CATEGORIES

HENRY HALFHEAD

Where's your head at?

CROTEAM

How a gaggle of football fans became the self-appointed national dev team of Croatia

TEMPEST RISING

Heading to the future for a very '90s war

Sid Meier's Civilization VII

Anyone who's engaged with Sid Meier's strategy series during its 34-year existence knows that the most exhilarating turns in a game are the initial ones. Sure, the mid-game can be an absorbing juggling act, requiring you to manage diplomatic crises and placate the citizens of a sprawling empire, while choreographing your battalions' advance into enemy territory.

HEAVY HITTER

Doom looks to the past for its biggest and weightiest iteration yet

Darkest Dungeon II

Having marvelled at Red Hook's leftfield approach to sequel-making in E385's review, Darkest Dungeon II's Kingdoms DLC was always going to pique our interest.

ASSASSIN'S CREED: SHADOWS

Ubisoft's signature series finds itself at a crossroads. After Valhalla concluded Assassin's Creed's trilogy-length RPG pivot back in 2020, it was three years - which felt like an eternity for this once-annual series - before Mirage arrived, with its promise of a return to the concept's stealthgame roots, and no pretence to the scale of its immediate predecessors.

THE MAKING 0F... ARCO

How a ramshackle gang of indie developers formed over three continents to produce an epic reverse western

DEATH HOWL

A gloomy deckbuilding odyssey and an accidental Soulslike

Sludge Life

Peer through the haze to discover a game that makes you ask some surprisingly sharp questions

Capital ideas

As it reaches its tenth anniversary, London Games Festival is expanding its horizons

ENTER THE CHRONO SPHERE

Dodge, shoot, pause for thought

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Uncovering the secrets of Animal Well, Tunic and UFO 50

STAINLESS STEEL

From one Extremes to another: how Warframe went from six-month 'Hail Mary' to a decade-plus of success

KINGMAKERS

Time travel to exotic, distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Stabiliser was the core of Citizen Sleeper, in both its mechanics and metaphors. It was medication, essentially, the only way to halt your own planned obsolescence. As an android Sleeper, you'd been sold into indentured servitude by your 'original', the person who signed a contract to have their personality copied and emulated inside a robotic frame, as cheap labour. That kind of corporate arrangement is rarely built to last.

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD

Buy the deluxe edition of this HD Wii remake and, alongside the cartridge, you'll receive a little plastic barrel. While the Kong family has been synonymous with such vessels since 1981, a cynic might suggest that underlining the connection might be unwise, lest Nintendo be accused of scraping the bottom of one itself. After all, Tropical Freeze got this same treatment in 2018, courtesy of Nintendo's realisation, in the early days of Switch, that it now had a home for Wii U's more unfairly forgotten releases. The arrival, seven years later, of that game's relatively primitive predecessor can only seem like a final spot of mopping up before the Switch doors are closed for good. It could also, perhaps, be taken as another sign of renewed interest in the character, in light of the addition of a Donkey Kong Country area to the Super Nintendo World park in Japan, and the rumours of a cinematic spinoff that have circled since The Super Mario Bros Movie's enormous success.

The Legend Of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures

Technology has finally caught up with Nintendo's trailblazing co-op adventure – so where is it?

HAREBRAINED SCHEMES

The former Paradox developer charts a course into a future without Shadowrun or BattleTech

COLLECTED WORKS TAKAYA IMAMURA

The creator of Star Fox, Captain Falcon and Tingle on 30 years at Nintendo and restarting as an indie

Create new save point?

The GAMM museum in the heart of Rome shows that preservation is coming of age

THE MAKING 0F...REDACTED

How a quest for the fast and the frenetic transformed survival horror into a comic-book Roguelike

CHANGING DESTINY

Chinese studio Leenzee aims to soar to the heights of its field

BLOOD MONEY

Luca Galante remembers clearly the first time Vampire Survivors was copied. \"It was immediate,\" he says. \"Even before the game got popular.\" At the time, he took it as a compliment.

BONAPARTE: A MECHANIZED REVOLUTION

No sooner have we stepped into the boots of royal guard Bonaparte than we’re faced with a life-altering decision.

TOWERS OF AGHASBA

Watch Towers Of Aghasba in action and it feels vast. Given your activities range from deepwater dives to climbing up cliffs or lumbering beasts, and from nurturing plants or building settlements to pinging arrows at the undead, it’s hard to get a bead on the game’s limits.

THE STONE OF MADNESS

The makers of Blasphemous return to religion and insanity

Vampire Survivors

As Vampire Survivors expanded through early access and then its two first DLCs, it gained arenas, characters and weapons, but the formula remained unchanged.

Devil May Cry

The Resident Evil 4 that never was, and the Soulslike precursor we never saw coming

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

With Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare has made a deeply self-conscious game, visibly inspired by some of the best-loved ideas from Dragon Age and Mass Effect.