DICE, it's easy to forget in all the kerfuffle that's surrounded the developer in recent months following the Star Wars Battlefront 2 debacle, can still craft a damn fine shooter. When the parts align - when you're sprinting between falling masonry on Battlefield 1's depiction of the western front, as a Sopwith Camel buzzes overhead and a Saint Chamond tank churns over the hills on the far horizon - it's still capable of making some of the most dramatic and spectacular shooters around.

Play through any of the maps introduced in Battlefield 1's Apocalypse update - which marks the final expansion for DICE's period shooter, some 17 months after the base game's release - and you're never more than a few seconds away from such moments. This is an update that doubles down on the popular iconography of World War 1, on the hellish thunder of No Man's Land and of seeing idyllic countryside turned over for mud, blood and mortar fire as DICE leans on such familiar backdrops as the Somme and Passchendaele.

It's mightily effective stuff, and for me - someone who prefers nothing more than a straightforward game of Conquest - the Apocalypse expansion gets straight to the heart of what makes Battlefield special. Even more than that, it delivers on the fantasy of its own chosen arena just as well as the series has since Bad Company 2's brilliant Vietnam expansion. When you're running through the trenches of Passchendaele, or bringing down the windmill on the outskirts of the Somme map and wiping out an entire squad, it really is that good.

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UPDATE, 1/3/18: Fortnite's 3.1.0 update is now here, bringing with it the usual bug fixes and improvements. As expected, however, it also introduces a few new goodies, including Battle Royale mode's previously teased Hunting Rifle and Lucky Landing point of interest.

The Hunting Rifle, which stands in for the temporarily delayed jetpacks that were teased earlier in the week, is effective at medium to long range - and only holds one round in its chamber. For the curious, it looks a little something like this:

Meanwhile, the new Lucky Landing point of interest can be found on the on Southern edge of Battle Royale mode's island map, and seems like a perfectly pleasant place to spend the afternoon. Aside from all the murder-bullets whizzing through the air, obviously.

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After several days of teasing, Blizzard has confirmed that Overwatch's next and 27th hero will be - as pretty much everyone had already assumed - "engineer turned valiant squire", and Torbj rn's daughter, Brigitte Lindholm.

Brigitte, of course, made her public debut in the Reinhardt-themed animated short Honor and Glory last year. According to her backstory, Brigitte grew up learning her craft from master weaponsmith Torbj rn, before leaving home to serve as her godfather Reinhardt's squire. You'll get a small glimpse of Brigitte's origin story in Blizzard's introductory trailer below.

That flavourful cinematic endeavour is accompanied by a rather more detailed, informative look at Brigitte, courtesy of Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan. According to Kaplan, Brigitte is a support character first and foremost, but, uniquely, shares a lot of traits more closely associated with the tank role, making for an "interesting hybrid character".

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The noise of flies fills your ears as you step down from the highway in search of shade. The body of a great white bull lies sprawled in the dirt among bits of rope and broken board, his hide blazing in the sunlight. You approach, covering your mouth, and recoil. The bull's chest - it's not maggoty flesh but beaten metal, held together by rivets the width of your thumb. Through tears in the beast's flank you see swarms of tiny brass pistons, shooting back and forth in a blur. The bull raises his head abruptly to regard you. Then he clambers to his feet, creaking like a furnace, and ambles back onto the road. The buzzing rises to a peak. When the air clears, the animal is gone.

That isn't quite my story, but nor is it entirely a story from this game. It's an embellishing of something I witnessed while trudging around Dim Bulb's haunted, patchwork vision of the United States during the Great Depression, a tribute to a game made up of stories that are always changing, picking up material like snowballs as they travel from mouth to mouth. Created by Gone Home programmer Johnnemann Nordhagen in partnership with a scattered throng of writers, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine sees you wandering a rich yet desolate continent, collecting tall tales and sharing them so that they can prosper and mutate.

The game's key thrill is of hearing a yarn you know well come back to you in a new, outlandish guise. The tragic spectacle of a cowboy lost in a tornado might eventually become the legend of a rider who could tame the wind, recounted by some Texan boozehound who swears that he saw it all firsthand. An anecdote about sharing a cigarette with a bootlegger might beget a sensational newspaper report of a gunfight. The tale of a mysterious dead bull might take on a supernatural aspect in the testimony of a child you run into a few states over.

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Cevat Yerli, the controversial boss and co-founder of Crysis developer Crytek, has stepped down as CEO and president.

Yerli, who was public enemy number one as Crytek staff went unpaid for months, will continue as "strategic shareholder", but the company will now be led by his brothers Avni and Faruk as joint CEOs.

The change comes following the launch of multiplayer first-person shooter and monster hunting game Hunt Showdown, which is developed alongside CryEngine at the company's Frankfurt, Germany office. Crytek continues to work on Warface at its Kiev studio. Crytek's Istanbul office operates Warface in Turkey.

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The Trail, Peter Molyneux's chilled out hiking game, is out today on Nintendo Switch priced 11.99.

The Trail first launched on mobile devices late in 2016 before a Steam via PC launch in 2017. It's easily the best game from 22cans, the studio Molyneux founded after leaving Microsoft and Lionhead Studios.

The idea behind the game is for players to explore, collect, craft and trade as they make their way to a frontier town called Eden Falls, one camp at a time. The Switch version is a port of the PC version (which carries the subtitle Frontier Challenge), and as such includes challenges and character skill upgrade trees. Here's the official blurb:

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The next game from Question is a co-op horror for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The Blackout Club, which is due out during the first quarter of 2019, follows a group of teens who discover they've all been temporarily losing consciousness and waking up in strange places with no memory of what they have done. Sounds like a regular night out in Croydon, then.

The teens band together to try to work out what's going on, and discover tunnels that lead to an underworld filled with weird music and even weirder adults.

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Ex-Duke Nukem owner 3D Realms has released a new game and, coincidentally enough, it looks quite a lot like Duke Nukem. But it isn't!

This retro first-person shooter is called Ion Maiden and it's made by a team called Voidpoint, with 3D Realms as publisher. It's on Steam Early Access now with a full desktop release planned for the third quarter of 2018.

Ion Maiden is actually a prequel to another 3D Realms game people would rather forget: Bombshell, a cruddy shooter/action-RPG from 2016. Ion Maiden stars Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison from Bombshell and was once a digital extra included with Bombshell (as listed on a QuakeCon 2015 poster spotted by NeoGAF). But as the "retro FPS prequel" grew into something bigger and standalone, Voidpoint decided on a new name - one that might put a bit of distance between it and Bombshell.

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If you don't fancy Steam's offer of Half-Life bonuses in Final Fantasy 15 on PC, you can now get costumes from The Sims if you buy from Origin.

Get the game before 1st May and you'll unlock a Llama Suit outfit, complete with the franchise's signature hovering Plumbob, for both the game's hero Noctis and your avatar in multiplayer expansion Comrades to wear.

Origin pre-orders also get a some bonus decals - based on the game's many characters - to stick on your vehicle, the Regalia.

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Warner Bros. has announced yet another version of Injustice 2.

Injustice 2 - Legendary Edition includes the NetherRealm fighting game and all downloadable playable characters released so far as well as the premiere skins available from the Injustice 2 Ultimate Edition.

The DLC characters are Darkseid, Red Hood, Starfire, Sub-Zero, Black Manta, Raiden, Hellboy, Atom, Enchantress and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

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