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Fanatical’s Latest PC Game Bundle Includes Death Stranding: Director’s Cut, Cryptmaster, And 20 More Games

by admin August 22, 2025

Fanatical has launched a new Summer Superstars Collection Bundle, giving you the chance to grab up to 22 PC games for as little as $6.60 each. The curated list has some pretty good titles in the mix, ranging from an acclaimed Hideo Kojima game to a colorful Zelda-like set in the Austrian Alps. Pricing starts at two games for $15 ($7.50 per key), and the price will drop the more games you choose from the list. If you choose three or more games, you’ll pay $7.15 per key, and if you choose five or more games, the price drops further to $6.60 per key. There’s no limit to how many games you can select, and if you grab all 22 games, you’ll pay $145–a pretty big discount from the full bundle’s $519 value.

Kicking things off is Death Stranding: Director’s Cut. Hideo Kojima’s first game after his departure from Konami, Death Stranding is a strange but engaging game about getting cargo from point A to B while being mindful of the terrain, rain that steals time, and invisible dead creatures known as BTs. It has a slow start, but once things pick up, the game quickly evolves into a breathtaking tour of the US. This is the Director’s Cut as well, so you’re getting numerous enhancements and gameplay refinements. Since the sequel has just come out on PS5–and has been critically acclaimed–this is a great way to jump into the world of Death Stranding before Death Stranding 2: On the Beach makes its way to PC eventually.

Our other big recommendation is Dungeons of Hinterberg. Imagine The Legend of Zelda if it were a European comic book, and you’ll have a good idea of what you can expect from the game’s visuals and vibe. The game features a robust system of socializing, as you’ll need to brave dungeons and the nightlife of a scenic Austrian village, building bonds with your fellow adventurers.

Fanatical’s Build your own Summer Superstars Collection

Another notable pick is the action-adventure game Creatures of Ava. As Vic, a researcher who arrives on the planet Ava to help rescue animals before the world is rendered uninhabitable by a mysterious plague, you’ll have to explore diverse biomes to save all of the critters.

There are many more games to pick from in Fanatical’s Build Your Own Summer Super Stars Collection, including the dungeon-crawling typing game Cryptmaster, post-apocalyptic colony survival sim Endzone 2, and the puzzle-RPG hybrid Arranger, which melds slide puzzles and bumb combat with art by David Hellman of Braid fame. Check the list below for all the games you can pick in the deal, or head over to Fanatical to start customizing your own bundle. As a reminder, each game purchased is delivered as an official Steam key.

Fanatical’s Build Your Own Summer Superstars Collection

Achilles: Legends Untold (Steam Deck Verified)
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure (Steam Deck Verified)
Bear’s Restaurant (Steam Deck Verified)
The Coin Game
Creatures of Ava (Steam Deck Verified)
Cryptmaster (Steam Deck Playable)
Dark Envoy (Steam Deck Verified)
Deathbound (Steam Deck Playable)
Death Stranding: Director’s Cut (Steam Deck Verified)
Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age (Steam Deck Verified)
Dungeons of Hinterberg (Steam Deck Verified)
Endzone 2
House Party (Steam Deck Playable)
Knights Within 2 (Steam Deck Playable)
Let’s School: Super Headmaster Edition (Steam Deck Verified)
Meg’s Monster (Steam Deck Verified)
Paleo Pines (Steam Deck Verified)
Shogun Showdown (Steam Deck Verified)
Sovereign Syndicate (Steam Deck Playable)
Sucker for Love Double-Pack (Steam Deck Playable)
Ultimate Zombie Defense Bundle
Wildmender (Steam Deck Verified)

There are also several other bundle deals from Fanatical that you can explore right now. The Build Your Own Blazing Bundle offers a variety of exciting genres to check out and the August Platinum Bundle is full of interesting games like Choo-Choo Charles and Fallout 76. If you’d like to grab RoboCop: Rogue City for just $5–and a few other games–then don’t miss out on the Killer Bundle, or for a selection of action-packed games, there’s also the Build Your Own Slayer Bundle.

Disclosure: GameSpot and Fanatical are both owned by Fandom.

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August 22, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Video Games Weekly: Silksong and Gamescom

by admin August 21, 2025

Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday (or Wednesday, whatever), broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.

On a planet shrouded in myth, in a land surrounded by lore, on a mountain draped in mystery, in a cave suffocated by secrets, the legend sleeps. For six years, the legend has slumbered while wild stories spiral around it, twisting and expanding and entwining. New words have been born and old words infused with evolved meanings: Believer. Doubter. Silkpost. The lies have grown so thick they’ve become corporeal, spreading trickery with a name and a dead smile.

