Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era will release in PC early access on April 30th, Hooded Horse and Ubisoft have announced. The new strategy RPG from developers Unfrozen is the first freshly baked HOMM game in over a decade, and will launch with a mixture of familiar and new modes, spanning singleplayer and multiplayer.

If you're new to the series – there is the faint but horrifying possibility that you were not yet born, when the last one came out - it's a turn-based affair with procedurally generated maps, where you alternate between tending to your towns and sending heroes, fantasy beasties and armies on quests.

Read more

Resident Evil director, Devil May Cry producer and former Tango Gameworks boss Shinji Mikami is now making games for Shift Up, developers of Stellar Blade. You know, the one with the shiny bums and quite good hack-and-slash mechanics. The one that has a DLC version of 2B off've Nier Automata (pictured). Shift Up have acquired Mikami's new company Unbound, which he founded in 2022 after leaving Tango.

Read more

I'll be honest right off the bat. As a single player Elder Scroller, the Elder Scrolls Online's never managed to hook me for more than a few hours. I've given it a couple of goes, usually during periods when it's gone free to play, but have always bounced off its vast MMOiness. Might the slew of fresh additions coming across the next couple of years be able to change that and finally convince me to spend significant time with ESO in the same way I have Fallout 76 in the past few years? The answer could be yes, if the naval combat and underwater exploration Zenimax have just revealed are as fun as they sound on paper.

Read more

Ho, wasteland packmules and sticky-fingered ornithologists! Embark have released a sizeable Arc Raiders update. Titled Flashpoint, it introduces a new shotgun, SMG and deployable together with a Close Scrutiny map condition, a fresh breed of Arc enemy, some cosmetic bundles, and a feeding boost for Scrappy the loot chicken, which will cause him to dig up a wider variety of more valuable items. As warned, they've also permitted all those awful Shredder things from Stella Montis to infest the other maps.

Read more

Well, that's certainly a bold strategy. Mark Gerhard, CEO of MindsEye developers Build a Rocket Boy, has said that the studio are indeed planning to add a new mission to the game which will "share some of the evidence of the sabotage". That'd be the sabotage from a malevolent third party which the exec's been alleging MindsEye faced around launch for a while now, with Gerhard also claiming that an investigation into it is currently in the hands of "authorities" in the UK and US.

Read more

There is always a risk with a live service game, or any game with only competitive elements, that it enters the Cool For Some Zone. This is a space that exists within a given game and also around it, a place where you can pull off Sick Tricks as a result of movement tech not purposefully included in the game, but born as an incidental result of mashing buttons in just the right way. And until today, Marathon found itself in said zone, but Bungie have made the call to patch out the offending issue.

Read more

As pretty (and ugly) as the Resident Evil games have become over the years, there is a quality to the original PS1 entries that lingers on in the hearts of many. That'll likely be partially down to the permanently raised heart rates of kids playing them too young everywhere. But I think the thing that endures in the ever popular PS1 aesthetic in the indie horror scene is that nasty griminess that just feels so at home. And Vultures - Scavengers of Death, a turn-based, extractiony take on Resident Evil, looks like it'll stay true to that vibe.

Read more

Well, the time has finally come. After releasing almost a decade ago, The Long Dark finally wraps things up today with today's release of Wintermute's fifth and final episode, The Light at the End of All Things. It's been a long time coming (the free episode update was originally slated for the end of 2025), but it marks the end of a tough, cold journey. Sorry, what's that? It's "not the end, but also an end"? Oh, my mistake!

Read more

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or, so the saying goes, but I'm pretty sure the ham sandwich I had at my friend's house when I was seven didn't cost me a penny. Still, in Crown of Greed, a fantasy real-time strategy game inspired by the likes of Majesty, the old adage certainly holds true. And with its release today, it can even be put into the test!

Read more

Traditionally, the words 'ergonomic' and 'gaming mouse' haven't really gone together, although Keychron sought to bring them together with its M5 mouse. It's a vertical mouse that brings your hand into a more natural position, while retaining the beefy internals to make this a suitable mouse for gaming workloads. Currently, it's down to just $60 from Amazon USA on the final day of the Spring Sale, marking out a new low price, which is always nice.

