Battlefield Hardline opens at dusk in a bleak suburban neighbourhood of Miami. You—intense cop Nick Mendoza—banter with sidekick and fellow intense cop Khai, as the dull glow of TV emanates from drawn curtains. Conspicuous deals go down on rubbish strewn street corners, while boomboxes blast syrupy rap. Men lounge around on front lawns drinking from spirit bottles and tinkering with gutted cars. Travelling through this dystopia, I immediately felt something I have never felt before in a Battlefield game: interested. The atmosphere s been cribbed straight from Season 3 of The Wire.

As we travel the mean streets I m waiting for the magic to subside and for the game to invite me to kill something, but Hardline has different plans. Normally you d whip out an automatic and start mowing down anyone brave enough to exist in your vicinity, but in Hardline you re a cop. You can t just kill folk willy-nilly. Or rather, you can, but you feel like maybe you shouldn t.

This is the prologue to Battlefield Hardline. We re on some mission to capture some guy to get some information. There are a bunch of tough looking gangsters blocking one of the suburb s thoroughfares, so we re forced to sneak through some nearby housing projects. This is where Hardline s stealth mechanics are introduced, and they re strongly reminiscent of those found in Far Cry 3: enemies have detection meters which increase the more exposed you are, while flicking a bullet shell in any direction will distract and draw an opponent to that general area.

According to Visceral Games VP Steve Papoutsis, you ll be able to play the majority of Battlefield Hardline in the shadows or at the very least passively, doling out death only in heated defence scenarios (we ll get to those later). As a cop you re able to brandish a badge and quell, albeit briefly, up to three enemies at once, but you ll need to keep your weapon pointed in order to keep things under control. A swift non-lethal takedown is the best way to handle these situations, but be careful: not everyone is impressed by your badge.

The prologue takes us to a dilapidated school, now fallen into the hands of a local gang. The guy we arrested back in the projects is our mole here, and using the new police scanner we re able to trace his progress through the school from a nearby rooftop. The scanner also marks enemies and can pull up police records where relevant. Inevitably the plan falls into disarray when a couple carloads of gangsters turn up, presumably warned by their comrades that this mole is, well, a mole.

Now Khai and I need to get inside the hideout to investigate. There s the option to shoot my way in, but I opt for stealth. Once inside the belly of the beast—and once I ve captured some story-advancing evidence with the police scanner—I m inspired to shoot my way out. Which I do, but the firefight is mercifully brief and thus meaningful. Shooting baddies in Battlefield single-player campaigns is usually a numbing affair: you keep picking fellas off until they cease to spawn. Here, the shootout is over within a minute but it feels like there s real blood, sweat and tears involved.

Battlefield s single-player campaigns have a terrible reputation for bad pacing and laughably earnest storytelling, but Hardline has an almost Guy Ritchie romance to it. The dialogue is short, sharp and free of the kind of impenetrable military jargon we re used to suffering in previous Battlefield games. The episodic nature of campaign (there s ten episodes and a prologue) indicates that Visceral is going for a season boxset feel, and it shows. When you load your game you ll be invited to watch a previously on segment, while exiting a game will offer an (optional) coming up next presentation.

While I got a feel for the game s tone, the preview build I played didn t offer much opportunity to follow the actual story, as once I d finished the prologue I was fast-tracked to Episode 9—the penultimate mission. We re in a lustrous central business district and a nearby skyscraper is our destination. We need to get to the top and blow something up in the penthouse suite, but there are three ways to go about it: through the front door guns blazing, around the back sneakily, or through a car park. I opt to go around the back.

There are a bunch of tools at your disposal in Battlefield Hardline. The weapons are accessed via caches littered throughout levels, where you can change your loadout for both guns and gadgets. The latter includes ballistic shields, laser tripmines, breaching charges (remote mines, basically), a zipline, grappling gun, first aid kit and gas mask. The environment offers its own options too: once I ve penetrated security through the back door I switch off the alarm system before happening upon a security room. I take the guard out silently and, via the CCTV, mark all the enemies on the floor. Importantly, I feel like I m in control, and I don t fear the game is going to script my best laid plans away.

