Let’s run through her abilities. Her passive, Dream-Laden Bough, makes her abilities apply the Dream Dust debuff, dealing a portion of the target’s max health as magic damage over time. Her Q, Blooming Blows, swings her branch in a circle to deal magic damage to near enemies and pure damage to father ones, as well as giving her stacking movement buffs for skill hits. Her W, Watch Out! Eep!, is an AoE slam with the branch with damage drop-off over distance....

With the Rift officially severed, the Oculus Quest 2 will be one of the best ways forward for those getting into VR for the first time. “There’s no denying that the Quest 2 sets a high bar for entry-level VR, and the option to pick and choose between wireless and tethered PC VR gives you a lot more for your money than rival headsets,” says Katharine in her Oculus Quest 2 review....

It’s a lot better than I remember. And only some of that is down to the patch. HDI never really got the recognition they deserved. Pretty much all their games were solid, and original and unconventional, even by the inconsistent standards of 90s strategy games. I’ve mentioned Hammer Of The Gods before, but it’s their 14th Century Venetian mercantile/polit/pope-assassinating simulator Machiavelli the Prince that Emperor Of The Fading Suns compares to best....

The times I’ve been most scared playing a game are when I don’t expect to be scared. And what better way to lull myself into a false sense of security this Halloween than to play an otherwise not-so-scary game, with just one particularly horror-esque moment? Turns out there are a lot of games that fall into this category. So I’ve put together a few suggestions of the very best ones in case you’re like me....

EA Play Live 2021 didn’t have much apart from EA Motive’s new game, really. The Dead Space 202? speculation dominates this week’s Headline & Hot Takes. We still make time to talk about PES (now eFootball) going free-to-play and whether we might see more games going this route. And Tech Corner has some Steam Deck chat… it will likely be Steam Deck Corner until December, in truth. It’s a big Show and Tell, as Matthew’s most anticipated game of 2021 is here: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles....

This week, in Headlines and Hot Takes (the news-y bit), we discuss Oscar Isaac being cast as Snake in the upcoming Metal Gear Solid movie (and we cast the rest of the film ourselves), there’s some chat on what the recent departures at BioWare could mean (the answer is maybe nothing?) and Colm tells a very sad story involving the Nvidia 3060 Ti in Tech Corner. In Show And Tell (our “here’s what we’ve been playing in the last week” bit), I go in on my time with the very underwhelming, and at times a bit funny, Twin Mirror....

Earlier today we brought news that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s next-gen update – a seemingly juicy serving of new ray tracing, DLSS/FSR upscaling, and assorted quality of life features – had in fact arrived in a bit of a mess. To assess the damage, I’ve spent some time with it myself, and can confirm: it ain’t great! Besides the devastating frames-per-second toll that the RT effects take, it seems far more crash-prone than I ever remember The Witcher 3 being in the past, and performance in general is just worse than it was pre-update....

Get the Acer Nitro XZ3 XZ273U Xbmiiphx for $280 (was $600) OK, this schtick is getting old. Anyway, this is a rather good monitor for the price, if you’re not allergic to curved screens anyway. The quoted 0.5ms GtG response time is bollocks, likely attainable only in a few transitions at the fastest and most unusable overdrive setting, but this is still an extremely fast VA panel that has attracted strong reviews for its motion handling, contrast and overall immersiveness....

You bet I’m into the combo-laden combat and the punishing Soulslike boss fights (which’ll no doubt leave me staring at the ceiling while Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” echoes into the night). But it’s really the world and its mythology which leave me salivating. I want to know how Wukong can turn into a golden cicada. How he plucks his staff out of his ear at one point. And what beef these livid animals, or demons, or both, actually have against him....

