In case you haven't heard, the Resident Evil movie rocks. Zach Cregger's singular adaptation of the beloved Capcom video games is a 95-minute shot of t-Virus adrenaline that does a better job of adapting the series to film than any of the previous seven movies, despite telling an original story and failing to include a single game character.

This caused something of a backlash ahead of release, leading Cregger to embark on a self-professed "apology tour" during interviews. But I'm here to tell you all that Cregger was right: more filmmakers need to be brave enough to tell their own stories when adapting video games, and stay true to the source material in other ways, even if it means leaving fan-favorite figures behind.

Despite taking place "on the periphery" of Resident Evil 2, on the day of the t-Virus outbreak, Cregger's Resident Evil movie doesn't feature the iconic likes of Leon S. Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Jill Valentine, Nemesis or any of the myriad characters and monsters we know are running around the streets of Raccoon City at this exact time. Instead, it focuses on medical courier Bryan, an average Joe who's comically out of his depth when faced with seemingly unkillable zombies and even gnarlier mutated creatures. His simple goal: to get the basis of an antidote for the infection from A to B.

The movie's only acknowledgement of Resident Evil's outrageously convoluted lore is a brief moment of exposition revealing that (who else but) the Umbrella Corporation is behind the t-Virus outbreak. This side of Resident Evil, along with the well-explored characters, evidently wasn't of interest to Cregger.

And who can blame him – we had six Milla Jovovich-led movies featuring cosplay versions of familiar Resident Evil figures in daft fan-fiction scenarios that sort of looked a bit like the games if you squinted. These movies were at least fun, which can't really be said about the disastrous 2021 movie Welcome to Raccoon City – an adaptation so misguided in its efforts to please fans that it featured originally cut character Lisa Trevor, but was somehow the worst of the lot.

Instead, Cregger, a clearly passionate Resident Evil fan who also happens to be one of the most accomplished and exciting contemporary filmmakers, has adapted Resident Evil in the ways that matter: translating the tone, atmosphere, structure, absurdity, and the you-know-it-if-you-see-it feel of the games to film in a way that feels practically groundbreaking.

Lone survivor

Everyman Bryan might be a new kind of protagonist for a Resident Evil story (more akin to Ethan at the start of 7 than one-man-army Leon), but the idea of following a single isolated character through a nightmare gauntlet is standard operating procedure for the series. No time for idle chit-chat when you've got mutated beasties to kill and arcane sub-objectives to complete.

There's also the undeniable fact that most of the games simply aren't suited for a 1:1 translation to film. Resident Evil 2 might be an all-time classic, but Leon or Claire running laps around the RPD building to stay out of Mr. X's reach is unlikely to lend itself to compelling cinema. And the less said about the B-movie stories and dialogue, the better.

Despite his passion for the series, Cregger is smart enough to know that if you want to experience Resident Evil 4, the best way to do that will always be to play the game. This has long been the case for video game adaptations – particularly on the big screen – which have typically loosely adapted the stories and the characters out of necessity in a way that satisfies no one. Beyond a handful of specific examples – The Last of Us on TV among them – that truly lend themselves to faithful adaptation, it's almost always going to be the case that using the worlds as a jumping-off point for new stories, while honoring the ethos of the games, will yield more satisfying results for fans and newcomers.

We're living through the golden age of video game adaptations, akin to the position superhero cinema was in around the early days of the MCU. And just like superhero cinema was no longer treated purely as disposable kids' fare by a generation of filmmakers who grew up reading comics, as a generation of filmmakers who grew up playing video games move into positions of power in Hollywood, the approach to adapting them has become increasingly sophisticated. There have already been a number of successful examples on TV, including Fallout and Arcane, neither of which adapts specific stories from the games, but still manage to stay true to their respective worlds. Resident Evil is the first true success story on film, at least one put out by a major studio.

Of course, there are examples of this approach not working out in the past. 2016's Assassin's Creed, starring Michael Fassbender, wasn't a million miles away from Cregger's Resident Evil in its use of a new cast of characters in a familiar setting and scenario. But without casting aspersions, it's fair to say that Assassin's Creed director Justin Kurzel – the extremely accomplished filmmaker behind the likes of Snowtown and The True History of the Kelly Gang – probably didn't understand Assassin's Creed in the same way that Cregger does Resident Evil, and it showed.

A new way forward

The discourse around Resident Evil has been a bummer to see as a long-serving fan of the games and an equally big fan of Cregger. Here, at long last, a series as storied and full of potential as Resident Evil has enlisted a filmmaker with the vision and talent to craft something that lives up to the legacy of the games – which he accomplished and then some – and the instinct of many is to tear the movie down because it isn't a 1:1 translation. I, for one, don't want to see the same thing again, simply in live action; that experience is open to me again anytime by booting up my PlayStation. I'll always opt for something new, as long as it feels true to the world it's bringing to the screen.

It's too early to say whether or not filmmakers will learn the lessons of Cregger's Resident Evil. We've yet to get a proper glimpse of Wes Ball's The Legend of Zelda movie, though given comments from Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto recently that the movie would be inspired by the history of the whole series, and some sneaky set photos that appear to feature a mix of costumes from different eras, I'll be surprised if it's a faithful rendering of a specific entry. Better it captures the spirit of the series first and foremost, followed by any specifics which support that.

As for Resident Evil, despite saying he's had ideas for a sequel, it doesn't seem all that likely Cregger will return – and who can blame him. While many consider the ending abrupt, you can't deny that it closes the loop on Bryan as a character, and serves as a tragic origin story for a hulking Raccoon City sub-boss; you could almost imagine Leon stumbling across his voice message for Michelle in Raccoon City General Hospital's subterranean car park before going on to take him out with a few well-placed magnum shots to that bulging eye. As far as adapting a video game goes, Cregger has achieved an easy S+ rank.

Resident Evil is out now. For more, check out our ranking of the best Resident Evil movies and our spoiler-filled Resident Evil movie ending explained.

I love Silent Hill. I love the tension of exploring the twisted nightmare forms of real environments, pursued by bizarre creatures eager to make me one more body lost among the fog. Shifting the setting from Americana to Scotland with Silent Hill: Townfall, laden with UK-specific '90s details, made me incredibly excited. Even so, despite holding a candle for Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and more, I'm a scaredy cat at heart. Many horror movies are off the cards for me, and there's one gaming mechanic I struggle to vibe with above all others in horror games: having to hide from patrolling enemies.

Whether that's the gory heights of Outlast or the psychological hauntings in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I nope out nearly instantly. In our Silent Hill Townfall review, we praised how it's "full of real fear, impeccable atmosphere, and a distressing story of remorse and penance". So, when I found my first cupboard with a 'hide' prompt, foreshadowing the hiding mechanics that loom large from start to finish, I began to get worried. That was until I got used to Simon Ordell's CRTV, the chunky, almost Game Boy-like device he clutches throughout the nightmare trip that is Silent Hill: Townfall.

Screen time

At its core, it functions like the iconic Silent Hill radio, with bursts of static noise alerting you to when enemies are hiding in nearby fog. But, by holding up the screen and tuning it to available signals, you won't just get clues on how to progress, but can pick out the shape of specific monsters.

Zeroing in on one, the screen turns red and a darker outline of the creature can be seen through any object. You can keep tabs on a zoomie foe with an axe head running back and forth as you slink through the neighboring alleyway. A maze of gardens and sheds behind blocks of flats could spell doom with one wrong turn, unless I fiddle that dial enough to get an early look at the crouched shapes of enemies writhing on the ground.

Even with the guidance, enemies in Silent Hill: Townfall patrol enough around relatively tight spaces that I still have to put effort into avoiding detection. Sometimes I can use the cover mechanic to anchor myself to the spot and peek around corners, abandoned three-door cars, or the waist-high stone wall of a bungalow front garden. Holding down while peeking allows Simon to flatten himself even further. All the while, I'm clutching my CRTV to add a clearer silhouette to supplement the edge of the enemy I can otherwise barely see. It's the kind of tension I've not felt since Alien: Isolation, where I'm likewise moments away from death at any time.

Often, that can also mean tracking their movements until they look like they're about to double-back, then quickly dipping into the half-open door of a nearby house to 'hide', able to peer through only a small slit with my normal vision.

It's hard to outrun enemies, but Townfall's St Amelia is so full of hiding places that you can usually take a corner and find a spot to duck into. Early on, a monster chases me and continues just beyond where I'm cowered in the dark, instead knocking its head repeatedly on a nearby locked gate, the clanging constantly making me afraid it's about to turn its attention to the doors I'm right behind (make no mistake, they can pull you out if they see you). I soon learn there's an achievement – Isolating Experience – for staying in one hiding spot for at least 60 seconds.

As well as the CRTV you have a map, which roots you to the space – vulnerable – while you peruse it. It's telling, though, that the CRTV can be gripped while still walking around, and, also unlike the map, can be pulled out while in a hiding space. This is the stronger navigational tool you should be relying upon rather than burying your head in a map. The whole world is tinted red, haunted by ghost-like visions of your regret no matter where you are. Can you turn your inner eye away from what you have done before it consumes you? Certainly not. If you do, you're already dead.

Silent Hill Townfall's CRTV is empowering in that it allows you to see your doom coming. In theory, it's not that much more useful than peeking around walls, but it does keep the action pacier, and even encourages moments where I feel like I can step up and bring the danger rather than be hunted.

By tuning into each enemy in a zone one at a time, I can sometimes tell when outlines are trapped behind walls that can't reach me, leaving another vulnerable and alone, its back turned. I could hide, but why not take this destructible plank of wood and get the jump on them?

Sure, in a fair match-up, I'm likely to get my weapon smashed and take deadly hits, but just maybe the screen in my hands can tempt me to be successful with my violence. I'm not always sure the CRTV is a good thing. But this is Silent Hill. What good is left? Here in the fog, we take what we can get.

I'm reminded of another horror game that plays with giving the player some slack in the pursuer-pursued relationship – Forbidden Siren. There, Sightjacking can be used to see through the eyes of enemies as you can see yourself illuminated at a distance. Here, the benefit of knowing exactly where an enemy is off-set by the disorientation of the perspective shift. The vulnerability that comes from losing sight of your own body creates an ethereal feeling to the folkloric horror, while also giving me just a touch more control to staying one step ahead of death.

There's a scene in Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – a satirical, tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of slasher movies, which is more along the lines of what I can handle when it comes to horror cinema – where a character describes an out-of-body, disassociative experience that walks a line between terror and reclamation of power, control by way of a lack of control. It's a part of how audiences can enjoy horror movies, but becomes part of Camp Miasma's own text – uncomfortable and validating in equal measure.

In gaming, we're always at a remove. We might be immersed, but we always control a character. It's a framing trick; thinking about Camp Miasma while playing Townfall, I'm conscious that I'm watching through a screen as someone else watches a screen displaying their impending doom. By their nature, games have a lot more room to play with this feeling of distance, to shrug off cinematic ambitions that lock us to one viewpoint, and instead take these complete digital spaces and allow us to look within. A gaming character peering out of reality is, in a way, no different than the player experience often is. Townfall's CRTV outlines are, in a way, an underpowered form of Detective Vision common in the likes of Batman: Arkham Knight or even The Witcher 3.

Yet, conjured and grounded in the reality of this Scottish town that seems completely normal until the nightmare becomes apparent, the simple shorthand of an enhanced vision mechanic is rendered hellish, wrong, yet still no less valuable and necessary for survival. This is the kind of playful horror that reminds me why I always felt so drawn to Silent Hill in the first place. Between Townfall and Silent Hill f, these recent years of genuine reinvention for the series has me incredibly excited for its future, and the horror games it'll inspire.

Shrug off the silence and check out our best Silent Hill games and best Japanese horror games rankings for more!

May the odds be ever in your favor as we return to Panem for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. The upcoming movie acts as a prequel to the original saga, telling Haymitch Abernathy's tragic origin story. Katniss' mentor in the original movies is a jaded man from his own experiences in the arena, and this story sums up exactly why that is.

Based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, the new movie brings back director Francis Lawrence, who has helmed all of the Hunger Games movies apart from the first one, alongside an all-new cast. Below, we break down all the details you need to know about Sunrise on the Reaping, including who plays who, what exactly happens, and when it's coming out.

We've also got the lowdown on the new trailer as well as how it connects to the original movies. Read on for your ultimate guide to The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. And while you're at it, why not check out our guide to other upcoming movies you need to know about.

