Gamesplanet's Spring Sale is in full swing right now, and there are some great savings to be had on over 2500 games until next Monday, April 26th. Chief among them is Remedy's excellent telekinetic shooter Control, whose Ultimate Edition is over 50% off at the moment as part of today's 24 hour flash deal.
Developers Iron Gate Studios have made a big update to their Viking survival sim Valheim, overhauling the game's terrain system. It should be a big help to players who struggle with Valheim's performance, and make the landscape look a little more natural for all your groundworkers.
"The new terrain modification system is made to reduce the number of network instances and make loading faster and smoother," the devs say.
Ten years ago, Valve released Portal 2. I’d like to think that the ultimate goal of Portal 2 was to get me to write an article about its tenth anniversary, so my ego wouldn’t let it go by. 10 is a nice age to celebrate, and it’s also the perfect number of random facts to pluck from the history of one of Valve’s most celebrated games. Also, I get to call them “decafacts”.
Respawn Entertainment have revealed that the next character jumping into the Apex Legends arena is Valkyrie. She's the daughter of Viper, a villainous Titan pilot you might recognise from Titanfall 2. In a new Stories From The Outlands video, we get a glimpse of Valkyrie as a kid, taking a joy ride in papa's big Northstar mech. Unfortunatley, it seems Apex still isn't getting proper mechs, but Valkyrie will be bringing a few parts of Northstar into the battle royale with her when the new season starts on May 4th.
When Sennheiser's gaming division transformed into EPOS last year, one of their first orders of business was the release of their GTW 270 Hybrid wireless earbuds, an expensive, but highly compact take on a traditional gaming headset. Despite their tiny size, these earbuds had a built-in microphone and everything, but their short battery life of five hours made them less than ideal for prolonged gaming stints. The good news is that EPOS are now in the process of refreshing Sennheiser's more traditional line-up of gaming headsets, starting with the EPOS H3. This is the evolution of Sennheiser's GSP 300 and 350 headsets, the latter of which I thought was a decent, if rather chunky £115 headset back when I reviewed it in 2017.
I'm writing this just a day or so after Hunt: Showdown celebrated its three-year anniversary with an event which caused it to break its all-time concurrent players record. Of course, that would be more noteworthy if the game hadn't been breaking its concurrent players record with increasing frequency over the past several months. It seems that word has started to spread at last that Hunt, with its wonderfully unusual approach to battle royale and competitive multiplayer, is well-worth the average player's free time.
Portal 2 has just turned ten years old, and what better way to celebrate than by adding some extra head scratchers to Valve's tricky puzzle box? Portal Reloaded is a Portal 2 mod that adds 25 new puzzles and a brand new type of portal. This new, green portal lets expert portalers travel 20 years in the future and solve Aperture Science rooms across both space and time.
Netflix's animated Castlevania series is retuning for its fourth and final season next month to tie off the story of Alucard, Trevor Belmont, and Sypha. The first three seasons were good fun, increasing in drama and length each time. The season four date announcement comes with a short teaser trailer to remind you just a bit of what's been going on in the show. You can also likely spot some clues in the new season poster than Netflix have shared.
Celeste and TowerFall developers Extremely Ok Games have announced their next game. Sort of, anyway. They've announced its name and given a "vibe reveal" in the form of a poster, logo, and music by Lena Raine. If I had to describe the vibe, I'd call it magical and hopeful, but you can do your own vibe check on Earthblade right now.
Path Of Exile kicked off its latest expansion Ultimatum on Friday, a launch which was unfortunately part of a challenging week for the developers and players both. Server issues created a domino effect of troubles on launch day between Path Of Exile's developers, their players, and livestreamers. That was just the cap to a week which was already troubled by accusations of an unfair ban from what turned out to be an invented player. Most issues appear to be resolved now, but here's a look at what's been going on.