For six years, the legend has slept while the masses roiled, all of them waiting for the signal to awaken and know truth. All of them waiting for a bell that will ring, finally and clearly, on Thursday, August 21, 2025.

Skong. Skong. Skong.

It’s a special time in the Silksong subreddit. After years of silence around its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Team Cherry has scheduled a livestream with a “special announcement” about the game for August 21 at 10:30AM ET. Not only is this exciting for Metroidvania fans everywhere, but it’s also possible that this announcement marks the final moments of the Silksong subreddit as we know it. A strange cocktail of game delays, inconsistent updates and hyper-focused cult fandom has cultivated a fascinating little universe in r/Silksong, complete with its own rules, villains and heroes. It’s a place where clown wigs are commonplace and contributors have turned trolling into a role-playing artform. A LARPform, if you will. It’s a place that’s consistently made me laugh every time it’s appeared in my feed over the past year or so.

Ahead of Thursday’s special announcement, this sub is experiencing the last gasps of desperate myth-making and hopeless anticipation before it transforms into something else entirely, armed with actual information about the sequel, gameplay videos and maybe even a firm release date. Or, dare I say it, a surprise launch. For just a moment longer in r/Silksong, anything is possible.

And then it’ll be over. No matter what happens during Thursday’s livestream, the day will come when Silksong comes out and the drip-feed of silkposts dries up completely. But for now, our face paint is ready. Sometimes it’s just nice to recognize the madness and the beauty of the moment, before it slips away for good.

The news

News from ONL 2025

Gamescom 2025 kicked off on Tuesday with Opening Night Live, a showcase hosted by Geoff Keighley and the folks behind The Game Awards, and there were plenty of delightful morsels on display. Engadget UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith is on the ground at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, to play upcoming titles and talk to developers, but for now, here are our headlines straight out of ONL 2025:

And our headlines from Gamescom 2025 so far:

Gamescom 2025 runs through August 24.

ROG Xbox Ally lands in October

Microsoft is slowly establishing its handheld era with news that the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X will be available on October 16. There’s still no official word on how much they’ll cost, but there are hints: As spotted by Wario64, Best Buy recently listed the Xbox Ally at $550 and the Xbox Ally X at $900, and these fall in line with our predictions, which were based on the prices of existing ROG Ally handhelds. Alongside the release date, Microsoft announced the Handheld Compatibility Program, an initiative aimed at optimizing games for portable devices and informing players about how well they perform. It’s essentially Steam Deck Verified, but for Xbox handhelds, and it’s yet another sign that Microsoft’s portable gaming ambitions stretch beyond just one hardware manufacturer.

The PS5 will cost more tomorrow than it does today

First Nintendo and Microsoft raised the prices of their latest consoles, and now it’s Sony’s turn. Sony on Wednesday announced the following price increases for the PS5 family:

Standard PS5 with a disc drive: $550, up from $500
PS5 digital edition: $500, up from $450
PS5 Pro: $750, up from $700

Sony blames the increases on a “challenging economic environment,” echoing sentiments from its contemporaries. The price hikes come at a time in the hardware generation when we’re used to seeing consoles get cheaper, which just makes this whole thing more frustrating.

Rod Fergusson is in charge of BioShock again and already making big changes

There have been signs of turmoil at BioShock 4 studio Cloud Chamber for a while now, including news earlier this month that the game failed a review with 2K executives and was due for a complete narrative revamp. Now, we’re seeing even more fallout. Former Gears of War and Diablo head Rod Fergusson has left Blizzard to lead development of BioShock 4 at Cloud Chamber, and his appointment comes alongside news that 80 people at the studio are being laid off. This is actually the second time Fergusson has joined the development of a BioShock game at the last second — he similarly swooped in and cut aspects of BioShock: Infinite at Irrational Games in 2012.

The race through development hell between Judas and BioShock 4 continues.

Blizzard’s cinematic and narrative team is unionizing

Microsoft is the home of another video game union. Workers with Blizzard Entertainment’s Story and Franchise Development team, which handles in-game cinematics and lore for titles including Overwatch and World of Warcraft, voted this week to unionize under the Communications Workers of America. This covers about 169 developers and it marks the fourth unionization effort from Microsoft’s gaming teams, joining QA workers at Activision, ZeniMax and Raven Software.

Steam censorship is breaking PayPal

PayPal isn’t a valid way to buy games on Steam in certain countries any longer. Steam in July removed hundreds of games with adult and NSFW themes from its storefront, and updated its policies to ban “content that may violate the rules and standards” of its payment processors. This was incredibly vague and raised immediate concerns around financial censorship, especially when combined with a related culling of thousands of games from Itch.io. Now, it’s confirmed that PayPal has terminated its partnership with Steam in multiple countries, affecting any denomination “other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.”

