Excellent deck-building roguelike Slay the Spire has now sold one million copies, developer Mega Crit Games said this week as it unveiled a new game mode that allows you to craft custom dungeon runs.

Custom mode, Slay the Spire's third game mode, offers a variety of modifiers to switch on and off that will drastically change your next run. You can jump into the custom dungeon yourself, or share your options with others for them to try.

The 15 or so modifiers can both make the runs easier or harder. For example, one will let you pick your own custom deck before the run starts, while another changes the map so it only contains one path, cutting down your options. Some will add specific cards to your deck to alter your play style. Switch on all the difficult ones and you'll create a near-impossible challenge.

To unlock the mode, you'll first have to complete one of the difficult daily challenges, which will earn you the "My Lucky Day" achievement.

"Our aim is to expand this mode to allow new challenges such as Endless mode (which is still being worked on in Beta) and eventually allow players to create, incorporate, and access mods through this flexible interface," the developer said in a Steam post. See a quick gif of that interface below.

 Thanks, PCGamesN. 

What's the most underrated game on PC? This is the subject of the PCG Q&A, where each Saturday (and sometimes on Wednesdays too), we ask the global PC Gamer team for their answers to a burning question. We then encourage you to drop your answers to the same question in the comments thread below.

There's no comprehensive answer to this one, obviously, and it's just a bit of fun. We've picked games that either sold badly, were ignored despite having something to offer, or got an unfair kicking at launch by critics or players. 

Evan Lahti: LawBreakers

OK, I'll jump on this grenade: it's LawBreakers. Corners of the gaming community were fixated on making it a punching bag for their amusement, and the "dead game" Reddit groupthink that ultimately suffocated LawBreakers had nothing to do with how good it actually is. Its character movement styles are inventive—the Wraith kick-slides along the ground to accelerate, jabbing the air with a knife to swim forward in low-grav. They can also triple jump and wall jump, a moveset that gives them Wraith a darting, alien locomotion that's enjoyable to master. Gunslingers teleport in short bursts like Tracer from Overwatch, but the first shots from either of their dual pistols are buffed immediately after you blink. If you fly backwards as the Harrier, you shoot lasers from your feet. 

This is the only FPS I can think of that lets me shoot behind myself, never mind turning it into a way to physically propel myself forward. LawBreakers could've taken a much easier route and simply given everyone jetpacks and focused on unique guns, but instead it got ambitious and built weird, unfamiliar styles of aerial fencing, gunslinging, grenading, and more. It also sported some of the best netcode in years, backed up by expert testing.

Jarred Walton: Epistory: Typing Chronicles

I don't know that it's underrated, but I recently stumbled upon Epistory: Typing Chronicles, and it's great—and it was also a game I totally missed when it was new. I can thank Steam's Spring Cleaning event for recommending it as a game I should try, and I enjoyed the relatively short story, lovely aesthetic, and the crazy vocabulary. Anyway, I write for a living, so something that puts my typing skills to good use is a welcome diversion, and now I've inflicted my children with the game so that they can hopefully learn to type. My 15-year-old thinks it's great and my 8-year-old hates it (because it's too hard and frustrating).

Phil Savage: Dragon Age 2 (oh snap!)

It reviewed pretty well, but it would be fair to say that public reaction to BioWare's sequel was... unfavourable. That's fair: a game with only one cave layout shouldn't have so many missions set in a cave. In fact, many criticisms of Dragon Age II are entirely justified, but to write it off because of them would be to miss out on one of the most interesting RPGs BioWare has made. 

Instead of sending you out on a grand journey, Dragon Age II is about a single city and the people within it. As Hawke, you travel to this city, survive in this city and fight to save this city over the course of around ten years. You get to feel like a member of the community in the way few RPGs, with their huge maps and sweeping stories, can support. And you get to hang out with Varric in a dingy pub. I'd love for a developer to revisit this style of role-playing, but, until that happens, I'll keep propping up the bar in the The Hanged Man.

