The studio behind the excellent XCOM: Long War mods have launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to help finish their own game about alien invasion. Terra Invicta is not XCOM by a new name, mind. It’s a grand strategy game which starts with mysterious first encounters, leads to geopolitical manoeuvring as factions jostle for position and contend with alien influence, can develop into global war, then sprawls across the solar system with industrial colonies and spaceship battles. The devs say they plan to release Terra Invicta next summer, but could use a bit more cash to make it fancier.

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Show me someone who says I’m not a fan of our excellent VidBud team, and I’ll show you a liar. Recently, VidBud Matthew got an in-depth demo of Gears Tactics, a turn-based tactical entry into the Gears Of War series, and my admiration only grew.

Set 10 years before the events of the very first Gears Of War game, you’d be forgiven for thinking this’d have more in common with the alien-sniping fun of XCOM than the big, boot-stompin’ FPS action of the Gears games. But in his excellent video, Matthew explains why Tactics will win hearts among both long term XCOM fans and die-hard Fenix stans alike.

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Mech love, not war. That is the lesson we must learn from the futuristic prophecies of the MechWarrior games. Yes, it is very noble to slam your big steel shoes upon a separatist s bedroom, and to laser him in the head. But would it not bring greater valour, greater unity, greater enlightenment, if those same 65-ton brogues were used to dance!

No. Here is a list of the 9 stompiest mechs in PC games. The heaviest, most murderous machines we know and trust with our frail human bods. But are they are all good at squashing?

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It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you>, but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade.

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My favourite XCOM is XCOM: Enemy Unknown*, a pure and direct, no mess/no fuss modern-day remix of metagame-augmented turn-based tactics. My second-favourite XCOM is the polar opposite, XCOM 2 DLC War Of The Chosen, an absurd explosion of superheroics that throws internal logic to the wind.

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Standard-issue XCOM 2 is probably my least-favourite of the four different flavours of XCOM now available to us (i.e. including the Enemy Within and War Of The Chosen expansions), but that’s a bit like saying I don’t enjoy 29 degrees of heat quite as much as 26, 27 and 28 degrees. They’re all great! Make it like that all the time, please. Only, y’know, without the heat-death of the planet. And, yeah, keep on releasing more XCOMs.

If you’ve avoided Firaxis’ reimagining of The Greatest PC Game Of All Time (If You’re An Old Man Like Me), XCOM 2 can be a rather full-on point of entry. On the other hand, it’s currently free all weekend (and 75% off if you want to keep it forever), which is the easiest point of entry of all.

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Six years ago, Firaxis pulled off the impossible with XCOM, re-envisioning a DOS classic – next week, they’re celebrating this feat with the Tactical Legacy pack for XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen. It’s pure fan-service of the less-sexy kind (unless Carapace armour turns you on, in which case fly your freak flag high), featuring old favourite equipment and environments used in a new series of tactical mini-campaigns. Better still, it’ll be initially free to owners of War Of The Chosen. It’s out next week, October 9th. Check the reveal trailer below.

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An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC strategy games ever made, now freshened up to include everything from 2017 and 2018. From intricate, global-scale wargames to the tight thrills of guerrilla squads, the broad expanse of the genre contains something for everyone, and we’ve gathered the best of the best.

The vast majority are available to buy digitally, a few are free to download and play forever. They’re all brilliant.

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Is six years within ‘fashionably late’ territory? Better late than never, at least. Today, Firaxis’s alien-bothering turn-based squad tactics revival, XCom: Enemy Unknown has launched on GOG after over half a decade of the PC version being Steam-exclusive. Rather than divide it up, GOG are only selling the Complete edition of the game, including two minor bits of DLC and the rather more significant Enemy Within expansion.

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Snapshot Games, lead by David Kaye and X-Com creator Julian Gollop, is a runaway success. Or at least I would think $100k a month in pledges would give a game studio some breathing room. But Snapshot isn’t sleeping at night. The prevalence of cheap games and promotional bundles has the studio spooked because, while this is a time of incredibly bounties for consumers, not every game can have the financial safety net of, say, Sea of Thieves. This makes creating a game of the scale of Phoenix Point exceptionally perilous.

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