What sets SOS apart from other multiplayer survival games is its built-in social element: Players can talk to one another freely through a proximity-based chat (a microphone is required to play) and spectators can listen in on those conversations and throw out emotes in response. It's not the last player standing that counts, then, but the most entertaining—although as we learned in our December preview, a creative killer instinct is obviously a plus. It's been in closed testing for awhile now, but Outpost Games announced today that it will go into Early Access release on Steam on January 23.   

It's not just the ability to communicate that makes SOS different from games like PUBG or Fortnite. As we noted in our preview, it's purposely designed to put less pressure on players to kill everything they see. Guns and ammunition are relatively rare, there's a 30-minute match timer but no ring of death forcing players into contact,  and kills aren't tracked.

"There's a streamer who tends to win more than the average, and almost purely through social engineering. She just sort of makes friends, turns people against one another," creative director Ian Milham said. "She had two people who were both infected and needed the antidote that she had. She made them have a rap battle to decide who was going to get the antidote."   

The Early Access release of SOS will sell for $30. Further launch details will be revealed over the coming week.

Update: The post originally indicated that the Early Access release was set for January 29. It is in fact January 23.

PUBG Corporation has issued an apology for problems with the distribution of the in-game currency BP following the full release of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in December, and promised that players who were shortchanged will be taken care of. Based on the responses, however, the BP flub isn't what players are worried about. 

"We would first like to offer our most sincere apologies to our users who could not fully enjoy the game because BP was not given out properly, an issue which had occurred after the PC 1.0 launch, up until the Dec 27th (Wed) scheduled maintenance," PUBG Corp wrote.

"We are compensating you for this loss. BP is given out to users all around the world, so it might not be received right away after clicking on the popup informing you about your BP compensation. Please be patient, you will get your compensation." 

Players have until 3:59 pm PT/6:59 pm ET on February 9 to make the claim; in case there's any doubt, the message emphasizes that "you won't receive any BP if you click Confirm on the BP reward screen after the BP reward period is over." 

But the responses in the reply thread are focused almost exclusively on something else entirely, and it is, to put it mildly, ugly: 358 pages (and counting) of demands to region lock China. (The thread is also predictably salted with racial slurs, so exercise whatever cautions you feel appropriate before clicking.)

Steam recently saw a PUBG-driven explosion in the number of Chinese users, which unfortunately has also led to a massive influx of Chinese cheaters. Creator Brendan Greene told Kotaku in December that the vast majority of PUBG cheaters are now based in China, where cheating in online games is "seen as kind of a little bit more acceptable" than it is in other regions. 

A Steam user named Spud summed up the state of things slightly more eloquently than most. "Can you sort the hackers out please instead of this BP bullshit, no one gives a shit about BP," they wrote. "90/100 games now i die to hackers, and im not even being salty. Watch my replays. Sort it out, the game is ruined, stop just thinking about making money all the time. Make a decent game."

It's hard to argue with success, and debates about its long-term viability aside, the 1.5 million people currently playing PUBG certainly indicate that it's doing something right. And while the discontent on display is obvious, people looking for a Chinese region lock probably shouldn't get their hopes up: Greene made it clear in December that he's against the idea of banning an entire country because of a relatively small number of cheats. 

"Yes, the majority of cheaters come out of China, but that doesn't mean all Chinese players are cheaters. This idea that just because you've got a few bad eggs, you've got to ban a whole country is a bit reactive," he said. 

"They love the game. Why would we restrict them from playing on servers? I just don't get the attitude of some people."

Like most of Paradox's games, the space-flung 4X-meets-grand strategy affair Stellaris has benefited from a slew of post-launch support. It's latest portion of DLC, Apocalypse, brings with it new military options, civic paths and challenges, and it due at some stage in "early 2018".

Said to "redefine stellar warfare", Apocalypse caters to both violent and non-violent players. New Ascension Perks and Civics, for example, let space explorers build without bloodshed, while new Unity Ambitions facilitate new ways to spend Unity. 