When I sneak my way to the top of the building and start blowing things up, I'm inclined to turn to my gadgets for the first time. Khai warns of a gaggle of oncoming security guards so I place a couple of tripmines around the penthouse to catch them unawares. With the help of a barely touched shotgun I maim the guards as they arrive from every direction. There s no hiding behind a single piece of cover in this scenario: I needed to move around and react to the environment. This encounter is one of the aforementioned defence scenarios where you ll have to kill to stay alive, but again it s mercifully brief. Two rounds of enemies arrive and die relatively quickly, before a hilariously overblown cut scene has Mendoza flailing in the air on an untethered zipline cord.

And that s it. The weirdest thing about Hardline is that it doesn t really feel like a Battlefield game. The gunplay is customarily smooth, but it s actually not a primary concern. Indeed, guns kinda feel like just another gadget - a problem solving tool—not a core component of the game. If Hardline s final build manages to be as interesting as the two missions I played, then we may see a reverse to the usual Battlefield predicament, which is to say: we may see a solid single-player shooter marred by its sameish multiplayer offering. But however things pan out, I was totally ambivalent to this game last week, but now I m looking forward to a Battlefield single-player game. It s an odd feeling.

Competitive multiplayer darling Towerfall Ascension is getting an expansion. Dark World will feature new archers, new levels and, of course, new arrows. This additional selection of foe-piercing tools will be available sometime early next year.

"New locations are spread across the Dark World," explain the developers, "a twisted reality parallel to the TowerFall world you re familiar with. The final tower, Cataclysm, uses procedurally generated levels to make sure every match is unique and surprising."

As for the new arrows, some teaser gifs give a clear idea of what they can do. (Click the top-right corner to make 'em animate.)

For more, head over to the dev's Dark World announcement post.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2. Artwork is 'Tidehunter' by MikeAzevedo.

I'm playing through Dragon Age: Inquisition at the moment. It's great—probably my game of the year—and you should  read about that elsewhere. Its greatness isn't what I want to talk about right now. Yesterday, I made a decision in the game that actually broke my heart. I picked a dialogue choice from a list and something happened that made me so unhappy I had to take a break from the game. I thought about it, and talked to Phil, our News Editor, who has finished the campaign, and then I went back and unmade that decision. Normally, I would never do that. But this time I decided that I didn't want to be sad and so I loaded a save and picked the other option from the list.

That is how 'regret' most commonly manifests in your experience of playing a game. You go back and replay the section and alter your decisions, or play with more skill, and you bring about an outcome that you're happy with. Even in competitive games, where exact repeats are less likely, there are still scenarios that you can vow to approach differently: next time, they won't get the flag out through the back entrance. Next time, I won't fall for a Dark Templar rush.

Dota 2 is a little different, at least in my experience of it. The individual components that make up a given competitive scenario are so complicated that you never really get repeats: you might experience a base race more than once, but it's very unlikely that you'll ever experience the same base race again. Your hero, your friends' heroes, your enemies heroes; who's alive, who's dead, who has buyback; items, ultimates, cooldowns. All of these things matter enormously. They all factor in to the decisions you make, and when you make the wrong decision it can be as heartbreaking as watching a tragedy unfold in a singleplayer RPG.

Last weekend I played another round in the games industry amateur Dota 2 league,  The Rektreational. My team, Venomancer? I Hardly Know Her, doesn't really practice. Actually, there's no need for 'really'—we don't practice. I jump into games with Pyrion, Shane and Phill from time to time and play with Pip a little more regularly, but as a stack our only experience of playing together is these matches. This means that the first games are always a little rough.

Our first game against League of Legends (best team name in the tournament, there) was more than a little rough. And we should have won, but I made a big mistake. With their carries dead but our ancient exposed we charged down mid and went straight for the throne. As Tidehunter with a Refresher Orb, I was sitting on a double Ravage: I felt confident that we could push through the three remaining supports and take the game. But they weren't there.

