If you’ve been waiting for Control‘s Epic exclusivity to end, well, wait no longer. Remedy Entertainment’s third-person spook-em-up arrived on Steam today in the form of an Ultimate Edition containing the base game and both expansions, The Foundation and AWE. As fate (read: Remedy’s marketing department) would have it, AWE launched today as well. It’s the long-rumoured Alan Wake expansion, which has you exploring a new deep dark area of The Oldest House to uncover more supernatural mysteries.

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Io Interactive today announced a January 20th release date for Hitman 3, the end of Ian Hitman’s latest trilogy of stealthy murdering. He’s been picking off pieces of a conspiracy for two games now, and getting ready to really bury it in this final part. Hitman 3 will be an Epic Games Store timed exclusive on PC, though it seems bits will transfer from the Steam versions of the first two.

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Control

‘s new AWE DLC might technically stand for “Altered World Events” – the term the game’s FBI-but-magic organisation The Federal Bureau of Control uses for the weird stuff they investigate – but let’s be honest, we all know it’s going to be remembered as the “Alan Wake Expansion”. That’s the theme for this second and final DLC for Remedy’s third-person action-adventure, which we called an accomplished and fun version of X-Files with more guns but less Mulder when we put it on our best action games for PC list earlier in the year.

AWE is a decent chunk of DLC that adds what you’d expect: about four hours of wellying fire extinguishers down hallways, a new enemy type and a new section of the Bureau’s offices to explore. By the end, you get the nagging feeling that you’ve just played through the video game equivalent of a Marvel film’s post-credits sequence – this is, after all, a step in establishing the “Remedy Connected Universe” that started with Alan Wake’s splash onto the Xbox 360 ten years ago. If you’re a fan of Alan Wake, it doesn’t really offer any answers, just more questions. Alan himself isn’t even in it that much. But what it does> have is a really bloody good monster. Some spoilers follow.

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It’s tough finding work as a surgeon these days. Turns out, hospitals keep asking for “experience” and “professional training” before letting any old punter loose with a scalpel. Thankfully, that isn’t the case with Surgeon Simulator 2‘s operating theatre. Released today, Bossa’s brutally goofy gut extraction sim will let anyone bring their friends along to try at being doctors, for far less than it costs to grab yourself a medical degree.

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Left 4 Dead 2

will soon get a content update bringing an old favourite Left 4 Dead map to Valve’s co-op zombiethon. The Last Stand is a community-made update that’s being officially published by Valve, and fans of the original L4D might recognise its location from Survival Mode.

Catch the teaser trailer below for a short, sweeping view of a creepy lighthouse overlooking a cliffside.

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The funny thing about the friendship wrecking Among Us, a game where a small group of killers try to undermine and murder the crew of a spaceship, is that it’s best played with friends. The wounds cut deeper when you’re accused of sabotaging an engine by someone who knows you. The bloody betrayal by a BFF leaves you bereft and baffled. To get the most out of it, you need risk losing everything.

I have not been playing it with buds, pals, acquaintances, or even long lost relatives who Googled me. I’ve been on the public servers, where the cruel social examination and deliberate misdirection more resembles a group chat of teenage liars. It still works, it’s just a very different experience from the one that’s all over Twitch right now. And it has revealed to me how good I am at being a lying, traitorous murderer.

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The German games show Gamescom isn’t happening as a physical event this year, like everything else, but it is going virtual. Tonight it officially kicks off with Opening Night Live, a two-hour livestream of trailers and announcements for games including Star Wars: Squadrons, Fall Guys, The Sims 4, Doom Eternal, and Destiny 2. Hosted by the ubiquitous Geoff Keighley, it starts at 7pm (11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 8pm CEST) and is free for everyone to watch. So here’s the stream below, so you can watch it and cheer for phrases like “content debuts”.

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Marvel’s planet-gobbler, Galactus, is the new looming threat over Fortnite with Chapter 2: Season 4 starting today. The battle royale’s new season is one big Avengers-style crossover called Nexus War, and it’s brought loads of unlockable superhero outfits to dress up in while you battle the world-eater. Skins for heroes including Iron Man, She-Hulk, Wolverine and a bunch of others can be unlocked in the battle pass, and you’ll be able to take on a few different superpowers in matches – you’ll also be using these on each other, it is a battle royale, after all.

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It’s a big boy, gunslingers, but not a great boy. Wasteland 3 is okay, passable, middling. It should be commended for its sheer heft, its days-long bulkiness no doubt welcome in the face of our own ongoing apocalypse, but that doesn’t make its writing any less puerile, nor its combat any less uninspired. For some, this in-jokey game of tactics and chin-wagging will fill a vacant space in life, multiple evenings of rambling nostalgia-heavy roleplay echoing the Fallouts and Wastelands of yesteryear. But for others like me, it’s a vestigial fragment of a reanimated genre, a game with by-the-numbers battling that wears thin long before its consequence-baiting storytelling has the chance to pop.

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The Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless is one of my favourite gaming keyboards of all time, but its almost identical wired sibling, the G815 Lightsync, comes a very close second. It’s the keyboard I’ve had on my desk for months now, mostly because it has the added bonus of USB passthrough for my mouse – and the good news is that it’s £50 off over at Amazon UK today, taking it down to its lowest price ever.

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