Valve says it’s being pressured by payment processors including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal to remove certain games and implement puritanical censorship policies, and this has already resulted in at least one game being unjustly removed from the platform. That game, VILE: Exhumed, is now available as shareware.

Roblox is changing its rules after so, so many child-safety lawsuits

Roblox is locking down its system for sharing and viewing user-generated games following a wave of lawsuits accusing developers of failing to protect their young userbase. All unrated experiences, or user-created games, will be restricted to the developer and anyone actively working on them, rather than being available to anyone over the age of 13, as is currently the case. This change and others, including a new system that automatically detects and tracks “violative scenes” on individual servers, will roll out over the coming months.

Analogue delayed its N64 remake again

It’s now due out in Q4 2025. 🙁

Additional reading

Kris Holt’s indie game roundup
More action than RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 struggles to convince after a few hours’ play by Robert Purchese at Eurogamer

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August 21, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Oh No, There Are Way Too Many Games Launching In October

by admin August 21, 2025

There’s a large storm forming on the horizon. This October, around 40 games across all kinds of genres, franchises, and scales are set to launch on every major platform under the sun. There’s no escaping it. There are likely at least two games (or more!) in October that you’ll want to play, including stuff like Battlefield 6 and Moonlighter 2. So batten down the hatches and get ready to ride out the video game super storm that is coming in just a few short months.

Here’s the full list of planned October releases as of August 20:

Ghost of Yotei – October 2
Gigasword – October 2
Neon Inferno – October 2
Borderlands 4 on Switch 2 – October 3
Digimon Story: Time Stranger – October 3
Absolum – October 9
Painkiller – October 9
Barbie Horse Trails – October 10
Battlefield 6 – October 10
Little Nightmares 3 – October 10
Nascar 25 – October 14
Just Dance 2026 – October 14
Ball x Pit – October 15
Pokemon Legends: Z-A – October 16
Keeper – October 17
The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes – October 17
Escape Simulator 2 – October 21
Bloodlines 2 – Oct 21
Jurassic World Evolution 3 – October 21
Ninja Gaiden 4 – October 21
Double Dragon Revive – October 23
Moonlighter 2 – Oct 23
Plants Vs. Zombies: Replanted – October 23
The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles – October 23
Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition – October 24
Once Upon a Katamari – October 24
Ire: A Prologue – October 28
The Outer Worlds 2 – October 29
Arc Raiders – October 30
Terminator 2D: No Fate – October 31
Mina the Hollower – October 31

On Tuesday, during Gamescom Opening Night Live, I noticed a few games received October launch dates. I wondered to myself how many other games were arriving in that same month. Checking online, I discovered a giant list of October releases. This is one of the most jam-packed months I’ve seen in some time. It’s not just that a lot of games are arriving in a short window, but how varied the list is. We have big open-world AAA games, like Ghost of Yotei and, on Switch 2, Borderlands 4. But we also have smaller games like Ball X Pit and Moonlighter 2. There’s a park builder courtesy of Jurassic World Evolution 3 and a massive online shooter in the form of Battlefield 6. New Pokémon and Digimon games, a fresh Ninja Gaiden, a big Obsidian RPG, a creepy horror game, vampires, and even a fucking Christmas game. Heck, the new Double Fine game, Keeper, is out in October, and I’ve been waiting years for that studio’s next project. Now it’s coming, but sandwiched between, like, six other games I want to play.

What’s going on here? Well, some of this is just normal video game industry stuff. Studios want to get their games out before the holiday shopping season. But I bet some of these games were holding off until they knew what Rockstar was planning with Grand Theft Auto 6. And once it became clear October and November wouldn’t be dominated by GTA 6, as Rockstar delayed the open-world game to May 2026, some publishers and devs likely committed to launching in the spookiest month of the year.

Sure, maybe a few of these get delayed, but I’m not holding my breath. October isn’t that far away, so I’d expect most of these games to be locked in and not budge to November or later. That’s a scary thought as someone who works at a video game website. While I’m excited to have new stuff to play and write about, I wish it were a bit more spread out. Such is life. Good luck out there, folks, and remember: You can’t play it all, so play what you can and enjoy the ride.

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August 21, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

In Full Bloom isn’t just about being a planet-devouring Sarlacc’s babysitter, it’s my brain on games showcase

by admin August 20, 2025

I drop the house into the great maw (not that one). It screams as it falls away from the clutches of my mouse clicker. It disappears from view, but there’s a sickeningly wet crunching that betrays its fate. Oh and the fact that the entity’s jaws immediately flare open once more, teeth and tongue dripping with anguish to cram vegetation, trees, towerblocks into its gullet.

