input Wrapper," says GOG, "bringing full support for modern controllers—including radial menus, customizable controls, rumble, and compatibility with PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Logitech, and Amazon Luna controllers." Oh, and as ever, no need to buy the game again to get this stuff if you already own it on GOG.

I'm rather impressed. It's like Thief got a mini-remaster ahead of Nightdive's full-fat remaster. I suppose GOG felt like it needed to put some welly into this one: not only is Thief a classic, but this is the first game to get added to its Preservation Program as a result of GOG Patron voting. That's the system whereby those who sign up to chuck GOG $5 a month (a little walkin' around money) get to vote on which games get added to the Preservation library.

The voting on the next game to get the Thief treatment is already live. Patrons can choose between Nox, Lands of Lore 1 & 2, Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honour, Silver, and Albion.

18 months after release, Capcom is slashing the price on Monster Hunter Wilds and discontinuing three of its bundles in favour of… three different bundles. Okay, cool.

The change is coming in starting from August 3 or August 4, depending on where you are in the world. For the bundles, it seems like a little bit of shuffling and consolidation is happening. Its Deluxe Edition, Premium Deluxe Edition, and Cosmetic DLC Pass are being retired in favour of the following:

• Gold Edition: Base game plus the below Cosmetic DLC Collection
• Cosmetic DLC Collection: Has everything from the first four DLC packs, Festival Accord DLC, Deluxe Pack, and the below Extra Cosmetics DLC Pack
• Extras Cosmetic DLC Pack: Includes "select paid cosmetic DLC only previously available as standalone products."

It's all a tad confusing—probably thanks to the fact there are almost 200 extra items you can fork out money for, according to the Steam DLC page for the game—but it mostly seems like Capcom is trying to stuff all the microtransactions into a bigger bundle, since the Premium Deluxe Edition currently only offers everything from the first two packs.

The more interesting thing here, though, is what comes at the end of Capcom's announcement. "In addition, the Monster Hunter Wilds base game will receive a permanent MSRP reduction starting August 4, 2026."

There's not even a hint to how much Capcom will skim off the current price, which stands at a whopping $70. Its price point has been a bit of a point of contention since its release—you can scoop up both Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter Rise for less than one copy of Wilds, and some will argue that the former two are far more enjoyable games than the latter.

We do have another Capcom game as a loose frame of reference, though. Dragon's Dogma 2 recently underwent a permanent price cut—going from $70 to $40—though the game's been out almost an entire year longer than Wilds, so I'd imagine something a little less severe. Perhaps in the $50 to $60 range, I'd wager.

Either way, this feels like a net positive all around. I'm not a fan of endless, silly microtransactions, but neatening them up into a bigger bundle feels like a safe play. And a permanent price cut seems like a sensible choice for a game that, despite huge launch concurrents, never really found its footing and has ultimately settled into the realm of distinct averageness.

The lack of a Grand Theft Auto 6 PC port at launch is a sore spot for those of us faithful to the ol' mouse and keyboard. Sure, it's not new for Rockstar to prioritise console over PC (it's got a marketing deal with Sony, after all), especially with new game launches, but I thought we were beyond that. But we've got Phantom Vice Auto to look forward to on November 19 instead, and that's probably just as good, right?

So, why is Rockstar passing on a simultaneous PC launch for its games, including the upcoming GTA 6? According to former Rockstar producer John Ricchio in an interview with Reece 'Kiwi Talkz' Reilly on YouTube, it's not because the studio doesn't "care about PC".

Ricchio describes a time when games were typically made for PC first, focusing on the strongest hardware, and then downsized for consoles before launch. Naturally, this led to some shoddy console ports cramming optimisation for weaker hardware at the last minute.

"So you're much better off starting with the constraints," Ricchio explains. "Shrinking is a lot harder than extending" to more powerful hardware. "Oh, we've got extra room. Cool. We can de-optimise some things or make them more shiny."

Ricchio then punched us in the gut, noting that back when the first Red Dead Redemption was in the lab, they had a PC port working "very early" in development. Those who patiently waited will know that the PC version came in 2024, more than 14 years later. And you can blame GTA 5.

According to Ricchio, getting PC versions ready is more about development priorities. "It's not that we don't care about PC. It was just 'is it worth spending time getting a PC port going versus working on GTA 5?' … It's never any specific, anti any platform." So, he adds, "If you're working on that, you're not working on something else usually … There has to be enough of a business reason to do some of those ports, or the lift has to be so light that it'll be super easy to do. And it's rarely super light."

It still feels like Rockstar is having its cake and eating it too, though. Ricchio points out that in the past, there were cases of "legitimate hardware limitations" when developing for console compared to PC. That power gap is "definitely closer" now.

