The Kickstarter for Outcast's 'HD' reboot didn't have quite the momentum the development team were hoping for, reaching under half its target before creators Fresh3D conceded defeat earlier this year. Now, something called 'Outcast 1.1' has popped up on Steam and on GOG—what's that all about then? Well, it's a new version of the game featuring a few welcome enhancements, such as redone skyboxes, native Xbox 360 controller support, and a redesigned HUD to better fit with higher resolutions. Oh yeah: higher resolutions. You can now run Outcast natively at more modern resolutions, without having to mess around with mods. Considering the original game ran at around the same resolution as a postage stamp, this is a very fine addition indeed.

Outcast 1.1 is available on Steam for a fairly nominal fee, though if you already own it on GOG you'll get this new version for free. (And if you don't own it, it's also cheaper on GOG by about a pound, and comes with the soundtrack and a bunch of other stuff for free.) While it's replaced the original version of Outcast on GOG, that's still available in the 'bonus content' section in your library, under the catchy title "product_bonus_38603".

The Steam version does have a big point in its favour, however. The last week or so's worth of patches have been arriving there a lot quicker—at the time of writing, it seems the GOG version has only been updated the once. I've played a little of that version, and while it wasn't unplayable, it didn't run well. (It's also far, far uglier than I remember, even with those nicer skyboxes, but that's by the by.)

Anyway: Outcast is back! Sort of! While it's not the full-fledged HD reboot many were hoping for, it's nice to see it being given even a modicum of care and attention.

Look at all that rust, all that flora and fauna reclaiming the world from nasty humans. This is a STALKER game alright, except it's not, it's Survarium, the free-to-play (eek) multiplayer shooter made by some of the people responsible for the original STALKER games. We've mentioned Vostok Games' weathered FPS several times over the last couple of years, but now it's finally coming to Europe. On 5th January, European servers will be made available, along with an open beta comprising two PvP modes.

The news comes via the Survarium site, which details the coming beta thusly. "The Beta will feature two variations of the PvP game mode; the traditional Team Deathmatch and Battery Retrieval." It won't, however, feature the promised Co-op and Freeplay modes, because those still don't exist. Impressions of the PvP seem pretty positive, however, so it's worth a curious looksie if you're jonesing for some STALKERish shooting in the new year.

Ta, PCGamesN.

Admittedly, the story is forgettable, the protagonist is dull, and standard Ubisoft miscues like insta-fail stealth missions and poor checkpointing conjure up plenty of frustrations. But if you grit your teeth through the intermittent downers you'll be rewarded with a beautiful, sprawling sandbox of Chicago and some amazingly fun tools to hack it with. Turning traffic lights and steam pipes into weapons to destroy pursuers (or those you're pursuing) adds an exciting new element to driving and a satisfying alternative to shooting. While on foot, you can use chains of security cameras to infiltrate buildings, engage in 3-D puzzle solving, and sling yourself down the street like an electronic Spider-Man, all while nonchalantly standing on a street corner and peering at your phone. You can even fight bad guys without getting your hands dirty by remotely triggering traps and explosives. Aiden Pearce's smartphone is so much fun to use it more than makes up for the drag of being Aiden Pearce.

The most enjoyable part of the game, though, is its inventive multiplayer, particularly the mode called Online Hacking in which you invade another player's game without them knowing. Follow an unsuspecting player around while trying to blend in with the other NPCs, get close enough to start hacking their phone's data, and then hide and watch as they desperately try to find you among the crowds of innocent NPCs before time runs out.

What makes this mode so interesting is the way the advantage shifts from player to player during a round. Arriving in another player's game, you have long minutes in which to carefully tail them and orchestrate your hack while they remain completely unaware that they're even being watched. Once you start hacking, however, a swiftly shrinking circle is drawn around your location and your opponent will begin to scrutinize every NPC in the vicinity, making it incredibly difficult not to draw attention to yourself. If you're discovered, the advantage kicks back into your court: you need only escape, while your target must both chase you down and kill you.

Knowing someone could be tailing you through your own single-player game at any time provides the theme of paranoia the main story is sadly lacking. Slipping into someone else's game, meanwhile, gives you the voyeuristic enjoyment of watching them unselfconsciously play, as if they're the star of a Twitch channel they don't know is being broadcast. You also get to watch them frantically try to locate you, which is both tense and hilarious. In one match, I hid behind the counter in a gun store. My opponent ran through the store no less than five different times while searching for me but never noticed both the store owner and another NPC were talking to me the entire time I was crouched there.