This is In Full Bloom, a game that scores the full 10/10 in the wonderfully ironic naming category. Set in a greyscale universe sucked free of all hope and colour, it tasks you with accomplishing an impossible task. You’ve got to keep the infernal child of constant consumption happy by tossing an unending stream of junk into its mouth.

The demo I’ve just played for it has been out for a little while on Itch.io, while the Steam page foretelling a full release in 2026 went up a couple of months ago. The thing that led me to In Full Bloom today, of all days, was one tweet in a thread, which featured a picture of Swiss studio Obleak Games’ patch of Gamescom. I saw the giant mouth perched atop a dark planet, and decided this was a thing I had to play.

I’m glad I did. In Full Bloom’s described as a Katamari-like, and the truth is that it’s exactly what would happen if the folks who do Katamari were like ‘Right, how can we take everything that doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end in this game, and flip it so that’s a feeling so overwhelming you won’t be able to forget it’. To put it another way, the game’s like jumping into a MeatCanyon video about ASMR. Being not just present among the skin-crawling proceedings, but winding the crank that powers their descent into even more horrific depths.

Ok, I might be being a bit dramatic, but if you dislike the sound of people eating, this isn’t the game for you. The demo has three stages – small mouth, big mouth, and bigger mouth. You start off with the first, feeding it detritus and colourless veg from a garden as it grows with each gulp. The entity’s young at this point, so it makes panicked baby squeals and gurgles amid the slurping and swallowing of its three-toothed maw. I think they get more intense if you stop shovelling food in, but honestly they made me so uncomfortable that I couldn’t entertain slowing down to find out.

Watch on YouTube

Big mouth’s grown up, so it has a full set of human gnashers and can gradually work its way up to chowing down a full cul-de-sac. Fences, trees, screaming houses. There’s also a bus doing merry laps around the creature – you can have your weird son try to catch it by pointing with the mouse, but I didn’t manage it. The lethargy of this movement, while saving In Full Bloom from being a fully static experience and undeniably fitting with the rest of its atmoshere, does mean there’s nothing akin to the frenetic rolling that gives good universe Katamari its upbeat tempo and fuels a lot of the fun.

The sense of satisfaction you get from plucking up increasingly ludicrous amounts and sizes of object is still there, but that sense of satisfaction has become terrifying, as you sacrifice moons to a continent-proportioned pit of despair.

Image credit: obleak games

The demo will need plenty of fleshing out before it’s a game I can see myself playing for more than one sitting. It’s carried a lot by the novelty of the weirdness. As of right now, it’s a top class metaphor for the mechanisms of capital, always desperate for more, demanding constant and unsustainable growth because as the game’s description says, “there is only one way”.

I reckon it’s more universal than just that, though. It might be because the experience is fresh in my mind, but I spent my time with it being reminded of how helping cover the biggest game showcases has often left me feeling so far in my career. I like video games, but when they’re being fired at you one after the other, in a barrage of double digit minutes or hours, they tend to just blend into an overwhelming soup of lights, faces, rambling voices, bangs, booms, instrumental swells, platforms, release dates, jangling Keighs.

By the time your eyes have adjusted to try and take in one, the next has already arrived, like scoops of ice cream being fired from a machine gun. In the rush of the moment, the job’s to be a speedy vessel of information, from the stream to the virtual page. Ice Cream. Vanilla. Travelling at 50mph. Could have been double scoop if £50.99 deluxe edition was bought. Publish.

There’s a great skill to it, and even more of a skill to being able to take all of this in and occasionally give some useful commentary, like ‘the consistency of that mint scoop as it flies by may hint at chocolate chips, which would be an improvement from the last one, the chiplessness of which I and many long-time fans disliked’. As with folks watching at home, there’s a thrill to just seeing which games pop up, but the adrenaline rush is tied to a love of the scramble.

There may well be a day when this work feels more like classic Katamari rolling to me, but for now it’s more like feeding In Full Bloom’s great gob. Speaking of which, oh god, I think it’s hungry again.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

‘To put it bluntly, it was copying others’: Former Dragon Quest producer says he left Square Enix because the developer was too focused on making ‘safe’ games

by admin August 20, 2025

Former Dragon Quest producer Ryutaro Ichimura says he left Square Enix because the developer and publisher was too focused on making “safe” games.

In a recent episode of ReHacQ (translated by Automaton), Ichimura says he had always planned to go independent eventually, but Square Enix’s way of handling things sped that process up significantly. According to him, the publisher has been pretty focused on “safe” projects over the last several years, which he wasn’t too keen about.

