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It's no secret that Assassin's Creed has been stuck in a bit of a rut for a while. While the series' use of wildly different historical time periods helps add a lot of variety, it's struggled to marry its many disparate systems in a cohesive way. Assassin's Creed Valhalla makes this more obvious than ever with a wealth of issues, chief of which are a bloated open world and meandering story. That's exactly what makes Assassin's Creed Shadows such a pleasant surprise—it feels like a complete course correction.

While there are still some frustrating issues that continue to plague the series, it feels like Shadows might have stumbled onto a winning formula that could carry the series forward—a true fusion of the newer RPG games and the classic Assassin's Creed formula.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

The 2017 release of Assassin's Creed Origins changed the series' entire trajectory, and that new RPG formula has been iterated on ever since. But Valhalla, arguably, took that formula too far, and became too gratuitous in trying to be an expansive open-world RPG, shunting sneaky, assassin shenanigans off to the side.

Valhalla's real downfall is that it's simply trying to do too much, it's butter spread too thin over a piece of toast. It's a decades-spanning Viking epic; a free-form open world full of icons, activities and things to collect; an action RPG with the vestiges of a stealth system; and then there's the sections where you're not even playing Eivor.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed—the dozens of icons and color-coded spheres on your map, the intricate web of hundreds of abilities, and the meandering plot lines that feel like five seasons of a TV show crammed into a game.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

More often than not these activities and stories don't feel like they're contributing to the core narrative. They feel separate, and unfortunately because of that, like a waste of time. By trying to maximize all of the RPG elements of Origins and Odyssey, Valhalla ended up feeling unfocused and scattered, and that's a real shame considering there's some strong story moments near the end—it's just the 100 hours to get there don't feel worth it.

Coming into Shadows, that created a major question: would Assassin's Creed continue down the RPG path or go back to basics? The answer's a bit complicated, and while Shadows doesn't fix all of the problems that have been there in the past few games, it provides a blueprint for how the series can, and should, evolve.

Shadows feels like it directly addresses that unconnected feeling of Valhalla—there's a deliberateness behind Shadows that gives it an edge. Exploration activities like shrines give you knowledge points to unlock more skills. Side quests can lead to new allies joining your forces, hints to uncover assassination targets, resources to expand your base. Shadows focuses on a core set of ideas and mechanics, and makes sure to expand everything out of those handful of concepts. This even applies to the combat itself.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

In Valhalla, there were dozens of abilities you could unlock, and upgrades to strengthen those abilities—but you had to find hidden books to do so. But in Shadows those ideas are streamlined. Most abilities specifically apply to particular weapons, meaning you can sink ability points into the murderous tools you enjoy using the most. But the use of knowledge points means you can have a more satisfying progression by simply exploring the world and engaging in its activities as you come across them. You don't need to seek out specific objects to unlock abilities, and smaller skill trees mean you won't get locked out of some upgrade because you've only been investing in one side of the network of skills.

Even the way the story plays out feels more thoughtful—a clear expansion of ideas that were introduced in Assassin's Creed Mirage.

Even the way the story plays out feels more thoughtful—a clear expansion of ideas that were introduced in Assassin's Creed Mirage. Instead of the normal quest log you have a network of character icons, laying out a clear map of who's involved in this story and what their role is.

Quests are then attached to these portraits, letting you select quests by who's involved—whether that's an ally you want to help, or a member of the shadowy organization you're hunting down. These assassinations take you to the various regions of Shadow's feudal Japan, creating a sense of the main story progressing while you uncover more of the world. You can tangibly feel the narrative progression accompanying the exploration.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Even the likes of Origins and Odyssey struggled to keep that sense of momentum up—those games had all these interesting systems and assassination targets, but they didn't feel intrinsically linked to that main experience. They were simply side objectives, plain and simple.

While it's a clear step in the right direction, there's still a handful of troublesome elements that Shadows can't seem to drop. An explosive opening hour moves into a surprisingly slow Act 1—with one of the game’s dual protagonists, Yasuke, not even appearing again for nearly six hours. It’s a bizarre choice that halts the momentum set up by the opening, and a lot of those compelling exploration elements, and the variety offered by two characters, don’t become apparent until you’ve played quite a bit of the game. It feels like a hump you have to get over, in order to get to the good stuff.

While Valhalla's scattershot approach was detrimental, games of this scale still need a lot of variety to justify their immense size, they just need to be cohesive. Shadows has that cohesion, but it can also feel repetitive. The map is, once again, vast, and Ubisoft just hasn't created enough distinct diversions to fill it. Rhythm minigames and optional treasures break up the flow at first, but after you’ve done those a dozen times across 60 hours, it doesn’t feel fresh anymore.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Instead of doing the exact same thing in a dozen locations, there could be variation layered into each one—whether that’s in the form of more narrative context, or slightly different gameplay mechanics.

The same can be said for Shadow’s approach to assassination. There’s a ton of targets to take down, but the formula, over and over, is infiltrate a castle and take the target down, either with strength as Yasuke or stealth as Naoe. The two playable characters should add variety to these hunts, but it pales in comparison to the black box design of assassination missions in previous games. The foundations of a new formula is there in Shadows, but it could be drastically improved upon with more hand-designed assassination missions that have unique settings, mechanics, or objectives.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Shadows drastically improves the problems of Valhalla by making its world and activities feel more united and relevant to each other, but rather than finding perfection, it feels like this is the starting point of something that needs to be refined moving forward.