It's also great fun to detect an infiltrating player before they've even begun hacking you. One time, while speeding through Chicago, I stopped my car and climbed out to begin a side-mission. I suddenly realized I could hear tires screeching, glass breaking, and NPCs screaming in the distance. As I waited, the sounds grew closer and closer until a car suddenly shot from a side street into the middle of the intersection and skidded to a halt. The vehicle was almost entirely destroyed: hood crumpled, doors missing, windows shattered, engine smoking. The driver jumped out, looked around, spotted me staring at him, then jumped back into his shattered, smoking wreck and lurched away. It was the most obvious and inept tail I'd ever seen, but I was too busy laughing to even think about chasing him down.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.

There are so many free games released every week that it can be difficult to hold onto the ones that mean the most, which often vanish from my mind very quickly after I've played and written about them for this here weekly column. With 2015 approaching like a stampede of elephants, I thought it an apposite time to revisit some of my favourites—games that gave me, and many other people, plenty of great moments this year, but that haven't troubled many of this week's Best Of lists. To all the great free games I missed or forgot about this year: sorry about that. Of the ones I did play/remember, these are some of the very best.

Even the Stars by Pol Clarissou

Space exploration is a big deal right now, and if you're currently trading your way through Elite Dangerous, trying to survive your way through FTL, fathoming your way through MirrorMoon EP, or rocking back in forth in anticipation of No Man's Sky, you should put some time aside for the beautiful Even the Stars. Type in some co-ordinates, fly to a planet and see what you can find, if anything—Even the Stars is an inspiring, low-poly expedition of a game, and the perfect thing to embark upon should you have a surfeit of free time this holiday period.

Oneiric Gardens by Lilith

2014 was a banner year for weird 3D worlds, and the various gloriously low-res chambers of Oneiric Gardens were some of its very best. Walk, talk, surf and bask in a place built from memory and imagination. And after you've done all that, be sure to check out the works of Kitty Horrorshow, which present similarly strange, evocative, moody gameplaces, just waiting to trammelled all over in your search for meaning.

Roguelight by Daniel Linssen

In a sense, 2014 has been Daniel Linssen's year. Brought to the world's attention as the Javel-ein guy back in 2013, Linssen has spent the year following it up with yet more excellent freeware games, all while expanding his puzzle-platformer The Sun and Moon into a biggerer, longerer game. Most recently he gave us the bulging Metroidvania bird song, but it's his platforming roguelike Roguelight that crackles with excitement and tension after all these months. Arrows are a precious commodity in the underdark; do you use them to eliminate enemies, or to illuminate your surroundings? (Hopefully, you'll manage to do both.)

Expat by Brendon Chung

Brendon "Thirty Flights of Quadrilateral Flotilla Smasher" Chung made this '70s-set bounty-hunting adventure for the Space Cowboy Jam, mixing clue-gathering with spaceship combat with lovely fonts and text—and it's like no other space-based game you've played (er, Flotilla aside). Find bounties, try to claim those bounties, and admire the many funny names—all you need is a dash of imagination to bring the text to life.

SanctuaryRPG by Black Shell Games

A massive free RPG rendered in ascii, and no, it's not as daunting as you might think. Where Dwarf Fortress is impossibly huge, all-encompassing, and as approachable as a brick wall, SanctuaryRPG is accommodating, streamlined (in a good way), funny and engaging, even if you've never been able to stomach an ascii game. It's currently being expanded into a paid 'Black Edition' on Steam, should you fancy a bit more bang for some buck.

One Tap Quest by shimage

The name is accurate. Your sole contribution to One Tap Quest is a single click of the mouse, which sends your little hero careering upwards along a screen full of procedurally generated baddies and pickups. Just like in One Way Heroics—one of 2014's secret best games—the trick is to feed your character a diet of weaker enemies first, before moving on to the stronger ones in order to train them for the boss. A masterful, condensed RPG that trims out all the faff present in far too many games.