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping release date

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping hits theaters on November 20, 2026.

This is only a year and a half on from the release of Suzanne Collins' novel, which is pretty tight turnaround for Hollywood. However, it seems like the rights for the movie were confirmed when the book was announced, allowing for a quick adaptation.

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping plot details

It's expected that Sunrise on the Reaping will be very faithful to Suzanne Collins' book, which focuses on 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy.

24 years before the first film, he is selected to compete in the 50th Hunger Games for District 12. However, this year is different: as a Quarter Quell, two tributes are sent from each district to compete as President Snow and Plutarch Heavensbee attempt to make it the most dramatic year yet.

The film will follow Haymitch's life just before he's selected, where he lives with his younger brother and mother and often sneaks off to meet his girlfriend, Lenore Dove Baird. His world gets turned upside down when he's selected as one of the tributes, bringing him to the Capitol and into the orbit of a whole load of familiar faces.

But if you know anything about Haymitch, you know he does not play by the rules. Determined not to go without a fight, he sets his sights on bringing down the games from within.

Director Francis Lawrence has promised they mostly won't be holding back with the darkness of the novel either. "What’s great about Suzanne's writing is that she pulls no punches," he told Entertainment Weekly. "The only thing we have to do in the movies is make them PG-13. So there's certain things she describes in the book that I could never put in the movies. There's a character holding the head of a child at one point in the book, and that’s just not something you can do in a PG-13 movie."

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping cast

There are plenty of familiar characters in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, as it tells a story set 24 years before the first movie. Before the names were even announced, there was a whole load of fan-casting going on for the main players, and plenty of them actually ended up in the final film. This means the Sunrise on the Reaping cast is probably one of the most exciting ensembles I've ever seen, balancing newcomers and household names. Check out the full list below.

• Joseph Zada – Haymitch Abernathy
• Mckenna Grace – Maysilee Donner
• Whitney Peak – Lenore Dove Baird
• Jesse Plemons – Plutarch Heavensbee
• Elle Fanning – Effie Trinket
• Kieran Culkin – Caesar Flickerman
• Ralph Fiennes – President Coriolanus Snow
• Glenn Close – Drusilla Sickle
• Maya Hawke – Wiress
• Kelvin Harrison Jr. – Beetee Latier
• Ben Wang – Wyatt Callow
• Molly McCann – Louella McCoy
• Iona Bell – Lou Lou
• Billy Porter – Magno Stift
• Iris Apatow – Proserpina Trinket
• Lili Taylor – Mags Flanagan
• Kara Tointon – Willamae Abernathy
• Smylie Bradwell – Sid Abernathy
• Scot Greenan – Burdock Everdeen
• Grace Ackary – Asterid March

Do the original Hunger Games cast appear in Sunrise on the Reaping?

Just a quick warning about this section: we're about to discuss the ending of the novel. If you want to go in fresh to the movie, scroll past here to the next section.

At the end of Sunrise on the Reaping, there is an epilogue set after the events of the original series. In it, Haymitch speaks with Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark about his history, and they speak about how he remembers Lenore Dove, whom he lost all those years ago.

There's been no official confirmation, but it has been reported by The Hollywood Reporter that this will feature in the film adaptation too. This means that Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson will reprise their roles, a decade on from Mockingjay Part 2. It's not clear yet whether they'll be joined by original Haymitch Abernathy star Woody Harrelson or if the film will change up this scene a bit.

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping trailer

There have been several The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping trailers ahead of the movie's release. The first teaser gave us our first look at the bright, colorful arena as well as Ralph Fiennes' take on President Snow. The characters work together to try and break the arena from the inside out. "We're not animals to kill for their entertainment," Haymitch says.

The second trailer gives us a better look at the carriage scene, which fans of the books will know is one of the story's darkest moments. As well as this, you see Haymitch stand up to President Snow, something that will be a source of great pain for him in the future.

For more of what's heading to theaters, check out our guide to all the new superhero movies and the new horror movies you need to know about.

The success of Diablo 2 Resurrected proves there is hunger for updated versions of Blizzard's original genre-defining ARPGs, and the next remake should be 1996's Diablo. It's one of my favorite games ever and probably the most formative to my career in games. It's aged incredibly well for a 30-year-old game, or at least I thought it did until I saw parts of it beautifully reimagined in Diablo 4's latest update, Season of Hell's Legacy.

In case you missed it, which is understandable in the wake of Diablo 5's surprise announcement at BlizzCon 2026, Diablo 4's 15th season is one giant trip down memory lane for longtime fans of the series. Diablo himself, the Lord of Darkness, is one of the main highlights, but he joins other returning baddies like Mephisto and Baal, not to mention friendlier faces like Deckard Cain, who acts as your guide through the seasonal questline.

Waking Nightmares are the big highlights of the new season. Aptly timed to coincide with Diablo's 30th anniversary this year, these seasonal dungeons take you through iconic moments and boss battles from the series' history, with my favorite being an almost complete recreation of Diablo 1's main mission, all the way from Tristram Cathedral, down to the catacombs, the caves, and then into Hell itself to face off against the Dark Lord himself.

New Tristram

I can't think of a game more consequential to my love of gaming than OG Diablo, so this dungeon was super special for me. But when I found out you can actually return to a fully recreated version of Old Tristram, complete with the same landmarks and NPCs featuring original voice lines from the first Diablo, I knew I had to explore my old stomping grounds. Tristram – that music, those characters, they're like my virtual home. Diablo is the first game I ever became obsessed with as a kid, and I would spend hours chatting with strangers in Tristram, unknowingly forming friendships that would endure decades. Going back was intense, but more than anything it made me want a full-blown Diablo remake.

There are still three long years to go until we get to play Diablo 5, and that's assuming there won't be any delays. Diablo 4 is great, especially this new season, but three years is a long time, and we need something to do in the meantime. A full-fat remake of Diablo, not a remaster like Diablo 2: Resurrected, would not only give ARPG fans more demons to click to death while they wait for Diablo 5, but it would also give newer fans of the series, who might've started with Diablo 4, or Diablo 3, or even Diablo 2, a reason to go back and experience the very beginning of the whole saga, which could provide key context or at the very least a narrative foundation for Diablo 5.

Diablo 1 is also just a sick game with a great story and ridiculously vibey world that I think everyone should experience at least once. But with 1996 visuals and designs being what they are, I understand why someone under, say, 30, might bristle at the idea of sitting down for a full playthrough of a game that old. I would certainly accept a touched-up remaster with gratitude, but a ground-up remake would be a much stronger draw for people who've never played the game.

Blizzard missed a big opportunity to announce something like this during the series' 30th anniversary celebrations at BlizzCon 2026 – I suppose it was a little preoccupied – but it's not too late! Getting it into players' hands before Diablo 5 would be ideal, but even outside the context of a new game that's shaping up to bring the whole series full-circle, a Diablo remake just makes sense. It's a super old, equally beloved game that hasn't been updated meaningfully in 30 years. Diablo 4's bite-sized recreations are nostalgic treats, but they're mere teases of what's possible in a proper remake.

Check out all the best Diablo games to play while we wait for D5!

I've waited a long time to play as Nagash in Total War: Warhammer 3, but no amount of dreaming could prepare me for the real thing. To begin with, (un)life as Warhammer's first lich is surprisingly hard. Nagash's starting position is sandwiched between two greater daemons of Chaos, an angry French crusader, and Settra – fellow bone-man and Nagash's biggest hater. Most of the necromancer's nine books of power are scattered across the world, his Mortarch lieutenants are still infuriatingly independent, and to top it all off, I immediately lose the first tome I find in a pitched battle.

That was 200 turns ago. I would normally have succumbed to the urge to start a fresh campaign by now, but Lords of the End Times and its accompanying update 9.0 make Immortal Empires far more interesting in its middle and late stages. And when the titular End Times arrives – not brought on by Nagash, unfortunately, but Chaos big-bad Archaon – it feels like my campaign is broken in two.

Everybody wants to be Nagash

When Archaon arrives, I assume my campaign is coming to an end. Scores of Chaos invaders land on my southern shores, while the Everchosen commands them from the rear. Archaon is nigh invincible. Each Chaos army and unholy fortress grants him a percentage of invulnerability, so taking Archaon on requires blunting his invasion force. All the while, a ticking counter tells me how much of the world has been destroyed – settlements razed during the End Times can't be recolonized until (or if) the crisis ends, making it feel like a true apocalypse. Especially when the world's surviving civilizations come to me with last-ditch alliance offers – mankind, dwarfs, elves, even Skaven; all want Nagash on their side to face Chaos.

During the End Times, my tome-hunting mission is put on hold as Nagash inadvertently becomes the world police. Three quarters of the world is razed by the time I finally beat Archaon, besting him once on the battlefield and again in a climactic quest battle that involves besting every champion of Chaos before taking on the Everchosen. I'm a… hero?

Not for long. With most of the world lying in ruins, Archaon's defeat spurs a race to resettle as much land as possible. I rush to raise mausoleums and burial chambers across the Nehekara, using Nagash's Ritual of the Dead to dramatically warp the landscape into sickly (but visually impressive) wastelands. New powers rise – Kislev survives the End Times and takes over the Empire's old lands – and one by one, my allies remember Nagash is evil incarnate and declare war. But I'm in my lane, happy, unmoisturized: with a firm grip on a Mordor-like empire in the south, I'm free to continue gathering my Mortarchs and precious books.

I'm now in the campaign's late-game, requiring just a few more Mortarchs to achieve a Long Victory, but this is the most exciting Immortal Empires has ever been. A greater emphasis on narrative and structure gives the sandbox so much more definition, and seeing the post-apocalyptic world return to life gives me the same rush as starting a whole new campaign. Even with my Long Victory ticked off, I plan to keep playing this and perhaps even go for my first Domination victory since the first Total War: Warhammer.

Only war

I'm delighted by how fresh and tight Immortal Empires feels, even without Lords of the End Times' paid factions. Equally impressive is how well Nagash lives up to my expectations. The lich is a powerhouse in battle, but on the campaign map he's the tip of a spear that can only be pointed in one direction at a time. Entrusting my idiot psuedo-son Arkhan with his own conquest ends with daemons of Tzeentch beating him and spiriting one of my books away, while marching Nagash to fight Skaven in the north results in a lore-accurate slog that keeps him busy while other frontlines falter.

Nagash's tricky campaign spot is an excellent counterweight to his strength in battle. Defending my ghastly empire, I feel a stab of sympathy for Nagash, Sauron, and every other necromancer who's had the courage to launch their own start-up. It's not easy! But it's worth it – so worth it – to field Tomb King monstrosities, Vampire Coast artillery, and Vampire Count infantry in the same armies, all while Nagash funnels necromantic energy into his Black Pyramid to power them (and himself) up.

To give you some idea of how much fun I'm having with Nagash, I'm already considering another playthrough as the lich once this world is ashes. But there are another three lords to play in the pack (Skaven schemer Thanquol, the Empire's Boris Todbringer, and Nurgle-loving siblings The Glotkin), and I'm also tempted to see how update 9.0's End Times play out through other perspectives. In the 1007 hours I've put into Warhammer 3 since launch, this is the most exciting Immortal Empires has ever been. And with Nagash living up to a decade of expectations, I could die happy. Just don't expect me to stay gone…

I played Total War: Warhammer 40K and saw a generational strategy game in the making

PATCH NOTES v09.22.2026 – GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games reiterated its modding guidelines and new monetization policy in the run up to the new Grand Theft Auto, further complicating its relationship with custom and user-generated content. This comes three years after Rockstar purchased the studio behind one of the most successful GTA 5 multiplayer mod frameworks, FiveM, after having first sought to shut the project down completely.

It felt like a win back then, but as GTA 6 looms on the horizon, has Rockstar just canceled all mods for its new game outright?

What's going on with GTA 6 this week?

• Rockstar Games shared its comprehensive modding rules ahead of GTA 6's November launch
• Guidelines forbid the expansion or modification of key characters, storylines, locations, and "other elements of our established continuity" across Rockstar's litany of games

Why is this happening now?

