I will hold my hands up and say that I didn't get on too well with One More Level's first Ghostrunner game. While its one-hit-kill combat was fast, flashy and infinitely more appealing than some of the other neon lambs being led to the cyberpunk slaughter in the back end of 2020, its precise platforming and marksman-grade enemies made it a hard game to love while you were actually playing it. But having sat down for 45 minutes with Ghostrunner 2 at this year's Gamescom, I'm pleased to report that this is a sequel done right, building on everything you know and (probably) love about the first game, while also ushering in new, optional concessions to help make its still wonderfully gory swordplay much more approachable for old two-left-thumbs-McGee over here. Then there's the motorbike, which… phwoar>. Let me tell you about the motorbike.

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I’m not really one for patience in games. I’m definitely the hack and slash ‘em to bits kind of player rather than a slick stealthy player. My approach to games is pretty unruly is what I’m trying to say, but there has been one game that tamed my rampaging ways and that was Cappybara Games’ Below.

Below is a game that’s best played slowly. You’re tasked with reaching the bottom of an island’s subterranean caverns, trying to survive against monsters, traps, starvation, and dehydration. Each layer is shrouded in darkness meaning that you only have the small ring of light from your torch to watch carefully where you step. Charging through these levels is the quickest way of getting sliced and diced, and when you die, you begin back on the beach right next to the boat you arrived on.

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Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon launches tomorrow with the distinction of being a FromSoftware game that isn’t> missing a bunch of PC tech basics, with ultrawide and 120fps support welded on as standard. As I’ve been finding out, it’s also a fine fit for the Steam Deck: performance issues are few, controls translate comfortably, and it won’t hog too much space on a microSD card. Handheld life is good for Fires of Rubicon, even if it likes to keep yours brutish and short.

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I saw Creative Assembly's live service heist 'em up Hyenas at last year's Gamescom and came away unimpressed. I thought it was obnoxious and underwhelming, in all the ways you'd expect from a colourful hero shooter whose hook is stealing Sonic merch.

But this year I got to spend a good 30-minutes in a match against other players and have come away… pleasantly surprised. I like the way it eschews the sometimes slow, methodical pace of other extraction shooters in favour of a faster-paced team deathmatch. While it's way too early to make big judgement calls like, "the entire game will be good", it might have more of a chance at launch survival than I thought.

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Last time, you narrowly ruled that mimics are better than tactically sealing doors. Why would anyone want to lock away a beautiful pearwood chest that surely contains oodles of treasure and absolutely no consequences? This week, I ask you to choose between stress and pressure and panic and mistakes, and simply having a nice time helping a friend without a care in the world. What's better: timed dialogue choices, or a stress-free co-op helper?

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Lexar's NM790 PCIe 4.0 SSD is our 'best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming' pick, offering extremely rapid speeds. It maxes out at 7400MB/s reads and 6500MB/s writes, near the boundary of the PCIe 4.0 standard, and random read/write figures are impressive too despite lacking a DRAM cache, using HMB instead. So I thought it worth mentioning that you can now pick up this 2TB high-end drive for £85, following a price drop from £93 at Amazon UK.

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Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened got a remake back in April, the first game in Frogwares' long-running series to receive a second pass. And you'd better believe that it was like Eldritch Christmas for me, because the 2007 original is quite possibly one of my favourite PC games of all time.

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In the market for a pre-built gaming PC? Right now you can pick up a refurbished MSI model with an RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, a water-cooled Intel Core i9 12900KF processor, 64GB of DDR5 memory and a 2TB NVMe SSD for just $1249.99 at Woot. This PC uses standard parts for upgradeability and comes with a 180-day MSI warranty. All in all, it's a ton of computer for the money, and the best-specced gaming PC we can find at this price point.

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How do you like your missiles? Do you prefer ones that fire straight up and then swoop down like birds of prey, or the kind that jet off to the sides, trapping the target in a pincer formation? How about a single missile that splits into a swarm of smaller missiles? Perhaps a zig-zagger that leaves a trail of explosive charges in its wake, detonating them like dynamite dominoes once it impacts? Well, whatever your fancy, Armored Core 6: Fires Of Rubicon has a loadout for every occasion. With as many combinations as Dolly Parton's wardrobe, it’s almost a scandal to equip the same gear twice.

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Aperture Desk Job is full of unexplained details. Right at the start, as the camera pans down from the retrofuturist reception area to your lowly desk-based workstation, we see all manner of orange tubes, future Grady cores being trained to fool captcha image tests, a giant chicken, and what appears to be the origin point of Half-Life's ammo boxes being constructed. But there's also a pointed shot between the floorboards, showing us a pair of green praying mantises fumbling around over some electrical wiring and a rogue lightbulb.

On its own, this mantis scene is no stranger than anything else we've witnessed in the last 30 seconds. But as your journey through Aperture goes on, things start getting really weird, really fast. Over the course of the next half hour, we'll see these mantises discover electricity, evolve into a society of tiny house-dwelling insects with their own carriages and courtship dances, and eventually a futuristic civilization who have mastered flying saucers and created an eternally self-sustaining power source. All in the same time it takes your supervisor core Grady to come up with a rudimentary prototype for what will eventually go on to become Portal's creepy turret. But you, yes you>, CHARLIE, had to go and ruin it all by dropping the giant metal head of corporate mega-bastard Cave Johnson through the floorboards. What might those mantises have become, if they hadn't been so rudely crushed by your rampant disregard for their wellbeing?

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