There are few studios I respect more in the gaming world than Double Fine. Founded by industry legend Tim Schafer way back in July 2000, the mastermind behind adventure game classics like Grim Fandango and Full Throttle has spent the past 26 years making a range of games that have you doing everything from jumping into people’s brains to becoming a rock legend to using Russian dolls to solve puzzles.

Every single thing this developer creates is so unique, and none more so than Psychonauts 2.

And I love this delightfully unorthodox platformer not just because of its excellent characters and imaginative level design, but also because of the hard journey it went on to see the light of day after six long years of development. Now I consider most video games a miracle, but not all video games have a 23+ hour documentary showing exactly how they were made and all the things people sacrificed to make them so special.

You owe it to yourself to watch it, more so now that Double Fine has parted ways with Microsoft and is yet again stepping into the world as an independent studio with so much left to give. Enough about that for now, though; let us touch on everything that makes Psychonauts 2 such a masterpiece now that I’ve hit the credits for the first time.

Insane in the membrane

The concept of being able to read the minds of those around you and even jump into their brains to root around sounds thrilling at first, but I bet it doesn’t take long before you stumble across mountains of trauma and terrible opinions.

But what if you could change people by delving deep into their subconscious and pulling on a few strings? That’s exactly what our hero Razputin "Raz" Aquato must do as a newly minted member of the Psychonauts, who also happens to come from a family of eccentric circus performers who are horrendously allergic to water. That explains the gaudy green skin and penchant for 3D platforming.

Psychonauts 2 starts incredibly strong as you’re yeeted into the head of a paranoid dentist harbouring the location of a long-lost psychic supervillain. If you’re afraid of rotting teeth or the idea of someone rooting around in your chompers with sharp objects, this level totally isn’t for you, but goodness me, is it gorgeous.

I’m filled with a feeling of proud disgust as I grasp onto a zipper of teeth using my telekinesis, only to pull it down to reveal a new area, while bouncing across a squishy yet jagged mixture of gums and teeth resembles a video game equivalent of a SpongeBob SquarePants close-up gag.

It’s gross, needlessly detailed, yet instantly endearing. Thankfully, the remaining levels in Psychonauts 2 are equally as impressive but don’t make you want to lose your lunch. I’ll never forget helping a brain in a jar regain his physical form by reuniting his senses, who almost happen to play in a rock band pulled straight from the psychedelic 1960s, or the Casino Hospital, where sentient syringes are rolling the dice to try and have a baby.

Every level is a platforming masterclass that begins with a central premise before using that foundation to offer up stellar obstacles and puzzles which are always challenging enough to feel rewarding. During my first playthrough, I became obsessed with collectibles, leaving the beaten path behind in favour of hard-to-reach areas or consistently backtracking to make sure nothing was left behind. That’s the sign of a great platformer — each level is an utter joy to traverse the first time round before evolving into a familiar playground awash with secrets.

What color is the sky in your world?

Beyond how good Psychonauts 2 can feel to play, it’s the writing and characters that occupy this platformer that help it rise to another echelon of greatness. Raz may be a psychic hero, but he’s also a naive little kid with so much left to learn about the world, which makes having to constantly fix the mistakes made by adults around him a smidge awkward.

This acts as an effective springboard for Schafer and his team to tell nuanced stories surrounding issues like alcoholism, depression, grief, and what it means to be human. The game world is held up by eccentric psychic realism, but the way it narratively expresses itself couldn’t be more real if it tried.

Throughout its seven-year tenure with Xbox, Double Fine never managed to release another game of this magnitude as it opted for smaller, more experimental titles like Kiln and Keeper. But I’ve no doubt that Schafer is currently hard at work on a new project as creative director or project lead, whether this ends up being a new IP or a sequel to something fans love.

It’s the sort of experience it will need to produce in order to succeed as an independent studio in today’s climate, where even a single failed project can usher in a studio’s sudden demise. Its enduring history and legions of hardcore fans sadly don’t make it immune to this fate.

I’m not saying I want Psychonauts 3 — although that would be lovely — but the medium would be far darker if Double Fine stopped creating games like the idiosyncratic platformer.

It offers so much heart, so much purpose, and showcases what video games are capable of outside of chasing trends and retreading nostalgic old ground. We simply don’t have nearly enough experiences like it in the modern era, so hopefully Double Fine’s current Amnesia Fortnight campaign will produce something just as spectacular.

Platformers of this depth and caliber are hard to come by these days unless you’re being made by Nintendo, so if you’re after an emotionally satisfying adventure that will stay with you for years to come, I can’t recommend Psychonauts 2 enough. Oh, and be sure to give the documentary a watch as well. If we make enough noise, maybe we’ll be crowdfunding the third game sooner than we think.

• Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe says the game's Showbiz system was "a real challenge" for RGG Studio
• Abe says lots of research was put into finding out what a show promoter does and how to depict that in-game
• Abe adds that "At some point we did have a small rhythm game," but the idea didn't match the team's vision

Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe has revealed how RGG Studio designed the game's Showbiz narrative system and how difficult it was to get right.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Abe said the Showbiz, an entertainment management system requiring the main character, Makoto Daito, to build a business, find sources of inspiration for music, and plan productions as a promoter, "was a real challenge for us."

The director explained that RGG started by asking: what does a promoter actually do? Because "you know what a singer does, and you know what a band does, but you don't exactly know what a promoter does in the music industry," so research began from there.

Abe revealed that "At some point we did have a small rhythm game, but it didn't exactly match the feeling that you're promoting a show," so the team went back to the whiteboard phase to try different things.

"One thing that we noticed is that a promoter is the person who brings in not just the money, but also the inspiration and the whole vision of the show," Abe said. "We thought that's an interesting aspect that we can put into this game."

In Stranger Than Heaven, players can walk around cities and interact with things in the environment, like a grandfather clock or a bonfire, and collect sounds as inspiration for music. Daito can then take these samples and collaborate with a composer to create new music and plan a production for the singer and band.

"The inspiration sources are basically like when you have a certain job, you always have these antennas looking for something," Abe said. "So, if you're a musician, you always have this antenna for the music you're hearing, and that can inspire people to create new stuff, and that was no different for Makoto as well.

Abe added, "That's why this game system of finding and then using that inspiration to create music came to life in the game."

Stranger Than Heaven releases on January 15, 2027, for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.

• Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe says RGG Studios did a lot of "difficult" research to depict the game's many cities across different time periods
• However, Abe says "historical accuracy wasn't the goal from the very beginning," and the team took creative liberties
• He says there is a lot of "fiction" woven through the cities for the player experience

RGG Studio did plenty of research for its multi-era action role-playing game, Stranger Than Heaven, but director Mikinobu Abe has said historical accuracy wasn't the end goal.

In a discussion with TechRadar Gaming about the early stages of development, Abe confirmed that a story spanning 50 years and five cities in Japan required a lot of research, which "itself was really difficult," and that RGG visited all the cities depicted in the game and libraries for material.

"No one knows what it was like back in 1915 Kokura, or 1929 Kure," Abe said. "So, we had to dig into a lot of our pictures, and we visited a lot of museums. We even bought a lot of books that were published back then, or magazines that were published back then, and read every single one of them. There was one time that bugs were coming out of them, which was not good to have in the office! We did a lot of research like that."

However, as much as research was vital to get a sense of the time periods RGG wanted to depict, the director said "historical accuracy wasn't the goal from the very beginning," and the team took creative liberties.

"We took a lot of inspiration from what we researched, but we wanted to depict the city in a way that we feel really represents the video game experience that we want the player to have," Abe explained. "There's a lot of fiction within the cities, but we wanted to capture the tone of what it could have been like or how it could have felt to be in that place."

It wasn't just historical research; Abe said he and the art director, Daishi Kanaya, researched paintings, vintage lenses, and film that were created during these decades, and that they "took a lot of inspiration from the equipment side of things," like what brush artists used when drawing at the time.

"We took a lot of inspiration from those and re-imagined how we, as creators in 2026, would use that equipment and create this new vibe or atmosphere for the game," he said. "That's just how this older colour, and the look, and the tone, and the atmosphere of the city came to life.

"I don't think 1915 Kokura was that populated or was that big of a city, but you know, we really wanted to capture the essence and humanise it in a way that we feel like it's really entertaining for people to play."

Stranger Than Heaven releases on January 15, 2027, for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.

• Epic is kicking off an 'AI MegaJam' next month
• It's a four-day competition for developers to build a game with AI, giving away $50,000 worth of prizes
• Coming on top of Epic's recent push of AI in its preview launcher and elsewhere, this has provoked quite the negative reaction from gamers

Epic has announced an 'AI MegaJam' in which you can 'vibe your way to $50K,' a neat little rhyme there, but gamers are predictably bewildered by the idea of this event which rewards game developers using AI.

The MegaJam is a four-day competition that starts on November 12, whereby teams of up to five people can use unlimited AI agents to create a playable game in either Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN).

You can compete and code from anywhere, although there will be teams taking part locally (for two days) in San Francisco at Digital Jungle, where Epic promises "teams from Anthropic, Google, Meshy, OpenAI, SpaceXSI" and other big-name AI brands (expect daily livestreams, too).

Epic tells us: "Bring any AI tools into your workflow, from asset generation to coding agents. Get creative! Prototype the mechanic you never had time for, or try the art style you weren't sure you could pull off."

The prize pool is $50,000, which is split up into a bunch of categories. The main prizes are for the best Unreal Engine and UEFN games, which will net $7,500 respectively, with second and third places winning $5,000 and $2,500 in those categories too.

The best student project for either UE or UEFN will also receive $7,500, with the same runner-up prizes of $5,000 and $2,500.

The best team overall will bag a further $5,000, meaning the maximum prize here will be $12,500 (as presumably they must be one of the main category winners). There are a bunch of other modifier prizes, mind you, as extras on top, including best mobile game or solo developer ($2,500 apiece).

Epic also notes that: "Standout Unreal Engine and UEFN entries can earn development continuation grants of up to $50,000 to keep building after the jam."

Analysis: negative vibes

As you might imagine, there's been an immediate and strong negative reaction from gamers. There are multiple observations that Steam is already full of 'AI slop' games, with gamers asking why on earth Epic is encouraging this.

The irony of Epic proclaiming that the invited vibe-coders should "get creative!" isn't lost, either, given that most gamers view AI as the grim reaper for creativity, wielding its pixelated scythe as it kills and extracts the souls of games.

As one Redditor laments: "We're being bombarded with thousands of AI slop games because 'with AI, anyone can make their dreams a reality and become a game dev!' The game market is going to collapse, as seen in the latest Steam Next Fest, all thanks to AI bros and AI billionaires. Oh, how I hate Tim Sweeney."

In short, there's a lot of venting and vexation out there, so does this feel tone deaf from Epic? Very much so, but you wouldn't expect anything else really given CEO Tim Sweeney's recent (and past) comments on the subject of AI in gaming, and what's been going on at Epic lately.

Witness Sweeney's proclamation earlier this month that a "huge pivot" is happening at Epic where it's "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," with the chief exec arguing that AI can be "empowering for creators" and not the death of gaming. And of course there's also the new Epic launcher in preview, which took a tongue-in-cheek approach with a release announcement that declared: "Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that's way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look."

All of which went down swimmingly well with most PC gamers, of course.

Interestingly, the idea for this AI MegaJam may have originated in this discussion on X, where SYD Games Studio suggests such a developer competition. Sweeney replies that it's an "interesting idea" and appears to have taken that ball and run with it (he also observes that AI represents "truly a new age of gaming and software ahead").

I get that AI can be a useful tool when employed by game developers to save some time doing coding grunt work (with the appropriate careful checks in place), but extending vibe-coding more broadly to embrace the entire game-making process is just asking for trouble and heaping on the bad feelings towards Epic here. At this point, Epic seems to be almost trolling gamers, and coding aside, the general vibes are getting distinctly nasty.

• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 creative director Jan Theysen has explained how the original Dawn of War influenced the new game's RTS systems
• Theysen says King Art Games "wanted the battles to take a while" in Dawn of War 4
• He says that the game's on-field reinforcement feature was almost cut because it was "weird," but now the team loves it because it "brings the macro [management] and the economy side into the battles"

King Art Games co-founder and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 creative director Jan Theysen has described how the game manifests the classic real-time strategy (RTS) experience of the original Dawn of War.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Theysen explained that the first question the team asked itself was which game it wanted to draw inspiration from for the foundations of Dawn of War 4; it ultimately chose the first game, which was released in 2004, as it was the more "classic RTS" and the game the team refers to as its "north star."

"We basically said, 'Okay, we want to do a new Dawn of War,' but then the question was: 'What are we talking about? Dawn of War 1 or 2?' Which are both great but very different," Theysen said. "Maybe even Dawn of War 3. And we said, 'Okay, let's really go back to Dawn of War 1, which for us was more this classic RTS with base building, with big battles."

King Art looked at how big the battles were and how long they took in the original game, and decided on a larger and longer "time-to-kill" gameplay system for the newest iteration.

"We wanted the battles to take a while, so that you can actually throw more units into the battle, right?" he said. "And maybe you win the battle and lose the war because you put all your resources into this one battle, for example; it was something that we looked into a lot, because you know it's something that different RTS [games] handle very differently.

On-field reinforcements is one of the "weirder" things Dawn of War 4 will feature, which Theysen revealed King Art didn't have initially because it's an old system that not many modern RTS games have. Turns out, when the team tested it, [and they] really liked it.

"We felt like it was a little bit weird, right?" he said. "Lore-wise, it doesn't make any sense, and even gameplay-wise, it's not something that a ton of RTS games have. Maybe it's a weird thing that they had like 20 years ago, and maybe it's not that important, but then we actually tried it out, and now we love it."

The creative director added that "we think it's great" because on-field reinforcement also "brings the macro[management] and the economy side into the battles," as well as the real-time unit control with micromanagement.

"By just auto-healing everything or auto-reinforcing everything, the battles become easier, but actually the economy part suffers, right? Or it becomes harder," Theysen explained. "But if you are more about the macro and more about the big picture, it might be totally fine to just put all your units on auto in battle, and they'll do their stuff.

"While if you're really into micro, you probably say, 'no, I can optimize the battle', and then you spend less time in the macro but more in the micro, and that's also fine, and that is maybe an example you know that we directly took from Dawn of War 1."

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 is slated to launch on PC on December 3.

• World of Warcraft: Forever senior game designer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield confirms the MMO still has "thousands" of undiscovered secrets
• Greenfield says, "There’s going to be things to discover that we didn’t surface"
• He adds that there is "really well-buried stuff out there that’s probably going to take people a long time to find"

Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed that World of Warcraft: Forever features thousands of secrets, like items, that were turned off in the beta.

In its 'End of Beta Special' podcast, senior game designer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield, alongside other WoW: Forever developers, was asked about the undiscovered secrets in the beta, revealing that Blizzard disabled many of them for the first 30 levels (via GameSpot).

"There’s definitely some secrets and stuff that we had turned off," Greenfield said. "There’s going to be things to discover that we didn’t surface, suffice to say that."

When host Josh Corbett brought up that there are supposedly "thousands" of things hidden in the MMO, Greenfield agreed; some of those secrets include items and recipes, but the developer refrained from sharing more details.

"Honestly, it's almost kind of hard to say, because the thing is, I guess it's interesting to frame it like this, that our team has gone through this sort of evolution," Greenfield said. "We're a lot larger than we were before; we have a lot more really talented designers, really creative people working on it, and I think we've all sort of done our own little things here and there along the way of 'I'm going to hide this in this nook and cranny, and I'm going to turn it off for beta, and then we'll see what people see,' and stuff like that."

He added that there are "all kinds of things" to uncover and hinted at "fun things" like "emergent behaviors that have happened in the game based on the things that people have found" and "some of the new sort of technology tools we have to play with."

"It’s hard to talk about secret stuff," Greenfield continued. "It’s secret, right? We want people to find it. There’s some really, really, really cool, and really, really, really well-buried stuff out there that’s probably going to take people a long time to find. If we tip our hats to it too much, it’s just going to take the fun away."

Many of these secrets are so hidden that even data miners can uncover them, and lead encounter designer Michael Nuthals more or less confirmed during the podcast that some features may be used in future WoW: Forever content, such as the Manor Mistmantle, which was recently found in Duskwood.

"There might be some homes, some manors, out there that folks have found that might be something interesting in the future,” Nuthals said. "You might have seen some instance portals hiding in some inconspicuous spots. There are some things coming in the future, and we’re really excited to share those as we get there."

WoW: Forever launches on November 4, and the game's beta officially ends today after getting a short extension.

TechRadar Gaming recently interviewed Blizzard about WoW: Forever, which shared its design philosophy for creating an authentic "Classic Plus" experience and addressed the controversial new Skyborne race available to both Alliance and Horde.

You could be forgiven for having reservations going into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. After all, both last year’s instalment, the much-derided Black Ops 7, and this game’s direct predecessor, Modern Warfare III, were clearly rushed and displayed a level of sloppiness that suggested the first-person shooter franchise had reached its breaking point.

Thankfully, it’s now apparent that these were merely temporary hiccups, and Modern Warfare 4 sees developer Infinity Ward successfully bring Call of Duty back from the brink with a fresh and exciting instalment that represents the absolute pinnacle of what the series has to offer.

The brilliant single-player story campaign delivers blockbuster thrills, there’s a stellar extraction shooter component filled with tense encounters in DMZ, and the core multiplayer experience is wonderfully crafted. It’s a package that you shouldn’t miss, and if it represents the trajectory of future installments, I’m confident that we’re in good hands.

Boots on the ground

The Modern Warfare 4 campaign is simply superb and sets a new benchmark for the series’ cinematic storytelling. It truly feels like the culmination of the last decade of the Call of Duty series – and not just the Modern Warfare games.

It all kicks off in the fictional city of Hajin, South Korea, where you play as the lowly Private Park. An unwilling conscript in the country’s mandatory service program, he and his squadmates are suddenly thrust onto the front lines when a routine patrol is interrupted by the start of a full-scale invasion by North Korea. There are some genuinely shocking scenes in the opening as your team pushes through a rapidly crumbling city, dodging artillery strikes and witnessing widespread civilian casualties.

The early death of a squadmate hammers home the high stakes, and the decision to focus on newcomers rather than the established Modern Warfare cast makes it clear that there’s no plot armor here. You genuinely start to care about these new arrivals, with each member bringing a distinct and memorable personality to the squad’s dynamic. Dunn, a US Marine embedded in the local unit, is a particular highlight. His cultural cluelessness and overconfident swagger are frequently played for laughs, stopping the otherwise bleak tone from becoming too unrelentingly miserable.

It’s a big departure from the almost Marvel-movie-like silliness of the recent Call of Duty games (I’m looking at you, giant Harper mission from Black Ops 7), and the focus on a ground invasion makes for a grittier story that’s more in line with the events of the original Modern Warfare trilogy. Despite this more constrained focus, there are still plenty of memorable set-piece moments, such as an invigorating sequence that has you rapidly switching between different team members spread out across an air base, working together to fend off waves of North Korean troops.

There’s even one massive, open-world mission that unfolds similarly to a Far Cry game. It’s far more in-depth than the disappointing open-zone levels of 2023’s Modern Warfare III, with resources to scavenge, outposts to clear, and even a few puzzles to crack. It took me a few hours to clear, and since I didn’t see everything, I really appreciate being able to return to it later from the mission select screen and pick up where I left off.

Park’s story plays out mostly linearly, but it's interspersed with missions that detail the exploits of the fan-favorite Captain Price in the lead-up to the invasion. Set a few years after the events of the previous game, which, spoiler alert, ends with Price executing his long-term adversary, General Shepherd, in the middle of the Pentagon, the former SAS soldier is now on the run and travels between global locations hunting the members of a sinister cabal.

Price’s segments offer all the bombastic Mission: Impossible action that made the recent Black Ops 6 campaign so great. One minute you're infiltrating a New York nightclub, and the next you’re speeding through Paris, hanging out the side of a car chased by legions of heavily armed gangsters. Vladimir Makarov, a terrorist Price pursued throughout the previous game, is unceremoniously killed off in just the second mission, paving the way for the introduction of Archer, a new foe portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen. Unlike Makarov, he’s a compelling villain with coherent motivations and, importantly, enough screen time to appear like more than an afterthought, as his predecessor unfortunately did.

While Park’s journey sees the recruit come face to face with the horrors of war but emerge victorious thanks to camaraderie and teamwork, Price’s is all about the dangers of abandoning your morals and sacrificing those close to you in pursuit of revenge. They contrast excellently and, while the messaging certainly isn’t subtle, the way both gradually converge for a unified conclusion is nevertheless highly satisfying.

Off the books

The events of the campaign lead directly into the new DMZ extraction shooter mode, which sees mercenaries returning to the crumbling ruins of Hajin to find and extract abandoned military tech left over from the war. It plays like a simplified version of titles such as Arena Breakout: Infinite or Escape from Tarkov, with your chosen operator dropping in to the map from an upgradable field base.

This serves as a little hub world that you return to in between runs, offering limited storage for your scavenged gear, a 3D printer to forge new equipment with collected resources, a vendor for spending extracted cash, and intelligence detailing the non-player character (NPC) foes and most dangerous players active in the zone. While most extraction shooter games include base-building elements, it’s rare to see your home as a physical 3D space you can actually explore, and it makes the experience feel much more immersive.

You have three options when deploying into Hajin: Story Missions, Dynamic Ops, and Free Roam. Free Roam is the most basic: it drops you into the massive map with a few other players to pursue your own goals, whether that means finding good weapons to extract or trying to complete DMZ Orders, little challenges that guide your experience. Dynamic Ops is more guided, feeding you a stream of multi-stage objectives with increasing rewards for each that you manage to complete.

They’re assigned at random, with a good variety of options in the mission pool that range from taking out key NPC targets to taking over military camps and collecting stashed bombs to destroy marked vehicles. Story Missions, meanwhile, offer a more linear experience that feels much closer to the campaign.

One early highlight had my team of three taking on guards at an abandoned hospital, pushing our way up to the intensive care unit and wheeling a sedated enemy general to a rooftop extraction point under heavy fire. It was genuinely exhilarating, and became even more exciting when a squad of enemy players turned up to disrupt our mission.

Other players can appear regardless of your chosen mode, leading to tense PvP situations where one wrong move can mean the difference between a successful escape and losing your current operator and all of their equipment. Not every encounter has to end in a fight, though, as you can work together with enemy teams (and even opt to join them) if they’re willing to cooperate, leading to some fun emergent play.

I entered one story mission and quickly discovered that my team of randoms was absolutely terrible, with no apparent interest in actually completing our tasks, so I beelined to a nearby enemy squad shouting “friendly” until they sent me the invite to join them. I quickly led my new friends right back to my useless former teammates, and took great pleasure in helping mow them down to steal all their gear.