Assassin's Creed Shadows doesn't redefine the franchise like some may have wanted, but it does feel like Ubisoft is trying to find a middle ground that can appeal to both camps of players. Valhalla veered too far into RPG territory, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage went back to basics to middling results. This time, Ubisoft has tried to keep the issues inherent in both games in mind, and while it still has issues, it finally feels like Assassin’s Creed knows what it wants to be again.

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Terra Invicta, the space 4X from the creators XCOM's Long War mod, was already denser than a black hole when it launched into Steam early access back in 2022. But that hasn't stopped developer Pavonis Interactive from stuffing yet more matter into its strategic singularity where the alien defence of XCOM fuses with the geopolitics of Crusader Kings, with a brand new update landing this week, bringing a host of new features to the hugely ambitious strategy game.

"This update builds on the work done across our beta branches over the past several months," writes Pavonis in its Steam update blog. According to the developer, players can expect "new features, visual upgrades, balance work, and AI improvements across Earth and space."

Chief among these is the addition of exofighters, small ships that can launch from planetary bases and fly into low-Earth orbit. Naturally, Terra Invicta wouldn't be much of an XCOM-alike if it didn't counterbalance this small gift to humanity with a far bigger present for the game's alien menace. The extraterrestrials get two new alien ship classes, named the titan and the lancer, and they can also "deploy a new tier of advanced weapons during the endgame", so, good luck with that, Earth.

Beneath these additions are numerous changes to Terra Invicta's management layer. The update adds 35 new character traits and two new character classes, while nations can now invest in three new development paths—government, environment and oppression. In diplomacy, factions can now agree to share intel with one another, while in combat, players can now reorder formations at the outset of a fight.

The update also makes several improvements to the UI and visuals. The ship designer has been completely overhauled to support clearer shipbuilding workflows while most system interfaces have been updated for improved clarity. The tech tree has also been pruned to improve navigation and readability, and Pavonis has added a full ledger of incomes and costs to help manage your faction's finances.

Finally, there's those adjustments to the AI. Alien factions are now more effective at choosing targets in space, so you'll need to be more careful when arranging orbital defences. To compensate, AI human factions now build fleets more aggressively so hopefully you'll have a bit more assistance when it comes to combat.

You can read the full list of updates here. Remarkably, this update only brings the game version to 0.4.78, suggesting that even after three years of early access, Terra Invicta is still quite a way from realising its full ambitions. Then again, if any studio is familiar with being in it for the long haul, it's Pavonis Interactive.

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It's only been a couple of months since Abiotic Factor's Dark Energy update cascaded out of its Black Mesa-ish science lab. But developer Deep Field Games is already heavily into production on the game's next block of content. This week, it provided the first look at the new update, titled 'Cold Fusion', and it's shaping up to be another substantial addition to the Half-Life inspired survival game.

Cold Fusion primarily introduces a new area to the GATE research centre, the residence sector, which is suffering from an unnatural cold snap. "Something is causing residence sector to fall well below optimal living temperatures," writes Deep Field in its Steam update. "The important thing is you must science your way through it to see this journey to an end." The update doesn't specify what challenges you'll face in the sector specifically, but mentions that you'll experience "cold snaps, rolling blackouts and a mysterious black fog" throughout the facility, so I imagine these will factor into exploring the residence sector as well.

(Image credit: Deep Field Games)

From the handful of screenshots Deep Field has shown, the residence sector looks heavily inspired by my favourite part of Half-Life, Office Complex. Half-Life's fourth chapter showed players Black Mesa at its most mundane, which was precisely what set it apart from the phobos labs and slipgate dimensions of shooters like Doom and Quake. I hope Abiotic Factor's residence sector can replicate that everyday, humdrum vibe, and the tiled corridors and tree-lined courtyard shown in Deep Field's work-in-progress screenshots are a promising start.

Alongside this new area, the Cold Fusion update also brings a new upgrade system. Crafting an enhancement bench will allow your survivalist scientists to upgrade weapons, armour, and "a few other item types". The possibilities will be, not endless, but substantial, with Deep Field games declaring "for weapons alone, we have about 15 to 20 permutations in the works." The update will also introduce a new tier of weapons to wield, and allow players to reset their character specs during a game.

Finally, Deep Field is planning some big changes to how enemies will attack your base. "We’ve heard a lot of feedback about base assaults and how they just… Kinda stink," the developer writes. "Portal Storms are working largely as intended, but there are several cases, mostly non- Pest related assaults, where they will simply spawn inside your base or in the same spot over and over."

(Image credit: Deep Field Games)

To address this, the team says it has "done some major overhauls to how bases are detective", with the game's AI now looking for "gatherings" of furniture and "things that seem to constitute your outer walls." The upshot of this should be better, more interesting base assaults. "While this will never be absolutely perfect , we expect assaults to feel a lot more unique and varied, and starting, generally, well outside of your base."

Deep Field doesn't provide any info on when the Cold Fusion update will release. But given the frequency of updates to the game, I reckon it'll arrive sometime in the summer. Moreover, while the studio doesn't specify this, use of phrases like "the road to 1.0" and "see this journey to an end" does make it seem like Cold Fusion will be one of the latter major updates before Deep Field begins preparations for a full launch. No doubt we'll hear more about both Cold Fusion's progress and the plans for 1.0 soon.

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Ambitious modding projects are a bit like baby fish, in that millions of them spawn, but relatively few survive to adulthood. Hence, it's always worth celebrating when one makes it through to full release. Such is the case with the Middle-earth Extended Edition, which launches into 1.0 today after 13 years of development.

Middle-earth: Extended Edition first arose in the east way back in 2012, aiming to give Danger Close's beloved RTS The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth the same embiggening treatment Peter Jackson applied to his film trilogy. Over the course of the last decade plus change, it has added new maps to the game like Moria and Lothlorien, added new playable factions such as the Elves and the Haradrim, expanded existing factions like Rohan and Isengard with new units, and much more.