Tom Senior: The Sims: Hot Date

Sims DLC often takes criticism for being little more than overpriced packs of digital items. Some of the DLC is like that, but the major expansions add loads of ways for Sims to interact and grow inside your carefully manicured fishbowl. Hot Date could have been a frivolous expansion that added a few new romance-themed behavioural patterns and some nice clothes, but it ended up adding a rich strata of nightlife that gave the Sims themselves a more rounded and believable existence. 

Before Hot Date they hoovered, pooped, cleaned up mess and vanished off to work for hours at a time. Hot Date opened up huge new downtown areas where they could meet other Sims and, with a bit of luck, find a partner. The downtown area also froze time back home, which meant your Sims could have a career and hang out with friends and loved ones in the same life—they enjoyed a pretty grim domestic existence before this expansion came along. Dating sims are more prevalent now, but Hot Date brought the idea into the mainstream, and did a great job of making downtown a bustling social hub. For some reason Hot Date never seemed to receive the credit it deserved for its novelty and ambition at the time.

Austin Wood: Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams 

There's no shortage of good 2D platformers on Steam. Most everyone is familiar with the big ones—the likes of Fez, Shovel Knight, Super Meat Boy, Celeste and Cave Story—but for some reason nobody ever talks about Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. It came out nearly six years ago, and it's still one of the best 2D platformers on PC—and the Rise of the Owlverlord level pack released in 2013 only made it better. (You can get the full package for under five bucks in the Steam Summer Sale, by the way.) 

The art has aged well and the difficulty curve is spot-on, but what I love most about Giana Sisters is the music. You can swap between the titular sisters at any time, and while the happy blonde sister gets bright fantasy levels and bubbly electronic tunes, playing as the punk pink-haired sister drenches levels in horror themes set to fantastic original rock songs. I like my Ori and the Blind Forest orchestral swells as much as the next gamer, but you just don't hear rock music like this in 2D platformers anymore. I absolutely love it, so I played as the punk sister whenever possible. The boss themes are especially great. Giana Sisters looks, plays and sounds great, so if you've played all the best-known 2D platformers, or even if you haven't, you have got to give it a try. 

Andy Chalk: The Long Journey Home

The Long Journey Home is a sort of Starflight/Star Control/Lunar Lander hybrid exploration-adventure about a small spaceship that's flung, Voyager-style, to the wrong side of the universe. It's weird, it's funny, it's occasionally frustrating as hell, and it's really good. It didn't catch fire, though, with critics or gamers: Our 68/100 review was actually one of the more positive takes, and it's still languishing under the weight of "mixed" user reviews on Steam.

A big reason for that was the game's utterly unforgiving nature at launch: it was quite happy to swat players down for the slightest transgression, to the extent that one bad landing, for instance, could signal the abrupt end of an otherwise very successful mission. A "Story Mode" option was added later that made survival (and thus the ability to actually get out there and explore) much easier, but by that point the damage of those initial review scores was done. But it's good! (I thought it was good right from the start, but the increased accessibility is definitely a plus.) And it deserves far better than it got. (If you're curious, it's half-price in the Steam Summer Sale.)

It's also not nearly as dramatic as the launch trailer above makes it out to be.

Samuel Roberts: Red Faction Guerrilla

Alright, this sold well enough to get a (bad) sequel and it was acclaimed by critics, so 'underrated' is a bit of a weird label. Thing is, though, why wasn't this the most influential game of its generation? Why did open world games become about ticking off icons, climbing boring towers and dull counter-based combat systems? Why didn't they become about knocking shit down and hitting NPCs with hammers? In that sense, I believe Red Faction Guerrilla is underrated. 

The games industry didn't see the opportunity here, and it ended up having no imitators. And yet, it so clearly demonstrated how much fun it was to see things topple over because you detonated remote charges in all the right places. Is it too late for someone to make a proper open world sequel?

I also agree with Phil that Dragon Age 2 is underrated. I wouldn't want every RPG to be set in one location, but it was a neat experiment despite a weaker third act and a thin combat system. In some ways, I guess I never really left that one cave.

