The R-36 Eruptor is a hell of a democracy spreader. 

Available in Helldivers 2’s new Democratic Detonation Warbond, the Erputor is a primary weapon that fires “jet-assisted shells” which explode on impact, and can destroy fabricators, bug nests, gunships, tanks, and other vehicles and structures. Basically, it packs the power of a support weapon stratagem like the Anti-Materiel Rifle, but in a primary gun.

An Eruptor nerf is already being prophesied by some players, but it does have downsides. It’s heavy, slow, and although it doesn’t deal a ton of splash damage, it is not safe for close-quarters combat. It only has a five-round magazine, as well.

You’re definitely making a trade-off by putting the Eruptor in your primary slot instead of an assault rifle, but that…

It won’t have escaped your notice that Intel has been in the news a lot recently, either talking about its race to be at the cutting edge of chip manufacturing, getting billions of dollars from the US administration, or having a few issues with its high-end CPUs running the latest games. It’s certainly been very busy, though, building all kinds of new facilities for making processors, as well as expanding its research laboratories. In a brief report on its 10 largest construction projects, Intel shared that the total cost of all the current investments will be over $160 billion by the time it’s all finished.

If you’re wondering whether that’s a lot of money for such things, then rest assured, it absolutely is. Yes, semiconductor foundries all cost many billions of dollars to desig…

Dusk wasn’t originally supposed to get a full graphical remaster just five years after launch⁠. In its initial reveal at the 2022 PC Gaming show, New Blood head honcho Dave Oshry called it an update “nobody asked for, so we’re doing it anyway,” and the “HD” moniker for the tastefully updated weapon and enemy models was really more of a bit. Hell, the guy who made most of it wasn’t even a professional developer at that point: “I saw the trailer for Dusk HD and was like, ‘Oh, haha, Dusk but HD, what a joke,'” David “Garumin” Bonin told me in a recent interview. 

“But then I just had this gut feeling: what if it wasn’t a joke? What if it was more than just a tech demo for an SDK? What if we went all in, and that started this weird little obsession where I set aside my…

It’s not quite at the level of “can Doom run on this potato”, but putting GTA: San Andreas protagonist CJ in games is its own kind of meme. You can play Dark Souls as CJ, you can watch CJ and Big Smoke duel it out in Sekiro, and modders even managed to put CJ in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

FromSoftware’s Armored Core 6: The Fires of Rubicon has only been out since yesterday, and in that time modders Dropoff and TKGP had just one thing in mind: mecha-CJ. The mod unfortunately doesn’t yet appear on NexusMods or other sites, which may be just as well. This thing is deeply, deeply cursed (video below). I thought seeing CJ as a cat in Stray was bad but as a mech it’s somehow even worse, with our young hero’s proportions stretched-out and twisted into a…

Hammerwatch 2 debuted another new trailer during the Future Games Show 2023 and announced it would be joining the Steam Next Fest with a demo on June 19.

Hammerwatch and its followup Heroes of Hammerwatch are both excellent, co-op hack and slash games, the first a dungeon crawler and the second a roguelite. Developer Crackshell has now revealed its next game, Hammerwatch 2, and what the hell? It’s a full-on co-op action RPG now, and one that looks ridiculously pretty for a pixelated hack-and-slasher.

Hammerwatch 2 showed up at today’s Guerrilla Collective showcase with an explainer video featuring Crackshell’s creative director Jochum Skoglund. “With the sequel we are going for a more open-ended action adventure experience,” Skoglund says. Read more

The dungeon crawling Hammerwatch series is lowkey one of my favorite co-op RPG romps, and today the series gets a much bigger sequel that has me psyched to go back. Hammerwatch 2 takes the series’ fast-paced dungeon battles I enjoyed with friends and beefs them up with an open world, bigger skills list, gear, and quest system. It sounds like the indie upstart action RPG that we need right in the wake of Diablo 4. It’s not heavily inspired by the modern giants of ARPGs though, its developer Crackshell tells me, and is instead chasing the greatness of much older gaming touchstones.

The Hammerwatch games are modestly priced and are easy to pick up with a couple friends for a few nights. You don’t have to play co-op, mind, I just find it a particularly good diversion with friends who …

CES 2024 is nearly upon us and the raft of long awaited products are starting to be teased at a considerable rate. Amongst the expected laptop refreshes and big screen bonanzas, however, there are always some more, shall we say, unusual products that steal the show for many. LG may have set the bar pretty high rather early this year with some reveals from its LG Labs, chief amongst them being a rather stunning looking audio device it’s calling the “DukeBox”.