This most recent update, the first in four years, is somewhat less dramatic, with no major new additions to the game. But it is nonetheless extensive, tweaking and adjusting game parameters for just about every facet of the RTS so it better reflects the source material. Numerous maps have been adjusted so they have enemy lairs more authentic to their locations. AI has been tweaked to construct buildings and deploy tactics truer to their factions' nature. Campaign missions have been altered to more accurately reflect blow-by-blow events in the books and films. And just about every faction has been given a statistical once-over too.

Ultimately though, the main event here is that the mod is now, for all intents and purposes, complete. The mod's creator, Rohirim91, has been consistently involved with the project throughout its long gestation. Indeed, it's fascinating to read back through the game's updates. In 2017, for example, Rohirim was working on the mod while studying for university entrance exams. "During the spring of this year I have made a significant progress on the mod and was close to releasing it," he wrote at the time. "However, due to a mistake on my part and the upgrading of the PC I use, the mod files were lost." Haven't we all been there?

Rohirim91 doesn't specify whether the 1.0 release represents the end of work on the mod. Indeed, the update is rather matter-of-fact given the milestone. Rohirim opens the update with a succinct summary of the mod's features before diving straight into the changelog "Middle-earth Extended Edition returns with an expanded set of playable maps, new features, polished campaigns and AI, balance changes and bugfixes."

However, right at the bottom of the update, Rohirim writes "Feel free to post your suggestions and report any bugs you encounter via comments or private messages on this site", which seems to leave the door open for potential future updates.

Either way, you can download Middle-earth Extended Edition here. Rohirim notes that the mod requires patch 1.6 of the Battle for Middle-earth, and of course a copy of the game itself. This latter requirement may be tricky as Danger Close's game isn't for sale digitally anywhere, although you might be able to find it on a certain site for abandoned wares. There is currently a vote in progress on GoG to bring the game onto the platform, so perhaps add your support to that if you want to see this lost RTS treasure more easily purchasable.

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Unity has not been having the greatest time in recent years, much of which is down to its former CEO John Riccitiello. Calling developers "fucking idiots" didn't seem a wise move when your business depends on, erm, developers, but that was nothing next to Unity's plans for a mooted runtime fee that would see game makers charged for their games being booted up.

The reaction against the runtime fee was horror swiftly followed by unanimous anger, forcing Unity into a total climbdown and Riccitiello to fall on his sword. It's fallen to new CEO Matt Bromberg to rehabilitate the company's image and win back some developer goodwill, and he's recently been on the interview circuit saying very sane things like "you can’t have a business where we’re [fighting our] customers. That’s insane."

In an interview with The Verge Bromberg is asked about the metaverse, and I kinda like the cut of this guy's gib.

"I was never a massive believer in the metaverse during that period of time," says Bromberg. "I’ll tell you why: Because, as a game maker, I experienced all those new platforms and just thought they were garbage. And I thought, 'This looks like the games we tried to make 15 years ago. There is no way that’s a sustainable consumer experience.' All sorts of metaverse companies—I was completely confused by them."

Bromberg goes on to distinguish between the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg would describe it, and huge live service platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that are often described as metaverses (erroneously in my opinion). These experiences with millions and often tens of millions of players "in some ways [are] the fundamental feature of the videogame business right now—80 percent of the people are deeply invested in this experience that they’ve been playing for years."

He's not wrong about that: a recent GDC talk estimated that 92% of PC gamers are spending their time on games that are more than two years old. Bromberg reckons one of the big challenges now is convincing players to try something new, "but I wouldn’t confuse the failure of the metaverse with some lack of sustainability in major live service gaming."

(Image credit: SOPA Images / Getty)

As for all the gear that comes with the metaverse, the headsets we'll apparently be wearing all day and hand controllers etcetera, Bromberg doesn't mince his words about some of what we've seen: but reckons it's only a matter of time before AR glasses of some sort hit the right form factor.

"Put aside the idiocy of some of the metaverse stuff," says Bromberg. "The future, to some degree, is going to be tied to massive consumer adoption of peripherals, or maybe that’s an old-fashioned word for it, but new devices. I’m an enormous believer in AR [...] I have no doubt that a couple of years from now everybody’s going to be wearing AR glasses. The combination of AI and voice, which enables really easy interactions with the form factor, the battery life that is now possible, and the ability to overlay information and services in front of your eyes, to me, is obviously going to explode.

"And we’re going to look back and think about the time when we kept reaching into our pockets to pull out this thing for everything, it’s going to seem quaint. But it takes a long time to get true mass consumer adoption of these devices because it all has to be perfect. But once it hits, it explodes."

Hmmm. I don't disagree with the hardware side of what Bromberg's saying: I wear glasses, and putting them on in the morning barely registers. But it seems to me there's also a philosophical side there where you're choosing to have the whole world mediated, all the time, through technology. And much as I love tech, I'm not sure how appealing that is.

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What does it take to turn someone into a supervillain? According to a few Marvel movies, not much: Tony Stark skipping a meeting or taking over your construction contracts will instantly push you into a career of ruthless supervillainy.

In pixel art action game Vindefiant, it didn't take much to turn someone evil, either:

"In Vindefiant, you play as Alyx, a disgruntled ex-employee on a relentless path of vengeance and destruction," the game's Steam page says. After getting fired from his corporate job, "Alyx unleashes his powers and sparks a path of rage and destruction to get revenge on his former employer."