Bad Dream series by Desert Fox Software

Desert Fox's Bad Dream series has been my constant companion in 2014: whenever I saw that a new one had appeared, I knew I was in for another odd, slightly spooky, handsomely drawn adventure. The puzzles, the art and the scope of that adventure improved pretty dramatically over the course of the series, culminating in a demo for their first paid game, Coma, which is currently in development. Click the above link, settle down with a cup of tea/coffee/bovril/sunny d, and prepare to venture into a precise, darkly funny (and occasionally pretty sad) universe.

Bottle Rockets by James Earl Cox III

A surprisingly affecting game from the talented James Earl Cox III: a nominal platform game that uses gravity and revolution to achor you in an unanchorable space. I can't say any more than that for risk of ruining the damned thing, but it's not terribly long should you want to find out why I like it so much.

Creatures Such as We by Lynnea Glasser

I'm not entire compatible with interactive fiction—I get a bit antsy when asked to read reams of text in games—but Lynnea Glasser's Creatures Such as We kept me engaged the whole way through. It won second place in the 2014 Interactive Fiction Competition, and I can see why: it's a richly layered exploration of game stories, with the most convincing romance system I've seen in a game.

If you'd rather make your own stories in a purely textual space, you should give Devine Lu Linvega's sandbox IF Paradise a try.

The Way of Yiji by Schizoid

A strikingly drawn rumination on life and death, conceived as part of this huge 'album' of free games. The river of time flows as a samurai approaches his inevitable death, but maybe he can help his child (that's his child on his back there) in a final selfless act before he expires? An immersive, enigmatic world of beautiful sights and sounds, and one that richly rewards exploration.

I'm reliably informed by multiplayer shooter fans that snipers tend to ruin everything, the jerks, unless you're playing as a sniper in which case everything is totally balanced and fine. If you want fewer snipers picking you off from a distance in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, you'll be pleased to hear of a new mode that's just been added to the game. It's called One Shot, it's for snipers only, and Sledgehammer have roped in Call of Duty pro player NaDeSHoT to help them design it. You should find that it's been automagically added to Advanced Warfare's multiplayer, and while you search for a match I'll go into it in more detail below.

As explained on Sledgehammer's blog, One Shot is "a brand new snipers-only game mode with decreased health and highly specific classes. Each of the five classes have been custom designed by our development team and OpTic NaDeSHoT, to test the true sniper skill of Advanced Warfare in this new custom mode. Each class features the MORS, a bolt-action railgun sniper, along with a variety of perks, Scorestreaks, and Exo abilities". One thing it doesn't feature, however, is the option to carry a sidearm.

Those classes comprise Hard Scope, Zoomed, 4X, Ace and Irons, and you can see pictures of their loadouts below. To celebrate the occasion, and as a belated/extremely early Christmas present, Sledgehammer have also doubled XP gain for this weekend, just so long as you're playing in the new mode.

With a sprinkle of holiday magic and a massive dose of sarcasm, we're continuing our look at what 2014's PC games would be like in an alternate reality where graphics cards were never invented. It's more of the text adventures that never were!

Real-time strategy games continue their slow climb out of the big Pit o' Dead Genres with the upcoming Etherium, which is all set to turtle its way onto Steam in a month or so. You'll find more details here and here, but Etherium appears to mix its RTS battles with 4X-style turn-based outer-space tactics, and that sounds like a very pleasant combination indeed. A new trailer, below, shows off a load of in-game footage.

Etherium's Big Thing (aside from the lightly 4Xy space stuff) is its 'dynamic' weather system, which will see you battling (or taking advantage of) the elements as you aim to plunder all the Etherium you can get your hands on. You'll play as a race of humans, aliens or robots in the game, each of which wants the precious resource for a different reason—for instance, the aliens are going to use it to make some of their famous Etherium eccles cakes. Probably.

There's no specific release date I can spy, but the Steam pre-order promotion ends on the 20th of January, so that seems like the most likely candidate.

Christmas. It's a time for family and friends, and presents and hope. And when that gets boring, for playing new games. This season, I've been digging into many, though not all of them PC based - the new 80 Days expansion on my iPad, Bayonetta 2 on Wii-U, Russian Roulette down on the docks... you know how it goes. And on nothing more than a whim, I've also been firing up my copy of The Secret World, one of the most frustrating games I was ever disappointed to realise I was never going to love.