Some other runners up for me that spring to mind: decent Sonic-like Freedom Planet, D4, Star Wars: Battle For Naboo, Everyday Shooter, Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure, Darkside Detective, The Flame in the Flood, Mad Max, The Magic Circle and...Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which is several mandatory, terrible combat sequences away from being a great game. I should mention Alpha Protocol too, right?

Let us know your suggestions below.

Early noughties Cartoon Network classic Samurai Jack received a long-awaited fifth season last year, some 12 years after its fourth finished airing. To put it simply, Samurai Jack is about a man with a sword fighting for what he thinks is right, and in that sense it's quite similar to The Witcher. At least, that's the only explanation I can think of for why Mashed felt the need to combine the two in an animated short, but after seeing their "Samurai Witcher" cartoon, I'm certainly not complaining. Have a gander: 

It's a bit slow, but it nails the styles of its source material. It's sharply drawn and dramatically framed like Samurai Jack, and it's methodical and punishing like combat in The Witcher. It's oddly cathartic to watch all the preparation that goes into a good monster hunt, from gathering herbs and other consumables to tailoring your arsenal for the monster at hand. 

And, as always, it's satisfying to see a griffin go down. 

Localization specialist Xseed Games announced the PC port of Ys: Memories of Celceta earlier this year, promising a summer release. According to Celceta's newly minted Steam page, Xseed was right on the money: the long-awaited PC port is now scheduled to release next month on July 25. 

Barring a few buggy blunders—like the repeatedly delayed and ultimately terrible port of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana—the Ys PC ports have generally been pretty good, and Celceta is at least checking the right boxes. According to the Steam page, its port sports "a wide range of HD resolutions, fixed framerates up to 120 fps with the option to unlock the framerate altogether, fully customizable control bindings, fully integrated mouse support, and more." If you're the competitive type, you'll also find Steam leaderboards for Celceta's time attack and boss rush modes. 

You can see some of that in action in this new gameplay footage: 

The Crew 2 is out now, and while we had mixed feelings on Ivory Tower's new racing game and its efforts to broaden beyond cars, our friends at GamesRadar have put together a tips video on how to make a decent start with the game. Watch the video above for advice on how to break out early and make some lucrative rewards—even if you've come last in a race. You just need some friends to help you do it.

You'll also learn more about customisation, how higher difficulty settings can get you better spoils and more. While it's no Forza Horizon 3, The Crew 2 offers some pretty nice views of a weird America, and if you're gonna pick it up anyway, this guide will hopefully help you along the way. 

The Crew 2 is out now, and while we had mixed feelings on Ivory Tower's new racing game and its efforts to broaden beyond cars, our friends at GamesRadar have put together a tips video on how to make a decent start with the game. Watch the video above for advice on how to break out early and make some lucrative rewards—even if you've come last in a race. You just need some friends to help you do it.

You'll also learn more about customisation, how higher difficulty settings can get you better spoils and more. While it's no Forza Horizon 3, The Crew 2 offers some pretty nice views of a weird America, and if you're gonna pick it up anyway, this guide will hopefully help you along the way. 

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 319. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. 

Fort Frolic—BioShock’s lavish setting for Sander Cohen’s Snapchat murder gala—tends to be held up as that game’s standout level. It sits about halfway through the game, and I can’t deny that the anticipation of reaching it is a joyous thing. But encountering Fort Frolic would be nowhere near as satisfying without the verdant lead-in of the player’s exploits in the overgrown botanical environment of BioShock’s fifth level, Arcadia. 

In Arcadia, players must steer luckless lead character, Jack, through Rapture’s principal arboreal leisure and agricultural hub—its lungs ‘n’ larder if you like. But how does the level actually work from a design perspective and how does it augment your trip to the neon murderfest of Fort Frolic? 

Level designer J.P. LeBreton outlined three key requirements for Arcadia, as laid out by BioShock’s writer and director, Ken Levine: 1) Arcadia is where Ryan kills off all the plants in an attempt to kill you, 2) you’re locked in until you can fix it, 3) there’s a scientist there who helps you restore them. 