While I'll likely be taking the hit and playing GTA 6 on console (then playing it again when the PC version eventually arrives), it turns out you lot are actually quite patient—39% of our readers are more than happy to wait. Patience is a virtue, but Rockstar knows what it's doing.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is, naturally, a modern Ubisoft game—and as modern Ubisoft games are wont to do, it had some really annoying DLC wrapped up into it alongside an in-game cash shop. One point of contention was a day-one map pack DLC for five bucks, which reveals the location of every collectible in game, thus defeating the purpose of… y'know, looking for and collecting them.

What did Ubisoft reap as a reward for this chicanery? Well, aside from a brief dent to its overall Steam review score—one that's evened out to a respectable "very positive" 80% at the time of writing—not all that much.

According to the analysis work of Alinea Insight, the remaster made a whopping $35.1 million on Steam alone over the first four days. Its day-one DLC, which totals at an eye-watering $85 of cosmetics (and the aforementioned map pack), is responsible for around 2.8% of that number.

Which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's still $1 million that Ubisoft otherwise wouldn't have snagged—and still a tremendous amount of purchases on aggregate. And while my inner gamer naturally balks at the prospect of this DLC, it's almost hard to blame Ubisoft for the move when this is how it's rewarded.

Like, looking at these cosmetic packs—yes, the concept art, modelling, and implementation probably costs quite a bit, but certainly nowhere approaching $1 million. And the map pack, though it galls me, is likely just a few lines of code.

I still think it's deeply cynical, but just like that $90 World of Warcraft dinosaur that made Blizzard $15-$17 million, gamers are not great at actually voting with their wallets in a way that would dissuade companies like Ubisoft, which have no obligation to operate on principle, from basically printing a bunch of free money.

Assassin's Creed Unity, it hardly needs to be said, had its share of problems. At launch, the game which was intended to be Ubisoft's big technical showcase on the then-new PS4 and Xbox One was rife with sometimes-hilarious bugs, filled with map barf, crammed with microtransactions, had a rather odd emphasis on co-op gameplay in a historically singleplayer series, and was—a little garnish—venomously reactionary about its setting: the French Revolution.

And yet, and yet, I maintain it was actually one of the best Assassin's Creed games, and represented a much more interesting avenue the series could have gone down had Ubisoft not embraced full Witcher 3-ification in games like Odyssey, Origins, Shadows, and Valhalla.

I would like to call Jean Guesdon, former AC brand content director, as witness to Unity's defence. In a chat with the most recent Retro Gamer magazine (via GamesRadar), he came to the game's defence, hailing it as an overlooked entry in the series that fell victim to its own ambition.

Unity is "one of the most underestimated games in the series," says Guesdon. That's not to say it's unfairly underestimated—Guesdon is clear that the game had its troubles: "Sadly, Unity’s launch was a huge challenge because of several reasons," he says.

"Like Assassin’s Creed 3 with AnvilNext, Unity’s development was impacted by the incredible new tech allowing for 1:1 scale, interiors, massive crowds, a brand-new parkour system and an integrated multiplayer component."

All that whizzbang tech gave the devs a lot of plates to spin: "Pushing content and tech at the same time is always very demanding, and this opus maybe pushed too many things at once," says Guesdon. But dammit, it had ideas—"Unity’s team decided that the key component would be Paris, one city only. Hence all decisions were made in order to make the setting shine and ensure players would experience the French Revolution like never before.

"This is why all mechanics and systems were more dense and focussed," says Guesdon. "Maybe we could have done better in terms of progressive introduction but overall I don’t think the experience was too complicated."

I adore Unity's humid Paris streets, thronged with sans-culottes, and I love the fact that it's the only Assassin's Creed game I've ever played where stealth felt like it served a purpose—where combat carried any actual risk. Will Ubi ever try to pick up those ideas, and return to the dense, one-city game format of yore? Well, it sort of tried that with Mirage, and people didn't like it, but I'm holding out hope regardless.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has been a massive success for Ubisoft, having sold two million copies in a day and breaking the series' concurrent player records on Steam by nearly 40,000. Despite this good news, the company is planning to lay off 51 developers at Ubisoft Barcelona. These layoffs were announced last month, alongside reductions at Ubisoft's teams in Winnipeg and Belgrade.

Ubisoft Barcelona has a long history of supporting the publisher's larger studios, including Assassin's Creed, The Crew, Ghost Recon, and Immortals: Fenyx Rising. Of course, its latest efforts have been on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, where it was responsible for all the underwater sections. Those beautiful (terrifying) diving bell sites? Brought to life by Ubisoft Barcelona.

