It’s very nearly Explosion Day in America, so that means that every online shooter is doing its best to bludgeon us senseless with loud guns and louder outfits. Call of Duty: WW2 is no exception, but accompanying the Liberty Strike event‘s obligatory and garish red/white/blue-painted weaponry and outfits is a juicy little cherry of daftness on top. While Call of Duty isn’t my usual cup of shootybang tea, I love the sound of this week’s time-limited playmode, available now until July 9th – Wanderlust Mosh Pit – as it seems delightfully> stupid.

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Whatever your weapon of choice–plasma rifle, axe, M1 Garand, or raw capitalism, baby!–you may well be able to dabble in your favoured violence this weekend for free. The full versions of XCOM 2, For Honor, Call Of Duty: WWII‘s competitive multiplayer (okay, so not really the full version), and Offworld Trading Company are all available in free trial weekends for the next few days – mostly through Steam. (more…)

With a month to go until Activision start blabbing about Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4, the last annual sequel in their mega-blockbuster shooter series, the rumour mill is filling in the space. According to whispers on the wind, Cod Blops 4 won’t have a traditional story campaign, scrapped because it wasn’t going to be ready in time for the October launch, and will instead focus on multiplayer and the cooperative Zombies mode. Other whispers say that the game will have a battle royale mode too. Activision reply that they “don’t comment on rumor and speculation.” Believe as much or as little as you please. (more…)

I don’t understand how anyone can believe any first-person shooter series is improved by removing wallrunning and jetpacks, but apparently “historical accuracy” demanded Activision do that with Call of Duty: WW2. What rot! But if you do want to try zippy face-shooting with horrifying screams and no jetpacks, you can play CoD WoWa2’s multiplayer for free this weekend. A free trial kicked off last night, giving a free days to run on floors (not walls) and jump (not jumppack) around sodden and frozen battlefields. Might be fun to try, if you can download it in time. (more…)

We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol’ Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well – as do a host of other games from 2017’s great and good.

Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you’re so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I’d have gone for in each category. (more…)

Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games.> But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol’ breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.

Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.

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You know what I love about the winter holidays? Shooting people in various 20th century European locales. If you too enjoy sending small chunks of metal through the air at high velocity towards a fellow human being s vital organs, perhaps you will like the upcoming DLC for Call of Duty: WWII. It s called Resistance and has three new multiplayer maps, a new mission for war mode and another chapter for the daft Nazi zombies mode. Inspect the liver-puncturing possibilities in the trailer below. (more…)

Welcome to the Steam Charts. Here are the headlines. (more…)

The tail-end of Steam’s Autumnal sale sees a few old favourites lingering with the usual suspects in the charts this week. The discounts that got them here are all gone now, but it’s only a couple of weeks now before everything goes completely bonkers for the Winter Sale, and you can expect to see all the same names deeply discounted once more. (more…)

Videogames’ extended voyage through the uncanny valley would go on for at least another couple of decades, I’d presumed until recently. Real, believable people conjured from our graphics cards would surely remain a pipedream for many hardware generations to come. Then I played Call of Duty: WW2, and the first cracks appeared in the walls of reality.

All of sudden, videogames can do faces. Amazing faces. Terrifying faces. (more…)