Let’s pretend there was no such thing as the Total War series of games. Let’s pretend A Total War Saga: Troy was just called Super Iliad Guys – which it should be called anyway – but had otherwise come out of the blue exactly as it is. In this mythical world, I would be completely blown away by Super Iliad Guys, with its astonishing two-for-one of a cracking RTS game stacked on top of a sweeping military 4X game, and its first class, ochre-heavy art direction. But I would also wonder why, after all the time and effort it had clearly taken to make something so impressive, its makers hadn’t taken another year and made it perfect.

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War totally continues today with the launch of A Total War Saga: Troy, the latest strategic rumble from Creative Assembly. The Saga subseries focuses on particular regions, in this case the Bronze Age dust-up round the city of Troy as told in The Iliad (I think it’s an episode of The Simpsons?). Troy is initially an Epic exclusive but: this deal means the game is fully free to keep forever for the first 24 hours. That’s quite nice.

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Intel have confirmed that their first discrete Xe GPU is still on track to release before the end of 2020. Code-named DG1, the graphics card is currently in production and will begin shipping before the end of the year, just in time for an almighty showdown between the upcoming [cms-block] cards and the next-generation of [cms-block] GPUs.

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Disband the RPS youth contingent. Its founder, Matt Cox, is now 24 years old, and therefore much too old to continue as its leader. This is his last day at RPS – come say goodbye.

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I was ready to give up on Risk Of Rain 2. On the face of it that doesn’t make much sense, because it’s a 3D followup to an excellent platforming roguelike where possibility spills from cascading item combos. It’s like if The Binding Of Isaac was a third-person shooter set on an alien planet where dinosaurs, ghosts and automatons team up to kill you. I wanted> to like it, but a too-long crawl towards new characters and a tendency for levels to flip from ‘chill murder pottering’ to ‘instant death’ put me off.

These are still very big problems with the full version. But then I unlocked the robot with a grappling hook.

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The ISO is one of two new weapons added to Warzone in Season 5, and it’s taking a bit of time to find its place in the current SMG meta. Our Warzone ISO guide looks to sort things out once and for all, both by providing you with the best possible ISO loadout that we’ve found so far, and also taking a look at the gun’s base stats and seeing how it compares with other SMGs in Season 5.

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If managing an unruly colony of idiots on an alien planet filled with hostile wildlife, raiders, aliens, and robots has somehow become easy for you: good news, you can now make RimWorld more difficult. Thanks to this week’s free patch, you can fiddle with over two dozen difficulty settings to create your own ‘playstyle’ – everything from trades prices and friendly fire to the rates of disease and nasty enemy spawns. Some of the settings can make the game easier, but mostly this has been added for serious super-survivors.

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Looks like graphics aren’t the only thing being updated in the upcoming remaster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2. One of the game’s famous tricks, the “mute grab”, will be getting a name change to better represent the person that came up with it.

The trick was first performed by a deaf skater named Chris Weddle in 1981, who, at the time, was referred to by some as the “quiet, mute guy”. But deaf and mute and two very different things, so to better honour his legacy, it’ll now be known as the “Weddle grab”.

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Everyone loves a good distillery tour, right? Gawk at the big barrels, sample the products and all. Not so much in the latest update to Dead Cells, which adds an area called the Derelict Distillery. In this house of horrors the barrels explode and the products are death—your death specifically. The new update is out now, adding new enemies, weapons, and mimics—oh my!

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You know when you see a game and just know “oh yes, that is for me”? I knew just from a screenshot of As Far As The Eye that it would be my wheelhouse. Hexagonal tiles, turn numbers, and resource counts tell me it’s a turn-based strategy game while the vibrant colors and giant, fluffy creatures give me that tingly feeling in my heart. Fortunately, you and I won’t have to wait long to try it out. As Far As The Eye will launch on September 10th according to its new gameplay video.

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