"Ubisoft Barcelona did all the underwater levels," explains Manel Cota, a tech and gameplay animator on the team, on social media. "And that same team is being fired right now because Ubisoft thinks that's what we deserve :)"

This frustration from a blow right as you should be celebrating is echoed by quality assurance lead Isabel Codina García. "Today is a bittersweet day," García said on social media. After having worked on the Black Flag remake for over two and a half years, "the whole AC team at Ubisoft Barcelona was informed of a collective redundancy plan."

"After seven years at Ubisoft Barcelona, this is not how I imagined it would end. But I am genuinely grateful for the people I have met and everything I have learned along the way."

Ubisoft Barcelona will ne holding a strike for three days from r/gaming

But the team isn't going quietly. The Spanish union La Confederación General del Trabajo has called for a three-day strike, starting today, over the planned cuts at Ubisoft Barcelona. "After an intense production, the company claims a 'strategic shift' to justify these layoffs," the flyer reads. "After years of dedication to our team, the company has turned its back on us. We will never see the fruits of our labour, and the reward for our hard work will be the loss of our jobs."

From the archives: This feature was originally published in PC Gamer #302 (UK, March 2017). You can still subscribe to PC Gamer to get new issues of the magazine (in print!) every month.

My playthrough of the first game was more disaster than Dishonored. At the time, I didn’t quite grasp that slitting every throat I met in those early Dunwall levels would send me spiraling toward the dreaded High Chaos ending, never to return.

As the hours rolled on and the increasing swell of rats began to gnaw on Corvo’s bootstraps, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to redress the balance by going full stealth, stifling the screams of my foes without shuffling them off their mortal coil.

Alas, Arkane’s Chaos system was more severe than I’d anticipated. The rats continued to scoff their way through the mounds of decaying flesh strewn about the city, and poor Emily might as well have been crowned Queen of the Dunwall rodents by the end, her citizens having long since been digested in a million tiny rat stomachs.

No wonder Corvo felt so sluggish when he possessed them—his hosts had been binging on the Great Dunwall Rot-off. Fortunately, Arkane evidently managed to get the exterminators in before the events of Dishonored 2, and I finally got my chance to do things right.

In a fit of madness, I decided to embark on a perfect, no-kill, no-detection run—a tall order for someone whose last attempt at stealth ended up elbowing half of Prague to death in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

40 hours later, I finally succeeded, but not without having doused my trigger finger in several vats of anti-itch cream first. Indeed, there were several moments during the Clockwork Mansion mission where I almost gave in.

After five hours of quick-saves and hasty restarts (yes, five), I could have happily shot Kirin Jindosh in the face during our eventual confrontation, but the opportunity to strap him to his own electric chair and reduce him to a babbling idiot felt like better revenge.

Even the Grand Designs team would struggle to piece his house back together, let alone someone who can’t even spell their own name anymore.

Little did I know that Jindosh would have one last laugh, as just a couple of chapters later I encountered his infamous Jindosh Lock, a sealed door that you can only open by solving a riddle. I could have squeezed some hints out of the local neighbourhood gang lords, but I was determined to solve it peacefully. So I sat there, staring at it. I don’t know how much time passed, but even my monitor got bored waiting, going into sleep mode long before I cracked the combination.

Paper case

Damn you, Jindosh, I thought. This scrambled brainpan isn’t going to get the best of me. So I put my keyboard aside, grabbed a pen and reached for my dusty gaming notebook, something I haven’t touched since scrawling my way through The Witness earlier in the year. I tore out several scraps of paper and made cards for every last variable, shifting them around until, at last, my brain whirred into life.

Admittedly, it was immensely satisfying solving Jindosh’s last remaining masterwork, but it did make me wonder whether I should have been so merciful just a few hours before. I won’t spoil the solution here, but I will say you should definitely start with the alcohol (both literally and figuratively). It helps. A lot.

I've sunk legendary galleons, sailed across the Caribbean procuring plunder, and I've experienced Edward Kenway's redemption arc from start to finish. But upon rolling credits on Ubisoft's nostalgia-fuelled remake, I came to a realisation: almost everything good in Black Flag Resynced exists in the original game.

Sure, it's prettier and quality of life changes do help sand away the rougher edges, but removing all friction from a game isn't necessarily a good thing. Take stealth sequences, for instance—Black Flag Resynced now allows you to crouch anywhere, but it also removes all fail conditions from stealth missions, making the system somewhat redundant.

This give-and-take is something I experienced frequently with the remake. Resynced makes climbing far faster, but this means you no longer have to think about movement as you zoom up the side of almost every structure in sight. And don't even get me started on removing hidden blade combat, fisticuffs, and temporary weapons. The new cutlass-only fighting may be slightly harder, but it's ultimately bland thanks to fewer options.

