Humans have had their day in the city builder sun, so Distant Kingdoms is making way for fantasy folks such as dwarves and elves and orcs and all. Except none of them can get along, so the gods have banished them all from their homes and forced them to rebuild. No lovely castles for you until you decide to behave. Distant Kingdoms has just launched into early access with two maps and four races to choose from while it works to add a full campaign and modding support.

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Ah, I do so love a fresh new glitch with the latest season of my favourite battle royale. Apex Legends' ninth season, Legacy, launched last night, and it came with its fair share of server woes. Those are mostly dealt with, but now players have had a chance to try out the new character Valkyrie, and some of them are finding her abilities have some interesting (read: completely broken) combos with other Legends. Namely, her ultimate keeps throwing her terrified squadmates under the map.

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Though Left 4 Dead 2 still exists, and has a reasonably healthy if sodium-infused community, it’s still stuck in its 2009 ways. It's exciting, but it lacks proper personalisation. Back 4 Blood, the spiritual successor from the original-ish developers of L4D, is fully embracing 2021 by letting players and the AI game director throw down some game-changing cards before each battle.

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Ah, autumn. Crunchy leaves, snuggly jumpers, and the sort of weather that makes you want to cosy up with a good tabletop RPG - or a digital adaptation of a tabletop RPG, I suppose. Owlcat Games are pandering to my ideal autumn evening by giving Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous a September 2nd release date. There's also a second beta available right now for Kickstarter backers too, so they can try out some new quests and systems before the game's full launch.

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Ray tracing might be the big, hot graphics tech of 2021, but of all the ray tracing games that have come to PC so far, only a handful of them have actually blown me away in the old graphics department. I can count the number of games worth buying a ray tracing-capable graphics card for on a single hand - Control, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Minecraft at a push - but the good news is that we can now add Resident Evil Village to that exclusive list, as Capcom's latest survival horror game really capitalises on its atmospheric lighting to make it one of the best ray tracing games yet.

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Resident Evil Village is a blended smoothie of horror, one that covers a spectrum of flavours to suit various tastes. Those first couple of sips are delightfully complex. Dark and brooding. But as you drain the glass, it begins to taste a bit too fiery, a bit too wild, until you can't taste anything. In fact, it's spilled all over your shirt. Again?! Urgh, this happened last time.

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If, like me, you were one of the many excited players eager to jump into Apex Legends last night to try out all the lovely new things added in the battle royale's ninth season, you likely had a rough time logging in. A menu screen telling me there were no servers, the queue for Arenas mode being infinitely long, and losing access to all but the base characters were but a few of the problems I ran into myself. While these things seem to have been fixed now, it's fair to say the Legacy update had a rough go of it.

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If the Resident Evil Village demo wasn’t scary enough, just you wait. I have something that’ll give you the absolute heebies. Mods have already snuck out for Capcom’s horror game, extending the demo’s time limit, but I wasn’t ready for what was to follow. Prepare yourself for the nightmare fuel that is this Lady Dimitrescu/Thomas the Tank Engine mashup.

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Games where you get to play as tiny people and creatures have always delighted me, and now there's a game that throws mechs into that mix - a match made in heaven. Stonefly is an upcoming game made by the developers of Creature In The Well, where you play as a tiny inventor who flies around in bug mechs. It has a gorgeous art style and a colourful world, and it comes out on June 1st.

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Egosoft have just released X3: Farnham’s Legacy, a free game in their incredibly long-running space sandbox series (the first was released way back in 2005). The game was crafted by the Egosoft community, and is free to owners of X3: Albion Prelude. Hey, I own X3: AP! Yay for me! And hopefully yay for you, too.

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