No two games feel the same, and if that wasn’t reason enough to keep coming back, Hajin itself is a treat to explore. It’s big, beautiful, and filled with a variety of aesthetically distinct zones ranging from freezing cold, abandoned North Korean villages to the rusty ruins of the South Korean city and even some of the barren outskirts of Russia. Even when you’ve seen it all, the dynamic weather effects can still take you by surprise, introducing challenging conditions like dense fog or heavy rainstorms that make it more difficult to navigate and spot foes.

DMZ would be a strong offering as a standalone extraction shooter game, so it represents incredible value when bundled in alongside the rest of the Modern Warfare 4 package. This is a mode that I’m going to be coming back to time and time again in the weeks and months ahead.

A fresh start

Of course, no Call of Duty game is complete without a robust suite of core multiplayer modes, and Modern Warfare 4 delivers a truly superb experience across the board in this regard. The pacing of matches is perfect: noticeably snappier than the comparatively pedestrian battles of Modern Warfare II but not as overwhelmingly rapid as the wall-jumping, hip-firing action of Black Ops 7.

Fast movement helps you navigate the smaller maps of classic modes like Team Deathmatch or Kill Confirmed quickly so you’re always encountering new enemies to fight, keeping the excitement high. Focusing on tactical positioning is still rewarded, thanks to a finely tuned TTK (time to kill) that gives the player who lands the first hit an advantage, but not a guaranteed victory against particularly skilled opponents. New traversal mechanics like a ledge grab that lets you hang off the side of buildings and objects are seamlessly implemented too, opening up new exciting opportunities on every battlefield.

As I noted in my impressions of the Modern Warfare 4 beta, the overhauled ballistic system is far more than a marketing bullet point and genuinely impacts how you engage with weapons by accurately simulating the trajectory of bullets based on the position of your muzzle. In practical terms, it means being able to reliably hit shots when quickly shooting from the hip, which gives you a chance against players that slide around corners with SMGs at breakneck speeds to try and catch you off guard.

The guns themselves are all fantastic to use, with best-in-class model fidelity, impactful sound effects, and slick animations. There’s a great variety in the arsenal to boot, which spans from modern assault rifles to the antique WWII gear used by the real-world North Korean military. GUNNY, a new automated helper smartly built into the gunsmith system, makes it easier than ever to tweak your attachments for that perfect build. While I will always prefer poring over the detailed stats, giving newcomers the ability to automatically create good attachment setups based on their specific playstyles helps keep the playing field even.

As for the maps, they’re some of the best that we’ve had in recent years. They’re definitely on the smaller side unless you dive into the massive Ground War: Combat Outpost mode (which plays almost like a Battlefield match), though none of them stand out as suffering from poorly balanced spawn points or unfair sightlines. They’re visually stunning. Those taking place in South Korea, such as Silkworm, stand out particularly with their lavishly detailed streets, while little animated intros grant each arena a distinct visual identity.

Wrap all of this up in a slick UI that finally doesn’t look like the Netflix home screen, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Modern Warfare 4 is going to reshape the direction of the long-running series going forward. If I had to truly nitpick, I would fault the lack of faction divisions in the operator lineup – being able to tell at a glance which team a player is on without having to rely on the red enemy indicator would help readability.

For something this insignificant to be my only complaint is a testament to how strong the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 package is

Should I play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility features

As with most modern Call of Duty games, there is an expansive selection of accessibility settings. This includes a wide selection of visual presets designed to enhance readability, as well as an assortment of subtitle options for the campaign.

The controls are also highly customizable, with full remapping supported whether you’re using a keyboard and mouse or a controller. You can also tweak aim assist settings and enable presets designed to reduce motor strain.

How I reviewed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

I played more than 25 hours of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 for the purpose of this review. This included a full playthrough of the campaign, multiple DMZ sessions both solo and with a friend, and plenty of multiplayer. I also drew on my experience playing more than ten hours of the game’s beta, and some extra hands-on time in a studio visit earlier this year.

I tested everything on PC using a 5070 Ti-powered model by retailer Sca with a compact Corsair 2000d RGB Airflow case, Asus ROG Strix B860-I Gaming Wifi motherboard, Intel Core Ultra 7 265K CPU, a 2TB WD Black SN770 SSD, 32GB of DDR5 Corsair Vengeance RAM, and an Nvidia 5070 Ti manufactured by Asus. This setup lets me play smoothly on custom graphics settings at 1080p with most options set to High.

For peripherals, I used the new Logitech G Pro X2 Rapid keyboard and Logitech G Pro X3 SuperStrike mouse throughout my time with the game.

First reviewed October 2026

• Nacon reveals its officially licensed Xbox controller, the Revolution Pro X – Special Edition
• The controller design is inspired by Hell Is Us and is now available for £109.99 / $129.90 / €129.99
• It combines mechanical fine-tuning for all playstyles and tournament-grade precision

Nacon has announced the Revolution Pro X – Special Edition, its new officially licensed Xbox wireless controller inspired by Rogue Factor's action-adventure game, Hell Is Us.

Revolution Pro X – Special Edition is designed for competitive gaming and combines mechanical tuning and tournament-grade precision, allowing players on PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and Smart TVs to customize controls to suit their playstyle.

Available now at NaconGaming for £109.99 / $129.90 / €129.99, the jet-black controller features a minimalist whorl design inspired by Hell Is Us and features contactless Hall Effect joysticks and instant triggers equipped with micro-switches "without mechanical wear," plus two programmable shortcut buttons on the back.

It also offers four vibration motors, two programmable rear buttons, a 2.4 GHz wireless dongle, and a 3 m detachable braided USB-C cable.

"Its control ring lets you adjust the mechanical tension of the joysticks with a single gesture to prioritize either fast movements or precise aiming, depending on the situation," Nacon said.

When connected to a PC, it offers a wired mode with a 1,000 Hz polling rate and matches a claimed latency of 1 ms, prioritizing responsiveness in fast-paced games like first-person shooters.

"With the Revolution Pro X – SE, we wanted to offer a full-featured precision controller at a competitive price,” says Yannick Allaert, director of Nacon's accessories division.

"Its joystick tension adjustment, Hall Effect sensors, and micro-switch combine technologies designed to allow every player to tailor their controls to their playing style."

• World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has been extended until October 23
• Beta users will have more time to play the game ahead of the MMO's November 4 launch
• Early name reservations will also be available from October 27 through November 3

Blizzard Entertainment has extended the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, giving those with access additional playtime in Azeroth, ahead of the game's official release.

WoW: Forever is set to launch on November 4, and the popular beta period was initially supposed to end on October 20. However, Blizzard has announced on X that it's now extended to October 23 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET / 6 PM BST.

In addition, the studio has confirmed that early name reservations for Forever will be available from October 27 through November 3, "giving players an opportunity to secure the names that will become part of their adventures in Azeroth."

During this period, eligible players, including those who have pre-purchased the Skyborne Heroic Pack, Skyborne Epic Pack, limited-time Warcraft Forever Collection, the Digital Upgrade, or Collector’s Edition, can create and reserve names for up to three characters total across all Rulesets.

"This means that if you create two on a PvP Ruleset, you’ll only be able to create one more character in a Normal or Role-Play Ruleset," Blizzard explained. "This restriction only applies to Early Name Reservation."

TechRadar Gaming recently interviewed Blizzard about WoW: Forever, including the MMO's controversial new Skyborne race available to both Alliance and Horde.

The team said it has a "great story" to tell with the Skyborne and, regarding its decision to make Skyborne accessible to both factions, it said, "it’s mostly to try and avoid a potentially avoidable population swing."

Blizzard also confirmed it doesn't plan to add any modern WoW races since the game exists in its own timeline, while sharing its design philosophy for creating an authentic "Classic Plus" experience, and that it's actively working to combat real-money trading (RMT) in WoW: Forever.

WoW: Forever's classes also won't be modernized, but will receive "engaging depth."

• Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe explains why the game's story spanning decades is being told in one game instead of multiple titles
• Abe says it was "a week isn't enough to tell the story" of how a yakuza organisation is built
• The director says the era-spanning story worked best when framed around a man's life

Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe has explained why RGG Studios chose to tell an era-spanning story in one game, rather than across multiple titles.

"The whole starting point was that we wanted to depict why, or how, someone would create such an organisation like a yakuza organisation," Abe said in an interview with TechRadar Gaming.

Stranger Than Heaven centers on the main character, Makoto Daito, and the origins of a Yakuza organisation spanning 50 years across five cities in Japan, and Abe explained that the initial idea of containing the story within a smaller timeframe simply didn't work for the team's vision.

"We started from there, and while we were creating the narrative, we started to slowly realise that a week isn't enough to tell the story," he added. "We then explored how much time we needed to tell the narrative of a man who's going to build a gigantic yakuza organisation."

Abe went on to explain that this story worked best when framed around a man's life (Daito's) and realized it was the best outcome instead of splitting the story across multiple games, despite how long the narrative is.

"It was really important for us that the player experience the whole life of a man, because we wanted to tell this epic story of how the organisation became an organisation," he said.

"The timespan needed for that was basically a man's life. So, if we split it, people are going to experience it separately. But again, the main focus of the narrative was to tell why he created this organisation, and the timespan needed to tell that story was a life."

The director added, "So we just decided to create it and do it in one game. I will also say that the game itself is pretty long, but I'm quite satisfied with what we’ve built."

Stranger Than Heaven launches on January 15, 2027, for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.

• Electronic Arts has confirmed it will "be bringing together" its "Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project"
• Multiple sources have confirmed with Variety that it is Star Wars Battlefront 3
• The confirmation comes as EA shuts down BioWare and lays off 400 staff members across all studios

Star Wars Battlefront 3 is reportedly in development after Electronic Arts confirmed that Respawn and DICE will work collaboratively on a new project.

According to Variety, EA’s Cam Weber, president and chief studio officer, and David Tinson, president and COO, have confirmed the publisher is leaning into live-service online games after seeing success with Battlefield 6.

The executives said the game was "a great success, and we learned a lot from the launch and the live service" and alongside more Battlefield titles, "we’ll be bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project."

EA didn't specify what this project is; however, Variety confirmed with "multiple sources" that the game is Star Wars Battlefront 3. The game has made headlines recently, with initial reports claiming it was to be developed at DICE alongside Destiny developer Bungie.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 launched in 2017, but live-service support ended in 2020, leaving the popular online multiplayer game in the dust with no further content updates, and it was thought the series was on ice.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners acquired EA in September 2025, but the deal wasn't officially closed until August 2026, making the restructuring the publisher's first major move.

Alongside Respawn and DICE's project, EA will continue to "invest heavily” in the Apex Legends franchise over the next few years, with plans to introduce new multiplayer modes and other content, and has committed to delivering "our two huge launches coming up," which are Marvel's Iron Man and Star Wars Jedi 3.

It also plans to continue supporting EA Sports, with two new projects in development, The Sims franchise and Skate.

Unfortunately, it's not all good news. The executive's plan also included a major restructuring across its studios and projects, resulting in 400 layoffs and the permanent shutdown of the legendary Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio, BioWare.

Roughly 50 people were laid off from the studio, and work on Mass Effect 5 has been canceled.

Former BioWare cinematic supervisor Tony de Waal has spoken up about the studio's closure, saying that Mass Effect 5 would have offered "a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match"

• Secretlab has announced its new Titan Evo and Magnus Pro League of Legends K/DA collection
• The virtual pop group returns with new music, and Secretlab is celebrating with a themed gaming chair and standing gaming desk
• Both are wreathed in rich burgundy flame and the K/DA iconography

Secretlab is expanding its Secretlab Titan Evo and Magnus Pro series with a new League of Legends collection inspired by the game's virtual pop group, K/DA.

K/DA has officially made a comeback after years away with a new album consisting of four tracks, 'Firestarter,' 'Never Going Back,' 'Watch Me,' and 'Girls,' and to mark the occasion, Secretlab has announced its stunning new Titan Evo gaming chair and Magnus Pro desk, launching today at Secretlab.

"The comeback we’ve all been waiting for," Secretlab announced. "Celebrate the return of K/DA, the virtual global pop supergroup within the iconic League of Legends world, with the brand newSecretlabLeague ofLegends K/DA Firestarter Collection."

Wreathed in rich burgundy flame, black leather, and the iconography for the members of K/DA, including Ahri, Kai'Sa, Evelynn, and Akali, the Titan Evo League of Legends Firestarter edition also features gradient embroidery and silver frame motifs on the side wings.

The Secretlab Titan Evo is one of the best gaming chairs on offer, designed with patent-pending cold-cure foam, a pebble seat base, and four-way L-adapt lumbar back support to ensure comfort for long gaming sessions.

The Titan Evo can also be paired with the Magnus Pro League of Legends Firestarter edition, the first standing desk in the K/DA collection. Featuring fire wrapped around the entire frame and the same iconography of the group's members, the desk also offers a matching cable management bundle with hot metallic pink anchors.

The Secretlab Magnus Pro features built-in power, cable management, and a controller, and is one of TechRadar Gaming's picks for the best standing desks money can buy right now.

• Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe says the game's combat system was inspired by classic Ninkyo yakuza movies
• He says the action scenes in those movies were "raw and gritty" and encapsulated the feeling RGG Studios wanted to showcase
• Abe adds that the combat system also correlates with Makoto Daito, who will start as an inexperienced fighter before evolving

Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe has revealed that classic yakuza movies inspired the upcoming action game's combat system, and that it will tie into Makoto Daito's character development.

Speaking in an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Abe shared how RGG Studios conceptualized the game's combat, saying that it "really wanted to make sure that the player feels this atmosphere that it’s either you kill, or you get killed," and revealed that "we took a lot of inspiration from the old Ninkyo movies."

Ninkyo is a classic subgenre of Japanese yakuza-themed movies made in the 70s and 80s. Abe said RGG was influenced by movies like New Battles Without Honor and Humanity, starring Bunta Sugawara, who also plays a character in Stranger Than Heaven, because of its unrefined action scenes.

"While we were watching these movies, we noticed that what made those movies special was how raw and gritty the action scenes are in those movies," he said. "No one throws a cool-looking fist punch or anything; it's just people rolling around and fighting. We felt that atmosphere was what made those genres special."

The "raw" action scenes also influenced the game's main character, Makoto Daito, and his gradual progression to becoming a better fighter than he starts; players will see him evolving the more they become attuned to the combat system.

"We took a lot of inspiration from that, and wanted to make sure that Daito is a character who starts out not being too good in a fight," Abe continued. "As he progresses, though, he gets more comfortable fighting people. Because of that, because the game is about one man's life, we definitely wanted to depict how the main character is evolving, or I guess more like ageing, through the narrative. We wanted to make sure that the player can also feel that, while also feeling that tension of kill or be killed."

Abe added that "It was really, really important that the combat feels intuitive to create this sense of synchronisation between the player and Daito" and to allow the player to "immerse themselves in controlling Makoto."

"As the player's skill gets better, so does Daito as a character gets better," the director said. "So that was the whole concept of what we wanted to depict through this combat system."

Stranger Than Heaven releases on January 15, 2027, for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.

• Audeze and Audiokinetic are collaborating to add native head-tracking support to Wwise with the Audeze Maxwell 2 ANC headset
• The Maxwell 2 ANC integration into Wwise will "advance spatial audio content creation possibilities for game developers"
• Audiokinetic CTO Martin Dufour says the collaboration will unlock "new creative possibilities for developers, making it easier to implement vivid spatial audio that elevates player immersion"

Audeze has announced a new partnership with cross-platform audio solution provider Audiokinetic to introduce native head-tracking support for the Audeze Maxwell 2 ANC headset directly inside Wwise.

The collaboration will "advance spatial audio content creation possibilities for game developers" by integrating Audeze’s next-generation Maxwell 2 ANC gaming headset with Audiokinetic’s Wwise audio creation suite, leveraging both companies' tech and expertise to push its "commitment to driving innovation across gaming audio and delivering world-class tools to creators."

This will support sound designers and game developers alike, who can use Wwise and tap into Audeze’s Maxwell 2 ANC headset, which is equipped with real-time, self-calibrating head-tracking technology.

The tech will help creatives achieve highly accurate 3D sound placement and enhanced spatial audio authoring with a plug-and-play setup, with zero external software required.

"Simply connect the Maxwell 2 ANC via USB-C or its ultra-low-latency wireless USB-C dongle to begin monitoring directly in Wwise," Audeze said. "This collaboration is set to transform how game audio is created and experienced—from VR emulation and Tempest 3D AudioTech binauralization to non-standard speaker layouts for Location-Based Entertainment (LBE) using the AK Custom Panner."

Sankar Thiagasamudram, CEO of Audeze, shared a statement, saying, "By natively integrating Maxwell 2 ANC’s self-calibrating head tracking directly into Wwise, we’re removing the friction between creator vision and spatial execution."

"Game developers now have a portable, studio-grade reference system that lets them place, audition, and mix 3D audio effortlessly in any environment. Together with Audiokinetic, we’re establishing a new benchmark for spatial audio creation across the interactive media industry."

The Maxwell 2 ANC integration will also allow developers to take full advantage of the headset’s hardware-based, low-latency head tracking, "providing unparalleled spatial accuracy for creating immersive soundscapes in video games," as well as 90 mm planar magnetic drivers with Uniforce, Fluxor, Fazor, SLAM acoustic technologies, and Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), which is designed to maintain a consistent frequency response.

"We’re unlocking new creative possibilities for developers, making it easier to implement vivid spatial audio that elevates player immersion," added Martin Dufour, CTO of Audiokinetic.

• Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe says the game's narrative is very unique
• Abe hopes that Makoto Daito, the main character, and his background resonate with players of mixed heritage and that players will engage with the narrative
• Abe says, "We put a lot of focus on telling this narrative about a man's life who starts by facing a lot of racism"

Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe hopes the game's multi-era narrative and its mixed-heritage protagonist will resonate with players and those who have experienced discrimination.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Abe explained how Stranger Than Heaven's story, which spans 50 years across five distinct eras and cities in Japan, is not a concept he's ever experienced in a video game before, and believes it's "not just entertainment."

"I would say experiencing one man's life as a narrative and as a gameplay experience is something that I have personally never played before as a video game medium. I think that aspect of the game could be something that’s not just entertainment," Abe said.

The director continued to discuss the main character, Makoto Daito, who is of Japanese-American descent, and how his mixed heritage background and the racism he experiences when he first arrives in Japan are aspects of the story that he hopes players engage with.

Abe also said that while RGG Studios was developing the narrative for Makoto, it "felt it was really natural that music would be a big part of this character," and was one of the things that would help break the barriers of the racism he experiences.

"Once he comes to Japan, he faces a lot of discrimination, and people won't even talk to him just because of his race and language," he said. "So, music was the only thing for him that would break those barriers and help him communicate with people. That was really natural for us to put into the narrative.

"Of course, Captain Orpheus is the one who's going to teach him how to make money off of music. And for Daito, because he has that experience, it was really natural for him to start making money, and you know, start showbiz as his life's work. So that's why we always wanted the concept of music in this game to tell the narrative of Makoto’s life. That was the starting point of why we wanted music."

Abe continues, saying that he and Daito's actor, Yu Shirota, have both experienced discrimination and wants players to immerse themselves in the story, even if they're only playing Stranger Than Heaven for entertainment.

"Because of the way Makoto Daito’s story is written, where he starts from a mixed-heritage background, comes to Japan, and gets discriminated against, I hope that Makoto’s life journey really speaks to people around the globe who have had similar experiences," Abe said.

"I myself have had one before, and our lead actor also had a similar experience before, so we put a lot of focus on telling this narrative about a man's life who starts by facing a lot of racism. I hope it really encourages people, as well as the player who just wants to entertain themselves while playing the game can also get immersed in this narrative."

The director concluded, "So the concept of a man's life is, I think, one of the biggest things that I would love the player to experience, and I can’t wait for them to experience."

Stranger Than Heaven launches on January 15, 2027, for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.

• Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe says the game was always going to be different from the Yakuza or Like A Dragon games
• Abe says, "There was no conversation whatsoever about what Yakuza or Like A Dragon was like"
• He adds that RGG Studios "never compared" Stranger Than Heaven to its past titles, so it became "something new"

Stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe has explained why the upcoming role-playing action game was developed as a completely new experience from RGG Studio's Yakuza franchise.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Abe said approaching Stranger Than Heaven was "a big task" and a "huge challenge for us," but knew "from the very beginning that we wanted to make this experience different from the previous games."

Unlike the Like a Dragon games, which typically take place in one location and timeframe, Stranger Than Heaven shifts to a historical timeline by telling a story across five distinct eras and cities spanning 50 years.

It's an ambitious decision for RGG, but Abe said the team intentionally forgot everything it knew from making the Yakuza series to create something new.

"While we were developing Stranger Than Heaven, there was no conversation whatsoever about what Yakuza or Like A Dragon was like," Abe said. "We intentionally forgot what it was like in our previous games and started from scratch. We were doubting every single pixel of what we had in Yakuza."

This included everything from the game's map, the UI, and how RGG wanted to approach the world; Abe said it even applied to the narrative and cutscenes, and the team "never compared" Stranger Than Heaven to its past titles.

"Every single aspect of it, we started thinking about it from scratch, just to suit the style of Stranger Than Heaven," he added. "We were never trying to make this different because we never compared it with our previous games, so in the end, it became something new."

Stranger Than Heaven launches on January 15, 2027, for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.

Stranger Than Heaven is exactly the sort of game I want to champion. It’s rare to see a team of young developers given a significant budget and seemingly generous freedom to create a half-century-spanning epic that tackles heavy themes while taking bold risks with both the combat and music-influenced management game at its core.

My four-hour whistlestop tour across several of the game’s time periods between 1915 and 1965 in this latest fantastical tale from the Japanese criminal underworld did make it hard to see just how well all of this ambition from RGG Studio will come together in the end. But I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since.

And when you’ve played and previewed dozens (maybe hundreds) of games, it’s harder to find ones that leave a mark like that — ones that genuinely leave you wanting to play and see more.

What I admire most about Stranger Than Heaven is that it knows what it wants to be and fully commits to that idea to create its own unique vibe.

Music is the throughline. On one side, it's the way the protagonist, Makoto Daito, finds his place in a hostile world, as a way for him to break down barriers and overcome prejudice he faces as a Japanese-American immigrant.

There is a level of detail and adoration in the musical performances I saw in-game that made it easy to get swept up in the atmosphere — whether it was a professional big band showstopper full of belting brass, or an impromptu sing-a-long that draws in a large crowd on the streets of Kokura.

Play it, Daito

Music is also a fundamental part of several other aspects of the game. Mainly, it’s a key part of the main management mini-game in Stranger Than Heaven. Instead of running a hostess club or a confectionery shop as we've seen in Yakuza and Like a Dragon, Daito works as a promoter in the showbiz business. That involves creating tunes, hiring talent, scoping out venues, drawing in punters, and making sure performances run smoothly.