Prefer violence? Lead your fleets to battle with the new "enormous" Titan capital ships that offer "tremendous" bonuses to vessels under their command. Moreover, orbital installations allow players to fortify key systems and secure homeworlds in their bid to conquer the universe. And if all of that sounds too much like politics, the new 'Colossus' weapon lets players destroy rival planets at the drop of an atom.

Apocalypse adds marauding space pirates too. Paradox describes them like so: "Watch out for Marauders—space nomads who raid settled empires and carve out their lives on the fringe of civilization. Hire them as mercenaries in your own conflicts, but take care that they don’t unify and trigger a new late-game crisis."

Look out for Stellaris: Apocalypse in the coming months. Here's a trailer:

It's not a stretch to say that Rockstar makes some of the most lavish worlds in gaming. In Grand Theft Auto, if there's an email system for the player, that means that there's an internet. If a player can access their bank from that internet, then that means that there's probably a wider financial system, so the player should be able to invest in the stock market. And of course, if there's a stock market, then there should also a 'real' company behind every ticker symbol, complete with a fictional biography. The Grand Theft Auto series fills its world with rabbit holes of detail most teams wouldn't even dare to touch.

This detail brings GTA 5's extraordinary world to life, then, but it's the story that dictates the tone of each GTA. And this game has a wide tonal range. GTA 5 inconsistently swings from domestic drama, to slapstick comedy, to grim criticism of American foreign policy, within minutes. Everyone and everything is a target for ridicule—yet it neither shows the light hand to make the occasionally delicate subjects it tackles truly hit home, or the consistency to become an effective satire. Its protagonists, as a reflection of the game's fictional LA setting, put on a facade so they never have to discuss how they're really feeling, and Rockstar is reluctant to show you anything deeper than that as they interact. 

To find what these characters truly believe about themselves and each other, you need to dig deeper. You need to get them drunk.

After making your way through enough of the game, you unlock the ability to 'hang out' with characters on your in-game phone's contact list (much like in GTA 4), including fellow playable characters. Calling these characters (usually people with a significant connection to the protagonists) allows you to take them across Los Santos, to the cinema, tennis court, golf course, dart club, or local strip club. En route, the characters present will chat briefly about life, themselves, and their problems with each other, on a superficial level that doesn't tell you much more than their behavior in the game's central plot. However, If you decide to go drinking together, these situations immediately get more interesting.

You stumble out of the bar like a limp marionette, the very picture of the cartoon drunk. A wavering funhouse filter is smeared across the screen. You can barely see the street, let alone drive, and your characters are slurring their words like they've just come through the wrong end of a 10-year bender. As these caricatures tumble across the sidewalk, cursing each other, Grand Theft Auto 5 finally grants its characters something the narrative typically doesn't allow them to experience: honesty.

The characters act like they've been injected with truth serum, revealing moments of true emotional honesty, wrapped in the trappings of a skit. One might suggest the matriarchal insecurities underlining his psyche. Another will refer to a long-dormant cocaine habit. A once-loving couple will, between drunken barbs, hash out the many issues now tearing their family apart. The couple reveal how they met each other, and how they've become worse people as a result, as you roll down the street in a groggy low-speed chase. Even Trevor, the resident psychopath among GTA 5's colorful cast of characters, turns his unpredictable hatred inward while under the influence. It's a brilliant and shocking sensation to see the cynical characters you've spent hours with come apart at the seams. This sensation is so jarring, in fact, that many players don't take the missions seriously.

Take a look at the Steam forums for Grand Theft Auto 5. Of the extremely rare topics on the subject, the focus is usually on whether it's possible to have sex with one of the character's wives if you hang out enough, or how soon you can get an achievement for having all three main characters hang out with each other at once while surviving a police chase. Despite what appear to be more sincere sides to GTA 5's ensemble, few take these confessionals beyond their face value, because the game doesn't either. You can drive from bar to bar exploring personal epiphanies, but at the end of the activity, the characters will always walk away, having learned nothing.

