Nightmare Reaper is rad, which is something I didn't think I'd say. DOOM and its DOOM-like spawn don't often do it for me. Bouncing around an arena and carving demons into hunks of meat gets a bit repetitive for my tastes. Which is weird! I love FPS games and repetitive things, like dying in Hades over and over again.

I'm into Nightmare Reaper because it's repetitive... but not. It's a roguelike DOOM-inspired shooter where you blast through procedurally-generated levels and their demonic denizens, earn cash, put points into a skill-tree, and get as far as you can. The quest for loot has elevated this from a potential "Meh" to a solid, "Oh yeah>".

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It's a strange thing, returning to the world of Death Stranding after more than a year away. Having done that classic thing of rinsing almost every last delivery out of it before finally strapping myself in for its rollercoaster ending back in 2020, there hasn't been much reason to return to my precious, daft BB Boys in the intervening months - not even its Cyberpunk 2077 crossover was enough to tempt me back. At long last, though, I have cause to load up the BB train again. Death Stranding Director's Cut arrives on Steam and the Epic Games Store today, bringing with it new story missions, new delivery buddies, new weapons and... a Mario Kart-style race track? Yep, that sounds like a classic Kojima upgrade pack, if you ask me. Not quite as revolutionary as Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, mind, but it's roughly in the same kind of ballpark.

It's been great fun revisiting the lush mountains of Death Stranding's definitely not Icelandic version of post-apocalyptic America. If anything, the weirdest thing is seeing that same world I know and love on a fresh server, bereft of all the distracting neon signs, yelps of "Keep on keeping on!" and one-upmanship bridge-building that made up the bulk of the original's asymmetric online multiplayer component. It's actually quite refreshing to see these virgin, unspoiled landscapes again, although I imagine this won't last long once returning players flock back to their well-worn delivery routes. As for the new new stuff, is it worth making a return trip? As with all expando games, the answer will very much depend on if and how much you played the first one.

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With Crusader Kings III finally having invaded the console market - presumably, as a result of a club-footed Belgian mystic spending months fabricating a claim to it - now seems a fine moment to step back and see how the game looks, eighteen months into its reign on PC. The answer, with almost embarrassing simplicity, is: “great”.

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Deep breath. The Cycle: Frontier is a free-to-play PvPvE first-person shooter. Whew, that's a lot of parts smushed together, but think of it like a baby's first Hunt: Showdown. You're a Prospector, tasked with descending into Fortuna 3, an alien planet filled with minerals and plant matter and dinosaurs. Corpos hire you to get these goods and bring them back safely. The catch is other players and inconvenient helicopter schedules. Other Prospectors will murder you for your precious rocks and weeds, so your aim is to get a helicopter out of Fortuna before this happens. It's a setup where success breeds success in its current closed beta form, but failure also begets frustration. In the end, you might wish Fortuna was yours and yours alone.

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Remember, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is not a Borderlands game. In fact, it’s so much not a Borderlands game that it has almost identical visuals, PC system requirements and graphics options to Borderlands 3. The odds, right? Still, for seasoned fans of the loot shooter series, this does make the search for Wonderlands’ best settings a treading of comfortably familiar ground. Even if there are wizards this time.

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I'm going to jerk back the curtain a little bit here, and I hope the devs will forgive me - it'll turn out okay, I promise! You see, since the pandemic happened everyone has discovered you can do hands-on game previews using remote streaming, provided all parties have a decent enough internet connection. It usually works very well, with the added benefit that I don't have to get on a plane anywhere. I had one of these for Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong last week, an upcoming thrillery-puzzley-investigation-RPG set in The World Of Darkness universe (aka all them vampy games), by Big Bad Wolf, who did The Council. For various reasons, however, my preview went terribly. But if it had gone well, I probably wouldn't be as excited for Swansong as I now am.

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FromSoftware's games are filled with formidable foes, from notorious bosses like the Four Kings and Genichiro Ashina, to infamous regular enemies like Dark Souls' basilisks, or those sodding kite ninjas from Sekiro. Yet despite the presence of all these terrifying enemies, nothing sets me on edge in a FromSoft game like encountering a dog. The hideous hounds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne were bad enough, but Elden Ring takes canine combat to a whole other level.

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Sundays are for watching The Undertaker throw Mankind off the top of the Hell In A Cell. Before you wince, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Honestly, given Rocket League's prodigious success, it's a surprise more games haven't attempted to follow in its car tracks. Announced this week, Turbo Golf Racing looks to change that. It's a multiplayer game about driving a car into a ball, but as the name suggests it's drawing inspiration from those ruined good walks rather than from football.

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I'll be honest, reader, In about 12 hours from writing this I'll be getting up to catch a flight - indeed, as you read it, I'll be in the air - and there is still so much to do that I kind of resent you making me type this right now. Last night I had to borrow a hoover from a neighbour I've never spoken to before, because we need to clean our flat before we leave this hell-country forever, but realised too late that we have now sent our own hoover via international shipping>. What fresh hell. I will not have time for any games this weekend, nor, conceivably, the emotion of joy ever again. How dare you even make me consider what games I might have been playing instead?

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