Like its hero, the wall-climbing, sewer-spelunking, city-hopping Kyle Crane, Dying Light has its ups and downs and is kind of all over the map. Techland, creator of the Dead Island series, takes elements from a number of games—especially the Far Cry series—and mashes them together in its open world first-person zombie shooter. It's an uneven mix, bookended by a slow start and an exasperating finish, not to mention a few troubling performance issues, but in the middle lies a sweet spot that provides hours of satisfying, zombie-stomping fun.

Kyle Crane, a secret government operative, has been sent to the city of Harran to retrieve critical data about a virus that's turned most of the population into zombies. Crane, after immediately botching his mission and getting bitten, falls in with a selfless group of survivors, contends with a vicious warlord bent on controlling the medicine supply, and takes orders from an agency superior who would prefer to simply napalm the entire mess. Who will Crane ultimately pledge loyalty to? I wonder.

Crane, despite being what I assumed was a top physical specimen, initially can't run for long before slowing and gasping, and can only swing a melee weapon a few times before running out of stamina, which resulted in a slow and awkward first few hours of play. Weapons, at first, are limited to pipes, wrenches, small knives, or sticks of wood, all of which do little damage to zombies and need frequent repair before falling apart completely. The melee combat itself is a bit wonky: sometimes you'll score a staggering hit or grisly decapitation and win your fight instantly. Sometimes you'll just have to spam the mouse until you run out of stamina or your enemy falls. It doesn't feel like precise aiming helps: I've tried very hard to land my strikes perfectly, but the harmless glancing blows and devastating skull-crushers feel like they're randomly determined.

Weaponize yourself

Blueprints can be found or purchased, letting you craft upgrades to electrify pipes, sharpen or poison knives, add nails to a baseball bats, and otherwise beef up your attacks, and better weapons like swords and axes slowly begin to appear as you progress. Flipping through menus to craft gear tends to slow things down a bit, though provided you don't play in marathon stretches like I did, it may not be as tiresome as it eventually felt. It takes hours of play to even get your hands on a gun, and the relief of finally having a firearm somewhat defuses the issue of there being only a couple of pistols, two types of rifles, and a double-barrel shotgun.

Your best weapon is Crane's slowly improving agility coupled with a city perfectly built for climbing and roof-running. Once you get the hang of leaping and climbing and realize that nearly everything in the city that looks like it can be climbed can be climbed, Dying Light opens up and becomes a fun, zombie-infested playground. Techland has done a great job with the running, jumping, climbing, and clambering—zipping up the sides of buildings, sprinting across rooftops, and dodging and dashing through the crowded streets becomes real fun, an instinctive and exciting way to travel.

Skill points are doled out slowly and individually as you play and there's lots to spend them on. The vaulting skill is a useful one: while dashing through the streets you can plant your foot right on a zombie's face and launch yourself over it, leaving it in the dust. A related skill can also stun your targets as you leap off them, so you can land, turn, and bash your wobbling enemy's skull in. A fun, flying, two-footed kick can stagger enemies or knock them off perches, and a sliding kick can shatter a zed's legs. Despite finishing the main story I've still only unlocked about half of the skills available, and uber-skills like stealth kills and the ability to use a grappling hook come very late in the game. The result is a well-paced, gradual increase in skills and a character who markedly improves but never feels like some sort demigod placed on earth to smite zombies.

Right, zombies! They come in a few flavors. Mostly, they're slow, shambling types, clogging the surface streets and bridges, lurking in buildings and alleys, and occasionally staggering around on rooftops, providing amusement as they flop off ledges or over balconies while mindlessly trying to follow you. There are also specials: huge, durable brutes who swing clubs or hurl hunks of concrete, spitters who barf slime from a distance, bloated blobs who scream and explode, and a handful of freshly-infected citizens who haven't lost their mobility and can still sprint and climb. Distracting them, rather than fighting them, is often the best move; firecrackers will divert zombies for the few important seconds needed to pick a lock (in a Skyrim-style minigame) or force open a door, and the city is littered with other traps like cars rigged to explode and puddles of water that can be electrified. The zombies' attraction to noise is a double-edged sword, of course. Shooting or using grenades is quick and effective, but can draw an overwhelming crowd.