• Rockstar re-establishing its modding guidelines feels like a warning in the lead up to GTA 6
• The GTA studio's stance is an outlier among other major publishers that cultivate rather than stifle modding communities

Meta Shift

• Rockstar's modding guidelines state that monetized mods can only be bought and sold via "approved" storefronts

Most of Rockstar's mod guidelines spell out the demonstrably strict stance the studio has always taken on the matter. The one thing it does put in black and white for the first time, though, is that monetized mods can only be sold "via digital storefront providers approved by Rockstar Games" – likely via Cfx Marketplace. The platform serves as Rockstar's official one-stop shop for approved GTA 5 mods, and is an extension of the FiveM and RedM modding clients for GTA and Red Dead Redemption specifically.

Its very existence is telling. While some developers welcome free community mods as a natural part of a game's evolution, with Baldur's Gate 3 getting an internal client on top of full mod support, Rockstar's Cfx Marketplace platform gives the developer a cut of sales profits for all mods sold.

Publishers will always crack down on the unlawful buying and selling of mods, as this is tantamount to copyright infringement. But free game mods aren't inherently problematic as long as they stay free. It's why community mods were always not-for-profit in Simming communities, for example, until EA launched the Sims Marketplace this year and permitted content creators to sell their Sims 4 mods in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. This seems to be the case for anyone looking to monetize their Rockstar mods going forward – though thankfully, free mods are still very much out there.

There are other guidelines set out for modding in general, allegedly to protect the integrity and "official continuity" of Rockstar games. The rules remind us that Rockstar forbids the cross-pollination of its IPs (no more modding Arthur Morgan into San Andreas, kids), as well as platform modifications that reverse engineer games to be played on unsupported devices. This is especially pertinent to GTA 6, which is not set to release on PC when it launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X. Rockstar also refers back to its licensed creator platform, most likely FiveM, as being the only permitted way to make multiplayer mods. Which is ironic, considering how FiveM creator Cfx.re started off on the GTA publisher's hit list.

Known Issue

• Rockstar parent company Take-Two is known for taking swift litigious action against rulebreaking community mods, but it's folded to pressure before

Rockstar's modding rules have been heavily slammed by players on Twitter, with some calling them unenforceable "scare tactics". But there's a degree of mixed messaging, too. After threatening legal action against Cfx.re – the developer behind hyper-popular multiplayer mod FiveM that gave rise to robust GTA RP servers – Rockstar bought the studio outright in 2023. FiveM is now the official GTA 5 modkit, and all it took was cutting the developer in on its profits.

What I find interesting is that a lot of what GTA RP servers stand for – creating a deeper, more lived-in GTA multiplayer experience – may challenge a lot of Rockstar's stipulated rules. GTA RP allows players to revisit locations usually reserved for single missions in the fifth mainline game, for example, as well as creating more enterable houses on the map and letting players buy, sell, and decorate them. It's strange that, as a Rockstar-greenlit initiative that almost got shut down for being so good, GTA RP could be testing the limits of its own guidelines. But given how successful FiveM continues to be, I suppose exceptions can be made.

Patch Notes summary

• Modding Rockstar games is not illegal, but as always, be on your guard

If you're wondering what will happen to all your favorite single player offline Rockstar mods now that these guidelines have been outlined, the answer is… Probably nothing. Not yet, anyway. The rules serve as a reminder for players as GTA 6's launch date approaches, reiterating Rockstar's stance on how custom content should be made, used, and distributed by creators.

It's surfaced a lot of discourse all the same: does this mean that San Andreas mod Project Eagle, which seeks to put key classic GTA city locations in one huge open world map, is doomed? Has Rockstar just killed off GTA 6 mods before the game even launches? The jury's still out on both of those. But as long as you're not flogging mods without cutting the copyright holders in, these guidelines shouldn't raise any alarm bells.

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It's been over a year since Dune Awakening debuted on PC (you'll never guess in which month). Depending on who you ask, it was either a fantastic, atmospheric survival game, or a tedious desert trek even more boring than someone trying to explain Children of Dune to you unsolicited in a crowded bar. Now, alongside a big update on PC, it's arrived on PS5 and Xbox Series X, just in time to binge during the wait for Dune: Part Three.

Regardless of what you thought of it, there's no denying Funcom created an impressive open-world take on Arrakis, Dune's super-deadly desert planet. We called it a "true Dune love letter" in our Dune Awakening review. A beautiful recreation that nailed the look of Villeneuve's films, all made with a clear love for the source material and a clear hatred of onboarding anyone not familiar with said source material. Yeah, fair warning – if the words 'Bene Gesserit' are gibberish to you, do not start here.

DuneScape

The good news is it's still a visual treat on PS5. You can choose between lovely silky-smooth 60fps, which we all know is the mode a true Messiah would play. Or you can blaspheme and play at 30fps, which admittedly adds more visual detail and suffers less pop-in I suppose. As you've probably guessed, I'm a 60fps stan. The game feels far better to play, still looks terrific, and the pop-in is minimal enough to be a worthwhile compromise.

The setup; you're some nobody who's being shipped off to Arrakis to enjoy a life of endless slavery. But then your ship is blasted out of the sky, leaving you stranded in the middle of the desert (to be fair, Arrakis is basically all desert). The sun wants to burn you alive, water is seemingly scarcer than a first-party PlayStation game release, and a walk on open sands will likely end with you in the belly of a giant worm. Yikes.

It's a great hook for a survival game. My genre favourites, Subnautica and Grounded, love throwing you into a desperate situation, knowing that it'll be far more rewarding when you somehow survive against impossible odds. Considering Arrakis could only be more hostile if the ground was made out of freshly-unpinned grenades, Dune Awakening has the potential to be one of the best survival games and a true all-timer.

Except, over a year since release, this still feels like a game that's spread itself too thin without nailing the basics. It doesn't want to be seen as 'just' a survival MMO – it now even has a strictly single-player mode. It's also got stealth, shooting, climbing, flying, vehicle combat, and more. But, all those moving parts aren't as polished as they could be, meaning the core survival experience suffers.

Take the water system. Water is everything on Arrakis. It powers your base, your tech, your powers, and you quickly start to suffer when you run out. You can drink the dew from flower patches for some limited hydration, but it's clear from the disgusted bark your character makes that Dune Awakening considers this gross. That's why it encourages you to murder people and harvest water from their blood instead. OK then.

Forcing you to become a desert vampire is a wonderfully nasty idea, let down by the game's enemies being dumber than rocks. The smarter ones will hang back and shoot you, though they'll still rarely get into cover or do anything to avoid your gunshots. But they're practically MENSA members compared to the suicidally-stupid grunts who sprint towards you with knives, somehow oblivious to the fact I'm emptying my gun into them. By the time they reach me, they collapse dead at my feet, blood ready for the taking. Er, thanks, I guess?

In the world of Dune, characters have shield suits that make guns useless, forcing everyone to engage in close-quarters melee combat. Some characters in Awakening are wearing these, and the sight of one running towards you is properly tense, especially considering how much better the knife combat is than the utterly pedestrian gunplay. Knife combat is a little unwieldy, but that works here. A knife fight to the death in the desert should feel desperate and scrappy, after all.

But why are enemies who aren't wearing these shields – which is most of them, early on – also running towards me as if they are? One quest giver sent me to a testing facility and warned me that the people there had lost their minds. He described how they would run up to people and attack them senselessly. Buddy, that's half the idiots in this game!

Water shame

Because scavengers are so easily dispatched, that means the water they carry – which should be a precious resource – is easy to get, too. I set up my base near a camp where two scavengers reliably respawn, meaning I have two fresh water bags on tap. True, If you're playing single-player you can turn up the difficulty, but that doesn't stop enemies behaving mindlessly.

This did not go unnoticed in our three-star Dune Awakening verdict last year ("Both extremely compelling and extraordinarily boring, sometimes at the same time"). But it's elements like the "dull combat" that I was hoping would have been spruced up by now. Other potentially winning features still feel too janky, like its The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style climbing.

Like in Nintendo's classic, you can basically clamber up anything so long as you watch your stamina meter. Getting up a sheer cliff is mostly fine, but descending is still an imprecise chore, your character far too happy to fling themselves away from the cliff and take the quicker, more fatal way down. At least Link could survive a decent tumble, whereas in the early-game of Dune Awakening, your body is more fragile than games editor Oscar Taylor-Kent whenever I mildly criticize the Ocarina of Time remake.

Let's take a break from all this whining to talk about what Awakening does do well. The skill tree is full of great treats, including a terrific dash move for escaping Sandworms like a Looney Tunes character, and a hookshot that counters some of my complaints with the climbing. Its atmosphere and sense of place is spot-on. The power curve, though too stingy and slow, is rewarding if you persevere. Eventually you'll craft wearables that negate fall damage entirely which is somewhat a solution to the janky climbing.

And who doesn't like the idea of building their own awesome desert base? Me. I don't like it. Because I had to do it on PS5 with a DualSense, an experience about as friendly on the hands as sticking them in a couple of Pain Boxes, followed by an immediate vinegar bath.

Now obviously translating a complex PC game's UI to console is a nightmare. Baldur's Gate 3 managed it – just – whereas my recent Mistfall Hunter adventures showed how menus can come unstuck. But considering Dune Awakening's UI was a bit of a mess on PC, the poor PS5 version never really stood a chance.

Basic things you want are a chore to track down, buried in sub-menus within sub-menus. Open the pause screen and you can't see your objectives, which means by the time you do figure out which God-Emperor damn tab-menu-tab you need to be in, you've long forgotten what you were looking for anyway.

Over a year ago we said this game was "hindered by obtuse menus that make finding various projects on the tech trees and placebales an exercise in frustration." If that's been improved at all for this release, I shudder to think how bad it was before. Something's gone awry in your survival game when cold-blooded murder is a brain-off grind, but figuring out which menu the fabricator is hiding in has cost me what remains of my hair.

There's a decent Dune experience in here, but one I'd only recommend persevering with if you have a deep love of the source material. If you're more a casual fan of Timothée Chalamet movies, then I'm shocked to inform you that, unofficially, Lies of P is a far less stressful option you should consider playing instead.

Dune Awakening was played on PS5, with code provided by the publisher.

Awakening to more survival? 2,045 days later, Valheim's 1.0 launch proves its scope for epic journeys is still unbeatable, and if you want more we have great games like Valheim recommendations for you!

I've just slain a dragon by air-parrying it into the ground and impressed my new boss, Liu Bei – Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember's original but familiar take on the Chinese warlord many of us have come to know across years playing Dynasty Warriors. Set in the same period, in the run-up to the Three Kingdoms conflict, this supernatural take on real warfare sees Liu Bei offering to complete the rest of the mission at my side as he directs me to a bridge to tackle the mission's battlefield, which is scoped like a miniature open world of its own. I immediately take off my shirt, grab some nearby nunchuck-like flails, and prepare to unleash a can of demon whup-ass.

Developed by Team Ninja, it'd be easy to see Wo Long as the Chinese history equivalent of Nioh's equally supernatural take on Japanese history – the developer's Dynasty Warriors to their Samurai Warriors. Especially as, just like Nioh 3, Wo Long 2 is a sequel that shrugs off tighter mission design in pursuit of more open action. Yet, while the DNA they share is obvious – from brutal combat to a horde of loot with detailed stats and buffs – Wo Long and Nioh feel incredibly different to play. Even though both these recent entries are more open, the approach they take is very different. Through my hands-on spending a couple of hours in one large mission, I grow to really appreciate and love how Wo Long 2 sets itself apart from all Team Ninja has done before, while still feeling like a natural evolution from the master of action game development.

Demonic warfare

In the mission I get to play, Wo Long 2's open world puts much more emphasis on the feeling that I'm actually fighting through a contested battlefield as I help push Liu Bei's forces toward Cao Cao's fortress by spinning my flails. From enemy camps to a village in danger, and even a fight up to an occupied shrine, conflict is around every corner.

Though there's a Soulslike level-up mechanic, Wo Long 2 sees the return of the first game's morale system that has you gaining additional, mission-specific boosts to both your and your allies' stats. While it's possible to rush headlong into danger and, most likely, get shredded by enemies with morale far higher than yours, canny navigation of conflicts can see you erecting banners, clearing enemy camps, and completing snappy sidequests to increase your faction's hold on the No Man's Land, while reducing enemy morale in turn.

Be slain, and you'll lose accrued morale levels and your unspent experience points in Soulslike fashion, with one chance to reclaim them. However, these battlefield bonuses will remain, each sub-region affecting your overall minimum amount of morale while also raising the cap, pushing momentum in your favor. It goes a long way to taking the sting out of failure to know your forces are holding position.