I know that sounds unsettling and grim, but one look at the trailer below and you'll see it's filled with over-the-top pixelated destruction. Alyx's cartoony superpowers in Vindefiant are a bit reminiscent of metroidvania Carrion: you've got long snaking tendrils that lash out from your body so you can swing and clamber through world like a giant spider, flinging people through windows and into machinery and bashing them into bloody pulps. It's pretty grisly, but hey, you're the villain, right?

The inspiration for Alyx's backstory comes from a real place: the developer's own experience in the game industry.

"In February 2023, I was made redundant from my job in the AAA games industry, and this was the final catalyst that created a prototype in June 2023 that was soon to develop into Vindefiant," developer Jordan Blake of Blakey Games said.

"I went to college to study game design and then Uni, and I dropped out of Uni after being offered my dream job. It was a big risk but exactly what I wanted to do," Blake told me via email. "I was then unfortunately made redundant from that job after half a year and I took the risk and went indie full time."

Blake's job was consumed by the same sorts of layoffs that have become distressingly common in the past several years. "I was affected by mass layoffs, right at the start of my AAA career, and also right at the start of the industry collapsing. It was a very difficult time," Blake said.

I asked if Blake was at all concerned about finding future work in the industry—having now made a game where a guy goes absolutely ham on his former employers for firing him.

"I think when I first announced the game there were some concerns. But as time went on I’m much more of the belief that a studio should be able to recognise the difference between a game and reality," he said.

(Image credit: Blakey Games)

"The experience of being made redundant was merely an inspiration to create a revenge game. But from there the story grew on its own, and Vindefiant has a complete world of its own with different characters and motivations. There’s been a lot of positive reactions from people saying the game is a nice stress reliever, brought some laughter to their day, things like that. That's ultimately what I want from Vindefiant."

I asked if Blake would ever consider another job in a big studio.

"I would consider working for another AAA studio in the future," Blake said, "but I'm much more aware of the reality of AAA game development now, and know not to get so emotionally invested in working as a team, as losing that was tough to deal with."

Blake also said the Vindefiant wasn't specifically made to draw attention to game industry layoffs, "but I like that it’s a byproduct of it. People are struggling. And my heart’s with everyone who’s still looking for a job in the games industry. Stay strong!"

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A Microsoft employee interrupted an address being given by AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman as part of the company's 50th anniversary event, demanding the company "stop using AI for genocide."

The disruption was first reported by The Verge, which also shared video of the incident. It can also be heard in The Verge's full coverage of Microsoft's Copilot presentation, although Ibtihal Aboussad, reportedly the employee who interrupted Suleyman, is out of view.

"You are a war profiteer," Aboussad says as she's escorted out of the room. "Shame on you. You are a war profiteer. Stop using AI for genocide, Mustafa. Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands. All of Microsoft has blood on its hands."

A February 2025 report by AP said the Israeli military's use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology "skyrocketed" following the Hamas attacks of October 2024, to nearly 200 times higher than what it was the week before the attack. It also notes that Israel's Ministry of Defense is Microsoft's second-largest military customer, behind only the US military.

The Verge shared a copy of an email Aboussad sent to Microsoft employees via numerous internal mailing lists saying that it was that relationship that prompted her to take action.

"My name is Ibtihal, and for the past 3.5 years, I’ve been a software engineer on Microsoft's AI Platform org," Aboussad wrote. "I spoke up today because after learning that my org was powering the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice. This is especially true when I've witnessed how Microsoft has tried to quell and suppress any dissent from my coworkers who tried to raise this issue.

"For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil. There was simply no other way to make our voices heard."

Later in her email, Aboussad said she was initially excited to move to Microsoft's AI platform for the potential good it offered in areas like "accessibility products, translation services, and tools to 'empower every human and organization to achieve more'."

"I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government, with the purpose of spying on and murdering journalists, doctors, aid workers, and entire civilian families," Aboussad wrote. "If I knew my work on transcription scenarios would help spy on and transcribe phone calls to better target Palestinians, I would not have joined this organization and contributed to genocide. I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights."

Microsoft's military entanglements have been met with pushback in the past: In 2019, for instance, a group of Microsoft employees protested the company's $479 million contract to develop HoloLens technology for the US Army; shareholders expressed similar concerns in 2022. But concerns about Israel's ongoing attacks in Gaza are not hypothetical: More than 50,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed since October 2023, although that's merely an estimate—researchers say the actual number could be much higher.

Aboussad's email urged employees to speak out by signing a "No Azure for Apartheid" petition, urging company leadership to end contracts with the Israeli military, and ensuring others at the company are aware of how their work could be used.

"Our company has precedents in supporting human rights, including divestment from apartheid South Africa and dropping contracts with AnyVision (Israeli facial recognition startup), after Microsoft employee and community protests," Aboussad wrote. "My hope is that our collective voices will motivate our AI leaders to do the same, and correct Microsoft’s actions regarding these human rights violations, to avoid a stained legacy. Microsoft Cloud and AI should stop being the bombs and bullets of the 21st century."

Not long after Abbousad's protest, a second employee staged a similar disruption during a separate talk being held by current and former Microsoft CEOs Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates.

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"Shame on you all. You’re all hypocrites," Vaniya Agrawal said. "50,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered with Microsoft technology. How dare you. Shame on all of you for celebrating their blood. Cut ties with Israel."

Some in the audience booed, while Nadella, Ballmer, and Gates sat in awkward silence while Agrawal was escorted out of the room. Agrawal also sent an email to company executives, viewed by CNBC, in which she said she's "grown more aware of Microsoft's growing role in the military-industrial complex," and that Microsoft is "complicit" as a "digital weapons manufacturer that powers surveillance, apartheid, and genocide."