I dabbled with putting on a show or two, and can see how it has the potential to be another all-consuming distraction that RGG is known for, diverting you away from the main story for many hours. There’s a satisfaction to tinkering with all aspects of the performance to rake in the most cash, ensuring you’ve got the best singers and musicians performing the right sort of music in the right venue to suit the audience’s mood.

What also keeps that music throughline in other areas of the game is the way you draw inspiration for your next tracks and shows from the world around you. Those sparks also come from the combat, with small flashes or cues as kicks and punches fly that you can focus in on to unlock new sounds, instruments, or playing styles.

It’s a nice way to tie the game together, although I’m very aware that combat was a point of contention for some in earlier previews. I definitely struggled to grasp it fully in the beginning, but I was starting to get into the flow of it by the time I was wrapping up my time with the game. It has its own rhythm, swapping out flashy attacks and arcade-style simplicity from prior Yakuza games for more grounded and messy fistfights.

Mastering the art

It does require a bit of controller contortion to execute fully, with actions for your left and right hands and legs split across the left and right bumpers and triggers. Throw in directional blocking, perfect parries with spot-on timing, and the need to dodge some attacks, and it’s a lot to hold in your head and execute with ease.

Weapons add another dynamic, ranging from swords, knives, and batons to more improvised weaponry such as crowbars and a giant wooden mallet. These can be found or bought and switched between mid-combat to give you a bit more fighting power against multiple foes or tougher enemies.

Oh, and there’s ‘willpower’ too: a resource that you and opponents have that can be whittled down with repeated attacks, eventually causing you or them to fall to the floor when it’s emptied. You can then punish them with more severe finishers or find yourself fending off an assault while prone so you can get back on your feet.

It is a lot. And with pretty much all of these elements introduced from the first fight, I was getting beat up fairly regularly for a while. As I say, though, I eventually grew to like it with more practice, and I found myself taking down a few of the tougher enemies that are hiding around the game’s different locations in some extended but rewarding duels.

Those fights are just one of the many distractions that are dotted around the game’s towns, which include all sorts of games to play, items to find, and arenas to fight in. Even just exploring the spaces was fascinating, especially wandering through the entertainment capital of Sotenbori. It hits you with an overwhelming cacophony and a barrage of lights that RGG fans will be eager to experience in this different time period.

I think that’s what I appreciated most about Stranger Than Heaven: it does exist within that same universe of the existing RGG games, but is its own adventure in a new and confident direction.

Yes, it’s building off the Yakuza and Like A Dragon elements that are clearly in its DNA — in terms of the mix of brawling and business management, as well as its approach to story and presentation. But it feels like its own evolution. Or, to speak in the game’s terms, it’s several familiar melodies and motifs that have been remixed into a surprising new composition.

Stranger Than Heaven launches on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC on January 25, 2027.

Anomalith might be one of the most interesting releases of 2026. A third-person survival shooter set in a twisted, retro vision of Japan, it’s a major departure from publisher FuRyu Corporation’s usual role-playing game (RPG) output.

It looks almost like the company’s take on Resident Evil, with 17-year-old protagonist Reona Minazuki venturing into deadly anomaly zones filled with grotesque creatures at the behest of a shadowy government organization.

Real-time gun combat, managing your small inventory, and keeping track of precious ammunition form a key part of every mission. Each run unfolds in an almost extraction-shooter-like format, and between missions you can use the resources you’ve scavenged to upgrade your gear.

There’s more to Minazuki than meets the eye, though, with the hero able to harness a mysterious set of mutant powers brought on by exposure to these supernatural environments. I spoke to producer Gai Kidokoro over email to learn a little more about how this project took shape and discover some of what’s in store for players.

Expanded arsenal

Anomalith is Kidokoro’s first original project, having joined FuRyu in the company’s anime division, which has helped produce hit titles like Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, before making the leap to its gaming business to direct some licensed titles. Working on games has “always been an area I was interested in,” he says, adding that his career has been “a little different from that of FuRyu’s other producers.”

It therefore seems only fitting that he is producing quite a unique project, with Anomalith standing apart as FuRyu’s first third-person shooter. Interestingly, Kidokoro says that the genre was chosen because both he and the director “love third-person shooters and guns” and set out to create something based on the things they enjoy.

“Rather than thinking, 'Let’s deliberately challenge ourselves with a completely different genre,' it was really more about wanting to make a game in a genre that we personally love,” he continues.

This fascination with firearms seems evident in the game’s weapon customization system, which lets players “swap out a fairly detailed range of parts,” including a variety of attachments such as “sights, grips, stocks, and more.” These help you personalize the appearance of each gun, but also provide statistical bonuses to help in the field.

The producer is also keen to highlight the player’s ability to scavenge “pieces of equipment called Artifacts that enhance your character’s stats” and change your overall build.

“These include loot-based, hack-and-slash-style elements,” he teases, “and if you manage to equip an Artifact with extremely high values, some skills have the potential to become incredibly powerful.”

The team is well aware that not everyone is going to be interested in tweaking their guns or experimenting with the nitty-gritty of their character’s stats, which is why the game offers a wealth of cosmetic options for players to outfit themselves with – some already available to try in the recent free Steam demo.

“We realized that there are quite a lot of people who don’t necessarily get the same enjoyment we do from firing their favorite, carefully customized gun,” Kidokoro begins. “We thought, 'Maybe adding character outfits and customization would make it more fun for those players,' and that’s why we ended up including such detailed character customization options. Judging from the response to the demo, I’m really glad we added the outfit customization.”

Uncanny valley

The world design is shaping up to be a treat, with plenty of intricate detail to pore over. In fact, Kidokoro highlights this as one part of the experience that he is most excited about. “The development team has put a tremendous amount of effort into designing the Otherworlds,” he explains. “There are many areas where something may initially look like nothing more than an ordinary ceiling, but if you stop and look up, you might find something that gives you a real sense of unease.”

He describes the fundamental concept behind it all as the “anxiety and fear lurking within familiar scenery” and reveals that it was inspired by popular ideas of “liminal spaces, including things like the Backrooms,” referring to the viral meme featuring endless wallpapered corridors that recently inspired a horror film adaptation.

“Within the development team, we often use phrases like ‘give it a liminal-space atmosphere’ when discussing the visual direction.”

This extends to the soundtrack. Aside from the game’s title theme, the music of Anomalith doesn’t feature any vocal tracks. Nevertheless, the producer argues fans “can definitely look forward to the soundtrack” and warns “many of the tracks are quite dark and unsettling.” He jokes: “I recommend listening to them during the daytime.”

Although Anomalith seems very different, long-time FuRyu fans will recognize some common elements shared with the publisher’s past games, such as the focus on a teenage protagonist. Kidokoro thinks the reasons behind this particular motif “would vary” depending on the title, but personally reckons “that it is easier for audiences to emotionally root for younger characters.”

“Watching boys and girls confront unreasonable circumstances and ultimately overcome them can also feel more hopeful and moving than a story centered on adults,” he continues. “Of course, we have been influenced by other games. However, we try to keep those influences as references rather than simply copying them. Our main criterion is always whether a particular element is necessary for players to enjoy the world and experience of Anomalith.”

We will be able to find out whether this formula pays off when Anomalith launches for Nintendo Switch 2, PC, and PlayStation 5 on October 29, 2026.

It’s been a long time since I’ve poured so many hours into Warhammer 40,000, but playing a bunch of the Dawn of War 4 campaign has absolutely captivated me, and almost made it feel like I was playing from my living room floor 30 years ago all over again.

After seeing a glimpse of the game last summer, I knew it was on the right track, but after a couple of weeks with Dawn of War 4, it’s safe to say that the series’ rip-roaring, gritty action, and moreish strategic map play is back with a vengeance, and channels all that made the first game brilliant.

My time with the chunky preview build has shown that King Art Games are an incredibly safe set of hands for the next Dawn of War game.

Going back to Kronus

The planet of Kronus provides the setting for Dawn of War 4, and while a part of me wonders whether it might have been more exciting to go for a brand new setting and premise, the familiar planet is still superbly executed by the new developer.

Each map is extremely well detailed and feels alive with wind-blown sand and tumbleweeds across barren landscapes, blinking lights and crumbling epic architecture in urban maps, and wonderfully icy and snowy maps providing some of the best backdrops.

No matter where you are, though, you’re always cheered on by some mega, epic battle music, and the individual unit audio from ambient mechanical whirring, distinct machine clunking, and furious fighting are all absolute chef's kiss level.

Underneath the aesthetic excellence, there is a real meaty campaign here. My preview build dived in and out of a few armies’ storylines, and the branching narrative is interesting and genuinely compelling, with twists that you can make decisions to impact through mission selection and choices (from what I’ve seen), while the accompanying cutscenes are also fantastic.

Even the in-game story moments help to give me the feeling of those excellent battle write-ups in the old White Dwarf magazines that I remember poring over for hours at a time.

Unrivaled units and chaotic combat

Moving your forces around that campaign is the true highlight: this is a properly meaty and fabulous strategy experience, and a 40K experience.

Taking control of the Orks or Adeptus Mechanicus in my preview, it really does feel like the perfect real-time recreation of seeing your miniatures on a tabletop. The action can be slower and methodical; or you can embrace some chaos and have fights on multiple fronts as you aim to use speed to your advantage over the battlefield.

There were multiple times in both scenarios where managing large masses of a mix of units was a genuine thrill, with each resource point captured, the mowing down of enemy infantry, or the blowing up of tanks with grenade barrages more satisfying than the last.

If you remember the best thing about moving units across maps in the Dawn of War games of yesteryear, then you’re in for a treat. Orks feel as wild and chaotic as they should; and the Adeptus Mechanicus have wonderful machine-focused units as well as biomechanic infantry that can pack more of a punch than you think, especially from cover.

However, Dawn of War 4 simultaneously feels more modern, and there’s an effort to streamline some controls to make things more straightforward. You can drag over a whole heap of enemies, and your units will automatically attack the ones most vulnerable to their attack type; and you can right-click on any unit’s ability so it will automatically trigger during missions.

Engaging with the units — be you a more casual player, or a really experienced one — is superb, and starts with them being a treat for the eyes. Units really look the part, and every combat encounter does too. King Art Studio’s attention to detail, with bespoke combat animations for every combination (it seems) that look genuine, and plenty of blood splatter and rag doll physics on show. Even the armor and weaponry of all units look radiant and detailed, down to the lustre on metals.

The machine endures

There’s a good mix of missions that keep things interesting and elevate the branching campaign, too. That’s a really great thing in a particular way, as my one ‘gripe’, if you can really call it that, is that Dawn of War 4 continues the series’ trend of sometimes being purely a numbers game.

Especially in base-building missions; if you can pace your play a bit, secure your territory, and build an army that’s massive, you’ll rarely fail. This can offset the nuances and ‘other’ factors to think about too when managing Orks and the WAAGH! that fuels them in battle, and the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Nosphere links that strengthen buildings and open up more development options.

That’s why the mix of missions is welcome: while those base- and army-building ones are heavily present, there’s usually a gauntlet or defence mission around the corner to mix things up — and I’ve probably enjoyed the latter two more on the whole.

Not that dominating a map is unenjoyable, of course. The power fantasy is real in Dawn of War 4 and can feel fantastic, but the game is also wonderfully successful at creating those ‘If I can just make it to that resource point’ or ‘if I can just hold off this enemy encounter’ or ‘if I can just create a couple of units quickly ot turn the tide here’ kind of moments, which are a thrill.

I could talk about more of the individual features in the game that make it shine, but the most important thing about my time with the game for preview is that everything adds up to an authentic Dawn of War experience and really captures the feeling and the essence of the series — as well as translating the turn-based tabletop game into a real-time action setting once again.

Dawn of War 4 successfully takes me back to early 2000s LAN parties, devouring campaigns over and over again, and building massive armies to crush my foes as I did in the first game over two decades ago — and now I just want more.

• Bloomberg's Jason Schreier says Rockstar Games went on trips to Miami for research for Grand Theft Auto 6
• Rockstar went on "police ride-alongs" and "wound up hovering over a Beyoncé concert" in a helicopter
• The developers also met people who revealed their past crimes when they learned the team worked on GTA

Rockstar Games did extensive research on Miami for Grand Theft Auto 6 and even encountered people who shared about past crimes when they learned the developers worked on GTA.

Speaking in a new YouTube video about his time at Rockstar North and his behind-the-scenes experience seeing GTA 6 before the general public, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said he was told about the many trips Rockstar developers, including artists and leadership, made to Miami.

Since Miami and Los Angeles inspired GTA 6's Vice City, the team chose to do in-person research. They went on group trips and "went all over the place" for inspiration, even doing "police ride-alongs" and visiting "some scary places."

"At one point, some of the artists were in a helicopter taking photos of aerial views of the city, and they wound up hovering over a Beyoncé concert," Schreier said.

Speaking more about the ride-alongs, Rockstar also met tons of "really colorful characters" in Miami who shared their own life experiences with the developers.

Senior vice president of technology Jonathan Ashcroft revealed to Schreier that he spent his 40th birthday at a nightclub during one of these trips and said it was funny because he and some other developers were "these light-skinned Scottish people just like looking totally out of place wandering around this club" and "scrutinizing the lighting instead while everyone else around them is partying."

Returning to these "colorful characters" Rockstar met, Ashcroft said that they would divulge information about past crimes when they learned the team worked on GTA.

"As soon as they know where you're from, they just want to tell you every crime they or their friends have ever done," Ashcroft said.

In the same video, Schreier revealed that Rockstar Games reportedly spent years developing a new weapon interface for the game, but eventually stuck with the classic weapon wheel the series is known for.

• Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly suggests more Star Wars games could be made following the success of Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Star Wars: Zero Company
• Reilly says that while "huge triple-A games like Battlefront are always going to be an essential part of the strategy," the "goal" is to find "the best partner"
• This goes for both triple-A and smaller independent studios

It sounds like Lucasfilm Games wants to release more Star Wars games following the success of Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Star Wars: Zero Company, but it's not necessarily looking for triple-A studio pitches.

That's according to Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly, who told The Game Business that games developed by independent studios "very much is part of the strategy."

"Obviously, huge triple-A games like Battlefront are always going to be an essential part of the strategy," Reilly added. "But one of the great things about Star Wars is it has all kinds of other opportunities to tell stories in different genres.

Reilly said, "The goal has been to find the best partner who makes that experience come alive inside the galaxy far, far away," and it doesn't necessarily "have to always be triple-A."

"Sometimes it can be double-A, and it’s really about the experience that we’re delivering and the fantasy we’re fulfilling," he said, adding that Lucasfilm Games has "tried to be more flexible about who we’re willing to take pitches from."

Saber Interactive is quietly working on its Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake, which it confirmed is still in development, while a new game from Arcnaut Studios and Mass Effect trilogy director Casey Hudson, Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, is now in the works.

In addition, a new report has now claimed that Destiny developer Bungie and DICE are "aggressively" pursuing a Star Wars: Battlefront 3 project, but official confirmation has yet to come in.

"Good ideas can come from a lot of different places," Reilly continued. "You don’t have to necessarily be a top five publisher to make a great Star Wars game. There are some hurdles.

"We have a high-quality bar, and that means typically we work with more experienced teams than ones with no track record. But we’re exploring all kinds of things, large and small, with partners that are going to surprise folks."

I reviewed both Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Star Wars: Zero Company, and they're among the best games of the year. Galactic Racer is the Star Wars racing game I've always wanted and an exhilarating roguelike racer with endless customization, while Zero Company acts as an excellent companion story to the Clone Wars era with immensely fun turn-based tactics gameplay.

• An AMD 'Gainsborough' chip has been leaked in a benchmark
• The codename suggests that this could be the CPU of the Steam Deck 2
• Whether or not the performance fits the bill isn't clear yet, and there are doubts around the timing here too — but it's still a hint that Valve could be exploring the hardware to use in its handheld sequel

We've caught sight of a chip that supposedly might power the Steam Deck 2, which serves as a hint that Valve could already be working on its handheld sequel.

TechPowerUp spotted the development with an AMD 'Gainsborough' APU having been leaked via OpenBenchmarking. It's an engineering sample chip with 6-cores (12-threads) and a base clock of 2.4GHz – but what links this to Valve's next-gen handheld?

Well, it's tenuous, granted – so arm yourself with a pile of seasoning – but the word Gainsborough is the key here, as Valve has used codenames inspired by Final Fantasy VII for Steam Deck silicon before. Namely Aerith and Sephiroth, and Gainsborough is Aerith's surname, as well-known GPU leaker Kepler pointed out.

Seemingly this Gainsborough chip was paired with 24GB of system memory for testing, although that doesn't necessarily reflect a potential upgrade for the Steam Deck 2 in this regard – that's a shaky idea given the RAM crisis and how long it might last for. All this means is that this memory configuration is currently what AMD or Valve is trying out the chip with.

There are benchmark results here (of course, it's on a benchmarking site), and we get to see that this new AMD APU hits 3,508 points in Furmark at 1024 x 768 resolution. That's a bit faster than the Steam Deck which scores 3,323 (albeit at 1280 x 800).

Analysis: benchmarking clarification

If the benchmarking seems unimpressive, it's going by the raw numbers, but remember that this is very early testing with drivers which are still a long way from being knocked into shape. In other words, expect the Gainsborough APU to be a lot faster than this when the chip is fully finished and the drivers are properly honed.

Overall, at this stage it's difficult to read exactly what this benchmarking tells us, but the fact that it's already quicker than the current CPU in the Steam Deck is promising. Although some gamers out there are still arguing that it seems lacklustre, and that this wouldn't be enough of a generational upgrade for Valve's handheld sequel.

Also, this CPU is expected to debut late in 2027 or in 2028, and frankly, that feels a little early for the Steam Deck 2 given what's happening with the RAM crisis (in terms of keeping the retail price down). Also, when a Valve engineer most recently spoke about the Steam Deck 2, Pierre-Loup Griffais was very guarded on the subject of a potential launch timeframe, and the hardware sounded very much up-in-the-air still.

However, hardware cards being played closed to the chest like this is hardly surprising, and this doesn't rule out Valve exploring the Gainsborough chip currently for a possible Steam Deck 2 launch towards the end of the decade.

We shall see, but for now, I'd treat this one with a lot more caution than your average rumor. Nonetheless, it remains a tantalizing hint that Valve is now beyond tinkering with ideas for the next-gen Steam Deck, and is actively testing out potential hardware.

• Bloomberg's Jason Schreier says Rockstar Games spent years developing an alternative weapon system for Grand Theft Auto 6
• He says, "They wanted GTA 6's weapon system to be more like Red Dead," with a reimagined weapon wheel
• However, after years of iteration, Rockstar stuck to a classic design

Rockstar Games reportedly spent years developing a new weapon interface for Grand Theft Auto 6, but eventually stuck with the classic weapon wheel the series is known for.

As reported by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who shared a YouTube video about his visit to Rockstar North, co-studio head and head of development Rob Nelson said that the team wanted the game's weapon loadout system to be more like Red Dead Redemption 2 than GTA 5.

"They wanted GTA 6's weapon system to be more like Red Dead, where you couldn't just carry an unlimited number of guns," Schreier said, which was "a little more realistic."

In Red Dead Redemption 2, loadouts are tied to your horse, and players can only carry a certain number of weapons on their person at a time, whether a pistol or a shotgun, while the rest is stored on your saddle.

The team wanted to recreate a similar system for GTA 6 by having storage tied to the player's car and a limited loadout of weapons that players can carry at any given time, but wanted to reimagine the weapon wheel.

"So the idea that they were thinking was like, well, if we use a weapon wheel, is that just going to remind people of all these blank spots in it? It'll remind people of what they can't actually do, what they can't carry. And so maybe we shouldn't use a weapon wheel," Schreier explained.

"And so they spent months, if not years, trying a million different things that would replace the weapon wheel."

Schreier revealed that Rockstar tried "trays and webs and all sorts of different things in the UI" and other ways to replace the weapon wheel, but in the end, the team ended up back at the weapon wheel.

"They tried not having one," he said. "They tried all these different iterations on this. After all that, they just wound up back at a weapon wheel, and in the final game it's just a weapon wheel again."

Schreier believes this was part of the "dark periods" of development that "led to some problems for the game", as developers continuously reworked prototypes for the UI, only to end back at square one.

However, he added that "really ended when the game started coalescing, I would say around [the] end of 2022, beginning of 2023, something like that is where they really started to see it all come together."

"As I mentioned in the story, the first trailer that they released in December 2023 was really a guiding light for a lot of the people on the team to see, 'Oh, this is what the game is going to look like,'" Schreier said.

Rockstar recently released the cinematic GTA 6 launch trailer, ahead of GTA 6's launch on November 19. The game is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X, and Series S, with a new report claiming the PC version could launch in early 2027.

• Rockstar Games has been working on Grand Theft Auto 6 for 11 years, as the artists needed to plan out the map first
• The game's roads are much narrower and denser than GTA 5's, which created "ripple effects," according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier
• Schreier says head of development Aaron Garbut told him, "All these things sort of come [back] to bite you later"

Rockstar Games has reportedly been working on Grand Theft Auto 6 much longer than realized, since the studio needed to plan out the game's ambitious map first.

That's according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who shared more details about his visit to Rockstar North in a YouTube video after releasing his behind-the-scenes GTA 6 article.

While it's common knowledge that full-scale development of GTA 6 began around 2018 and was originally planned to be made alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, pre-production on the game actually began much earlier.

"Something that I learned while talking to those folks [the developers at Rockstar North] is that there are a few artists at Rockstar who have actually been working on GTA 6 for more than 11 years since 2015, if not earlier," Schreier said. "2015 is when Rockstar started kind of planning out GTA 6 in the sense that it was conversations before like before that."

Schreier explained that the game's massive map, which is twice as big as GTA 5's world and more densely populated and interactive, was a priority for the studio and the first thing it planned.

"2015 is when they started going to Miami, actually starting working on the map of the game, which is always the first thing that Rockstar does on these big open-world games as they start planning out the map first," Schreier said.

He added that gradually over the next couple of years, top leadership then mobilized everyone to work on Red Dead Redemption 2, as the game needed a lot of help due to its ambitious systems. However, a few artists continued work on GTA 6's map.

Aaron Garbut, art director, current head of development and co-studio head at Rockstar North, also told him that "the roads are significantly narrower in GTA 6 than they were in GTA 5," which fans may have noticed in the trailers.

This created a more realistic depiction of a fictional Los Angeles, and less like a racing game with wider spaces to zip through like GTA 5. However, Rockstar's goal of making GTA 6's map have narrower roads and denser traffic from the beginning presented some technical challenges, or what Schreier called "ripple effects."

Garbut told Schreier, "All these things sort of come [back] to bite you later," because narrow, denser roads meant the team had to implement more surrounding buildings, and artists have worked on the concept for 11 years.

