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When For Honor first pummelled its way onto the parapets of PC gaming, it was frustrating. The blow-by-blow of this ahistorical brawler presented a tough fighting game with all sorts of dastardly antics thrown in. Ledges, spikes, traps, ladders. But the gamey infrastructure around it was a disaster. Disconnections, lag, crappy matchmaking, and that all-too-common stinginess when it came to post-match rewards. A rusty pair of shin guards? Gee, thanks.

Today, it’s better. The stinginess never really went away, but most of the other problems have. Leaving a solid fighting game about booting people off high walls.

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Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re the sort of person who has a grand to spend on your CPU. Your craving for cores knows no bounds, and you gobble up threads like bowls of digital spaghetti. You’re the kind of person who takes one look at my best gaming CPU list and laughs because chips like Intel’s Core i7-9700K just don’t have the raw speed and power you hunger for. You, my friend, want the X-rated stuff. The XTREME. Well, you’ll be very pleased to hear, then, that not only are Intel releasing a four new Core X-series desktop processors sometime later next month in November, but that the top-end (and oh so memorably named) Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition also (finally) costs less than a thousand bucks. Rejoice!

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Kings and Queens, eh? What are they good for? I don’t recall the last time Queen Elizabeth sat in front of the people and promised to help them fund a new fridge or rescue their turnips from goblins, that’s for sure. It’s time someone kicked these crowned clowns off their plush seats and got them into the thick of the action. Developers Brave At Night are preparing to take the monarchy to task with royal family resource manager Yes, Your Grace.

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Solasta: Crown Of The Magister understands something fundamentally important about this medium of ours. Games can be so many things, but sometimes I just want to bash goblins with an axe. While I’ve become a bit fussier with my tastes in my mid-twenties, I’ll always have a soft spot for the time I spent building daft wee Neverwinter Nights 2 adventure modules over an easter break. Will Solasta become a genre classic? I don’t think it needs to, so long as the dungeon-delving hits the sweet spot.

Pick up your +1 Shortsword and don that leather cuirass – Solasta has surfaced a free demo on Steam, and I’m not diving into this dungeon along.

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Do you remember the original Steelseries Sensei? Apologies if those words make you feel a thousand years old, but if you were a fan of Steelseries’ popular gaming mouse from the blessed year of 2009, then I have some good news for you. It’s back! This time in the form of the Sensei Ten. Borrowing the same classic ambidextrous shape as its ten-year-old predecessor, the Sensei Ten has been fully upgraded with a new optical sensor and other modern conveniences like RGB lighting, improved switches and onboard profiles. Here’s everything you’ve ever wanted to know about it.

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Do you like hearing indie devs spilling the beans about the secrets of game design? Would you also like to see the lovely faces of RPS coaxing said developers to spill those beans at the same time? Well then, you better get yourself over to the Rezzed Sessions stage on Friday October 18th at EGX 2019, as we’ll be hogging the stage from 2.30pm onwards as we grill some friendly developers that just happened to walk into our big indie dev net. From the making of NoCode’s space horror game Observation to how to make an RPG like Disco Elysium, here’s the line-up for the second day of EGX 2019, which runs October 17th-20th at London’s ExCeL.

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Sorry, definition nerds. Soulslike is a word now. Disgusting, I know, but this is how genres are made. Along comes a giant like Dark Souls that everybody won t stop bleating about and soon it has copycats. Before you know it, a swarm of like-minded games with sparse checkpoints and lethal attacks are scuttling around, leaving slime trails and biting your ankles for surprisingly massive damage. Ugh, soulslikes. But stoop low to appreciate these little monsters, and among them you ll find some very good games about dying.

Here are ten of the best.

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Fortnite‘s latest patch delays the inevitable. Oh, the end is still very much nigh for Battle Royale Season 10 – the apocalypse has just been pushed back a week, is all. Rather than ending this Sunday, October 6th, Fortnite’s tenth season will now come to a close one week later on October 13th. Epic Games haven’t quite revealed why Season 11 has been pushed back. Is it a delay, or an overly elaborate fake-out planned from the very start. Regardless, there’s plenty to be getting on with during the extra week.

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As the many hapless scientists now wearing wee aliens as hats (and Valve Software themselves) could tell you, one need be careful with Half-Life’s alien dimension of Xen. That’s why the gang behind sanctioned remake Black Mesa gang have taken their time remaking those much-reviled end-game levels, initially releasing the game without any Xen then getting back to work on it. They’ve been gradually expanding Xen in a beta branch, and now they invite us to that weird meaty factory processing (cloning? packaging?) aliens. The unexpected concept made it my favourite part of Xen, so I’m glad to see them go for it.

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10 years of Borderlands, is it? A whole decade since four cel-shaded bounty hunters hopped off a bus and murdered their way across a planet to the whiny twangs of Cage The Elephant? Blimey, where does the time go? Well before Destiny, Borderlands married Diablo’s gear grind with run n’ gun blasting in an open-world romp, kicking off a generation of shooting bloody numbers out of heads. To celebrate a decade of cartoon carnage, the next five weeks of Borderlands 3 will crank things up to 11, starting with a week of better boss loot drops.

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