Even with Into the Breach releasing this week, we want more FTL-style games. Abandon Ship, which hit Early Access last week, brings us an evil cult, a summoned kraken, and a managerial high seas adventure that will, possibly, be great. It's heavily styled after FTL, with cannons and sails in place of lasers and shields, and concise, effective Lovecraftian prose, but right now the tuning is off—it doesn't produce quite as fearful, exciting, or creative an adventure as its inspiration.

The world of Abandon Ship is a web of maps, framed squares of sea which are connected by gates. Opening a gate requires completing certain number of encounters which are discovered by zipping your little ship around and uncovering icons hidden by the fog of war. Mostly, I've been fighting or fleeing cultist ships and pirates in pausable real-time combat, though the maps are also populated with narrative encounters—opportunities to trade or seek repairs, or sometimes ambush a friendly vessel to the detriment of crew morale. After a couple tutorial maps, a danger meter also appears, siccing aquatic monsters on your ship if it fills before you unlock a gate and move on.

Abandon Ship is less economical with space and time than FTL was. The sea maps are pretty, but they're canvases for icons, not rich play spaces unto themselves. I don't like that I feel rushed not to make a decision, but simply to paint the map with my ship. I might choose to flee an area without repairing and buying ship upgrades if it's taking me too long to find a port, and that's 'a decision,' but it's dependent largely on luck. 

Taking too long without sinking a cultist ship fills up that danger meter, which when full results in either a kraken attack (slash at its tentacles until the 'flee' meter is full) or a sea monster boarding party. To kill the latter invaders, you'll pair crew members with enemies and watch life bars deplete, occasionally sending one or more of your tiny men off to heal (there's no way to zoom in, which would be helpful). It's a tedious punishment for unluckiness.

Cannons and mortars 

Ship combat is far better than exploration. Crew members must be assigned to parts of the ship, aiming and reloading cannons or specialized guns, steering (which allows for special maneuvers like ramming or fleeing), making repairs, bailing out water and so on. 

The fastest way to sink a ship, I found, is to ram it, and the best way to minimize damage to my own hull—which is the only thing that doesn't automatically regenerate between fights—is to inflict wounds on the opposing crew such that they have to abandon their cannon posts to heal. And so I developed a strategy that, while not foolproof, works well against the many low-level encounters I've had to run through so far. 

First, I upgraded my sails, which makes it easier for me to close in on captains who try to maintain their distance (some will come right at you, while others prefer to constantly retreat to the maximum distance). If they hold me off anyway, I bombard their mast until they slow enough that I can enter ramming range. I send one of my gunners to an anti-personnel gun, injuring enemy sailors as much as possible to encourage them to visit their medical station. Once my maneuver bar fills (everything's a bar) I ram them. Repeat as needed.

I've managed the last ten or so fights in the main campaign with this flowchart to mostly unfettered success. Any complications that arise—a hull breach, an enemy invader, a crew member with dangerously low health—I can solve by taking one gunner off his cannons for a moment. It has become somewhat rote.

There are theoretical decisions I could be making. For instance, if I focused my upgrades on anti-personnel weapons, I could kill the opposing crew or knock them all overboard without sinking their ship, securing better loot. But the high prices for new crew members and new guns and ship upgrades have kept me conservative—better to hit hard with more cannons than be underpowered if I encounter a bigger ship. Boarding and going hand-to-hand is worrisome, too, as losing a crew member is a big set-back.

Volcanoes and lightning 

How precisely to make the ship battles more puzzling, to deepen the risks at every level and dismantle rote solutions, I don't claim to know exactly, though Abandon Ship's alternate 'combat' mode, which discards exploration for a series of increasingly-difficult ship battles, contains hints.

Where the main adventure beefs up opposing vessels too slowly, the combat mode quickly turns encounters frantic as hull breaches let in water and fires break out. Improved enemy weapons are paired with environmental calamities, such as lightning strikes and an active volcano raining fiery rocks on the deck. A heavy rain means my fire-starting weapons are a no-go—I have to improvise. And my simple ramming technique is in constant peril of being thwarted, as no maneuvers are possible if my mast has been cracked.