When night falls, the zombie game changes entirely. A new breed of zombie called Volatiles appears, and suddenly Crane is no longer the fastest thing on two legs in Harran. The Volatiles prowl the pitch-black city, and if you wander into their vision cones they pursue you at a lightning-fast pace while screeching to attract other zombies. You can set off traps or distract them while fleeing, but a single stumble usually results in a quick and brutal death. The complete difference between daytime and nighttime in Harran is remarkable, and I always find the approach of night to be genuinely panic-inducing as I hurriedly sprint for the nearest safe zone before the sun goes down. You're occasionally forced to do missions at night, but otherwise you can advance the clock to morning by sleeping in a bed.

Bright frights, big city

Harran itself is peppered with stuff to do, much of it familiar from other open world games. In addition to lengthy story missions, there are multipart side-quests, looting and scavenging expeditions, random encounters with hostile thugs or boss zombies, airdrop recoveries, citizen rescues, hunts for collectibles, securing safehouses, and a few timed challenges. It's all pretty standard open world fare and easily ignored when you're headed to a mission, but if you're just out for a run you'll always find something happening nearby.

As for the story itself, it's a bit of a clunker as Crane, supposedly torn between his loyalties, grapples unconvincingly with his conscience despite very obviously being a complete Boy Scout. Characters are both familiar and forgettable: the reckless kid, the reluctant leader, the soullessly pragmatic government agent, and an assortment of helpless or nefarious NPCs. Of course, there's the evil boss who executes his henchman for minor infractions and taunts you over loudspeakers as you infiltrate his headquarters. At one point, after you slip from his clutches because he wanted to deliver yet another monologue instead of just killing you, he even raises his face to the sky and howls "Craaaaaaane!" Classic.

Considering the formulaic story and the uninteresting characters telling it, I appreciate that Techland let me skip through cutscenes and speed up conversations by tapping the spacebar. That said, Dying Light also contains a series of my personal gaming no-nos. I was stripped of all my carefully collected and crafted weapons and dropped into an deathmatch arena not once but twice. There's no manual or quick saves, only checkpoints, and while they worked reasonably well for most of the game they were mostly absent for the final story mission in a cheap attempt to make the endgame more challenging. A lengthy dream/hallucination sequence, shamelessly ripped from Dishonored's Outsider sequences, slowed my movement to a crawl to forced me to listen to some truly terrible voiceovers. Finally, it made me engage in a stupid QTE-based knife fight with a boss when I had a full load of guns, grenades, and molotov cocktails stuffed in my pants.

Infect your friends

I played a couple hours of co-op, which allows friends to drop in and out of each others' games, team up for missions, engage in competitive challenges, or just run around and bash zombies together. It was fun, though my co-op partner and I both experienced some very heavy lag at various times. I also tried out a couple sessions of the multiplayer Be The Zombie mode, which pits a group of human survivors against a player-controlled uber-zombie who stalks them through the city, but it just feels like a half-baked version of Left 4 Dead.

The lag we experienced was hardly Dying Light s only technical problem. I experienced framerate dips (see the Performance and Settings sidebar), as well as issues in cutscenes. When a scripted scene or a conversation with a character began, the visuals would completely freeze, sometimes for as long as fifteen seconds, while the audio would continue to play. Then the audio would freeze while the visuals struggled to catch up. I eventually found that simply turning off depth of field fixed it, though I have no idea why. I've also seen various reports on forums about the game not being optimized for SLI, to the point that playing with two cards is somehow worse than playing with one. If you're on the fence about buying Dying Light, you may want to hold off to see if patches make any positive changes to the situation.

When it wasn't tripping over its own feet—be it from technical problems or the shambling start and potboiler story—I enjoyed Dying Light. Over the three consecutive days spent playing it almost constantly, I typically came away having had a pretty good time. There are frustrations here, but there s also an exciting movement system and a healthy if familiar list of activities to engage in.