“Aside from the initial brief, I had a lot of freedom to lay out the level and orchestrate as needed,” remembers LeBreton. 

The world you’ve encountered prior to Arcadia has been one of greeny-blues, shiny brass and, in the case of the preceding fourth level, Smuggler’s Hideout, grey rock. Arcadia is thus able to make an immediate impact on players simply by switching up the colour palette.

Vibrant greens predominate, punctuated by the pinks and orangey yellows of water lilies, or pinkypurple tree blossom. LeBreton has previously said the idea was “to truly shock the player with the strange sight of an underwater forest”, but he tells me that this makes it sound more intentional than it was. 

“So many things in game development are opportunistic, run-with-it type affairs. Once the visual identities of the fisheries and the submarine bay in the preceding levels became clear, and once we decided the player would be entering Arcadia not via a bathysphere station but via a tunnel into the lush cemetery and tea garden, it was obvious we had an opportunity for a surprising visual moment.”

Visible roots

LeBreton is candid in describing Arcadia’s earliest iterations, starting with the rough geometric space he outlined in March 2006. “I was still a pretty inexperienced level designer when I started building it,” he explains. “This was the first massive singleplayer game I’d worked on.” 

Initially the shape of the space was influenced by the idea that BioShock would be a spiritual successor to System Shock 2. 

“What I was interested in specifically were some of its connections to the level design of the first two Thief games (which shared some personnel with both [System] Shock 2 and BioShock), which were very sprawling, twisty and strange in places. Not much of that survived into the finished product, other than the fact that the level is still kind of hard to navigate.” 

Over the summer of 2006 the level was rebuilt piece by piece, mostly by the 2K Australia art team, to reorganise the space. One key edit was to tweak the scale of the Tea Garden, for example making the corridors you move down roughly twice as wide. The main addition to the space involved splicing the entire Arcadia Glens central connecting hallway into the existing layout. The idea was “to separate the areas from one another and establish that hierarchical navigation-type idea”.

“The rebuild kept everything I liked about the layout while simplifying it, and I made plenty of changes once they handed it back so my sense of ownership wasn’t really disrupted. I still have attachment to the weird intricacy of those early builds but I think 2K Australia’s revisions were vital to getting the map on a good path to ship.” 

That seems especially true of the addition of the Arcadia Glens hallway. “It created a backbone whereas before the level had been an amoeba-like cluster of organs,” explains LeBreton. “When you have a central thoroughfare, you can put signs on it, pare it down to keep the player moving ahead if you want, or tempt the player off it when you want them to hit an objective or explore for a while.” 

Doors of perception

With numerous nooks, crawlspaces and subareas radiating out from Arcadia Glens, there are a lot of doors occupying a tight space, including some you won’t be able to open until later in the level. That can be a confusing experience for the player. 

“Whatever confusion the layout we shipped caused, the earlier versions of it would have been even more confusing, I think,” notes LeBreton. He also points out that although having so many identical doors can induce a kind of choice paralysis in the player, they also offered a technical benefit. 

“The heavy use of doors in Arcadia and other parts of the game was partly an answer to technical constraints: our doors could block rendering behind them when fully closed, so if framerate was poor in an area, adding a door could potentially fix that problem quickly and easily.” 

To go back to Ken Levine’s requirements for Arcadia, this section of BioShock would need to trap the player while they fixed a problem (the problem here being uberjerk Andrew Ryan attempting to poison all the plants and suffocate your character via toxic gas).

I ask LeBreton if there was some sort of formula he applied when balancing Arcadia’s architecture and events so that the player is engaged in what’s going on, but not overwhelmed. “On the player’s initial trip through an area, you do the conventional Half-Life 2-style pacing where you alternate relative safety and exploration with combat encounters of varying intensity,” he says. “The return trips used a repopulation system to keep parts of levels from feeling too empty, though we would still augment this with scripting as needed.”