While some of these control points are obvious (and can be added to the map if you find enemy strategy maps), some are less so, such as routing out hidden supernatural creatures. Along the way, enemy drops and big shiny chests hide more loot that can further push your advantage, though I keep the wrestler armor type active at all times so foes can see my sweat drip as I box their ears with a flail to the face.

In a way, this battlefield structure does nod to the likes of Dynasty Warriors, but I'll flag that these missions are conquerable through methodic play – once you push forward, enemies won't be claiming their morale back. You'll only be risking losing some of your own if you fall but, even then, you can earn more quite easily over a few respawning encounters.

With several routes to my ultimate goal, there's plenty of points of interest along the way and reasons to explore off the beaten track. One diversion has me clearing an enemy camp on the walls of ancient ruins, which allows me to raise a banner to control the battlefield, deploy a commander to it for a further boost, and kick down some ladders to create shortcuts.

Then, I'm able to optionally descend within the ruins to slay supernatural beasts, which both unlocks a path to a massive chest of shiny, multi-colored loot, and allows me to kill a mini-boss beastie which then boosts my army's morale even further. Elsewhere, I can find baby panda creatures that I can feed my unwanted equipment to in exchange for a new accessory of similar rarity before it has a well-earned snooze. Trading a sword I've outgrown for a new belt buckle is very fashion forward, and the kind of upcycling I could use in my real life.

The ancient ruins chunk of map on the other side of the woods can be avoided if I instead worm my way through to another exit, battling up a tower that spirals upward to give alternative access to the enemy fortress, enabling me to outflank the gates and allow more of my army to penetrate within. Fast travel can be used at any time to jump between banners, making it easy to hop around (though not every checkpoint can be used to level-up and deploy allies).

Two weapons can be equipped at a time, making it worthwhile to score those chunky chests. Even though I love the fast-strikes of my nunchuck-style weapons for throwing enemies off balance, I can supplement that with my longer-reaching spear when the situation demands. On top of that, elemental magic can add buffs to my equipment, or simply allow me to hurl fireballs and icicles at enemies to keep the pressure up at distance. Separately, martial arts skills can be dropped using Spirit energy mid-combo to deliver strikes that will batter an enemy's stagger bar, softening them up for delightfully extra finisher moves.

Spirit, is, essentially, Wo Long 2's stamina system, but rather than be a single bar that refills, it's always represented as a push-pull line with neutral being in the middle. Land clean hits, and it'll fill up in your favor with a blue color, but give too much ground and it'll drop in the other direction, turning red and putting you at risk of being staggered. You can even use special abilities to put yourself deep in the red if you're confident enough you can earn the Spirit back without being knocked about – but you have to be careful not to write a check you can't cash.

Big gains can be made to this meter by parrying and deflecting enemy strikes, which repositions you and the enemy as you redirect incoming blades (you can even punt demonic minions like footballs with an ability upgrade) – there's a sense of finesse to some of Wo Long 2's toughest battles that reminds me of the action in Sekiro. Though, while the first game very much felt like Team Ninja's take on that game, there are more options in combat this time around.

Spirit is one of Wo Long's most inventive systems, and it really helps to sell each individual fight as one where momentum really matters, building on the morale that underscores each mission. By chipping away at the whole battlefield, you can feel the odds shift in your favor as you loop back to previously deadly looking encounters to discover you and your allies can now take your revenge much more easily.

At times, the wider spaces do result in me jogging for a fair bit before getting back into the action. And, it feels like the parries that defined success in the first Wo Long are less vital here, with you and your allies surrounding enemies with big sticks often being perfectly viable instead. Even so, I'm impressed with how distinct Wo Long 2 manages to feel, not only as a 'masocore' Soulslike, but as an entry in Team Ninja's impressive gaming catalog. Despite Nioh's relative success, the original Wo Long felt like an underrated gem – but Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember has what it takes to burn brightly.

Longing for more like this? Check out our best Soulslike games ranking!

For almost two decades, I've played more creature-collecting games than I can count. With a love started by Pokemon, I can almost always find something to enjoy in an RPG that lets me loose on a world full of fun monsters to befriend, and I can confidently say that after an hour with Honkai: Nexus Anima, these are some of my favorite creature designs I've ever encountered – I only wish its battle style didn't leave me with so many reservations.

I'll admit that I'm easily charmed when it comes to this genre. I see a cute animal design, I click. Blend those animal designs with food inspirations? Now we're really cooking. During my hands-on session of Honkai: Nexus Anima – the upcoming creature-collecting strategy game from Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse – I'm constantly delighted by almost every creature I encounter, from the donut merchant rabbit Donubi to the ramen seal Pupanoo and pancake dog Puddlipup. The non-foodie Anima are great too – the very fashionable pig, Hoggit, is another favorite – but I can't deny there's a theme to my preferences here.

Feel the joy

My hands-on is a somewhat unusual one as I'm dropped into a preheated save file (already in the late level 40s, though I'm unsure how much playtime this equates to) with the freedom to explore the world, capture Anima, participate in battles, and progress story quests as I please. I find myself scanning the various tutorial pages looking for guidance on how the battle system works, as there's a lot to take in. I have dedicated Frontline and Backline Anima, each with traits that offer different benefits. Protectors, for example, take enemy aggro and regenerate energy when they're hit, while Masterminds have high damage output, with skill regeneration every second.

Dispositions, meanwhile, give Anima unique additional abilities even among the same species, making each one you capture slightly different. My Marshalbird comes with one that restores 5% health to the rest of my team when it falls in battle, for example. Between all this, as well as factors like your team's composition influencing status effects that are triggered in battle – Joy can trigger the Ecstacy status, for instance, but I couldn't find any explanation of what this actually means – I feel almost overwhelmed by the systems laid out in front of me, but eager to work out how they all click together.

Except, when I actually jump into some battles, it quickly becomes clear that I didn't have to feel overwhelmed at all. Combat works on a real-time autobattling system – your team of Anima is thrown into a top-down battle arena and immediately start charging toward their foes, autonomously using their abilities. While you do have some involvement – you have a number of cards at the bottom of your screen representing different human characters known as Eidos, who have various skills you can deploy when you like (cooldowns pending) – things generally take care of themselves.

Now, I don't know if I've been given a particularly souped-up team for my demo or if this is indicative of the game's difficulty in general, but my squad consistently wipes out every enemy it faces in a matter of seconds. Like, so fast I can't really process what's happening. I certainly never have to apply any thought or strategy, despite the systems clearly being deep enough to allow for such things.

Perhaps this is my own personal preference coming through, but this idle game-esque combat system is sadly where things fall apart for me. Admittedly, I've never been a fan of the format, but here especially, I can't help but feel disappointed that this is the battle style these incredible creature designs are locked to. They're shrunk down on the screen to fit into the surprisingly small arenas, with so much action unfolding that it's hard to pick them out individually most of the time. It almost feels like a waste of such fantastic ideas that I know I'd fall in love with in either a turn-based format or something more akin to Palworld's real-time combat, for example.

Autobattler fans may feel differently here, but I can't deny I'm currently unconvinced that Honkai: Nexus Anima will stick the landing for me at launch. Maybe with more time to learn the battle system from the beginning of the game, things may click into place, but for now, I'm left uncertain that there's enough going on here to keep me hooked, as much as I wanna befriend those cute Anima.

Looking for your next-us adventure? Check out our games like Pokemon recommendations, or our best RPGs list for more!

Nighthawks is exactly what I wanted Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 to feel like. Not in terms of its format as a text-based RPG (the excellent VTM visual novels can hold their own), but in the depth, character, and intrigue of its vamp noir dystopia.

I start off my journey as a fledgling vampire, hunting for my sire's vassal – a servant, bound in blood to their Master – on the grimy streets of Cradlebridge. Blood junkies, thralls, and the great lost masses haunt the gloom, congregating around a vampire-owned nightclub by the name of Nighthawks. A short cab away is Angelbreach, all fishnets and sleaze painted in hot pink neon desperation. Prim and proper Fountaincourt is the only neighborhood with any decency around here, but to paraphrase a particularly colorful saying I saw on Reddit once, we're all bare necks in the shower.

Sucks and the city

Nighthawks is a tale as old as the night is long: while working my way up the social ladder from fangless nobody to apex predator, I'll be making frenemies and solving mysteries in the big city. I'm also crowned the new boss of the eponymous nightclub fairly early on in the proceeds, after its original owner gets on the wrong end of a giant vampire's massive boathook.

But there's more to life as a vampire than shady club dealings and social politics. Well, kind of. Nighthawks features a robust stats and traits system. Skills can be improved through equipping certain pieces of gear, and can be further buffed by having a companion join you on your adventures – recruited and dismissed from the club's bar. Your credentials chosen at the start of a new game indicate your character's background, special powers, and blood lineage. My vampire is a Continental vampire whose scholarly pursuits were granted and encouraged by her sire, for example, and she can communicate with rats and other undesirable creatures to obtain information or gain control of sticky situations.

The above dictates how I play Nighthawks. I'm not the most brawny of vamplings, so rely heavily on seductive words and stealth to get my way. It means I get beaten up pretty badly the first few times I'm ambushed around Candlebridge, but buying and equipping some knuckle dusters ups my intimidation and brawler stats considerably.

Exploring the city is sumptuous on your own – developer The Curiosity Engine sure knows how to pen a heady, slick mystery yarn – but Nighthawks truly shines in its characters. The veritable buffet of companions draw inspiration from countless other pulpy thriller games and movies. Only this time, there's a little extra bite.

Lux is a magician at a rival burlesque nightclub, with a secret lying dormant in her ice cold veins. Eccentric book shop owner Maze is even seedier than he looks, and as a dude with gold-capped fangs and red-lensed glasses, that's really saying something. There's a human PI called Domino, working out of a neighboring room in the hotel you start off in. You get to see his butt later on, too – though I must warn the horndogs out there that Nighthawks is far more PG-13 than its risque Steam listing might've indicated before Valve relented.

Each of these characters has a unique story to uncover, from life as a female captain during the Golden Age of Piracy to that of an elite, tortured artist bound by the harsh covenant of her pedigree blood. Uncovering them between main obligations is my favorite thing to do; each of the game's acts (I'm on the fourth right now) gives you one overarching task to complete within a month, which is fairly easy to accomplish and leaves plenty of time to get closer to your newfound fang-mily. Who you travel with in a given night also affects your role-play options – as a con-man, Maze is wise to tricks throughout town, and Domino, for instance, might be able to use the warmth of his blood to assist where your undead nature may cause problems.

These little mysteries keep me curious as I play through Nighthawks, picking at a thread and seeing where it takes me. If I'm not losing myself in the winding sewers with my rodent buddies, I'm purchasing the latest finery before a trip to the swankiest member's club in town. Sometimes I stumble upon a random group of nerds playing a vampiric tabletop RPG in the local diner and indulge in a little double-layered roleplaying. Most of the time, though, I'm visiting Cradlebridge's answer to a Cyberpunk 2077 ripperdoc – only instead of high-tech implants, the undead medic simply mends my health-sapping Wounds, restoring my vitality to its fullest.

My biggest gripe with Nighthawks so far is that I didn't discover the mail inbox until halfway through Act 2. Your phone is your lifeline in this game, and only when I was frustrated with a particular mission chain taking so long did I stop to study the device properly, only to learn that I had to read one particular email in order to progress it. I also am kicking myself for not picking up a more useful power – Tenebrous Form would have been handy for teleporting around obstacles, while every time a grayed-out Corpsetalker interaction pops up, I yearn for all the secrets I could be privy to had I not chosen to be a rat whisperer instead.

Regrets and boomer tech tendencies aside, I have loved my time with Nighthawks so far. Its weighty decisions leave me torn down the middle, the stellar voice acting makes the action jump off the screen, and the text-based RPG loop is so engaging that I've foregone a lot of sleep to play it as much as humanly possible over the past week.

Above all, the small yet mighty RPG reminds me just how much Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 pales in comparison. And not in the "sexy vampiric pallor" way, either. The long-awaited sequel was meant to be another supernatural noir RPG, just like this one. But my Bloodlines 2 review had me despairing as I bit randoms in the street with little to no repercussions, and paced a deserted city between the same four locations on a desperate hunt for something to make life after death more interesting.

Nighthawks, meanwhile, lets me plan out my hunts strategically across a selection of prime stalking grounds, relying on skill checks and smart decisions before I get a taste of the good stuff. You don't need a large 3D open world to create a city that feels alive in an RPG. And did I mention all the butts?