I like these more trying battles better, as I'm rarely sitting and watching meters fill without doing anything—through directing every minor repair goes a little too far. There's a balance to be found in how often my plans should be stalled by damage or weather, as right now it feels either too little or too much. That's one knob to turn. 

Balancing those extremes can't be the end of the changes, though, as neither is fully satisfying. I still want to puzzle out different strategies for different ships. I'd love to stock one side of my ship with close-range flamethrowers, and the other side with long-range cannons so that I can run two attack styles, and to have a larger library of maneuvers. Perhaps a reworked, less stingy upgrade system could begin to open up the potential for that creativity.

For now, Abandon Ship is pleasantly engaging busywork. As your crew will happily stand next to a spreading fire—or worse, in the fire—doing nothing, they must be directed at all times. And there are so many little details to manage (each crew member has specialties, like in FTL, for instance) that it does effectively pass time: I played four hours without noticing them go by. 

I'm excited to see how Abandon Ship develops in Early Access, because it doesn't need a total rewrite (except maybe in the exploration portion). Most of the details that are there have been combined to make great games before, and the same can happen here. Changing their values may have a dramatic effect. Like some other Early Access games, there's probably a better game on the horizon, and I don't want to play this version much longer for fear it'll spoil me on what's to come.

H1Z1 is launching out of Early Access today and features a new team-based, cars-only mode called Auto Royale. The mode consists of up to to 30 teams of four players (one drives while the other three passengers lean out of the windows and shoot) speeding across the map as the circle of gas closes, collecting power-ups (like oil slicks, smoke screens, and double-jumps), launching off ramps, and doing battle with each other.

I got to play a couple rounds of Auto Royale this week on a test server, and you can see gameplay video and read all about it here.

As for H1Z1 itself, it's launching with a few changes to its standard battle royale experience. Most notably, players will be able to select the map grid they want to spawn over—until now, you spawned over the map in a random location. This tactical deployment, as it's being called, more closely mirrors battle royale games such as PUBG, which lets you decide when you want to leap from the plane and thus gives players a good degree of control over what part of the map they want to begin playing in.

A new heatmap, updated every few seconds, will give players an idea of where other players are landing. Also, players will usually (about 80% of the time, says Daybreak) be able to see the area of the starting safe-zone (the circle of gas) before they spawn, which will also help them decide where to land. I was told the price of H1Z1 will not change as it departs Early Access: it'll still be $20.

It's been a long road, so to speak, for H1Z1's exit from Early Access. The battle royale game started off as a popular mode for Sony Online Entertainment's free-to-play multiplayer survival game, H1Z1. After SOE became Daybreak Game Company, H1Z1 split into two different games: H1Z1: Just Survive (the survival game) and H1Z1: King of the Kill (battle royale). Both were in Early Access and both became paid-for games rather than free-to-play. 

More recently, Just Survive dropped the H1Z1 from its title (and remains in Early Access) and King of the Kill dropped everything but H1Z1 from its title. And now, H1Z1 is finally out of Early Access. Gosh. What a long, strange development cycle it's been.

Along the way, H1Z1 became a popular standalone battle royale game, opening the door for PUBG and Fortnite, which have since surpassed H1Z1 in player count and popularity. While its numbers have dwindled in the past six months (its peak was around 150,000 concurrent players, and it's now more regularly around 10,000), H1Z1 still has a pro scene and several yearly tournaments.

H1Z1 is launching out of Early Access today and features a new team-based, cars-only mode called Auto Royale. The mode consists of up to to 30 teams of four players (one drives while the other three passengers lean out of the windows and shoot) speeding across the map as the circle of gas closes, collecting power-ups (like oil slicks, smoke screens, and double-jumps), launching off ramps, and doing battle with each other.

I got to play a couple rounds of Auto Royale this week on a test server, and you can see gameplay video and read all about it here.

