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If Elden Ring Nightreign wasn't punishing enough for you, FromSoft is adding a high-difficulty mode
Game Reviews

Elden Ring Nightreign is getting a new higher difficulty so you can stop complaining about just how ‘easy’ it is

by admin August 29, 2025


FromSoftware has dropped something of an expected announcement for players of Elden Ring Nightreign. If you’re still playing the online co-op action RPG, you’ve likely defeated many, if not most of its Nightlord bosses.

Though the developer keeps adding tougher versions of said bosses – called Everdark Sovereign – the core game’s difficulty remains unchanged, and many players simply don’t find it to be pushing their abilities anymore.


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The solution? A new, harder difficulty. FromSoftware calls it The Deep of Night, and it’s going to arrive in Nightreign on Thursday, September 11. Because it raises the base difficulty of each Expedition, Deep of Night is designed for veteran players.

Of course, the enemies you face will be tougher than you’re used to. More interestingly, however, you cannot specify which Nightlord to target before starting the Expedition, meaning you won’t be able to build your character to exploit each of their weaknesses.

Endless how? | Image credit: FromSoftware.

As you explore during the Expedition itself, you’ll also notice that ongoing terrain changes won’t be reflected. The upside is that Deep of Night Expeditions will drop new special items, including special Relics. You’ll also find weapons with more status effects, and some will even have negative effects.

Perhaps the most insidious change, however, is that the deeper into each day you go, the more difficult the game is going to get. This isn’t always going to be a fixed change, however, as it will fluctuate based on your wins and losses within that difficulty.

Finally, FromSoftware confirmed that Depths 4 and 5 will even offer the option of endless battle, though it’s not really clear what that means in practice.

If you’re still deep into Nightreign, our guides will absolutely make a difference in your experience. We recently posted updated guides on how to beat Everdark Tricephalos, and how to beat Everdark Equilibrious Beast – two recent Everdark Sovereign additions.



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August 29, 2025 0 comments
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Herdling review: an emotional trek through magical alps that feels a little too easy
Game Reviews

Herdling review: an emotional trek through magical alps that feels a little too easy

by admin August 27, 2025


A powerful, memorable story told not with dialogue but with interaction, movement, and art.

Video games are good at making us feel things for clumps of pixels, especially when those clumps are in constant mortal peril. Herdling joins a long tradition of extended escort quests that deftly fiddle the heartstrings: everything from Ico and The Last Guardian to the burgeoning library of Sad Dad simulators that define modern gaming.

Herdling review

Herdling has much more in common with its stablemates, the critically acclaimed FAR: Lone Sails and FAR: Changing Tides, than it does with anything else: a bleakly apocalyptic duology that was about caring for machines rather than a herd of weird goat things, but with strikingly similar results. The FAR duology made you care about your motor, grow adept at making it go, and feel a torrent of emotions whenever the thing got lost or damaged, as you were constantly thrown into situations which trapped, damaged, or broke your line of sight from your pride and joy.

Herdling pulls all the same tricks, applying them to a collection of Calicorns, a dozen or so ram-like beasts with beautiful horns and adaptive technicolour coats, vaguely defined magical powers and an admirable gift for following basic instructions (go here, go here slowly, OK STOP, etc). Your goal: shepherd them on an alpine journey from the edge of a dystopic city up to the very tip of the mountains, encountering many challenges along the way, ranging from light puzzles to winged terrors that react to sound. Yes, this is a linear game with stealth sections, or “forced stealth” in the parlance of people who dislike stealth.

Haven’t you herd? | Image credit: Panic

Those people will be pleased to hear that none of the challenges in Herdling are particularly, well, challenging. The aforementioned stealth sections are almost comically forgiving. You need to sneak your flock past a sleeping murder owl, who will startle awake if one of your lumbering charges knocks over any of the dozens of stone cairns dotted about the place. And it’s tense, in no small part due to the creepy creature designs involved: horrid masked birds of prey with the wingspan of a minibus, claws like angry spiders, and a vacant death stare that pierces the soul.

Except it’s a piece of piss to get your herd around the noisemakers as they magically narrow their group silhouette around tight bends. And, even if you knock over two of the stone piles, the birds don’t actually attack. The only time I triggered an assault it was a hard-coded chase sequence that’s impossible to avoid.This is fine – the FAR games weren’t particularly challenging either. What matters is the journey, the emotional resonance, the sense of progress – and loss – that comes with an arduous undertaking. What the FAR games did have, though, were machine puzzles that at least made you feel like a gifted engineer. Even getting the vehicles to move in those games felt akin to operating a steam engine. Grand obstacles in the world required the sussing out of Big Machines and their foibles. Nobody got stuck playing those games, but it was an incredibly sustained illusion.Not so with Herdling.