You complete daring heists, only to give the proceeds back. You drink yourself into oblivion with people you don't even like, to reveal sympathetic aspects of your character that will be forgotten by the next in-game morning. Whether you're playing as Michael the experienced criminal, Franklin the gangbanger, or Trevor the psychopath, the trio of playable characters in Grand Theft Auto 5 are meant to be accessible stereotypes. If they grow in a meaningful way, inside or out of prescribed cutscenes, their heightened cartoon world falls apart. It already buckles in these booze-soaked scenarios, so as an audience, we're inclined to treat these playable scenes as GTA 5's fallback when dramatic sequences don't hit the mark—as comedy.

In its successful pursuit of the never-ending playground, Grand Theft Auto 5 blunts the nuance it does contain. This seems like a missed opportunity, because these scenarios are a glimpse of the stories Grand Theft Auto could tell, in the format it tells them best—within player-controlled margins. Stories with narrative and emotional depth that go beyond a so-called satire of the American Dream. Stories about broken people who, if they reached out to others, even in the unhealthy ways available to them, could get better. 

The truth of these hang out scenarios is that they reveal that Grand Theft Auto 5 is not a comedy, a drama, or a fantasy. They reveal that GTA 5 is a tragedy—and no one can tell.

Bulkhead Interactive's last game was first-person puzzler The Turing Test, a philosophical game about artificial intelligence and human morality. So when they launched a Kickstarter for a multiplayer World War 2 shooter, it seemed like it came a bit out of left-field. It was obviously a passion project for the team, however, and their pitch communicated that well—so well that they blew past their target and raised £317,281.

What they were pitching was a resurrection of a specific kind of FPS multiplayer, the kind Call of Duty 2 players fondly remember. It wasn't just about WW2 as a backdrop, but about a specific kind of speed and balance and movement, a bundle of gamefeel notions that more recent shooters, no matter what their settings, have moved on from. A game without unlockable skills or equipment, with strafe-jumping and speed but still with aim-down sights and guns like the beloved M1 Garand.

Bulkhead have just announced that Battalion 1944's going into Early Access on February 1. Studio lead Joe Brammer told us what to expect.

PC Gamer: What is it about WW2 that's such a draw, especially now?

Joe Brammer: For us the draw has never really been WW2, if you know what I mean? It was popular when we were growing up playing FPS games, so it felt fitting to choose WW2. A staple part of our original Kickstarter campaign was to create a fair and balanced FPS game, WW2 weapons are pitted nicely against each other anyway, so it made a lot of sense to keep true to the weapons that each faction used and let the all out war between each faction commence. We didn’t want to let over-design get in the way of simplicity, because that’s what classic shooters are about, going back to basics.

Were you surprised by the response to the Kickstarter?

It sounds a bit cocky maybe, but we weren’t. I didn’t suggest making this game because I thought it would fail. I knew there were FPS fans just like me that were tired of going home and playing the same shooters that I was. Before this we were making first-person puzzlers, and we were pretty good at it too! The Turing Test was looking like a great game and it sold really well, but it wasn’t our main passion. We wanted to make something that would shake up the industry a bit, so when we pitched Battalion, we weren’t that surprised that people were feeling the same way we were about FPS games.

How long has Battalion 1944 been in alpha now, and what's feedback been like?

Battalion ran its first alpha in May 2017. We got some great feedback and everyone was so excited that we spent the whole weekend putting out fires for that insanely early version of the game! Recently we’ve been running alpha testing sessions every weekend and the community know that it’s all about getting the game ready for Early Access. The feedback we receive from our alpha team is always focused on making the game better. We have to argue back and forth a lot with them on Discord or the forums, but I like to think instead of being a regular developer and replying "Thanks, we’ll take that on board" we reply with "No, we don’t like that idea for these reasons…" [so] our fans see us as honest and open? The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, which is great, but it’s also frustrating because trying to find what’s wrong when everyone is telling you "it’s great!" can be tricky.

Why do you want your game to be moddable, and what kind of mods do you hope players create?

