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Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League got a lengthy demonstration at tonight's PlayStation State Of Play event, which clarified several things about what kind of game Rocksteady's long-awaited return to the DC Universe really is. It turns out it's a game with lots of floaty air combat, lots of noise, lots of loot and gear scores and weapon classes, and with a battle pass (but for cosmetics only). Plus there will be DLC to add new characters post-launch.

The next game from the developers of Tetris Effect and Rez Infinite is called Humanity, and it's an action-puzzle game in which you control a Shiba Inu and try to guide crowds of people around obstacle-strewn greybox levels. A bit like Lemmings, maybe, but presumably with a surprising emotional resonance. Watch the trailer below.

Forza Horizon 5 announced its second expansion this evening as planned. Rally Adventure will launch on March 29th and is entirely focused on getting your wheels dirty. You'll find the announcement trailer below.

As I write this, Sons Of The Forest is the third most played game on Steam with 265,000 concurrent players. That's not bad for a game that came out a little over three hours ago. It's so popular in fact, it might have crashed Steam.

Earlier this month, we asked you to vote for your favourite strategy games of all time to celebrate the launch (and glorious return) of several strategy classics this month, including Relic's WW2 RTS Company Of Heroes 3, Blue Byte's The Settlers: New Allies and Cyanide's fantasy Warhamball Blood Bowl 3. And cor, I've never seen such love for individual expansions and total conversion mods among mainline RTS games and 4Xs. As with all strategy games, however, there can only be one victor - and you can find out what that single strategy game to rule them all is right here. Here are your 50 favourite strategy games of all time, as voted for by you, the RPS readership.

There’s a touch of poetry to the way Wild Hearts carves so liberally from Monster Hunter. After all, Monster Hunter is a series about an unknown newcomer toppling ancient beasts, chopping up their best bits to create weapons and armour. Forget sleeves, Wild Hearts wears its inspirations as a complete set of clothing crafted from the bones, fur, and teeth of Capcom’s increasingly popular series. Inevitably these materials may feel lesser than the whole from which they were harvested, but they are worn proudly and with confidence nevertheless.

Besides, as a rare challenger to Monster Hunter, Wild Hearts is clearly aware of the difficulties involved in trying to pull off something new. Perhaps this is why Omega Force’s monster battler is so welcoming to newcomers. Finally, here is a game that is willing to teach a player why this long-running genre is held in such high regard. Wild Hearts is the perfect entry point for anyone who has ever dreamed of being a Monster Hunter Liker. A bombastic, brilliant good time that’s held back by frequent, frustrating performance issues on PC.

There’s rarely much intrigue to be found in curating a list of ray tracing and DLSS games, but we recently saw the closest thing to it when Soviet shooter Atomic Heart released without the ray tracing features that its developers, publishers, and Nvidia themselves had spent the past four years bigging up. Still, Atomic Heart does come equipped with DLSS 3, so it’s not entirely bereft of the latest graphics tech. You can find more DLSS 3 games below, along with every PC game confirmed to support ray tracing or older versions of the DLSS upscaler.

You know it’s a great turn in The Pale Beyond when only five of your crew are freezing, two have frostbite, and one has scurvy. After all the struggles and dangers I’ve been through trying to keep my ship’s crew alive in the bone-biting cold of the arctic tundra, that’s definitely a success in my book.

It’s easy to describe Bellular Studio’s survival sim as just ‘Frostpunk on a ship’, but in some ways that’s pretty accurate: you’re the leader of a group trying to survive in a harsh frozen wasteland. But it’s also a comparison that falls short in plenty of other ways. Sure, the engine of this survival sim might run the same as Frostpunk’s, but it’s buried deep in a handcrafted hull. With an overarching story that deals with the drama and despair of survival, together with a cast of underdog characters whose personalities and flaws fuel your determination to keep them alive, The Pale Beyond is much more human than its steampunk counterpart.

The devs behind Command & Conquer Remaster are releasing their The Great War: Western Front on March 30th, but for now they’re showing off exactly how the WW1 RTS works in a new developer diary. The ‘Commanding The Western Front’ video has several leads devs from Petroglyph walking us through aspects of the campaign, from the macro decisions of Field Commander Mode, to the tactical RTS skirmishes in Theatre Mode.