I've now spent 40 hours with Black Flag Resynced, but I find myself unconvinced it ever needed a remake, especially one which more often chooses to change core components over retaining the feel of the original. It'd be a lie to say Resynced isn't good, but almost everything good in it is still good in Black Flag. Better, in fact, if a fond nostalgic adventure be your wish and you'd prefer not to toss a handful of dubloons in the sand for a game you likely own.

Hopping into the original Black Flag after playing Resynced, I was shocked by how remarkably well the game has aged. The combat still feels fluid (albeit easy thanks to chain finishers) but it benefits from the classic high profile, low profile control scheme that came to define the first three Assassin's Creed games—something the remake also does away with.

The movement and climbing also feel far more grounded. Instead of zipping up the sides of cathedrals, you've got to route yourself somewhat, especially since Black Flag includes a bunch of tailing sequences that require you to keep a target in sight at all times. Many players despised these, but after playing Resynced where stealth never mattered and I could murder my way through every situation, the challenge felt positively refreshing.

Alongside the visual upgrade, one of the few unequivocally positive changes is that ship combat feels far more dramatic in Resynced. The Jackdaw (Ed's ship) has new firing modes and officer upgrades, but naval battles are also significantly harder. Where, in the original, you could feasibly defeat a legendary ship without a fully upgraded Jackdaw, that feels almost impossible in the remake—ships fire fast, accurately, and use mortars more.

If you found naval combat in Black Flag too easy, this is definitely a good change. For my part, I found that the tough ship battles came to revolve around Lucy Baldwin (one of the new officers) and her Perfect Brace ability, which all but mitigates damage when you time a brace appropriately.

Even 13 years later, Black Flag's story is still first-rate, exploring, as it does, a man driven by greed and personal ambition, qualities that still make him a breath of fresh air by comparison with Assassin's Creed's usual goody two shoes protagonists. It's so well-written, in fact, that the new quests Resynced adds can't help but come off poorly by comparison.

The same goes for retaining the in-game shop that lets you purchase cosmetics that look like they're right out of Skull and Bones, or even buy the locations of in-game collectibles for real money. And don't forget the inexplicable addition of the weird Animus projects from Assassin Creed Shadows. I'm not sure who thought adding a battlepass mechanic to the remake was a good idea, but honestly, it sucks.

Ubisoft added many of these elements to modernise Black Flag, but ultimately creates a juxtaposition between old and new which really doesn't reflect well on either Ubisoft itself or the state of our industry. Black Flag was a formative game for me, arguably the beginning of open world bloat for the series, but a fun, well-written adventure with some of the best side content around—no wonder it's one of the few Assassin's Creed games I 100%-ed.

But Resynced ultimately doesn't feel like the same game to me. I thought it did, but then I went back and played the original Black Flag and remembered what it was actually like. I suppose it depends why you're playing a remake. If your goal is to revisit your past experiences and nostalgia, the original will serve you far better in that endeavor.

I'd never considered the prospect that some people might cheat at playing Helldivers 2. But I suppose it's inevitable given some people will find ways to cheat at anything. In this case, rogue Helldivers have found ways to game super credits—the premium currency used to buy Warbonds—to earn them at impossible rates, and it's become such a problem that Arrowhead has implemented new ways to tackle it.

"You've told us that cheaters and exploiters ruin the experience that it feels unfair when someone games the super credit system while you're out there earning yours the hard way," Arrowhead wrote in a Steam post. "We heard you, and we're starting to implement changes that will tackle issues like this."

Arrowhead only explains these changes in the broadest terms, stating they include "improving our monitoring methods for suspicious super credit activity." Basically, if Arrowhead sees a player earning credits "at an unreasonably high rate" there are "now steps in place to counter this."

The developer stresses that players who earn super credits the traditional way—grinding maps, clearing POIs, looting bunkers etc "will never experience any change". Instead, the system is targeted at "Cheaters. Botters. People using automation and duplication exploits to hoover up super credits at rates no human Helldiver could ever reach legitimately."

Ultimately, Arrowhead claims that "A healthier economy means the super credits you earn through honest service to Super Earth stay worth earning". This could be a joke, but it is a slightly odd way to frame the solution in any case given Helldivers 2 doesn't really have an economy. At least, not one that players have any real say in. It isn't like you can buy and sell items from other players, or that the price of Warbonds is affected by the game in any way. Not to mention, the main benefactor of these changes would be Arrowhead, as it is the studio which ultimately profits off of super credits.

Which isn't to say that cheaters should be allowed to roam freely, especially if players' games are being clogged up by bots. But I do wonder if the prevalence of credit cheaters in Helldivers 2 is symptomatic of a broader problem—namely that earning super credits is tremendously boring.