"Even if we don't work directly in AI or Azure, our labor is tacit support, and our corporate climb only fuels the system," Agrawal wrote. Like Abbousad, she also called on employees to sign the No Apartheid for Azure petition.

It seems likely that this protest will cost Aboussad and Agrawal their jobs: In 2024, Microsoft fired two employees who organized a vigil at the company's headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza.

I've reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

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In late 2022, Activision pulled PC gaming into the $70-for-triple-A-games era that the consoles were already living in, becoming the first major publisher on Steam to abandon the old $60 standard for its launch of Modern Warfare 2. Two and a half years later, I'm only now starting to accept the reality of being expected to exchange 70 United States dollars for the privilege of pretending I'm a guy who hits lizards with swords.

It's good that I haven't gotten too comfortable, because a champion for an $80 standard has already come forward.

Earlier this week, in the wake of its Switch 2 showcase, Nintendo revealed that launch game Mario Kart World will cost $80 as a digital purchase. The $450 price of the console itself is stoking its own discourse, with its MSRP in the US expected to rise even higher now that Nintendo has delayed American preorders following the Trump administration's sweeping tariff announcements.

The justification for Mario Kart's price hike is the same that publishers offered for the rise to $70: increasing development costs and inflation. Both of those factors are real and undeniable. It now costs close to a billion dollars to develop a Call of Duty game, and the value of the dollar has fallen by a third in the last decade.

So no, it isn't surprising that games are continuing to get more expensive. But when wages in the US have remained stagnant compared to the steadily rising cost of living, any additional increase—justifiable or not—becomes harder to stomach. Even if it's delightful that Nintendo is letting cows drive now.

Videogames have sometimes been called "recession proof" on the basis that people play them even when money is tight, when at-home entertainment is preferable to expensive nights out anyway. But the industry did contract following the early pandemic boom, with big companies laying off thousands as the bets they made during that brief period failed to pay off.

And meanwhile, the word on the street is that most PC gamers are pretty busy playing the games we already have, thank you very much: According to games industry intelligence firm Newzoo, PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games.

If you buy a Switch 2, you've effectively committed yourself to buying some new Switch 2 games. But the same can't be said about a gaming PC or Steam Deck, which offer access to loads of free-to-play games, cheap classics, and out-of-the-blue hits like Schedule 1, the $20 indie game that's currently Steam's best seller by revenue.

Even on the higher end, there are options like Baldur's Gate 3, which has a base price of $60 and is still one of the most-played games on Steam after almost two years.

Activision and the other big publishers may be wise to let Nintendo blaze the $80-per-game trail on its own for now. Rockstar could probably get away with any price it wants to set for GTA 6 (whenever it comes to PC, at least), but it's a special case, and things are not looking up for the disposable incomes of Americans. Turn that 7 into an 8 at your own peril, triple-As.

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For me, the name Raphael Colantonio is basically synonymous with immersive sims, which for the record I love deeply. He founded Arkane, headed up Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, and Prey, and then proved immsims could work from an isometric perspective with the excellent Weird West.

So I was more than a little shocked when he said during a recent Quad Damage Podcast (via GamesRadar) that he gave up on the 2023 System Shock remake because, well, it was just "too hard."

The original System Shock, released in 1994, was one of the first games Colantonio tested while at Electronic Arts, which owned publisher Origin Systems. The experience was "fantastic," he said, because he was "a huge fan of Looking Glass," the game's developer; he also, appropriately and correctly, called out the groundbreaking Ultima Underworld, which came out a couple years ahead of System Shock, for helping inspire what would become his "passion for immersive sims."

"I was already hooked when I had a chance to playtest System Shock back then at EA," Colantonio said. "It was like some sort of destiny. I was so lucky, because I could not believe what was happening to me."

Given that formative experience, you might think Colantonio would be a big fan of Nightdive's brilliant 2023 remaster, an outstanding update of the original that we dubbed the Best Remake of 2023. But apparently that's not the case.

"I tried the one that came out a year or two ago," he said. "I got stuck in cyberspace. That gameplay was too hard. I was frustrated by it. But the rest was really cool, until then.

"It was a fun experiment, but it was not the best part of the game. I was avoiding it as much as possible."

In all fairness, the cyberspace bits in System Shock were kind of a hassle. Rejiggered as a Descent-like 6DOF for the remake, they're a big departure from the gameplay of the rest of the game, and for me at least they tended to land more as something I had to do than something I wanted to do.

Still, I can't help feeling a little, well, disappointed. Danny Glover was emphatically too old for this shit, but that didn't keep him from cleaning house when the need arose. Bruce Wayne was a broken-down old man when he kicked Superman's ass. And when the late, great Val Kilmer told Tom Cruise, "The kids need Maverick," well, the kids got Maverick. You know what I'm saying?

Of course, I'm kidding—mostly, anyway. And as someone who's walked away from a game or two because of time-wasting boss fights, a part of me appreciates hearing that other people too sometimes hit a wall in a game they otherwise dig and decide they've got better things to do.

And if nothing else, there's no questioning his commitment to the genre: Following the success of Weird West, Colantonio's WolfEye Studios is now working on a "retro sci-fi first-person" game that sounds like it might just have a little bit of Prey DNA running through its veins. You better believe I'll be jumping on that at the first opportunity.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

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Cozy farm sim games have a problem: We still don't have a good name for them. Sometimes I call them farm sims, but the ones that don't actually have farms are life sims—not to be confused with Sims-like life sims—sometimes I mash them up into farmlife sims, and sometimes they're just games like Stardew Valley when I give up entirely.

