In the best possible way, the Hitman series is ridiculous. Its protagonist, Agent 47, is the single most conspicuous person in any crowd. He s big and bald and white with a bar code prominently tattooed to the back of his head, and not once does this fact deter him from his preferred method of infiltration: wearing a disguise.

These aren t disguises in the elaborate, Mission: Impossible, we ll give you an entire fake head sense. No, 47 simply throws on the clothes of whatever guard or unfortunate bystander he s subdued. And this actually works. In the franchise s fiction, he s considered one of the most dangerous people in the entire world, the best of the best. This imposing figure who scarcely bothers to alter his body language, let alone his voice, is a master of disguise. Like its 2016 predecessor, Hitman 2 is quite aware that this concept is absolute nonsense.

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For all the bruisings, beatings and impalings that Lara Croft endures in the recent rebooted trilogy, the real victim was Tomb Raider s sense of scale. Everything became crushed down to deliver fidelity. There were temples, sure, but you viewed them from cramped tunnels as you scurried past guards, and towering structures were only seen from the extreme close-up of a climbing wall or the long-distance photo op as you were shepherded along ziplines. Yamatai, Siberia and Peru are vast landscapes you view from a thin corridor of interaction. And even then control is wrestled away with endless QTEs. Returning to Tomb Raider: Underworld s gargantuan locations is like stepping off an EasyJet flight and feeling the blood rush back to your ankles.

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With Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, Lara has now completed another trilogy, probably by falling through its roof and shooting it in the face. This would be the second set of three games from Crystal Dynamics (with help from other parts of Eidos), following on from the six titles created by Core (if you don’t count the Game Boy ones). She’s twelve main games old, twenty-ish if you count the mobile and off-brand ones, and 22 years old if you count in linear time. I’m here to argue it’s time for Lara to go.

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As the latest Lara trilogy reaches its end, it seems a good moment to cast one’s mind back to the beginning of the previous one. Because crikey it was good>.

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Welcome to the freshly relaunched RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show! You might think this is episode 31, but actually it s episode 1 again. We re rebooting it, even though we just did that last year. We ve started by making it more accessible. Instead of three of us chatting about videogames between snippets of jaunty music, there s just a sad man saying Sonic the Hedgehog over and over. We re confident you ll like it. (more…)

What Works And Why is a new monthly column where Gunpoint and Heat Signature designer Tom Francis digs into the design of a game and analyses what makes it good.>

I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they’re ‘immersive sims’. If you asked me what I liked about them, my answer would be a phrase almost as dumb: ’emergent gameplay!’

I always used to think of these as virtually the same thing, but of course they’re not. Immersive sims usually have a whole list of traits, things like: (more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

I always feel a bit sad when I think about Deadly Shadows. Ion Storm Austin’s spin on Looking Glass’ landmark stealth series is an embodiment of frustrated ambitions. The developers had basically planned for Deadly Shadows to be an open-world stealth game, a sort of medieval Grand Theft Carriage. But the prioritising of the original Xbox combined with lofty technological ambitions meant that, like a man trying to fit an elephant into a fridge, Ion Storm had to mercilessly cut down the scope of its project. Even then, they could only include the important bits, like the trunk and a couple of the feet. (more…)

The CEO of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsuda, has spoken out about the future of Deus Ex. At the start of this year, Eurogamer reported that we shouldn’t expect a new Deus Ex game anytime soon – and they’re right, though we should get one eventually. It simply isn’t Deus Ex’s turn yet, with the studio first focusing on other projects such as the next Tomb Raider and an Avengers game.

Matsuda explained all this in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, where he also talked about Final Fantasy’s anime spin off, the studio’s approach to the Eastern and Western markets, as well as augmented and virtual reality.

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There are more wonderful games being released on PC each month than ever before. In such a time of plenty, it’s important that you spend your time as wisely as possible. Thankfully, we’re here to help. What follows are our picks for the best PC games ever made. (more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

There are lots of things I love about NEO Scavenger [official site]. I love how, despite its lo-fi visuals, it conveys the fickle fortunes and indifferent cruelty of a wilderness better than many technologically superior survival games. I love its ridiculously detailed combat system that lets you rugby-tackle feral dogs. I love the ambient sound effects that convey the misleading serenity of its natural environments; the chirping of birds, the wind in the trees, the soft crunch of grass underfoot. Delightful. (more…)