As has been the case since launch, players can only acquire super credits from the same dozen or so points of interest that appear randomly on a map, and scouring those POIs time and again grew tiresome ages ago. Compounding the problem is that the fastest way to earn super credits is to play on easier difficulties, creating a contradiction between natural player progression and unlocking premium items.

To be clear, I'm not saying that earning super credits should be easier—although given Helldivers 2 is a premium game that has sold 20 million copies by this point, Arrowhead could afford to be a bit more generous with them. But I would like earning super credits to be more fun, perhaps tied to some new side objectives or combat challenges rather than blithely hoping they appear in some random bunker or shipping crate.

Super credits aside, Arrowhead's broader efforts to address player concerns with Helldivers 2 appears to be working. The studio has adjusted and reworked many different aspects of the game lately, from performance to player progression.

As a result, recent Steam reviews have shifted from mostly negative to mostly positive in the space of a couple of months. While I wouldn't say we're in the "We're so back" phase of the game's turbulent relationship with its community, Helldivers 2 is kind of back, which is good to see.

After Traffic and Breaking Bad used it for scenes set there it became know as "the Mexican filter", though it's sometimes used for scenes set in South Asia or anywhere a bit tropical. You may recognize it as "the piss filter" that stained the original incarnation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's the yellow gradient that's usually intended to make things look warm, and it's not to everyone's taste. Like piss, I guess.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is the latest videogame to fall under the stream, making Edward Kenway look a bit more tanned and the waters look a bit more green. I didn't think it was particularly excessive until I saw some before and after screenshots with it removed, and yeah, it does seem a bit dehydrated actually.

These images come courtesy of Blu, a modder who has cooked up a reshade called ACBlackFlag Natural Colors: "A simple reshade preset that removes the ugly yellow filter from the game and corrects oversaturated colors."

You'll need the latest version of Reshade to install it. While you're at it, the ACBlackFlagFix will let you uncap the cutscene framerate, set cloth to animate at 60 fps, and remove pillarboxing, while Fast Launch will get you through those annoying startup videos at a rate of knots.

It's a miserable time in the upper echelons of game development right now, but in the midst of all the layoffs, cancelled games, and legendary studios being horribly and inexplicably gutted, one company at least is riding high—Saber Interactive.

Previously known for vehicle simulators and middling action games like World War Z, Saber found itself with a monster hit on its hands two years ago, courtesy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. Saber saw colossal success with the license, and according to Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits, the sequel put the studio on the map for other licenses seeking the videogame treatment.

In an interview with The Game Business (via RPS), Willits said that Space Marine 2 "literally changed everything" for Saber's fortunes. "It not only changed the way that the team looks at making games, it changed how people look at us," he explained.

Willits said that Space Marine 2's success has been a huge boost to Saber's confidence and their ambitions. "I've seen this in my career. When you have a huge hit, when you go to make the next game, everything has to be awesome. It's like, 'This has got to be the most awesome toaster ever.' And it fuels success."

The studio's confidence has been further bolstered by other potential partners now approaching them to collaborate, with Willits stating that numerous "major license" holders have been in touch with potential deals. "We are in a very fortunate position to turn down more than we can accept. I can't say the name, but … you know you're successful when you've turned down those guys."

Following Space Marine 2's success, Willits said that Saber's plan is to continue adapting other licenses, in games like Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, simply because having that pre-existing fanbase generally makes those games a safer bet: "Let's talk about Hellraiser. If we wanted to make a survival horror game and it was our own IP, it would be more of an uphill battle. But people have heard of Hellraiser. People have heard of Space Marine, and Space Marine 2 was a huge success. World War Z, a great book, okay movie, and a super good video game."

Grand Theft Auto 3's Ghost City was my first proper experience of community discovery.

I was too young to fully appreciate game-breaking in the likes of Super Mario and Alex Kidd, so the idea of flying the clipped-wing Dodo aircraft from the runway of Frances International Airport at a very specific angle in order to break the 3D map and wind up in an otherwise inaccessible area—the section which housed the game's opening bank robbery cutscene, floating well beyond the playable map—blew my teenage mind.

In 2004, modder Eliano86 built a bridge that allowed players to more formally access the area with less of the faff, however the project's original hosting platform (gta-downloads.com) has long since disappeared from the interwebs. Now, hobbyist creator Mod_Saver has resurrected that project well over two decades down the line. Enter Ghost City Available.

"For over a decade, this specific alternative bridge mod was considered 'Lost Media'," says Mod_Saver. "The original hosting platform went completely offline, and the original link was dead forever. Even the Wayback Machine couldn't recover the downloadable files. This mod was gone.

