
Phil declared in his review of Hitman 2 that it "feels safe": It doesn't depart from the formula established by the first game, but it delivers levels "that can rival some of the best in Hitman's long history." The first of them, Hawke's Bay, is set in a small beachfront property in New Zealand, and as of today it's free for everyone in a new Hitman 2 Starter Pack on Steam.
The Starter Pack provides full access to all Hawke's Bay content, including challenges and unlocks, hidden stashes, new starting locations and weapons, and escalating difficulties. From March 8-17 it will also be the location of the fourth Hitman 2 Elusive Target, Dame Barbara Elizabeth Keating, aka "The Politician," a former Minister of Trade and Foreign Affairs for New Zealand who was busted siphoning charity funds into her offshore account.
She was ultimately able to pin the blame on the charity's director and now she's working to restore her reputation and position—and thus it falls to Agent 47 to deliver a modicum of justice by, umm, airing her out. Owners of the Starter Pack will have the same opportunity to do the job as everyone else, under the same set of rules: You get one shot, and if you blow it, she gets away for good. (Or at least until Io Interactive brings her back around again.)
The Hitman 2 Starter Pack is free, and any progress you make in it will carry over to the full game if you decide to go for it. Hitman 2 also happens to be on sale for 37 percent off—$38/£28/€38—until February 28.
A wee free demo for Hitman 2 is out now, inviting all would-be slapheads to sneak around the game’s first campaign mission and try murder. This ‘Starter Pack’ demo contains Hawke’s Bay, a beach house level serving as the game’s prologue and tutorial, with all its challenges and unlocks and such.
Today also brings an update which, most importantly, reduces the amazing psychic ability of guards to instantly know where a gunshot was fired from. The update spruces up the levels carried over the previous game with tweaked lighting too.

I worry about Geralt. The Witcher series may be over for now, but this hasn’t stopped Geralt from taking odd jobs here and there, slaying beasts in Monster Hunter: World, or stabbing folks in Soul Calibur VI. Is Geralt getting adequate retirement benefits? Have witchers unionized yet? I hope he can get some rest, or at least find more contract work that doesn’t involve exterminating monsters all the time. Freelancing is tiring.
Here are seven games that need to be blessed by Geralt s presence.

While last year’s Steam Awards were just a poll on the store, Valve are stepping up their game this year. Starting in a few minutes (at the time of writing) is the Steam Awards 2018 show, broadcasting live on the company’s own Steam TV site. While I doubt there’ll be anything as surprising as Epic’s coup at the Game Awards before the holidays, there’s still a chance for unexpected announcements in there, plus I’m curious just how fancy the show will be. Tune in here on Steam TV – the show starts soon. Below, a reminder of the categories and the nominees in the running.
Update: Show’s over, and honestly I’m a bit underwhelmed, even starting with low expectations. No surprises, no human faces, no pageantry. Barely any time to breathe, even. The show began immediately with the awards and hammered through them in under twenty minutes. At least each of the winning studios recorded a little award acceptance clip – that was nice. You can see a recording of the show on the Steam Awards page here.>


HDR on PC continues to be a bit of a mess these days, but provided you haven’t been put off by the astronomical prices of the [cms-block]s for HDR or, indeed, the ongoing debacle surrounding Windows 10 support for it, then the next step on your path to high dynamic range glory is to get an HDR compatible graphics card.
Below, you’ll find a complete list of all the Nvidia and AMD graphics cards that have built-in support for HDR, as well as everything you need to know about getting one that also supports Nvidia and AMD’s own HDR standards, G-Sync HDR and FreeSync 2. I’ve also put together a list of all the PC games that support HDR as well. There aren’t many of them, all told, but I’ll be updating this list with more titles as and when they come out so it’s always up to date.
With the arrival of the RTX 2060, we now have four [cms-block] cards that can take advantage of the GPU giant’s cool new graphics features, such as their reflection-enhancing ray tracing magic and performance-boosting DLSS tech. But not all games can do both things at the same time, and many more still have no confirmed support for ray tracing and DLSS at all. So I thought I’d do the hard work for you and put everything in a nice, big list, detailing every ray tracing and DLSS game confirmed so far. The list is still quite small at the moment, but if you’re thinking about upgrading to either the RTX 2060, RTX 2070, RTX 2080 or RTX 2080 Ti, then these are the games that are going to get the most out of them.