On Mordhau's medieval battlefields there is an unspoken code of honor that many players abide by. Mordhau's complex and nuanced first-person combat and medieval themes naturally encourage players to approach combat with mindfulness. After launching last week and selling a shocking 500,000 copies, its community has already formed a code of honor that it encourages others to observe. A lot of it is simple stuff: Don't run away from a duel, be mindful of your attacks so that you don't accidentally damage a teammate, don't interrupt another's duel just to steal the kill.

But Mordhau's honor code is also an implicit endorsement of certain playstyles over others. At the top of this hierarchy sits those noble, sword-wielding knights. They take pride in their mastery of Mordhau's nuanced combat, knowing the ins and outs of 'chambers,' ripostes, and other esoteric concepts like 'drags and accels'. They'd like for you to believe that their skill is so supreme that they don't need such lowly equipment like a shield, bandages, or, say, even a helmet. They are the muscled Chads of Mordhau, and anyone who doesn't play like them should be ashamed.

I am not one of those players.

To hell with that, I say. You can have your e-chivalry. I'm here to see my name at the top of the leaderboard and I'll do anything to get there. And if you're like me, this is how you do it.

Be sure to turn on the volume for each of these gifs.

Use the spear

Of all of Mordhau's weapons, one stands tall above the rest—no seriously, the spear is a five-foot-nine harbinger of pain and frustration. If you want to be the king of the battlefield, you should spend in-game gold to unlock it immediately. That five-foot-nine length translates into an extreme reach that can't be matched by any other weapon, which means you can safely stab people in the face while they desperately try to get close to you. But, don't worry, if you follow this guide, they'll never get close to you.

What makes the spear the ultimate weapon of the Mordhau bastard isn't just its reach, though. It's how much damage it does with its stab attack. Oh, sure, you could swing it from side to side, but then you would be an idiot. Are you an idiot? I didn't think so. See, if you hit an unarmored foe in the chest with a slash attack, your spear will only do 30 damage. If you stab them in the chest, however, that number leaps up to a whopping 75. Headshots are instantly fatal. So you might as well unbind all other attack keys and change your LMB to stab (like I have). It's the only attack you need.

The downside is that spear costs a whopping 10 points, leaving you with just enough left over to suit up with some decent armor but not much else. You won't need it anyway, and I'll explain why.

Short spears and shields are for wimps 

If you've played any amount of Mordhau by now, you've likely fought against the scourge that is sweeping through this game, the dreaded short spear and shield user. On the surface the benefits seem obvious: You take the stabbing power of the god-tier spear and you complement it with a shield that effectively turns you into a turtle with knives strapped to your shell. Not only can you stab but you can stab and easily block almost any attack. It's an obvious choice… if you're a complete craven.

Short spears are bad and you should never use them—unless an enemy threw one at you and you're merely giving it back. The short spear has dramatically less range and power than the regular spear, which are its two best features. And what do you get in exchange? A shield and a slightly faster stab animation? Please. Our next point will explain why this is dumb. 

Never be on the frontline 

A shield is useful if you're directly in the path of enemy weapons, yes. But the Mordhau bastard knows that the best shields are made of not wood but flesh. Specifically your teammates' flesh. With your five-foot-nine spear, your job is to always stay just a foot or two back from the front line of a fight, letting your team soak up the damage of incoming blows while you jab your spear in between the gaps, poking enemies in the face until they die.

Chances are you'll occasionally stab your own teammate in the head. Don't worry. As long as they're not facing your direction (why would they be?) they won't even know it was you who did it. If you feel really guilty, though, you can pick up the Friendly perk for one equipment point (you'll have to sacrifice some armor) which makes you do less damage to teammates.

Always go for the cheap kill

The road to being number one is paved with stolen kills. Find enemies who are preoccupied fighting one of your team (preferably two or more, so the enemy is severely outnumbered), rush around to their flank (assuming the path is clear), and stab them in the head. 