As for H1Z1 itself, it's launching with a few changes to its standard battle royale experience. Most notably, players will be able to select the map grid they want to spawn over—until now, you spawned over the map in a random location. This tactical deployment, as it's being called, more closely mirrors battle royale games such as PUBG, which lets you decide when you want to leap from the plane and thus gives players a good degree of control over what part of the map they want to begin playing in.

A new heatmap, updated every few seconds, will give players an idea of where other players are landing. Also, players will usually (about 80% of the time, says Daybreak) be able to see the area of the starting safe-zone (the circle of gas) before they spawn, which will also help them decide where to land. I was told the price of H1Z1 will not change as it departs Early Access: it'll still be $20.

It's been a long road, so to speak, for H1Z1's exit from Early Access. The battle royale game started off as a popular mode for Sony Online Entertainment's free-to-play multiplayer survival game, H1Z1. After SOE became Daybreak Game Company, H1Z1 split into two different games: H1Z1: Just Survive (the survival game) and H1Z1: King of the Kill (battle royale). Both were in Early Access and both became paid-for games rather than free-to-play. 

More recently, Just Survive dropped the H1Z1 from its title (and remains in Early Access) and King of the Kill dropped everything but H1Z1 from its title. And now, H1Z1 is finally out of Early Access. Gosh. What a long, strange development cycle it's been.

Along the way, H1Z1 became a popular standalone battle royale game, opening the door for PUBG and Fortnite, which have since surpassed H1Z1 in player count and popularity. While its numbers have dwindled in the past six months (its peak was around 150,000 concurrent players, and it's now more regularly around 10,000), H1Z1 still has a pro scene and several yearly tournaments.

One of the best parts of battle royale is being jammed into a car with your teammates, speeding across the map, encountering another car filled with enemy players, and then smashing into them, shooting at them, chasing them down, and blowing them up. Well, now there's a battle royale mode that is not just exactly that but only that. H1Z1 is leaving Early Access today: surprise! And a bigger surprise: it's launching with an arcadey new cars-only mode called Auto Royale. Check out the trailer above.

H1Z1's Auto Royale is a mode for up to 30 teams of four players, with each team packed into a car together—and there's no getting out. Launch over ramps, collect power ups, shoot at other cars, avoid the poison gas, and fight to be the last car standing (on wheels). I got to play a couple rounds of Auto Royale this week: here's a few minutes of footage from one match, and you can watch the entire match further down.

Auto Royale begins with each car in a cargo container that has just landed in a random spot on the map. There are currently two cars to choose from, a sedan (faster but with less health) and a military-style vehicle called an ARV (slower but more durable). The round begins, you bust out of the container, and teams speed across the map while the gas cloud closes in.

Scattered around the map are ammo and weapon pickups that can be collected by driving over them. Once collected, they appear in the trunk of the car, which acts as a communal inventory. Some pickups are in crates that must be shot open by players leaning out of the car windows and firing their weapons. More valuable pickups are dropped by planes and marked by beacons, or can only be reached by driving over jumps—sometimes a series of jumps.

It's not just guns and ammo you can collect while you drive, but Spy Hunter-like gadgets: deployable oil slicks, smoke screens, and landmines that can be activated by any player in your car. There are four different car-based power-ups that can be found and upgraded as well, including those for car durability (roll cages that mean you take less damage from the environment, or let you smash through fences without losing speed), water speed boosts (for driving over lakes—yes, you can drive on water, and with enough upgrades you'll actually drive faster on water than you will on land), health upgrades for the car itself, and bullet-proof glass, which protects players from gunfire provided they're not leaning out of the car windows when they're shot.

There's even a spring you can collect to allow you to double-jump the car, useful for snagging pickups on rooftops or launching your car over obstacles.

As for players, you can't die in the car from being shot (unless the car itself takes so much damage it explodes, killing everybody), but if you're shot enough by other players you'll become incapacitated until you heal yourself. If a driver is knocked out, another player will have to seat-swap and take the wheel. If the driver is the only one conscious, they can't shoot at all until another player in the car is healed, but they can still deploy defenses like landmines and oil slicks.