This week on The Electronic Wireless Show podcast our interest was piqued by new trailers for a Jesus simulator and a politics in hell strategy game. We ask ourselves: why are there so many hell-themed games and so few heavenly ones? Is it blasphemy? What would our pitch for a game set in heaven be? (Spoilers for that last one: there's a lot of admin involved). We also chat about what we've been playing this week, and Nate orchestrates a mini-game pitchathon that goes at least somewhat off the rails.

My backlog is practically overflowing at this point, hence my New Year's resolution to avoid buying a game until I’d actually play it. But, every now and then, an especially deep discount will catch my eye, my bad impulses wake up, and I spend a few quid on something I won’t touch for six months (seriously, Abzu has been floating on my hard drive for years.) My New Year's resolution won’t hold out for much longer, as Valve have announced their schedule for all of 2023’s Steam Fests and sales events.

Warhammer 40k: Darktide seemed like a recipe for certain success when it launched late last year. Developers Fatshark were taking the formula established in their co-op horde shooters Vermintide, throwing in some beefy melee, and moving it over to the 40k universe. Fans were less than happy with the end result, pointing toward technical issues, randomness in the endgame, and a lack of crafting systems, which Fatshark are hoping to fix in today’s update.

A new month is on the horizon which can mean only one thing: more gaming freebies. Amazon Prime members can snag seven free games throughout March, with 90s RPG Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition leading the pack, followed by the cute puzzler (and undercover horror game) I Am Fish. New games are available every Thursday, so scribble that day into your calendars.

A lot of folks, including our Liam, have been having a grand old time hunting Japanese fantasy beasts in Wild Hearts. Great! Less great is that it still runs like concrete on PC, even after a performance-focused patch that developers Omega Force had detailed even before the game had formally released.

Wild Hearts launched last week into a world of problems on PC, from dreadful overall performance to more specific issues with certain graphics cards and a bizarre bug that meant setting audio output to Stereo meant fewer frames per second. The game itself proved enough of a satisfying monster hunter (no relation) to charm Liam, but the technical mess remained.

Developers Omega Force say they’re continuing to work on Wild Heart’s PC performance, including the future addition of DLSS and FSR upscaling, and this week released a patch that claimed to fix several key snags. Did it? To find out, I returned to it with the same RTX 3070 GPU I used for our original best settings guide, and... uh, it’s still bad. Sorry.

When it comes to ultrawide gaming monitors, curved VA panels are very much the standard - but despite their benefits in terms of immersiveness, not everyone prefers them. Therefore, I thought I'd highlight this deal on Gigabte's M34WQ, a flat 34-in monitor that hits the popular 3440x144 144Hz spec and is today $20 off with a coupon code at Newegg to hit its lowest ever price.

Honor has heavily discounted one of its MagicBook 16 laptops at its UK store, with a Ryzen 5 5600H model with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a 16-in 1080p 144Hz screen going for £499.99. That's the best laptop I've seen at this price as of late, and while this laptop is designed more for work than play, its integrated RX Vega graphics are still capable of playing older titles.

The MagicBook 16 initially debuted at £849.99 (and still costs that much on Amazon UK), and has since dropped to £549.99. To get today's £499.99 price, use code AGOBEYOND50 at the checkout.

UPDATE: Bethesda have now confirmed the news in a statement posted on Twitter, saying, "We thank him for his work as a creative mentor to young developers." They continued to say, "We wish Mikami-san well in the future and are excited by what lies ahead fpr the talented developers of Tango."

Original story: Tango GameWork’s co-founder and studio head Shinji Mikami is reportedly leaving the Evil Within company “in the coming months.” This comes courtesy of TrueAchievements who saw and verified a company-wide email sent to employees by Bethesda’s VP of development Todd Vaughn. "I am writing today to let you know that studio head Shinji Mikami has decided to leave Tango Gameworks in the coming months," Vaughn said. "Mikami-san has been a creative leader and supportive mentor to young developers at Tango for 12 years through his work.”

Another day, another drop on AMD graphics cards. This time is special though, as it's one of the best value points on the current Team Red GPU hierarchy, the RX 6700 XT, and it's also a top-rated Asus Dual design. It was previously retailing for around £400, but now it's dropped at Amazon to £372.54, a very reasonable price for this level of performance.

AOC make some of the best value gaming monitors in the business, especially in the mid-range where you can get some truly impressive specs and solid build quality at surprisingly low prices. Case in point is this deal on a 27-in 1440p 165Hz gaming monitor for just £230 after a solid £135 reduction. That's an awesome deal for this spec, which looks great and offers a competitive advantage over 60Hz alternatives.