Think of yourself as a noble and majestic eagle, circling the field of battle. You don't want to always be in the thick of combat, but rather darting in and out to capitalize on openings the enemy gives you. Did an enemy take a swing at an ally and miss? Rush in and stab them in the head! Is an archer getting too close to the action? Rush in and stab them in the head! Has an enemy turned their back on you to engage in a duel? Rush in and stab them in the head!

Don't feel guilty about stealing a kill from your mate who was risking their life to fight that enemy, though. Mordhau is a team sport.

Always run from an even fight

Never engage the enemy one on one unless you absolutely have to. You have nothing to prove, and on the off chance someone calls you out in chat for strategically repositioning yourself just tell them their family is dumb. If you do get attacked while you're alone (like in the gif above), just keep parrying and walking backwards toward your team's spawn zone. Eventually help will arrive and you can overwhelm the enemy... and do a sick air jump and stab them in the head like I did in the gif above.

Loot a shield from a fallen soldier 

"But Steven," you say, "didn't you just tell me shields are for cowards?" Yes, but the shield you should pick up isn't meant for holding. When you pick up a shield with a two handed weapon like a spear, the shield is strapped to your back. So when you inevitably have to strategically reposition yourself from what isn't a fair fight, enemy archers can't shoot you in the back. That's right, shields that aren't being actively held in your hands will still block projectiles (but not melee attacks). As soon as one of your shield-bearing teammates dies (preferably by distracting an enemy so you can swoop in and stab them in the head), loot their shield from their corpse. Just remember to thank them for their sacrifice. 

Get in their heads with your aggravating battlecry

Here's a quick tip: Press 'V' constantly. That's how you battlecry in Mordhau. It's imperative that you're doing this as often as you can, preferably just after killing someone by stabbing them in the head. Also go into the face and voice customization menu and change your voice to "Foppish" and your voice pitch to as high as it can go. You really want your screams to ring in the ears of everyone near you.

The whole point of this guide is to just stay out of danger and stab people in the head. And if you do that, expect to be at the top of the leaderboards each round. I'm not even exaggerating. Best of all, you'll earn a tidy sum of gold and experience points too. Naturally you should spend it on cosmetic upgrades for your spear. It's worked hard to put you at the top.

There are Monster Hunter: World mods that make the game a bit more convenient, giving you more information on monster health or highlighting items to make them easier to pick up. Then there are the actual important mods, like the one that turns Nergigante into Thomas the Tank Engine, or these mods, which replace your hunter with comic book characters. Why be a normal hunter when you could be Iron Man, equipped with Thor's hammer and Captain America's shield for good measure?

This mod, called "I' m iron man" (I love that unnecessary space) comes in a few pieces. There are male and female Iron Man armor variants, a skin replacing the sword and shield weapon Grand Barong, and another weapon reskin that turns some Kulve Taroth silver weapons into a pair of Infinity Gauntlets.

I was pretty into modder crimsonfaust's Iron Man mod until I saw their One Punch Man mod, which looks exactly the right amount of stupid to be a great mod. If you're not familiar with One Punch man, all you need to know is that he's a normal guy who did 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and ran 10 kilometers every day, and then got so strong he can destroy anything in a single punch.

This mod makes you look like the wonderfully dopey One Punch Man, though it does not, I need to point out, make you KO monsters in a single hit.

Still, it's pretty great. Here's another video of someone using the mod, punching monsters into submission.

If neither comic book man is quite what you're looking for, don't forget you can also play MHW as Geralt of Rivia in a special quest right now.

Some enterprising GTA 3 YouTubers and modders have discovered some of the original tools Rockstar developers used while building and debugging Grand Theft Auto III, and they provide a fascinating glimpse into the development process.

Via Kotaku, YouTubers Vadim M and Badger Gooder have a video up that showcases many of the debug tools that have been discovered lingering in different builds of Grand Theft Auto III. Some of these were lying dormant in GTA III’s code, and many were created to use with PlayStation 2 devkits.