LOL pulled an Alliance-in-TI3 and bought Boots of Travel, closing in on our ancient as we took down their tier four towers. I should have teleported back then and there, but I didn't have a scroll. Stupid. I hesitated, thinking there might still be defenders in their base, and waited slightly too long before running to their fountain to buy a town portal and jump back. I ran from the fountain, Blink Dagger on cooldown, to try to get their supports in range of Ravage. I was maybe 200 units away when our ancient exploded—and among those tumbling fragments of our game-critical glowy rock garden were little shards of my self-regard. I was gutted. And you can't go back and fix that.

I'll never encounter that scenario again, and I'll never get to unmake that mistake. It just happened that way. One of the things that can be so frustrating about learning Dota 2 is that you can learn to recognise the mistake but the process of implementing that knowledge takes years to bear any kind of fruit. Another example: last night, in a JoinDota League match, my team successfully ganked a way-too-farmed Spectre carrying an Aegis. As soon as she fell we got ready to fight again. A thought wormed through my mind: their Tidehunter probably has Ravage. Brewmaster probably has Primal Split. They've got time to get here. We're probably already--

dead.

Whose fault was that? I genuinely do not know. Perhaps we were only delaying the inevitable. Perhaps I should have said something, or said it more clearly. Maybe the other members of my team should have seen what I saw coming too, and overcome the natural human urge to cooperate enough to back off on their own. Trying to unpick that game-ending catastrophe is like trying to unpick any other act of irrecoverable bad luck and failure—the unshakeable minor grief of missing the bus to somewhere really important. Except with wizards.

You can vow to do things differently next time, but that's only realistic to a point. You've probably learned something, but you'll probably never know: next time will always be different, and the reasons for your success and failure then won't necessary have much to do with how much you do (or don't) learn now. 

Instead, the conclusion I've arrived at is this: that making a mistake is, in some ways, its own reward. The feeling of recognising a mistake, horrible though it might be, is the only sign you are going to get that you are improving at the game. You were not a good player in that moment, but you are aware of some of the reasons why. You can never guarantee that you'll fix those problems, so you have to learn to derive satisfaction from your awareness of them. There are no repeats. But there is always the ongoing linear progress of your understanding, a mass of experience that can only ever be grown, never diminished, by the things you regret.

I still wish I'd teleported earlier.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

From the very first moment you meet it, Icewind Dale grumbles through its frozen beard that I am going to be a old-fashioned pen and paper RPG . It starts as your six adventurers, drinking around a table in the tavern of Easthaven, are approached by a mysterious stranger to go on a quest… cue a ramble across Icewind Dale, the frozen north of Faerun, the land of the Forgotten Realms book series, with a plot that acts a preamble to R.A. Salvatore s so-so Icewind Dale trilogy.

For those who ve not played it, Icewind Dale is an infinity engine game, just like Baldur s Gate and Planescape Torment. Yet, where those games had epic branching storylines and finely-sketched characters, Icewind Dale is more restricted in its ambitions. Similarly, the Enhanced Edition is more limited in its additions.

This version is a minor improvement on the previously complete edition of Icewind Dale (available from GOG). It adds a touch of cut content (restored mainly thanks to a persistent modding community called Gibberlings) and imports the much larger variety of equipment, classes and class kits from Baldur s Gate. There are also useful additions like the ability to skip dialogue, an essential loot-finder tool, and a zoom function so you can fit more of the game s beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds on your screen. Finally, there s a new cross-platform multiplayer mode, allowing you to play with friends on their phones and tablets.

Anyway, following on that mysterious quest in a pub RPG promise, Icewind Dale is as close to Diablo as Baldur s Gate. Much of the game is spent killing. Killing skeletons, yetis, orcs, goblin, giants, thieves, umber hulks, salamanders, trolls, monks, golems, zombies, lizardmen, yuan-ti, mummies, shadows and liches. Amongst others. Unlike modern games, they really didn t skimp on the monster types in ye olde days, and there are several tough battles that will require careful planning and character management to survive.