I always maintain those are the worst games. If something is bad, it's easily ignored or laughed at. If something is great, hurrah! When something just... doesn't... work, but you can still see the game it could have been, it's often heartbreaking. That's how I feel about The Secret World, a game whose every fault comes straight from its need to be an MMO and to adhere to that genre's rules. It's overcomplicated, it's not particularly pretty, it's janky, and the presence of other people tends to detract more than it adds, moreso here in a world where you're meant to be solving puzzles and investigating mysteries but will usually see someone standing around just plain demanding to know the answer so they can get the points and move on.

In many ways, it's the perfect failure of the most damaging trend to hit the genre over the years - the personal quest. With a personal quest, designers are freed from the need to design around players and their willingness to work together in the 'right' way, they're spared the times when the content simply dries up and leaves the player with nothing to do, and they ensure that the lore and story is pushed at all times, even if the heroes hacking through it are talking about Star Trek as they go. At the same time though, they're self-destructive. The obsession with these quests, with everyone being the hero, is that multiplayer has inevitably been sidelined to the point that other players are only really needed to help beat up tough bosses and descend into dungeons to grind for loot and call each other rude names, if they even bother talking at all. At the same time, the solo content itself is constantly hampered by the needs of the MMO side, like the aforementioned dungeons suddenly being sprung as a "And now you have to play with others for a bit" after hours and hours of being taught that you can accomplish anything with just pluck and a few weapon-skills.

(I was pleased to see that in the new World of Warcraft expansion, the dungeons are finally split from the solo-content so that you never end up with business unfinished at the end of a quest-line if you don't play well with others. The remade Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand also scores some marks for having the guts to enforce group play - to progress on the personal story, you have to complete three basic dungeons and a surprisingly challenging introductory boss fight pretty early on. Both approaches are fine by me, as while I naturally favour solo play, I'm not against a multiplayer game insisting on, well, multiplayer. Though I do prefer people to know their place in most MMOs, as wallpaper to breathe life into the otherwise static world)

The Secret World is of course far from the only game that has suffered here, but it is - even more than The Old Republic - the one I've most enjoyed while able to enjoy it. The writing is still some of the best the genre has to offer, particularly from characters like Illuminati faction-handler Kirsten Geary (who I remain convinced is former PCG-writer Kieron Gillen's otherkin self) and every appearance of Jeffrey Combs. His performance as Montag, the emotionless headteacher of Innsmouth Academy, is a game-stealer, to the point that his fine establishment really needed some kind of spin-off set in better times. Well, less bad. Slightly less bad. Very slightly, ideally.

What's strange about The Secret World is that its major problem remains the one thing you'd expect a game so rooted in storytelling technique to understand - pacing. Like many MMOs, it's set to be a slow, slow process intended to take months to unpick and finish even though inevitably the hardcore players will have finished in about three and a half minutes. Never though have I played a game so absolutely committed, devoted, to wasting time. Every mission is a million-tiered operation, every step designed to drag things out as long as humanly possible whether you're beating up monsters or looking for mushrooms. Arguably the worst individual case is when you arrive in the first zone, Solomon Island, to be told that your first mission is eighteen steps long and by the end of the first zone you're only seven or so into them. This kind of lingering assignment is obviously meant to feel like an epic quest, but instead it just feels like a prison sentence. Solomon Island is your personal Alcatraz, with no escape for hour after hour of filler quests that almost never contribute to the main story except on the most peripheral 'here's more weird s hit' level.

And yet for all that, when everything actually comes together, you find some of my favourite moments in the genre. They don't involve the multiplayer side unfortunately, but never mind that. I love that, for instance, it doesn't just have you look at the abandoned theme park on the Savage Coast, but lets you ride its haunted roller coaster via-cutscene. I adore some of the staging, like the haunted Black House on the same level, and the way that story elements are reinforced by everything from child's drawings in abandoned notebooks to the casual way that everything you think you're discovering is just business as usual to the guys back home. I particularly loved finding out that the Illuminati base is in a real district - how much effort Funcom put into trying to create a baseline for all the madness to be neatly layered on top of. And goodness, wasn't there a lot of madness? You wouldn't see Varian Wrynn welcoming new recruits into the Alliance like this, put it that way... (Slightly NSFW, unless you assume it's just a really, really good foot massage. As it may be.)