LG describes it as an “innovative audio product” that aims to combine vacuum tube audio chops with an adjustable transparency OLED panel that can be used both as a control method and as display, or even to create the illusion of a fireplace glowing away over the top of those rather prominent tubes. 

Audio o…

The day has finally come: Nvidia no longer requires a login to access its graphics card software. The new Nvidia App has just been released in beta and effectively replaces the GeForce Experience app, and one of the first things many of you will notice is how you can access ostensibly the entire software suite without logging into an Nvidia account.

“Your identity isn’t essential to this experience,” an Nvidia spokesperson said of the decision.

Nvidia first introduced a mandatory login for the GeForce Experience app in 2016, and it’s been widely criticised as a bad move ever since. There are threads on Reddit and Nvidia’s own forums filled with complaints from users, but after nearly eight years it felt like a done deal.

Thankfully Nvidia has seen the light on this iss…

Oh boy, I thought the RTX 4090 Founders Edition looked good, but this is like my fantasy RTX 4090 design. This is like a single slot version of Nvidia’s top GPU—hell, the world’s top GPU right now—yet it channels the utilitarian chic of my all-time favourite graphics card, the GeForce 8800 GT. 

And is unfeasibly even smaller.

But this is not a graphics card that you can go out, pull off the shelf, stick under your jumper, and take home to your rig. No, this is what happens if you mix a third-party RTX 4090 with Alphacool’s Enterprise Series water block. And, oh my, does it have my attention.

Optimum Tech has picked up the block and installed it on an Inno3D card—the iChill X3 to be precise—and notes that there are actually only a few cards’…

I knew Omni-Man’s inclusion in Mortal Kombat 1 was gonna bring back memories—you grab any popular character and throw them into a fighting game, and their moveset’s going to be reference-heavy. But NetherRealm really went all out with this one. First, due diligence—if you’ve not watched it yet, I’m going to run through some major spoilers for Invincible’s first season. 

The trailer is a flashback-inducing gauntlet of some of Omni-Man’s worst moments. He’s a Viltrumite—a Superman that’s not above splattering someone’s brains across the wall. He’s also part of a horrific, galaxy-spanning Empire dedicated to “bettering” the universe by obliterating any civilisation that disagrees with them. Fun times.

As such, he gets a lot of harrowing m…

Someone at JRPG developer Atlus or publisher Sega is about to have a very bad day: an accidentally published Instagram post on Thursday leaked the existence of Persona 3 Reload and Persona 5 Tactica, the next two games in the popular Persona series. A remake of Persona 3 has been rumored recently, despite the long-in-the-making PC port of Persona 3 just this January. And we won’t have to wait long for it: it’s coming “early 2024,” according to Atlus.

The Instagram post was quickly deleted, but not before it was spotted, ripped and spread across social media. Here’s a Twitter embed of the minute-long Persona 3 Reload trailer.

At a glance it looks like it brings Persona 3’s art style and graphical fidelity in line with Persona 5, featuring a closer camera angle than the origin…

Less than two months after releasing The Callisto Protocol’s first (and last) story expansion DLC, developer Striking Distance Studios has laid off 32 employees.

As noted by VGC, the layoffs first came to light after numerous employees reported being let go by the studio. Striking Distance parent company Krafton later confirmed with IGN that a total of 32 employees had been terminated. That’s a not-insignificant percentage of the studio’s total headcount, which according to Striking Distance’s “about us” page currently sits as 144 employees in all.

“Striking Distance Studios and Krafton have implemented strategic changes that realign the studio’s priorities to better position its current and future projects for success,” Krafton said. “Unfortunately, these changes have…

After months of bickering and horsing around, Microsoft and Sony have signed a deal that will keep the Call of Duty series on PlayStation consoles for—you guessed it—10 years following the company’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

“We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard,” Xbox boss Phil Spencer revealed on Twitter. “We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games.”

“From Day One of this acquisition, we’ve been committed to addressing the concerns of regulators, platform and game developers, and consumers,” Microsoft president Brad Smith said. “Even after we cross the fini…

Valve’s let slip a preview for SteamOS 3.5, the system that runs the Steam Deck, among a few other things, and you can now opt-in to an updated build rich with visual improvements and tweaks—among a few other fixes. 

The biggest single change is that Valve has rebalanced the Steam Deck’s default colors. It’s now using the sRGB primary colors, meaning it has a slightly warmer and more vibrant set of colors by default. By going to Settings -> Adjust Display Colors you can tune Color Vibrancy and Color Temperature, either with a test image or whatever game you’re running. You can also swap back to the previous color set or to a boosted color range that’s more vibrant but will possibly introduce some gradient clipping.

The big new feature is that a Steam Deck can n…