He says that in comparison to current-day Square Enix, the early days of Dragon Quest were all about innovation. “In Dragon Quest 2, you had a three-person party. In Dragon Quest 3, you could change jobs. In Dragon Quest 4, party members could fight using AI,” he said. “Each entry pushed the series forward, both through the evolution of game mechanics and by leveraging the latest hardware at the time.”

It seems as though Ichimura wasn’t fond of Dragon Quest spin-offs like Builders—a more narrative-driven Minecraft—and the Pokémon Go-inspired Dragon Quest Walk. He says Square Enix pivoted to hitting its own version of popular games to try and nail some guaranteed winners, especially as Dragon Quest’s popularity outside of Japan wasn’t as stellar as it hoped. “To put it bluntly, it was copying others,” Ichimura said.

(Image credit: Square Enix)

Automaton notes that Ichimura calls the Dragon Quest spin-offs “pakuri kikaku,” meaning copycat projects. I do feel like that’s a little harsh in the case of Dragon Quest Builders, which feels like it does enough differently from Minecraft to shake off too many comparisons.

I also feel like if anyone is taking risks with strange games right now, it’s Square Enix. Does it put any effort into marketing any of them? Hell no, but it has at least tried to push out some weirder stuff like Foamstars (which, to be fair, was very Splatoon-coded), Harvestella, and The DioField Chronicle. And lest we forget Forspoken, a game that very much had the potential to be rad if it wasn’t, well, a bit boring.

I do agree with his sentiment at large, though: bigger games are getting safer, and we’re all suffering for it. Why reinvent the wheel when there’s a perfectly good one to slap another coat of paint on and roll out to the masses?

Games are getting more expensive to make and people are increasingly less willing to risk spending the dough on potential duds that get banished to a decades-long backlog. It’s a tough situation to be in on all sides, and while I don’t entirely agree with Ichimura’s sentiment, his frustrations are certainly valid.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

The Most Dope Games We’ve Played During Gamescom 2025

by admin August 20, 2025

Gamescom 2025 has begun, and I’m on site in Cologne, Germany, checking out more than two dozen new and upcoming games, ranging from Hollow Knight: Silksong to The Outer Worlds 2 to 007 First Light and beyond! I’ll be doing individual write-ups for a lot of these games, but I’ll also be writing condensed quick-hit thoughts on the coolest games I’ve played so far, and you can read them right here (so bookmark this page, folks!).

The Most Dope Games We’ve Played During Gamescom 2025

Below, you’ll find a running list of the games I’ve played during Gamescom 2025. They’ll be listed in reverse-chronological order, so the latest game I’ve played will be at the top and the first game I played will be at the very bottom!

Hollow Knight: Silksong

It’s real, y’all. Hollow Knight: Silksong exists and is playable, and I checked out the game’s very first level, Moss Grotto. After a brief cutscene that shows Hornet trapped in a Cinderella-like carriage (that she then breaks out of), I take control. Immediately, Hornet is much faster than the first game’s protagonist, both as she platforms around and with her attacks. She has a new ability called Bind (used by pressing B on an Xbox controller) that heals her. However, you can’t spam this ability as it requires using a bar on screen that must be full.

It recharges over time and by defeating enemies, and I found it pretty easy to get it full for another Bind. Platforming around Moss Grotto feels a lot like 2017’s Hollow Knight, though Hornet is more nimble and can mantle up cliffs and platforms. The enemies here are easy to defeat, and it’s not until I fight the demo’s boss, Moss Mother, that I’m challenged. It’s a fun fight, but still mostly easy.

With the demo and my hands-on time with Silksong behind me, I’m excited to see what else awaits me in the full game. If this first level is any indication, it’s going to be a great Metroidvania, much like the first game. That said, I’m not convinced it’s going to break through the hype and make a mark on the genre like the first game did. I’m also not convinced it needs to, though.

For more, read my full Hollow Knight: Silksong hands-on thoughts here.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Dragon Quest producer Ryutaro Ichimura left Square Enix because it was prioritizing “safe” or “copycat” games

by admin August 20, 2025

Dragon Quest producer Ryutaro Ichimura said he left publisher Square Enix because the company was prioritizing “safe” projects.

Ichimura joined Enix in 2000 and spent most of his career working on the Dragon Quest series, progressing to producer on Dragon Quest 8: Journey of the Cursed King and Dragon Quest 9: Sentinels of the Starry Skies.

But as the developer told ReHacQ, he ended up leaving because “to put it bluntly, [Square Enix] was copying others.”

“In DQ 2, you had a three-person party, in DQ 3 you could change jobs, in DQ 4, party members could fight using AI. Each entry pushed the series forward, both through the evolution of game mechanics and by leveraging the latest hardware of the time,” Ichimura said (as transcribed and translated by Automaton).