Why have Dota 2 and League of Legends become the most popular PC games of the generation? Wes and Chris take a moment during their visit to the Smite World Championship to try and answer what it is about MOBAs that's elevated them above FPSes, RTSes, and RPGs as the most-played games in the world.

The PC Gamer Show appears every Friday. Hit us with PC gaming questions for us to answer at the end of next week's episode in the comments!

Chrysalis, the first episode of Life is Strange, is now available, and as is the custom it's got a launch trailer that sets up the game's characters, background, and a Big Secret Mystery. (Spoiler: Max can reverse time.) The developers at Dontnod also revealed a bit about what players can expect from the intro chapter, and how it will extend over the course of the full game.

The opening chapter is "basically an introduction to the world of Life is Strange," the studio said in a press release. Players will make decisions that will influence the destinies of Max and Chloe in the wake of their reunion, but while some of the consequences of these choices will be immediately apparent, Dontnod warned that "there are also mid and long-term repercussions that will pan out over the course of the later episodes, in a butterfly effect manner."

Chrysalis will also serve as an introduction to the game's mechanics, although those will evolve over the course of the game as well, as interactions and "rewinds"—that is, Max's ability to reverse time—grow in complexity.

Life is Strange is available now on Steam, in individual chapters or as a "complete season" bundle. The Life is Strange soundtrack is also up for your listening pleasure on Spotify and YouTube.

Quake Live has reported that it is suffering through a DDoS attack, and that players may experience intermittent outages while it works on resolving the problem.

"Quake Live is experiencing issues due to a DDoS attack, and may be down intermittently while we seek to address the problem," a brief message on the Quake Live site states. "We apologize for the inconvenience." The DDoS warning was actually posted last night but users on the Quake Live forums are still complaining about difficulty connecting to the game, and according to Blue's, the Quake Live site itself has also been forced offline at times.

I'm compelled to take a moment to note that a DDoS attack—Distributed Denial of Service—is the lowest form of "hack" that a person can undertake, essentially the digital equivalent of setting a bag of dog poop on fire and leaving it on someone's front porch. Worse, actually, because at least the poop is only going to be stomped on by one particular person, who's presumably caused you some sort of irritation; a DDoS attack is tedious, indiscriminate jerkery that accomplishes nothing.

Okay, got that off my chest. No other information about the attack has been released, but I've had trouble reaching the Quake Live site myself this afternoon: Sometimes it will load, and sometimes the connection simply times out. A Bethesda rep echoed the message posted on the Quake Live site, saying, "The game will be down intermittently as we address the DDoS attack," but offered no suggestion as to when the matter might be resolved. We'll let you know if and when we hear more.

Dustin Browder is the Game Director for both Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft 2. We got a chance to talk to him about Heroes of the Storm's place in the MOBA world, its content release schedule, the possibility of a map editor, e-sports, and more. 

PC Gamer: There are a lot of MOBAs out there already and there are a lot more coming. What part of the MOBA market are you trying to carve yourself a place in?

Dustin Browder: We kind of view it a little differently. I know it s gonna seem dumb, but we don t really view it from a business perspective like that. We decide if we want to make a game or if we can make a cool game. We have confidence that if we do something that s cool then we can find an audience. We ve been accused of all kinds of things that we re going after on this game, like we re going after the casual market or we re going after the e-sport market or whatever. We re just making the coolest game we know how and we ll find an audience.

[...] We were all big fans of Aeon of Strife, Defense of the Ancients, and all these games that were created by our community in Warcraft 3 and even a little bit in StarCraft back in the day. We all played these games for many many years, and some of us a bunch of League and some of us played a bunch of Dota 2, some of us are playing Strife and all these other games in the genre. But we went back and started looking at this game and wanting to make a game like this—we went back to the source, we went back to the Aeon of Strife maps that we were playing back in the early 2000s in Warcraft 3 and we imagined what would we develop if we were thinking about where those games were going? As opposed to starting with what s out there today, we started with what we imagined the genre was doing ten years ago, and it took us to a very different place.