Scripting, in this instance, could mean a fight between Splicers which the player would stumble upon, Splicers lying in wait for players, or even fights staged near a Big Daddy to amp up tension for players as they tried to avoid angering it. 

“There was also the security system; as you re-enter Arcadia proper from the Farmer’s Market, I scripted a security alarm that summoned a higher than usual number of flying robots, to accompany an Andrew Ryan radio message that makes it clear the level of antagonism is ramping up to the level’s final siege.” 

But it was the plant die-off caused by gas which presented the biggest technical challenge in Arcadia. The solution was “a totally opportunistic use of existing tech”, says LeBreton. “The original design for Bioshock included a ‘pressure’ system, where you could change the pressure in zones and it would alter the gameplay, making certain enemies and weapons more or less effective. 

“This pressure system, implemented and mostly abandoned before I even started Arcadia, could also control lighting and fog in different regions. As soon as the idea of ‘Ryan kills off the trees to cut your oxygen’ emerged, we realised we could use that system to make it a dramatic visual change. There was a bit of tech work to support how I wanted to use that system in Arcadia, but overall the level’s tech needs were pretty light.”

Paradise regained

The regrowth effect you see once you’ve released the Lazarus Vector into the atmosphere was mostly the work of 2K Boston’s FX artist Stephen Alexander. Alexander painted a custom mask that would appear to change as an index value moved from 0 to 1. “It’s probably a common FX/shader trick now but it was the first time I’d seen it in 2006/7,” says LeBreton. This same technique by Alexander is also used to create the effect of botanist Julie Langford writing a safe code with her finger on a fogged up window. 

The dying off of the vegetation in Arcadia reveals the mysterious symbolic daubs of the Saturnine cult etched on the walls and a few formerly unreachable cave areas where these heavily spliced-up cult members meet. “The Saturnine were a fairly late addition, and their main value was to enrich the area’s backstory,” LeBreton previously explained. The idea was that these were a group of frat boys or businessmen who had gone feral, cribbing pagan imagery from pop culture and taking weird Plasmids. 

These Saturnine are a version of a type of enemy introduced during Arcadia; Houdini Splicers. Houdini Splicers can turn invisible, relocate during a fight and throw fiery projectiles. Of their introduction, LeBreton points out, “Before the player knows exactly how something works, you can tease them with incomplete information about it, let them form theories for a bit, before whisking the cloth off and making it a gameplay mechanic they’ll see many more times.” 

According to LeBreton’s own Vector Poem blog, the Houdini Splicers required some complex scripting. “The AI itself has zero concept of ‘teasing’, so there are multiple instances of the first Splicer you encounter that gets destroyed and respawned at different places. Field-of-view-based triggers know whether or not the player has seen a given part of the tease.”

Accompanying this new variant of foe is a new type of weapon; the Chemical Thrower. 

“Most games with a certain number of weapons and abilities plan out the introductions of each new tool with a schedule or ‘power ramp’ as it’s sometimes called,” explains LeBreton. “For Arcadia we knew we wanted to introduce the crafting system, the one or two remaining new Plasmids and, originally, a weapon called the BioWeapon. 

“Later the BioWeapon was cut (its effects were turned into the Enrage and Insect Swarm Plasmids) and replaced with the Chemical Thrower, which still happened to make sense given the level’s theme. Aside from introducing Insect Swarm in the Apiary area, I didn’t do much special design work to cater to these new abilities; by that point in the game the player knows the ropes so it’s more about giving them lots of space to play with the tools.”

Wave lengths

The level’s intense finale sees the player fight off the Splicer hordes while the Lazarus Vector revives Rapture’s plant life and oxygen supply. The ambush actually shares a scripting system with events in two other BioShock levels; Medical Pavilion and Fort Frolic. 

The scripting system for BioShock and Bioshock 2 was “a bit quirky” but “it provided enough flexibility that I was able to use my still-developing programmer brain and define logic for spawning and managing waves,” explains LeBreton. “After a few iterations and having people on the team play my test level, it felt good enough to depend on for a climactic battle or three.” 