According to Automaton’s reporting, Ichimura felt Dragon Quest was a “leader” in the RPG space, and he was keen to “build something from zero.” But with spiralling costs, the producer felt Square Enix was less willing to innovative and instead focused on its tentpole franchises or “pakuri kikaku” — copycat projects — like the Minecraft-like Dragon Quest Builders, or Pokémon Go-inspired Dragon Quest Walk.

When Square Enix wouldn’t greenlight an idea for “game in which players could learn about wordbuilding and story structure through gameplay, and then build their own Sragon Quest-style games,” Ichimura left.

Ryutaro Ichimura formed PinCool, a new NetEase Games-funded development studio, in May 2023.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Eight games, including an overlooked Metroidvania, will leave PlayStation Plus in September

by admin August 19, 2025

The games set to leave PlayStation Plus Extra in September have been revealed. The eight titles include some very good games, so you might want to make some time before 16th September to get them played.

As these games are part of the Game Catalogue and not the monthly games that you claim as part of PS Plus Essential, these games will no longer be playable from 16th September even if they are in your library.

Leaving PS Plus Extra on 16th September:

UFC 5 (PS5)
The Plucky Squire (PS5)
Night in the Woods (PS5, PS4)
Road 96 (PS5, PS4)
Pistol Whip (PSVR2)
Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir (PS4)
FIST: Forged In Shadow Torch (PS5, PS4)
Dragon’s Crown Pro (PS4)

Of the bunch, I’d certainly recommend FIST: Forged In Shadow Torch, especially if you are partial to a Metroidvania. Pistol Whip is superb if you have PS VR2, and the Plucky Squire is definitely worth a look even though it didn’t quite live up to pre-launch expectations. Night in the Woods is also excellent.

In fact, why stop there… Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir and Dragon’s Crown Pro are also very good games. So, really, what I’m saying is, don’t rush to play UFC 5 (which is fine, but just more UFC) or Road 96 (didn’t enjoy the writing on this, unfortunately), but all the others are worth your time.

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.

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August 19, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

18th August video games round-up: Battlefield 6 beta sadness, Shenmue 3, and a Nintendo Direct for Kirby

by admin August 19, 2025

Update: That was the world of video games today on 18th August. A full transcript of everything that occurred today is available below if you wish to digest it all at your leisure.

It’s 18th August, and we’re back with another daily live report. We’ll be running down all the day’s news and events, checking in with what you are up to, and providing some hopefully entertaining commentary on the world of video games.

Today we’ve got some great articles going live on the site, but we’ll also discuss Gamescom, which takes place this week, and look at the games releasing in September that you’ve got your eyes on.

Our live coverage of this event has finished.

Coverage
Comments

08:09 am
UTC

Morning everyone! I hope you’ll join us today as we look ahead to Gamescom, round up the day’s news and events, and think about the games we’re all looking forward to in September.

Tom Orry

08:15 am
UTC

Kane & Lynch 2 – remembering the most miserable game of all time

If you’re looking for something to read on a quiet Monday morning, and you missed what we published over the weekend, here’s a round-up:

Tom Orry

08:31 am
UTC

Tony Hawk on his life and his video games

Image credit: TonyHawk.com

Has a video games series had a bigger impact on people than the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series? Talk to anyone who was playing video games and growing up in the late 90s/early 00s and I bet most of them have fond memories of those early games.

Tom Orry

08:33 am
UTC

rmx87 says: It’s the 18th Tom! Morning!MarcusJ says: Flip your desk calendar over, Tom!

Looking forward to this week’s EG. Should be some good stuff.

Well done you two! Test passed. You both win a day of live reporting. Congratulations!

Tom Orry

09:00 am
UTC

New Pokémon Legends: Z-A trailer shows off Link Battles

If you are keen for every single morsel of Pokémon Legends: Z-A info, as some of the team at Eurogame are, then this new trailer and info released over the weekend will be of interest. This latest game update focuses on the game’s Link Battles.

Watch on YouTube

Tom Orry

09:16 am
UTC

Gamescom ONL, time to get hyped via a trailer?

We reserve the right not to get hyped about Gamescom ONL, the show taking place tomorrow evening (7pm BST in the UK), but that hasn’t stopped Geoff putting out a trailer designed to do just that.

Watch on YouTube

Tom Orry

09:50 am
UTC

2much says: Presumably _this_ is the night we’re gonna see the Bloodborne remaster

Thanks for this, 2much. I needed a good laugh this morning. ONL is tomorrow night, and I will be gobsmacked if anything near this level of game reveal is there.

Tom Orry

10:00 am
UTC

Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War is one of the greatest strategy games of all time

Image credit: Relic Entertainment

Chris is well into Space Marines and that, and he has a special place in his heart for the Dawn of War series. The original game was a little tricky to get running nicely on modern hardware, but the newly released Definitive Edition fixes all that and comes with a bunch of new refinements and tweaks.

