Moon Beast have released a pre-alpha demo for their action-RPG Darkhaven. You know, the one from the former Blizzard North devs, which harkens back to Diablo 2 while stirring in a dynamic world and terrain destruction reminiscent of Minecraft. I did a big interview feature about it. Now, you can play a very early build and decide whether I've been quaffing the Kool Aid.

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Battlefield 6’s Season 2 thunders onto PC today, a three-month festival of Battlefoolery that begins with a new map, Contaminated, new modes for the Redsec battle royale component, a dinky yet deadly helicopter, and some new guns and gadgets. The EA shooter’s Steam playerbase has slumped following its chart-topping release last year, but don’t worry, ye Battlefaithful, because Season 2 has officially recaptured my interest by filling my lungs with psychoactive vapours.

In new limited-time mode VL-7 Strike, available in regular multiplayer and Redsec, you must wear a gas mask and replenish its filters to avoid falling victim to clouds of funky fumes. Idiot! Why would you want to avoid falling victim to clouds of funky fumes. It’s got to be more intriguing than flipping the objective yet again.

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Avowed now has a bunch more possibilities when it comes to one of the most important fantasy RPG build archetypes, thanks to the deployment of its anniversary update. Three new character races are on offer alongside the established humans and elves, and you can arm them with a quarterstaff which caters to mages who think puny wands and books aren't quite showy enough.

As you might recall, some of the stuff included in this anniversary update was orignally supposed to arrive in Avowed late last year, but ended up being delayed by Obsidian.

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Amid soaring SSD prices, slower-but-cheaper mechanical hard drives may have offered an attractive reprieve for anyone wanting to embiggen their PC storage on a – and I know it’s increasingly difficult to use this word without breaking down into desperate laugh-crying – budget. Unfortunately, that probably ain’t happening either, as leading HDD manufacturers Western Digital and Seagate have both revealed that they’ve already sold “pretty much” all of their mechanical drive stock that was allocated for 2026.

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Back when Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown was announced, we knocked it for offering zappy muzak in place of the TV show’s official theme. Gamexcite and Daedalic have added the theme, now, and I sort of wish they hadn’t. “Help!” I screeched to my bedroom walls, as the rousingly sorrowful opening bars wafted from the speakers like nitrous oxide. “A videogame is making me feel something! It is making me feel like 31 years have passed, and I can still remember Neelix getting drunk on water. I still remember the Doctor’s first words. I still remember blowing up the Caretaker Array rather than using it to insta-warp home.”

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Rubbing shoulders with factions is a big part of the Fallout: New Vegas charm, even if it often devolves into you doing a bunch of favours if you don't want to risk ending up on the vilified naughty list for one too many accidental grenade pickpocktings. You do get some nice perks for keeping the likes of the NCR or Legion on side, but a new mod aims to take that to a new level, letting you send faction cronies out on handy odd jobs while you kick your feet up.

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Highguard is in a bit of a Schrödinger's cat situation. That's because at the time of writing, the official site only shows the shooter's logo, and text that reads "This site is currently unavailable. Please contact support@codethirtytwo.com for assistance," alongside links to its official Discord server and Dwitter page. This, of course, could just be a blip, but even as I'm writing this it's been the case for several hours, and there's not a single word from developer Wildlight about why it's down. So, it is both dead and not dead until someone opens the box.

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"Huh." This, as admiringly as I can make this sound, was the first thought I thunked when I put down the demo for Titanium Court. Here is a game that is many things. The first thing it is is a play, in perhaps a literal sense, perhaps as a tool to immediately allow one to suspend their sense of disbelief at everything that is about to follow. We're watching a play, a narrative vehicle where anything can happen as long as what's on stage is convincing enough to make us believe it's happening. And truthfully, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what did happen.

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Remember Hyper Scape? I acknowledge that this might come across as a tad mean, but in this ridiculously fast-paced world we find in, it can genuinely be hard to remember one failed live service game from the next. For a refresher, this was Ubisoft's attempt at a battle royale game back in 2020, though it didn't pan out as it was shut down only a couple of years later. Well, anyway, it's back! Sort of, not quite, but it might soon, or actually probably eventually, will be thanks to the efforts of a group of people hoping to revive it.

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I think that with a game like Crimson Desert, you'd be well within your right to have an eyebrow pre-raised considering its online, sort of free-to-play (depending on where you live) predecessor Black Desert Online regarding the like of microtransactions. I know I certainly have! At a glance Crimson Desert certainly looks like it could fall into similar pitfalls if only based on vibes alone. However! Developer Pearl Abyss would quite like you to know that, in that regard at least, you have nothing to worry about.

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