The end result was based around waves. “There are a certain number of filler enemies (melee Splicers, mostly) in these waves, their spawn locations are chosen from a few points and trigger when the player isn’t looking at one of those points, and when they die that goes towards the ‘cleared for this wave’ total.”

When they meet the wave total, the player gets a chance to catch their breath and then faces a new wave. “Additionally, a specific Houdini Splicer was spawned for each wave, and maybe two for the final wave—we considered these enemies tough enough that we did not want an open-ended number of them spawning.” 

Once the system had been fine-tuned and was working well in Arcadia, LeBreton turned it into a ‘prefab’ (“not unlike the modern Unity engine concept of prefabs”). This meant that fellow designers Paul Hellquist and Jordan Thomas could utilise it in their own BioShock levels (Medical Pavilion and Fort Frolic respectively) and just tweak a few settings to ensure it matched the levels’ position on the game’s difficulty curve. 

“This system also formed the basis of the Little Sister Gathering Ambush system that was in BioShock 2,” adds LeBreton. “Wave-based enemy spawning is pretty common so it’s not like some tech innovation or anything, but like I said I was still learning to think like a programmer and was proud that I was able to make something that was useful to the rest of the team.” 

Given Arcadia came so early in LeBreton’s career, I ask what he would do differently if he was designing the same space today, with a decade of experience behind him. 

“Simply put, it would be easier to find your way around but also more full of interesting exploration,” he says. “The map we shipped was, I think, in a bad middle ground between too complicated for a console FPS in 2007, and not weird and sprawling enough to stand among the greats of immersive sim level design à la Constantine’s Mansion from Thief.” 

Summing up his time working with Arcadia, LeBreton describes it as a series of layers, accumulating to build a space which felt real. “The early builds, the later builds, and what we shipped are all kind of overlaid atop one another in my memory, and all the personal interactions and difficulties and (eventually) triumphs live in those spaces as well.”

It’s the roads between cities where The Crew 2 shines. Those great swathes of highway that curve through deserts, snake through canyons, and cut through forests. Here the game’s immense scale, arcade handling, and palpable sense of speed coalesce into something genuinely thrilling—especially if you have a couple of friends driving alongside you. But it’s a feeling that doesn’t last, because outside of these blissful moments the game is absolutely determined to sabotage the purity of its driving with endless nonsense.

The Crew 2 is an open world racer set in a massive, condensed approximation of the continental United States. To give you an idea of its size, it took me 46 minutes to drive non-stop from Los Angeles to New York City in a Ferrari 458. It’s a vast and varied setting, and it’s undoubtedly the best thing about it. There’s fun to be had in just aimlessly driving from state to state, watching the scenery change around you, visiting famous landmarks (of which there are, curiously, fewer than the first game). But the game gets impatient when you do this, insisting you focus on earning followers for some non-specific social media network instead: the primary metric of your success in The Crew 2.

Followers are earned by winning races, performing stunts, driving dangerously, and dozens of other activities that send the counter ticking up. As you play, a cast of obnoxious, horribly written characters are forever buzzing in your ear about how rad you are, how many followers you have, and how many more you could get if you take part in this awesome event, dude. The dialogue is astonishingly bad, and the whole thing comes off like a desperate attempt to piggyback on contemporary culture without really understanding it.

It’s just vapid, treating internet fame like it’s somehow the peak of human achievement, and the constant, cloying validation of everything you do, no matter how banal, is exhausting. But here’s the thing—it could have been interesting. What if, as well as earning followers, you also lost them? So every failed stunt, crash, and spin-out actually counted against you, and you were constantly at war with yourself to maintain your following. That would have at least given the social media concept some bite, rather than it just being some arbitrary number that increases to make you feel good about yourself.