Other debug scripts for GTA 3 were discovered in the mobile port by hackers like Fire Head, who managed to port them back into the console or PC versions.

Some of the features let you see the character, vehicle, and environmental hitboxes and collision detection. Others let you attach a second controller to use developer console commands (important if you were debugging on a console), or use a freelook camera and warp your character to wherever you park it.

It’s a pleasant and informative video, and you can watch the whole thing right here:

The Lost Tales of Greece are a steady stream of new missions for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and the next episode in the series will feature a hunt for an impostor who is posing as none other than you.

The story is called “A Really, Really Bad Day,” and it’s the ninth episode in the Lost Tales of Greece series. Someone in Lokris is pretending to be you, and is ruining your reputation in the process. Players will have to travel to village there and figure out who the impostor is. You’ll need to reach chapter five in the main story to open this quest.

The new Lost Tales episode will be available free to all players May 14. Also on the way this month is a new title update, which adds a few new improvements to the game, including unique legendary lieutenants who scale up with players’ levels. The update will also reduce the objectives in weekly contracts so they’re quicker to finish.

Titan Quest is nearly 13 years old, but it just got a new expansion this week. Atlantis, the third DLC add-on for 2006’s action RPG, invites players to explore another mysterious mythological realm, this one beneath the ocean and beyond the bounds of reality as we know it. 

In Titan Quest Atlantis, heroes meet an explorer who is in search of the legendary city of Atlantis, and set sail across the Mediterranean to find the Diary of Herakles, which is said to contain the key to the hidden realm. 

The new storyline can be played solo, or in co-op as a group of up to six players. Atlantis also comes with a new Tartarus endless mode, in which you’ll fight off waves of enemies, again either solo or as part of a six-player group. You’ll also be able to spend extra in-game cash on randomly-generated loot at the new Casino Merchant.

THQ Nordic says Atlantis gives Titan Quest a bit of a visual upgrade by adding options for color grading and SSAO.

Atlantis joins Titan Quest: Ragnarok as new DLC for the game in the years since THQ Nordic re-released the Anniversary Edition of Titan Quest in 2016.

It’s not often we get new DLC for a game more than a decade old, but hey, this is Atlantis—maybe it just took a little while to find the place.

Released early last year, Monster Prom was a multiplayer dating sim about hooking up with monsters. The visual novel was special for at least two reasons: one, it was a game about hooking up with monsters. Two, the multiplayer aspect was neat, pitting players against one another in order to win the affection of their preferred monster crush.

Now the same studio, Beautiful Glitch, has announced Monster Prom 2 via a Kickstarter campaign. The sequel is pretty much guaranteed at this stage: the campaign has attracted $154,212 at time of writing, with a goal of just $36,000. But aside from the name, Monster Prom 2 is a bit of a departure from the original, because it's actually three games in one.

These are Summer Camp, Winter Retreat and Roadtrip. The first is a fairly straightforward dating sim heavily reminiscent of the first game, the second is... a strategy snowball fight, while the third is structured as a road trip with a few survival mechanics. No matter which you play, there will be monsters to fall in love with.

The list of stretch goals and gift incentives are of Tolstoyan proportion–you can check it all out on the Kickstarter page. You've still got 28 days to back the project, and there's even a playable demo on the Kickstarter page if you need further convincing. Here's the trailer:

I'm playing Jupiter Hell, and once again my health is critically low. I've just taken down my second tough security bot in as many minutes and I have no stimpacks or health kits remaining. To make matters worse, I'm low on ammo for my assault rifle. 

Things are not looking good, but the next room has a health station. I just might survive this level, I think, but as I pick up the stimpack and heal up, an archreaver and fiend appear. The good news is that they're standing next to some exploding barrels, which I target first. I mop up the remnants and heal up, getting me back to 99 health, but I'm still out of 7.62 ammo. My 9mm auto rifle feels like a pea shooter in comparison...