"Instead of letting it fade into history, I decided to fully recreate and resurrect it from scratch based on an old 2012 video (GTA 3 - Tips & Tricks - How to Reach Ghost Town by GTA Series Videos) footage. But I didn't just clone it: I fixed its biggest flaw. The original 2004 mod was strictly visual (you would fall straight through the Ghost Town floor). 22 years later, I have finally built the missing collision files (.col) to make the entire island solid and fully playable for the very first time."

Which is pretty beautiful, truth be told. I'm a sucker for game preservation, for unearthing secrets and for the passion that drives each and every hobbyist endeavour—in this case in relation to a game now 25 years old and an OG mod just a few years younger.

I gotta hand this one to the suits: I thought gamers might find a $60 price tag on a rehash of a 13-year-old Assassin's Creed game to be a bit much, and apparently I was wrong. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced sold more than two million copies in just one day, and has handily surpassed Steam player counts of newer games in the series, including Assassin's Creed Shadows.

"Dash my Buttons... Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has already passed 2 million copies sold!" Ubisoft wrote on X the day after the overhauled Black Flag launched. "Whether you're sailing with us again, or stepping aboard the Jackdaw for the first time: THANK YOU from the bottom of ARR hearts."

It's notable here that Ubisoft refers specifically to two million copies sold, as opposed to the "one million players" it used to characterize the success of Assassin's Creed Shadows in its first day of release. As Joshua Wolens noted at the time, it left us uncertain as to how Shadows was really doing compared to Valhalla, although Ubisoft later said Shadows had put up the "second-highest day one sales revenues in Assassin's Creed franchise history."

A more straightforward comparison can be found in the concurrent player numbers on Steam, where Black Flag Resynced stands head and shoulders above the rest. Here too, some differences need to be accounted for: Ubisoft had a years-long no Steam dalliance so Valhalla didn't arrive on that storefront until a couple years after its debut on the Epic Games Store, and Shadows was weighed down by coordinated culture war nonsense over the presence of the Black samurai Yasuke. Shadows also costs $10 more than Black Flag Resynced.

Still, it's about as close to apples-to-apples as we're going to get, and the numbers make it clear: Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

(These are ordered by their all-time peak concurrent player count.)

"Black Flag has always held a special place in the heart of the community, and ours." Assassin's Creed brand boss Martin Schelling said. "Bringing it back with Resynced was a promise to that passion for Edward’s adventures, and to the unique sense of freedom players experienced back then. Seeing two million players set sail on day one, along with the great reviews from critics, is the greatest reward we could have hoped for."

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is here and violently colon-less, despite my deep-rooted ancestral urge to fill every gap between those words with dots and dashes, as our forefathers did in the days of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

But it's not Ubisoft's crimes against grammar that prompted the game to hit Mixed Steam reviews at launch (it's picked up since, and at time of writing is at Mostly Positive). It was the fact that, in typical Ubisoft fashion, the game's store page ripples with microtransactions for outfits, weapons, and the obligatory 'Pay $5 to play less of the $60 game you just bought' map-reveal pack.

The reviews were home to a lot of people who felt nickel-and-dimed. "What's the point of getting the deluxe version when, immediately in game, there's $84.91-worth [of] 'DLC' that you don't own" asked one. "I want a single player experience I can enjoy WITHOUT microtransactions," wrote another.

Ubi, perhaps inadvisably, is actually responding to some of these reviews, though. The studio's boilerplate response to a bunch of complaints about the game's microtransactions reads as follows:

We've seen your feedback since launch, and we're reading all of it. Thank you for caring this much about Black Flag Resynced. We want to be clear on one point: the standard edition is the full, complete experience. Every mission, every island, the full story and the complete world are all there, with nothing held back. The additional packs are entirely optional extras for players who want them, never a requirement to enjoy or complete the game.

We'll keep listening as you play!

At least one positive review that mentioned the microtransactions got a differently-worded but similar "We hear you" response. "The frustration around day-one DLC is something we take seriously," Ubi said in that one, while reiterating that the game's DLC isn't a 100% necessary purchase.

Which certainly strikes me as a little odd! I can think of two possible explanations here. Either Ubi genuinely thinks people are going to experience some sort of Damascene conversion upon being confronted with the corporation's unassailable logic—which would be very silly—or it's just coating a fairly catty 'You control the buttons you press' response in anodyne marketing speak. Which would also be silly, but at least in a kind of amusing way.

I've not touched the remake myself, but our Rory wasn't happy with how Ubisoft had tried to relentlessly monetise the Black Flag remake when he was playing it. Somehow, I doubt a copy-paste assurance that the DLC isn't necessary to beat the game will make him feel any better about it.