Indeed, to put that in context, I’ve been recommending people buy the regular RTX 2070 for the last couple of months, the cheapest model of which is still around £380 in the UK. However, now that you can get this RTX 2070 Super for just another £20, it’s definitely worth spending that little bit extra to get the Super. As you can see in my RTX 2070 vs RTX 2070 Super benchmark comparison, the Super offers some quite substantial performance gains over the regular RTX 2070 at 2560x1440 on max settings, and its improved ray tracing innards means it will be able to handle all those fancy lighting effects more effectively....

The Shadow Of Skyrim mod launched on Nexus Mods this week. It does away with Skyrim’s normal death system (sending you to reload the last save) and instead has you wake up elsewhere without your gear. You’ll have a quest to retrieve your backpack, and a quest to hunt your bold new Nemesis. Whichever baddie kills you (yes, even a mudcrab) gets powered up with a unique title, stat boosts, and a special buff....

Thousand Threads is a walking simulator with an open world light RPG-ish simulation on top. It is a little bit, like Death Stranding, about how a courier or postman can hold a society together. It’s a vastly more relaxing and low-key game, and about walking in the woods and observing the dynamic behaviour of its many NPCs than rebuilding or fighting or pontificating. There’s not even a story as such....

After warming up with a quest through Steam Early Access for the past few months, Torchlight 3 is ready to brave a full release with the help of a new launch trailer. Set a century after the close of the very good Torchlight 2, Echtra’s sequel has you once again facing off against a resurgent Netherim menace with four new plucky adventurers - a train-summoning beefcake, a pressurised boxing robot, a centrist wizard and “guy with gun”....

If big strategy battles are you jam, you’re in for a treat. Shogun 2 is one of the best strategy games on PC according to the RPS hivemind. “Set during Japan’s warring states period, you are put in the samurai war flip-flops of one of the many warlords struggling for control of the islands during the 16th Century, and it gets hectic.” say we. “The campaign is paced with shrewd finesse: if you throw your weight around too much, the Shogun himself will paint a target on your head, and everyone will come at you like estate agents after a plate full of money....

TinyBuild say that in the noodle-armed ragdoll sandbox you’ll “work together (or against each other) to deliver packages to customers using a variety of vehicles and odd machines. Safe deliveries are rewarded, but mayhem is highly encouraged!” You can spot a bunch of entirely impractical vehicles in the trailer like propeller planes, speedboats, and rockets? Is that a rocket? These little spaghetti folks need a delivery workers union, pronto. You can play local co-op with three friends if you’re all stuck at home together or online co-op if everyone you game with is stuck apart....

If you give it a go, the good thing about about the big human NPC migration back to Fallout 76 is that there’s no level requirement to see the new bits. There are new folks to talk to straight down the steps from your vault exodus and a main quest to pick up just down the road. Given a weekend, you could likely saunter your way through the first main quest chunk of the update in which you get in the middle of a gang of bandits hassling the new local bar....

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to get through the Dark Tomb and reach the West Garden. We’ll also walk you through the West Garden region so that you can reach the West Belltower and open the Sealed Temple. Tunic Dark Tomb guide: how to reach the West Garden in Tunic After finding the lantern, head to the Dark Tomb entrance and make your way along the first corridor....

“Bublar’s subsidiary Goodbye Kansas has signed an agreement to produce a game trailer for the French game developer Ubisoft,” their announcement said. “The order value amounts to approximately SEK 11 million.” They’ll deliver it early next year. Plain and simple. Goodbye Kansas have worked with Ubisoft before, including on a Watch Dogs 2 season pass trailer and characters for Wildlands marketing. They’ll be making this new one together with DDB Paris, a marketing agency behind a Watch Dogs 2 cinematic trailer, and French production company Eddy....

It’s the future, right, and you’re playing a game in the Internet. But it’s the Futureinternet, so there are more triangles. You can pick up ‘Hack’ abilities too, swapped in and out as you find new ones, things like a dash move, armour, and a heal. It does have upgrades for weapons and Hacks but you simply get a more powerful version - no fiddling with scopes and mags in inventory screens....