I loved Bad North back when I reviewed it. It's a doomy game about fighting off invading forces, set on a chilly archipelago strung across the edge of the world. It's one of those games where brilliantly simple mechanics - three kinds of units, very straightforward victory and loss conditions for each scrappy battle - are married to rich atmospheric details. The seas here are glassy and still, each island a bleached eruption of cold earth. You feel the cold, the wind, and you get a sense of how tenacious life must be to get by here. And then the invaders arrive, masked and silent in their black ships which ghost in without sails to propel them. There is a horrible inevitability to their advancing, something of a bad dream to it. And the horn that marks their arrival! The horn.

At the time I was playing it for review, Bad North struck me as being almost a museum exhibit of a game - everything was so poised and perfected. You stand back from the landscape as if you're viewing a little diorama through safety glass. The game is so wrapped up with death and violence that there is nothing else in its world besides death and violence - unreadable heroes and villains from the past, so unlike us!

None of this is a slur, by the way. I love a game with a strong sense of its identity. But as I return to it now, clumsier somehow, sausage-fingered at the Switch, I'm starting to see so much more. This is one of those glorious games that scales brilliantly to match the player's errors with sheer fun.

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Microsoft has revealed the latest titles heading to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service for PC, and they look an awful lot like Dirt Rally 2.0, Saints Row 4, Cities: Skylines, and Bad North.

Cities: Skylines, of course, is developer Colossal Order's phenomenally popular city-builder, which, since its launch in 2015, has gone from strength to strength. Four years on, it's now received eight major expansions - After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Parklife, Industries, and Campus - plus an enormous number of free feature updates, and even a console release. Its enduring popularity is well-deserved too; it's a thoroughly entertaining urban planning and traffic management sim, and well worth checking out.

As for developer Volition's Saints Row 4: Re-Elected (which includes all DLC), it's a wonderfully idiotic spin on the open-world gangster genre, this time ramping up the ridiculousness to previously unseen heights. While early games in the series played it mostly straight, Saints Row 4 throws caution to the wind, delivering a game in which aliens trap our likeable rogue's gallery of heroes in a digital simulation of their beloved city of Steelport.

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Microsoft has revealed the latest titles heading to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service for PC, and they look an awful lot like Dirt 2.0, Saints Row 4, Cities: Skylines, and Bad North.

Cities: Skylines, of course, is developer Colossal Order's phenomenally popular city-builder, which, since its launch in 2015, has gone from strength to strength. Four years on, it's now received eight major expansions - After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Parklife, Industries, and Campus - an enormous number of free feature updates, and even a console release. Its enduring popularity is well-deserved too; it's a thoroughly entertaining urban planning and traffic management sim, and well-worth checking out.

As for developer Volition's Saints Row 4: Re-Elected which includes all DLC), it's a wonderfully idiotic spin on the open-world gangster genre, this time ramping up the ridiculousness to previously unseen degrees. While early games in the series played it mostly straight, Saints Row 4 throws caution to the wind, delivering a game in which aliens trap our likeable rogue's gallery of heroes in a digital simulation of their beloved city of Steelport.

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If you're an Xbox Game Pass subscriber positively quivering with anticipation over what happens next, inner peace is about to be restored: Microsoft has revealed the full line-up of games coming to the service on PC and Xbox One in September.

The biggie, of course, is Gears 5, the latest instalment in Microsoft's long-running cover-shooter series. The 'of War' may be no more, but the thick necks and bug mangling are still present and correct - and Xbox One and PC Game Pass subscribers will be able to see how developer The Coalition has fared on Friday, 6th September.

Before that, however, Motion Twin's exquisite action-platform rogue-like Dead Cells joins the Game Pass library tomorrow, 5th September, on Xbox One. It's coming to PC this month too but - and you'll soon spot a theme here - there's no release date on the platform at present. Metal Gear Solid HD Edition: 2 & 3 also arrives on the 5th, but that's Xbox One only.

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Late last year, developer Plausible Concept released its fiendish Viking-themed real-time strategy oddity Bad North, a game that impressed Eurogamer enough to earn it a big old Recommended badge. And now, the studio is back with a "giant" free expansion, titled, appropriately enough, the Jotunn Edition, and it's available now on PC and Mac.

Bad North, despite its rather serene, somewhat minimalist good looks, is a surprisingly punishing affair, coughing up ever-more-difficult bite-sized challenges as players moved from island to island in the main campaign.

The goal each time never wavers, however; players must command their small army into position around an island in order to fend off attacking forces and protect as many buildings as possible. Armies are colour-coded into distinct units - specialising in melee attacks, archery for long-range assaults, and so on - and must be thoughtfully positioned, in time-honoured rock-paper-scissors fashion, to best deal with incoming marauders.

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The Steam-like Discord Store launches its global beta today, so everyone can try it out.

Discord's store cupboards are nowhere near as full as Steam's - there are only around 20 games to straight-out buy - but there are some nifty initiatives which make Discord stand out. These are First on Discord, Discord Nitro and Universal Library features.

First on Discord is what it sounds like: games with timed exclusivity to Discord. The handful of signed games aren't juggernauts but do include Bad North, which Christian Donlan Recommended in his review.

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Discord has now detailed the first wave of games which will debut for PC via its own store - each with an exclusivity period "typically" lasting 90 days.

The range, dubbed First on Discord, will roll-out this autumn with seven titles. Perhaps most notable in line-up is viking roguelike Bad North, already available on Switch:

Here's the full list:

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The art looks peaceful and almost cheery, but the bleached white of the rocks and cliffs and the overcast grey of the calm waters suggests otherwise. Then there's the soundtrack, muttering and worrying at strings and giving way to deep ominous booms when a dark craft appears on the horizon. And the game is almost all horizon, isn't it? Each level is a tiny Chewit of turf surrounded by ocean. You marshall your forces, send them towards the likely landfall and then you wait, completely adrift and beset on all sides by the potential for invasion.

Bad North may look sweet, then. It may occasionally feel sweet, as you use a finger to spin your current island, as if it was a tiny model on a designer's turntable. But this is about as unsweet as games get. A stripped-back real-time strategy - a handful of units to control, no base-building - with all that genre's potential to watch a single mistake blossom into panoramic catastrophe intact. Marry that with the structure of a roguelite: incremental improvements, the strengthening drum-beat of your evolving powers and abilities, all playing out across a procedural campaign and silenced by a single disaster.

Each level lands you on a fresh island with the same objective: defend the cluster of buildings huddled around you from the invaders who will arrive on your shores one after the other. It is all so sinister! They stand silent in their longboats, these invaders, masked faces unreadable but murderous intentions entirely clear. You, meanwhile, control that handful of colour-coded armies, moving them from one spot to another, slowly levelling them up over the course of a campaign so you have the likes of specialised archers, pike-men and infantry, all with strengths and weaknesses regarding things like range and the ability to attack when moving to take into account. You take out one landing, and then you scan the horizon for the next one. And then the one after that, and then the landings that occur in two places at once.

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EGX Rezzed was wonderful, wasn't it? Tim Schafer of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango fame came to shoot the breeze with editor Oli Welsh on stage, the teams behind Two Point Hospital and Phoenix Point delved into their upcoming creations, and Digital Foundry explained how Sony might get on the road to its next console, the PlayStation 5.

There were plenty of things to play, too, and it was arguably the strongest year yet - with studios big and small showcasing fascinating new games, and some truly innovative things to play them with in the Leftfield Collection, RPS area and elsewhere.

As with previous years, this isn't a definitive list, but a personal selection from the team at Eurogamer as we roamed the show, and will hopefully serve as something to keep an eye out for in the coming months.

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