Our reviewer Morgan actually agrees with Ubi that the DLC is entirely ignorable outfits and weapons, but therein lies the tackiness of the whole affair. What's actually annoying, he reckons, is how easy it is to accidentally end up on the store page during normal play—when you press Start to pause, pressing Start again to unpause will actually take you to the store tab. To leave the pause menu, you actually need to hit B/Circle. Diabolical stuff.

For the most part, the long-awaited and worst-kept secret, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, is very faithful to one of my favourite games from 13 years ago. And anything that's brand-new, like some islands, the ship officers, and an extended story, fits in pretty seamlessly, almost like they were there in the original.

But you know what I don't remember from the original Black Flag? A microtransaction store filled with obnoxious outfits, faux battle passes, and weekly challenges. You know where I've seen that before? The RPG era of Assassin's Creed. Where I hated it.

In a full-priced remake of a 13-year-old swashbuckler, and a single-player game no less, Ubisoft decided to tack on one of the most distasteful cases of monetisation. You're greeted by the store on the main menu, little adverts when you pause the game, and it's actually fewer buttons to access the shop in-game than it is to save your progress. That's neat.

Inside this store you'll see very immersion-breaking outfits that I'm sure must appeal to someone, otherwise they wouldn't exist. I'll stick to my pirate outfits. Though I suppose it is being faithful to the original Black Flag in letting you buy resources and the 'Map Pack' that just reveals all of the treasure maps, Mayan stones, and so on. I mean, you could just Google that if you're lazy.

So, you might say that I shouldn't complain because it doesn't really affect me. True, to an extent—I won't buy exploitative map packs or these gaudy skins, so I won't see them in my game. But there's still a cash shop shoehorned into a "faithfully enhanced remake". That's not what I'd call faithful or enhanced.

More importantly, it undermines one of the key areas I'd have liked the remake to improve—the lack of new outfits in Resynced is one of my main disappointments. I want more costumes to find while exploring the world, especially now that it's bigger. Instead, the original outfits have simply been shifted out of the merchants and into chests across the map. The new skins Ubisoft has created, you've got to pay for separately.

Then there are the Animus Projects and whatnot directly lifted from Assassin's Creed Shadows. There are free (thankfully) reward tracks that look like battle passes, and you progress them by completing weekly Anomaly challenges. There's the Exchange store where you can trade Keys for Connor's iconic robes—I can only assume that Altair's and Ezio's robes, which were present in the original and are now mysteriously absent, will appear in the store in the future update.

Now look, Ubisoft, I'm not logging on each week to complete mindless challenges like it's a live-service multiplayer shooter. Just let me find the damn outfits by exploring the beautiful open world you've created and diligently expanded on in Resynced. Please.

Ubisoft was presented with the perfect opportunity to iterate on what many, myself included, would claim is the best Assassin's Creed game. And in as many ways as it has, it's also taken a step back. Content locked behind unnecessary, mindless challenges and microtransactions could instead have been fun rewards for the new activities and locations the team has added. If Black Flag Resynced is faithful to anything, it's Ubisoft's obsession with trying to pinch my dubloons. Talk about the golden age of piracy.

Black Flag Resynced has finally launched, and with it, a reprisal of the eternal debate surrounding the different stripes of Assassin's Creed combat. As Morgan notes in our review, Resynced ultimately "loses more than it gains" thanks to its wide-ranging changes masquerading as quality of life, and I'm inclined to agree.

For me, the most glaring offender here are the fights. Now don't get me wrong, Black Flag's combat was a bit of a joke, an almost cinematic experience of watching an endless array of beautifully brutal finisher animations play out before your eyes, as Edward terminated his fifth ship crew that day. It was cakewalk combat, and it's even easier to see that if you return to Black Flag after playing Resynced.

The counter window is absurdly long and you only have to kill one enemy to chain finisher everyone else around you. But what Black Flag did have was choice. You could whip out your hidden blades and decimate enemies in a more low profile manner, pick up a massive axe and swing it about your head, or even carry and reload a musket, and each weapon had its own bespoke melee animations. I remember being amazed the first time I killed a fella with a musket in Black Flag that they'd even made animations for it.

Resynced, by comparison, only lets you use boring old cutlasses, and I struggle to see how removing a vast swathe of situational weaponry is an upgrade. For my part, I almost exclusively used hidden blades, throwing knives, and the occasional musket in the original—I literally would've unequipped my cutlasses if I could have. So playing through Black Flag Resynced in its entirety with them didn't really feel like the same game to me.