Nighthawks delivers what Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 failed to accomplish in its first 5 minutes. The two games are like night and day, and as someone who prefers the shadows myself, I'll stay here on the dark side with Nighthawks.

Nighthawks was played on PC, with code provided by the publisher.

Vampire games were neglected last year, but their shunning only proves my point: it was the year of the underdog bloodsucker

I didn't come to RuneScape: Dragonwilds as a complete RuneScape virgin, despite missing the boat on RuneScape back in the '00s. I've played a little bit of Old School RuneScape, and was incredibly absorbed in the Jagex-published Melvor Idle. I'm not exactly unfamiliar with how the game's sense of progression works, and it makes sense that a survival spin-off could have worked. Could.

Fundamentally, there's nothing egregiously wrong with RuneScape: Dragonwilds. It is paced much like other survival games, with clear influence taken from Valheim, which hit 1.0 earlier this month. There are many different skills for you to master, a range of biomes to explore, and enemies to hunt – but it all feels a bit joylessly functional.

After scrounging up the rocks and wood that you need to make an axe, you go to a tree and swing. And then you miss. Turns out, you need to be almost square to the tree to chop properly. Okay, no problem. Let's go mine some rock. Not that rock; that's a decorative rock. You need to go and mine those specific rocks over there. It's extremely rigid in the way that it wants you to do things, a point the game makes clear immediately by having you follow a pre-ordained set of tasks rather than just exploring and discovering things for yourself.

That rigidity extends all the way through the game, too. Take the spinning wheel that I needed to make, for example. To track down a character who'd gone missing, I needed antlers, but deer are hard to hunt with a dagger or a club. So, you need to make a bow. To make a bow, you need a coarse thread. To make coarse thread, you need a spinning wheel. The game doesn't tell you how to unlock this. It turns out that you need to pick up some flax to get the spinning wheel blueprint. If you aren't compulsively wandering around and picking up everything that you see, you're buggered, it seems. This is a game that you need to play with the wiki open, because some kind fan will likely have explained the game better than it explains itself.

Keep yourself alive

Let's get down to the basics of gameplay – survival. You need food and water to keep going, so you'll have to channel your great (x200) grandparent and become a hunter gatherer. That's fine, we all know what to expect when you need sustenance in a game. What we don't normally have to deal with is your character being such a terrible cook at low Cooking levels that your food can come out burned, and far less nutritious. This has knock-on effects, with burned food not efficiently helping you recover health, which, in turn, can make early combat encounters against goblins a real slog.

Why not let me take the food off the fire when it's ready? Why do all my efforts go to waste so that a number can tell me that I'm better at Cooking, rather than my character and I becoming better at in-game cooking? Water is a better system. You can collect dirty water anywhere, but to make it drinkable, you need to boil it. Simple, intuitive, and the game doesn't make you arbitrarily mess it up.

Most individual skill levels feel fairly fatuous. Leveling them gives you tiny stat increases most of the time, with meaningful upgrades arriving less frequently. There's none of the sense of achievement or progression that you are treated to in Melvor Idle, despite its deliberately streamlined and stripped-back nature.

The wild, grey yonder

More than anything, Dragonwilds feels like a game that struggles to express its reason for being, and one that's still underdone at 1.0. The sense of place is perhaps the biggest contributor. While hand-crafted, the world itself doesn't feel interesting to explore. There's no real sense of mystery, with one goblin-infested area looking much like another, and it's very easy to get turned around without realizing it because areas look broadly samey.

While I was playing Dragonwilds, I wondered why you'd choose to play it rather than any of the best survival games already on the market. This is particularly true when you compare it, once again, to Valheim, which feels like its clearest competitor. RuneScape gives you a huge world full of discoveries, while Melvor Idle offers its sense of progression in a highly-distilled form. What role does Dragonwilds play? After several hours, I still don't know.

10 years later, Old School RuneScape is still the best MMO I've ever played

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is actually the seventh Modern Warfare game. The slate was wiped clean with 2019's Modern Warfare, but to developer Infinity Ward, the sub-series' principles remain the same going into Modern Warfare 4.

"We wanted to chase this gritty, grounded, almost ripped from the headlines style Modern Warfare game – where it feels not exactly like the real-world, but something that could be in the real-world," says Jack Hoppus, multiplayer technical designer. "We were really laser focused on boots on the ground, [a] return to form with traditional modern warfare, and that was the guiding principle."

In the original trilogy, we followed soldiers across the world as they tried and failed to prevent World War 3. In recent years, Modern Warfare's perspective has shifted to spec ops, its casts working behind the scenes to foil more self-contained threats. But Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's campaign trailer shows North Korea invading the Korean Peninsula, and its scenes of full-scale army assaults are reminiscent of when London, Paris, and Washington DC were turned into battlefields in the first three games.

True grit

That "boots on the ground" focus has been the guiding light for Modern Warfare 4, says Hoppus. "It's been a unifying factor. Everyone at the studio is really aligned on the visual style and the tone we're setting."

"Historically, in our recent titles, it's been really spec ops – really highly trained militant forces – and it's been a while since we've seen the grunt perspective, and that's something that I'm also really looking forward to in our campaign," he adds. "Seeing this group of ragtag soldiers try to navigate their way through this conflict is something that's really interesting."

In realizing that tone at the action layer, Infinity Ward is aiming for a "grounded, fluid movement" system for Modern Warfare 4. That's not always something I've associated with Call of Duty – preferring the likes of Battlefield or Escape from Tarkov for weightier combat. With Call of Duty's quicker style of play, I ask Hoppus how that heft will be conveyed.

"It really comes down to the movement and also our weapon fidelity. So, we are committed at Infinity Ward to making these guns feel strong, feel powerful, but also not compromise on gameplay. We want them to feel satisfying to shoot. We don't want you to feel like you are holding a piece of plastic. We want you to feel like you're holding this high caliber, strong weapon that a highly trained soldier would use, right? But we don't want it to feel heavy in the sense that you're clunky with it. We make a first-person shooter game, so the gun is the hero of our game – it's deserving that we spend a whole bunch of time on weapon fidelity. So, the gun will dynamically, with how close to a wall you are, it'll actually tilt up, and you'll hold it closer to your chest. Or, as you enter a doorway, your gun will pivot with your arms like a highly trained soldier."

"All of those [features] are meant to feel like you are in the driver's seat, like you have agency, and it's also a balance of our movement as well," Hoppus continues. "We understand that the world is moving fast-paced now, so players want to slide and get up in other players' faces and try to break ankles. But we also want to have something for the tactical player that maybe wants to take intentional gunfights, check corners, and hold positioning. We want to create a game that, if you take really smart battles, you can win. But, if you're really mechanically good, you can also win those fights. [We] find the balance between both of those."

Speaking selfishly, I always prefer when Call of Duty opts for more considered movement. I can usually tell whether I'll gel with an entry based on how much I dig its marksman rifles, which I relay to Hoppus. "I am a marksman rifle player myself," he grins, "and I think you're gonna be having a great time this year [...] They feel great, more so in this game than any game I've played before."

Now approaching its 23rd iteration, Call of Duty has poked and prodded in many directions over the years. Infinity Ward has been at the heart of it all – and heading into Modern Warfare 4, I'm curious to learn how the studio approaches new entries. Is it a case of looking back through the years, at specific touchstones, or perpetually building upon the latest game?

"As one of our directors would say, we're always building from the things we couldn't do in the last game. So when we were building Modern Warfare 4, it was a lot of what we couldn't do – or what we didn't do great – in Modern Warfare 2. That's where all of our movement fidelity came in."

He points to similarly-scoped changes, like "stripping away the complexity" of weapon platforms and the gunsmith system to better incorporate shared attachments between guns. "We're always looking at the past, but we're also looking at what we can do that's cool and new this game."

Ahead of Modern Warfare 4's launch on October 22, we've rounded up the best FPS games you can play right now

This feature contains spoilers for Lanterns episode 6. Make sure you're up to date before reading on.

The latest episode of Lanterns finally brings Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner into the picture, reprising his role from Superman last year. But another key character is also introduced this week, one even more important to Hal Jordan than a fellow Green Lantern.

With the past storyline complete, Lanterns episode 6 devotes the vast majority of its runtime to the mystery that surrounds Jordan's murder in the present day. It's there that John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) discovers that everyone hates the former Green Lantern in Rushville due to what happened ten years prior.

That's why Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) called John up. "I just wanted someone else around who cared that he was gone." But it turns out that there is someone else who cared about Hal. Or at least cared enough to attend his funeral, which is otherwise pretty quiet.

Yep, Carol Ferris (Amie MacKenzie) shows up briefly for the first time at the request of Kerry, who invited her because she and Hal "had history." "I bet he liked you," Carol tells John, referring of course to Hal. "And I bet he never said it."

There's a sense that Carol knew Hal intimately, better perhaps than anyone else at the funeral. This history is only hinted at though, and newcomers to Green Lantern lore wouldn't necessarily think Carol is that important still, especially given how fast her one major scene flies by.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with Hal Jordan outside of Lanterns knows better though. Carol Ferris is easily the most significant female character in Green Lantern lore. She is very much the Lois Lane to Hal's Clark Kent and prior to this show, it was near impossible to imagine a Green Lantern story without her.

Former flame

Carol debuted in the DC comic Showcase #22 (1959), the very same issue that introduced us to Hal as Green Lantern. It was Carol who first hired him as a test pilot at Ferris Aircraft, an origin that could also hold true for Hal in Lanterns. Across the six decades that followed, Carol remained Hal's main love interest, even when she was transformed into Star Sapphire, a supervillain with comparable abilities to Green Lantern.

From the noughties-era Justice League cartoon and the short-lived Green Lantern animated series to even Ryan Reynold's ill-fated blockbuster, Carol has always been a mainstay. In the latter film, she was played by Blake Lively, whose performance was anything but. A character reportedly based on Ferris, renamed Carrie Farris, also showed up briefly in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

It's no wonder then that everyone assumed Carol would therefore play a bigger role in Lanterns. When Macdonald was cast as Hal's potential love interest in October 2024, the obvious answer was that she would be playing Carol. When it became clear that wasn't the case, Laura Linney's subsequent casting ignited those same rumors. It wasn't until episode 3 that they were eventually dispelled when the show revealed she's actually playing a Guardian of the Universe.

Even though Carol has now arrived at last, her limited role still comes as a shock to fans who assumed she'd be more important given how vital she is to the Green Lantern mythos at large.

Going rogue

To be fair though, Lanterns is hardly comic book accurate, a label the writers sport rather proudly. Billed as a True Detective-style story from the start, Lanterns has repeatedly defied expectations, mostly to the show's benefit. Take episode 3, for example, which rejigged John Stewart's origin story to bold effect.

When it comes to adapting long-running comic book stories, there's much to be said for putting a new spin on the lore in question. As such, it's almost admirable how Lanterns has gone out of its way to sideline such a key character. This sense of daring is one of the main reasons why it's become the third most successful show on HBO Max, behind only House of the Dragon and The Last of Us.

The issue, however, is that ignoring Carol feels like such a wasted opportunity. More than just a mere love interest, Carol is one of the most intriguing female characters in the DC universe at large, straddling the line between good and evil, between love and hate, with her unique position as Star Sapphire. With or without Hal, Carol stands on her own two feet, as made evident by her recent Justice League membership in DC’s All In comic book relaunch.

Sure, Lanterns is more about John, and rightly so, but it's not like Carol has fared particularly well previously in live-action either. Unlike Lois Lane, who appears in pretty much every single Superman adaptation ever made, Carol's live-action legacy boils down to Lively's portrayal in the universally despised Green Lantern film of 2011.

If there's room to develop at least some romance between Hal and Kerry, more could have also been done to bring in Carol, regardless of whether she ended up being his love interest or not. It's likely Carol was sidelined to further emphasise just how lonely Hal was, how he pushed away every important person in his life. But to not even mention her in passing before now feels odd and an oversight.

That's not to say Carol's story is over completely. There is technically a whole world beyond Lanterns, one where Ferris could return to play a much bigger role. But with it looking like Hal's journey will end this season, it doesn't feel like there's more story to tell where Carol is concerned, not beyond her one fleeting appearance at Hal's funeral.

That's a shame, especially when more time is given to the likes of Guy Gardner, a character who's not just less important but also doesn't quite fit into the world of Lanterns in the way that Carol could so well.