PCG: Was simplicity on your mind while you were thinking about all this stuff, or was simplicity just what you arrived at after going back to those old gameplay ideas?

DB: Simplicity is always on our mind at Blizzard game design and Blizzard art and Blizzard engineering. We know that great games come from very simple gameplay pieces that are stacked fifty on fifty on top of one another. The cards in Hearthstone are very simple in the design, but when they start interacting it gets insane. It gets really deep and really interesting. So it wasn t just this game, StarCraft has a core value of simplicity of design. Trying to keep the pieces clean and clear and as crisp as possible. 

This does a couple of things; first of all, it makes the game easier for everybody to get into, which is very exciting. Second of all, it makes it easier to balance and deal with when we re building the game. It also still makes for an incredibly deep experience because, with the gameplay pieces being simple, everybody can focus on higher levels of strategy. [...] We don t believe that simple means lack of strategy, or simple means lack of depth. We think easy to learn, difficult to master, and part of easy to learn is clean game pieces. And in many ways even difficult to master can be about clean game pieces, so we re always shooting for that for all of our games.

PCG: Are you worried the simplicity is going to discourage fans of Dota or LoL? I could imagine a lot of the things I love about Heroes of the Storm being the same things a Dota 2 fan hates.

DB: It s really interesting. I mean, I don t know the answer to your question, but I ve met many people like you and they always say the same thing to me, which is Well I like it, but I imagine that other people will not. I ve never found the guy who likes things really complicated. He s probably out there and he s just not talking to me, but most people are in your camp where they re like I really enjoy this. I love Hearthstone, and I love that I can get into it and understand it, but I love all the tactical depth that it provides. They ll often say the same things about heroes if they ve had a chance to play. At the end of the day, I don t know. I mean, yeah, maybe they don t come. Not up to me, right? Not up to me whether the ten year DOTA veteran likes Heroes of the Storm or not, or maybe he likes it in a different way or maybe he doesn t like it at all, who knows? All we can do is make the best game we know how, the game we re excited to play.

PCG: From my experience with it, the game seems very polished. Why go from alpha to a closed beta and how much longer do you think it will be closed for?

DB: It really depends on a lot of factors. There s some things that you re seeing going on now that are features we feel like we should have when we launch the game. We feel like we should have ranked play modes. We think we want a profile screen, I d love to have a profile screen [laughs] How about a score screen? A score screen would be nice—a good one, not the placeholder one we have now. So there s some basic features that just aren t in.

I think one of the misconceptions people have about Blizzard—I certainly had it before I came to work here—was that Blizzard takes an extra six months, maybe a year, maybe two years to make a game and they do all that as polish, they polish on the back end. But that s not actually what we do, we polish as we go. There s no reason why we shouldn't be looking at the most polished version of the game we can accomplish everyday. So it takes us longer to make games, but we re polishing everyday. So when you see the game, by our standards three-quarters done, you ll say well, it looks like it s polished, and there s truth to that. It is polished in many ways, but there s still lots of features not in the game.

There's a possibility that we could do something in Heroes that brings down WoW...that doesn't sound fun.

The second thing that s also happening that I don t understand maybe as well as you would like, but I can represent it for you, is just the amount of technology and server infrastructure that s at stake here. We ve seen many games in the industry, even our games, launch with challenges, with problems, with bad day one experiences for players.

PCG: Those are nice ways to put it.

DB: Highly uncool, right? Highly uncool. Not what we want, not what anyone in the business wants, and certainly not how we want to represent ourselves. We re taking a more measured approach into standing up these servers and then getting people into the game and trying to feel out where we re having problems. At Blizzard, all of our games are connected through Battle.net to one another so you can chat with your friends in Hearthstone, you can chat with your friends in WoW, or whatever it is you want to do. We ve had challenges where we ve done something in one game that could potentially crash another game or could cause problems elsewhere. So there s a possibility that we could do something in Heroes that brings down WoW, Diablo, StarCraft, or Hearthstone. That doesn t sound fun. We re taking what to some people might be an overly cautious approach. We don t agree. We owe it to our players to do our best and to do everything we can to prevent those things from occurring, so we re taking a cautious approach to who we let in and how many we let in.