And let’s be clear, despite the big, obvious differences, this game is so conceptually and visually similar to the FAR series that you can absolutely think of them as a loose, thematic trilogy. And so when encountering the first Machinery Puzzle, I expected some sort of extended sequence of lever pulley with a devious twist. There was a lever, I pulled it, and the job was 75% done.Herdling’s analog of FAR’s plate-spinning vehicle controls is in the unwieldiness you’d expect from fantasy goat herding. Your flock go More or Less where you want them to. They stop More or Less when you ask them to. It’s almost akin to something like Surgeon Simulator, where the challenge sits entirely in the floppy, wooly membrane between the player’s intent and the on-screen consequences. But it’s not remotely that tricky. In fact, after half an hour, it’ll be as second nature as anything else you do in games.

Image credit: Okomotive

This is a road trip without any road blocks. Sure, there are bits that require you to go slowly, or trigger a requisite number of magical plants to unlock the path ahead, but it’s all very rote. Each chapter ends with the shepherd and his flock settling down for the night at a campfire, but in more than one instance I felt as though we’d barely done anything to warrant a kip. And it wasn’t even night time.

It’s a bizarre, uncanny sort of experience. And yet, the core conceit works: your herd is special, and dear. You want to protect them from the perils of the world. All of your animals have a sweet individuality to them: some of them love playing fetch, some of them are constantly getting their fur manky with mud and twigs no matter how often you clean them. Others have a stoic beauty about them that implies a quiet, contemplative intelligence working behind the googly eyes.And when you lose one, it is devastating. This is most easy to do during the many traversal sequences where the treacherous ground, rather than the nasty birds, is your enemy. The one time I lost a Calicorn was here, on a spindly bridge across an impossible gorge, as I failed to get to dear Butthead in time and he slid yowling into the depths.

Yes, you can anme them. From then on, Butthead would reappear at certain points in the story as a spectral ghost, snuffling around for ethereal food or running gleefully with his still living siblings as we frolicked across the plains (wonderfully, there is a lot of plain frolicking to be had). In a way I’m glad that my Herdling story was so bittersweet: had I managed to finish the game with all my herd assembled and well, I wouldn’t have experienced the guilt of losing Butthead, and I wouldn’t have yearned for him to move on with his afterlife every time he returned to us: unallowing us to mourn him, hanging around like a stuck sneeze. It’s a wonderful commentary on grief, on how losing a loved one somehow short-circuits your innate sense of causality and object permanence. How a death in the family is not an event, but a state change. Not a moment, but an eternity.

A wing and a prayer. | Image credit: Okomotive

At a slim three hours, give or take, and with very little replay value, Herdling is an almost perfect package of bottled feelings. Personally I would urge you to treat it as a one-and-done, as it’s far more poignant if you have to live with a mistake or two. Those who need some sort of skill challenge to stay engaged may find Herdling a disappointing experience that never quite spools up, but if you just love being absorbed in a world, and throwing yourself into the kind of narrative that only video games can provide – powerful, memorable stories told not with dialogue but with interaction, movement, and art, wordless conversations between game and player that reach far deeper places than you expect – Herdling is a must play.

It’s not as good as FAR: Lone Sails, but what is?

A copy of Herdling was provided for review by Panic.



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August 27, 2025 0 comments
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A screenshot of the PC version of Gears of War: Reloaded
Gaming Gear

Gears of War: Reloaded PC performance: The updated graphics are easy work for any desktop GPU from the past six years but they’re still enough to give handhelds grief

by admin August 26, 2025



If you were hoping that Gears of War: Reloaded was going to be like The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, then I have a bit of bad news for you. It’s essentially 2016’s Ultimate Edition of Gears of War, but with better lighting and textures—everything else, including meshes, animations, and the overall gameplay, is exactly the same.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was a remaster itself, so Reloaded is a remastered remaster. Or is it a re-re-master? Either way, whatever your feelings are about the Ultimate Edition, they’ll probably be no different for Reloaded.

I must admit to being a little surprised that developers The Coalition retained the use of Unreal Engine 3 for Reloaded, albeit with large chunks of it heavily rewritten, replaced, and modified. But having thought about it, rewriting the whole game to work with Unreal Engine 5 was probably going to be too much work for the scale of the project, and if you’re going to do that, then you might as well do a full remake instead.


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(Image credit: Microsoft Studios)(Image credit: Microsoft Studios)

The good news about sticking with the old engine and just using better quality assets, lighting, shadows, and reflections, is that Gears of War: Reloaded will run on pretty much any gaming PC you like. For game performance analysis, I usually start with a top-end rig, but in this instance, I kicked off with the oldest gaming PC in my office, and the game ran so well—even at maximum quality settings—that I skipped over testing a full range of PCs.

In fact, other than one very specific type of PC platform, you can likely just slap all the settings to the maximum values and enjoy 60+ fps performance. You might need to keep the resolution down or utilise a spot of FSR 3.1 or DLSS 3.5 upscaling to push it higher if you want to, but the main reason for using either one is for the superior anti-aliasing—the alternative is to use FXAA, but there’s absolutely no reason to do so.