It's just such a wonderful world, as Louis Armstrong might have commented had he been into computer games. Every new area you go to feels fresh, every character is so lovingly written - and sometimes overwritten, yes, though it is a game from the creators of The Longest Journey. The sheer attention to detail and worldcraft puts most other single and multiplayer games to shame, even if it does diminish a bit after Solomon Island (I can't speak for the new areas added after it dropped the subscription). It feels solid in a way that's very unusual, and all the more impressive for having to create a world where Lovecraftian horrors, vampires and friendly sasquatches are supposedly something that we missed for the many years before we accidentally swallowed a bee and got magic powers. Also of course, the bee thing. I really appreciate that it takes a little bit of time to show your character's life changing in painful, confusing ways before they're thrust head-first into their new life; that it's not purely a case of "Well, I'm magic now. Time to join the Templars!" Your trashed apartment has a story of its own, and the walls don't need to talk to tell it. It's just the right mix of scary and uplifting, even if the justification is a little bit silly.

Now, as ever, I can't play The Secret World for long. It doesn't take much time before its agonising pace and clunky mechanics drive me away. Every time I fire it up though, I'm aware that in an alternate universe where it was inspired by the likes of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (most popular game of 2004, selling ten million copies on its first day and currently on its seventh sequel), it's almost certainly one of my favourite games. That's largely what keeps me reinstalling it every few months; less for a fresh chance to play it, then to remember the high hopes I had for it before release. That might not sound like the warmest thing to say, but it's a hell of a lot more than I've done for, say, APB. Remember when that was due to be the next big thing?

Nope. Me neither. Ah well. Farewell again, The Secret World. See you in a few months, the next time I crave a hit of your crazy, and a new dream of what could have been.

Every time I publish a news story about Titanfall at least one guru pipes up in the comments to say this game is dead . Quite why the tide of public opinion turned against Titanfall so quickly I ll never understand, because it s dizzyingly fun. It s the best multiplayer shooter I played this year, chiefly because it let me run along walls.

I played this game for hundreds of hours and I have no idea what the lore is or why I m shooting other people and riding inside of robots. I would boot up Titanfall of an evening for the same reason I might boot up an arcade racer, or go for a ride on my bicycle. I longed for the speed and control, the freedom to pull off tricky moves, the acrobatics. As someone who played a lot of Quake and Doom as a teenager I hate the plodding movement in most modern shooters. I hate their obsession with authenticity, their macho military bravado. Just let me double jump around in space while shooting mechs please, video games.

Thankfully Titanfall let me do that. It felt really good to play on a second-to-second basis. Even if I was not winning, even if I could not pull off a single kill, I was still having fun just getting around. Titanfall let me perform: I could feel special gliding through the levels gracefully. I fell in love the first time I rocketed into the air from a burning titan, only to land on an enemy titan on the other side of the map, all the while dispatching AI grunts from the skies. Unlike a lot of multiplayer shooters, Titanfall felt like a series of encounters rather than a roulette wheel of deaths and kills. The parkour mechanics offered the potential for a quick escape if an enemy happened to see me first. Enough time to equip a satchel charge and send them to their doom.

Since Titanfall released it feels like I ll never play a shooter that doesn t let me double jump again, or at the very least run very quickly. Making the switch from Titanfall s silky, graceful, beautiful movement to, say, Wolfenstein: The New Order (also good!) was as jarring as tasting eggnog when you expect beer.

It s definitely true that Titanfall s community shrank a lot quicker than you would hope for a purely multiplayer experience, thanks to a longevity problem our Chris Thursten identified in his review. It was impossible to get a game of Capture the Flag last time I checked (the best vanilla mode for sure) and standard team deathmatch (Attrition in Titanfall) is a dreary, directionless experience. The modes which required you to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible (Capture the Flag, Marked For Death, Hardpoint) were the best, as they forced you to hone your traversal skills.

And that s where the game shines: as a more violent Mirror s Edge. It took Respawn over 6 months to release a parkour-centric game mode (Deadly Ground, a the floor is lava mode) but it should have been there at launch. With Titanfall 2 a dead certainty, I feel like we ll remember Titanfall as a mere promise compared to its inevitably much better and more feature complete sequel, but even as a promise it kept me and my friends occupied for months.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.