Lanterns is currently airing weekly on HBO Max. Read our Lanterns review for why you should be watching before checking out our guide to all the upcoming DC movies and shows you need to know about.

The cozy life sim genre is becoming an increasingly crowded one. As the likes of Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and Story of Seasons can attest, it's a formula that just works. However, with more competition, it's getting harder and harder for cozy games to do something different.

After one hour with Petit Planet, HoYoverse's galactic spin on the genre, I'm hopeful the Genshin Impact devs might have something up their sleeve here to set it apart from its clear inspiration – even if many factors will feel, for better or worse, very familiar to anyone who's spent hours of their life in debt to Tom Nook.

Reach for the stars

My preview session allows me to explore what the first hour of Petit Planet has to offer, welcoming me to the cosmic setting and introducing me to its basic mechanics.

Your journey begins with you setting up life on your very own, teeny tiny planet. While you might have to do some space travel to get started, life in your personal world quickly feels very akin to a certain other life sim.

As I run around with my bug net and fishing rod, shake fruit from trees, and place decorations around my house (the string lights immediately make it feel more homely), it feels like stepping right back into Animal Crossing: New Horizons – a fact not helped by the animal characters you find yourself living with. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does feel like HoYoverse is playing it rather safe, and it makes it impossible not to draw comparisons, too.

It's this familiarity that makes me curious about how Petit Planet will feel in the hours past its intro, when I've settled into the more standard, long-term gameplay loop. It was the long haul that lost many New Horizons players back in 2020 once the repetition set in, after all. It's fair to say that longevity is the key factor that can make or break a life sim.

For now, at least, my goal in Petit Planet is to nurture a mysterious Luca seed into a big tree – one that can only be grown by pouring magical essence (also called Luca) onto it. I quickly collect jars of the stuff each time I'm introduced to a new task – be it the aforementioned bug catching or fishing – with each growth spurt bringing more life and activity to the planet, and in turn more Luca to harvest.

This story is pushed forward by Petit Planet's cast of bubbly characters, who, unlike Animal Crossing's own, notably all have actual voices.

I imagine individual players' enjoyment of the voice acting may vary, though. One of the main cast of characters, a large white dog called Mobai, has a sweet, calm demeanour with the endearing mannerisms of an old man. As he offers you tea and a chat, it's hard not to find him a pleasant chap. Unfortunately, he's also got a habit of saying "mo" instead of "no" in various phrases that, in the first hour of the game, are used constantly. "Mo rush," "mo worries," he constantly tells me, and I can already find myself reaching for the button to skip to the next dialogue box so I don't have to hear him say either aloud again.

Character building

That mild gripe aside, it's the characters and the way that they're handled that have me most intrigued about Petit Planet, giving it an edge that could help it break out of Animal Crossing's shadow.

My first proper 'villager' is Yunguo – a shy, fox-like farmer girl who quickly decides she wants to move in right next door to me. Not only does she immediately have a lot of personality, but flicking through the game's menus, I see pages that suggest a deeper level of relationship-building and character development than simply watching an Animal Crossing cat light up at being gifted a pear.

There's nothing wrong with the latter, but it appears that there'll be a focus here on making Petit Planet's characters more defined individuals, rather than creatures locked down into pre-set personality types.

Alas, an hour with a sprawling life sim could never be enough to know if Petit Planet has what it takes to take on genre juggernauts, but it certainly has a lot of the right ingredients. Above all else, it's extremely cute – charming character designs and inviting visuals make it impossible not to smile at what HoYoverse has got cooking up, which goes a long way in making a good first impression on anyone setting foot in the Starsea. Let's just hope it can stick the landing when Petit Planet launches later this year.

Lose yourself in these games like Animal Crossing if you're looking for some other wholesome life sim adventures!

Ubisoft makes a lot more than just Assassin's Creed, but where would it be without Altaïr, Ezio, Connor, and the rest? More pertinently, what would its games look like? In the eight years since a hooded avatar first leapt from steeple to haystack, Assassin's Creed has not just become the most important line on Ubisoft's balance sheet, but also a driving influence on almost every design document that spools from its printers. Whatever the setting or central mechanic, if the company is making an open-world game, then Assassin's Creed will run deep in its DNA. And it does make a lot of open worlds.

Introduced in the first Assassin's Creed, the formula of capturing – or, in Altaïr's case, scaling – a point to fill out the map in its vicinity has become Ubisoft's calling card. Yet while the first Assassin's Creed laid foundations for the series' mechanics and its lore, it didn't make for much of a game. Its two protagonists – Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad in the past and Desmond Miles in the present – had little to say and not much of worth to do. That would improve in the second game, Altaïr making way for the immeasurably more likeable Ezio Auditore Da Firenze and Miles seeing his skills transfer back to the real world. Looking back, Assassin's Creed was the tech demo, and its direct sequel was the proof of concept. But Assassin's Creed Brotherhood was the peak and tipping point, the game where Ubisoft briefly understood what it wanted the series to be and executed it in style.

Back to the 'hood

That said, it's a hard game to go back to. Elements that once felt novel have since been reprised at least once a year in the series, and many more times throughout Ubisoft's bulging back catalogue. The law of diminishing returns holds true. What once inspired appreciation now invites cynicism; each canny design choice taken not on its merits but seen as a scrawl on a whiteboard at Ubisoft Montreal that no one ever bothered to wipe clean. Brotherhood's component parts may have been copied and pasted into other games in different genres, but once your eyes have stopped rolling, you can see that those ideas, while often borrowed, have rarely been bettered.

Take, for instance, the tutorial. Ubisoft has long struggled to elegantly explain the morass of systems within its games, and a new Assassin's Creed invariably means a ponderous opening while each little mechanic is relayed one by one. That is certainly the case here – five hours in, you're still being shown new things – but each introduction makes sense within a story moving at such a rate. And for once, Ubisoft's annual iteration offers a bonus to the player as well as the shareholder.

As the second game in the Ezio trilogy (still the only example of its kind in a series that has introduced a new protagonist with each release since Revelations), Brotherhood kicks off its tale seconds after the conclusion of Assassin's Creed 2 with a two-minute cutscene, then puts a blade in Ezio's hand in short order thereafter. He's got all his Assassin's Creed 2 endgame gear and a whopping health bar, and while it's inevitable that they will be taken away, even this cliché is handled with elegance. It's not a flashback or cataclysmic event that strips our hero of his toys and toughness, but a sex scene, a surprise Borgia attack setting Ezio running from a morning quickie half-dressed and empty-handed. Within half an hour of the disc spinning for the first time, Ezio's family seat is in ruins, his relatives either dead or dispatched to safety, and he leaves the scorched Monteriggioni countryside for the stonework sprawl of Rome to exact revenge. It makes ‘press B to crouch' look incredibly clumsy.

It's along the banks of the Tiber that Brotherhood reveals its evolution of ideas brought into life in earlier games, plus a few new notions of its own. Three games in, scaling viewpoints was already beginning to lose its lustre. Meanwhile, the first game's prerelease promise of freeform stealth had gone unfulfilled, at first asking that players spend an unacceptable amount of time sitting on benches and then, in the sequel, hiding behind the skirts of a hired group of courtesans. Brotherhood sought to fix both of these problems in one go.

While traditional viewpoints remained in abundance, many took the form of Borgia towers. These well-staffed camps and structures needed clearing out, climbing, and burning down before the map icons in the vicinity became available. Tightly wound, filled with corners and cover, these were spaces designed for flexible stealth. While Assassin's Creed has, both before and since, allowed players to get spotted and draw their swords without penalty (instafail stealth missions aside), here there was a painful consequence to being seen. The regiment's captain, who must be killed before you can claim the tower, usually bolts if you're spotted; if he escapes to his safe room, you'll have to wait until the guard rotates at dawn or dusk to try again. As well as making good on years-old promises, stripping away the Borgia's hold over Rome one flaming, collapsing tower at a time added a weighty sense of achievement to the familiar routine of uncovering the map.

There was a more profound benefit to capturing points, too. The viewpoint concept was always incongruous, asking players to accept that the tallest landmarks in a city are perfect for spying on its denizens, rather than distancing you from them. Here, removing the Borgia's influence from an area allowed Ezio to renovate and reopen a series of shuttered small businesses, each of which would pay out a small tribute every 20 minutes. It gave context to the one-button busywork and – combined with similar rebuilding work demanded by the story, such as a pub done up to give the Thieves' Guild a base of operations, or a knocking shop made over to give Ezio's mother and sister somewhere to hide – provided the tangible sense that Ezio was pushing his enemies back. It was a change for a series where progress had been measured in VIPs killed while the world around you lay unchanged.

As the Borgia guards thinned out, you began to appreciate the world. OK, most of the people in it were there only to fill the streets with walking, talking cover, but the city around them was steeped in atmosphere. Assassin's Creed's world-building is always at its best when you're dropped in a city that still stands, surrounded by architecture that still exists; in Rome, Brotherhood had a recognisable, beautiful urban sprawl that would go unmatched until Assassin's Creed Unity. A restrained, ethereal score by Jesper Kyd further added to a sense of place, to a world that felt recognisable and real but retained a sense of otherness, the strings kicking in as Ezio clambered up the side of another Roman edifice or stalked his next mark.

Ezio's influence would spread far beyond the city walls, too. The legacy of all these elements can be felt elsewhere in the Ubisoft oeuvre, but none makes the difference between the Ubisoft of then and now so clear as the titular brotherhood system. A finely made metagame in which you recruited Assassins, then sent them far and wide to further the brotherhood's influence across the continent, it reinforced the sense that you were changing the world for the better, and was a pleasant distraction in its own right. After disappearing from the series entirely for four years, it returned for Unity as a mobile companion app.

The bother of the brotherhood

What must, to the investor, seem like Ubisoft's greatest asset – a vast network of global studios that can ensure that each successful series yields a new game every year – is its biggest creative problem. That busy schedule means that by the time this year's Assassin's Creed hits shelves, work on the next will be well underway. Any lessons learned about what does, or doesn't, work will have to wait for at least 12 months. Little wonder, then, that so much of Brotherhood's magic was left behind and Assassin's Creed has become so confused. Revelations, the closing instalment of the Ezio trilogy, was seemingly made under the assumption that what players most wanted from Assassin's Creed was a Batman game, given its baffling focus on gadgetry. By the game's end, Ezio had some 150 variations on the theme of ‘bomb'. It had a tower defence system and first-person puzzle sections. It was as if ideas were blindly folded in for the sake of giving players something different to do and to hell with how it hung together.

It's been a recurring theme ever since. Assassin's Creed has leapt annually between time periods, settings and protagonists. Its worlds have become bigger but flatter, more riddled with stuff but feeling ever emptier. Ubisoft has never found a world as rich as Rome or a hero as affable as Ezio, but then none since have had to stick around long enough for it to matter. Black Flag warmed cockles (and shivered timbers), but it was a fine Pirates of the Caribbean game and a lukewarm Assassin's Creed. No matter: 12 months later, Edward Kenway was gone, players were transported across the Atlantic to Paris, and the clock wound forward by the best part of a century. Next up is Victorian London, and as appealing as that may be, Brotherhood shows that Assassin's Creed is about more than just historical tourism. It is about systems, stories and settings that work together, rather than get in each other's way. If there's still time, Ubisoft could do with looking back to 2010 and when – for the first time, but hopefully not the last – the most muddled series in videogames almost made sense.

This Assassin's Creed Brotherhood article was first published in issue 280 of Edge Magazine. To get more like this delivered straight to your doorstep (or digital device) consider subscribing to Edge.

If life is but a dream, then The Blood of Dawnwalker's Home Sweet Home mission must be a nightmare. I stumble into it as a bit of an afterthought, having fought my way into the alchemist's tower while investigating the clay-baked gargoyles plaguing the city of Svartrau. But instead of leaving to show Marat the alchemist's notes, as per my next objective, I head up the spiral staircase and ascend further into the tower.

A short cutscene plays out when I reach the landing and interact with a closed door. The alchemist himself is just inside, Coen notes – should I head inside to confront him? Thinking it would be yet another boss fight, I choose to follow my curiosity. But, instead of a blistering encounter with a magical artificer, Coen steps through the door and right into his family home.

Family business

I put the controller down and give myself a long hard stare in the TV's reflection. From Max Payne to Night in the Woods and Mass Effect 3, dream or nightmare levels are the bane of my life in video games.

