I had a fine time with Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden‘s post-apocalyptic, ducking good blend of real-time stealth and turn-based combat, but one concern dogged me throughout. Used repeatedly throughout the game are two beyond-familiar terms: ‘zone’ and ‘Stalker.’ Names scorched into the very soul of anyone who’s played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games/seen Tarkovsky’s Stalker/read Roadside Picnic.

How what why? I asked Mutant Year Zero’s developers to explain this anomaly. (And then I spent far too long researching the Swedish release dates of cult 1970s sci-fi).

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Up for a claustrophobic tunnel crawl packed full of mutants, marauders and otherworldly anomalies? The Russian underground of Metro 2033 should be your next stop, and it’s completely free on Steam today. For the next twenty hours (give or take), just check out its Steam page, click to add it to your account and keep it forever. This is the original version of 4A Games’s shooter, rather than the polished up Redux edition, but still worth the trip if you’ve never tried it before. (more…)

It s deathly quiet in the forest. Then the silence gives way to a man shouting for help. He’s tied to a post and trying to fend off a ravenous wolf. A single crossbow bolt takes the feral creature out. The shirtless man pleads for my help to free him, cussing as he explains his predicament. I choose to cut him loose. I owe you my life, he says. I ll never forget this, I swear.

Inconsequential though it may seem, I begin to ponder his words. Could this have implications? Maybe his captors will return to find he s escaped and attempt to track me down. It may have been better to leave him tied up. But perhaps he ll help me the next time our paths cross. It s this kind of small-scale player choice that runs through the heart of Metro Exodus.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is still years away so here’s a banquet of irradiated exploration and scavenging to tide you over. Dead Air is a standalone mega-mod (no purchase necessary) for bleak FPS sandbox series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Built on top of the fan-upgraded OpenXRay engine and using Call of Chernobyl‘s massive world map, it offers an uncompromising but accessible survival sandbox that looks good and runs better than any similarly huge S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod out there.

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Good news for fans of uncompromisingly bleak and incomparably atmospheric Eastern European sandbox shooters: an official S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel is on the way, original devs GSC Game World have confirmed.

The less-good news is that we re all going to have to continue playing mods for the original games for a while yet. According to the announcement, the game isn t due until 2021. And for those itching to pass the time with the similarly-themed Metro Exodus, that s slipped to next year, according to a THQ financial report. (more…)

THQ Nordic, publishers of the Darksiders games and recent jankfest Elex, have bought Koch Media, the companies have announced. Koch are the father-company of Deep Silver, who publish games like Saints Row, Metro, Dead Island, and Homefront: The Revolution. That means THQ Nordic now own alllll of those bad boys, among others. Due to all the combined plates this company now spins, they could now make a game where the hero of Mighty No. 9 fights jazzy paint-monster De Blob in a doomed bid for supremacy on Mars, aka, Red Faction 3. Although, they probably shouldn t do that. (more…)

There will be no “major” expansion content for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III and the studio has turned to other projects, Relic confirmed to us today, despite intentions to the contrary discussed last year. The Games Workshop-themed strategy game was met with a divisive response due to its abandonment of real-time strategy mainstays in favour of more of a hero unit approach, in addition to an overly-formulaic singleplayer campaign.

DOW’s active players have slumped in the ten months since release – to the point that there were, over the past 30 days, twice as many people playing the original, 2004 Dawn of War and its expansions as there were last Spring’s Dawn of War III. (more…)

We’ve previously covered Lost Alpha, a massive labor-of-love project to rebuild the original Shadow of Chernobyl from the ground up, reinstating concepts and content that never quite made the final cut. While the first release of Lost Alpha suffered nearly as badly from a messy development cycle as the original game, the updates have continued, and the massive patch released this week makes it a far more tempting prospect, whether or not you’ve played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game before.

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Well, this is a sight for Thor eyes.

I thought Titan Quest was done for good, which wouldn’t be surprising considering it’s more than a decade old. But today, right now, THQ Nordic have released a fresh expansion, Ragnarok, that takes the mythological hack and slasher into the cold of northern Europe. Titan Quest has moved on from Olympus and Hades and now we’re getting a dose of Norse mythology.” Brave the realms of the Celts, the Northmen and the Asgardian gods in the largest act to date,” it says here, and you’ll do all that braving across dozens of new quests.

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A friend of mine started the Saints Row [official site] series with the fourth one. She loved having superpowers and trashing a virtual city, but she did wonder what the deal was with Johnny Gat. Even though he’s not in half the game spoilers for the third and fourth Saints Rows, but Johnny Gat dies and then comes back to life his absence is felt. Characters talk about how his loss changed them. The dude with the sunglasses and neck tattoos who seems like a generic video game badass is treated like he matters.

Gat’s a mascot for Saints Row, whether cameoing in games outside the series or within them. You start Saints Row: The Third with every member of the gang wearing an oversized Gat mask during a bank robbery even Gat himself has one, pointless as that makes the disguise. Everybody wants to be Johnny Gat. To understand why he has that reputation, why fans love him while outsiders roll their eyes, we have to go back to Saints Row 2.

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