Returning to XCOM, the Marvel’s Midnight Suns director says he “felt the ghosts of everybody everywhere looking over my shoulder” Anyone who’s played one of Firaxis’XCOMgames in the last ten years will have a story about missed shots. Shots that, even with a 90% chance of hitting their target, still end up going wide and punching a hole in your carefully laid plans. In the moment, they induce feelings of white hot injustice, but for many, they’re an integral part of what makes XCOM, well, XCOM....

Back from the dead The bombastic hack-and-slasherLollipop Chainsawis making a return, ten years after the original’s release. Yoshimi Yasuda, former CEO of Kadokawa Games (the original publishers of Lollipop Chainsaw)vaguely teasedthe game’s return last month during its 10-year anniversary, but it’s now beenconfirmedthat the remake is definitely happening and that Yusada will be returning to the series alongside his new studio, Dragami Games. If you never had the pleasure of playing Lollipop Chainsaw, watch the trailer below for a taste of the chaos....

Get free gems and strength boosts with these freebie codes Looking for the latest Muscle Legends codes?Muscle Legends is aRobloxexperience with a simple premise: get unbelievably hench, and fight other unbelievably hench players in tournaments. Of course, because this is a Roblox game, you’ll also be collecting pets, unlocking new home bases (or gyms) to retreat to outside of tournament time, and hoovering up in-game currencies to pay for it all....

Every active Ni No Kuni code you can redeem for gold and more Looking for the latest codes for Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds?Ni No Kuni: Cross Worldsis the latest entry into the increasingly sprawling Ni No Kuni franchise, a series of Studio Ghibli-influencedRPGs. Cross Worlds is free-to-play on PC and mobile (hooray) but features a heavy dose of in-game purchases and gacha mechanics, and has already laid the groundwork for an in-game NFT marketplace (considerably less hooray)....

The hunt for the “2” continues Liam and I thoughtOverwatch 2’s first PVP beta was fine! It was just hard to say just how much of that came down to the “2” in its title. We jumped back into its ongoing second beta, in the hopes that we’d finally wrap our heads around the game. Maybe we’d got it all wrong thefirst time around? It’s the sequel to the biggest hero shooter out there!...

The Ryzen 5 5500 isn’t the fastest, but it may be the best value option out there. The Ryzen 5 5500 is one of AMD’s latest Ryzen 5000 processors, but a strong competing Intel lineup means it’s already gotten a 33% reduction on Amazon, dropping from £176 to £113. This six-core twelve-thread chip is a solid upgrade over the likes of the Ryzen 5 3600 from the previous generation, but mostly makes sense in a new budget gaming build or as an upgrade for an older Ryzen 1000 or Ryzen 2000 system....

Rockstar focusing on GTA6, sources say Rockstar have reportedly shelved plans for remasters ofRed Dead Redemptionand GTAIV after the poor reception ofGrand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. The trilogy, which released late last year, was a technical disaster and heavily criticised despite high sales. Yesterday, Tez2 - a regular and reliable source of information on GTA games - tweeted that a “reliable source” had told them the remasters were planned a few years ago, but that Rockstar “chose not to proceed” and that “the poor reception of the Trlogy DE might be a reason”....

Plus a new installer and launcher Here’s Update Video #8, which introduces each of those new features and more. Previously if you wanted to play the Enhanced Edition mod, you had to download individual enhancement packs one by one from the mod team’s website. Some were executables, some were zip files, and you had to follow lengthy instructions on the mod’s website to piece them together. Now a new setup tool makes that process easier by letting you download and install whichever enhancements you want in just a few clicks....

Certainly the gods of my childhood It’s been a while since we’ve written aboutSmite, so if you’ve forgotten: it’s a third-person MOBA about duelling gods in which players control the likes of Anubis and Zeus. That makes it a slightly odd fit for new characters like Invader Zim or Rocko from Rocko’s Modern Life, but well, that’s what is coming later this month, alongside a handful of other Nickelodeon characters....

A snow-slinging affair set in the 80’s After an FPS game that’s not all about which assault rifle has the best vertical foregrip? Well,Snow Warlooks to fill that gap. As a modern revamp of an 18-year-oldHalf-Lifemod by the same name, it’s an FPS where bullets are spheres of snow and guns are human arms… and snowball-launching crossbows. Not to mention it’s set in the 80’s with a synthwave backing track. I’m sold....

An incredible price for an eight-core sixteen-thread gaming CPU. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X has hit $275 at Amazon, an incredible price for an eight-core sixteen-thread CPU that ranks among the best for gaming and content creation. That’s nearly a $100 less than the same CPU cost last year, when we trumpeted thatthe processor had reached $369in a one-off sale and $175 below the chip’s US MSRP. At this reduced price, you’re paying $34 per core, which is a pretty incredible value when you consider just how strong each of those cores are....

And it’s on PC Game Pass The most prolific indie studio of the last decade are preparing to bow out, with today bringing the early access launch of “the last game from Zachtronics”,Last Call BBS. It’s a puzzle-o-rama firing up a mysterious old computer to download pirated software from a BBS, letting us play everything from logic puzzles of circuits and flesh to a model kit-building simulation. I’ve played a wee bit and am keen to explore more, even as someone who is the absolute worst at Zachlikes....

Promising “updates and news on multiple games” Ubisoft Forward is returning this September. Ubisoft’s very own not-E3 livestream will “reveal updates and news on multiple games and projects”, Ubisoft say. Before that - on this Thursday July 7th, even - the publisher are going to broadcast an in-depth look on their lost-at-sea live service pirate ‘em up Skull And Bones. It’ll have changed a lot since then, however. A post on theUbisoft news sitesays that Thursday will offer “an in-depth look at the upcoming open world multiplayer pirate game inspired by the Indian Ocean during the Golden Age of Piracy....