They are discombobulating by design, an intentional frustration that never fails to hit its mark. Some are repetitive walking sims. Others are combat or traversal puzzles with few, if any, auto-saves to cushion your mistakes (some might argue that a full-level reset makes for a seamless, uninterrupted experience; I heartily disagree). You need to learn the rules of the dreamworld and obey them for a time in order to escape its clutches. Unfortunately, this Blood of Dawnwalker mission involves elements of all this and more.

It starts off simple enough. Coen awakens to find his entire family at the breakfast table, waiting for him. He stutters something nonsensical about how none of this can be real (duh), but as his mother turns to ask what he'd like on his oladkas, Coen is momentarily stunned to hear her voice again.

By this stage in my Dawnwalker adventure, I've uncovered a little of father Pieter's backstory and have pieced together that his mother, Esme, suffered some kind of psychotic break many years before the events of the game. Coen never goes into detail about what happened to her or his late little brother, Alin, but it's all implied as a sore spot for him.

Monsters attack the homestead, sending Coen's family scattering in fear. He rushes out of the house, desperate to save them, and as I resume control following the cinematic, the first thing I do is check my inventory for the inevitable.

All of my high-level armor, my weapons, potions, powerful vampire abilities – all gone. In its place I have a common-quality sword that deals 40 damage per hit, zero equipped trinkets, and not even a pair of bog-standard bracers to keep me company. It's like that nightmare scenario about going to school totally naked, only so much worse.

This is enough to make the dream terrible already. But, when I speed off down the path (after looting all the consumables I can from nearby carts), I'm faced with the fight that makes me want to end it all. Five ghoulish specters are swarming Coen's mother. I'd make quick work of the lot in the real Vale Sangora, but here in dreamworld, it's a blistering fight that puts my direction block and parry skills to the test.

Each strike of my sword barely makes a dent in my spongy foes. In contrast, a lack of proper armor means just one of their attacks can take off a third of my health bar easily. I die maybe four times before giving in to my tried and true method for all timing-heavy combat in video games: I mute the TV.

When I finally declare victory over the spirits, having hushed their nerve-wracking wails, Esme rushes over to thank Coen. I have options here again: encourage her to get to the others and head to the church for safety, or dip an experimental toe further into the dream (very, very gingerly) and talk to Esme as if she is real.

I resist the urge. Much as I'm desperate to know more of Coen's family backstory, I don't want to get sucked into the dreamscape. So I forge on ahead, leaving a confused and sobbing Esme wondering why her eldest boy is being so dismissive.

I drop a quicksave (thank god) and head through some gates into a larger town square, lined with locked houses. Immediately I set off to gather up all the consumables in the vicinity – healing salves, an apple, an ironic clove of garlic – before Coen draws his sword again as wraiths start popping up all around me. I start hacking and slicing at the coming horde with gusto, and again, they barely take damage.

Wraiths hit incredibly quickly, so much so that I barely have time to react when the directional warning indicates a coming attack. So swarmed am I by the black-cloaked enemies that I don't see that one spirit is wreathed in red instead.

It's familiar. I put two and two together just as I die for the sixth time: just like when I fight wraiths at haunting sites in the "real" game, I need to target and defeat that red spirit first otherwise it will draw health from the others and keep spawning new lackeys.

I reload my quicksave and get right into the fray again, this time bearing in mind the above info (enemy variety isn't that broad in Dawnwalker). I rescue my siblings, again forgo the white dialogue choices indicating exploratory conversation, and head up to the church to confront my father. And, shock horror, a gargoyle – which is much easier to fight, considering I am a parrying pro and this is one enemy instead of a dozen.

Home to roost

I've done it, I think. I've completed the dream and rescued my family, so heading into the church to join them will surely wake Coen from the dream! Except, it does not. I enter the church and am right back where I started at Coen's family home. The dream has looped – but a fleeting image of a well in the village square flashes across the screen, and I make a mental note to check it out later.

When I re-enter the breakfast room and the family greets me, I experiment here with a little backstory text. I have all the time in the world, it seems, and if I have to go through all that again, at least I can do it with more narrative depth.

Here is where the root of Coen's savior complex is slowly uncovered. He tells his mother how he's missed her, but also how he hates her for abandoning the family by retreating into her own mind. He mentions his brother, briefly – has she never forgiven Coen for what happened to… Alin, was it? Nevermind. The monsters descend and it's time to charge back through the dream, and this time, I do a pretty decent job. I need to get to that well, and no ghoul or wraith can stop me.

After clearing the wraiths from the town square, Coen mentions the well. I run over and interact with it, only to be faced with his reflection.

It's angry. Coen chides himself – he's a coward, unable to come to terms with what happened to his little brother nor forgive himself for the role he played in his death. Only by screaming his brother's name – Alin! Alin! Alin! – does the dream start to crack at its seams.

If I'd ignored the well I would have stayed stuck in the nightmare's loop, resulting in one of the secret and most depressing Blood of Dawnwalker endings, but I am more than happy to be rid of this place. My vampire powers are back, and I'm able to shadowstep up the icy cliff in front of me and make my way through a maze of memories.

Rebel Wolves does a beautiful job of telling rather than showing the shame and guilt Coen carries with him. He blames himself for the accident that took Alin's life when they were both mere children playing on a frozen lake. Alin was there one moment and gone the next. But he cannot square away the feeling that he could have done something – until Alin himself appears before him.

He tells his brother to forgive himself; that the worst thing he has done is not visit Alin at the site of his death. He's been waiting for him for years, after all. Coen breaks down as Alin hugs his big brother before sinking to his knees, clutching Alin close. Alin tells him goodbye one last time and, with a shove, sends Coen tumbling out of the dream and back into consciousness.

I did not expect such a painful dream sequence to result in an equally painful narrative revelation. The pressure I was under as Coen, fighting through Hell to save his family with barely anything to his name, is the same pressure he had taken upon himself when Alin died.

Home Sweet Home turned out to be one of the most poetic examples of narrative and level design confluence I've ever experienced. It's also completely optional. After waking up and killing the alchemist, I check my mission log to find that it was actually one of long-dead boyaress Xanthe's branching side quests (she was the first of Brencis' lieutenants I killed in the game). I'll bear that in mind for next time. As touched as I was by Coen's redemption after years of emotional torment, Home Sweet Home is still the best Blood of Dawnwalker mission I will not be hastening back to in an inevitable replay. I've had enough nightmares for days, thanks Rebel Wolves.

Is The Blood of Dawnwalker one of the best RPGs of all-time? Watch this space...

Project Zeta has a lot stacked against it. The MOBA genre is not exactly one that's wanting for competition, with many well-established competitors already throwing hands in the arena that Korean developer Nirvanana seeks to enter. Your average League of Legends or DOTA player isn't usually one to venture too far out of their comfort zones, and to the uninitiated, the genre as a whole has a huge barrier to entry that wouldn't necessarily attract new players.

But that hasn't shaken Nirvanana's ambitions for Project Zeta. Sitting down with executive producer Namseok Kim to try the game at Gamescom 2026, I'm told that Project Zeta isn't just a MOBA in the strictest sense. Rather, Nirvanana has crafted a MOBA-battle royale hybrid, with elements of hero shooter thrown in for good measure.

Chaos reigns

In Project Zeta, gameplay revolves around battling multiple four-player teams across a map, completing objectives on the road to victory. While the core bones do seem all too familiar for any fan of the best shooters, Project Zeta seems to be more about the journey than the destination.

Nirvanana is laser-focused on player satisfaction, whether or not you win the game, as well as moment-to-moment gameplay and, most importantly, kills. I'm shown footage of Twitch streamers celebrating with glee as they mow down the opposition, only to be blindsided by another team and forced to try again. The satisfaction of the pure chaos overshadowed the disappointment of defeat, as they charged back in to rejoin the fray.

These large multi-team skirmishes are the foundation that Project Zeta is built upon, and Kim reflects on seeing this gameplay pillar in action. "A large number of players were gathered together, [and] kills would just erupt – 11 kills, 12 kills at a time," he says. This differs from the highest multi-kill available in a traditional MOBA, the five-kill pentakill. "When I saw that, I felt an enormous thrill myself, and I thought, 'this is the future of some new form of MOBA game'."

But reaching this point hasn't been easy. During multiple public game tests, Nirvanana learned many lessons and iterated upon Project ZETA's gameplay. The practice continues even now – "we keep meeting players, hearing their feedback, and taking plenty of heat," says Kim

"We reworked every character, and we changed the terrain once more: [..] We changed the map itself as well. And because players said they wanted to know intuitively where they are at any given moment, we changed the concept and narrative of each area of the map."

Hopefully, this approach of listening to players and crafting a game around their wants will pay off for Nirvanana. The gaming community can be a fickle bunch, and sometimes only the loudest voice prevails. But with each iteration, it seems the game has come closer to achieving Nirvanana's goals.

Witnessing players successfully rack up these gargantuan multi-kills marked an important moment for Kim. "That's when every puzzle piece clicked into place at once – combat, controls, heroes, systems, UI, UX, all of it," especially when players pulled off "a deca-kill – ten kills. [It's] the joy of development, I suppose; I felt it very intensely."

Global playtests are now open for sign-ups on Steam if you want to be a part of Nirvanana's iterative process and, maybe, rack up some deca-kills of your own.

Without getting too misty-eyed, a "physical game" used to be easy to define. You bought a box and the game was sitting inside on a disc or cartridge.

Fast-forward to today and things are more complicated. The box might hold a download code or a Game-Key Card that still needs software from a server, while some expensive collector’s editions don’t even include a physical copy at all. So, with Sony steering full-steam toward Playstation's digital-only future, what exactly are we going to mean by a "physical game" in 2030?

To find out, I spoke to Perry Gresham, head of data at MIDiA Research, and James McWhirter, senior analyst at Omdia. Their answers suggest the physical box isn’t necessarily going anywhere – but what it contains, and what owning it gives you, may change dramatically.

Physical demand could outlive the disc

It’s easy to look at the growing share of digital game sales and assume the physical market is heading towards zero. Gresham thinks the picture is more complicated.

"[The] decline in consumer demand is somewhat overstated by the headline digital vs physical figures reported in financial statements," he says. "It’s important to be careful about what’s actually being measured – there are factors that distort the picture. PC and mobile games are almost entirely digital-only, a lot of games now aren’t seeing a physical release, and importantly, stats reported often include in-game spending within the ‘digital’ part."

Gresham also notes that discounted older games still count as digital unit sales, while second-hand physical sales aren’t captured in publisher financials.

There’s still plenty of appetite for something tangible, too. Recent YouGov research found 51% of US console gamers generally preferred discs or cartridges, with permanent ownership the most commonly cited reason among physical buyers.

Gresham expects the physical market decline to moderate as we approach 2030, in part because many of the people still buying physical games actively care about ownership, resale, or collecting. If publishers force that audience towards digital, some may simply stop buying instead. “There’s a risk of shrinking the pie if those physical buyers don’t shift over,” he says.

If that decline does flatten, the pressure may increasingly come from the supply side: companies could stop making discs and cartridges before players stop wanting to buy them. PlayStation is already moving in that direction, with Sony planning to end disc production in 2028.

Why publishers want the game off the disc

Changing buying habits are only part of the appeal for publishers – there are some very practical reasons to get the game itself off the disc or cartridge.

On Nintendo platforms, physical remains a major route to market. Omdia estimates that just under 40% of full-game purchases in 2026 will be physical. But McWhirter says the cost of Switch 2 Game Cards is significant, with Game-Key Cards offering publishers a cheaper alternative.

"The cheaper per-unit cost of Game Key-Cards allows publishers like Square Enix and Ubisoft to launch at lower price points while also giving them the flexibility to discount post-launch and avoid ‘Switch tax’ and code-in-box reprints," he says.

McWhirter notes that Nintendo has wrestled with cartridge cost and supply before, citing the Famicom Disk System and Nintendo 64DD as earlier attempts to find alternatives.

Physical manufacturing creates an earlier deadline, too. On PlayStation and Xbox, McWhirter says download-dependent releases can give developers more time to finish a game before it has to be locked down for manufacture. "This is more important for games aiming to launch during periods where release dates are less flexible, like the holiday season," he says.

The disc also sits awkwardly with platform strategies that increasingly stretch beyond the living-room console. PlayStation and Xbox are looking towards PCs, handhelds, and cloud streaming to reach players on more devices.

McWhirter puts it plainly: “Discs are likely seen as an impediment,” while digital purchases can potentially follow players across consoles, PCs, handhelds, and cloud streaming.

