Unity of Command is one of those rare hexy strategy affairs that manages to feel like a treat for seasoned fans as well as a welcoming entry point for newcomers to the intimidating world of operational-level wargaming. It's one of the best wargames around, and now we're getting a sequel. Take a look at the trailer above.

In Unity of Command 2, the Western Allies and Axis are duking it out over Europe, with players taking control between 1942 and 1945. Expect branching missions and dynamic objectives to shake things up a bit, hopefully offering up surprises even after repeated playthroughs. 

It sports a new 3D engine and looks extremely different from its predecessor. Units have proper models that fight on a map that's full of details, both cosmetic and practical. It's quite a step up from the first game.

Along with the new engine, Unity of Command 2 introduces some additional wrinkles and systems. There's the HQ, for instance, which is a real location on the map that's essential for organising and supplying your army, or the expanded ability to go behind enemy lines and mess up their infrastructure. Bonus objectives, meanwhile, give you new ways to change history, like the Allies reaching Berlin before the Soviets. 

It will launch with a full Allied campaign, but you'll be able to play as the Axis in battle scenarios, while a scenario editor will allow you to create your own and upload them to the Steam Workshop. 

Unity of Command 2 is due out later this year. 

Warsaw is a 2D turn-based tactical RPG set during World War 2. With a ragtag group of "accidental heroes" you can fight Nazis and attempt to liberate the city. Despite a very different setting, screenshots call to mind Darkest Dungeon, from the character art to how the game displays attacks. Check out the reveal trailer above. It's a bit grim, though. 

From the safety of your shelter you'll be able to recruit an underground army and plan your urban war, sending teams out to patrol, hunt down Nazis and scavenge for supplies and weapons to better equip your band of rebels. You might find other people and groups out there, surviving on their own, who can lend a hand, joining your band.

The management side sounds closer to something like This War of Mine, where the focus was survival and protecting your home, not fighting. But in Warsaw, it looks like there will be plenty of both.

Your new pals will have classes—from medics to angry flamethrower guys—with unique skills that they can used in the turn-based battles, which let you use cover, flanking and skill combos. The enemy is lot better armed, so it probably won't be a walk in the park.

Warsaw is due out later this year.

Detailed exclusively in the next issue of PC Gamer magazine, Winds of Magic is the first expansion for Vermintide 2, planned for release this summer. The expansion will bring a new enemy faction, a new endgame mode, new difficulty options, new talents and a new weapon type for each character.

In Winds of Magic, Beastmen will join the existing alliance of Skaven and the Rotblood Tribe. Rather than simply being fresh meat to carve through, the Beastmen have been designed to introduce new types of problems for players to tackle. In the prototype build I was shown, Fatshark was testing packs of bow-wielding Ungors, and augmenting standard melee fighters with spear units—providing different ranges of attack.

The Beastmen's elite unit is the Bestigor, a giant, armoured hulk who charges players—also knocking over any other enemies that get between him and his target. Their special, rather than ambushing players like the Gutter Runner or Packmaster, plays more of a support role. The Standardbearer will place totems that will buff nearby enemies with effects like invulnerability, forcing players to deal with the problem before clearing out the hordes.

While Winds of Magic will likely offer a new introductory mission, Fatshark aren't planning to create a new campaign of adventure maps. Instead, the focus of the expansion will be a new mode: an ongoing gauntlet of exponentially more difficult challenges, each with a special modifier related to one of Warhammer's eight winds of magic.

The Winds of Magic is made up of what Fatshark is currently calling "Weaves". Each Weave will be a combination of the following elements:

• Map: A chunk of one of the existing adventure maps, remixed to add variety. In the example I was shown, for instance, the map was played back-to-front. These maps will also look different based on which Wind is currently active.
• Wind: A modifier based on the Winds of Magic. One example being prototyped for the Jade Wind (the Lore of Life) is that players have constant health regeneration, but take damage each time they hit an enemy.
• Objective: Your goal in each Weave is to complete a specific task. Currently being trialled are objectives such as killing a number of enemies of a specific type and defending a capturing a number of control points.
• Finale: Once the objective has been completed, a portal will open to an arena where players must survive a final showdown. Examples I was given included battling waves of enemies, or fighting against multiple bosses.
• Difficulty: As players progress through Weaves, Fatshark plans to escalate the challenge far, far beyond what is currently available. The base set of Weaves will all be handcrafted, but the plan is for them to repeat at exponentially higher difficulties.