Tested on: Core i7 9700K | Radeon RX 5700 XT | 16 GB DDR4-3200

1080p | FSR Balanced | Ultra quality preset

As you can see from the above footage, the Core i7 9700K + Radeon RX 5700 XT combination has no problems whatsoever running Gears of War: Reloaded at an acceptable frame rate. There’s quite a big difference in the frame rate when fighting in narrow corridors to battles held in open areas, but every PC I tested is affected in the same way.

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If you’re happy to go with a lower frame rate (GoW:R isn’t a fast-reaction game by any means), then you could increase the upscaling quality mode. AMD’s FSR Native AA and Nvidia’s DLAA are both supported, but you’re not really going to easily tell the difference between them and DLSS/FSR Quality.

Admittedly, the RX 5700 XT is still quite a capable graphics card, so the next platform I tested Gears of War: Reloaded on was an entry-level gaming laptop.

Tested on: Ryzen 7 7735HS | GeForce RTX 4050 | 16 GB DDR5-4800

1080p | FXAA | Ultra quality preset

Just as with the Core i7 9700K rig, the RTX 4050 laptop coped absolutely fine. So much so that for the above footage, I disabled DLSS and just used FXAA to remove jagged edges from objects, characters, and other models. Even with no performance boost from upscaling, the little laptop has no problem hitting 60 fps or more.

The other reason why I included the use of FXAA was to highlight just how bad the anti-aliasing technique is compared to what can be achieved with FSR and DLSS. Both solutions have been implemented well in the game, so you’re pretty much covered, no matter what GPU you have.

Tested on: Core Ultra 9 285K | GeForce RTX 5090 | 48 GB DDR5-8400

4K | DLAA | Ultra quality

Heading to the other end of the hardware scale, pairing a GeForce RTX 5090 with a Core Ultra 9 285K and 48 GB of DDR5-8400 produces an entirely expected outcome. You might be surprised that the fps isn’t higher, but that’s in part because Gears of War: Reloaded has an adjustable frame rate cap with a limit of 240 fps.

You might think it has to do with the choice of CPU, as Intel’s Arrow Lake chips aren’t the best for gaming. However, the 5090 was being correctly utilised, and at no point were the 285K’s P-cores being saturated with work. In fact, this was common across all of the PCs I tested Gears of War: Reloaded on, though there was one exception.

Tested on: Asus ROG Ally | 15 W mode

1080p | FSR Balanced | Custom low quality

Given how well the old Core i7 9700K rig coped with 1080p Ultra quality, I was confident that my Asus ROG Ally would be fine with a lower preset and perhaps a bit more upscaling. Upon first firing up the game on the handheld gaming PC, it defaulted to the Medium quality preset with FSR Balanced upscaling.

In the narrow corridors, it just about reached 60 fps, but once out into the open areas, the frame rate would drop below 40 fps. That might not sound particularly rubbish, but it created a surprising amount of input lag, making what’s already quite a clunky game feel leaden and slow.

(Image credit: Microsoft Studios)

My solution was to use the Low preset with a Medium quality texture setting. You don’t really gain much fps by using lower quality textures, and it looks especially bad on the Low or Lowest preset. To be frank, while the new HDR lighting algorithm does a decent job of things, the game’s old-school looks lean heavily on the quality of the textures. In some cases, even on the maximum setting, they’re rather poor, so you’ll want to use the best texture setting that you can.

The one thing I did notice when testing the ROG Ally was that the GPU utilisation was quite poor. In the above footage, you can see that some of the handheld’s CPU cores are being hit quite hard, and along with the relative lack of VRAM bandwidth, this particular handheld isn’t best suited for good-looking, smooth gameplay in GoW:R. Steam Deck owners will want to skip the game entirely.

Final thoughts

(Image credit: Microsoft Studios)

In addition to the above PC platforms, I tested Gears of War: Reloaded on Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5700X3D, Core i5 13600K, and Core i7 14700K rigs, with graphics cards including a GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 5070, and a Radeon RX 6750 XT and RX 7900 XT. All of them, without exception, had no difficulties in running GoW:R with the Ultra preset enabled.

In some cases, I had to use Balanced upscaling instead of Quality or DLAA/Native AA, but it didn’t affect the visual quality of the game, and it helped keep the 1% low performance above 60 frames per second. It’s just a shame that I couldn’t do the same with my ROG Ally, without ruining the game’s looks.

The old-school graphics techniques are a piece of cake for any modern graphics card, to be honest, because they all have enough pixel throughput and VRAM bandwidth to keep on top of things. However, handheld PCs are limited in both of these aspects, which is a real shame, as Gears of War: Reloaded is supposed to scale down to such hardware.

Technically, it does, though you’ll have to accept a relatively low frame rate and sluggish controls. At least I didn’t experience any glitches or bugs in the review code, nor any shader compilation or traversal stutters—just frame rate wobbles upon loading a new stage and hit boxes with minds of their own.

Gears of War: Reloaded is arguably a more definitive version of the game than the Ultimate Edition, and if the idea of playing a stompy-stompy, cover-and-fire classic appeals to you, then at least you won’t have to worry about whether your desktop or laptop gaming PC will be up to the task.

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August 26, 2025 0 comments
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