I had a pretty good time in my two matches of Auto Royale: it's goofy and arcadey, it's different than pretty much any other battle royale game or mode out there (except perhaps Motor Wars, GTA Online's BR mode), and who doesn't love speeding around, leaning out of car windows, and shooting the shit out of other cars? Combat is chaotic, with bullets spitting, smoke filling the air, and cars careening wildly over the landscape, dropping landmines and spraying oil everywhere. By the way, that oil slick you activate? It can be set on fire, meaning your car might wind up being chased by a river of flames. Fun.

Auto Royale does, however, feel like a mode that should have its own special map, perhaps one without so many unbreakable obstacles. Driving through the woods or through narrow alleys between buildings isn't much fun because unbreakable objects will stop you flat, and the game is at its best at high speeds in open areas to really let you go wild. It also feels a bit dull at the start of matches, too, because there's simply not much for the passengers to do except shoot crates open and keep a lookout until you spot another vehicle. When a couple cars engage each other though, it's good crazy fun.

There are plans to add an additional vehicle in the future, and Daybreak says there's the possibility of testing a duos mode (one driver and one passenger per car). You can watch one of the entire matches I played (as a passenger) below.

Whether your fighting flush or guarding your pennies, Humble's latest gathering of games has something to suit your budget. Well, that's assuming you like beat 'em ups. 

If you don't, you're as screwed as me playing any beat 'em up in the history of beat 'em ups. But if you do, you might like to know the Humble Brawler Bundle's pay what you want tier features BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, Skullgirls, and GUILTY GEAR XX ΛCORE CORE PLUS R—the latter of which means business because it's stylised in all-caps. 

Step up to the bundle's 'pay more than average' weight division—$5.59 at the time of writing (£4.02 or thereabouts)—and face-off with Street Fighter X Tekken and Arcana Heart 3 LOVE MAX!!!!! That last one really means business. Caps lock and five exclamation marks? Listen mate, I don't want any trouble. 

Graduate to the bundle's main card by paying $9 (around £6.47) to unlock all of the above, plus GUILTY GEAR Xrd -SIGN-, and Rivals of Aether. Launched last year, Rivals offers a pixelated riff on Super Smash Bros and looks lovely. Here's a trailer from last year:

As always, payment here is divvied up between Humble, the games' devs and a charity of your choice. Direct Relief and the American Cancer Society are this bundle's nominated organisations. 

Check out the Humble Brawler Bundle in full over here. 

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

Battle Princess Madelyn is Causal Bit Games' debut project, a modern throwback to Ghosts 'n Ghouls-era platformers that accrued three times its Kickstarter ask last April. As director and CEO, Christopher Obritsch shoulders most of the work. His boss, however, is his seven-year-old daughter Maddi.  

Which is partly why Battle Princess Madelyn is filled with fantastical boss characters—not least giant crabs and trees and spiders and boars, all of which feature in the following boss montage:

In a recent Kickstarter backer update, Obritsch explained that additional polishing and testing has delayed Battle Princess Madelyn by "a few months, maximum" to ensure the best possible game come launch time. 

"If this was a just a PC/Steam game, and not for my daughter, we’d be a little more lenient about it, however, this is not the case," says Obritsch, "and since it has her name attached to it as the main character—and is very much her creation as well—we want the game as polished as we can possibly get it with our small team."

Elsewhere in that post, some pretty polished-looking screens feature, as do these other neat boss face-offs:

Post-delay, Battle Princess Madelyn is expected around April time. Check out the aforementioned KS post in full for more deets on what its baddies are about. 

Matt Damon made life on Mars seem almost trivial, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I'd struggle to adjust to the red planet, what with its notable absence of corner shops offering cheap flapjack at nearly any time of day. Haemimont Games' imminent Surviving Mars will give me a chance to prepare for it beforehand—you know, should NASA run out of astronauts and have to resort to sending unfit games journalists out on its galactic expeditions.