Not to say that Resynced doesn't have some decent ideas combat wise. Its kicks-on-demand are fun, and it's certainly a tad more challenging than Black Flag ever was, but what I struggle to understand is why that increase in difficulty couldn't have combined with the original's weapon choice? All Black Flag's combat really needed to be better was removing the endless chain finishers and reducing the counter window—that alone would've made a huge difference.

I feel like the removal of temporary weapons also fundamentally misunderstands that combat isn't their only use. Having a musket, for instance, lets you take out troublesome sharpshooters in towers or on ship tops—the only way to do that now is get close and hope your pistol has the range, or climb up and kick them off. Throwing knives let you quickly kill enemies that spot you at a distance, so are useful in stealth, but also slick as hell.

These were never only weapons for pure combat, but tools that changed how you approached situations, which is the core premise of Assassin's Creed, and something you kind of needed before Resynced removed fail conditions for stealth missions. The saddest part is that we have a new enemy with a blunderbuss. I feel like that would have been an incredible temporary weapon to pick up and use. What did we get instead? A rope dart.

Resynced's combat is certainly passable, it just isn't Black Flag combat. You can't remove viable playstyles from a game and then claim it's a true remake. If I can't play a remake the same way I played the original, it's something else entirely. But that's ultimately my issue with Black Flag Resynced—it may be beautiful and have better ship combat, but its myriad changes mean it doesn't retain the feel of the original, something I realised when I went back and played Black Flag after finishing Resynced.

Is there anything more piratey than searching for buried treasure? I think not. Digging up the treasure map locations was one of my favourite side activities in the original game, and that's not changed in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. If you completed everything in the original and thought you knew it like the back of your hand, you don't now. The tectonic plates have shifted, as the remake has moved the location of major islands, and the clues are different too.

All Black Flag Resynced treasure map locations

There are 27 treasure maps in Black Flag Resynced, most of which line up with the original game, plus a few extras. If you're wondering where the old Anotto Bay to Principe map has gone, that's more or less been replaced by Blackbeard's Treasure quest.

To be able to dig up the buried treasure, you need to have the associated map—you can't skip straight to the reward, sorry. That's why I've also included where you can find each map.

Speaking of booty, buried treasure chests generally include a handful of Reales and either an Ultimate Ship Plan upgrade, a Design Plan, or some art for the Great Inagua collection, making them a worthwhile distraction while not murdering Templars and boarding ships.

Here's where to find each buried treasure chest via their coordinates and the rewards you'll get, sorted into the order you're likely to encounter each clue (some are locked behind story progress or the Treasure Dealer at Great Inagua):

Cape Bonavista

• Rewards: 1,500 Reales

Havana

• Rewards: The Queen Anne's Figurehead design plan, 3,000 Reales

Salt Lagoon

• Rewards: Serpent Figurehead design plan, 3,000 Reales

New Bone

• Rewards: Maize Deity, 3,000 Reales

Abaco Island

• Rewards: Earth Monster relief, 2,500 Reales

Andreas Island

• Rewards: Harpoon Strength ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Nassau

• Rewards: Elite Sails design plan, 3,000 Reales

Isla Providencia

• Rewards: Governor Outfit, 1,000 Reales

Anotto Bay

• Rewards: Crimson Cloak outfit, 2,400 Reales

Kingston

• Rewards: Gilded Hull design plan, 3,000 Reales

San Juan

• Rewards: Fire Barrel Strength ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Petite Caverne

• Rewards: Heavy Shot Storage ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Pinos Isle

• Rewards: Ivory Wheel design plan, 3,000 Reales

Matanzas

• Rewards: Mortar Storage ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Tulum

• Rewards: Fire Barrel Storage ultimate plan, 3,000 Reales

Jiquey

• Rewards: Baroque Guitar, 2,500 Reales

Cumberland Bay

• Rewards: 4,000 Reales

Princípe

• Rewards: Standard Bearer art, 1,000 Reales

Cayman Sound

• Rewards: 4,800 Reales

Ambergris Key

• Rewards: Pirate Captain outfit, 2,400 Reales

Misteriosa

• Rewards: Heavy Shot Strength ultimate plan, 3,600 Reales

Long Bay

• Rewards: Scottish Broadswords (rare cutlass)

Mystery Island (Weathered)

• Rewards: Persian Scimitars (legendary cutlass), Gargoyle's Breath (legendary pistol)

Sacrifice Island (Preserved)

• Rewards: Shade and Shadow Robes, Wooden Eyeball (legendary trinket)

Florida (Tattered)

• Rewards: Elite Ship Wheel, Gilt Lined Sails, Sleek Crew Attire

Santanillas (Digested)

• Rewards: Hunter Outfit, Hunter's Amulet (rare trinket)