GTA 6 launches in under one month, on November 19, for PS5, Xbox Series X, and Series S. Rockstar recently released the cinematic GTA 6 launch trailer, which offers a deeper look into the game's story. Elsewhere, a new report claims the PC version could launch in early 2027.

Following its expansive Gamescom 2026 demo, I just got to experience a much more linear segment from Final Fantasy VII Revelation set right at the start of the new game — it sets Cloud and the gang up to finally face the biggest twist from the original, albeit a lot earlier than they did in 1997.

The demo itself was pretty short — I blasted through in around 30 to 45 minutes — but I got to play around with the new party members Vincent and Cid (the latter formally joined as an active combatant at the start of the demo), and most of my team were utilizing the new FITS system (Revelation’s version of the Job / Class system used in other Square Enix games).

Though I want to focus on the story content.

The party finds themselves in the North Crater, the impact site of the asteroid which brought Jenova to the game’s planet. Here they find even more of the black-robed figures they’ve been following for the past three games — including Broden, the former SOLDIER and inn manager you meet in Kalm during Rebirth — and yet again Cloud is racked with headaches and visions of Sephiroth, tormenting him about his past.

Players of the original will know where this is going, but before I go into any more details, here’s an obligatory SPOILER WARNING. We’ll be talking about Final Fantasy VII’s biggest twist after Aerith’s death below, and if you somehow don’t know it yet and don’t want to get spoiled, you’ve been warned.

While my demo cuts things a little short, it shows Sephiroth forcing Cloud to remember he isn’t really a SOLDIER, just as he does in the og FF7.

He’s pointing out inconsistencies like Cloud’s lack of a SOLDIER ID number on his arm (something all the others have), comments that he must have the “wrong man” when attempting to reminisce with Cloud, and finally making him, Barret, and Tifa relive the Nibelheim incident one last time — and we see differences from the version from Rebirth, as Zack features, and one of the Shinra guards that was with the group before is suddenly missing…

Barrett even comments on how happy Cloud looks when posing for a photo, saying he looks like a “whole other person.”

SOLDIER no more…

As a reminder for anyone who hasn’t relived the FF7 narrative recently, or who is unfamiliar with the plot and doesn’t care for spoilers, Cloud was actually just your regular Shinra grunt — those (lowercase) soldiers we’ve been dicing up since the opening of Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

He was there at the Nibelheim incident, but as backup for the actual SOLDIERs Sephiroth and Zack Fair. Embarrassed that he didn't achieve his SOLDIER dreams, Cloud hides his face from Tifa and others in the village, which is why she told Aerith that she doesn’t remember seeing him on that mission during the events of Rebirth.

We already know from Rebirth that things don’t go according to Shinra’s plans on this mission, and in the original continuity we know that Cloud is able to defeat a weakened Sephiroth using Zack’s Buster Sword (it seems likely this is what happens in the Remake continuity too, though we haven’t had explicit confirmation, and we’ve already seen more than a few plot details shift between the two timelines).

Following the victory, Cloud and Zack are picked up by the mad Shinra scientist Hojo, who proceeds to experiment on the pair using Mako and Jenova cells in the hope they’ll become clones of the slain Sephiroth — or at least gain strength comparable to him.

Cloud’s mind is broken by these experiments, but Zack is able to hold himself together and rescue himself and Cloud — making it all the way to Midgar with his unconscious friend before Shinra catches up with them. In the original, this is where Zack is gunned down, though in at least one timeline (which we see in Remake and Rebirth) Zack is somehow able to survive the onslaught.

Back to the original version, however, left for dead by the grunts, Cloud eventually recovers enough to pick up Zack’s weapon, mourn his friend, and carry himself the rest of the way to Midgar — where he bumps into Tifa, and he is convinced into helping Avalanche on the mission Remake starts with.

The trauma caused by years of experimentation and the loss of his friend causes Cloud’s mind to build itself back incorrectly. His memories aren’t just his own, but an amalgamation of his and Zack’s — making Cloud believe he is indeed a First-Class SOLDIER.

The truth is out

Thanks to Hojo’s test, Cloud becomes as physically strong and agile as a First-Class SOLDIER, and earns their ‘Mako eyes’ — a glow associated with Mako-enhanced folks — which is why he’s able to pass as one so effectively.

But Rebirth already poked holes in his story. In the Nibelheim flashback, we see multiple instances of Cloud behaving unlike himself — with the party noting he sounds a lot more upbeat and happy-go-lucky than he is with them, and Tifa admitting to Aerith that Cloud wasn’t one of the SOLDIERs she remembers being on the expedition with her.

Revelation looks set to finally burst Cloud’s bubble in the Remake continuity, but interestingly this looks set to happen at the game’s intro rather than at its climax as it does in the original.

What impact this will have on the party’s dynamics — trust in Cloud already seems to be at an all-time low thanks to the visions and strange behaviour caused by his connection to Jenova — and for Cloud himself is yet to be seen.

But it’s another sign that Final Fantasy VII Revelation is just as unafraid to mix up the game’s timeline as previous entries, and I, for one, am excited to see what giving the party more time to digest this twist will mean for the adventure when it finally lands on April 8, 2027.

I’ll say one thing for EA Sports FC 27: it’s not the same game as EA Sports FC 26.

That reads like a compliment — and in some respects, it is — but where previous entries in EA’s long-running football simulator series shipped with minor improvements and equally minor frustrations, FC 27 takes bigger swings that flip between successful, insignificant, and occasionally experience-worsening in their execution.

I wish I could package that sentiment into a neat metaphor (‘a mixed bag’ is too hackneyed), but I can’t — so here’s the Cliffs Notes version of my review:

EA’s shiny new mode, The Grounds, is a hollow imitation of NBA 2K's The City. Ultimate Team is objectively better than it was in FC 26, but is still geared towards card-collecting youngsters and time-rich YouTubers. Career mode is the best it’s ever been, but is oddly prone to breakage by the same new features that make it better. And the overall FC gameplay experience is more challenging than before, but more rewarding as a result.

Still with me? I’ll run through each of those mini-verdicts as you read on, but you get the idea: EA Sports FC 27 is immense fun in parts, dull in others, and a generally quite confusing entry in a series that rarely changes so much from one year to the next. But hey, change is good... right?

Around The Grounds (and out again)

This year’s big new addition to the FC franchise is The Grounds — an ‘open-world’ reimagining of the series’ Clubs mode in which you can compete with friends or randoms in both stadium- and street-based challenges.

I put ‘open-world’ in quotation marks because The Grounds is not so much a free-roam experience as a third-person menu-hopping one. The idea of exploring three “cultural hubs of football” sounds cool, but in reality, these hubs are little more than poorly rendered maps populated by lifeless NPCs (non-player characters), Riddler Trophy-style Drop Kick Targets, and PvP waiting areas.

The game modes available within The Grounds are fun enough — there are traditional 11v11 matches, FIFA Street-style cage matches, and more casual mini-games like the basketball-inspired Bucket Ball — but the ‘open-world’ aspect of the experience adds little beyond longer wait times (because you now have to travel from A to B on foot) and the ability to customize your pro’s wardrobe with licensed clothing. At a price, of course.

I won’t lie: I did have a good time building my pro and was excited to get out into The Grounds’ virtual world. But once I’d played a handful of matches and completed enough Alex Hunter-ordered errands to buy myself a cool headband (Kylian Mbappé, Paulo Dybala, and Chloe Kelly are the other ‘mentors’), the novelty of this new open-but-actually-closed game mode quickly wore off.

With enough friends in tow, I can imagine The Grounds being a lot of fun, and I don’t criticize EA for trying something genuinely new with FC 27. I’m just not sure The Grounds actually is all that new — it’s more like Clubs with an extremely elaborate menu system.

Players for points

Opening Ultimate Team (FUT) for the first time in FC 27 feels like walking into a nightclub sober. You’re immediately hit with a barrage of menus, cards, and checklists, which is a frankly disorienting experience until you remember that this is exactly what FUT has been like for several years now.

Still, once you get over the customary nausea, there are some genuinely neat improvements to be found in this year’s edition of EA’s most popular (and profitable) mode.

My favorite addition is Streamlined SBCs (Squad Building Challenges). These are essentially SBCs that swap the starting XI puzzle aspect for a cumulative target score — each player in your club has a value, and you need to exchange enough players to reach that score. You don’t need to worry about formations, positions, or chemistry; instead, Streamlined SBCs are purely a numbers game.

Traditional SBCs are still present and correct in FC 27 — I personally enjoy the challenge of completing the weekly Marquee Matchups SBC — but with Streamlined SBCs, EA has acknowledged that most players aren’t fussed about the puzzling they require. Streamlined SBCs are for those who, understandably, want to snag the SBC reward in as little time as possible. But I appreciate that EA has kept both SBC types in the game.

The Gallery is a less meaningful but otherwise harmless addition to FUT. It’s a sticker book-style card-collection feature that tracks every player who’s ever passed through your club and encourages you to curate these players into graded sets. Doing so earns you trinkets and cosmetics (boring), but also Gallery Tokens (less boring), which can be spent on special Hall of FUT players like Loïc Rémy, Adebayo Akinfenwa, and Marouane Fellaini.

Honestly, the Gallery interface is as dizzying to navigate as everything else in FUT, but at least there are tangible player rewards to be gained from taking the time to understand it. I just wish The Gallery were available in the FC 27 Web App, so I could kill time grading cards while on my evening commute, and not while playing FC 27 proper.

Jockey down the line

It’s a little hard to give a comprehensive verdict on gameplay in FC 27, since EA is tweaking the mechanics all the time, but broadly speaking, the biggest gameplay changes apply to defending and set pieces.

On the former, there’s now less AI assistance, so computer-controlled players on your team (i.e., those you haven’t switched to yet) won’t auto-tackle an opponent, meaning you’ve got to be quicker on your L1/LB draw and smarter with your tackle timing. Jockeying is faster for all players as a result, which also makes the Jockey PlayStyle less overpowered than it was in FC 27.

As someone who’s better at defending than attacking, I’m all for these defensive changes — and the redesigned corner kicks system also puts more importance on defenders in this year’s game.

There’s now a longer pause between the taking of a corner kick and the ball’s arrival in the box, and — finally! — you get manual control over player positioning within the box itself. This change means corners are now skill-based rather than luck-based, which is absolutely what they felt like before (even if EA would never say so).

I spend most of my time playing the Authentic gameplay preset in Career mode, which is a different kettle of fish entirely, but for those who play Competitive in FUT, I’d say defending and corner kicks have seen the most noticeable tweaks in FC 27.

Skilled dribblers now ride challenges more effectively, too, but this isn’t such a significant gameplay tweak in my experience — but then again, I haven’t played too many online matches in FUT, which is where you’re likely to come up against the dribble-happy duo of Ousmane Dembélé and Lamine Yamal. I’ll pray for your controller.

The Art of the Deal

After fulfilling my testing-time obligations in The Grounds and Ultimate Team, I couldn’t wait to dive into FC 27’s refreshed Career mode. And judging by the view counts on EA’s YouTube Deep Dives for the game (the Career Deep Dive has the most views by a margin of over 1 million ), there’s a good chance that you, too, are more interested in FC 27’s slower-paced managerial simulator than any of its other modes.

The big changes this year apply to transfers. The awkward 3D negotiation scenes have been replaced with FIFA 13-style 2D negotiations, primarily because there’s a lot (and I mean a lot) more negotiating to be done in FC 27.

Previously, you’d offer a sum of money for a player, and if the selling club accepted your price, you’d then negotiate personal terms with the player in question. That was it. Two steps. You could pretty much buy any player for any club if you had the funds to do so.

In FC 27, transfer negotiations are far more realistic — for better and worse.

Now, if you’ve got your eyes on a player, you first have to send an inquiry to determine whether their current club is willing to sell them. The players themselves can also reject your advances if they’re simply not interested in joining your club — regardless of the money you might’ve been prepared to pay them and their club. If you’re rejected, you won’t be told the reasons why, but EA says player decision-making is based on tactical fit, club finances, form, historical rivalries, and long-term club philosophy.

And trust me: you will get rejected a lot. Or at least I was while playing as Everton. I couldn’t convince 80% of my transfer targets to even come to the negotiating table, and even when I did get close to signing a target, they’d invariably be stolen at the last minute by a bigger rival (Newcastle, for instance, accepted my offer for Harvey Barnes, but Barnes rejected me to join Chelsea on deadline day. Mercenary!).

If you do get to the negotiation stage, there are some nice new ways to structure deals, including with transfer instalments, agent fees, and performance-based bonuses. But I was honestly surprised by how difficult it was to sign players generally.

You can make transfer negotiations easier — they’re set to strict by default when you start a save — but actually, after the initial difficulty shock, I came to enjoy the challenge. Sure, I didn’t get most of my initial transfer targets, but that struggle made my eventual signings — Patrik Schick, Lucas Bergvall, Dan Ballard, and Raúl Asencio on loan — feel more rewarding as a result. It also felt very Everton to be rejected or outbid so frequently.

One big negative, though, is that players are absolute prima donnas in FC 27 Career mode — and their stinking attitudes can sometimes present a real headache.

It’s entirely possible that large groups of players hand in transfer requests at the same time because, as per the new minutes system, a player with 41% or higher stamina expects to play. If they don’t, they get annoyed and request a transfer. That (sort of) makes sense, but it’s particularly problematic if you like to simulate lots of matches, as the computer will only play high-stamina players (think 70% stamina and above).

I’ve seen some streamers complain that the game’s liberal transfer request system has ground their Career saves to a halt, and even if you can appease your unruly squad, it’s not particularly enjoyable to feel like virtual players are managing you, rather than the other way around.

Unexpected Events are back in FC 27, too, and these random scenarios — like Abrupt Retirement or Urgent Family Leave — can similarly disrupt the flow of a season.

I’m all for being tested as a manager, but Career mode feels particularly patience-testing this year — it’s more rewarding in places, sure, but it would be nice to play five straight matches without an injury, a mutiny, or an unmissable family funeral.

Dynamic Overall is a more positive addition to Career mode in FC 27. It’s essentially a dynamic rating system that causes player ratings to fluctuate throughout the season instead of staying fixed. Form, morale, and fitness can all make a player’s rating go up or down, and transfer values are impacted by big changes in rating.

In my Everton save, Tyler Dibling played so well so consistently that his rating went from 74 to 83 in a matter of months — that seems ridiculous on paper, but it’s actually representative of how player values change drastically in real life. Good feature!

Should you play EA Sports FC 27?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility features

Like its predecessors, EA Sports FC 27 offers a comprehensive suite of accessibility options, including settings for subtitles, button remapping, color blindness, and increasing the size of the player indicator. It also features a dedicated High Contrast Mode for low-vision and cognitively disabled players.

All of these accessibility options can be found in a dedicated Accessibility Settings tab. The game has six difficulty levels — Beginner, Amateur, Semi-Pro, Professional, World Class, Legendary, and Ultimate — and features support for 21 languages.

How I reviewed EA Sports FC 27

I played EA Sports FC 27 for a month, having received the game a few days ahead of its official Early Access release on September 18. During that time, I had access to all modes and features and was able to compete against real-world players who also had early review access to the game.

I played on PS5, using a standard DualSense controller, on a Samsung QN95A Neo QLED 4K TV. I’ve played every EA Sports football title since FIFA 13, and also reviewed FIFA 22, FIFA 23, EA Sports FC 24, EA Sports FC 25, and EA Sports FC 26 for TechRadar Gaming.

First reviewed: October 2025.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it: 2026 has been a terrible time to be a PC gamer. As someone who's been covering computing tech for over a decade and building machines for longer than that, the future looks bleak.

The biggest tech companies in the world are buying up vital components such as RAM and graphics cards to build data centers. Prices for these parts are soaring as demand drastically outpaces supply. Many expect things won't stabilize until at least 2030, so what can we do to get through the worst of it?

While the best graphics cards, NVMe SSDs, and the best DDR5 RAM modules have become expensive and elusive, that's not the case across the board for other computing components, as there are plenty of other essential upgrades you can make to weather the storm and ensure you've got one of the best gaming PCs ready for the flagship releases of the future... provided you keep your expectations in check.

I'm going through the five biggest ways you can maximize your PC gaming experience through this dark and uncertain time. My best advice without spending any additional money is to hold onto what you've got and be smart with your graphics settings and target resolution.

Today's best PC games are optimized with console parity in mind, meaning they have to be able to run on the Xbox Series X/S and PS5, so as long as your GPU is from 2020/2021 or later, you should be okay. If you're looking to spend a little money, though, here's what I recommend doing next.

1. Replace your keyboard and mouse

The average PC gamer replaces their peripherals, such as keyboards, mice, and headsets, every four to five years. If you're reading this at your desk, there's a high chance you're typing on an old deck or scrolling with a past-their-prime pointer.

While this year has been pretty terrible for internal computing components, it's actually been an exciting time of innovation for mice and keyboards, making now the perfect time to take the cash that would have gone on a GPU and to pump life into your setup instead.

I'm a tech journalist, but I'm also an avid esports gamer. 2026 alone has seen some truly stand-out peripherals that have been head and shoulders above what we've had since the RAM crisis began. My top recommendations right now include the excellent Logitech G Pro X3 Superstrike with its second-generation HITS tech, or you can stick to tried-and-true analog with the stellar Razer Viper V4 Pro, or the lightweight Corsair Sabre V2 MG. It goes far beyond just an 8K polling rate; there have been advancements with better battery life, enhanced 2.4GHz wireless stability, and (most crucially) a shift towards a reduction in weight.

Gaming keyboards have come just as far towards the end of 2026 as well. Many of today's decks have embraced the benefits of magnetic sensor technology, through either Hall Effect or TMR, with features such as Rapid Trigger that are genuinely game-changing. It simply dynamically resets a key once your finger lifts up, with an actuation sensitivity as low as 0.1 mm, as opposed to the standard 2mm depth of mechanical decks. Magnets and light sensors also mean fewer moving parts, meaning fewer points of failure — and that leads to a longer lifespan.

I've tested dozens of keyboards over the last 10 months, and (depending on budget), I currently recommend the Logitech G X2 Rapid, Cherry XTRFY K5 Pro TMR, Corsair Clipper Pro Mini 60, and the Razer Huntsman V3 HE 8KHz. You can find more of the best gaming keyboards for around the £100/$100 to $200/£200 mark, depending on whether you want wired or wireless connectivity, and the form factor (essentially, the size of the keyboard and amount of keys).

2. Lean on AI-powered upscaling to boost gaming performance

If one good thing has come out of this whole situation, it's just how far the likes of Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS have come over the years. All current upscaling methods (DLSS 5, FSR 4, and XeSS 3) render at a lower native resolution and utilize AI to scale the picture up to the target one.

In other words, it means getting playable framerates (60fps or above) in 1440p and even 4K from budget or mid-range graphics cards. This has only gotten better with the implementation of Frame Generation and MFG, which use AI to interpolate generated frames with natively rendered ones, doubling (or tripling) the total framerate in tandem with the resolution bump.

In an ideal world, we would all have the best 4K graphics cards, such as the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080; however, right now Nvidia's flagships are going for as much as $9,000. Given the state of the worldwide economy, that's a hard sell for (almost) everyone on the planet. Luckily, all modern graphics cards from 2020 and upwards (RTX 30 series and RX 5000 line) can make use of this technology, which can help delay the need to upgrade.

It will mean making compromises, though, such as targeting lower resolutions for demanding software, particularly if your current GPU has a smaller memory pool, such as 8GB of GDDR6 or GDDR6X.

3. Push your existing DDR4 or DDR5 RAM to their limits

You may be surprised to hear this, but many PC gamers forget to utilize AMD EXPO or Intel XMP. Whether you've custom-built a rig from scratch or you've purchased a boutique-built or a premade machine from a company like Acer, Alienware, or Corsair, RAM is often set at stock speeds, leaving extra performance off the table. Overclocking RAM is a one-click solution that can make a massive difference to the performance of your PC.

Without EXPO or XMP enabled, DDR4 RAM tops out at 3,200MHz and DDR5 caps at 4,800MHz. This is fine, sure, but you're missing out on anywhere from 20% to 40% of a performance uplift by not enabling this simple BIOS setting, which can see top-end memory modules run at their respective full speeds of 5,333 MHz and 9,600 MHz. Dual-channel RAM, when properly configured, can do more of the heavy lifting with larger games that require additional bandwidth, particularly if they utilize 4K textures, which can exceed upwards of 11GB of VRAM on the GPU.

4. Upgrade to a faster, better gaming monitor

It's easy to forget just how much of a difference one of the best gaming monitors can make to your setup, particularly if you've been used to a slower or duller display.

Panels haven't been subjected to the same price gouging as core components, meaning that the end of 2026 is an ideal time to consider an upgrade. According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, the bulk of PC gamers are still using 16:9 1080p displays. It's a popular resolution, sure, but 1440p panels have become substantially cheaper and faster, with trusted brands like HP, Gigabyte, and Samsung offering sub-£200/$200 QHD displays, like the Samsung Odyssey G5, Gigabyte G27Q2, and HP Omen 27Q G2, among others.

If you have a little more cash at hand, then you should consider upgrading to either an OLED or a mini-LED gaming monitor. OLED displays have also (thankfully) come down in price, offering (seemingly) unlimited contrast and deep, inky blacks for an unparalleled gaming experience. You can now find top-end displays for as low as $400/£400, such as the Lenovo Legion 27Q-10 OLED, the HyperX Omen OLED, the MSI MAG 271QP QD-OLED, and the Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQDMESZ. It really can make a difference to have a brighter, faster, and prettier display to game and work on, even if your hardware doesn't upgrade alongside it.

I'm also the world's biggest cheerleader for 21:9 monitors for both work and play, and these have also come down in price in the last handful of years, too.

Most modern games natively support the ultrawide resolution; it also helps massively if you work from home like me and enjoy juggling more Chrome tabs than is probably healthy. It's a far better way to spend this kind of cash than you would overpaying on a grossly inflated DDR5 RAM kit or a GPU that's double (or triple) its MSRP.

5. Play through your existing gaming backlog instead of newer games

As technology becomes unobtainably expensive and the costs of modern gaming as a hobby continue to skyrocket, it has become a far more viable strategy to look backwards instead of forwards.

While Valve claims that the average Steam user only plays four games a year, that's not a realistic metric for people who primarily game on PC. Take me, for example. I've had a Steam account since 2011, and over the last 15 years, I've accumulated a total of 613 games, or over 900 titles if you count my Steam Family library.

After a quick scan through my games list, I've estimated there are fewer than 100 titles that have any recorded playtime, and only a handful of Steam games that have more than 100 hours invested. I know I'm not alone in this; I am convinced there are thousands of people just like me who see the likes of the Steam Autumn Sale and go on a spending spree, collecting cheap games that will probably never be played.