It’s on the road, away from all this embarrassing “How do you do, fellow kids?” noise, where The Crew 2 is at its best—particularly in the way it lets you seamlessly transition between land, sea, and air vehicles on the fly. You can be screaming along the highway in a supercar, before transforming into a plane and taking to the air, then changing into a speedboat as you fly across a river, landing safely in the water. It’s immensely fun being able to switch your mode of transport on a whim, but the enjoyment is tainted by the fact that, cars aside, the vehicles just aren’t much fun to drive in The Crew 2.

The motorcycles, particularly the motocross bikes, are frustratingly stiff to control, with completely rote physics. Flying in planes feels sluggish and laboured, with a feeble sense of speed. And the boats are unremarkable, failing to create a convincing sensation of moving through water. None of the vehicle types (well, except for the motocross bikes) are terrible—they’re just deeply underwhelming. But they do have their moments, such as navigating a plane through the snaking rocky corridors of the Grand Canyon or back-flipping a Harley Davidson off the top of Mount Rushmore. It’s a shallow thrill, however, and I found myself spending as much time in cars as possible.

The Crew 2 is not a great driving game, but the cars are far superior to every other mode of transport. The arcadey handling is smooth and responsive, but has none of the wonderful, weighted nuance of the Forza Horizon games. The cars all feel vaguely the same, and the physics are cartoonishly bouncy, like your chassis is made of hard rubber. But when you hit those long desert roads, which seem to go on forever, it’s hard not to feel a rush of excitement. This is where the size of the map earns its keep, giving you miles of road to tear up and a powerful feeling of travelling across a great distance.

Going on cross-country road trips with friends is easily the most fun I’ve had in The Crew 2. But if you want credits to buy new cars, you’re gonna have to take part in some events. This is the game at its most basic, with all manner of checkpoint races to take part in, as well as distractions such as drag races, aerial acrobatics, and motocross competitions. I do like the off-road races and how they let you choose your own path to each checkpoint, but otherwise this is stuff I’ve seen and done in a dozen other open world driving games.

The AI is maddening too. You can drive perfectly for two laps, only to make one minor mistake and see the rest of the pack immediately rush past you. It’s some of the most obscene rubber-banding I’ve encountered in a racing game outside of Mario Kart. There’s also a hilariously jarring loot system that lets you upgrade your car with new parts. I couldn’t help but laugh at the ‘rare exhaust’ I found that gave me an utterly meaningless 0.07% boost to my follower gain. But upgrading doesn’t appear to give you any edge over the AI, who always seem to adjust to your current specs, rendering the whole activity futile.

If you’re in a crew you can enter these events with friends and race against them. But this, amazingly, is the extent of multiplayer in The Crew 2 at the moment. You’ll see other players in the world as you drive around, but they can’t be challenged to a race, unless you go to the trouble of inviting them to your crew first. There’s no lobby system either, meaning you can’t race against strangers on your own. Even if you start an event in a crew, the other racers will be AI. GTA Online has this stuff figured out, so why doesn’t an online-focused driving game that costs $60? Ubisoft says a December update will add PvP, but it’s bewildering that they didn’t launch the game with such basic multiplayer functionality.

There are other issues too, such as the waypoint system that sometimes just refuses to snap to any roads. Unless you’re grinding events, some vehicles are outrageously expensive—and of course there’s a cynical microtransaction storefront to tempt weak-willed players into spending real-world money on them. And despite an admirable attempt to make the game more charming than the gloomy, self-serious original, it’s completely devoid of personality. I think The Crew would benefit from having no story at all and focusing entirely on the driving, which should stand tall on its own without the player being forced to become an insufferable Instagram star against their will.

It’s a shame, because there’s a huge amount of potential in The Crew 2. The scale of the world is quite extraordinary, and being able to warp to the other side of the continent near-instantly is impressive on a technical level. Cresting a hill at night on some lonely desert highway and seeing the neon glow of Vegas far in the distance is a moment I won’t soon forget. And I love how you can share these moments of discovery with friends in co-op. The ten minutes I spent in a plane doing loops through the legs of a giant cow in Wisconsin with my friends was way more memorable than any of the tepid race events, and I feel like the game could have leaned into the co-op side of things more.