Where they did skimp was on the characters. Unlike the earlier infinity engine games, you don t get interactive characters or inter-party dialogue or plot from your party members here, nor can you recruit more as the game goes by. You generate them right at the start, use pre-generated ones, or import ones from other games. It s recommended you start with six new characters, but given the way it doles out experience, it s perfectly plausible to start with just one or two and level them up fast.

These characters of yours travel out from the great druidic tree of Kuldahar to explore why its warming aura is fading in the snowbound lands of Icewind Dale. Though in description the story seems rich enough, it mainly consists of killing lots of people in a whistle stop tour of Faerun s minority factions. Occasionally, you get to talk to them before you kill them. Thankfully, there are the usual endless Black Isle sidequests, varying from rebuilding an Elven arboretum to repeatedly rescuing villagers, which add a little more flavour to the world. Black Isle s (Obisidian s) dialogue is as witty as ever, and the depth of NPC responses to different character classes adds to the already-enormous replay value - though given the weakness of the story, we d balk at playing it on the Story mode where your party is invulnerable.

There are other, minor problems. I never understood the D&D THACO combat system and it s still obscure and unexplained here. Though the imbalances in it are fun, being unable to kill a boss because none of my magic weapons are +3 is daft. Similarly, though the new autoloot helps with finding items on the ground, you ll still have to pixelhunt to find switches and crucial loot containers. And quicksave before each battle, because the jaunt to find a priest to resurrect a fallen character is always tedious and autosaves aren t generous.

The biggest problem with this Extended Edition is that the original, despite being slightly buggy, is still completely playable, especially the GOG edition; this isn t one of our much-vaunted treasures like Ultima Underworld or Arcanum: Of Steamworks Obscura that simply aren t much fun to play these days because of interface, control and/or resolution issues. The infinity engine established many of the modern expectations for RPGs, so it s not surprising that a later game like this still just works. One suspects that this version has been rejigged mostly so it can be released on iPad, and the PC release is an incidental benefit.

Yet, despite being only a minor advance, this is certainly the definitive version of Icewind Dale. That itself is a fun, tough quest that brings back nostalgia for the beauty of the engine and combat system of those days. That makes it a nice stopgap between here and Eternity.

Warlords of Draenor comes out today; the fifth expansion for the massively multiplayer phenomenon that is World of Warcraft. In December's issue of PC Gamer, we salute not only WoW's future, but also its past—celebrating 10 years of lore, quests, community and hide-skinning.

What else? How about Cory's hands-on impressions of H1Z1? Or maybe Chris's report on the making of Wolfenstein: The New Order? Or perhaps a Smite hero? Nestled inside the issue, you'll find a free Smite character and skin. The issue, which is in shops now, can be ordered through My Favourite Magazines. Digitally, you'll find it on the App Store, Google Play, and Zinio, and you can subscribe to get issues delivered directly to your door. Read on for a look at the subs cover, and a round-up of the features to be found in issue 272.

This month we...

• Talk to Blizzard about the future of WoW.
• Investigate the impact of the world-changing MMO.
• Talk to MachineGames about the violence and humour of Wolfenstein: The New Order.
• Offer up the latest impressions of H1Z1, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Total War: Attila, Dungeons 2, Battleborn, Crookz and Life Is Strange.
• Review Alien: Isolation, FIFA 15, Defense Grid 2, Wasteland 2, The Golf Club, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Stronghold Crusader 2, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Fable Anniversary, A Golden Wake, Train Fever, Minimum and Hack 'n' Slash.
• Find out which gaming mouse is worthy of your hands.
• Discover the hidden worth of Resident Evil 6, and go bug hunting in Boiling Point: Road To Hell.
• Find out if Chivalry is dead. Get it?
• Reinstall Alien versus Predator.
• Find even more ways to torture the poor denizens of The Sims 4.

...And more!

Mount & Blade Warband is not a beautiful game. Its graphicsability is low. It is, to borrow from the teachings of Daphne & Celeste, without an alibi. On the plus side, it can run on pretty much any recent system without dropping to a single-digit FPS, or refusing to load faces. So, you know, there's that.