I come from modding, when I was 11 I used to be a part of the Battlefield and Half-Life modding communities. I love that 14 years later *wince* I can be doing this all day every day. I want Battalion to be a platform for other people to be able to create some amazing mods. For me I’d like to see a mod that brings in a totally new faction that’s not been done before, maybe the Gurkas, or the German Resistance? Someone totally new that we can work with the mod team to make a part of the full game. Competitively of course, we’d love to see some great competitive maps that we can help fund if they look like they’re going in the right direction.

Battalion 1944 is quite different to The Turing Test but are there any lessons from making that game that have carried over?

I mean we’re always learning when we’re making games, especially when you’re young. I like to think The Turing Test taught us to believe in ourselves more. I know it's corny, but I genuinely believe my team are one of the best groups of game developers in the world. When given the right opportunities Bulkhead can really make something special. The Turing Test was obviously a learning curve, every game we do gets bigger and bigger, but I don’t think Turing Test prepared us for the mammoth that is Battalion 1944, but we’re here now, we’ve made it. Now begins the journey of Early Access.

Battalion 1944 has elements of authentic recreation (the weapons, bullet penetration, mo-capped movements), but at the same time it's a game about strafe-jumping and running along walls. What is it about the contrast between the grounded parts and the over-the-top elements that's so appealing?

We have to be careful when using the word ‘authentic’ because people often get the wrong idea about Battalion 1944. I think we felt that the realistic shooter market is being well catered to. Our friends at Squad and Insurgency are doing excellent work and continue to grow their games as part of the FPS revolution we’re seeing the last few years, where fans are taking control of the genre. So we didn’t feel the need to try and get involved in that subgenre. But we did feel that we should be true to the time period and era, the weapons are created from real sources with plenty of research put in.

We have a little too regularly traveled to Normandy, and if you think our game is a little too gray, you should visit Normandy! We try to bring color into these war-torn grey environments by using often sunrise/late afternoon lighting to keep a nice bright feel to our levels. In regard to the ‘Over the top elements’ I’d have to massively disagree with that comment, there’s nothing over the top about our movement, we’ve struck a nice balance between games like Enemy Territory, Call of Duty 2, and Quake and more modern competitive shooters like Counter Strike: Global Offensive. We felt that was a winning combination, we’ve had to ‘rewrite’ a lot of code that was once considered ‘buggy’ but now in Battalion is hailed as a massive technical achievement. The greatest moment for us was an anonymous email from an ex-COD2 developer saying "I don’t know how you rewrote the kar98 rifle code to work that way, but you did it!"

Why no ability unlocks?

Other games have this covered, it’s just not a part of our design ethos. We do have classes, but they’re limited in what they can do, it’s more competitive and balanced that way.

Why five-vs-five?

We toyed with 4v4 and 6v6 but 5 is a number that works really well, honestly, I couldn’t tell you why it is. But when we tried competitive games with different numbers, 5v5 just works the best by far!

What modes will be available at launch?

CTF, TDM, DOM, FFA, and ‘Wartide’ our new competitive game mode

What kind of cosmetics are available, and how will they be earned?

We have ‘Warchests’ containing tastefully relevant and designed weapon skins which can be purchased in the Battalion armoury in-game, don’t worry, you also get one every time you rank up, which is pretty regularly in Battalion! It’s also worth noting that whenever you buy a chest from Battalion 1944, it gets reinvested by us into making more content such as maps, weapons, factions, and it also goes into a tournament prize pool. So if you get involved with our ‘Warchests’ you know your money is helping make the game and your playing experience better.

Why do people love the M1 Garand so much?

Play Battalion, turn up your volume, and listen for that PINGGGGG! 

On the last day of AltspaceVR, a virtual reality chat app that was shut down due to lack of funding before Microsoft acquired and reopened it, friends sang songs and took group photos and exchanged contact information in a big party. It was bittersweet, so much so that it felt anomalous—where were the callous internet people I'm used to playing games with? The ones who are always yelling at me? After an evening in newly-popular upstart VRChat, I can confirm that I have found them.