Fatshark's hope is that Weaves will act more like puzzles—requiring the community to figure out the best careers and weapons to progress. By not randomising them, players can share their tips, and also compete in individual leaderboards for each Weave. Beyond that, a global leaderboard is being discussed, showcasing the players who have made it the furthest through the mode. Ultimately, by continuing to escalate the challenge, Fatshark hopes to create an endgame with no upper limit on the number of Weaves—that ends simply when players are unable to progress any further.

That's the general overview. You'll find more details, including an explanation of the new weapon types (here's a hint for one character: throwable axes) and a more thorough explanation of the new faction and mode, in the new issue of PC Gamer magazine, out March 7 in the UK, and March 26 in the US. Here's a look at the exclusive subscriber cover, which will start arriving at subscribers' doors from tomorrow. 

Plague Inc., the strategy sim where you create and nurture a pathogen in an attempt to destroy all the pesky humans, is now getting an anti-vaxxer scenario thanks to a Change.org petition. 

Ndemic Creations noticed the petition last week, which wanted the developer to add anti-vaxxers as a buff. In Plague Inc. your pathogen has certain traits that makes it more or less effective in different situations and can, during the course of a game, evolve into a more powerful disease. But humanity can take lots of precautions, shutting down airports, giving out inoculations. Anti-vaxxers, then, would be a plague's best pal. 

Instead of just adding a buff, Ndemic said it would add an anti-vaxxer scenario if the petition got to 10,000. It's currently sitting at just over 20,000.

Plague Inc was ported to PC as Plague Inc: Evolved, and hopefully we'll see the anti-vaxxers infecting our version of the game, too. It also supports user-created scenarios, so if we don't get the official one, maybe a diligent modder will work their magic. 

Previous scenarios have tackled other serious issues like Brexit and vampires. 

On April 9 we'll finally have the chance to enjoy Phoenix Wright on PC. The Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy package contains the 14 episodes that make up the first three games. It's available to pre-purchase on Steam now for $29.99/£29.99

Phoenix Wright started out on handhelds like the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. It's a comedy adventure game series in which you snoop around crime scenes and talk to suspects to gather clues. At the climax of the case you deploy these clues as smackdowns in absurd but surprisingly tense courtroom scenes.

They are great games to travel with, and the DS version encouraged people to yell "OBJECTION" into their device to trigger Wright's famous point. I'm not sure how well they will translate to a full-monitor desk setup, but it's nice to have the option. The trilogy is also coming to PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.

The Grim Dawn expansion Forgotten Gods was announced in March 2018, with an expectation that it would be out sometime in the second half of that year. Today, with March 2019 looming, developer Crate Entertainment rolled out a gameplay trailer showcasing the new desert setting, a new Mastery, and other new content and changes, and said that it will be out—for real this time—next month. 

Forgotten Gods will take players into a great, scorching desert beyond the lands of the Erulan Empire, a place of "burning sands, lush oases and volcanic wastes," and secrets best left buried. It will add a new Mastery to the game called the Oathkeeper, new mobility skills, four new Factions and nine new Constellations, dozens of new enemies and hundreds of items, and a new endless game mode set in a crumbling reality called Shattered Realm. 

Grim Dawn, for those who haven't yet had the opportunity to enjoy it, is an old-school action-RPG, stylistically similar to Diablo 2 but with deeper gameplay mechanics including a multi-classing system, character-modifying Constellations, and numerous high-level "Challenge Dungeons." It's relatively complex as these things go, but also really good: We scored it 83/100 in our review, saying that "few modern hack-and-slash RPGs are quite so fun"—even though it's really grim. 

The extra wait for Forgotten Gods is very on-brand for Grim Dawn, too: The base game was announced in 2009 and slated for release in 2011, but didn't actually come out until 2016. Find out more about what's coming at grimdawn.com. 

Steven gave us a rundown of Warframe's "massive" roadmap for 2019, which includes plans for an overhaul of the game's daily Alert and Challenge missions. Digital Extremes kicked that new system off today with the launch of The Wolf of Saturn Six, the first of a series of Nightwave radio events "built on fresh, immediate story-infused gameplay." 