As such, this tough time for PC gaming is the perfect excuse to finally try to tackle your gaming backlog. In my limited spare time, I'm primarily putting hours into esports games like VALORANT, but when I think about what else to boot up, my mind instantly shifts towards the "Play Next" tab in my Steam library. Steam uses an algorithm to suggest games you should try out based on what you've played before; it knows me to some extent, recommending Assassin's Creed, Half-Life, Splinter Cell, Far Cry, and Sonic the Hedgehog. If you can't afford the cutting edge to keep up with the demanding requirements of modern AAA games, then turning your attention to older, though still great, games should keep you occupied until component prices start to drop.

• 007 First Light will launch on Nintendo Switch 2 on March 18, 2027
• The edition was originally scheduled to launch this year but was delayed
• IO Interactive says it will continue "refining the game's optimisation and performance" in the lead-up to the game's release

IO Interactive has finally announced that 007 First Light will launch on Nintendo Switch 2 on March 18, 2027.

The release date is much later than initially promised — IOI originally said the Switch 2 edition would arrive this year after the game's PS5, Xbox, and PC launch in May — however, it's now said that the delay allowed the team extra time to address performance issues and that it will continue to improve optimisation in the following months.

"Since announcing additional development time to ensure the quality of experience players expect, IO Interactive has brought hands-on builds of 007 First Light to both Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show, where players and press had their first opportunity to experience Bond's world running on Nintendo's hardware," IOI said in a statement.

"Player response from both events has been positive, reflecting the progress being made across the game as development continues toward launch."

The studio added that "the development team will use the coming months to continue refining the game's optimisation and performance on Nintendo Switch 2, ensuring it meets the standard players expect at launch."

On top of a Switch 2 release date and a new gameplay trailer running on the hardware, the 007 First Light – Deluxe Edition is now available for pre-order for $69.99 / £69.99.

The Deluxe Edition offers the Gleaming Lighter, Gleaming Earphones, Gleaming Dart Gun, and Gleaming Pen gadgets, plus four additional outfits, including the Day of the Dead, the Desert Explorer, the Silent Anchor, and the Gentleman Operator.

In addition, the 007 First Light - Special Edition on Switch 2 is also available exclusively at Amazon, giving players access to the Classic Tuxedo.

Anyone who pre-orders the game on Switch 2 will also receive early access to the GoldenEye Suit at launch.

IOI released 007 First Light's first major free downloadable content (DLC) earlier this month, which included New Game Plus, Photo Mode, and a brand-new "00" difficulty level, among other activities.

• Rockstar Games co-head of development Aaron Garbut says Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks from 2022 were an "invasive" moment
• The leaks caused a huge shift at Rockstar that forced a five-day in-office work policy for security reasons
• Rockstar’s head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, says Rockstar plans to reexamine the policy after GTA 6 launches

Rockstar Games has addressed the initial Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks from 2022, calling it an "invasive" moment that resulted in a huge policy shift at the studio.

In a lengthy interview with Bloomberg, where Rockstar leadership discussed GTA 6's long development period, co-head of development Aaron Garbut touched on the huge leaks from 2022 that changed how the studio works today.

In September of that year, someone hacked the company's Slack channel and leaked dozens of raw, unfinished gameplay footage before Rockstar was ready to unveil anything. Rockstar released a statement about the leaks, and despite copyright takedowns, the footage quickly spread like wildfire, and though law enforcement later tracked the alleged hacker down, it was too late.

"It feels like somebody’s wading through your dirty washing," Garbut said. "It’s like they’re inside your head. You see your early work out there. Nobody’s ever supposed to see that. It’s really weirdly invasive. And so it’s quite hard to deal with on an emotional level."

As a result, Rockstar introduced a controversial policy in 2024 requiring every developer to work in-office five days a week for security reasons; developers were also banned from accessing Rockstar’s servers and tools outside the office, which forced them to take vacation days if they needed to stay home for childcare or emergencies.

The policy set back the cultural progress the studio made after Red Dead Redemption 2's release, a game made under extensive periods of "crunch." With GTA 6, Rockstar knew it couldn't repeat those mistakes; however, the new policy following the leaks meant no more hybrid working.

Rockstar’s head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe told Bloomberg, however, that the studio plans to reexamine the policy after GTA 6 launches, though she doubts it will be able to switch to the more common three-days-in, two-days-out hybrid work model.

"The idea that we would have the game in that many environments is something that I think the security team would not love," Kolbe said. “I think if we did not have a game that people wanted to steal as much, maybe it would be an easier conversation."

Unfortunately, more leaks have since occurred, notably ahead of Rockstar's GTA 6 extended look, and persist to this day, with a prevalent leaker known as 'Cyberleek' threatening to release more in the lead-up to the game's launch on November 19.

In case you missed it, Rockstar has released the cinematic GTA 6 launch trailer, which offers a deeper look into the game's story.

• Rockstar Games has released the launch trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6
• The trailer features Jason and Lucia and sets up the game's story
• We see new cinematic footage and gameplay systems in action

Rockstar Games has released the launch trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6, showcasing new story details and a deeper look at crime-duo protagonists, Jason and Lucia.

The trailer, which was captured "entirely in-game from a PlayStation 5," begins with some narration from Jason talking about his time in the army, before we see him receiving a call from Lucia in prison, suggesting the prologue will be from his perspective before we're introduced to his counterpart.

A montage of different scenes plays out, including missions with both characters, the pair getting hot and heavy in a shower, dancing in a club, fighting off bad guys and the police, as well as jumping off a building into a swimming pool.

Interestingly, we see Lucia wearing an ankle monitor, meaning she hasn't completely escaped the law just yet and some of what we're seeing is from the beginning of the story.

We also see Jason wearing tactical gear wading through water with two other men behind him, almost like he's leading an army mission; could this be a flashback to his army days?

The entire trailer looks incredibly cinematic, with footage showing a helicopter crashing into the side of a building, Lucia climbing the wheels of an airplane Mission Impossible-style, and Jason sneaking onto a huge ship; several other gameplay systems can also be seen in action, including bank robberies and seemingly quick-time events.

We also have a brand-new story synopsis provided in the description, which you can read below.

"Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them," it reads. "But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive."

The trailer also features a new track, 'Flower in a Hurricane,' from electronic duo Justice, the composers behind the original score of Grand Theft Auto 6, feat. Tame Impala, SZA, and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, who are also included on the Grand Theft Auto 6: The Album.

GTA 6 launches in just over a month on November 19 for PS5, Xbox Series X, and Series S. A new report claims the PC version could launch in early 2027.

• Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko says he likes to "go to extremes to add depth to everything" in his work
• He says each Resonant has "their own features in the concept track" that can be picked apart
• Alanko says, "Nothing is obvious and nothing is rubbed into your face, and in the end it’s all only music made with love and enthusiasm"

Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko has revealed that his music features easter eggs that may take fans years to uncover, as he likes to "go to extremes to add depth to everything."

Speaking to TechRadar Gaming about his favorite aspects of the Control series and its music, Alanko said there are "layers" to each soundtrack, and some of them are only revealed "when you dive deep into my project file timelines and start digging out the details of sounds."

"One trick I’ve used about a million times with various tools is to add some string section’s 'resin' sound to something else, turning it into a resemblance of a stringed instrument," Alanko said. "Some of the tricks will probably never surface and are more or less subliminal, some of them slightly more at the forefront, but as I mentioned, I love to hide all kinds of nods and winks everywhere, pay homage to the greats."

He continued, sharing that if any hardware synth is involved in his work (which he explained is a big part of his musical arsenal), it was " reamped through a speaker setup and a pair of microphones," which was a trick he learned from the articles concerning the late Konradi "Conny" Plank, the sound engineer and producer of Kraftwerk and Ultravox.

"I learned my chops back in the day meticulously inspecting and evaluating Die Mensch-Maschine, Computerwelt, Vienna and Rage In Eden," Alanko said, adding that he "learned a good deal of studio tricks during my early adulthood" when he worked as a synth programmer and a producer for various productions, and all of that experience has "proven to be rather handy during the creation of the Control Resonant soundtrack."

Alanko went on to share some neat details about the creation of the game's enemies, the Resonant, and said each has "their own features in the concept track," with Hedron, for instance, having "clangorous, metallic, sequenced, patterned, constantly moving" sounds.

"Hiss wants to corrupt everything and especially with that entity, the pitches start going all over the place," he said. "And Mold is a triumphant spectacle of all kinds of dispersers, turning everything into some sonic goo."

Alanko said his passion allowed him to add as much detail as he wanted, which also meant leaving in small hints that listeners likely won't find until years later.

"I have, and I will go to extremes to add depth to everything," Alanko said, "and the most beautiful thing is when people realise something after, say, seven-eight years, and I get an email from someone who just realised the rhythm of a certain sound was actually Morse code for 'BEWARE'.

"Nothing is obvious and nothing is rubbed into your face, and in the end it’s all only music made with love and enthusiasm."

Alanko has discussed the early stages of Control Resonant's development, revealing that he was brought on to the project "very early" and was still working on Alan Wake 2. He explained that this proved to be a better outcome and suggested that other studios should value music more if they care about their games and avoid AI.

Funselecktor Labs Inc. is known for its minimalist yet vibrant takes on various forms of motorsport, starting with Absolute Drift in 2015, followed by Art of Rally in 2020 and Golden Lap in 2024. Now, the independent studio is tackling offroading, but rather than competing against the clock or other drivers, over the hill is about exploring an open world on your lonesome (or with a friend or three) at your own pace.

Taking inspiration from the recent wave of cozy games, over the hill doesn’t have concrete aims or objectives as such. Rather, you simply pootle around the various maps to discover various points of interest and earn Pebbles, the game’s currency, to upgrade your vehicle to better navigate the environment.

Off the beaten path

over the hill sticks to the same cardboard-cutout aesthetic of the developer’s past efforts. Textures are flat and basic, but they’re elevated by the pastel colors and lush lighting effects, with environments drenched in pinks, oranges, and greens that invite players to explore them.

There are two main regions to choose from at the start of a game: Canada and Algeria. Each has its own sub-areas (three for Canada and two for Algeria), featuring all kinds of terrain and climates; you’ll see rain, snow, and sandstorms, which naturally affect your driving and navigation abilities, adding an extra element of challenge.

The music complements the visuals perfectly. The in-game radio gives you four ‘albums’ to choose from, each representing a certain flavor of ambient, from synth-heavy pieces to folksy guitar numbers, all with gentle melodies to lull you as you play. I was impressed with the score’s production value, given that it merely serves to subtly set the mood as you play.

This is a game low on story and characters, but high in vibes — specifically of the zen variety. Aside from the Buddha statue that acts as your tutorial guide, the only other character is Crazy Günther, the hippie mechanic you visit to customize your vehicle. His textual dialogue (there’s no VO) adds a small amount of flavor to an otherwise purely functional NPC, and it chimes well with the gentle tone of the game.

Once you learn the basics in the brief tutorial, you’re left to explore the world. Campsites are the chief points to discover, as they act as the game's main fast travel hubs. You can also use them to fast-forward time, useful if you want to wait for a different time of day or skip certain weather events.

Other points of interest in the maps include crates that unlock cosmetic features for your vehicle, as well as scenic points from which to take photographs. You can also find Trial Challenges to complete, which take you along treacherous routes of varying lengths to test your off-roading skills, and find wildlife to snap. These discoveries and activities earn you Pebbles.

Pedal to the metal?

If you’re looking for a fast and furious off-roading experience, over the hill isn’t it. Instead, it takes a considered, sedate approach to the sport, one that rarely rewards harebrained driving and impatience. Speeds are slow at the best of times, with second gear being the highest. True to real life, vehicles have both low and high range gears, with the former being used to give you better control and traction on slippery surfaces and steep slopes. Such surfaces are indicated organically via the game’s visual style, without making it too obvious by overtly highlighting them.

Anyone who’s played MudRunner or SnowRunner will be in familiar territory with over the hill. As long as you’re in the right gear range, you don’t have to worry too much about being sensitive with the throttle; you’ll either make it up a slope or you won’t, regardless of how you modulate the throttle. Steering is fairly laborious as well, with the wheels being slow to turn and recenter on most vehicles, which only adds to the challenge of navigating around obstacles. I’ve never been offroading in real life, but this is how I’d imagine 4x4s to handle.

When the going gets too tough, you can use various bits of equipment to get you out of tight spots. First and foremost of these is the winch. A single button press will fire it at the tree you’re looking at (as long as it’s in range), and holding that same button will reel you towards it. You can also slacken the winch with another button, useful when you want to descend rather than ascend. If you want more control, you can use the winch in manual mode, which lets you choose which side of your vehicle to winch from and which tree to anchor to within a certain radius.

The winch can be used as many times as you like and is always in your inventory. Other tools, though, have to be selected before you enter a map; if you want to alter your loadout while playing, you’ll need to visit the mechanic. They’re also single-use items, although you select multiple instances of them, and they replenish whenever you visit a campsite. Among them are a portable anchor, which you can winch onto when there are no trees around, and two wooden planks to lay across small gaps or on the ground to give you more traction. These are a little fiddlier to use, as it can be a chore to line them up with your wheels, and misaligning them even slightly can easily result in your vehicle slipping off them. Still, they’re very useful and rewarding when you find yourself stuck. Other tools include a portable camp, a repair kit, and a car jack for righting your vehicle if you roll it over, which is easily done.

There’s a respectable number of customization and upgrade options for your vehicles. There are a variety of vehicle bodies to choose from, ranging from classic 4x4s and wagons to more utilitarian and industrial models — and yes, there’s even a campervan. The differences between them are more than cosmetic, as they each have their own speed and handling characteristics, despite the game not actually listing these stats. The selection is resolutely vintage, with no model looking beyond the 90s at best. Most are inspired by iconic real-life vehicles, too, as suggested by their menu descriptions.

You can personalize your vehicle with a large number of trinkets, unlocked via the crates you find throughout the world. Sadly, however, the paint options are more limited. As for upgrades, you can improve attributes such as speed, grip, protection, and tool capacity — all of which you’ll need to do if you want to explore every area completely. Again, though, the upgrades are limited in their stages, and you’ll find yourself maxing out your vehicle’s potential quite quickly.

Riding shotgun

While over the hill offers a good time solo, it’s more fun with friends. Having companions by your side (you can have up to four players in a server) not only takes some of the burden out of exploration, but also introduces the possibility of mischief. This is because you can winch to each other’s vehicles, which is obviously a big help when one of you is stuck in the weeds, but also allows you to pull each other off cliffs and into rivers. However, in order not to put the winch-ee at too much of a disadvantage, they can de-winch themselves at any point.

You can also explore independently if you so wish, and fast travel for one doesn’t mean fast travel for all, which gives everyone greater flexibility to explore. The whole experience ran smoothly during my testing; I didn’t encounter any problems with connectivity or lag, save for one occasion when my friend’s framerate dropped considerably, but Funselektor said this is a known issue with the preview build I played, so it’s entirely possible it’ll be rectified before launch. For most of my time in both single- and multiplayer, the game ran very smoothly, even at Ultra settings. The only real bug I experienced concerned some input clashes when I remapped certain buttons, but this was easy to work around.

Perhaps my main gripe with over the hill is that there’s just not that much to do. And while the central act of driving over rough terrain is fun thanks to the skill and problem-solving nous it requires, the mechanics lack real depth to sustain the game for long periods in the face of little additional activity. There’s not quite enough feel and feedback from slipping and sliding on loose ground to make it as engaging as it could be, and the lack of any sort of drifting mechanic — guaranteed to amplify the fun of any driving game by a factor of ten — is a real shame, especially since Funselektor has great form in this area, if its previous games are anything to go by.

I can only hope that future updates will add more to the driving and DLC will arrive to give players more to do. But for now, over the hill remains a fun time to while away an hour or so, but not much more than that.

Should you play over the hill?

Play over the hill if…

Don't play it if…

Accessibility features

There are no accessibility features to speak of in over the hill. Subtitles for dialogue are on by default, since there’s no VO, and the closest the game comes to offering any comfort features is letting you disable motion blur.

How I reviewed over the hill

I played over the hill for about 10 hours, seeing most of the main areas and features the game had to offer. I was also given a save file by Funselektor with all areas, upgrades, and customizations unlocked.

I mainly played solo, but I also tested online multiplayer by playing with a friend. I played on a gaming PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, an RTX 5070 GPU, and 32GB of RAM. I played mostly with a controller, but I also tested its mouse and keyboard controls.

I’m a fan of racing and driving games, and I’ve played similar off-roading games, such as SnowRunner. I also played a lot of Art of Rally, one of Funselektor’s other titles.

First reviewed October 2026

• Nvidia has considerably improved the AI model for DLSS 5
• This means the tech now offers up to 40% faster frame rates
• Team Green has also improved frame generation, and is bringing DLSS 5 to two new games: Hogwarts Legacy and Where Winds Meet

If you were wondering how soon Nvidia might start ramping up the performance of DLSS 5, well the answer is that it just happened.

Team Green's neural-rendering tech, which officially debuted in NBA 2K27, has only been out for just over a month, but Nvidia is claiming that it has doubled the performance of the AI that drives DLSS 5.

When it was first previewed in March 2026, DLSS 5 needed a pair of RTX 5090 GPUs to run, with the company improving the performance of the AI model by 5x for the release of the tech in NBA 2K27. With this latest update, it's now 10x more performant than that baseline.

Nvidia also made it clear that it has reduced the video memory (VRAM) usage of the tech considerably, noting that: "The DLSS 5 October update shrinks the [AI model] footprint by 24% to roughly 118 million parameters while reducing 4K VRAM usage by 20%. The result is half the GPU overhead of the September [launch] version while maintaining comparable visual fidelity."

Based on Nvidia's testing in NBA 2K27, that translates to boosts in frame rates in the order of 30% to 40%. Check out the video clip below to see the gains in the basketball game.

This new DLSS 5 model launches on October 16, with availability for RTX 5000 GPUs, RTX Spark laptops and the GeForce Now streaming service.

Nvidia also announced that DLSS 5 is being introduced for Hogwarts Legacy on November 5, and also Where Winds Meet in the "near future", although we aren't given a specific launch date in the latter case.

Finally, away from DLSS 5, Nvidia announced that it's bringing in a new performance mode for frame generation, speeding up the tech considerably. The company explains that this benefits from a "faster and lighter algorithm" that boosts frame rates even further, and that it'll offer up to 35% better frame rates with an RTX 5060.

This performance mode is called 'Preset C' in the Nvidia app's frame-generation override.

DLSS 5 is also coming to RTX Remix on October 23, meaning old games can get a graphical makeover with added neural-rendering goodness. That only makes sense. given that gamers have been fudging support (in various ways) with classic PC games anyway.

Analysis: a laudable step forward — but gamers want more

It's remarkable to see DLSS 5 performance being boosted so quickly, although Nvidia needed to act in this regard. One of the main criticisms of this tech has been that the performance hit is too hefty, and it requires a powerful RTX 5000 GPU to run smoothly enough — at a time when the prices of such graphics cards are getting rapidly more expensive.

That said, an increasing number of gamers seem to be accepting that DLSS 5 is worth the cost to the frame rate for the visual uplift. Those folks will doubtless be pleased with Nvidia's progress here, and likely wouldn't disagree with Team Green's assertion in its blog post that 2026 has been a "year of relentless DLSS innovation."

Of course, there are still skeptics who'd rather Nvidia didn't bring AI into play in this way with DLSS. And it's also true that these early optimizations are where the larger gains will be carved out, and as the AI model is further refined, performance improvements are likely to become a lot more modest.

There are also gamers out there who are asking whether, now that the AI model is much improved, this going to usher in wider support for Nvidia's older graphics cards? As this Redditor put it: "Great so could we get official support on the [RTX] 40 series now since the new model is so efficient?"

It's a good question, given that Nvidia has promised that after tuning RTX 5000 performance it's going to work on bringing support to the last-gen RTX 4000 range. I'm guessing this won't happen until early next year, though.

The other work on DLSS frame generation is obviously welcome, too, albeit the new 'Preset C' option has attracted some criticism for causing a bit more glitching and artifacts while boosting frame rates by a decent amount. Not everyone is seeing this, mind, and how obvious it is may be somewhat subjective going by reports (and it could obviously depend on the specific game, too).

At any rate, this preset should be useful for laptop gamers looking to further bolster frame rates with relatively modest Nvidia GPUs — and indeed, it's likely tied into the release of RTX Spark laptops to help their gaming chops.

• Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko shares what game he would like to work on next
• He says he would "love to do a proper sci-fi score one day" and enjoys "emotional psycho-thrillers a lot"
• Alanko says he would pass on any "cute cartoon-like games" like My Little Pony

Petri Alanko, the composer for Remedy Entertainment's Control, Control Resonant, and Alan Wake 2, has revealed which genre of game he would love to work on next, but insisted that "cute games" are a hard pass.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Alanko said that with "synth" being part of his musical arsenal, he would "love to do a proper sci-fi score one day," and shared his enthusiasm for thrillers.

"Just gimme a project and free hands, thank you," Alanko said. "I enjoy emotional psycho-thrillers a lot; they offer so much writing ground, but combining that with some other, say, sci-fi flavours, now that would be something I’d love."

As for what he's working on right now, the composer said he's moved on to another game soundtrack, which he couldn't reveal, and also the movie Häyhä, which is about a WW2 Finnish sharpshooter, Simo Häyhä (aka The White Death).

He explained that "scoring movies is relatively easy, really," as "you have the linear media unchanged in front of you," and compared to the average game, " you need only a handful of music for it."

"I certainly don’t want to look down on any film composer," Alanko added. "I know several of them, and they are very dear to me, but in some ways, I feel like that posse has it pretty easy in their line of work."

Alanko went on to share which genre of game he would absolutely avoid if offered the chance to compose music for, including cozy games, because they don't align with his personal tastes.

"One thing is sure: I’m not much good for a My Little Pony game," he said. "Or cute cartoon-like games. Or rally games. Nothing against them, but I don’t have that in me. I’m from a Northern faraway country, and I live with a forest behind my house, and Nordic Noir is more or less a code of conduct in my whereabouts (laughs), so that pretty much stamps my life with [a] 'psycho-thrillers ahoy' badge."

Elsewhere, Alanko suggested studios should value music more if they care about their games and avoid AI at all costs, saying, "Love your game, love your handiwork. Respect the client: the gamers, the fans, dammit."

• The PC version of Grand Theft Auto 6 will reportedly launch in early 2027, a few months after the console versions
• Some fans believe a 2028 release was possible, but Rockstar Games has moved the PC release up
• Fans speculate that Rockstar wants to get ahead of a potential PS5 emulator

A new report has claimed the PC version of Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch in early 2027, and fans believe Rockstar Games wants to get ahead of a potential emulator.

