If there’s one thing better than looting the artefacts of ancient, forgotten civilisations for personal gain, it’s doing it with a friend. Today, the first of seven planned DLC tombs for Shadow Of The Tomb Raider was released. The Forge is a lava-filled, puzzle-heavy delve, and designed for play either solo or in the newly introduced online co-op mode. Lara can now tag along with a pal and solve problems in fun tag-team ways, further building on the back-to-basics tomb raiding approach of the game. Below, Eidos Montreal show off some of the quirks of multiplayer.

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As graphics card launches go, it’s probably fair to say Nvidia’s new RTX cards have had a pretty terrible one so far. With concerns over their somewhat extortionate pricing and the continued lack of all those confirmed RTX games to really show what their magic Turing GPUs are made of, it’s left both the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti feeling like one big shoulder shrug – even if the latter is by far and away the best graphics card ever made.

It’s an awkward position to be in, to say the least, and it only gets doubly embarrassing when you get to the RTX 2070, the littlest and least powerful entry in Nvidia’s new RTX family. Sure, it’s got the same fancy ray-tracing reflection tech and deep-learning gubbins as the rest of the 20-series, but there’s still no way to actually see how it all works in a real, honest to goodness game. Instead, all I can really test at the moment is its raw performance, which early reports pegged to be roughly the same as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080. Now that I’ve finally had a chance to look at one myself, I’d say it’s a little more complicated than that. Let’s take a look.

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Path Of Exile‘s next league – Betrayal – is set to be the largest expansion to Grinding Gear’s free-to-play action RPG since its story doubled in length last year. The Forsaken Masters, four NPCs who gave you minor side-quests as you progressed through the game, have disappeared – no great loss, really. In their place, the past three league quest-givers are returning permanently, plus one more. Betrayal adds a Shadow Of Mordor-ish board of assassination targets with a twist; your marks won’t stay dead, which is a problem. The league starts December on 7th. Below, the trailer.

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This is like one of those jokes that work on Twitter but makes people really concerned if you write it on Facebook: “Anyone else feel like the planet is doomed and we should stop trying?” Like, your aunt would post a comment underneath asking if you were okay. The first time I played Eco, I chose a world that had been running for a few days, with a few active players. It seemed like a good idea, because they d have gotten a head start on stopping the meteor about to hit the planet, you see. I spawned in on a wide, flat plain with a few tents dotted around. The tutorial advised me to set up my camp near other buildings, so I d be able to take advantage of what the community had built so far.

I didn t realise then that the plain I was on was once a thick forest carpeted with wild fruits and vegetables; the deforestation had been curbed by the introduction of a tax on anyone but new players cutting down trees.

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It feels only right that the biggest expansion for historical simulator Crusader Kings 2 adds the option to simulate alternate worlds’s histories, too. Released today, Holy Fury was initially billed as an expansion to the religious systems of the game. While that is part of the package, even Paradox’s own focus has shifted to the expansion’s potential to generate endless earths. While the geography may look similar, the empires, cultures, religions and borders are all new. Plus, sometimes the planet may be full of talking animals. The launch trailer readies to march below.

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Ian Hitman is back once again with the kill behaviour in Hitman 2, which just launched. The sandbox stealth-o-murder simulator visits new lands, does new murders in new ways, and generally does that Hitman stuff well. Adam Cook said in our Hitman 2 review that “although IO’s latest take on their murder-sim doesn’t veer too far from the previous game’s reinvention, it spends time re-enforcing what made it so good to begin with,” which sounds like a grand old time to me.

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Are there some situations in Fallout 76 where a bullet to the head of your enemies just won’t do? A player in this PVP game may be repeatedly killing you and your friends and tempers may be frayed to the point where drastic actions need to be taken. For the first time, you can drop miniature atom bombs on enemies, which has the added bonus of not just forcing them to relocate their CAMP, but also create a habitat where valuable resources can be obtained. In this guide, I will tell you how to get those nuclear codes, as well as what happens to the landscape when the bomb drops. (more…)

With so many things trying to kill you in Appalachia, it’s worth investing some of the resources you find in the wrecked buildings and desolate countryside into making armour. These armour pieces are worn over the top of outfits, which are how you add some more unique touches to how you look. That said, some outfits do have uses, while armour now can be upgraded to increase in levels. This guide will go over the most useful outfits and what armour pieces you should be crafting. (more…)

It’s no secret anymore that Fallout 76 has revamped how Perks work. Instead of choosing one at every level, you collect cards that can be equipped and shared at any point. There are a ton of these in the game, some requiring an increase in rank to get more out of them. This guide will have more on exactly how to obtain them or Perk Card packs, what you need to do to upgrade them, and a full list of all the Perk Cards and their subsequent effects by rank that we know so far. (more…)

Since the beta has come and gone, it soon became apparent that Bobbleheads and Magazines work a fair bit differently in Fallout 76. Instead of being permanent upgrade, both Bobbleheads and Magazines are now consumable temporary buffs that provide either increases to your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats, or a trait such as weapon specific boost. Since they work slightly differently this time, there are more places that you can find them, this guide will have more on their locations, exactly how to obtain them, and when it is best to collect duplicates. (more…)