The developer of well-received indie strategy game Frozen Synapse has today announced the game's sequel will be launched in August.

Frozen Synapse 2 was originally due for release in 2016, but for reasons unknown, these plans had to be put on ice. Developer Mode 7 recently came under fire from the game's Steam community, who had been demanding an update on the game's release date. In response, Mode 7 has now promised the game will be released sometime in August, but it cannot yet confirm an exact date. According to its press release, "the game is currently undergoing final bug and balance testing, as well as a last beta round for gameplay purposes".

But the game may well be worth the wait, as the developer has claimed Frozen Synapse 2 is the "culmination of everything [they've] done" since they started Mode 7. The developer promised Frozen Synapse 2 has a "proven tactical core with a big, systemic strategic overworld," a glimpse of which may be seen in the new gameplay preview video below.

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In a restaurant somewhere in sunny Los Angeles County, 13 years ago, two old friends were having lunch. Wine and conversation were flowing. They remembered how they'd met at LucasArts in the 90s. They weren't there to talk business but they did because video games were their bread and butter. One of the men, Jack Sorensen, was reeling-off job opportunities he knew of - he being executive vice president of worldwide studios at games publisher THQ. "THQ Australia?" he enquired. But the other man, Dean Sharpe, didn't seem interested. He had closed his own studio Big Ape Productions a couple of years earlier, dropped off the radar and taken a break, and now he was ready for something new. But Sharpe wanted a challenge.

Sorensen dangled the bait. "It was somewhere during the second bottle of wine he mentioned he had this crazy thing in Ukraine," Dean Sharpe tells me over Skype now (he never did get fully back on the radar and he's a hard man to find). "Wow Ukraine," he thought to himself, "that sounds interesting."

Sorensen outlined his problem: THQ had a team making a fascinating game in Ukraine called Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. The game was dark and massive, set around the twisted disaster zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was part shooter, part role-playing game, part eerie open-world sandbox adventure. But Stalker was overdue, long overdue, and Sorensen needed someone on the ground out there to finish it - someone in Ukraine to be THQ personified, day in day out, doing whatever it took to get the game done.

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It's Indie Mega Week at the Humble Store right now, which - as you may have gleaned from the name - is a big celebration of some of the best indie games around, with the range seeing discounts of up to 90 per cent for the time being.

There are pages of stuff on offer in the Indie Mega Week sale range, ranging from smaller and more obscure titles to some of the biggest indie games released in recent years, and some soundtracks and DLC packs are even thrown in for good measure.

Some of the most notable games on offer include 11-bit Studios' recent suffer-sim Frostpunk, which is down to 21.24 / $25.49, current Twitch favourite House Flipper for 13.16 / $16.99, the unrelentingly addictive Dead Cells for 17.59 / $19.99, and the closet thing we'll get to a Left 4 Dead 3 anytime soon, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 for 15.40 / $20.09.

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No Man's Sky's impressive NEXT update came out last week and the response has been generally positive. Over the weekend, in fact, more than 97,000 concurrent players logged in to Hello Games' revamped space sim on PC - and, even now, it's the fifth most played game on Steam.

That's quite the turnaround, and some fans are showing their enthusiasm for the rejuvenated No Man's Sky in the time-honoured fashion: by sharing kind words or screenshots of their most beautiful discoveries across the internet. However, one fan, going by the name Roland Oberheim, has taken a more unique approach to celebrating NEXT's accomplishments, building a giant monument to creator Sean Murray on the surface of one of the millions of planets within No Man's Sky's universe. It's so big, in fact, that it's visible from the atmosphere.

The massive edifice is fashioned using a precise arrangement of floor panels - elements included in the game's extensive building tools - and measures 37x50 squares. The result, as I'm sure you'll agree, is an entirely convincing replica of Sean Murray and beard.

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It's been a long time since I've played a Formula One game, and in truth I've seldom enjoyed them that much - which, as a fan of both racing games and the sport, seemed a shame. There was something alienating, I found, in the monotonously fast machinery with its nervy handling and in the dry pageantry of the licence. The championship season was the main hook, but it was exhaustingly long and, without the variety and sense of progression offered by broader racing games, its payoff seemed distant.

So it was without much expectation that I covered for our regular F1 correspondent Martin at a recent preview event for this year's F1 game from Codemasters, F1 2018. Yet what I found there was, on the basis of a couple of hours' play, the most immediately involving and cleverly designed career mode in any current racing game.

