Enginefall is as much about fabricating bandages and building hovels as it is about mad locomotive sci-fi, but upon being invited to try out an early build, its concept proved compelling enough to punch through my survival crafting fatigue like a runaway... I dunno, bus. Basically it’s a first-person Snowpiecer-em up, where a typical session sees postapocalypse survivors raiding enormous trains, fighting (or joining forces) from tail to tip to usurp the conductor’s position and steal precious fuel cores before escaping back to their own private engine.

Again, I like the idea. I especially like that Enginefall isn’t massively fussed how you deal with other Tailies – alliances, truces, and armed banditry are all permitted and accommodated for. What I played last week, sadly, was awkward, janky, and undercooked, to the point where the one thing more ambitious than the game’s railriding concept might be its Q1 2026 release plan.

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When Sega and Creative Assembly's Alien: Isolation launched in 2014, I was deputy editor at Official Xbox Magazine. I remember getting the review copy from our contributor Alex "Game Over, Man" Dale, and asking him how long the game was. 35-40 hours, he said. WTF, I said. I can't remember how Alex responded - possibly his transmission ended with a jangling scream and a burp of static, or possibly he agreed with me that 35-40 hours is indecently hefty for a horror game, even with the qualification that you can get through the main campaign in around 20. 35-40 hours? That's a farking Final Fantasy, mate!

Over 10 years later, we finally know who to blame. Surprise surprise, it was the xenomorph all along. According to Alien Isolation writer Dion Lay, the Gigerbeast's increasing capability during development made certain areas more time-intensive than they were originally supposed to be. There's probably a relevant Alien quote to invoke, here, but I'm going to settle for that Jeff Goldblum line from Jurassic Park.

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"A Civ-like with neat ideas, but half-formed fundamentals and messy execution make your decisions feel less than impactful," wrote contributor Ian Boudreau in our Millennia review from March 2024. Sounds like the kind of thing updates might fix, but alack, there shall be no more. Paradox have announced that the 4X strategy Civ-like's eighth patch, out now, will be its last.

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You there, fumbling around in the dark darkness of Elden Ring Nightreign's Deep of the Night. A new mod offers you the chance to channel your inner gladiator and test your strength in a dedicated boss arena.

I know, I know, you've spent at least 80% of your time with Nightreign thus far battering and being battered by bosses. But come on, you know you need to roll around more big blokes, with the chance to customise each bout of rolling exactly to your liking.

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Delightful medieval RPG Pentiment is among a number of games which have been temporarily delisted on Steam, as a result of a security vulnerability being unearthed in the Unity engine. Other games, including Among Us, have already received updates as a result of the issue.

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Last Monday I spent three paragraphs crying havoc over a shortage of tasty new releases to feed the Maw, our resident headline-guzzling cosmic kaiju. The week didn't go so terribly in the end. True, the Maw did swallow the colour purple on Friday, but Mark managed to distract everybody with a bulky Baldur's Gate 3 mod while I administered the emetic.

This week, several monkey paw fingers have curled, and there is an embarrassment of groovy material that spans the whole spectrum of budgets, brand recognisability and pricepointage. So let's get right to the listing.

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Call of Duty Black Ops 7 beta cheaters were inevitable and expected, with Activision hinting that they were intentionally prepping their big anti-cheat guns prior to early access kicking off. Now the beta's first weekend's passed, the publishers' anti-cheat enforcers Team Ricochet have posted an update addressing the cheating situation, claiming that their efforts thus far have seen a lot of success.

Seriously, they go as far as openly declaring that cheat sellers are "feeling the heat", which is a massive missed opportunity to use the phrase 'quaking in their unsecured boots', but we can't have everything.

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Good morning, weekend wanderer of the World Wide Washout. Or if it isn't morning where you are, good afternoon. Or if it isn't afternoon, good evening. If it's neither morning, afternoon nor evening, then you are clearly in outer space. I hear life up there can be dull. Perhaps these articles will lift the monotony.

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