A few weeks ago, I talked about a number of new features coming to RPS in 2023, and here we are with our very first edition of Ask RPS! This is a new mailbag feature where RPS supporters get to pose questions to the RPS Treehouse team (mostly video games-related, though not necessarily always), and we then answer those questions in public posts for everyone to get involved with. Easy peasy.

To kick us off, our first question comes courtesy of Old_Man_Gaming, who asked: "What was the first game that really grabbed you and dominated your life?"

Come and find out which games had us trapped in the throes of childhood mania below, and why not tell us about your own gaming obsessions in the comments? You might just find a surprise kindred spirit.

Universe-spanning survival sim No Man’s Sky is releasing its 4.1 Fractal Update today, bringing along a new Expedition, tons of accessibility options, a VR overhaul, and much more. Developers Hello Games have updated the game so consistently their launch woes are a distant memory, sent to a faraway galaxy. Since then, No Man’s Sky has become a not just a space exploration game, but a city management sim and a generally nice place to chill with your odd alien pets, all in one package.

Even after a decade marked by the abandonware crowd being proven right, there are old games that remain lost between the cracks of digital distribution. Instead of waxing lyrical about that though, I'm here today with good news: My favourite open world 3D spaceflight/trading sim Hardwar is back.

It's been back for over a year, in fact, via Zoom Platform, who've just made the interesting choice to publish it on Steam too, promising that their own store will remain resolutely DRM-free, and that this aims "to help fund additional signings and improvements for our DRM-Free preservation efforts". I'll brush aside analysing this strategy, because the immediate upshot is that, hopefully, Hardwar might finally get its due. In a better world, we'd already be playing its modern descendants.

Atomic Heart continues to dominate both my professional time and my personal brainspace; it really is a fascinating game, for reasons good and terrible alike. Its most recent twist came in the complete lack of ray tracing at launch, despite various pre-release builds having been held up by Nvidia themselves as the technology’s exemplars. Crispy critters, indeed.

For Magic Week, I wrote about Team Lazerbeam's upcoming dating sim Wrestling With Emotions: New Kid On The Block (WWE) and how you're able to romance a beefcake composed entirely of green ooze. There is, of course, far more to it than that. I asked Team Lazerbeam's Ben Rausch about how it tackles themes of queer identity and diversity in a kickass way, which I highlighted in my post, but wanted to highlight even more here. Their answers were too good not to share.

Amazon Games have announced that they’re bringing NCSOFT’s South Korean MMORPG Throne And Liberty to the Americas, Europe, and Japan. NCSOFT has a history of publishing their own games worldwide, as they have done with Guild Wars in the past, so their agreement with Amazon is somewhat unique. Amazon haven’t given a release window for Throne And Liberty, but they’ll be publishing the game on PC and consoles with cross-play enabled.

Documentaries chronicling game development are great. With so much marketing fluff surrounding games, it can be nice to hear directly from the devs about their inspirations, struggles, and creative intentions. Hearing them chat candidly, making jokes and getting excited, is a good reminder that real-life people are at the heart of every game - what a crazy concept. Luckily, these types of documentaries seem to be increasingly common, evidenced by the Yakuza (or Like A Dragon) docuseries that just debuted on YouTube.

Roguelike dungeon crawler Backpack Hero has been in early access for under a year, and it’s now getting a full 1.0 launch on PC and consoles in May. Backpack Hero has been successful for its three-person dev team and stood apart from other roguelikes with its Tetris-inspired inventory management. You see, success in Backpack Hero is determined by how you organise your bag rather than what you’re actually carrying, as you shuffle items around a grid to create synergies and mod your playstyle.

It’s episode four of RPS’ indie podcast Indiescovery and this week the team got into the Valentine's Day spirit and had a long chat about our favourite indie game romances (any excuse to gush about how hot the characters are in Hades, really). We get gabbing about our favourite game OTPs, the fabulous representation of queer romances in indies, and then finish with a cursed (not horny) Cosmo-style dating quiz.

Paradox’s grand spacefaring strategy Stellaris is getting its fifth story pack First Contact on March 14th, following on from the previously released Leviathans, Synthetic Dawn, Distant Stars, and Ancient Relics. Story packs are mid-sized expansions that flesh out Stellaris’s universe and this time First Contact is focusing on pre-FTL civilisations, taking a step back from the stars. The expansion was officially revealed back in January after a series of SteamDB leaks outed the project.