After several delays Heart Of Madness was announced back at the start of March, with promises of concluding New World’s storyline. Then it was going to release on Tuesday of this week, but was delayed due to a last minute bug. Then it was going to release on Wednesday of this week, but was delayed due to a last minute bug. Well, it’s here now, Thursday, and it also adds a new Blunderbuss weapon and endless balance changes to the MMO....

Here are the rules, in case you’re in need of a reminder. As always, these lists aren’t intended to be a definitive ‘best’ list of the year in question. Rather, they’re all games we’d recommend people still play today,andhave something that makes them worth saving. That might be they’re the best example of their genre, or they contain a valuable lesson that future game designers would do well to take heed of....

Lighting a fuse under Lost Ark’s bum Diablo meets The Boys is the four-word elevator pitch of Stitch Heads and Raw Fury’s new isometric hack and slasher - and judging from the amount of loot, blood and minced limbs I saw in my hands on demo last week, I’d say they’re pretty bang on the money, albeit with an extra dash of Borderlands thanks to its cel-shaded comic book visuals. Whichever way you slice it, though,Superfusemakes a striking and violent first impression....

You say goodbye, I say Halo This week, the Electronic Wireless Showpodcastis talking about TV adaptations of video games, specifically the best games that would make for great telly box shows, rather than what’s already been turned into visual screen fodder (cough Halo cough). Alice Bee is away this week, adapting to life in a brand-new country, leaving Nate and Matthew to dwell on the merits of The Mandalorian, and whether a show following the life of a Halo grunt would be better than big flashy Master Chief quips....

Age of pomegranates I’m not going to bury the lede here:The Fertile Crescentis, to my delight, a proper little belter of a real-time strategy game. Having just hit early access, this Mesopotamian pomegranate-’em-up is certainly no epic, and you can see pretty much everything it can do within a couple of hours of play. But it’s been under development for five years, and by Hammurabi’s majestic beard does it show....

City Of Brass is free again too This week’s big free game on the Epic Games Store might have two sequels by now, but it’s still a good’un: it’sTotal War: Warhammer. You have one week to claim the start of Creative Assembly’s strategy trilogy set in Games Workshop’s fantasy world of WH0K. Epic have also brought back a previous freebie, the first-person stabberCity Of Brass. A tidy haul for the small price of using the Epic Games Store....

Another delay for the sci-fi follow-up to Vermintide The makers of cooperative Warhammer FPS Vermintide today finally announced a release date for the far-future follow-up,Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. Its ragtag gang will start rooting out Chaos on the 13th of September, which, yes, does mean the game is delayed again. But this time they’re committing to an actual date. “The aquila-eyed amongst you will note this is later than planned,” developers Fatshark said intoday’s announcement....

Dead-and-buried-wood “Graveyard’s full,” says Timothy Hall, the man prodding the bones of the piano at the saloon in Grackle. It’s a concise expression of everything the town’s been through: the rampaging bandits, the cannibal kidnappings, the swirling tornados. Filling the graveyard has been a solemn bid for order in the wake of so much chaos. It’s not that way in Bripton, the next town over. The graveyard there is uncannily empty, save for a similarly bare tree....

Many of the new additions are best experienced with a fresh playthrough, though It’s been great fun revisiting the lush mountains of Death Stranding’s definitely not Icelandic version of post-apocalyptic America. If anything, the weirdest thing is seeing that same world I know and love on a fresh server, bereft of all the distracting neon signs, yelps of “Keep on keeping on!” and one-upmanship bridge-building that made up the bulk of the original’s asymmetric online multiplayer component....

The giveaway only lasts 48 hours Hie theeto GOG’s front pageand scroll down to the giveaway banner then click the button to claim a free copy on your GOG account. This will also sign you up to GOG’s mailing list, though you can unsubscribe. In ourThea 2: The Shattering review, Nic Reuben explained that he wasn’t super into a lot of Thea 2’s individual elements (of which there are many) but he had a soft spot for the game as a whole....

Following allegations of workplace abuses Indie game studio Funomena, best known for working on Wattam and Luna, could close by the end of this month if they don’t find investment. This is the same studio that featured in People Make Games’recent investigationinto abuses at Funomena, Mountains, and Fullbright. People Make Games' Chris Bratt first broke news of the possible closure onTwitter, saying that it’s come as a surprise to many of the studio’s employees....

Also tease a sleek-looking desktop graphics card coming this summer The firstIntel ArcGPUs are finally here, and they are… for laptops. That might not please anyone hoping for relief from ongoing stock woes in the desktop graphics card market, but the mobile Arc A-Series chips are built for gaming all the same – and the first Arc laptops are launching today. That’s all via the livestreamed launch event that finished mere minutes ago, and that you can find liveblogged below....

Balance changes, graphics filters, music, and more One month afterannouncing Street Fighter 6, Capcom have waved goodbye toStreet Fighter Vwith a big patch they’re caling the ‘Definitive Update’. It sets what I guess is the final meta, overhauling balance by tweaking characters and even giving some whole new moves. It also spruces the place up a bit with new graphical filters and music. Capcomsaythe update, now live, is “closing out this era of Street Fighter”....