Despite its looks, it's an absolutely brilliant RPG-cum-strategy—filled with a multitude of freeform, sandbox options. And now it's getting a Viking expansion, courtesy of the creators of the popular Brytenwalda mod.

Here, then, is a new trailer for that expansion, which is due out "soon". Check that sweet boat tech!

Yesterday,  I complained that there were no good screenshots for the newly announced Just Cause 3. Then, because I'm petty, I asked readers to tweet me with their own artistic recreations of what they think the game will be.

People actually did this.

Also yesterday, genuine screenshots of Just Cause 3 appeared. They appeared courtesy of  Game Informer, who have temporary dominion over all Just Cause 3 related happenings.

I'm going to post them anyway, like the rebel without a cause that I am. I will, however, keep the Game Informer watermark CLEARLY VISIBLE, because someone from Game Inform e r  might see this and I don't want to be sued.

As an additional challenge to all of you, I'm going to post the official Just Cause 3 screenshots BROUGHT TO YOU IN ASSOCIATION WITH GAME INFOR M ER alongside our community-made pictures. I invite you to attempt to work out the difference. Answers at the bottom of the post.

Okay, I have realised that the inherent problem with this quiz is the GAM E I N F O R M E R  watermark. It makes it too easy. I have manually attempted to correct that in the next image.

Right, there's your lot. Did you spot them? To be sure, here are the answers.

Shot 1: by  Flaillomanz. Shot 2: by  August Hassnert. Shot 3: Just Cause 3, brought to you in as s o c i a t i o n w i t h G a m m m M M m f o r m e r . Shot4: by Jedi Master Luke. Shot 5:  Shot 6: Just Cause 3. All Hail Game Informer. Shot 7: by Gus. Shot 8: by Shiny Llama.

Ubisoft has already acknowledged the problems AMD users are experiencing, noting that performance may be "adversely affected" by certain CPU and GPU configurations. But the game's issues extend beyond certain specific hardware issues. Now, they've mapped out some of the other pressing concerns that they should probably get around to fixing.

The next update, Ubi says, will address some specific issues. That is, issues more specific than, "this game runs like a man whose legs have been encased in Camembert."

• Arno falling through the ground.
• Game crashing when joining a co-op session.
• Arno getting caught inside of hay carts.
• Delay in reaching the main menu screen at game start.

Beyond that, Ubi is planning to address the game's bigger problems. "This list doesn t capture everything," explain the team, "but here are the most widely-reported problems we ve heard about from you."

• Frame rate issues.
• Graphical and collision issues.
• Matchmaking co-op issues.
• Helix Credits issues.

Taken in totality, that is a lot of Assassin's Creed Unity problems that need to be addressed. I've been playing on a Nvidia GTX 670, and can confirm that the frame rate issues are consistent and noticeable. While my game can run at around 30 FPS in open play, it does suffer frequent stuttering. Moreover, it tanks during cutscenes—dropping as low as 10 FPS for no discernible reason. Then, of course, there's the fact that sometimes characters just straight up walk through each other. It's an strange old bit of software.

Many adventure game heroes are borderline sociopaths and kleptomaniacs. Randal is just a little more honest about it than most. He's a user. He's a layabout. He's the bad friend who gets you into trouble, then simply shrugs or goes "Whatever..." depending entirely on his mood. Were you to drunkenly give him the engagement ring you were planning to give to your would-be fiancee, he'd pawn it for rent money. After all, if you don't remember, it's OK.

In this case though, there's a problem—a curse has trapped him in a Groundhog Day loop, played out in classic point and click style. That's pretty bad. It gets worse in a hurry. Everything Randal breaks or otherwise changes also gets unstuck in time, with the universe thrashing around each time to fit in the changes—every day getting more complicated (if not always as a result of much obvious logic). The one constant is that things only ever get more complicated, up to and including his best friend repeatedly committing suicide in hideous ways that would be hilarious if they… nope, they re just plain funny.