You've already seen Evan Lahti play Surviving Mars for 13 of our Earth minutes, but ahead of its release on March 15, developer Haemimont Games joined us at the PC Gamer Weekender to offer a little more detail about its open-ended city-building strategy game.

Taking a cue from publisher Paradox's Stellaris, the technologies on offer on the research screen will be randomised for each playthrough, with only a third or even a quarter of the total tech being available to players on each run through the game. Hopefully this will keep it feeling fresh, by stopping players from falling back on the same strategies each time they start a new colony.

The above is only a glimpse of the full panel with Haemimont Games, however. If you'd like to watch the developer talking us through the early parts of a Surviving Mars mission, then get your peepers round the whopping 45 minutes of Martian footage I've stashed below.

Being evil in an RPG is no easy feat. Not only do you need the stomach for it, but developers aren't always the best at making evil choices feel as nuanced and satisfying as their morally righteous counterparts. It's rare for a game to present you with a decision so evil that it actually upsets you, but there is also an undeniable joy in being a monstrous jackass—even if your reason for detonating a dormant nuke in the middle of a small town is just for the lols.

That's why we forced some of our writers into the confession booth to finally fess up about their favorite evil decisions in PC gaming. It's some pretty dark stuff—from smothering babies to forcing someone to murder their lifelong best friend—but if you've got a kink for the chaotic, here are our picks for some of the most sinful choices we've made in games. 

Tyranny - Hush little baby 

To be fair, Tyranny is an RPG that has no real shortage of evil choices to be made—you do murder millions of people in the introduction alone, after all. But later in the story, Tyranny trades mass murder for one decision that is hauntingly terrible. See, to undo your overlord's Edicts that, like magical natural disasters, are tearing apart the land, your character must help fulfill certain contractual clauses. When you first venture to the Blade Sea, that clause is killing the last of its traitorous ruling family. At first this seems like a pretty easy task after you besiege the castle, corner the Regent Herodin and make ready to end his life. But after he is dead, the edict remains mysteriously intact. It's then revealed that there is another heir—a child born out of love between Herodin's son and the kidnapped daughter of your commander, Graven Ashe.

It's a hopelessly complicated situation made even more complicated by the fact that the mother, Amelia, will die to protect her child. But if the child lives, the Edict of Storms will continue. True to developer Obsidian's great storytelling lineage, there's a few different ways to handle the decision. But if you're the ruthlessly pragmatic type, you can simply kill Amelia and then smother her child in its crib. Or if you're a real monster, you can force one of your unwilling companions to do it for you, probably subjecting them to a lifetime of guilt and self-loathing. Whichever way you go about it (or however you might justify it) smothering babies isn't exactly heroic.— Steven Messner

Fallout 3 - The Big Bang

The big, obvious one from Fallout 3 is such a grand moment that it's almost impossible to resist. I blew up Megaton for two reasons: one, I wanted a nice apartment in Tenpenny Tower, where I could have a little break from the depressing nuclear post-apocalypse and chill with my robot butler. Secondly, the layout of Megaton is really annoying, and needlessly tricky to navigate compared to other locations in Fallout 3. It had to go, really. I activated the nuke and watched that baby go off. I regret nothing—it's still one of the most shocking and exciting moments from any game in the last ten years. — Samuel Roberts

Dishonored - Lust for vengeance 

Despite being an assassin, Dishonored rightly punishes wanton murder and instead encourages players to seek their vengeance through more creative means. Each kill pushes the city of Dunwall closer to complete chaos, so finding an alternative is necessary if you hope to ultimately rid the city of evil and corruption. Instead of murdering the pope, for instance, you can brand him with a mark of shame and force him to live out the rest of his life as a beggar. It's poetic justice at its finest—except in the case of Lady Boyle.