The news comes from GamesBeat, which reports that Rockstar plans to release the PC version of GTA 6 "in the first quarter of 2027," and that's according to "four industry sources familiar with the studio’s plans, all of whom requested anonymity to avoid damaging business relationships."

It's worth taking this report with a grain of salt, as Rockstar has yet to announce any PC edition; However, this is GTA 6 we're talking about, and fans are already theorizing over potential reasons a PC release could arrive mere months after the PS5 and Xbox versions, despite the PC version of GTA 5 arriving roughly two years after the console editions.

Many have speculated that Rockstar moved the PC release date up to anticipate a possible PS5 emulator, which would allow PC owners access to a "PC build" of GTA 6 without having to wait and pay for the official version. This would also allow users to avoid the "double dipping" scheme that many believe Rockstar is going for.

One redditor suggested Rockstar is "Not waiting a year with the PS5 emulator breathing down their necks." Some other fan wrote something similar, saying, "GTA 6 will probably be emulator ready a month after launch. It’s almost guaranteed at this point."

Some have also pointed out the more recent leaks from 'Cyberleek' (via GamesRadar) and suggest the studio wants to get ahead of the hacker.

"I actually believe this because of the leaks and emulator thing, they probably want the game out asap," a fan said on Reddit, as another wrote, "Im leaning heavily towards an original 2028 PC launch, but some exec has seen the speed that recomps are coming out and realised if they dont release it quick, everyone will be playing it for free."

Other fans think Rockstar hasn't announced the PC release date yet in order to maximise console edition sales; we've recently seen retailers hit with huge price hikes on the PS5 and PS5 Pro in anticipation of the game's launch.

"Not the first rumour we've heard like this," one fan said. "I find it believable - I strongly suspect the PC version is already pretty much done and the 'delay' is artificial from Rockstar to maximise the console release."

We'll have to wait for an official announcement from Rockstar, but in the meantime, PS5 and Xbox users don't have much longer to wait because GTA 6 launches next month on November 19.

In other news, new details have emerged ahead of the GTA 6's launch, which details even more gameplay features and immersive systems.

Metro 2039 pre-orders, including that brilliant-looking Collector's Edition, are out in the wild right now!

The big news right away is that some UK retailers are live already! I expected action to commence at 4pm UK time, but Smyths Toys, The Game Collection, Game UK went live ahead of that time and a few on both sides of the |Atlantic have followed after that time to fill out the options for players.

We now know that there are three editions: the excellent Collector's Edition with a wearable Spartan helmet; a Deluxe Edition with a steelbook and art book; and a Standard Edition. If you pre-order any copy, you get a few in-game goodies as well as what each edition brings to the table. I've got more info on the specifics below.

Now we have one more reason to look forward to our next grim adventure in the Moscow metro tunnels; below you'll find all the best links for the Collector's Edition, Deluxe Edition, and Standard Edition that I could find at the time of writing this.

Where to buy the Metro 2039 Collector's Edition - US

• Walmart:
  🔆Check for PS5 stock🔆
  🔆Check for Xbox Series X stock🔆
• Best Buy:
  🏷️Check for PS5 stock🏷️
  🏷️Check for Xbox Series X stock🏷️
• Target:
  🎯Check for PS5 stock🎯
  🎯Check for Xbox Series X stock🎯
• GameStop:
  🎮PS5 - $299.99🎮(out of stock)

Where to buy the Metro 2039 Collector's Edition - UK

• Very:
  𝓥 PS5 - £259.99𝓥
• 𝓥 Xbox Series X - £259.99 𝓥
• Smyths Toys:
  🧸PS5 - £279.99🧸(out of stock)
  🧸Xbox Series X - £279.99🧸(out of stock)
• The Game Collection:
  🎮PS5 - £259.95🎮(out of stock)
  🎮Xbox Series X - £259.95🎮(out of stock)
  🎮PC - £259.95🎮(out of stock)
• Game:
  🕹️PS5 - £259.99🕹️(out of stock)
  🕹️Xbox Series X - £259.99🕹️(out of stock)
• EE:
  📱Check for PS5 stock📱
  📱Check for Xbox Series X stock📱
• Currys:
  ©️Check for PS5 stock©️
  ©️Check for Xbox Series X stock©️
• Argos:
  🟥Check for PS5 stock🟥
  🟥Check for Xbox Series X|S stock🟥
• ShopTo:
  🟡Check for PS5 stock🟡
  🟡Check for Xbox Series X stock🟡
• John Lewis:
  🛍️Check for PS5 stock🛍️
  🛍️Check for Xbox Series X stock🛍️
• Hit:
  💥Check for PS5 stock💥
  💥Check for Xbox Series X stock💥

Where to buy Deluxe and Standard Editions - US

• Best Buy:
  🏷️PS5 Standard Edition - $69.99🏷️
  🏷️PS5 Deluxe Edition - $109.99🏷️
  🏷️Xbox Series X Deluxe Edition - $109.99🏷️
  🏷️Xbox Series X Standard Edition - $69.99🏷️
• Amazon:
  📦PS5 Deluxe Edition - $109.99📦
  📦PS5 Standard Edition - $69.99📦
  📦Xbox Series X Deluxe Edition - $109.99📦
  📦Xbox Series X Standard Edition - $69.99📦
• GameStop:
  🎮PS5 Deluxe Edition - $109.99🎮
  🎮PS5 Standard Edition - $69.99🎮
  🎮Xbox Series X Deluxe Edition - $109.99🎮
  🎮Xbox Series X Standard Edition - $69.99🎮
• Walmart:
  🔆Check for PS5 stock🔆
  🔆Check for Xbox Series X stock🔆
• Target:
  🎯Check for PS5 stock🎯
  🎯Check for Xbox Series X stock🎯
• PlayStation Store:
  🅿️PS5 Digital Deluxe Edition - $99.99🅿️
  🅿️PS5 Standard Edition - $69.99🅿️
• Xbox Store:
  ❎Xbox Series X|S Digital Deluxe Edition - $99.99❎
  ❎Xbox Series X|S Standard Edition - $69.99❎

Where to buy Deluxe and Standard Editions - UK

• Amazon:
  📦PS5 Deluxe Edition - £94.99📦
  📦PS5 Standard Edition - £59.99📦
  📦Xbox Series X Deluxe Edition - £94.99📦
  📦Xbox Series X Standard Edition - £59.99📦
  📦PC Standard Edition - £59.99📦
• Smyths Toys:
  🧸PS5 Deluxe Edition - £89.99🧸
  🧸PS5 Standard Edition - £59.99🧸
  🧸Xbox Series X Deluxe Edition - £89.99🧸
  🧸Xbox Series X Standard Edition - £59.99🧸
• The Game Collection:
  🎮PS5 Deluxe Edition - £94.95🎮
  🎮PS5 Standard Edition - £54.95🎮
  🎮Xbox Series X Deluxe Edition - £94.95🎮
  🎮Xbox Series X Standard Edition - £54.95🎮
• Very:
  𝓥 PS5 Deluxe Edition - £94.99 𝓥
  𝓥 PS5 Standard Edition - £59.99 𝓥
  𝓥 Xbox Series X Deluxe Edition - £94.99 𝓥
  𝓥 Xbox Series X Standard Edition - £59.99 𝓥
• Game:
  🕹️PS5 Deluxe Edition - £94.99🕹️
  🕹️PS5 Standard Edition - £54.99🕹️
  🕹️Xbox Series X Deluxe Edition - £94.99🕹️
  🕹️Xbox Series X Standard Edition - £54.99🕹️
• EE:
  📱Check for PS5 stock📱
  📱Check for Xbox Series X stock📱
• Currys:
  ©️Check for PS5 stock©️
  ©️Check for Xbox Series X stock©️
• Argos:
  🟥Check for PS5 stock🟥
  🟥Check for Xbox Series X|S stock🟥
• ShopTo:
  🟡Check for PS5 stock🟡
  🟡Check for Xbox Series X stock🟡
• John Lewis:
  🛍️Check for PS5 stock🛍️
  🛍️Check for Xbox Series X stock🛍️
• Hit:
  💥Check for PS5 stock💥
  💥Check for Xbox Series X stock💥
• PlayStation Store:
  🅿️PS5 Digital Deluxe Edition - £84.99🅿️
  🅿️PS5 Standard Edition - £59.99🅿️
• Xbox Store:
  ❎Xbox Series X|S Digital Deluxe Edition - £84.99❎
  ❎Xbox Series X|S Standard Edition - £59.99❎

Should I pre-order Metro 2039?

We can safely (probably) approach this question for Metro 2039 in terms of the editions that will be available.

In short, if you're interested in the Collector's Edition for Metro 2039 with that super cool wearable helmet, then my advice is to absolutely pre-order. We already know that there'll be a limited number of these, so waiting around until launch to hopefully snag one is a fool's game. If you're a big fan and willing and able to place a Collector's Edition pre-order, then my advice is to definitely do that.

If you're interested in the other editions only, then the pressure probably isn't so high. Certainly not with the standard edition in terms of stock anyway; you'll be able to find this at launch naturally, but the pre-order bonuses might make it tempting.

Now, if you're keen on the Deluxe Edition that sits 'in between' the standard one and the Collector's, then I'd lean more toward placing a pre-order over not if you're interested. We often see these middle editions being super popular due to the fact that the Collector's might be too pricey for most (or sell out), but fans want something a bit more special than the standard edition, especially if they are big followers of the series.

As a result, it's slightly nuanced but, in brief: the bigger the edition, the more need for a pre-order, I reckon.

Metro 2039 pre-orders — what's in each edition?

Thanks to Smyths Toys in the UK going earlier than I expected, we now know what's in each edition of Metro 2039. First, if you pre-order any copy of the game, you get:

• The Metro 2039 Specialist Pack that includes three blueprints - three unique, swappable backpack upgrades: an Equipment Specialist Pouch, Chemtech Specialist Pouch, and Munitions Specialist Pouch

If you want to go for the Collector's Edition, you'll get:

• A copy of the game
• A wearable replica Spartan helmet
• An exclusive steelbook
• A hardback art book
• Story expansion DLC
• A digital copy of the art book
• A digital copy of the soundtrack

But if you'd rather go for the Deluxe Edition, you'll bag the following:

• A copy of the game
• An exclusive steelbook
• A hardback art book
• Story expansion DLC
• A digital copy of the art book
• A digital copy of the soundtrack

• Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko tells TechRadar Gaming how he approached the game's musical aesthetic
• He says "human vocals" and the "significant" relationship between Dylan and Hedron helped inform his writing
• Alanko says Dylan being an "involuntary hero" provided "a lot of writing material"

Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko has shared how the game's new setting and the relationship between protagonist Dylan and antagonist Hedron informed the soundtrack.

"Usually, it’s the scenery that hits best, and how the main character is related to the scenery, be that a connection or a disconnection," Alanko told TechRadar Gaming in an interview when asked about his design process. "It’s interesting, as there also are no rules whatsoever; again it’s a classic case of 'Hey, I think THAT would make you think this…'

"It’s basically psychological to an extent, really. Trying to play with your brain first, and later on with the player’s brain."

Alanko said "human vocals" was a term he and Remedy identified as part of the Resonant's core music aesthetic, "offering a whole dimension, practically." In addition, the "significant" relationship between Dylan and Hedron, a powerful Resonant entity, was another angle that "drove this first phase onwards."

"The path of the main character [Dylan] and the main antagonist’s [Hedron] relationship with him, it’s indeed a very conflicted pairing," he said. "Dysfunctional, one would say, but that provided a very human layer to the original setting.

"Dylan, being one might call 'an involuntary hero', or 'anti-hero' even, provided a lot of writing material; his path from a blank, soulless and partially mindless being into something willing to sacrifice himself just to find his sister is worth a dozen stories alone, not to mention the fact that their relationship hasn’t been exactly peaceful."

The composer went on to say that terms like "rough," "larger than life," "gut-wrenching," "human, yet inhuman," and "organic" were all on his Post-It notes at the beginning of development, concerning how he approached Dylan.

On the other hand, for Hedron, he had "strangely familiar yet frightening," "clangorous," "structured and sequenced," "mathematical and procedural" as his terms.

"And when I mention 'procedural', I mean the appearance," Alanko added. "It’s almost as if Hedron communicated with circular shapes, hence the term."

Alanko also shared his approach to the whole Remedy-verse score and musical landscape with TechRadar Gaming, saying, "There’s always the absolute evil lurking in there," at the games' core.

Slaying vampires always feels good, and 2D action-adventure and exploration game Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is no exception. The first entry in the iconic horror platformer in more than a decade, Evil Empire and Konami have crafted a love letter to past titles that, while not changing much of the formula, delivers an experience worthy of the Belmont name.

Despite a fantastic animated adaptation (and great spinoff series with Nocturne), Castlevania has been six feet under as Konami barely revisited the series. Seldom for tie-ins with Dead Cells and re-releases, so fans were ready to sink their fangs into a new title.

Fortunately, it would come from the Dead Cells team, Evil Empire. Its mastery of the craft with the Metroidvania genre made it a safe but effective pick to hand the Vampire Killer whip to. And, lo and behold, they ran with it and made something fans will love.

You must whip it, whip it good

Surprisingly, the game is a sequel of sorts to both Netflix’s Castlevania and Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse. As Rose Belmont, the daughter of Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades, she is tasked with stopping the newfound dangers flooding Paris.

With her father’s guidance and all the Belmont tactics, she’ll discover the root of it all, as well as how she and her mysteriously cursed arm fit into things.

Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse does go a good distance with its narrative, but it doesn’t reach too high. It’s got some twists, turns, and great moments, though it can feel sparse. Of course, most of the fun will come from your experience dashing and slashing, but it can feel uneven with its cinematic counterparts. Still, it’s serviceable enough for you to want to keep playing and see more.

Rose Belmont, as the daughter of Trevor and Sypha, is a pretty likeable protagonist. She’s not one-note by any means and struggles with her emotions, especially with the spotlight now on her. However, it’s the supporting cast that provide her with what she needs to be a worthy Belmont.

Without spoilers, her Confidantes will be her moral compass, and it’s up to her to choose which direction she wants to go in. Props go to many of the fantastic performers in the game, as everyone works perfectly with their respective characters.

A missable little pile of secrets

Once you set foot off the docks of the Seine, you’re instantly thrust into classic Castlevania gameplay: slay monsters and maneuver through obstacles. There are small tutorials, but for the most part, Paris is an open book, and you’re free to flip through the pages almost immediately.

Action-wise, it also harkens to classic Castlevania, with Rose using a variety of weapons to kill the many creatures of the night. There are many types of weapons, from the iconic whip to flashy gauntlets. Finding new versions of them throughout the world is always a treat, as it never disappoints when you equip them and test them out. Personally, the whip was a go-to, as it rewarded distance with better damage output, though the spear was a close second.

Also, with Rose’s abilities, which she’d earn after certain bosses, it unlocks various attacks, like throwable crosses or pillars of fire. It leaves customization very open, letting you play how you’d like in terms of combat.

Without going into spoilers, Rose’s journey goes beyond the confines of Paris into various regions. Each of them has some theme and gimmick that makes them memorable in both a playing sense and a backtracking sense. As this is a Castlevania game, you will find yourself going back to certain locations to find secrets and clues for other locations. Luckily, with new abilities like an air dash and, of course, a grappling hook whip, you’ll be able to do so easily and rapidly.

That said, the level design in Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is phenomenal. Traps and platforming take advantage of Rose’s abilities, including ones she earns throughout her adventure. It takes precision and good reflexes to maneuver through them, and it never gets old. It can get frustrating, though, especially if you’re going back and forth a ton. Still, finding what you need after a seemingly impossible challenge feels so good.

Slaves to our family’s wishes

As the first new 2D Castlevania in decades, there have been noticeable increases in graphical fidelity since then.

Belmont’s Curse blends 2D with 3D to bring a Dead Cells-like style to the gameplay and look. It does keep the drawn silhouettes of characters for dialogue, but in-game cutscenes are all flat 3D. While the pixelated depth in past titles like Symphony of the Night and Order of Ecclesia is sorely missed, Evil Empire’s redesign works well with the series and fits right in.

Frame-rate-wise, there were rarely any hiccups during the playthrough. There was a stutter or two during certain moments with tons of monsters, but it was pretty seldom. However, there were a handful of glitches with the audio, as it would cut in and out and, often, restart with each level transition. While rare, some glitches with the gameplay, like phased-out enemies or awkward platforming, would happen.

It’s also important to mention that it can be quite a difficult game. The series is known for being brutal, and Belmont’s Curse is no exception. A death can bring you way back and reset tons of progress. It’s a worthwhile challenge, but it is one that takes time and patience. Bosses will be the bane of many people’s existence, as some of them, especially late-game ones, are super difficult. It can feel a bit overkill, but it’s nonetheless satisfying to whittle them down and then finally get the last laugh.

In short, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is classic Castlevania brought to the modern age. Evil Empire and Konami have crafted a title that, while it’s not the huge blockbuster many would hope for, is a well-done action platformer. It doesn’t go too far outside the box, but it makes the most of what it does have.

With fantastic level design and combat, the franchise is in a position to return to its glory days and its bloody reign over the action platformer genre.

Should you play Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility features

While the game touts its difficulty, there are available accessibility features to lessen it. There are also various visual adaptations for thicker outlines or colorblind mode. In addition, subtitles are available in different languages, as well as voice-overs. However, despite some accessibility, some things, like one-hit-kill traps, exist and can be frustrating.

How I reviewed Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

I played Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse for around 16 hours, seeing much of the game’s map, bosses, and secrets. I also got many of the available weapons and spells, as well as heart and mana containers. In addition, I did play the demo, which was released prior to the game’s release, and transferred the save file from that to the full title.

I played the game on a base PS5 with the DualSense Wireless Controller and HyperX Cloud 3 wired gaming headset, all on a Roku 4K TV.

First reviewed October 2026

When you read ‘video game fashion’, you likely picture faintly embarrassing Pokémon-inspired onesies, awkward PlayStation-branded rucksacks, or cringeworthy Sonic the Hedgehog T-shirts. But the world of video game and lifestyle collaborations has changed markedly over the last few years. With gaming becoming more of a major cultural force, higher-end brands have started to get involved.

You can probably already think of some examples. It wasn't long ago that cult streetwear brand ARK/8 launched a capsule inspired by the world of Elden Ring at the peak of that game’s popularity, including a coat that made headlines thanks to its eye-watering $1,700 price tag.

On the more approachable end of the cost spectrum, premium watchmaker Hamilton has been collaborating with some of the biggest names in gaming for years and has big plans for the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launch in just a few weeks.

From Hollywood to high scores

“What’s fantastic about Hamilton is that the brand keeps working to its DNA and its roots,” explains Hamilton International CEO Francesca Ginocchio as we chat about the company’s gaming efforts. “I would say the American spirit of the brand, now with Swiss movement, is very strong, as is the link with cinema and entertainment, which has been so consistent starting back in 1957 with Elvis Presley.”

The King of Rock and Roll himself famously owned and frequently wore a Hamilton Ventura, the watch even appearing on his wrist in the 1961 musical film Blue Hawaii. The asymmetrical design became so synonymous with the star that the model is still dubbed the ‘Elvis watch’ today.

Hamilton continues to work closely with the glamorous world of Hollywood today, collaborating with directors including Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve to create custom pieces for titles like Tenet and Dune: Part Two.

“We have been in more than 300 movies so far, but we keep on trying to update ourselves,” Ginocchio continues. “Gaming is really a new part of the DNA of a brand linked to entertainment and movies. It’s the next step.”

Hamilton’s gaming collaborations began back in 2021, when eagle-eyed Far Cry 6 players might have spotted a custom titanium field watch on protagonist Dani Rojas’s wrist. Designed specifically for the game, Hamilton made 1983 identical real-world pieces available for dedicated fans to buy.

For a tie-in product, the design was understated: a vintage brown leather strap, military-style titanium case, and a simple watch face with beige numbering. It looked like an object that could plausibly exist in the game’s fictionalized Yara setting, which draws heavily on the aesthetic of modern-day Cuba. You would be hard-pressed to identify it as a collab unless you spot the vertical line dividing the dial’s number six in a reference to the game’s logo.

According to Ginocchio, this subtlety is by design and all in view of delivering a product that feels authentic to the fictional universe: “We have this credibility in the entertainment world, and we apply how we work with movies to the gaming industry. Basically, we try to do the best watch for the character in the movie or in the game.”

Mission ready

This approach is evident in Hamilton’s latest video game endeavor, a collaboration with the upcoming blockbuster first-person shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.

Fan-favorite hero Captain Price wears a Hamilton Khaki Field watch on his wrist throughout the story campaign, with a matching model releasing alongside the game.

It’s a pairing that Ginocchio says came naturally given the brand’s heritage. “When the Call of Duty collaboration came up, a big pillar of a business and big part of our story, or DNA, is the Khaki collection,” she explains. “It was born in the US and used in World War One and World War Two. It’s very recognizable; Khaki, I would say, is almost a brand within the brand. If you have a Khaki on your wrist, everybody can tell you’re wearing a Hamilton, and Call of Duty was the perfect combination to put all that storytelling and this part of the collection in a game.”

The Hamilton x Modern Warfare 4 special edition is outfitted with a 38mm black PVD-coated stainless steel case, a rugged material in an unassuming color befitting a man trying to keep a low profile.

There is some brightness, though, in the highlighter yellow arrow of the second hand and little triangle shape at 12 o'clock – a dominant color in the upcoming game’s marketing. Otherwise, the dark green numbers are perfectly legible against the black dial and, if you look closely, you’ll spot the Korean character 사 in place of the usual Arabic number, reflecting the game’s Korea setting and mirroring its branding.

It’s paired with a durable green fabric strap for a look that the brand says is inspired by British-issued service watches. Interestingly, this model uses Hamilton’s mechanical H-50 movement, which offers an 80-hour power reserve but requires hand winding.

Ginocchio notes this as another conscious choice steeped in history, saying that "Mechanical hand winding was really important for us" as it harkens back to old service watches and "really represents Hamilton."

She goes on to explain that, although the finished watch is something entirely new, it’s important to use existing real-world models as a starting point to maintain believability. She also says every design decision was the result of close conversation with Activision and the Call of Duty team: “It’s really done in collaboration, because we don’t want to make the perfect Hamilton watch. We want to make the perfect watch for the character of the game, and that’s a different story.”

Custom packaging is also an important part of the real-world product, and the Hamilton x Modern Warfare 4 watch comes nestled inside a cigar-box-like travel case – a not-so-subtle allusion to Price’s frequently lighting up in-game.

Never slowing down

This isn’t Hamilton’s first Call of Duty collaboration: the brand released a special edition Black Ops 7 model last year (worn in-game by multiplayer operator Axel Vermaak).

Last year’s watch was noticeably tamer, however, with far fewer customized elements and little more than a branded caseback to set it apart at a glance – something that many online commenters were quick to lament.