None of those things roll off the tongue. More importantly, none of them really capture the whole of the genre. Cozy farming games aren't always set on an actual farm (sometimes it's a graveyard or a workshop) and although they are about life, calling them life "sims" has always felt a little incorrect too. Out of desperation I just call them "games like Stardew" a lot, but sometimes they're really more like Animal Crossing, actually.

Roots of Pacha (Image credit: Soda Den)

Too many other emergent game genres have gone the way of the ugly "game-like" suffix: roguelikes, soulslikes, and even the survivorlikes—though we're workshopping that genre name too.

Stardew-like is worse than all of those combined. Not only will the occasional pedant point out that it should really be Harvest Moon-like—though I'm of the opinion that the honor belongs with the game that eclipsed its own inspiration, not the series whose naming rights snafu makes the legacy of the series a headache to track. It also just sucks to say.

Long after I'd given up thinking this was a solvable problem, the answer came to me—as I was complaining about fishing, of all things. Much as I despise it as a minigame, fishing is one of the core activities of a Stardew-style farming sim. You might call it one of the main pillars of the genre. One of the four big Fs, even.

Stardew Valley

Wait, we have a genre like this already: 4X games. Like Stardew and its ilk, they're a specific subset of a broader genre (strategy games), grouped together by a common set of game systems they share—explore, expand, exploit, exterminate—not one common ancestor like roguelikes or an easy acronym like FPS.

Stardew games have that too. They're a subset of simulation games, neither life sim nor crafting sim nor job sim, but identifiable by a handful of specific elements they pretty universally include. They can be 4F games: farm, forage, fish, friendship.

Or maybe it should be: food, forage, fish, friendship to account for the games that don't actually involve farming. Or perhaps it's a sort of three-out-of-four checklist to identify if a game is "one of those." Look, one way or another I think the 4F thing has legs, alright?

Hello Kitty Island Adventure (Image credit: Sunblink Entertainment)

It has the capacity to capture the Stardew Valley-alikes and the Animal Crossing-inspired games without accidentally lumping in Farming Simulator 25 and The Sims.

But does it actually work? Let's check it against some of my favorite farmlife-y things from the past couple of years and some that are yet to come:

That actually came out even more uniform than I expected. Okay, here are some edge cases then.

What about Rusty's Retirement, the adorable idle game that was one of my favorite cozy games last year? It has farming, but not foraging, fishing, or friendship. It really isn't a Stardew or Animal Crossing-like game, but it does have those vibes. With only one of the 4Fs accounted for is it a 4F-like?

Rusty's Retirement (Image credit: Mister Morris Games)

How about Fallout 76? It's not a Stardew-like game at all in my book, but after adding fishing in an update this summer as it's planned to, it will have all four Fs: farming, foraging for supplies, fishing, and the companion character friendship and romances. That feels like one of those "is a taco a sandwich?" situations.

Maybe the concept of time simulation is important to capture since it's an element that's important, if slightly different, in both Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley style games. Who knows a good 'F' word for "time"?

Game genre name will always be a source of banter and disagreement, but I'm confident that 4Fs are better than the stardewcrossinglike mouthful I've had to write for the past nine years.

Stardew Valley mods: **** Custom farming
Stardew Valley cheats: Farm faster
Stardew Valley multiplayer: **** Co-op farming
Games like Stardew Valley: More life sims
Best indie games: Independent excellence

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Tekken 8 is losing the matchup against its own community right now, with its second season being met with near-universal criticism, tanking its recent Steam review rating all the way to Overwhelmingly Negative.

Currently, only 14% of reviews made in the last 30 days are positive, while its overall rating is still Mixed as Steam has flagged the whole thing as a review bomb incident. I don't know if that's necessarily true, though—sure not every thumbs down is inherently insightful, but it's clear the choices made for season two are not liked.

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Some of that boils down to the fact that, as a whole, Tekken 8's direction has been all-in on aggression and offensive gameplay. It couldn't be any more different to Tekken 7 which, by the end of its run, favoured incredibly defensive and turtle-y gameplay, though I maintain that was too far in the other direction.

But the community hasn't exactly been endeared to Tekken 8's more combative mindset, and for a moment, it seemed like Bandai Namco recognised that. Streams leading up to season two's changes seemed to have people convinced that the developer was going to put a greater emphasis on defensive gameplay.

Except, it didn't really do that at all. In fact, it's seemed to do the complete opposite. Characters who seemed to be ripe candidates for nerfs, like Bryan, were instead buffed, with fans feeling as though the roster has largely homogenised into coin-flip movesets rather than diversifying each fighter with distinct weaknesses.

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

"No-one literally no-one asked for these changes, even new players never asked for more offense in a game that clearly lacks defensive options and is easy to mash buttons and win like in most Tekken games," the top negative review on Steam currently reads.

Steamer and competitive Tekken player IncosiderateRaccoon also left a Steam review which reads: "The developers do not understand the characters they design. They see that the character has strengths and weaknesses and continue to not let them have this weakness. Instead, they homogenize the character to be like the others making them overtuned."

The backlash hasn't died down in the days since the patch's release, which seems to have prompted director Katsuhiro Harada to quickly address the situation on Twitter. "It is clear to me that the result is a disconnect between what the community wants and the tuning results," he said in response to a thread between producer Michael Murray and a myriad of fans.

(Image credit: @Harada_TEKKEN via Twitter)

He continued: "We have our Battle & Tuning team working around the clock to read through all the feedback logs from the community and work on future policies and changes for the better."

