Bienvenidos a Miami in a new trailer for Hitman 2 which crept out of E3 earlier this week, following its cinematic-heavy announcement. It shows Ian Hitman goin’ to Miami–the city where the heat is on–to off people during a supercar race day, which will offer some exciting opportunities for creative murder in the stealth sandbox. This is a “gameplay” trailer in the “lots of clips of in-game things with no UI and often from angles you’ll never see while playing” sense of the word, but that’s E3 for you. Fear not! Actual gameplay footage of the E3 demo is starting to ooze out from the press. Read the rest of this entry »

Bad Robot, the production company of J.J. “I make every show and movie starting with ‘Star'” Abrams, have officially opened a video games division. They have dabbled in games before, including collaborating with Valve on Team Fortress 2’s Pass Time mode and with ChAIR on the still-unseen Spyjinx, but now they’re really going for it. Video games are a good match for J.J.: they share the same wild lust for exaggerated lensflare effects. What makes this most interesting is that the creative director of Bad Robot Games is Tim Keenan, the creator of wonderful low-fi sci-fi horror Duskers. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to leak week, those pre-E3 days more leaky than a colander of leek soup. This time, it’s Warner Brothers. They’ve only accidentally left a logo for Hitman 2 sitting around in the innards of their website, the big sillies. It’s gone now but was there long enough to be spotted by Twitter persons RobotBrush and Wario64. Hitman developers IO Interactive had been teasing an announcement on June 7 and it looks like this is it. We already knew the bald murderer was going on another set of homicidal holidays when IO confirmed they were working on a new entry last year. But now we know Warner Bros is officially involved too. Read the rest of this entry »

Seeing DC’s superheroes are as bad as villains these days, at least going by their movies, it’s perhaps no surprise that the villains are becoming heroes. Warner Bros today announced LEGO DC Super-Villains, the latest in the fight-o-build-a-platformer series from TT Games, and it’ll see baddies becoming goodies to save the day. We’ll get to build our own custom villain to lead the adventure, and if your go-to back-up pals aren’t Harley and Ivy then frankly you can just get out. The game isn’t due until October but, for now, here’s the announcement trailer. Read the rest of this entry »

Middle-earth: Shadow of War Desolation of Mordor is the most nonsensical sequence of words I have typed in some time. Yes, this is the second expansion for the popular orc dating simulator set in the land of Lord of the Rings, featuring two brothers who love to fight sand and all the animals that live in the sand. It’s out now, and a free update alongside the expansion also brings the first of those loot box rollbacks promised by Monolith. Read the rest of this entry »

A new cinematic trailer for the second (and final?) story expansion for Middle-earth: Shadow Of War introduces the brothers who’ll stab orcs into a sandy new land. They’re off to the land of Lithlad, which sounds like the name of an electro-powered superhero’s sidekick. Here, watch the new Desolation Of Mordor trailer. Read the rest of this entry »

Monolith have announced plans to remove loot boxes from Middle-earth: Shadow Of War in July, eight months after the open-world enslave-o-stabber launched. They’ve realised that they make the game worse, they say. The ‘War Chest’ loot boxes in Shadow Of War contain random items, orc slaves, and bits, and are sold for either the virtuacash earned in-game or for a microtransaction currency bought with real money. Monolith say the loot boxes cause people who buy them to miss out on the experience of the game’s Nemesis system – and even if you don’t buy them, their presence detracts from the game. Neither realisation is remotely surprising. Read the rest of this entry »

The supervillains at TT Games at continuing their fiendish plot to turn the world’s superheroes into virtual plastic. Having trapped Marvel and DC champions inside a string of games, now they’re making LEGO The Incredibles to snare Pixar’s heroes too. It’ll do those usual TT LEGO fight-o-jump a things, this time with the combined superpowers of the Parr family. It’ll will launch in a few months on the same day The Incredibles 2 hits cinemas, which disappointingly is one month late for us here in the UK. Ooh it’s like the 90s all over again. Read the rest of this entry »

The success of the LEGO games and films as a vehicle for legitimately good family comedy continues to be one of geekdom’s most pleasantly inexplicable surprises. The LEGO Batman film had no right being so funny (or self-aware), and the LEGO Star Wars games even managed to make the prequel trilogy palatable.