This capitalist is the financier behind many of Dishonored's villains and is rightly deserving of justice. But Dishonored's non-lethal way of dealing with her is pretty abhorrent. During the Lady Boyle's Last Party mission, Corvo can choose to simple murder Boyle (and her lookalike sisters) or instead deliver her into the hands of a creepy-ass stalker named Lord Brisby who, in addition to confessing his love for her, promises to make her disappear forever. While his suggestion is vague, it's just insidious enough to make me believe that handing Lady Boyle over is little more than human trafficking. That, by knocking her unconscious and letting Lord Brisby have her, I'd be condemning her to a life of sexual slavery at the hands of this creep. I mean, I get it, she's a terrible person and absolutely deserves punishment—but I think we can all agree that this is a bit much.— Steven Messner

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow - No questions asked  

Okay, obviously this isn’t an RPG, but I’ve pulled rank in order to include it because it’s such a juicy moral dilemma. What, dear reader, would you do if your boss ordered you to shoot someone—and only gave you a second to decide. Luckily for Steven, that’s not a situation I’m ever likely to be in. But for Sam Fisher, double-tapping a colleague is all in a day’s work. So it goes when midway through Pandora Tomorrow you step into one of those elevators with a mesh door. Suddenly you get a call from your handler, Lambert. “Fisher, we need Dahlia Tal dead. Kill her.” The elevator starts moving. “Don’t think, just do it.”

To this point as far as you’re aware Tal is an undercover agent in the Israeli secret police who’s been helping Fisher infiltrate a terrorist base, and has been portrayed as the kind of entirely sympathetic ‘goody’ NPC you expect from the series. The game barely gives you a second to make the call—I shot her, as did the guy in this video—and afterwards I remember feeling something close to actual actual shock.

If I’m being honest, there was also some exhilaration that the game had thrust such a horrendous decision on the player with zero foreshadowing. Brilliantly, at least in terms of design, if you kill Tal you don’t get any explanation as to why it was necessary. Whether or not I’d made the right decision was just about all I could think about for the rest of the game.

A quick trip to Wikia now reveals that Tal was in fact planning the ol’ switcheroo on Fisher, and had a team of snipers waiting to ambush him outside the facility. If you decide to let her live, Lambert gives you a bollocking and explains the deal with the double cross. It always disappointed me that although subsequent Splinter Cell games also came with tough decisions, none felt as startling as that murderous phone call. It’s also a pity that Pandora Tomorrow doesn’t appear to be on GoG or Steam currently. Time for a stern talk with Ubisoft.— Tim Clark

Knights of the Old Republic - Do as I command 

Playing the Dark Side in Knights of the Old Republic was way more fun, but this bit was twisted. Towards the end of the game, as you take on the mantle of the Sith and confront your party about their allegiances, things get pretty heated. The purehearted Mission Vao wants to redeem you, while her loyal wookiee friend Zaalbar is stuck in an impossible situation. He has a life debt to you, but loves Mission dearly. What's the most evil possible thing you can do, in this situation? Use Force Persuasion to convince Zaalbar to stab, strangle, or shoot Mission to death, while she shouts "It's me, Big Z! Noooo!" I don't think that's how the life debt is supposed to work.— Wes Fenlon

Planescape: Torment - I have no body and I must scream 

Planescape is full of potential bastardry, from selling your companions into slavery to, well, everything involving Deionarra. But in the Nine Hells of Baator there's an especially memorable moment. The Pillar of Skulls is where sage souls whose lies resulted in someone else's death are punished by being turned into chattering heads trapped in a column of flesh for eternity. The heads trade their knowledge for sacrifices, and know things you can't learn anywhere else. 

This is where you discover that one of your companions, a wisecracking floating skull named Morte, is an escapee of the pillar who has been trying to atone for his sin by serving you. Knowing this, you can put him back into the Pillar of Skulls in return for which it will answer one question. I don't know if shoving the first friend you make in the game back into a mass of bone and putrid flesh for eternity in trade for some information counts as Lawful Evil, Chaotic Evil, or Neutral Evil but whichever it is you are a dick for doing it.— Jody Macgregor

Fallout 2 - All is fair in love and war 

Fallout 2 was the first game I can recall where you could be truly evil—like, really, really evil. If you, like me, ended up sleeping with Miria (or her brother Daven), you'd be forced by her father into a shotgun marriage, straddling you with a completely useless companion. If you're truly evil, you can make the best of a bad situation and profit in the process. If you head over to The Hole or New Reno, you can pimp off your spouse for some extra caps or, if you encounter trappers, have Miria earn you some gecko skins by doing the dirty. That's probably not what her father intended to happen when he forced you to marry her.