PCG: You currently have 6 maps in the game, and how many heroes?

DB: It s hard for me to remember because I have so many more internally. 34, I want to say? Something like that. [It currently has 33 heroes.]

PCG: Well, I m sure you ve got a number you re not allowed to tell me about.

DB: It s just I have like another six that are being tested internally, and I get confused because I play that at the office and I play a different version at home. [...] We re just going to keep adding heroes forever until we get sick of it and stop at this point. There s no secret number and there s no number that determines when we launch. I ve had that asked many many times like so, how many heroes do you need to launch? and then they re doing the math and counting like you do about about one a month...That s six months! Gotcha! Unfortunately, I would launch today with the number of heroes we have. I m good. The heroes are cool. We re ready to go.

PCG: How about maps?

DB: We re good. We re ready to go. We re gonna keep adding more, definitely the rate of growth on maps is not gonna slow or stop until we say so. Until somebody tells us dude, too many maps or whatever. We re adding them as frequently as we can, and we re going to keep adding them as frequently as we can, even after launch. What you re seeing now is not a burst of speed prior to launch. This is the pace that we re hoping to continue developing at going forward. We re gonna add game modes, we re gonna add new heroes, we re gonna add new battlegrounds. Our goal for this game is to communicate with our audience to the best of our ability that you haven t seen anything yet. We don t want this game to become stale. We do not want this game to become repetitive. We want this game to constantly evolve.

On the next page: A map editor, e-sports, and the acronym.

PCG: Are you nervous at all that the amount of level variance as more maps are added will go counter to that philosophy of simplicity?

DB: We have some strategies for how to handle that. There are a couple of things we could do; one is, we could actually pull maps from rotation for periods of time. So we could say that the optimal number of maps in rotation is four or five, for example, and then the maps are going to be pulled and they ll come back later if we still like them. You could also do a map rotation, so every week it s a different set of maps, every two weeks, every month, whatever seems appropriate. 

I think the feedback hidden in your question though is valid, which is: is there a point where there s too many maps in play and that it s difficult to keep it all in your head. Each map is simple enough, and that s fine, but maybe there s too much? I don t know, that s a fair question. Nobody, to my knowledge, has tried this many maps in this type of game before and certainly hasn t kept adding them at the crazy rate that we re adding them. We re definitely in new territory here, which is a happy place where we want to be. We want to be doing new stuff that keeps the game fresh and interesting. But yeah, maybe. Maybe at some point we should consider a rotation, maybe at some point we should pull maps out. I m not sure. It s a good question.

PCG: Heroes of the Storm is built with the StarCraft 2 engine. What are some of the challenges or advantages of building a brand new game off of that veteran engine?

DB: We get the capability to prototype very quickly. We have an amazing map and game editor that was shipped with StarCraft and our community for StarCraft has used to create some of the most incredible mods I ve ever seen, and this is in the tradition with all of the map editors we ve shipped with all of our previous games; Warcraft 3, Warcraft 2, StarCraft, going all the way back. [...] It makes us very agile. It allows us to develop battlegrounds quickly. It allows us to develop heroes quickly as long as we can get the ideas and the balance correct. Tools are not the problem, the only problem we have is being smart enough to use them correctly.

[...] The ability to build these battlegrounds comes from the fact that we can sit down and brainstorm an idea with one guy—like a guy on our team, Meng Song, who is this amazing technical game designer who worked on StarCraft for many many years—he comes over and he sits with us and says Hey guys, we want to do a map that s like a pirate ship and you collect coins, I don t know... So we brainstorm with him, and literally three days later we re playing that map. It doesn t look great yet, but you can playtest the gameplay and we can start tuning and polishing from there. Incredibly powerful for game development to have that kind of firepower.

PCG: Are you planning on adding a map editor or true custom modes?