As such, pairing Pixar’s knack for visual comedy and TT Games’ consistently solid game design seems a match made in heaven. Disney presumably agree, as the much-rumored LEGO Incredibles game seems just a little bit closer, thanks to a leak spotted at American retail-arcology chain Walmart. (Credit to LEGO blog The Brick Fan for that)

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My favourite Middle-earth: Shadow Of War nemesis story isn’t my own, but one I found on Reddit. It was about a musician Orc who the player mercilessly humiliated time and time again, until his mind had broken and all he could do was murmur about how he’d “lost his song”. It’s tragic stuff, and while the new behaviours added in today’s patch might not generate the same heart-wrenching tales, they should mix things up if you’ve found those encounters have grown stale.

The Blade Of Galadriel expansion is also out today, and lets you step into the Elven shoes of Eltariel, one of Talion’s sidekicks from the main game. She’s better known as the Blade Of Galadriel, so expect to run around stabbing Nazguls in the name of freedom, justice, or whatever it is that Galadriel actually stands for. Bright white lights, maybe.

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The Atom, DC’s shrinking scientist, is coming to Injustice 2 this month. It’s Ryan Choi, the character created by Grant Morrison, rather than the probably better known Ray Palmer version. That version is currently being played by Superman actor Brandon Routh on Legends of Tomorrow, a show that I love, despite knowing it’s bad for my health. Becoming really tiny never sounds like a great superpower, but as the trailer below shows, it’s actually the best power.

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Superheroes, supervillains, and superantiheroes from DC Comics are now kicking seven shades of heck out of each other in Injustice 2, the new fighting game from Mortal Kombat developers NetherRealm. The supersequel hit consoles in May and finally launched on PC today. Our Adam already played a bit on PlayStation 4 quite likes it so good, grand, ta. Read the rest of this entry »

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a very big game, full of very big Orcs. It’s probably big enough. Regardless, it’s getting a slew of DLC, introducing two new Orc tribes and some story expansions that let you play as the tale’s secondary characters. The tribal addition is due next month, and you can get a brief taste of all the upcoming DLC in the trailer below. Read the rest of this entry »

Update: Injustice 2’s PC open beta hasn’t kicked off today, unfortunately. Is Brainiac to blame? Is evil Superman up to his old tricks again? The developers are keeping shtum right now, but have promised more information. We’ll let you know when a new date is announced.

Injustice 2 is a game in which superheroes punch each other so hard that sometimes they’re sent flying into orbit, or back in time where they clip the nose of the Great Sphinx of Giza. Turns out merry speedster The Flash is a TIME VANDAL.

Although I don’t particularly care for its Snydery grimdark take on DC, I have been enjoying Injustice 2 a lot. It lives on my PS4 and I wasn’t sure if it’d ever come to PC, but Warner and developers NetherRealm (they of Mortal Kombat) send word that a port is on its way. And not only is it set to arrive in this very season of autumn, an open beta will begin tomorrow on Steam. Cracking news.

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War, I’m told, war never changes – and nor need it end. Middle-earth: Shadow of War [official site] will add the option to endlessly play Shadow Wars, the fortress-assaulting mode that’s the focus of the game’s fourth act. Leif Johnson told us he grew bored of Shadow Wars before the end of the chapter but hey, if you want to endlessly attack and defend, you will get that option. Read the rest of this entry »

Tootle on your warhorn and coax your ghostpal back into body, as Middle-earth: Shadow of War [official site] launched overnight. Monolith’s sequel to 2014’s Shadow of Mordor brings more open-world action with orcs to antagonise, fortresses to capture, limbs to hack off, baddies to enslave (ikr?), faces to fill with arrows, spooky ghostpowers to learn, and a sexy spider to puzzle over. The sequel also expands the ‘Nemesis’ system which builds relationships with NPCs and changes how they react to you. This is great, Leif Johnson said in his Middle-earth: Shadow of War review: Read the rest of this entry »