VRChat is a free-to-play, user-created multiverse where bored teenagers coalesce at your feet as hordes of miniaturized abominations of Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog, ten-foot-tall anime women chastise you for looking at them in the most unsettling text-to-speech voice available, and a melancholy Brian from Family Guy gazes at the floor and then says, "I'm Brian Griffin" while continuing to stare—just standing there, waiting for nothing.

As I played VRChat last night, I began to accept that it's a hell I deserve. I deserve it for reasons that begin in the late '90s when I probably went into a Yahoo! chat room and said "fuck Neon Genesis" or something to start a fight. This is the natural evolution of that primordial pre-meme '90s trolling, crude image editing, and Flash animation, of making an unending stream of pop culture references throughout the 2000s, of replacing identity with brands, of being so hyped for the potential of expensive goggles that the universe needed to punish me. For all these reasons and more, I absolutely deserve to spend an eternity in an anime nightclub dodging the Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear from Toy Story as he charges at me declaring that he needs strawberries.

(If you want, you can play VRChat without a VR headset, but you won't have a proper experience that way. It really has to feel like Brian Griffin is right there if you're going to be reminded of how this is all your fault for unironically liking Family Guy in the aughts and ironically reading Ready Player One a few years ago.)

Suddenly popular

Here's how it happened. While VRChat is laggy and prone to bouts of impromptu loading, it's a good, simple concept: expressive avatars, basic physics (I enjoyed chucking plates of food at people in an attempt to 'serve' them), and a Unity SDK so that anyone with the requisite skills can create worlds and characters. Second Life developer Linden Lab has been working on a similar concept, called Sansar, Microsoft now has the reins of Altspace, and there are surely many other sandbox-y VR social experiences in the works. VR is best as a social experience in my view.

Fun things have and will come from these virtual spaces, but VRChat's recent popularity—which took the servers down yesterday and prompted a message from the small team behind it—hasn't been due to the magic of friendship. It's largely due to the 'Ugandan Knuckles' meme, which Polygon has already explained in detail. And it's still mainly that: a competition to be the next meme, or to maintain the dominance of the current one, with everyone shouting over each other in the hope of spurring mass action toward their cause of getting likes and subscribes. And a lot of racism. It's the PUBG lobby, but forever, and it's where I'll wake up when I die as punishment for the years in the early 2010s when I cared deeply about getting favs on Twitter.

I'm hoping that after this popularity spike some fun communities will settle into VRChat, and I wish the developers the best of luck as they attempt to "maintain and shape a community that is fun and safe for everyone." It'll depend on demographics, on what players create, and as currently evidenced, on what streamers and YouTubers encourage. I don't know what these virtual spaces are going to look like as VR becomes better and cheaper, though it's safe to assume that everything you can find currently in Second Life will be found in VR at some point, and more. 

In the meantime, at least in VRChat, it's memes and anime, awkward silence pierced with shouting streamers, everyone either uncomfortable, apathetic, or on the offense. It's a hell we built for ourselves, and I can't pretend it isn't funny that all the grand talk about the potential of VR—which I previously contributed to—has led to an anime girl idly blinking at me while embedded in a cardboard box. Long live the new flesh.

Another week in GTA Online means another new ride to show off to your friends. The Lampadati Viseris, available now at Legendary Motorsport, has clean, sweeping lines that put it a world apart from the Annis Savestra that was released last week, but they do share one common trait: A pair of machine guns pointing out from under the hood. 

Selling for $875,000, the Viseris is a two-door classic sports car inspired by the great Italian machines of the 1970s and '80s. According to the GTA Wiki it's prone to spinouts and thus not a great racer, but it has a tremendous top speed—in fact, it's one of the fastest civilian cars in the game. The only downside is that its speed could be the result of a suspension bug, and if so that speed could eventually be patched down. 

Rockstar is also offering double GTA$ and RP on all Lester Contact Missions through January 15, and the "Island Hopping" Premium Stunt Race (locked to the Blazer Aqua vehicle) and "Maze Bank Arena" Time Trial will both be available over the same period. And of course there are discounts: Smart shoppers will save 25 percent on aircraft weapons, vehicle armor, headlights and neons, skirts, spoilers, suspension, turbo kits, and the Nagasaki ultralight plane.   