To quote Chris, verbatim, from a definitely real conversation I had with him about Dawn of War: “It’s orksome.” What more do you need to be told?

Tom Orry

10:15 am
UTC

On the subject of games people are looking forward to in September (and end of August, if you want):

Danzig85 says: I’ve got my eye on Metal Gear this month and Hell Is Us next month. Plenty to finish before then though.

So many games, so little time.

Both potentially great games. We’ve got a MGS3 Delta review coming later this week, and Hell is Us has impressed at preview.

Tom Orry

11:02 am
UTC

These games are set to leave Xbox Game Pass at the end of August

Image credit: Sabotage / Eurogamer.

Xbox has revealed which games are leaving Xbox Game Pass at the end of August. A few good ones in this list.

Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition
Sea of Stars
Paw Patrol Mighty Pups Save Adventure Bay
This War of Mine: Final Cut
Ben 10: Power Trip

Tom Orry

11:39 am
UTC

chesterBox says: PS Store added a discount called “Gamescom 2025” and there’s Bloodborne… that must mean something, right? Right?! 😀

(99% it does not mean anything)

Don’t do this to yourself, Chester. It’ll just bring pain.

But… what if?

Tom Orry

11:44 am
UTC

A delve into the Eurogamer archive

Image credit: Valve

My brain can’t always go back far enough to bring out the real classics, but this superb article from Simon Parkin popped into my head this morning, so I’m sharing it with you all now.

At 6am on 7th May 2004, Axel Gembe awoke in the small German town of Schönau im Schwarzwald to find his bed surrounded by police officers. Automatic weapons were pointing at his head and the words, “Get out of bed. Do not touch the keyboard,” were ringing in his ears.

Get this read if you haven’t already, or maybe read it again.

Tom Orry

12:22 pm
UTC

Euro Truck Simulator 2 PS5 and Xbox versions spotted

Cult hit Euro Truck Simulator 2 is seemingly coming to PS5 and Xbox consoles. The news comes via PSN and Xbox store listings for the game, which is yet to be officially announced for the two consoles.

Tom Orry

13:17 pm
UTC

Surprise! Shenmue 3 is back

Image credit: Ys Net

Shenmue 3 is coming back for a second bite at success with the Enhanced Edition. This reworked and improved version of the original release will be available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series consoles, and Nintendo (presumably Switch 2). A full reveal is coming at Gamescom this week.

Tom Orry

13:21 pm
UTC

Kirby Air Riders Direct tomorrow

Tune in tomorrow Tuesday, August 19th at 2pm UK time for a livestreamed Kirby Air Riders Direct featuring about 45 minutes of information about the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 game.

Boom! 45 minutes of Kirby tomorrow? What a treat.

Kirby Air Riders Direct is airing tomorrow at 2pm BST in the UK.

Tom Orry

13:42 pm
UTC

45 minutes of Kirby Air Riders? I love a bit of Kirby as much as the next fan of alien entities that take on the abilities of the objects they consume, but that’s a long time to spend on one game. I’m excited to see what Nintendo has cooked up, though.

Tom Orry

13:47 pm
UTC

Endling – Extinction dev reveals its next game

Image credit: Herobeat

Developer Herobeat has announced its next game, Rewilders: The Lost Spring, which has been inspired by the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli films.

Tom Orry

13:54 pm
UTC

Any Shenmue fans in the comments today? I won’t pretend I’m a big fan. I played the original game on the Dreamcast and simply couldn’t get into it. And that is as a huge Sega fan who had grown up as a Sega kid. Just wasn’t for me.

Tom Orry

14:23 pm
UTC

The Battlefield 6 party continues in… Battlefield 2042

Connor has been on the blower to moan about how sad he is that the Battlefield 6 beta has finished. “Don’t worry,” I said in reply, cutting through his tears. “You can just play Battlefield 2042 and earn some stuff to use in Battlefield 6.”

He turned to me (not that I could see as we were on a phone call, not a video call), and he said: “Tom, you are so wise. I will play Battlefield 2042 as I am the exact target audience for this type of marketing campaign. I’ll also write up my thoughts on such an event in a story to publish on Eurogamer.net.”

