Ian Games Network scooped the scloosie on the first gameplay video: While I see lots of comments dead impressed with the voice actor’s Leonard Nimoy impression, I keep expecting him to say e.g. “You have quite a treasure there in that Centaur-class starship.” I fear I will never shake this. Still, while I could do without Spock as a touchstone (do your own thing, maaan), I’m quite glad to see they’re just sitting around discussing a tricky situation....

Rogue and Stealth go way back to the beginning of Hearthstone. Being able to stay on the board without being attacked for a turn is super valuable, as the only counter is area-of-effect damage until you attack. Of course, this is a deck with aggression at the forefront - don’t be afraid to skip trades and go face - you do have extra late-game power in this edition of the deck too....

Launched back in 2019, Remote Play Together is a feature that allows users to play local co-op games online with others who don’t own the game. I’ve used it myself a few times to play stuff like Moving Out and it works pretty well, as long as the person hosting has good enough internet (it works by essentially streaming the game to your pals). To use the feature with a friend or family member without Steam, you’ll need to use Steam’s beta branch (which you can get on by toggling the “beta participation” section in your account settings)....

Valve announced the beta and gave a full list of the features included in the new Big Picture mode: Big Picture mode was added to Steam a little over ten years ago as part of Valve’s initial push towards living room televisions. As an interface, I’d deem it semi-successful, even if its intended use on Steam Machines or even Steam Link never became commonplace. The Steam Deck’s interface, despite primarily being designed for little screens, is much improved....

Nemesis introduces a new ascension perk which lets you become the end-game crisis, unlocking powerful bonuses to not only dominate the galaxy but destroy it. Or if you want to be a goodie you can lobby the galactic community to be declared a Custodian, with emergency powers to defeat a crisis - then maybe consider not relinquishing them, becoming an evil overlord of a different sort. The expansion opens extra options for the new espionage system too, letting you covertly steal tech, sabotage bases, and more....

Coming from McPixel and Mosh Pit Simulator developer and pop-up firetruck DJ Sos Sosowksi, Stock Jump is a quick little dance on the free market’s deathbed. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Sos Sosowski (@Sosowski) March 21, 2020 An intimidating front-end lets you pick from a staggering list of real-life stock exchanges, and any company publically listed therein. Each one is tracked and transferred to Sosowski’s slopes in real-time, letting you watch an economic collapse as it happens....

WD - or, Western Digital - have been on a crusade to rival Samsung’s computer bits for a while now, and may have finally achieved it with this SSD. In layman’s terms, it will kick your computer into super speed, running games and operating system super fast and quick like. This particular SSD supports the PCle 4.0 standard, allowing for much faster read and write speeds than the older 3....

The world of Desertum is certainly a marked change from Stranded’s initial mountainous forest planet, Sobrius, but after a few weeks of trying (and inevitably failing) to stay alive in them, I do feel like I’ve settled on a couple of vital dos and don’ts now. For example, Do: invest in defences early on. Don’t: eat that weird alien zebra camel until you know whether it’s going to give you gut rot....

It’s a strategy game about building beautiful castles and embarking on siege warfare, and it’s the first major new game in the series since 2014. Here’s a trailer that describes how it works, including a bunch of the systems new to this iteration: It’s only been out for a few hours, but early reviews on Steam are “Mixed”. There’s one person calling it the best RTS ever, and a bunch of other people complaining about a dated UI and thin content....

“In these uncertain and challenging times, it’s more important than ever that video games serve as a common and virtual connection point between us all,” Keighley says. After E3 was cancelled, a couple publishers like Microsoft and Ubisoft expressed that they’d still be planning to deliver announcements in a digital format, though they’d not yet explained their actual plans. It seems that Summer Game Fest is giving them a different banner to organise beneath, albeit in a much longer format....

John stamped Sundered with our Recommended seal in 2017, saying: For free, absolutely, I’ll go there again. And that was before developers Thunder Lotus Games added local cooperative multiplayer, new areas, a new quest chain, and more with the ‘Eldritch Edition’ update. You have until 4pm on Thursday the 16th to grab Sundered free for keepsies from the Epic Games Store. It usually costs £15 and Epic have said they pay developers for freebies so hey, grab away....

Developers Bossa studios really crammed a lot into the sequel’s torso. A story about four friends starting a sort of beginner’s hospital for the masses justifies the carnage that follows. People who have almost no control over their limbs attempt surgery on a single human subject. You can play it solo or encourage up to three other players to join you in what looks more like a serial killer practice run than surgery....

You can buy The Sims 4 on Steam right now. The base game has a 50% discount at launch, bringing it £17.49/€19.99/$19.99. All of the expansions have 20-30% off right now too, except for the latest - see Alice Bee’s Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle review to see if that one is worth your money (spoiler: ahh not as much as hoped). If you just want to lark about with the game, maybe look up The Sims 4 cheats for everything from editing characters to spawning items....

From The Woods is set in Fernwood Creek, a youth mental health centre surrounded by the titular woods. Things go awry with the arrival of a new patient, a quiet boy with a mysterious secret. I’m always a little apprehensive when a horror story tackles mental health, since it’s easy to play into tired stereotypes, or blame all of the supernatural scares on a mental illness. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done tastefully, however, and I like the idea of being trapped in the woods while a creepy kid wreaks havoc....

That’s sort of what Svoboda 1945 Colon Liberation is about. Dynamics like that happen, especially as fascists and collaborators lie and deny everything, so there’ll always be collateral in the wake of revenge on a large enough scale.

I’m a big fan of the tiny monster that’s just a lemon with fairy wings. I am equally enamoured by the little beasties expertly balancing themselves on orange fluff. I am cautious, however, of the cactus creature with a big row of sharp teeth. Like Pokémon Snap, the aim of the game is to collect some cool shots of these beasts in interesting poses doing interesting things. You’ll gather your pics in a guidebook, and even learn some history and secrets abouts the abandoned park you’re exploring....

Goat Sim developers Coffee Stain Studios knew this would happen, and they knew people would report on it when it did. I am facilitating shenanigans, and I can hear that damn goat laughing at me from within the black void of its copyright takedown notice. The ad featured the goat, who I refuse to name out of spite, boasting about his work in other games - then a cut to him plastered over some of the leaked footage....

Oh right. Forget I said anything. Go back inside, lock the doors, and consider some of these perfect virtual holiday destinations. Please, trust us with your fake vacation. After all, what is a games journalist but a sort of really dodgy travel agent? Sapienza - Hitman Noted corpse secreter and bald man-for-hire Agent 47 has long been a fan of international travel. He has visited all sorts of exotic locations in his time as a professional loose end tidy-upper....

The Crucial MX500 is one of the best and cheapest SSDs for gaming around right now, and today’s deal price cements its position at the wallet-friendly end of the scale even further. £67 is a great price for a 1TB SSD like this, as many of its rivals such as the Samsung 860 Evo will still set you back close to £100 for a 1TB version, which is over £30 more than today’s MX500 price....

It’s exactly the kind of gaming laptop I can get behind: a normal 14in device with a colour-accurate 1920x1080 IPS display and a gorgeous all-metal chassis that has a very agreeable 17 hours of battery life for when I want to take it on the road and get some work done. Then, thanks to its combination of an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU and one of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs, it can also deliver some serious power for playing games on in my downtime....