If you’ve never picked up Blizzard’s hero shooter, give it a go This past Christmas marked the anniversary of me playingOverwatch 2. 7 years of my partner and I swearing at seemingly impenetrable enemy teams, then whooping in victory when we finally pull together a plan that cracks them apart - or just as our chill W+M1 game while we chat about our days. Apart from frequent balance adjustments and behind-the-scenes tweaks to their matchmaking system, the more expansive map design and swap from 6v6 to 5v5 in recent years has made Overwatch feel far less formulaic, with each battle requiring careful assessment and recalculation rather than rote memorisation of cover spots and endless hammering against impossible choke points....

Need a hint for today’s Connections? Read our guide for help with Connections #208 This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theConnections hint and answers for Thursday 12th December! Want a hint for Connections today?Piggybacking off the monumental success of daily puzzle gameWordle, the New York Times has another fantastically popular word game out now. It’s calledConnections, and if you haven’t played it before, now’s the time to start....

Backlog goals The first week of January is always one of my favourite times of the year. It’s a time for making plans, setting goals, thinking about all the cool new games I’ll be playing over the next 12 months (while also looking nervously at the pile of games I missed over thelast12 months and placing them very, very gingerly on the teetering and totteringly tall pile of my backlog). And, of course, making some new year’s resolutions....

Pets won’t arrive this year, though First, backpacks! After years of player-made mods, they’ll finally be made official on February 1st, with players able to craft backpacks as a new attire, allowing for increased storage space. Next month’s update will also see the number of shelters that players can place limited. Backpacks will be available a few weeks earlier in Rust’s Staging branch, if you’re playing on the test server....

Konami stealth-and-horror combo to launch this year The usual approach to covering remakes is to talk in-depth about how they differ from the original games, but I’m going to be obnoxious and assume you have no previous experience of either series. So! Snake Eater is a kind of tropicalSplinter Cellclone about a man stuck in the jungle with his boss and lots of edible crocodiles. TheSilent Hill 2remake, meanwhile, is a bit like developer Bloober Team’sThe Mediumexcept it happens in a lakeside American town, the titular Silent Hill, rather than a collapsing Soviet-era hotel near Krakow....

You’ll need to cough up a grand for the pleasure first Seemingly not content with having raised over $650 million for a game in development for over a decade without a full release date in sight,Star Citizenis now offering a new way for those with too much money to spend it: a bundle of digital ships costing £46,000. Yes, that’s forty-six thousand pounds. Technically, £46,080 - or $48,000. That’s about ten grand more than the average person in the UK earns in a year, and more than the average mortgage deposit you need to buy a house....

Co-founder cites delayed funding, higher costs and AAA competition as causes Surgeon SimulatorandI Am Breadcreators Bossa Studios have laid off around a third of their staff, with 19 people departing the London, UK-based independent in December due to what co-founder Henrique Olifiers has called “a perfect storm of events” - heavy competition from blockbuster games at the backend of last year, increased operating costs, and delayed funding decisions across the industry....

Stuck on today’s Wordle word for January 5? Read our hint or find the answer below! This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theWordle hint and answer for Thursday 12th December! Need a hint for today’s Wordle answer?Wordleis an addicting but challenging test of word acumen. Luckily, you’re in the right place for some assistance. Every day, Wordle presents its legions of players with a deviously simple quandary: can you guess the right five-letter word within just six guesses?...

A metaverse is born Every game is Who Framed Roger Rabbit now - or, less charitably, a metaversal hellscape where canonical integrity matters far less than providing a platform through which to sell cosmetics. Apex Legendsis the latest live service game to take the plunge with its first crossover event. It’s withFinal Fantasy VII Rebirthand it’ll bring the Buster Sword, Aerith, and other elements from the JRPG to the battle royale on January 9th....

Homecoming That should be less of an issue in future. One of those community-hosted servers, Homecoming, has been granted an official license to operate by City Of Heroes' IP owners NCSoft. “We’ll have much more to share on this in the coming months, however right now we’d like to make a few things clear: Your accounts and characters are safe,” saysthe announcement by the Homecoming team. Access to the game and its server will continue to be completely free, too, with support coming via player donations....

Platform responds to latest thirsty gamer “meta” I realise we’re all struggling through the dank depths of January but it’s never too early in the year to talk about sex, baby. Twitch have updated their attire policies to stop an outbreak of “implied nudity” among thirstier streamers, who have taken to filming themselves nude with black censor bars, or positioning the camera to suggest that they’re fully or partially naked outside the frame....

Rockfish aim to support joyful Luke Skywalking sim “for a long time” “Mainly we’re looking at this as a way to help future-proof the game so we have less difficulty bringing updates and expansion content down the road,” the developers wrote in a blog post. “We want to be able to support Everspace 2 for a long time.” All fantastic news, providing they can overcome certain “growing pains”. In a relatively rare show of candour, the developers haveshared details of Everspace 2’s extremely WIP Unreal Engine 5 version on Steam....

Buckshot Roulette is from the dev behind Unsorted Horror Russian Roulette is just an edgy version of Snakes & Ladders. It’s pure luck gussied up with high stakes and the cool aesthetic of spinning a six-shooter. A grizzled mafioso whose cheeks glitter with fragments of other people’s teeth has as much chance of winning Russian Roulette as a sleepy five-year-old in SpongeBob pyjamas. But take Russian Roulette, swap the revolver for a pump-action shotgun, mix up live and dud rounds, and addInscryption-esque items which let you change the rules, and now you have a more skillful game....