Thanks, Connor. Here is that story:

Tom Orry

14:46 pm
UTC

Today’s Blast from the Past: Flights, Co-op Tomb Raiding, and more

Image credit: Xbox / Microsoft

Another day presents another opportunity for us to look back at gaming history. Here’s some milestone anniversaries for today, 18th August:

Microsoft Flight Simulator’s grand reboot leads the pack of gaming anniversaries today – the reimagining of the franchise first released five years ago. I recieved the coveted Eurogamer Essential, back when that was the parlance – and it sits alongside Animal Crossing as a perfect game for the then all-consuming pandemic, allowing a sort of digital tourism at a time when we were all trapped inside. It’s a shame that the much more content-rich 2024 edition has run into various troubles, but hopefully that team can eventually recapture the spirit of the 2020 edition over time.
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is fifteen years old today. A cool, well-reviewed spin-off of the franchise inspired by the likes of Diablo and Gauntlet, it first launched for Xbox 360’s Live Arcade and then made its way to PS3, PC, and even mobile. It brings to mind that era when downloadables were always smaller, bite-sized games, which led to interesting spin-offs of big-name brands like this – something we now don’t see as often. A shame.
And here’s a trio of further recent anniversaries: Rogue Legacy 2, Mortal Shell, and Spiritfarer all hit on this day in 2020 – the same day as Flight Simulator! There was clearly something in the water on this day five years ago. I’m also now just realizing I can’t write “on that day five years ago”, or a variation thereof, without hearing this.

Alex Donaldson

15:04 pm
UTC

I actually really liked Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, not that I can remember a single thing about it – although I think you had to push a large ball around at one point?

Tom Orry

15:15 pm
UTC

Crazyreyn says: “Any Shenmue fans in the comments today?” hello

Here he is! The Shenmue fan has logged on.

Tom Orry

15:38 pm
UTC

Sword of the Sea review

Image credit: Giant Squid / Eurogamer

Liked this one quite a bit folks.

It’s the latest from Giant Squid, the developer behind Abzu and The Pathless, with creative director Matt Nava having also worked heavily on Journey as art director back in the day. He teams up again with renowned game composer Austin Wintory here. It’s a game that mixes a bit of light Zelda-ing with serene platforming, ludicrously pretty views and a sense of movement, mindfulness and flow that’s right up there with very best of ’em. Big fat five stars from me.

Chris Tapsell

15:44 pm
UTC

Mortal Kombat movie is 30 years old today

As the clock ticks ever closer to 5pm in the UK and I can see the fajitas I’m about to cook for my dinner drift into view, now is the perfect time to remember the original Mortal Kombat movie which turns 30 today. I know this film has gained a large following in the years since its release, but I never liked it that much. That said, it probably captured the video games better than the recent movie did. You can’t say anything negative about this music, though, which is superb.

Watch on YouTube

Tom Orry

16:03 pm
UTC

That’s your lot for today. Big day tomorrow, everyone, so don’t stay up too late tonight. Chances are there’ll be at least one good game shown during Gamescom ONL, which kicks off at 7pm BST tomorrow – although there is supposedly also a bit of a pre-show before that.

Thanks for joining us today. See you all tomorrow.

Tom Orry

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August 19, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Make-A-Wish launches initiative to “empower the games industry” to grant wishes

by admin August 18, 2025

Make-A-Wish International has launched Infinite Wishes, a new global initiative that aims to unite the video games industry “to help grant life-changing wishes for children living with critical illnesses.”

Announced in a press release on August 13, 2025, the Infinite Wishes initiative was launched “in response to a dramatic rise in gaming-related wishes,” which range from children wishing for a custom-built PC to wishing to meet developers.

Infinite Wishes aims to provide “a flexible, inclusive framework for the industry” to allow game companies to help grant these gaming-related wishes, and “to make a meaningful impact, no matter an organization’s size or budget.”

The initiative offers tiered partnership levels and non-financial participation offers, allowing companies to get involved in a way that suits their goals and resources.

“Infinite Wishes is about creating pathways for the games industry to do great things, whether that’s funding wishes, hosting a livestream, or simply sparking a new idea for impact,” said April Stallings, charitable gaming and creators community manager at Make-A-Wish International.

“We know how passionate and talented this community is. This initiative is about giving teams a purpose-driven outlet to rally around – one that lifts spirits, sparks creativity, and changes lives.”

To help guide the programme, Make-A-Wish International has assembled a Games Industry Advisory Committee, consisting of representatives from Square Enix, Bethesda, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Raccoon Logic, 2K, Deviant Legal, Modoyo, Stream for a Cause, and Dames4Games. While inaugural members include Raptor PR and PlaySafe ID.

“There’s never been a better time for the games industry to show its heart, said Wouter Van Vugt, EMEA communications and community engagement senior director at Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe and chair of the Make-A-Wish Games industry advisory committee.

“Through Infinite Wishes, our industry has the opportunity to channel our collective goodwill and reach into something that delivers lasting, real-world impact for children who need it most. The opportunity to help fulfil a child’s wish is one of the most powerful things we can offer.”

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August 18, 2025 0 comments