DB: We really would love to. We ve got a few little hiccups to work out but they don t seem unsolvable to me. We will definitely get to it. It s not [an engineering problem], it s actually some policy issues. Like, in StarCraft if you go in and make the Mickey Mouse vs Batman game and then Warner Bros. and Disney are knocking on our door going What is this!? We d just ban you or we ban your map, and we say go away, and if you want to come back in, you re going to have to buy another box. It s a little barrier to being a bad guy, to abusing other people out there in the world. Heroes of the Storm is free to play, so if you want to come in and make Batman vs Mickey Mouse and we ban you, you can put it right back up tomorrow. We don t really have an easy way to stop that right now.

So we re going to work it out, but it s not unsolvable. It s more like how do we want to work that out? How do we want to control this? How do we make sure that you don t put up a bunch of highly questionable things like that or pornographic stuff or I don t know. People do bad things, right? We just have a policing problem, but it s not a technology problem and we just need to get the time to do it. Right now we re just so desperate to stand up our ranked modes, to get a profile screen, to get a score screen, to make sure our servers are good, but it s something that we re very passionate about. I can t see a world where Team 1 doesn t get to that. There s too many people on Team 1 who love that stuff. We re way too passionate about it as a group. It s how the genre was invented.

What you re seeing now is not a burst of speed prior to launch. This is the pace that we re hoping to continue developing at going forward.

PCG: We saw a showmatch at BlizzCon this year, but what are Blizzard s long term plans for supporting Heroes of the Storm as an eSport?

DB: It s really simple: We re going to watch what the community does and talk to them, and then jump in and support them as best we can. That s the whole strategy from a high perspective. We have an e-sports team here at Blizzard that s very passionate about e-sports. [...] They re ready to go and they re talking with tournament organizers now, they re talking with pro gamers, they re talking with shoutcasters—all of whom are interested in creating an e-sports experience around Heroes of the storm. And once we see what they re doing more of, we will leap in to help them as best we can without interfering and damaging them, you know what I mean? We don t want to mess it up for them. These guys have put in lots of work and they deserve our respect and trust and they deserve our support.

PCG: So it s more of a supportive role rather than a proactive role like Riot Games has taken.

DB: I don t see a world where we re owning them, no. We want them to be successful, we feel like they ve earned it. It s the same strategy we took with StarCraft, it s the same strategy we ve taken with Hearthstone, it s the strategy that works for us. We think it s a strategy that promotes our communities, that promotes our eSport personalities, that promotes our e-sports organizers. They do come talk to us and they give us advice [...] If we hear advice that we think we can act on, then we ll do it. But I don t know exactly what advice we re gonna get. I don t know exactly what advice we ll act on, but we are certainly ears open and we re listening. We re seeing the beginnings of an eSport community develop and we re super excited about the people who have had the courage to jump in early like that. We re very honored at those people who have jumped in early and are trying to help build this up, and we ll do everything we can for those guys to support them and see that they re successful.

PCG: Ideally, would it be your intention to have every hero and every level be competitively viable?

DB: No, no, no. For example, right now Gazlowe the goblin tinkerer is not considered a top tier character on any map except Sky Temple, where we re starting to see Gazlowe do some pretty cool stuff because he s very much a board control piece. Gazlowe can t fight for much but he can own an area of ground. Well guess what Sky Temple is all about? It s all about owning ground. So suddenly here s a hero, probably a tier two maybe tier three hero, who is suddenly first pick on Sky Temple, and that s what we re going for. We want variability in these heroes. We don t want twelve heroes to be top. It may happen, but that s not the goal. We want the variation in battlegrounds to cause changes in your composition. We want variation in enemy team compositions to change your composition, and with the introduction of ranked play, we re finally getting to see how successful our strategy has been here in creating that kind of variability. We could have guessed that before, but we never would have seen it, and now we can start working towards more and more of that kind of variability.

PCG: I have to ask before you go: why d you guys have to double up on the HotS acronym?

DB: [laughs] Heroes of the Storm was one of our favorite names for the game, and we almost didn t call it that just because of that reason, like it s another HotS! We can t do another one! Nooo! But we were like aw...It s not about the acronym. Okay, we can do it. People will make fun of us, but it s okay. So I accept your mockery, sir. It is a little silly but it was not our intention, it was an accident.