This may not be news to people who've stayed in touch with the series. Since it made a bare-bones reboot on the current consoles in F1 2015, Codemasters has been progressively beefing up F1's career offering. Actual new features in F1 2018 are relatively few: I've listed them below, but the headline addition is that of media interviews, which present you with multiple choice answers and affect your driver's reputation in the paddock, the morale of your team and your position in the contract market.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's Battle Royale mode, Blackout, was introduced to the world back in May. Now, two month's later, Activision has offered the first proper footage (albeit a fleeting, 13 second sample) of Blackout in action.

A Battle Royale mode for this year's iteration of Call of Duty was repeatedly rumoured prior to Black Ops 4's full unveiling, so nobody was particularly surprised when Treyarch made it official during Activision's reveal event in May. Announced as Blackout, the mode was teased in only the broadest of strokes, alongside a lengthy but rather abstract cinematic trailer.

"For us to even consider this kind of [Battle Royale] experience," Treyarch said, "it had to be unique and done in a way that only Black Ops could do". The final product, it continued, would be a "crazy collision of fun", mixing favourite weapons and characters with land, water, and air vehicles, all on a map comprising of numerous iconic locations from previous games.

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No Man's Sky's recently released Next update radically improves content and visuals and we've had a lot of fun playing it in its new Xbox One X incarnation - but we've got to say that the PC version still needs a lot of work. Performance doesn't seem to be where it should be, even on higher-end GPUs while basics like v-sync don't seem to work properly. On top of that, right from the off, basic user-friendliness comforts and presentation create a genuinely poor introduction to the game. For a title that has improved so dramatically since launch, we genuinely hope to see Hello Games make one last push to make life easier for PC users.

It starts with the game's first load, where No Man's Sky spends a lot of time pre-caching shaders. On a top-end Ryzen processor, this procedure takes over three minutes to complete, while other reports have seen waiting times of anything up to ten minutes depending on the CPU in question. As first impressions go, this is pretty dreadful and really needs to be improved. Secondly, there's the joypad orientated options selection system that still sees you holding down a button or key to actually make a change. Next up, there's No Man's Sky's remarkable lack of user-friendliness in tweaking for performance - adjusting options inevitably leads to the need to completely restart the game. Even turning off v-sync requires a full reload of the game... really?

And that leads us on to the next major issue - the implementation of v-sync doesn't seem to act as it should and there are profound performance implications as a result. With v-sync enabled on a Ryzen 7 1700X/GTX 1070 system, frame-rate monitors report a solid 60fps, however on-screen motion is plagued with stutter and running captured footage through our tools, the game seems to ricochet between 16ms and 33ms frame-times. Turning off v-sync seems to put the game into a borderless windowed mode, where frame-rate can exceed 60fps but there's no sign of any tearing. It's an improvement but it's still not working correctly.

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Did you know it's been nearly 20 years since Digimon was first released? Somehow, the series has managed to succeed in the shadow of its more famous rival for two decades, so it seems fitting the latest game should concentrate on the theme of survival.

Following talk in Japan over the last few weeks about a new chapter in the Digimon story, Digimon Survive has finally been confirmed for a western release. In yesterday's Digimon livestream by Bandai Namco, the company announced the latest incarnation of the series will be a "survival-simulation RPG".

According to Bandai Namco's press release, the game will feature a "brand-new group of teenagers" who "get lost on a school camping trip" and are "transported to a world of monsters and danger". Sounds like my Duke of Edinburgh experience, to be honest.

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With it being the end of July and with Prime Day 2018 a mere memory, online retailers are beginning to get their payday sale ranges up and running, with a selection of games, consoles and assorted merch seeing discounts.

First up, we've got ShopTo's Pay Day offerings. The site has dedicated Sale pages for PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo, as well as a handful of console and PSVR offers.

Specifically, you'll find a PSVR (V2) bundle with the PS4 Camera, PSVR Worlds and The Persistence for 249.85, as well as PS4 1TB Slim bundles with Hidden Agenda for 279.85, a white PS4 Pro for 319.85 and a handful of Xbox One bundle offers including an Xbox One X for 419.86.

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UPDATE 1/8/18: In addition to adding a warning pop-up for suspicious trades, Steam will now also require approval in order for a game to change its name.

The information was posted on a Reddit thread by Valve employee Tony Paloma, who's somewhat bizarrely named Drunken_F00l on the site. The reason for the change is to prevent games from scamming Steam users into buying fake items, which is what happened when the game Abstractism renamed itself Team Fortress 2 to sell a bogus rocket launcher.

According to Paloma, Valve has also promised to restore and recover any items that were lost due to the scam. Valve apparently hopes to make these refunds automatic. This was welcome news for the original victim, Poor Asian Boy, who thanked Valve for the reassurance and response .

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