Read more

If you're looking to fit in a break from social media discourse in the near future, it's looking like May is going to be a good time for it. That's because ZA/UM's followup to Disco Elysium, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, is launching around then. And what better a game to post about than one which has a studio embroiled in a whole heap of mess.

Read more

A major French consumers group is taking Ubisoft to court over the publisher's ending of online support for The Crew in March 2024, rendering the notionally singleplayer-friendly open world racer unplayable. They're acting with the backing of the Stop Killing Games movement, who want publishers at large to stop yanking servers and taking games offline.

Read more

If you've ever longed for your Steam library to be a bunch of shelves littered with physical games you can touch, sniff, and agonise about having to shift if you move house, let me introduce you to Boxroom. It takes all of the games you've either bought for pennies in a sale and never got around to playing or paid through the nose for on release and have put 1000 hours into out of sheer sunk-cost fallacy. It sticks their front covers onto boxes you can use to fill a cosy customisable computer room.

Read more

There is a tiny wild sun trapped inside my crystal tower. I hear its garbled voice and catch the yellow of its fire through the blinding white blocks of the summit. The tower itself is so bright on the outside you can barely identify objects placed on it, but I have smashed the crust and dug a network of passages, and it’s shadier within. A realm of shining fog, slick as tooth enamel, with fissured, fugitive reflections that call to mind the beautiful quartz spacecraft in Noctis.

The relative gloom inside the tower implies that the structure’s external radiance is also a reflection. It appears to be caught in the glare of some celestial body, but if such a body exists, it emits radiation invisible to the naked eye, discernable only from its impact on other bodies. The skies of Lucid Blocks are dark and cloudy even by day, inasmuch as ‘day’ means anything in the game. There is one major astral feature, a hazy torus that neither rises nor sets, luminous enough to orient by when exploring the game's procedurally generated landscapes, but not enough to actually light your steps after dark. The only real sun here is the one below. The one I crafted. It slurs and shouts, nosing the walls of its prison.

Read more

Letters have been sent by the US Federal Trade Commission to the CEOs of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe, reminding them that there could be hell to pay if they deny customers access to their services because of said customers' political or religious views. Potential discrimination against those with Trumpy views are the body's main concern, but their push could also impact the buying of NSFW games.

Read more

A capacious and speedy power bank is a tech essential in my book for keeping all your stuff charged, be it a phone, headphones or a handheld games console such as a Steam Deck. This Anker Zolo option provides up to 30W of power for speedy charging, and has a hefty 20,000mAh capacity in a compact size. At the moment, this power bank is at the lower part of its price cycle on Amazon judging by price tracking graphs, working out to £25 on Amazon UK and $34 on Amazon USA. The latter deal is part of the final day of the US Amazon Spring Sale, too. That's an excellent price on such a powerful unit, giving you a compact and powerful option that's a surefire hit for when you're taking on your travels.

Read more

Eidos Montreal, developers of the most recent two Deus Ex entries, have laid off 124 staff. At the same time, they've announced that they're "parting ways" with veteran studio head David Anfossi, who'd been in that post for just under 13 years.

Read more

With the first few months of its latest target release year drawing to a close, the modders behind Skyblivion are looking to make some "final" and "vital" veteran additions to their team in order to get the ambitious remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine over the line. This comes after a delay late last year, which saw Skyblivion's arrival pushed to 2026, following some accusations from a former dev that it was being rushed out of the door.

Read more

Amazon's Spring Sale rumbles on, and in its final days in the 'States, it's knocked a staggering 37% off one of the beefier processors in AMD's current lineup - the 12 core/24 thread Ryzen 9 9900X. At $315 from Amazon USA, it's dropped to a new low price from the big online retailer down from a previous price of $370 or thereabouts, although Amazon is stating a bigger 37% discount on its $499 list price.

Read more

I know exactly who Kliff, the protagonist of Crimson Desert, is. During my romp through the vast expanse of Pywel, he was a distant tower enthusiast with a side interest in lonely locomotives. Aside from those things, he's rather bland. Though, the actor who played him has now outlined that throughout the game's regularly shifting development - which included a name change for its main character - he pushed Pearl Abyss to make the character more than just a stoic line-grumbler.

Read more