It's not part of the update but you should probably also be aware that Team UK has been spending some time with the recently-released Doomsday Heist, and on the whole it's pretty good—especially the water cannon. (At least until someone takes it away.)

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a "road game" that follows an anonymous backpacker crossing the US during the Great Depression, encountering 16 different characters, each with a unique story arc, along the way. A trailer released today showcases several of those characters and the voice actors behind them, included among them the mononymous rock star and tantric sex pro Sting, who plays the role of the Wolf. 

The game is inspired by narrative-focused adventures like Kentucky Route Zero and Sunless Sea, plus works including Huckleberry Finn, On the Road, and Easy Rider: "That real Paul Bunyon shit," as we said in our October preview. Each of the main characters is written by a different author, which lead designer Johnnemann Nordhagen hopes will give the game a diverse range of perspectives and voices.

"Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a unique storytelling experience," Sting said. "I'm happy to be a part of this visionary collaboration." 

Other cast members include veteran voice actors Dave Fennoy, whose first IMDB-listed credit is the 1992 Sierra adventure King's Quest 6; Cissy Jones, who voiced Delilah in Firewatch; and Kimberly Brooks, who gave life to Mass Effect space soldier Ashley Williams.   

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is currently expected to be out early this year. For now, you can find out more about the game via its website, which includes the full list of collaborating actors and authors, and on Steam.

Free-to-play mobile spinoff Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links recently made its way to Steam, and while I don't love it like I do the standard Yu-Gi-Oh card game, its authentic presentation and snappy interface are enough to give fans of the series hours of nostalgic fun. Of course, PvP is at the heart of all card games, and Duel Links is no exception. 

As I detailed in my impressions piece, Duel Links uses speed duel rules. This rule set essentially cuts standard Yu-Gi-Oh in half: 4,000 life points instead of 8,000, six board spaces instead of 10, one main phase instead of two, 20 card decks instead of 40, and a smaller starting hand. Duel Links also lacks extra deck tools like Synchro, XYZ and Pendulum cards, as well as several archetype-specific finishers and support cards. 

As a result, the best decks in Duel Links are very different from their TCG counterparts. Some strategies and themes carry over, but everything plays out on a smaller, more limited scale. Compared to the TCG, this limits Duel Links' competitive depth, though its duelist-specific skills help make up the difference. Nevertheless, the emergence of strong decks in card games is as sure as death and taxes, and Duel Links does have a roughly defined meta. Here are five competitive decks from the upper echelons of that meta which illustrate different playstyles. 

(Note: In light of the most recent ban list update, Cyber Angels were not included in this list, as semi-limiting both Cyber Angel Dakini and Machine Angel Ritual severely weakened the deck and their post-nerf power level is still unclear.) 

Ninjas 

Skill: 

Three-Star Demotion (Paradox Brothers): Pay 3,000 life points to reduce the level of all monsters in your hand by three until the end phase. You can only use this once per turn. 

Key cards: 

Black Dragon Ninja: Your main finisher. This monster is capable of dodging enemy cards, triggering other Ninja effects and sneaking in multiple attacks by blinking (i.e. banishing and then resummoning) monsters.  

Ninjitsu Art of Transformation: Tribute a Ninja monster to special summon another Ninja monster from your hand or deck, often Black Dragon Ninja. 

Ninjitsu Art of Duplication: Tribute a Ninja to special summon multiple lower-star Ninjas which can wreak havoc on your opponent's board. 

Best Ninja deck: Duel Links GameA's 3SD Ninja list 

I wanted to begin with Ninjas because it's arguably the closest thing to a 'normal' Yu-Gi-Oh deck that you'll find in Duel Links: it's filled with unique cards, it has high one-turn-kill potential, and it has a tool box of support cards to help clear the way for an OTK. 