Even worse, if you tire of any of your companions (and you don’t just let them get killed in a fight), you can sell them into slavery and be rid of them forever. ‘Losing’ Miriam to Metzger in The Den was my eventual choice, and when I happened to return to Modoc and mentioned what happened to her father, Grisham, the old geezer had a heart attack. RIP, dad, and thanks for the shotgun wedding.

— Jarred Walton

Trion's 2013 MMO shooter Defiance is a defiantly decent game. It's got "mostly positive" reviews on Steam, and we said it was fun in our review: "Not the kind of fun that warrants an unreserved recommendation," but certainly acceptably solid. And while the current player count doesn't quite live up to the promise of "thousands of players" scouring a transformed Earth, there's apparently enough of an audience (or at least Trion hopes there is) to warrant a remake, which was announced today as Defiance 2050. 

The new game is set 20 years after the Arkfall, the catastrophic event that ended the war between humanity and the alien Votans who came here intending to colonize the planet, apparently without knowing that we were here. By my calculations, that places it four years after the original Defiance game, which was actually a tie-in to the Syfy television series. (Update: Trion PR informs me that the TV show was actually a tie-in to the game. The original Defiance announcement describes the two as "interconnected." Make of it what you will.) Trion said Defiance 2050 "recreates the original game from the ground up," with improved textures, higher resolutions, and better framerates, but it will also feature major improvements to gameplay systems that will enable larger-scale action. 

"Defiance 2050 has been created with the original game’s community in mind," producer Matt Pettit said in the announcement. "The team has been listening to feedback and taking some helpful cues from fans to really create the Defiance experience that people have wanted for a long time. Defiance 2050 marks a shift for the game that goes beyond the change from the year 2046 to 2050, and we are absolutely thrilled to hear what people think of it."   

Defiance—the game—launched in 2013 as a conventionally-priced release, but transitioned to free-to-play in 2014. The television series was canceled in 2015 after three seasons, but Trion has continued to support and expand on the story via the game, and even described the Dark Metamorphosis update released in 2016 as a fourth season. Defiance 2050 may be more of a remake than a proper sequel, but setting it four years after Defiance will enable Trion to advance the story further. 

Defiance 2050 will undergo a closed beta prior to release, which is expected sometime in the summer. Signups are open at defiance2050.com, and you can find out more in the brief developer update video below.

The first of three new Battletech trailers showcasing the challenges facing giant fighting robots and the people who drive them in the war-torn Inner Sphere of 3025 rolled out today, as Harebrained Schemes announced that preorders are now live, and that the game will be out sometime in April. 

The video is a fairly basic overview of Mechwarrior combat, which Battletech creator Jordan Weisman describes as similar in many ways to that of XCOM. However, "the tactical challenges are very different, " he says: Battlemechs are massive machines that pack a tremendous punch, but they also generate huge amounts of heat that has to be dealt with, and they're like a tortoise flipped onto its back if they fall over.   

"There's all sorts of different kinds of tactical combinations between the mechs and the mechwarriors, and what their different capabilities are. Do I have, this one is going to be my long-rage scouter and then be able to fire in remotely? Am I trying to do brawlers who can really go in and use melee?" 

We took Battletech for a spin in January and found it to be a very promising sci-fi mercenary sim, at the tactical level and in the overall strategic layer: Damaged mechs cost money, dead pilots bring down morale, and occasional shipboard events—"mini choose-your-own-adventure digressions with consequences for morale," and thus pilot effectiveness—will have to be handled as well.  

Battletech is available for preorder now on Steam, GOG, or directly from publisher Paradox Interactive, for $40/£35/€40, or $10 more for the "digital deluxe" edition with wallpapers, the soundtrack, and a digital artbook.