If the above sounds a lot like Doom, that's because Jupiter Hell is a spiritual successor to Doom, the Roguelike (DoomRL, or DRL now). It was a fun parody project, taking the familiar story of the space marine fighting against the forces of hell and putting it into a turn-based, procedurally generated format played on a grid structure. But where DoomRL is free and opensource, it wasn't authorized by ZeniMax.

The planned sequel was announced on Kickstarter in 2016 and obviously had to undergo a change in name, as well as a few other technicalities. It reached the funding stage, and while any official link with Doom is obviously dead, the core idea is the same. You're still a marine (or technician or scout) fighting the forces of hell, only this time it's around the moons of Jupiter. Oh, and there's a heavy metal soundtrack.

It's a tense but enjoyable take on the standard roguelike, with substantially upgraded top-down 3D graphics compared to many games in the genre. There are reflective floors, shadows and other lighting effects, and more. I'm old, so some of my earliest gaming memories are of the original Rogue, running in glorious ASCII monochrome on my dad's PC in the early 80s. This is a far more polished approach, which I'm currently enjoying at 4K.

The first alpha of Jupiter Hell came out last year, with the beta launching to Kickstarter supporters in October. The beta was made available via Itch.io in February with Steam Early Access planned for June. The latest 0.6 'Universal Soldier' update brings a host of changes, including increased chances to find some of the better weapons. More importantly, you now have three weapon slots, which can be used for any weapon—previously, there were distinct pistol, primary, and heavy weapon slots.

Permadeath is of course part of the game. I've made several runs, encountering a variety of environments, weapons, and enemies. There's also a journal, which currently just says, "There is nothing here ... yet," so obviously there's still work to be done. But even in its current form, Jupiter Hell is a fun and generally quick diversion.

There are three difficulty levels, though even on 'easy' I've died plenty of times. (Pro tip: assault rifles don't work so well when enemies are adjacent to you.) You move through maps in one direction, never returning to previous levels, with occasional branches along the way. Do I dig through the Callisto Mines, where demons are more likely, or head to the Spaceport and its heavily armored security bots? Both are perhaps equally likely to end in death, and replayability is high.

There are three classes to change things up, with different skills/perks you can select from each time you gain a level. The marine has health perks for example, so he can get to 160 total health. The scout and technician have perks to carry more stuff and convert ammo types when your inventory is full.

You can start playing now if you buy the game on Itch.io for $40, but the Steam Early Access release will apparently cost less if you want to wait a month. Now if you'll pardon me, I need to search for some 7.62 ammo, because my chaingun has run dry.

The fourth and, apparently, final DLC release for the exceptionally good medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance, A Woman's Lot, will be available on May 28. As the title suggests, the expansion will give players the opportunity to experience the poop-throwing majesty of Kingdom Come's game world as a woman: Theresa, a potential love interest for Henry in the main storyline, whose family was killed in the early stages of the game. 

Accompanied by her dog Tinker, Theresa will play through her own separate, standalone questline in the expansion, although it will ultimately tie into the main story too, as you'll witness the battle that begins the game from an entirely different perspective. "A Woman's Lot provides the last puzzle of the Skalitz story, as you find out what happened just before Henry was found unconscious," publisher Deep Silver said. 

A Woman's Lot will also be the last piece of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance Royal Edition, which will bundle the Treasures of the Past, From the Ashes, The Amorous Adventures of Bold Sir Hans Capon, and Band of Bastards DLC releases together with the enhanced version of the base game. It was originally scheduled for release on May 28, but Deep Silver announced today that it's been pushed back slightly, to June 11.

You’re probably wondering what the hell ‘barotrauma’ means. In simple terms, it refers to injuries caused by changes in water or air pressure. For divers that can mean burst eardrums or drowning. The latter is what Barotrauma is mostly concerned with, being a game set in a leaky submarine where a watery death awaits the crew if they don’t work together. 

Set in an alien ocean on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, Barotrauma is reminiscent of FTL, but on a much larger scale. You view your sub from the side and can freely wander around it as one of several classes including captain, engineer, mechanic, and medic. There are dozens of interaction points around the sub such as lockers, water pumps, engines, and other mechanical stuff that keeps the thing running. 