The CEO says that the choice to make this year’s model more adventurous came as a result of such feedback: “Last year, we had some enthusiastic people, and some people who were saying, ‘Oh, but we wanted something more customized. You could have done more!’ [...] People that buy a Hamilton watch, they are passionate, and so we listen to them.

"This year we said, ‘Okay, let’s do something stronger. Something with more differentiation.’ [...] This year, as it’s the second collaboration, we feel we can push a little more and go with something more aggressive.”

Of course, for well-known brands like Hamilton, gaming collaborations are a way to reach a new audience outside of their core market. “We have our usual watch 'passionates' who have to buy everything we propose, and they will go for this because it's something totally new, totally fun,” she adds. “Then we have many, many people who are gaming passionate – but they don’t know about Hamilton, and they get to know us.”

It’s a strategy that seems to be working, with Ginocchio stating that Hamilton’s top sellers “are all watches with a movie or storytelling behind them” and teasing that there are even more collaborations to come. “We already have three new projects for 2027,” she reveals. “It’s a long-term strategy; we want to keep on going and be consistent.”

You can learn where to buy the Hamilton x Modern Warfare 4 special edition via the brand’s official website, or see it in-game when Modern Warfare 4 launches for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC on October 23, 2026.

• Blizzard Entertainment says it learned plenty of lessons from World of Warcraft Classic: Season of Discovery
• It acknowledged that "we were going too far" with class changes in Season of Discovery and "Forever will be a lot more careful and cautious with slower class changes"
• The studio also learned "what levers we could create to help us manage the in-game economy" in Forever

Blizzard Entertainment has learned a lot from World of Warcraft Classic: Season of Discovery, but it's taking care not to overindulge in class experimentation for World of Warcraft: Forever.

In the same lengthy interview with TechRadar Gaming, where Blizzard confirmed it doesn't plan to modernize Forever's classes, as it wants to preserve the Classic experience, the team shared what it learned from Season of Discovery, a seasonal release for Classic that reimagines progression systems, adds new abilities, unconventional class roles, and redesigned instances, and how it will apply those lessons to Forever.

The team said that it had fun exploring class changes, but admitted it went "too far" and is taking steps to be more considerate with how it applies updates in Forever.

"We pushed every class to the limit and explored every power fantasy on every class," Blizzard said. "But we knew we were going too far. It’s like eating all your Halloween candy on October 31. It’s fun and amazing, but afterward you are sick to your stomach.

"Forever will be a lot more careful and cautious with slower class changes."

Another lesson it learned from Season of Discovery was "what levers we could create to help us manage the in-game economy," something that sometimes suffers from botting and real-money trading (RMT).

It told us that it's actively working to combat RMT in Forever and has already devised penalties that, depending on the terms of service infraction, could result in permanent bans.

Blizzard continued, saying, "We built several systems both under the hood and player-facing that allowed us to control the inflow and outflow of key resources, which led to a much healthier economy, with much less problematic behavior such as RMT."

RMT has always been a huge issue in WoW, whether it's retail or Classic, and Blizzard confirmed it has "a number of new systems in place" to support detection.

"It’s a cat and mouse game, so talking too much about our plans here could tip our hand," it said. "Suffice to say, we are watching very closely, and engaging in RMT is not worth putting your account at risk."

Blizzard has also addressed WoW: Forever's controversial Skyborne race and explained why the Elf race is available to both Alliance and Horde. It's also shared why Summoning Stones won't be in the upcoming game.

There’s little else quite so satisfying in gaming as a really chunky parry sound effect. When you read your opponent precisely and time a deflection to perfection, hearing that impactful audio cue as a reward is about as good as it gets — especially if you can follow it up with a devastating finishing move. Valor Mortis nails this.

I never tired of hearing the reverberated twang of blades clashing in my time with the first-person ‘Souls-like’ from One More Level. And given how much time is spent duelling with the reanimated corpses of Napoleonic soldiers, body horror monstrosities, and a few unique creatures I won’t spoil, it’s really something the developers had to nail.

So, I’m pleased to say that they have, and it’s one reason why I stuck with Valor Mortis through several of its other less successful aspects.

The opening, however, is strong. You awaken on a battlefield, surrounded by corpses, the rousing voice of Vincent Cassel as Napoleon in your ear encouraging you to move forward. But this conflict has turned into something far worse than just blades and cannon fire. A plague of sorts has torn through the land, transforming humans into monsters and unlocking mystical powers for you to use in your quest to understand exactly what’s happened while you’ve slumbered.

It’s all a setup that fits the Dark Souls-inspired core of the game, with its dangerous, foreboding, war-torn world to explore. This time, lanterns serve as the safe spaces to save your progress, level up using the blood from dead enemies, tweak your build with several skill-tweaking gems, and restart from when you inevitably die.

Your power to fight back against the horrors builds slowly and doesn’t ever get massively expansive. First, a sabre. Then, a pistol. After that, well, it’s the ability to shoot fire from your hands and put enemies in stasis. You can switch between these and a handful more melee, ranged, and magical powers at will — and will often need to do so to tackle different enemy types most effectively.

Bonjour

For example, basic soldiers can be taken out with a few sword slashes. A more imposing axe-wielding officer is better handled by keeping your distance as you burn it with fire to set off the explosive keg on its back. There’s a malformed grenadier who protects its sack of explosives with an engorged hand, but when it moves to lob a grenade at you, a well-timed shot can cause a massive explosion.

As you proceed forward, each encounter requires you to assess whichever threats you’re facing and break down the best way to take them out or exploit a weakness with the tools at your disposal. Of course, you can always go wailing in with a sword, but it’s rarely the smartest move. You have limited stamina, and the aggressive enemies can obliterate you in just a few hits.

As is the trial-and-error nature of these types of games, it takes a few encounters with some new foes to get the better of them, but I wish Valor Mortis wasn’t so obsessed with the trickery of it all. Long delayed attacks that are preceded by multiple feints and five seconds of interpretive dance before a sudden blow pulverises you is kind of funny the first couple of times, but by the dozenth time I was getting irate.

The same goes for some aspects of the level design, which is regularly full of traps and “gotcha” moments. Enemies pop up out of bushes, others surprise you from behind doors, items are placed for you to be ambushed, or trigger rocks falling on you, or make you step on sections of floor that fall out from under you. I get that these moments are meant to keep you on your toes, but when they happen repeatedly in quick succession, they start to feel cheap rather than challenging.

What I do like is that at least Valor Mortis mixes up linear gauntlets with open areas that give you more freedom in how you approach. There are opportunities to sneak up or around to get better vantage points and backstab enemies for an instant kill or significant damage. Thinning out larger groups is definitely something you’ll need to do, as even facing just two enemies at once puts you at a massive disadvantage in the game’s first-person view.

Variety is added further with some fantastic sections that combine the frenetic platforming of the team’s previous Ghostrunner series with the tight combat mechanics to create some entertaining and inventive set pieces. A section across broken-up ships that are suspended in time above the sea is a highlight, as you hop and swing between the splintered decks, take out snipers with your musket, and slash through any remaining soldiers prowling around.

Finding its footing

On the other hand, a diversion into a mine is perhaps one of the game’s most dreary and aggravating sections. Here, lots of tight, dark, and windy corridors are not the easiest to see or fight in. Then, while you’re also trying to dodge and parry different enemies, the game decides to throw freewheeling minecarts that can almost kill you in one hit down these same small alcoves at the same time. A fun idea, in theory, but there’s a point where a situation becomes too chaotic for you to assess it and react to it quickly enough, and so my approach changed to brute force and luck rather than skill.

But then I was quickly brought back again by another thrilling on-rails segment that makes full use of all abilities and weapons you’ve gathered until now, before culminating in a surprising out-of-this-world boss fight that puts the rewarding parrying mechanics front and centre.

When that works, it really works. And the flourishes One More Level adds with ranged weapons and magical abilities are welcome tactical options — even if you will have to rely on swordplay more than anything else. The fact I kept getting beat up but wanted to keep coming back to nail a parry combo shows where the strengths of Valor Mortis lie. It’ll likely scare many away, but if challenging Souls-likes are what you enjoy, here’s another with an intriguing premise and a neat twist to add to your list.

Should you play Valor Mortis?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility features

Valor Mortis offers very few accessibility features. In terms of dialogue, there is only an option to adjust the subtitle size between small, medium, and large. Mouse and keyboard, and controller options are available, with full key rebinding possible on the former and several control schemes available to choose from on the latter. You can also adjust the field of view, turn off or tone down camera shaking, as well as turn blood splatter and dismemberment on or off if you prefer a less gory experience.

How I reviewed Valor Mortis

I played over 10 hours of Valor Mortis on PC using an Xbox Wireless Controller and playing audio through my Bose QuietComfort Headphones. I’m using a fairly mid-range rig with a Ryzen 5 9600X, an AMD Radeon RX 9060XT, 48GB of RAM, and a Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD. My monitor is the MSI MAG 27CQ6F.

With some tweaks to the settings, I was able to play the game on High at 1440p with frame generation on and maintain a comfortable 100+ fps at almost all times. It may not be a hugely demanding game, but it looks good and runs smoothly, which is ideal for reaction-based combat.

First reviewed October 2026.

• Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko says every Remedy game has "absolute evil lurking in there"
• Alanko says he and Remedy rely on players' intelligence to understand the "psychological aspect to it all"
• He adds that "Remedy is not a dictating entity; we don’t do walking simulators, and we don’t hold hands"

According to Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko, every Remedy Entertainment title has a sinister aspect at its core, and he relies on the player's intelligence to understand it through his music.

When asked if there is a particular approach to the whole Remedy-verse score and musical landscape in an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Alanko explained that "There’s always the absolute evil lurking in there," with an added psychological aspect.

He said, "It affects instruments, instrumentation," as well as "the overtone series" (a sequence of musical pitches or frequencies that naturally sound above a main base note when it is played), as something so evil it "has a gravity" and "that affects the sounds, too, by bending and separating the overtones from each other."

"Its nature is very prominent, and there is a psychological aspect to it all: when you hear something familiar to be slightly off, it triggers your lizard brain into action, and with some preparation, we’re able to have a very suitable fight-or-flight reaction to introduce some action as a spice," Alanko said. "It is a very, very interesting process to affect people, to sort of kick them into action without actually telling them what to do."

As for how he and Remedy portray that "evil" across the games, he explained that they rely on players' understanding of subtext and context clues to find the meaning of what they're experiencing.

"Remedy is not a dictating entity; we don’t do walking simulators, and we don’t hold hands; we believe in intelligence and the ability to think and deduce something from the facts given," he said. "Same applies to music: a set of hints and a basic feeling may be introduced, but it ends there.

"A good mentalist always lets the audience do the magic. And everyone has seen those really awful marketplace magicians; nobody wants that for a birthday. Remedy is not that. We believe in a thinking, investigating, curious human being."

This applies across all of Remedy's games, whether it's Control, Alan Wake, or Quantum Break; however, Alanko and the studio know they can't regurgitate the same thing over and over again, but players will find a commonality between each series.

"Every new IP adds to the recipe, more or less, and though we don’t exactly want to repeat ourselves, there must be something in common and something familiar to the scores and the soundtracks, and that’s something you can’t really create overnight," Alanko said.

"The same applies with everything: it gets better with time. For instance, we introduced orchestra to Remedy’s sonic identity with Alan Wake, and it was there as is, but also as a slightly mangled version of itself, too. Then there was a very softly played grand piano, with enough compression to turn Manhattan into a peanut, with a reverb that ate half of Helsinki, basically. Quantum Break allowed for much more industrial and electronic flavours to enter the soup, and Control brought musique concrète in."

He added that those three qualities created "What I love to call 'A Remedy Sonic Bermuda Triangle', some top-notch processing," noting that a "huge amount of raw material is originated from acoustic sources, as "There’s very little 'just synths' stuff, although I do love my arsenal."

In the same interview, Alanko has suggested studios should value music more if they care about their games and avoid AI at all costs.

• World of Warcraft: Forever won't receive any new races from retail World of Warcraft
• Blizzard says its "main focus" is to "build off the foundational lore of Warcraft," since Forever exists in its own "continuity"
• It confirms that the stakes won't be as high as retail WoW to begin with, as "You aren’t THE hero in WoW: Forever, you are just A hero"

Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed that it doesn't plan to add any modern World of Warcraft races to World of Warcraft: Forever, since the game exists in its own timeline.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, where the WoW: Forever team discussed adding the controversial dual-faction Skyborne race and its plans for the game's future, Blizzard said it doesn't plan to reintroduce any races from Azeroth-based expansions, such as Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands, or Midnight.

"We have no plans to add races from WoW’s expansions at this time," Blizzard said, meaning fans shouldn't expect new races like Vulpera, Goblins, or Haranir.

And Blizzard's reasoning for avoiding the newer additions to retail WoW? It explained that it wants to build on the original Warcraft game because WoW: Forever essentially exists within its own timeline.

"Our main focus for the game is to build off the foundational lore of Warcraft," it said. "This means first and foremost the RTS [real-time strategy ] games, and we’ve hit on this right from the start with our content that picks up after the events of the new Warcraft 3: Forsaken Kingdom campaign.

"One of the liberating things about this game existing in its own continuity is that we can forge our own path forward and tell stories that serve the world of WoW: Forever first and foremost. It wouldn’t be fair to WoW: Forever and the players who want to see where this world is going for us to spend a ton of time trying to further flesh stories that have already been told extensively in the modern game."

Blizzard added that it plans to "keep our stories very grounded," explaining that while the stakes of modern WoW are "so vast" and "have that gravity and weight because of how far our characters have gone in that world," WoW: Forever will start "in a very different place."

"We may be a part of larger narratives and events, but how we interact with those narratives will be more subtle and grounded, just as was the case in original WoW," the team said, emphasising that "You aren’t THE hero in WoW: Forever, you are just A hero."

It continued, teasing, "That isn’t to say we’ll never go to some of the places that came in later WoW expansions, but we are fairly committed at this time to doing the WoW: Forever version of those places, not simply retreading the versions of these places that we’ve already seen."

Elsewhere in the same interview, Blizzard confirmed that it's actively working to combat real-money trading (RMT) in WoW: Forever.

Revisiting one of Omega Force’s most beloved works via Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered has been interesting. I got into the series quite late, so I’ve never had the same reverence for the earlier games that many other fans do. I’m happy to say that has changed with this remastered version.

This is a very different game compared to modern entries like Dynasty Warriors Origins or Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. Objectives are straightforward, battles (for the most part) tend not to last as long, and your KO count per battle is much lower than the thousands you rack up in newer installments.

Satisfaction lies elsewhere in Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered. It trades bombastic theatrics and ‘rule of cool’ battlefield domination for a more grounded approach. Instead of tearing across battlegrounds like a Category 5 hurricane, you’ll need to pick your fights more carefully and move with your army. Even basic peons are far more aggressive in this game, so ditching your allies isn’t exactly the wisest decision.

There are some cool quality-of-life additions, such as being able to counter enemy Strong and Special attacks with your own. A handy checkpoint feature lets you rewind the battle to key moments if you die, and there’s an honest-to-goodness dodge button that helps even the odds and can even be followed up with a counter if timed correctly. Alternatively, you can set the entire game to a ‘Classic’ mode, ditching all of this in favor of the original gameplay experience.

It’s an incredibly thoughtful remaster in that regard, offering options for newcomers, purists, and everyone in between. The visual facelift is nice, but not overbearing. Plus, additional content from the Xtreme Legends expansion is included here, too, making Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered an extremely beefy package for its relatively budget price tag.

Same as it ever was?

Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered, as ever, presents a loose interpretation of Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Which in itself is a romanticization of this turbulent wartorn era of Ancient China.

As an earlier entry, Dynasty Warriors 3 pretty much gives you the highlights rather than delving deep into character drama or motivations. It’s quite refreshingly simple, though individual playable officers do get their own cutscenes, endings, and the like.

You’ll spend the majority of your time in Musou Mode — effectively the game’s campaign. You will then choose an officer from one of four factions: Wei, Wu, Shu, or Other. The latter of which featuring officers with no set affiliation like Lu Bu, Dong Zhuo, and Diaochan.

Each officer has their own bespoke Musou Mode route, though some are longer than others. Even so, your goal on each map typically boils down to defeating a key enemy officer, while ticking off smaller objectives to boost your side’s morale or rob the enemy of powerful weaponry.

That might sound repetitive, and it can be if played over longer sessions. However, I think Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered is tailored to shorter bursts of play, and the bite-sized Musou Mode campaigns for each officer support that. Playing through a campaign will bolster that officer’s stats, as well as earn them new weapons and equippable items — the latter of which can be shared between all officers.

Part of the beauty of Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered is that it feels like a snowball of unlockables. You’ll routinely be bagging new playable officers, more powerful weapons, and potent rare items should you meet their conditions during a stage.

Some stages can also grant you an officer’s fourth or fifth weapon. These are extremely strong, but are typically gated behind higher difficulties and some rather stringent objectives so be sure to bring upgraded officers and plenty of patience for these.

Old and new

One of my favorite things about Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered is that it has options for basically everyone. You can play the entire game in either modern or classic modes. Classic is just that: Dynasty Warriors 3 as it played on the PlayStation 2, for the most part. No fancy extras. Does it feel a bit dated? Yes absolutely, but I’m happy it’s here as an option for purists.

The more modern take applies a bunch of quality-of-life changes and gameplay additions. As mentioned at the top, these include Strong and Special attack counters, a dodge, and a quick mount option for your horse. It helps the game feel a lot more fluid, in my opinion.

Was I still getting juggled to death by lowly peons for daring to take on an officer on my lonesome? Yep. More than a few times. But ultimately I did appreciate the more humbling experience here when I’m so used to treating enemy armies like mowing the lawn in more modern Musou games.

What’s nice is that if you’re somewhere in the middle — say, wanting a hybrid modern/classic experience — Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered supports that. Quality-of-life additions can be toggled individually in the options menu, allowing for a widely customizable experience.

Additions aside, Omega Force has elected to keep the original game’s amazing soundtrack and cheeseball dialogue fully intact. I love this because there are some truly hilarious line deliveries across cutscenes, and the overt mispronunciation of officer names just adds to the charm of it all. Battles have been spiced up with combat lines from later entries like Dynasty Warriors 8, though, which is a nice touch.

Should I play Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered?

Play it if…

Don't play it if...

Accessibility features

There aren't any dedicated accessibility toggles in Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered such as subtitles or colorblind modes. However, individual game settings can be toggled based on preferences. These include target-facing assists, dodging, power guards, and strong attack counters.

How I reviewed Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered

I played Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered for 15 hours on PC via Steam for this review. Being a remaster of an older title, my Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 was more than enough to run the game on maximum settings with zero hitches or issues.

My gamepad of choice was the Valve Steam Controller (2026), and I often hooked up my RIG 900 Max HS gaming headset to enjoy the game's banging soundtrack and corny dialogue sequences.

The majority of my playtime was spent in the main Musou Mode, unlocking characters, weapons, and optional rare items. Though I did delve into the Free and Challenge modes for a change of pace, too.

First reviewed October 2026

• World of Warcraft: Forever's classes won't be modernized, Blizzard says
• However, they will receive more "engaging depth" since some Classic classes felt "too simple"
• Blizzard wants to serve the "Classic" ethos, while also "adding things to freshen up the vanilla experience"

Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed it won't modernize World of Warcraft: Forever's classes, as it wants to align with the "Classic" experience, but some will receive more "engaging depth."

World of Warcraft has undergone many class and balance changes over the years, in both 'retail' and Classic, and with WoW: Forever launching next month, players can expect similar updates.

However, in an interview with TechRadar Gaming, the WoW: Forever team doesn't plan to dramatically alter vanilla classes fans are familiar with; instead, it wants to build on them to make them more engaging as part of its design framework.

Blizzard wants to make a "Classic Plus" experience centered around four design pillars (Nurture and Protect Social Experiences, Approachable and Familiar, World as the Main Character, and Journey before destination), which will help the team build on the vanilla experience while staying true to the game's established "core design, pacing, and tone."

With this in mind, Blizzard plans "to err on the side of simpler classes, but with engaging depth,". The company further explained that "some classes in the Classic era were too simple, so those have gained a few mechanics."

How many? "The level of mechanical complexity found in the beta classes is indicative of our intentions," the team said. "When considering encounter design, we want to align those with our core values. Namely Approachable and Familiar."

It explained that its encounter team played a lot of Classic dungeon and raid content "to truly get an understanding of how the Classic game felt," and it discovered that "encounters that were very approachable and systems that encouraged players to go out into the world, adventure, prepare, and come back ready to take on any sort of challenge ahead of them."

But when it comes to specific mechanics, "we want to empower the team to be creative and surprise the player, but we always want everything we do to point back to our core pillars."

Blizzard touched on the "complexity" of class combat, saying that it likes the pacing "the pacing and combat speed of original WoW, and that all the changes it makes to classes or raid content "need to still serve that" while also "adding things to freshen up the vanilla experience."

"Particularly in terms of classes," the team said, "as some classes or specs had wild power swings and/or sometimes uninteresting gameplay. That’s something we want to improve upon without drastically speeding up the game or making it overly complex or unapproachable."

As for specialization changes and multi-specs, the game already has Dual Specialization, which can be learned at level 40 for a cost, but there are "no plans to go past that."

"We do not want to have cheap respecs," Blizzard continued. "The first re-spec every hour is temporarily cheap in the beta. When the game goes live, the price of re-spec will climb quickly and only decrease once per week. We want players’ talent decisions to be meaningful. There is the possibility, however, of some increased re-spec utility coming to the Legacy talents in the future."

However, Blizzard does plan to incorporate "a lot of class changes in beta" with a rather ambitious update schedule. "When we do make changes, they will be batched up to all happen at the same time, rather than trickle in."

The company added that it anticipates frequent balance changes in the first six months, as it will be able to gather class performance data during this time. Blizzard said, "Initially, we plan this to be once per week."

However, the aim remains to make "very few design changes once the game goes live" on November 4.

What could possibly be left to say about Grand Theft Auto 5?

In the 13 years since the release of Rockstar Games’ open-world magnum opus, we’ve had a nonstop running commentary from YouTubers, podcasters, and game journalists about its world, writing, and many secrets. Entire careers have flourished based on the art of talking about GTA 5.

Rockstar’s 2013 open-world opus has had such an effect on culture since its initial release that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. It’s seen releases and remasters across three console generations. It’s won the highest awards in some countries and been outright banned in others. And an entire generation of gamers has grown into adulthood knowing the streets of Los Santos better than their hometown.

Alas, GTA 6 is on the horizon – following years of trailers, teasers, and unfortunate leaks, the sixth Grand Theft Auto game arrives on November 19, 2026. The fact that the game won’t launch with a physical disc version won’t stop it from dominating conversation and the sales charts on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC for years to come.