Dark as the humour is, though nowhere near as much as, say, Hector: Badge of Carnage, Randal's Monday pulls it off. The dialogue, while overwritten, is sharp, especially when playing around with fourth-wall moments like Randal firing the player, and his growing boredom with dealing with the cast, like the gruff cop convinced he's a murderer. In particular, Randal usually manages to avoid the trap that—without wanting to cast aspersions on specific games here—I think of as the 'Simon The Sorcerer 3D mistake. If a protagonist is too nasty, at least to people who don't deserve it, they become intolerable. Randal hits the right level; he's always an ass, but rarely too much a dick.

Quest for Cameos

Even before his messing around does things like unleash a plague of koalas though, his world is a weird one. Just about everything on every screen is a pop-culture or gaming reference. He lives on Threepwood Street. A psychiatrist has screenshots from The 7th Guest, Maniac Mansion, and Ghouls and Ghosts on his wall. The courier company he works for just straight up uses both a Portal logo and the Planet Express shield from Futurama. Almost never are they actually connected to anything, or there as an actual joke, right down to having Harold from Day of the Tentacle do a cameo, but then calling him Robert and giving him a different personality. At times it's like playing a comedy version of Limbo of the Lost.

Pop-culture referencing is common of course—Scott Pilgrim and Spaced spring to mind. The difference is that when they did it, it was with a purpose; as part of their characters' worldview and to reflect what's going on rather than simply to be seen. On PC, games like Space Quest have thrown stuff in, but even then usually in a subverted context, like Obi-Wan and Vader's fight simply stuffed in the background, or the Enterprise visiting a drive-through.

Here, most of them don't even get hotspots. It's just "Yep, you recognised Sophia Hapgood's amulet on that shelf, have an imaginary cookie , and far more jarring than cute. What makes it especially strange is that when Randal does actively riff instead of just show, it's usually worth a smile. Like a Gandalf stop sign declaring "You shall not pass! or a gold Tim Schafer.

Sam and Max Hit The Skids

Still, whatever. It's all harmless fan-service. And when you have a funny adventure game with a decent script, a clever gimmick, solid voices and good art, what could possibly go wrong?

Oh, right. Puzzles. And this unfortunately is where it all crashes down. At best, Randal's Monday has puzzles that professors at the Institute of Moon Logic would point to and ask "What the hell?" They're nonsensical, poorly explained, reliant on the most painful 'try everything on everything' guesswork, and feel longer than being strapped to a board until Stephen Hawking's voice synthesiser has read out the entire works of Dostoyevsky. An early one, for instance, involves combining a support pin from a globe with a nut from a broken radio to create a key which winds a clock to make a crook think he has to be somewhere else. This isn't close to the worst, just the only one there's space to even quickly describe here. Later puzzles are whole coiled up snot-strings of this nonsense.

It's a common misconception that in a comedy game, anything goes. No. Look at Day of the Tentacle and you'll see how the logic and goals have to be clear, even if the solution is from Toon Town. Randal's Monday gets it painfully wrong, mistaking convoluted and crazy for funny and logical to the point of being tedious and infuriating to play even with an in-game walkthrough for when you've had enough. Just reading some of the solutions is tiring.

An adventure can survive dropping the ball in many ways, even get away with skimping on puzzles, but when they're bad, the whole experience suffers like a hamster in a microwave. Or the person who thought that was a good idea, when Weird Ed Edison sees what they did.

While it took me around 80 hours, here's Dark Souls 2 completed in less than an hour. Usually when I see a speed run stat this impressive it's wise to assume glitches have been exploited. But that's what makes this run so mind-boggling: Twitch broadcaster Allakazzaror has managed to beat the game in 59 minutes and 15 seconds, and not once does he break the rules set down by From Software.

While Allakazzaror naturally foregoes all of the non-essential boss battles, it's fun to watch his minimally attired build evade the vast majority of the game's grunt enemies on his way to the final showdown. It's not a perfect run either: there's one avoidable death in the playthrough below, indicating that Allakazzaror's record could easily be challenged by someone patient and willing enough.