And, inevitably, this stuff is gonna break. Europa’s oceans are filled with alien horrors, and a shunt or a chomp from one of these massive, toothy beasts will damage the sub, letting water in or causing machinery to malfunction. This is when the crew has to spring to action, plugging leaks, sealing bulkheads, pumping water out and repairing things. But that’s easier said than done with up to 16 players per submarine online. 

You can play with bots, but multiplayer is where you’ll probably have the most fun in Barotrauma. The scrabble to stop water rushing into part of the sub, trying to get everyone to work together, is massively chaotic. You’ll have to work together to seal off parts of the submarine that are filling with water. Sometimes this involves pulling on a diving suit and swimming down into the flooded depths of the ship. And with every gallon of water that spills in, the likelihood of sinking to the depths and being crushed by the pressure rises. 

If you’re joined by 15 friends, communicating with voice chat, patiently following the orders of the captain, you might be alright. But when you’re online, with strangers, you never know what people’s intentions are. Someone might get a kick out of sealing the engineer in a flooding room and drowning them, meaning no one will have the skills necessary to repair the nuclear reactor. Someone might just steer the submarine into a rock, for a laugh. This kind of griefing might be annoying, but it’ll be certain to generate some great stories. 

Any player can attempt any role on the sub, but if their class isn’t dedicated to it, it’ll be slower and more likely to fail. If the medic is trying to repair an engine, they might be able to muddle through it, but much less efficiently than an engineer. 

It’s not all terrifying sea monsters and leaky hulls, though. There’s exploration to be done in this ocean, and your crew will have to work together to steer the ship and adjust the ballast to ascend and descend.

Return fire

If the writhing tentacles of one of these Lovecraftian creatures do get a little too close for comfort, you can equip your submarine with weapons systems including turrets and sonar. These can be controlled by players and it’s possible to repel an intruding alien if you work together. But attacking an enemy will just make it mad, and make your sub a target. 

Barotrauma comes with a suite of creation tools too, letting you create your own submarines and sea monsters and share them on Steam. There’s also basic scripting in there, similar to redstone in Minecraft, which you can use to create mechanisms and triggers. Barotrauma sounds like a game tailored towards player creation and community, and if it takes off once it enters Early Access in spring, it could be home to some amazing stories.

Frostpunk just saw its one-year anniversary, and in that time it’s sold more than 1.4 million copies, far exceeding developer 11 bit Studio’s expectations. Now, the studio is thinking about what comes next for their game, which they’ve bolstered over the past 12 months with a steady stream of post-release content. While a sequel would certainly make sense, the studio has other ideas in mind, too—including a role-playing game set in the Frostpunk universe.

GamesIndustry.biz spoke with Patryk Grzeszczuk, 11 bit’s director of marketing, about his company’s future plans for Frostpunk. Part of those plans is bringing Frostpunk to consoles, which the studio is working on now.

But further on down the road, Grzeszczuk says 11 bit is looking into exploring new genres, including RPGs. The studio has been gradually adding to Frostpunk’s backstory and lore as they’ve produced more DLC, and that process has resulted in a world rich enough to support a more narrative-leaning game.

“We’ve had that approach since day one,” Grzeszczuk said. “We wanted to create a world, and then fill that world with stories, with places, and then build connections between them.”

“The world of Frostpunk is growing,” he continued. “And we’re thinking that, in the future we should think about, maybe not a sequel, but a spin-off—an RPG set in the same universe.”

Grzeszczuk didn’t elaborate further, but it’s an exciting idea, particularly coming from a studio that, between Frostpunk and This War of Mine, has pushed us into some of the most harrowing decisions we’ve ever had to make in video games. 

Should Frostpunk find continued success in the console market, it’s likely we’ll see a more expanded universe in the near future. 

We gave Frostpunk our Best Sim award for 2018.