Ah, hello, and welcome to Rainbow Six Siege s restaurant of blowing the shit out of walls. I ll get you a menu shortly, but first, today s specials.

Would ma am like a breaching charge, unfurled and exploded so as to knock out a person-sized section? Or would she prefer to use burrowing grenades to excavate a perfect head-height peephole, through which she can take potshots? And for sir, may I suggest a thermite detonation powerful enough to punch through even reinforced barriers? Of course, one may choose to do the work oneself: to rip a hole in patchy plywood with a hail of bullets and make a gap either small enough to press an eye against, or big enough to pop a grenade through. All selections are excellent today just as they were at launch. (more…)

Weirdly, none of my favourite Assassin s Creed Origins moments so far relate to assassinating. Then again, they never really did in the previous games. Instead they re about buildings, specifically climbing them and going into them. So it s appropriate that my absolute second favourite thing to do in Assassin s Creed: Origins is tombs. (more…)

Once more, we’ve made it to the very middle section of the week – right there in between a weekend and another weekend. What better time to indulge in some digital video game niceness? Incidentally, this also happens to be the week before the international commerce festival that is Black Friday 2017. We’ve already got a guide to the best PC gaming Black Friday stuff on the site, take a look at that and maybe bookmark it, why don’t you.

Before that all unfolds, there is already a batch of fairly nice deals on digital downloads available right here on the good ship Internet. So, consider this another convenient mid-week digital deals roundup if you like. Let’s get to it, shall we?

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It’s odd to think of Mickey Mouse while ordering a giant robot to rip another robot’s arms off, but in the words of its creator Jordan Weisman, Battletech is kind of like Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland. Opened in 1955, the park was an homage to the march of science that inevitably struggled to keep up. Its present-day incarnations are a bizarre mishmash of the vintage, the cutting edge and the merely obsolete, Flash Gordon-brand retro colliding with touchscreens and VR. Similarly, Battletech is a vision of human history up to the 31st century that began life as a table-top strategy game in 1984, made up of once-outlandish concepts such as artificial muscles that now seem positively quaint.

The series wears its age more gracefully than Tomorrowland, however, because its campaign is as much about obsolescence and forgetfulness as the far future a re-imagining of the fall of the Roman Empire and ensuing dark age that rebuts the concept of history as a steady, linear advance. It’s a solid footing for a strategy sim in the vein of Total War, comparable to Warhammer 40K’s Imperium but less, well, preposterous, though I still think the turn-based battle system Adam sampled in June is Battletech’s strongest asset.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

I haven’t played Grand Theft Auto V since just a few months after its release, but parts of its city are still as clear in my memory as some of the real cities I’ve lived in. (more…)

Any plans for the weekend? You might want to consider shooting holes in walls so you can shoot faces on the other side in Rainbow Six Siege. Ubisoft will hold yet another free trial of their tactical FPS this weekend, they’ve announced, inviting everyone to play the full game from Thursday through to Sunday. If you need persuasion, hey, we declared Siege one of the best FPSs. And did I not mention you can smash holes clean through walls to shoot people on the other side?

For current Siegers, some other news: the next content update, Operation White Noise, will hit test servers on Monday. (more…)

Twas the Wednesday a week before Black Friday and all through the web, the deals were stirring, yes, it s that time of year again, let s prep. That s how it goes, right? As you may have noticed, it s Black Friday next week, but despite the fact the biggest sales day of the year isn t meant to kick off for another ten days, some retailers, like Currys PC World, have started their discounts early, letting you beat the crowds and bag that all important deal before the masses start clicking feverishly at any saving they can find.

There are over 800 Black Friday products on sale at Currys PC World right now, all of which have a handy Black Friday Price Now sticker telling you their prices won t change between now and the day itself. To save you the hassle of trawling through that giant list yourself, though, we ve sifted the wheat from the chaff and have listed our top PC-related picks below. Of course, if you also fancy a new TV, camera, soundbar, fridge, washing machine or microwave oven, then you re on your own. (more…)

Twas the Wednesday a week before Black Friday and all through the web, the deals were stirring, yes, it s that time of year again, let s prep. That s how it goes, right? As you may have noticed, it s Black Friday next week, but despite the fact the biggest sales day of the year isn t meant to kick off for another ten days, some retailers, like Currys PC World, have started their discounts early, letting you beat the crowds and bag that all important deal before the masses start clicking feverishly at any saving they can find.

There are over 800 Black Friday products on sale at Currys PC World right now, all of which have a handy Black Friday Price Now sticker telling you their prices won t change between now and the day itself. To save you the hassle of trawling through that giant list yourself, though, we ve sifted the wheat from the chaff and have listed our top PC-related picks below. Of course, if you also fancy a new TV, camera, soundbar, fridge, washing machine or microwave oven, then you re on your own. (more…)

I seem drawn to games where one map is played over and over and over until I know every corner and every brick and every tiny change feels huge. A few years ago Dota 2 moving some trees would make me flip, and now I’m stoked as Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is adding a pond. But Plunkbat is also taking huge steps and adding whole new maps on its journey out of early access and beyond, with a desert level scheduled to hit alongside the full launch. We’ve seen screenshots and read about it before but the level has been reworked a fair bit between these fleeting glimpses, it seems. Dataminers have dug into the current test server client and pulled out a new map showing that for starters, ooh this desert is now on the coast. (more…)

Blizzard have released a big free version of sci-fi real-time strategy game StarCraft II, offering one full singleplayer campaign along with all the multiplayer. This launched overnight, available now if you sign up for Battle.net and download its client doodad. The free version contains the campaign from 2010’s Wings of Liberty–the one focused on humans–plus bot battles and online competitive, casual, and co-op action. That’s a fair chunk of clicking for free. A big ol’ SC2 patch has launched alongside this for all players too. (more…)