STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is getting its first proper expansion this year, titled Cost of Hope, and it looks stuffed to its icky mutant gills with classic STALKER series beats that the base game – while a powerfully engrossing survival FPS – missed out on. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant returns as an explorable, doubtless horrible addition to the game’s open world, and the story concerns the conflict between the rival Freedom and Duty factions that’s been simmering since the original STALKER.

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Perhaps sensing competition in the field of Japan-flavoured arcade racing games, Forza Horizon 6 devs Playground Games have revealed the open-world vroomer’s system requirements. Agreeably, they’re a sensible balance of attainable low-end fare – at 1080p, a GTX 1650 and 16GB of RAM are apparently all that’s needed for 60fps – and the kind of hulking graphics bricks that you’d expect for 4K ray tracing. Only the most baby-oiled of hypercars for the RX 9070 XT owners, you understand, though support for lil’ handhelds like the Steam Deck is confirmed as well.

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High-resolution monitors have become a lot cheaper over recent years, in contrast to a most internal component types, which are currently in a race to see who can plunge us into financial destitution the fastest. It wasn’t that long ago that the 4K, 160Hz, 27in panel of the Asus ROG Strix XG27UCG would put it out of reach for anyone who didn’t have access to a sovereign wealth fund, yet here it is, discounted to just £319 / $299. That’s only about half what it would cost to buy a new graphics card capable of actually running 4K games.

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I’ve been through much with my Razer Wolverine V3 Pro. Malenia, Blade of Miquella. Groal the Great. The bit in Dispatch where you have to choose a favourite doughnut and "Chocolate" isn’t an option. Then there’s the psychic shock of having a game controller than costs more than, say, 40 quid to begin with – it’s not something that immediately feels right.

The Wolverine V3 Pro itself, however, feels very right indeed. It's a solid and endlessly comfortable wireless pad, whose buttons are enriched with the pleasant mechanical clickiness of a high-end mouse. Cost-wise, it’s also a lot less now than when I got mine: Amazon US has it at 35% off during their Spring sale, while in the UK, Scan has it down from £190 to £130. Still premium, but worth it, in my eyes. And hands.

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The new Steam Machine remains an almost tragically distant prospect, despite Valve’s attempts at reassurance. But y’ know what the next best thing is? Not caring about hardware release dates, obviously. The second next best thing is to equip a Steam Deck with Ugreen’s handy 9-in-1 docking station, which is down from $60 to $40 in the Amazon US Spring Sale – and isn’t all that expensive in the UK either.

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Roguelite clone-stabber (and upsettingly effective paranoia generator) It Has My Face is skulking out of early access this month, a Steam news update confirming its 1.0 release for April 3rd 2026. Hooray, and also, arrrrrrgh. I’ve been following IHMF since its impressive first demo under the name DoubleWe, and its short, highly-strung bursts of deduction and one-hit-kill violence are as cleverly staged as they are stressful.

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If you read our verdict over the weekend, you’ll know that Mark and I found the anime-flavoured Screamer reboot to be a delightfully exaggerated bit of slidey arcade racing – albeit one that, in the story-based Tournament mode, sometimes becomes randomly, viciously hard for no readily apparent reason.

Judging by Screamer’s first update, which launched yesterday alongside game access for Digital Deluxe pre-orderers, those difficult spikes were an oopsie on the part of developers Milestone. Rather than send themselves on a Driving Awareness Course, though, they’ve "tweaked AI behaviors in various events to bring them closer to the intended difficulty," while announcing a future balance pass for the game’s difficulty settings. That’s good news for controller-chuckers and desk-smashers, though obviously as someone who progressed through Screamer before this update, I claim entitlement to the same Smug Bellend rights as those Elden Ring players who beat Pre-Patch Radahn.

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Regardless of whether Intel would say it out loud, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus both represent an attempt to right the wrongs of the original Arrow Lake/Core Ultra 200S family. That bundle of chips was, necessarily, more power-efficient and cooler-running than the hotheaded 14th Gen models before them, though this came at the cost of hamstrung gaming performance. Rarely a desirable quality in a gaming CPU, that.

These two Core Ultra 200S Plus (or Arrow Lake Refresh) processors do, in comparison, achieve some appeal. They’re inexpensive and excellent multitaskers, and while they do still have efficiency on their silicon brains, Intel have looked to bump game speeds back up by rejigging their innards into a less latency-prone layout.

Alas, it’s not enough. Not only are Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus slower in games than AMD’s best chips, they once again fail to convincingly outpace Intel’s own back catalogue – the 2023 vintage 14th gen processors, included.

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Battlefield 6 marks the first time, in all my years of hardwaring, that I have been summoned to someone’s house in order to make a PC game work. I can’t offer this Jim’ll Fix It service to everyone, not least because IGN’s lawyers have issues with the name, so I’ll just say this: Enabling Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 is inconvenient, but not as fiddly as it sounds, and can be done with at most a couple of toggles in your BIOS/UEFI’s Security section.

As it turns out, that’s probably the worst of BF6’s hardware worries. I don’t know who forgot to tell DICE that all FPS blockbusters must now be callously demanding graphics card shin-kickers, but in both the campaign and multiplayer, this seems to run quite... well? Likely well enough that as long as you’re on any reasonably modern rig, you might not need to do much twiddling with the visual settings.

Still. Let’s have a go at it anyway.

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