"Nightwave is an ongoing pirate radio broadcast hosted by Nora Night, the eyes and ears of the Origin System," the studio explained. "Each Nightwave Series will unfold over several weeks and tells a brand new story. Completing daily and weekly challenges—called Acts—will unlock limited-time, exclusive rewards." 

Players will encounter new enemies and storylines in Nightwaves, and progress through a series of unique tiered rewards that will only be available while each series is running. "There's a bit of worldbuilding in the Wolf of Saturn [Six]," creative director Steve Sinclair said last month. "It's primarily focused on cosmetic rewards. You'll get to see the lineup and what you're working towards as well as, paced in there, some high-end power rewards." 

The Wolf of Saturn Six will tell the tale of a "savage and unruly convict" who has escaped his prison and is now roaming free in the Origin System. It's live today on all platforms, and is "only the beginning," Digital Extremes said: A new series, with an all-new story, incentives, and rewards, will start up after this one is over. 

Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart had quite a bit to say in a new interview with Game Informer about The Outer Worlds, the Fallout-esque sci-fi RPG the studio is currently working on, and its recent acquisition by Microsoft. He also teased a couple of new things that the studio's "three-ish" development teams are working on, and hinted that even though The Outer Wilds doesn't have a release date yet, Obsidian already has its eyes on a sequel. 

"We have The Outer Worlds team, which is the majority of our development," Urquhart says in the video. "We saw the small group of people that are finishing up in Pillars of Eternity. And then we have two other teams that are starting things up."

No more is said about it—the interview is clearly focused on Microsoft and The Outer Worlds—but it's not too hard to imagine that one of those "things" Urquhart mentioned is preliminary work on an Outer Worlds sequel. He said midway through the interview that he can't get into specifics about who would own the rights to potential Outer Worlds followups in the wake of the Microsoft acquisition, but he did hint pretty strongly that it's probably going to happen. 

"We started the company to make games like The Outer Worlds. That's what we had started going at Black Isle Studio, at Interplay, and we wanted to keep on doing that. That's why we left Interplay, we left Black Isle Studios—I didn't want to leave Fallout, I didn't want to leave the place where I'd kind of grown up in the industry. But we did it because we wanted to continue to make these things. And The Outer Worlds relay is the culmination of that," he said. 

"I think the thing that I like so much about it as well is, it's creating this world that we'll get to go play in for years. I guess that's how I think of it—I'm an old school sci-fi/fantasy reader, so everything's a trilogy, or everything's like books and books and books—although the whole Robert Jordan thing is insane—but that's what I like about it. We're building this game world, this setting, that we can go now tell all different kinds of stories in. And it lives up to that, it's that dense, it's that built, it has these cool characters in it. It's like thinking about a D&D campaign, from the standpoint of, 'This is B1, and then there's gonna be B2 and B3 and B4,' and so forth and so on." 

The Outer Worlds may or may not be scheduled for release on August 6. 

The farm animal tactics game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is quite good: Maybe a little shorter than it should have been, but "a tense, absorbing and atmospheric" game in the style of XCOM. Even so, the front-facing weirdness of the thing—characters include an anthropomorphic duck, a brutish, bipedal boar, and a literal stone cold fox—may have put some people off. 

The obvious solution is to give people a chance to try to try the game without paying for it, which of course is why we're here—because a demo is now available on Steam. It's about a 3GB download, and it sounds like it's a pretty thick slice of the game: Funcom said it includes "all content from the beginning of the game, up [to] and including reaching the Ark." 

The "Download Demo" button isn't very prominently featured, but it's there, buried on the right-hand sidebar of the Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Steam page, just above the list of Steam features. Hit that and you're off to the races. The recently-announced Stalker Trials "challenge mode" expansion, with scored progress through specially populated maps, leaderboards, and a handful of new options and bug fixes, is also now available and free for everyone. 

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 has sprung a leak, with the name of its next DLC appearing on SteamDB. It's called Winds of Magic, the fancy name given to the magical energy that causes so much mischief in the Warhammer universe. 

To find out exactly what it is, come back to PC Gamer at 7.30am ET/12.30 pm GMT tomorrow, when we'll have a lot more details for you.

Vermintide 2 was our best co-op game of 2018, and I think Tom managed to get to the heart of its appeal: "There is some seriously excellent hitting in this game. When you whack a rat in the head with a hammer it blows up and the poor creature stumbles around a bit before falling over dead. Top hitting."

It's OK, they're bad rats.