Medieval Engineers is a very niche sort of game. As its Steam Early Access page puts it, it's about "engineering, construction, and the maintenance of architectural works and mechanical equipment using medieval technology." It sounds a bit like Minecraft, but there's a much greater emphasis on the laws of physics and the need to design and build within those limitations. And when you don't, bad things happen.

It's all about structural integrity, especially when somebody starts flinging cannonballs at your fortifications. But developer Keen Software House says that while it can be played as an action game, "We expect players to avoid engaging in direct man-to-man combat and instead use their creativity and engineering skills to build war machines and fortifications. Medieval Engineers shouldn't be about troops; it should be about the machinery you build."

My experiences playing in real-world sandboxes as a child leads me to think that this might be an optimistic take on the situation—I like smashing them down a lot more than putting them up—but a game like this is clearly aimed at a very specific audience that might have a different attitude toward such things. And Keen Software House does have some idea what it's talking about: Its first game, Space Engineers, sold over a million copies in its first year of release, despite still being in Early Access itself.

Medieval Engineers launches on Steam Early Access on February 19.

We've partnered with Bundle Stars to give you a chance to win $500 in your Steam Wallet! Two winners will be selected to win the $500 Steam Wallet prizes, while ten runner-ups will win the Fully Loaded Bundle, which includes 10 games. 

To enter, check out the widget below. You'll get two entries for joining the PC Gamer Steam group, two entries for joining the Bundle Stars Steam group, and one entry for tweeting about the giveaway. Each entry gives you a better chance to be selected to win, and you can get even more entries for referring friends to enter the giveaway through Facebook and Twitter. 

The giveaway starts Friday, January 30th at 2pm GMT and runs until Monday, February 2nd at 2pm GMT. Winners will be contacted by email after the giveaway has ended on Monday. Good luck!

A new asymmetrical multiplayer shooter from the makers of Left 4 Dead should be a cause for celebration, right? And yet, somehow, Evolve keeps managing to dilute its core promise. I haven't even played it yet—I hope it's brilliant—but its orbiting Business Strategy has seriously sapped my enthusiasm.

Here's the new thing: a mobile companion app that takes the form of—you guessed it—a free-to-play match-3 mini-game.

Here's the trailer:

And here's a passage from the trailer's description. Time how long it takes before you become visibly annoyed:

"Use match 3 tokens of the same color to unleash devastating attacks on your enemies, and fill up energy bars to activate hunters special abilities. Earn Mastery Points to rank up your character in both the mobile and console games. Explore the planet of Shear in search of new wildlife and monsters. Discover and complete your collection of exotic wildlife in the Bestiary, and earn unique art for the Evolve console game. Enhance your Evolve skills by watching your multiplayer match replays from a strategic top-down view, and devouring intel in the Game Changer. Evolve: Hunters Quest lets you continue your Evolve experience from anywhere!"

In case you were wondering, I became irate at the point that the description twice uses "Evolve console game" to describe a game that is also on the PC. And again at the phrase "devouring intel in the Game Changer". Nonetheless, it's a thing that'll let you earn Mastery Points towards bonuses in the main game. If that's a thing you want, and your tolerance for match-3 games is high, I guess this is something you can do now.

Apparently, Evolve isn't just a mechanism from which to hang a companion app and a bewildering selection of DLC and pre-order bonuses. There's also a game—one due out on 10 February.

Ta, Eurogamer.

Last week, Firaxis announced Sid Meier's Starships—a game that both includes the Sid Meier moniker and is being made by Sid Meier. It's a Civ: Beyond Earth spin-off set amid the warring fleets of space exploration.

Last night, Sid himself sat down in front of a Twitch audience to tour fans through the game as it currently exists. You can see the recording of that stream below. (Skip to about 8 minutes—that's when things start happening.)

The Beyond Earth influence is clear from the off. It features the same leaders and affinities, giving players of that game a sense of progression within this. Naturally, the focus is different. Starships is all about the fleet, and so resources and tech are geared to upgrading your ships.

Starships is due out "Early 2015".

Thanks, PCGamesN.