Black Dragon Ninja is the core of this deck. You want to use his effect to remove monsters from play at the right time, frequently during the battle phase. The obvious implication is removing defending enemy monsters, but you can also blink Black Dragon Ninja himself to protect him from enemy effects (he won't be targetable when the chain resolves) or to allow him to attack repeatedly in the same battle phase. You can repeat this process as long as you have Ninja and Ninjitsu cards to tribute. 

Ninjitsu Art of Transformation and Duplication ensure you always have immediate access to the Ninjas you need, and support spells like Ninjitsu Art Notebook and Armor Ninjitsu Art of Alchemy help thin your deck. An added bonus is that you don't need multiple copies of Black Dragon Ninja if you don't have them, since you can consistently summon him from anywhere. Together with Three-Star Demotion, which allows you to normal summon Black Dragon Ninja or Red Dragon Ninja from your hand for one turn, this makes for incredibly consistent OTKs, often as early as turn two. 

Gladiator Beasts 

Skill: 

Holy Guard (Tea Gardner): You don't take battle damage during your turn.

Key cards:

Gladiator Beast Bestiari: When special summoned by another Gladiator Beast's effect, Bestiari can destroy a spell or trap. 

Gladiator Beast Murmillo: When special summoned by another Gladiator Beast's effect, Murmillo can destroy a monster. 

Gladiator Beast Laquari: When special summoned by another Gladiator Beast's effect, Laquari's attack is boosted to 2,100. 

Best Gladiator Beast deck: Duel Links GameA's Gladiator Beast list

Gladiator Beasts are the picture of a tool box deck. Their unique effect allows them to 'tag out' whenever they attack or are attacked, letting you special summon another Gladiator Beast from your deck and activate their effect. So, to play them correctly, you need to determine when to tag out and who to summon based on the situation. 

In general, you'll focus on controlling the board by tagging between Bestiari and Murmillo while Laquari, your strongest normal attacker, holds the line. To ensure your monsters survive the battle phase, use cards like Enemy Controller and Impenetrable Attack to manipulate enemy monsters and protect your own. The Holy Guard skill works especially well with Impenetrable Attack because you never have to worry about taking damage on your turn. This allows you to freely attack into stronger monsters in order to tag out. 

When you see an opening, you can use finishers like Gladiator Beast Dimacari (a strong one-of) or Gladiator Beast Fusion monsters like Nerokius and Heraklinos to close out the game. 

Red-Eyes Zombies 

Skill:

Beatdown (Seto Kaiba): Boost the attack points of your face-up attack position monsters by 300 points for every level five-or-higher monster you control. You can only use this once per turn.

Key cards:

Red-Eyes Zombie Dragon: Your main finisher which can be tribute summoned with just one zombie and easily special summoned in several ways. 

Red-Eyes Spirit: An easy way to get Red-Eyes Zombie Dragon onto the board from your graveyard. 

Gozuki: The best way to put Red-Eyes Zombie Dragon into your graveyard to set up for Red-Eyes Spirit, not to mention a built-in way to special summon it from your hand. 

Best Red-Eyes Zombie deck: Kaito's Red-Eyes Beatdown list 

As you may have guessed from its recommended skill, Red-Eyes Zombies is a beatdown deck. That is to say, it hits things really hard. But it's especially powerful and interesting because it focuses on playing from your graveyard. It also received a significant boost with the addition of the Zombie World field spell, which makes Red-Eyes Zombie Dragon's secondary effect far more relevant.

Gozuki is your bread and butter. He can pull Red-Eyes Zombie Dragon from your hand or dump him into your graveyard from your deck—whatever you need to set up a special summon. From there, you can use Red-Eyes Spirit, Red-Eyes Insight and Red-Eyes Wyvern to fill your board with Zombie Dragons, use Beatdown to pump them up, and go in for the kill.  

This deck's main weakness is its, well, weakness. Red-Eyes Zombie Dragon has a powerful engine but its attack isn't actually that high, which is why we rely on Beatdown to give us an edge in the battle phase. However, to help get over huge enemy monsters, you'll also want to run cards like Wall of Disruption and Enemy Controller. Mirror Wall is another power tool for shrinking enemy monsters. 