It's a relatively short and diplomatic response right now, and I can imagine things aren't very fun at the Bandai Namco offices right now. While the developer has promised to address some game-breaking behaviour—mostly relating to issues with moves from Paul and Jack-8 right now—it's unclear how long it'll take for any major overhauls to fix the stuff people are most upset with right now.

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I'm a PC evangelist through and through, but there are a few consoles that have stolen my heart over the years: The Game Boy Advance, the GameCube, and, in 2017, the Nintendo Switch. After skipping out on the 3DS and Vita, it reminded me how magical portable gaming can be. The Switch transmuted some hand-me-down mobile/tablet tech from the mid 2010s into a gaming juggernaut through singular hardware design and great games.

The Switch made me excited about Nintendo again, an enthusiasm that has steadily dwindled once more in the face of the company's belligerence toward emulator developers and out-of-touch, consumer-unfriendly practices like subscription-based emulation of its classic games library.

I don't know what the company's follow-up console could have been other than an iterative upgrade to the original Switch, one of the greatest successes in its long history, but on watching Nintendo's debut presentation for the console, I found my worst fears for it were realized: The magic is gone.

The original Switch gave me something I couldn't find anywhere else in 2017, while the Switch 2 joins the most recent two generations of PlayStation and Xbox consoles in failing to offer anything I can't find in more open, PC-based platforms, save a smattering of exclusive games⁠—the stick of console exclusivity rather than the carrot of a truly desirable device.

The Deck effect

When the Switch 1 launched, Nintendo was an extreme underdog whose hardware business was in jeopardy. It released a handheld console into a market with virtually no competition, with some wondering if dedicated handhelds were on their way out in the face of smartphone gaming.

Much like how tablets failed to kill the PC in the early 2010s thanks to their inability to match or exceed PC functionality, it turns out phones aren't a one size fits all solution for on-the-go gaming. Mobile gaming is the largest segment of the industry today, but on the back of experiences tailor-made for a touch interface.

Console or desktop-style games curdle in the face of that awful little touchscreen controller facsimile you always see, and attempts to port triple-A games to new iPhone models that lap the Switch several times over in terms of processing grunt continue to flop.

Thanks to its USB-C dock, the Switch found a unique niche as a sub-par home console and superb handheld. With the recent flowering of handheld PCs, spearheaded by Valve's Steam Deck, the Switch 2 is launching amid much stiffer competition. I have no doubt that a Switch 2 sales "failure" would still dwarf the entire handheld PC market in terms of units sold, but as a critic and enthusiast, the product doesn't, well, enthuse me.

Nintendo's first party games aside, the promise of on the go, triple-A gaming on the Switch 2 sounds just as compromised as on PC handhelds.

The Switch 2 distinguishes itself from the competition with a thin, svelte frame, and even though it's an LCD, its 120hz HDR screen sounds like it could trade blows with the category-leading Steam Deck OLED. Otherwise, though, Nintendo seems to be hitting the same hard limits with current tech as handheld PC manufacturers. The quoted battery life of two to six and a half hours is standard in the field, and its 256 GB onboard storage only sounds impressive in the face of the original Switch's downright miserly 32.

In terms of graphics and gaming performance, early reports remind me of the original Switch: Some truly dark wizardry with the hardware from first party Nintendo devs, with third party standards upgraded to "passable" from the original Switch's dreadful, muddy ports.

I can't deny I'm impressed by Retro Studios' 4k 60 fps (or 1080p 120 fps) work on the gorgeous Metroid Prime 4, but that will surely be as much of an outlier as the Metroid Prime Remake's perfect 900p 60 fps on the original Switch. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported from a Switch 2 preview event that Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 40 fps in its performance mode while docked⁠—superior to its Steam Deck performance, but handheld would be more of an apples to apples comparison, and this figure doesn't inspire confidence.

Killer app

Nintendo's first party games aside, the promise of on the go, triple-A gaming on the Switch 2 sounds just as compromised as on PC handhelds: The games will look and run "fine" while rapidly chewing through your battery. But I've never seen taking worse versions of graphically intensive new (or six month to five-year-old) games on the road to be the true draw of the Switch or PC handhelds.

For me, there were three pillars to the Switch's appeal: Nintendo first party games, ports from the Xbox 360 era or prior, and indies. The Steam Deck is a superior machine for handling the latter two categories, and I've rarely dusted off my Switch in the past few years except to enjoy Nintendo's own offerings.

(Image credit: Dbrand)

I recall waiting for months for ports of Dark Souls and Hollow Knight to finally land on Switch in 2018. Meanwhile, with some exceptions, even obscure indie oddities like Betrayal at Club Low, Lunacid, or FlyKnight work on Steam Deck with little fuss. Ditto for lower-intensity triple-A games from 10+ years ago like Metal Gear Solid 5, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or Mass Effect⁠—all games that would have been a great fit for the Switch.

Nintendo's insistence on squandering its library in an insulting subscription emulation service is an utter abomination to me.

Not having to wait for a port of a game to play it on a handheld PC touches on something truly critical for me: The PC's nature as an open platform with unbroken continuity back to its earliest games. Console ecosystems like the Switch leave us at the mercy of publishers for what games we can access to a far greater extent than on PC, compartmentalizing gaming history in a way that those publishers exploit to resell us games we've already bought in order to play them on more accessible platforms.

Old games coming to GOG or Steam, or otherwise getting remastered by someone like Nightdive, is always a good thing. But I could hook a USB disc drive up to my desktop or even Steam Deck to take advantage of my physical PC games that managed to survive the years, various moves, and one particularly tragic basement flood. Thanks to emulator developers, I can do the same with ISOs and ROMs extracted from my console game collection.