I’ve spent a good few years playing GTA 5 (in order to keep PEGI off our backs, that’s as specific as I’ll be getting) and have put in thousands of hours across various versions of GTA 5 and GTA Online.

As a final salute to Los Santos, I loaded up GTA 5 on my PlayStation 5 and PS4 to see how one of the best games of all time has evolved during its ten-year tenure at the forefront of gaming culture.

Re-remastered

Full disclosure: I’d never actually played the PS5-native version of GTA 5 before starting work on this piece, and loading up the game for the first time, I wasn’t sure if Los Santos could still surprise me after so many years spent drifting through its virtual streets.

Luckily, I was proven wrong — not in the prologue, which is showing its age at this point, but in my first drive around the open world. After speeding through the first few missions as Franklin, I stole an Aston Martin-esque sports car and blasted north on the Great Ocean Highway, stopping along the way to take in the enhanced visuals and classic San Andreas vistas, and ultimately spending around an hour just drifting through the streets and countryside trails.

GTA 5’s PS5 edition comes with a few new graphics modes, and the one that stands out is Performance RT. This combines the ray-tracing of the Fidelity mode and the 60 frames per second (fps) framerate of the Performance mode, and leaves the game looking simply gorgeous.

There’s only so far you can polish 13-year-old character models, and some textures are beginning to look a little JPEG-ish, but the environmental design, excellent weather effects, and increased framerate made GTA 5 feel more alive than ever. The game has always had best-in-class driving controls for a casual title, and passable combat and on-foot input, but doubling the framerate to a stable 60fps makes everything feel more immediate and responsive.

Speaking of driving, the PS5’s DualSense controller gets a few neat tactile responses with this version of the game — you’ll get a bump on the right trigger as your car changes gear, feel the weight of each trigger pull in a shootout, sense the rumble of passing traffic. It’s a small change, but one that pulls you even further into the game’s criminal underworld.

Not that immersion was ever an issue. I played GTA 5 on PS5 up until the end of the first heist, and I felt that, in some ways (more on that later), the writing had aged tremendously — though I’m not sure how much of that is down to my own progressing adulthood.

As I step into the latter half of my twenties, Franklin’s frustration with the everyday struggle at the start of the game comes through as incisive and relatable. Michael’s unstable ennui is, likewise, easier to imagine with the weight of the world resting a little heavier on my shoulders. I don’t quite relate to Trevor yet (maybe that’s one for my thirties). It’s quite something for a game to imprint on you as a blockbuster action experience in your teens, only to reveal some much more grounded undertones years later.

That’s not to say that GTA 5 is any less of a spectacle than it was at launch. This is where Rockstar really started presenting its games as directed, cinematic experiences, a formula it perfected with the follow-up Red Dead Redemption 2.

Even the first few missions — sneaking into Michael’s mansion as Franklin, the boat chase just a few missions later, and of course the jewel store heist — are loaded with moments ripped straight out of Hollywood. And a near-endless render distance makes launching off of Mount Chiliad on a dirt bike seem terrifyingly real.

It’s really quite amazing that GTA 5 originally launched on PlayStation 3. My original disc has been lost to time, but looking at videos, the original holds up pretty well — despite its 720p resolution and graphical patina, it’s still entirely enjoyable today. And beyond graphics, its gameplay and world wouldn’t feel totally out of place in a 2026 release.

The PS4 version holds up even better — I remember being stunned by Rockstar’s 2014 trailer for the remastered version of the game, which focused on new wildlife, non-player character (NPC) density, and graphical improvements. It’s the version of the game I’ve spent the most time in, thanks in large part to these updates, and it still feels utterly alive today.

Cultural impact

Indeed, the massive reaction to GTA 6 proves that the Grand Theft Auto series is very much alive in the public consciousness, even if the long wait for its next entry rendered it dormant for a while.

It’s worth remembering how totally dominant GTA 5’s hold over online culture has been, especially for the first five years of its life cycle. We’ve seen countless YouTube video essays debating Mount Chiliad conspiracy theories and in-game UFO sightings, let’s play channels dedicated to covering GTA Online’s endless updates, and scammy shitposters claiming to have early copies of GTA 6.

Many of us will remember the mad dash to our gaming setups the day a new heist was added to GTA Online, or endless hours spent playing minigames and missions to grind for a new sports car or apartment.

Then there are the memes. ‘Watch your jet’. ‘Davey!’. Franklin showing up to defend his home. The green vs purple alien war. The Welcome to Los Santos texts. ‘We got X before GTA 6’. As one of the most-played games in the world for its entire lifespan, GTA 5 has propped up the online nonsense industry for years, priming the algorithm for an inevitable landslide of GTA 6 content in about a month’s time.

And as one of TechRadar’s contributing music nerds, I just have to talk about the radio stations. GTA 5 introduced me and thousands of others to some of the best music of the 2010s. I will never, ever forget the first time I raced Lamar through the streets of LS in a boosted sports car to the sound of ‘Appetite for Destruction’ by N.W.A., courtesy of West Coast Classics, or driving up to Paleto Bay to Frank Ocean’s Blonded Radio station, or idling in Vinewood while listening out for Cara Delevigne’s insane quips as the host of Non-Stop Pop.

In large part, GTA 5 is responsible for my love of rap music, dance music, country music, and radio DJing, which I continue to utilise as a writer and musician today.

Where do we go from here?

GTA 5 stands as a true titan of modern gaming and holds a deep-rooted place in my heart and hard drive alike. With that said, it’s not perfect, and jumping back into Los Santos left me with a couple of things that I hope GTA 6 can improve on.

First of all, GTA 5 is, in part, a story about contemporary masculinity struggling and failing to cope with late-stage capitalism – but in telling this story, it treats its female characters horribly. The only female characters with any substance are Michael’s wife Amanda and daughter Tracey, and Franklin’s aunt Denise, all of whom are portrayed as whiny annoyances that serve as plot devices for the male characters to revolve around and objectify.

In fairness, the game is a satire of American culture, which has no shortage of problems with sexism and objectification, and there’s an abundance of annoying male characters as well – neurotic heist-master Lester Crest and TV host Lazlo come to mind. But the game’s male characters get the chance to develop through or into their flaws, even if, as in Lazlo’s case, it’s only to become more of a punching bag.

Rockstar has said it’s leading with a more grounded tone for GTA 6, and the game introduces the series’ first female protagonist, Lucia, which suggests we’ll be getting at least one fully realised female character.

Gamers’ expectations and the window for jokes about gender have both changed quite significantly since 2013, and GTA Online grew to feature several key female NPCs throughout the 2010s, so I’d be surprised if GTA 6’s other female characters don’t have a little more substance.

We already know GTA 6 will introduce a hugely expanded map and RDR2-style role-playing mechanics, so my other request concerns how we get around that new immersive world. For lack of a better term, GTA 5 has a bit of jank about it – the ‘tap to sprint’ mechanic has never been anything but annoying, and its strange approach to climbing ledges and ragdoll physics is good for a laugh but not great in the heat of a firefight or police chase. Rockstar, with its infinite budgets and massive staff, is certainly powerful enough to smooth over the few bumps left in the GTA experience.

With these complaints well considered, GTA 5 still stands tall over the gaming industry, not only as a titanic financial success, but as an enduring blueprint for open-world excellence. It remains a totally gripping gameplay experience and, despite some dated writing, a genuinely cinematic heist adventure. In short, GTA 6 has a lot to live up to.

Before brandishing Geralt of Rivia's twin blades and braving a "new game" in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, the main menu invites you to check out the re-release's patch highlights.

Clicking the option opens a top-level list of the title's abundant updates, improvements, and enhancements, from "Upgraded Visuals and Performance" to a "Reimagined Skill System." But while these entries showcase the game's most significant and ambitious inclusions, some of the remaster's best new features are hidden under the catch-all category of "And Much, Much More."

For example, the fact that the grey-maned monster hunter no longer navigates ladders and waist-high ledges like a toddler sorting out their motor skills might impress seasoned fans more than any fancy new lighting tech. Looting resources while riding Roach – another awesome update that doesn't earn its own bullet point – will similarly delight anyone who previously endured getting on and off Geralt's trusty steed every time they wanted to pick a flower.

While these subtle tweaks aren't as sexy as, say, the stunning visual update, they are welcome, meaningful fixes that not only make the game better, but also reflect CD Projekt Red's larger commitment to deliver more than the bare minimum to make a quick buck.

Much more than a pretty makeover

Of course, while you're effortlessly gathering alchemy ingredients from the saddle, you'll indeed also appreciate the significant graphical leap the game has achieved. The Witcher 3's 2022 next-gen update was already a looker, but the remaster's response to it is a confident, "Hold my beer (or Redanian Lager).

The lighting effects – and resulting shadows – are far more realistic, textures pack noticeably sharper details, and flora-filled environments look as though they've leapt off a postcard. Overall, there's an across-the-board fresh layer of detail and depth that makes the Continent come to life like never before.

If you're tackling the Wild Hunt on a PlayStation 5 Pro, you also have some say in just how striking you want the game to look. A Performance mode uncaps the framerate, guaranteeing the game runs at 60 FPS minimum – but is capable of hitting as high as 90 FPS.

Meanwhile, a dedicated Ray Tracing mode consistently hovers around 60 FPS, while funneling more horsepower into rendering the absolute best lighting effects. Both options more than get the job done, though I preferred the slight visual bump and solid framerate offered by the latter selection.

Combat worthy of a Witcher

It also doesn't hurt that you can now soak in the picturesque sights – such as sunlight realistically filtering through dense foliage – without having to pause every few seconds to reposition Roach. That's right, another "And Much, Much More" addition addresses your mount's previously frustrating collision detection, ensuring the 1,000-plus-pound animal no longer gets caught up on jutting branches and small rocks.

Roach's smoother movements have also apparently rubbed off on Geralt, as the sword-swinging, spell-casting hero not only navigates environmental obstacles with ease, but wields his steel like a proper badass on the battlefield. Previous iterations of The Witcher 3 have been endlessly praised for their graphics, storytelling, quest design, and content-packed open world, but their combat mechanics were typically left out of those acclaim-filled conversations.

That's been remedied in the remaster, as CD Projekt Red has seemingly reworked the clunky combat from the ground up. Where the protagonist's attacks previously felt loose and lacking weight, they now pack a more precise, impactful punch. But not at the cost of speed, as enemy encounters also feel faster, more fluid, and kinetic.

Some factors – from smoother animations and smarter, more reactive enemies to new finishing moves and, crucially, a dynamic camera that no longer struggles to keep up with the lightning-quick action – combine to deliver an experience that now has me eager to breach any bandit camp or monster lair I might stumble upon.

An unbeatable, beast-slaying bundle

CD Projekt Red could have polished the visuals, improved the combat, added a few quality-of-life fixes, and then collected a fat paycheck for their efforts. But they dug deep, considered fan feedback, and made the typical remaster look like a stain on the titular beast-slayer's boots.

Speaking of Geralt's well-trodden footwear, a new style-forward transmog system allows you to wear the armor and wield the weapons you want without sacrificing any attached stats. You'll find further flexibility in the reimagined skill system, which offers newfound freedom for molding your playstyle, experimenting with skills, and generally forging a meaningful character progression path on par with contemporary RPGs.

But these inclusions, too, barely scratch the surface of a lengthy list of improvements that could over-encumber Roach's Beauclair saddlebags. Quest tracking has also been streamlined, looting is less tedious, and meditation is now more immersive and interactive. All that, and a much deeper photo mode ensures you'll spend more time snapping pics than swinging your swords.

Needless to say, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is the absolute best, most definitive version of a game that was already a genre-defining banger when it launched 12 years ago. Toss in the fact that this impressive update also includes the base game's two massive, equally excellent expansions – Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine – and securing this bundle is a no-brainer for anyone who's yet to conquer the Continent.

Best of all, those who already own any previous version of the award-winning RPG won't pay a single Novigrad Crown for the update, as it's completely free for returning fans.

Should I play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered?

Play it if…

Don't play it if...

Accessibility features

On top of standard settings for adjusting subtitles, interfaces, and HUD elements, The Witcher 3 includes an expansive suite of accessibility options under a new, dedicated section dubbed "Bard's Ballad."

This mode includes several default presets – from unlimited item durability to faster boats – meant to make the game less taxing for those who might experience mental fatigue.

But the mode's nearly 20 toggles can also be tailored to individual needs, so different options, like color-blind-friendly Witcher Senses or fisheye Witcher Senses, can be selected individually based on a particular player's needs and preferences.

How I reviewed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered

I played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered for 30 or so hours. Having already invested dozens upon dozens of hours in more traditional playthroughs of both the original 2015 game and its 2022 next-gen update, I approached the remaster differently, focusing on the many fresh features, updates, and enhancements that separate it from its previous iterations.

I played the game on a PS5 Pro using my budget TCL 4K 65" TV, with HDR enabled. I tested the platform's Performance and Ray Tracing modes, finding the latter offered the preferred experience. For audio, I tested with both my TV's onboard stereo speakers and Sony's PlayStation Pulse Elite headset.

First reviewed October 2026

In my books, the most satisfying part of any action role-playing game (ARPG) like Diablo or Titan Quest is the constant feeling of progression. Nothing quite compares to watching your little on-screen hero grow from a tiny ant that can barely bash their way through a pack of lowly wolves to a maxed-out bringer of destruction that mows through entire armies without breaking a sweat.

Minecraft Dungeons 2’s aggressive level scaling robs the player of that experience. In the more than 12 hours it took for me to beat the story campaign, I never felt more powerful. Sure, I unlocked more interesting abilities and got to try a variety of weapons, but the amount of time required to take down each newly spawned foe remained near-constant throughout.

A friend even joined my game towards the end of my playthrough, with their level 1 character effortlessly keeping pace with my level 40 one throughout the final encounters, really underscoring the system’s ridiculousness. I’m sure the intention here is to make it easy for friends to jump into the same lobbies and play together without having to worry about their respective levels, but it left me wondering what the point of all the grinding actually is.

Blocky buddies

It’s a shame, because there is still some good in Minecraft Dungeons 2. This standalone spinoff recreates the blocky look of the popular Minecraft survival game expertly, with its own more stylized twists that make the world instantly recognizable, yet refreshingly new thanks to more expressive lighting and Pixar-like character animations that make everything pop even from the distant isometric perspective.

I may have lamented the fact that I couldn’t wow my friend with my character’s power, but the co-op experience is otherwise well done. Creating a group with up to three companions is impressively straightforward no matter where they play, thanks to seamless cross-platform connectivity. There’s even couch co-op, which is quite rare in 2026 and worth praising. The ability to play with others easily goes a long way in making Minecraft Dungeons 2 genuinely worthwhile for younger players.

For everyone else, however, everything here is just too straightforward to appeal. The enemy variety is sorely lacking for starters. The expected Minecraft favorites like the Creepers, Zombies, Skeletons, and, of course, the iconic Chicken Jockey are all present and accounted for, along with the evil grey-skinned Illagers from the first Minecraft Dungeons game. Unfortunately, most enemies function indistinguishably. Those with projectile weapons spray arrows at you from afar, while the rest just rush towards you in a big group.

The strategy in every encounter is to simply mash the attack button and occasionally dodge, even as more powerful Illagers with magic attacks are introduced. The boss fights are equally bland, forcing you to whittle down gigantic health bars for minutes at a time while waves of low-level enemies spawn in. To make matters worse, many of them are repeated throughout the campaign with little variation.

It’s frustrating because, on paper, the combat does have some depth: you have a melee and ranged attack, plus three equipped abilities granted by items that you’ve managed to find.

The weapon selection is decently varied, with scooping shovels and fast-attacking double daggers performing very differently from slow-swinging war hammers or claymores, and a steady trickle of new gear encourages you to experiment. They can be upgraded too, with unlockable enchantments that add little mechanics such as a lightning strike that triggers at the end of a chain attack.

Your abilities are powered by a blue soul-meter, which fills up a little with each defeated foe. I think the intention is to create some form of rhythm, with you alternating between melee, ranged, and your abilities, but the fundamental problem is that there’s just no real strategy to any of it.

Sure, you could probably spend ages creating a build with complementary gear – though there’s no real reason to bother when the aforementioned enemy scaling wipes out any real power gain.

Lacking craft

Much was made of Minecraft Dungeons 2’s world in its marketing. It’s much more open than the previous game, though I wouldn’t exactly call it a true open-world.

The map is designed like a linear corridor that funnels you from one story mission to another with no real room for exploration. Yes, there are side quests and optional dungeons scattered around, but none of the ones that I sampled offered anything that felt meaningfully distinct from the main story.

Regarding the story, the most polite way to describe it would be ‘functional’. It’s presented entirely in second person through a narrator that is devoid of personality. There are no memorable non-player characters (NPCs), no charming companions, no real atmosphere at all — just a bland summary of events.

The game also serves as the Minecraft community’s introduction to The Sift — a new dimension that’s being added to the main game sometime next year. It shows up a few times in the campaign in both procedurally generated encounters and a hand-crafted map. It's got a very distinct aesthetic and its own unique enemies, though it's sadly mechanically indistinguishable from the normal world as you navigate through it spamming attacks.

Like many elements of Minecraft Dungeons 2, it feels like a missed opportunity. Everything here is perfectly functional, but it’s just bland to the point of tedium. If the pitch was a skimmed-down version of Diablo for kids, then developers Mojang and Double Eleven have delivered a serviceable product.

Creativity is a core part of the Minecraft brand, and here I wish the team had been more adventurous.

Should I play Minecraft Dungeons 2?

Play it if…

Don't play it if...

Accessibility features

Minecraft Dungeons 2 has some accessibility options. The game features a guidance trail that is enabled by default. Subtitles are used throughout, with customizable sizing, color, and background opacity.

There are two font options: the default stylized font and a simplified, easier-to-read version. There are also multiple color blind modes, a high-contrast mode, and the ability to set your own HUD colors.

How I reviewed Minecraft Dungeons 2

I played more than 13 hours of Minecraft Dungeons 2 on my RTX 4090-powered PC using the Turtle Beach Pacific Skyline Wireless Controller as my main peripheral, along with a 1080P Lenovo monitor and Logitech computer speakers.

I completed all missions of the single-player campaign and experienced a decent amount of side content both solo and with a friend.

First reviewed October 2026

• Blizzard Entertainment has explained why World of Warcraft: Forever won't have Summoning Stones
• It says, "Easy, quick access to teleports shrink the world"
• Summoning Stones would disrupt the experience it's trying to build

World of Warcraft: Forever won't feature Summoning Stones because Blizzard Entertainment believes quick access to teleporting would conflict with its design intentions.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, where the WoW: Forever team also discussed the controversial addition of the new Skyborne race, Blizzard shared its design philosophy for creating an authentic "Classic Plus" experience; it centered around four design pillars, which include: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences, Approachable and Familiar, World as the Main Character, and Journey before destination.

These pillars help the team build on the "vanilla" WoW world while also staying true to the game's established "core design, pacing, and tone."

A feature like Meeting Stones, also known as Summoning Stones among the player base, wasn't an option in vanilla, but was a convenient addition to retail WoW, letting players teleport their friends to a raid or dungeon entrance.

However, Summoning Stones is something WoW: Forever won't offer. Blizzard explained that teleporting would minimize the scale of the game's world, which would clash with a few of its four core design pillars, specifically Nurture and Protect Social Experiences and World as the Main Character.

"Making sure any change we make passes the muster of those pillars is a must," the WoW: Forever team said. "And certain convenience changes can very easily erode one or more of those pillars.

"Summoning stones are one of those. Easy, quick access to teleports shrink the world, and marginalize part of the identity of a class like Warlock. Thus, it fails muster against 'Nurture and Protect Social Experiences' and 'World as the Main Character'."

It continued, saying, "We have a lot of different players with a lot of different preferences joining us for this journey, which is a great thing, and makes it all the more important to hold the line when it comes to our pillars."

Blizzard said it has 22 years of data on how quality-of-life or convenience changes impacted "the social fabric of the game." However, with WoW: Forever, the studio is "going down a different path," meaning every update it introduces is "going to be well-informed by that experience and regulated by our pillars.

"It’s a great place to be," the team added.

• Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko explains the process of developing Dylan's theme song, which is Jesse's theme played backwards
• He explains how Jesse's theme was more about power, while Dylan's is "a source of growth"
• Alanko says, "Dylan’s is more upward-reaching, as if it was asking for permission for Dylan’s existence"

Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko has shared his process for developing Dylan's theme song, compared to how he designed Jesse's, his sister and the main character of Control.

In the same interview with TechRadar Gaming, where Alanko explained how he created the game's eclectic soundtrack for Remedy Entertainment, the composer said the method for writing Dylan's theme was distinct from Jesse's, because their origins start in different places.

Without going into spoilers, Alanko explained that their paths are different, but, "Due to their roots, they actually share the same theme - but Dylan’s is essentially Jesse’s theme backwards."

"It first appeared already in the original Control at a few points, but here I wanted to slap the gamer’s face properly with it," Alanko said. "They share the DNA, so the theme’s shared too. What was Jesse’s power theme is, for Dylan, a source of growth; it appears in different harmonies across the game, and depending on the events, the harmony root is changed under the melody a few times."

He added, "Jesse had her power theme played in direct conjunction with her position only in the ending, whereas Dylan’s appears all the way, texturizing his path from nothing to a superhero."

Alanko continued, explaining that "The scale of the protagonist is larger in Control Resonant," and while Jesse's theme "landed" and was "grounded" in a way that was "a 'THIS IS ME' statement," he said, "Dylan’s is more upward-reaching, as if it was asking for permission for Dylan’s existence."

"From the very early points of development, I had the feeling Dylan was asking for a justification for his release and his freedom," he added. "Dylan is an involuntary hero; although he chooses to become one, he just doesn’t know it in the beginning.

"By grabbing a walkie-talkie from a corpse hanging mid-air after having come out from the building is his knowingly made decision: 'I choose this.' He chose to walk that path, and I wanted to pinpoint and emphasize the attempt by creating a few very driving percussion patterns through the story."

While Jesse and Dylan have two different juxtaposing themes, Resonant also features a blended theme for both called 'Sibling Theme.' Alanko shared that the game's end credits track, 'The One I Once Knew,' "was easily one of my favourites," as 'Sibling Theme' "wouldn’t exist without it."

"We weren’t able to use any vocals with the 'Sibling Theme' as there was a metric ton of voiceovers happening, and we didn’t want to distract the gamer from the core feeling of the Broken Conduit, the place where 'Sibling Theme' is played through various devices and means," he said. "I had one of the music industry’s most beautiful voices appear on the end credit track, 'The One I Once Knew' (TOIOK), Amelia Jones, who recorded and edited her own vocals and sent me everything she had performed, and I didn’t have to change a thing from her selections. Awesome voice, awesome work ethic, awesome ear."