The PC version of the game runs well on my GTX 1080, and occasionally looks stunning—at least from a distance. There are some remarkable vistas to be found here, but the world doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. The cities, which include San Francisco, Dallas, Washington D.C., and Chicago, are boxy and unconvincing. The lighting is often flat and lifeless, and there’s some fairly severe pop-in when moving at high speeds. The vehicles look great, but their fidelity is at odds with the world around them. It’s one of the most visually inconsistent games I’ve ever played, which I suppose is a side effect of creating a world this large. It’s clear where the corners have been cut.

The first Crew improved dramatically after a series of post-launch updates, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the sequel received the same treatment. But right now this is a full price game released by one of the biggest publishers in the world, and I can’t recommend it in its current state. The lack of multiplayer options is inexcusable and, on a more fundamental level, the driving simply isn’t as fun or refined as it should be. The Crew 2 could be something special, but Ubisoft doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. I’m willing to give it another chance after a few updates, but until then I’ll stick to Forza Horizon 3.

Ice-Pick Lodge has released a fresh Pathologic 2 progress report for June, detailing some of the tweaking and tuning that's been done to the game's systems, including trading and bartering, street-level autopsies, lockpicking, and infection. "Many game systems have already been locked in place, and most of our resources go into content creation these days," the studio said. "Still, we keep fine-tuning interfaces and experimenting with sub-systems!" 

Most of the changes seem relatively minor: If you can't meet a merchant's price for something, for instance, some of them will accept other items in trade but will probably gouge you deeply. There are also numerous animated gifs demonstrating how certain game mechanics work, like lockpicking, or how parts of it have evolved: The autopsy screen has been changed to more clearly indicate how organ damage works, for instance. 

But there are also some interesting insights into how Pathologic 2 will actually play. Games can be saved manually, but only in certain places, a "compromise" solution intended to give players flexibility while preventing "abuse". Save locations "often host important characters, so if you strongly need to reload a heartfelt conversation, you will be able to do so, while save-scumming an action sequence in the street is discouraged." And aside from that, it may not work quite as you would expect anyway.

"Are you absolutely positive that loading a save just turned the time and erased the unfortunate event from in-game history completely?" Ice-Pick wrote cryptically. "Are you sure no one remembers?" 

The update also covers work in progress on autopsies, violent encounters with the locals, lockpicking (yes, there is a lockpicking mini-game), infection, diagnostics, healing, lucid dreaming, and more. It sounds weird, but that's Pathologic for you: Intensely strange but really good, if that's your cup of tea. (Those links are for the Pathologic remake rather than the sequel, but it's a fair bet that the weirdness will hold.) A release date still hasn't been announced. 

Feeling spoiled by the summer sun and summer sales? Fanatical has more beautiful bargains in this season of excess. Live now through July 1, the digital storefront's Red Hot Sale discounts everything from PUBG to Conan Exiles, Dying Light and Football Manager 2018.

As always, I've lead with my top picks. Let's take a closer look.

With 40 percent off, PUBG comes in at £17.99/your regional equivalent. With 46 percent off, Conan Exiles comes in at £20.39. With 70 percent off, Dying Light The Following—Enhanced Edition comes in at £13.19. And also with 70 percent off, Football Manager 2018 comes in at £11.39. The World Cup 2018 has turned over a few shocks already. Hone your skills in the latter and show 'em how it's done. 

Elsewhere, Fanatical offers nine game bundles that cost just $1 each, as part of its Dollar Bundle Madness offer. My favourite is the DOS-driven Dollar Classics Bundle, but you can check out all nine this-a-way. Here are the top sellers:

• Dollar Forever Bundle—27 mixed games for $1.
• Dollar Jumbo Bundle—25 puzzle and hidden object games for $1.
• Dollar Viva Bundle—24 hidden object, adventure and puzzle games for $1.
• Dollar Classics Bundle—21 retro games for $1.

Check out Fanatical's Red Hot Sale in full this way, and be sure to add your RED10 discount voucher at the checkout for a further ten percent off most games. 

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