By contrast, Nintendo's insistence on squandering its library in an insulting subscription emulation service is an utter abomination to me, while original Nintendo Switch back compat still seems to be a bit of an open question: Digital Foundry has pointed out that many third-party Switch games have documented issues already acknowledged by Nintendo, with many more appearing to require additional testing.

Nintendon't

(Image credit: Nintendo)

I fully understand the plug and play appeal of consoles, something that has increasingly vanished in the face of ubiquitous online services and day one patches. I'm staunchly against Windows handhelds, whose degraded, crappy user experiences trigger a similar revulsion in me as those touch screen simulated gamepads.

But SteamOS and the Steam Deck represent to me the sweet spot of a console-style, user-friendly frontend with no compromise on user control: I can load up ROMs, 20-year-old physical PC games, or even games from competing digital storefronts on my Steam Deck with minimal technical know-how. Similar freedom on a launch Nintendo Switch requires jailbreaking the system with a positively medieval method where you physically short the Joy Con rail with a paperclip.

Cost is always something I want to be cognizant of as a barrier to PC gaming, but despite the current derangement around graphics card pricing, low to mid-range hardware provides more mileage now than at any point in the history of the hobby⁠—the 10-year-old GTX 970 still shows up in some triple-A games' minimum specs.

Best of the best

(Image credit: Larian Studios)

2025 games: Upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

[Content truncated due to length...]

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Since life sim Inzoi launched in early access last week, I've relished watching players discover the game's weirdest quirks, ranging from impressively detailed housing customization options to…the ability to kidnap babies. My new favorite thing, however, is how players who have tried out the game's fishing system have been unexpectedly greeted with a sharp surprise.

Over the past few days, quite a few players have gone fishing in hopes of catching a small fish or two (or perhaps something a bit bigger to turn into sushi), only to unexpectedly catch a giant shark that's so much bigger than their Zoi that it clips through the ground.

In contrast to the Sims, Inzoi has made itself out to be the arguably more serious life sim (no Cowplants or grilled cheese-related aspirations here), which is why so many players have been surprised that their Zois are fishing up massive sharks. The sharks become even stranger when noting that players are also catching them in Inzoi's relatively small rivers, not just at the beach.

I have more questions, though. How are Inzoi's flimsy fishing rods reeling these sharks in? How are these tiny Zois able to effortlessly hold up what look like 300-pound bull sharks with one hand (like those guys with fish photos on dating apps)? How are these sharks even getting into Inzoi's rivers?

my zoi caught a whole shark out of the river?? #inZOI pic.twitter.com/p3kBw5HDmEMarch 28, 2025

If you'd rather ignore these pressing questions and want to catch a shark for yourself, you can do so simply by heading to one of the game's fishing spots near water (indicated by a little blue cooler bag) and fishing until luck strikes. While sharks seem to be relatively rare, there isn't a skill attached to fishing, leaving the shark chances up to the RNG gods and possibly the assistance of advanced bait. This makes things even weirder—so many poor Zois must have gone fishing for the first time only to be forced to carry an entire shark home.

As a fishing minigame freak myself, I'm hoping that Inzoi eventually fleshes out its fishing system, maybe with a skill of its own and fish that are gated behind levels or maps. At the same time, though, I'm still very much amused by the giant river sharks currently plaguing the world of Inzoi and its unsuspecting players and I won't be mad if they stick around.

Inzoi roadmap: Early access updates
Inzoi cheats: The current cheat codes
Inzoi multiplayer: Will it be online?
Inzoi Character Studio: How character creation works
Games like The Sims: More to life

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The Phasmophobia 2025 roadmap promised Easter, Halloween, and Holiday seasonal events would return this year with recent feedback implemented from its 2024 celebrations. Seasonal spirit sightings should start sometime soon, too, as the Phasmophobia Easter event preview airs later on this month.

To get prepared, we're always watching and waiting—hoping for a sign from the Blood Moon cult—and plan to record any evidence of confirmed release dates or speculation sightings below. Here's what we know about any Jackalope or Krampus visits over the year with a Phasmophobia 2025 seasonal event calendar.

When is the Phasmophobia Easter event 2025?

The Phasmophobia Easter event doesn't have an official release date yet, but Kinetic says it has a preview planned for April 17, 2025, as part of the Twitch Galaxies Showcase.

Actual Easter Sunday is April 20, so there's a three-day window there for Ghost Hunters to get rolling if Kinetic plans on having any overlap with the holiday. In 2024, the Easter event began just a few days before the actual seasonal celebration, so maybe make some assumptions there and plan whatever egg hunting accordingly.

Phasmophobia event calendar

(Image credit: Kinetic Games)

Upcoming Phasmophobia events in 2025

Ghost Hunters typically don't get much notice before a Phas event begins, but we can at least speculate based on any teases and historical hauntings of years past. So far, we know about the Easter developer preview coming up mid-April, while the other celebrations will keep you waiting until the end of the year.

Previous Phasmophobia seasonal events

(Image credit: Kinetic Games)

There's no going back to collect old rewards, but keeping track of historic haunts is helping in predicting any upcoming ghost activity. Or it's just a nice way to double-check your trophy cabinet and mourn the empty spaces.

2022 Event dates

• Easter — April 15 - April 20
• Halloween — October 7 - November 4
• Holiday — December 14, 2022 - January 9, 2023

2023 Event dates

• Easter — March 26 - April 9
• Halloween — October 26 - November 10
• Holiday — December 11, 2023 - January 9, 2024

2024 Event dates

• Easter — March 26 - April 9
• Halloween: Crimson Eye — October 28 - November 17
• Holiday: Winter's Jest — December 12 - December 31

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