Bamboo Burn 

Skill:

Duel, standby (Tea Gardner): Both players start the duel with one more card in their hand.

Key cards:

Woodland Sprite: The core of the deck. Use its effect to send equip spells to the graveyard and damage your opponent.

Cursed Bamboo Sword: This equip spell nets you another Bamboo Sword card when tributed by Woodland Sprite, which keeps your engine running. 

Golden Bamboo Sword: A powerful source of card draw which is virtually always active. 

Best Bamboo Burn deck: Player One's Bamboo FTK list 

Bamboo Burn is new to the Duel Links meta and isn't exactly beloved due to its uninteractive nature. After all, the focus of the deck is exploiting Duel Links' lowered deck size and life point total, ignoring the board and killing your opponent with direct damage—ideally in one turn and often on turn one.  

It's similar to Exodia decks, and consequently, many people consider it to be a cheap deck—even Konami said they're considering nerfing it. I'm inclined to agree, but there's no denying its effectiveness and elegance. It's also fairly cheap to build and a great example of how burn works in Yu-Gi-Oh.

Bamboo Burn's strength is its simplicity: you draw lots of cards, equip cards like Broken Bamboo Sword and Black Pendant to Woodland Sprite, and then send them to the graveyard for 500 damage apiece. Repeat until dead. This strategy lets you get away with helter-skelter cards like Into the Void and Cup of Ace: you don't have to worry about their potential downsides because you planning on winning the turn you play them. Magical Mallet is another great way to improve your opening hands, and extra burn like Restructer Revolution won't go amiss.

Massive Amazoness  

Skill:

Balance (available to multiple duelists): Your opening hand is dictated by your deck composition. So, if you run five monsters, 10 spells and five traps, you'll always open with one monster, two spells and one trap. The same formula holds true for other combinations, so aim to build your deck in increments of five. 

Key cards:

Amazoness Swords Woman: Your opponent takes all battle damage you would take from battles involving this card, meaning you can run it into big monsters to burn your opponent out. 

Amazoness Willpower: This trap special summons your Amazoness Swords Woman from the graveyard and forces it to attack, which is exactly what we want. 

Massivemorph: Doubles the attack of an enemy monster and prevents it from attacking you directly. 

Best Massive Amazoness deck: JayDizzle's Mighty Morphing Amazoness list 

While arguably a burn deck, Massive Amazoness is more of a combo deck than anything. It pairs Amazoness Swords Woman's unique effect with Massivemorph to deal huge damage to the opponent using their own monsters. It also uses Balance to ensure consistent opening hands, which demonstrates how powerful Duel Links' skills can be. 

This is a very simple deck, so apart from your few key cards, just focus on playing up your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses. Use Enemy Controller to force enemy monsters into attack position, increase your damage output with Half-Shut, or protect your Amazoness Swords Woman with cards like Dimensional Gate. As player JayDizzle's list demonstrates, you can also add in alternate win conditions with cards like Lava Golem, and stall for time with Draining Shield or Enchanted Javelin. 

Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana hit a few snags last year on its way to a launch that was ultimately pushed into early 2018 because of some unexpectedly deep-rooted localization problems. With early 2018 now upon us, publisher NIS America has firmed that up to January 30, and also opened its doors to beta testing applications. 

"Included in the PC release are game optimizations and the localization revisions originally announced in late 2017," the company said on Steam. "The localization revisions include improvements to the game’s script, adjustments to graphical text, and re-recorded audio and will be implemented across PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions simultaneously." 

For the first week following the game's release, owners will also be able to download Adol's Adventure Essentials, a mini art book, a soundtrack sampler, and Laxia’s “Eternian Scholar” Costume for free. And in case you didn't see it in the tweet, NIS America is also taking applications for the beta, which is worth signing up for even if you're not interested in testing: Everyone accepted into the beta test will be rolled over to the full version of the game when it's released for free.