What does physical ownership actually mean?

Once the game itself no longer has to live on the disc or cartridge, the physical object has a different job.

Switch 2 Game-Key Cards are a good example: they contain no game data, but the card still behaves much like a traditional physical copy once the software has been downloaded. "Game-Key Cards are not single-use codes and allow for lending and resale," McWhirter says. "They also do not require a Nintendo eShop account."

Gresham thinks that idea could eventually move beyond familiar game media altogether, with a physical token representing the purchase – potentially something as simple as a flash drive.

A code in a box works very differently. Redeem one of those and the game becomes tied to your digital account, leaving the physical package with no transferable copy to lend or sell. In practical terms, a Game-Key Card with no game stored on it can preserve more of the freedoms associated with physical ownership than a lavish collector’s edition containing a download code.

The weak spot is the download itself. A fresh Game-Key Card installation still depends on the game data being available online, although McWhirter notes that data can also be transferred locally between Switch 2 handsets.

Gresham thinks the same questions will increasingly matter for digital purchases too: "For consumers, the merit of any digital solution will come down to what rights come associated with their purchase.

"Can access be revoked, and does it depend on platform servers? Can the game be played offline? Can I transfer or resell it? Will access be available in 20+ years?"

Nintendo’s Virtual Game Card system already shows one possible direction, bringing some physical-style lending to digital purchases. Gresham points to PC as a contrast, where competition between storefronts helped encourage less restrictive approaches to digital licensing; console platforms already have integrated digital ecosystems, leaving them with far less incentive to offer the same freedoms.

Why the box survives

Even if the disc disappears, there are still good reasons to keep something on the shelf. Boxed games remain useful for gifting and retail, while the packaging itself can carry value for players who want something tangible from a favourite release. Case in point: I still have my GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 boxes on display.

Sony has already said that new PlayStation games will continue to be sold through retailers after disc production ends in January 2028, albeit in digital formats. McWhirter expects that to mean packaged code-in-a-box releases.

Whether a download code can simply take the disc’s place is less certain. McWhirter points out that code-in-a-box releases on Switch have generally worked better later in a game’s life, when publishers want a cheaper reprint without committing to another run of cartridges. "And because code-in-a-box is rarely associated with day-and-date releases, they tend to end up in supermarkets at discount prices," he says.

GTA 6 could prove that model can work at launch, although few games can count on anything like its level of demand – or, at the time of writing, level of leaks.

At the other end of the market, physical games may become more elaborate. Gresham sees a parallel with music, where streaming handles most everyday listening while vinyl and other physical formats cater to fans who want to collect.

"There’s a very good chance that physical games become increasingly collector-focused," he says. Gresham argues that digital deluxe editions generally struggle to command the same premium because they lack the perceived scarcity and tangibility of a physical collector’s edition.

McWhirter also points to specialist publishers already producing physical versions of digital games in the low thousands, often selling them at a premium through Amazon or direct. As mainstream volumes fall, that model could become increasingly important – leaving the traditional boxed disc squeezed between cheap digital access and physical editions made specifically for people who really want them.

By 2030, that could leave mass-market retail selling boxes that mainly deliver digital access, while genuinely physical releases increasingly cater to enthusiasts willing to pay for them.

So what is a "physical game" in 2030?

By the end of the decade, "physical" may tell us surprisingly little about where a game lives; the box could contain the actual software or unlock a download. For some, it might simply give you something tangible to put on a shelf.

Can you lend it, resell it, play it offline, or still access it years later? A Game-Key Card and a code-in-a-box might look equally physical at the checkout, but they can leave the buyer with very different rights once they get home.

Perhaps the better question in 2030 won’t be whether a game is physical, but what the thing you’ve bought actually lets you do.

More from Saturday Read: "It really is accepting of everybody": How Games Done Quick uses community to make a difference.

It's a superhero movie where the bad guy wins – which was pretty surprising for Marvel at the time. With just the snap of his fingers, Thanos made all of our favorite heroes, and their loved ones, disappear. It's a jarring entry in the MCU, though we have a feeling Avengers: Doomsday might outdo Infinity War (and Endgame for that matter) in terms of absolutely heartbreaking endings.

After making his first appearance in a mid-credits scene in The Avengers, Thanos would return in Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Age of Ultron before becoming the MCU's biggest threat across two subsequent films. He's a warlord titan with a demeanor that's almost too calm and zen for a comic book supervillain, and it's his insistence on bringing balance to the universe that results in the wipeout of half of Earth-616. In a strange way, Thanos is almost presented as the protagonist of Infinity War.

I don't know about you, but there are times in the film where I almost felt bad for the guy. I found myself nodding at his evil warlord plans. And part of this is aided by good writing by way of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and a stellar portrayal from Josh Brolin. It's not that I wanted him to win necessarily, but I kind of understood his whole deal. And I think that's what Markus and McFeely and the Russo brothers were going for – why not get a little sad and conflicted over the bad guy for once?

As we gear up for Avengers: Doomsday, I think it's important to revisit the MCU's first seemingly unkillable villain before we go on to properly meet Victor Von Doom. Things are about to get bad for The Avengers, and just about every other hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and more. But let's not forget how bad things got in Infinity War, when the heroes we loved disintegrated before our very eyes on screen.

Oh, snap

The Blip, also known as The Snap, is the event that changed quite literally everything within the MCU, altered the Sacred Timeline, and gave some questionable motivations to the most surprising characters. Thanos spends the majority of Infinity War collecting all six Infinity Stones in his little Infinity Gauntlet in order to restore balance and prevent further catastrophes from occurring within the universe. He does this, of course, by snapping his fingers and wiping out half of all the living things in Earth-616 – with the victims chosen completely at random.

Among the missing are Bucky Barnes, Clint Barton's entire family, Yelena Belova, Betty Brant, Drax, Mantis, Ned and MJ, T'Challa and Shuri, Star-Lord, Doctor Strange, and Peter Parker... the latter of which is the scene where children in my theater started audibly crying.

No one else really knew they were being blipped, so to speak, before it was happening, and it was an almost instantaneous disintegration. Because Peter has heightened senses, he was able to feel himself disappearing into nothingness. And it's there, while he's lying in Tony's arms, that we get the gut-wrenching line: "Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good," before he fades away. It was impossible in that moment not to think, "Oh my God, did they just kill off Spider-Man? Can they do that? Can we sue Joe and Anthony Russo?" And that's what sets Infinity War apart from other Marvel movies: it plays with our hearts in a uniquely terrible way.

Let's not forget that Vision was killed, which prompts Wanda to recreate him with magic and S.W.O.R.D to physically recreate him as a robot without any memories. The events of Infinity War cause Wanda to hold an entire town hostage in WandaVision, and take things one step further in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Thanos also strangles Loki to death and kills Gamora. This results in a new Loki variant being introduced in the MCU by way of the Disney Plus show of the same name, as well as an alternate-timeline version of Gamora being introduced (mostly just to destroy Peter Quill's emotions over and over again to move the already heartbreaking plot along) in Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

It's also why Yelena Belova and Echo are both on a mission to kill Clint in Hawkeye: Yelena faults him for Natasha's death, while Echo (rightfully) faults him for a murder he carried out while assuming a vigilante-assassin-esque alter ego known as the Ronin. He needed something to do with his grief and frustration while his family was gone for five years.

It's OK if you forgot that Infinity War is the movie that made everything happen, because I almost did, too.

Doom and gloom

Infinity War is frequently overshadowed by the finality of Avengers: Endgame, which effectively and permanently kills Thanos, Tony Stark, and Black Widow. And that's totally fair. It was also the last Avengers movie for six whole years before the now-defunct Kang Dynasty was announced. Still, it's absolutely required viewing before heading to the theaters in December to see Robert Downey Jr. put on a green cape and a scary metal mask. Without Infinity War, there would be no Thunderbolts movie, and we wouldn't have the New Avengers either.

In the Disney Plus series Hawkeye, there's a brief scene where Clint goes into a restroom and sees "Thanos was right" graffitied on the wall. I think of this often: was he right? Does humanity kind of suck? Perhaps. But does it suck badly enough to destroy thousands of innocent lives? Absolutely not.

Avengers: Doomsday will take us into new, darker waters, and give us another ultra-powerful supervillain who will take multiple movies to be defeated. However, Doom's motivations aren't for the good of mankind... he's just kind of a bad dude with a weird chip on his shoulder. But that's enough to potentially destroy all of mankind and send our heroes to a planet where they're forced to fight for all eternity. Thinking about that almost makes me miss The Blip.

Avengers: Infinity War is available to stream now on Disney Plus, ahead of the release of Avengers: Doomsday on December 18.

Look ahead with our list of upcoming Marvel movies and check out how to watch the Marvel movies in order ahead of your next re-watch. See you next week as we revisit Avengers: Infinity War.

Whenever I play Overwatch with my friends and actually contribute to our success, I'm treated like a child who's 'helping' his parents put away groceries and manages to put the cheese in the right fridge drawer for a change. In short, I suck.

Even when I'm in the zone as my main man, Reinhardt, I'm not sure I've ever gotten MVP in the hundreds of matches I've played over the years. It was to my great surprise, then, that I found myself dominating as new support hero Doctrine over the weekend at BlizzCon 2026.

Don't get me wrong; I still didn't get MVP in the handful of matches I played. But I was surprisingly competent for someone who A) sucks, and B) had never played Doctrine before. Even without much time to get a good handle on the hero's moves, Doctrine's primary ranged attack, speed, and healing speed-buffing drones were so intuitive that my Quick Play performance made me feel like I wasn't being carried for once.

Unfortunately, I have a hunch that I didn't suddenly 'git gud', synchronizing with Doctrine's life energy as a lover of all things vampire myself. No, my impression after a few surprisingly great rounds as Doctrine is that a big, fat, bloodsucking nerf is probably waiting around the corner to take the wind right out of my sails.

Jack of all trades

What surprised me the most about Doctrine is just how incredibly well-balanced he is. With great mobility bolstered by straight-up flight via Infuse, solid DPS for a support, flexible engagement range, and an Ultimate with a nasty HP debuff and simultaneous team heal, it's hard to identify a major vulnerability in the vamp's toolkit.

I foresee his Deliverance Ultimate specifically becoming a real problem as players familiarize themselves with his abilities. It's probably going to be one of the main targets of the hero's inevitable first balance update. Meanwhile, Infuse changing the character's rush and drone abilities makes Doctrine a tough hero to predict and counter. With a perk that dramatically reduces Infuse's damage and healing cooldowns, that unpredictability becomes, well, even more unpredictable.

I brought up Doctrine's versatility in a conversation with Overwatch game director Aaron Keller. He pointed out the new hero's high aim skill floor as a potential downside, while ultimately agreeing with me about "flexibility."

"You need to have pretty high aim right there," Keller says. "He also has a pretty decent amount of mobility as well. He can get in, get out, get to high ground if he infuses his dash. So, I think that there's a lot of flexibility with somebody like Doctrine." Asked specifically what meta niche is being filled by a highly-adaptable hero like Doctrine, Keller says he's "not exactly sure who he's going to replace or what the best synergy is here," but "he's going to be versatile and powerful enough to where he gets incorporated into the meta."

Not another Jetpack Cat

Keller says it's a dangerous game, predicting how a new hero will be perceived – balanced, underpowered, or overpowered – because while the dev team tests out roster additions "a lot," it's still "just a team of a couple hundred people" all operating at "different skill levels."

Still, he insists players will grapple with Doctrine's "high skill cap" and strategic design, hopefully preventing all-out support meta dominance similar to Jetpack Cat at launch. "There's aim skill, and there's a lot of strategic decision-making that you need to do with how and when you're going to use Infuse," he explains of Doctrine's playstyle. "It'll be interesting to see if this becomes one of those heroes that is just played a ton at the high level and maybe played a little bit less at lower levels, or if he's played all over the place," Keller tells me.

If Doctrine really is the easy-to-learn but tough-to-master hero Keller says he is, that's terrifying. In other words, if a scrub like me was able to become a respectable, even valuable, team-player in my very first games as the new hero, imagine his potential in the hands of someone who actually knows what they're doing after six months in Ranked queues? That's why a nerf feels all but guaranteed once Doctrine officially joins the Overwatch roster on October 6.

If Overwatch isn't your thing, be sure to check out our ranking of the best FPS games to find your new obsession.